from , and , with some inspiration from , and some twists you’ll only find from …
go here and look through random quotes until you find [arbitrary number] that reflect who you are or what you believe. post them in your journal, or in the comments to this journal, or not. then tag [arbitrary number] of your LJ friends to do the same, or not.
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
— Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004)
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors
into trouble of all kinds.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902)
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy
you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste
your time voting.
— Charles Bukowski (1920 – 1994)
Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes
freedom from avarice.
— Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 31 Remain Frugal, 08-22-04
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who
reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and
feeble mind.
— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
The truth is more important than the facts.
— Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 – 1959)
Do not trust all men, but trust men of worth; the former course is silly,
the latter a mark of prudence.
— Democritus (460 BCE – 370 BCE)
If you believe everything you read, better not read.
— Japanese Proverb
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
— Mohandas Karmachand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869 – 1948)
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.
— Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE)
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
— Dick Cavett (1936 – )
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach to himself.
— Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)
The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.
— Ronald Reagan in 1973
Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), Notes on the State of Virginia
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether
to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.’
— Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919)
Anger is never without Reason, but seldom with a good One.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you
the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.
— Frank Zappa
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
— Mohandas Karmachand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869 – 1948)
Who are the brain police?
— Frank Zappa
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
— Frank Zappa
Don’t get suckered in by the comments — they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code.
— Dave Storer
Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without.
— Chuang Tzu (369 BC – 286 BC), On Tolerance
On June 6, the US national archives released some 27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA’s Cold War relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials.
The files reveal numerous cases of German Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds, weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to protect Washington’s allies in the post-war West German government headed by Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer.
Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths while coordinating the Nazis’ “final solution” campaign to exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after the fall of the Third Reich. Utilizing friendly contacts in the Catholic Church and the Peron government in Argentina, Eichmann was able to reside in the South American country for 10 years under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted in 1960 by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, put on trial in Israel and executed in 1962.
The documents show that the CIA was in possession of Eichmann’s pseudonym two years before the Mossad raid. The CIA received this information in 1958 from the West German government, which learned of Eichmann’s alias in 1952. Both the CIA and the Bonn government chose not to disclose this information to Israel because they were concerned that Eichmann might reveal the identities of Nazi war criminals holding high office in the West German government, particularly Adenauer’s national security adviser Hans Globke.
When Eichmann was finally brought to trial, the US government used all available means to protect its West German allies from what he might reveal. According to the declassified documents, the CIA pressured Life magazine into deleting references to Globke in portions of Eichmann’s memoirs that it chose to publish.
In addition to the revelations regarding Eichmann, the documents chronicle the CIA’s creation of “stay-behind” intelligence networks in southwestern Germany and Berlin, labeled “Kibitz” and “Pastime,” respectively. The Kibitz ring involved several former SS members. In the early 1950s, the CIA provided these groups with money, communications equipment and ammunition so that they could serve as intelligence assets in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany.
The CIA documents were reviewed by Timothy Naftali, a historian with the National Archives Interagency Working Group, the government body that oversaw their declassification and release. According to an article published by Naftali, the stay-behind program was dissolved “in the wake of public concerns in West Germany about the resurgence of Neo-Nazi Groups.” Specifically, the Kibitz-15 group, led by an “unreconstructed Nazi,” became a potential source of public embarrassment for the US, as its members were broadly involved in Neo-Nazi activity. [1]
The CIA terminated the program by 1955 and arranged for many of its contacts to be resettled in Canada and Australia. According to the documents, Australia provided funds for relocation while the CIA provided its ex-assets with a “resettlement bonus.”
The CIA employed Gustav Hilger, a former adviser to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As an employee of the German foreign office, Hilger was present at the negotiation of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The CIA deemed his experience with the USSR sufficiently valuable to free him from incarceration at Fort Meade in Maryland and employ him as an intelligence evaluator in West Germany.
In 1948, Hilger moved to the United States and obtained a position at the CIA’s K Street building in Washington as a researcher and expert on the USSR. Hilger eventually left the CIA to work for the West German foreign office.
According to a paper analyzing the CIA documents published by Robert Wolfe, a former senior archivist at the US National Archives, “it is beyond dispute that Hilger criminally assisted in the genocide of Italy’s Jews…. During the roundup of Italian Jews in late 1943, a note signed ‘Hilger’ recorded Ribbentrop’s concurrence that the Italians be asked to intern the Jews in concentration camps in Northern Italy, in lieu of immediate deportation. The SS intended thereby that the Italian Jews and their potential Italian protectors should believe that internment in Italy was the final destination, rather than eventual deportation to the murder mills in Poland to be immediately murdered or gradually worked to death. The stated purpose of this ruse was to minimize the number of Italian Jews who would go into hiding to avoid deportation to Poland” [2]
In another instance, the CIA employed Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Nazi gendarme and Waffen SS lieutenant, who, according to a paper published by Interagency Working Group Director of Historical Research Richard Breitman, “participated in an execution commando [combat group detailed to executing Jews and Communists en masse] and had searched North Caucasian villages for Jews.”
Soobzokov was employed by the CIA for seven years. Over this period, he repeatedly used his intelligence contacts to avoid investigation by the FBI and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in regard to his complicity in war crimes.
According to Breitman’s paper, CIA examiners noted that Soobzokov was an “incorrigible fabricator” who repeatedly lied about his past in order to conceal his participation in criminal activity. Nevertheless, the CIA shielded him against investigation, at one point sending the INS a document asserting that Soobzokov had never worked for the Nazis. [3]
Prior to the outbreak of war, a significant section of the American ruling elite had favored cooperation with the Nazis as a European hedge against the spread of Bolshevism. Henry Ford was notorious for his anti-Semitism and his political affinity for German Fascism, and a number of major American companies retained their business ties with the Third Reich. Notably, IBM sold Germany the punch cards that were used to catalog the “final solution.” (See: “How IBM helped the Nazis IBM and the Holocaust”)
However, as one European nation after another fell before Hitler’s onslaught, the threat of German imperialist dominance in Europe spurred the American ruling class to enter the European theater.
US imperialism mobilized popular support in its war against the Nazi regime by appealing to the democratic and anti-fascist sentiments of the American people. After the defeat of Germany, it organized, together with its World War II allies—Britain, the Soviet Union and France—the Nuremburg trials to prosecute top Nazi officials for their complicity in war crimes.
However, with the start of the Cold War, the United States reversed its policy of identifying, trying and executing prominent Nazi war criminals. As is starkly demonstrated in the case of Eichmann, the knowledge possessed by many of these individuals made trying them inconvenient.
Regardless of its limited prosecution of upper-echelon Nazis, the United States had no qualms about recruiting Nazi Party members and war criminals into its military research apparatus. Prominent German military developers such as Werner Von Braun and Bernhard Tessmann were assimilated into the US rocketry program, while Kurt Blome, a Nazi scientist who experimented on concentration camp prisoners, was employed by the US to develop chemical weapons.
Likewise, the early stages of the Cold War saw high-level Nazi cadres drafted into the US intelligence machine and deployed in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. According to the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the bureau assigned to investigate German war criminals living within the US, at least 10,000 Nazis entered the US between 1948 and 1952. Of the thousands of German Nazis who fled—or were brought—to the United States, only some 100 have been prosecuted by the OSI.
Don’t Be Terrorized You’re more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder By Ronald Bailey August 11, 2006
Yesterday, British authorities broke up an alleged terror plot to blow up as many as ten commercial airliners as they flew to the United States. In response, the Department of Homeland Security upped the alert level on commercial flights from Britain to “red” and boosted the alert to “orange” for all other flights. In a completely unscientific poll, AOL asked subscribers: “Are you changing your travel plans because of the raised threat level?” At mid-afternoon about a quarter of the respondents had said yes. Such polls do reflect the kinds of anxieties terrorist attacks, even those that have been stymied, provoke in the public.
But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate. Your odds of dying of a specific cause in any year are calculated by dividing that year’s population by the number of deaths by that cause in that year. Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.
What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they’ve gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.
So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America’s 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America’s 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.
Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.
So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.
WASHINGTON – Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States. The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.
The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.
Parsi says the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal which he learned about in 2003 from the U.S. intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in late April or early May 2003. The intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified, according to Parsi.
The Iranian negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to U.S. hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.
Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had attacked Arab governments which had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration”, which it also referred to as the “Saudi initiative, two-states approach.”
The March 2002 Beirut declaration represented the Arab League’s first official acceptance of the land-for-peace principle as well as a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to the territory it had controlled before the 1967 war.. Iran’s proposed concession on the issue would have aligned its policy with that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others with whom the United States enjoyed intimate relations.
Another concession in the document was a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory” along with “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967”.
Even more surprising, given the extremely close relationship between Iran and the Lebanon-based Hizbollah Shiite organisation, the proposal offered to take “action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon”.
The Iranian proposal also offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology”. It offered “full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)”.
That was a reference to protocols which would require Iran to provide IAEA monitors with access to any facility they might request, whether it had been declared by Iran or not. That would have made it much more difficult for Iran to carry out any secret nuclear activities without being detected.
In return for these concessions, which contradicted Iran’s public rhetoric about Israel and anti-Israeli forces, the secret Iranian proposal sought U.S. agreement to a list of Iranian aims. The list included a “Halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of status of Iran in the U.S.”, as well as the “abolishment of all sanctions”.
Also included among Iran’s aims was “recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region with according defense capacity”. According to a number of Iran specialists, the aim of security and an official acknowledgment of Iran’s status as a regional power were central to the Iranian interest in a broad agreement with the United States.
Negotiation of a deal with the United States that would advance Iran’s security and fundamental geopolitical political interests in the Persian Gulf region in return for accepting the existence of Israel and other Iranian concessions has long been discussed among senior Iranian national security officials, according to Parsi and other analysts of Iranian national security policy.
An Iranian threat to destroy Israel has been a major propaganda theme of the Bush administration for months. On Mar. 10, Bush said, “The Iranian president has stated his desire to destroy our ally, Israel. So when you start listening to what he has said to their desire to develop a nuclear weapon, then you begin to see an issue of grave national security concern.”
But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.
Interest in such a deal is still very much alive in Tehran, despite the U.S. refusal to respond to the 2003 proposal. Turkish international relations professor Mustafa Kibaroglu of Bilkent University writes in the latest issue of Middle East Journal that “senior analysts” from Iran told him in July 2005 that “the formal recognition of Israel by Iran may also be possible if essentially a ‘grand bargain’ can be achieved between the U.S. and Iran”.
The proposal’s offer to dismantle the main thrust of Iran’s Islamic and anti-Israel policy would be strongly opposed by some of the extreme conservatives among the mullahs who engineered the repression of the reformist movement in 2004 and who backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year’s election.
However, many conservative opponents of the reform movement in Iran have also supported a negotiated deal with the United States that would benefit Iran, according to Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer on Iran. “Even some of the hardliners accepted the idea that if you could strike a deal with the devil, you would do it,” he said in an interview with IPS last month.
The conservatives were unhappy not with the idea of a deal with the United States but with the fact that it was a supporter of the reform movement of Pres. Mohammad Khatami, who would get the credit for the breakthrough, Pillar said.
Parsi says that the ultimate authority on Iran’s foreign policy, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was “directly involved” in the Iranian proposal, according to the senior Iranian national security officials he interviewed in 2004. Kamenei has aligned himself with the conservatives in opposing the pro-democratic movement.
WASHINGTON – U.S. Muslim groups criticized President Bush on Thursday for calling a foiled plot to blow up airplanes part of a “war with Islamic fascists,” saying the term could inflame anti-Muslim tensions.
U.S. officials have said the plot, thwarted by Britain, to blow up several aircraft over the Atlantic bore many of the hallmarks of al Qaeda.
“We believe this is an ill-advised term and we believe that it is counterproductive to associate Islam or Muslims with fascism,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group.
“We ought to take advantage of these incidents to make sure that we do not start a religious war against Islam and Muslims,” he told a news conference in Washington.
“We urge him (Bush) and we urge other public officials to restrain themselves.”
Awad said U.S. officials should take the lead from their British counterparts who steered clear of using what he considered inflammatory terms when they announced the arrest of more than 20 suspects in the reported plot.
Hours after the news broke, Bush said it was “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”
Bush and other administration officials have used variations of the term “Islamo-fascism” on several occasions in the past to describe militant groups including al Qaeda, its allies in Iraq and Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told MSNBC television the phrase reflected what he called Osama bin Laden’s own vision of leading a totalitarian empire under the guise of religion.
“It might may not be classic fascism as you had with Mussolini or Hitler. But it is a totalitarian, intolerant imperialism that has a vision that is totally at odds with Western society and our rules of law,” Chertoff said.
MUSLIM CONCERNS Many American Muslims, who say they have felt singled out for discrimination since the September 11 attacks, reject the term and say it unfairly links their faith to notions of dictatorship, oppression and racism.
“The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals,” said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.
She said the terms cast suspicions on all Muslims, even the vast majority who want to live in safety like other Americans.
Bush upset many Muslims after the September 11 attacks by referring to the global war against terrorism early on as a “crusade,” a term which for many Muslims connotes a Christian battle against Islam. The White House quickly stopped using the word, expressing regrets if it had caused offense.
Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist, said he was upset by the president’s latest comments.
“We’ve got Osama bin Laden hijacking the religion in order to define it one way. … We feel the president and anyone who’s using these kinds of terminologies is hijacking it too from a different side,” he said.
The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.
The set the government doesn’t talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government’s accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included – as the board that sets accounting rules is considering – the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.
Congress has written its own accounting rules – which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs such as the growing expense of retirement benefits for civil servants and military personnel.
Last year, the audited statement produced by the accountants said the government ran a deficit equal to $6,700 for every American household. The number given to the public put the deficit at $2,800 per household.
A growing number of Congress members and accounting experts say it’s time for Congress to start using the audited financial statement when it makes budget decisions. They say accurate accounting would force Congress to show more restraint before approving popular measures to boost spending or cut taxes.
“We’re a bottom-line culture, and we’ve been hiding the bottom line from the American people,” says Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a former investment banker. “It’s not fair to them, and it’s delusional on our part.”
The House of Representatives supported Cooper’s proposal this year to ask the president to include the audited numbers in his budgets, but the Senate did not consider the measure.
Good accounting is crucial at a time when the government faces long-term challenges in paying benefits to tens of millions of Americans for Medicare, Social Security and government pensions, say advocates of stricter accounting rules in federal budgeting.
“Accounting matters,” says Harvard University law professor Howell Jackson, who specializes in business law. “The deficit number affects how politicians act. We need a good number so politicians can have a target worth looking at.”
The audited financial statement — prepared by the Treasury Department — reveals a federal government in far worse financial shape than official budget reports indicate, a USA TODAY analysis found. The government has run a deficit of $2.9 trillion since 1997, according to the audited number. The official deficit since then is just $729 billion. The difference is equal to an entire year’s worth of federal spending.
Surplus or deficit? Congress and the president are able to report a lower deficit mostly because they don’t count the growing burden of future pensions and medical care for federal retirees and military personnel. These obligations are so large and are growing so fast that budget surpluses of the late 1990s actually were deficits when the costs are included.
The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years. The audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion.
In addition, neither of these figures counts the financial deterioration in Social Security or Medicare. Including these retirement programs in the bottom line, as proposed by a board that oversees accounting methods used by the federal government, would show the government running annual deficits of trillions of dollars.
The Bush administration opposes including Social Security and Medicare in the audited deficit. Its reason: Congress can cancel or cut the retirement programs at any time, so they should not be considered a government liability for accounting purposes.
Policing the numbers The government’s record-keeping was in such disarray 15 years ago that both parties agreed drastic steps were needed. Congress and two presidents took a series of actions from 1990 to 1996 that:
Created the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board to establish accounting rules, a role similar to what the powerful Financial Accounting Standards Board does for corporations.
Added chief financial officers to all major government departments and agencies.Required annual audited financial reports of those departments and agencies.Ordered the Treasury Department to publish, for the first time, a comprehensive annual financial report for the federal government — an audited report like those published every year by corporations.
These laws have dramatically improved federal financial reporting. Today, 18 of 24 departments and agencies produce annual reports certified by auditors. (The others, including the Defense Department, still have record-keeping troubles so severe that auditors refuse to certify the reliability of their books, according to the government’s annual report.)
The culmination of improved record-keeping is the “Financial Report of the U.S. Government,” an annual report similar to a corporate annual report. (The 158-page report for 2005 is available online at fms.treas.gov/fr/index.html.)
The House Budget Committee has tried to increase the prominence of the audited financial results. When the House passed its version of a budget this year, it included Cooper’s proposal asking Bush to add the audited numbers to the annual budget he submits to Congress. The request died when the House and Senate couldn’t agree on a budget. Cooper has reintroduced the proposal.
The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, established under the first President Bush in 1990 to set federal accounting rules, is considering adding Social Security and Medicare to the government’s audited bottom line.
Recognizing costly programs Adding those costs would make federal accounting similar to that used by corporations, state and local governments and large non-profit entities such as universities and charities. It would show the government recording enormous losses because the deficit would reflect the growing shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.
The government would have reported nearly $40 trillion in losses since 1997 if the deterioration of Social Security and Medicare had been included, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the proposed accounting change. That’s because generally accepted accounting principles require reporting financial burdens when they are incurred, not when they come due.
For example: If Microsoft announced today that it would add a drug benefit for its retirees, the company would be required to count the future cost of the program, in today’s dollars, as a business expense. If the benefit cost $1 billion in today’s dollars and retirees were expected to pay $200 million of the cost, Microsoft would be required to report a reduction in net income of $800 million.
This accounting rule is a major reason corporations have reduced and limited retirement benefits over the last 15 years.
The federal government’s audited financial statement now accounts for the retirement costs of civil servants and military personnel – but not the cost of Social Security and Medicare.
The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit alone would have added $8 trillion to the government’s audited deficit. That’s the amount the government would need today, set aside and earning interest, to pay for the tens of trillions of dollars the benefit will cost in future years.
Standard accounting concepts say that $8 trillion should be reported as an expense. Combined with other new liabilities and operating losses, the government would have reported an $11 trillion deficit in 2004 — about the size of the nation’s entire economy.
The federal government also would have had a $12.7 trillion deficit in 2000 because that was the first year that Social Security and Medicare reported broader measures of the programs’ unfunded liabilities. That created a one-time expense.
The proposal to add Social Security and Medicare to the bottom line has deeply divided the federal accounting board, composed of government officials and “public” members, who are accounting experts from outside government.
The six public members support the change. “Our job is to give people a clear picture of the financial condition of the government,” board Chairman David Mosso says. “Whether those numbers are good or bad and what you do about them is up to Congress and the administration.”
The four government members, who represent the president, Congress and the Government Accountability Office, oppose the change. The retirement programs do “not represent a legal obligation because Congress has the authority to increase or reduce social insurance benefits at any time,” wrote Clay Johnson III, then acting director of the president’s Office of Management Budget, in a letter to the board in May.
Ways of accounting Why the big difference between the official government deficit and the audited one?
The official number is based on “cash accounting,” similar to the way you track what comes into your checking account and what goes out. That works fine for paying today’s bills, but it’s a poor way to measure a financial condition that could include credit card debt, car loans, a mortgage and an overdue electric bill.
The audited number is based on accrual accounting. This method doesn’t care about your checking account. It measures income and expenses when they occur, or accrue. If you buy a velvet Elvis painting online, the cost goes on the books immediately, regardless of when the check clears or your eBay purchase arrives.
Cash accounting lets income and expenses land in different reporting periods. Accrual accounting links them. Under cash accounting, a $25,000 cash advance on a credit card to pay for a vacation makes the books look great. You are $25,000 richer! Repaying the credit card debt? No worries today. That will show up in the future.
Under accrual accounting, the $25,000 cash from your credit card is offset immediately by the $25,000 you now owe. Your bottom line hasn’t changed. An accountant might even make you report a loss on the transaction because of the interest you’re going to pay.
“The problem with cash accounting is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for manipulation,” says University of Texas accounting professor Michael Granof. “It’s not just that you fool others. You end up fooling yourself, too.”
Federal law requires that companies and institutions that have revenue of $1 million or more use accrual accounting. Microsoft used accrual accounting when it reported $12 billion in net income last year. The American Red Cross used accrual accounting when it reported a $445 million net gain.
Congress used cash accounting when it reported the $318 billion deficit last year.
Social Security chief actuary Stephen Goss says it would be a mistake to apply accrual accounting to Social Security and Medicare. These programs are not pensions or legally binding federal obligations, although many people view them that way, he says.
Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you go programs and should be treated like food stamps and fighter jets, not like a Treasury bond that must be repaid in the future, he adds. “A country doesn’t record a liability every time a kid is born to reflect the cost of providing that baby with a K-12 education one day,” Goss says.
Tom Allen, who will become the chairman of the federal accounting board in December, says sound accounting principles require that financial statements reflect the economic value of an obligation.
“It’s hard to argue that there’s no economic substance to the promises made for Social Security and Medicare,” he says.
Social Security and Medicare should be reflected in the bottom line because that’s the most important number in any financial report, Allen says.
“The point of the number is to tell the public: Did the government’s financial condition improve or deteriorate over the last year?” he says.
If you count Social Security and Medicare, the federal government’s financial health got $3.5 trillion worse last year.
Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, a certified public accountant, says the numbers reported under accrual accounting give an accurate picture of the government’s condition. “An old photographer’s adage says, ‘If you want a prettier picture, bring me a prettier face,’ ” he says.
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in… to kind of catapult the propaganda. — George W. Bush, May 24, 2005
… people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. — OSS Report on Adolph Hitler, page 51
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. — Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925
At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President’s recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique–which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.
The basic claim of the President’s desperate and strident attack on the war’s critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus President when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.
His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, Al Qaeda’s sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush’s “evidence” for this, available to top Administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.
Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.
“Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people,” the President said at an Air Force base in Alaska. “Leaders in my Administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat.”
This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat–to somebody, somewhere, in some context–is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the President of the United States is just a lie on its face–it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.
It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq–the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee–shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short “summary” of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.
The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush Administration’s key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance–said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction–was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably “intentionally misleading the debriefers.”
Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon’s intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate’s vote to authorize the war, that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases.”
The false Al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush’s argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.
Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops–references to “a mushroom cloud” and calling Hussein an “ally” of Al Qaeda–to convince the rest of us it was necessary.
The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.
Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new cold war, never acknowledging that he has handed Al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his “Axis of Evil” member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush Administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-US slogans.
Under Bush’s watch, we not only suffered the September 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given Al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.
to further my rant from earlier, this was apparently an either incredibly conveniently timed “terrorist” event, or it was completely made up to distract us while "they" sneak around behind our backs and propose retroactive protection for anyone who does something that is later determined to be a war crime, which is in violation of the article I section 9 proscription on ex post facto legislation, and the bill which abolishes the bill of rights all together.
if it was a real “terrorist” act that was “foiled” this morning, it was coincidentally well timed, but since we haven’t seen the “terrorists” in custody, and the authorities won’t comment on what kind of bomb they were allegedly trying to smuggle on an airplane, the whole thing sounds quite fishy, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this were just a ruse to cause us to look the other way while "they" take a few more whacks at our already teetering rights.
wake up folks. it won’t be long until we have no rights and no way of complaining about it. if we don’t do something soon, it will be too late, and we’ll end up just like pre-world-war-two germany, with jack-booted thugs wandering the streets, beating people up who don’t have the proper identity papers… 8(
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policy makers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.
The move by the administration is the latest effort to deal with the treatment of those taken into custody in the war on terror.
At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military. When interrogators engage in waterboarding, prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning.
One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”
Another section would apply the legislation retroactively, according to two lawyers who have seen the contents of the section and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their sources did not authorize them to release the information.
One of the two lawyers said that the draft is in the revision stage, but that the administration seems intent on pushing forward the draft’s major points in Congress after Labor Day.
“I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That’s why it’s so dangerous,” said a third lawyer, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.
Fidell said the initiative is “not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations.”
Interrogation practices “follow from policies that were formed at the highest levels of the administration,” said a fourth lawyer, Scott Horton, who has followed detainee issues closely. “The administration is trying to insulate policy makers under the War Crimes Act.”
A White House spokesman said Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions includes a number of vague terms that are susceptible to different interpretations.
The administration believes it is very important to bring clarity to the War Crimes Act so that those on the front lines in the war on terror “have clear rules that are defined in law,” said the White House spokesman.
Extreme interrogation practices have been a flash point for criticism of the Bush administration.
okay, i haven’t read the news or anything like that, in a few days, but from what i gather, "they" have apparently thwarted a “terrorist plot” recently, which involved multiple “terrorists” smuggling liquids, which are not explosive by themselves, onto airplanes, and then combining them into an explosive once the plane is underway. while distressing, that’s not what i’m the most alarmed by…
apparently, "their" response to all this has been anywhere from banning all liquids except baby formula from carry-on luggage – which is interesting considering the furor that was created last year when someone was forced, by clownland security goons, to drink a bottle of breastmilk that was in their carry-on luggage – to banning all carry-on luggage, which would effectively prevent just about anybody from travelling anywhere for less than a week unless they were willing to find other modes of transportation – i don’t know, i probably don’t want to know, and i will probably be forced into knowledge of the exact details of this fiasco a lot sooner than i would like. neither of these things will do a single thing from stopping a determined “terrorist” from exerting whatever control they think they can get away with, over an airplane full of passengers who are so scared of people like that, that they will be eating out of the “terrorists” hand at the mere suggestion of a highjacking, but they will make it practically impossible for us “normal” folks to travel pretty much anywhere without some untrained moron pawing through our luggage any time we hit the ground.
now keep in mind that i haven’t seen the news on TV, read a newspaper or listened to the radio in at least a week, and i have only been reading individuals’ journals and doing updates on my own web sites, when i’ve not been at various different rehearsals, for a couple of days, so my initial impressions are probably way off, but this strikes me as precisely the reason why every person associated with the bush administration, especially those stupids that voted for him, and then voted for him again, should be… i’m not even sure what they should be. killed would be nice, but not practical. jailed would also be appropriate, especially considering the criminal activities that lead up to the current mockery of justice being perpetrated in the name of democracy we’re currently suffering with, but also not practical…
i’m seething. i can’t say what i really want to say, because of aphasia, but i’m not sure whether it would have been any better before my injury… i’m not sure that there is anything rational to say about such stupidity at such high levels…
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NSA risking electrical overload Officials say outage could leave Md.-based spy agency paralyzed By Siobhan Gorman August 6, 2006
WASHINGTON – The National Security Agency is running out of juice.
The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency’s ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.
At minimum, the problem could produce disruptions leading to outages and power surges at the Fort Meade headquarters, hampering the work of intelligence analysts and damaging equipment, they said. At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency, paralyzing the intelligence operation, erasing crucial intelligence data and causing irreparable damage to computer systems — all detrimental to the fight against terrorism.
Estimates on how long the agency has to stave off such an overload vary from just two months to less than two years. NSA officials “claim they will not be able to operate more than a month or two longer unless something is done,” said a former senior NSA official familiar with the problem, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Agency leaders, meanwhile, are scrambling for stopgap measures to buy time while they develop a sustainable plan. Limitations of the electrical infrastructure in the main NSA complex and the substation serving the agency, along with growing demand in the region, prevent an immediate fix, according to current and former government officials.
“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” said Michael Jacobs, who headed the NSA’s information assurance division until 2002.
“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today,” he said in an interview during last week’s barrage of triple-digit temperatures.
William Nolte, a former NSA executive who spent decades with the agency, said power disruptions would severely hamper the agency.
“You’ve got an awfully big computer plant and a lot of precision equipment, and I don’t think they would handle power surges and the like really well,” he said. “Even re-calibrating equipment would be really time consuming — with lost opportunities and lost up-time.”
Power surges can also wipe out analysts’ hard drives, said Matthew Aid, a former NSA analyst who is writing a multivolume history of the agency. The information on those hard drives is so valuable that many NSA employees remove them from their computers and lock them in a safe when they leave each day, he said.
A half-dozen current and former government officials knowledgeable about the energy problem discussed it with The Sun on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment on specifics about the NSA’s power needs or what is being done to address them, saying that even private companies consider such information proprietary.
In a statement to The Sun, he said that “as new technologies become available, the demand for power increases and NSA must determine the best and most economical way to use our existing power and bring on additional capacity.”
Biggest BGE customer The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, using as much electricity as the city of Annapolis, according to James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author of two comprehensive books on the agency.
BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy acknowledged a power company project to deal with the rising energy demand at the NSA, but she referred questions about it to the NSA.
The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble Jan. 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA’s first-ever network crash. It took the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations, but with a power outage it could take considerably longer to get the NSA humming again.
The 2000 shutdown rendered the agency’s headquarters “brain-dead,” as then-NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden told CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2002.
“I don’t want to trivialize this. This was really bad,” Hayden said. “We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone.”
As an immediate fallback measure, the NSA sent its incoming data to its counterpart in Great Britain, which stepped up efforts to process the NSA’s information along with its own, said Bamford.
The agency came under intense criticism from members of Congress after the crash, and the incident rapidly accelerated efforts to modernize the agency.
One former NSA official familiar with the electricity problem noted a sense of deja vu six years later.
“To think that this was not a priority probably tells you more about the extent to which NSA has actually transformed,” the former official said. “In the end, if you don’t have power, you can’t do [anything].”
Already some equipment is not being sufficiently cooled, and agency leaders have forgone plugging in some new machinery, current and former government officials said. The power shortage will also delay the installation of two new, multimillion-dollar supercomputers, they said.
To begin to alleviate pressure on the electrical grid, the NSA is considering buying additional generators and shutting down so-called “legacy” computer systems that are decades old and not considered crucial to the agency’s operations, said three current and former government officials familiar with the situation.
“It’s a temporary fix,” one former senior NSA official said.
On Wednesday, the same day that The Sun inquired about the power issue with the NSA’s public affairs office, the agency sent word to Capitol Hill about its energy conservation efforts.
“They have told us they have been shutting down all non-essential uses of power to help out BG&E,” said one congressional aide, adding that the NSA is also raising the temperature in its buildings two degrees to conserve.
The information was presented in the context that the NSA was making these changes “to be a good corporate citizen,” the aide said.
Contractors on at least one high-priority, power-intensive NSA project that is located off the headquarters campus, have upgraded their electrical infrastructure to ensure power for their project, according to two former agency officials. That lone upgrade, a fraction of the agency’s total demand, took four months.
Longer-term solutions being considered would move some operations to off-campus facilities with more electrical capacity, current and former officials said.
Adding more capacity to the substation feeding NSA is an obvious answer, but constraints on that particular facility make an expansion difficult, they said. BGE’s Foy declined to discuss specifics about the substation. She said it takes 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years to design, procure equipment, obtain permits, and build a new one.
Post-9/11 needs Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA has ramped up its operations, and the electricity needed to sustain major projects — such as the warrantless surveillance program and technology modernization programs — has increased sharply.
The computer systems supporting these programs demand far more wattage per square foot than their predecessors and still more energy to cool them.
Area development like the Arundel Mills Mall has contributed to the problem by putting additional strain on the local electrical grid, according to two sources familiar with the issue. Joe Bunch, BGE’s director of strategic customer engineering, said, however, that the mall’s demand “was fairly easily accommodated.”
Demand in the Baltimore-Washington region has been growing, and the regional operator for Maryland and 12 other states has been studying the installation of up to $10 billion in new power lines to deliver more and cheaper electricity to this region.
“We’ve seen a lot of growth in Anne Arundel County as a whole but particularly in the north and northwest area of the county,” said Bunch, who agreed to talk about trends in the area but not the NSA’s specific demand. Much of that growth is because of the surge of high-tech jobs in the area from the NSA and government contractors, he said.
He said BGE is working to meet the demand by building new substations in the area. One was built about a year ago, and another is scheduled to be built in two to three years, he said.
“We have adequate capacity” now, he said, but upgrades like the new substation are being planned to stave off future strains on the electrical grid.
The NSA’s problem was identified in the late 1990s and could have been fixed by now — and for much less money — had keeping the lights on been a priority, current and former officials said.
“It fits into a long, long pattern of crisis-of-the-day management as opposed to investing in the future,” said one former government official familiar with the NSA’s electricity shortfall.
Electrical infrastructure maintenance and upgrades have been a casualty of the fight against terrorism, according to unclassified budget documents.
Upgrades delayed Even as the NSA’s budget has ballooned after 9/11, the agency has put off basic utility upgrades such as a $4 million computer system to manage the allocation of power at the NSA — a sliver of the NSA’s estimated $8 billion budget.
“Due to budget constraint [sic] and other development [sic] in the fight against terrorism,” a 2007 budget document reads, the system was never fully implemented.
Without this system, the document stated, the NSA “may experience difficulties in meeting its power requirement to support critical war fighting missions.”
Neglect of infrastructure at the NSA has been a chronic problem, often fraught with bureaucratic politics, former agency officials said.
Fort Meade is not the only NSA outpost facing limitations on its ability to upgrade electrical infrastructure. Listening posts around the world, such as Menwith Hill in Britain and Bad Aibling in Germany, are ailing.
The NSA’s largest listening station, Menwith Hill, has an “aging infrastructure that cannot support the people or equipment” there, according to a budget document for 2007.
It is faced with “concrete foundations that are crumbling,” an “electrical infrastructure that is not in compliance with current codes,” and a weakened infrastructure that poses a safety hazard, the document said.
Identical language appeared in the previous year’s budget documents.
With agency operations facing an imminent threat, facilities issues are front and center. “It’s a big deal,” said one former senior NSA official. “They’re all talking about it, anyway. That’s progress.”
i’ve got a lot of friends who, for one reason or another, continue to use AOL even though it is not the best service provider out there, and i wouldn’t dream of trying to change their minds about this… but at the same time, i’m glad i’m not an A-Oh-Hell user, and this is yet another reason why:
and just because A-Oh-Hell has admitted their mistake and taken the information down, don’t think you’re off the hook, because there are mirrors, and more people are downloading it as you read this…
Having grown up on welfare, Rochelle Riordan had vowed never to ask for a government handout. That was before her hard-drinking husband kicked her and their young daughter out of their house near Lewiston, Maine, leaving her with a $300 bank account, a bad job market and a 15-year-old car held together in spots with duct tape.
Maine’s welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean’s list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans — and Maine’s Parents as Scholars program — suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor’s degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.
A decade after the government set out to transform the nation’s welfare system, the limits on college are part of a controversial second phase of welfare reform that is beginning to ripple across the country. The new rules, written by Congress and the Bush administration, require states to focus intensely on making more poor people work, while discouraging other activities that might help untangle their lives.
By Oct. 1, state and local welfare offices must figure out how to steer hundreds of thousands of low-income adults into jobs or longer work hours. They also must adjust to limits on the length of time people on welfare can devote to trying to shed drug addictions, recover from mental illnesses or get an education.
This second generation of change reverses a central idea behind the 1996 law that ended six decades of welfare as an unlimited federal entitlement to cash assistance. The law decentralized welfare, handing states a lump sum of money and the freedom to design their own programs of temporary help for poor families. Ten years later, the government is tightening the federal reins.
Many state officials and advocates are furious. “You had fixed block grants in exchange for state flexibility,” said Elaine M. Ryan, deputy executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, which represents welfare directors around the country. “Now you have fixed block grants in exchange for federal micromanagement. . . . That was not the deal.”
Based on interviews with welfare officials in 10 states, including in the Washington area, the new requirements conflict in significant ways with the eclectic approaches to welfare that states have chosen.
States are struggling to decide how to comply. Some are exploring the idea of walling off certain groups of welfare clients into separate, state-funded programs, avoiding large federal penalties by insulating people from the new rules. Some states are scrambling to change how their welfare clients spend their time. Others are frankly unsure what they will do.
“States are kind of in a low-grade panic,” said Ron Haskins, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who helped to write the 1996 law and later worked on welfare in the Bush White House.
In a climate of such flux, most of the nearly 2 million families on welfare nationwide are not yet feeling any change. Many will soon.
Riordan heard about the threat to her last year of college a few weeks ago. “I feel nauseous,” she said. “This is my ticket . . . out of poverty.”
In August 1996, when Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act, neither supporters nor critics predicted its dramatic effects: The number of families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as welfare became known, has plummeted by 60 percent.
Despite that unexpected success, when the law came up for renewal in 2002, lawmakers deadlocked in a bitter ideological fight over how it should be changed. Democrats argued that the government should give states more money to subsidize child care while parents were at work. Republicans argued that the work requirements were not strict enough.
The law, the GOP pointed out, had envisioned that half the adults on welfare would get jobs. In reality, fewer than one-third were working — and in some places, many fewer than that — because the law had given states an inducement: The more people a state moved off its welfare rolls, the smaller the share of those who remained had to work.
Last December, buried in a sprawling bill meant mainly to cut federal spending, Republicans finally got the welfare changes they wanted. They compel states to find jobs for fully half their adult clients, and they increase the required work hours from 20 hours per week to 30. Then, in late June, the Department of Health and Human Services issued strict new rules defining what counts as work — and who must be counted.
Wade F. Horn, HHS’s assistant secretary for children and families, said the closer federal regulation is necessary because states have been lax. “Some defined as work bed rest, going to a smoking-cessation program, getting a massage, doing an errand with a friend,” Horn said. He acknowledged that federal officials do not know how often people have done those things, because states have not had to report such information.
The new rules say states may count toward their work-participation rates no more than six weeks per year that a client spends looking for a job, or receiving help such as drug or mental health treatment. And when reporting who is working, states must take into account extra people, including grandparents who are not on welfare but are raising children who get benefits.
“We expected the [rules] to be bad,” said Robin Arnold-Williams, secretary of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. “They are worse than that.” In that state, one-fourth of the 25,000 adults on welfare are not working while they try to conquer barriers such as addictions or too little education — a policy in direct conflict with the new rules.
Even states that have emphasized work are facing new hurdles. According to recent federal figures, 50 percent of the adults on welfare in Virginia are employed. But under the expanded definition of who states must take into account in their work-participation rates, the commonwealth needs about 3,000 more people a month to get jobs, costing Virginia about $28 million more a year to help with child care and job searches, said Anthony Conyers Jr., commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services.
In the District, about 2,200 more people will need to go to work, said Kate Jesberg, head of the D.C. Department of Human Resources. Most, she said, will need more than the six weeks allotted to find a job, in no small part because two-thirds of the city’s adults on welfare read at the fifth-grade level or less. The rules turn her staff into “extraordinary bean counters,” Jesberg said. “Who cares if it takes six weeks or eight weeks? The point is, it is time well spent if you keep them in a job.”
Maryland began three years ago requiring every adult on welfare to do something productive for 40 hours a week. Most of what they have done, such as getting high school equivalency degrees or counseling for domestic violence, does not meet the federal definition of work. “We are scrounging,” said Marshall Cupe, a case manager in Prince George’s County’s Family Investment Division, who is combing through his 400 cases to try to shift people into subsidized jobs, volunteer work or other activities the government will recognize.
The new rules come with new paperwork. In Utah, temporary-assistance administrator Helen Thatcher said the program has emphasized vocational training to equip people to enter fields, such as health care, with plentiful jobs and opportunities for advancement. The training is still permitted, but her staff now will have to keep track every day of how much time nearly 1,400 clients spend on classes and homework.
A few states have quickly passed laws to adjust. New Hampshire just altered its program to try to navigate people into jobs more swiftly and penalize them more promptly if they miss appointments. Terry R. Smith, director of the Division of Family Assistance, said the state also has decided to move out of welfare 136 two-parent families, a small group for whom the rules say 90 percent must work. They will go into a separate state program that Smith said will cost New Hampshire $880,000 a year — less than a $4 million federal penalty it risks incurring in a year or two if not enough are employed.
Many states cannot adjust as quickly, because some welfare changes will require approval of legislatures that will not convene until months after the federal rules take effect in October. In Maine, welfare administrators are debating whether to ask lawmakers to preserve Parents as Scholars as a separate state program. Since 1996, it has enabled about 1,000 low-income adults a year to go to college. Virtually no one who has graduated, state figures show, has returned to welfare.
If its participants had to work 20 hours a week in addition to college, as the new rules require, “a lot of people wouldn’t even try,” said one of Riordan’s friends, Emily Wood. Wood had a son at 17, married at 18, divorced at 22, and was working at a laundromat for $6.50 an hour before starting college with help from Parents as Scholars. At 28, she was named outstanding senior when she graduated from the University of Southern Maine in May. She is starting a master’s degree and trying to decide between two job offers at social service agencies. They pay $15 an hour.
Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.
People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.
The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.
Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.
“I’m flabbergasted,” said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration’s shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.
“This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,” Massing said.
Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan’s Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
“I think the Harris Poll was measuring people’s surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,” said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.
But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such “orphan” munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.
“These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction,” said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. “They weren’t deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis.”
Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra’s announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press “didn’t give the story the play it deserved.” But in some quarters it was headlined.
“Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today …” was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. “Americans are waking up from a distorted reality,” read one posting.
Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general’s book — at best uncorroborated hearsay — claimed “56 flights” by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.
But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that’s more sustained than the odd headline.
“I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest ‘factoid,’ but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument,” said John Prados, author of the 2004 book “Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.”
Administration statements still describe Saddam’s Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that “perhaps” WMD weren’t in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that “he wouldn’t let them in,” as he said in 2003, and “he chose to deny inspectors,” as he said this March.
The facts are that Iraq — after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections — acceded to the U.N. Security Council’s demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.
As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, “When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity.”
“Which isn’t true,” observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But “it doesn’t surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible.” This president may even have convinced himself it’s true, she said.
Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull’s WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD “finds,” and people “assume the issue is still in play,” Kull said.
“For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan.” The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.
Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.
“As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with,” said the Harris Poll’s David Krane.
Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at “the best factual account,” his group’s densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.
“It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another,” he said in an e-mail. “It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts.”
The creative “morphing” goes on.
As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.
“ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN’S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH’S HANDS?” asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.
The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) has recently changed the process we use in choosing the priority of service group for each of our customers. DVR changed the process to more fairly serve people with all types of disabilities. Because the process has changed, DVR will re-evaluate all customers not in Priority Group 1.
As you may know, because of limited funding, DVR must prioritize services using the following three Priority Groups:
Priority Group 1: Customers with Most Significant Disabilities Priority Group 2: Customers with Significant Disabilities Priority Group 3: Customers with Disabilities
When we are able to serve customers from our waiting list, we start with customers from Priority Group 1 and we serve customers by earliest date of application. Federal regulations require that DVR serve customers in this order.
In the re-evaluation, you will retain your date of application, and be served in the order described above.
On the basis of the re-evaluation of your Priority Group placement, you are now placed in group 2.
wow. i told them that i should probably not be in group 3 more than a year ago. not that it’s going to speed up the process of my actually getting any kind of assistance.
Art Car August – Ganesha the car will be appearing there, hopefully with me coming along for the ride, but only if i don’t have to be at marymoor park in redmond for the captain underpants video shoot.
A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.
The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.
The draft proposed legislation, set to be discussed at two Senate hearings today, is controversial inside and outside the administration because defendants would be denied many protections guaranteed by the civilian and traditional military criminal justice systems.
Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.
Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.
An early draft of the new measure prepared by civilian political appointees and leaked to the media last week has been modified in response to criticism from uniformed military lawyers. But the provisions allowing a future expansion of the courts to cover new crimes and more prisoners were retained, according to government officials familiar with the deliberations.
The military lawyers received the draft after the rest of the government had agreed on it. They have argued in recent days for retaining some routine protections for defendants that the political appointees sought to jettison, an administration official said.
They objected in particular to the provision allowing defendants to be tried in absentia, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the deliberations. Another source in contact with top military lawyers said, “Their initial impression is that the draft was unacceptable and sloppy.” The source added that “it did not have enough due-process rights” and could further tarnish America’s image.
The military lawyers nonetheless supported extending the jurisdiction of the commissions to cover those accused of joining or associating with terrorist groups engaged in anti-U.S. hostilities, and of committing or aiding hostile acts by such groups, whether or not they are part of al-Qaeda, two U.S. officials said.
That language gives the commissions broader reach than anticipated in a November 2001 executive order from President Bush that focused only on members of al-Qaeda, those who commit international terrorist acts and those who harbor such individuals.
Some independent experts say the new procedures diverge inappropriately from existing criminal procedures and provide no more protections than the ones struck down by the Supreme Court as inadequate. John D. Hutson, the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: “We know you’re guilty. We can’t tell you why, but there’s a guy, we can’t tell you who, who told us something. We can’t tell you what, but you’re guilty.”
Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, said after reviewing the leaked draft that “the theme of the government seems to be ‘They are guilty anyway, and therefore due process can be slighted.’ ” With these procedures, Fein said, “there is a real danger of getting a wrong verdict” that would let a lower-echelon detainee “rot for 30 years” at Guantanamo Bay because of evidence contrived by personal enemies.
But Kris Kobach, a senior Justice Department lawyer in Bush’s first term who now teaches at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, said he believes that the draft strikes an appropriate balance between “a fundamentally fair trial” and “the ability to protect the effectiveness of U.S. military and intelligence assets.”
Administration officials have said that the exceptional trial procedures are warranted because the fight against terrorism requires heavy reliance on classified information or on evidence obtained from a defendant’s collaborators, which cannot be shared with the accused. The draft legislation cites the goal of ensuring fair treatment without unduly diverting military personnel from wartime assignments to present evidence in trials.
The provisions are closely modeled on earlier plans for military commissions, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal two months ago in a case brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni imprisoned in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “It is not evident why the danger posed by international terrorism, considerable though it is, should require, in the case of Hamdan, any variance from the courts-martial rules,” the court’s majority decision held.
No one at Guantanamo has been tried to date, though some prisoners have been there since early 2002.
John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the earlier plan, said Bush administration officials essentially “took DOD regulations” for the trials “and turned them into a statute for Congress to pass.” He said the drafters were obviously “trying to return the law to where it was before Hamdan ” by writing language into the draft that challenges key aspects of the court’s decision.
“Basically, this is trying to overrule the Hamdan case,” said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who was Hamdan’s lead attorney.
The plan calls for commissions of five military officers appointed by the defense secretary to try defendants for any of 25 listed crimes. It gives the secretary the unilateral right to “specify other violations of the laws of war that may be tried by military commission.” The secretary would be empowered to prescribe detailed procedures for carrying out the trials, including “modes of proof” and the use of hearsay evidence.
Unlike the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the commissions could rely on hearsay as the basis for a conviction. Unlike routine military courts-martial, in which prosecutors must overcome several hurdles to use such evidence, the draft legislation would put the burden on the defense team to block its use.
The admission of hearsay is a serious problem, said Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, because defendants might not know if it was gained through torture and would have difficulty challenging it on that basis. Nothing in the draft law prohibits using evidence obtained through cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that falls short of torture, Malinowski said.
The U.S. official countered that a military judge “would look hard” at the origins of such evidence and that defendants would have to count on “the trustworthiness of the system.”
To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree, two fewer than under the administration’s earlier plan. Courts-martial and federal civilian trials require that 12 jurors agree.
i got notification that my sousaphone mouthpiece has been shipped, but when i actually went to the web site it said that it hasn’t actually been shipped yet… although it did say that they haven’t got notification of it’s shipping yet, and i know how lackidaisical the postal service is about updating their web sites – twice a day, if we’re lucky – so i’m not panicked yet… but the seller said that they were “going on tour” on august 4th, so it might not actually be shipped until the 20th, which would be a drag, but acceptable if she actually ships it on the 20th.
i made a whole bunch of changes to the Hybrid Elephant web site, the most noticable of which is the change in the navigation bar on the left side. now some of the links actually load new navigation bars instead of going directly to the “index” link in the content frame, like they used to. this is to make navigation easier for people on slow network connections, because now it loads a sub-menu where you can click directly on the page you want, instead of having to go through the index pages. also, according to my web stats, in the past two months i have given away 20 copies of my mac font, and 44 copies of my windoesn’t font, and despite the fact that i have the “READ-ME” in the zip and binhex archives, where i clearly ask them to send me money, i’ve recieved no compensation of any kind for it. so i’ve decided that, now that i actually have a “shopping cart” (which i’ve had for at least a year now 8/ ), i can start selling my font, rather than just trusting people to send money for a font that they probably never open the “READ-ME” for anyway.
my reward for all of this web-based activity is that i got a new order within 5 minutes of my posting the changes, and because of the last round of changes i made, i can fill the order and ship it out right away: i’ve got it sitting next to me on the desk, and i’m going to the post office next.
but then again, i’m the one who is always talking about how much better a workless society would be than the current fiasco in which we’re currently inundated, which we continue to delude ourselves into believing that it’s really the way humans should exist with one another on the planet, when it is actually destroying us… 8/
i’ve got 11 parts completely transposed, and i’m working on the 12th. i haven’t figured out how to insert just the chord names instead of the actual chords, so the last one i’m doing by hand, but it would have taken a lot longer if i had had to do all of them by hand.
there you will find a free program with which you can typeset music, called Lilypond. it’s a small, intuitive, easy to use, text-based markup language similar to HTML, and the shell script it uses to turn .ly files, which you create with any text editor, into .pdf files of typeset music.
apparently it’s also good for midi stuff, but i haven’t gotten that far yet…
so i wake up this morning, and i come in here to check my email, and among the piles of spam is a “WWW Form Submission” which usually means that either one of two submit buttons have been clicked upon, or (more rarely, but still happens fairly frequently) somebody has attempted to use my feedback form to send spam (it doesn’t work, the form only sends mail to me, not to other people at all, and i report any abuses, so don’t bother!)
this time it was because somebody clicked the “submit” button on my feedback form, however, and they sent me the following message:
Whilst I was in Sri Lanka I bought a gift box ‘from the memory of trees’ . It contained a terracotta burner, charcoal tablets, gum benzoin resin, frankincense resin, gum damar powder and myrrh resin. I bought the gift box from Barefoot. I cannot seem to find this item on your wed site. Can you help please as I would like to order some more if possible.
now i appreciate that she thought of Hybrid Elephant first – i really do – and i am going to do my utmost to see that, when she does finally order, she orders from Hybrid Elephant, but at the same time… does she really think that i will have exactly the same selection of incense as a (probably tourist) shop in sri lanka!?!? does she think that all incense shops have the same supplier? i don’t have gum damar, and the burner, both of which can be special ordered, but i’ve got everything else… it’s fairly obvious on the web site – click on “Incense” and then click on “Resins”… and that’s not to mention the fact the likelyhood of her finding that particular gift box on my web site – or not – is a good way to tell whether i market that particular gift box – or not!
<grumble, mutter> why are people so flaming, gawd-awful stupid????
what, is this an epidemic now? first it all but became illegal to be homeless in las vegas, and now, not more than a week and a few days later, it’s orlando… soon they’ll start interning homeless people in camps, and at that point it won’t be too big a step to just make it illegal to be anything they want to be illegal! this must be what it was like in the early days of nazi germany, before anybody realised how dangerous the nazis really were…
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – City officials have banned charitable groups from feeding homeless people in parks downtown, arguing that transients who gather for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses.
The measure, approved Monday, prevents serving large groups in parks and other public property within three kilometres of City Hall without a permit. The American Civil Liberties Union vowed to sue, saying it’s a superficial fix that ignores the city’s homeless problem.
City commissioner Patty Sheehan pushed for the ordinance after complaints from business owners and residents that homeless people were causing problems at a downtown park popular with joggers and dog walkers.
A group called Food Not Bombs, which has served weekly vegetarian meals to homeless people for more than a year there, said it would continue illegally.
Robin Stotter, who is opening a restaurant downtown, said he would support homeless people by pledging money for food and shelter, but supported the ordinance.
“The homeless issue is not going to be solved today,” he said. “It’s a safety issue, and the public deserves a safe place to be.”
Two of the city’s five commissioners voted against the ordinance – including Robert Stuart, the head of a homeless shelter.
Stuart said the city was moving to “criminalize good-hearted people.”
“We’re putting a Band-Aid on a critical problem,” said commissioner Sam Ings, the other opposing vote.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force schools and libraries to block chat and social networking sites as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding. This bill goes far beyond the already broad mandate that requires schools and libraries to filter out obscenity and “harmful-to-minors” content and would block access to many legal and valuable web sites and Internet tools. Because chat and social networking are woven into the fabric of Internet communication, a huge range of sites may be declared off limits in libraries and schools. The bill appoints the Federal Communications Commission as the arbiter of what can and cannot be accessed in libraries around the country, meaning that for the first time, the federal government would be getting into the business of evaluating and screening wholly lawful Internet content.
A 12-year-old boy dead on a stretcher. A mother in shock and disbelief after her son was shot dead for standing on their roof. A phone rings and a voice in broken Arabic orders residents to abandon their home on pain of death.
Those are snapshots of a day in Gaza where Israel is waging a hidden war, as the world looks the other way, focusing on Lebanon.
It is a war of containment and control that has turned the besieged Strip into a prison with no way in or out, and no protection from an fearsome battery of drones, precision missiles, tank shells and artillery rounds.
As of last night, 29 people had been killed in the most concentrated 48 hours of violence since an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants just more than a month ago.
The operation is codenamed “Samson’s Pillars”, a collective punishment of the 1.4 million Gazans, subjecting them to a Lebanese-style offensive that has targeted the civilian infrastructure by destroying water mains, the main power station and bridges.
The similarities with Israel’s blitz on Lebanon are striking, raising suspicions that the Gaza offensive has been the testing ground for the military strategy now unfolding on the second front in the north.
In Gaza, following the victory of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas in January, Israel, with the help of the US, initiated an immediate boycott and ensured the rest of the world fell into line after months of hand-wringing. Israel has secured the same flashing green light from the Bush administration over Lebanon, while the rest of the world appeals in vain for an immediate ceasefire.
The Israelis, who launched their Lebanon offensive on 12 July after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah fighters, intend to create a “sterile” zone devoid of militants in a mile-wide stretch inside Lebanon.
In Gaza, Palestinian land has already been bulldozed to form a 300-metre open area along the border with Israel proper. And in both cases, the crisis will doubtless end up being defused by a prisoner exchange. With Lebanon dominating the headlines, Israel has “rearranged the occupation” in Gaza, in the words of the Palestinian academic and MP, Hanan Ashrawi. But unlike the Lebanese, the desperate Gazans have nowhere to flee from their humanitarian crisis.
Before Israeli tanks moved into northern Gaza, yesterday, 12-year-old Anas Zumlut joined the ranks of dead Palestinians, numbering more than 100. His body was wrapped in a funeral shroud, just like those of the two sisters, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old baby, who were killed three days ago in the same area of Jablaya.
In the past three weeks, the foreign ministry and the interior ministry in Gaza city have been smashed, prompting speculation that Israel’s offensive is not only aimed at securing the release of Cpl Gilad Shalit, or bringing an end to the Qassam rocket attacks that have wounded one person in the past month and jarred the nerves of the residents of the nearest Israeli town of Sderot.
“At first we thought they were bombing the Hamas leaders by targeting Haniyeh and Zahar,” a Palestinian official said, referring to the Palestinian Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. “But when they targeted the economy ministry we decided they wanted to completely destroy the entire government.”
The only functioning crossing, Erez, is closed to Palestinians who are almost hermetically sealed inside the Strip. As the local economy has been strangled by donor countries, Gaza City’s 1,800 municipal employees have not been paid since the beginning of April. Families are borrowing to the hilt, selling their jewellery, ignoring electricity bills and tax demands and throwing themselves on the mercy of shopkeepers.
Western officials say they hope the pressure will coerce Hamas into recognising Israel but the Palestinians believe the real goal is the collapse of the Hamas government – six of whose cabinet members have been arrested, the rest are in hiding.
The signs on the ground are that Israel’s military pressure is proving counter-productive. There is the risk of a total breakdown of the fabric of society at a time when the main political parties, Fatah and Hamas, are at each other’s throats. “The popularity of Hamas is increasing,” says the Palestinian deputy foreign minister, Ahmed Soboh, from the comparative safety of his West Bank office in Ramallah.
The situation has become unbearable for Gazans, says Nabil Shaath, a veteran Fatah official who is a former foreign and planning minister. Through the window, small fishing boats are anchored uselessly in the harbour, penned in by Israeli sea patrols.
All mechanisms for coping are being exhausted.
Mr Shaath, who had a daughter, Mimi, late in life, says that he tried “laughter therapy” with his five-year-old at home in northern Gaza. “Every time there was a shell, I would burst out laughing and she would laugh with me. But then the Israelis occupied everything around us, and there were tanks, and shrapnel in the garden, and she saw where the shells were coming from, and she was terrified. So Mimi now gets angry when I laugh.”
Only a few miles away, on the other side of the border, the Israeli army says it is taking pains to minimise civilian casualties. Hila, a 21-year old paratrooper who is not allowed to give her last name, says the Hamas fighters in Gaza – like Hizbollah in Lebanon – deliberately mingle with the civilian population as a tactic. Weapons are stored in the upper storeys of houses where families live downstairs, she says. “The terrorists deliberately choose places where we can’t retaliate.”
But these places are being hit. And Mr Shaath is scornful of the disproportionate Israeli reaction to the Palestinian rockets. Five Israelis have been killed by the 10km range Qassams since 2000.
Mrs Ashrawi believes Samson’s Pillars are no closer to falling. “Israelis think they are searing the consciousness of the Palestinians and the Lebanese with a branding iron. But if people have a cause they will never be defeated.”
Day 17
Israeli aircraft kill 12 in southern Lebanon, with hill villages near Tyre among the targets.
Hizbollah fires a new long-range missile, the Khaibar-1, at Afula south of Haifa, the furthest a Hizbollah rocket has landed inside Israel.
At least six people are wounded in rocket attacks on northern Israel. One rocket hits a hospital in Nahariya.
US State Department describes Israel’s remarks that the Rome conference gave it a “green light” to continue its attack on Lebanon as “outrageous”.
Emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland asks Israel and Hizbollah for a 72-hour ceasefire to allow evacuation of the elderly.
Israeli aircraft attack homes owned by Palestinian militants and a metal workshop in the Gaza Strip, wounding seven, doctors say.
Death toll:
At least 459 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon
51 Israelis, including 18 civilians, according to Reuters’ tally.
Israeli military says 200 Hizbollah fighters killed, Hizbollah has said 31 of its fighters killed.
NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.
“I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence’, because I don’t believe that I am non-violent,” said Ms Williams, 64.
“Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.
“I don’t know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It’s our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life.”
Ms Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years ago, when she circulated a petition to end violence in Northern Ireland after witnessing British soldiers shoot dead an IRA member who was driving a car. He veered on to the footpath, killing two children from one family instantly and fatally injuring a third.
Ms Williams’s petition had tens of thousands of Protestant and Catholic women walking the streets together in protest. Now the former office receptionist heads the World Centres of Compassion for Children International, a non-profit group working to create a political voice for children.
“My job is to tell you their stories,” Ms Williams said of a recent trip to Iraq.
“We went to a hospital where there were 200 children; they were beautiful, all of them, but they had cancers that the doctors couldn’t even recognise. From the first Gulf War, the mothers’ wombs were infected.
“As I was leaving the hospital, I said to the doctor, ‘How many of these babies do you think are going to live?’
“He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘None, not one’. They needed five different kinds of medication to treat the cancers that the children had, and the embargoes laid on by the United States and the United Nations only allowed them three.”
Wrapping up the three-day forum yesterday, delegates agreed to a 26-point action plan.
“There can be no sustainable peace while the majority of the world’s population lives in poverty,” they said.
“There can be no sustainable peace if we fail to rise to the global challenge presented by climate change.
“There can be no sustainable peace while military spending takes precedence over human development.”
i went to the scottish highland games yesterday, where i performed four times as part of the tattoo, with the ballard sedentary sousa band. it was, apparently, the third or fourth time the BSSB has performed at the highland games, but it was my first time performing, and the first time i had been to the highland games since i was very young – i remember going with my parents, before my older younger sister was born, so i must have been five or six years old. i very clearly remember being absolutly in awe of the pipe bands, and i also remember the drummers twirling their sticks in fancy patterns. it’s probably where i developed my love of the highland pipes, but even the memory of that event did nothing to prepare me for the awesomeness that came from playing in the middle of the massed bands at the tattoo last night. i had pipers standing all around me, i was playing my trombone, and i was in heaven. words are not enough to describe how awesome it was. other players in the BSSB were complaining about the noise, and at least one of the trumpet players was actually wearing earplugs, which i find almost insulting. it was heaven and i was right there in the middle of it!
first i played in the fanfare, which was just the trombones and the trumpets, along with our “drum major” (a diminutive woman who plays clarinet or flute, and is also the world’s only sedentary baton twirler), and we played the fanfare from “The Poet, The Peasant and The Light Cavalryman” march by Henry Filmore (who was part of sousa’s band, so it’s okay) while military people did things with the flag, and then we sauntered off the “stage” – after all, we are a sedentary band, and the concept of standing up, even for a fanfare, grated on most of us – we sat around for a while, during which time we heard performances by a pipe band from port coquitlam, a group called “Molly’s Revenge”, a guy with a guitar, and the silent drill team from some military outfit. then we did a short set, only three marches, and then there was a pipe band from some place in california, and another guy with a guitar, and another group or two, or possibly three (i don’t remember), then we played another short set of four marches. then the pipe band from SFU (Simon Fraser University) came on, and they were incredible. they started from all different sides of the stage, and came together, while playing. they did an arrangement of pachelbel’s canon, which must have been written especially for a pipe band, because otherwise it would have sounded wrong, and they did a piece that was for drums only, with massive quantites of twirling drumsticks in fancy ways and only one mistake. then we came out again, and played with all three pipe bands, and it was incredible.
we left home around 5:00, got to enumclaw at around 5:30, and we finished performing around 10:30. because of the fact that there was also a “rock concert” or something like that at the white river amphitheatre and traffic was backed up, we didn’t get home until after midnight. i have to remember not to eat, because moe and i, and a bunch of moe’s friends are going to maneki this evening.
On the 50th anniversary of our national motto, “In God We Trust,” we reflect on these words that guide millions of Americans, recognize the blessings of the Creator, and offer our thanks for His great gift of liberty.
From its earliest days, the United States has been a Nation of faith. During the War of 1812, as the morning light revealed that the battle torn American flag still flew above Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key penned, “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust!'” His poem became our National Anthem, reminding generations of Americans to “Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.” On July 30, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the law officially establishing “In God We Trust” as our national motto.
Today, our country stands strong as a beacon of religious freedom. Our citizens, whatever their faith or background, worship freely and millions answer the universal call to love their neighbor and serve a cause greater than self.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of our national motto and remember with thanksgiving God’s mercies throughout our history, we recognize a divine plan that stands above all human plans and continue to seek His will.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim July 30, 2006, as the 50th Anniversary of our National Motto, “In God We Trust.” I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-seventh day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.
GEORGE W. BUSH
you know, when i was in high school, “bush” was a common slang term that meant “unacceptable” or “un-cool”. i always thought it was derived from “bush league”, but now i’m not so sure…
If it is happiness you are seeking a move to Denmark could be in order, according to the first scientist to make a world map of happiness.
Adrian White, from the UK’s University of Leicester, used the responses of 80,000 people worldwide to map out subjective wellbeing.
Denmark came top, followed closely by Switzerland and Austria. The UK ranked 41st. Zimbabwe and Burundi came bottom.
A nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels.
Wealth and education were the next strongest determinants of national happiness.
Mr White, who is an analytic social psychologist at the university, said: “When people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP [gross domestic product] per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.”
He acknowledged that these measures of happiness are not perfect, but said they were the best available and were the measures that politicians were talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.
He said it would be possible to use these parameters to track changes in happiness, and what events may cause that, such as the effects a war, famine or national success might have on the happiness of people in a particular country.
Measuring happiness He said: “There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth.
“A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the population think the government should focus on making us happier rather than wealthier.
“It is worth remembering that the UK is doing relatively well in this area, coming 41st out of 178 nations.”
He said he was surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th, because these are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.
“It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly,” he said.
He said: “The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the world.”
Israel ignored repeated warnings it was shelling close to United Nations observers in southern Lebanon before an Israeli bomb killed four for them, the Irish foreign ministry has said.
The ministry said on Wednesday a senior Irish army officer had called Israeli military liasion officers at least six times to warn them that Israeli munitions were landing close to UN installations in the region.
The peacekeepers were killed on Tuesday night when an aerial bomb struck a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) building in Khiam, southern Lebanon, an UNIFIL spokesman said.
“On six separate occasions he [the officer] was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in South Lebanon,” a department of foreign affairs spokesman said.
The dead were Canadian, Finnish, Austrian and Chinese nationals.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has condemned Israel, saying he was shocked by the “apparently deliberate targeting” of the post, and calling for it to investigate the incident.
Several international governments and organisations also expressed their anger at the bombing.
‘Deep regrets’ Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, expressed “deep regrets” earlier on Wednesday over the deaths in a telephone conversation with Annan, his office said, but the Israeli premier said it was “inconceivable” for the UN to think that the incident was deliberate.
Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, also said that Annan’s comments were “premature and erroneous” for implying that Israel had deliberately targeted the observers.
The US government on Wednesday defended Israel, saying that although the attack was “horrible” there was no indication that the post had been targeted.
Since clashes between Israel and Hezbollah fighters began two weeks ago, there have been several incidents of firing close to UN peacekeepers and observers, including direct hits on nine positions, a UN official told the Associated Press news agency.
UNIFIL has almost 2,000 peacekeepers and has been deployed in the southern Lebanon for almost 30 years, mainly providing protection and humanitarian assistance to the local population.
word is that the whole world is now a target for al qaida because of this. no wonder. more power to them. i support the idea of israel existing as much as the next guy, but when it comes to violating the commandment from God that says “THOU SHALT NOT KILL”, especially when it’s that unequal, my personal opinion is that the sooner we, as a unifed people, get these morons out of office, by whatever means necessary, the better. if we don’t, it won’t be long before we don’t have a habitable planet to live on, and, regardless of how much these morons wish it would happen, i think that once it does happen, these morons will be having second thoughts about the whole thing… but, of course, by then it will be too late.
You scored as XIII: Death. Death is probably the most well known Tarot card – and also the most misunderstood. Most Tarot novices would consider Death to be a bad card, especially given its connection with the number thirteen. In fact this card rarely indicates literal death.Without “death” there can be no change, only eventual stagnation. The “death” of the child allows for the “birth” of the adult. This change is not always easy. The appearance of Death in a Tarot reading can indicate pain and short term loss, however it also represents hope for a new future.
the washington state supreme court has just ruled in favour of upholding the defense of marriage act (marriage equals one man and one woman), in spite of the fact that the state constitution clearly states that “No law shall be passed granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens, or corporations.” (Washington State Constitution, Article 1, Section 12)
i don’t think that laws which limit marriage to only heterosexual couples can possibly fall under this category… what? do they think that homosexual couples simply don’t exist? at this point, i think that if they want to call it “marriage,” they should qualify it by saying that it is “marriage for only those people who those people who make the laws think should get married” and have “gay marriage” be called something completely different. 8/
why is this even an issue when we have israel bombing lebanon and killing hundreds of innocent children and other civilians over one kidnapped israeli soldier when the people who kidnapped him are willing to accept a cease fire?
LAS VEGAS — A battle is brewing over a new Las Vegas ordinance that bans providing food or meals to the indigent at city parks.
The Las Vegas City Council unanimously passed a law, which went into effect Thursday, making it a crime to feed the homeless at city parks. It carries a maximum penalty of $1,000 and six months in jail.
The law bans giving away or selling food to anyone who could get assistance from official sources under state law, and officials said city marshals will get specialized training to enforce it.
The city’s mayor, Oscar Goodman, dismissed questions about how marshals will identify the homeless so that they can enforce the ordinance.
“Certain truths are self-evident,” Goodman said. “You know who’s homeless.”
Marshals recently began arresting the homeless in parks under a campaign to force people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves to get mental help.
City officials call the measure an attempt to stop so-called “mobile soup kitchens” from attracting the homeless to parks.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada calls it unconstitutional, unenforceable and the latest attempt by the city to hide and harass the homeless instead of constructively addressing their plight.
“So, the only people who get to eat are those who have enough money? Those who get (government) assistance can’t eat at your picnic?” asked ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I’ve heard of some rather strange and extreme measures from other cities. I’ve never heard of something like this. It’s mind-boggling.”
One advocate for the homeless said she will continue to feed the homeless, despite being cited twice already.
“I’m going to do whatever I think is necessary to keep people alive,” Gail Sacco told the paper.
She said her previous citations came while she was feeding the homeless for holding a gathering of 25 or more people without a permit.
MINNEAPOLIS – Six friends spruced up in fake blood and tattered clothing were arrested in downtown Minneapolis on suspicion of toting “simulated weapons of mass destruction.”
Police said the group were allegedly carrying bags with wires sticking out, making it look like a bomb, while meandering and dancing to music as part of a “zombie dance party” Saturday night.
“They were arrested for behavior that was suspicious and disturbing,” said Lt. Gregory Reinhardt, a police spokesman. Police also said the group was uncooperative and intimidated people with their “ghoulish” makeup.
One group member said the “weapons” were actually backpacks modified to carry a homemade stereos and the suspects were jailed without reason. None of the six adults and one juvenile arrested have been charged.
“Given the circumstance of them being uncooperative … why would you have those (bags) if not to intimidate people?” said Inspector Janee Harteau. “It’s not a case of (police) overreacting.”
Harteau also said police were on high alert because they’d gotten a bulletin about men who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people in other states.
Kate Kibby, one of those arrested, said previous zombie dance parties at the Mall of America and on light-rail trains have occurred without incident. Last fall, nearly 200 people took part in a “zombie pub crawl” in northeast Minneapolis.
Kibby said they were cooperative and followed the two officers to the station where they were questioned and eventually loaded into a van and booked into jail.
“It was clear to us that they were trying to get a rise out of us,” Kibby said.
Members of the group could face lesser charges like disorderly conduct, police said.
it’s HOT! friday and saturday it was hotter than it has ever been around here, since they started keeping records of such things. it was 114 (farenheit) in pasco yesterday, which is east of the mountains and in the middle of the desert, but it’s also obscenely hot. on friday, it was 104 in issaquah, which is just up the road from where we live. today it’s only 9:30 in the morning and it is already in the 80s, and while they say that it’s not going to be as hot today, they still said that we will have temperatures in the mid-90s, which is hotter than i’d like it to be.
and bush says global warming doesn’t exist… idiot.
moe and i went to see circus contraption last night, and despite the oppressive heat (it was the middle of the 18th century and air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet) the show was amazing. i actually know quite a few of the people involved, because of the moisture festival, drunk puppet night, and from hanging out at the pike place market. it gave me all kinds of ideas about what to do with my sousaphone, once i actually get it. it was amazing to see the performers in all kinds of costumes that had to be hotter than hell, doing as well as they did. there was one guy (girl? i don’t really know – their web site says it was a girl, but really there was no way to tell) who was entirely wrapped from head to toe in a giant worm costume who was lead out on stage, tethered to one of the sets with a leather leash, and left there the entire intermission. also, in the song “Over The Rails” when the singer sang “I’ll pull out my hair” and then doffed his wig (he was bald underneath), he also said “thank god!” their final piece, “Carousel” was entirely performed on bottles of various sizes, some tuned with water, and i, personally, thought that was the best part of the entire show.
the ballard sedentary sousa band has a performance today at the ballard locks. moe has to work today, again (this is day 6), and she’s only supposed to be working 4 days a week, but she’s the hospital manager, which means that she has to cover for people who are sick, and there have been two of her co-workers who have been sick on and off for several weeks, and moe has been having to work at least 6 days a week for long enough that i have been encouraging her to hire me to do stuff that doesn’t require veterinary medical training (answering phones, making appointments, cleaning kennels, sweeping, mopping, etc.) so that she doesn’t have to work as much.
today is ? day in the united states – 22/7 – happy ? day everyone.
for those who don’t know, 22 divided by 7 – 22/7 – is the simple fraction that is the closest to ?:
22/7 = 3.142957142857…
? = 3.1415926535…
it’s ? day in the united states because 22/7 is the simple fraction that is closest to representing ?. everywhere else in the world, ? day is march 14 (3.14) because everywhere else in the world they have gone beyond using simple fractions to represent decimal fractions.
i got home from rehearsal last night and my computer was turned off, which is odd since i didn’t turn it off before i left. i tried to turn it on, and it wouldn’t go, so i pulled everything out from it’s niche and sprayed compressed air at various places inside, checked the sockets and determined that it wasn’t a hardware failure, so i plugged everything back in and it didn’t work again, but this time it gave me a keyboard error. after mucking about until well after midnight, i determined that it was the cable from the KVM switch to the computer. fortunately i had a spare, so i replaced it and now everything is operational again, but it’s hot enough today that i’m probably going to shut everything down anyway, once i get a label made for the incense order that is sitting here next to me.
the upshot of the rehearsal yesterday is that we’ve postponed the cirque shows until the last weekend of september and the first weekend of october, which increases the probability that we’re going to get rained out (shades of vancouver), but it will also give us a couple of months to finish the show, rather than opening next weekend, like was originally planned. also we got news that one of the colleges in portland has been begging for us to come down and do a show for them, which is intriguing, since they’ve not only offered to pay us room and board (to the total of around $15,000), but they have no fire regulations, unlike seattle which has been basically regulating us out of business. it’s going to be the “summer barbecue” show, with two “families”, the “Carnivores” and the “Veganis” (not “Vaginas”), which is going to be a take-off of “Romeo and Juliet” (Rodeo and Achooliet), with the requisite feud between the two families, including the “grandfathers” of each family going after each other with flaming canes, a pyrotechnic barbecue grill (which actually works as a barbecue grill) in the shape of a bull – El Diablo – and BBWP stuck in the middle. also, i’m on the verge of buying a sousaphone, so i won’t have to transpose unless i want to. the sousaphone is currently in the new bathroom at the powerhouse, and there was nobody there yesterday when i went to check it out, but it’s there, and it will soon be mine! now i’ve got to figure out how i’m going to schlepp it around from performance to home and back, and i’ve got to figure out where i’m going to keep it when i’m not actually performing – i live in a tiny little house without enough room for a proper workshop and, like a genius, i’ve bought an instrument that is so large that there’s currently no place to keep it, but i’m sure i can work out something.
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they’ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
MORGAN CITY, La. — Residents of trailer parks set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house hurricane victims in Louisiana aren’t allowed to talk to the press without an official escort, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reported.
In one instance, a security guard ordered an Advocate reporter out of a trailer during an interview in Morgan City. Similar FEMA rules were enforced in Davant, in Plaquemines Parish.
FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Rodi wouldn’t say whether the security guards’ actions complied with FEMA policy, saying the matter was being reviewed. But she confirmed that FEMA does not allow the news media to speak alone to residents in their trailers.
“If a resident invites the media to the trailer, they have to be escorted by a FEMA representative who sits in on the interview,” Rodi told the newspaper for its July 15 report. “That’s just a policy.”
Gregg Leslie, legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said FEMA’s refusal to allow trailer-park residents to invite news media into their homes unescorted was unconstitutional.
Morgan City Mayor Timothy Matte told The Advocate that he was surprised residents were being barred from talking to reporters.
“I would think anyone who lives there would be allowed to have any visitor they wanted,” he said.
FEMA leases the land for the trailer park from the city, Matte said. “It’s public property. There’s no question about that. You would think the people would have the same freedom there as everyone else has,” he told the newspaper.
Hundreds of trailers at FEMA parks sit empty and unused in Louisiana, according to The Advocate.
Officials in Morgan City estimate that FEMA has spent about $7.5 million to build the trailer park but that only about 15 of the 198 trailers are being used.
“We all wonder why no one lives there,” Matte said.
FEMA officials refuse to say how much was spent to build the park or why 183 of the trailers are vacant.
“We’re not going to talk about cost,” Rodi told the newspaper.
As in Morgan City, the 334-trailer FEMA park in Davant in Plaquemines Parish is greatly underused.
The north side of the park is empty, and 92 families live in the south side, Rodi said, adding that the empty trailers would be removed.
“We put them there at the parish’s request,” she said. “Now we’ve found that the need is not as great there or that people don’t want to live there.”
The trailers are going to be put on private property or in private parks in the parish as needed, Rodi said. She refused to disclose how much the park cost to build.
Meanwhile, Plaquemines Parish President Benny Rousselle blamed FEMA, in part, for the slow return of residents to the parish.
Rousselle said FEMA knows where many evacuees relocated after the storm but won’t give that information to parish officials.
“FEMA told us because of privacy issues, they can’t give us the addresses of our residents who are spread out in all 50 states. And no one but FEMA has that information,” Rousselle said. “If we could contact them, I think a lot of them would come back if they knew we had places for them to live.
my style is back to the way i want it again, but it was not because of anything the lj “technicians” did, it was due to my being frustrated and clicking around in the advanced customisation page until i found something that worked. it really irritates me that they took a month to get around to looking at my issue before offering me several “solutions” that didn’t really work, and it irritates me even more that some “technician” made 10 points for closing an issue that wasn’t resolved, but i guess it’s okay now that things are more or less back to normal. it would be a lot easier for everyone if they didn’t have “internal caches” that got corrupt, and it would be a lot easier if they had “technicians” that actually knew something about CSS and HTML.
NEW DELHI — As India’s financial capital, Mumbai, observed a moment of silence on Tuesday to commemorate the seven bombings of commuter trains seven days ago, a blistering silence blanketed the Indian blogosphere.
For reasons yet to be articulated by the authorities, the government has directed local Internet service providers to block access to a handful of Web sites that are hosts to blogs, including the popular blogspot.com, according to government officials and some of the providers.
The move has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.
Nilanjana Roy, a Delhi-based writer who runs kitabkhana.blogspot.com, a literary blog, called it “a dangerous precedent.”
“You have a right to know what is being banned, and why it’s being banned,” she said. “I can understand if it’s China or Iran or Saudi Arabia. I’m truly appalled when it’s my country doing this.”
The ban, which has come into effect in recent days, means that people living in India are, in theory, kept from reading anything that appears on the blocked platforms, whether Indian blogs or otherwise.
But the ban seems far from effective. Some Internet providers have blocked access. Others have not, and many more blog aficionados have figured out how to continue reading their favorite sites.
One Web site offers help, by way of a free blog “gateway.” “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?” it asks, and goes on to offer instructions for outwitting the restrictions.
That site was prompted by the efforts of the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block blogspot.com in February, as a way to prevent the proliferation of Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
On Thursday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered the block of blogspot.com “due to security reasons.” Another service provider in Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.
Officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry’s department of information and technology, said he was aware of “two pages” that had been blocked for spreading what he called anti-national sentiments, but did not provide details.
The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, the highest-ranking civil servant in the sector, hung up the phone when reached at home.
The tempest is a testament to growing government anxiety about how to control this mushrooming medium.
Like blogs anywhere, Indian blogs serve as forums to pontificate on national passions: books, movies, politics, cricket. There are blogs devoted to everyday self-indulgence: One blogger, a self-described amateur photographer, writes of jogging in the monsoon, while another recalls what she wore to a cocktail party.
And there are blogs that strive to be public service tools, including one that within hours of the Mumbai train bombings began listing phone numbers of hospitals where victims were taken. Called mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, it is now blocked.
The attacks in Mumbai killed 182 people and injured more than 700. Frenetic Mumbai observed a short silence on Tuesday in memory of the victims.
It is impossible to know how many Indian blogs are affected. One blogger, Mitesh Vasa, from Vienna, Va., has documented “40,128 Indian bloggers who mention India as their country.” That does not include those who do not identify the country they are based in, nor others who identify their country of origin, as Peter Griffin does from Mumbai, as “utopia.”
Mr. Griffin, who helped set up the mumbaihelp site, said he woke up Tuesday morning to a furious litany of 300 e-mail messages, mostly from bloggers enraged by the blockade.
Among the speculation offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations. “Even if that were true, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Griffin argued. Anyone with a domain name, he said, could effectively do the same thing on an ordinary Web site.
we were supposed to start cirque de flambé performances in two weeks, but apart from not having enough rehearsals, now the guy who wrote 90% of the music that we were going to perform for them can’t be there, so we’ve decided that we’re going to postpone the performances until after burning man, which means later in august. there have been a whole bunch of difficulties with performing in seattle to begin with: the fact that the city of seattle is trying to make it as difficult as possible for us to perform here, the fact that they’re now charging us what they charged us for the entire run two years ago, for one show – that’s right, they want to charge us $800 for one show where they charged us the same amount for a three week run two years ago – and to make matters worse, they want to tell us what we can and cannot perform – no fire cyclone, no meteors, no poi, etc. – and they want to tell us how close we can allow our audiences… and now the guy who wrote most of the music can’t be there, so we’re going to put off the show until things get worked out.
fred works as a musical instrument repair technician for a music store in marysville, and apparently the music store has told him that he can’t take time off to rehearse or do the shows until after school starts. it’s kind of odd, actually, because they said that they were thinking about hiring another repair tech, and i’ve been pestering him about getting me a job as a repair tech, but then there would be two of us that couldn’t make the shows. not only that, but fred’s not completely certain that, even after school starts, he would be able to take the time off to rehearse and do the shows. at the same time, he mentioned to me before OCF that he was concerned about people not being available for shows, about people not being prepared, and not taking it seriously, and now he’s the one who can’t make the performances.
one way or the other, there’s a good probability that this is going to be our last show in seattle, and the cirque de flambé will be moving it’s base of operations to somewhere other than seattle at some point within the next year.
yesterday i found out that monique isn’t attracted to me, and that she loves someone else. she says that it was written down in a “psychotherapy” notebook that i shouldn’t have had access to, but i’m not sure, especially since she left the notebook open, in her car, and when i said i was going to take a nap (in her car, at the EAT picnic yesterday) she didn’t seem too concerned about it. in any event, she has been gone most of the day, teaching, and now she is gone because she had a lunch scheduled with one of her clients on friday, that she and the client determined would be better if they had it today. i don’t know what to do. blah.
Duluth, MN July 4, 2006 — The author of an article about the attack on the World Trade Center has found himself under attack for having published it in a new on-line publication, Journal of 9/11 Studies. Entitled “The Third Elephant”, the article discusses evidence that a third airplane was captured on video at the time of the WTC attack. He has now received a thinly-veiled threat against his children, who are cited by name, suggesting it would be a good idea if his article were to simply “go away”.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan society of experts and scholars committed to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about the events of 9/11. The journal, which is archived at journalof911studies.com, is its latest attempt to create forums for discussion and debate about these important issues beyond its web site, which is archived at st911.org. The author, Reynolds Dixon, a writer and Professor of English, former lecturer and Fellow at Stanford University, has withdrawn from the society.
“Threats of this kind have no place in a democratic nation”, said James H. Fetzer, the founder of S9/11T. “These are the tactics of brown-shirts and totalitarians who fear the discussion of controversial questions that threaten the government’s control over the governed. This is a despicable act and we are not going to back down!” He added that the organization itself will assume responsibility for the study, which Reynolds has relinquished. “We cannot allow advances in understanding what happened on 9/11 to be suppressed by threats to our members. The stakes are simply too high.”
In Wisconsin, another member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Kevin Barrett, who has been active in efforts to inform the American people about discoveries that have been made by Scholars–including that the Twin Towers were destroyed, not by the impact of airplanes or the ensuing fires, but by sophisticated controlled demolition; that Vice President Dick Cheney gave a “stand down” order to not shoot down the plane approaching the Pentagon; and that the FBI has now confirmed that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11–confronts the loss of his job.
A Wisconsin legislator, Stephen Nass, Republican of Whitewater, has called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to immediately fire him from his teaching position. The UW Office of the Provost has announced that it will conduct a 10-day review of Barrett’s plans for an introductory fall course in Islam and of his past performance as a teacher at UW-Madison. Provost Patrick Farrell has endorsed his freedom of speech, but “We have an obligation to insure that his course content is academically appropriate, of high quality, and that he is not imposing his views on his students.”
Prominent experts and scholars who are members of S9/11T include Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Morgan Reynolds, former Chief Economist for the Department of Labor in the George W. Bush administration; Bob Bowman, who directed research on the “Star Wars” program in both Republican and Democratic administrations; Andreas von Buelow, the former director of Science and Technology for Germany; and David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of theology at the Claremont Graduate School and author or editor of four books on the events of 9/11.
Concern about academic freedom at UW-Madison extends beyond the Scholars group. Ron Rattner, an attorney from San Francisco, CA, for example, has written to Provost Farrell with the observation that, “When teachers are intimidated against seeking and speaking truth on a campus renowned for its liberal and progressive traditions, we are in trouble”. He added, “Universities are for inquiries, not inquisitions. UW must operate in the traditions of La Follette, not McCarthy”. Robert La Follette was noted as a progressive leader, while Joe McCarthy portrayed his opponents as subversives.
Fetzer observed that the right wing is continuing to attack faculty who speak out on 9/11. “During an appearance on Hannity & Colmes (June 22, 2006), with Ollie North sitting in for Hannity, I made points about controlled demolition, the “stand down” order, and the FBI’s position,” he said, “but they were more interested in whether I was discussing these things with my students than whether they were true.” On a subsequent appearance on Laura Ingraham’s program (June 30, 2006), “She had her staff chanting about ‘nutty professors’ before I was even introduced. Then, after I made some telling points at the end of the program, they edited their archived copy and cut it off after a long harangue attacking me. That is intellectually dishonest.”
Many other members of S9/11T, including Morgan Reynolds and David Ray Griffin, have spoken out in defense of academic freedom and in opposition to censorship and curtailing research into 9/11. “These nasty threats against the children of one member and the freedom of speech of another”, Fetzer said, “make a sorry statement about this nation on the eve of the 4th of July.” Coincidentally, Fetzer will appear with Barrett at the Mid-West Social Forum on Sunday, July 9, 2006, from 9-10:30 AM, at the Student Union of UW-Milwaukee, to discuss 9/11.
(CNN) — The United States on Thursday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding Israel halt its attacks in Gaza.
The proposal also demanded that Palestinian militants release the Israeli soldier abducted June 25 in a raid in Israel and stop launching rockets at Israel from Gaza. In addition, it called on Israel to release Palestinian government officials and lawmakers it took into custody after the soldier’s abduction.
Ten nations on the council voted in favor of the resolution, and four abstained.
John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that “in light of the fluid events on the ground,” the United States believed the Qatar-sponsored resolution was untimely and out of date, and would have helped inflame passions in the Middle East.
As one of the five permanent members on the Security Council, the United States has veto power over resolutions.
Earlier Thursday, the United Nations called fighting between Hezbollah militants and Israel a “major crisis” and said it was sending a diplomatic team to the region.
A U.N. statement said the team will urge all parties to exercise restraint.
The three-member team first will visit Cairo to meet with Egyptian officials and consult with Arab League Foreign Ministers, who will be meeting there Saturday.
Vijay Nambiar, Alvaro de Soto and Terje Roed Larsen are also expected to travel to Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria, with other stops added as needed.
Israel has bombed runways at civilian and military airports in Lebanon, as well as a Hezbollah-run television station in response to Wednesday’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers. It also has imposed a full naval blockade on the country. Hezbollah fighters have been lobbing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. (Full story)
Lebanese Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat called the airport strikes a “general act of war.” He said they had nothing to do with Hezbollah but were, instead, an attack against Lebanon’s “economic interests,” especially its tourism industry.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday said the attack and abductions were an “act of war” and said the Lebanese government would be held responsible for the soldiers’ safe release.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he is concerned that a “regional war is mounting” with Israel’s military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza, where forces were deployed after last month’s capture of an Israeli soldier.
“This is not our interest and will not bring peace and stability to the region,” Abbas said, referring to “this [Israeli] aggression.”
Bashar Ja’afari, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday that Syria supports Hezbollah because it is engaging in “national resistance against foreign occupation.”
Ja’afari said the roots of the current conflict go far beyond the recent escalation of tensions.
“The Arab-Israeli conflict did not start with the capture of an Israeli soldier in Gaza or two other Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon. The Arab-Israeli conflict is 60 years old, and nobody was giving any care to solving this conflict,” he said. “Those who should be blamed are the Israeli policies, not the Arab policies.”
Asked whether Syria has direct contact with Hezbollah, Ja’afari said, “We have been having direct contacts with everybody, except, of course, the American administration and the Israeli side.”
President Bush, speaking during a trip to Germany, said that “Israel has a right to defend herself.” But he warned that Israel should take care not to weaken Lebanon’s government.
“The democracy of Lebanon is an important part of laying a foundation of peace in that region,” Bush said.
Bush also said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “needs to show some leadership toward peace.”
Ja’afari said Damascus “is deploying a huge effort within the Arab circles … as well as at the international level through direct contacts.”
“We are doing our utmost,” he said. “Saturday there will be a meeting of Arab foreign affairs ministers in Cairo to discuss the Israeli escalation. We will do our best. But, mainly speaking, those who have the upper hand with regard to the Security Council should deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in its … wider spectrum.”
Bush said the United States was working to calm the situation.
“We’ve got diplomats in the region. Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice, who is here, is on the phone talking to her counterparts. I’ll be making calls,” Bush said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the abduction of the soldiers was unacceptable and blamed Hezbollah for starting the crisis.
The European Union reportedly condemned the fighting and criticized Israel for using what it called “disproportionate” force. It said the blockade of Lebanon was not justified.
“Actions which are contrary to international humanitarian law can only aggravate the vicious circle of violence and retribution,” the EU president said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Hezbollah is designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, but the Islamic militia is a significant player in Lebanon’s fractious politics. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, told reporters Wednesday that abducting the soldiers was “our natural, only and logical right” to win freedom for Hezbollah prisoners held by Israel.
Nasrallah said the two soldiers had been taken to a place “far, far away” and that an Israeli military campaign would not win their release.
The new fighting on Israel’s northern border comes amid a two-week-old Israeli campaign in Gaza in search of Israeli army Cpl. Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Palestinian militants there.
Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.
Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods.
I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic—in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.
My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the “gook” of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.” A soldier by the gun said, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.”
I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.
In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the “good news” and go along with the official story.
My first direct encounter with American Marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A Marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed Marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The Marines did not understand Arabic. “Irjau!” “Go back!” the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting “America is the enemy of God!” as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the Marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: “That’s why we’ve got the guns.”
A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, “You must go.” “I have the weapons,” the sergeant said. “You back off.”
“Let’s get the fuck out!” one Marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the Marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city’s support of the resistance.
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.
I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: “Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?”
After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the “nervous system” of the area resistance “and the guys who actually do the shooting.”
The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. “Fuck yeah!” cheered one sergeant, “Hi honey I’m home!” The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, “You’ll fucking learn how to walk.” Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. “Down the road,” he pointed. “Show us!” he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. “No, no, it’s here,” yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, “Take me for 10 years but leave my father!” Both were taken. The children screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.
Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man’s arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.
As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them “Dogs! Jews!” over and over. When his soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.
Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic “zip ties” sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to “Shut the fuck up” as their basket’s contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.
The soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. “If they got something to tell us I’d rather they be scared,” he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked “Police.” He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. “It’s good for morale after such a long mission,” a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.
In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that 112 suspects had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. “The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources,” a military spokeswoman said. “Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find ‘subversive elements,’ including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture,” she said.
That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. “Did they just arrest every man they found?” he asked, wondering if “we just made another 300 people hate us.” The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.
The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. “That woman is annoying!” one young soldier complained about a mother’s desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. “How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?” a sergeant asked him.
Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting “USA, USA!” over and over. “They were talkin’ when we told ’em not to, so we made ’em talk somethin’ we liked to hear,” one of the soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty “will be guilty next time,” after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.
In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a “security risk.” Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.
The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past—a fact that frustrated soldiers to no end. “You get all psyched up to do a hard mission,” said one sergeant, “and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry.”
The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub’s home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.
On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub’s door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub’s frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense soldier to spare her son’s life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier’s hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub’s four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called “The Crimes of Saddam,” are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.
Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round—balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub’s injured hand and chuckled to his friends, “It ain’t my hand.” The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.
Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. “Oh shit,” said the S2 captain, “[we’ve got] the wrong Ayoub.” The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. “It was not the wrong guy,” the troop’s captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. “We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to.”
When the soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. “Oops,” said one. Another one wondered, “What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?” “It’s depressing,” a third said. “We trashed the wrong guy’s house and the guy that’s been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed.” The soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, “I’m just glad he didn’t do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet].” Then the soldiers resumed their banter.
A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army’s intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.
The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. “Oh he just hates anything Iraqi,” another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army’s civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of “incidents” and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.
In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army’s appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man’s backyard. “He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming,” one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.
Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. “He was up to no good,” the captain explained.
On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush’s death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. “Mowhoush said he didn’t feel well and subsequently lost consciousness,” according to the statement, “ … the soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective.” On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner’s autopsy said the general’s death was “a homicide by asphyxia,” but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” and that there was “evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs.” Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.
American soldiers had no mission and viewed Iraqis as “the enemy” through a prism of “us and them.” An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of “a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum.” Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army’s civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig’s blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that “I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy.” He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.
One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.
The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as “material witnesses” when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. “They were up to no good,” they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country’s counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.
It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after “incidents” or when they are looking for planted bombs. Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive “wrong side,” as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.
It is hard to relax when the soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.
An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to “get the fuck away.” She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave “we will kill you.”
The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.
Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.
Last week’s headlines prove the point: North Korea fires missiles, Iran talks of nukes again, Iraq carnage continues, Israel invades Gaza, England observes one-year anniversary of subway bombing. And, oh, yes, the feds stop a plot to blow up tunnels under the Hudson River.
World War III has begun.
It’s not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to be heading there. The expanding hostilities mean it’s time to give this conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big picture.
The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.
While it is often a war of loose or no affiliation, and sometimes just amateur copycats, the similar goals of destruction add up to a threat against modern society. Even the hapless wanna-bes busted in Miami ordered guns and military equipment from a man they thought was from Al Qaeda. Islamic fascists are the driving force, but anti-American hatred is a global membership card for any and all who have a grievance and a gun.
The feeling that the wheels are coming off the world has only one recent comparison, the time when America’s head-butt with communism sprouted hot spots from Cuba to Vietnam. Yet ultimately the policy of mutual assured destruction worked because American and Soviet leaders didn’t want their countries hit by nuclear bombs.
Such rational thinking is quaint next to the ravings of North Korean nut Kim Jong Il and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They both seem to be dying to die – and set the world on fire.
And don’t forget Osama Bin Laden’s declaration that it is the duty of every Muslim to acquire a “Muslim bomb.” Is there any doubt he would use it if he had it?
I sound pessimistic because I am. Even worse than the problems is the fact that our political system is failing us. Democratic Party leaders want to pretend we can declare peace and everything will be fine, while President Bush is out of ideas. Witness Bush now counseling patience and diplomacy on North Korea. This from a man who scorned both for five years.
But what choice does he have now that the pillars of his post-9/11 foreign policy are crumbling? As Harvard Prof. Joseph Nye argues in Foreign Affairs magazine, Bush’s strategy of “reducing Washington’s reliance on permanent alliances and international institutions, expanding the traditional right of preemption into a new doctrine of preventive war and advocating coercive democratization as a solution to Middle Eastern terrorism” amounted to a bid for a “legacy of transformation.”
The first two ideas have been repealed. The third brought Hamas into power and has so far failed to take root in Iraq or anywhere else.
I believed Iraq was the key, that if we prevailed there, momentum would shift in our favor. Now I’m not sure. We still must prevail there, but Iraq could mean nothing if Iran or Bin Laden get the bomb or North Korea uses one.
i wasn’t going to post anything about this, but then the guy wrote me back with more “gobbledy-gook”, which was so amusing that i had to post something…
i recently was made aware of rapture ready dot com, which has a "check your spiritual health" section, and in that section, they have a common word that is misspelled: "currupted". i wrote to them and essentially told them that if they’re going to have any hope of convincing me that what they say has even the remotest possibility of being “the truth”, then they’re going to have to learn how to spell.
here’s what i said:
if you’re going to try to convince people that you know the way things are really are, then you are going to have to learn to spell common words first. how are we to expect that you know who God really is if you don’t know how to spell “currupted”?
the guy wrote me back, and said:
And, YOU must learn to edit sufficiently, so that you write your e-mails to correct us in a cogent manner, not with gobbledy-gook in your message, such as you did in the following.
so i wrote back to him and said:
i am not trying to convince anyone of anything… even in this email message.
you, on the other hand, are trying to convince every non-“christian” that you are the one that has all the information, and you don’t spell “currupted” correctly, which makes me think that you’re talking through your hat.
it’s extremely amusing, which, i think, is not the intended purpose of your web site.
i don’t know how much longer this will go on, but i think it’s very funny that apparently he can’t figure out what i am trying to say… of course i didn’t give him the exact URI of the page with “currupted” on it, but you would think that the editor of a web site such as this would know how to use spell check…
The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel. When questioned by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on whether the President’s interpretation of the Hamdan case was right or wrong, Bradbury replied, “The President is always right.”
LEAHY: The president has said very specifically, and he’s said it to our European allies, he’s waiting for the Supreme Court decision to tell him whether or not he was supposed to close Guantanamo or not. After, he said it upheld his position on Guantanamo, and in fact it said neither. Where did he get that impression? The President’s not a lawyer, you are, the Justice Department advised him. Did you give him such a cockamamie idea or what?
BRADBURY: Well, I try not to give anybody cockamamie ideas.
LEAHY: Well, where’d he get the idea?
BRADBURY: The Hamdan decision, senator, does implicitly recognize we’re in a war, that the President’s war powers were triggered by the attacks on the country, and that law of war paradigm applies. That’s what the whole case —
LEAHY: I don’t think the President was talking about the nuances of the law of war paradigm, he was saying this was going to tell him that he could keep Guantanamo open or not, after it said he could.
When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.
This news came fast on the heels of Bush’s shocking admission that, since 2002, he has repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law.
And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and to indefinitely detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants.
All these declarations echo the refrain Bush has been asserting from the outset of his presidency. That refrain is simple: Presidential power must be unilateral, and unchecked.
But the most recent and blatant presidential intrusions on the law and Constitution supply the verse to that refrain. They not only claim unilateral executive power, but also supply the train of the President’s thinking, the texture of his motivations, and the root of his intentions.
They make clear, for instance, that the phrase “unitary executive” is a code word for a doctrine that favors nearly unlimited executive power. Bush has used the doctrine in his signing statements to quietly expand presidential authority.
In this column, I will consider the meaning of the unitary executive doctrine within a democratic government that respects the separation of powers. I will ask: Can our government remain true to its nature, yet also embrace this doctrine?
I will also consider what the President and his legal advisers mean by applying the unitary executive doctrine. And I will argue that the doctrine violates basic tenets of our system of checks and balances, quietly crossing longstanding legal and moral boundaries that are essential to a democratic society.
President Bush’s Aggressive Use of Presidential Signing Statements Bush has used presidential “signing statements” – statements issued by the President upon signing a bill into law — to expand his power. Each of his signing statements says that he will interpret the law in question “in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”
Presidential signing statements have gotten very little media attention. They are, however, highly important documents that define how the President interprets the laws he signs. Presidents use such statements to protects the prerogative of their office and ensure control over the executive branch functions.
Presidents also — since Reagan — have used such statements to create a kind of alternative legislative history. Attorney General Ed Meese explained in 1986 that:
To make sure that the President’s own understanding of what’s in a bill is the same . . . is given consideration at the time of statutory construction later on by a court, we have now arranged with West Publishing Company that the presidential statement on the signing of a bill will accompany the legislative history from Congress so that all can be available to the court for future construction of what that statute really means.
The alternative legislative history would, according to Dr. Christopher S. Kelley, professor of political science at the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, “contain certain policy or principles that the administration had lost in its negotiations” with Congress.
The Supreme Court has paid close attention to presidential signing statements. Indeed, in two important decisions — the Chadha and Bowsher decisions – the Court relied in part on president signing statements in interpreting laws. Other federal courts, sources show, have taken note of them too.
President Bush has used presidential signing statements more than any previous president. From President Monroe’s administration (1817-25) to the Carter administration (1977-81), the executive branch issued a total of 75 signing statements to protect presidential prerogatives. From Reagan’s administration through Clinton’s, the total number of signing statements ever issued, by all presidents, rose to a total 322.
In striking contrast to his predecessors, President Bush issued at least 435 signing statements in his first term alone. And, in these statements and in his executive orders, Bush used the term “unitary executive” 95 times. It is important, therefore, to understand what this doctrine means.
What Does the Administration Mean When It Refers to the “Unitary Executive”? Dr. Kelley notes that the unitary executive doctrine arose as the result of the twin circumstances of Vietnam and Watergate. Kelley asserts that “the faith and trust placed into the presidency was broken as a result of the lies of Vietnam and Watergate,” which resulted in a congressional assault on presidential prerogatives.
For example, consider the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which Bush evaded when authorizing the NSA to tap without warrants — even those issued by the FISA court. FISA was enacted after the fall of Nixon with the precise intention of curbing unchecked executive branch surveillance. (Indeed, Nixon’s improper use of domestic surveillance was included in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the impeachment articles against him.)
According to Kelley, these congressional limits on the presidency, in turn, led “some very creative people” in the White House and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to fight back, in an attempt to foil or blunt these limits. In their view, these laws were legislative attempts to strip the president of his rightful powers. Prominent among those in the movement to preserve presidential power and champion the unitary executive doctrine were the founding members of the Federalist Society, nearly all of whom worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses.
The unitary executive doctrine arises out of a theory called “departmentalism,” or “coordinate construction.” According to legal scholars Christopher Yoo, Steven Calabresi, and Anthony Colangelo, the coordinate construction approach “holds that all three branches of the federal government have the power and duty to interpret the Constitution.” According to this theory, the president may (and indeed, must) interpret laws, equally as much as the courts.
The Unitary Executive Versus Judicial Supremacy The coordinate construction theory counters the long-standing notion of “judicial supremacy,” articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, which held that the Court is the final arbiter of what is and is not the law. Marshall famously wrote there: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Of course, the President has a duty not to undermine his own office, as University of Miami law professor A. Michael Froomkin notes. And, as Kelley points out, the President is bound by his oath of office and the “Take Care clause” to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to “take care” that the laws are faithfully executed. And those duties require, in turn, that the President interpret what is, and is not constitutional, at least when overseeing the actions of executive agencies.
However, Bush’s recent actions make it clear that he interprets the coordinate construction approach extremely aggressively. In his view, and the view of his Administration, that doctrine gives him license to overrule and bypass Congress or the courts, based on his own interpretations of the Constitution — even where that violates long-established laws and treaties, counters recent legislation that he has himself signed, or (as shown by recent developments in the Padilla case) involves offering a federal court contradictory justifications for a detention.
This is a form of presidential rebellion against Congress and the courts, and possibly a violation of President Bush’s oath of office, as well.
After all, can it be possible that that oath means that the President must uphold the Constitution only as he construes it – and not as the federal courts do?
And can it be possible that the oath means that the President need not uphold laws he simply doesn’t like – even though they were validly passed by Congress and signed into law by him?
Analyzing Bush’s Disturbing Signing Statement for the McCain Anti-Torture Bill Let’s take a close look at Bush’s most recent signing statement, on the torture bill. It says:
The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
In this signing statement, Bush asserts not only his authority to internally supervise the “unitary executive branch,” but also his power as Commander-in-Chief, as the basis for his interpretation of the law — which observers have noted allows Bush to create a loophole to permit the use of torture when he wants.
Clearly, Bush believes he can ignore the intentions of Congress. Not only that but by this statement, he has evinced his intent to do so, if he so chooses.
On top of this, Bush asserts that the law must be consistent with “constitutional limitations on judicial power.” But what about presidential power? Does Bush see any constitutional or statutory limitations on that? And does this mean that Bush will ignore the courts, too, if he chooses – as he attempted, recently, to do in the Padilla case?
The Unitary Executive Doctrine Violates the Separation of Powers As Findlaw columnist Edward Lazarus recently showed, the President does not have unlimited executive authority, not even as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Our government was purposely created with power split between three branches, not concentrated in one.
Separation of powers, then, is not simply a talisman: It is the foundation of our system. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, that:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
Another early American, George Nicholas, eloquently articulated the concept of “power divided” in one of his letters:
The most effectual guard which has yet been discovered against the abuse of power, is the division of it. It is our happiness to have a constitution which contains within it a sufficient limitation to the power granted by it, and also a proper division of that power. But no constitution affords any real security to liberty unless it is considered as sacred and preserved inviolate; because that security can only arise from an actual and not from a nominal limitation and division of power.
Yet it seems a nominal limitation and division of power – with real power concentrated solely in the “unitary executive” – is exactly what President Bush seeks. His signing statements make the point quite clearly, and his overt refusal to follow the laws illustrates that point: In Bush’s view, there is no actual limitation or division of power; it all resides in the executive.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense:
In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
The unitary executive doctrine conflicts with Paine’s principle – one that is fundamental to our constitutional system. If Bush can ignore or evade laws, then the law is no longer king. Americans need to decide whether we are still a country of laws – and if we are, we need to decide whether a President who has determined to ignore or evade the law has not acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government.
(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)
× I miss somebody right now.
✓I don’t watch much TV these days.(i don’t watch any TV ever, if i can help it.)
✓I own lots of books.
✓I wear glasses or contact lenses.
× I love to play video games.
✓I’ve tried marijuana.(i am a cannabis legalisation activist.)
× I’ve watched porn movies.
× I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship.
✓I believe honesty is usually the best policy.
✓I curse sometimes.(god damn it, i curse all the time!)
✓I have changed a lot mentally over the last year.
✓I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me.
* * * * *
× I have broken someone’s bones.
✓I have a secret that I am ashamed to reveal.
× I hate the rain.
✓I’m paranoid at times.
× I would get plastic surgery if it were 100% safe, free of cost, and scar-free.
✓I need/want money right now.
× I love sushi.
× I talk really, really fast.
× I have fresh breath in the morning.
× I have long hair.
× I have lost money in Las Vegas.
✓I have at least one sibling.(two younger sisters and a younger brother, none of whom have spoken to me in 20 years.)
× I was born in a country outside of the U.S.
× I have worn fake hair/fingernails/eyelashes in the past.
× I couldn’t survive without Caller I.D.
✓I like the way that I look.
× I have lied to a good friend in the last 6 months.
✓I am usually pessimistic.
✓I have a lot of mood swings.
✓I think prostitution should be legalized.
✓I slept with a roommate.(if you consider my wife to be a roommate…)
✓I have a hidden talent.
× I’m always hyper no matter how much sugar I have.
× I have a lot of friends.
✓I have pecked someone of the same sex.
× I enjoy talking on the phone.
× I practically live in sweatpants or PJ pants.
× I love to shop and/or window shop.
× I’m obsessed with my Xanga or Livejournal.
✓I’m completely embarrassed to be seen with my mother.
✓I have a mobile phone.
× I have passed out drunk in the past 6 months. (i have passed out from smoking cannabis, though…)
× I’ve rejected someone before.
✓I currently like/love someone.
× I have no idea what I want to do for the rest of my life.
× I want to have children in the future.
✓I have changed a diaper before.
✓I’ve called the cops on a friend before.
× I’m not allergic to anything. (tobacco…)
✓I have a lot to learn.
✓I am shy around the opposite sex.
✓I’m online 24/7, even as an away message.
× I have at least 5 away messages saved.
✓ I have tried alcohol or drugs before.
× I have made a move on a friend’s significant other or crush in the past.
✓I own the “South Park” movie.
× I have avoided assignments at work/school to be on Xanga or Livejournal.
× I enjoy some country music.
× I would die for my best friends.
✓I’m obsessive, and often a perfectionist.
× I have used my sexuality to advance my career.
× I think Halloween is awesome because you get free candy.
× I have dated a close friend’s ex.
× I am happy at this moment.
× I’m obsessed with guys.
×Democrat.
×Republican.
×I don’t even know what I am.
× I am punk rockish.
× I go for older guys/girls, not younger.
× I study for tests most of the time.
× I tie my shoelaces differently from anyone I’ve ever met.
× I can work on a car.
× I love my job(s).
✓I am comfortable with who I am right now.
✓I have more than just my ears pierced.
✓I walk barefoot wherever I can.
✓I have jumped off a bridge.
✓I love sea turtles.
× I spend ridiculous amounts of money on makeup.
✓I plan on achieving a major goal/dream.
✓I am proficient on a musical instrument.(i am proficient on many musical instruments.)
✓I hate office jobs.
× I went to college out of state.
× I am adopted. (i might as well be adopted, since my own family wants nothing to do with me.)
✓I am a pyro.
× I have thrown up from crying too much.
✓I have been intentionally hurt by people that I loved.
× I fall for the worst people.
✓I adore bright colours.
× I usually like covers better than originals.
✓I hate chain theme restaurants like Applebees and TGIFridays.
✓I can pick up things with my toes.
× I can’t whistle.
✓I have ridden/owned a horse.
✓I still have every journal I’ve ever written in.
× I talk in my sleep.
✓I’ve often thought that I was born in the wrong century.
× I try to forget things by drowning them out with loads of distractions.
× I wear a toe ring.
✓I have a tattoo.
× I can’t stand at LEAST one person that I work with. (being self employed means that the only co-worker i can get angry with is myself.)
× I am a caffeine junkie.
✓I am completely tree-huggy spiritual, and I’m not ashamed at all.
× If I knew I would get away with it, I would commit at least one murder.
✓I will collect anything, and the more nonsensical, the better.
× I enjoy a nice glass of wine with dinner.
✓I’m an artist.
✓I am ambidextrous.
× I sleep with so many stuffed animals, I can hardly fit on my bed.
× If it weren’t for having to see other people naked, I’d live in a nudist colony.
× I have terrible teeth.
✓I hate my toes.(i modified my toes so that i will like them better, but i still hate them.)
✓I did this meme even though I wasn’t tagged by the person who took it before me.
✓I have more friends on the internet than in real life.
✓I have lived in either three different states or countries.
✓I am extremely flexible.
× I love hugs more than kisses.
✓I want to own my own business.(http://www.hybridelephant.com/)
✓I smoke.(cannabis.)
✓I spend way too much time on the computer than on anything else.
✓Nobody has ever said I’m normal.
✓Sad movies, games, and the like can cause a trickle of tears every now and then.
× I am proficient in the use of many types of firearms and combat weapons.
✓I like the way women look in stylized men’s suits.
✓I don’t like it when people are unpleased or seem unpleased with me.
✓I have been described as a dreamer or likely to have my head up in the clouds.
✓I have played strip poker with someone else before.
✓I have had emotional problems for which I have sought professional help.(25 years of counselling and i’m still fucked up.)
✓I believe in ghosts and the paranormal.(i don’t believe in the paranormal, i know it exists.)
× I can’t stand being alone.
✓I have at least one obsession at any given time.
× I weigh myself, pee/poo, and then weigh myself again.
✓I consistently spend way too much money on obsessions-of-the-moment.
× I’m a judgmental asshole.
× I’m a HUGE drama-queen.
× I have travelled on more than one continent.
✓I sometimes wish my father would just disappear.
✓I need people to tell me I’m good at something in order to feel that I am.
✓I am a Libertarian.
✓I can speak more than one language.
✓I can fall asleep even if the whole room is as noisy as it can be.
✓I would rather read than watch TV.
✓I like reading fact more than fiction.(as long as you consider scripture to be fact…)
× I have pulled an all-nighter on an assignment I was given a month to do.
× I have no piercings.
✓I have spent the night in a train station or other public place.
× I have been so upset over my physical gender that I cried.
× I once spent Christmas completely alone because there was a miscommunication on which parent was supposed to have me that night.
✓There have been times when I have wondered “Why was I born?” and may/may not have cried over it.
✓I like most animals better than most people.
× I own a collection of retro games consoles.
× The thought of physical exercise makes me shiver.
× I have hit someone with a dead fish.
✓I am compulsively honest.
✓I was born with a congenital birth defect that has never been repaired.(it has been resected, otherwise i wouldn’t be here…)
✓I have danced topless in front of dozens of complete strangers.
✓I have gone from wishing I was a girl to revelling in being a boy to feeling like a girl again in the span of five minutes, and not cared a whit for my actual sex.
✓I am unashamedly bisexual, and have different motivations for my desires for different genders.
✓I sometimes won’t sleep a whole night or eat a whole day because I forget to.
× I find it impossible to get to sleep without some kind of music on.
× I dislike milk.
× I obsessively wash my hands.
✓I always carry something significant around with me.
× Sometimes I’d rather wear a wig in day-to-day life than use my own hair.
✓I’ve pushed myself to become more self-aware and thereby more aware of others.
× Even though I live on my own I still cry sometimes because I miss my mother.
✓I hand wrote all the HTML tags in this document.(and they all validate!)
✓I’ve liked something which a majority of people claimed was either bad or weird.
✓I have been clinically dead for a brief period of time.(10 days in intensive care.)
× Instead of feeling sympathy/empathy with people and their problems, I simply become annoyed.
× I participate/have participated in auto drag races and won.
× I do not ‘get’ most comedy acts.
✓I don’t think strippers are money-greedy or slutty for dancing.
✓I don’t like to chew gum.
✓I am obsessed with history/historical things and can’t wait for someone to build a time machine so I can be the first to use it.
✓I can never remember for the life of me where I parked the car.
× I had the TEEN ANGST thing going for at least 2-3 years.
✓I wish people would be more empathic and honest with each other.
× I play Dungeons and Dragons weekly.
✓I love to sing.
× I want to live in my mother’s basement when I grow up.
✓I have a custom-built computer.
× I want to create a certain someone’s babies, even though there’s a 0% possiblity of ever achieving it.
✓I would be in a relationship with one of my pets if they were human.
✓I’ve gone skinny-dipping.
✓I’ve performed in three plays.
✓I enjoy burritos.
× I’m Irish and loving it.
✓I have a thing for redheads.
× I am a twin!
✓Most of the times, I’d rather do something intellectual instead of doing something generically ‘fun’.
✓Once I set out to finish something, I always stay at it until it is completed before I move on to something else.
✓I wish there were a way to erase past mistakes.
✓I sleep more than 12 hours a day.
✓I wish I could be prouder of what I’ve accomplished, but it’s never enough.
× I need more time to myself.
× I wish I was more open-minded.
✓I hope that I go really prematurely grey.(it’s too late, i’m already prematurely grey.)
✓I download songs from the internet.
× I’ve just reenacted chapter 58 of Death Note with my best friend. (what is death note?)
✓I say random things to freak people out.
× I’m still a little mad about the ending of Death Note. (what is death note?)
× I love playing Truth or Dare.
× I love listening to slow music, but I hate singing to it.
× Music helps me remember that I am not alone.
× Playing my favorite sport makes me temporarily forget my problems.
✓I think this survey is particularly long.
× I prefer my LJ friends to my real-life ones.
✓I can only hate someone that I love.
× I’ve ordered an extra two shots of espresso to an Americano at Starbucks.
this is one of the saddest birthdays i have ever had… 8(
Pink Floyd’s Barrett dies aged 60 Syd Barrett, one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes.
The guitarist was the band’s first creative force and an influential songwriter, penning their early hits.
He joined Pink Floyd in 1965 but left three years later after one album. He went on to live as a recluse, with his mental deterioration blamed on drugs.
“He died very peacefully a couple of days ago,” the band’s spokeswoman said.
“There will be a private family funeral.”
A statement from Pink Floyd said: “The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett’s death.
“Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.”
David Bowie described Barrett as a “major inspiration”, saying: “I can’t tell you how sad I feel.
“The few times I saw him perform in London at UFO and the Marquee clubs during the ’60s will forever be etched in my mind.
“He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter. Also, along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent.
“His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.”
Born Roger Barrett in Cambridge, he composed songs including See Emily Play and Arnold Layne, both from 1967.
He also wrote most of their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But he struggled to cope with fame and drugs.
Dave Gilmour was brought in to the band in February 1968 and Barrett left that April, releasing two solo albums soon after.
The band’s biggest-selling releases, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, emerged in the post-Barrett era, with the band selling an estimated 200 million albums worldwide.
Just as Pink Floyd were about to achieve global success, Barrett retreated from public life and returned to Cambridge.
Little was known about his whereabouts for 20 years until he was tracked down living with his mother.
But his influence remained, with younger fans and artists discovering his music.
Former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon released a statement saying: “Lost him again… for bang on 20 years Syd led me to better places.”
“From my agape 17-year-old first listen to Bike to, just the other day, Jugband Blues.
“Languished in his noise… dreamt in his night… stared at his eyes for answers…”
Barrett’s biographer Tim Willis said the guitarist’s music left a lasting legacy.
“I don’t think we would have the David Bowie we have today if it wasn’t for Syd,” he told BBC Radio Five Live.
“Bowie was very much a kind of clone of Syd in the early years. His influence is still going.
“New bands discover him all the time. There’s always a Syd revival going on – if it wasn’t the punks, it was REM, and I’m sure that Arnold Layne and Emily Play as pop songs will live forever.”
whoo… another weekend of OCF come and gone, but it was almost 5 days, so calling it a weekend is a bit of a misnomer. i left on wednesday. i had originally planned on leaving tuesday and attending moe’s family’s “traditional” fourth of july, but moe wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to make the drive by herself back, while i went on to veneta, so i got up early wednesday morning and made the 5 hour drive. i was on the outskirts of eugene on the way to veneta when i went over 166,666 miles in ganesha the car. i’m not sure if that’s a good sign, but the fair went well, so i’ll take it as one even if it’s not.
i worked on the backstage area for the remainder of wednesday and all of thursday, helping larry the carpenter build the band box, helping create the lower part of the stage where the band sat, and making a sign for our “recruitment mirror” (Dwarves Needed – Apply Here), which was a carnival-style mirror that was convex, so that everyone who walked by it looked like a dwarf. the three dwarves (dwarfs, dorfs) were a play on the three stooges, among other things, but there was a lot of fun to be had with unsuspecting hippies who wanted to know why we only had three dwarves. we would tell them all kinds of weird stuff, usually that we made up on the spot, including that the four other dwarves were in jail in california, and we were at the fair to raise money for their legal defense. we made up several ruses to give unsuspecting hippies who wanted to know how to audition for the part of dwarves. one was that the guy to talk to was named “ruben” and he was wearing tie-dye and was around “somewhere”… of course, there was no “ruben”, or if there was, he certainly didn’t know about anything having to do with us or dwarf auditions.
i was introduced to the concept of “tribes” at the fair, for example: the flamingo tribe is responsible for the ritz. so we created a new tribe, the bacon tribe, which is the people surrounding the big boys with poise performances. BBWP, once again, played to rave reviews, both for the friday night fire show and the sunday night comedie/varieté show (for which we used practice poi so that we wouldn’t set the stage on fire). the friday night show was spectacular. it was easily 2000 people in the audience, and possibly more. all of the other artists were talented, and graceful, and flashy, and innovative, and they danced and breathed and spun fire with alacrity that is extremely difficult to match anywhere, but BBWP, all of whom are over the age of 45, weigh more than 180 pounds, and have absolutely no talent, grace or artistry, is the show that everyone will remember for years to come. we chanted “WE’RE BIG, WE’RE BOYS, WE’RE BIG BOYS WITH POISE, COME ON NOW AND MAKE SOME NOISE, WE’RE BIG BOYS…” and the crowd literally roared“WITH POISE!!!”
i talked with beau, who made the cute little skull that is my icon. it turns out he made me three skulls that have the craniotomy in the correct place. one is just the upper part of the skull, with no lower jaw, and it either has multiple craniotomies, or a place to put a leather strap through to make it into something that you wear around your neck, one is a complete skull with a lower jaw and only one craniotomy, and one is my skull, with a beard and moustache, and a sikha. i also saw jeff and gary, who i know from drunk puppet night. gary is also a tuba player, and it turns out that he’s buying a “new” sousaphone, so he said he would sell me his old one for $250 or so, which is the upper limit of what i can afford, but he also said that, since it is in the family, he probably wouldn’t need all the money right away.
saturday and sunday there was a workshop put on by people from gamelan-x on performing the balinese ramayana monkey chant (which is actually called “kecak”). it’s another one of those things that, if i were to learn all about it, i would probably have to give up any preconceived ideas about music as we know of it in the west, and start from scratch. it’s simple enough that it’s fairly easy to learn, especially if you have experience performing pretty much anything with a group of people, but it’s deep and powerful enough that it’s easy to understand how, when it’s performed correctly, it actually has the power to transform the guy in the middle of the group from an ordinary human being into the monkey god Hanuman.
there’s probably more of this post, but it probably won’t be posted until at least tomorrow. meanwhile, go look at a whole pile of pictures and wonder why you weren’t there enjoying yourself.
CIA disbands bin Laden hunt team The CIA has disbanded a unit set up to capture Osama Bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leaders. 05 July 2006
Members of the unit, which was set up in 1996, have been transferred to broader operations that track Islamist groups.
The bin Laden unit, codenamed Alec Station, became less valuable as the movement’s focus shifted more to regional networks of militants, said a US intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday.
“Al-Qaeda is no longer the hierarchical organisation that it was before 9/11. Three-quarters of its senior leaders have been killed or captured,” the official said.
“What you have had since 9/11 is growth in the Islamic jihadist movement around the world among groups and individuals who may be associated with al-Qaeda, and may have financial and operation links with al-Qaeda, but have no command and control relationship with it,” he added.
Hiding Alec Station was established in 1996 after bin Laden’s initial calls for global jihad, and employed about two dozen people.
The unit was strengthened after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the bin Laden unit was disbanded late last year and quoted its first director, Michael Scheuer, as predicting the move would harm the CIA’s efforts to find bin Laden.
Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people […]
The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [?]
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
[…]
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.
It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.
The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.
Is President Bush a die-hard spendthrift in Republican’s clothing? Would former President Reagan roll over in his grave if he knew how big government is getting under his vice president’s son? Conservative Bruce Bartlett says, “Oh, yes,” to both questions.
Bartlett worked in the Reagan White House and advised this president early in his first term. He’s now the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bartlett joined Tucker on ‘Situation’ to asses the president’s spending habits.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST, ‘SITUATION’: Bush is a liberal? I mean, this is going to come as a huge shock to the many obsessive Bush haters who think he’s a right-wing maniac. Explain.
BRUCE BARTLETT, AUTHOR, “IMPOSTOR”: Well, I think there’s a difference between saying somebody is not a conservative and saying they’re a liberal. I believe it was Bill Buckley who said George Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative. He’s not one of us, basically.
His conservatism is the conservatism of the guy who says, you know, like Archie Bunker, the good old days and why is everything, you know, not working the way it used to? It’s not borne out of thought or reason or analysis.
CARLSON: Now, you make the point, I think, very convincingly, in your book, that he is a big government conservative, or big government president anyway.
You’re an economist familiar with numbers. Explain in a way that our viewers—many of them are not economists—can understand just how big a spender this president is.
BARTLETT: I did a calculation the other day based on officially—official Treasury Department data that showed that in the first four years of the Bush administration, our national debt, not just what we call the national debt, but all of the indebtedness—had increased by $20 trillion under this president.
Let me give you another figure. The Medicare drug benefit that he rammed through Congress a couple years ago has an unfunded liability of $18 trillion. The Social Security system, which he talked so much about fixing last year, has an unfunded liability of only $11 trillion. We could repeal the drug benefit, keep Social Security exactly as it is forever, and still cut $7 trillion off our national debt.
CARLSON: You can never repeal the drug benefit.
BARTLETT: I know.
CARLSON: I mean, as a political matter, that is going to be—our great-grandchildren will be weeping over it 75 years from now.
BARTLETT: I say in the book, and a lot of people criticized me for this, that because of that program and because of the utter unwillingness to deal with entitlements, we’re looking at, really, a massive tax increase over the next generation that I think we’re going to need a new source of revenue to pay for.
CARLSON: I just want to restate, so it’s perfectly clear to those watching, you are not a liberal, you are, in Washington anyway, a very well known conservative. You are not attacking Bush from the left at all.
You say something interesting, and given that, this is a fascinating statement that you think the nation might actually be better off with a Democrat in the White House after this president.
BARTLETT: Well, I look at one of the most recent good old days we had, which was from 1994 to 2000, when we had gridlock. I think perhaps the optimum policy from the point of few of fiscal conservatives like me is a Democrat in the White House and Republican control of Congress. Because neither one can do anything, and we’re on automatic pilot and we ended up with surpluses instead of deficits.
CARLSON: I think that’s a very smart point. This government, of course, was designed to produce gridlock. And a Republican Congress and a Republican president turned out to be bad.
You said Bush has hurt his party by not designating a successor. What do you mean?
BARTLETT: Well, obviously, Dick Cheney is not going to be running to replace George Bush in 2008, and I think the Democrats are going to be united. I think they’re going to have a stronger candidate than they’ve had recently.
And I think that the Republicans are going to be handicapped by the fact that they’re going to have a wide open race, no frontrunner. And it’s going to be very difficult.
And it would be a lot better if President Bush had had, as his vice president, somebody who was in a better position to replace him, which is normally what we do after two-term presidents.
CARLSON: Right. But presidents with fragile egos can’t deal with the idea of a competitor in the same building. Is that the idea?
BARTLETT: That’s right. But on the other hand, they also want their own success ratified, so they want their vice president to succeed them, because that is a way of the electorate saying that you did a good job.
CARLSON: Right. Well, a long-term thinker might perceive that. This president did not.
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said “The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader.” Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.
To Bush’s base, his bumbling folksiness is part of his charm — it fosters conservative populism. Bush plays up this image by proudly stating his lack of interest in reading and current events, his fondness for naps and vacations and his self-deprecating jokes. This image causes the opposition to underestimate his capacities — disregarding him as a complete idiot — and deflects criticism of his conservative allies. If incompetence is the problem, it’s all about Bush. But, if conservatism is the problem, it is about a set of ideas, a movement and its many adherents.
The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:
Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment – “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” – to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
Winning re-election and solidifying his party’s grip on Congress
These aren’t signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.
It’s not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it’s the conservative agenda.
The Conservative Agenda Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual initiative, that is, government’s positive role in people’s lives outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom and opportunity.
The conservative vision for government is to shrink it – to “starve the beast” in Conservative Grover Norquist’s words. The conservative tagline for this rationale is that “you can spend your money better than the government can.” Social programs are considered unnecessary or “discretionary” since the primary role of government is to defend the country’s border and police its interior. Stewardship of the commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left to people’s own initiative within the free market. Where profits cannot be made — conservation, healthcare for the poor — charity is meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.
Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn’t there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn’t have failed if he bore no responsibility.
The response to Hurricane Katrina — rather, the lack of response — was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen’s lives. This response was not about Bush’s incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.
Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives’ golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes — based on recognizing global warming — were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.
Our budget deficit is not the result of incompetent fiscal management. It too is an outgrowth of conservative philosophy. What better way than massive deficits to rid social programs of their funding?
In Iraq, we also see the impact of philosophy as much as a failure of execution.
The idea for the war itself was born out of deep conservative convictions about the nature and capacity of US military force. Among the Project for a New American Century’s statement of principles (signed in 1997 by a who’s who of the architects of the Iraq war — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby among others) are four critical points:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad
we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Implicit in these ideas is that the United States military can spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. Our military might and power can be a force for good.
It also indicates that the real motive behind the Iraq war wasn’t to stop Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but was a test of neoconservative theory that the US military could reshape Middle East geo-politics. The manipulation and disregard of intelligence to sell the war was not incompetence, it was the product of a conservative agenda.
Unfortunately, this theory exalts a hubristic vision over the lessons of history. It neglects the realization that there is a limit to a foreign army’s ability to shape foreign politics for the good. Our military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cuba (prior to Castro) and Panama, or European imperialist endeavors around the globe should have taught us this lesson. Democracy needs to be an organic, homegrown movement, as it was in this country. If we believe so deeply in our ideals, they will speak for themselves and inspire others.
During the debate over Iraq, the conservative belief in the unquestioned authority and moral leadership of the President helped shape public support. We see this deference to the President constantly: when Conservatives call those questioning the President’s military decisions “unpatriotic”; when Conservatives defend the executive branch’s use of domestic spying in the war on terror; when Bush simply refers to himself as the “decider.” “I support our President” was a common justification of assent to the Iraq policy.
Additionally, as the implementer of the neoconservative vision and an unquestioned moral authority, our President felt he had no burden to forge international consensus or listen to the critiques of our allies. “You’re with us, or you’re against us,” he proclaimed after 9/11.
Much criticism continues to be launched against this administration for ineptitude in its reconstruction efforts. Tragically, it is here too that the administration’s actions have been shaped less by ineptitude than by deeply held conservative convictions about the role of government.
As noted above, Conservatives believe that government’s role is limited to security and maintaining a free market. Given this conviction, it’s no accident that administration policies have focused almost exclusively on the training of Iraqi police, and US access to the newly free Iraqi market — the invisible hand of the market will take care of the rest. Indeed, George Packer has recently reported that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is nearing its end (“The Lessons of Tal Affar,” The New Yorker, April 10th, 2006). Iraqis must find ways to rebuild themselves, and the free market we have constructed for them is supposed to do this. This is not ineptitude. This is the result of deep convictions over the nature of freedom and the responsibilities of governments to their people.
Finally, many of the miscalculations are the result of a conservative analytic focus on narrow causes and effects, rather than mere incompetence. Evidence for this focus can be seen in conservative domestic policies: Crime policy is based on punishing the criminals, independent of any effort to remedy the larger social issues that cause crime; immigration policy focuses on border issues and the immigrants, and ignores the effects of international and domestic economic policy on population migration; environmental policy is based on what profits there are to be gained or lost today, without attention paid to what the immeasurable long-term costs will be to the shared resource of our environment; education policy, in the form of vouchers, ignores the devastating effects that dismantling the public school system will have on our whole society.
Is it any surprise that the systemic impacts of the Iraq invasion were not part of the conservative moral or strategic calculus used in pursuing the war?
The conservative war rhetoric focused narrowly on ousting Saddam — he was an evil dictator, and evil cannot be tolerated, period. The moral implications of unleashing social chaos and collateral damage in addition to the lessons of history were not relevant concerns.
As a consequence, we expected to be greeted as liberators. The conservative plan failed to appreciate the complexities of the situation that would have called for broader contingency planning. It lacked an analysis of what else would happen in Iraq and the Middle East as a result of ousting the Hussein Government, such as an Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden recently said, “if I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority [to go to war].” Had Bush actually been incompetent, he would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges. Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the country.
Hidden Successes Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bush-is-incompetent frame is that these “failures” — Iraq, Katrina and the budget deficit — have been successes in terms of advancing the conservative agenda.
One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state governments, have become distrustful of the federal government’s capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush’s popularity may have suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept turned out to be a conservative victory.
Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won’t come from military spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war. Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call “non-military, discretionary spending;” that is, the programs that contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.
Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda. Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq’s oil production off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush’s conservative agenda.
Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst these “disasters,” Conservatives win again.
Where most Americans see failure in Iraq – George Miller recently called Iraq a “blunder of historic proportions” – conservative militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the importance of our military — our national pride and worth is expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the world that we can and will preemptively strike with little provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power. The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive to be the locus of the national interest —military power.
It’s NOT Incompetence When Progressives shout “Incompetence!” it obscures the many conservative successes. The incompetence frame drastically misses the point, that the conservative vision is doing great harm to this country and the world. An understanding of this and an articulate progressive response is needed. Progressives know that government can and should have a positive role in our lives beyond simple, physical security. It had a positive impact during the progressive era, busting trusts, and establishing basic labor standards. It had a positive impact during the new deal, softening the blow of the depression by creating jobs and stimulating the economy. It had a positive role in advancing the civil rights movement, extending rights to previously disenfranchised groups. And the United States can have a positive role in world affairs without the use of its military and expressions of raw power. Progressives acknowledge that we are all in this together, with “we” meaning all people, across all spectrums of race, class, religion, sex, sexual preference and age. “We” also means across party lines, state lines and international borders.
The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a referendum on Bush’s management capabilities, and deflects a critique of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It also leaves open the possibility that voters will opt for another radically conservative president in 2008, so long as he or she can manage better. Bush will not be running again, so thinking, talking and joking about him being incompetent offers no lessons to draw from his presidency.
Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush’s conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.
Conservatism itself is the villain that is harming our people, destroying our environment, and weakening our nation. Conservatives are undermining American values through legislation almost every day. This message applies to every conservative bill proposed to Congress. The issue that arises every day is which philosophy of governing should shape our country. It is the issue of our times. Unless conservative philosophy itself is discredited, Conservatives will continue their domination of public discourse, and with it, will continue their domination of politics.
moe has been sick for the past few days, and she’s got to work tomorrow, so the possibility that we are going to portland on tuesday has been considerably diminished. i am always hesitant to go anywhere without moe for more than 12 hours, but it’s even more of a stretch for me to prepare to go away for 5 days when she’s sick… 8(
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
Christians have struggled with the issue of war for centuries. Before Jesus arrived on the scene, all good people wrestled with war and the existence of evil. Thankfully, the Bible is not silent on the subject.
Before we examine war, though, let’s look at the God of Peace.
One of God’s primary attributes is peace. Isaiah said the Messiah would bear these names: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). God longs for all people to live in peace. That is how He created the universe – in total peace and harmony.
Christians are to be people of peace.
One of the most notable biblical commands to live in peace is in Romans 12:18: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”
With the Bible clear on our responsibility to live peaceably, it seems that there would be no reason to ever go to war. However, if one depends on the Bible as a guidepost for living, it is readily apparent that war is sometimes a necessary option. In fact, just as there are numerous references to peace in the Bible, there are frequent references to God-ordained war.
Many present-day pacifists hold Jesus as their example for unvarying peace. But they ignore the full revelation concerning Jesus pictured in the book of Revelation 19, where He is depicted bearing a “sharp sword” and smiting nations, ruling them with “a rod of iron.”
Moreover, the Song of Victory in Exodus 15 hails God as a God of war: “… The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name.” And, as the verses that open this column indicate, there is indeed a time for war.
God actually strengthened individuals for war, including Moses, Joshua and many of the Old Testament judges who demonstrated great faith in battle. And God destroyed many armies challenging the Israelites. I Chronicles 14:15 describes God striking down the Philistines.
God even gives counsel to be wise in war. Proverbs 20:18: “Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war.”
Today, America continues to face the horrible realities of our fallen world. Suicide bombings and terrorist actions are beamed live into our homes daily. This serves as a constant reminder of the frailty of our flesh.
It is apparent that our God-authored freedoms must be defended.
Throughout the book of Judges, God calls the Israelites to go to war against the Midianites and Philistines. Why? Because these nations were trying to conquer Israel, and God’s people were called to defend themselves.
President Bush declared war in Iraq to defend innocent people. This is a worthy pursuit. In fact, Proverbs 21:15 tells us: “It is joy to the just to do judgment: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.”
One of the primary purposes of the church is to stop the spread of evil, even at the cost of human lives. If we do not stop the spread of evil, many innocent lives will be lost and the kingdom of God suffers.
Finally, some reading this column will surely ask, “Doesn’t the sixth commandment say, ‘Thou shalt not kill?'”
Actually, no; it says: “Thou shalt not commit murder.”
There is a difference between killing and murdering. In fact, many times God commanded capital punishment for those who break the law.
We continue to live in violent times. The Bible tells us war will be a reality until Christ returns. And when the time is right, Jesus will indeed come again, ending all wars.
Until that time, however, Christians must live as Galatians 6:2 instructs: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
the ballard sedentary sousa band has a performance at the king street station, for something having to do with amtrak today at 10:00 am. then it’s off to the post office where i have to mail a couple of packages, and then i am officially of the books until OCF on wednestay. in the mean time i hope that it will be cool enough that i can mow the lawn, because if i don’t get the chance to do it now, it’s going to be hell to do when i get home. we also have plans to go to portland for moe’s “traditional”(?) “family”(?) fourth of july, which, in spite of the fact that it means spending the night at her mom’s place without moe to protect me from her mom and her mom’s female housemate (who, in spite of obvious connotations, are conservative, flag-waving, right-wing women who happen to be platonic – although neither of them even know who plato was), only adds to my plans for getting to OCF early wednesday by giving me a 300 mile head start.
WASHINGTON – Congress on Thursday took a major step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in coastal waters that have been off limits for a quarter-century, but a battle looms in the Senate over the issue.
And the Bush administration’s support for the legislation, which was approved by a 232-187 vote in the House, is lukewarm.
The House bill would end an Outer Continental Shelf drilling moratorium that Congress has renewed every year since 1981. It covers 85 percent of the country’s coastal waters — everywhere except the central and western Gulf of Mexico and some areas off Alaska.
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., a leading proponent for lifting the ban, said he believes a majority of the Senate wants to open the protected waters to energy companies.
Asked about White House opposition to some parts of the bill, especially a provision that would give tens of billions of dollars to states that have drilling rigs off their coasts, Pombo said, “I dare them to veto this bill.”
“They don’t like us giving money back to the states. I think it’s right,” Pombo told reporters after the vote. Forty Democrats joined most Republicans in favor of ending the drilling moratorium.
Florida filibuster possible In the Senate, the measure is likely to face a filibuster from Florida senators and possibly others from coastal states that fear offshore energy development could threaten multibillion-dollar tourist and recreation businesses if there were a spill.
The Senate is considering a limited measure that would open an area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, known as Lease Area 181, that goes within 100 miles of Florida. It is not under the moratorium. Even that is unlikely to pass unless its sponsors get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster from the Floridians.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he would pursue efforts to open the Lease 181 Area. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, also of New Mexico, criticized the House-passed bill, saying it would eventually create “a huge hole in our federal budget and undermine environmental protections on our lands and off our coasts.”
Environmentalists, for their part, turned their focus to the Senate.
“Instead of catering to Big Oil and Gas, the Senate will have a chance to focus on the many faster, cheaper and cleaner ways to meet our energy needs — renewable sources of energy like home-grown biofuels, greater fuel efficiency in our vehicles, smart-growth policies, and wind and solar energy,” said Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The group said the bill would exempt seismic testing and individual oil and gas lease sales from environmental impact statements; reduce the amount of royalties that oil and gas companies must pay for tar sands and oil shale development; and no longer require companies to remove offshore drilling rigs when they are done drilling.
The House vote was a huge victory for Pombo, two Louisiana lawmakers – Republican Bobby Jindal and Democrat Charlie Melancon – and Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., who spearheaded the drive to lift the moratorium.
Only six weeks ago, a proposal by Peterson to open coastal waters to natural gas development fell 14 votes short.
This time, they included a provision that would allow states to keep the moratorium in place if they opposed drilling and changed the revenue sharing so that states’ share of royalties would soar eventually as much as 75 percent.
The Gulf states where most U.S. offshore energy resources are being tapped, now get less than 5 percent of the royalties. For example, Louisiana’s royalties would go from $32 million last year to a total of $8.6 billion over the next 10 years — and even higher after that.
Loss of federal revenue The Interior Department estimated that the changes could cost the federal government as much as $69 billion in lost royalties over 15 years and “several hundred billion dollars” over 60 years.
The White House issued a statement saying it favors much of the bill but strongly opposes the changes in royalty revenue sharing, which it said “would have a long-term impact on the federal deficit.”
The Interior Department estimates there are about 19 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 86 trillion cubic feet of natural gas beneath waters under drilling bans from New England to southern Alaska.
Supporters of the drilling moratorium argue there’s four times that amount of oil and gas available in offshore waters open to energy companies, mainly in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and off parts of Alaska. And they say energy companies are only developing a fraction of the government leases they have available to them.
The country uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day.
While critics of the offshore drilling restrictions argue the additional oil and gas is needed if the country is to move toward greater energy independence, supporters or the bill fear energy development could despoil coastal beaches and threatens their recreation and tourism based economies.
“Our beaches and our coastline is what is critical to Floridians,” declared Rep. Jim Davis, D-Fla. “We should not be sacrificing our economy, our environment for a little oil and gas.”
Pombo countered that drilling still would be prohibited within 50 miles of shore under the bill and states could extend the ban up to 100 miles. He ridiculed the bill’s critics as “opposing everything” when it comes to increasing domestic energy production.
“You can’t say no on everything,” Pombo proclaimed.
Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., said states would have to overcome numerous hurdles to continue the drilling restrictions, including having state legislatures and the government seek such protection every five years.
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — U.S. Forest Service officers drew their shotguns but then got into their vehicles and abandoned a checkpoint without firing a shot after about 200 people at the Rainbow Family gathering surrounded the officers, an agency spokeswoman said.
“We’re not going to compromise the safety of our officers,” agency spokeswoman Denise Ottaviano said Tuesday. “We have to reavaluate whether or not we’re going to continue any checkpoints because of what happened.”
At least 500 people have converged in Routt National Forest for the gathering but the Forest Service had been turning away new arrivals from entering because the group hasn’t gotten a permit for large groups. The group’s annual event, often described as a huge gathering of hippies, is expected to draw between 15,000 and 20,000 people to the Routt National Forest for a weeklong July 4th event.
About 60 to 80 people already at the event site approached the officers who had been turning people away and surrounded them in a “hostile manner”, Ottaviano said.
She said more than 100 other people who had been hanging out near the checkpoint because they were not allowed in joined the smaller group, forcing the officers to retreat.
Ottaviano said the checkpoint has been disbanded. No one was stopping people from entering the area but officers will continue their patrols, she said.
The Forest Service began issuing citations on Monday and so far about 60 people have been cited, she said.
Groups of 74 or more are required to get a free permit but no one has responded to the agency’s request to apply for one, she said. The group can still apply for a permit and the Forest Service must issue a response within 48 hours.
In the meantime, the Forest Service has closed two motorized trails near the gathering near Big Red Park to avoid any potential conflict between recreationists and the Rainbow Family, she said. Trails 1204 and 1199 are set to be closed through Aug. 20 because it could take that long for all the participants to leave.
The group gathers each year on public lands. Last year, about 15,000 turned out for the event in Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia and the 2004 event drew about 19,000 to the Modoc National Forest in California.
An attorney for a Rainbow Family member filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday asserting that closed court hearings being held on dozens of minor infractions associated with the group’s annual gathering violate a constitutional right to public trials.
The annual Rainbow Family gathering, a counterculture bacchanal that federal officials said could attract as many as 20,000 modern-day hippies to the woods about 35 miles north of Steamboat Springs, has stirred controversy since its first adherents arrived this month.
Forest Service officials Wednesday released details of another violent confrontation with the Rainbows that required slightly injured law enforcement officers to retreat in a mist of pepper spray.
Meanwhile, Routt County commissioners and officials of the Routt National Forest enacted a regionwide ban on open fires and smoking because of the high danger of wildfires – just in time for the gathering’s July 4 climax.
Forest officials said the Rainbow Family may get permission to continue using some large fires in “kitchen” areas but campfires are prohibited.
Federal officials contend the gathering is being held illegally, and officers last week began issuing citations to dozens of participants.
The civil case, filed Tuesday by Denver attorney David Lane, argues that closed hearings on those citations being held in a nearby firehouse violate the Sixth Amendment.
The case was filed on behalf of Adam Mayo, a Colorado attorney, and William Randell III of New York, claiming that the makeshift courtroom is too small to accommodate all of those who wanted to attend.
The lawsuit seeks an emergency court order that would force the court to proceed in a way that doesn’t infringe on the plaintiffs’ rights to have a public trial.
A hearing on the case had not been set by Wednesday evening.
Many members of the Rainbow Family have claimed that law enforcement by the Forest Service has been particularly heavy-handed, boiling up into Monday’s confrontation, in which three officers were injured when two men being sought for arrest incited a crowd into an intimidating mob, according to Forest Service spokeswoman Denise Ottaviano.
“They were surrounded by a hostile crowd of approximately 200 people who were verbally abusive and hostile in their behavior,” Ottaviano said. “Individuals assaulted some of the officers and pulled the suspects away and, in one case, piled on top of one of the suspects to prevent his apprehension. The officers were forced to defend themselves with the use of pepper spray and batons.”
It is at least the third physical confrontation reported between Forest Service officers and the Rainbow Family, although accounts have differed between the two sides.
i haven’t written that much about OCF, even though it’s a week away now, but that’s primarily because i’ve been busy with rehearsals for it for about the past 3 weeks. about a week ago i went out and bought a bunch of bird whistles and other noisemakers to re-stock my supply of sound effects. i’ve already got a crash box and two sets of coconut shells, but i needed a ratchet and a bunch of new sounds to make the effect of a forest scene (see 22 June, 2006 for stuff i already wrote about, but forgot. 8/ ) i got the nightengale call to work, after searching out an audio clip of an actual nightengale. it’s a bit more complicated than i figured, but not so much that i can’t teach pam, who is playing it.
i bought a slide whistle last year, and while it makes precisely the sound i want it to when it is in one piece, it is made of a very brittle plastic (not PVC or ABS, but something similar) and it has broken so many times that the mouthpiece is mostly glue, and the stopper at the end is being held together with a hose clamp. it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a similar thing out of one of the many plastic soprano recorders i have lying around, some PVC tubing and a bit of ingenuity.
the Big Bois With Poise are performing at the friday night fire show, which means that i won’t be performing with the philharmonic at the friday late night burlesque, but BBWP takes priority now that RA is gone. the philharmonic has been invited to play at the ritz again “sometime” (we don’t know precise details, and probably won’t until the day it happens), and we’re also sawing a lady in half every day at noon at the morningwood odditorium.
i foresee extremely bad things happening to me, and everybody even remotely like me (which includes everybody on my friends list) if this trend continues… today it’s israel, but who’s to say that tomorrow it may be chicago or new york… or seattle…
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces arrested nearly one-third of the Hamas-led Palestinian Cabinet and 20 lawmakers early Thursday and pressed their incursion into Gaza, responding to the abduction of one of its soldiers.
Israeli warplanes also buzzed the summer home of Syria’s president, accused by Israel of harboring the hard-line Hamas leaders its blames for masterminding the kidnapping.
Palestinian witnesses told The Associated Press that Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered northern Gaza before daybreak Thursday, adding a second front to the Israeli action in Gaza that began early Wednesday when thousands of Israeli troops crossed into southern Gaza.
The Israeli military denied it moved into northern Gaza.
Adding to the tension, a Palestinian militant group said it killed an 18-year-old Jewish settler kidnapped in the West Bank. Israeli security officials said Eliahu Asheri’s body was found buried near Ramallah. They said he was shot in the head, apparently soon after he was abducted on Sunday.
Army Radio said the arrested Hamas leaders might be used to trade for the captured soldier. Israel had refused earlier to trade prisoners for the soldier’s release.
Palestinian security officials said seven ministers of the 24-member Hamas-led Cabinet and 20 lawmakers were arrested. Earlier reports that Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer was among them were incorrect, they said.
No deaths or injuries were reported in the Israeli actions. But the warplanes knocked out Gaza’s electric power plant, raising the specter of a humanitarian crisis. The Hamas-led government warned of “epidemics and health disasters” because of damaged water pipes to central Gaza and the lack of power to pump water.
Although the Israeli action was sparked by the abduction of the soldier, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government also is alarmed by the firing of homemade rockets on Israeli communities around Gaza and support for Hamas in the Arab world, especially from Syria.
In a clear warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Israeli airplanes flew ovecr his seaside home near the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria, military officials confirmed, citing the “direct link” between his government and Hamas. Israeli television reports said four planes were involved in the low-altitude flight, and that Assad was there at the time.
Syria confirmed Israeli warplanes entered its airspace, but said its air defenses forced the Israeli aircraft to flee.
In Gaza late Wednesday, Israeli missiles also hit two empty Hamas training camps, a rocket-building factory and several roads. Warplanes flew low over the coastal strip, rocking it with sonic booms and shattering windows. Troops in Israel backed up the assault with artillery fire.
The area’s normally bustling streets were eerily deserted, with people taking refuge inside their homes.
Witnesses reported heavy shelling around Gaza’s long-closed airport, which Israeli troops took over. Dozens of people living near the airport fled to nearby Rafah.
The militant Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades said it fired a rocket with a chemical warhead at the Israeli town of Sderot Wednesday night, the first such claim. The Israeli military said it did not detect a rocket fired then. Al Aqsa is linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction.
In Rafah, Nivine Abu Shbeke, a 23-year-old mother of three, hoarded bags of flour, boxes of vegetables and other supplies. “We’re worried about how long the food will last,” she said. “The children devour everything.”
Prior to the latest incursion into northern Gaza, the Israeli army dropped leaflets warning residents of impending military activity.
Dozens of Palestinian militants – armed with automatic weapons and grenades – took up positions, bracing for the attack.
Anxious Palestinians pondered whether the incursion, the first large-scale ground offensive since Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, was essentially a “shock and awe” display designed to intimidate militants, or the prelude to a full-scale invasion.
Olmert threatened harsher action, though he said there was no plan to reoccupy Gaza. Abbas deplored the incursion as a “crime against humanity.”
The Israeli assault came as diplomatic efforts to free the 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, bogged down with Hamas demanding a prisoner swap and Israel refusing, demanding Shalit’s unconditional release. Shalit was abducted by Hamas-linked militants on Sunday and is believed to be in southern Gaza.
“We won’t hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family,” Olmert declared.
Abbas and Egyptian dignitaries urged Assad to use his influence with Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas leader exiled in Syria, to free Shalit. Assad agreed, but without results, said a senior Abbas aide.
As for Mashaal, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said the hard-line Hamas leader, who appears to be increasingly at odds with more moderate Hamas politicians in Gaza, is in Israel’s sights for assassination.
“Khaled Mashaal, as someone who is overseeing, actually commanding the terror acts, is definitely a target,” Ramon told Army Radio.
Israel tried to kill Mashaal in a botched assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997. Two Mossad agents injected Mashaal with poison, but were caught. As Mashaal lay in a Jordanian hospital, King Hussein of Jordan forced Israel to provide the antidote in return for the release of the Mossad agents.
The United Nations and European Union on Wednesday urged both Israel and the Palestinians to step back from the brink and, echoing a statement from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to give diplomacy a chance.
The White House kept up its pressure on Hamas, saying the Palestinian government must “stop all acts of violence and terror.” But the U.S. also urged Israel to show restraint.
“In any actions the government of Israel may undertake, the United States urges that it ensures that innocent civilians are not harmed, and also that it avoid the unnecessary destruction of property and infrastructure,” said White House press secretary Tony Snow.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged restraint in a phone call to Olmert, saying he had spoken with Assad and Abbas and asked them to do everything possible to release the soldier. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa called on the U.S. to assume its role as “honest broker” and to make the Palestinian-Israeli conflict its top priority in the Middle East.
Hamas’ negotiators’ tentative acceptance Tuesday of a document that Abbas allies claimed implicitly recognizes Israel appeared beside the point a day later, with Israel saying no political agreement can substitute for Shalit’s freedom.
On Wednesday, Palestinian militants braced for a major strike, fanning out across neighborhoods, taking up positions behind sand embankments and firing several rockets into Israeli communities bordering Gaza. Civilians stockpiled food, water, batteries and candles after warplanes destroyed the coastal strip’s only power plant, and main roads linking north to south.
Gaza’s economy was already in the doldrums before the Israeli assault, a result of five years of Israeli-Palestinian violence and an international aid boycott that followed Hamas’ parliamentary election victory in January. The Israeli assault threatened to turn a bad situation into a disaster – underscoring the extent to which hopes have been dashed following the optimism that accompanied Israel’s pullout.
Palestinian plans for high-rise apartments, sports complexes and industrial parks in lands evacuated by Israel have given way to despair, with rising poverty, increasingly violent relations with Israel and a looming threat of civil war.
waitaminute… it is happening here at home… against good old american homegrown terroristshippies!!! that’s it… the first chance i get, i’m outta here, and i’m not coming back.
I need your help to protect my family, the collective efforts of tens of thousands of citizens known as the “Rainbow Family.” This week, near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the U.S. Forest Service has taken illegal action to stop this annual assembly for expression and prayer, in gross violation of the participants essential Constitutional rights.
The ‘Rainbow’ Gatherings have borne a legacy of spiritual & cultural pilgrimage to the National Forests since 1972, the purest exercise of open consensual assembly in our time. The annual ‘Gathering of the Tribes’ draws thousands over the first week of July, focusing on the 4th as a holy day of prayer for peace and freedom. In recent years small regional events in this mode have emerged, and such gatherings have taken place in many nations around the world.
THE GATHERING EXPERIENCE —
Some say the “Rainbow” Gathering is the continuation of the idealism of Woodstock. I think of it more as my annual spiritual retreat and family reunion. Since 1980, I have gathered with my family to compare ideas and pray for peace. I arrive loaded with the burdens of my work, depressed about the world situation. Each year I depart with my faith in humankind renewed and with the energy to fight the beast another year.
The rainbow family is not organized in any way; it is an exercise in self-determination and cooperation in the public interest, without need of government controls. We understand that no matter what comes down, it is the respect and care for each other that win in the end. We have no leaders or leadership, we have no offices or officers, we have no treasurer or treasury. We sit in counsel, often for days at a time in order to make mutual decisions, but there is no power to enforce these decisions on any individual. In the end, just like in society, it works because enough responsible people make sure that what needs to be done gets done.
We have been doing rainbow gatherings for over 30 years, each time in a different national forest across the country. We come in and set up a village in the woods. Cooperative kitchens pour out a wide variety of foods. Seminars on just about any topic are run by the hour.
The Rainbow is known as a healing gathering; people with various ailments come for help. Here in one place they can receive healing, from herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors and masseuses working with osteopaths and physicians. These healers work as a team and share their knowledge in a holistic approach that teaches all involved a lot about the roots of medicine.
Religious groups, ranging from Christians to Hare Krishnas set up camps. It’s truly a free society. We go pretty far back in the woods to get away from the ills of civilization like alcohol and hard drugs. We have our gathering and then restore any damage we cause to the woods. And we have a perfect record of restoration of the forest.
It’s great to walk through a gathering and see so many people but not a scrap of paper on the ground, not a cigarette butt in sight. Each year we train thousands of newcomers how to get along in the woods without destroying the place. Knowledgeable Forest Servide ‘Resource’ personnel love us; it’s the Federal bureaucrats and police from Washington who are on our case.
REPRESSIVE FEDERAL POLICIES —
The Bush Administration has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the Rainbow Gatherings. They are enforcing a ‘Noncommercial Group Use’ permit regulation that is impossible for unaffiliated individuals to comply with. 36 CFR 251.54 They require that that someone sign as an agent for a fictional group entity named as permit Holder — which then must assume full liability from the Government and bind participants vicariously to its terms.
By the creed of the gatherings, no one can appoint themselves to such a position. More importantly, such an ad hoc gathering has no legal capacity to designate agents or act as a group party in any way. As a result, individuals are denied personal standing in First Amendment exercise and subjected to harsh criminal prosecution for being anywhere near the area
The Forest Service requires that a permit be applied for in advance of the gathering. And they use any excuse possible to deny a permit application when we manage to submit one. This year their denial was based on the fact that a logging company had a permit to log in a nearby parcel of the national forest, even though there is no logging activity present whatsoever. The site is far remote from any inhabitants — but still the Forest Service is all over our case.
Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to block this harmless gathering from taking place. The scariest aspect of all this is how Homeland Security is using these gatherings to perfect their techniques of martial law. Regulations written for the Federal Emergency Management Authority to deal with natural disasters are now being used to crush dissent in this country.
Each year the Rainbow Gathering is declared a “National Incident” and federal military law ensues. A Special Agent is appointed “Incident Commander”, with a Delegation of Authority, a large law enforcement “Team”, and huge budget to control the gathering. Qualified Forest Service administrators lose their power, while the county sheriff and other officials are brought into targeted law enforcement actions by inclusion in the Incident Team and other inter-agency agreements.
Each year Homeland Security gains more power over the individuals involved.
RIGHTS CRISIS IN COLORADO —
At this writing Forest Service law enforcement has issued over 500 tickets to the early arrivals at the gathering in Colorado. They have blocked the road and have prevented food and water from reaching those who managed to get into the gathering before the police roadblock was set up.
The 500 people with tickets are being herded into trials like none anyone has seen before in America. These pseudo trials are prototypes for what Homeland Security will use in the cases of insurrection or even a plague. Defendants lose the right to a public hearing (this year these hearings are being held behind closed doors in a firehouse garage near the site.
Attorneys and legal observers have been denied the right to even view these trials. The defendants are not explained their rights nor afforded the right to an attorney, the right to summon witnesses, the right to a jury trial, etc. Defendants ordered to appear each day at 9:00 a.m. and sit in the hot sun without water or sanitary facilities until their trials. Some have now been waiting for several days. These abbreviated trials only take a few minutes. Last year I tried to help a string of defendants defend themselves in these trials but felt helpless to do much as the system was clearly stacked against them.
This year is especially frustrating to me as I have to watch this come down from 6000 miles away. Right now I am in Hungary at a medical conference for my employment. I am flying home on Thursday and plan on being in court Saturday, July 1st, to defend some of my best friends who got a ticket for illegally gathering as they drove down a public highway.
WHAT TO DO —
The confrontation this year is getting more intense by the minute, which is why I am asking for your help. The only way to stop a massive conflagration in Colorado in the next few days is to get thousands of people to contact their political representatives as well as the responsible administrators at the Forest Service to demand that this repression stop immediately.
Please, even if you can never conceive of yourself at a Rainbow Gathering, you must understand that if these citizens lose their constitutional right to gather, we all lose such rights. This year the Rainbow Gathering is being used to set precedents that will be turned against drug policy, civil liberty, anti-war or other activists in the near future.
**********************
Following are some instructions on who to write and/or call
We hope to start flooding the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service with complaints starting Monday morning and not stopping until harassment stops. It is especially important that we get a few Congressional representative and Senators concerned enough to write the Forest Service for an explanation of why so much money is being spent to keep people from camping in the National Forest set aside for exactly that purpose.
Please keep the pressure on these bureaucrats until we are able to spread the word that the government has backed off and that the gathering can proceed unhindered.
If you do not know the contact information for your Congressman or Senator, you can find this here. You can call your representative at 212-224-3121. Besides your representatives in Washington, please call and write the following people to voice your protest to this harsh treatment of people who just want to go on a camping trip in the woods. Keep the calls coming until word is passed around that the government has called off their dogs. Please forward this letter to your friends and feel free to re-post it on any listserv or website you wish. Email me if you have any questions.
Don E Wirtshafter
Attorney at Law
Box 18 Guysville, OH 45735
740 662 5297
don [at] hempery.com
Kathleen Gause, Director 202-205-8534
USDA Forest Service
Civil Rights Staff
Stop Code 1142
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington., DC 20250-1142
Tel (202) 205-1585
Office of the Chief
Dale Bosworth, Chief
USDA Forest Service
Yates Federal Building (4NW Yates)
201 14th Street, SW – Washington, DCÊ20250
202-205-1661; Fx: 202-205-1765
Executive Assistant…Karla Hawley, 202 -205-1195
Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests,
Mary H. Peterson, Supervisor
2468 Jackson Street — Laramie, WY 82070-6535
307-745-2300 Fax: 307-745-2398
U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region (R-2)
Rick Cables, Regional Forester
Mail: P.O. Box 25127 — Lakewood, CO 80225-0127
303-275-5451
Richard Stem, Deputy Regional Forester, Resources: 303-275-5451
Steve Silverman, Office of General Counsel, Regional Attorney: 303-275-5536
Bill Fox, Law Enforcement & Investigations, Special Agent in Charge: 303-275-5253
Jerome Romero, Deputy Director of Civil Rights: 303-275-5340
WASHINGTON – Having several older brothers increases the likelihood of a man being gay, a finding researchers say adds weight to the idea that there is a biological basis for sexual orientation.
“It’s likely to be a prenatal effect,” said Anthony F. Bogaert of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, “This and other studies suggest that there is probably a biological basis for” homosexuality.
S. Marc Breedlove of Michigan State University said the finding “absolutely” confirms a physical basis.
“Anybody’s first guess would have been that the older brothers were having an effect socially, but this data doesn’t support that,” Breedlove said in a telephone interview.
The only link between the brothers is the mother and so the effect has to be through the mother, especially since stepbrothers didn’t have the effect, said Breedlove, who was not part of the research.
Bogaert studied four groups of Canadian men, a total of 944 people, analyzing the number of brothers and sisters each had, whether or not they lived with those siblings and whether the siblings were related by blood or adopted.
He reports in a paper appearing in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that having several biological older brothers increased the chance of a man being gay.
It’s an effect that can be detected with one older brother and becomes stronger with three or four or more, Bogaert said in a telephone interview.
‘Some sort of prenatal factor’ But, he added, this needs to be looked at in context of the overall rate of homosexuality in men, which he suggested is about 3 percent. With several older brothers the rate may increase from 3 percent to 5 percent, he said, but that still means 95 percent of men with several older brothers are heterosexual.
The effect of birth order on male homosexuality has been reported previously but Bogaert’s work is the first designed to rule out social or environmental effects.
Bogaert said he concluded the effect was biological by comparing men with biological brothers to those with brothers to whom they were not biologically related.
The increase in the likelihood of being gay was seen only in those whose brothers had the same mothers, whether they were raised together or not, he said.
Men raised with several older step- or adopted brothers do not have an increased chance of being gay.
“So what that means is that the environment a person is raised in really makes not much difference,” he said.
What makes a difference, he said, is having older brothers who shared the same womb and gestational experience, suggesting the difference is because of “some sort of prenatal factor.”
One possibility, he suggests, is a maternal immune response to succeeding male fetuses. The mother may react to a male fetus as foreign but not to a female fetus because the mother is also female.
It might be like the maternal immune response that can occur when a mother has Rh-negative blood but her fetus has Rh-positive blood. Without treatment, the mother can develop antibodies that may attack the fetus during future pregnancies.
Whether that’s what is happening remains to be seen, but it is a provocative hypothesis, said a commentary by Breedlove, David A. Puts and Cynthia L. Jordan, all of Michigan State.
The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
and then, there’s a public toilet in thailand designed to make you uncomfortable.
Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. — President Ronald Reagan
Americans demand top-quality service from the private sector. They should get the same top-quality service from their government. — President George W. Bush
it’s really strange for me to be agreeing with the great satan, but at the same time, why isn’t the government doing a better job of protecting our rights? it makes one wonder when they are they are the champions of democracy everywhere but in their own back yard…
WASHINGTON – Culminating emotional debate on patriotism and individual rights in the age of terrorism, the Senate is preparing to vote as early as Tuesday on a constitutional amendment to ban the burning or desecration of the U.S. flag.
It could become the first change to the Constitution approved by Congress in 35 years.
Supporters and opponents said the final result would be a cliffhanger, likely coming within one vote either way of the 67 needed to achieve a two-thirds majority and send the amendment to the states. If the Senate joins the House in approving the amendment, ratification by three-fourths of the states (at least 38) appears likely as many have already passed resolutions saying they would ratify it.
On one level, the debate takes its place among other culturally contentious issues the Republican congressional leadership has introduced in recent weeks, including a proposed ban on same-sex marriage. The issues are designed to appeal to the GOP’s conservative base ahead of the November congressional elections, but unlike some of those proposals, the flag desecration ban is seen as having a chance of passage.
The battle to ban the desecration of the flag has a long history. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that burning an American flag was a form of speech protected by the Constitution. In response to that ruling, Congress passed a law that would have punished anyone who purposefully mutilated, defaced, burned or trampled on the flag, among other actions. However in 1990, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision invalidated that law, once again coming down on the side of free speech.
Congress in response has attempted several times to change the Constitution and ban the activity, falling short each time. But a greater Republican majority and conservative presence in the Senate makes passage more likely this time, as does the emotional resonance of the Sept. 11 attacks. The amendment passed the House for the sixth time in 2005, on a 286-130 vote.
As the debate began Monday, the amendment’s supporters on the Senate floor used patriotic rhetoric to suggest the importance of the flag as representation of patriotism, liberty and the American union.
“I think of the veterans in our society,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I think of the veterans’ expectation of the sanctity of the flag, I think of the flag as a symbol of what the veterans fought for, what they sustained wounds for, what they sustained loss of limbs for, what they sustained loss of life for.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, one of the amendment’s chief supporters, said, “The flag is a unique symbol of our nationhood that demands protection. There are few public symbols that we do share as people.”
Hatch along with such organizations as the Citizens Flag Alliance, an umbrella group that favors the amendment, say that the court erred in labeling flag desecration a form of protected speech.
If the amendment becomes part of the Constitution, it would return to Congress the authority to pass federal legislation protecting the American flag.
Those who oppose the amendment suggest that the measure has nothing to do with flag protection, and they are frustrated by Congress’ frequent attempts to amend the Constitution in what they call a political tactic.
“(Republicans) want to exploit America’s patriotism for their gain in November,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., adding, however, that he finds flag burning cruel and contemptible. “The real issue here is not the protection of the flag, it’s the protection of the Republican majority.”
Other organizations opposing the amendment said this debate diverts attention from ongoing issues facing Congress, and contributes to turning the Constitution into a bulletin board for posting the latest slogan.
“The Constitution has served the country well with a limited number of amendments,” said Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way, a group that has spoken out against the amendment. “I have never seen (an amendment) like this one that would cut away from free speech.”
First Amendment concerns resonated on the Senate floor and elsewhere. Robert Corn-Revere, who wrote a report on the Flag Desecration Amendment for the First Amendment Center, pointed to history, suggesting that attempts to limit using the flag for political protest have only increased instances of flag burning.
Furthermore, the amendment would raise new problems while lawmakers and the courts struggled to define the terms “flag” and “desecration.”
For example, a shirt displaying the image of the flag may fall outside the law, as may a 47-star flag, which has never existed in U.S. history.
Opponents of the measure say the amendment would increase law enforcement’s ability to selectively prosecute people whose political messages were disagreeable.
“(The amendment) will open up a great period of uncertainty in a lot of litigation,” Corn-Revere said. “What it won’t do is increase respect for the flag, because you can’t force what goes on inside another person’s mind, and what it also won’t do is reduce the amount of flag burning and desecration.”
Senate Republicans are trying to torch a hole in the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee by passing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow federal and state authorities to punish flag-burning.
With the Fourth of July fast approaching, Senate Republicans are holding a barbecue. Unfortunately, instead of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, they are trying to torch a hole in the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee by passing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow federal and state authorities to punish flag-burning.
Some things should be out of bounds even in a competitive election year. Messing with the Constitution is one of them.
In reality, of course, the Stars and Stripes are in no urgent need of protection from scruffy match-wielding protesters. The Senate has been debating the flag issue on and off for years – ever since the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision holding, quite properly, that flag-burning, however offensive it may seem, is constitutionally protected free speech. The amendment’s return – just in time to distract voters from G.O.P. failures on more pressing fronts – might be dismissed as a bad joke except for two things: an intense lobbying campaign on its behalf by the American Legion, and the fact that no lawmaker relishes taking a stand that might be portrayed as unpatriotic, especially in an election year.
The last time the full Senate voted on the amendment, in 2000, the measure came up just four votes short of the required two-thirds. Nose counters on both sides say that supporters of the amendment are now just a single vote shy. That means that when the roll call is taken on the amendment later this week, there are no freebies. On this round, every vote counts. The House has already approved the amendment, and its ratification by the states is virtually certain should the Senate go along.
As an alternative to the amendment, two of its opponents, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, have proposed a statute against flag-burning instead. Unquestionably, passing a law to address this nonproblem is preferable to rewriting the Constitution. But in crafting a bill with a comparatively narrow reach, its sponsors have not cured the affront to free speech. For that reason, it deserves to be defeated.
As debate on the amendment proceeds, past supporters like Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, owe a duty to search their consciences. Each senator must cast a vote as if it is the deciding one. Given the political math, it well could be.
i’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently, so i went from reading community blogs as well as individual blogs, to only reading individual blogs… and this is precisely the reason why:
As we, the American people, approach the anniversary of our independence from tyranny in 1776, it pays to consider the Bill of Rights threatened by the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration.
Freedom of the press and religion, the right to peacefully assembly, freedom from unlawful searches and seizures have all been endangered by this administration’s reckless conduct in the global war on terror.
The Clinton administration brought us the end to welfare as we knew it.
The Bush administration has brought us an end to the Constitution as we knew it.
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, must examine the Bush administration’s excesses, misconduct and unlawful agenda affecting individual liberties and democracy.
To paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, the Bushvolk have defended democracy abroad and denied it at home. They have out-Nixoned Nixon.
In the next few weeks, expect several columns that celebrate our independence by describing our threatened liberties.
Let’s have an open and honest public debate about issues of importance to our national identity.
We should all question why the federal government silenced librarians until after Congress renewed the USA Patriot Act.
Librarians who had wanted to speak publicly or testify before Congress during hearings were prohibited from doing so. They were threatened with federal imprisonment if they did. Once the Patriot Act was renewed, the gag was lifted.
We should question why animal-rights groups, environmental organizations and civil rights interests fall under the label “domestic terrorism.” Since when is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals equal to al-Qaida?
Since when does telling the public about global warming threaten national security? Expect to learn why this White House considers your phone calls and e-mails the government’s business not yours.
This White House has sought to quell debate by invoking such things as “executive privilege,” “state secrets” and “national security.” It has made the U.S. attorney general, sworn to uphold the Constitution, its lapdog.
It has made citizens fearful of writing signed op-eds and letters to newspaper editors that might get them labeled as subversive or “anti-Bush.”
The Bushvolk are goose-stepping their way into history. They’re trampling the Constitution. They have slandered jurists as “activist judges.” They have misinterpreted Congressional intent and bent and/or broken laws.
Through indefinite incarcerations of people not charged with crimes, they have deprived people of the right to outside legal counsel and privileged communications.
With the oversight of an emasculated Congress, the administration has abused its powers to establish an imperial presidency.
We escaped one King George only to have crowned another.
We can keep America safe and free. We must confront terrorism and resist tyranny.
We, the people, must let freedom ring. To do anything less is to lose America.
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
and ‘s questions to me:
1. Apart from the oft-mentioned tuba and the occasionally-mentioned synthesizer, what musical instruments do you play?
earlier in life, i would have said that it would be easier to name the musical instruments i don’t play, but since my injury, the number of instruments that i have actually determined that i can play again is relatively small. before my injury the only instruments that i couldn’t play were ones with strings (although my wife will tell you that i played guitar, i didn’t really play guitar, i just plunked around). since my injury, i play tuba and trombone, sort of… other brass instruments that use 3, 4 or 5 valves are more or less of a possibility, depending on how small their embrochure is, and although i used to play flute, clarinet and saxophone quite well, i’ve lost enough use of my right hand that they are probably a lost cause. i also play keyboards, but not as well as i used to before my injury, which wasn’t as good as i wanted to play keyboards, but good enough that i had done gigs in several bands.
2. How did you become aware of the positive meanings of the swastika?
i have been intrested in swastikas ever since i was first able to draw one, and was reprimanded for drawing something that people made a fuss about. at that time, it was probably more that i was reprimanded for drawing something that people made a fuss about that was attractive to me than the fact that it was a swastika, regardless of what it meant, but once i put the two together, it has always been a source of fascination to me. i first learned about the spiritual significance of the swastika when i was in high school, approximately 30 years ago, which added a new layer of fascination to the whole thing. my next step is to get a swastika tattoo on my scalp.
3. How do those around you generally react when you listen to the music of Arnold Schoenberg? (Yes, I look at peoples’ info pages for question ideas…)
about 95% of people that hear me listening to arnold shönberg have responded with varying degrees of “what the hell are you listening to anyway??”, and about 4% of the remainder (like my mother, for example) have been made physically ill… it’s always impressed me that somebody actually succeeds in doing that and calling it music, but even moreso when it actually is music.
in case you’re interested, the remaining 1% are people who, like me, listen to just about anything with enjoyment.
4. What’s your favorite band/musician, of any genre?
you have to ask?
frank zappa.
5. Why a duck? (I had to slip a silly one in, most people just got serious stuff…)
the tone that is played when you call a radio station and you’re call being recorded for broadcast – a short, repeated tone that does not interfere with the conversation and is repeated at reasonable intervals as long as the recording is taking place – is called a duck, and is required by the federal communications commission unless the person making the recording has a warrant to record your conversation without your knowledge.
my style disappeared again, and, unlike the last time, there doesn’t appear to be any way to fix it. i have re-opened one of my bug reports, but there has been no action on it for a couple of days, so i don’t expect much.
i went out and bought $100 worth of sound effects for “Snow White and The Three StoogesDwarves“… i bought a ratchet, a frog/creak cuico-like thing (which is my favourite), a duck-call like thing, a samba-whistle “solitary tinamou” bird-call, and a nightengale call which i haven’t yet figured out how to work… i’m assuming that you put water in it, blow it, and it makes a “chirp-chirp-chirp” noise, but when i put water in it and blow, it makes a single-pitched whistle, unless i hold it so that the water comes out the mouthpiece, in which case it makes a single, slow chirp while spraying water all over my face. the phil has a rehearsal this evening, supposedly at hales, but that has yet to be confirmed. we go to OCF in two weeks, so i’d better learn how to make the nightengale call work before then.
it turned out that moe had to work late, so we didn’t get to go to the park we had originally planned on (dash point park) or fly our kites, and instead we went to the park near our house (five mile lake park), and had a picnic while watching the bats flutter about over the lake until the mosquitos drove us inside. i’ve got my wedding anniversary on my calendar now, so presumably i won’t forget it next time.
tomorrow is my 8th wedding anniversary, and i forgot, and scheduled a rehearsal for that day several weeks ago… now i’ve got to cancel the rehearsal at the last minute and think of some way to un-dissapoint moe, who had to remind me. 8P
the parade went well. i got to the site at 8:00 am, and, because of the fact that i was driving an art car, i was able to drive right in and park a block and a half away from the center of the universe, and park without hassle. strangely enough, although the parade and the pageant were higher profile,
i think a lot of this update is going to be about the art car blowout, because having the art car was the main reason why everything else went so smoothly. i didn’t even have to unpack my gear for the parade until 10:00, although i did put a whole bunch of ganesha murtis and a siva murti in the back window, and 5 sivalingams in the front window (no picture, sorry), so i hung around and saw the entire fair before all the crowds, and basically relaxed. jeremy was back from the berklee school, which was the first time in almost a year that i’ve played with him. earlier emails from him said he was going to be at OCF this year, but instead he’s going to greece and italy with two other (female) students for something related to school, but i get the very strong impression that it may be a lot more than that – nudge nudge wink wink… i saw my father, and he looked as though he were pointing his camera right at me (you’d think that i would know by this time), but he didn’t say anything to me and didn’t even acknowledge my presence – admittedly, there were thousands of people, at the same time, he pointed his camera right at me. don’t be too surprised if pictures of me don’t turn up on my father’s photo CDs some day…
after the parade i went back to my car and dropped off my tuba and gear, and picked up my trombone and headed up to gasworks park for the pageant. my call was at 3:00 pm, and we were done with the parade by 2:00, so i was able to relax and take my time. there’s apparently a new hare kṛṣṇa restaurant in the university district which had set up a booth at gasworks, so i got the chance to hang out and talk with the vaisnava devotees who said that most of them actually work at microsoft. they make a really good curry.
i haven’t written much about the pageant, and i’m probably going to make this it, because honestly, i didn’t have a clue what was going on. there was apparently something having to do with the four elements, plus a “techno tribe” that represented æthyr, or something like that, i suppose. apparently brian kooser had been busy, because there were a whole bunch of giant puppets that had his hands all over them, including a whole bunch of giant, deformed baby heads, a puppet that grew from merely giant to truly enormous (which was accomplished with the use of a man-lift, which i could see from “back stage”), and a giant floating bear puppet that transformed into something else, which i was not able to get a clear view of what it was. the trombone choir (which was actually three trombonists, joined for the last song by a fourth, on stilts, who came up from the cast) was directed by mark nichols, who i know from the moisture festival, but all he had us doing was making more or less bizarre noises on cue, and because of the fact that i only saw the performance from back stage, i never really got a good idea of what it was about.
when that was done, i wandered back to my car and packed up my trombone, but it was around 5:00, and there were still crowds of people hanging around, so it was impossible for me to drive anywhere anyway, so i perused the fair again, which was mostly home-crafted stuff, imported stuff, food, and other commercial enterprises with random music acts. i was able to drive out at 8:00, whereupon i went and dropped off orrin’s sax (for which he paid me $120).
sunday, i got to the art car parade staging location, which was the phinney community centre, at 9:30 am, and took a few pictures of the cars as they were showing up. there was one in particular that was tremendously detailed, but totally meaningless. then we drove around greenlake and back to the fair.
i saw three broad groups of people that wandered by ganesha the car: the first were the people who said something along the lines of “i wonder what it says” and then walked on without bothering to find out. of these, there was an interesting sub-group, which said, usually with some authority to the group of people that they were travelling with, that it was some language or another, which was usually wrong. the languages generally were hebrew, and arabic (farsi and persian were the two main variants), but one i heard really boggles my mind: they said “oh, that’s french.”…
WHAT???
the second group of people were the most likely to stop and ask questions, and they ranged from the merely curious but clueless, to the people who actually knew what language it is, and could sound out words. these people were usually discernable by long pauses and thoughtful expressions as they sounded out the words.
the third group were indians or people who are into yoga or hinduism, who knew what the car was without having to say anything. i only talked with a few of them, but they were universally positive in their reactions. they’re the people for whom ganesha the car was made originally, and although there were comparitively few of them, i’m glad to have been there if it was only for them.
not everybody that walked by was exactly “normal”. this baby has a weird hat… cute, but weird… and what do you suppose his indian parents are looking at?
i talked to a guy who had seen my car in auburn about a month ago. he writes down all of the vanity license plates he sees, and the impressions he has about what kind of people drive the cars they’re attached to. he’s got a whole bunch of information from 3 years of research, and is planning on putting it all in a book soon.
i talked with a couple of teenage girls who were in seattle with a group from their church, to do prison ministry (hah!). i talked with them for about 45 minutes and by the time they walked away, they were thoroughly confused and sincerely questioning the version of reality presented by the prison ministry trip with which they had been brainwashed.
i got a chance to talk with don ehlen, creator of the fish mobile and others. don was the original inspiration for ganesha the car. i met don in 1999, when he and i were in the production of “Rock Opera”, an opera about geology by my friend pliny the weird. i had thought about writing sanskrit on my car for a couple of years, but when i saw the fish mobile i asked don about how he had done it, and from there it was all downhill.
the owner of ‘VAINVAN’ has had brain surgery as well, as has her husband.
the frog car, rev. bill’s vacation bible camp, and one or two other cars had an mp3 player hooked up to a loudspeaker under the hood. i also saw a couple of cars that had “guest books” attached to them. art cars mean that the owner is an artist, which can mean that when you see one, there’s a possibility that they will be selling their artwork, which may or may not have anything to do with the art on their car. also, there are other “art car blowouts”, those that i know of are in canada, oregon and california, that pay your gas, food and lodging if you bring an art car to their blowout.
my style mysteriously returned. apparently i had “pasted a new layer over” over my layout, which is news to me… of course i was unaware that i was working with “layers”, i thought i was working with “wizards” who are supposed to keep track of the “layers” for me, but apparently i was mistaken because once i reverted to the “layer” that i was familiar with, everything went back to the way it should have been all along… before things on the server end got screwed up to begin with… grumble, mutter… 8/
a whole bunch of stuff surrounding the solstice parade, solstice pageant and art-car blowout will have to wait until tomorrow, because i’m beat.
blah. my style disappeared and there is apparently no way to get it back. i filed what amounts to a bug report, which got responded to a couple of times, but at least one of them was a canned response, and i don’t even think they looked at the replies. the other one hasn’t even been looked at for two days now, and i seriously suspect that they’re ignoring it.
busy. i’ve had a rehearsal every day so far this week: monday and wednesday snow white, tuesday the BSSB, and today is the trombone choir that’s performing for the solstice pageant after the parade. i’ve got two performances saturday, one at the parade and one at the pageant, plus the art car blowout that is saturday and sunday, so i’ve got to wash ganesha the car tomorrow.
another order for $40 worth of incense from someone in denver.
i picked up the octave key from orrin last night. so i’ve officially finished the alto sax. i made a new screw for the octave key, put on a new pad and provided a flat spring that wasn’t there, and adjusted the linkage so that it worked correctly. if the octave mechanism on a sax isn’t working correctly, the probabilty is good that the entire horn won’t play right. when you’re playing in the second octave, above the G key, the upper octave key is open and the lower octave key is closed, but as soon as you activate the G key, the mechanism automatically closes the upper octave key and opens the lower octave key at the same time. it’s a pretty sensitive balance between 5 springs, and i got it to work the first time without having to figure out what it was actually supposed to do.
according to the spam LJ support sent me, my style should be back “in a few hours, once the internal cache is cleared out”… why it takes a few hours to clear an internal cache is beyond me, but apparently my style has been randomly changing for more than a year because of “the internal caches becoming corrupted in some form”… now i understand “internal cache”, and i understand “corrupt”, but what i don’t understand is why it takes so long to clear a corrupt internal cache. admittedly, i’m sure they’re running a whole farm of multi-terrabyte disk arrays, but my impression is that they’d take less time if they just rebooted the machines, and while that doesn’t necessarily produce the most desirable results for us end-users, at the same time, if it would replace information that has become corrupt with the corresponding uncorrupted information, i would do that rather than taking hours to clear out a cache on the off chance of finding something that points to the source of corruption.
i suppose that’s what they get for running a system that is in test off of servers that are in production.
my style changed again, unexpectedly, and unexplained… component to generator, purple to blue, serif to ariel, left to top… and now the customisation page for component is not the same, so there’s no way to change it back.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/przxqgl/39141.html – Mon, 21 Mar 2005
http://www.livejournal.com/users/przxqgl/39442.html – Fri, 25 Mar 2005
Do-It-Yourself Impeachment – this is another one of those quirks that’s still left in our rapidly disappearing government rights that, if carried out in just exactly the right way, by enough people, just might work… it’s worth a try. nothing else has helped… 8/
Nearly $650 million to increase scrutiny of containers shipping into Seattle and every other U.S. port was stripped out of a national security funding package moving through Congress this week in a move critics say makes the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Opponents of the $648 million for port security said it was too expensive and needed to be cut to satisfy President Bush’s request that the supplemental budget for things such as the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina reconstruction be brought under control.
Though the action by Congress was not unexpected, port safety advocates such as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Port of Seattle Chief Executive Mic Dinsmore were dismayed.
“We are not going to have the money we need for screening machines, customs inspectors, Coast Guard inspectors, radiation monitors, gates, fences and more,” Murray said. “The administration keeps talking a good game, but words do not provide security.”
The decision came on the heels of the House passage Tuesday of a separate Department of Homeland Security spending bill. Absent in that bill was a controversial provision requiring that all U.S.-bound containers be scanned at overseas ports, which Democrats had tried to push through after the national uproar over the Dubai Ports World deal this spring.
Currently, about 5 percent of U.S.-bound containers are inspected.
The $648 million in port security funding was supported by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security panel. It would have paid for inspectors to be added at 50 foreign ports, additional Coast Guard inspectors to oversee security abroad and domestically, and 60 cargo container imaging machines.
Byrd’s amendment passed in the Senate but was not included in the House version. Though the final version of the funding package still needs to be voted on by the Senate and the House, the committee that eliminated the amendment early Wednesday took further measures to ensure that it could not be reinstated this year.
“Like many people who have been strong advocates of getting this national security issue right, I am disappointed,” Port of Seattle chief Dinsmore said. “We have not determined what kind of negative impact it will have, but if it takes money away from projects we need, it is going to hurt Seattle, as well as Tacoma and Everett.”
The American Association of Port Authorities said the move was especially inopportune, given the additional costs incurred by ports implementing the government mandate for standardized federal identification for port workers.
Those rules, announced last month, create a national standardized identification procedure for all who have unescorted access to ports: longshore workers, truck drivers, port staff and contractors, and vessel and rail operators. Making that happen could cost from $299 million to $325 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security figures cited by the port association. However, the Homeland Security bill passed by the House contains only $40 million specifically designated for that.
“It’s a grave disappointment that’s not putting money into real port security,” said Herald Ugles, president of Local 19 International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
“They paid money to inspect American workers, but should be spending it more wisely on inspecting cargo.”
Ugles said the government, as part of a nationwide effort, asked for and received a list of the names and birthdates of all Local 19 longshoremen. Their information, he said, will be checked against the terrorist watch list.
“We understand that it has to be done, but they need to be inspecting the containers,” Ugles said.
The Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill passed by the House does include $4.2 billion for port, container and cargo security, but Murray said those funds are “not enough, that is why we asked for more.”
Murray said that ports need the kind of hardened security now present at the airports, and that the cost of doing so far exceeds the bill’s budget for it. The bill will go onto a committee that will resolve the differences between the Senate and the House versions, then pass through a final vote.
It includes $2.1 billion for the Coast Guard port security operations, $1.7 billion for Customs and Border Protection cargo inspection and trade operation, $139 million for a Container Security Initiative, $178 million for radiation portal monitors, $70.1 million for a Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, and $200 million in port security grants.
“You’re talking less then bare bones with those numbers,” said Murray, calling the emergency security funding package “the smallest budget number we’ve seen in a long time.” She is co-writing legislation that would “push the borders back” and have containers inspected in foreign ports, among other things.
The White House had urged Congress to keep to its limit, or risk veto of the emergency funding bill that will send much-needed cash to Iraq and areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
it’s as finished as i can make it, but it’s missing the upper octave key (orin’s father has it, for some unknown reason), but it makes all the correct popping noises when i close the keys, and with a piece of tape over the upper octave tone hole, i was able to play all the way down to Bb without any difficulty… and i figure if i can play it, there’s a good chance that an experienced sax player without a brain injury will do just fine.
i also put a new mouthpiece cork on the neck, but, alas, i will have to wait for orin to get the key from his father before i can actually finish the horn…
not a workshop update: i finally found my cork and felt cement, and got my leak light set up. finished the lower stack, the C-D# keys, and the D-B-Bb key/G# key combination. mostly pad leveling, regulation, and spring tensioning, although i broke the spring on the C# key twice (doh!). it’s really incredible to be able to do this, because i’m basically running on automatic… if i were to stop and think about what i’m doing, it would never get finished.
i tried to take a picture of the leak light in action, but it was too dark, and if i use the flash then you can’t see the leak light. i’ll figure out something and post a picture of it later. now i’ve got to go to a ballard sedentary sousa band performance at small faces child development center.
they have assured me that the site will be removed without any further hesitation, and those responsible will be put in contact with the appropriate authorities.
the site is a “phishing” site, which fools you into believing that it’s paypal (it’s not, DO NOT try to log in there). i have also reported it to spoof at paypal, the administrator of the place where you originally sent your spam (vi.net), and the FBI.
the last thing the spammer expects to see… IS THE MALLET!
WASHINGTON, May 11 – President Bush appears to be losing support among a key group of voters who had hitherto stood firmly with the president even as his poll numbers among other groups fell dramatically.
A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time, Bush’s approval rating has fallen below 50% among total fucking morons, and now stands at 44%. This represents a dramatic drop compared to a poll taken just last December, when 62% of total fucking morons expressed support for the president and his policies.
The current poll, conducted by phone with 1,409 total fucking morons between May 4 and May 8, reveals that only 44% of those polled believe the president is doing a good job, while 27% believe he is doing a poor job and 29% don’t understand the question.
The December poll, conducted by phone with 1,530 total fucking morons, showed 62% approved of the president, 7% disapproved and 31% didn’t understand the question.
Faltering approval ratings for the president among a group once thought to be a reliable source of loyal support gives Republicans one more reason to be nervous about the upcoming mid-term elections. “If we can’t depend on the support of total fucking morons,” says Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), “then we’ve got a big problem. They’re a key factor in our electoral strategy, and an important part of today’s Republican coalition.”
“We’ve taken the total fucking moron vote for granted,” says Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), “and now we’re paying for it. We’ve let the Democrats control the debate lately, and they’ve dragged discourse back into the realm of complex, nuanced issues. So your average total fucking moron turns on his TV and sees his Republican Congressman arguing about Constitutional law or the complexities of state formation in the Middle East, and he tunes out. He wants to hear comforting, pandering, flattering bromides and he doesn’t want to hear a logical argument more complex than what you’d find on a bumper sticker.”
For Feeney, the poll is a dire warning that Republicans can ignore only at their peril. “This should send a signal that we have to regain control of the debate if we want the support of our key constituencies in the coming election and beyond. We need to bring public discourse back into the realm of stupidity and vacuity. We should be talking about homosexual illegal immigrants burning flags. We should be talking about the power of pride. We should be talking about freedom fries. These are the issues that resonate with total fucking morons.”
But some total fucking morons say it’s too late. Bill Snarpel of Enid, Oklahoma is a total fucking moron who voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. But he says he won’t be voting for Bush in 2008. “I don’t like it that he was going to sell our ports to the Arabs. If the Arabs own the ports then that means they’ll let all the Arabs in and then we’ll all be riding camels and wearing towels on our heads. I don’t want my children singing the Star Spangled Banner in Muslim.”
Total fucking moron Kurt Meyer of Turlock, California also says his once solid support for Bush has collapsed. “He invaded Iraq and all those soldiers died, and for what? We destroyed all their WMDs, but now their new president is making fun of us and saying he’s going to build nuclear bombs and that we can’t stop him. Well, nuclear bombs are even worse than WMDs, so what did we accomplish?”
Laura McDonald, a total fucking moron from Chandler, Arizona, says she is disappointed that the president hasn’t been a more forceful advocate of Christian values. “This country was founded on Christian values,” she says, “but you’d never know it looking around and seeing all the Mexicans running around. I thought Bush was going to bring Jesus back into the government. Instead, Christians are being persecuted worse than ever before in history, because all these Mexicans come here and tell Christians that we have to respect their religious beliefs. So now it’s illegal for children to pray in school. Soon it will be illegal for them to speak English.”
Not all total fucking morons have turned their backs on the president. Jeb Larkin of Topeka, Kansas says he still fully supports Bush. “He is doing a great job. He is a great president. He is a great decider. I have a puppy. His tail sticks straight up and you can see his butthole.”
And not all Republican lawmakers are concerned about the poll. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), for one, does not find it a cause for anxiety. While he agrees that his party should not take total fucking morons for granted, they “really don’t have anywhere else to go. They’re never going to be able to understand someone like Al Gore or John Kerry or anybody intelligent and articulate who wants to talk about substantive issues. Just try having a conversation with one of them about global warming. They’ll say, ‘Oh, but Rush says volcanoes consume more ozone than humans do.’ I mean, they’re morons! Total fucking morons!”
“They’ve got nowhere else to go,” Alexander reaffirms with a smile, “and they always vote.”
WASHINGTON – A constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage went down to Senate defeat Wednesday, but supporters said that several new votes for the measure represent progress that gives the GOP’s base reason to vote on Election Day.
The 49-48 vote fell 11 short of the 60 required to send the matter for an up-or-down tally by the full Senate.
Had the amendment survived, a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress would have been required to send it to the states. It then would have had to be ratified by at least 38 state legislatures.
But ban supporters took solace in the fact that the idea received several new votes from Republican freshmen elected after the amendment received its last vote in 2004.
“We’re building votes,” Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a new supporter, said before the vote. “That’s often what’s required over several years to get there, particularly to a two-thirds vote.”
A majority of Americans define marriage as a union of a man and a woman, as does the amendment, according to a new ABC News poll. But just as many oppose amending the Constitution, the poll found.
Forty-five of the 50 states have acted to define traditional marriage in ways that would ban same-sex marriage — 19 with their own state constitutional amendments and 26 with statutes.
“Most Americans are not yet convinced that their elected representatives or the judiciary are likely to expand decisively the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a possible presidential candidate in 2008. He told the Senate on Tuesday he does not support the federal amendment.
The measure’s defeat in the Senate is by no means its last stand, said its supporters.
“I do not believe the sponsors are going to fall back and cry about it,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “I think they are going to keep bringing it up.”
got my bench motor set up and working, and found cork and felt, but not cement for them. got to set up my leak light, because when i got the lower stack steel un-bent and re-tapped (3:48NF), i discovered that the pads needed leveling (naturally), but i don’t know where my leak light is, so locating that and getting it set up will be my next goal.
in spite of the fact that i don’t have a “real” workshop set up, i took in orin’s buescher alto saxophone because i figured that i could. and so far, i’m doing marginally okay, although i’m going to have to set up my bench motor (the grey box in the lower left), because he’s got three bent steels that need to be straightened, and for that you need to be able to spin the steel laterally. also he has one steel on the lower stack which needs to be re-tapped to the correct size, and to be re-slotted so that the next guy who works on it won’t have to remove it with a pair of pliers, like i did. i’ve already replaced two springs, and i think there’s at least one more. also i have to figure out where my cork cement is so that i can replace most of the key corks, and i’ve got to figure out which box my key felts are in, so that it doesn’t go clank clatter. i didn’t realise this until after i had started taking it apart, but i believe this is the first alto sax that i have repaired since my injury. intellectually, i look at the pile of bits and pieces and wonder how i’m going to get it back together again, but i’m sure that it will come back to me… partially because i was able to take it apart with minimal trouble. orin has another sax, a conn, which also needs help, and i’ll probably take it on as well, but one thing at a time.
Washington — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to military officials, a step that would mark a potentially permanent shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
The decision culminates a lengthy debate within the Department of Defense, but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed.
However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, Defense officials acknowledged.
For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing policies on detainees and interrogation, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.
The process has been beset by debate and controversy, but the decision to omit Geneva Convention protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq.
The directive on interrogations, a senior Defense official said, is being rewritten to create safeguards so that detainees are treated humanely but can still be questioned effectively.
President Bush’s critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of civilians last year at Haditha, Iraq, allegedly by U.S. Marines. But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations.
The detainee directive was due to be released in April along with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. But objections from several senators on other Field Manual issues forced a delay. Senators objected to provisions allowing harsher interrogation techniques for unlawful combatants, such as suspected terrorists, as opposed to traditional prisoners of war.
The lawmakers argue that differing standards of treatment allowed by the Field Manual would violate a broadly supported anti-torture measure advanced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain last year pushed Congress to ban torture and cruel treatment and to establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for treatment of all detainees. Despite administration opposition, the measure passed and became law.
For decades, it was the official policy of the U.S. military to follow minimum standards for treating detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, President Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Among the directives being rewritten following Bush’s 2002 order is one governing U.S. detention operations. Military lawyers and other Defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture. However, the move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, government sources said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told New York to drop dead yesterday as he slashed the city’s federal anti-terror funding in a traitorous action that endangers the lives of 8 million people and demands his immediate firing.
Chertoff’s decision to cut the flow of U.S. money by 40% was at the least gross incompetence and at the worst vengeful payback by a petty bureaucrat who tangled last year with the NYPD and wound up humiliated. Either way, President Bush must give Chertoff the boot with a hearty, “Heck of a job, Mikey.”
This city, America’s No. 1 target, had to fight long and hard for federal terror aid while Congress doled out the money as pork rather than based on threat. That was supposed to change this year because Chertoff was given the power to allocate much of the funding based on where it was needed most. Instead, fresh from monumentally bungling the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina, he went out of his way to whack New York’s slice of the national pie from $208 million to $124 million. The No. 2 target, Washington, also took a huge hit from Chertoff’s team.
Homeland Security’s rationale for stabbing the city in the back, as Rep. Pete King put it, was based on figments of the imagination and outright lies, all recorded in black and white on the score sheet used by the department for determining which cities got funding. By Chertoff’s reckoning, New York has not a single national monument or icon that needs special security. No Ground Zero. No Empire State Building. No New York Stock Exchange. No Federal Reserve Bank. No St. Patrick’s Cathedral. No Statue of Liberty. No nothing.
Even more outrageous, Chertoff concluded that New York’s Police and Fire departments are clueless in the war on terror. In his official estimation, giving them all the money they requested would have been a complete waste. Among the units Chertoff rated as in the bottom 15% nationwide, and requiring special federal baby-sitting, was the NYPD’s globally recognized counterterrorism bureau, the very outfit that shamed him in October when Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly wisely put the city subways on alert for an attack. Coincidence? We think not, and we dare Chertoff to repeat the same despicable libel face to face with Kelly.
i got up at 6:00 so that moe could jump start ganesha the car so i could drop it off in burien at 9:00 (which meant a couple of hours of “hanging around” waiting for jack to get there). then i took the bus into downtown seattle and “hung around” until my appointment with ned at 2:00, during which jack called and said that ganesha the car was working again, so i finished up with ned and took the bus back down to burien, picked up the car at around 3:45, and jack only charged me $45, which i actually had!
after 4 hours of “hanging around” in seattle, i realised that i really miss living in the city. living out in the sticks is okay, but it would be a lot better if i had a workshop and/or some way to bring in money. but the lack of a job and/or a workshop wouldn’t matter so much if we were living in the city, because there’s so much to look at, even if i don’t have anything else to do.
according to what ezra tells me, katharyn is back in the state loony bin, because she ran away from managed care facility a few weeks ago instead of taking her medications. she still won’t admit that she’s there involuntarily. she still thinks the state is persecuting her…
i’m so glad that i’m not a part of her life any longer…
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they’ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
The following is a first-hand account of police harrassment and brutality against a World Can’t Wait organizer in Cleveland. If anything like this happens to you, let us know asap! Contact [email protected].
My name is Carol Fisher, and I am on the staff of Revolution Books in Cleveland OH. At the bookstore we have been immersed in building and supporting the initiatives of World Cant Wait. Yesterday, 1.28.06, while putting “Bush Step Down” posters on telephone poles along a major thoroughfare on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was brutalized by Cleveland Heights police, charged with 2 counts of felony assault and held incommunicado under police custody in the hospital! This outrage and others like it must be exposed and opposed by all who hate the direction that the Bush regime is taking this country and the world.
Here is what happened:
I had set out from my house with a full agenda, to contact lots of people and get out materials about our upcoming Cleveland event to Drown Out the State of the Union address, and the call to march around the White House on Feb. 4th. My first stop was the an area known for its community of artists and progressives, where I stapled up posters for blocks and was greeted warmly by those who saw and appreciated what World Cant Wait is doing. I talked to an artist, and a Palestinian store owner who took fliers to distribute to customers.
Next stop, to the east side. I drove down a street in Cleveland Heights, another area known for its diversity and progressive history. This street was badly in need of postering too and though i was in a big hurry, I couldnt drive on without getting up a few signs. Before long a cop called from across the street: “Ma’am! Hundred dollar fine for doing that!” Oh really, since when? Another way of keeping us from getting the word out, eh? But not wanting to get arrested, I said ok and put up my staplegun and walked away. But that wasnt the end of it. “Ma’am! Hundred dollar fine unless you take those posters down.” He is pursuing me across the street. Damn! OK fine, I say, I will take them down (not wanting to get into a confrontation, because I have lots to do today!) But this too is not enough for the cop. He wants my ID. I say I dont have my ID. He grabs my arm. I say let go of me, I am not doing anything wrong, I will take the posters down. People are watching to see what happens, are outraged but very afraid. The cop wont let go, he clearly wants more grief from me, and he is in the spotlight. He wants people to be scared. He pushes me against a store window and next thing I know I am face down on the sidewalk with two cops on top of me, one with his knee in my back. I am trying to call out to people, to tell them what the posters are about. They keep pushing my face into the sidewalk. I cant breathe.
I have osteoradionecrosis in my jaw, resulting from radiation treatments for cancer. My jawbone is slowly deteriorating, is very fragile, and doesnt heal well. I am 53 years old, not exactly a spring chicken. A hand comes down again to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a parkbench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about. One of the cops says to me, “Shut up or I will kill you!”, “I am sick of this anti-Bush shit!” “You are definitely going to the psyche ward.” Then somebody calls the EMS, and a fire squad shows up. The cop superviser appears and puts his finger in my face: “I dont like it when people treat my men like this and if you don’t obey the law you will suffer the consequences.”
I am lifted into the EMS truck, hands still cuffed behind my back. I ask to make a call and this is refused, but a fireman offers to make a quick call for me. If not for this, no one would have known where I was or what was happening, a fate shared by many immigrants in this country. At the hospital, I am treated as an arch-criminal. Escorted by four policemen, I shuffle into the emergency room, legs still shackled, covered with leaves and mud. I think to myself, if I was Black, I would not have made it this far. I would probably be dead by now. People in the emergency room are shocked by the scene and by what I am saying happened. I probably do look pretty crazy by now.
They put me on a gurney and pull the curtains around. One female nurse and four male cops. They want me to undress in front of the cops. I refuse. The cops refuse to leave. Finally the nurse shields my body with a gown as I undress and put on hospital clothes. I am cuffed to the bed, and two cops remain guarding me the whole time. They put in an IV. I have no idea what they have in mind. Questions, probes, tests and a tetanus shot, a hint from the nurses that friends are calling to find out whats going on. First they say that one friend is coming in to see me, but that never happens.
After many hours a psychiatrist appears to determine my sanity. I dont want to talk to him, but have no choice. “This information is confidential”, I say. Well yes, he says, but if the police want the information, I don’t know if I can refuse… “This information is confidential”, I repeat, and I tell him, there are times when you have to decide which side you are on. I have told him why I have wound up here and what they did to me, and I tell him, this is a moment in history when people have to stand firm against these repressive measures. He replies, “Fair enough”, and proceeds to write a detailed record of my injuries.
I dont know it at the time, but outside in the waiting room all hell had broken loose. In a very short period of time, over a dozen WCW people showed up at the emergency room to demand that someone be allowed to see me. The WCW people discussed what was happening with the folks waiting in the ER, who were horrified at what was happening, and very supportive when they were shown the posters I had been putting up. The police and hospital staff claimed over and over that the police were in charge of me, and they determine what happens, not the doctors! Another example of a police state.
At one point, there was a big confrontation between the WCW people and the police, right in the ER. My supporters said that we weren’t going to leave until someone saw me. Some of them were sitting in the waiting room holding the big green WCW posters.
The main cop tried to have a “private conversation” with the person with medical power of attorney. ” NO! Come out here in the open where we can all hear!” As people gathered to listen to the conversation, and enter in their own opinions, the police threatened WCW folks with arrest! They argued, stood their ground, called this shameful (both to the police but also to the nurses who did nothing to stand against this shit). The cops kept saying that there was no legal right to see me, but people responded that, in Bush’s America, the law is whatever the police say it is and that there is a moral and ethical right to to check on someone who is in the hospital.
Then a large phalanx of cops came. My friends pushed it as far as they could, then marched out of the ER, followed by the cops, all the way up to the street. 4 more people showed up who’d heard about what was happening and wanted to help.
A lawyer and a doctor, who are endorsers of the WCW Call, persisted in getting what info they could. All the while, people were calling the local media (who never showed up!), calling in complaints to the Cleveland Heights Police Department, and Cleveland Heights City Hall. I was never able to be seen by my own nurse or doctor or communicate by phone with anyone.
Shortly after being released from the hospital, I was released on my own recognizance. The battle is far from over. This is but one example of the attempts that the state, their authorities and spokespeople will make to try to keep us from opposing the crimes of this regime, and especially now, 2 days before the State of the Union address. Our cause is as righteous as it gets, and no attempts to intimidate or suppress, with threats or laws or physical abuse, should stop us but instead strengthen the resolve, build our organization and further demonstrate to the world that this regime is doomed, they are vicious, and they must be stopped.
As it says in the Call, “If we speak the turh, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Sush and we are NOT going to stop…The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.”
There are plans in the works for possibly a press conference, suing the Cleveland Heights Police Department, taking this issue of brutality to the Cleveland Heights City Council Meeting on Feb 6, doing a press conference, and circulating a pledge of medical personnel to not allow medical treatment to be run by the police. We will also be working with lawyers to fight these outrageous charges. If any legal aid could be offered nationally, it would really help.
For as long as we have had some kind of mental health system, women who “behave incorrectly” have been ordered to undergo its treatments. At one time or another, feminists, suffragists, menopausal women, and women who question authority in any way have been sent to institutions so that they could recieve “help.” The latest woman to get such help is Carol Fisher of Cleveland. Fisher is on the staff of Revolution Books, and on January 28, while she was putting Bush Step Down posters on telephone polls in Cleveland Heights, she was ordered by a police officer to take them down or face a fine. When she complied, she was asked for her ID, which she did not have on her. He then grabbed her by the arm, pushed her against a store window, and knocked her face down onto the sidewalk. He was joined by another officer, and they both pressed their feet against her back until she could not breathe. Her chin was pressed down into the concrete; Fisher has osteoradionecrosis in her jaw from radiation treatments for cancer.
Fisher was handcuffed and shackled. During this time, Fisher yelled out to everyone who passed what the posters were about. One of the police officers then told her, Fisher says, to “Shut up or I will kill you! I am sick of this anti-Bush shit! You are definitely going to the psyche ward.”
She was then threatened some more and taken away in an EMS truck. At the hospital, Fisher was asked to undress in front of the police officers, which she refused to do. The officers refused to leave, so a nurse attempted to shield her while she undressed. Fisher says she was then cuffed to the bed, given an IV of some sort, and made to wait hours for a psychiatrist to interview her. By this time, members of her World Can’t Wait group were in the emergency room having a confrontation with the police, who refused to let them see Fisher. Someone called the news media, who never made an appearance.
Fisher was eventually released and sent home. On May 2, she went to court and was found guilty of two counts of felonious assault of two police officers. The prosecution’s “witnesses” had not seen the alleged assault; rather, they claimed that Fisher lacked respect for authority. It took a jury more than eight hours to find her guilty. According to a letter to the editor of The Free Press, the prosecution misquoted Fisher’s testimony and gave the jury incorrect information about the city’s arrestable offenses. When asked to clarify the law, the judge refused.
As part of the pre-sentencing procedure, the judge, Timothy McGinty, had Fisher undergo a state psychological exam. He had already surmised publicly that Fisher must be mentally unstable to resist arrest. McGinty then declared her “delusional,” and on May 9, ordered her to be incarcerated in a psychiatric unit of the Cuyahoga County Jail in downtown Cleveland, where she now sits and waits; she could face a three-year prison sentence. According to Mark Crispin Miller, who has spoken with Fisher by telephone, Fisher has also been placed on suicide watch, has had her eyeglasses taken from her, and–if she refuses to take the psych exam–she will be sent to North Coast Mental Institute for a 20-day evaluation.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Monty Coles was 3,000 feet in the air when he discovered a stowaway peeking out at him from the plane’s instrument panel: a 4½-foot snake.
Coles was taking a leisurely flight over the West Virginia countryside in his Piper Cherokee last weekend and was preparing to land in Ohio when the snake revealed itself.
“Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this,” said the 62-year-old Cross Lanes resident.
But advice given 25 years earlier from his flight instructor sprung to mind: “No matter what happens, fly the plane.”
Coles attempted to swat the snake but it fell to the pilot’s feet, then darted to the other side of the cockpit.
While maintaining control of the single-engine plane with one hand, Coles grabbed the reptile behind its head with his other.
“There was no way I was letting that thing go,” he said. “It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling.”
The next step was to radio for emergency landing clearance.
“They came back and asked what my problem was,” he said. “I told them I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane. They cleared me in.”
After a smooth landing, Coles posed for pictures with the snake, then let it loose.
“That snake resides in Ohio now,” he said.
The perfect female breast – even if you don’t have female breasts, for whatever reason, they can fix you right up…
now i think Aleister Crowley is one of the most interesting people in history, and i hesitate to say anything that might be construed as being uncomplimentary to him (he has so many fans, after all), but this really makes me wonder about the influences that caused the current corruption in power…
before the performance yesterday, i couldn’t get the car started.
last year about this time, the car started being intermittent about starting, but i found that if i got a jump, everything worked fine. i thought it might be the battery or the alternator, but i checked both of them and they were working fine, as far as i could tell. it was an intermittent problem, which, of course, meant that it didn’t do it any time when a mechanic was present, and it didn’t do it often enough that carrying jumper cables and hoping that i would be able to find a jump if necessary didn’t solve the problem. and to add to that, it seemed to be a problem that only happened when we had dry weather, because once it started raining regularly, the problem went away.
but this time it was slightly more sinister. i noticed that when i hit the brakes, the tachometer “glitched” – briefly went down to zero, and then back up to running speed. it was subtle enough that the first few times it happened, i either didn’t see it at all, or caught the movement of the needle as it was flying back up to normal running speed, but i wached, and finally figured out what was going on. this was something i had never seen before, but it went along with what i had figured out previously, that either the battery or the alternator was faulty in some way, and when the brake lights went on, it caused an electrical surge in the car.
after my performance, at the seatac mariott hotel, i went out to the car, and it wouldn’t start… no problem, i figure… just roll it backwards so that someone can pull along side it, jump start it, and i’ll be on my way. but no, now i can’t shift it, either. i checked to see if the shift lever was locked because it has a locking steering column, but the steering wheel was moving freely, and i couldn’t have someone pull in beside me because the parking places on both sides of the car were blocked by other people. after about an hour and a half on the phone, finally, monique came up to “rescue” me, and she and i jury-rigged jump starting it by connecting two sets of cables together – which reminded me a lot of a long time ago when ian and i were hitchhiking on whidbey island, and we were picked up by a person who we later realised was very drunk, but not before he had attempted to jump start his car using coat hanger wire, and then just about ran over ian as he was getting his backpack on…
anyway, we got ganesha the car started and rolling home. as i was getting on the freeway, i turned on the lights, and there was a big electrical surge – it was almost as if i had turned the engine off. i was accellerating, and suddenly it shifted down into first, the RPMs went through the roof, all of the accessories, like my ipod, turned off, the “overdrive off” light went out, and there was a definite jerk as the car slowed down, and then sped up again.
and when i got home and turned off the car, it wouldn’t start, and i couldn’t shift it again.
grr
it’s going to see jack on monday, if i can get it started, but god knows how we’re going to pay for it…
SALEM, Ore. – Police say a Salem man accidentally shot and killed himself Tuesday morning while he and his family were trying to climb out of a ravine after a car accident.
According to police, 38-year-old Vladimir Gorkavchenko was driving near Detroit early in the morning when he lost control of his minivan.
The car rolled multiple times, before coming to a rest at the bottom of a rocky embankment.
Gorkavchenko, his wife, and their daughter were uninjured in the crash.
Police say Gorkavchenko then removed a rifle from his van to take it with him as the three started climbing out of the ravine.
According to police, Gorkavchenko was using the rifle as a brace as he climbed and apparently slipped, causing the gun to fire a round that hit him in his thumb and his head.
It appears he died as a result of his injuries.
Detectives are continuing to investigate.
you might think that if pat robertson talks with God as much as he claims, that he might have some advance warning of things like this…
GROTON, Conn. – Authorities in Connecticut say two people died after a plane owned by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson went down in heavy fog today.
Robertson was not aboard.
The bodies were recovered from Long Island Sound.
Three other people were in the Learjet 35 when it went down about a half-mile short of the runway at Groton New London Airport. They were able to escape with minor injuries. They were pulled from the water and taken to a hospital in New London.
The plane is registered to Virginia-based Robertson Asset Management. The company is owned by Robertson and is separate from the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Coast Guard officials said the chartered, twin-engine plane took off from Norfolk, Va., and stopped in Atlantic City, N.J., to drop off two passengers before heading to Connecticut.
EDISON — After a day of boating and swimming in the summer, Edison police officer Ioannis Mpletsakis said he drove in the nude so he wouldn’t ruin the leather seats in his BMW.
“I was in the Raritan River and a pool with chemicals,” the officer testified in Dunellen Municipal Court yesterday. “I decided, it’s dark out, it’s 10 o’clock at night, and it’s four or five minutes to my house.”
Mpletsakis, 26, took the stand in a trial where he is accused of assault by auto, because a passenger of a truck was injured; hindering apprehension and leaving the scene of an accident.
“It was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve been regretting it for the past 11 months,” Mpletsakis said. “I embarrassed myself, my family and the police department I work for.”
Mpletsakis crashed his 2002 BMW 330is into a box truck on Route 27 near Talmadge Road on July 20.
He testified yesterday that he got out of his car, checked to see the passengers of the truck were OK and ran to conceal his nudity.
Mpletsakis, who was suspended without pay after the July 20 accident, was found by a colleague behind a car in the parking lot of a building about 300 feet away from the scene.
Mpletsakis said he fled because he couldn’t get to a pair of shorts he had stashed on the foot well of the passenger side and didn’t feel safe in the vehicle. He said he ran toward the Pines Manor, where he hoped to get help and use the phone to call police.
“In my state of nakedness, I didn’t want to run down Route 27,” he said. “I didn’t want people to see me like that.”
Mpletsakis said his decision to drive naked was influenced by a love he had for the metallic green BMW, which he said he cared for meticulously.
“Even my family teased me on how I was always out there doing something to it — cleaning it; vacuuming it,” Mpletsakis said.
Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Brian Gillet asked Mpletsakis about the amount of alcohol he drank on July 20.
Mpletsakis testified to drinking three beers, but he said the reason he swerved into the box truck was because a third vehicle struck the left side of his BMW.
“I was going straight home,” Mpletsakis told Gillet. “If it wasn’t for that other vehicle, the accident wouldn’t have ever happened.”
Mpletsakis could not describe the third vehicle, which he said “whizzed by” his peripheral vision.
“Everything happened so fast,” he said.
As to why he left the scene of the accident, Mpletsakis said: “No one appeared to be in distress … no one was crying.”
Mpletsakis added the driver and passenger of the box truck were laughing at him when they saw him naked.
Like his colleagues who testified earlier in the trial, Mpletsakis said he would only charge someone with a summons for leaving the scene of the accident after he had all the facts.
“We try to locate the driver to give them the benefit of the doubt,” he said.
Gillet attempted to question Mpletsakis on the nature of a phone call made to his cell phone on the evening before the crash. But Dunellen Municipal Court Judge Joe Leonard sustained an objection by defense attorney Darren M. Gelber.
Gillet was also forbidden from asking about a prior car accident that left Mpletsakis badly injured in 2004. In that accident, Mpletsakis was driving southbound on Route 1 in a 2000 Honda Prelude when the vehicle left the road near Forest Haven Boulevard and struck a concrete wall near the old Ford plant, police said.
The next phase of the trial — motions and summations — will take place at 1 p.m. Monday. The trial is being held in Dunellen to avoid a conflict of interest in Edison.
acupuncture in a couple of hours, and a gig at the seatac daughters of the american revolution with BSSB at 6:00. planting irises if there’s time, otherwise tomorrow.
New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent–from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.
The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation’s most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.
The form ignored that New York City is the capital of the world financial markets and merely stated the city had four significant bank assets.
New York City is home to Chase, JP Morgan, Citi Group, The New York Stock Exchange, The Commodities Exchange, American Express, George Soros funds, Michael Gabelli’s funds, Lazard Frere and Salomon Brothers, to name just a few of the more prominent banking interests located there.
The formula did note a commuter population of more than 16 million around the city twice struck by fundamentalist terrorists and twice more targeted in plots halted in pre-operational stages. It noted the more than eight million residents and the largest rail ridership in the nation – more than five million. It is those commuters and rail riders who are expected to suffer most from the cuts since mass transit is listed on most DHS alerts as the top terror target. (Click here for the Strategic Threat Document obtained by ABC News.)
The report lists as classified “visitors of interest destination city,” immigration cases, suspicious incidents and FBI cases. New York City is home to the largest FBI field office in the country, which actively monitors 24/7 the Iranian Mission. The city has also had the most significant terror trials in the nation and is home to one of the largest air hubs in the nation.
Killer Workout Are gyms, not mosques, the main breeding ground for Islamic terrorists?
By Brendan O’Neill June 1, 2006
There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years—9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohammad Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.
The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course.
The British government recently published its Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005. It reveals that three of the four members of the 7/7 cell seem to have become radicalized in gyms rather than in mosques. Mohammed Sidique Khan, leader of the cell, worked on his protégés in “informal settings,” primarily at a local Islamic bookshop where they watched radical DVDs and at local gyms, some of which were based in rooms below mosques. According to the report, “Khan gave talks [at the gyms], and worked out.” He set up two gyms, one in 2000 with local government money—which means that government officials unwittingly funded one of the settings for his efforts—and another in 2004. Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old who seems to have been the second-in-command of the 7/7 cell, “got to know [Khan] again (having known him a little as a child) through one of the gyms.” Indeed, Tanweer was as much a fitness fanatic as he was a religious one. Shortly after 7/7, one of his former friends told the Guardian: “Shehzad went to a few mosques around here but he was more interested in his jujitsu. I trained with him all the time. He is really fit.” Jermaine Lindsay, another of the 7/7 bombers, has also been described as a “fitness fanatic.” A report published by the Terrorism Monitor at the end of July 2005 said that he “met his fellow bombers while attending one of the gyms set up by Khan.”
According to the British government’s report, one of Khan’s gyms was known locally as “the al-Qaida gym.” Khan also seems to have used outdoor sporting activities to win over and indoctrinate recruits, and the report suggests that other alleged terror cells in the United Kingdom may have done so as well. “Camping, canoeing, white-water rafting, paintballing and other outward bound type activities are of particular interest because they appear common factors for the 7 July bombers and other cells disrupted previously and since.” The report asks if such outings may have been used to “help with bonding between members of cells.”
Khan seemed to view gym and sports activities as more than an opportunity for physical bonding; he also appeared to consider them moral and pure, an alternative to the decadent temptations of contemporary society. Healthy living, as a doctrine, appears to have been close to his radical heart. In Khan’s talks to young Muslims and potential recruits, he reportedly made numerous references to keeping fit. His talks “focused on clean living, staying away from crime and drugs, and the value of sport and outdoor activity,” says the British government’s 7/7 report. Perhaps it was the gym setting that nurtured the 7/7 cell’s combination of arrogance and fury, its seeming belief that they were good and the rest of us were rotten.
One of the chief suspects in the Madrid bombings, Moroccan immigrant Jamal Zougam, was also known for his devotion to keeping fit. Zougam ran a mobile-phone shop in an immigrant quarter in Madrid, and he is thought to have provided the mobile phones for the remote detonators that exploded the bombs and killed 191 commuters in March 2004. According to reports, he was a “gym-loving man.” The French newspaper Le Monde reported that his friends and acquaintances were shocked to discover Zougam’s involvement in the Madrid bombings, because he liked nothing better than attending the “gym or the discotèchque.” The bomb that did not explode, and that subsequently led police to Zougam’s shop, had been planted in a gym bag. It is also reported that Zougam and Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the Tunisian ringleader of the Madrid bombings who blew himself up when surrounded by Spanish police a few weeks later, attended gym together and sometimes discussed politics there.
The 9/11 hijackers spent a great deal of time in gyms. Mohammad Atta joined one in Hamburg in 1999. Upon arrival in America in 2000, he and other leaders of his cell—Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi—signed up for gym memberships. When the “muscle hijackers” from Saudi Arabia, whose job was to use physical force on 9/11, joined the ringleaders in the United States, they were encouraged to find housing close to gyms and to get gym memberships. In the first week of September 2001, five of the muscle hijackers—Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, Majed Moqed, and Hani Hanjour—were regularly seen training and talking at Gold’s Gym in Greenbelt, Md.
The 9/11 hijackers needed to be reasonably fit for their operation. They had to overpower airline staff and passengers in order to commandeer the jets. Yet there seems to have been more to their interest in gyms than building up muscle. One gym owner said the men seemed to gather for “social reasons.” And it was Atta, Jarrah, and al-Shehhi, the pilots of 9/11 who would spend that fateful morning locked inside the cockpit, who seemed most keen on keeping fit. According to Complete 9/11 Timeline, published by the Center for Cooperative Research, Jarrah “train[ed] intensively” from May to August 2001 and Atta and al-Shehhi “also took exercising very seriously.” The muscle hijackers, meanwhile, tended to “simply cluster around a small circuit of machines, never asking for help and, according to a trainer, never pushing any weights.”
Perhaps the ringleaders of 9/11, like one of the prime suspects in Madrid and three of the four 7/7 bombers, had a penchant for healthy living. Certainly Atta seemed to be obsessed with bodily appearance. He advised his team of hijackers to shave off their pubic hair and to douse themselves in cologne the night before the attacks, to ready themselves for arrival in paradise. Islamic scholars have pointed out that these stipulations have little grounding in Quranic law. But they do reflect our keep-fit age. Bodybuilders, among others, are known to shave off their body hair in order to make the contours of their bodies look more impressive.
Today’s gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission. If some of these attackers viewed their own bodies as pure instruments, and everyone else as wasteful and deserving of punishment, they could just as well have come to that conclusion through absorbing the healthy-living agenda of the gym as by reading the Quran. At the gym, Atta, Khan, and the others could focus on perfecting the self, the body, as a pure and righteous thing—and hone their disdain for others.
So, should we shut down all gyms in the name of fighting terrorism? Of course not. It’s a ludicrous idea. But no more ludicrous, perhaps, than the infiltration of Western mosques.
Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Jun 01, 2006
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”
Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ”Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ”You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren’t just off the mark — they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ”Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ”so reliable,” he added, ”that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.”(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine — paid for by the Bush administration — exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ”corrected” numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)
”The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,” says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ”They were really screwed up — the old models just don’t work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.”
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations — running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News — retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico’s elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) — approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) — driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ”Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,” a Fox News analyst declared, ”or George Bush loses.”(32)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities — as much as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ”As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” he says, ”it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.” (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)
Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ”I’m not even political — I despise the Democrats,” he says. ”I’m a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.” In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology — so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) — displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry’s favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn’t buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation’s leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky’s ”reluctant responder” hypothesis is ”preposterous.”(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ”It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.”(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey — compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ”The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,” observes Freeman, ”but actually contradicts it.”
What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
”When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,” concludes Freeman. ”The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud — and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.”
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state’s exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts — nearly half of those polled — they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again — against all odds — the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush’s favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ”27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ”virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.” The discrepancies, the experts add, ”are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio’s electoral votes if Ohio’s official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.”(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ”No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the ”completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ”completely consistent with election fraud — specifically vote shifting.”
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln’s, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign — more than to any other state.(42)
But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush’s re-election committee.(43) As Ohio’s secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws — setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush’s re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ”principal electoral system adviser” for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush’s campaign there.(46)
Blackwell — now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) — is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio’s right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ”an unapologetic liberal Democrat,”(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ”accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.”(51)
”The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections — not throw them,” says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ”The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.”
The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party’s failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee’s minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ”massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.” The problems, the report concludes, were ”caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.”(54)
”Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,” Conyers told me. ”He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.”
When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ”silly on its face.” Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ”gold standard” for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)
There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote — often without any notification — simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland’s precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) — the lowest in the state.
According to the Conyers report, improper purging ”likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.”(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day — a conservative estimate, according to election scholars — that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ”The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,” a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ”caging.” During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett — who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County — sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn’t sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell’s direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) — a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ”inquisition.”(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff’s detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP’s claims of fraud.(74)
—
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ”Latest Conspiracy Theory — Kerry Won — Hits the Ether,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ”About Those Election Results,” The New York Times, November 14, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results
3) United States Department of Defense, ”Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,” August 6, 2004. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ”2004 Post Election Survey Results,” June 2005, page 11. http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_
v1.0_usletter.pdf
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ”Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,” International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ”Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,” Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ”Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf
James W. Bronsan, ”In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,” Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ”A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,” September 2005, pg. 10. http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.
12) See ”Ohio’s Missing Votes.”
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, “Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio,” June 22, 2005. Page 5 http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf
15) See ”VIII. Rural Counties.”
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3 http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, “Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,” The Hill, November 4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx
19) Martin Plissner, “Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,” The New York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, “U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,” Associated Press, December 11, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html
Daniel Williams, “Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,” Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3. http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
23) Mitofsky International Web site. http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm
24) Tim Golden, “Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,” The New York Times, August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., “The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.” FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9 http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ”Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,” The New York Times, November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3. http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) “The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,” U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006. http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf
41) ”The Gun is Smoking,” pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, “Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,” November 2, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html
43) John McCarthy, “Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,” Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
45) Joe Hallett, ”Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,” The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ”Records Indicate Harris on Defense,” Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.
47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48) Joe Hallett, ”Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,” Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006. http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B1-02.html
49) Sandy Theis, ”Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, “Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.” http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.
56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ”Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,” Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID
=73195662517954
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ”A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,” The New York Times, September 26, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=1254024000&en=
cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ”Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,” The Washington Times, October 28, 2004. http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm
63) Jo Becker, ”GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,” The Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html
64) Janet Babin, ”Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,” NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2. http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
66) Sandy Theis, “Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,” Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, “Early Returns on Election Reform,” George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, “Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,” Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ”Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ”Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,” Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/
NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4. http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
74) LaRaye Brown, ”Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,” The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
Collecting information about every American’s phone calls is an example of data mining. The basic idea is to collect as much information as possible on everyone, sift through it with massive computers, and uncover terrorist plots. It’s a compelling idea, and convinces many. But it’s wrong. We’re not going to find terrorist plots through systems like this, and we’re going to waste valuable resources chasing down false alarms. To understand why, we have to look at the economics of the system.
Data mining works best when you’re searching for a well-defined profile, a reasonable number of attacks per year, and a low cost of false alarms. Credit-card fraud is one of data mining’s success stories: All credit-card companies mine their transaction databases for data for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card.
Many credit-card thieves share a pattern — purchase expensive luxury goods, purchase things that can be easily fenced, etc. — and data mining systems can minimize the losses in many cases by shutting down the card. In addition, the cost of false alarms is only a phone call to the cardholder asking him to verify a couple of purchases. The cardholders don’t even resent these phone calls — as long as they’re infrequent — so the cost is just a few minutes of operator time.
Terrorist plots are different; there is no well-defined profile and attacks are very rare. This means that data-mining systems won’t uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.
Just in the United States, there are trillions of connections between people and events — things that the data-mining system will have to “look at” — and very few plots. This rarity makes even accurate identification systems useless.
Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll be optimistic — we’ll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that’s about 10 events — e-mails, phone calls, purchases, Web destinations, whatever — per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them actually indicate terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Clearly ridiculous.
This isn’t anything new. In statistics, it’s called the “base rate fallacy,” and it applies in other domains as well. And this is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program: The New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm, at enormous cost in money and civil liberties.
Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier. We’d be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.
By allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on us all, we’re not trading privacy for security. We’re giving up privacy without getting any security in return.
Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”
By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig February 5, 2006
Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as “terrorist surveillance” and summed it up by declaring that “if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.” But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, “wash out” most of the leads within days or weeks.
The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush’s circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program’s lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged “reasonable” if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.
Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation’s second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers “have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.” Other officials, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the prevalence of false leads is especially pronounced when U.S. citizens or residents are surveilled. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that “terrorist . . . operatives inside our country,” as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.
The Bush administration declined to address the washout rate or answer any other question for this article about the policies and operations of its warrantless eavesdropping.
Vice President Cheney has made the administration’s strongest claim about the program’s intelligence value, telling CNN in December that eavesdropping without warrants “has saved thousands of lives.” Asked about that Thursday, Hayden told senators he “cannot personally estimate” such a figure but that the program supplied information “that would not otherwise have been available.” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the same hearing that the information helped identify “individuals who were providing material support to terrorists.”
Supporters speaking unofficially said the program is designed to warn of unexpected threats, and they argued that success cannot be measured by the number of suspects it confirms. Even unwitting Americans, they said, can take part in communications — arranging a car rental, for example, without knowing its purpose — that supply “indications and warnings” of an attack. Contributors to the technology said it is a triumph for artificial intelligence if a fraction of 1 percent of the computer-flagged conversations guide human analysts to meaningful leads.
Those arguments point to a conflict between the program’s operational aims and the legal and political limits described by the president and his advisers. For purposes of threat detection, officials said, the analysis of a telephone call is indifferent to whether an American is on the line. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a former CIA official said, “there is a lot of discussion” among analysts “that we shouldn’t be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists.” But under the Constitution, and in the Bush administration’s portrait of its warrantless eavesdropping, the distinction is fundamental.
Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be “right for one out of every two guys at least.” Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, “knew they could never meet that standard — that’s why they didn’t go through” the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI’s national security law unit until 2002, said in an e-mail interview that even using the lesser standard of a “reasonable basis” requires evidence “that would lead a prudent, appropriately experienced person” to believe the American is a terrorist agent. If a factor returned “a large number of false positives, I would have to conclude that the factor is not a sufficiently reliable indicator and thus would carry less (or no) weight.”
Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that “we will not listen inside this country” without a warrant. Hayden said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to “drill down,” as he put it, “to the degree that we need all communications.”
Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush’s program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person’s overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.
Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing “uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate.” Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.
New Imperatives Recent interviews have described the program’s origins after Sept. 11 in what Hayden has called a three-way collision of “operational, technical and legal imperatives.”
Intelligence agencies had an urgent mission to find hidden plotters before they could strike again.
About the same time, advances in technology — involving acoustic engineering, statistical theory and efficient use of computing power to apply them — offered new hope of plucking valuable messages from the vast flow of global voice and data traffic. And rapidly changing commercial trends, which had worked against the NSA in the 1990s as traffic shifted from satellites to fiber-optic cable, now presented the eavesdroppers with a gift. Market forces were steering as much as a third of global communications traffic on routes that passed through the United States.
The Bush administration had incentive and capabilities for a new kind of espionage, but 23 years of law and White House policy stood in the way.
FISA, passed in 1978, was ambiguous about some of the president’s plans, according to current and retired government national security lawyers. But other features of the eavesdropping program fell outside its boundaries.
One thing the NSA wanted was access to the growing fraction of global telecommunications that passed through junctions on U.S. territory. According to former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Intelligence Committee at the time, briefers told him in Cheney’s office in October 2002 that Bush had authorized the agency to tap into those junctions. That decision, Graham said in an interview first reported in The Washington Post on Dec. 18, allowed the NSA to intercept “conversations that . . . went through a transit facility inside the United States.”
According to surveys by TeleGeography Inc., nearly all voice and data traffic to and from the United States now travels by fiber-optic cable. About one-third of that volume is in transit from one foreign country to another, traversing U.S. networks along its route. The traffic passes through cable landing stations, where undersea communications lines meet the East and West coasts; warehouse-size gateways where competing international carriers join their networks; and major Internet hubs known as metropolitan area ethernets.
Until Bush secretly changed the rules, the government could not tap into access points on U.S. soil without a warrant to collect the “contents” of any communication “to or from a person in the United States.” But the FISA law was silent on calls and e-mails that began and ended abroad.
Even for U.S. communications, the law was less than clear about whether the NSA could harvest information about that communication that was not part of its “contents.”
“We debated a lot of issues involving the ‘metadata,'” one government lawyer said. Valuable for analyzing calling patterns, the metadata for telephone calls identify their origin, destination, duration and time. E-mail headers carry much the same information, along with the numeric address of each network switch through which a message has passed.
Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.
“I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about,” the intelligence official said.
‘Subtly Softer Trigger’ Hayden has described a “subtly softer trigger” for eavesdropping, based on a powerful “line of logic,” but no Bush administration official has acknowledged explicitly that automated filters play a role in selecting American targets. But Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, referred in a recent letter to “mechanical surveillance” that is taking place before U.S. citizens and residents are “subject to human surveillance.”
Machine selection would be simple if the typical U.S. eavesdropping subject took part in direct calls to or from the “phone numbers of known al Qaeda” terrorists, the only criterion Bush has mentioned.
That is unusual. The NSA more commonly looks for less-obvious clues in the “terabytes of speech, text, and image data” that its global operations collect each day, according to an unclassified report by the National Science Foundation soliciting research on behalf of U.S. intelligence.
NSA Inspector General Joel F. Brenner said in 2004 that the agency’s intelligence officers have no choice but to rely on “electronic filtering, sorting and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication but that are imperfect.”
One method in use, the NSF report said, is “link analysis.” It takes an established starting point — such as a terrorist just captured or killed — and looks for associated people, places, things and events. Those links can be far more tenuous than they initially appear.
In an unclassified report for the Pentagon’s since-abandoned Total Information Awareness program, consultant Mary DeRosa showed how “degrees of separation” among the Sept. 11 conspirators concealed the significance of clues that linked them.
Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers, was on a government watch list for terrorists and thus a known suspect. Mohamed Atta, another hijacker, was linked to Almihdhar by one degree of separation because he used the same contact address when booking his flight. Wail M. Alshehri, another hijacker, was linked by two degrees of separation because he shared a telephone number with Atta. Satam M.A. Al Suqami, still another hijacker, shared a post office box with Alshehri and, therefore, had three degrees of separation from the original suspect.
‘Look for Patterns’ Those links were not obvious before the identity of the hijackers became known. A major problem for analysts is that a given suspect may have hundreds of links to others with one degree of separation, including high school classmates and former neighbors in a high-rise building who never knew his name. Most people are linked to thousands or tens of thousands of people by two degrees of separation, and hundreds of thousands or millions by three degrees.
Published government reports say the NSA and other data miners use mathematical techniques to form hypotheses about which of the countless theoretical ties are likeliest to represent a real-world relationship.
A more fundamental problem, according to a high-ranking former official with firsthand knowledge, is that “the number of identifiable terrorist entities is decreasing.” There are fewer starting points, he said, for link analysis.
“At that point, your only recourse is to look for patterns,” the official said.
Pattern analysis, also described in the NSF and DeRosa reports, does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.
“These people don’t want to be on the phone too long,” said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.
Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.
Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data “and says, ‘There must be a secret in there.’ ”
But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that “look at people’s behavior to predict terrorist intent,” he said, “are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that’s necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines.”
‘A Lot Better Than Chance’ Even with 38,000 employees, the NSA is incapable of translating, transcribing and analyzing more than a fraction of the conversations it intercepts. For years, including in public testimony by Hayden, the agency has acknowledged use of automated equipment to analyze the contents and guide analysts to the most important ones.
According to one knowledgeable source, the warrantless program also uses those methods. That is significant to the public debate because this kind of filtering intrudes into content, and machines “listen” to more Americans than humans do. NSA rules since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have said “acquisition” of content does not take place until a conversation is intercepted and processed “into an intelligible form intended for human inspection.”
The agency’s filters are capable of comparing spoken language to a “dictionary” of key words, but Roger W. Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until late 2002, said terrorists and other surveillance subjects make frequent changes in their code words. He said, ” ‘Wedding’ was martyrdom day and the ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ were the martyrs.” But al Qaeda has stopped using those codes.
An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA’s work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on “decomposing an audio signal” to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.
A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and “paralinguistic” features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.
This kind of analysis can predict with results “a hell of a lot better than chance” the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Frankly, we’ll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time,” he said, “but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions.”
Now that he is officially sworn in as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden plans to build a vast domestic spying network that will pry into the lives of most Americans around the clock.
President George W. Bush told Hayden to “take whatever steps necessary” to monitor Americans 24/7 by listening in on their phone calls, bugging their homes and offices, probing their private lives, snooping into their financial records and watching their travel habits.
Can I prove this in a court of law? No. Do I know it is happening? Yes, without a doubt. Enough sources within the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon have come forward in recent days to warn about Hayden’s plans for an expanded, consolidated spy network aimed at Americans, not terrorists, and violating numerous laws that prohibit such activities against citizens of this country.
“What Hayden plans to do is not only illegal, it is immoral,” says a longtime CIA operative who may retire early rather than participate in what he sees as an illegal extension of the spy agency’s activities.
Hayden, who oversaw the National Security Agency’s questionable monitoring of phone calls and emails of Americas, plans to consolidate much of the country’s domestic spying into a new desk at the CIA, calling it a “domestic terrorism prevention” operation.
The desk will oversee not only NSA’s increased monitoring of electronic communications by Americans but also the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “terrorist information awareness” program that monitors travel and financial activities by Americans by gathering real-time data from banks, airlines, travel agencies and credit card companies.
The CIA operation will also coordinate with the Pentagon’s domestic spying program that monitors activities of anti-war groups, organizations critical of the Bush administrations and others tagged as enemies of the state.
FBI agents will step up monitoring of journalists to identify leaks of stories embarrassing to the government. The bureau is already monitoring phone calls and emails by reporters on a routine basis and has increased surveillance of writers for major news organizations and monitoring of travel and financial records using the DARPA computers.
“This is not ‘total information awareness’ but ‘total information control’ aimed at watching Americans fulltime and ignoring the protections that are supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitution,” says an FBI agent familiar with the programs. “I didn’t sign on for this and I’m getting the hell out.”
In fact, resignations at major U.S. spy agencies are at an all-time high. Exact numbers are classified but sources say field agents, data analysts and others are leaving in droves rather than join the frenzy to spy on Americans.
Hayden sailed through the Senate confirmation process defending his domestic spying program at NSA, claiming it was legal. Privacy experts and Constitutional law professors say otherwise but the Senate rubber-stamped Bush’s choice anyway, choosing to ignore the threats to freedom.
Hayden will have little problem concealing the operation from the public and Congress. Many of the CIA’s programs are classified and the agency has, in the past, concealed programs even from the intelligence committees in both the House and Senate. The DARPA project and the Pentagon domestic spying programs are “black bag” operations that do not require Congressional approval or oversight.
Likewise, many of the details of the NSA domestic spying program were withheld from Congress and escaped public notice until media reports unearthed them and the Bush administration now threatens to jail the reporters who broke the story.
I wish I could prove this. I wish one, just one, source on the inside was willing to come forward and allow his or her name to be used but those who might be tempted see what happened to Mary McCarthy, the CIA employee fired and under threat of prosecution for leaking information about CIA torture camps in Europe.
But I know it is happening. People I’ve known for years and trust tell me it is happening and the past record of spying, lies and deceit by the Bush administration point to just such an operation.
This nation is under attack. We, the people, are under attack. And the enemy in this case is not an Islamic radical hiding in a cave in Afghanistan but a cabal of truly evil men and women at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Capitol Hill aided by carefully-picked, law-ignoring appointees at the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a black glass-walled building at Fort Meade, MD, and a complex in Langley, Virginia.
Canadians are healthier than Americans, have better access to health care and have fewer unmet health needs, a new study of both countries reveals.
The findings come in spite of the fact that the United States spends almost twice as much per capita on health care as Canada, the researchers noted.
“This shows that you can spend much less than we [Americans] do, and deliver much more and better care then we do,” said study co-author Dr. David U. Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass.
The new study appears to reinforce the findings of a Rand Corporation report issued earlier this month that showed a similar health care gap between the U.S. system and that of Great Britain, which, like Canada, has a universal health care system — subsidized by tax dollars.
In the current study, Himmelstein and his colleagues reviewed responses from more than 3,500 Canadians and almost 5,200 Americans over the age of 18 who participated in the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health — a one-time phone survey conducted between 2002 and 2003.
In addition to documenting race, class and immigrant status, the survey sought to assess each individual’s current health status, access to health care, use of health care, history of illness, and ongoing behaviors — such as smoking — considered to be health risks.
Reporting in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the researchers found that although Canadians smoke more than Americans, Americans are more likely to be inactive and obese, and have higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and lung disease.
Specifically, Americans are one-third less likely to have a regular doctor, two times less likely to take needed medications, and one-fourth more likely to have unmet health care needs than Canadians.
While Americans were more likely to identify cost as the impediment to care, Canadians were more likely to cite waiting times as their main obstacle to good care. However, just 3.5 percent of Canadians were impacted by treatment delays, the survey found.
Despite generally better health and access to care, however, Canadians do not appear to be any happier with their health care system than Americans.
In fact, Americans said they were more satisfied than Canadians with the quality of care they received at either a hospital or a community-based facility. Canadians were happier with their physicians, however.
As well, American health care did excel in some areas compared to the Canadian system. For example, American women were more likely to have had a Pap smear and a mammogram than their Canadian counterparts.
Nevertheless, the American health system appears weakest in relation to the Canadian approach when it comes to caring for the uninsured.
Americans lacking insurance were found to have a much worse health care experience than both insured Americans, and (universally insured) Canadians. The survey found that nearly one in every three (30.4 percent) uninsured Americans had gone without some kind of needed care because of cost.
Overall, 7 percent of all U.S. residents cited cost as a barrier preventing them from getting needed care. That number was just 0.8 percent for Canadians.
The influence of wealth on access was also less acute in Canada, where poorer patients have better access to health care than low-income Americans.
In terms of race and health, non-whites in both countries were less satisfied with their health care than whites. However, racial differences in accessing care appear to be less drastic in Canada.
Based on the results, the researchers conclude that universal health care coverage should be implemented in the United States. But they also called for the health care community to improve services to the poor, and particularly the immigrant populations. They also urged reforms to prevent waiting-period issues that have impeded Canada’s system.
Although this research indicts the American health care system, Himmelstein said he wanted to accent the positive.
“Actually it’s a very hopeful message,” he said. “We (Americans) have the best doctors, best hospitals, and best nurses in the world. But the way we finance healthcare just doesn’t let us do the job. Given what we are now spending on our healthcare system, we can do better — if we just had national health insurance and were allowed to do it right.”
Jon Gabel, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan research organization Center for Studying Health System Change, agreed. He said the absence of a national health insurance system in the U.S. means patients don’t get full access to care or a better bang for their health-care buck.
However, Gabel noted that any between-country comparison depends in large part on whether the focus is on each system’s “haves” or “have-nots”.
“For example, once you’re in the U.S. health care system, patient satisfaction is higher than in Canada,” he noted.
Greg Scandlen, the founder of the non-profit Consumers for Health Care Choices based in Hagerstown, Md., disputed the findings.
“In terms of overall satisfaction with the health care system, Americans score better,” noted Scandlen. “So, the headline coming out of this ought to be that ‘Americans are more satisfied with their healthcare system than Canadians are.'”
Scandlen also criticized the way the study was conducted, noting that there was too much focus on routine health issues, to the relative exclusion of crisis situations that can demand more costly and dramatic interventions.
“Canada clearly emphasizes primary care pretty strongly, and I give them credit for that,” he said. But he added, “This survey doesn’t look at the more serious stuff, like surgery and cardiac care — serious, expensive things that apply to a minority of the population.”
LONDON, England — It’s a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.
Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life.
Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.
Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.
The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said.
“Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg,” he added. “So, I would conclude that the egg came first.”
The same conclusion was reached by his fellow “eggsperts” Professor David Papineau, of King’s College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns.
Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.
He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the “non-chicken” bird parents.
“I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it,” he said.
“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.”
Bourns, chairman of trade body Great British Chicken, said he was also firmly in the pro-egg camp.
He said: “Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs.”
The debate, which may come as a relief to those with argumentative relatives, was organized by Disney to promote the release of the film “Chicken Little” on DVD.
SHANGHAI, China — Doctors in Shanghai on Tuesday were considering surgery options for a 2-month-old boy born with an unusually well-formed third arm.
Neither of the boy’s two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center.
“His case is quite peculiar. We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm,” Chen said in a telephone interview.
The boy, identified only as “Jie-jie,” also was born with just one kidney and may have problems that could lead to curvature of the spine, local media reports said. Jie-jie cried when either of his left arms was touched, but smiled and responded normally to other stimuli, the reports said.
Chen said doctors hoped to work out a plan for surgery, but the boy’s small size made it impossible to perform certain tests that would help them prepare.
Media reports said other children have been reported born with additional arms and legs, but in those cases it was clear what limb was more developed.
Chen’s hospital is one of China’s most experienced in dealing with unusual birth defects, including separating conjoined twins.
Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.
Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.
The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.
“We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them,” said Diana Farsetta, one of the group’s researchers. “I would say it’s pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air.”
Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. “They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like,” she said.
The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission’s enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group’s report.
The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying “Thank you Bush. Thank you USA” in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.
Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer’s product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe’en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel – in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.
Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world’s largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. “We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video,” said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. “In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure.”
The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. “Essentially it’s corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news,” he said. “The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told.”
The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).
okay, here we go again… 8/
if this gets much worse, i’ll probably do something like Pliny the Weird (a very good friend of mine) came up with the last time this was an issue, and make “FLAG BURNING KITS” with an american flag on a cocktail toothpick and a strike-anywhere match…
Some time this summer, the Congress will likely set in motion the steps needed to amend the U.S. Constitution to make it unlawful to desecrate the flag.
The amendment, which has bipartisan support, will make it against the law to burn the American flag. Unfortunately, in the process, it will trample all over the very thing the flag stands for: your personal freedom.
The Constitution, and specifically the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, set out the freedoms that protect every citizen and set us apart from virtually every other country in the world.
Burning, mutilating or destroying the flag is a juvenile and despicable form of protest best suited for unruly mobs in faraway dictatorships, not the streets of America.
But as wrong-headed as it is, flag desecrating shouldn’t be against the law.
The flag is a proud symbol of America. We show our respect (or should) by removing our hats when it passes in a parade. We pledge our allegiance to the United States of America while facing the flag. It has been carried into battle around the world and our troops have died beneath it.
However, we should not confuse the symbol for the substance. The flag is a symbol of the freedoms that make America great. One of our most important freedoms is the freedom to disagree with the government and our neighbors. When we make it against the law to disagree, even in a way that is offensive, we are desecrating the Constitution.
Dissent is not a sign of weakness – it is a sign of strength. Only in a country that is strong is dissenting a freedom that enjoys equal protection under the law.
Demanding everyone support a particular cause or face consequences, real or social, is contrary to the personal liberties that have made our country strong.
You are free to express your thoughts, no matter how contrary to prevailing sentiment, because the First Amendment guarantees you that right. Thanks to that same amendment, the government can’t open your mail or listen to your phone calls without a search warrant. The First Amendment also permits us to publish this newspaper without prior approval of any government authority.
The only way supporters can make burning a flag illegal is to amend the Constitution and specifically exclude that activity from First Amendment protection.
This exercise is an unfortunate example of how politicians of both parties pander to voters on issues that sound profound and patriotic, but in reality will do great harm to the very institution they profess to protect.
Ironically, the number of reported flag burning incidents declined rapidly following 9/11 and hasn’t shown any signs of rebounding – further evidence that this constitutional amendment is a solution in search of a problem or, more accurately, in search of votes.
If the backers of this travesty are successful in amending the Constitution, America will join an elite club of nations that punish flag burners: China, Cuba and Iran.
Memorial Day is a time to remember those who gave their lives in service to our country. No doubt, many veterans past and present, along with many other citizens, join us in deploring flag burning.
The only thing worse than desecrating the flag is violating the Constitution to punish offenders.
Members of Congress last week finally decided that invasion of privacy and the president’s overstepping his power are matters of grave importance.
And it took an FBI raid of the office of one of their own to get them all worked up.
As The Washington Post first reported, FBI agents obtained a warrant to search the offices of Rep. William Jefferson, a long-time New Orleans Democrat after they secretly taped him accepting $100,000, ostensibly to help a company win Internet contracts in Africa.
Never mind that this time the FBI obtained a search warrant unlike, say, the CIA or the NSA in their attempts to listen in on Americans’ private phone conversations.
Democrats and Republicans alike called on the FBI to return the documents seized from Jefferson’s office, saying along the way that it represented an extraordinary overreaching of power on the part of the executive branch.
“No person is above the law, neither the one being investigated nor those conducting the investigation,” said a letter signed by both House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The Justice Department must immediately return the papers it unconstitutionally seized. Once that is done, Congressman Jefferson can and should fully cooperate with the Justice Department’s efforts, consistent with his constitutional rights.”
It was apparently the first time in Congress’ history that a member’s office had been raided by the Justice Department. Of course, as The Washington Post explained in an editorial, “this was no fishing expedition.”
It’s great that there is bipartisan anger at law enforcement officials executing a lawfully obtained search warrant against someone suspected of wrongdoing. That should play well here in the rest of America.
Vermonters are no strangers to outrage over invasions of privacy on the part of our congressional delegation. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been one of the most vocal critics of the recently disclosed collection of millions of phone records by the country’s top spy agency. Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., has been one of the loudest opponents of the Patriot Act and provisions that allow government snooping into our library borrowing habits.
Heck, a former member of Congress who couldn’t disagree more with Sanders’ socialist leanings, came to the state a few weeks ago to decry the ever-encroaching nature of the current president’s administration.
“I can’t understand that while you have a president thumbing his nose at Congress and the country and expressing disdain for the Constitution that Congress just sits there and takes it,” former Rep. Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia, said during his visit here. “How is it that one individual can take power from the people and not be held accountable?”
How is it, indeed? On the one hand, Congress seems to just sit by and do nothing more than express frustration when the executive branch is reaching its tentacles into the private lives of the people from whom it derives its powers.
But if one of their own – no matter what party or what wrongdoing is suspected – is the recipient of a little intrusion from the executive branch, well, then, something must be done.
Vermonters are proud of their government’s relative absence from our lives and about its strong protection of individual liberties. Recall that when the latest phone-records scandal broke, calls for an immediate investigation of the state’s largest telephone company were swift and bipartisan.
I suspect, however, that Vermonters and other Americans will look at Pelosi and Hastert and Jefferson with more than a little skepticism.
It’s one thing for the crew of insiders to act like they’ve somehow been wronged by what looks like, from all accounts, a perfectly lawful and reasonable search of a crime suspect’s office, a suspect whom authorities say didn’t cooperate with them for months.
It’s quite another for them to expect that we will share their outrage.
After all, they certainly don’t seem to share ours when it is our privacy that is being violated.
Every little man thinks that only Jesus Christ himself is good enough to be his teacher. But you can learn from the most ordinary circumstances once you have the key that opens all doors. — Georges I. Gurdjeiff
jac is waiting to hear from his supplier, and has been for the past 3 days, i haven’t been able to get hold of jim because he has moved since the last time i called (typical), and gunnar isn’t answering his phone. bleh.
1968. It was the height of the Vietnam War, the year of My Lai and the Tet offensive. Student riots in Paris nearly brought down the French government. Soviet tanks put a premature end to Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring.
In the United States, the streets were teeming with antiwar protesters and civil rights demonstrators. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated within two months of each other. The Democratic convention in Chicago dissolved into chaos. And by the summer, America’s cities were in flames.
The world was seething, and for good reason. There was a lot to be angry about. It was a lousy year, 1968.
I was in high school then. I quit the baseball team because, frankly, sports seemed frivolous. In 1968, there were more important things to worry about than perfecting a curveball. All very high-minded and, in retrospect, more than a little pompous. But nearly 40 years down the road I don’t regret having done it. My political consciousness was awakened and I was actively engaged in the world around me.
But as bad as things were then, they seem infinitely worse now.
So why aren’t the streets clogged with angry Americans demanding to know why their president lied and deceived them so he could attack a country that had absolutely nothing to do with his so-called war on terror? To an extent, we got suckered into Vietnam. We can’t make that claim about Iraq. Iraq was the premeditated, willful invasion of a sovereign nation that was threatening nobody. “Saddam Hussein is a prick who treats the Kurds miserably” is no justification. By the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal and international law, our president is a war criminal.
Why aren’t we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties — the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies — to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won’t stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth.
Why aren’t irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast, demanding that the press reassert the right to perform its single most important function, that of government watchdog? The ghost of Richard Nixon, and a very corporeal Bill Clinton, must be cursing their rotten luck.
Why aren’t enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom’s SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit?
Why aren’t we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America, demanding that their executives be tossed into fetid dungeons for cynically manipulating gas prices while raking in obscene profits?
Why aren’t we demanding that religion return to the pulpit, where it belongs, and keep out of the White House and the courts?
In short, where the hell is everybody?
I’ll tell you where they are. They’re at home, tuning in to root for the next “American idol.” They’re plugged into their iPods, utterly self-involved and disconnected from what lies just outside their doors. They’re spending 25 hours a week playing video games in virtual worlds instead of fighting to save the only world that really matters. They’re surfing porn. They’re text messaging and e-mailing and scheming to close that next big deal. They’re flogging their useless crap on eBay.
All that technology at their fingertips, and they’re completely blind. Two terms for George W. Bush? They’re deaf and dumb, too.
Bread and circuses. The government and the corporations are giving us bread and circuses to keep us sufficiently distracted so the powers that be can pursue their agendas. Television (flat screens only, please) serves up Donald Trump and Paris Hilton as role models, and gives us the abomination of Fox News, which is more a wolf in sheep’s clothing than any Vulpes vulpes you’re likely to encounter.
Hollywood only cares about blockbusters, chick flicks and inane buddy movies. Tiresome reality doesn’t make for good escapism and, more importantly, it doesn’t fill coffers. And George Clooney can’t be expected to produce every movie.
Whither the press? Forget it. Britney Spears gets more ink — and better play — than global warming does.
WASHINGTON – Military investigators probing the deaths last November of about two dozen Iraqi civilians have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said Friday.
The Marine Corps initially reported 15 deaths and said they were caused by a roadside bomb and an ensuing firefight with insurgents. A separate investigation is aimed at determining if Marines lied to cover up the events, which included the deaths of women and children.
If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which President Bush said Thursday he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.
The defense official discussed the matter Friday only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation. He said the evidence found thus far strongly indicated the killings in the insurgent-plagued city of Haditha in the western province of Anbar were unjustified. He cautioned that the probe was not finished.
Once the investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Three officers from the unit involved — 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. — have been relieved of duty, although officials have not explicitly linked them to the criminal investigation.
In an indication of how concerned the Marines are about the implications of the Haditha case, their top officer, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, flew to Iraq on Thursday. He was to reinforce what the military said was a need to adhere to Marine values and standards of behavior and to avoid the use of excess force.
“Many of our Marines have been involved in life or death combat or have witnessed the loss of their fellow Marines, and the effects of these events can be numbing,” Hagee said a statement announcing his trip. “There is the risk of becoming indifferent to the loss of a human life, as well as bringing dishonor upon ourselves.”
A spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters in the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, declined to comment on the status of the Haditha investigation. He said no information would be provided until the probe was completed.
According to a congressional aide, lawmakers were told in a briefing Thursday that it appears as many as two dozen civilians were killed in the episode at Haditha. And they were told that the investigation will find that “it will be clear that this was not the result of an accident or a normal combat situation.”
Another congressional official said lawmakers were told it would be about 30 days before a report would be issued by the investigating agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Both the House and Senate armed services committees plan to hold hearings on the matter.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the civilians killed at Haditha included five men who had been traveling in a taxi and others in two nearby houses. The newspaper quoted an unidentified official as saying it was a sustained operation over as long as five hours.
Hagee met with top lawmakers from those panels this week to bring them up to date on the investigation.
“I can say that there are established facts that incidents of a very serious nature did take place,” Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate panel, said Thursday. He would not provide details or confirm reports that about 24 civilians were killed. He told reporters he had “no basis to believe” the military engaged in a cover-up.
Separately, the Marines announced this week that a criminal investigation was under way in connection with an alleged killing on April 26 of an Iraqi civilian by Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad. No details about that case have been made public.
In the Haditha case, videotape aired by an Arab television station showed images purportedly taken in the aftermath of the encounter: a bloody bedroom floor, walls with bullet holes and bodies of women and children. An Iraqi human rights group called for an investigation of what it described as a deadly mistake that had harmed civilians.
On May 17, Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a former Marine, said Corps officials told him the toll in the Haditha attack was far worse than originally reported and that U.S. troops killed innocent women and children “in cold blood.” He said that nearly twice as many people were killed as first reported and maintained that U.S. forces were “overstretched and overstressed” by the war in Iraq.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was being kept apprised. Ruff said he did not expect any announcements in the next few days.
The coach of Iraq’s tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.
Coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda were killed in the al-Saidiya district of the capital.
Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.
Other Iraqi athletes have been targeted in recent incidents.
In this case, according to accounts, the men dropped off laundry and were then stopped in their vehicle by gunmen.
Leaflets Two of the athletes stepped out of the car and were shot in the head, said one witness. The third was shot dead in the vehicle.
“The gunman took the body out of the car and threw it on top of the other two bodies before stealing the car,” said the witness, who requested anonymity.
He said leaflets had been recently distributed in the area warning residents not to wear shorts.
Last week, 15 members of Iraq’s taekwondo team were kidnapped between Falluja and Ramadi, west of Baghdad, said a member of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. The kidnappers have demanded $100,000 for their release.
i left for seattle at 7:30 this morning because i wanted to get a good parking place, which i did, right across from the “skybridge”. it was early enough that most of the vendors weren’t even there yet, so i wandered for a couple of hours. minor things have changed recently: the second floor of the center house no longer goes all the way around, and some things have vanished from the main floor, like an escalator and a stairway. i found the place to check in and confused the volunteers when i wasn’t the whole group. got my button and went and wandered for a couple more hours until the performance. it was raining until we got onstage, and then it stopped. liz said that it always happens that way, which is a good thing, i think. they told me (i’ve got it written down in email) that our performance was at 11:45, but it was really at 12:45. also, the volunteers at the check in said that we had two performances, and that the second one was at 1:00, but we really only had one performance… i think that maybe the volunteers’ schedule was broken up into 15 minute increments, but i don’t know because they were pretty confused without me adding to it. we’re performing again for a party given by the canadian consulate at the intiman theatre at 10:00 tonight… one piece – oh canada – and we’ve never played it before, so it should be exciting.
anyway, after the band played, i went up to swamp creek to fill my water bottles and then i came home.
the ballard sedentary sousa band is playing tomorrow at folklife, at approximately 12:30 pm at the fountain lawn stage. we’re also playing at 10:00 pm for the party after.
i got an incense order today. first one in almost 2 months.
GASTONIA, N.C. — Eyebrows are being raised because of a new sign along Highway 74 and a pagan group’s promise to keep the road clean.
The Silvermoon Pagan Wicca Group, through the state’s Adopt-A-Highway program, recently sponsored the stretch of road in Gastonia. At the head of the group is Kym Miller, a self-proclaimed witch who owns the Witch’s Brew Café in Lincolnton.
“We want to be community-minded and active in the area, and we wanted to do something to help keep the area clean,” Miller said Thursday.
But many Gastonia residents have their objections.
“I’m not for it if it’s got anything to do with witchcraft,” resident Mildred Bumgardner said.
Resident Cody Sams said, “They should change the name or something.”
Miller insists that her group does nothing more than cast spells and experiment with herbal magic.
“We don’t worship the devil, we don’t believe in the devil,” she said. “We’re not Satanists.”
Miller said she has been receiving death threats since her café opened last summer, but she hopes the highway adoption can prove to people that her group wants to make a positive impact on the community. She said it also intends to adopt another highway in the near future.
“So that they realize that we’re not evil people doing evil things,” she said.
Bumgardner doesn’t buy it.
“They’re just trying to get into our communities with that type of thing,” she said.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation said it has not received any written complaints about the Silvermoon sign. Officials said it’s unfair to discriminate against any group that wants to adopt a highway.
It doesn’t cost any money to adopt a highway, but whoever does must pledge to clean it up at least a couple of times a year.
The Transportation Department said the program saves taxpayers $4 million a year in cleanup costs.
Desmond Dekker, the first Jamaican pop act to score a major hit in the UK, has died.
The singer died of a heart attack in London on Wednesday night. Dekker was 64 years old.
Born Desmond Adolphus Dacres in Kingston, on July 16, 1941, Dekker and his backing group the Aces (consisting of Wilson James and Easton Barrington Howard), had the first international Jamaican hit with Israelites. Other hits include 007 (Shanty Town), from 1967, and It Mek (1969).
Orphaned as a teenager, Dekker began working as a welder, singing around his workplace while his coworkers encouraged him. In 1961, he auditioned for the late Coxsone Dodd at Studio One and Dodd’s archrival, Duke Reid at Treasure Isle. Neither was impressed by his talents, and Dekker moved on to Leslie Kong’s Beverley’s label, where he auditioned before Derrick Morgan. With Morgan’s support, Dekker was signed but did not record until 1963, because Kong was reportedly waiting for the perfect song. That came in the form of Dekker’s Honour Your Father And Mother.
The song was a hit and Dekker followed up with Sinners Come Home and Labour for Learning. It was at this time that he changed his surname from Dacres to Dekker.
His next hit, King of Ska, on which he was backed by the The Cherrypies (also known as The Maytals), became one of his early signature tunes and remains well-known among ska fans.
Until 1967, Dekker’s songs, including Parents, Get Up Edina, This Woman and Mount Zion. were polite and conveyed mainstream messages. In that year, however, he appeared on Morgan’s Tougher Than Tough, which marked the beginning of the rude boy craze. Dekker’s own songs did not go to the extremes of many other popular tunes, though he did introduce lyrics which resonated with the rude boys, starting with the aforementioned 007 (Shanty Town). The song established Dekker as a rude boy icon, and helped him become a leading figure in the British mod scene.
Dekker continued with songs in the same vein, such as Rude Boy Train and Rudie Got Soul, as well as continuing with his previous themes of religion and morality in songs like It’s a Shame, Wise Man, Unity, It Pays, and Sabotage. His Pretty Africa is among the earliest popular songs to promote repatriation.
Israelites, released in 1968, appeared on both the US and UK charts, eventually topping the latter and peaking in the Top Ten of the former. He was the first Jamaican performer to enter US markets with pure Jamaican music, but he never managed to repeat in the US. That same year saw the release of Beautiful And Dangerous, Writing On The Wall, the Jamaica Festival song winner Intensified [Music Like Dirt], Bongo Girl and Shing a Ling.
At the end of the 1970s, Dekker signed with Stiff Records, a punk label linked with the Two-Tone movement, a fusion of punk and ska. He recorded an album called Black & Dekker, which featured his previous hits backed by The Rumour, Graham Parker’s backing band. Dekker’s next album was Compass Point, produced by Robert Palmer. Though that album did not sell well, Dekker remained a popular live performer, and he toured with The Rumour.
Only a live album was released in the late 80s, but a new version of Israelites reawakened public interest in 1990, following its use in a commercial for the audio recording products maker Maxell and on the soundtrack for the 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy. He re-recorded some old singles, and worked with The Specials for 1992’s King of Kings, which used hits from Dekker’s musical heroes, including Derrick Morgan.
despite the fact that i haven’t had any orders for more than a month, i signed up as a distributor for shoyeido incense (they now have a “resell from internet” policy, which they haven’t in the past), and ordered $125 worth of incense from them, primarily because chris wants more hori-kawa. the added bonus is that i get to order their $100 a box incense at wholesale.
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.
In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA’s visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.
Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco,” a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled “SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure” and a second “Cut-In and Test Procedure” dated Jan. 24, 2003.
AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens 31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program, which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it’s been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network 16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
“As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.” The New York Times, 9 November 2002
To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting “research” using “artificial synthetic data” or information from “normal DOD intelligence channels” and hence there are “no U.S. citizen privacy implications” (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to “Terrorism Information Awareness” to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter’s abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for “the majority of the TIA components,” allowing several “components” to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into “real world” telecommunications offices.
In San Francisco the “secret room” is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T’s WorldNet service, part of the latter’s vital “Common Backbone.” In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the “secret room” on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The “secret room” itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the “secret room,” which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company’s endless “downsizings,” but he was quickly replaced by another.
Plans for the “secret room” were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from “AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services” and authored by the labs’ consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not “leak” their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.
This problem is solved with “splitters” which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the “secret room.” The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform — in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter — its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.
The above-referenced document includes a diagram showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to “SG3 Secure Room,” i.e., the so-called “Study Group” spy room. Another page headlined “Cabinet Naming” lists not only the “splitter” cabinet but also the equipment installed in the “SG3” room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 “backbone” routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the “splitter” cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the “secret room” on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco “secret room” is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.
One of the devices in the “Cabinet Naming” list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the “secret room”: a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the “Lead Sponsor” for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled “Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance.” Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the “war on terror” had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?
“The (Narus) STA Platform consists of standalone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message…. These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device” (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology “captures comprehensive customer usage data … and transforms it into actionable information…. (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications.”
To implement this scheme, WorldNet’s high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special “splitter” cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure, dated 01/13/03. “SIMS” is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
“A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document…. “This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits.”
The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion “management” employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the “splitter” cabinet.
Another Cut-In and Test Procedure document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the “splitter” cabinet. One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were “cut-in” in February 2003, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It’s not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on — it’s the entire internet.
The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various “secret rooms”? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General’s report (cited above):
“For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)….”
Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM “testing” are the “National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center.” There are also “discussions” going on to bring in “non-DOD federal agencies” such as the FBI.
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
this is sort of a backhanded compliment… they say that there’s no link between pot and lung cancer, but they still recommend not smoking pot because of problems like “cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis”, in spite of the fact that there’s no mention of alcohol or other “legal” drugs that have identical, if not more severe problems linked with them. also i’d be willing to bet that they didn’t test pot smoked through a water filtration device like a bong because tobacco isn’t smoked that way… 8/
LOS ANGELES – Marijuana smoking does not increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.
They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.
Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
The study results were presented in San Diego on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society.
The study was confined to people under age 60 since baby boomers were the most likely age group to have long-term exposure to marijuana, said Dr. Donald Tashkin, senior researcher and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.
The results should not be taken as a blank check to smoke pot, which has been associated with problems like cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis, said Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. He was not involved in the study.
Previous studies showed marijuana tar contained about 50 percent more of the chemicals linked to lung cancer, compared with tobacco tar, Tashkin said. In addition, smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco.
“Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there’s less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled,” Tashkin said in a statement. “And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers — they hold their breath about four times longer, allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lung.”
He theorized that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical in marijuana smoke that produces its psychotropic effect, may encourage aging, damaged cells to die off before they become cancerous.
Hansen-Flaschen also cautioned a cancer-marijuana link could emerge as baby boomers age and there may be smaller population groups, based on genetics or other factors, still at risk for marijuana-related cancers.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Autopsy results obtained by CNN show a retarded man was shot in the back when he was killed by New Orleans police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This contradicts testimony by a police sergeant that the victim had turned toward officers and was reaching into his waistband when shot.
“Clearly he was shot from behind,” said famed New York pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who examined the body for the family’s lawyer.
A prosecutor said the case will go before a grand jury soon and acknowledged the investigation includes the possibility of police wrong-doing.
Ronald Madison, 40, was mentally retarded and lived at home with his mother. He had no criminal record. He was shot when police responded to a report of gunfire on a bridge over the flooded Industrial Canal on Sunday, September 4, six days after Katrina hit New Orleans last year.
It was a week of dire flooding, rampant looting, death by drowning. Police were strained, beset by suicides and desertion. Four people were killed in confrontations with police that weekend alone.
Madison’s older brother, Lance, said he and Ronald were walking across the Danziger bridge toward another brother’s dental office when teen-agers ran up behind him and opened fire that Sunday morning.
By his account, he and Ronald were running away toward the crest of the bridge when a police team, responding to the report of gunshots, arrived in a rental truck and opened fire on people on the bridge.
Police Superintendent Warren Riley told CNN, “Several of the people were shot and two were killed by our officers in a running gun battle… Most police shoot-outs last somewhere between six and twelve seconds, and it’s over with. This was a running gun battle that went on several minutes.”
One teen-ager, still unidentified, was killed near the base of the bridge. Another was critically wounded. Three other people with them were also shot and were hospitalized.
Lance Madison said a policeman pointed a rifle at Ronald and shot him as the two of them were running up the bridge. Lance said he helped carry his wounded brother to a motel on the other side of the canal and left him there as Lance kept running to seek help.
The Police Department said in a press release last fall that Ronald Madison, whom it called a second unidentified gunman, “was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him.”
Testifying in a preliminary hearing last fall, Police Sgt. Arthur Kaufman said much the same thing: “One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers.”
Autopsy results, made available to CNN by a source involved in the investigation, directly contradict that police account.
The findings list five separate gunshot wounds in Ronald Madison’s back. Three went through the body and exited in front. There were two other wounds in his right shoulder. None of the shots entered his body from the front.
CNN had sued the coroner of Orleans Parish to try to get official access to the autopsy report. At a court hearing on that lawsuit in New Orleans a week ago, the coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, verified the handwritten autopsy report obtained elsewhere by CNN was indeed prepared in his office by a pathologist on his staff who listed the wounds in the victim’s right back.
Under cross-examination by a CNN lawyer, Dr. Minyard testified those five wounds in the back “were entrance wounds, yes.”
Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, met with CNN in New York City two weeks ago to discuss his own observations when he examined Ronald Madison’s body for the family lawyer last fall. Asked if Ronald could have been facing the police when shot, Dr. Baden said, “Absolutely not.”
No weapon was found on or near Ronald Madison’s body.
Asst. District Attorney Dustin Davis, testifying in the same court hearing on the CNN lawsuit, said a grand jury has been assigned to investigate the Danziger Bridge shootings. However, the grand jury has not yet met on the case because the New Orleans Police Dept. has yet to complete its final report, eight months after those deaths.
The CNN attorney asked Davis, “What you are investigating in that case is whether any of the police officers may be indicted for homicide, is that correct?”
Davis answered, “That’s partially correct. We are also looking at Mr. Madison’s involvement in the incident.”
Lance Madison was arrested on the other side of the bridge where his brother was killed and was accused of shooting at the police officers in the gun battle. He, too, had no weapon when taken into custody. He was released from bail after six months because the District Attorney’s office had not initiated any prosecution, although the investigation remains pending.
Sgt. Kaufman testified at the bail hearing for Lance Madison last fall that another policeman saw Lance throw a gun into the Industrial Canal as he was going over the bridge. Lance Madison denies that. He told CNN correspondent Drew Griffin, “I had no gun, at all.” Asked if Ronald had a gun, Lance answered, “No, he didn’t.”
In a CNN interview earlier this month, Griffin told Police Chief Warren Riley, “We understand Ronald Madison was shot in the back five times.”
Riley said, “Those are things I can’t comment on and no one can comment on until the investigation is concluded.”
Griffin asked Riley if he was concerned about his officers’ actions and Riley replied, “Certainly, we do not condone our officers overreacting, even in the most chaotic time,” but he went on, “We don’t know that they overreacted. From the radio transmission, it sounds like their lives were in danger.”
Riley turned down a request by CNN to interview the officers who were involved.
A 25-year career employee at Federal Express, Lance Madison has no criminal record.
At the end of the CNN interview, Riley conceded the two Madison brothers may not have been connected with the other people on the bridge that day.
“I don’t know if those young men were innocent or not. I really don’t know if they were with that group or not,” Riley said. “I really don’t know.”
you know how hard it is to place a coin on it’s edge when you’re trying… you can do it, but it’s difficult, and especially so when the surface is uneven. i wasn’t paying attention, and wasn’t trying to put this penny down in any particular way, and it came to rest like this anyway.
in the past four days, i’ve updated ‘ links on the The Church of Tina Chopp (which i was just notified about this morning) and applied for a job <shudder> at a place where i’ve applied about every six months for the past three years and not been hired. i’ve known the guys who run the print shop for 25 years – since we both lived in bellingham – and i’ve never been hired by these guys for any of the jobs that they have had available during that period of time, so i don’t expect much different this time, but i applied again because moe asked me to.
okay, i’ve been looking for a version of this meme that i can do with minimal effort, and i found one yesterday. i would have done it yesterday except for the fact that i was depressed and cleaned up the house instead of listening to music.
Turn on your favorite media player and turn your shuffle feature on.
Hit “play” and keep track of the next 10 songs that come up.
Post your 10 shuffled songs, along with these instructions. You are not allowed to lie, omit tracks or otherwise try to make your musical taste seem hipper than it actually is.
Tag five people on your friends list to do the same. horseshit. tag yourselves.
Hollowmusic – St. Fred, Hollow Music — yeah, listening to music that you, yourself, created is a guaranteed way to move up on the “hip” list… 8/
Fantastic Voyage – David Bowie, Lodger
Bulky Rhythm – The Bobs, My I’m Large
Under Wraps #1 – Jethro Tull, Under Wraps
Kill Him! – The Residents, Wormwood
Loss Of Innocence – The Residents, Commercial Album
Francisco – Brian Eno, The Shutov Assembly
Catholic Girls – Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore vol. 6
there have been no hybrid elephant orders for over a month, since that guy who runs an oriental medicine practice in nevada was talking about ordering $1,000 worth of incense, and then decided that he only wanted $400 worth, and then – after i had already ordered it – he decided that he wasn’t going to order from me at all, so i had to send $400 worth of incense back to the supplier. not only do i not know where he’s getting it from, but since then i have had no orders of any kind. i’m getting concerned, and i don’t know what to do.
i have decided that i’ve got to have a workshop… i’m going crazy not having anything to do. so i’m looking into buying a 8’x8.5’x20′ shipping container and transforming it into a workshop… but i get the very strong impression that moe would much rather i get a more building-like “shed”. the problem is that i have exactly enough money to buy either one or the other, and at this point, i don’t have any money to make the “improvements” necessary to make both into a functioning workshop. i get the very strong impression that, of the two, the shipping container would come in a state that is much more workshop-ready – all i’d have to do is put in some overhead lights and run a couple of extension cords, but, as i said, i get the very strong impression that moe would much rather i get something other than a shipping container, and at this point, i feel like if i don’t do what she wants, there’s likely to be bigger problems.
the other option, if i decide that i’m not buying a workshop structure, is that i could buy a new computer. if i were to do so, it would very likely be either a mac book, or a G5 mac mini. however, if i get a new computer, a workshop of any kind is going to be completely out of the question for at least another year, unless the hybrid elephant market does an amazing turnaround.
i replied to a post whose subject was “seattle’s most fabulous horn players” about a month ago, and it turned out to be someone i know from bellingham, 25 years ago. well, it turns out that, like 25 years ago, the guy has grandiose dreams of stuff he’d like to do, but he doesn’t have the talent or the organisational skills to do it the way he wants to. the third rehearsal is coming up on saturday, and this week he emailed me to say that he hasn’t been able to get any other horn players (unlike last week when i showed up only to find that i was the only horn player out of three people at the rehearsal), so “in case you don’t want to be the only horn again” i can cancel… what i’m going to tell him is that when he’s ready for horn players to show up, that he can give me a call, but i’m not expecting a call any time soon.
Dell is apparently putting hardware keyloggers in their laptops at the behest of the Department of Clownland Security,although when asked about it, they say “the intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information” and hang up. the only thing i know for sure is that the guy who submitted a FOIA request for an explanation of why his new laptop had a device that can and is used to spy on terrorists (among other, less legal uses) got a reply that included the following statement from DHS: “the requested records are exempt from being disclosed under FOIA”… dude, i’m not getting a dell!!! (and here’s evidence that the whole thing is a hoax, but i’m not getting a dell anyway, i’m getting a mac, if i’m getting a computer at all)
Hayden Insists NSA Surveillance Is Legal CIA Nominee Gen. Michael Hayden Insists NSA Warrantless Surveillance Program Is Legal By KATHERINE SHRADER May 18, 2006
WASHINGTON — CIA nominee Gen. Michael Hayden insisted on Thursday that the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program was legal and that it was designed to ensnare terrorists not spy on ordinary people.
“Clearly the privacy of American citizens is a concern constantly,” the four-star Air Force general told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing. “We always balance privacy and security.”
Hayden was peppered by as many questions about the National Security Agency, the super-secret agency that he headed from 1999-2005, as about his visions for the CIA.
Senators grilled him on the NSA’s eavesdropping without warrants on conversations and e-mails believed by the government to involve terrorism suspects, and reports of the tracking of millions of phone calls made and received by ordinary Americans.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush decided that more anti-terrorism surveillance was necessary than the NSA had been doing, said Hayden.
Hayden said he decided to go ahead with the then-covert surveillance program, which has been confirmed by Bush, believing it to be legal and necessary.
“When I had to make this personal decision in October 2001 … the math was pretty straightforward. I could not not do this,” Hayden said.
He said the surveillance program used a “probable cause” standard that made it unlikely that information about average Americans would be scrutinized.
But he declined to openly discuss reports that the NSA was engaged in even broader surveillance, including a story in USA Today that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone-call records of tens of millions of U.S. citizens.
Under questioning from Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Hayden said he would only talk about the part of the program the president had confirmed.
“Is that the whole program?” asked Levin.
“I’m not at liberty to talk about that in open session,” Hayden said. A closed-door session was planned for later in the day.
Hayden was asked about reported friction between him and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how the NSA and other intelligence agencies would work with the Pentagon, which has the lion’s share of intelligence dollars.
Had they disagreed, he was asked by Levin? “Yes sir,” said Hayden.
Some critics have suggested that Hayden, 61, who remains an active general, is too closely aligned with the Pentagon to objectively run the civilian CIA.
Hayden declined to answer a string of questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., saying he would answer them later in a closed-door session.
They included whether he believed that “waterboarding,” in which prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning, was an acceptable form of interrogation. He also declined to say publicly how long he believed the United States could hold terror suspects without a trial.
“He didn’t answer any of them,” Feinstein said into an open mike as the hearing recessed for lunch.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Tony Snow expressed the president’s full confidence in Hayden. “The guy’s got a record of trying to take on big reform tasks and carrying them out,” Snow told reporters.
Hayden acknowledged a series of intelligence failures in the run-up to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and promised to take steps to guard against a repeat of such errors.
“We just took too much for granted. We didn’t challenge our basic assumptions,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing.
He said that since launching the surveillance program a month after the terror attacks, targeting decisions have been made by NSA experts on al-Qaida.
Asked by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., whether a NSA analyst could intentionally look at information unrelated to suspected terrorist activity, Hayden said, “I don’t know how that could survive.”
Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas complained about the CIA’s performance on Iraq. While “nobody bats 1,000 in the intelligence world,” Roberts cited “a terribly flawed trade craft” in the CIA’s intelligence suggesting the presence of weapons of mass destruction there.
At the same time, Roberts complained that the discussion among lawmakers had not been over Hayden’s long intelligence-services resume “but rather the debate is focused almost entirely” on controversy over NSA surveillance and eavesdropping programs.
Hayden, as expected, drew the most fire from Democratic members. “I now have a difficult time with your credibility,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
In an opening statement, Hayden said that intelligence-gathering has become “the football in American political discourse” since the terror attacks of Sept. 11.
He said the embattled agency “must be transformed, without slowing the high tempo under which it already operates, to counter today’s threats.”
“Yes, there have been failures, but there have also been many great successes,” Hayden said.
If confirmed, “I would reaffirm the CIA’s proud culture of risk-taking,” said Hayden, who was selected by President Bush to succeed Porter Goss, who was forced out after serving for 18 months.
Hayden’s hearing before the Intelligence Committee was much different than a year ago, when the panel approved him unanimously to be the nation’s first principal deputy director of national intelligence.
Bush chose Hayden as CIA director-nominee after consultation with Hayden’s current boss, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Goss announced his retirement earlier this month after disputes with Hayden and Negroponte about the CIA’s direction.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – In another in a series of notable pronouncements, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says God told him storms and possibly a tsunami will hit America’s coastline this year.
Robertson has made the predictions at least four times in the past two weeks on his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which he founded.
Robertson said the revelations about this year’s weather came to him during his annual personal prayer retreat in January.
“If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms,” Robertson said May 8. On Wednesday, he added, “There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.”
Robertson has come under intense criticism in recent months for suggesting that American agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine retribution for Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip.
today i spent 9 hours working on Ganesha The Car. if i had it to do all over again i would make all the writing the size of the new red & black lines, but it’s pretty good the way it is.
When Kylie Hodgson gave birth to twin daughters by caesarean section, she was just relieved that they had arrived safely.
It was only when the midwife handed them over for her to hold that she noticed the difference between them.
Remee, who weighed 5lb 15oz, was blonde and fair skinned. Her sister Kian, born a minute later weighing 6lb, was black.
‘Our two gorgeous little girls’ “It was a shock when I realised that my twins were two different colours,” said Kylie, 19. “But it doesn’t matter to us – they are just our two gorgeous little girls.”
The amazing conception happened after two eggs were fertilised at the same time in the womb.
Both Kylie and her partner Remi Horder, 17, are of mixed race. Their mothers are both white and their fathers are black.
According to the Multiple Births Foundation, baby Kian must have inherited the black genes from both sides of the family, whilst Remee inherited the white ones.
Kylie, from Nottingham, discovered she was pregnant in the summer of 2004 and a scan at the Queen’s Medical Centre revealed that twins were on the way.
“It was a shock at first to discover I was expecting as we hadn’t been trying for a family,” she said I had my 14-week scan and the sonographer ran the scanner over my stomach and announced that I was carrying twins.
“We couldn’t believe it. Neither of us could take our eyes off the scanner – you could just see two of everything, even the outline of their little noses. We were both overwhelmed.”
The twins were born by caesarean in April last year because one of the girls was lying in an awkward position in the womb.
“I didn’t see them at first,” added their mother. “They were both whisked away to be checked over and then the midwife came back and placed them both in my arms.
“I noticed that both of them had beautiful blue eyes, but whilst Remee was blonde, Kian’s hair was black and she had darker skin.
“It seemed strange, but I was feeling so ill that I didn’t really take it in at that stage.”
The next day she mentioned the colour difference to her mother, who told her that Remee’s skin would darken as she grew older.
But as the weeks passed, Remee became lighter still while Kian went darker. And while Remee’s eyes stayed blue, Kian’s turned brown.
“There are some similarities between them,” said their mother. “They both love apples and grapes, and their favourite television programme is Teletubbies.
“If they haven’t seen each other for a few hours, they are so pleased to see each other and will hold out their arms, wanting to hug each other. And their smiles just light up their faces.
“I’ll explain it all to them when they get older about why they look so different.”
Million to one odds The odds against of a mixed race couple having twins of dramatically different colour are a million to one.
Skin colour is believed to be determined by up to seven different genes working together.
If a woman is of mixed race, her eggs will usually contain a mixture of genes coding for both black and white skin.
Similarly, a man of mixed race will have a variety of different genes in his sperm. When these eggs and sperm come together, they will create a baby of mixed race.
But, very occasionally, the egg or sperm might contain genes coding for one skin colour. If both the egg and sperm contain all white genes, the baby will be white. And if both contain just the versions necessary for black skin, the baby will be black.
For a mixed-race couple, the odds of either of these scenarios is around 100 to one. But both scenarios can occur at the same time if the woman conceives non-identical twins, another 100 to one chance.
This involves two eggs being fertilised by two sperm at the same time, which also has odds of around 100 to one.
If a sperm containing all-white genes fuses with a similar egg and a sperm coding for purely black skin fuses with a similar egg, two babies of dramatically different colours will be born.
The odds of this happening are 100 x 100 x 100 – a million to one.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.
ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.
“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being “tracked.”
“Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.
But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.
In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.
“The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.
Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.
Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.
HARTFORD, Conn. – U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.
The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.
In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.
Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year, accounting for nearly one in five of all non-combat deaths and the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring, the Courant reported. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for “extended deployments.”
“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based advocacy group. “You’re creating chemically activated time bombs.”
Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.
“I’m concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country,” said Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped to get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.
The Army’s top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
“The challenge for us … is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge,” she said. “And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”
Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but said that is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon.
Commanders, not medical professionals, have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in the war zone. Ritchie and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and are open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment.
“Your average commander doesn’t want to deal with a whacked-out soldier. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he’s willing to send you home,” said Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserves who handled trial defense for soldiers in northern Iraq last year.
Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.
Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on the front lines while on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, with little or no counseling or medical monitoring.
And some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing the risk to their mental health.
These practices, which have received little public scrutiny and in some cases violate the military’s own policies, have helped to fuel an increase in the suicide rate among troops serving in Iraq, which reached an all-time high in 2005 when 22 soldiers killed themselves – accounting for nearly one in five of all Army non-combat deaths.
The Courant’s investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress. In at least seven of the cases, superiors were aware of the problems, military investigative records and interviews with families indicate.
Among the troops who plunged through the gaps in the mental health system was Army Spec. Jeffrey Henthorn, a young father and third-generation soldier, whose death last year is still being mourned by his native Choctaw, Okla.
What his hometown does not know is that Henthorn, 25, had been sent back to Iraq for a second tour, even though his superiors knew he was unstable and had threatened suicide at least twice, according to Army investigative reports and interviews. When he finally succeeded in killing himself on Feb. 8, 2005, at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, an Army report says, the work of the M-16 rifle was so thorough that fragments of his skull pierced the barracks ceiling.
In a case last July, a 20-year-old soldier who had written a suicide note to his mother was relieved of his gun and referred for a psychological evaluation, but then was accused of faking his mental problems and warned he could be disciplined, according to what he told his family. Three weeks later, after his gun had been handed back, Pfc. Jason Scheuerman, of Lynchburg, Va., used it to end his life.
Also kept in the war zone was Army Pfc. David L. Potter, 22, of Johnson City, Tenn., who was diagnosed with anxiety and depression while serving in Iraq in 2004. Potter remained with his unit in Baghdad despite a suicide attempt and a psychiatrist’s recommendation that he be separated from the Army, records show. Ten days after the recommendation was signed, he slid a gun out from under another soldier’s bed, climbed to the second floor of an abandoned building and shot himself through the mouth, the Army has concluded.
The spike in suicides among the all-volunteer force is a setback for military officials, who had pledged in late 2003 to improve mental health services, after expressing alarm that 11 soldiers and two Marines had killed themselves in Iraq in the first seven months of the war. When the number of suicides tumbled in 2004, top Army officials had credited their renewed prevention efforts.
But The Courant’s review found that since 2003, the military has increasingly sent, kept and recycled troubled troops into combat – practices that undercut its assurances of improvements. Besides causing suicides, experts say, gaps in mental health care can cause violence between soldiers, accidents and critical mistakes in judgment during combat operations.
Military experts and advocates point to recruiting shortfalls and intense wartime pressure to maintain troop levels as reasons more service members with psychiatric problems are being deployed to the war zone and kept there.
“What you have is a military stretched so thin, they’ve resorted to keeping psychologically unfit soldiers at the front,” said Stephen Robinson, the former longtime director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. “It’s a policy that can do an awful lot of damage over time.”
Army officials confirmed that 22 soldiers killed themselves in Iraq, and three in Afghanistan, in 2005. The Army suicide rate was about 20 per 100,000 soldiers serving in Iraq – nearly double the 2004 rate, and higher than the 2003 rate that had prompted alarm. Three Marines also committed suicide in Iraq last year.
The military does not discuss or even identify individual suicide cases, which are grouped with other non-combat deaths. The Courant identified suicide victims through Army investigative reports and interviews with families.
Although The Courant determined that a spate of six suicides occurred within eight weeks last year, from late May to July, there is no indication that the military took steps to respond to the cluster.
While the 2005 jump in self-inflicted deaths was as pronounced as the 2003 spike that had stirred action, Army officials said last week that there were no immediate plans to change the approach or resources targeted to mental health. They said they had confidence in the initiatives put in place two years ago – additional combat stress teams to treat deployed troops and increased suicide prevention programs.
Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the top psychiatry expert for the Army surgeon general, said that while the Army is reviewing the 2005 suicides as a way to gauge its mental health efforts, “suicide rates go up and down, and we expect some variation.”
Ritchie said the mental health of troops remains a priority as the war enters its fourth year. But she also acknowledged that some practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with PTSD back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
“The challenge for us … is that the Army has a mission to fight. And as you know, recruiting has been a challenge,” she said. “And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”
But The Courant’s investigation shows that troubled soldiers are getting lost in the balance:
Under the military’s pre-deployment screening process, troops with serious mental disorders are not being identified – and others whose mental illness is known are being deployed anyway.
A law passed in 1997 requires the military to conduct an “assessment of mental health” on all deploying troops. But the “assessment” now being used is a single mental health question on a pre-deployment form filled out by service members.
Even using that limited tool, troops who self-report psychological problems are rarely referred for evaluations by mental health professionals, Department of Defense records obtained by The Courant indicate. From March 2003 to October 2005, only 6.5 percent of deploying service members who indicated a mental health problem were referred for evaluations; overall, fewer than 1 in 300 deploying troops, or 0.3 percent, were referred.
That rate of referral is dramatically lower than the more than 9 percent of deploying troops that the Army itself acknowledges in studies have serious psychiatric disorders.
In addition, despite its pledges in 2004 to improve mental health care, the military was more likely to deploy troops who indicated psychological problems in 2005 than it was during the first year of the war, the data show.
The Courant found that at least seven, or about one-third, of the 22 soldiers who killed themselves in Iraq in 2005 had been deployed less than three months, raising questions about the adequacy of pre-deployment screening. Some of them had exhibited earlier signs of distress.
Also, at least three soldiers who killed themselves since the war began were deployed despite serious mental conditions, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
The military relies increasingly on antidepressants, some with potentially dangerous side effects, to keep troops with known psychological problems in the war zone.
Military investigative reports and interviews with family members indicate that some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants, including a class of drugs known as SSRIs.
In one case, a 26-year-old Marine who was having trouble sleeping was put on a strong dose of Zoloft, an SSRI that carries a warning urging doctors to closely monitor new patients for suicidal urges. Last April, within two months of starting the drug, the Marine killed himself in Iraq.
Some service members who experienced depression or stress before or during deployments to Iraq described being placed on Zoloft, Wellbutrin and other antidepressants, with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Some of the drugs carry warnings of an increased risk of suicide, within the first weeks of their use.
Those anecdotal findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army cautioning that antidepressants for cases of moderate or severe depression “are not usually suitable for extended deployments.”
Also, the military’s top health official, Assistant Defense Secretary William Winkenwerder Jr., indicated in testimony to Congress last summer that service members were being allowed to deploy on psychotropic medications only when their conditions had “fully resolved.”
The use of psychiatric drugs has alarmed some medical experts and ethicists, who say the medications cannot be properly monitored in a war zone. The Army’s own reports indicate that the availability and use of such medications in Iraq and Kuwait have increased since mid-2004, when a team of psychiatrists approved making Prozac, Zoloft, Trazodone, Ambien and other drugs more widely available throughout the combat zone.
“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on SSRIs, when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient advocacy group. “You’re creating chemically activated time bombs.”
The military is sending troops back into combat for second and third tours despite diagnoses of PTSD or other combat-related psychological problems – a practice that some mental health experts fear will fuel incidents of suicide and violence among troops abroad and at home.
Although Department of Defense standards for enlistment in the armed forces disqualify recruits who suffer from PTSD, the military is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria. The practice, which military experts concede is driven partly by pressure to maintain troop levels, runs counter to accepted medical doctrine and research, which cautions that re-exposure to trauma increases the risk of psychological problems.
At least seven troops who are believed to have committed suicide in 2005 and early 2006, and one who has been charged with killing a fellow soldier, were serving second or third tours in Iraq. Some of them had exhibited signs of combat stress after their first deployments, according to family members and friends.
Some soldiers now serving second tours in Iraq say they are wrestling with debilitating PTSD symptoms, despite being placed on medications.
Jason Sedotal, a 21-year-old military policeman from Pierre Part, La., returned home in March 2005 after seven months in Iraq, during which a Humvee he was driving rolled over a land mine, badly injuring his sergeant. After completing his tour, Sedotal was diagnosed with PTSD and placed on Prozac, he said.
Last October, after being transferred to a new unit, he was shipped back to Iraq for a one-year tour. During a short visit home last week, he described being wracked by nightmares and depression and convinced that “somebody’s following me.” When he conveyed his symptoms to a doctor at Fort Polk in Louisiana last Tuesday, he said, he was given a higher dose of medication and the sleeping pill Ambien and told that he was to go back to Iraq.
“I can’t keep going through this mentally. All they do is fill me up on medicine and send me back,” he said. “What’s this going to do to me in the future? I’m going to be 60 years old, hiding under my kitchen table? I’m real scared.”
More than 378,000 active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops have served more than one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, representing nearly a third of the 1.3 million troops who have been deployed, according to Department of Defense statistics. That repeat exposure to combat could dramatically increase the percentage of soldiers and Marines who experience PTSD, major depression or other disorders, some experts say.
Recent studies have estimated that at least 18 percent of returning Iraq veterans are at risk of developing PTSD after just one combat tour.
“The [Department of Defense] is in the business of keeping people deployable,” said Cathleen Wiblemo, deputy director for health care for the American Legion. “What the consequences of that are, we haven’t begun to see.
“This is uncharted territory. You’re looking at guys being extended or sent back multiple times into an extremely stressful situation, which is different than past wars. … I think the number of troops that will be affected, it will be a huge number.”
Preserving The Force
Military officials insist they have made aggressive efforts to improve mental health services to troops in Iraq in the past two years. After the spate of suicides in 2003, the Army dispatched a mental health advisory team, which issued a report recommending additional combat-stress specialists to treat troops close to the front lines, and encouraging training and outreach to reduce the stigma associated with mental health problems.
A follow-up report, released January 2005, cited the drop in suicides in 2004 as evidence that the Army’s efforts were successful. It also highlighted a decline in the number of soldiers who were evacuated out of Iraq for mental health problems – from about 75 a month in 2003 to 36 a month in 2004. In 2005, an average of 46 soldiers were evacuated each month, Army data show.
Overall, barely more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 1.3 million troops who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been evacuated because of psychiatric problems.
Both advisory team reports recommended that soldiers with mental health problems be kept in the combat zone in order to improve return-to-duty rates and help soldiers avoid being labeled unfit.
“If you take people out of their unit and send them home, they have the shame and the stigma,” said Ritchie, the Army’s mental health expert.
But with the suicide rate climbing, the emphasis on treating psychologically damaged soldiers in the war zone is raising new questions.
“You think it’s a stigma to be sent home from the Iraq war? That might be the line they’re using” to justify retaining troops, said Dr. Arthur S. Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who formerly served as national director of the Veterans Administration’s counseling centers. “I wouldn’t say that.”
Mental health specialists who have served in Iraq acknowledge that their main goal, under military guidelines, is to preserve the fighting force. Some have grappled with making tough calls about how much more stress a soldier can handle.
“You have to become comfortable with things we wouldn’t normally be comfortable with,” said Bob Johnson, a psychologist in Atlanta who counseled soldiers last year as chief of combat stress control for the Army’s 2nd Brigade. “If there were an endless supply [of soldiers], the compassionate side of you just wants to get these people out of here. They’re miserable. You can see it in their faces. But I had to kind of put that aside.”
Army statistics show that 59 soldiers killed themselves in Iraq through the end of last year – 25 in 2003, 12 in 2004, and 22 in 2005. Twelve Marine deaths also have been ruled self-inflicted.
The only confirmed Connecticut suicide is that of Army Pfc. Jeffrey Braun, 19, of Stafford, who died in December 2003. His father, William Braun, told The Courant he still did not have a full explanation of what happened to Jeffrey, but said, “I’ve chosen not to pursue it or question it. It’s over and done with.”
Military data show that deaths in Iraq due to all non-combat causes, such as accidents, rose by 32 percent from 2004 to 2005. Of the more than 500 non-combat deaths among all service branches since the start of the war, gunshot wounds were the second-leading cause of death, behind vehicle crashes but ahead of heart attacks and other medical ailments.
While many families of service members who died of non-combat causes say they are not familiar with military deployment policies, some question whether the military knowingly put their loved ones at risk.
Among them are relatives of Army Spec. Michael S. Deem, a 35-year-old father of two, who was deployed to Iraq in January 2005 despite a history of depression that family members say was known to the military. Shortly before Deem deployed, a military psychiatrist gave him a long-term supply of Prozac to help him handle the stress, his wife said.
Just 3½ weeks after he arrived in Iraq, Deem died in his sleep of what the Army later determined was an enlarged heart “complicated by elevated levels of fluoxetine” – the generic name for Prozac.
Family members of some troops whose deaths have been labeled suicides complain that the military has given them limited information about the circumstances of the deaths. Some have had to wait more than a year for autopsies and investigative reports, which they say still leave questions unanswered.
Barbara Butler, mother of Army National Guard 1st Lt. Debra A. Banaszak, 35, of Bloomington, Ill., said she has trouble understanding why her daughter would have taken her own life in Kuwait last October, as the military has determined. She said that while Banaszak, the single mother of a teenage son, was proud to serve her country and had not complained, the stresses of the deployment may have exacerbated her depression.
“She was used to being in charge and being a leader, but never in these circumstances,” said Butler. “If the Army is right that she did this, it was nothing she would have done ordinarily. It was that war that brought it about.”
Recognizing Trouble
Some autopsy and investigative reports obtained by The Courant make clear that service members who committed suicide were experiencing serious psychological problems during deployment.
In the months before Army Pfc. Samuel Lee, of Anaheim, Calif., killed himself in March 2005, an investigative report says, the 19-year-old had talked to fellow soldiers about a dream in which he tried to kill his sergeant before taking his own life, and of kidnapping, raping and killing Iraqi children. Three times, a soldier recounted in a sworn statement, Lee had pointed his gun at himself and depressed the trigger, stopping just before a round fired.
But two of Lee’s superiors gave statements saying they did not realize Lee was having trouble until the day he balanced the butt of his rifle on a cot, put his mouth over the muzzle and fired.
But a number of other reports on 2004 and 2005 suicides indicate that military superiors were aware that soldiers were self-destructing.
Among them was Army Staff Sgt. Cory W. Brooks, 32, of Philip, S.D., who shot himself in the head on April 24, 2004. In sworn statements, a major and first lieutenant acknowledged they had conducted “counseling” with Brooks, and a first sergeant “detailed his knowledge of SSG Brooks’ suicidal ideations.”
Brooks’ father, Darral, said he believes his son’s death stemmed from a combination of personal and combat-related stress, and he does not blame the military for retaining him in Iraq.
“Cory was a dedicated soldier. He wanted to be there,” he said. “If his captain told him to walk off a cliff, he’d do it.”
But in other cases in which superiors retained a soldier who was experiencing mental health problems, families are not so forgiving.
Ann Scheuerman, mother of the soldier who shot himself after his suicide note was discounted by Army officials, said her family has had a frustrating time getting the military to acknowledge mistakes in the way her son was treated.
“We wanted to make sure that whatever protocol they have in place is used, and if it doesn’t work, fix it,” Scheuerman said. “And to date, we’re just not getting anything at all.
“Nothing can bring back my son,” she said. “But if something can be done to prevent any more deaths, then if I offend a couple of people, I’ll go ahead and apologize up front. Go ahead and come after me, but something needs to be done.”
Family members of Jeffrey Henthorn, the Choctaw, Okla., native, are concerned that the Army ignored blatant warnings that Henthorn was suicidal.
An investigative report into Henthorn’s death contains statements indicating that Henthorn’s “chain of command” was aware that he had tried to harm himself in November 2004 – by slashing his arm “intentionally, in a [horizontal] manner” – in the weeks leading up to his second deployment to Iraq, while he was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas.
Then, soon after his deployment in December, a distressed Henthorn took his gun into a latrine in Kuwait and charged it, in what fellow soldiers feared was a suicide gesture. Although his superiors at the scene grabbed the weapon away, his platoon sergeant returned the gun the same day, after talking to Henthorn for about a half-hour, according to a sworn statement. The platoon’s first lieutenant was notified, but there is no indication that Henthorn was referred for a mental health evaluation or counseling.
Eighteen days later, after crossing into Iraq with his unit, Henthorn finished what he had started.
“If you lock yourself in a latrine for 10 minutes with your gun and threaten to hurt yourself, you don’t just get your gun back. You get relieved of duty and sent home,” said Henthorn’s father, Warren, who is still struggling to understand what happened to his only son.
“It’s the same as Vietnam – all they care about is the numbers in the field,” he said. “That’s all that matters, having the numbers.”
Ritchie insisted the military is working hard to prevent suicides, which she said is a challenge, given that soldiers have access to weapons.
“When you go back, in retrospect, there may be warning signs,” she acknowledged.
Addressing The Courant’s findings, she added, “What you don’t see from that are the other cases that perhaps had the same warning signs and were kept in [the combat] theater and went on to do OK in their job.”
While they would not comment on particular cases, Ritchie and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment. It is commanders, not medical professionals, who have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in the war zone.
“I think the majority of our commanders are very receptive,” Ritchie said.
But some service members say commanders’ sensitivity to mental health issues varies.
“As a practical matter, the quality … of the military’s mental health care professional is uneven,” said Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserve who handled trial defense for soldiers in northern Iraq last year. “Likewise, the understanding of mental health issues by commanders may also be spotty.”
He said commanders weighing whether a service member should be retained have to be mindful of how their troops will perceive the decision.
“Your average commander doesn’t want to deal with a whacked-out soldier. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he’s willing to send you home,” Efaw said.
Some troops and their families say the military has not made good on its pledge to make mental health care easily accessible in the field.
Summer Lipford of Statesville, N.C., said she urged her son, Pfc. Steven Sirko, to talk to a counselor in April of last year, after he complained in a phone call from Iraq that he was having nightmares, losing weight and not sleeping.
“I asked Steven, `If you’re having dreams that are so [messed] up, why don’t you go talk to somebody?'” Lipford recalled. “He said, `Yeah, Mom, like that’s gonna happen.’ He said it was an act of God to get to see somebody.”
Four days later, Sirko, a 20-year-old medic, injected himself with vecuronium, an anesthetic that causes muscular paralysis, and died of an accidental overdose, according to what the military has told Lipford.
Some returning troops acknowledge that their own fear of being stigmatized kept them from seeking psychological help during deployments. Despite the military’s efforts to improve mental health care, soldiers’ perceptions of a stigma associated with seeking such care remained unchanged between 2004 and 2005, with more than half of the soldiers surveyed by Army teams expressing concerns that they would be viewed as weak.
Matthew Denton, a Camp Pendleton Marine and helicopter mechanic, said he spent most of his six-month deployment in 2005 quietly contemplating his own death aboard a ship in the Persian Gulf.
“My head was in a scary place. I remember thinking, `I can’t believe I’m working on a $14 million aircraft. I just don’t care about this,'” he said. “When I’d come out of my daze, I was worried about messing up and endangering the life of my guys.”
Denton, 30, said his depression was easy to keep secret – pre- and post-deployment health screenings were self-reported, and commanders hustling Marines through six-month rotations never probed his mental state.
Now back home, Denton, who is being treated for depression, isn’t sure whether he managed to stay below the radar – or whether there was any radar to stay below.
(CNN) — In a new poll comparing President Bush’s job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.
The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush).
On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton’s favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.
Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.
When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers — 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush — falling within the poll’s margin of error. The same was true for a question on handling national security: 46 percent said Clinton performed better; 42 percent picked Bush.
Clinton was impeached in 1998 over testimony he gave in a deposition about an extramarital sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinksy. He was later aquitted by the Senate.
SAN FRANCISCO – As lawmakers demand answers about warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans, the Bush administration says its secretive program’s constitutionality cannot be challenged.
The government is taking that position in seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed in federal court here against AT&T Inc. over its alleged involvement in the surveillance program adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The federal government is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in arguing that the lawsuit must be thrown out because it threatens to divulge information that is deemed critical to national security.
“The state secrets privilege permits the government to protect against the unauthorized disclosure in litigation of information that may harm national security interests,” the Justice Department wrote to the judge presiding over the lawsuit filed by the San Francisco-based Internet privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The government announced that position in a legal brief late last month and is expected to expand on its arguments in an upcoming filing.
The tactic, first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a McCarthy-era lawsuit, has been increasingly invoked by federal lawyers seeking to shield the government from scrutiny by the courts.
Legal experts say it usually prevails.
“The state secrets privilege is sometimes called the ‘nuclear option,'” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. “In almost every case, it terminates the lawsuit.”
He suspects the San Francisco case will meet the same fate.
The government invoked the state secrets privilege to defeat a similar lawsuit in 1979 that accused the National Security Agency of illegally spying on Americans.
Lawmakers erupted Thursday when USA Today reported the NSA was secretly collecting the records of phone calls by millions of ordinary Americans to build a database of all calls within the country.
The revelation renewed debate about whether Americans’ privacy rights were being violated. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced he would demand phone companies to appear before the panel.
President Bush quickly weighed in. “We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” he said.
The president confirmed in December that the NSA has been conducting warrantless surveillance of calls and e-mails thought to involve al-Qaida terrorists.
Experts said the Bush administration has turned often to the state secrets defense, from espionage cases and patent disputes to routine employment discrimination lawsuits.
On Friday, citing the state secrets defense, the government urged a federal judge in Virginia to block a lawsuit filed by a German national who says he was illegally held in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for four months and tortured.
The Supreme Court upheld the defense as recently as January, when it rejected an appeal from a former covert CIA officer who accused the agency of race discrimination.
The high court first recognized the doctrine in 1953, when it dismissed a lawsuit against the government brought by family members of people killed in a plane wreck while testing secret electronic surveillance equipment.
Gregory Sisk, an expert on the state secrets doctrine at the St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minn., said legal precedent dictates that judges should give the “utmost deference” to the government when it raises the privilege.
“The thesis is that the courts lack the competence to second-guess the executive on military needs or national security threats,” he said.
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, filed in January, differs slightly from past cases in that it does not name the government, instead targeting AT&T.
The group accuses the telecommunications giant of cooperating with the NSA to make all communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.
Legal experts suggest it’s possible for the judge to rule on whether the president possesses wartime powers to authorize warrantless eavesdropping in the United States without disclosing any classified or sensitive material.
“I’m not surprised that the defense is being asserted,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “There’s no reason necessarily that the case should be dismissed.”
AT&T, the San Antonio-based telecommunications giant, says it is following all applicable laws.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has scheduled a hearing Wednesday to determine whether documents supplied to the Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T technician should remain under seal.
The case is based largely on the technician’s documents, which the technician and EFF assert show that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T’s network after the NSA installed equipment at AT&T offices in San Francisco and elsewhere.
This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why:
It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.
The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation.Section 2707 of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”
(The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But USA Today reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the NSA did not go to the FISA court to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.
In other words, for every 1 million Americans whose records were turned over to NSA, the telcos could be liable for $1 billion in penalties, plus attorneys fees. You do the math.
Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.
The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.
Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.
“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.
“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”
This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.
A Finnish computer expert working with Black Box Voting, a nonprofit organization critical of electronic voting, found the security hole in March after Emery County, Utah, was forced by state officials to accept Diebold touch screens, and a local elections official let the expert examine the machines.
Black Box Voting was to issue two reports today on the security hole, one of limited distribution that explains the vulnerability fully and one for public release that withholds key technical details.
The computer expert, Harri Hursti, quietly sent word of the vulnerability in March to several computer scientists who advise various states on voting systems. At least two of those scientists verified some or all of Hursti’s findings. Several notified their states and requested meetings with Diebold to understand the problem.
The National Association of State Elections Directors, the nongovernmental group that issues national-level approvals for voting systems, learned of the vulnerability Tuesday and was weighing its response. States are scheduled to hold primaries in May, June and July.
“Our voting systems board is looking at this issue,” said NASED Chairman Kevin Kennedy, a Wisconsin elections official. “The states are talking among themselves and looking at plans to mitigate this.”
California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.
In California, three counties — San Joaquin, Butte and Kern — plan to rely exclusively on Diebold touch screens in their polling places for the June primary.
Nine other counties, including Alameda, Los Angeles and San Diego, will use Diebold touch screens for early voting or for limited, handicapped-accessible voting in their polling places.
California elections officials told those counties Friday that the risk from the vulnerability was “low” and that any vote tampering would be revealed to voters on the paper read-out that prints when they cast their ballots, as well as to elections officials when they recount those printouts for 1 percent of their precincts after the election.
“I think the likelihood of this happening is low,” said assistant Secretary of State for elections Susan Lapsley. “It assumes access and control for a lengthy period of time.”
But scientists say that is not necessarily true.
Preparations could be made days or weeks beforehand, and the loading of the software could take only a minute or so once the machines are delivered to the polling places. In some cases, machines are delivered several days before an election to schools, churches, homes and other common polling places.
Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa’s Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.
“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.
…because they’re putting ’08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future,
rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger- Americans and the undead.
WARNING! There are cranks and kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who say that George Bush lost the 2004 election, like one titled, “Kerry Won” published on the TomPaine.com web site two days after the election. I wrote it.
On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com published it, I received an e-mail from The New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, The Times reporter asked me pointed questions:
Question #1: Are you a “sore loser”?
Question #2: Are you a “conspiracy nut”?
There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, for The Times at any rate, complete. The next day, the paper’s thorough analysis of the evidence yielded this front-page story, “VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED.”
As America’s self-proclaimed Paper of Record had no space for the facts, I thought I’d share some with you here.
“Kerry Won” was not a two-day inquiry à la Times. It was the latest in a series of investigative reports coming out of a four-year team examination, begun for BBC Television’s Newsnight, Britain’s Guardian papers and Harper’s Magazine, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.
And, by the way, the answer to Question #1: I didn’t lose, so I’m not sore. This investigation isn’t about John Kerry. As a journalist, I don’t give a toss which rich white kid won the game. But I’m not so blasé that I don’t care about the disappearance of American democracy. And I really wanted to know how the Bushes swallowed the sausage.
How’d they do it? Again. And how will they do it in ’08? The answer arrived just after midnight on October 8, 2004, three weeks before the official voting, in a series of extraordinary e-mails. The e-mails were intended for the chieftains of the President’s re-election campaign in Washington. Strangely enough, they were misaddressed and ended up in my mailbox. Such things happen.
Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes But the e-mails and their technical attachments won’t mean a thing unless you understand some arcane facts about elections American-style.
First, consider CNN’s Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.
So here’s your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?
Answer: The Uncounted.
In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government’s Election’s Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn’t locate to tote up.
Why doesn’t your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It’s right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election-in a footnote to the report on voter turn-out. The Census tabulation of voters voting “differs,” from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.
This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census’ whispered footnote, has not been reported.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical “glitches,” millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.
In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called “spoilage.” Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.
Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the U.S.A, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners.
In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, “black boxes,” that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist-voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black-went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.
I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network’s exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.
What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network’s polling company applied a fancy “algorithm,” a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.
And that’s bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.
Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the “official” polls, media grabbed on Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client’s wind blows.
Morris said:
“Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they’re used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World Countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible.”
His opening was promising, but then he switches into full Morris:
“It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”
So, Dick, you’re telling us there was an evil cabal among six pollsters, competitors who don’t even like each other, conspiring one dark night to make George Bush look like a vote thief.
There’s another explanation: Kerry won.
We’ve got the body (the wounded elections), we’ve got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How’s it done?
But that little Bill O’Reilly in your head is screaming, Get over it; let’s move on already. That’s the point of investigation. What they tested in 2000 and practiced in 2004, they are preparing to roll out in 2008 big time.
WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, “whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to “execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.
But with the disclosure of Bush’s domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override.
Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws — many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.
Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush’s theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.
Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.
“There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government,” Cooper said. ”This is really big, very expansive, and very significant.”
For the first five years of Bush’s presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.
Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush’s challenges to the laws he has signed.
Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions about Bush’s position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has “been used for several administrations” and that “the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.”
But the words “in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution” are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.
Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.
Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files “signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.
In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.
“He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.
Military link Many of the laws Bush said he can bypass — including the torture ban — involve the military.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for captured enemies, and “to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” But, citing his role as commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military.
On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.
After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.
Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a secret operation, such as the “black sites” where suspected terrorists are secretly imprisoned.
Congress has also twice passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence that was not “lawfully collected,” including any information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.
Congress first passed this provision in August 2004, when Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program was still a secret, and passed it again after the program’s existence was disclosed in December 2005.
On both occasions, Bush declared in signing statements that only he, as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be used by the military.
In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law, then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration’s lawyers.
Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing “security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions.” Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.
The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq. But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector “shall refrain” from investigating any intelligence or national security matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for itself.
Bush had placed similar limits on an inspector general position created by Congress in November 2003 for the initial stage of the US occupation of Iraq. The earlier law also empowered the inspector to notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate. Bush said the inspector could not give any information to Congress without permission from the administration.
Oversight questioned Many laws Bush has asserted he can bypass involve requirements to give information about government activity to congressional oversight committees.
In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of domestic-spying laws. And it contained 11 other requirements for reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances, border security, and counternarcotics efforts.
After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he could withhold all the information sought by Congress.
Likewise, when Congress passed the law creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it said oversight committees must be given information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening of checked bags at airports.
It also said Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.
On several other occasions, Bush contended he could nullify laws creating “whistle-blower” job protections for federal employees that would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member of Congress about possible government wrongdoing.
When Congress passed a massive energy package in August, for example, it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The provision was included because lawmakers feared that Bush appointees were intimidating nuclear specialists so they would not testify about safety issues related to a planned nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada — a facility the administration supported, but both Republicans and Democrats from Nevada opposed.
When Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing statement declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower protections.
Bush’s statement did more than send a threatening message to federal energy specialists inclined to raise concerns with Congress; it also raised the possibility that Bush would not feel bound to obey similar whistle-blower laws that were on the books before he became president. His domestic spying program, for example, violated a surveillance law enacted 23 years before he took office.
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over “the whole idea that there is a rule of law,” because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.
“Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional,” Golove said.
Defying Supreme Court Bush has also challenged statutes in which Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference.
Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say.
In November 2002, for example, Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute to conduct studies and publish reports “without the approval” of the Secretary of Education. Bush, however, decreed that the institute’s director would be “subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education.”
Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs, as long as they do not include quotas. Most recently, in 2003, the court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs should be struck down as unconstitutional.
Yet despite the court’s rulings, Bush has taken exception at least nine times to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he would construe them “in a manner consistent with” the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection” to all — which some legal scholars say amounts to an argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse discrimination against whites.
Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court’s precedents, he threatens to “overturn the existing structures of constitutional law.”
A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply ”disappear.”
Common practice in ’80s Though Bush has gone further than any previous president, his actions are not unprecedented.
Since the early 19th century, American presidents have occasionally signed a large bill while declaring that they would not enforce a specific provision they believed was unconstitutional. On rare occasions, historians say, presidents also issued signing statements interpreting a law and explaining any concerns about it.
But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president.
When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute’s legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president’s influence over future court rulings.
Under Meese’s direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to the Supreme Court.
In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the president’s attempt to grab some of its power by seizing “the last word on questions of interpretation.” He suggested that Reagan’s legal team should “concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress.”
Reagan’s successors continued this practice. George H.W. Bush challenged 232 statutes over four years in office, and Bill Clinton objected to 140 laws over his eight years, according to Kelley, the Miami University of Ohio professor.
Many of the challenges involved longstanding legal ambiguities and points of conflict between the president and Congress.
Throughout the past two decades, for example, each president — including the current one — has objected to provisions requiring him to get permission from a congressional committee before taking action. The Supreme Court made clear in 1983 that only the full Congress can direct the executive branch to do things, but lawmakers have continued writing laws giving congressional committees such a role.
Still, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton used the presidential veto instead of the signing statement if they had a serious problem with a bill, giving Congress a chance to override their decisions.
But the current President Bush has abandoned the veto entirely, as well as any semblance of the political caution that Alito counseled back in 1986. In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto.
“What we haven’t seen until this administration is the sheer number of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the White House,” said Kelley, who has studied presidential signing statements through history. “That is what is staggering. The numbers are well out of the norm from any previous administration.”
Exaggerated fears? Some administration defenders say that concerns about Bush’s signing statements are overblown. Bush’s signing statements, they say, should be seen as little more than political chest-thumping by administration lawyers who are dedicated to protecting presidential prerogatives.
Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them.
Indeed, in some cases, the administration has ended up following laws that Bush said he could bypass. For example, citing his power to ”withhold information” in September 2002, Bush declared that he could ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the department has still put the list on its website.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who until last year oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for the administration, said the statements do not change the law; they just let people know how the president is interpreting it.
“Nobody reads them,” said Goldsmith. “They have no significance. Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is too secretive in its legal interpretations.”
But Cooper, the Portland State University professor who has studied Bush’s first-term signing statements, said the documents are being read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are charged with implementing new laws.
Lower-level officials will follow the president’s instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that may endure long after Bush leaves office, Cooper said.
“Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy doesn’t look like the legislation,” he said.
And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether the administration is violating laws — or merely preserving the right to do so.
Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. And since the disclosure of Bush’s domestic spying program, many people have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to violate laws.
In January, after the Globe first wrote about Bush’s contention that he could disobey the torture ban, three Republicans who were the bill’s principal sponsors in the Senate — John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina — all publicly rebuked the president.
“We believe the president understands Congress’s intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees,” McCain and Warner said in a joint statement. “The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation.”
Added Graham: “I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any… law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified.”
And in March, when the Globe first wrote about Bush’s contention that he could ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, several Democrats lodged complaints.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of trying to “cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow.”
And Representatives Jane Harman of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan — the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively — sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and abide by the law.
“Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight,” they wrote. “The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight…. Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it.”
Lack of court review Such political fallout from Congress is likely to be the only check on Bush’s claims, legal specialists said.
The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush’s assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters.
“There can’t be judicial review if nobody knows about it,” said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. “And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked.”
Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush’s fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party.
“The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and they’re not taking action because they don’t want to appear to be too critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to his because they are all Republicans,” said Jack Beermann, a Boston University law professor. “Oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party.”
Said Golove, the New York University law professor: “Bush has essentially said that ‘We’re the executive branch and we’re going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.'”
Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ”to exercise some self-restraint.” But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.
“This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy,” Fein said. “There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn’t doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power.”
the only thing that really surprises me about this is that qwest is turning out to be the best possible option, unlike my previous rants about qwest would seem to have indicated… maybe it’s time i re-examined my bias about them…
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.
The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.
The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency’s operations. “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide,” he said. “However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”
The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.
She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government “are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” All government-sponsored intelligence activities “are carefully reviewed and monitored,” Perino said. She also noted that “all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States.”
The government is collecting “external” data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting “internals,” a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it’s been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for “social network analysis,” the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.
Carriers uniquely positioned AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.
The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.
Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.
Qwest’s refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest’s region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.
Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”
In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named “Shamrock,” led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.
Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.
Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of “data mining” — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.
Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn’t necessary for government data-mining operations. “FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,” said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.
The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.
The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.
The NSA’s domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer’s calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.
Ma Bell’s bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. “No court order, no customer information — period. That’s how it was for decades,” he said.
The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.
The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of “violation.” In practice, that means a single “violation” could cover one customer or 1 million.
In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.
Companies approached The NSA’s domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.
The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their “call-detail records,” a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits.
The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.
With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.
AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”
In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”
Verizon, the USA’s No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.”
Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: “We can’t talk about this. It’s a classified situation.”
In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.
Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales’ reply: “I wouldn’t rule it out.” His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.
Similarities in programs The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA’s procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation’s citizens.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, “I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. … I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks.”
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.
One company differs One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.
Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.
The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.
The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest’s financial health. But Qwest’s legal questions about the NSA request remained.
Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio’s successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.
Q: Does the NSA’s domestic program mean that my calling records have been secretly collected?
A: In all likelihood, yes. The NSA collected the records of billions of domestic calls. Those include calls from home phones and wireless phones.
Q: Does that mean people listened to my conversations?
A: Eavesdropping is not part of this program.
Q: What was the NSA doing?
A: The NSA collected “call-detail” records. That’s telephone industry lingo for the numbers being dialed. Phone customers’ names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. The agency, however, has the means to assemble that sort of information, if it so chooses.
Q: When did this start?
A: After the Sept. 11 attacks.
Q: Can I find out if my call records were collected?
A: No. The NSA’s work is secret, and the agency won’t publicly discuss its operations.
Q: Why did they do this?
A: The agency won’t say officially. But sources say it was a way to identify, and monitor, people suspected of terrorist activities.
Q: But I’m not calling terrorists. Why do they need my calls?
A: By cross-checking a vast database of phone calling records, NSA experts can try to pick out patterns that help identify people involved in terrorism.
Q: How is this different from the other NSA programs?
A: NSA programs have historically focused on international communications. In December, The New York Times disclosed that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international phone calls to and from the USA. The call-collecting program is focused on domestic calls, those that originate and terminate within U.S. borders.
Q: Is this legal?
A: That will be a matter of debate. In the past, law enforcement officials had to obtain a court warrant before getting calling records. Telecommunications law assesses hefty fines on phone companies that violate customer privacy by divulging such records without warrants. But in discussing the eavesdropping program last December, Bush said he has the authority to order the NSA to get information without court warrants.
Q: Who has access to my records?
A: Unclear. The NSA routinely provides its analysis and other cryptological work to the Pentagon and other government agencies.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Thursday the government is “not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans” with a reported program to create a massive database of U.S. phone calls.
“Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates,” Bush said. “The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”
Bush’s comments came after USA Today reported Thursday that three telecommunication firms provided the National Security Agency with domestic telephone call records from tens of millions of Americans beginning shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
According to the report, Qwest, a Denver-based telecommunications company, refused to cooperate with the program.
Bush did not specifically mention the newspaper’s report.
In response to the USA Today article, NSA spokesman Don Weber issued a statement saying, “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide.
“However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”
The report comes at an awkward time for CIA director nominee Gen. Michael Hayden, whom President Bush named this week to replace Porter Goss as head of the spy agency. Hayden, whose confirmation hearings are to begin next Thursday, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. Hayden on Thursday met with Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican whip, about his nomination.
Afterward, Hayden refused to comment about the report when meeting with reporters but said, “Everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done, and the appropriate members of the Congress — both House and Senate — are briefed on all NSA activities.”
The report comes months after the Bush administration came under criticism on Capitol Hill for ordering an NSA surveillance program, that allowed communication to be monitored between people in the United States and terrorism suspects overseas without a court order.
Hayden headed the NSA when the wiretapping program was launched in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Lawmakers concerned Members of Congress expressed concern Thursday about the report. (Watch angry senator say, “Shame on us” — 3:56)
“It’s our government, government of every single American — Republican, Democrat or independent,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “… Those entrusted with great power have a duty to answer to Americans what they are doing.”
In the House, Majority Leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “I’m concerned about what I read with regard to the NSA database of phone calls. … I’m not sure why it’s necessary to us to keep and have that kind of information.”
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said he would call on representatives from the companies named in the USA Today story; AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth; to testify.
However, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, told reporters he “strongly” agrees that the program is necessary, and said, “We’ll discuss whether hearings are necessary.”
In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, asked Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, for hearings into the program during a Thursday afternoon meeting.
Pelosi said the hearings should be conducted by the House Intelligence Committee because “those people have the clearance.”
Pelosi declined to say how Hastert responded to her request.
Conservatives defend program During a morning session, Republican members of the committee defended the legality and necessity of such a database.
The USA Today report said the program did not involve the NSA “listening to or recording conversations,” a point that Sen. Jeff Sessions touched on.
“No recordings and no conversations were intercepted here, so there was no wiretapping here,” the Alabama Republican said.
Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona also faulted the revelation of the program as harmful to national security.
“This is nuts,” Kyl said. “We are in a war and we’ve go to collect intelligence on the enemy, and you can’t tell the enemy in advance how you are going to do it. And discussing all of this in public leads to that.”
Hayden nomination to proceed Despite the controversy, the White House intends to go “full steam ahead” with Hayden’s nomination, Reuters reported.
“I think General Hayden has had a really good start to his confirmation process. He’s met with several members, the feedback is positive and we’re full steam ahead on his nomination,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters while traveling with President Bush to Mississippi.
Facing Senate confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 18, Hayden’s meeting today with Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were canceled.
The meeting with Santorum has been tentatively rescheduled for Tuesday afternoon, said Santorum aide Robert Traynham. “But the White House called it very tentative,” Traynham said.
Investigation dropped The Justice Department has been denied security clearances for access to information, which prompted it to drop an investigation into the domestic spying program revealed late last year by the New York Times.
The Democrats’ No. 2 member of the Senate, Sen. Richard Durbin, called the development “evidence of a cover-up.”
“The fact … that the Department of Justice has abandoned their own investigation of this administration’s wrongdoing because there’s been a refusal to give investigators security clearances is clear evidence of a cover-up within the administration.”
by the way… that doesn’t make it any more legal, or excuse the nastiness of having to view everyone as suspects until proven otherwise, which is sort of like the ideas that this country was founded to get away from… 8/
ORLANDO, Fla. – President Bush suggested Wednesday that he’d like to see his family’s White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.
The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make “a great president.”
“I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that’s his intention or not,” Bush said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.
The president said he had “pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do,” but the younger Bush has not said.
“I have no idea what he’s going to do. I’ve asked him that question myself. I truly don’t think he knows,” Bush said.
Jeb Bush, 53, will end his second term as governor in January. His brother George ends his second presidential term in January 2009. Neither can seek re-election because of term limits.
Lott to ‘Hardball’: Not a good idea Jeb Bush has repeatedly said he is not going to run in 2008. And one veteran Republican Party leader suggested Wednesday that it wouldn’t be a good idea.
Just hours after President Bush endorsed a presidential run someday by his brother, Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican, flatly rejected the idea in an interview with Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”
Lott, whose ouster from the Senate Republican leadership in 2002 was helped in part by the Bush administration, offered a swift assessment of another Bush presidential campaign.
“I would not be supportive of Jeb Bush running for president, but I certainly understand why the president would say that about his own brother,” Lott said.
Lott has previously said he is supporting fellow Sen. John McCain of Arizona for the 2008 Republican nomination.
Asked if Gov. Bush could beat Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York in a 2008 matchup, Lott said, “I don’t think so. No.”
Lott went on to say that “the Republican nominee will eventually be able to win, will be able to beat Hillary Clinton or any Democrat.” But he repeated that the president’s brother would not be the right choice in his mind.
“I don’t think he’d be the best candidate for the nomination. You know, I’ve said that before, and I’m not backing off of that,” Lott said.
Dad: Jeb would be ‘awfully good’ Former President George H.W. Bush told CNN’s “Larry King Live” last year that he would like Jeb Bush to run one day and that he would be “awfully good” as president.
The Florida governor laughed when asked about his father’s comments last June. “Oh, Lord,” he said and shook his head no. “I love my dad.”
The brothers Bush appeared together Tuesday during the president’s visit to the Tampa area. Gov. Bush was waiting on the tarmac when Air Force One arrived and greeted the president with a politician’s handshake and “Welcome to Florida.” The president brushed aside the formality and playfully adjusted his younger brother’s necktie.
Jeb Bush introduced his brother at a retirement community in Sun City Center, where the president touted the new Medicare prescription drug benefit as the governor watched intently from a politically appropriate seat stage right.
Brotherly love They had a private lunch together with political supporters, then visited a fire station and appeared together before television cameras to express concern about wildfires that were blazing across the state.
The governor was not with the president during his visit to the Puerto Rican Club of Central Florida in Orlando on Wednesday — the president’s final stop on a three-day trip to the state. But the president was sure his brother still got some attention.
“Yesterday I checked in with my brother,” President Bush said as he took the stage. “Make sure everything’s going all right. I’m real proud of Jeb. He’s a good, decent man, and I love him dearly.”
and finally Bush Ratings Hit New Low which i’m too lazy to copy, but goes right along with everything else…
WASHINGTON – The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The inquiry headed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January 2006, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
“Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,” wrote Jarrett.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of their own agency’s lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush’s decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program’s legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA’s activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Jared Guinther is 18. Tall and lanky, he will graduate from high school in June. Girls think he’s cute, until they try to talk to him and he stammers or just stands there — silent.
Diagnosed with autism at age 3, Jared is polite but won’t talk to people unless they address him first. It’s hard for him to make friends. He lives in his own private world.
Jared didn’t know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall — shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Portland strip mall and complimented his black Converse All-Stars.
“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, `Well, that isn’t going to happen,”‘ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he had not only enlisted, but signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
What happened to Jared is a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to again reach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. Both the active Army and Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he’d be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he’d dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job’s ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared’s case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
Maj. Curt Steinagel, commander of the Military Entrance Processing Station in Portland, said the papers filled out by Jared’s recruiters contained no indication of his disability. Steinagel acknowledged that the current climate is tough on recruiters.
“I can’t speak for Army,” he said, “but it’s no secret that recruiters stretch and bend the rules because of all the pressure they’re under. The problem exists, and we all know it exists.”
* * *
Jared lives in a tiny brown house in southeast Portland that looks as worn out as his parents do when they get home from work.
Paul Guinther, 57, labors 50- to 60-hour weeks as a painter-sandblaster at a tug and barge works. His wife, Brenda, 50, has the graveyard housekeeping shift at a medical center.
The couple got together nearly 16 years ago when Jared was 3. Brenda, who had two young children of her own, immediately noticed that Jared was different and pushed Paul to have the boy tested.
“Jared would play with buttons for hours on end,” she said. “He’d play with one toy for days. Loud noises bothered him. He was scared to death of the toilet flushing, the lawn mower.”
Jared didn’t speak until he was almost 4 and could not tolerate the feel of grass on his feet.
Doctors diagnosed him with moderate to severe autism, a developmental disorder that strikes when children are toddlers. It causes problems with social interaction, language and intelligence. No one knows its cause or cure.
School and medical records show that Jared, whose recent verbal IQ tested very low, spent years in special education classes. It was only as a high school senior that Brenda pushed for Jared to take regular classes because she wanted him to get a normal rather than a modified diploma.
Jared required extensive tutoring and accommodations to pass, but in June he will graduate alongside his younger stepbrother, Matthew Thorsen.
Last fall, Jared began talking about joining the military after a recruiter stopped him on his way home from school and offered a $4,000 signing bonus, $67,000 for college and more buddies than he could count.
Matthew told his mother that military recruiting at the school and surrounding neighborhoods was so intense that one recruiter had pulled him out of football practice.
Recruiters nationwide spend several hours a day cold-calling high school students, whose phone numbers are provided by schools under the No Child Left Behind Law. They also prospect at malls, high school cafeterias, colleges and wherever else young people gather.
Brenda phoned her two brothers, both veterans. She said they laughed and told her not to worry. The military would never take Jared.
The Guinthers, meanwhile, tried to refocus their son.
“I told him, `Jared, you get out of high school. I know you don’t want to be a janitor all your life. You work this job, you go to community college, you find out what you want. You can live here as long as you want,”‘ Paul said.
They thought it had worked until five weeks ago. Brenda said she called Jared on his cell phone to check what time he’d be home.
“I said Jared, `What are you doing?’ `I’m taking the test’ — he said the entrance test. I go, `Wait a minute.’ I said, `Who’s giving you the test?’ He said, `Corporal.’ I said, `Well let me talk to him.”‘
Brenda said she spoke to Cpl. Ronan Ansley and explained that Jared had a disability, autism, that could not be outgrown. She said Ansley told her he had been in special classes, too — for dyslexia.
“I said, `Wait a minute, there’s a big difference between autism and your problem,”‘ Brenda said.
Military rules prohibit enlisting anyone with a mental disorder that interferes with school or employment, unless a recruit can show he or she hasn’t required special academic or job accommodations for 12 months.
Jared has been in special education classes since preschool. Through a special program for disabled workers, he has a part-time job scrubbing toilets and dumping trash.
Jared scored 43 out of 99 on the Army’s basic entrance exam — 31 is lowest grade the Army allows for enlistment, military officials said.
After learning Jared had cleared this first hurdle toward enlistment, Brenda said she called and asked for Ansley’s supervisor and got Sgt. Alejandro Velasco.
She said she begged Velasco to review Jared’s medical and school records. Brenda said Velasco declined, asserting that he didn’t need any paperwork. Under military rules, recruiters are required to gather all available information about a recruit and fill out a medical screening form.
“He was real cocky and he says, `Well, Jared’s an 18-year-old man. He doesn’t need his mommy to make his decisions for him.”‘
* * *
The Guinthers are not political activists. They supported the Iraq war in the beginning but have started to question it as fighting drags on. Brenda Guinther said that if her son Matthew had enlisted, she “wouldn’t like it, but I would learn to live with it because I know he would understand the consequences.”
But Jared doesn’t understand the dangers or the details of what he’s done, the Guinthers said.
When they asked Jared how long he would be in the Army, he said he didn’t know. His enlistment papers show it’s just over four years. Jared also was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t be paid the $4,000 signing bonus until after basic training.
During a recent family gathering, a relative asked Jared what he would do if an enemy was shooting at him. Jared ran to his video game console, killed a digital Xbox soldier and announced, “See! I can do it!”
“My concern is that if he got into a combat situation he really couldn’t take someone’s back,” said Mary Lou Perry, 51, longtime friend of the Guinthers. “He wouldn’t really know a dangerous thing. This job they have him doing, it’s like send him in and if he doesn’t get blown up, it’s safe for the rest of us.”
Steinagel, the processing station commander, told The Oregonian that Jared showed up after passing his written exam. None of his paperwork indicated that he was autistic, but if it had, Jared almost certainly would have been disqualified, he said.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared’s autism.
“Cpl. Ansley is Guinther’s recruiter,” he said. “I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that.”
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared, but later said he’d spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails “engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles,” according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he’d spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter’s tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers’ permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared’s medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper’s story.
Ansley, reached at his recruiting office Thursday, declined to comment for this story.
S. Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, in Fort Knox, Ky., said he could not comment on specifics of the investigation in Portland. But he defended the 8,200 recruiters working for the active Army and Army Reserve.
Last year, the Army relieved 44 recruiters from duty and admonished 369.
“Everyone in recruiting is let down when one of our recruiters fails to uphold the Army’s and Recruiting Command’s standards,” Smith said.
The Guinthers are eager to hear whether the Army will release Jared from his enlistment. Jared is disappointed he might not go because he thought the recruiters were his friends, they said. But they’re willing to accept that.
“If he went to Iraq and got hurt or killed,” Paul Guinther said, “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t try to stop it.”
have you ever wondered what that long stick with a ball on the end of it that sign painters use to steady their hands when they’re lettering is called? i know i have… for a long time… i’ve known what it is used for, and i’ve actually made a couple of them (the most recent one is a piece of dowl with a rubber ball on the end, that i made to assist with the Ganesha the car project), but i didn’t know what it was called before yesterday. it’s called a mahlstick (also called a “maulstick”, from the dutch malen – to paint. definition here), and here is the next logical step in mahlstick evolution, which is a pretty slick idea indeed. now we both know.
Seattle Art Car Blowout – i went to a “djazz djam” at gasworks park on saturday, and when i went back to my car, there was a thing that looked, at first, like a ticket on the window, which i thought was strange since i parked in a public, no-pay parking lot… but when i looked at it more closely, it was an invitation to be a part of this… which, it turns out, will be very convenient, as i need to find a place close to the center of the universe to park while i’m playing with the fremont philharmonic at the solstice parade. the “djazz djam”, by itself, was really interesting… i went to it as the result of responding to someone in a LJ community (i don’t remember if the actual post was in or or or some other community) whose post included “seattle’s most fabulous horn players” in the subject line. well, it turns out that i know the guy who is the motivating force behind it. we were sort of housemates for a short period of time, 25 years ago, and i haven’t seen or heard from or about him since then. i’d be tempted to say it is because we are former bellinghamsters, or that it is because it’s seattle, or even because it’s me, and i attract things like that on a regular basis, but it goes to support frank zappa’s theory that “there are forty people in this world, and five of them are hamburgers.”
i posted yesterday from edinburgh, tristan de cunha, and what came up when i clicked the “Location” link was edinburgh, scotland, which is not the same place… edinburgh, tristan de cunha is 37° 4′ south latitude, 12° 19′ west longitude, and it is the largest city (which isn’t saying much) on the most remote island in the world. livejournal, if you’re going to post locations, then at least make them in the correct hemisphere… 8/
Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found.
The mammals are able to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.
St Andrews University researchers studying in Florida discovered bottlenose dolphins used names rather than sound to identify each other.
The three-year-study was funded by the Royal Society of London.
Dr Vincent Janik, of the Sea Mammal Unit at St Andrews University, said they conducted the research on wild dolphins.
He said: “We captured wild dolphins using nets when they came near the shore.
“Then in the shallow water we recoded their whistles before synthesising them on a computer so that we had a computer voice of a dolphin.
“Then we played it back to the dolphins and we found they responded. This showed us that the dolphins know each other’s signature whistle instead of just the voice.
“I think it is a very exciting discovery because it means that these animals have evolved the same abilities as humans.
“Now we know they have labels for each other like we do.”
The research was conducted in Sarasota Bay off Florida’s west coast.
The findings are published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
[As if any further argumentation were needed, this merely underlines the great truth of this war. There is no enemy in Iraq. There never was any enemy in Iraq. The common enemies of the U.S. troops and the Iraqis are to be found in Washington DC, running their Imperial government for their own personal private profit.
[“Traitors” is too mild a term to describe them. At a certain point, rhetoric becomes exhausted, and only bright, white rage remains. A government that would do this, on top all the greed, lies, and stupidity that have characterized this war, has long outlived its usefulness, and has become a mere collection of incompetent cancerous predators.
[Of all the reasons to bring all the troops home now, immediately, one reason begins to tower above all the rest: we need them here to protect us against the filth in command at every level of power in this society. Our troops have the power to sweep that filth away, forever. Payback is overdue.]
02 MAY 06 By BOB KERR, The Providence Journal
The Iraq war has been the war fought on the cheap: not enough body armor, not enough armor on vehicles, not enough night vision equipment.
It has been the war in which packages from back home have had to fill some crucial needs.
Now, we have chow call at the Greenwood Credit Union in Warwick, R.I. It’s the latest in home-front intervention. It’s partially in response to the unthinkable image of U.S. Marines approaching Iraqi citizens and asking for food because they do not have enough.
There’s a big barrel in the lobby of the credit union on Post Road in Warwick. It’s decorated with ribbons and it’s there because Karen Boucher-Andoscia’s son, Nick Andoscia, called and asked his mother to send food.
Nick’s a Marine corporal. He was in Afghanistan last year, where there was enough to eat. He’s in Iraq now even though his enlistment was up last year.
He’s one of those Marines who can’t walk away. His unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marines, was headed for Iraq and he just couldn’t head for civilian life while those he had served with were heading to their second war.
“He extended,” says Karen. “He told me, ‘I really have to go. I can’t let my guys go alone.’”
There are a lot of stories like that. We don’t hear them much. They’re kind of personal.
So Nick Andoscia went to Iraq. And hunger soon followed.
“I got a letter,” says Karen. “And he had called me before that. He said, ‘Send lots of tuna.’”
Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit were all about 10 pounds lighter in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts. They were getting two meals a day and they were not meals to remember.
“He told me the two meals just weren’t cutting it. He said the Iraqi food was usually better. They were going to the Iraqis and basically saying, ‘feed me.’”
Karen started packing in that wartime tradition as old as mothers and sons. She packed a lot of the packaged tuna, not the canned.
She happened to mention her hungry son to people she works with at Greenwood Credit Union, where she is a teller and has worked for 30 years.
Pounds and pounds of food started showing up amid the daily business of loans and deposits and withdrawals. Marianne Barao, the branch manager, said it could be done, the credit union could become the place where people help feed hungry Marines who are risking their lives on a skimpy diet.
“We sent out 51 pounds this week,” says Karen. “There are customers coming in saying, ‘What do you need?’”
The credit union is paying the cost of packing and shipping.
Any packaged food is welcome. So are baby wipes because showers are even rarer than a full meal. And foot powder.
Nick Andoscia, who is 22, is due to come home later this year. He wants to study criminal justice, his mother says, then go to work for a fire or police department.
But for the next few months he will be on patrol in western Iraq, dealing with the heat and the dirt and the danger.
The last thing he should have to worry about is an empty stomach. The last thing he should have to do is approach Iraqis and ask for food.
You have to wonder what the gracious hosts must think when a fighting man from the richest country on earth comes to their door in search of something to eat.
A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security Wednesday May 3, 2006 The Guardian
This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.
The traveller’s name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper – actually a flimsy piece of card – was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.
It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a “Gold” standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.
If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer’s personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans – and even allow me to fake his passport.
It would also serve as the perfect tool for demonstrating the chaotic collection, storage and security of personal information gathered as a result of America’s near-fanatical desire to collect data on travellers flying to the US – and raise serious questions about the sort of problems we can expect when ID cards are introduced in 2008.
To understand why the piece of paper I found on the Heathrow Express is important, it is necessary to go back not, as you might expect, to 9/11, but to 1996 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound, 12 minutes out of New York, with the loss of 230 lives. Initially, crash investigators suspected a terrorist bomb might have brought down the aircraft. This was later ruled out, but already the Clinton administration had decided it was time to devise a security system that would weed out potential terrorists before they boarded a flight. This was called Capps, the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.
It was a prosaic, relatively unambitious idea at first. For example, in highly simplistic terms, if someone bought a one-way ticket, paid in cash and checked in no baggage, they would be flagged up as an individual who had no intention of arriving or of going home. A bomber, perhaps.
After 9/11, the ambitions for such screening grew exponentially and the newly founded Department of Homeland Security began inviting computer companies to develop intelligent systems that could “mine” data on individuals, whizzing round state, private and public databases to establish what kind of person was buying the ticket.
In 2003, one of the pioneers of the system, speaking anonymously, told me that the project, by now called Capps II, was being designed to designate travellers as green, amber or red risks. Green would be an individual with no criminal record – a US citizen, perhaps, who had a steady job and a settled home, was a frequent flyer and so on. Amber would be someone who had not provided enough information to confirm all of this and who might be stopped at US Immigration and asked to provide clearer proof of ID. Red would be someone who might be linked to an ever-growing list of suspected terrorists – or someone whose name matched such a suspect.
“If you are an American who has volunteered lots of details proving that you are who you say you are, that you have a stable home, live in a community, aren’t a criminal, [Capps II] will flag you up as green and you will be automatically allowed on to your flight,” the pioneer told me. “The problem is that if the system doesn’t have a lot of information on you, or you have ordered a halal meal, or have a name similar to a known terrorist, or even if you are a foreigner, you’ll most likely be flagged amber and held back to be asked for further details. If you are European and the US government is short of information on you – or, as is likely, has incorrect information on you – you can reckon on delay after delay unless you agree to let them delve into your private details.
“That is inconvenient enough but, as we tested the system, it became clear that information was going to be used to build a complete picture of you from lots of private databases – your credit record, your travel history, your criminal record, whether you had the remotest dubious links with anyone at your college who became a terrorist. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about it.”
Eventually, he quit the programme.
All of this was on my mind as I sat down with my computer expert, Adam Laurie, one of the founders of a company called the Bunker Secure Hosting, to examine Broer’s boarding-pass stub. Laurie is known in cyber-circles as something of a white knight, a computer wizard who not only advises companies on how to make their systems secure, but also cares about civil rights and privacy. He and his brother Ben are renowned among web designers as the men who developed Apache SSL – the software that makes most of the world’s web pages secure – and then gave it away for free.
We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer’s name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details – including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.
Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able – within 15 minutes – to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)
Laurie was anything but smug.
“This is terrible,” he said. “It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn’t enhance our security; it undermines it.”
Just over $100m had been spent on Capps II before it was scrapped in July 2004. Campaigners in the US had objected to it on grounds of privacy, and airlines such as JetBlue and American faced boycotts when it emerged that they were involved in trials – handing over passenger information – with the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration. Even worse, JetBlue admitted it had given the private records of 5 million passengers to a commercial company for analysis – and some of this was posted on the internet.
But the problems did not end with the demise of Capps II. Earlier that month, after 18 months of acrimonious negotiation, the EU caved in to American demands that European airlines, too, should hand over passenger information to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, BCBP, before their aircraft would be allowed to land on US soil. The BCBP wanted up to 60 pieces of information routinely gathered by booking agencies and stored as a Passenger Name Record, PNR. This included not only your flight details, name, address and so on, but also your travel itinerary, where you were staying, with whom you travelled, whether you booked a hire car in the US, whether you booked a smoking room in your hotel, even if you ordered a halal or kosher meal. And the US authorities wanted to keep it all for 50 years.
At first, the European Commission argued that surrendering such information would be in breach of European data protection law. Eventually, however, in the face of huge fines for airlines and cancelled landing slots, it agreed that 34 items from PNRs could be handed over and kept by the US for three and a half years.
Capps II was superseded by a new system called Secure Flight in August 2004. Later, in October last year, the BCBP demanded that airlines travelling to, or through, the US should forward “advance passenger information”, including passport number and date of birth, before passengers would be allowed to travel. It called this the advance passenger information system, or APIS. This is the information that Laurie and I had accessed through the BA website.
“The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return,” says Laurie. “Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.
“You can imagine the case where a businessman’s trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist. Since BA didn’t enter the data – frequent flyers are asked to do it themselves – they can’t be held responsible and can’t be sued for his lost business.”
By the time I found the ticket stub and went to Laurie, he had already reported his suspicions about a potential security lapse to BA (on January 20) by email. He received no response, so followed up with a telephone call asking for the airline’s security officer. He was told there wasn’t one, so he explained the lapse to an employee. Nothing was done and he still has not been contacted.
Three months ago, after further objections in the US, but before our investigation, Secure Flight was suspended after costing the US taxpayer $144m. At the time, Kip Hawley, transportation security administrator, said: “While the Secure Flight regulation is being developed, this is the time to ensure that the Secure Flight security, operational and privacy foundation is solid.”
The TSA said it would continue its passenger pre-screening programme in yet another guise after it had been audited and added that it had plans to introduce more security, privacy and redress for errors – confirming critics’ suspicions that no such systems were yet in place. To the consternation of privacy activists in Europe, the TSA also spelled out plans for its desire for various US government departments to share information, including yours and mine.
Dr Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow specialising in privacy and terrorism at the London School of Economics, is concerned about where the whole project will go next.
“They want to extend the advance passenger information system [APIS] to include data on where passengers are going and where they are staying because of concerns over plagues,” he says. “For example, if bird flu breaks out, they want to know where all the foreign travellers are. The airlines hate this. It is a security nightmare. Soon the US will demand biometric information [fingerprints, retina scans etc] and they will share that around.
“But what the BA lapse shows is that companies cannot be trusted to gather this information without it getting out to criminals who would abuse it. The potential for identity theft is huge, but the number of agencies among which it will be shared is just growing and growing.”
And that is where concern comes in over the UK’s proposed ID cards, which may one day be needed to travel to the US. According to the Home Office, the identity cards bill currently going through Parliament allows for up to 40 pieces of personal information to be held on the proposed ID card, with digital biometric details of all of your fingerprints, both your irises and your face, all of which can be transmitted to electronic readers. The cards will contain a microchip the size of a grain of sand linked to a tiny embedded antenna that transmits all the information when contacted by an electronic reader.
This readable system, known as Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, has recently been installed in new British passports. The Home Office says the information can be transmitted across a distance of only a couple of centimetres because the chips have no power of their own – they simply bounce back a response to a weak signal sent from passport readers at immigration points.
However, the suspicion is that the distance over which the signal can be read relates only to the weakness of the signal sent out by the readers. What if the readers sent out much stronger signals? Potentially, then, criminals with powerful readers could suck out your information as you passed by. The Government denies that this scenario is viable, but, in January, Dutch security specialists Riscure successfully read and de-encrypted information from its country’s new biometric passports from a distance of about 30ft in just two hours.
“The Home Office says British passport information is encrypted, but it’s a pretty basic form of encryption,” says Hosein. “Everyone expects the ID cards to be equally insecure. If the government insists they won’t be cracked, read or copied, they’re kidding themselves and us.”
BA has now closed its security loophole after being contacted by the Guardian in March, but that particular lapse is beside the point. Because of the pressure being applied to airlines by the US, breaches will happen again elsewhere as our personal data whizzes around the globe, often without our knowledge or consent.
Meanwhile, accountability remains lamentable. Several calls to the US Transportation Security Administration were not returned.
Perhaps the last word should go to Mark Broer, the man whose boarding pass stub started off this virtual paper chase. He is aged 41 and is a successful executive with a pharmaceutical recruitment company. When I told him what we had done with his boarding pass stub, he was appalled.
“I travel regularly and, because I go to the US, I submitted my personal information and passport number – it is required if you are a frequent flyer and want to check yourself in,” he says. “Experienced travellers today know that they have to give up information for ease of travel and to fight terrorism. It is an exchange of information in return for convenience. But as far as I’m concerned, having that information leaked out to people who could steal my identity wasn’t part of the deal.”
those who frequent the LJ pic feed sites may have noticed pics from this site. it’s a rather amusing little site that takes you through a quick 25-question “IQ” test, and give you a quick thumbnail sketch of your “real” IQ.
unfortunately, there’s a catch. here’s what I see as my results on my home computer
but here’s what everyone else sees
apparently, the site uses some sort of script that shows your IP one graphic and shows everyone else another. a rather juvenile (but funny, in a really nasty way) trick that seems to have nailed hundreds (myself included).
by the way, the person who foisted this off on all of us (which is easily available to the general public by typing
whois iq-challenge.com
) is:
Kevin Kelm, otherwise known as
8240 Lighthouse Court
970- -0967
and the stooge he used as an artist is … wanna do nasty things to him? i sure do…
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Federal prosecutors will retry an ice cream vendor on charges that he lied to the FBI about his son’s attendance at a terrorist training camp, authorities announced Friday.
Umer Hayat’s first trial ended with the jury deadlocked last month. The same day, a separate jury convicted his son, Hamid Hayat, of supporting terrorism by attending an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan.
U.S. District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. set June 5 to begin selecting a new jury for the father’s retrial.
“This case is simply too serious to walk away after one hung jury,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Brown said Friday as he left the courthouse.
Brown said prosecutors interviewed jurors in the first trial, and found that “there was not a lot of dispute about whether or not Umer Hayat lied to the FBI. Still, there were some jurors who looked down upon the investigative techniques that were used by agents.”
During the nine-week trial, jurors heard separate videotaped confessions the father and son made to FBI agents. The defense said the two were worn down by hours of questioning and were merely responding to leading questions by agents.
Umer Hayat, a 48-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, was released from federal custody Monday after Burrell lowered his bail from $1.2 million to $390,000. He will remain under house arrest in the Central Valley town. If convicted of the charges, he could face up to 16 years in prison.
His 23-year-old son, also a U.S. citizen, was working at a cherry-packing shed when he was arrested. Hamid Hayat faces up to 39 years in prison at sentencing July 14.
The FBI began focusing on the 2,500-member Pakistani community in Lodi shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Agents initially were interested in pursuing a tip that Lodi businesses were sending money to terror groups abroad. They recruited a 32-year-old former Lodi resident of Pakistani descent who was then living in Oregon.
The informant soon befriended Hamid Hayat and secretly recorded their conversations. In some of those discussions, the younger Hayat said he planned to attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan during a visit there from 2003 to 2005.
Hamid Hayat’s attorney, Wazhma Mojaddidi, said her client never actually attended the camp and argued that prosecutors had no direct evidence that he had. She has requested a new trial for her client.
The Hayats were arrested in June, shortly after Hamid Hayat returned from Pakistan, along with two Muslim clerics who later were deported for immigration violations.
U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said lying to the FBI during a terrorism investigation could cause them to lose valuable time that would be better spent foiling deadly plots.
“Seven citizens serving as jurors in the Umer Hayat trial found beyond a reasonable doubt that he had lied to the FBI about his son’s attendance at a terrorist training camp,” Scott said in a statement Friday.
GENEVA – The United States on Friday defended its treatment of foreign terrorism suspects held abroad, telling a U.N. committee it backed a ban on torture and stressing there had been “relatively few actual cases of abuse.”
John Bellinger, the U.S. State Department’s top legal adviser, said Washington was “absolutely committed to uphold its national and international obligations to eradicate torture.”
Human rights groups this week accused the United States of mistreating detainees through cruel interrogation methods including “water-boarding,” a form of mock drowning.
Bellinger, who heads the American delegation to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, said allegations of U.S. abuse had been greatly exaggerated.
“This committee should not lose sight of the fact that these incidents are not systemic,” he told the 10-member panel at the start of a two-day review of U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment.
“Relatively few actual cases of abuse and wrongdoing have occurred in the context of U.S. armed conflict with al Qaeda,” he said.
The United States is holding hundreds of terrorism suspects, most arrested since al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks in 2001, at its prisons in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron told the committee the “notorious” abuses that occurred at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “inexcusable and indefensible.”
“We know that the image of Abu Ghraib and questions about Guantanamo have been damaging to the reputation of the United States,” Bellinger told a news briefing after the session.
“That is one reason the U.S. government is trying very hard to set things on the right course through investigations that have been conducted and through our appearance at the committee today,” he said.
CHAIN OF COMMAND The 10-member U.N. committee grilled the U.S. delegation on whether criminal responsibility has been established for known abuses, and challenged the U.S. definition of torture.
“We would like to have more details regarding the chain of command,” said Andreas Mavrommatis, the committee’s chairman.
Vice-chairman Wang Xuexian from China asked: “Where would you put such methods as interrogation by mock drownings — as torture or as other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?”
“Are there measures to monitor CIA operations to ensure they are not violating the Convention Against Torture?”
The panel also asked about “extraordinary renditions” whereby prisoners are moved to other countries where, critics say, they can face torture, and asked whether seeking “diplomatic assurances” from governments was enough to prevent abuse of those moved.
“I would like to emphasize that the United States has not transported detainees to countries for purposes of interrogation using torture and will not,” Bellinger said in response, adding diplomatic assurances were relied on only “sparingly.”
Speaking after the session, Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch decried what she called “a continued attempt by the U.S. to say that the abuse we see in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan was just limited to a few bad apples.”
“The (Bush) administration is unwilling to assume responsibility for policies and practices that were promulgated at a high level, which allow a climate of abuse to flourish,” she said.
apparently, now the movie of flight 93 has become “the official history”, and the war against terror has officially become “world war III”… he said it, i didn’t… 8/
US President George W. Bush said the September 11 revolt of passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the first blow of “World War III.”
In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Bush said he had yet to see the recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
But he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it “our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war — World War III”.
Bush said: “I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III.
“It was, it was unbelievably heroic of those folks on the airplane to recognize the danger and save lives,” he said.
Flight 93 crashed on the morning of September 11, 2001, killing the 33 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers, after passengers stormed the cockpit and battled the hijackers for control of the aircraft.
The president has repeatedly praised the heroism of the passengers in fighting back and so launching the first blow of what he usually calls the “war on terror”.
In 2002, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer explicitly declined to call the hunt for Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group and its followers “World War III.”
very weird situation: i went to the bank to deposit my (substantially more than i expected it to be) check from the moisture festival, and the ATMs were acting strangely, wouldn’t let me make deposits, and said my balance is $2,700… the computer says the account has $233 in it, which is a lot closer to what i expected, but i can always hope… and if nothing else, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to deposit anything in the machine until they get the machines straightened out anyway.
A kiivott hordóban egy szeszben aszalódott múmiára bukkantak a munkások
Literszámra nyakalták és vitték haza a jóféle rumot a pincében álló 300 literes hordóból egy szegedi családi ház felújításán dolgozó melósok. Amikor az utolsó csepp szesz is elfogyott, odébb akarták tenni a kiivott fahordót, de még kotyogott benne valami. Szétbontották, egy összeaszalódott holttest d?lt ki bel?le.
A rémregénybe ill? történet több évtizedes múltra tekint vissza. A Szeged kertvárosában lév? régi ház els? tulajdonosa egy nyolcvanas éveiben járó özvegyaszszony volt, aki csendes öregségben, magányosan éldegélt. A zárkózott, úri all?rökkel megáldott nénikér?l keveset tudtak a szomszédok.
Sajátos íz Az a hír járta, hogy a matróna valaha nagyvilági életet élt a Karib térségben diplomataként dolgozó urával, ám egyedül tért haza a mesés tengerentúlról. Egyetlen távoli rokona volt, akinek annyit mondott, hogy a férje meghalt, azt azonban senki nem firtatta, hol nyugszik a szebb napokat idéz? fotókon fest?i szépség? nejét átkaroló, daliás ember. Az otthonából ki sem mozduló, ?sz öregasszony egy nap nem nyitott ajtót a nála kopogtató szomszédoknak, akik rosszat sejtvén rend?rt hívtak. A behatoló zsaruk az ágyban találtak rá a holttestére, halálát végelgyengülés okozta. A titokzatos házat néhány hónap múlva egy fiatal pár vette meg, és elkezdték felújíttatni új otthonukat. Az átépítési munkálatok azonban kissé elhúzódtak, mert a melósok rájártak a pincében talált 300 literes, rummal teli hordóra. Sajátos íze volt, osztályozták kés?bbi vallomásaikban a jóféle szeszt, amivel hetekig locsolgatták a torkukat. Még haza is vittek bel?le néhány flaskával, s csodájára járt, aki belekóstolt.
Konzervált ember ? Fél év sem telt el az id?s asszony halála óta, amikor ismét riasztottak minket a házhoz ? emlékezett a felejthetetlen eseményekre Pénzes Zoltán százados. ? Egy meztelen férfi holttestre bukkantak a munkások a rumos hordóban, amit azért szedtek szét, mert bár elfogyott bel?le a szesz, mégis kotyogott benne valami, ahogy mozgatták. Az összeaszalódott halott embriópózban helyezkedett el a hordósírban. Külsérelmi nyom nem volt rajta, a boncolás megállapította, hogy természetes halállal halt meg. A rum, amiben a munkások megjelenéséig információink szerint legalább 20 éven keresztül ázott, tartósította, így csupán valamelyest összetöpörödött. A helyszíni szemlét végz? szegedi zsaruk szerint a múmiát megtaláló brigád tagjainak arcáról lerítt, hogy jó id?re elment a kedvük az ismeretlen eredet? szeszes hordók megcsapolásától. A tanúkihallgatások során többen rosszul lettek, amikor szóba került, hogy ittak a konzerválóléb?l.
Pincesírból temet?be A rend?rségi vizsgálat kiderítette, hogy az elhunyt a ház egykori asszonyának diplomata ura, akit Jamaica partjainál ért a végzet. A holttest hivatalos hazahozatása azonban túl költséges és a szükséges okmányok beszerzése miatt körülményes is lett volna, ezért a találékony özvegy a kurrens jamaicai rummal teli hordóban, hajón csempészte haza az urát. Azt azonban senki sem tudja, hogy kés?bb miért nem temettette el, és titkolta a pincében lév? hordósírt. Az öregurat végül a szegedi köztemet?ben helyezték végs? nyugalomra.
Budapest, May 4 – Workers renovating an empty house in Szeged, SE Hungary, dipped deep into a 300 litre barrel of rum they found in the basement, but the drinking came to a screeching halt when they discovered a long-dead body at the bottom of the barrel, the website of a police magazine reported.
The house had been owned by an elderly lady who had spent many years in the Caribbean region with her diplomat husband before returning home alone some 20 years ago, Zsaru Magazine wrote. Her husband had died abroad, she said.
The lady herself died recently and the house was sold to a young couple who ordered a basement-to-attic renovation.
Workers soon discovered that a 300-litre barrel left behind by the former owner was filled with rum, and they took it upon themselves to empty it, commenting on its unusual bouquet. The rum tasting lasted some six months before the body was discovered, preserved in the alcohol. Stunned by the discovery, they called police.
Yes, the body was that of the diplomat husband, but no, he had not met with foul play, police found. An autopsy revealed that death had been due to natural causes, and a bit of investigation found that he had died in or around Jamaica over 20 years earlier. The widow, on learning how expensive and complicated it was to return a corpse to Hungary, avoided officialdom by having him packaged in a barrel of rum, which she brought home and kept in her basement until her own death.
Jackson Mayor Frank Melton said he impulsively asked his police escort to pull four Callaway High buses over on I-220 on Friday afternoon because he needed a hug.
The buses were taking students home from school, about 4:30 p.m.
“It’s been such a stressful two weeks,” Melton said. “I wanted to shake their hands. I wanted to touch them. That’s all it was. … I went through the buses and shook their hand and hugged them and told then how proud I was of them.”
Melton said students saw him out their windows and waved before he had the buses stopped. “I told the kids to have a great weekend and a safe weekend,” he said. “I didn’t do anything stupid or illegal.”
He said there was no safety hazard. The drivers pulled the buses off the interstate on the right median.
Jackson school officials learned about Melton’s actions from a television video clip and called his office to see if there was a problem on any of the buses.
Superintendent Earl Watkins was out of town.
“It is certainly unorthodox,” Watkins said Wednesday. “Unless there is an issue occurring on a bus, it is always better not to prevent bus drivers from transporting their kids.”
Watkins said something like this opens up “unintended problems and consequences.”
“We don’t want to get into a negative conversation with the mayor,” said Michael Thomas, deputy superintendent for operations. “Our concern was purely perception – people thinking buses had done anything wrong.”
Melton has long been known to interact with students, going into schools unannounced when he was director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and touring schools when he was a member of the state Board of Education.
“I reserve the right to go into our schools. I reserve the right to encourage kids. I reserve the right as the mayor,” he said.
The Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings and Vice Lords were born decades ago in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. Now, their gang graffiti is showing up 6,400 miles away in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods — Iraq.
Armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls all have served as canvasses for their spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with “GDN” for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang’s six-pointed star and the word “Chitown,” a soldier who photographed it said.
The graffiti, captured on film by an Army Reservist and provided to the Chicago Sun-Times, highlights increasing gang activity in the Army in the United States and overseas, some experts say.
Military and civilian police investigators familiar with three major Army bases in the United States — Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and Fort Bragg — said they have been focusing recently on soldiers with gang affiliations. These bases ship out many of the soldiers fighting in Iraq.
“I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present,” said Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang detective at Fort Lewis in Washington state. “I think that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Of paramount concern is whether gang-affiliated soldiers’ training will make them deadly urban warriors when they return to civilian life and if some are using their access to military equipment to supply gangs at home, said Barfield and other experts.
‘They don’t try to hide it’ Jeffrey Stoleson, an Army Reserve sergeant in Iraq for almost a year, said he has taken hundreds of photos of gang graffiti there.
In a storage yard in Taji, about 18 miles north of Baghdad, dozens of tanks were vandalized with painted gang symbols, Stoleson said in a phone interview from Iraq. He said he also took pictures of graffiti at Camp Scania, about 108 miles southeast of Baghdad, and Camp Anaconda, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. Much of the graffiti was by Chicago-based gangs, he said.
In civilian life, Stoleson is a correctional officer and co-founder of the gang interdiction team at a Wisconsin maximum-security prison. Now he is a truck commander for security escorts in Iraq. He said he watched two fellow soldiers in the Wisconsin Army National Guard 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry, die Sept. 26 when a roadside bomb exploded. Five of Stoleson’s friends have been wounded.
Because of the extreme danger of his mission in Iraq, Stoleson said he does not relish the idea of working alongside gang members, whom he does not trust. Stoleson said he once reported to a supervisor that he suspected a company of soldiers in Iraq was rife with gang members.
“My E-8 [supervising sergeant] told me not to ruffle their feathers because they were doing a good job,” he said.
Stoleson said he has spotted soldiers in Iraq with tattoos signifying their allegiance to the Vice Lords and the Simon City Royals, another street gang spawned in Chicago.
“They don’t try to hide it,” Stoleson said.
Army doesn’t see significant trend Christopher Grey, spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, did not deny the existence of gang members in the military, but he disputed that the problem is rampant — or even significant.
In the last year, the Criminal Investigation Command has looked into 10 cases in which there was credible evidence of gang-related criminal activity in the Army, Grey said. He would not discuss specific cases.
“We recently conducted an Army-wide study, and we don’t see a significant trend in this kind of activity, especially when you compare this with a million-man Army,” Grey said.
‘Lowering our standards’ “Sometimes there is a definition issue here on what constitutes gang activity. If someone wears baggy pants and a scarf, that does not make them a gang member unless there is evidence to show that person is involved in violent or criminal activity,” Grey said.
Barfield said Army recruiters eager to meet their goals have been overlooking applicants’ gang tattoos and getting waivers for criminal backgrounds.
“We’re lowering our standards,” Barfield said.
“A friend of mine is a recruiter,” he said. “They are being told less than five tattoos is not an issue. More than five, you do a waiver saying it’s not gang-related. You’ll see soldiers with a six-pointed star with GD [Gangster Disciples] on the right forearm.”
Fort Lewis offers free tattoo removal, but few if any soldiers with gang tattoos have taken advantage of the service, Barfield said.
In interviews with the almost 320 soldiers who admitted they were gang members, only two said they wanted out of gangs, Barfield said.
None has been arrested for a gang-related felony on the base, Barfield said. But some are suspected of criminal activity off base, he said.
“They’re not here for the red, white and blue. They’re here for the black and gold,” he said, referring to the gang colors of the Latin Kings.
Barfield said most of the gang members he has identified are black and Latino. He has linked white soldiers to racist groups such as the Aryan Nations.
Barfield acknowledged that the soldiers he pegged as gang members represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of soldiers based at Fort Lewis in the period he reviewed. But he stressed that he only investigates a fraction of the soldiers on base.
Barfield said he normally identifies gang members during barracks inspections requested by unit commanders. He interviews them about possible gang affiliation when he sees gang graffiti in their rooms, photos of a soldier flashing gang hand signals or a soldier with gang tattoos.
Learning urban warfare “I know there is a lot more going on here,” he said. “I don’t inspect off-base housing or married soldiers’ housing.”
The Gangster Disciples are the most worrisome street gang at Fort Lewis because they are the most organized, Barfield said.
Barfield said gangs are encouraging their members to join the military to learn urban warfare techniques they can teach when they go back to their neighborhoods.
“Gang members are telling us in the interviews that their gang is putting them in,” he said.
Joe Sparks, a retired Chicago Police gang specialist and the Midwest adviser to the International Latino Gang Investigators Association, said he is concerned about the military know-how that gang-affiliated soldiers might bring back to the streets here.
“Even though they are ‘bangers, they are still fighting for America, so I have to give them that,” Sparks said. “The sound of enemy gunfire is nothing new to them. I’m sure in battle it’s a truce — GDs and P Stones are fighting a common enemy. But when they get home, forget about it.”
Barfield said he knows of an Army private who fought valiantly in Iraq but still maintained his gang affiliation when he returned home.
The private, a Florencia 13 gang member from Southern California, spoke to Barfield of battling a 38th Street Gang member when they were civilians.
Then the 38th Street Gang member became a sergeant in the Army and the Florencia 13 member became a private. They served in Iraq together, Barfield said.
“They had exchanged blows in Inglewood [a city near Los Angeles], but in the Army, they did get the mission done,” he said. “The private is a decorated war veteran with a Purple Heart.”
The private still has his gang tattoos and identifies himself as a Florencia 13, Barfield said.
Marine killed cop in California Barfield said a big concern is what such gang members trained in urban warfare will do when they return home.
He pointed to Marine Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, a suspected Norteno gang member who shot two officers with a rifle outside a liquor store in Ceres, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2005, before police returned fire and killed him. One officer died, and the other was wounded by the 19-year-old Raya, who was high on cocaine. Raya had spent seven months in Iraq before returning to Camp Pendleton near San Diego.
Photos of Raya wearing the gang’s red colors and making gang hand signs were reportedly found in a safe in his room.
Hunter Glass, a Fayetteville, N.C., police detective, said he has seen an increase in gang activity involving soldiers from nearby Fort Bragg. A Fort Bragg soldier — a member of the Insane Gangster Crips — is charged with a gang-related robbery in Fayetteville that ended in the slaying of a Korean store owner in November, said Glass, a veteran of the elite 82nd Airborne based at Fort Bragg.
He estimated that hundreds of gang members are stationed at the base as soldiers.
“I have talked to guys who say ‘I’m a SUR 13 [gang member], but I am a soldier,’ ” Glass said. “Although I see the [gang] problem as a threat, I do believe the majority of the military are good people and that many of those [military officials] that I have made aware of the situation have expressed concern in dealing with it. It is safe to say that I am less worried about a gang war in the sand box [Iraq] but more about the one on our streets upon its end.”
Glass has given presentations to military leaders in Washington, D.C., about gang members in the military.
Sending flak jackets home A law enforcement source in Chicago said police see some evidence of soldiers working with gangs here. Police recently stopped a vehicle and found 10 military flak jackets inside. A gang member in the vehicle told investigators his brother was a Marine and sent the jackets home, the source said.
Barfield said he knows of civilian gang members in the Seattle area who also have been caught with flak jackets that he suspects were stolen from Fort Lewis.
Barfield said he has documented gang-affiliated soldiers’ involvement in drug dealing, gunrunning and other criminal activity off base. More than a year ago, a soldier tied to a white supremacy group was caught trying to ship an assault rifle from Iraq to the United States in pieces, he said.
In Texas, the FBI is bracing for the transfer of gang-connected soldiers from Fort Hood in central Texas to Fort Bliss near El Paso as part of the nation’s base realignments. FBI Special Agent Andrea Simmons said gang-affiliated soldiers from Fort Hood could clash with civilian gang members in El Paso.
“We understand that [some] soldiers and dependents at Fort Hood tend to be under the Folk Nation umbrella, including the Gangster Disciples and Crips,” Simmons said. “In El Paso, the predominant gang, without much competition, is the Barrio Azteca. We could see some kind of turf war between the Barrio Aztecas and the Folk Nation.”
FBI agents have visited Fort Hood to learn about the gang activity on the base, Simmons said.
“We found most of the police departments say they do see gang activity due to the military — soldiers and dependents,” she said. “Our agents also have been in contact with Fort Bliss to discuss the issue.”
Simmons said investigators may conduct background checks on soldiers relocating from Fort Hood to Fort Bliss to assess the level of the potential gang problem.
Barfield said he welcomes the FBI’s scrutiny of gang members in the Army.
“Investigators as a whole across the military aren’t getting the support to remove gang members from the ranks,” he said.
But Grey, the spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command, said the unit is open to any tips about gang activity in the Army.
“If anyone has any information, we strongly recommend they bring it to our attention,” he said.
WASHINGTON — The national anthem should be sung in English — not Spanish — President Bush declared Friday, amid growing restlessness over the millions of immigrants here illegally.
“One of the things that’s very important is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul,” the president exclaimed. “One of the great things about America is that we’ve been able to take people from all walks of life bound as one nation under God. And that’s the challenge ahead of us.”
A Spanish language version of the national anthem was released Friday by a British music producer, Adam Kidron, who said he wanted to honor America’s immigrants.
When the president was asked at a Rose Garden question-and-answer session whether the anthem should be sung in Spanish, he replied: “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.”
He made his remarks during a wide-ranging briefing with reporters.
“The intention of recording ‘Nuestro Himno’ (Our Anthem) has never been to discourage immigrants from learning English and embracing American culture,” Kidron said in a statement issued after the president spoke.
“We instead view ‘Nuestro Himno’ as a song that affords those immigrants that have not yet learned the English language the opportunity to fully understand the character of the Star-Spangled Banner, the American flag and the ideals of freedom that they represent,” Kidron said.
The president’s comments came amid a burgeoning national debate — and congressional fight — over legislation pending in Congress, and pushed by Bush, to overhaul U.S. immigration law.
Bush called on lawmakers to move forward on legislation — now stalled — that would revamp immigration laws.
“I want a comprehensive bill,” Bush said, that includes enforcement as well as giving temporary worker status to some illegal immigrants.
Large numbers of immigrant groups have planned an economic boycott next week to dramatize their call for legislation providing legal status for millions of people in the United States illegally.
“You know, I’m not a supporter of boycotts,” Bush said. “I am a supporter of comprehensive immigration … I think most Americans agree that we’ve got to enforce our border. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
The president’s remarks followed the release of the Spanish language version of the song.
WASHINGTON — President Bush likes to drop a few words of Spanish in his speeches and act like he’s proficient in the language. But he’s really not that good, his spokesman said Thursday.
“The president can speak Spanish but not that well,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. “He’s not that good with his Spanish.”
McClellan’s comment was noticeable because presidential press secretaries usually boast about a president’s ability rather than talk about any shortcomings. McClellan is in the last days of his job, leaving the White House next week.
McClellan made his remark in response to a report that Bush had sung the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish during the 2000 campaign. Just last week Bush said the national anthem should be sung in English, not Spanish.
“It’s absurd,” McClellan said of the report, suggesting that Bush couldn’t have sung it in Spanish even if he had wanted to.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent drug gangs, the government said on Tuesday.
President Vicente Fox will not oppose the bill, passed by senators last week, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters, despite likely tensions with the United States.
“The president is going to sign that law. There would be no objection,” he said. “It appears to be a good law and an advance in combating narcotics trafficking.”
Public Security Minister Eduardo Medina-Mora said Mexico’s legal changes are in line with other countries and warned drug users they should not expect lenient treatment from the police if they are caught.
The approval of the legislation, passed earlier by the lower house of Congress, surprised Washington, which counts on Mexico’s support in its war against gangs that move massive quantities of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines through Mexico to U.S. consumers.
Under the federal law, police will not criminally prosecute people or hand out jail terms for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, or 25 milligrams of heroin. Nor does the law penalize possession of 500 milligrams of cocaine — enough for a few lines.
The legal changes will also decriminalize the possession of limited quantities of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, ecstasy and peyote — a psychotropic cactus found in Mexico’s northern deserts.
STILL ILLEGAL
But city and state governments may pass their own misdemeanor laws against drug possession, levying fines, forcing law-breakers to spend up to 48 hours in police station holding cells or even making them accept medical treatment for substance addiction, Medina-Mora told reporters.
“International practice, including in the United States, in many cases dictates that possession of small amounts of drugs does not require a penal sanction,” he said.
Hundreds of people, including many police officers, have been killed in Mexico in the past year as drug cartels battle for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.
The violence has raged mostly in northern Mexico but in recent months has spread south to cities such as vacation resort Acapulco.
Medina-Mora warned that vacationing college students and other foreigners caught with even with small amounts of drugs could be breaking municipal or state misdemeanor laws and could easily be shown to the airport or the border.
Vacation cities including Cancun, Acapulco, Tijuana and Mazatlan already have their own laws against drug possession, he said.
The legislation is expected to make the rules clearer for local judges and police, who currently decide on a case-by-case basis whether people should be criminally prosecuted for possessing small quantities of drugs, often leading to corruption.
While likely to complicate relations with the U.S. government, the legislation has drawn relatively little attention from the media in Mexico, where drug use is less common than in the United States.
Medina-Mora said Fox has until September to sign the bill, but neither he nor Aguilar could say more specifically when it might be signed.
May 3, 2006 — King Tutankhamun’s rediscovered penis could make the pharaoh stand out in the shrunken world of male mummies, according to a close look into old pictures of the 3,300-year-old mummified king.
The formerly missing sex organ has been just another puzzle in the story of the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
Photographed intact by Harry Burton (1879-1940) during Howard Carter’s excavation of Tut’s tomb in 1922, the royal penis was reported missing in 1968, when British scientist Ronald Harrison took a series of X-rays of the mummy.
Speculation abounded that the penis had been stolen and sold.
“Instead, it has always been there. I found it during the CT scan last year, when the mummy was lifted. It lay loose in the sand around the king’s body. It was mummified,” Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News.
At first look, Burton’s pictures may seem to indicate that King Tut could have been a little better endowed. But according to mummy expert Eduard Egarter Vigl, the pharaoh was normally built.
Caretaker of Ötzi the Iceman, the world’s oldest and best-preserved mummy, Egarter was also a member of the Egyptian-led research team that examined King Tut’s CT scan images.
“The pharaoh’s sex organ is clearly visible in Burton’s pictures. All was normal in King Tut. The penis is a highly vascularized organ and shrinks when it is mummified. Actually, King Tut has been flattered by the embalmers’ work. There is no comparison with Ötzi’s penis,” Egarter told Discovery News.
Ötzi’s natural mummification and dehydration in an Alpine glacier produced a “collapse of the genitalia,” which left the Iceman with an almost invisible member.
“He would not make a bella figura today,” Egarter said.
According to the mummy expert, it is not possible to see if King Tut was circumcised or not.
Eugene Cruz-Uribe, professor of history at Northern Arizona University and an expert on Tutankhamun, told Discovery that some earlier documents mention circumcision at King Tut’s time.
“It was probably done for hygienic reasons, but some ritual issues may have occurred as well,” Cruz-Uribe said.
Tut.ankh.Amun, “the living image of Amun,” ascended the throne in 1333 B.C. at the age of nine, and reigned until his death in 1325 B.C., aged 19.
He married 13-year-old Ankhesenpaaten, who was probably his stepsister, on his accession to the throne. During their marriage, Ankhesenpaaten, who had changed her name to Ankhesenamun, gave birth to two stillborn girls.
Keith Richards, a guitarist of Rolling Stones British Rock Group, is still nursing a sore head in an Auckland hospital after falling out of a tree in Fiji last week. The English Guitarist, 62, was airlifted brought from Fiji to Auckland by air and admitted to the Ascot Hospital with mild concussion.
Richards suffered a head injury and concussion after falling from a coconut tree at a luxurious resort in the Fiji Islands on April 29, where Richards and fellow band member, Ron Wood, 58, were apparently climbing the tree.
After initial treatment in Suva-the capital of Fiji, he was airlifted to a private hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, where he was given a brain scan to check for neurological damage.
However, neither the Hospital nor the air ambulance company which transported him to Auckland from Fiji said anything about his fall or his condition. During the treatment his wife, Patti Hansen, was beside him at the hospital. They had been staying at the luxury Club Resort on Wakaya.
Richards-the songwriter, best recognized for his work with The Rolling Stones, is better known for his drug-related outlaw image than for his songwriting contributions, to the general public.
Richards is no stranger to unforeseen injuries as in 1998 the Stones had to delay a tour after he fell off a ladder while trying to find a book in the library of his Connecticut residence. He needed treatment for rib and chest injuries and there were even fears he had punctured a lung when he fell while stretching amid the library’s floor-to-ceiling shelves. In another incident, according to band mate Ron Wood, he once slipped on a frankfurter lobbed on stage while playing a concert in Frankfurt, Germany.
The fall story of the guitarist is on the top of Newspapers and news networks throughout America and the United Kingdom, who are giving the story a good airing. An American newsreader tried to conceal her laugh as she asked, after reading the story, why was the Stone up a tree in the first place.
According to the overseas reports, the reformed heroin addict and one-time hell raiser – who still smokes and drinks – was halfway up the five-meter tree when he slipped and fell, hitting his head.
Richards, who once kicked a serious heroin habit by having his entire blood supply replaced in a Swiss clinic, fell out of the tree on Wednesday but refused to go to hospital until his holiday ended on Friday.
The rock star, who is nearly into his seventh decade, does not let the age come between him and his good time.
what do i have in common with bill gates?
more than i’d care to speculate, apparently… i suppose that could be a good thing or a bad thing…
Outcast Genius 60 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 69% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in all three, earning you the title of: Outcast Genius. Outcast geniuses usually are bright enough to understand what society wants of them, and they just don’t care! They are highly intelligent and passionate about the things they know are *truly* important in the world. Typically, this does not include sports, cars or make-up, but it can on occassion (and if it does then they know more than all of their friends combined in that subject).
Outcast geniuses can be very lonely, due to their being outcast from most normal groups and too smart for the room among many other types of dorks and geeks, but they can also be the types to eventually rule the world, ala Bill Gates, the prototypical Outcast Genius.
this is the “disguise” i came up with for the swastika, but to me it still looks enough like a swastika that i wonder what other people see… especially when they see the car from the outside, as it is travelling down the street…
i’ve decided to “disguise” the swastika on Ganesha the car. i think i can do a pretty good job of it by duplicating it in different colours, and rotating it. after the incident with ‘ housemate i wrote to ManWoman, who is my inspiration for doing bizarre shit like this, and he said that he wouldn’t paint a swastika on his car, so i guess i don’t feel too bad about it.
Thanks for supporting the swastika. It can be trying and even dangerous. I have been very close to people getting very violent in their denial of the perceived violence of the swastika.
I would not paint one on my car because, I fear that sooner or later some angry person will do society a favor by vandalising it. People see a swastika and it is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, rationality goes out the window.
I honor you for your vision and understanding around the sacredness of the symbol. Please do not martyr yourself needlessly. I need you in the world, quietly educating others about its vast sacred history.
— ManWoman
it is really depressing to realise that even someone with as much notariety as manwoman would not put a swastika on his car. every time i read about some neo-nazi horseshit in the newspaper or see them on TV i shudder to think about how many people still buy their crap and equate the swastika with them instead of what the swastika really means. the swastika has been around as a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck for thousands of years and the nazis have only been around for less than one hundred years, and yet the majority of people completely reject the swastika’s thousands of years of history and focus on the wrong stuff that has only been around for a comparitively short period of time… which strikes me as just about as ridiculous a way of doing things as any that i can think of…
but then again, it’s the same group of people, more or less, which “elected” george w. bush into office, so i guess i may be expecting too much from these folks… 8/
i knew there was a reason i was avoiding signing up for a myspace account… myspace is owned by faux news, and if you post your videos, text, artwork, music or what-have-you on your myspace account, the people at faux news can alter it, edit it, sell it, etc. WITHOUT giving you credit…
May 1st, 2006 will be the 3rd Anniversary of the end of “major combat” in Iraq. It was a glorious day when George Bush flew onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was hailed by the rapturous throngs of toadie “news” persons such as Chris Matthews (“And that’s the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star,” Hardball, May 1, 2003) and Bob Schieffer (“As far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you’re a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.” Meet the Press, May 4, 2003). What a fast and clean war! G. Gordon Liddy was enthralled with the president’s package (“all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars.” Hardball, May 7, 2003) and a new era free from terrorism was ushered in.
This is the faith based fable of what happened almost exactly three years ago. The reality based scenario goes something like this:
*Over 2400 American soldiers (including my son who was killed almost a year after Mission Accomplished Day) have come home in cardboard boxes in cargo areas of planes in the secrecy of the night.
*Thousands of our young people wounded, many grievously also bused into Walter Reed and other hospitals in the dark of the night.
*Tons of rubble upon rubble in Iraq with inconsistent electrical power still and not much clean water or chance of future power and clean water.
*Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are dead, being punished for the sins of a leader who was propped up, armed and supported by many US Regimes.
The Mission Accomplished Day (or, Operation Codpiece) public relations’ dream for the presidential pelvic zone has turned into a frighteningly real nightmare for so many people around the world who have had sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and oftentimes entire families wiped out and devastated by the strutting and smirking terrorist who was feeling mighty “chipper” last night at the Washington Correspondent’s annual dinner as the 2400 th soldier was being killed and as the 2400th Gold Star Mother was falling on the floor screaming for her child. There are hundreds of thousands of people on our planet who will have a hard time ever feeling chipper again because of George Bush, no matter how good he looks in a flight suit.
Now that BushCo has done such a fantastic job with the invasion and occupation of Iraq that never should have happened, but now that it has happened is extraordinarily evil in its scope and tactics, he is warning Iran that if it doesn’t shape up the US is going to come and impose freedom and democracy on that country. The rah-rah, “yes, sir” Congress who has an easy job of approving everything that George Bush does, thereby eliminating critical thinking, debate, or any semblance of rational discussion has voted for sanctions that will lead to an attack on Iran which will be devastating for our troops in Iraq and for that poor region that had the unfortunate luck to be built upon tremendous oil and natural gas reserves.
Only 21 Congress people voted “nay” on the Iran Freedom Support Act which is incredible considering what happened when they voted “yea” to give George Bush the green light for every sanction against Iraq and to invade it. I ran into one of the “yea” voters on the Iran Freedom Support Act, Rep. Major Owens, and I asked him why he voted that way. He said it was because he hated the “evil” regime of Iran. I asked him about our own evil, irresponsible regime! The radical President of Iran says very irresponsible and inflammatory things, but by all accounts is over a decade away from a nuclear weapon and is reigned in by the mullahs and the young population of Iran that is very westernized. We are in trouble with our one party system of government, which is the War Party.
Before we the people need to be subjected to another swaggering spectacle from George after he has bombed Iran back into the stone ages and has made we the people of the United States of America even more hated around the world, it is time to rein him in ourselves. Congress won’t do it and the media is falling into lockstep behind the murder again.
It is time to fire the warniks whose bloodlust cannot be slated and hire people who will finally use their wisdom, integrity, and non-violence to solve problems, and won’t create imaginary problems out of smoke and mirrors. We need a Congress that will hold George accountable not one that is complicit in the war crimes.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “We must live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.” God protect us from the fools that we elected to protect us!
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Rush Limbaugh and prosecutors in the long-running painkiller fraud case against him have reached a deal calling for the only charge against the conservative commentator to be dropped if he continues treatment, his attorney said Friday.
Limbaugh was booked on a single charge that was filed Friday, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail. He left about an hour later, after Limbaugh was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Barbera said.
The radio giant’s agreement to enter a diversionary program ends a three-year state investigation that began after Limbaugh publicly acknowledged being addicted to pain medication and entered a rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors accuse him of “doctor shopping,” or illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions. They learned that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.
Limbaugh pleaded not guilty Friday to a charge of fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions. Though he steadfastly denies doctor shopping, the charge will be dismissed in 18 months if Limbaugh complies with court guidelines, his lawyer Roy Black said.
“Mr. Limbaugh and I have maintained from the start that there was no doctor shopping, and we continue to hold this position,” Black said in an e-mailed statement.
Limbaugh spokesman Tony Knight said the commentator signed the agreement Thursday, and that it called for him to enter the not guilty plea. “It’s not in the system moving toward trial. It was all a formality. It’s a concluded deal,” Knight said.
Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney’s office, said prosecutors had not yet received the signed agreement.
“I am not disputing the facts, the conditions that Black represented, but until his client signed the agreement, we don’t have a full agreement,” Edmondson said. “I am sure it’s just a timeline issue.”
He refused to comment further.
As a primary condition of the dismissal, Limbaugh must continue to seek treatment from the doctor he has seen for the past 2 1/2 years, Black said. Among other provisions, he also has agreed to pay the state $30,000 to defray its investigative costs, Black said.
The warrant alleges that sometime between February and August 2003, Limbaugh withheld information from a medical practitioner from whom he sought to obtain a controlled substance or a prescription for a controlled substance.
Prosecutors began investigating Limbaugh in 2003 after the National Enquirer reported his housekeeper’s allegations that he had abused OxyContin and other painkillers. He soon took a five-week leave from his radio show to enter a rehabilitation program and acknowledged he had become addicted to pain medication. He blamed it on severe back pain.
Before his own problems became public, Limbaugh had decried drug use and abuse and mocked President Clinton for saying he had not inhaled when he tried marijuana. He often made the case that drug crimes deserve punishment.
“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. … And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up,” Limbaugh said on his short-lived television show on Oct. 5, 1995.
Prosecutors seized Limbaugh’s medical records after learning about the painkillers he had received at the Palm Beach pharmacy. The investigation was held up as the prosecutors and Black battled in court over whether the records were properly seized.
Limbaugh reported five years ago that he had lost most of his hearing because of an autoimmune inner-ear disease. He had surgery to have an electronic device placed in his skull to restore his hearing. But research shows that abusing opiate-based painkillers also can cause profound hearing loss.
FRESNO, Calif. – A jury awarded $500,000 Friday to a woman who was spanked in front of her colleagues in what her employer called a camaraderie-building exercise.
The jury of six men and six women found that Janet Orlando, 53, was subjected to sexual harassment and sexual battery when she was paddled on the rear end two years ago at Alarm One Inc., a home security company in Fresno. The jury said Orlando did not suffer from sexual assault, as she had alleged.
Alarm One was ordered to pay her damages for lost wages, medical costs and pain and suffering. She had asked for at least $1.2 million.
The next phase of the trial — to determine whether she should receive punitive damages — was scheduled to begin Friday afternoon.
Orlando’s attorney, Nicholas “Butch” Wagner, said of the verdict: “It’s in the ballpark.”
K. Pancho Baker, an attorney for Alarm One, said it was excessive. “I think the jury was so upset at Alarm One that they went overboard,” Baker said. “Not to say that what Alarm One did was right, but this allows her to manipulate the system.”
Orlando quit in 2004, less than a year after she was hired, saying she was humiliated during the company’s camaraderie-building exercises.
Sales teams were encouraged to compete, and the losers were made fun of, forced to eat baby food, required to wear diapers and spanked with a rival company’s yard signs, according to court documents.
Lawyers for the company said Orlando and others took part in the exercises willingly. The company has since abandoned the practice.
During the trial, company attorneys revealed that Orlando had sued a previous employer, also claiming that she had been sexually harassed.
Birth Erotica – i know, some of you are going to say either “eeewww! that’s gross” or “giving birth is very definitely NOT sexy” but it has a strong scientific basis: the orgasm is an analgesic that is 10 times more powerful than any drug, and the orgasm is also exactly equal to a very powerful uterine contraction. it aids the birthing process in two very profound physical ways, plus getting it on also guarantees that the baby will be born into an even more intimate, loving environment than it would be already, so i say, without being facetious (although it is a nice pun) what the fuck?
It’s Just A Plant – even if you’re not a parent, YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK!
i went over to ‘ house today to play my keyboards. i had been there for about 2 hours when there was a commotion upstairs and one of his housemates came storming downstairs and started yelling at me because i have a swastika on my car. he said he “hates hatred” and “takes grave offense” at my swastika, despite the fact that he wouldn’t listen when i tried to explain it to him.
i hate hatred just as much as he does, if not more, but when hatred is directed at me, particularly when i don’t deserve it, then i just want to get out of there. i packed up my keyboards and left as quickly as possible. of course, i had the small car, so i couldn’t get both keyboards, but i’ll go back on sunday (i’m going to bellingham tomorrow to fix a saxophone for warren) with the big car to get it.
people shouldn’t be angry with the swastika because of the nazis, they should be angry at the nazis because of the swastika.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A local school employee said a rough run-in with a couple of Homeland Security officers has left him with a strong sense of insecurity. Leander Pickett says he was handcuffed, roughed up and humiliated by two Homeland Security officers who refused to move their car from the path of waiting school buses.
Leander Pickett, a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all.
“I would like to treat people the way I would want to be treated, and yesterday I wasn’t treated that way,” Pickett said.
Pickett has been working at Englewood for two years, and his principal and colleagues told Channel 4 they have never met a harder worker or nicer guy.
“He’s well loved by everyone because he’s willing to do anything to help children,” said the Englewood Elementary Principal Gail Brinson.
However, Tuesday afternoon Pickett’s niceness turned to anger, disappointment, and betrayal when, as Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.
“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said.
However, Homeland Security tells a different story.
The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.
The department also said it’s looking into what happened, and that Pickett’s version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.
Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett’s story.
“Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it,” said Englewood coach Alton Jackson.
“At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, ‘Mr. Pickett is an employee here,’ and they said that didn’t matter,” said Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok.
“‘We’re with Homeland Security,’ and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he’s handcuffed and slammed against a car,” Brinson said. “All the children are watching, they’re all upset.”
After about 30 minutes, the men released Pickett.
“The part that really upsets me is all these students were watching, and that and it isn’t good,” Jackson said.
Pickett said he plans to sue.
“You now you hear these stories everyday and say, ‘This will never happen to me,’ but yesterday it happened to me,” Pickett said.
“If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid,” Brinson said.
The central office of Homeland Security contacted Channel 4 about the incident and stated that it considers all allegations seriously and the matter has been referred to a neutral investigative entity.
The national anthem that once endured the radical transformation administered by Jimi Hendrix’s fuzzed and frantic Stratocaster now faces an artistic dare at least as extreme: translation into Spanish.
The new take is scheduled to hit the airwaves today. It’s called “Nuestro Himno” — “Our Anthem” — and it was recorded over the past week by Latin pop stars including Ivy Queen, Gloria Trevi, Carlos Ponce, Tito “El Bambino,” Olga Tañon and the group Aventura. Joining and singing in Spanish is Haitian American artist Wyclef Jean.
The different voices contribute lines the way 1985’s “We Are the World” was put together by an ensemble of stars. The national anthem’s familiar melody and structure are preserved, while the rhythms and instrumentation come straight out of Latin pop.
Can “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the republic for which it stands, survive? Outrage over what’s being called “The Illegal Alien Anthem” is already building in the blogosphere and among conservative commentators.
Timed to debut the week Congress returned to debate immigration reform, with the country riven by the issue, “Nuestro Himno” is intended to be an anthem of solidarity for the movement that has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to march peacefully for immigrant rights in Washington and cities across the country, says Adam Kidron, president of Urban Box Office, the New York-based entertainment company that launched the project.
“It’s the one thing everybody has in common, the aspiration to have a relationship with the United States . . . and also to express gratitude and patriotism to the United States for providing the opportunity,” says Kidron.
The song was being prepared for e-mailing as MP3 packages to scores of Latino radio stations and other media last night, and Kidron was calling for stations to play the song simultaneously at 7 Eastern Time this evening.
Rejecting assimilation? However, the same advance buzz that drew singers to scramble for inclusion in the recording sessions this week in New York, Miami, Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic has also spurred critics who say rendering the song in Spanish is a rejection of assimilation into the United States.
Even some movement supporters are puzzled by the use of Spanish.
“Even our Spanish media are saying, ‘Why are we doing this, what are you trying to do?’ ” said Pedro Biaggi, the morning host with El Zol (99.1 FM), the most popular Hispanic radio station in the Washington area. “It’s not for us to be going around singing the national anthem in Spanish. . . . We don’t want to impose, we don’t own the place. . . . We want to be accepted.”
Still, Biaggi says he will play “Nuestro Himno” this morning if the song reaches the station in time. But he will talk about the language issue on the air and solicit listeners’ views. He says he accepts the producers’ explanation that the purpose is to spread the values of the anthem to a wider audience. He adds he will also play a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in English — as he aired the Whitney Houston version earlier this week, when the controversy was beginning to brew.
In the Spanish version, the translation of the first stanza is relatively faithful to the spirit of the original, though Kidron says the producers wanted to avoid references to bombs and rockets. Instead, there is “fierce combat.” The translation of the more obscure second stanza is almost a rewrite, with phrases such as “we are equal, we are brothers.”
An alternate version to be released next month includes a rap in English that never occurred to Francis Scott Key:
Let’s not start a war With all these hard workers They can’t help where they were born
“Nuestro Himno” is as fraught with controversial cultural messages as the psychedelic “Banner” Hendrix delivered at the height of the Vietnam War.
Pressed on what he was trying to say with his Woodstock performance in 1969, Hendrix replied (according to biographer Charles Cross), “We’re all Americans. . . . It was like ‘Go America!’ . . . We play it the way the air is in America today.”
Now the national anthem is being remade again according to the way the air is in America, and the people behind “Nuestro Himno” say the message once more is: We’re all Americans. It will be the lead track on an album about the immigrant experience called “Somos Americanos,” due for release May 16. One dollar from each sale will go to immigrant rights groups, including the National Capital Immigration Coalition, which organized the march on the Mall on April 10.
But critics including columnist Michelle Malkin, who coined it “The Illegal Alien Anthem” nickname say the rendition crosses a line that Hendrix never stepped over with his instrumental version. Transforming the musical idiom of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is one thing, argue the skeptics, but translating the words sends the opposite message: We are not Americans.
“I’m really appalled. . . . We are not a bilingual nation,” said George Taplin, director of the Virginia Chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, part of a national countermovement that emphasizes border control and tougher enforcement, and objects to public funding for day-laborer sites. “When people are talking about becoming a part of this country, they should assimilate to the norm that’s already here,” Taplin said. “What we’re talking about here is a sovereign nation with our ideals and our national identity, and that [anthem] is one of the icons of our nation’s identity. I believe it should be in English as it was penned.”
Yet, even in English, 61 percent of adults don’t know all the words, a recent Harris poll found.
Appealing to such symbols of national identity to plug into their profound potency is how new movements compete for space within that identity. During the rally on the Mall, the immigrants and their supporters also waved thousands of American flags and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But they didn’t translate the pledge into Spanish. They said it in English.
Juan Carlos Ruiz, the general coordinator of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, said there’s not a contradiction. The pledge was printed phonetically for Spanish speakers, and many reciting the sounds may not have understood the meaning. Putting the anthem in Spanish is a way to relay the meaning to people who haven’t learned English yet, Ruiz said.
“It’s part of the process to learn English,” not a rejection of English, he said.
‘A communal shout’ While critics sketch a nightmare scenario of a Canada-like land with an anthem sung in two languages, immigrant rights advocates say they agree learning English is essential. Studies of immigrant families suggest the process is inevitable: Eighty-two percent to 90 percent of the children of immigrants prefer English.
“The first step to understanding something is to understand it in the language you understand, and then you can understand it in another language,” said Leo Chavez, director of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California at Irvine. “What this song represents at this moment is a communal shout, that the dream of America, which is represented by the song, is their dream, too.”
Since its origins as the melody to an English drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” circa 1780, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has had a long, strange trip. Key wrote the poem after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814. It became the national anthem in 1931.
At least 389 versions have been recorded, according to Allmusic.com, a quick reference used by musicologists to get a sense of what’s on the market. Now that Hendrix’s “Banner” has mellowed into classic rock, it’s hard to imagine that once some considered it disrespectful. The other recordings embrace a vast musical universe: from Duke Ellington to Dolly Parton to Tiny Tim. But musicologists cannot name another foreign-language version.
“America is a pluralistic society, but the anthem is a way that we can express our unity. If that’s done in a different language, that doesn’t seem to me personally to be a bad thing,” said Michael Blakeslee, deputy executive director of the National Association for Music Education, which is leading a National Anthem Project to highlight the song and the school bands that play it in every style, from mariachi to steel drum.
‘A noble intent’ “I assume the intent is one of making a statement about ‘we are a part of this nation,’ and those are wonderful sentiments and a noble intent,” said Dan Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Benigno “Benny” Layton wonders. He’s the leader of Los Hermanos Layton, a band of conjunto- and Tejano-style musicians in Elsa, Tex., 22 miles from Mexico. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he recorded a traditional conjunto version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was instrumental.
“I’m a second-generation American,” Layton said. “I love my country, and I love my [Mexican musical] heritage, and I try to keep it alive. But some things are sacred that you don’t do. And translating the national anthem is one of them.”
on september 11, 2001, the united states was the victim of a crime. if we are to follow “the rules,” the victim of a crime cannot be involved in the investigation or prosecution of whoever committed that crime, apart from giving evidence. any other way of doing it makes the probability of the victim mentality creeping in and affecting the outcome very high, and, as we all know, justice is blind.
the united states has no right to declare war on, or to extract legal justice from afghanistan, iraq, iran, or any other place that may have been involved in the commission of the crime on september 11, 2001, regardless of what you might think. to do so would be just as much an act of terrorism as the crime itself.
i don’t know what the solution to the problem is, but the current situation is so far beyond fucked that i don’t even have an appropriate way to describe it.
this is more of a test or quiz than it is a meme, but it did tell me something i already knew without asking any obvious questions specifically about that subject, which intrigues me a little more than most of the test/quiz/meme thingies out there…
Ernie You scored 33% Organization, 73% abstract, and 54% extroverted!
This test measured 3 variables.
First, this test measured how organized you are. Some muppets like Cookie Monster make big messes, while others like Bert are quite anal about things being clean.
Second, this test measured if you prefer a concrete or an abstract viewpoint. For the purposes of this test, concrete people are considered to gravitate more to mathematical and logical approaches, whereas abstract people are more the dreamers and artistic type.
Third, this test measured if you are more of an introvert or an extrovert. By definition, an introvert concentrates more on herself and an extrovert focuses more on others. In this test an introvert was somebody that either tends to spend more time alone or thinks more about herself.
You are more sloppy, more abstract, and bothintroverted and extroverted.
Here is why are you Ernie.
You are both sloppy. You might not always know where everything you need is. Perhaps you don’t even care. Ernie sure doesn’t. Hey, when you got a best friend that is anal about cleaning you can afford to not worry about it. Sure Ernie likes taking baths, but that’s just to spend time with his ducky.
You both can be abstract thinkers. Ernie is a dreamer by nature, always making up songs while he plays. He comes up with fanciful adventures. You definitely are not afraid to take chances in life. You only live once. You may notice others around you playing it safe, but you are more concerned with not compromising your desires, and getting everything you can out of life. This is a very romantic approach to life, but hopefully you are also grounded enough to get by.
You are both somewhat introverted. Ernie enjoys spending time with others, but he is also quite content to be in his own fantasy world with his duckies. Unlike Bert, he has other friends to spend time with. Like Ernie, you probably like to have some time to yourself, but you do appreciate spending time with your friends, and you aren’t scared of social situations.
The other possible characters are Cookie Monster Big Bird Snuffleupagus Oscar the Grouch Elmo Kermit the Frog Grover The Count Guy Smiley Bert
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
the bush administration has got to be stopped. at this point, we’ve moved far beyond funny, ridiculous, ironic, and even tragic… the bush administration has got to be stopped!
they’re going to release about a third of the detainees in gitmo, because they pose no threat to the united states.
these are the people bush & co. said were “the worst of the worst” terrorists… even though only 10 have ever been charged with a crime.
U.S. to Free 141 Terror Suspects The Guantanamo prison detainees pose no threat, an official says. Most of those still in custody have no charges pending against them. By Carol J. Williams April 25, 2006
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba — The Pentagon plans to release nearly a third of those held at the prison for terrorism suspects here because they pose no threat to U.S. security, an official of the war crimes tribunal said Monday.
Charges are pending against about two dozen of the remaining prisoners, the chief prosecutor said. But he left unclear why the rest face neither imminent freedom nor a day in court after as many as four years in custody.
Only 10 of the roughly 490 alleged “enemy combatants” currently detained at the facility have been charged; none has been charged with a capital offense.
That leaves the majority of the U.S. government’s prisoners from the war on terrorism in limbo and its war crimes tribunal exposed to allegations by international human rights advocates that it is illegitimate and abusive.
The decision to release 141 detainees — the largest group to be reclassified and moved off the island — follows a yearlong review of their cases in which interrogators also determined that they could provide no further intelligence. It was unclear when or where the detainees would be released.
About 250 detainees have been released since the prison camps were established in 2002.
Longtime critics of the Guantanamo facility said the announcement of the planned release marked a milestone in the four years the base had held suspected terrorists.
The prison has been dogged by allegations of torture and has brought choruses of international condemnation, including calls from a United Nations panel and the European Parliament to shut it down.
The detainees determined by last year’s Administrative Review Boards to pose no threat to U.S. national security are “no longer enemy combatants,” explained Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Pentagon office in charge of reviewing detainee status.
He contended that the men’s detention had been justified. Battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan had determined when the men were arrested that they were a threat to U.S. forces in the region, he said.
“Every detainee who came to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals went though multiple reviews” before their arrival at Guantanamo, Peppler said.
Although Peppler said the majority would be leaving the island “in the near future,” he noted that some detainees who had been cleared might remain until an appropriate release site could be found. The government decided, for example, that minority Muslim Uighurs from China should not be handed over to their governments because they could face persecution, torture or execution.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said the full significance of freeing the detainees could not be assessed until their fates were clear. Because of pressure from their governments, most European nationals have been released or transferred.
Many of the remaining detainees are from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, Malinowski said.
Afghanistan has a process for granting amnesty to low-level Taliban members and prosecuting senior leaders of the old regime, making it an appropriate place to release the prisoners, he said.
“If they have committed crimes, we support their prosecution,” Malinowski said. “If their crime was that they were Taliban, then they should be sent back to Afghanistan.” Officials in Guantanamo would not release any information about the nationalities of the men cleared for release.
Pentagon officials have said previously that most of the men being held here were likely to be freed.
The former chief of interrogations, Steve Rodriguez, said in January 2005 that the majority held no further intelligence value.
Officials in Washington indicated last week that a group of about 120 Saudi prisoners could be released to their government.
A defense lawyer for one Saudi suspect said the government in Riyadh was doing little to expedite repatriation of its nationals.
“I believe the Saudi government could do much more like the British government has done” to take its citizens home, said Lt. Col. Bryan Boyles, whose client, Jabran Said bin Al-Qahtani, was to make his first appearance before the tribunal today.
The Army defense lawyer said Riyadh was being “unhelpful” by refusing to get involved.
He noted that the British government’s activism had resulted in the transfer and release of all British suspects who had passed through the prison network created by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Malinowksi of Human Rights Watch said transferring detainees into Saudi custody was troublesome.
“Saudi Arabia is not a struggling democracy,” he said. “Anyone sent to a Saudi prison … is in a worse place than Guantanamo.”
Announcement of the pending releases coincided with a considerable drop in the number of detainees likely to be charged, suggesting that the U.S. government either lacks the evidence to convict more or — as defense lawyers and human rights monitors contend — feels little pressure to accord the terror suspects a speedy trial or due process.
Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor, said earlier this month that the government was actively pursuing charges against about 70 additional prisoners.
But in a meeting with journalists on Monday, he said charges would be forthcoming on “about two dozen” other jailed suspects, including some who would face the death penalty.
Davis was responding to media questions as to why so few of the detainees — all described by defense attorneys as “small fry” — have been formally charged as the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks approaches.
“We’re working on about two dozen additional cases,” Davis said.
“I anticipate some of these will certainly present the possibility of death penalty cases.”
The man steering the government’s cases against war-crimes suspects insisted that some big fish had been ensnared in the U.S. counter-terrorism net.
“I think it’s pretty significant when you’re specifically training to build bombs to kill coalition forces,” he said of three men who will appear before the tribunal this week on charges of having plotted to build remote-controlled explosive devices at an alleged Al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Davis conceded, though, that “they’re certainly not Osama bin Laden, if you look at that as the top of the pyramid.”
Boyles, Al-Qahtani’s lawyer, expressed bafflement at the government’s proceedings.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out how they picked the people they’ve picked,” he said. “If these are the worst of the worst, as the secretary of Defense alleges, then someone other than Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur would be here.”
He was referring to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemen native whose challenge of the Guantanamo tribunal’s legality is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and is expected to be decided in late June.
The high court could take one of three paths, Davis noted: uphold the whole process, order modifications or deem the entire Guantanamo tribunal illegitimate.
but don’t let the fact that they’re releasing some of them lull you into thinking that they don’t torture prisoners at gitmo… a man named sean baker posed as a prisoner and ended up with a brain injury from the guards before they figured out he was friendly…
(CBS) Pictures from Abu Ghraib prison tell a story that has shocked the world.
There are no pictures of what happened in the prison camp at Guantanamo last year. But Correspondent Bob Simon has a shocking story — and it’s not about what Americans did to foreign detainees. It’s about what Americans did to a fellow American soldier, Sean Baker. Sean Baker has seizures an average of four times a week. 60 Minutes Wednesday went to see him a few weeks ago in a New York hospital.
Baker, a National Guardsman, was working last year as a military policeman in the Guantanamo Bay prison when other MPs injured him during a training drill. It was a drill during which Baker was only obeying orders.
“I was assaulted by these individuals,” says Baker. “Pure and simple.”
It’s all the more bizarre because Baker was considered a model soldier and he had served as an MP in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.
Then, minutes after the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Baker made a phone call from the auto repair shop in Lexington, Ky., where he was working. “I had to get back in the military right then,” recalls Baker. “I had to go back then. I had to do something.”
And he did. At 35, married and with a child, Baker volunteered to join the 438th Military Police Company in Murray, Ky., because it was about to be deployed overseas.
Ron England was Baker’s first sergeant. “He seemed to like being a soldier,” says England. “He loved being a soldier. He was always more than willing to give his part and somebody else’s, or to pitch in for somebody else.”
In November 2002, Baker’s unit was sent to Guantanamo Bay, home to what the Pentagon called the most vicious terrorists in the world. Spc. Baker’s job was to escort prisoners and walk the causeways of the prison block.
He was the new guy on the block, and he says he got special treatment from the detainees: “They wanna try the new guy. See how much they can push you. You know? How much water they can throw on you. How much urine they can throw on you. How much feces they can dump on you.”
His unit was on duty at 2 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2003, when his squad leader got a message. “‘Someone needs to go for training,'” says Baker. “And I looked around the room. I couldn’t believe that everyone had not stood up, and said, ‘I’ll go.’ But I said, ‘Right here, Sarg.'”
Baker was always the first to volunteer. This time, it was to go to the block where the most dangerous detainees were kept in isolated cells. There, Baker was met by Second Lt. Shaw Locke of the 303rd Military Police Company from Michigan. Locke, who was in charge of an IRF (Immediate Reaction Force) team, briefed Baker about the training drill he was planning.
“‘We’re going to put you in a cell and extract you, have their IRF team come in and extract you. And what I’d like you to do is go ahead and strip your uniform off and put on this orange suit,'” says Baker, who was ordered to wear an orange jumpsuit, just like the ones worn by the detainees at Guantanamo.
“I’d never questioned an order before. But, at first I said, my only remark was, ‘Sir?’ Just in the form of a question. And he said, ‘You’ll be fine,’” recalls Baker. “I said, ‘Well, you know what’s gonna happen when they come in there on me?’ And he said, ‘Trust me, Spc. Baker. You will be fine.’”
Drills to practice extracting uncooperative prisoners took place every day, with a U.S. soldier playing the role of a detainee, but not in an orange jumpsuit, and not at full force.
“You always train at 70 percent. Never 100 percent,” says Michael Riley, who was Baker’s platoon sergeant. “Seventy percent means you want to practice and be proficient, but not get anybody hurt.”
Baker says his orders that night were to get under a bunk on a steel floor in a dark cell, and wait: “I said, ‘Sir, you’re going to tell that IRF team that I’m a U.S. soldier?’ He said, ‘Yes, you’ll be fine, Spc. Baker. Trust me.'”
But in fact, Locke later acknowledged in a sworn statement that he did not indicate “whether the scenario was a drill or not a drill to the IRF team.” Locke did, however, tell the team the detainee had not responded to pepper spray.
“They wanted to make training a little more realistic,” says Baker. “Put this orange suit on.”
Locke gave Baker a code word – red – to shout out in case of trouble. From under the bunk, Baker heard the extraction team coming down the causeway. In sworn statements, however, four members of the team said they thought they were going after a real detainee.
“My face was down. And of course, they’re pushing it down against the steel floor, you know, my right temple, pushing it down against the floor,” recalls Baker. “And someone’s holding me by the throat, using a pressure point on me and holding my throat. And I used the word, ‘red.’ At that point I, you know, I became afraid.”
Apparently, no one heard the code word ‘red’ because Baker says he continued to be manhandled, especially by an MP named Scott Sinclair who was holding onto his head.
“And when I said the word ‘Red,’ he forced my head down against the steel floor and was sort of just grinding it into the floor. The individual then, when I picked up my head and said, ‘Red,’ slammed my head down against the floor,” says Baker. “I was so afraid, I groaned out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.’ And when I said that, he slammed my head again, one more time against the floor. And I groaned out one more time, I said, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.’ And I heard them say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ you know, like he wanted to, he was telling the other guy to stop.”
Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. “I said, ‘Go get the tape,'” recalls Baker. “‘They’ve got a tape. Go get the tape.’ My squad leader went to get the tape.”
Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, “There is no tape.”
“That was the only time that I heard that a tape had gone missing,” says Riley, Baker’s platoon sergeant.
“Of all the tapes, this was probably the most important one that we should have kept,” adds England.
Baker started having a seizure that morning and was whisked to the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo. “[He looked like] he’d had the crap beat out of him. He had a concussion. I mean, it was textbook,” says Riley. “[His face} was blank. You know, a dead stare, like he was seeing you, but really looking through you.”
Baker was airlifted to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where doctors determined he had suffered an injury to the right side of his brain. He was released after four days, and Baker says he requested to go back to Cuba.
“I wanted to go back and perform my duties,” says Baker. “I wanted to be back with my unit.”
Baker got back to Guantanamo, and hoped no one would notice he was having seizures, but they got to the point where he says he couldn’t hide them: “I was shaking and convulsing around people.”
Some days, he says, he was having 10 to 12 seizures per day.
What does he think would have happened if he had been a real detainee? “I think they would have busted him up,” says Baker. “I’ve seen detainees come outta there with blood on ’em. …If there wasn’t someone to say, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier,’ if you were speaking Arabic or Pashto or Urdu or some other language in the camp, we may never know what would have happened to that individual.”
Baker was finally taken off Guantanamo and sent to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he was put in a psychiatric ward. His diagnosis: traumatic brain injury. After 47 days, he was ordered to report to a medical hold unit at Fort Dix, N.J. But the seizures continued.
“He was shaking all over his whole body. It just looked like he was — you ever seen ‘The Exorcist?’ That’s what it looked like. It was pretty freaky,” says Spc. Sean Bateman, who saw Baker. “He had plenty [of seizures]. I can’t count them all is pretty much what I’m saying. He had some so often, it was pretty much expected.”
But back at Guantanamo, a promised investigation into what happened to Baker wasn’t getting anywhere.
“There was what was called a commander’s inquiry. It doesn’t really tell me anything,” says England. “And after that it more or less seemed like, least said the best said. That was my opinion of it.”
Riley says he and England approached Capt. Judith Brown, the commander of the Kentucky National Guard at Guantanamo, and asked her what was going on with that investigation. What did the captain say? “I’ll paraphrase. It’s something like, it’s being looked into, but we really don’t wanna get anybody in trouble,” says Riley.
Nobody got into trouble because the Army didn’t conduct a serious investigation into what happened to Spc. Baker — not for 17 months. Only then, and only after word of Baker’s beating got leaked to the media, did the Pentagon launch a criminal investigation into how he got so badly hurt that January morning in Guantanamo.
The criminal investigation is still going on. 60 Minutes Wednesday wanted to talk to someone at the Pentagon about the Baker case, but was told no one would talk about it.
Despite repeated calls, Capt. Judith Brown refused to speak to 60 Minutes Wednesday. Crews tried to interview Shaw Locke, the man in charge that night, and Scott Sinclair, the man Baker accused of bashing his head, but they wouldn’t meet with 60 Minutes Wednesday either. Sinclair did write in a sworn statement after the incident that Baker was resisting and that Sinclair merely placed his head back on the floor of the cell.
Meanwhile, Baker was stuck in bureaucratic limbo at Fort Dix for 10 months, long after Locke, Sinclair and the 303rd returned home to Michigan to a celebration in September 2003.
Baker was left to fight the Pentagon for a disability check, and he says it took four months to get his first check. Meantime, he says drew unemployment insurance, about half of what he was accustomed to making, to get by.
“These are our American veterans,” says England. “Sean Baker was one that wasn’t taken care of. In my own personal opinion, Sean Baker wasn’t taken care of.”
When Baker got home to Kentucky, he didn’t complain. But he needed help just to get his disability check. Attorney Bruce Simpson agreed to help Baker, pro bono. But Baker is unable to sue because of a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that bars members of the military from suing the government.
“He’ll not get a dime from what happened to him through the court system because the doors to the federal courthouse as to Sean Baker are closed,” says Simpson, who adds that no one has paid a price for what happened to Baker that night. “He’s been destined to a life of walking in a minefield of unexploded seizures. He doesn’t know when they’re gonna come. And he doesn’t know when they are gonna bring him to his knees.”
“It’s as if they just went on living their lives, as if they’ve done nothing. Nothing wrong,” adds Baker, who now takes nine medications a day, can’t get a job, has put on 50 pounds and has constant nightmares.
At the end of September, Baker went to Columbia University Medical Center in New York to consult with Dr. Carl Bazil, a seizure specialist, and one of the top neurologists in the country.
While undergoing testing, Baker suffered a seizure in front of Bazil, who believes Baker has intractable epilepsy – which means his seizures are difficult to control.
Is it an injury Baker could have received as a result of having his head repeatedly knocked against a steel floor? “Oh, absolutely. That is the kind of injury that would be severe enough to result in epilepsy,” says Bazil, who believes that with better treatment, Baker’s condition could improve. “If he doesn’t get better treatment, that will probably continue indefinitely.”
“So, if you got your health back, I take it, after your experience with the Army, you’d never serve again,” Simon asks Baker.
“I’d be in,” says Baker. “Till the day I die.”
and if that wasn’t enough, the neocons have stooped to making sexual slurs and death threats to a 15-year-old peace activist who has had the temerity to make an animation that implies that jesus loves iraqis too…
Ava Lowery is a fifteen-year-old who lives in Alabama. She calls herself a peace activist, and for the past year, she’s been producing her own short animations on her website, peacetakescourage.com. All in all, she’s made about seventy of them, she says, and most of them oppose Bush and his Iraq War.
“I was just so mad about it,” she explains. “And the media are not showing the real images of the war, so I did a lot research and started my own website.”
She submitted one of her latest creations, “WWJD,” to the monthly “contagious” contest that huffingtonpost.com is running. (It’s an open contest that ranks the number of viewers for each submission.)
“WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do”) is a powerful animation that features a soundtrack of a child singing “Jesus loves me, this I know” while one picture after another of a wounded, bloody, or screaming Iraqi child fills the screen.
“The object of the animation,” says Lowery, is “to get the following point across: Jesus loves Iraqis, too.”
Lowery ends the video with quotations from Beatitudes, including, “Blessed are they who mourn” and “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed are the merciful” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
She says she’s received a lot of positive feedback in short messages back to her site. And she understands that the fact that “people are on the web, and they just let loose.” But she was unprepared for the viciousness of the negative feedback—especially the ugly sexual slurs similar to those that Cindy Sheehan has faced. (If you can’t stand foul language, stop reading now.)
“It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun,” said one e-mail Lowery shared with me. “Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.”
“You are a TRAITOR to your country and should be executed for treason,” another one said. “All you do is bitch about the US. If you hate it so much, why don’t you GET THE FUCK OUT.”
“Why don’t you go masterbate [sic] to a pic of Sheehan and fuck off,” said a third.
“Are you a muslem [sic] terrorist?” asked another.
She says there was a threat against her that was circulating “on the conservative underground.” And she says she received one e-mail from someone who said, “Contact me ASAP. It concerns a danger to your life.”
When her mom called the number, the person who answered denied any knowledge of the threat, Lowery says.
It was the battle of the hotel room for George W Bush and Rolling Stone frontman Mick Jagger, when the singer refused to give up his suite to the US President.
Jagger hired the luxury Royal Suite at the five-star Imperial Hotel in Vienna, Austria, which is rated to be among the top 100 hotel rooms in the world, where the Stones are due to perform in June.
In doing so, he beat Bush’s aides to the punch, when they tried to book it to tie in with a summit meeting.
A source said that Jagger, an out-spoken Bush critic, had refused to budge from the 3,600 a night suite when the US President’s aides came calling.
“White House officials had wanted to reserve the suite and all the other rooms on the first floor. But Mick and the Stones had already booked every one of them. Bush’s people seemed to be under the impression that they would just hand over the suites but there was no way Mick was going to do that,” The Sun quoted the source, as saying.
And, it was Bush throwing in the towel first, for the hotel confirmed that he would no longer be staying there.
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’" — Rep. Abraham Lincoln, explaining his opposition to the Mexican War
i just got a very strange call which i assume to be a sales call…
the phone rang and i answered it and it was a recording. i’ve noticed that it’s a recording under one of two different circumstances: either it’s somebody really important to talk to, like the utility company, the phone company or the cable company, who wants to tell us that, if we don’t pay our bill immediately, some essential service is going to be disconnected, or it’s a sales call.
i didn’t catch what the guy was saying at first, but as i was realising that it was a recording, i did hear that it was concerning our “private line retail service”, which sounded important enough that i held on rather than hanging up immediately… but after keeping me waiting for five minutes, the recording apologised for taking my time, said they would call back later, and hung up.
HJ0125 LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r
1 HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION
2 WHEREAS, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of
3 the United States House of Representatives allows federal
4 impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of
5 a state legislature; and
6 WHEREAS, President Bush has publicly admitted to ordering
7 the National Security Agency to violate provisions of the 1978
8 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a felony, specifically
9 authorizing the Agency to spy on American citizens without
10 warrant; and
11 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that President Bush authorized
12 violation of the Torture Convention of the Geneva Conventions,
13 a treaty regarded a supreme law by the United States
14 Constitution; and
15 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration has held American
16 citizens and citizens of other nations as prisoners of war
17 without charge or trial; and
18 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration
19 has manipulated intelligence for the purpose of initiating a
20 war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, resulting in the
21 deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians and causing the
22 United States to incur loss of life, diminished security and
23 billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses; and
24 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration leaked classified
25 national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an
26 unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential
27 harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to
28 investigate the matter; and
29 WHEREAS, The Republican-controlled Congress has declined
HJ0125 - 2 - LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r
1 to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore, be it
2 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
3 NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE
4 SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the
5 State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S.
6 House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President
7 of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office
8 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
9 States; and be it further
10 RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the
11 charges contained herein, should be removed from office and
12 disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.
blatantly stolen from , who isn’t even on my friends list…
20 years ago I…
was 24 years old.
was a soon-to-be ex-student of the Renton Vocational Technical Institute in their Musical Instrument Repair program
thought i was going to graduate, move back to bellingham (which is where my girlfriend and our four-year-old son lived), get the ideal job as a musical instrument repair technician and live happily ever after
10 years ago I…
was 34 years old
was working as a technical support engineer for mac products at microsoft (so much for technical school training and the “ideal” job)
was living in a tiny, 1-room apartment in the basement of a building in downtown seattle, and was in the middle of an intense legal battle over custody of my fourteen-year-old son.
5 years ago I…
was 39 years old
was working as a test lead at STLabs
started Hybrid Elephant, the business that moe and i had been playing around with for 3 years or so.
3 years ago I…
was 41 years old
was working as a graphic artist at a minuteman press shop, from which i was fired for having a brain injury instead of showing up for work for two months
was two months away from having a brain injury, but had no clue that it was going to happen
1 year ago I…
was working as a graphic artist at a different minuteman press shop, very quickly getting fed up with the owner who is a mental midget… and this opinion is coming from a person who doesn’t have a complete brain!
was living in a RV in juanita, because we still hadn’t figured out where we were going to move to after having to move out of our big house in renton because i was unable to find a steady job after my injury
was getting really fed up with having to have a job in order to survive, and was actively looking for alternatives
So far this past year I…
have decided that i don’t really need a traditional job
okay, i’m going to see if i can actually post pictures without having to delete everything and start over, like i had to yesterday… by the way, for anybody who cares, LJ has in mind converting to “rich text” editing by defalt, rather than the “plain text” editing that they currently have, and the rich text editor currently sucks big fat rancid donkey dicks. regardless of where you want to put <lj-cut> tags, it has the tendency to put them where it thinks they should go, which means around the text instead of around the pictures, regardless of how big they are, and the “edit source” button lets you edit the raw html, but when you click the “Okay” button on the source window, the “rich text” editor goes back to the same, incorrect html code that it had before, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to go back to plain text once you’ve chosen the rich text editor. it reminds me very much of the HTML editor i worked on at micro$lop a few years ago, which didn’t recognise HTML standards and had a number of bugs which it still has because micro$lop developers decided that, despite the fact that i logged several bugs against it, “nobody would notice”…
the bumper sticker on the right says “WARNING: This object does not exist!”
now that’s the way HTML code should look, and it displays the way i want it to…
i’ve wanted to have an art car for years, and this is pretty much exactly what i’ve wanted. i only finished the hood because i got started late this afternoon (3:00 pm), but that means that i will probably finish all of the large lettering by tomorrow, so i won’t have to drive an “incomplete” art car to the store where i’m going to get the colours to finish it. it’s a little more stark than i was hoping for, but that will be taken care of once all the lettering is in place: i’ll use other colours to brighten it in the corners and areas that are too small for lettering…
whee! 8)
by the way, if you commented on this previously and your comment was deleted, it was because i was having some problems with the update page not allowing me to input HTML that i am familiar with, not putting in <lj-cut>s where they were supposed to go, and displaying an annoying HTML toolbar which didn’t do all of the things that a HTML toolbar should do… so i deleted it and started over again, and i did so before any comments had shown up from my point of view… but i think i got at least one comment shortly afterward and it wasn’t on this version, so i have to wonder…
During an interview on CNN Friday night, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner claimed that U.S. military operations are already ‘underway’ inside Iran, RAW STORY has found.
“I would say — and this may shock some — I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way,” Col. Gardiner told CNN International anchor Jim Clancy (as noted by Digby at the blog Hullabaloo).
Gardiner, who designed a war game in November of 2004 for Atlantic Magazine (“Will Iran be next?”) which simulated “preparations for a U.S. assault on Iran,” also claimed that Aliasghar Soltaniyeh, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told him a few weeks ago that units who had attacked the Revolutionary Guard had been captured and confessed to working with Americans.
“The secretary point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year,” Gardiner said. “I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.'”
“He said, quite frankly, ‘Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans,'” said the retired Air Force colonel.
Last Thursday, Raw Story’s Larisa Alexandrovna reported (On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say) that, according to former and current intelligence officials, the Pentagon has been using a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as an operational asset “to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack.”
“[I]nstead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world – including US civilian and military casualties – Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike,” Larisa reported.
“They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,” an intelligence source told Larisa.
Larisa reported that the MEK soldiers were told to “quit” their organization and were “renamed” in accordance with a plan conceived by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so that they could be “converted” into a military special ops team.
According to a UN official close to the Security Council whom Larisa interviewed, the “newly renamed MEK soldiers” were being employed in the place of U.S. military advance teams to commit “acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.”
“We are already at war,” the UN official told RAW STORY.
George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty — and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression’s onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole — a fact the president’s admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about “the current crop of history professors” than about Bush or about Bush’s eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled — and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating — reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled — nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success — flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt — about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians’ poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer’s words, “a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.”) Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush’s handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush’s in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
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THE CREDIBILITY GAP No previous president appears to have squandered the public’s trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, “a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man” and denounced the war as “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” But the swift American victory in the war, Polk’s decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush’s second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush’s reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk’s, suited to the television age — a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase “credibility gap,” meaning the distance between a president’s professions and the public’s perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson’s disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 — a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson’s, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as “Slick Willie.”
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public’s trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House’s inner circles. But Bush’s publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his “high-flown pronouncements” about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections — but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush’s ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff — a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition — represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
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BUSH AT WAR Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well — including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America’s military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk’s favor — much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson’s idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush’s presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush’s simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president — Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president’s own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies — including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill — suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president’s supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush’s father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, “There is a higher Father that I appeal to.”
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq — an appeal that would have sounded too “sensitive,” as Cheney once sneered — the administration built a “Bush Doctrine” of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy — yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson’s idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq’s fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops — accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as “wildly off the mark.”
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that “one can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
* * * *
BUSH AT HOME Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a “compassionate conservative,” more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that “we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush’s domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush’s father once ridiculed as “voodoo economics.” Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, “We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket.” The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush’s tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion’s share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration’s original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush’s administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush — sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that “prosperity is just around the corner” — insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush’s skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing — a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states — including Utah, one of Bush’s last remaining political strongholds — have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos’ call for tougher anti-immigrant laws — a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP’s hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House’s sectarian positions — over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls “the first religious party in U.S. history.”
Bush’s faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration’s pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don’t like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science — dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to “the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.”
The Bush White House’s indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them — much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush’s Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called “the rich and powerful” from bending “the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson’s famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton’s version of “The Battle of New Orleans” won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
* * * *
PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington’s has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law — most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant’s secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon’s, was Ronald Reagan’s, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers — HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger — left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant’s personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon — a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush’s top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian’s intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison — investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush’s closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation’s banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon’s conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called “the legitimate authority of the presidency” — threatens to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious “signing statements,” which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn’t bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases — using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush’s violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush’s alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. “I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president,” Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton’s efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. “No man is above the law, and no man is below the law — that’s the principle that we all hold very dear in this country,” Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. “The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door,” warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton’s chief accusers. In the face of Bush’s more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president’s defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush’s actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. “I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful,” Lincoln wrote in 1864, “by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.” Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a “war on terror” — a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln’s exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush’s could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
* * * *
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush’s policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush’s reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself “a uniter, not a divider” and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious — much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush’s presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents — Harry Truman was one — who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn’t seem to be concerned about his place in history. “History. We won’t know,” he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. “We’ll all be dead.”
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” said Abraham Lincoln. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
also: The Past is Over – Can you imagine a speech given by president Bush that would convince you that he has had a change of heart and could actually be the president of your dreams? A group of five students, ages 7-10, from Rooftop Elementary in San Francisco accepted the challenge, and have written speeches, which were then recorded by Jim Meskimen, a professional impersonator.
there has been a whole bunch of things that have been causing a bit of distress, but there have also been a lot of good things happening that have been offsetting the distress to the point where it’s more like a minor irritation. scott mcclellan is resigning, the “president” of china, hu jintao visited seattle with the requisite protests by tibetans, taiwanese, and chinese falun gong, and was here at the same time cheney was, which caused much uproar and confusion in seattle for two or three days. and other things that are precisely why i don’t read the newspaper that often…
the picture above bears absolutely no relationship to the article at the left, but if i posted it elsewhere it would probably mess up other peoples’ page layouts, so it goes here instead.
WASHINGTON, April 20 – The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that “no sound scientific studies” supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.The announcement inserts the health agency into yet another fierce political fight.
Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday’s statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded “smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment.”
Ms. Bro said the agency issued the statement in response to numerous inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it.
“Any enforcement based on this finding would need to be by D.E.A. since this falls outside of F.D.A.’s regulatory authority,” she said.
Eleven states have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the director of national drug control policy, John P. Walters, have opposed those laws.
A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even for medical purposes and even in states that have legalized its use.
Congressional opponents and supporters of medical marijuana use have each tried to enlist the F.D.A. to support their views. Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana and a fierce opponent of medical marijuana initiatives, proposed legislation two years ago that would have required the food and drug agency to issue an opinion on the medicinal properties of marijuana.
Mr. Souder believes that efforts to legalize medicinal uses of marijuana are a front for efforts to legalize all uses of it, said Martin Green, a spokesman for Mr. Souder.
Tom Riley, a spokesman for Mr. Walters, hailed the food and drug agency’s statement, saying it would put to rest what he called “the bizarre public discussion” that has led to some legalization of medical marijuana.
The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be “moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting.”
Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana’s effects, said in an interview that the statement on Thursday and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.
The federal government “loves to ignore our report,” said Dr. Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “They would rather it never happened.”
Some scientists and legislators said the agency’s statement about marijuana demonstrated that politics had trumped science.
“Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the F.D.A. making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a New York Democrat who has sponsored legislation to allow medicinal uses of marijuana, said the statement reflected the influence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which he said had long pressured the F.D.A. to help in its fight against marijuana.
A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration referred questions to Mr. Walters’s office.
The Food and Drug Administration’s statement said state initiatives that legalize marijuana use were “inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the F.D.A. approval process.”
But scientists who study the medical use of marijuana said in interviews that the federal government had actively discouraged research. Lyle E. Craker, a professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, said he submitted an application to the D.E.A. in 2001 to grow a small patch of marijuana to be used for research because government-approved marijuana, grown in Mississippi, was of poor quality.
In 2004, the drug enforcement agency turned Dr. Craker down. He appealed and is awaiting a judge’s ruling. “The reason there’s no good evidence is that they don’t want an honest trial,” Dr. Craker said.
Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he had studied marijuana’s medicinal effects for years but had been frustrated because the National Institutes of Health, the leading government medical research agency, had refused to finance such work.
With financing from the State of California, Dr. Abrams undertook what he said was a rigorous, placebo-controlled trial of marijuana smoking in H.I.V. patients who suffered from nerve pain. Smoking marijuana proved effective in ameliorating pain, Dr. Abrams said, but he said he was having trouble getting the study published.
“One wonders how anyone” could fulfill the Food and Drug Administration request for well-controlled trials to prove marijuana’s benefits, he said.
Marinol, a synthetic version of a marijuana component, is approved to treat anorexia associated with AIDS and the nausea and vomiting associated with cancer drug therapy.
GW Pharmaceutical, a British company, has received F.D.A. approval to test a sprayed extract of marijuana in humans. Called Sativex, the drug is made from marijuana and is approved for sale in Canada. Opponents of efforts to legalize marijuana for medicinal uses suggest that marijuana is a so-called gateway drug that often leads users to try more dangerous drugs and to addiction.
But the Institute of Medicine report concluded there was no evidence that marijuana acted as a gateway to harder drugs. And it said there was no evidence that medical use of marijuana would increase its use among the general population.
Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine, said he had “never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless.”
Studies clearly show that marijuana has some benefits for some patients, Dr. Piomelli said.
“We all agree on that,” he said.
but at the same time, i’ve got my keyboards set up over at ‘ house, and i’ve spent two days over there rediscovering my love of making music – i have a piece that’s finished but not yet in a format that i can put somewhere where a large number of people can listen to it, and another which is very much like about 6 other pieces that i have partially finished but are waiting for a second section which hasn’t yet been created (i seem to do that a lot).
also, i’m now a member of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, which is something for which i’ve been looking, for longer than i have been a member of the fremont philharmonic, which is 5 years, more or less.
MIAMI (Reuters) – A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams, and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said on Thursday.
One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said.
The woman then phoned the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the suspect fled. He was arrested at another woman’s apartment in the same Lauderdale Lakes neighborhood on Wednesday, a sheriff’s spokesman said.
The white-haired suspect, Philip Winikoff, carried a black bag and claimed to be visiting on behalf of a local hospital.
“He told the woman that he was in the neighborhood offering free breast exams,” sheriff’s spokesman Hugh Graf said in a statement.
At least two women, both in their 30s, let him into their homes and he fondled and sexually assaulted them, the investigators said.
Winikoff was not a doctor, Graf said. He worked as a shuttle driver for an auto dealership.
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — In a move decried by some as state-sponsored segregation, the Legislature voted Thursday to divide the Omaha school system into three districts — one mostly black, one predominantly white and one largely Hispanic.
Supporters said the plan would give minorities control over their own school board and ensure that their children are not shortchanged in favor of white youngsters.
Republican Gov. Dave Heineman signed the measure into law.
Omaha Sen. Pat Bourne decried the bill, saying, “We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back.”
“History will not, and should not, judge us kindly,” said Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha.
Attorney General Jon Bruning sent a letter to one of the measure’s opponents saying that the bill could be in violation of the Constitution’s equal-protection clause and that lawsuits almost certainly will be filed.
But its backers said that at the very least, its passage will force policymakers to negotiate seriously about the future of schools in the Omaha area.
The breakup would not occur until July 2008, leaving time for lawmakers to come up with another idea.
“There is no intent to create segregation,” said Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the Legislature’s only black senator and a longtime critic of the school system.
He argued that the district is already segregated, because it no longer buses students for integration and instead requires them to attend their neighborhood school.
Chambers said the schools attended largely by minorities lack the resources and quality teachers provided others in the district. He said the black students he represents in north Omaha would receive a better education if they had more control over their district.
Coming from Chambers, the argument was especially persuasive to the rest of the Legislature, which voted three times this week in favor of the bill before it won final passage on the last day of the session.
Omaha Public Schools Superintendent John Mackiel said the law is unconstitutional and will not stand.
“There simply has never been an anti-city school victory anywhere in this nation,” Mackiel said. “This law will be no exception.”
The 45,000-student Omaha school system is 46 percent white, 31 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian or American Indian.
Boundaries for the newly created districts would be drawn using current high school attendance areas. That would result in four possible scenarios; in every scenario, two districts would end up with a majority of students who are racial minorities.
NGLEWOOD, Calif. – A principal trying to prevent walkouts during immigration rallies inadvertently introduced a lockdown so strict that children weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom, and instead had to use buckets in the classroom, an official said.
Worthington Elementary School Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 as nearly 40,000 students across Southern California left classes that morning to attend immigrants’ rights demonstrations. The lockdown continued into the following morning.
Marquez apparently misread the district handbook and ordered a lockdown designed for nuclear attacks.
Tim Brown, the district’s director of operations, confirmed some students used buckets but said the principal’s order to impose the most severe type of lockdown was an “honest mistake.”
“When there’s a nuclear attack, that’s when buckets are used,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times. The principal “followed procedure. She made a decision to follow the handbook. She just misread it.”
In some cases teachers escorted classmates to regular restroom facilities, students said.
Telephones rang unanswered Monday at Worthington Elementary School because of spring break and messages left for Marquez and Brown at school district headquarters were not returned.
Appalled parents have complained to the school board. Brown said the school district planned to update its emergency preparedness instructions to give more explicit directions.
Parents and community activists asked the school board at its April 5 meeting to explain the principal’s decision. They also sought promises that the lockdown wouldn’t be repeated.
“There was no violence at the protests, so this was based on what?” activist Diane Sambrano asked. “It was unsanitary, unnecessary and absolutely unacceptable.”
ALSO: Guidelines for Abstinence Curricula from the Administration for Children & Families – scroll down until you find the heading “Additional Guidance Regarding Curriculum Content” and peruse that section… “choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage” and “marriage” being defined as “only a legal union between one man and one woman” stick out in my mind as aggravating and contentious terms…
GLASGOW, Scotland, April 14 – The rate of suicide attempts and self-mutilation-is high among those in the Goth youth subculture, researchers here reported.
More than half of 19-year-olds who self-identified as Goth reported self-harming behavior, and nearly half reported a suicide attempt, said Robert Young, a research associate at the University of Glasgow.
But whether participation in Goth culture leads to self-destructive behavior or whether adolescents with those tendencies gravitate to Goth is not clear, Young and colleagues said online today in BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.
Goth is a subgenre of punk culture characterized by “a dark and sinister aesthetic, with aficionados conspicuous by their range of distinctive clothing and makeup and tastes in music,” the investigators said. There is a Goth subculture in the U.S., reportedly inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragon.
Self-harming behavior is “a maladaptive coping strategy intended to relieve negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, frustration, or guilt,” the investigators said. “It is usually unrelated to an immediate suicide attempt.”
The researchers surveyed 1,258 young people during their final year of primary school (age 11) and again at ages 13, 15, and 19. The study participants were asked about self-harm and identification with a variety of youth subcultures.
The study found that belonging to the Goth subculture was strongly associated with a lifetime prevalence of self harm (53%) and attempted suicide (47%). For comparison, the rate of self-harming behavior among the general youth population in the United Kingdom is 7% to 14%, and the rate of suicide attempts is about 6%, the authors said.
Furthermore, identifying oneself as Goth was associated with a 14-fold increase in risk for self harming behavior (odds ratio=14.16; 95% confidence interval=4.42-45.39) and a 16-fold increase in risk for suicide attempt (OR=16.37; 95% CI=4.93-54.35) compared with non-Goth youth, the study found.
Even after adjusting for other known predictors such as being female, having divorced or separated parents, smoking, drug use, and depression, Goth identification remained the single strongest predictor of self-harm or suicide attempt, the study found.
Some other youth subcultures, such as Punk and Mosher, were also associated with self-harm, but the association was strongest for Goth.
“Although only fairly small numbers of young people identify as belonging to the Goth subculture, rates of self-harm and attempted suicide are very high among this group,” Young said.
“One common suggestion is they may be copying subcultural icons or peers,” he said. “But since our study found that more reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a Goth, this suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the Goth subculture.”
“Rather than posing a risk, it’s also possible that by belonging to this subculture young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers,” he suggested. “However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results.”
INSANITY INDEX 7.77 The SaniTest(TM) is a delicate instrument, capable of many fine distinctions. After analyzing your score, it suggests that you’re wacko. While not generally recognized as a scientific term, ‘wacko’ is used by mental health professionals when a patient exhibits numerous otherwise unrelated symptoms at the high end of the moderately insane spectrum. Although your condition is probably not dangerous, you should be carefully monitored for signs of hallucinatory ideation. And go easy on the sugar. Other notable wackos at this score level include Flying Nun star Sally Field, cartoonist Don Martin, and theme park magnate Walt Disney.
now that i’ve gotten that out of the way and there should be no doubt left about who you’re actually dealing with here…
Anatomy of a Revolt What made a chorus of ex-generals call for the SecDef’s head? The war over the war—and how Rumsfeld is reacting. By Evan Thomas and John Barry April 24, 2006
Gen. Eric Shinseki, former chief of staff of the Army, says he is “at peace.” But reached last week, he didn’t sound all that peaceful. In the winter of 2003, alone among the top brass, Shinseki had warned Congress that occupying Iraq would require “several hundred thousand troops.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had rewarded Shinseki for his honesty by publicly castigating and shunning him.
Last fall, Shinseki went to the 40th reunion of the class of ’65 at West Point. It has been reported that his classmates were wearing caps emblazoned RIC WAS RIGHT. Last week NEWSWEEK e-mailed Shinseki to ask about the reports. Shinseki called back to say he had heard “rumors” about the caps. But, NEWSWEEK asked, wasn’t he there? “Well,” he replied, “I saw a cap.”
Shinseki, who has retired to Hawaii, was clearly uncomfortable with the role of martyr. He had no desire to join the chorus of retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation. He was circumspect about criticizing Rumsfeld at all, but he seemed to be struggling to disguise his feelings. He pointedly said that the “person who should decide on the number of troops [to invade Iraq] is the combatant commander”—Gen. Tommy Franks, and not Rumsfeld.
Some critics have argued that Shinseki should have banged on the table, pushed harder to stop Rumsfeld from going into Iraq with too few troops. How does Shinseki respond? “Probably that’s fair. Not my style,” said the old soldier, who nearly lost a foot in combat in Vietnam. There was, he added cryptically, “a lot of turmoil” at the Pentagon in the lead-up to the war. Was that Rumsfeld’s fault? “Partly,” said Shinseki. Did Rumsfeld bully General Franks, the overall invasion commander? “You’ll have to ask Franks,” said Shinseki, who indicated that he had talked long enough. “I walked away from all this two and a half years ago,” he said.
The former four-star general appeared to be torn between his strong sense of duty and an uneasy conscience. The moral dilemma is as old as the republic. When does a military officer stand up to—and push back against—his civilian masters? And when does he just salute and say, “Can do, sir”?
It’s a question of enormous consequence for a democracy with the world’s most powerful military. The balance between the civilian and military is precarious. The model may be Lincoln, firing his commanders until he found one (Ulysses S. Grant) who would fight. But the modern reality is messier. It is generally forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt rejected the recommendation of his sainted Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall to invade Europe in 1942—which would have been a fiasco. Harry Truman was widely vilified for—wisely—recalling the great Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to widen the Korean War by attacking China. On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson overreached when he stayed up at night picking bombing targets during the Vietnam War. In 1997, Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assigned the top brass to read “Dereliction of Duty,” a classic study accusing Vietnam-era generals of failing to stand up to their civilian bosses.
Somehow, the lesson did not sink in. Before the Iraq invasion, the senior military did not force a discussion of what to do after the war was won. Rumsfeld was obsessed with the plan of attack, but not the aftermath. The consequences are by now a familiar litany: Rumsfeld demanded a swift, lean force that worked superbly to depose Saddam Hussein—but was woefully inadequate to take over the more onerous task of securing and rebuilding Iraq. Only now are the retired generals coming forth to complain of Rumsfeld’s bullying and demanding his resignation.
The Revolt of the Retired Generals has created considerable discomfort in the E-Ring of the Pentagon and at the White House. President George W. Bush felt compelled last week to issue a written statement expressing his “full support” for the SecDef. For now, Bush has no intention of firing Rumsfeld. “He likes him,” says a close friend of the president’s, who requested anonymity in discussing such a sensitive matter. “He’s not blind. He knows Rumsfeld sticks his foot in it.” Adds a senior Bush aide, who declined to be named discussing the president’s sentiments: “I haven’t seen any evidence that their personal rapport is at all diminishing. They see each other often and talk often.” Rumsfeld says he has twice offered his resignation to Bush, who has declined it.
The old generals can be quite biting about Rumsfeld; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wrote an op-ed calling the secretary of Defense “incompetent strategically, operationally, and tactically.” But their criticisms are probably best understood as “the first salvos in the war over ‘Who Lost Iraq’,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose book “Breaking the Phalanx” was influential in inspiring the military’s blitzkrieg assault on Baghdad. “Yes, Rumsfeld should go,” says Macgregor. “But a lot of the generals should be fired, too. They share the blame for the mess we are in.”
Rumsfeld is the chief villain of a very influential new book, “Cobra II,” by retired Marine Corps Gen. Bernard Trainor and New York Times reporter Michael Gordon. In their detailed, thorough accounting of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Rumsfeld is shown badgering the reluctant but mostly quiescent generals into attacking with as few troops as possible. Despite all the talk of the war’s being hatched by a neoconservative cabal, Rumsfeld himself appears indifferent to ideology; he was profoundly suspicious of the notion that America could bring democracy to Iraq. Rather, he focused on forcing a transformation of the hidebound, heavy-laden, slow-moving Army. Rumsfeld disdains “nation-building” and blithely counts on the Iraqis to rebuild their own country. But right after the invasion he signed off on orders by the American proconsul, Paul Bremer, to disband the Iraqi Army and fire most of the top civil servants—leaving the country vulnerable to chaos and a growing insurgency.
The publication of “Cobra II,” plus talk-show comments from Zinni, the former chief of CENTCOM who was promoting his own book, “The Battle for Peace,” appear to have encouraged retired generals to attack Rumsfeld in public. “There was a lot of pent-up agony,” says Trainor. “The dam broke.”
One of the most powerful indictments came from Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who was chief of operations for the Joint Staff during the early planning of the Iraq invasion. Writing in Time magazine, Newbold declared, “I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—Al Qaeda.” Actually, it was not the job of a uniformed officer, even a high-ranking one like Newbold, to challenge the president’s decision to invade Iraq. That’s a political judgment: it’s up to the president and Congress to decide whom to fight. The military’s job is to win the fight.
Still, Newbold has a point when he writes that the decision “was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.” The real responsibility for Iraq, of course, lies with President Bush. Together with Vice President Dick Cheney (draft-deferred in Vietnam) and Rumsfeld (Navy jet pilot who did not see combat), Bush (Texas National Guard pilot) seemed determined to brush past or roll over the cautious national-security bureaucracy. Bush made little or no effort to prod his national-security staff to ask tough questions, such as how the Sunnis and Shiites would bury centuries of resentment when Saddam was gone. (Bush has said he listens to the generals, but it does not appear he heard any words of caution.) The get-tough trio essentially cut out Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was regarded as too squishy, too much a creature of the go-slow bureaucracy.
Powell has come in for some criticism for not trying harder to slow the Bush juggernaut into Iraq. And the various generals have taken talk-show grief for not speaking out until their pensions were safely vested in retirement. But it is important to understand the military culture to appreciate why more soldiers do not cross their civilian bosses. It is true enough that “political generals” get ahead by never rocking the boat. And it is fair to say that Rumsfeld’s shabby treatment of Shinseki—the secretary did not bother to attend the retirement ceremony of the Army chief of staff, whose replacement was leaked 14 months before his term was up—had a chilling effect on other officers.
But it is unlikely that senior military officers go to sleep at night thinking that if only they kowtow a little more they will win that next star on their shoulder. They are far more likely to believe that their duty is to do the best they can with what they’ve got: the military culture breeds a “can do” attitude in its most successful officers. They are acutely conscious that squabbling at the top can be a morale-crusher for troops who must risk their lives in battle.
Rumsfeld’s persona and management style are grating to many buttoned-up, by-the-book officers. He constantly asks questions, often with sarcasm and in-your-face one-upmanship. Briefing the secretary can be an intimidating exercise. Rumsfeld has been known to get so hung up on a single slide, peppering some hapless colonel or general with antagonistic queries, that the briefer never gets a chance to finish his tidy, orderly presentation. Some soldiers like the macho give-and-take, or at least get used to it. “When you walk in to him, you’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about,” says Marine Gen. Mike DeLong, deputy CENTCOM commander from 2000 to 2003. “If you don’t, you are summarily dismissed. But that’s the way it is, and he’s effective.”
Other officers, particularly those with less exposure, just find Rumsfeld to be an impatient meddler who jumps around, nosing into subjects he knows nothing about and should leave to the professionals. Rumsfeld himself seems impervious to criticism. Last week, at a Pentagon news conference, confronted by reporters quoting from embittered retired generals, he dismissively shot back, “There’s nothing wrong with people having opinions … you ought to expect that. It’s historic. It’s always been the case, and I see nothing really very new or surprising about it.”
But in fact, Rumsfeld is bothered by the furor. “He’s concerned about the impact on the institution,” says Lawrence DiRita, Rumsfeld’s counselor. The controversy, DiRita says, can “make generals clam up around civilians, and civilians wonder, ‘Is this the next general who is going to leak to The New York Times?’ ” Rumsfeld worries that the whole concept of civilian control is “turned on its head” by the revolt of the generals. “Conceptually, institutionally, that a handful of disgruntled generals could determine who will lead the Department of Defense—that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” says DiRita.
As a practical matter, the rebellion may secure Rumsfeld’s job. “No president is going to be bullied by a bunch of retired general officers into firing a secretary of Defense,” says Thomas Donnelly, the editor of Armed Forces Journal. Of course, by defending Rumsfeld, the president has “moved into the target area,” notes General Trainor. “Now the Democrats can say, ‘Look, the president’s defending an incompetent’.”
Rumsfeld is not the sort to fall on his sword, at least willingly. He liked being teased as “Matinee Idol” by President Bush after he held forth so confidently (and, to many Americans, reassuringly) about “killing the enemy” in the traumatic months after 9/11. He has only retirement to look forward to, a boring prospect for a vigorous 73-year-old. His advisers do not expect him to quit any time soon. For many months, on a shelf behind DiRita’s desk in his old Pentagon office, stood a Rumsfeld doll that was sold in PXes on military bases after the war in Afghanistan. Pull a string on the backside and a mechanical version of Rumsfeld’s rich voice intones, “I don’t do diplomacy.” DiRita attached a slip of paper near the doll’s mouth with his boss’s mantra. It reads faster. DiRita’s not sure what happened to the doll. But his boss, he says, is still charging forward, trying to change an institution that sometimes resists change. In the weeks ahead, he is sure to meet more resistance from old soldiers who think he is not so much a change agent as a wrecking ball.
Neil Young sets his sights on Bush He is country rock’s biggest icon, and he is angry. Recorded in secret, his forthcoming album savages the war in Iraq. One track says it all: ‘Impeach the President’ By Andrew Buncombe 17 April 2006
It started as a rumour – gossip shared by fans on internet chat sites. Could it true, they asked? Could Neil Young, a cultural lodestone for a generation of country rock fans, really be turning his attention to President George Bush and the war in Iraq? Now Young himself has confirmed it. Not only has he recorded an entire album about the conflict, but in one of the songs he spells out who he thinks is to blame for the ongoing chaos and violence and what the consequences for that person should be. That track is called “Impeach the President”.
“I just finished a new record – a power trio with trumpet and 100 voices,” the 60-year-old says in a ticker-tape message posted at the bottom of his official website. “Metal folk protest? It’s called Living with the War.”
Further details about the album came from Jonathan Demme, the film maker who produced the recently released documentary Heart of Gold about the singer-songwriter. “Neil just finished writing and recording – with no warning – a new album called Living With War,” he told the music magazine Harp by e-mail. “It all happened in three days … It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq … Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon.”
Those who have followed Young’s twisting career, stretching over more than four decades – from the psychedelia-tinged rock of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the Sixties, his joining up with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, his huge solo success in 1972 with Harvest, as well as the experimentation of the Eighties and finally his return to country rock – may be a little surprised by Young’s decision to launch such a blunt political assault against the Bush administration.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the al-Qa’ida attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, it seemed that Young had taken the side with the President and supported the steps he was taking in the so-called “war on terror”. Having written a song, “Let’s Roll”, to honour the passengers on board United Airlines’ Flight 93 who apparently fought with the hijackers and forced the plane to crash-land in rural Pennsylvania rather than letting them use it to target the White House, he announced his support for the Patriot Act. The Act, which gave law-enforcement bodies a whole range of new powers, was condemned by many campaigners as an assault on civil liberties. Young said at the time he thought the legislation was necessary.
Speaking at an awards banquet in Hollywood where he had received the Spirit of Liberty award by the liberal campaign group People for the American Way, Young announced: “To protect our freedoms it seems we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time.” But now it appears that for whatever reason, the Canadian-born singer’s support for President Bush has run it’s course and that his latest incarnation is as a protest singer. He has joined list of musicians such as the Dixie Chicks, Lou Reed, Dave Matthews, Steve Earle and REM who have used their platforms to speak out against the war or the administration in general. His song urging that Mr Bush be impeached reportedly accuses him of “lying” and features a rap with the President’s voice set against the choir singing “flip-flop” – an accusation Mr Bush and other Republicans aimed at John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, during the 2004 election campaign.
Meanwhile the lyrics to the new album’s title track include the words: “I’m living with war right now, And when the dawn breaks I see my fellow man, And on the flat screen we kill and we’re being killed again, And when the night falls I pray for peace, Try to remember peace.”
Whilst details of the 10-song recording are still incomplete – it is known that he is accompanied by Chad Cromwell on drums, Rick Rosas on bass and Tommy Bray on trumpet – a further insight into what to expect has come from the California-based musician Alicia Morgan, who was recruited to be part of the 100-strong choir. In an entry on her blog on Friday she wrote: “Have you, like me, been recalling the great protest songs of the Sixties, and wondered where the new protest songs are? Yesterday, I found out.” She said she and the other singers read off the lyrics as they flashed onto a giant screen, with cheers of approval coming up from the choir. With the main tracks having been previously recorded, Young himself directed the backing singers. “Turns out the whole thing is a classic beautiful protest record. The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally,” she said.
“Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. It was a spiritual experience … We finished the session by singing an a cappella version of “America the Beautiful” and there was not a dry eye in the house.” She added: “I’ve never been at a recording session that was more like being at church. Heck, I’ve never been to a church that was more like a church than that session.” Speaking from Sherman Oaks, California, yesterday Morgan told The Independent that many people liked Neil Young because he “pisses everybody off”.
She said: “I have always enjoyed his music and respected him. People have told me he used to be a Reagan supporter but I don’t think he is bound by any ideology other than his own. He writes and sings about whatever is going on in his life. Sometimes it’s political – sometimes it’s not.”
Asked if she thought Young had enjoyed the 12-hour session, at which they completed the 10 tracks, she added: “Very much so.” Young, who has served on the board of Farm Aid, fellow singer Willie Nelson’s project to help rural Americans, for more than 20 years, is not the first person to have suggested the impeachment of Mr Bush. With his approval ratings in the low 30s, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has sought to have Congress pass a motion to censure the President, though the effort has received only limited support from Mr Feingold’s Democratic colleagues.
Meanwhile Mr Bush can apparently do nothing to shift his ratings, the worst for a president in second term since the days of Richard Nixon, for whom, incidentally, Young also wrote a song. Young, who has said he has previously voted for the Republicans, was apparently inspired to write the words for the song “Campaigner” – originally called “Requiem for a President” – after watching television news about Nixon’s wife suffering a stroke and seeing the broken president arrive at the hospital. In the song he wrote: “I am a lonely visitor, I came too late to cause a stir, Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.”
Songs of shame By Geneviève Roberts
* ROLLING STONES Despite being famously apolitical, the band launched an attack on George Bush in their latest album, A Bigger Bang. The track “Sweet Neo Con” contains the lyrics: “You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot, Well I think you’re full of shit.”
Despite Jagger saying: “It’s not aimed personally at President Bush. It wouldn’t be called ‘Sweet Neo Con’ if it was,” Stones fans were not convinced, especially as Jagger had previously said of the tune: “It is direct. Keith said: ‘It is not really metaphorical. I think he’s a bit worried because he lives in the US. But I don’t.”
* EMINEM In 2004, rap artist Eminem urged fans to vote against George Bush in the US election by issuing a music video specifically to criticise the Iraq war. The lyrics for “Mosh”: “Let the President answer on high anarchy, strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war,” accompanied a video depicting a US soldier arriving home from Baghdad, to be told he must return.
* DIXIE CHICKS “Not Ready to Make Nice”, to be released in the US in May, is an attack on people who sent the Texan band death threats after they criticised Mr Bush. Singer Nathalie Maines, performing in London on the eve of the Iraq war, said: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Many US radio stations dropped the band and their CDs were smashed.
* GEORGE MICHAEL In 2002, he released the single “Shoot the Dog”, which featured a cartoon video of Tony Blair and Mr Bush’s poodle on the White House lawn. The backlash was so forceful – the New York Post called him a “past-his-prime pop pervert” – that Michael feared he would not be able to return to the US.
NEW YORK – Along a gritty stretch of street in Brooklyn, police this month quietly launched an ambitious plan to combat street crime and terrorism. But instead of cops on the beat, wireless video cameras peer down from lamp posts about 30 feet above the sidewalk.
They were the first installment of a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds of additional cameras could follow if the city receives $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested to safeguard Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a surveillance “ring of steel” modeled after security measures in London’s financial district.
Officials of the New York Police Department _ which considers itself at the forefront of counterterrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks _ claim the money would be well-spent, especially since the revelations that al-Qaida members once cased the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.
“We have every reason to believe New York remains in the cross-hairs, so we have to do what it takes to protect the city,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said last week at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The city already has about 1,000 cameras in the subways, with 2,100 scheduled to be in place by 2008. An additional 3,100 cameras monitor city housing projects.
New York’s approach isn’t unique. Chicago spent roughly $5 million on a 2,000-camera system. Homeland Security officials in Washington plan to spend $9.8 million for surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol. And Philadelphia has increasingly relied on video surveillance.
Privacy advocates say the NYPD’s camera plan needs more study and safeguards to preserve privacy and guard against abuses like racial profiling and voyeurism.
The department “is installing cameras first and asking questions later,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Police officials insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear because the cameras will be restricted to public areas. The police commissioner recently established a panel of four corporate defense lawyers to advise the department on surveillance policies.
“The police department must be flexible to meet an ever changing threat,” Kelly said. “We also have to ensure whatever measures we take are reasonable as the Constitution requires. That’s the only way to retain public support and preserve individual freedoms.”
Lieberman concedes cameras can help investigators identify suspects once a crime has been committed, but argues they can’t prevent crime. She cited a 2002 study which concluded that surveillance cameras used in 14 British cities had little or no impact on crime rates _ just as they didn’t keep terrorists from bombing the London subway system last year.
“The London experience shouldn’t be misconstrued that the ‘ring of steel’ prevents terrorism,” she said. “But that’s how it’s being pitched.”
Still, New York police were impressed that their British counterparts drew on 80,000 videotapes to identify and retrace the routes of the subway system suicide bombers and the suspects in a failed follow-up attack.
Timothy Horner, a specialist with the Kroll security firm and a former NYPD captain, said the measures make sense.
“It’s not a cure-all, and the department is not thinking that way,” he said. “But we really want law enforcement to use whatever tools they can to keep us safe.”
moe and i took the dogs here yesterday, as the weather was nice, we both had the day off, and we haven’t gone anywhere like this for a long time. on our way back, we went past the south end of paine field and there were about half a ton of state patrol and king county sheriffs on motorcycles, hanging around looking official and trying to guard the perimeter… i guess this is at least part of the reason why…
i ordered replacement poles for the tent, so that this year i won’t have to make do with rope and duct-tape at OCF.
i took my keyboards over to ‘ house yesterday, and discovered how much i have missed being able to play my keyboards since we moved into this shoebox. i’m definitely going to spend a lot more time over there, especially since they also have a person who is a regular supplier of Holy Vegetable living in the basement… right next to the room that the keyboards are in, so it won’t even be a separate trip most of the time.
also i have to get my workshop set up. i got email yesterday from the National "Tobacco" Alliance who “are looking for new suppliers for churchwarden style tobacco pipes.” and also i got email from Pakataş Pipes who are looking for someone to sell their pipes…
it seems to think that i have no clue who the founder of the vaisnava cult in the united states is, because two of them actually are the founder of the vaisnava cult in the united states, five of them are directly related to the vaisnava cult, and ten of them are indirectly related to the vaisnava cult… for a total of 17 out of 20. if i didn’t know who that person was, i might be tempted to find out more about him, but since i already know who he is and what the cult he founded is all about, i think i’ll ignore them instead.
besides which, i already have 150 interests anyway, and can’t put up more without deleting some of the ones i have, and considering that i’m already listing interests in the bio section of my profile, i think i’ll pass for now.
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed “biopaper”, with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. “We can print any desired structure, in principle,” Forgacs told the meeting.
Other tissue engineers have tried printing 3D structures, using modified ink-jet printers which spray cells suspended in liquid (New Scientist, 25 January 2003, p 16). Now Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.
Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. “After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner,” says Forgacs.
Most tissue engineers trying to build 3D structures start with a scaffold of the desired shape, which they seed with cells and grow for weeks in the lab. This is how Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues grew the bladders which he successfully implanted into seven people (New Scientist, 8 April 2006, p 10). But if tissue engineering goes mainstream, faster and cheaper methods will be a boon. “Bioprinting is the way to go,” says Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.
In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn’t be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.
The EFF filed the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Northern California in January, seeking damages from AT&T on behalf of AT&T customers for alleged violation of state and federal laws.
Mark Klein, a former technician who worked for AT&T for 22 years, provided three technical documents, totaling 140 pages, to the EFF and to The New York Times, which first reported last December that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on citizens’ phone calls without obtaining warrants.
Klein issued a detailed public statement last week, saying he came forward because he believes the government’s extrajudicial spying extended beyond wiretapping of phone calls between Americans and a party with suspected ties to terrorists, and included wholesale monitoring of the nation’s internet communications.
AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels internet traffic data from AT&T Worldnet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T’s massive internet backbone to the NSA, according to a statement from Klein.
Klein’s duties included connecting new fiber-optic circuits to that room, which housed data-mining equipment built by a company called Narus, according to his statement.
Narus’ promotional materials boast that its equipment can scan billions of bits of internet traffic per second, including analyzing the contents of e-mails and e-mail attachments and even allowing playback of internet phone calls.
While AT&T’s open filings did not confirm the details of Klein’s statement, they did not dispute the legitimacy of his claims, and the company’s filing included a sealed affidavit attesting to the sensitivity of the documents.
The company asked for a hearing Thursday to determine whether the documents could be used in the class-action lawsuit, whether they would be unsealed or whether the EFF would have to return them. The EFF filed a rebuttal, calling that time frame unworkable and accusing AT&T of not following normal court rules.
AT&T’s lawyers also told the court that intense press coverage surrounding the case, including Wired News’ publication of Klein’s statement, was revealing the company’s trade secrets, “causing grave injury to AT&T.” The lawyers argued that unsealing the documents “would cause AT&T great harm and potentially jeopardize AT&T’s network, making it vulnerable to hackers, and worse.”
The EFF filed the documents last week under a temporary seal when it asked the judge to force AT&T to stop the alleged internet spying until the case goes to trial.
Klein’s statement and documents are the only direct evidence filed so far by the EFF, and without them its case could be weakened.
It is not clear whether AT&T has served legal papers to Klein.
As of last week, Klein was represented by Miles Ehrlich, who until January served as a U.S. attorney in San Francisco, prosecuting white-collar crime. Klein is now also represented by two lawyers from the powerhouse law firm Morrison & Foerster, including James J. Brosnahan, who is best known for representing John Walker Lindh, the Marin County, California, man found fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The EFF declined to comment on the filing, while AT&T did not return a call seeking comment. The case is Hepting v. AT&T.
ATF agents are always on alert for anything suspicious — including ninjas.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents, on campus Tuesday for Project Safe Neighborhoods training, detained a “suspicious individual” near the Georgia Center, University Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said.
Jeremiah Ransom, a sophomore from Macon, was leaving a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was detained.
After being held in investigative detention, he was found to have violated no criminal laws and was not arrested.
“It was surreal,” Ransom said. “I was jogging from Wesley to Snelling when I heard someone yell ‘freeze.’”
Ransom said he thought a friend was playing a joke before he realized officers had guns drawn and pointed at him.
ATF agents had noticed Ransom’s suspicious behavior and clothing and gave chase, apprehending him, Williamson said.
“Agents noticed someone wearing a bandanna across the face and acting in a somewhat suspicious manner, peeping around the corner,” said ATF special agent in charge Vanessa McLemore.
Ransom was wearing black sweatpants and an athletic T-shirt with one red bandanna covering the bottom half of his face and another covering the top of his head, Williamson said.
“Seeing someone with something across the face, from a federal standpoint — that’s not right,” McLemore said, explaining why agents believed something to be amiss.
Agents noticed Ransom peering around a corner and said when police sirens sounded, he took off running.
After chasing Ransom and identifying themselves, ATF agents detained him, turning him over once University Police arrived, McLemore said.
Ransom said Williamson told him the incident should not have been handled in such a manner and he would file a complaint with the ATF.
I was going to post this in the “Expose the big lie” thread but after I wrote it I thought it was interesting enough to merit a thread of its own. This is all good information, personally verified or witnessed by none other than me, but I will not answer any questions about it or go into any detail other than what I’ve already typed out. I may reply with more information or anecdotes if I see fit, but I’ve pretty much already scraped the barrel of my experiences.
These are some facts I have witnessed and learned through my employment. Take it at face value, believe it or don’t believe it, because I’m not providing corroborating pictures, details, or evidence beyond my own testimony.
Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.
Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.
President Bush uses anti-depressant medication, a lot of it, at a stupendous dosage, and he is hiding it from the American public. This is the real reason he stopped drinking. Because of the dosage, he is also impotent.
Tom Ridge carries 20 credit cards with him at all times, each one with a very low limit. I have never heard of him using one, ever, but he has them. He also wears his socks inside-out, and will flip the fuck out and walk strangely if he is forced to wear them properly, because it drives him crazy. All of his socks must be laundered right side in and then turned inside out before they are returned to him. He gave specific instructions about handling his food, and not allowing his vegetables to touch any other food item on the plate. His utensils must be steamed over boiling water. He will not eat soup which hasn’t been boiled within the past 20 minutes or which he has not prepared himself. If any of these rules are violated, he flies into a rage, turns beet red, and will not eat a single thing. He has his personal attendants confirm over and over that the food is as he likes it. He also shaves his forearms and hands because he can’t stand the idea of body hair on his arms. He demands that his bedsheets are bleach white and changed fresh every night and he sleeps in a separate bed in a big, tight, body-length nylon sleeve, with a fan blowing over him at full power. He is terrified of animals which have fur or hair longer than one inch, and will not go near curly hair of any kind, even on people. At one time he ran from his office and demanded that someone look under everything for a rodent which did not and could not exist, then he had the entire place wiped down with disinfectant and vacuumed twice. While this was done he couldn’t even bear to look at the door, or come within 20 feet of his office. He was in hysterics.
President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.
Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.
Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.
There is a sealed room in the whitehouse which once held a half-ton block of cheese for about 30 years.
The White house is planting its own men among the press agents at press conferences.
The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.
Despite all of this craziness, there is nothing strange whatsoever about Condoleeza Rice. She is completely balanced and normal, if slightly robotic in her personal demeanor. She smells very nice at all times. She does, however, constantly check her investments online from her office when she thinks that nobody is looking, and she has slept at her desk on multiple occasions.
There is an administrative law judge who sits in an office in a building near the white-house, earns around 200k per year and has a secretary, and he does nothing except sit, read, and listen to classical music all day. His secretary likewise does nothing. He gets meals taken to him from the White-house kitchen, and is so lonely that he latches on to whoever gets sent and talks to them for hours about the korean war. His family is all dead and his secretary hates him. In a drawer in his desk he has an old revolver, which he got in there somehow despite that he shouldn’t have been able to bring it in. I think he will shoot himself one day.
The “undisclosed location” is usually a local police officer training ground or state trooper college. Shh.
ATLANTA — Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she’s demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
FOR THE RECORD: Religious expression: An article in Monday’s Section A said Gregory S. Baylor of the Christian Legal Society viewed homosexuality as a lifestyle choice. In fact, he does not have a stance on that issue. As the article noted, he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race, gender and other inborn traits. He asserts that antidiscrimination policies regarding homosexuality are different because they protect people based on conduct. Baylor’s organization seeks to exempt religious groups from those policies.
With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.
The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. “Christians,” he said, “are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.”
In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.
The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they’re labeled intolerant.
A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults — including 80% of evangelical Christians — agreed with the statement “Religion is under attack in this country.”
“The message is, you’re free to worship as you like, but don’t you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your church,” said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Assn. Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians who feel harassed.
Critics dismiss such talk as a right-wing fundraising ploy. “They’re trying to develop a persecution complex,” said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.
“What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn’t mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn’t work?” asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.
Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.
“Think how marginalized racists are,” said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom. “If we don’t address this now, it will only get worse.”
Christians are fighting back in a case involving Every Nation Campus Ministries at California State University. Student members of the ministry on the Long Beach and San Diego campuses say their mission is to model a virtuous lifestyle for their peers. They will not accept as members gays, lesbians or anyone who considers homosexuality “a natural part of God’s created order.”
Legal analysts agree that the ministry, as a private organization, has every right to exclude gays; the Supreme Court affirmed that principle in a case involving the Boy Scouts in 2000. At issue is whether the university must grant official recognition to a student group that discriminates.
The students say denying them recognition — and its attendant benefits, such as funding — violates their free-speech rights and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court, with the groups prevailing.
WASHINGTON – The latest fossil unearthed from a human ancestral hot spot in Africa allows scientists to link together the most complete chain of human evolution so far.
The 4.2 million-year-old fossil discovered in northeastern Ethiopia helps scientists fill in the gaps of how human ancestors made the giant leap from one species to another. That’s because the newest fossil, the species Australopithecus anamensis, was found in the region of the Middle Awash — where seven other human-like species spanning nearly 6 million years and three major phases of human development were previously discovered.
“We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time,” study co-author and Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw said in a phone interview from Addis Ababa. “One form evolved to another. This is evidence of evolution in one place through time.”
The findings were reported Thursday in the scientific journal Nature.
The species anamensis is not new, but its location is what helps explain the shift from one early phase of human-like development to the next, scientists say. All eight species were within an easy day’s walk of each other.
Until now, what scientists had were snapshots of human evolution scattered around the world. Finding everything all in one general area makes those snapshots more of a mini home movie of evolution.
“It’s like 12 frames of a home movie, but a home movie covering 6 million years,” said study lead author Tim White, co-director of Human Evolution Research Center at University of California at Berkeley.
“The key here is the sequences,” White said. “It’s about a mile thickness of rocks in the Middle Awash and in it we can see all three phases of human evolution.”
Modern man belongs to the genus Homo, which is a subgroup in the family of hominids. What evolved into Homo was likely the genus Australopithecus (once called “man-ape”), which includes the famed 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” fossil found three decades ago. A key candidate for the genus that evolved into Australopithecus is called Ardipithecus. And Thursday’s finding is important in bridging — but not completely — the gap between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.
In 1994, a 4.4 million-year-old partial skeleton of the species Ardipithecus ramidus — the most recent Ardipithecus species — was found about six miles from the latest discovery.
“This appears to be the link between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus as two different species,” White said. The major noticeable difference between the phases of man can be seen in Australopithecus’ bigger chewing teeth to eat harder food, he said.
While it’s looking more likely, it is not a sure thing that Ardipithecus evolved into Australopithecus, he said. The finding does not completely rule out Ardipithecus dying off as a genus and Australopithecus developing independently.
The connections between Ardipithecus and Australopithecus have been theorized since an anamensis fossil was first found in Kenya 11 years ago. This draws the lines better, said Alan Walker of Penn State University, who found the first anamensis and is not part of White’s team.
Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agreed: “For those people who are tied up in doing the whole human family tree, being able to connect the branches is a very important thing to do.”
WASHINGTON – From the beginning days of the CIA leak investigation in 2003, the Bush White House has insisted there was never an effort to discredit Joseph C. Wilson, the man who emerged as the most damaging critic of the administration’s case that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.
But now the White House – and specifically President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney – have been pitched back into the center of the nearly three-year controversy, this time because of a prosecutor’s court filing in the case that asserts there was “a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House,” to undermine Wilson.
The new assertions by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has put White House officials on the spot in a way they have not been for months, as attention in the leak case seems to be shifting away from the White House to the pretrial procedural skirmishing in the perjury and obstruction charge against Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.
Fitzgerald’s court filing talks not of an effort to level with Americans but of “a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson.” It concludes, “It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish Wilson.'”
With more filings expected from Fitzgerald, the prosecutor’s work has the potential to keep the focus on Bush and Cheney at a time when the president is struggling with his lowest approval ratings since he came to office.
Even on Monday, Bush found himself in an uncomfortable spot during an appearance at a Johns Hopkins University campus in Washington, when a student asked him to address Fitzgerald’s assertion that the White House was seeking to retaliate against Wilson.
Bush stumbled for a moment as he began his response before settling on an answer that sidestepped the question. He said he had ordered the formal declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq July 2003 because “it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches” about Iraq’s efforts to reconstitute its weapons program.
Bush said nothing about the earlier, informal authorization that Fitzgerald’s court filing revealed for the first time. The prosecutor described testimony from Libby, who said that Bush told Cheney that it was permissible to reveal some of the information in the intelligence estimate, which described Saddam’s efforts to acquire uranium.
But on Monday, Bush was not talking about that. “You’re just going to have to let Mr. Fitzgerald complete his case, and I hope you understand that,” Bush said. “It’s a serious legal matter that we’ve got to be careful in making public statements about it.”
Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Fitzgerald’s account of what was happening in the White House that summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration’s narrative, which suggested that Wilson was regarded as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered perfectly well by simply disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Bush relied.
It turned out that much of the information about Saddam’s search for uranium was questionable at best, and it became the subject of dispute almost as soon as it was included in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
The answer to the question of whose recounting of events is correct – Bush’s or Fitzgerald’s – may not be known for months or years, if ever.
John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.
This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.
What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.
It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, “Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the ‘war on terror’ than John Yoo.”
This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him? Yoo: No treaty. Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo. Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Yoo argues presidential powers on Constitutional grounds, but where in the Constitution does it say the President can order the torture of children ? As David Cole puts it, “Yoo reasoned that because the Constitution makes the President the ‘Commander-in-Chief,’ no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war. On this reasoning, the President would be entitled by the Constitution to resort to genocide if he wished.”
What is the position of the Bush Administration on the torture of children, since one of its most influential legal architects is advocating the President’s right to order the crushing of a child’s testicles?
This fascist logic has nothing to do with “getting information” as Yoo has argued. The legal theory developed by Yoo and a few others and adopted by the Administration has resulted in thousands being abducted from their homes in Afghanistan, Iraq or other parts of the world, mostly at random. People have been raped, electrocuted, nearly drowned and tortured literally to death in U.S.-run torture centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay. And there is much still to come out. What about the secret centers in Europe or the many still-suppressed photos from Abu Ghraib? What can explain this sadistic, indiscriminate, barbaric brutality except a need to instill widespread fear among people all over the world?
It is ironic that just prior to arguing the President’s legal right to torture children, John Yoo was defensive about the Bush administration policies, based on his legal memo’s, being equated to those during Nazi Germany.
Yoo said, “If you are trying to draw a moral equivalence between the Nazis and what the United States is trying to do in defending themselves against Al Qaieda and the 9/11 attacks, I fully reject that. Second, if you’re trying to equate the Bush Administration to Nazi officials who committed atrocities in the holocaust, I completely reject that too… I think to equate Nazi Germany to the Bush Administration is irresponsible.”
If open promotion of unmitigated executive power, including the right to order the torture of innocent children, isn’t sufficient basis for drawing such a “moral equivalence,” then I don’t know what is. What would be irresponsible is to sit by and allow the Bush regime to radically remake society in a fascist way, with repercussions for generations to come. We must act now because the future is in the balance. The world cannot wait. While Bush gives his State of the Union on January 31st, I’ll find myself along with many thousands across the country declaring “Bush Step Down And take your program with you.”
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
Report shelved while claim went forth The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts — scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons — who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, “Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,” remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.
“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”
Primary piece of evidence The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government’s handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers — along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was believed to be a nuclear weapons program — were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team’s reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration’s public views about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency both declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team’s findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group’s final report in September 2004 — 15 months after the technical report was written — said the trailers were “impractical” for biological weapons production and were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.
“Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say,” said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
Others thought trailers had weapons use Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. “It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides,” said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The technical team’s findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies’ public statements on the trailers. A day after the team’s report was transmitted to Washington — May 28, 2003 — the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were “confident” that the trailers were used for “mobile biological weapons production.”
Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply “mobile biological laboratories” in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the “confidence level is increasing” that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be “mobile biological facilities,” and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.
Doubts creep in By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group’s first leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was “no consensus” among intelligence officials, the trailers “could be made to work” as weapons labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.
Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.
Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon accepting the survey group’s leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were “backsliding” on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team’s findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group’s leader.
“If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq,” Kay said, “I would certainly have given their findings more weight.”
A defector’s tales Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.
The CIA’s star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany’s intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.
Curveball’s detailed descriptions — which were officially discredited in 2004 — helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.
“We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails,” Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, “We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like.”
The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flat-bed trailer covered by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.
Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.
Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed Curveball’s story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.
Crack team dispatched to Iraq Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the “Jefferson Project,” a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy Department’s national labs.
The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
“Within the first four hours,” said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, “it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs.”
News of the team’s early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.
The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the trailers as “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.
But the technical team’s preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.
Crucial components lacking Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team’s findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group’s nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.
That report said the trailers were “impractical for biological agent production,” lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were “almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen,” the survey group reported.
The group’s report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
“It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket,” said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.
The technical team’s preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants,” on its Web site.
After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report’s conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended for weapons?
In the end, the final report — 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix — remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.
“It was very assertive,” said one weapons expert familiar with the report’s contents.
Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.
“I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated,” one member recalled. “It never happened. And I just had to live with it.”
i went over to ‘ house yesterday for the first time in a number of months. he proposed that his house would be a good place to “store” my fender piano and my yamaha keyboard, and you know what? it would be an excellent place to store my keyboards! not only would it give me a place that i can go and play on a regular basis, but it would mean that i see all of the people associated with a lot more frequently, and adds the substantial benefit of having a regular place to obtain the holy vegetable.
i’ve made a decision, which, for me, is pretty monumental, and it’s been brought about by spending the past month doing gigs 5 days a week. the fact is, i enjoy doing gigs. i don’t enjoy going to “work” five days a week as a tester, and i can tolerate doing 5 days a week as a graphic artist and typesetter, but i’d rather be playing. the problem previously has been that i don’t get paid (as much, if at all) for playing, and i do get paid for being a tester or a typesetter, but at this point, i don’t care any more. beau bonds as “the naked puppet” (“i’ve got nothing to hide, i’m naked!”) said, “sometimes you don’t need a job, sometimes you need a life.” i remember when i was in the tech school i couldn’t imagine getting paid for playing (which includes doing the things that i was trained to do at the tech school), but that’s what i wanted, and now, finally, i’ve figured out that playing is what i want to do, regardless of whether i get paid or not. i had a near-death experience and survived, so i’ve been given a second chance at life, and i don’t want to screw it up again. fuck work. i’m through with working.
it’s kind of a scary decision, but it’s also kind of an exciting one.
the 3rd annual fremont moisture festival, the largest comedie/varieté festival in the world(!), ended yesterday. the time to beat for next year’s marathon is 4 hours and 46 minutes (last year’s record was 4’20”, heh heh heh). the last show was supposed to have an encore performance by johnny jetpack, but it got censored at the last moment because “there were kids in the audience”, which i think is a lame excuse – it was only johnny jetpack getting a blow job from a 12,000 gallon per minute milking machine, and it didn’t even show anything truly obscene, although i can understand why a guy like mike hale (the notorious “christian” who is the reason why the burlesque nights were held at a different venue) would see it that way. Big Bois With Poise opened the 3rd half of the show, but instead of fire poi, we had water balloons. it was really funny, because there were two people directly in front of where i was spinning who were obviously not particularly interested in getting wet at all, and were shying away from my spinning poi, and one of my water-balloons had sprung a leak, so that every time i spun it, they got showered with water. and then, after we were done chanting, we broke the water balloons on our heads, but for some reason mine wouldn’t break (who ever heard of a sturdy water balloon?), so i ended up biting them. and in spite of how well it went, i sure hope that they have a new person organising music next year, because the person that was doing it this year (RB?) couldn’t organise his way out of a wet paper sack (which is an obscure reference to rhys thomas’ act).
the fremont phil has an unexpected in with the folklife festival this year. apparently the lady who is also the leader of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band is on the selection committee for folklife, and she came to fred with an offer of getting us a stage without having to go through the normal application procedures. i just heard about the BSSB during the moisture festival, from the tuba player for the Fighting Instruments of Karma, and it turns out tha they need a new trombone player, so i’m now more or less officially playing for the sedentary sousa band. i figure that it will be perfect for me, because i don’t like marching anyway.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”
The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.
One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,” The New Yorker pointed out.
In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.
“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.
president bush views president mahmoud ahmadinejad as a potential adolph hitler, i view president bush as a potential adolph hitler. i wonder which one of us will have our views proved right in the long term…
BLITZER: And you’re saying that some senior military officers are prepared to resign?
HERSH: I’m saying that, if this isn’t walked back and if the president isn’t told that you cannot do it — and once the chairman of the joint chiefs or some senior members of the military say to the president, let’s get this nuclear option off the table, it will be taken off. He will not defy the military in a formal report. Unless something specific is told to the White House that you’ve got to drop this dream of a nuclear option — and that’s exactly the issue I’m talking about — people have said to me that they would resign.
Hersh: …And then, of course, nobody in their right mind would want to use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East, because it would be, my God, totally chaotic. When the JCS, the joint chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House, people in the White House, in the Oval Office, the vice president’s office, said, no, let’s keep it in the plan. They refuse to take it out. And what I’m writing here is that if this isn’t removed — and I say this very seriously. I’ve been around this town for 40 years — some senior officers are prepared to resign. They’re that upset about the fact that this plan is kept in. Again, let me make the point, you’re giving a range of options early in the planning. To be sure of getting rid of it, you give that option.
JACK STRAW, BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY: The idea of a nuclear strike on Iran is completely nuts.
BLITZER: He didn’t mince any words: “completely nuts” in his words. You want to react to that?
HERSH: Well, what he didn’t say — he didn’t deny that there’s serious planning about the military strike is the point. I mean, he’s absolutely right about a nuclear option, but there is serious planning for a conventional war.
WASHINGTON — Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 – as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.
The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was “preposterous” to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.
The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved. The phone records of calls to the White House were exhibits in Tobin’s trial but prosecutors did not make them part of their case.
Democrats plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.
Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002.
Besides the conviction of Tobin, the Republicans’ New England regional director, prosecutors negotiated two plea bargains: one with a New Hampshire Republican Party official and another with the owner of a telemarketing firm involved in the scheme. The owner of the subcontractor firm whose employees made the hang-up calls is under indictment.
The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004. Other calls from New Hampshire senatorial campaign offices to the White House could have been made by a number of people.
A GOP campaign consultant in 2002, Jayne Millerick, made a 17-minute call to the White House on Election Day, but said in an interview she did not recall the subject. Millerick, who later became the New Hampshire GOP chairwoman, said in an interview she did not learn of the jamming until after the election.
A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls – mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office – between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting.
There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.
Prosecutors did not need the White House calls to convict Tobin and negotiate the two guilty pleas.
Whatever the reason for not using the White House records, prosecutors “tried a very narrow case,” said Paul Twomey, who represented the Democratic Party in the criminal and civil cases. The Justice Department did not say why the White House records were not used.
The Democrats said in their civil case motion that they were entitled to know the purpose of the calls to government offices “at the time of the planning and implementation of the phone-jamming conspiracy … and the timing of the phone calls made by Mr. Tobin on Election Day.”
While national Republican officials have said they deplore such operations, the Republican National Committee said it paid for Tobin’s defense because he is a longtime supporter and told officials he had committed no crime.
By Nov. 4, 2002, the Monday before the election, an Idaho firm was hired to make the hang-up calls. The Republican state chairman at the time, John Dowd, said in an interview he learned of the scheme that day and tried to stop it.
Dowd, who blamed an aide for devising the scheme without his knowledge, contended that the jamming began on Election Day despite his efforts. A police report confirmed the Manchester Professional Fire Fighters Association reported the hang-up calls began about 7:15 a.m. and continued for about two hours. The association was offering rides to the polls.
Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.
“As policy, we don’t discuss ongoing legal proceedings within the courts,” White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said.
Robert Kelner, a Washington lawyer representing the Republican National Committee in the civil litigation, said there was no connection between the phone jamming operation and the calls to the White House and party officials.
“On Election Day, as anybody involved in politics knows, there’s a tremendous volume of calls between political operatives in the field and political operatives in Washington,” Kelner said.
“If all you’re pointing out is calls between Republican National Committee regional political officials and the White House political office on Election Day, you’re pointing out nothing that hasn’t been true on every Election Day,” he said.
THE Daily Mirror was yesterday told not to publish further details from a top secret memo, which revealed that President Bush wanted to bomb an Arab TV station.
The gag by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith came nearly 24 hours after the Mirror informed Downing Street of its intention to reveal how Tony Blair talked Bush out of attacking satellite station al-Jazeera’s HQ in friendly Qatar.
No 10 did nothing to stop us publishing our front page exclusive yesterday.
But the Attorney General warned that publication of any further details from the document would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
He threatened an immediate High Court injunction unless the Mirror confirmed it would not publish further details. We have essentially agreed to comply.
The five-page memo – stamped “Top Secret” – records a threat by Bush to unleash “military action” against the TV station, which America accuses of being a mouthpiece for anti-US sentiments.
Following the Mirror’s revelations, there were calls for the transcript of the memo to be released.
Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said: “If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration.
“On this occasion, the Prime Minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”
The White House yesterday said of the Mirror’s report: “We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response.”
Downing Street said: “We don’t comment on leaked documents.”
The memo turned up last year at the Northampton office of then-Labour MP Tony Clarke.
Civil servant David Keogh, 49, is now accused of passing the memo to Leo O’Connor, who once worked for Mr Clarke.
Both Mr Keogh and Mr O’Connor are due to appear in court next week on charges under the Official Secrets Act.
this is interesting, because i’ve actually been in treatment for bipolar disorder, and, in fact, a PhD psychiatrist "diagnosed" me with bipolar II a few years ago… now admittedly, she based her "diagnosis" on nothing more than an hour’s conversation with me (which is why i put "diagnosis" in quotation marks), but still…
You are moderately reserved, moody, unstructured, accommodating, and intellectual, and may prefer a city which matches those traits.
The largest representation of your personality type can be found in the these U.S. cities: Washington DC, Portland/Salem, Richmond, New Orleans, Norfolk, Denver, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York City, Indianapolis, San Antonio and these international countries/regions Slovenia, Croatia, Caribbean, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Belgium, Guam, Ukraine, Argentina, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Wales, Finland, Germany, Poland
now why would i want to live in a city or region of the world where a majority of other people are all like me? while it may be okay politically, my impression is that such a place would be extremely depressing…
You Belong in Amsterdam
A little old fashioned, a little modern – you’re the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam. Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city).
now amsterdam is an actual possibility. i’ve thought a lot about emigrating recently, and i’ve pretty much decided that it’s going to be either the netherlands or new zealand… but it’s all just a fantasy until something financial happens. 8/
CHARLOTTE, April 6 — Harry Taylor got the chance Thursday to do what frustrated liberals across the country have wanted to do for a long time: He stood up and told off the president.
And in its own way, that’s just what the White House wanted.
President Bush flew here for the latest of his open-forum events, an innovation for a leader who until recently stuck to scripted meetings with screened audiences. At a time of dwindling public support and of charges of Bush’s being isolated, the idea was to put him in front of crowds for spontaneous exchanges to show he is not afraid of criticism.
By the time Bush landed in Charlotte, these audience-participation sessions had produced some skeptical questions, some interesting back-and-forth, and even a few off-script comments by a famously disciplined president.
But until Taylor came along, no one had really gotten in Bush’s face. No one had really confronted him so directly on the issues of war and liberty that are at the heart of both his presidency and his political troubles. And no one had given him the opportunity to look unbothered by dissent.
“I would hope, from time to time, that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself,” Taylor told Bush after rattling off a litany of grievances.
Bush responded only to Taylor’s complaint about warrantless eavesdropping. “You said, would I apologize for that?” he said. “The answer is absolutely not.”
The dialogue interrupted a love fest here in a state Bush carried in both elections. Microphone in hand, Bush dispensed with the podium and text to wander the stage like a talk-show host. He presented himself as a reluctant warrior struggling with sending young men and women into harm’s way.
“It’s a decision I wish I did not have to make,” he said. In a nod to public frustration, he added: “If I didn’t think we could win, I’d pull them out. You just got to know that.”
The president boasted of building democracy and rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq, without mentioning that his administration is scaling back funding for both goals. And he seemed eager to re-litigate the original reasons for the invasion.
“I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I’m just as disappointed as everybody else is,” he said. But he added: “Removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing for world peace and the security of our country.”
The audience cheered boisterously as he slipped off his coat to take questions. The forum was sponsored by the nonpartisan World Affairs Council of Charlotte at Central Piedmont Community College, and the two institutions invited nearly 1,000 people.
Most of those who stood had only polite inquiries or statements of support. One man told Bush he prayed for him. A woman asked to have her picture taken with him and predicted “you will be vindicated.” Asked by another man what he would do differently, Bush mentioned the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. “I wish that could be done over,” he said. “It was a disgraceful experience.”
Then came Taylor, 61, a commercial real estate broker, who got Bush’s attention from the balcony.
“You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that,” Taylor told him. “But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food.”
Bush interrupted with a smile. “I’m not your favorite guy,” he joked, provoking laughter.
“What I want to say to you,” Taylor continued, “is that I, in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by, my leadership in Washington.”
Many in the audience booed.
“Let him speak,” Bush said.
“I feel like, despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration,” Taylor added.
Bush took it in stride but offered no regrets. In response, he dealt only with the National Security Agency program to eavesdrop without court approval on telephone calls and e-mails between people inside the United States and people overseas when one person is suspected of terrorist ties.
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did on the terrorist surveillance program, and I’ll tell you why,” Bush said, launching into his explanation of how he approved the program to avoid another Sept. 11. “If we’re at war,” he said, “we ought to be using tools necessary within the Constitution on a very limited basis, a program that’s reviewed constantly, to protect us.”
What made the exchange intriguing was its rarity. Bush is almost never confronted with strong, polite criticism. Hecklers sometimes make it into a speech, but when they stand up to shout, security agents remove them. Three Bush critics sued after they were ejected from an event in Denver.
In an interview afterward, Taylor said he had become an activist in recent years out of discontent with Bush and was pleasantly surprised he was allowed to challenge the president. “I didn’t think I’d be let in the room,” he said.
Bush hardly won him over, though. “I didn’t care about his response,” Taylor said. “I wanted to say what I wanted to say and I wanted him to know that despite being in a room with a thousand people who love him . . . there are plenty of people out there who don’t agree with him in any way, shape or form.”
what alarms me the most is that, in spite of bush repeatedly lying to the american public about everything from 9/11 to weapons of mass destruction, to sweetheart deals with corporate cronies to torturing prisoners to spying on american citizens to outing valerie plame, there are still people who would boo when a guy gets up and tells the president how he feels…
WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush authorized the leak to the media of classified material about Iraq, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney said according to court papers filed by prosecutors and made public on Thursday.
The aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, also testified that he was specifically directed by Cheney to speak to the media about the intelligence information and about Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had criticized Bush’s Iraq policy, according to the papers.
Libby has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice after an investigation into the leaking to the media of the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent, which Wilson says was done to pay him back for his criticisms.
The court documents made public on Thursday emerged from that investigation.
The reported authorization by Bush of disclosure of secret material in 2003 came at a time when the March 2003 Iraq invasion was being challenged after U.S. forces failed to find weapons of mass destruction, cited by Bush as the main reason for the action.
Bush had the authority to declassify and allow publication of the material. But the court papers said Libby noted “it was unique in his recollection” to get approval from the president, via the vice president, to discuss material with a reporter that would be classified if it were not for this approval.
The documents showed that Libby, testifying before a federal grand jury before his indictment, said that he got approval from Bush through Cheney to discuss the classified Iraq material with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
The former head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Presidents Ford and Carter has gone public to say that the official version of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory and his main suspect for the architect of the attack is Vice President Dick Cheney.
Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country’s foremost experts on National Security.
Bowman worked secretly for the US government on the Star Wars project and was the first to coin the very term in a 1977 secret memo. After Bowman realized that the program was only ever intended to be used as an aggressive and not defensive tool, as part of a plan to initiate a nuclear war with the Soviets, he left the program and campaigned against it.
In an interview with The Alex Jones Show aired nationally on the GCN Radio Network, Bowman stated that at the bare minimum if Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in 9/11 then the government stood down and allowed the attacks to happen. He said it is plausible that the entire chain of military command were unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack.
Bowman outlined how the drills on the morning of 9/11 that simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast were used as a cover to dupe unwitting air defense personnel into not responding quickly enough to stop the attack.
“The exercises that went on that morning simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD….that they didn’t they didn’t know what was real and what was part of the exercise,” said Bowman
“I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they’re the ones that should be the object of investigation.”
Asked if he could name a prime suspect who was the likely architect behind the attacks, Bowman stated, “If I had to narrow it down to one person….I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney.”
Bowman said that privately his military fighter pilot peers and colleagues did not disagree with his sentiments about the real story behind 9/11.
Bowman agreed that the US was in danger of slipping into a dictatorship and stated, “I think there’s been nothing closer to fascism than what we’ve seen lately from this government.”
Bowman slammed the Patriot Act as having, “Done more to destroy the rights of Americans than all of our enemies combined.”
Bowman trashed the 9/11 Commission as a politically motivated cover-up with abounding conflicts of interest, charging, “The 9/11 Commission omitted anything that might be the least bit suspicious or embarrassing or in any way detract from the official conspiracy so it was a total whitewash.”
“There needs to be a true investigation, not the kind of sham investigations we have had with the 9/11 omission and all the rest of that junk,” said Bowman.
Asked if the perpetrators of 9/11 were preparing to stage another false-flag attack to reinvigorate their agenda Bowman agreed that, “I can see that and I hope they can’t pull it off, I hope they are prevented from pulling it off but I know darn good and well they’d like to have another one.”
A mainstay of the attack pieces against Charlie Sheen have been that he is not credible enough to speak on the topic of 9/11. These charges are ridiculed by the fact that Sheen is an expert on 9/11 who spends hours a day meticulously researching the topic, something that the attack dogs have failed to do, aiming their comments solely at Sheen’s personal life and ignoring his invitation to challenge him on the facts.
In addition, from the very start we have put forth eminently credible individuals only for them to be ignored by the establishment media. Physics Professors, former White House advisors and CIA analysts, the father of Reaganomics, German Defense Ministers and Bush’s former Secretary of the Treasury, have all gone public on 9/11 but have been uniformly ignored by the majority of the establishment press.
Will Robert Bowman also be blackballed as the mainstream continue to misrepresent the 9/11 truth movement as an occupation of the fringe minority?
Bowman is currently running for Congress in Florida’s 15th District.
WASHINGTON – Succumbing to scandal, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday he will resign from Congress in the face of a tough re-election race, closing out a career that blended unflinching conservatism with a bare-knuckled political style.
“I have no fear whatsoever about any investigation into me or my personal or professional activities,” DeLay said in a statement to constituents. At the same time, he said, “I refuse to allow liberal Democrats an opportunity to steal this seat with a negative, personal campaign.”
He said the voters of his Houston-area district “deserve a campaign about the vital national issues that they care most about … and not a campaign focused solely as a referendum on me.”
DeLay relinquished the post as House majority leader last fall after his indictment in Texas as part of an investigation into the allegedly illegal use of funds for state legislative races. He decided in January against trying to get the leadership post back as an election-year corruption scandal staggered Republicans and emboldened minority Democrats.
Last week, former DeLay aide Tony Rudy pleaded guilty to conspiring with lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others to corrupt public officials, and he promised to help the broad federal investigation of bribery and lobbying fraud that already has resulted in three convictions.
Neither Rudy, Abramoff nor anyone else connected with the investigation has publicly accused DeLay of breaking the law, but Rudy confessed that he had taken actions while working in the majority leader’s office that were illegal. DeLay has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., a major player in congressional investigations of Abramoff and the lobbyist’s involvement with Indian tribes, said Tuesday that he respects DeLay’s decision to step down, and added, “I think there are other aspects of the Abramoff scandal that will be unfolding in the weeks ahead.”
McCain spoke to reporters following a speech to a Hispanic conference. President Bush said Tuesday that DeLay had informed him of his decision Monday afternoon.
“I wish him all the best,” Bush told reporters during a brief White House session, adding, “It had to have been a very difficult decision for someone who loved representing his district in the state of Texas.”
Bush said the Republican Party won’t suffer from DeLay’s decision to resign from Congress. “My own judgment is that our party will continue to succeed because we are the party of ideas.”
DeLay, an 11-term Texas lawmaker who turns 59 on Saturday, said he would make his resignation effective sometime before mid-June but contingent on the congressional calendar.
“He has served our nation with integrity and honor,” said Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who succeeded DeLay in his leadership post earlier this year.
But Democrats said the developments marked more than the end to one man’s career in Congress.
“Tom Delay’s announcement is just the beginning of the reckoning of the Republican culture of corruption that has gripped Washington for too long,” said Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. “From DeLay to Scooter Libby to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to Duke Cunningham, to Bob Ney, to David Safavian, the list of goes on and on.”
DeLay portrayed his decision to resign as a fatal blow for the fortunes of his opponent, Democrat Nick Lampson, who has garnered national attention – and financial support.
“As difficult as this decision has been for me, it’s not going to be a great day for liberal Democrats, either,” DeLay said. “My loyalty to the Republican Party, indeed my love for the Republican Party, has played no small part in this decision.”
Last month, DeLay capped a triumph in a contested GOP primary with a vow to win re-election.
It was not clear whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry would call a special election to fill out the unexpired portion of DeLay’s term, or whether the seat would remain vacant until it is filled in November.
Either way, DeLay’s concern about the potential loss of a Houston-area seat long in Republican hands reflected a deeper worry among GOP strategists. After a dozen years in the majority, they face a strong challenge from Democrats this fall, at a time when President Bush’s public support is sagging, and when the Abramoff scandal has helped send congressional approval ratings tumbling.
Until scandal sent him to the sidelines, DeLay had held leadership posts since the Republicans won control of the House in a 1994 landslide. DeLay quickly established himself as a forceful presence – earning a nickname as “The Hammer” – and he easily became majority leader when the spot opened up.
DeLay was the driving force behind President Clinton’s impeachment in 1999, weeks after Republicans lost seats at the polls in a campaign in which they tried to make an issue of Clinton’s personal behavior.
His trademark aggressiveness helped trigger his downfall, when he led a drive to redraw Texas’ congressional district boundaries to increase the number of seats in GOP hands. DeLay was soon caught up in an investigation involving the use of corporate funds in the campaigns of legislators who had participated in the redistricting.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday at his Maryland home on charges he used his computer in an attempt to seduce a child and transmitted harmful materials to a minor, according to the Polk County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office.
Brian J. Doyle, 55, is charged with seven counts of use of a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmission of harmful material to a minor, according to a sheriff’s office statement.
In interviews with police, Doyle confessed and has agreed to waive extradition to Florida, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
On March 12, according to a police statement, Doyle contacted a Polk County computer crimes detective posing online as a 14-year-old girl “and initiated a sexually explicit conversation with her … Doyle knew that the ‘girl’ was 14 years old, and he told her who he was and that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”
Judd said that Doyle, in the first conversation, told the detective his position with DHS and “started immediately into pretty vulgar language. He explained in graphic detail the sexual acts he wanted to perform with this 14-year-old.”
As the two continued chatting online, police said, Doyle gave her his home and office phone numbers, and the number to his government-issue cell phone. He also had explicit telephone conversations with a detective posing as the girl, authorities said.
In addition, he used the Internet to send “hard-core pornographic movie clips” to her, and also used an America Online instant-messaging service to have explicit online conversations with her.
“The investigation revealed that the phone numbers given to the detective were in fact Doyle’s, and that the AOL account was registered to him,” police said.
Doyle also sent photos of himself that were not sexually explicit, but said he would send nude photos if the “girl” would buy a Web camera and send him nude photos of herself. In one photo, Judd said, Doyle’s DHS security tag is clearly visible.
“Many of the conversations he initiated … are too extraordinary and graphic for public release,” a statement from the sheriff’s office said.
“I read the transcripts,” Judd said. “I wanted to see if this was just as outrageous as the detectives depicted it … It shocked all of us who have worked vice, narcotics, organized crime, homicides.”
A DHS spokesman said the agency would cooperate in the probe.
“We take these allegations very seriously,” Russ Knocke said, “and we will cooperate fully with the ongoing investigation.”
Doyle, Judd said, is divorced and has children. Authorities believe he could have held similar conversations online with others, Judd said, because at some points during online chats he would address the detective by the wrong name.
Doyle never attempted to arrange a visit, Judd said, but did mention knowing someone in the region.
Before Doyle was arrested Tuesday night at his home in Silver Spring, Judd said, the detective had told him that she had access to a Web camera and that her mother would be away, so “he was eager to rush home from work.”
As he was online, detectives from agencies including the U.S. Secret Service and the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department knocked on his door and served the arrest warrant, Judd said. They also executed a search warrant for his residence.
“We found his communication still on his computer with our undercover detective,” he said. “Had we not been posing as a 14-year-old, Brian Doyle would have been grooming someone, some young lady, for a sexual encounter.”
i’m still half asleep from yester two-days-ago performance (that ended yesterday), and i was hoping for a couple of days off, but apparently one of the zebra kings has requested a rehearsal for the burlesque nights today, so i’m going to haul my ass back to seattle for that. hopefully i will have caught up on sleep before wednesday, because it starts all over again (although my understanding is that the thursday and friday performances are only circus contraption shows, and won’t require us).
Here be dragons Mar 30th 2006 With luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological pet
PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.
GeneDupe’s business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.
Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe’s team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.
Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.
Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe’s scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal’s genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.
Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe’s enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe’s scientists can add a little evolution to their products.
Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.
Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe’s scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.
This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.
Readers with long memories may recall GeneDupe’s previous attempt to break into the pet market, the Real Goldfish (see article). This animal was genetically engineered to deposit gold in its skin cells, for that truly million-dollar look. Unfortunately Dr Fril, a biologist, neglected to think about the physics involved. The fish, weighed down by one of the heaviest metals in existence, sank like a stone, as did the project. He is more confident about his new idea, though. Indeed, if he can get the dragons’ respiration correct, he thinks they will set the world on fire.
For an undisclosed sum reputed to be in the billions, Microsoft’s Bill Gates has personally bought the leading open-source desktop project. Saying he “was sick and tired of open-source eating away at his profits,” the world’s richest man decided to put an end to the nuisance and simply buy OpenOffice.org. It will form part of a growing list of Microsoft acquisitions, including several erstwhile competitors, a considerable number of prominent politicians, and a few small governments.
The initially stunned OpenOffice.org community–a happy-go-lucky international band numbering in the hundreds of thousands–later turned to champagne to celebrate their newfound wealth. “Bless Bill!” one happy Torontonian exclaimed, bubbly in hand. “With all this money, I can beat Mark’s time in orbit!”
Gates has assured all current OpenOffice.org users that their future migration path to Microsoft Office is guaranteed thanks to OpenOffice.org’s faultless support of MS Office files formats. Users can further rest assured that the full functionality currently provided by OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be available in MS-Office 2020 – or possibly 2030.
it’s 9:0010:00 and moe still isn’t home from work. she called me at 7:00 to say that she was working late because they had an emergency dog-ate-two-foreign-bodies-connected-by-a-ton-of-string… sort of like what happened to ziggy when he ate the needle and 5 feet of thread, only worse. at least i know she’s not stranded somewhere or worse.
EDIT: she called at 10:15 to say that she’s on her way home, and her emergency dog survived.
okay, now that internet works again – need i say it? QWEST SUCKS RANCID DONKEY DICKS!!! because they disconnected our DSL service without warning or provocation on saturday. they said that we hadn’t paid our bill, in spite of the fact that we have the confirmation numbers that say we did. when we told them so, the IMBECILES took 48 hours to do nothing… and when i finally called again this morning, suddenly, we had internet service again within 15 minutes, which indicates to me that we could have had internet service within 15 minutes, TWO DAYS AGO but they couldn’t be bothered to fix their own mistake… grumble, mutter…
an interesting update to the stuff that’s going on here, apparently bill breeze, otherwise known as hymenaeus beta, erstwhile OHO of the caliphate OTO, and the complainant in the DMCA notification that was filed against me and my ISP, is apparently no longer a member of the caliphate OTO. he is now head of a “splinter group” and the caliphate OTO is, apparently, without an outer head, at least for the moment. i don’t expect the caliphate people can confirm any of this, and even if they can, i’m not sure they’d want to, but the whole thing is terrifically amusing, as the caliphate OTO have maintained that they are the only “real” OTO and all the others are “fakes” for a long time, while i have maintained that they’re all fighting like children over who is more important, and who was authorised by whom to do what, and ignoring The Great Work. here is an excellent example of what i am talking about.
the first weekend of drunk puppet night went more or less without a hitch, although whether i am going to be able to run lights and sound for them in the future is sort of questionable, as the current fixed lights in the theater are all on one two-position switch, and the guy who runs the columbia city theater is a snob and won’t let me touch the sound equipment. the good news is that the meat play impressed josh enough, and was well enough received that he’s going to include it as part of the show, so even if i don’t get to run lights and sound, i’ll still get paid for two more weeks of performances. also my understanding is that we have sold approximately 15 buttons, which isn’t a lot, but every little bit helps.
i’m going to an acupuncture appointment, then i’m going over to mercer island to pick up a business card from the vet clinic (they need two or three new cards, and i don’t have the original in a place where i can find it easily), then i’m going to opening night of drunk puppet night, where, at the last minute, i got 3 other people together and we’re going to do the meat play.
we got the car back from the body shop on monday. it was all shiny and new-looking, which is pretty dramatically different from what it looked like the last time i saw it… hopefully it will stay like this for a while… i expect it to collect road dirt, but not a deer.
this is weird. i’m sitting here waiting for an autosave, so that i can switch platforms and get the updated version of this post on a different platform… and it worked. very strange indeed.
thanks to , i found a resource for filing a "formal DMCA notification" without having to spend money for a lawyer, and as a result, the whole "offending" page at tokerlounge dot com has been taken down. that’s not to say that he’s still not hot linking other web sites, because, in fact, he is… and being the concientious businessman that i am, i went ahead and notified the four other sites that i was able to find (which is not to say there aren’t more, i just found four others in my idle perusing of his site) about this, so it’s likely that soon the whole site will come down and/or be completely redone with a different background (because one of the images that they’re hot linking is the background for the whole site). i don’t have anything in particular against this guy, but the fact that he hot links graphics means that it’s likely that he’s ignorant enough to get infected with a trojan or something like that, which would affect a lot more people than just christian hartmann.
i haven’t heard anything from christian hartman (the owner of tokerlounge dot com), but i heard from his host provider, which requests me to file a “formal DCMA notification” before they will do anything… typical bureaucracy… 8/ so i changed the graphic, and i got a link to the Comprehensive guide to .htaccess, which should give me some ideas about how i can deal with this without having to pay a lawyer to write me a “formal DCMA notification”.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — The Supreme Court, at full strength with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the bench for the first time, opened the next chapter in its long-running confrontation with abortion today by agreeing to decide whether the first federal ban on a method of abortion is constitutional.
The court accepted, for argument next fall, the Bush administration’s appeal of a decision invalidating the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion during which a portion of the fetus, either the “entire fetal head” or “any part of the fetal trunk past the navel,” is outside the woman’s uterus at the time the fetus is killed.
While the law’s supporters maintain that this technique is used only late in pregnancy, and that the law therefore does not present an obstacle to most abortions, abortion-rights advocates say the statute’s description applies to procedures used to terminate pregnancies as early as 12 or 13 weeks.
The law makes an exception for instances in which the banned technique is necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life, but not for preservation of her health, as the Supreme Court found necessary six years ago when it overturned a similar law from Nebraska.
In omitting a health exception, the federal law presents a direct threat to that precedent. In the federal statute, Congress included a “finding” that “partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother” and that “there is no credible medical evidence that partial-birth abortions are safe or are safer than other abortion procedures.”
The four doctors who went to Federal District Court in Lincoln, Neb., to challenge the federal law, including Dr. Leroy Carhart, who had brought the earlier challenge to the Nebraska state law, disputed the Congressional findings. They said the method was safer under some conditions and could preserve some women’s fertility by avoiding such complications as punctures from bone fragments inside the uterus.
The trial judge, Richard G. Kopf, who had earlier found the Nebraska law unconstitutional, said the plaintiffs had demonstrated that the Congressional findings were “unreasonable.” He declared the federal law unconstitutional in a 269-page opinion, issued in September 2004. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, upheld that decision last July, leading to the administration’s Supreme Court appeal, Gonzales v. Carhart, No. 05-380.
Last month, two other federal appeals courts, the Second Circuit in New York and the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, declared the statute unconstitutional in separate lawsuits. All three courts issued injunctions barring enforcement of the law.
Ever since Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, in 1973, the court has required exceptions for health as well as life in any regulation of abortion. But the vote in the Nebraska case, Stenberg v. Carhart, was 5 to 4, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the majority. It is highly likely, therefore, that her successor, Justice Alito, will be in the position to cast the deciding vote. The dissenters in the Nebraska case were Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy, along with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who has since been replaced by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
After the court’s announcement this morning, groups on both sides of the abortion debate tried to attach some significance to the decision to accept the case. In fact, it would have been highly unusual for the court to turn down the appeal. A lower court’s invalidation of a federal statute has an almost automatic claim on the justices’ attention, even those justices who may view the decision as correct or those who may not necessarily agree in this instance with the Bush administration’s description of the case as “extraordinarily important” and requiring immediate review.
The court had the administration’s appeal under review since early January. It may have deferred action as a courtesy to Justice Alito, who participated in his first closed-door conference with the other justices last Friday.
Or, equally likely, the justices set the case aside while they finished work on a New Hampshire abortion case that also raised a question about a medical exception to an abortion regulation, in that instance a requirement that a teenage girl notify a parent and then wait 48 hours before obtaining an abortion.
In what proved to be Justice O’Connor’s final opinion before retirement, that case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, was decided on Jan. 18. The unanimous opinion restated the court’s longstanding insistence on an exception for medical emergencies but, in its list of precedents, pointedly omitted reference to the Nebraska case from six years ago, its most recent treatment of the subject.
In the Bush administration’s brief in the new case, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement said the appeals court should have given “substantial deference” to the Congressional findings on the lack of need for a health exception. Such deference was not at issue in the Supreme Court’s earlier case, he said, because that case concerned a state rather than federal law.
Representing the plaintiffs, who include Drs. William G. Fitzhugh, William H. Knorr, and Jill L. Vibhakar, in addition to Dr. Carhart, the Center for Reproductive Rights told the justices in its brief that the Congressional findings were not entitled to the deference that courts usually apply when evaluating legislation.
“The facts at issue here involve the current state of medicine, physicians’ testimony about patients they have cared for, medical conditions they have treated and the impact of abortion techniques on the health of these patients,” the brief said, adding that Congress does not have “a particular expertise in the area of medicine, as it does in the area of nationwide economic regulatory schemes.”
The organization, based in Manhattan, was known as the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy when it represented Dr. Carhart in the earlier case.
and this one goes in the “if alito had been presiding over this case, it would have come out entirely differently” department… 8/
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that a small congregation in New Mexico may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a four-hour ritual intended to connect with God.
Justices, in their first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church’s religious practice. Federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the hoasca tea of the Brazil-based church, Roberts wrote in the decision.
The tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.
New Justice Samuel Alito did not take part in the case, which was argued last fall before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before her retirement. Alito was on the bench for the first time on Tuesday.
Roberts said that the Bush administration had not met its burden under a federal religious freedom law to show that it could ban “the sect’s sincere religious practice.”
The chief justice had also been skeptical of the government’s position in the case last fall, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a “zero tolerance approach.”
The Bush administration had argued that the drug in the tea not only violates a federal narcotics law, but a treaty in which the United States promised to block the importation of drugs including dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT.
“The government did not even submit evidence addressing the international consequences of granting an exemption for the (church),” Roberts wrote.
The justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court, which could consider more evidence.
Roberts, writing his second opinion since joining the court, said that religious freedom cases can be difficult “but Congress has determined that courts should strike sensible balances.”
The case is Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, 04-1084.
The planet’s population is projected to reach 6.5 billion at 7:16 p.m. EST Saturday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and its World Population Clock.
Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century thinker who famously predicted the human population would outrun its food supply, would be astounded.
Back in 1798, when Malthus penned his classic An Essay on the Principle of Population, barely a billion Homo sapiens roamed the planet. Today, Earth’s population teeters on the brink of a new milestone: 6.5 billion living, breathing humans.
“Malthus would be astonished not only at the numbers of people, but at the real prosperity of about a fifth of them and the average prosperity of most of them,” said demographer Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller and Columbia universities. “He wouldn’t be surprised at the abject poverty of the lowest quarter or third.”
The clock, which operates continuously, estimates that each second 4.1 people are born and 1.8 people die. The clock figures are estimates, subject to error, given the difficulties of maintaining an accurate global population count.
However, the key concept — that population levels are growing, but at a slower rate than in the past few decades — reflects the consensus view of demographers. The current growth of world population, estimated by Cohen at 1.1 percent a year, has slowed significantly from its peak of 2.1 percent annual growth between 1965 and 1970.
“That’s a phenomenal decline,” said Cohen, who probed the question of whether population growth is sustainable in his book, How Many People Can Earth Support?. (The short answer: It depends.)
Today, a large portion of the world’s population lives in nations that are at sub-replacement fertility, meaning the average woman has fewer than two children in her lifetime. Countries in this camp include former members of the Soviet Union, Japan and most of Europe.
Demographers attribute the slowing rate of global population growth in part to more-widespread availability of birth control and to people in developed nations choosing to have fewer children. But low-birthrate countries are counterbalanced by nations like Yemen, where the average woman has seven children in her lifetime.
The highest population growth rates emanate disproportionately from the poorest regions of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
U.S. population is also growing at a steady clip, augmented by high numbers of immigrants. It is projected to hit 300 million later this year. Earth’s population is expected to reach 7 billion in 2012, according to the Census Bureau.
Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, sees urbanization contributing to slowing growth, because urban areas typically have lower birthrates than rural areas. In 1950, less than 30 percent of people lived in areas defined as urban. Next year, the United Nations projects that more than half the world’s population will be urban.
As population growth marches forward, debate continues in academia — as it has since Malthus’ time — over how many people the Earth can realistically support.
Certainly individual countries, such as Bangladesh or Rwanda, can be characterized as overpopulated, said Haub. But in other places, such as India, it’s harder to determine the extent to which overpopulation — rather than other social and economic factors — contributes to poverty.
Some turn to mathematical models for estimating maximum sustainable population levels.
One metric modeled on the Census Bureau’s population clock compares world population to the finite supply of arable land.
For his part, Cohen estimates that if we want to support individuals indefinitely — allotting each person 3,500 calories per day from wheat and 247,000 gallons per year of fresh water — the planet has room for only about 5 billion people.
But such formulas are subject to tinkering. Changes in agricultural practices, more efficient water-desalination technologies and a host of other factors can increase the number of people the planet can support. Shifts in behavior — such as acceptance of new food sources that are cheap to produce — can have a similar effect, noted Cohen.
“What most of this commentary neglects is the role of culture in defining wheat as food but not, let’s say, cultured single-cell algae,” he said.
Sneaky, cunning, and spiritual: You are a Druid Druids work with nature to cast their spells and favor balance over extremes. They’re shapeshifters, capable of taking the forms of natural creatures. While they don’t always deal well with people, they do have animal companions to come to their aid. You are probably intelligent, spiritual, and more than a little deceptive. Fortunately, your lack of violent tendencies means you are also likely to be level-headed.
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
i’m not sure whether to be annoyed or amused or what, but i discovered that one of my pipe graphics is being used, without my permission, by tokerlounge dot com. i was going through my web stats and i noticed that the objects directory was consistently higher hit rate than the incense directory, despite the fact that i’ve essentially taken the pipes offline since i don’t have a worshop… i’m inclined to be annoyed, since they used the graphic from my web page on their web page, without providing a link or any clue that the graphic wasn’t theirs, and then had the balls to post “dont copy or redistribute any content on this site, without giving proper credit to tokerlounge” at the bottom of the page. i wrote to the administrative contact for the domain, and i also wrote to the host service for the web site… and i just got an email back from the web host service… now we’ll see what happens next.
it’s obvious that other people probably will end up writing to this guy as well. there’s another graphic that is not resident on tokerlounge dot com on the same page with my pipe, and i’m going to bet that, judging by the skillz of the guy who coded the HTML, there are a few other graphics that he stole from other web sites on other pages of his web site as well. if he would link to my site, and copy the graphic on to his web host, i wouldn’t have anywhere near as much of a problem with this, but as it is currently, i’m pretty pissed off at this guy.
also, if you’re ever looking for sound effects, a good place to avoid is soundrangers dot com, in spite of the fact that they are located here in seattle. i ordered some sound effects from them recently, and without giving me an option not to recieve spam from them, they sent me spam. it is my understanding that such behaviour is illegal in the state of washington, and it may well be illegal under federal statute as well, but one way or the other, i don’t do business with spammers, so i’m no longer a customer of theirs.
okay, now that i’m done venting about that asshat majid, i have finally calmed down enough to write about the opening weekend of drunk puppet night.
the opening was in the winningstad theatre, where it was last year… unfortunately there are no actual pictures of the puppet shows because i was too busy running sound. i stayed with lance, who is the guy whose job is to run the technical aspects of this theatre… which means from top to bottom if you want some kind of theatre magic, lance is the guy to ask. they have 300 hanging lights, and another 100-200 in a room backstage in case that wasn’t enough, that are all controlled by a board in the booth, which also houses all the audio gear and a separate board for that. josh needed a piece of gel for one of his shadow puppet sets and lance took us into a back room where they have every colour gel imaginable, all classified according to the catalogue number. we decided that the winningstad is where we want to do all of our performances, but lance says that “menopause: the musical” has bought the theatre for the next year, with options to extend another year, so next year we’re probably going to have drunk puppet night in portland in a different theatre. i got there with no clue where i was going to stay, so i was grouped with a couple of other folks from seattle who were supposed to stay at the emcee’s house, but there was only enough room for two, so i actually got to stay with lance. he and his wife both work for tears of joy puppet theatre, which was our sponsor, and they have a futon in their basement. they also have huge quantities of a wide variety of geckos and skinks in their basement, apparently lance also breeds them – for what… i didn’t ask… just the fact that they were there was cool enough for me – and, thus, they have crickets in their basement as well, which are gecko food. they also have a parrot and an iguana and a dog named dozer who was apparently starved for attention.
the first night was kind of sparse, but al franken was appearing in the theatre next door, and everybody apparently went to see him instead (slobs), but the second night there was actually a full house, which was a lot better than we expected, considering that (or because of, we weren’t able to determine which) the emcee, a guy named rale sidebottom, was smoking and drinking on stage during the performance, and was actually “fired” from his job as emcee by someone in the audience.
i got up sunday morning and left portland by 9:30 and drove straight to port townsend for the lantern festival. i arrived in port townsend at around 1:00 and spent a couple hours wandering around and re-acquainting myself with fort worden. there have been some changes at the cistern which lead me to believe that somebody official has gained access for some official purposes, but has restricted all other access. the whole area has been mowed, and the two tanks full of concrete that used to be over the access hole have been moved to the side, and a new access hole, with a steel door and a lock, has been added. because of the fact that the area was mowed, i actually discovered a second, and, potentially, a third and a fourth access point that leads to the cistern which i didn’t know about previously. one of them has a similar door and lock, and the other two can probably be accessed with a pry bar and some muscle. it’s good that someone has been looking after the space, in spite of the fact that i couldn’t get in myself. i did some harmonic singing in one of the mortar batteries, underground in the powder room, to make up for, once again, not being able to access the cistern.
around 3:30 or so i went down to the jefferson county municipal field, which is where the lantern festival was being held. it was fairly sunny in port townsend yesterday, but when the sun went down (which, coincidentally, was when we started to play) it was suddenly evident that it was the pacific northwest in the middle of february. fortunately i had my burnoose, and my tuba was as good as a camel, as long as i was playing. unfortunately there were a lot of breaks at first, and when i stopped playing, and especially when i (frequently) had to put my horn down to get a piece of music that fred came up with on the spur of the moment, but wasn’t in the line up, it got really cold, really fast. the performance itself went surprisingly well considering that only 6 of the 25 people in the show were at the dress rehearsal last weekend. nobody caught fire that wasn’t supposed to.
it was all over, finally, around 8:30, and i drove through tacoma and got home by 10:30… whereas if i had gone through bremerton, it would have meant a 3 hour wait for the ferry to seattle, and then another 45 minutes from seattle. and i did it all without a map, despite the fact that i haven’t driven up the olympic peninsula since before my injury. i shouldn’t have worried about it… the roads tell me where to go… 8)
then, when i came home, our blindingly cute little doggie was in the bedroom, with her nose under the door, and i had to share the blinding cuteness with all of you…
ergh… i got back from portland drunk puppet night, and the port townsend lantern festival last night, but before i write about that, i’ve got to vent about majid again… in spite of the fact that he fired me in october!!!
i was working on the photos for the afore mentioned show when i got email from majid. he needs my help… apparently his server went down, and when it came up again there was no font directory on the macs. i know exactly what happened, and could probably fix it without any difficulty whatsoever, within about 10 minutes, but i don’t know if i want to… after all, he fired me in october!!!
what i would like to do is two different things, which are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. the first thing i want to do is delete the email and ignore any further requests from him. the other thing is that i want to tell him that i can fix it for $125 an hour, with an hour minimum, and then go in, fix it, and leave again without saying anything to anyone, including majid. actually there’s a third thing, which is also mutually exclusive of the other two, which is ream majid a new asshole via email.
unfortunately, i’ll probably end up doing the “professional” thing and doing the 2nd option, but it really gets to me that i can’t do either the first or the third options without seeming like i am the one who is an asshole… 8/
for those of you with appropriate technology, there is a 1963 video of frank zappa on the steve allen show which i’ve heard the audio for, but never actually seen…
the washington quarter is due to be minted next year. there are currently 3 candidates, of which i, personally, feel that #3 is the preferable one. if you’re a resident of the state of washington, maybe you’ll get a vote in the final decision. if not… stay away, ’cause we’ve already got far too many people from other states here, and they’re clogging traffic and contributing to smog.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that an executive order gives him the authority to declassify secret documents, but he would not say whether he authorized an indicted former aide to release classified information.
Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, told a grand jury he was “authorized by his superiors” to disclose classified information from an intelligence estimate on Iraq to reporters, the special prosecutor investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA agent’s identity told Libby’s attorneys. The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, did not identify who those “superiors” are.
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Cheney said the case was “nothing I can talk about.” But he said he had the authority to declassify material under an executive order that “focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.”
He would not disclose whether he had exercised that authority, however.
Libby was indicted in October on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators probing the July 2003 exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had just emerged as a critic of the pre-war intelligence underpinning the invasion of Iraq when her identity was disclosed.
According to Fitzgerald, Libby met on July 8, 2003, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller to give her information regarding the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The document included much of the information used to justify the invasion of Iraq earlier that year.
But a legal source involved in the case tells CNN that Libby has never suggested and did not testify that anyone in the administration — including Cheney — authorized outing Plame.
Cheney declined to discuss the investigation but said he had “cooperated fully” with the special prosecutor. And he suggested he may have to testify in Libby’s trial, now tentatively set for January 2007.
“Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence,” the vice president said. “He’s a great guy. I’ve worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it’s, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.”
Cheney’s remarks came during an interview in which he accepted responsibility for the weekend shooting of a companion during a south Texas quail hunt.
The wounded man, 78-year-old Harry Whittington, remained in intensive care in a Corpus Christi hospital on Wednesday.
The incident’s belated disclosure left the White House fending off questions for three days and fueled renewed criticism of the vice president, with Democrats calling it symbolic of an administration obsessed with secrecy.
now let me get this straight… in an investigation to discover who outed plame, i seem to recall cheney vowing that whoever was responsible would face extreme and dire consequences… but when it turns out that he is the one who was actually responsible, suddenly he has the power to declassify information and nothing was done wrong… including his shooting “his friend”, harry whittington…
does that make sense to you, or does it sound like more back-pedalling and ass-covering?
Chicago, IL (AHN) – The American Bar Association objects to President Bush’s domestic spying program. The lawyers’ group accuses the White House of exceeding his power, and is calling for special court warrants for similar spying in the future.
The Bush Administration says warrant-less eavesdropping is legal under the President’s constitutional powers as commander-in-chief and congressional authorization for the use of military force adopted days after the September 11 attacks. The program bypassed secret courts created under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA) that grant warrants.
The ABA’s resolution calls on Mr. Bush “to abide by the limitations which the Constitution imposes on a President” to make sure national security is protected in a way that is consistent with constitutional guarantees. It opposes “any future electronic surveillance inside the United States by any U.S. government agency for foreign intelligence.”
An investigation into the prison at Guantanamo Bay says the US committed acts amounting to torture, including force-feeding and prolonged periods of solitary confinement.
The report by five human rights experts from the UN accused the US of violating the detainees’ rights to a fair trial, to freedom of religion and to health.
It recommended that the US close the detention centre and revoke all special interrogation techniques authorised by the US Department of Defence.
The draft report said: “The apparent attempts by the US administration to reinterpret certain interrogation techniques as not reaching the threshold of torture in the framework of the struggle against terrorism are of utmost concern.”
US officials rejected the report, saying it was riddled with errors and treated statements from detainees’ lawyers as fact.
Its most significant flaw, officials said, was that it judged US treatment of detainees according to peace-time human rights laws.
US position The US contends that it is in a state of conflict and should be judged according to the laws of war.
An official from the US State Department said: “Once you fail to even acknowledge that as the legal basis for what we’re doing, much of the legal analysis that follows just doesn’t hold.”
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the US has not formulated an official public response.
The draft report was delivered to the US on 16 January. It was first disclosed late on Sunday by the Los Angeles Times, and a copy was obtained by journalists.
The five experts have mandates that cover torture, freedom of religion, health, independent judiciary and arbitrary detention. They started working together in June 2004 to monitor conditions at Guantanamo Bay.
Important UN group They were appointed to their three-year terms by the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission, the global body’s rights watchdog.
The US holds about 500 people on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban government at the base in Guantanamo. It has filed charges against 10 detainees.
The draft report, which will be presented to the next session of the commission, dismissed the US claim that the “war on terror” constitutes an armed conflict.
It also said the detainees at Guantanamo Bay had a right to challenge their detention, and that right was being violated.
Criticism The report said: “In the case of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, the US executive operates as judge, as prosecutor, and as defence counsel. This constitutes serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial.”
The five experts had sought invitations from the United States to visit Guantanamo Bay since 2002. When it was offered last year, they turned it down because they were told they would not be allowed to interview detainees.
On Monday, US officials faulted the experts for rejecting the invitation, saying it undermined the accuracy of their findings.
Uighur case Meanwhile, lawyers for two Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay want a federal appeals court to order their release inside the US.
In court papers filed on Monday, lawyers for Abu Bakker Qassim and A’Del Abdu al-Hakim, captured in Pakistan in 2001, said they should be released because the US military found that they are not “enemy combatants”.
The lawyers want the appellate court to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who ruled in December that the men are being detained illegally but said he could not force the U.S. government to release them.
The two men, along with several other Uighurs, have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 because the US government has been unable to find a country willing to accept them. US officials cannot send them back to China because of the possibility they would be tortured or killed.
Treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay constitutes torture in some cases and violates international law, a leaked UN draft report says.
The document, seen by the Los Angeles Times, suggests that investigators will recommend the prison camp is shut down.
It also questions the legal status of the camp and the classification of detainees as enemy combatants.
The US State Department has criticised the draft report as “hearsay”.
‘Force-fed’ The Los Angeles Times published the draft report in its paper on Monday and spoke to one of the authors, the UN special raporteur on torture, Manfred Novak.
“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government. There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture,” Mr Nowak told the LA Times.
The report suggests some of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay meets the definition of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture.
This includes the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes and the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques such as prolonged solitary confinement and exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light.
The UN team also questions the legal status of the Guantanamo camp.
It says insufficient effort has been made to prove that the inmates really are enemy combatants.
It also recommends the prison camp is shut down.
“The US government should close Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay,” the report says. “The US government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial … or release them without further delay.”
‘Spurious claims’ Mr Nowak was one of five UN envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families during the past 18 months.
nvestigators rejected an invitation to tour the base in Cuba because they would not have been allowed to interview the prisoners directly.
The US State Department has criticised the findings.
“Just because they decided not to take up the US government on the offer to go to Guantanamo Bay does not automatically give [them] the right to publish a report that is merely hearsay and not based on fact,” spokesman Sean McCormack said.
UN officials will include responses from the US government before the report is officially released at the end of the week.
Mr Nowak says that nothing of substance will be altered when the final report is issued.
The investigation was ordered by the UN Commission on Human Rights.
The camp at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects, many of them captured in Afghanistan.
The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame’s work. Their accounts suggest that Plame’s outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program.
While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan’s nuclear “father,” A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.
Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.
Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of the Administration’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.
Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.
The damages Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame’s work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in “severe” damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA’s ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.
Plame’s team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan’s network in the course of her work on Iran.
While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.
Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a “counter intelligence assessment to agency operations” was conducted on the orders of the CIA’s then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.
Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.
“An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment,” Johnson said. “That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA.”
One former counterintelligence official described the CIA’s reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: “[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public,” the source said. “They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed.”
The source described the findings of the assessment as showing “significant damage to operational equities.”
Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described “operational equities” as including both people and agency operations that involve the “cover mechanism,” “front companies,” and other CIA officers and assets.
Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.
Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to “ten years” in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson’s identity.
A.Q. Khan While Plame’s work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.
Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.
The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.
According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan’s dismissal.
“It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem,” Pike said. “It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had.”
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States’ chief regional ally in the war on terror.
The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame’s work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House’s decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran’s possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.
If you read enough numbers, you never know what you’ll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.
Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.
His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.
If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You’re not alone. Bush didn’t pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.
First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security,” even though, as I said, he’d never submitted specific legislation.
Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress “to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” adding that the commission would be bipartisan “and offer bipartisan solutions.”
But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget.
“The Democrats were laughing all the way to the funeral of Social Security modernization,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy told me in an interview Tuesday, but “the president still cares deeply about this. ” Duffy asserted that Bush would have been remiss not to include in the budget the cost of something that he feels so strongly about, and he seemed surprised at my surprise that Social Security privatization had been written into the budget without any advance fanfare.
Duffy said privatization costs were included in the midyear budget update that the Office of Management and Budget released last July 30, so it was logical for them to be in the 2007 budget proposals. But I sure didn’t see this coming – and I wonder how many people outside of the White House did.
Nevertheless, it’s here. Unlike Bush’s generalized privatization talk of last year, we’re now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.
In the first year of private accounts, people would be allowed to divert up to 4 percent of their wages covered by Social Security into what Bush called “voluntary private accounts.” The maximum contribution to such accounts would start at $1,100 annually and rise by $100 a year through 2016.
It’s not clear how big a reduction in the basic benefit Social Security recipients would have to take in return for being able to set up these accounts, or precisely how the accounts would work.
Bush also wants to change the way Social Security benefits are calculated for most people by adopting so-called progressive indexing. Lower-income people would continue to have their Social Security benefits tied to wages, but the benefits paid to higher-paid people would be tied to inflation.
Wages have typically risen 1.1 percent a year more than inflation, so over time, that disparity would give lower-paid and higher-paid people essentially the same benefit. However, higher-paid workers would be paying substantially more into the system than lower-paid people would.
This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security’s political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned benefit.
Bush is right, of course, when he says in his budget proposal that Social Security in its current form is unsustainable. But there are plenty of ways to fix it besides offering private accounts as a substitute for part of the basic benefit.
Bush’s 2001 Social Security commission had members of both parties, but they had to agree in advance to support private accounts. Their report, which had some interesting ideas, went essentially nowhere.
What remains to be seen is whether this time around Bush follows through on forming a bipartisan commission and whether he can get credible Democrats to join it. Dropping numbers onto your opponents is a great way to stick your finger in their eye. But will it get the Social Security job done? That, my friends, is a whole other story.
CAMBRIDGE, Md. – The eavesdropping tables were turned on President Bush on Friday. The president apparently believed he was speaking privately when he talked about listening in without a warrant on domestic communications with suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas. But reporters were the ones doing the listening in this time.
The incident happened at a House Republican retreat. After six minutes of public remarks by the president, reporters were ushered out. “I support the free press, let’s just get them out of the room,” Bush said, intending to speak behind closed doors with fellow Republicans and take lawmakers’ questions.
When reporters left, Bush spoke about the National Security Agency program that he authorized four years ago and which has drawn criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
However, the microphones stayed on for a few minutes. That allowed journalists back at the White House to eavesdrop on Bush’s defense of the eavesdropping. His private statements were basically no different from what he’s said in public.
“I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions,” Bush began. “First of all, I expect this conversation we’re about to have to stay in the room. I know that’s impossible in Washington.”
this is a stereogram. to view it, let your eyes cross, so that there appears to be three images, and focus your gaze on the image in the middle… something interesting will happen in the center of the middle image. if you need a hint, take a look here and try again… if you still can’t see it, the answer is here.
went to a “rehearsal” for sunday’s performance last night. of the 25 people that have confirmed that they are going to be in the performance, only six showed up for what looks like it’s going to be the only rehearsal that we’re going to have before then, which isn’t too encouraging, particularly since we’re going to be performing in the dark with fire… this morning i got up, took moe to work, shipped stuff out, and came home before 9:00. we bought a collapsible dog crate from costco, that broke over the weekend, so i called and made arrangements to take it back, but i don’t know if i’ll get another one or if they don’t have any more in stock… and i probably won’t know until i actually get there.
Religious Discrimination For the second time in as many months, Starbucks management has kicked SWU member Suley Ayala out of the workplace for wearing her modest Pentagram necklace. Ms. Ayala is a practicing Wiccan and as a religious observance never takes off the necklace. She wore the necklace at Starbucks without interruption for three years until the company started harassing her after she and a group of her co-workers went public as members of the Starbucks Workers Union on November 18, 2005. Since then various management officials have badgered her and sent her home for refusing to take off the necklace. Ms. Ayala is extremely distraught and understandably angry.
Management can’t even get its story straight, sometimes saying no religious symbols are allowed and other times saying the necklace is too distracting. All the while, baristas wearing crosses of the same modest size have never been disciplined. Our opinion is that Starbucks is exploiting Suley’s non-traditional religion to retaliate against her for union activity.
The Fight Back As a mother of four working hard to make ends meet, being disrespected by the company and losing a day’s earnings are the last things Ms. Ayala needs. We’re asking people of good will from all religions or no religion at all to join our fight. An indigenous Ecuadorian, Suley has struggled hard to win material gains on the job for her family and she’s not about to back down on her right to freely practice her religion.
Last Tuesday after Suley was sent home following a lull in the harassment, a co-worker and fellow union member asked her for the necklace. Tomer Malchi, a
Jew, put the necklace on and he too was confronted by management. In a moving act, Mr. Malchi refused to take off the Pentagram in solidarity with his sister worker. He was ousted from the workplace. Since then SWU members and supporters have been leafleting in front of the store to get the word out about Starbucks’ reprehensible conduct. Suley Ayala has filed a religious discrimination complaint against Starbucks with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, the government won’t win this fight for us, grassroots action will. In response to the union’s outrage, Starbucks has backed down a bit. Management now says that Ms. Ayala can wear a miniature version of the Pentagram. But that’s not enough. Suley wore her Pentagram without incident for three years. Why should she be arbitrarily disciplined now that she is a union member? We demand that she be allowed to wear her original Pentagram and receive compensation for the days she was sent home early.
Take Action Before we formed the Starbucks Workers Union, the tyrants at the company could treat us like servants and we had no recourse to fight back. No longer. We will not tolerate religious discrimination against any of our members whether Wiccan, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist, or any other world view. Please take a stand with us for religious liberty in the workplace. Together we can create a truly global labor movement.
Call Starbucks District Manager Kim Vetrano NOW and demand that Suley be allowed to freely observe her religion while at work and that she be compensated for the work hours she missed:
Our community of Dildo is situated in a deep narrow cove at the entrance point of Dildo Arm, Dildo and South Dildo. It is at the South side of Trinity Bay, some 96 km. from St. John’s. This community is close to good fishing grounds and the cod fishery was always the basis for this community. Later in the twentieth century, this community became a flourishing whaling community. A museum in the nearby town of South Dildo shows the history of whaling. Our school is in Dildo. There is another school called Woodland Junior High located here, too. However, we have other buildings here. There is the Interpretation Centre for our town, which has fishery-related artifacts from the past. Outside this museum there is a large giant squid, of actual size, made from fiberglass. There is also a tepee made with sticks and covered with seal skin.
Our commmunity also has a Lion’s Center, which has a large playground where boys and girls can go to play safely. We can play field hockey, soccer, tennis, and volleyball. The Lions Club also sponsors many activities for our community such as parities, dances, and suppers. This building is used by many groups throughout the community.
Dildo, today with a population of about 700 people is a very interesting community to visit.
1. (left) a gallery of black and white pictures that were taken during an acid trip in approximately 1983. these photos are on fading negatives that have never been printed, so the quality is a little poor, but it definitely catches the feelings that i was having at the time. location is downtown seattle, and the sea tac airport (this was a long time before 11 september, 2001…
2. (right) a gallery of various pictures of ezra from 1984 to 1989 or thereabouts.
3. (below) a gallery of photos from the past, including one that may be NSFW, so beware. also includes at least one that won’t be of any meaning to you unless you were there.
4. (left, small) a gallery of some of the more interesting musical instruments and some of the more difficult jobs that have been repaired by Nataraja Music Service, and some of it’s different locations since 1986.
most of these galleries will expand as time goes on. i just discovered that i have the ability to process regular negatives into reasonably acceptible digital photos, and i have a huge quantity of negatives of a variety of subjects that have never been printed before, and plenty of time to scan them.
took moe to work so that i can have the car today. shipped stuff out. bought some screens. did some grocery shopping, but didn’t find what i wanted. i suspect that i won’t find it out here in the boonies, in spite of the fact that safeway is supposed to be more or less the same store regardless of where you find it. they had what i was looking for when we lived in renton, which is a lot closer to seattle, but far enough out that they could be pretty well assured of some indians coming in to the store, but out here in “unincorporated” king/pierce county, they’re not as likely to get people who want indian food, and i doubt they will carry an item that only one of their customers wants… it’s time to start making the rounds of the numerous small asian markets along highway 99, which i’ve been avoiding because the signs are in chinese or korean and i suspect that their knowledge of english is minimal at best… ’cause they’re bound to have something similar, and potentially a lot better…
we still haven’t heard anything new about the van, which is making me nervous since i have to use the car on wednesday during the time when i know moe will be wanting to use it, and even if that works out, i’m going to portland next friday and saturday, and then going directly to port townsend on sunday, so i’m going to need my car, more-or-less with no strings attached, and i’ve gotten no indication that those strings are going to be adequately attached to someone else’s car for that period of time. moe said that she was going to call them today, so i won’t start worrying about it just yet.
it’s things like this that make me wonder how long it’s going to have to be before we, the people, take action to preserve this democracy against those who would take it from us, whether those people are our leaders or not.
The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration’s unauthorized wiretapping.
Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.
“It’s hardball all the way,” a senior GOP congressional aide said.
The sources said the administration has been alarmed over the damage that could result from the Senate hearings, which began on Monday, Feb. 6. They said the defection of even a handful of Republican committee members could result in a determination that the president violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such a determination could lead to impeachment proceedings.
Over the last few weeks, Mr. Rove has been calling in virtually every Republican on the Senate committee as well as the leadership in Congress. The sources said Mr. Rove’s message has been that a vote against Mr. Bush would destroy GOP prospects in congressional elections.
“He’s [Rove] lining them up one by one,” another congressional source said.
Mr. Rove is leading the White House campaign to help the GOP in November’s congressional elections. The sources said the White House has offered to help loyalists with money and free publicity, such as appearances and photo-ops with the president.
Those deemed disloyal to Mr. Rove would appear on his blacklist. The sources said dozens of GOP members in the House and Senate are on that list.
So far, only a handful of GOP senators have questioned Mr. Rove’s tactics.
Some have raised doubts about Mr. Rove’s strategy of painting the Democrats, who have opposed unwarranted surveillance, as being dismissive of the threat posed by al Qaeda terrorists.
“Well, I didn’t like what Mr. Rove said, because it frames terrorism and the issue of terrorism and everything that goes with it, whether it’s the renewal of the Patriot Act or the NSA wiretapping, in a political context,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican.
Q: Does the president think he should obey the law? He put his hand on the Bible twice to uphold the Constitution. Wiretapping is not legal under the circumstances without a warrant.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Well, I guess you didn’t pay attention to the attorney general’s hearing earlier today, because he walked through very clearly the rationale behind this program.
Q: There is no rationale —
MR. MCCLELLAN: And Helen, I think you have to ask —
Q: — (inaudible) — the law.
MR. MCCLELLAN: I think you have ask are we — well, he’s not — are we a nation at war.
Q: That’s not the question.
MR. MCCLELLAN: No, that is the issue here.
Q: The question is, the point is, there are means for him to go to — get a warrant to spy on people.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Enemy surveillance is critical to waging and winning war. It’s one of the traditional tools of war.
Q: But he says he doesn’t have running room —
MR. MCCLELLAN: The attorney general outlined very clearly today how previous administrations have used the same authority —
Q: That doesn’t make it legal.
MR. MCCLELLAN: — and cited the same — and cited the very same authority.
Q: (Inaudible) — they broke the law, that’s too bad.
MR. MCCLELLAN: And we’re going to continue doing everything we can —
Q: You know what happened to Nixon when he broke the law.
MR. MCCLELLAN: — within our power to protect the American people. This is a very different circumstance, and you know that.
President George Bush led a crowd of 10,000 mourners at yesterday’s funeral for Coretta Scott King, one of the icons of the civil rights movement, only to squirm in his seat as one speaker after another invoked Mrs King’s spirit to lambast his administration on everything from the Iraq war to the response to last year’s Hurricane Katrina.
The lavish occasion, bringing together civil rights veterans, three former presidents, more than a dozen senators, musicians and poets at a megachurch in the suburbs of Atlanta, was both a tribute to the woman who carried on the campaigning legacy of her assassinated husband, Martin Luther King Jr, for almost 40 years and also an opportunity to invoke some of the Kings’ passionately outspoken rhetoric.
President Bush called Mrs King, who died 10 days ago at the age of 78, “one of the most admired Americans of our time”.
Her nearest and dearest pointedly did not return the compliment. “We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there,” said Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr King more than 40 years ago, “but Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here.”
The Rev Lowery issued a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s economic priorities. “For war billions more,” he said, “but no more for the poor.”
Far better received than President Bush was Bill Clinton, who won an enthusiastic ovation as he described how Mrs King might easily have given up the civil rights struggle after her husband’s assassination in 1968. Instead, he said, she asked herself “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
U.S. policy appears to be "we don’t torture unless it serves our purpose, and then we don’t admit it, or, preferably, let our ‘allies’ take care of it so that we can say it doesn’t reflect negatively on us"… 8/
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government wants an Iraqi court to handle criminal charges against a naturalized American citizen who is being held in Iraq on suspicion that he is a senior operative of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The man’s lawyers said he is innocent and likely to be tortured if he is handed over to the Iraqis.
The case is the first known instance in which the government has decided to allow an American to be tried in the new Iraqi legal system. At least four other U.S. citizens suspected of aiding the insurgency had been held in Iraq, the Pentagon has said.
Shawqi Omar, 44, who once served in the Minnesota National Guard, has been held since late 2004 in U.S.-run military prisons as an enemy combatant. He has not been charged with a crime or been given access to a lawyer, said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer representing Omar’s family in the United States.
The government said Omar, who also holds Jordanian citizenship, was harboring an Iraqi insurgent and four Jordanian fighters at the time of his arrest and also had bomb-making materials. He is described in court papers as a relative of Zarqawi who was plotting to kidnap foreigners from Baghdad hotels.
Separately, Omar, Zarqawi and 11 others have been indicted by a Jordanian court on charges they plotted a chemical attack against Jordan’s intelligence agency.
Omar’s family said he is a businessman who was seeking reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
The family is asking a U.S. judge to step in and force the government to charge Omar with a crime and put him on trial in the United States, or release him. They also are seeking to prevent Omar’s transfer to Iraqi custody, which they said would subject the Sunni Muslim to torture by Shiite-dominated authorities.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina last week issued an order in Washington temporarily blocking Omar’s transfer to Iraqi custody. The order is set to expire on Monday, but the judge could extend it.
The Justice Department weighed in on Tuesday, arguing that Urbina has no business intervening on Omar’s behalf and denying that Omar is even in U.S. custody.
Instead, the department said in court papers, Omar was captured by the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq and remains in its custody, the department said in court papers. The multinational force is independent of the U.S. government, the department said.
In any event, Omar would not be handed over to the Iraqis unless he is convicted in an Iraqi court, the government said.
Hafetz, a lawyer at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the government is resorting to a legal gimmick to keep Omar’s case out of American courts. “It’s legally incorrect and factually incorrect to say the U.S. does not have control of him,” Hafetz said.
In July, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said five unnamed Americans, including one who also had Jordanian citizenship, were in U.S. military custody in Iraq. Whitman said then that the government had not decided whether their cases would be turned over to the Justice Department or to the new Iraqi legal system, which has handled the prosecution of other foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqi government.
In March, Matthew Waxman, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said a panel of three U.S. officers determined the Jordanian-American was an enemy combatant and not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention. The description provided by Waxman and other officials matches Omar’s biography as contained in the government’s court papers.
In its filing Tuesday, the Justice Department said the officers were part of the multinational force.
Omar became a U.S. citizen in 1986, two years after he served in the National Guard. Omar spent about 11 months in the Guard before being discharged in November 1984 without completing his training, said Shannon Purvis, a spokesperson for the Minnesota National Guard. Omar received an “uncharacterized discharge,” meaning he was discharged for such things as health problems or poor performance, Purvis said.
Non-citizens can serve in the Guard as long as they obtain citizenship within eight years of joining, Purvis said.
more updates for Seattle Agility Center including a new EAT page, and pictures for another, plus a surreptitious update to two more EAT pages in an attempt to start organising their web site a little more logically. more updates for Capitol Hill Neighborhood Acupuncture, including changing the message, link and order on a javascript rollover that i didn’t create, which is pretty good considering that i never really learned javascript. all in all, they came out pretty well, in that you can’t tell that they’re not original unless you really look, but the fact that his site doesn’t validate really bugs me and i want to change it… unfortunately that means totally replacing the whole site, and not just chris’ part of it, so for now i’m keeping my hands to myself. got an order for bhutanese temple incense today that i was able to prepare for shipping within 5 minutes of receiving the order. i like it when that happens.
when i had my injury, i lost consciousness on the way to the hospital, and regained consciousness 10 days later. during that period of time i was apparently conscious and responding to commands, but i don’t remember any of it. instead i had this bizarre, vivid hallucination of an opera, which i fully intend to write and produce eventually. here’s what i’ve got so far:
opening my skull and performing surgery is like opening the hood and performing maintenance. the surgeon and the auto mechanic perform the same services, only on a different level.
a big show-piece with a large chorus of men and women dressed in 50’s-style, white uniforms. this also features a young, eager person of indetermite sex, all in a white 50’s-syle uniform, although different from the rest of them, buying an alchohol-powered tow-truck from a somewhat-sleazy car dealer in a white, pin-striped suit.
open with the imression that it’s going to be a musical about cars, then morph into psychedelic brain-surgery with oversized, flashing backgroud of angiogram graphics, then finish with explanation of how brain surgery and auto mechanics are the same thing.
—-
introduction: about cars and trucks, how they are used every day, how they break down and who the people are who fix them. music is ragtime/dixieland/marching band style.
the chorus is in white tuxedos with hats and canes and are doing complicated dance steps in a grid pattern, on multiple levels
introduction of the young, eager, idealistic person of indeterminate sex: how s/he wants to be one of these people.
the person should be clean-shaven, with a blonde pageboy bob, and slightly chubby, in a white uniform with a tie, and a floppy uniform hat with a bill. throughout the performance, it should not be made obvious whether the person is male or female.
the song of the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman.
the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman should be a short, skinny person with a pencil-thin moustache and greased back hair in a grey pinstriped suit that’s slightly too big, and shoes that would match if they weren’t clown-sized.
duet between the person of indeterminate sex and the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman: combining his/her interest with becoming a tow-truck driver, lack of skill and desire to learn with the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman’s desire to sell something, anything to anyone at all.
an alcohol-powered truck appears: alcohol versus gasoline – the differences and similarities, whether gas or alcohol has more power.
the truck is sold, much to the amazement of everyone. the person of indeterminate sex is seen driving down a dirt road lined with trees.
we are left with an image of the truck lumbering off into rolling hills in the distance, on a dirt farm road, lined with trees, with the person of indeterminate sex waving their uniform hat out the window.
we need some repair: the truck is put to use, much to the amazement and delight of everyone… or could it be that the tow-truck itself needs repair? we may never know, because:
psychedelic morph: the music changes, the uniform and tuxedos change from white to red and everything is overlayed with movies of angiograms.
the music changes gradually from ragtime/dixieland/marching band style music to heavy rock with screaming guitars
introduction of the two repair men: one is a doctor, with bag, mask, occulus and stethescope, the other is a car mechanic in a grease stained, pin-striped coverall (the return of the somewhat-sleazy used truck salesman?) and cap, with a wrench and hand rag, but for the most part they move and act as one person.
the repair: the hood goes up and we tinker with the engine. the skull opens up and we tinker with the brain. the movies change to stills of angiograms but there is still an overall red cast to everything.
the repairmen: auto-mechanics and brain-surgeons are the same thing; both make things go.
the repairmen part 2: auto-mechanics perform brain-surgery on a car while brain-surgeons perform engine maintenance on a human. complex, indian-style pas-de-deux with repairmen.
finale: has this performance been about auto maintenance or brain surgery?
Soldier pays for armor Army demanded $700 from man who was wounded
By Eric Eyre February 07, 2006
The last time 1st Lt. William "Eddie" Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood.
A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook’s right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again.
But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago.
He was leaving the Army for good because of his injuries. He turned in his gear at his base in Fort Hood, Texas. He was informed there was no record that the body armor had been stripped from him in battle.
He was told to pay nearly $700 or face not being discharged for weeks, perhaps months.
Rebrook, 25, scrounged up the cash from his Army buddies and returned home to Charleston last Friday.
"I last saw the [body armor] when it was pulled off my bleeding body while I was being evacuated in a helicopter," Rebrook said. "They took it off me and burned it."
But no one documented that he lost his Kevlar body armor during battle, he said. No one wrote down that armor had apparently been incinerated as a biohazard.
Rebrook’s mother, Beckie Drumheler, said she was saddened – and angry – when she learned that the Army discharged her son with a $700 bill. Soldiers who serve their country, those who put their lives on the line, deserve better, she said.
"It’s outrageous, ridiculous and unconscionable," Drumheler said. "I wanted to stand on a street corner and yell through a megaphone about this."
Rebrook was standing in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when the roadside bomb exploded Jan. 11, 2005. The explosion fractured his arm and severed an artery. A Black Hawk helicopter airlifted him to a combat support hospital in Baghdad.
He was later flown to a hospital in Germany for surgery, then on to Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington, D.C., for more surgeries. Doctors operated on his arm seven times in all.
But Rebrook’s right arm never recovered completely. He still has range of motion problems. He still has pain when he turns over to sleep at night.
Even with the injury, Rebrook said he didn’t want to leave the Army. He said the "medical separation" discharge was the Army’s decision, not his.
So after eight months at Fort Hood, he gathered up his gear and started the "long process "to leave the Army for good.
Things went smoothly until officers asked him for his "OTV," his "outer tactical vest," or body armor, which was missing. A battalion supply officer had failed to document the loss of the vest in Iraq.
"They said that I owed them $700," Rebrook said. "It was like ‘thank you for your service, now here’s the bill for $700.’ I had to pay for it if I wanted to get on with my life."
In the past, the Army allowed to soldiers to write memos, explaining the loss and destruction of gear, Rebrook said.
But a new policy required a "report of survey" from the field that documented the loss.
Rebrook said he knows other soldiers who also have been forced to pay for equipment destroyed in battle.
"It’s a combat loss," he said. "It shouldn’t be a cost passed on to the soldier. If a soldier’s stuff is hit by enemy fire, he shouldn’t have to pay for it."
Rebrook said he tried to get a battalion commander to sign a waiver on the battle armor, but the officer declined. Rebrook was told he’d have to supply statements from witnesses to verify the body armor was taken from him and burned.
"There’s a complete lack of empathy from senior officers who don’t know what it’s like to be a combat soldier on the ground," Rebrook said. "There’s a whole lot of people who don’t want to help you. They’re more concerned with process than product."
Rebrook, who graduated with honors from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., spent more than four years on active duty. He served six months in Iraq.
Now, Rebrook is sending out resumes, trying to find a job. He plans to return to college to take a couple of pre-med classes and apply to medical school. He wants to be a doctor someday.
"From being an infantryman, I know what it’s like to hurt people," Rebrook said. "But now I’d like to help people."
If there is someone on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.
you know who you are… 😉
oh, by the way… i have an interview today. i was feeling really discouraged the other day, so i went to the martin luther king center web site and found a volunteer position at a local center, helping people who lack computer skills gain them. i don’t know whether this will be in the form of teaching classes, or just being overseer for a computer lab somewhere, and i’m not sure how long i will last before i go nuts, but it’s better than doing nothing.
EDIT: barring anything negative on my background check (which i can’t imagine, but anything is possible, especially these days) i will have a five-hour-per-week volunteer position on or about the 20th. whee.
Hybrid Elephant report: i shipped out two orders on saturday, got one ready to ship out today, and, if fedex gets here before i have to leave, i’ll have one to ship out tomorrow. average successful requests per day is 988, and has been going up steadily during the past few weeks, but average successful requests for pages per day is only 347, which is fewer than it was last week or the week before, which tells me that i’ve been getting a ton of hits from robots, but fewer actual people… which is good in a way, i suppose, but i’d rather have paying customers than lookie-loo robots, especially when the robots have been looking places that they shouldn’t recently anyway… 8/ i got a big order from aroma harbor of franklin, georgia, which i had to refund because they need the fragrance right away and i am completely out of stock of almost everything they ordered. i’m probably still going to order it, but now it can wait until i actually have need of it.
NEW YORK (AP) – Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of The Munsters whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 95.
Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.
“To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement,” White said.
Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne’s ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on Car 54, Where Are You?
But Lewis’ life off the small screen ranged far beyond his acting antics. A former ballplayer at Thomas Jefferson High School, he achieved notoriety as a basketball talent scout familiar to coaching greats like Jerry Tarkanian and Red Auerbach.
He operated a successful Greenwich Village restaurant, Grandpa’s, where he was a regular presence – chatting with customers, posing for pictures, signing autographs.
Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green party candidate against incumbent Governor George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as Grandpa Al Lewis.
He didn’t defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes.
Lewis was born Albert Meister in upstate New York before his family moved to Brooklyn, where the 6-foot-1 teen began a lifelong love affair with basketball. He later became a vaudeville and circus performer, but his career didn’t take off until television did the same.
Lewis, as Officer Schnauzer, played opposite Gwynne’s Officer Francis Muldoon in Car 54, Where Are You? – a comedy about a Bronx police precinct that aired from 1961-63. One year later, the duo appeared together in The Munsters, taking up residence at the fictional 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
The series, about a family of clueless creatures plunked down in middle America, was a success and ran through 1966. It forever locked Lewis in as the memorably twisted character; decades later, strangers would greet him on the street with shouts of Grandpa!
Unlike some television stars, Lewis never complained about getting typecast and made appearances in character for decades.
“Why would I mind?” he asked in a 1997 interview. “It pays my mortgage.”
Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the ’90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the Federal Communications Commission.
He also popped up in a number of movies, including the acclaimed They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Married to the Mob. Lewis reprised his role of Schnauzer in the movie remake of Car 54, and appeared as a guest star on television shows such as Taxi, Green Acres and Lost in Space.
But in 2003, Lewis was hospitalized for an angioplasty. Complications during surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee and all the toes on his left foot. Lewis spent the next month in a coma.
A year later, he was back offering his recollections of a seminal punk band on the DVD Ramones Raw.
He is survived by his wife, Karen Ingenthron-Lewis, three sons and four grandchildren.
“Is something burning in here? Oh, it’s just me.” You’re a total nutball who will do anything for attention. The first to take a dare, you’ll pull almost any stunt. You’re one weird looking creature, but your chickens don’t mind!
the electricity was out yesterday… it’s what we get, i suppose, for living at the end of a rural gravel road that you have to drive down another gravel road to get to. i suppose the idea of a generator wouldn’t be too out of the question, but not until i can afford a workshop.
the weather was fairly nice today, so i put up the tarp over the holes in the roof, and put roofing goo on the leaky spots near the chimney. woo hoo.
i was forced to take down a section of the web that has been there for at least 5 years that i can recall, and probably a lot longer than that, because the Caliphate O.T.O.’s web crawler finally figured out where i had stashed Liber CDXIV. in spite of all their bluster, they haven’t been able to prove that they actually own the copyright to a piece that should be in the public domain by now anyway, but i’ve had to take it down because i can’t afford to defend myself against a group who thinks it’s okay to violate uncle al’s specific request that people involved in the great work not file lawsuits against one another… feh!
here it is, three days after the SOTU, and already bush has broken two of his promises already… so bush lied. who is surprised? what surprises me is that we’re not in the middle of an impeachment already. don’t any of you remember NIXON? what is so different about bush?
President Bush has moved slowly to fill top civil liberty and privacy posts.
The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But it took the Bush administration a full year after passage of the bill to fill the position last Dec. 7.
The current DNI is former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte. His deputy is ex-National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden, who, for the last month, has been vigorously defending the NSA eavesdropping program that circumvented federal wiretapping laws. Alexander W. Joel was appointed to the civil liberties post days before The New York Times revealed that the NSA was spying on Americans’ overseas communications.
Bush mentioned the spy plan in his State of the Union address Tuesday, calling it a "terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America."
The White House has also failed to nominate a replacement chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, a post that’s been vacant since September when Nuala O’Connor Kelly left the administration to become General Electric’s privacy officer. The office is currently being run by O’Connor Kelly’s former deputy, Maureen Cooney.
Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies.
The privacy board was also created by the Reform Act, which translated the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations into law. According to the 9/11 Commission report, the board should make sure that antiterrorism powers "actually materially enhance security and that there is adequate supervision of the executive’s use of the powers."
"The civil liberties board is supposed to be the first contact for the president to talk about privacy and intelligence matters," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We didn’t know about the NSA piece when the intelligence-reform bill was put forward, but it would have been helpful to have the experts at the civil liberties board involved at the beginning."
Bush named the board’s members in June, but did not forward the nominations to the Senate until late September.
Carol E. Dinkins, a former deputy attorney general under President Reagan and a partner at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former law firm, is slated to head the commission, while Alan Charles Raul, who served under President George H.W. Bush, will be the vice chairman.
Both had confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 8, but the committee will not likely vote on their nominations until at least early February, according to a commission staffer.
The Senate should move quickly, according to Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration.
"Recent revelations show even more clearly why the board is needed," Swire said. "The White House has had no privacy officials, and having privacy expertise in the White House will reduce the chance of mistakes going forward."
The White House did not return a call for comment.
hmmm… this is odd… why do you suppose that nobody noticed this when it was happening back in july and august of last year!!
and while we’re at it, somebody needs to remind those people in china and iran that…
There is no such thing as a dirty word, nor is there a word so powerful that it’s going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it. –Frank Zappa
WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense has developed a new strategy in counterterrorism that would increase military activities on American soil, particularly in the area of intelligence gathering.
The move is sparking concern among civil liberties advocates and those who fear an encroaching military role in domestic law enforcement.
In an argument that eerily foreshadowed the July London terror attacks, the Pentagon in late June announced its "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Support," which would expand its reach domestically to prevent "enemy attacks aimed at Americans here at home."
The strategy, approved by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England on June 24, argues that the government needs a multi-layered, preventive approach to national defense in order to combat an unconventional enemy that will attack from anywhere, anytime and by any conceivable means.
"Transnational terrorist groups view the world as an integrated, global battlespace in which to exploit perceived U.S vulnerabilities, wherever they may be," reads the 40-page document that outlines the new plans.
"Terrorists seek to attack the United States and its centers of gravity at home and abroad and will use asymmetric means to achieve their ends, such as simultaneous mass casualty attacks," it said.
Critics say the fears raised by the Pentagon are being used as a justification for the military to conduct wider, more intrusive surveillance on American citizens.
"Do we want, as a free people, with the notion of privacy enshrined in the Constitution and based on the very clear limits and defined role of government, to be in a society where not just the police, but the military are on the street corners gathering intelligence on citizens, sharing that data, manipulating that data?" asked former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a constitutional law expert and civil libertarian.
"This document provides a blueprint for doing just that."
Barr said the new strategy is a back-door means of following through with a 2002 plan to create a massive, centralized information database using public and private records of individuals, called "Total Information Awareness." Congress killed TIA in 2003 because of civil liberties and privacy concerns.
Critics say they believe much of TIA lives on in some form through smaller, undisclosed military contracts. This latest plan, they say, is one way of jump-starting TIA’s initial goals.
"This is TIA back with a vengeance," said Barr. "What they have come up with here is a much vaguer and much broader concept that sounds more innocuous. [The Pentagon] is getting much smarter in how to sell these things."
The Defense Department report says its increased surveillance capabilities at home will adhere to constitutional and privacy protections, even though it emphasizes enhancing current "data mining" capabilities.
"Specifically, the department will develop automated tools to improve data fusion, analysis, and management, to track systematically large amounts of data and to detect, fuse and analyze aberrant patterns of activity, consistent with U.S. privacy protections," the report reads.
It will also develop "a cadre of specialized terrorism intelligence analysts within the defense intelligence community and deploy a number of these analysts to interagency centers for homeland defense and counter-terrorism analysis and operations," states the report.
Some national security experts agree that emboldened surveillance on domestic soil is necessary in the global War on Terror, and that such intelligence could prevent the kind of attacks perpetuated by homegrown terrorists in England on July 7 and 21.
"The Defense Department has always done intelligence operations in the United States. They have the legal right to do that. There is nothing new here," James Carafano, a homeland security analyst with The Heritage Foundation, told FOXNews.com. "There are no new threats to privacy or constitutionality. I just think it’s about doing [intelligence] more efficiently and effectively."
But John Pike, founder of GlobalSecurity.org , a clearinghouse of available intelligence and national security information, says it’s not so clear how much data the Pentagon will be collecting on citizens and whether it will be retaining, sharing and building individual dossiers. So far, the lack of detail leaves as many question as answers, he said.
"The bad news is there is certainly the possibility of a return to the sort of domestic surveillance that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s," Pike said.
Pentagon officials declined to comment on the variety of data it would gather and share, or how long it would retain files on individuals under the new homeland defense plan.
The Washington Post reported recently that among the databases being built by the Pentagon is a military recruitment list of individual high school and college students culled from commercial data brokers and other sources. The military is planning to share the database with federal and state law enforcement agencies if necessary, the Post reports.
A Defense Department spokesman said the military’s domestic role in homeland security will remain a supportive one, and the Pentagon will only provide resources when local, state and federal resources and capabilities "have been exceeded or do not exist."
"We have expanded activities in order to better execute support missions, but we are extremely sensitive to the historically restricted, limited role of the Defense Department," the spokesman told FOXNews.com in an e-mailed response to questions.
The Pentagon’s new strategy appears to dovetail with a recent report by The New York Times, that said the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, which outlines the future vision of the military and is due to Congress in February, will reflect a new approach in which the Defense Department will prepare to fight in one war theater at a time while putting the bulk of its resources into homeland defense.
The strategy approved by military officials in June also increases joint training exercises with first responders and other agencies as well as the creation of National Guard-staffed teams in case of a catastrophic attack.
The president would have to authorize the actual use of troops on military soil in order to adhere to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military involvement in domestic law enforcement. Pentagon officials say the new strategy won’t require that authorization.
But the strategy does includes more collaboration with law enforcement in "support" roles on all levels of counter-terrorism efforts as well as the monitoring of terrorist threats along the borders, in the air and on water.
"If they find information in the course of their business that might help other agencies, then they can share it. If other agencies in their own intelligence gathering find information that can help the Defense Department, they can share that," said Carafano. "I really don’t see any legal or constitutional issues here."
WASHINGTON – Free speech advocates are frustrated with a host of American companies they say have been collaborating with oppressive regimes in countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to help them filter and monitor the Internet activity of their citizens.
Big technology names like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco Systems have been criticized roundly in recent years for providing foreign governments with the tools they need to crack down on Internet use, but critics say they have not been able to do much more than complain.
"These companies’ lack of ethics is extremely worrisome," said Lucie Morillon, the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group for journalists that monitors government repression of the Internet worldwide, documenting dissidents charged with breaking their country’s Internet laws. For instance, the organization reports that an estimated 60 "cyber-dissidents" are in Chinese jails today.
"It’s the role of watchdog organizations like ours — and any citizen who is willing — to let these companies know that this is a matter of human rights," Morillon said. "Write to these companies and make them feel bad."
Critics last month blasted Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, when it acknowledged that it was working with the Chinese government to censor its new Chinese-language Web portal and new free Web log tool, MSN Spaces.
In addition to the vigilant filtering of content transmitted through Web sites, e-mail, message boards, chat rooms and blogs, the Communist government in Beijing announced in June that everyone in China publishing a blog would have to register it with the government by the end of the month.
Already, anyone who opens a Web account in China must register it with police, according to the Open Net Initiative, a collaborative effort by the University of Toronto, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
"China’s Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," ONI authors declared in a recent report on China. "The implications of this distorted online information environment for China’s users are profound, and disturbing."
According to the ONI, about 15 to 20 nations across the globe are actively filtering their citizens’ Internet access. In June, the group announced that Iran’s filtering efforts are reaching the sophisticated status of China.
"Iran is also one of a growing number of countries, particularly in the Middle East region, that rely upon commercial software developed by for-profit United States companies to carry out the core of its filtering regime," ONI’s report on Iran reads. "In effect, Iran outsources many of the decisions for what its citizens can access on the Internet to a United States company, which in turn profits from its complicity in such a regime."
ONI reported that Iran relies on filtering software designed by U.S.-based Secure Computing, called "SmartFilter." It helps block a range of banned words, topics and images — most of which Tehran says contradict the country’s strict Muslim beliefs.
Unlike China, selling technology to Iran is illegal because of U.S. sanctions. David Burt, spokesman for Secure Computing, said that the big Iranian Internet service providers, which are controlled by the government, are using SmartFilter illegally.
"We have no contracts with any ISPs in Iran. A couple of the biggest ones are illegally using our software," said Burt. "I think our options of going after these foreign companies are limited."
But Secure Computing legally provides its software to other countries that filter Internet content, including Saudi Arabia. "We sell to ISPs all over the world," acknowledged Burt. "It’s really up to the customer on how they use the product."
Representatives from Nortel and Cisco said they do not specifically design their technology for regimes like China to repress Internet access. They say they cannot control the use of the technology once it is enabled. For instance, the firewall that Cisco designed to combat viruses can also be used to block political content that the government does not like.
"Cisco has been and will continue to be a key driver of Internet growth worldwide," said spokesman John Earnhardt. "Cisco Systems has not specially designed any products for any government, or any regional market, to block or filter content. The products that Cisco Systems sells in the U.S., China, India, Pakistan, France, Mexico, etc. are the same products that we sell worldwide."
The fact that U.S. companies like Nortel Networks and Cisco Systems have been silent on what they consider the misuse of their technology by governments creating back doors into monitoring Internet use and filtering capabilities, has angered many.
"I think that companies chartered in free countries ought to ask the question, ‘What is our technology being used for in authoritarian [countries], and is it a purpose that we want to be behind?’" said Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and assistant professor of law at Harvard University.
Dick D’Amato, chairman of the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which has held hearings on the Chinese Internet filtering issue, called the companies’ explanations a "copout."
"They know what’s being done with [the technology]," he said. "They need to be held accountable for what they are doing."
Western companies providing technology to authoritarian governments say that playing by the rules of the host country is the price they pay for doing business there.
"MSN (Microsoft Network) abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," an MSN spokesperson told FOXNews.com.
Yahoo! made a similar argument two years ago, and continues to do so as critics complain that the regime censors its Yahoo! China portal.
"Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based," Yahoo! said in a statement to FOXNews.com.
But the watchdogs don’t buy it — especially, they say, when the Chinese government prohibits any political dissent, even to the point of blocking out searches that include words like "democracy," as well as international news sites of which the government does not approve.
D’Amato said the commission, which reports to Congress, hopes to put pressure on these companies by bringing them in for hearings, soon.
"I’m not so sure they’ll come," he said. "They’re running for cover."
You scored as Discordian. You are a Discordian! That makes you a real oddball, and this is a fact in which you take great pride! Everything is funny, and really, who cares anyway? Synchronicity is the Great Cosmic Comedy, and meaning is where you find it! Have you hugged your paradigm today?
i put a favicon on The Seattle Agility Center, but i’m not gonna tell anyone about it and see how long it takes until somebody associated with the center (other than moe, who reads this journal occasionally) notices and says something about it.
the shipment of murtis came in on monday and i shipped out murtis on tuesday. another shipment of incense is supposed to be here tomorrow, and i’ve got another shipment of incense that i don’t know when it’s supposed to get here, and the suppliers haven’t called me back, so i’m getting a little worried. steven has been flaky – as usual – but he’s apparently back in reality for the moment, so i’m probably going to order some stuff from him within a week or so. i’m considering putting some more “hippie-type” stuff (meaning “less spiritual-type stuff”) on Hybrid Elephant, but i have been hesitating because i don’t have a very clear idea of what the market is, whether it is more hippy-type people that are looking for spiritual-type stuff, or whether it is more spiritual-type people. i wouldn’t want to drive away what customers i have…
WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that’s where the greatest oil supplies are.
The president’s State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that “America is addicted to oil” and his call to “break this addiction.”
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing “more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”
He pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”
Not exactly, though, it turns out.
“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.” The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.
Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. “I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region,” he said.
Through the first 11 months of 2005, the United States imported nearly 2.2 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. That’s less than 20 percent of the total U.S. daily imports of 10.062 million barrels.
Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.
Alan Hubbard, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, projects that America will import 6 million barrels of oil per day from the Middle East in 2025 without major technological changes in energy consumption.
The Bush administration believes that new technologies could reduce the total daily U.S. oil demand by about 5.26 million barrels through alternatives such as plug-in hybrids with rechargeable batteries, hydrogen-powered cars and new ethanol products.
That means the new technologies could reduce America’s oil appetite by the equivalent of what we’re expected to import from the Middle East by 2025, Hubbard said.
But we’ll still be importing plenty of oil, according to the Energy Department’s latest projection.
“In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand … up from 58 percent in 2004,” according to the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.
Some experts think Bush needs to do more to achieve his stated goal.
“We can achieve energy independence from the Middle East, but not with what the president is proposing,” said Craig Wolfe, the president of Americans for Energy Independence in Studio City, Calif. “We need to slow the growth in consumption. Our organization believes we need to do something about conservation” and higher auto fuel-efficiency standards.
WASHINGTON — A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any “special event of national significance” away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn’t in attendance at the time.
The measure has civil libertarians protesting what they say is yet another power grab for the executive branch and one more loss for free speech.
“It’s definitely problematic and chilling,” said Lisa Graves, senior counsel for legislative strategy at the American Civil Liberties Union , which has written letters to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, pointing out that the provision wasn’t subject to hearings or open debate.
Some conservatives say they too are troubled by the measure.
“It concerns me greatly,” said Bob Barr, former U.S. prosecutor and Republican representative from Georgia. “It clearly raises serious concerns about First Amendment rights.”
But not everyone agrees that rights are being trampled on by the additional provision. In fact, some say the ACLU is the problem when it comes to protecting national security.
Rocco DiPippo, a freelance writer for the conservative FrontPageMagazine.com and editor of The Autonomist Web log , said the ACLU has fought the government every step of the way over security measures following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“Its opposition to Specter’s reasonable proposal is simply more of the same,” he said. “I can understand the concern that we should be suspicious of government, but we shouldn’t adopt this mindset: ‘government is evil.’ This is just more hatred of (President) Bush.”
Under current law, the Secret Service can arrest anyone for breaching restricted areas where the president or a protected official is or will be visiting, but the new provision would allow such arrests even after those VIPs have left the premises of any designated “special event of national significance.” The provision would increase the maximum penalty for such an infraction from six months to one year in jail.
In a post-Sept. 11 world many non-political events have been designated National Special Security Events and would rise to the higher status. Examples of possible NSSEs are the Olympics or the Super Bowl. In 2004, the presidential inaugural balls and President Ronald Reagan’s June funeral procession in Washington, D.C., were designated NSSEs.
According to government sources with knowledge of the legislation, Secret Service protection and law enforcement authority would extend beyond protecting a specific person, rather the event itself would become the “protectee.”
Currently, non-violent demonstrators who enter restricted areas at such events previously would be arrested and charged by local law enforcement with simple trespassing, said Graves. Under the provision included in the new law, they will be charged with felonies by the Secret Service.
“It’s a different consequence to people,” she said.
“You are talking about giving the executive branch broader authority to create these exclusion zones which could cover broad areas and last for days [during an event],” David Kopel, a constitutional expert with the Cato Institute, told FOXNews.com.
A spokesman at Specter’s office said the senator was surprised by the clamor over the provision, which merely makes a technical change to clear up legal confusion over who has arresting authority at NSSEs. His office had no further comment on the provision. Committee Ranking Member Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., also declined comment. Republican and Democratic House Judiciary Committee leaders did not return calls for comment.
White House sources say the measure was not instigated by the administration and pointed out that it was a stand-alone bill that was rolled into the Patriot Act by Specter’s office during House-Senate conference negotiations. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told FOXNews.com that the White House would not comment on the intent of the measure, but that the president is concerned with preserving individual rights.
“President Bush is committed to protecting the American people’s national security as well as their civil liberties,” she said.
Secret Service representatives said the agency does not comment on pending legislation.
The Bush administration has been criticized in the past for what many say are tactics that keep protesters far away from official events and by employing stringent policies to ensure favorable audiences for the president.
Last year, three ticket-holding audience members at one of the president’s Social Security events in Denver, Colo., were apprehended by a man who they said identified himself as Secret Service. The three were forced away from the event because of an anti-war sticker on the driver’s car.
“[The administration] has certainly demonstrated a desire to have carefully-controlled events,” said Graves.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based clearinghouse for domestic and international security information, said he “could certainly understand why the Secret Service would want that legal authority,” given the enormous burden of making venues safe for VIPs today.
“However, I think many people have concluded that the way it is being used has nothing to do with protecting the president from Usama bin Laden and everything to do with suppressing dissent and making sure the protesters don’t get on TV,” Pike said.
Bush is not the first president to flex his authority in this area, said Kopel, who pointed out that beginning with Reagan, presidents have created a larger security bubble and greater distance between themselves and dissenters at public events. The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States just intensified the situation, he said.
“I think the concerns about free speech in areas where the president is speaking long pre-date Bush. They were an issue in the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration and began as an issue during Reagan,” Kopel said. “I do think the ACLU has legitimate concerns about the breadth of the new language and how it could be applied.”
Graves points out that conservative “pro-life” groups will be the target of the new provisions, too, a scenario that could raise the concerns for those who are typically critical of the ACLU, which she said is necessarily concerned about other provisions in the bill that impinge on civil liberties.
House and Senate leaders, who return to Capitol Hill this week, are trying to renew the Patriot Act by Friday. Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate who filibustered a final vote in December after raising concerns about preserving civil liberties instituted a short-term extension of the previous bill, which was set to expire on Dec. 31.
about three and a half years ago i saw a protestor by the side of the road with a handmade sign that said “IRAQ IS A WEAPON OF MASS DISTRACTION”… it seems that only now are our “leaders” starting to get the same idea…
Wednesday February 1, 2006
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
This March will mark the beginning of the 4th year of the war in Iraq. In contrast, U.S. involvement in WWI came to an end after 19 months. Victory in Europe was declared in WWII after 3 years 5 months. In the Korean War, a cease-fire was signed after 3 years and 1 month. But after more than three and a half years into the war in Iraq, your administration finally produced what is called a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq.
Iraq is not the center for the global war on terrorism. I believe Iraq has diverted our attention away from the fight against global terrorism and has depleted the required resources needed to wage an effective war. It is estimated that there are only about 750 to 1,000 al-Qaeda in Iraq. I believe the Iraqis will force them out or kill them after U.S. troops are gone. In fact, there is now evidence that Iraqi insurgent groups are increasingly turning against al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists.
Our country needs a vigorous and comprehensive strategy for victory against global terrorism. The architect of 9/11 is still out there but now has an international microphone. We must get back to the real issue at hand – we have to root out and destroy al-Qaeda’s worldwide network.
There are 4 key elements that I recommend to reinvigorate our global anti-terrorism effort: Redeploy, Replace, Reallocate, and Reconstitute.
Redeploy The war in Iraq is fueling terrorism, not eliminating it. Our continued military presence feeds the strong anti-foreigner fervor that has existed in this part of the world for centuries. A vast majority of the Iraqi people now view American troops as occupiers, not liberators. Over 80% of Iraqis want U.S. forces to leave Iraq and 47% think it is justified to attack Americans. 70% of Iraqis favor a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces, with half favoring a withdrawal in the next six months. In fact, 67% of Iraqis expect day-to-day security for Iraqi citizens will improve if U.S. forces withdraw in six months and over 60% believe violent attacks, including those that are ethnically motivated, will decrease. Our military presence is the single most important reason why the Iraqis have tolerated the foreign terrorists, who account for less than 7 percent of the insurgency. 93% of the insurgency is made up of Iraqis. Once our troops are re-deployed, the Iraqis will reject the terrorists and deny them a safe haven in Iraq. The Iraqis are against a foreign presence in Iraq of any kind.
The steadfast and valiant efforts of the United States military and coalition partners have provided the Iraqi people with the framework needed to self govern. The Iraqis held elections that have been touted as highly successful, based primarily on the accounts of Iraqis who went to the polls. But our continued military presence in Iraq, regardless of the motives behind it, is seen by Iraqis as interfering in Iraq’s democratic process and undercuts the chances for the newly elected government to be successful. Recently, Iraq’s National Security Adviser accused U.S. negotiators of going behind the back of the Iraqi government on talks with insurgents, saying the process could encourage more violence. He said, “Americans are making a huge and fatal mistake in their policy for appeasement and they should not do this. They should leave the Iraqi government to deal with it… The United States should allow the new Iraqi government to decide on how to quell the insurgency.”
In December 2005, an ABC News poll in Iraq produced some noteworthy results. 57% of Iraqis identified national security as the country’s top priority. When asked to rate the confidence in public institutions, they gave Iraqi police a 68% confidence level, the Iraqi army 67%, religious leaders 67%. But the U.S./U.K. forces scored the lowest, a mere 18%.
The longer our military stays in Iraq, the more unwelcome we will be. We will be increasingly entangled in an open-ended nation building mission, one that our military can not accomplish amidst a civil war. Our troops will continue to be the targets of Iraqis who see them as interfering occupiers.
Redeploying our forces from Iraq and stationing a mobile force outside of the country removes a major antagonizing factor. I believe we will see a swift demise of foreign terrorist groups in Iraq if we redeploy outside of the country. Further, our troops will no longer be the targets of bloody attacks.
Replace The ever-changing justifications of the war in Iraq, combined with tragic missteps, have resulted in a worldwide collapse of support for U.S. policies in Iraq.
The credibility of the United States of America will not be restored if we continue down the path of saying one thing and doing another. We must not lower our standards and tactics to those of the terrorists. In order to keep our homeland secure, we must hold true to the values that molded our American democracy, even in the face of adversity. Former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, said it best during a speech in March 2004 to the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies: “America knows we cannot seek a double standard. And, America knows we get what we give. And so we must and will always be careful to respect people’s privacy, civil liberties and reputations. To suggest that there is a tradeoff between security and individual freedoms — that we must discard one protection for the other — is a false choice. You do not defend liberty to forsake it.”
Restoring the world’s confidence in America as a competent and morally superior world leader is essential to winning the war on global terrorism.
A recent pubic opinion poll, conducted jointly with Zogby International and taken in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, found that 81% said the war in Iraq had brought less peace to the Middle East. A majority of the respondents said they view the United States as the biggest threat to their nations.
Mr. President, I believe in order to restore our credibility, you must hold accountable those responsible for so many missteps and install a fresh team that demonstrates true diplomatic skill, knowledge of cultural differences and a willingness to earnestly engage other leaders in a respectful and constructive way. This would do much to reinvigorate international participation in a truly effective war on global terrorism.
Reallocate The Department of Defense has been allocated $238 billion for the war in Iraq, with average monthly costs growing significantly since the beginning of the war. In 2003 the average monthly war cost was $4.4 billion; by 2005 the average monthly cost had reached $6.1 billion.
Despite the urgent homeland security needs of our country, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission issued a dismal report card on the efforts to improve our counter-terrorist defenses. Even the most basic of recommendations, such as the coordination of fire and police communication lines, still have not been accomplished.
In the face of threats from international terrorists, we need to reallocate funds from the war in Iraq to protecting the United States against attack. A safe and swift redeployment from Iraq will allow us to do just that.
Reconstitute The U.S. army is the smallest it’s been since 1941. It is highly capable. But this drawn out conflict has put tremendous stress on our military, particularly on our Army and Marine Corps, whose operations tempo has increased substantially since 9/11.
The Government Accountability Office issued a report in November 2005 addressing the challenges of military personnel recruitment and retention and noted that the Department of Defense had been unable to fill over 112,000 positions in critical occupational specialties. This shortfall includes intelligence analysts, special forces, interpreters, and demolition experts– those on whom we rely so heavily in today’s asymmetric battlefield.
Some of our troops have been deployed four times over the last three years. Enlistment for the regular forces as well as the guard and reserves are well below recruitment goals. In 2005, the Army missed its recruitment goal for the first time since 1999, even after offering enlistment bonuses and incentives, lowering its monthly goals, and lowering its recruitment standards. As Retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich recently warned in a report to the Pentagon, the Army is “in a race against time” to adjust to the demands of war “or risk ‘breaking’ the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment.
The harsh environment in which we are operating our equipment in Iraq, combined with the equipment usage rate (ten times greater than peacetime levels) is taking a heavy toll on our ground equipment. It is currently estimated that $50 billion will be required to refurbish this equipment.
Further, in its response to Hurricane Katrina, the National Guard realized that it had over $1.3 billion in equipment shortfalls. This has created a tremendous burden on non-deployed guard units, on whom this country depends so heavily to respond to domestic disasters and possible terrorist attacks. Without relief, Army Guard units will face growing equipment shortages and challenges in regaining operational readiness for future missions at home and overseas.
Since 9/11, Congress has appropriated about $334 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the insurgents have spent hundreds of thousands. We have seen reports estimating that the total cost of the wars may reach as high as $1 trillion. These estimates are said to include such costs as providing long-term disability benefits and care for injured service members. It is estimated today that over 16,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq, 10,481 of whom have been wounded by “weaponry explosive devices.”
But while war costs continue to climb, cuts are being made to the defense budget. As soon as the war is over there will be pressure to cut even more. This year, even while we are at war, 8 billion dollars was cut from the base defense spending bill. You ordered another $32 billion in cuts to the defense budget over the next five years, with $11.6 billion coming from the Army. The Pentagon told Congress only last year that it needed 77 combat brigades to fulfill its missions, but now insists it only needs 70. In fact, 6 of the 7 combat brigades will be cut from the National Guard, reducing its combat units from 34 to 28. Even though all of the National Guard combat brigades have been deployed overseas since 9/11, your Administration has determined that, because of funding shortfalls, our combat ground forces can be reduced. Not only will these cuts diminish our combat power, but our ability to respond to natural disasters and terrorist threats to our homeland will be adversely affected. It is obvious that the cost of the war, in conjunction with the Army’s inability to meet recruitment goals, has impacted this estimate. My concern is that instead of our force structure being based on the future threat, it is now being based on the number of troops and level of funding available.
I am concerned that costly program cuts will lead to costly mistakes and we will be unable to sustain another deployment even if there is a real threat. The future of our military and the future of our country could very well be at stake. The high dollar forecasts of our future military weapons systems and military health care add pressure to cut costs on the backs of these programs. As our weapons systems age, the concern becomes even greater.
During a time of war, we are cutting our combat force, we have not mobilized industry, and have never fully mobilized our military. On our current path, I believe that we are not only in danger of breaking our military, but that we are increasing the chances of a major miscalculation by our future enemies, who may perceive us as vulnerable.
This piece is called “Your Television Will Not Be Revolutionized” because despite what our so-called leaders of technology and communications may tell you, the chances are slim that your quality of life will be enhanced by further dependence on a device which has throughout its history been referred to as the “idiot box” or “boob tube.” After Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
You will not be able to site back in your recliner and experience
the sights and smells of an actual African safari with Marlon Perkins
because your television will not be revolutionized.
You will not have the option to view programming that reflects
actual facts, opinions and situations of real people in real jobs doing real work
because your television will not be revolutionized.
You will not have more information at your disposal,
but a great deal more disposable information;
you will not experience a reduction in the amount of subliminal messaging
or an increased exposure to the fully explored viewpoints
of persons with alternative outlooks on the world and ways of life;
nor will you have the ability to selectively choose shows and entertainment
that will best equip you to face other human beings
who may have differing and conflicting methods of dealing with everyday existence
because, despite your ability to earn a Ph.D.
by absorbing the litany of T&A, S&M, B&D and R&R
on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN,
people who have important things to say
regarding the fragility of relying on modern convenience
will not be able to set up independent broadcast towers
because the FCC, FBI and CIA will make sure
that you do not find these programs included as part of “Must See TV,”
and they will certainly not be sponsored
by Mobil Oil Corporation and the Fortune 500.
You will not be able to immediately gain access
to the viewing public without waiting nine months
on a list for new programs, waiting only to be passed over
by a Committee for Fairness in Television
because your views are not deemed interesting enough
to command a favorable Nielson share.
Nor will you be able to select features for your viewing pleasure
that have not been hand-picked by the owners of the airwaves
and their supporting advertisers.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
You will continue to experience a decrease in rapid eye movement,
increasing cases of attention deficit disorder among your babies and children,
and on-going, invasive modifications to your DNA
caused by the barrage of an electron machine gun
you have invited into your home to expose “viewers like you”
to a thousand points of artificial light.
You will continue to form images subconsciously inside your physical brain
without the benefit of seeing them outside your head,
and without the ability to blink and shut them out or slow them down
so as to maintain the facility to selectively choose
the sound bytes and sound tracks and sound effects and
hypnotic waves of electricity that will influence
your spending patterns, your methods of recreation, your opinions on procreation,
your impression of reality and
your overall sense of physical health and well-being.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your retention of information will continue to decrease,
while the available percentage of brain cells at your disposal
will continued to be used up by phrases from sitcom theme songs,
by deductive meanderings on who shot J.R., and
by images of politicians wrapped in flags and kissing babies,
eating chitterlings, slicing pizza and
spreading lox on bagels.
You will not be able to take your message to the streets
or distribute pamphlets questioning the party line
at union meetings or city council sessions,
because your fellow citizens will be safe at home,
unified only in the respect that they are all watching re-runs
of the same shows so it can be assured there will be a topic of conversation
when we are all turned loose to exercise
our First Amendment rights
assisted by a new and improved level of communication
brought to you by the Association for the Preservation of Technological Megalomaniacs.
You will not be able to tell the difference between an embrace
offered by a virtual reality image of your dead father
and the gentle purring of a live kitten grasping your shoulder;
but you will continue to be able to anesthetize your sense of boredom
vicariously, whether through the war game simulation of professional sports,
or candid interviews with starvation victims
in a country of which you were not even aware “prior to this newscast,”
and may be convinced exists
only thanks to the believability score of the on-the-scene commentator,
or by gripping the edge of your seat while watching
carnage and bloodshed and laying on of hands
resulting in cures for leprosy, AIDS, infantile paralysis,
sickle cell anemia, and that awful bloated feeling,
all of which may or not be created using special effects.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
You will continue to trust in a world that has been edited for television,
in situations that will be re-enacted based on circumstantial evidence
and the imagination of financial advisors to the producers during “sweeps” week,
and in actors who are paid to tell you their headache disappeared in minutes
or that they actually spent time at their last dinner party discussing yeast infections
or wash-and-go shampoos.
You will be able to see inside the minds and hear the thoughts
of Richard Nixon, of Jeffrey Dahmer, of Charles Manson and Mother Theresa,
but you will see them being asked the same questions, things like,
“When did you first realize that you were different from other children?”
and you will see the same one-liners being used to promote their causes
in between paid advertisement programs
showcasing the efficiency and pleasure provided by shopping at home,
and they will be given equal air-time,
and each will be gently disclaimed:
“The opinions expressed by guests on this program
do not necessarily reflect the views of this network,
do not support the philosophy or political leanings of the majority of our viewers,
and are not intended to stimulate, educate or otherwise affect anyone at all.”
You will continue to find yourself in a world
that has an increasing number of methods for communication,
and alarmingly less and less to say.
You will find it true, as Marshall McLuhan once said, that
“the medium is the message,”
and that its sweet velvet voice is crooning,
“Learn to consume as you have taught me to consume,”
and reminding us in the words of Jello Biafra
that the conveniences we have requested are now mandatory.
as you are probably aware at this point, i am a terrorist in the same way Cindy Sheehan is a terrorist, which is why i didn’t watch shrubby junior’s state of the republican "christian" radical-right-wing part of the country that he currently calls "the union", although i can pretty much guarantee that whatever he said, with the exception of mentioning that coretta scott king died, was 100% lies. this is a pretty good characterisation of how i feel about the whole thing:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Bush set energy self-sufficiency goals Tuesday night that would still leave the country vulnerable to unstable oil sources. He also declared he is helping more people get health care, despite a rising number of uninsured.
Whether promoting a plan to "save Social Security" or describing Iraqi security forces as "increasingly capable of defeating the enemy," Bush skipped over some complex realities in his State of the Union speech.
ENERGY:
By identifying only Mideast oil imports for reductions, Bush was ignoring some of the largest sources of U.S. petroleum, among them Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela. The U.S. considers Venezuela a source of political instability in the region; relations with Mexico have been strained over immigration; and violence has curbed nearly 10 percent of Nigeria’s oil output.
Imports of oil and refined product from the Persian Gulf make up less than a fifth of all imports, according to the government.
Bush has spoken of reducing reliance on foreign oil in every State of the Union speech, if not as explicitly as in this one, and presidents back to Richard Nixon outlined similar goals, to little or no effect.
Nixon announced Project Independence in 1973, setting a goal of energy self-sufficiency in seven years. Then, the U.S. imported 35 percent of its oil; now it’s close to 60 percent. This, despite substantive steps taken by Nixon and Jimmy Carter to spur both supply and conservation, including construction of the Alaskan oil pipeline and reduction in the highway speed limit to 55 mph for many years.
HEALTH CARE:
Noting that the government must help provide health care for the poor and elderly, Bush asserted, "We are meeting that responsibility."
It is true that a new prescription drug benefit took effect this year, a new entitlement for up to 42 million disabled and older people. But implementation has been rocky: Mark McClellan, the administration’s top Medicare official, recently acknowledged that tens of thousands of recipients probably didn’t get medicine due to confusion and computer glitches, prompting some lawmakers to seek an extension of the May 15 signup deadline to work out the snafus.
An incomplete picture also emerges on health care for the poor.
The number of uninsured has increased nearly 5 million since Bush took office in 2001, to 45.5 million in 2004, two-thirds of the total from low-income families, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
And while total federal spending on the health care "safety net" for the uninsured edged up from 2001 to 2004 – adjusted for inflation, slightly more than 1 percent – spending actually decreased from $546 to $498 per uninsured person due to the jump in uninsured, the Kaiser group said.
Bush actually is expected to propose curbing the growth of benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in his 2007 budget request next week.
SOCIAL SECURITY:
Bush said Congress did not act last year on his "proposal to save Social Security." In fact, his plan does not take care of Social Security’s future solvency; instead, he wants to let younger workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into private investment accounts to take advantage of the possibilities for a better return.
IRAQ:
Bush’s upbeat account of progress in Iraq, coupled with an acknowledgment that "our enemy is brutal," left unstated a variety of setbacks in turning control over to Iraqi forces, including Iraqi Army desertions in the volatile west.
KATRINA:
Addressing Hurricane Katrina aid, Bush said a hopeful society "comes to the aid of fellow citizens in times of suffering and emergency" and the government is meeting New Orleans’ "immediate needs."
Federal money is indeed being used to build stronger levees and provide business loans and housing assistance. But the government has declined to rebuild levees strong enough to sustain a Category 5 hurricane, and it recently rejected as unnecessary a $30 billion redevelopment plan for Louisiana that state officials considered the cornerstone of their hopes for rebuilding.
HOMELAND SECURITY:
Bush urged Americans to back his secretive domestic spy program, saying he was using his "authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute" and noting that "appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed."
Bush did not address the counterarguments that he failed to heed a separate 1978 law that specifically calls for court approval to conduct the surveillance. Some lawmakers have also questioned why Bush did not brief more than eight members of Congress about the program, which has been in effect since 2001.
EDUCATION:
On the theme of improving math and science education, Bush boasted, "We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country."
In 2005, fourth-graders and eighth-graders posted their highest-ever math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and black and Hispanic children narrowed their achievement gap with whites in both math and reading. But the fourth-grade reading performance was essentially flat, and in eighth grade, reading scores dropped.
SPENDING:
The president said that "every year of my presidency, we have reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending." That doesn’t tell the full story because the category he cited omits big-ticket spending items like Iraq, natural disasters such as Katrina and homeland security.
He spoke of saving taxpayers $14 billion next year if his budget proposals are adopted, not mentioning some of those savings would come from health care programs such as Medicaid.
meanwhile, once again this is appropriate, and although i’ve said it before, it bears repeating again, as those who do not learn from history are CONDEMNED to repeat it…
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they’ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union address last night.
I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country.
There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press (shocker). So this is what really happened:
This afternoon at the People’s State of the Union Address in DC, where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh, Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union address. At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2245 Dead. How many more?
After the PSOTU press conference, I was having second thoughts about going to the SOTU at the Capitol. I didn’t feel comfortable going. I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me, and I knew that I couldn’t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket, and I didn’t want to be disruptive out of respect for her. I, in fact, had given the ticket to John Bruhns, who is in Iraq Veterans Against the War. However, Lynn’s office had already called the media, and everyone knew I was going to be there, so I sucked it up and went.
I got the ticket back from John, and I met one of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s staffers in the Longworth Congressional Office building and we went to the Capitol via the underground tunnel. I went through security once, then had to use the rest room and went through security again.
My ticket was in the 5th gallery, front row, fourth seat in. The person who in a few minutes was to arrest me, helped me to my seat.
I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled, "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat, and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I’m going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.
The officer ran with me to the elevators, yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That’s Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said, "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn’t care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That’s because you were protesting." Wow, I got hauled out of the People’s House because I was "Protesting."
I was never told that I couldn’t wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things … I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."
After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2245, huh? I just got back from there."
I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.
What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this? I can’t even wear a shirt that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.
I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there, and I thought every once in awhile they would show me, and I would have the shirt on. I did not wear it to be disruptive, or I would have unzipped my jacket during George’s speech. If I had any idea what happens to people who wear shirts that make the neocons uncomfortable, that I would be arrested … maybe I would have, but I didn’t.
There have already been many wild stories out there.
I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.
I don’t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether or not he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That’s why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That’s why I am not going to let BushCo take anything else away from me … or you.
I am so appreciative of the couple of hundred of protesters who came to the jail while I was locked up to show their support. We have so much potential for good. There is so much good in so many people.
Four hours and 2 jails after I was arrested, I was let out. Again, I am so upset and sore it is hard to think straight.
Keep up the struggle … I promise you, I will too.
late breaking word is that they’re dropping the charges against sheehan, but i think she should go ahead with her first amendment lawsuit in spite of this… she doesn’t have to be arrested to have her civil rights trampled upon.
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; Posted: 12:32 p.m. EST (17:32 GMT)
WASHINGTON — Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush’s State of the Union address.
According to a blog post on Michael Moore’s Web site attributed to Sheehan, the T-shirt said, "2,245 Dead. How many more?" — a reference to the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq.
"She was asked to cover it up. She did not," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman.
On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Florida, spoke on the House floor saying his wife, Beverly, had been "ordered to leave" the gallery during the speech for wearing a shirt that said, "Support Our Troops."
Young, an 18-term congressman, held up his wife’s shirt during his remarks, speaking with anger and emotion about her treatment.
"She has a real passion for our troops, and she shows it in many, many ways," Young said.
"And most members in this House know that, but because she had on a shirt, that someone didn’t like, that said, ‘Support Our Troops,’ she was kicked out of this gallery while the president was speaking and encouraging Americans to support our troops. Shame. Shame."
Sheehan held 4 hours Sheehan was arrested around 8:30 p.m. ET Tuesday on charges of unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail, Capitol Police said.
She was handcuffed and held in the Capitol building until she was driven to the Capitol Police headquarters for booking. According to her blog, she was released about four hours after her arrest.
Sheehan, who became a vocal war opponent after her son was killed in Iraq, was an invited guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California. Woolsey has called for a withdrawal of troops in Iraq and supports legislation for the creation of a Department of Peace.
Sheehan gained national attention in August when she and hundreds of other protesters camped outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and demanded an audience with the president.
She also recently penned a book, "Not One More Mother’s Child."
In April 2004, Sheehan and other relatives of troops killed in Iraq met with Bush during a visit to Fort Lewis, Washington, shortly after the death of her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, 24.
Sheehan later said that the president wouldn’t look at pictures of her son and "didn’t even know Casey’s name."
The Vacaville, California, resident has said she’d like to meet with Bush again to discuss her opposition to the war.
The president has declined another meeting and has taken issue with Sheehan’s calls for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
"She expressed her opinion; I disagree with it," Bush said in August. "I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake."
WASHINGTON – Cindy Sheehan, mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq, wasn’t the only one ejected from the House gallery during the State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt with a war-related slogan that violated the rules. The wife of a powerful Republican congressman was also asked to leave.
Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Florida — chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee — was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."
"Because she had on a shirt that someone didn’t like that said support our troops, she was kicked out of this gallery," Young said on the House floor Wednesday morning, holding up the gray shirt.
"Shame, shame," he scolded.
Mrs. Young was sitting about six rows from first lady Laura Bush and asked to leave. She argued with police in the hallway outside the House chamber.
"They said I was protesting," she told the St. Petersburg Times. “I said, ‘Read my shirt, it is not a protest.’ They said, ‘We consider that a protest.’ I said, ‘Then you are an idiot.’"
They told her she was being treated the same as Sheehan, a protester ejected before the speech Tuesday night for wearing a T-shirt with an antiwar slogan. Sheehan wrote in her blog Wednesday that she intends to file a First Amendment lawsuit.
"I don’t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government," Sheehan wrote.
Capitol Police took Sheehan, invited as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor. She later was released on her own recognizance.
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said police warned her that such displays were not allowed in the House chamber, but Sheehan did not respond.
Woolsey gave Sheehan her only ticket earlier in the day — Gallery 5, seat 7, row A — while Sheehan was attending an "alternative state of the union" news conference by CODEPINK, a group pushing for an end to the Iraq war.
In her blog, Sheehan wrote that her T-shirt said, "2245 Dead. How many more?" — a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.
She said she felt uncomfortable about attending the speech.
"I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn’t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket," Sheehan wrote. "I didn’t want to be disruptive out of respect for her."
She said she had one arm out of her coat when an officer yelled, “Protestor.”
"He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs," she wrote. She was then cuffed and driven to police headquarters a few blocks away.
"I was never told that I couldn’t wear that shirt into the Congress," Sheehan wrote. "I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things… I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later."
Sheehan was arrested in September with about 300 other anti-war activists in front of the White House after a weekend of protests against the war in Iraq. In August, she spent 26 days camped near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was spending a working vacation.
a "working vacation"… riiiiiiight… how many of us "real people" have ever had a "working" vacation?
You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out. Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You? brought to you by Quizilla
i went to bed at 10:30 last night. when i woke up this morning at 5:30, when the alarm clock went off, i looked over to the other side of the bed and moe wasn’t there. it’s not too uncommon for her to fall asleep in the recliner, so i got up and went into the living room to wake her up, but she wasn’t there either. now i’m starting to panic. i called her, but there was no response, so i looked out the front door to see if she had already left for work – which i was certain she hadn’t, but she wasn’t anywhere else, but the car was still in the driveway. now i’m really starting to panic. i called out her name again… and she responded??? from the bedroom???????? i went back to the bedroom and she was wondering why i was banging around and yelling… BLOWN HEAD GASKET!! apparently she went to bed, in the bedroom, shortly after i did last night, around 11:00 or so. normally i wake up when she comes to bed, but in spite of the fact that i apparently turned off the light, which is on my side of the bed, i didn’t wake up. i still don’t know why she wasn’t there when i woke up, because she said she hadn’t moved…
now i’m back home after taking moe to work, shipping out a package for hybrid elephant and getting the oil changed in the car, feeling like i didn’t get any sleep at all, and i find out that coretta scott king died last night, and alito has been confirmed as a supreme court justice… wonderful… now that the king legacy is dead, they figure that they can do anything they want… next they’re going to be overturning roe v. wade, demanding paternal consent for abortions and who knows what else that’s totally in opposition to everything upon which this country was founded…
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Senate confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court on Tuesday by a vote of 58-42, a day after an attempt by some Democratic senators to block his nomination fizzled.
Alito, who will be the court’s 110th justice, will be sworn into office across the street from the Capitol at the Supreme Court, just hours before President Bush’s State of the Union address. He will then join Chief Justice John Roberts in the House chamber for Tuesday night’s speech.
Judge Alito will be ceremonially sworn into office Wednesday in the East Room of the White House.
Alito watched the Senate vote from the Roosevelt Room of the White House with President Bush and his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner.
Only one of the Senate’s 55 Republicans voted against Alito’s confirmation — Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a moderate facing re-election this fall in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.
The four Democrats who broke party ranks and voted for Alito are Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota. All four of the states represented by the senators were carried by Bush in both 2000 and 2004.
Alito’s supporters in the Senate, as expected, cleared the final roadblock Monday when senators, by a vote of 72-25, decided to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote, rebuffing an attempt by a cadre of liberal senators to talk the nomination to death.
The vote easily exceeded the 60 votes needed to pass the motion.
In the end, only 24 of the chamber’s 44 Democrats went along with the filibuster, a maneuver allowed under Senate rules to block a vote by extending debate indefinitely. It was also supported by the chamber’s lone independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont.
Arguing against cutting off debate, Sen. John Kerry — who spearheaded the filibuster effort with his fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy — said Alito’s record during his 15 years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given “the extreme right wing unbelievable public cause for celebration.”
“That just about tells you what you need to know,” Kerry said. “The vote today is whether or not we will take a stand against ideological court-packing.”
But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said the move to cut off debate fulfilled a “very straightforward principle — a nominee with the support of a majority of senators deserves a fair up-or-down vote.”
“The sword of the filibuster has been sheathed because we are placing principle before politics, and results before rhetoric,” Frist said.
The motion to cut off debate drew the support of 53 Republicans and 19 Democrats, including all 14 senators who signed on to an agreement last year that ended a series of Democratic filibusters of Bush’s judicial nominations.
The so-called Gang of 14 included seven Democrats and seven Republicans.
The Democrats agreed not to support judicial filibusters except under “extraordinary circumstances,” which would be up to each senator to define. In return, the GOP members agreed not to support any attempt by Republican leaders to change Senate rules to permanently end the practice.
Among the 24 Democrats who supported the filibuster were five senators being mentioned as possible 2008 White House contenders — Kerry, who lost to Bush in 2004; Hillary Clinton of New York; Evan Bayh of Indiana; Russ Feingold of Wisconsin; and Joe Biden of Delaware.
The Senate’s top two Democrats, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, also supported the Kerry-Kennedy filibuster effort.
Alito, 55, replaces retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate swing vote and the first woman appointed to the high court.
if it weren’t tuesday, i would swear that it was monday… 8/
Fnord is that funny feeling you get when you reach for the
Snickers bar and come back holding a slurpee.
Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is this really, really tall mountain.
Fnord is the reason boxes of condoms carry twelve instead of ten.
Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is an arcade game like Pacman without the little dots.
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5pm.
Fnord is the tool the dentist uses on unruly patients.
Fnord is the blank paper that cassette labels are printed on.
Fnord is where the buses hide at night.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.
Fnord is the screw that falls from the car for no reason.
Fnord is why Burger King uses paper instead of foam.
Fnord is the little green pebble in your shoe.
Fnord is the orange print in the yellow pages.
Fnord is a pickle without the bumps.
Fnord is why ducks eat trees.
Fnord is toast without bread.
Fnord is a venetian blind without the slats.
Fnord is the lint in the navel of the mites that eat the lint in the navel of the mites that eat the lint in Fnord’s navel.
Fnord is an apostrophe on drugs.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for H*lvetica.
Fnord is the gunk that sticks to the inside of your car’s fenders.
Fnord is the source of all the zero bits in your computer.
Fnord is the echo of silence.
Fnord is the parsley on the plate of life.
Fnord is the sales tax on happiness.
Fnord is the preposition at the end of sixpence.
Fnord is the feeling in your brain when you hold your breath too long.
Fnord is the reason latent homosexuals stay latent.
Fnord is the donut hole.
Fnord is the whole donut.
Fnord is an annoying series of email messages.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.
Fnord is the serial number on a box of cereal.
Fnord is the Universe with decreasing entropy.
Fnord is a naked woman with herpes simplex 428.
Fnord is the yin without yang.
Fnord is a pyrotumescentretrogradeonyxobelisk.
Fnord is why lisp has so many parentheses.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.
Fnord is double-jointed and has a cubic spline.
Fnord never sleeps.
Fnord is the “een” in baleen whale.
Fnord is neither a particle nor a wave.
Fnord is the space in between the pixels on your screen.
Fnord is the guy that writes the Infiniti ads.
Fnord is the nut in peanut butter and jelly.
Fnord is an antebellum flagellum fella.
Fnord is a sentient vacuum cleaner.
Fnord is the smallest number greater than zero.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.
Fnord is the odd-colored scale on a dragon’s back.
Fnord is the redundant coin slot on arcade games.
Fnord was last seen in Omaha, Nebraska.
Fnord is the founding father of the phrase “founding father”.
Fnord is the last bit of sand you can’t get out of your shoe.
Fnord is Jesus’s speech advisor.
Fnord keeps a spare eyebrow in his pocket.
Fnord invented the green hubcap.
Fnord is why doctors ask you to cough.
Fnord is the “ooo” in varooom of race cars.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.
I cannot escape them
No matter how I try
They wait for me everywhere
I cannot pass them by.
Driving down the street
I see “Jesus Is Lord”
And then immediately after
I hear the word “FNORD!”
Innocuous sayings and parables
And on the evening news
I hear the word “FNORD!”
And suddenly I’m confused
I sit alone in my room
And I’m feeling rather bored
I turn on the tube and guess what
I hear the word “FNORD!”
“Don’t see the fnords and they won’t eat you”
That’s what I’ve heard the wisemen say
But I can’t get away from those beasties
There’s just no fucking way.
Dear Cecil: Two related questions: As a cat owner, I’ve been a little concerned recently about rumors that cat poop can cause schizophrenic behavior in people who are overexposed to the waste. How much truth is in this–and if there is any truth to it, what amount can possibly count as overexposure? I’m also bothered by the supposed risk to pregnant women that changing the litter box can cause–not so much to them as to the fetus, through bacteria and whatnot. If that’s really true, then with a third of all Americans owning cats, why don’t we see higher rates of these dreadful birth defects? Certainly some of these women must get pregnant sometime, and I doubt they all know the dangers posed to them by cleaning up what Puss left behind. What gives? –Onnie in Baltimore
Cecil replies:
Buckle up, friend. This one’s bizarre.
While you’re surely right that not everyone has gotten the word, the medical profession and hopefully most women of childbearing age know that if you’re pregnant you don’t want to get near cat feces. The problem is the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, for which cats are the principal host. The microscopic parasites reproduce in the cat’s gut, the eggs are excreted, and by a process I’m not about to describe the critters wind up in your brain and muscles, where they create tiny cysts, leading to a condition known as toxoplasmosis. Unpromising as this sounds, the symptoms of toxoplasmosis are generally mild to nonexistent in adults, which is good, because roughly a third of all humans are infected, with the rate in some tropical countries approaching 100 percent.
For some, though, things are less benign. If a woman initially becomes infected while pregnant, there’s a fair chance the T. gondii will migrate across the placenta to her unborn child, with ghastly results ranging from cerebral palsy, seizures, and mental retardation to death. Women infected prior to pregnancy don’t run the same risk, which no doubt explains why we haven’t seen an epidemic of toxo-induced birth defects–the parasite’s ubiquitousness confers a sort of immunity. I’ve seen no research suggesting there’s a threshold exposure below which there’s no danger, and in my opinion it’d be foolish to assume there is one. Besides, you’ll never get a better excuse to make somebody else clean the litter box.
Here’s where things get strange. While the link between toxoplasmosis and birth defects has long been recognized, scientists now suspect that T. gondii may cause schizophrenia too. That in itself represents a major change in thinking–till recently the assumption, based on twin studies and the like, has been that schizophrenia is transmitted genetically. No way, scoffers say: schizophrenia is so profoundly disabling that sufferers tend not to reproduce. Germs are a likelier candidate. Studies typically have found T. gondii antibodies occurring in schizophrenics at twice the rate seen in control groups.
But get this. Forty-five percent of schizophrenics tested positive in one study for both T. gondii and D-lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. To quote a recent paper: “These results support the hypothesis that T. gondii may cause schizophrenia and may do so by producing or triggering the production of an hallucinogenic chemical” (“Genes, Germs, and Schizophrenia,” Ledgerwood et al, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2003). Mindful that rodents are often an intermediate host for the parasite, the authors go on to say, “Production of such a compound may have been favored by natural selection because an infected, hallucinating rodent would be more easily captured by a cat.” In other words, schizophrenia in humans may be a side effect of T. gondii’s attempt to set cats up with a steady supply of tripping mice, the better to ensure its own reproductive success. Told you this was bizarre.
A word of caution: our authors’ impressive theoretical edifice is built on some pretty thin evidence. It’s simplistic to say T. gondii works by triggering the production of LSD–among other problems with the idea, acid mainly gives rise to visual hallucinations, whereas the delusions of schizophrenics are primarily auditory (e.g., hearing voices). No doubt genetics plays some role in schizophrenia, if only by establishing a predisposition to the condition. Still, even without the hallucinogen angle, this is a promising line of research. If germs are in fact a cause of schizophrenia, which afflicts more than two million Americans, there’s a better chance we’ll be able to come up with a method of prevention if not a cure.
–CECIL ADAMS
BLUES are motivated by INTIMACY, seek opportunities to genuinely connect with others, and need to be appreciated. They do everything with quality and are devoted and loyal friends and employers/employees. Whatever or whomever they commit to are their sole (and soul) focus. They love to serve and will give freely of themselves in order to nurture others lives.
BLUES, however, do need to be understood. They have distinct preferences and occasionally the somewhat controlling (but always fair) personality of a confident leader. Their code of ethics is remarkably strong and they expect others to live honest, committed lives as well. They enjoy sharing meaningful moments in conversation as well as remembering special life events (i.e., birthdays and anniversaries). BLUES are dependable, thoughtful, nurturing, and can also be self-righteous, a bit worry-prone, and emotionally intense. They are like sainted pit-bulls who never let go of something once they are committed. When you deal with a BLUE, be sincere, make an effort to truly understand them, and truly appreciate them.
President George W. Bush has not made many moves more unethical than offering Noel L. Hillman, the Abramoff prosecutor, a federal judgeship. Hillman has apparently been talking with Bush’s representatives since last year, and on last Thursday, he publicly announced he was accepting the appointment.
Let me make this perfectly clear.
At the same time that Mr. Hillman was conducting a grand jury and submitting evidence aimed at Bush’s allies and perhaps Bush himself, he was meeting with Bush, who was, in effect, offering him a bribe.
Mr. Hillman, Bush is saying, leave the job, let me put someone else in your stead, someone I want. Forget, says Mr. Bush, that you have been in charge of the investigation for two years, that you have been involved on a day-to-day basis, and that your leaving seriously impedes the investigation.
All this had been kept quiet until Thursday, January 26, 2006. Neither the Bush administration nor Mr. Hillman thought it appropriate to let anyone know what was going on until the deal was done. Secrecy, the modus operandi of this administration, kept the information from the public.
President Richard Nixon was the last one who tried something like this, but he didn’t get away with it. In 1971, he invited a California federal trial judge, Matthew Byrne, then sitting on the criminal prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for his release of the Pentagon Papers, to Nixon’s San Clemente home, to offer Byrne the job of heading the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Byrne accepted the invitation. A limousine sent by Nixon picked Byrne up after the court. The next morning, at 7am, John Ehrlichman sent a limousine to Byrne to get his answer.
Neither Nixon nor Byrne nor Ehrlichman released information about any of the meetings. But secrecy, the modus operandi of that administration, did not work.
That day, the story leaked. Leonard Weinglass, one of the attorneys for the defense, virtually cross-examined the judge in the courtroom. The judge confirmed the meetings and then turned down the job.
Byrne then denied a recusal motion, continuing with the case. Byrne, then totally aware of his impropriety, ultimately dismissed the case, in part, because of the storm created by his secret Nixon meetings.
Both Matthew Byrne and Noel Hillman have good reputations. Byrne recognized that he was offered a bribe and turned it down.
I do not personally know Mr. Hillman. Thus far, his public actions seem to warrant only applause. But Hillman’s boss is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Neither has said a word about the offer and its acceptance. The public is entitled to know more.
But Bush is getting away with it. There’s been very little press coverage. Alito, Hamas, Iraq, and Oprah Winfrey have buried the story.
The Democrats should insist on the appointment of a special prosecutor to fill Mr. Hillman’s position. Attorney General Gonzales should not be permitted to designate Hillman’s successor.
This, unlike the botched up Alito hearings, is a war we can win. We should not let Bush appoint his own person, someone like Harriet Miers, Samuel Alito, or the man Bush’s father said was the best person qualified for a Supreme Court seat, Clarence Thomas.
It is nearly impossible to have faith in any of America’s governing personnel or institutions. This administration’s total disregard for law and ethics continues to shock even though we thought we were by now unshockable.
Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — A majority of Americans said the presidency of George W. Bush has been a failure and that they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who oppose him, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Fifty-two percent of adults said Bush’s administration since 2001 has been a failure, down from 55 percent in October. Fifty- eight percent described his second term as a failure. At the same point in former President Bill Clinton’s presidency, 70 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they considered it a success and 20 percent a failure.
In a poll conducted in January of 2002, after Bush was president for one year, 83 percent of those surveyed said his presidency was a success.
In the new poll, conducted Jan. 20-22, fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who do not support Bush’s policies.
The percentage of Americans who called Bush ‘honest and trustworthy’ fell 7 percentage points in the last year to 49 percent, the poll found.
The new poll also found that 62 percent of Americans said they are ‘dissatisfied’ with ‘the way things are going’ in the U.S., unchanged from a December survey. The percentage of ‘dissatisfied’ Americans reached its peak in October of 2005 when 68 percent of those surveyed agreed.
The survey interviewed 1,006 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points. For the questions about whether Bush’s presidency is a success, about 500 U.S. adults were surveyed and the margin for error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.
if that’s the case then why isn’t there more action towards getting him out of office and into a jail uniform? 8/
by the way, in a typical republican move, they moved up the vote for alito’s confirmation from tomorrow to today but didn’t tell anyone in hopes that the democrats won’t get behind a filibuster. i heard about the possibility on friday, and sure enough, today it’s announced.
The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit in Atlanta on behalf of two vegan protesters who were subjected to imprisonment, arrest and harassment by Homeland Security officials.
The lawsuit stems from a Dec. 2003 incident, when vegans Caitlin Childs and Christopher Freeman were protesting on public property outside a Honey Baked Ham store in Georgia’s DeKalb County.
After the protest, the duo noticed they were being watched and photographed by a man in an unmarked car. They approached the car and wrote down the make, model, color and license plate number on a piece of paper. They then noticed the unmarked car was following them.
According to the ACLU suit, the car contained both a uniformed police officer and an undercover detective, later identified as Homeland Security Detective D.A. Gorman. The two pulled in behind Childs and Freeman and ordered them to exit their car.
Gorman then demanded that she turn over the piece of paper on which she had copied his license tag number. Childs refused to hand the paper over, and was handcuffed.
She was searched a male officer, despite her request to be searched only by a female officer, the ACLU says.
Both Childs and Freeman were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Police confiscated the piece of paper and Childs’ house keys. Both were released from custody, but neither the piece of paper nor the keys were returned. The county has not pursued a criminal case.
To view the surveillance photos taken by Homeland Security, go to http://www.aclu.org/spyfiles/honeyham/1.html.
More from the ACLU’s release:
“All across the country, the ACLU is uncovering information about Americans engaged in peaceful protest being spied on by Homeland Security, the FBI and local police,” said Debbie Seagraves, Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia. “It is deeply disturbing that the government would use resources intended to protect national security to instead spy on innocent Americans who do nothing more than express their opinions on social and political issues.”
The ACLU argues that by stopping and detaining Childs and Freeman for no legal reason and then refusing to tell them why they had been pulled over, Detective Gorman and the DeKalb County Police Department deprived them of their right to be secure in their person and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The officials’ actions violated the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the federal and state constitutions, charged the ACLU.
“People of this country need to realize that our basic human rights are being whittled away on a daily basis,” Freeman said. “I hope this case brings to light the fact that anyone can come under government security and pay the price.”
In addition to the lawsuit, the ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of Childs and Freeman to uncover any surveillance files kept on the activists by Homeland Security or other law enforcement agencies. ACLU affiliates in 15 other states have filed similar requests with the FBI on behalf of more than 100 groups and individuals, as part of a nationwide effort to expose unlawful domestic spying.
Last month, the ACLU of Michigan obtained an FBI report summarizing a meeting that was intended to keep local, state and federal law enforcement agencies apprised of planned protests and activities by various groups and individuals. Among the groups discussed at the meeting were an affirmative action advocacy group and a peace and justice group.
The ACLU launched its national “Spy Files” effort last year in response to widespread complaints from students and political activists who said they were questioned by FBI agents in the months leading up to the political conventions. The FOIA requests seek two kinds of information: 1) the actual FBI files of groups and individuals targeted for speaking out or practicing their faith; and, 2) information about how the practices and funding structure of joint task forces between the FBI and local police may be encouraging rampant and unwarranted spying.
no, it’s not the war on vegetarians, it’s the war on terrorists… this just goes right along with bush and his unwarranted domestic wiretaps, and it’s another reason why we need to revolt and oust these people from power… and people think it’s dangerous for me to wear a button that says "I Am A Terrorist!"… 8/
Hybrid Elephant report: i’ve been somewhat more than usually busy the past couple of weeks. i got an order for two ardhanarisvara murtis (why two i will probably never know, but what the hell, right?), and an order for a narada sivalingam, which i had to send out for and which should be arriving tomorrow or tuesday, and another order for a whole bunch of different fragrances from sarathi, and an order for auroshikha cedar, and an order for a whole bunch (like six 80-stick boxes) of bharath darshan, which i have to send out for tomorrow. i’m also working with ezra on his “Bald Man” t-shirts, and i’ve got more html maintenance to do for chris. on top of everything else, i’m making 100 buttons for Drunk Puppet Night (which opens in portland in 3 weeks) if i could just be this busy all the time, i wouldn’t need to look for another job.
i recently wrote to my congressional representative, adam smith, d-wa, and this was his reply…
Thank you for contacting me in regards to President Bush’s authorization of a National Security Agency (NSA) program to conduct domestic wiretaps without judicial oversight. I appreciate hearing from you on this critical issue.
I share your concerns about the legality of President Bush’s authorization of domestic surveillance. As you may know, President Bush authorized the NSA to conduct domestic wiretaps on U.S. citizens shortly after September 11, 2001. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), surveillance requires a warrant from a special FISA court or the authorization of the Attorney General which must then be reported to the court within 72 hours. It appears that the President authorized the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without going through those critical checks. Like you, I am very concerned about these revelations, and am doing everything I can to make sure this is fully investigated.1
I have joined my colleagues in sending several letters citing our concerns and requesting investigations and actions to be taken to bring this program tolight. These include a letter to the Inspectors General of the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), calling for them to contuct immediate investigations. My colleagues and I also sent a letter to the leadership of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence calling for immediate investigations.2
I also joinced Congressman John Conyers (D-Mi) in sending a letter to President Bush expressing our concern about the apparent illegality of this program and urging the President to propose to Congress any legislative changes that may be needed so that Congress can excersise its Constitutiona authority to oversee the Executive Branch’s actions. Specifically, the letter requests that the President submit legislative changes to the Congress and disclose to Congress information about the program such as how many people have been monitored under this authority and for what reasons.3
I am also a co-sponsor of H.Res. 643 introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-Mi). This resolution of inquiry directs the Attorney General to submit to the House of Representatives all documents relating to the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone conversations and electronic communications of U.S. persons. This important measure would allow the House to scrutinize the Attorney General’s legal advice and justification for the wiretapping program.
Due to questions of legality surrounding the authorization of the NSA program, many have raised the question of whether or not the President has committed an impeachable offense. Certainly, impeachment cannot be ruled out as a possibility should it become clear that the President or other members of the Adminmistration have committed impeachable offenses.4 However,5 before considering such an option, much more would have to be known about the President’s authorization of the NSA program.6 Impeachment is a very serious step to take,7 and I strongly believe that it is something that should only be undertaken in a deliberate and thoughtful manner.8 That is why we must have robust congressional oversight and investigations as soon as possible.9 At this time, I am not yet ready to prejudge the outcome of any investigation by suggesting impeachment must be a component in the proceedings. There is still much to be learned about how this program has been used.10
As you know, impeachment involves the legislative branch of our government bringing accusations against officials such as cabinet members, judges and the President. The power to impeach resides solely with the House of Representatives; the power to try an impeachment case resides solely with the Senate. The Chief Justice of the United States presides over the inquiry in case of impeachment of the President. Impeachable acts cited in the Constitution are “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
One of the most difficult questions raised by this Constitutional provision is: What are high crimes and misdemeanors? The conclusion reached by most scholars11 is that clear criminal law violations represent impeachable offenses, whereas misconduct that is not necessarily criminal but undermines the integrity of the office (such as disregard of constitutional responsibilities) may rise to the level of an impeachable offense.12 Partly because of this, impeachment has taken place infrequently. By making impeachment difficult, the Constitution guards against the intrusion of the legislature into the business of the judiciary and executive brances. It also ensures that impeachmenmt remains primarily a legal, or judicial, procedure, rather than a political process.
I hope that I have sufficiently explained my position on these important issues.13 Once again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please be assured that i’ll keep pushing for thorough investigations so that Congress can exercise its oversight on this serious matter. If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact me again.
Sincerely,
Adam Smith
Member of Congress
Translation:
i wish you people would stop bothering me and go away.
i’m tired from all this letter-writing… let me sit and catch my breath for a minute…
he might have learned something that i can use to be able to stay in office, so i don’t want to discount anything without “investigating” further.
let me see… president getting a blow job, that’s an impeachable offense. president lying, deliberately misleading, flagrantly violating national and international law, and admitting it… we’ll have to think about that.
nope… not impeachable offense… sorry.
see note #3.
and i have a 2:00 tee time…
so we’ll think about it and we’ll let you know what we come up with… eventually… if we feel like it.
more investigations… you would think that bush’s admitting that he broke the law would be enough, but no… there have to be more investigations…
see note #3.
any statistic that starts out with “‘most’ something” cannot be proven.
president getting a blowjob, impeachable offense. president lying, intentionally misleading, flagrantly violating national and international law and admitting it, not impeachable offense.
i might just be able to make that 2:00 tee off…
and this is a democrat, supposedly the “opposition” party in congress at this time… my solution? depopulate the country. it’s a lost cause. the administration has been corrupt for so long that it’s what people expect now. they don’t see that the foundations upon which this country was built are being taken away, piece by piece. if you don’t leave now, tomorrow may be too late.
DON’T go to the vegetable sacrifice today… the pass is closed due to avalanche control work, and they’re turning people around at edgewick road, which is one or two exits *west* of eXit-38…
once again, the vegetable sacrifice is CANCELLED for today, however it will be rescheduled before october, so if you have a suggestion for when (springtime would be good if you want it to be at eXit-38) write to me and we’ll work something out.
In Honour of Tinite New Year
Saturday, 28 January, 2006
at HIGH Noon
the place is the usual spot, eXit-38, at the Change Creek Bridge. map here –
http://snurl.com/hrue
questions and/or carpool arrangements, contact The Church – [email protected]
for those of you who haven’t been to a Ritual Vegetable Sacrifice before, full
details can be found here –
http://www.ebeneezer.org/ritual/vegetable/public.html
delocator dot net is an online database of coffee houses that are independently owned and not under the watchful thumb of starbucks or any of the other transnational coffee corporations… and there’s one by my house which i didn’t know about before finding it on delocator. help them grow!
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie or Shielded Cap… take your pick… although the first link contains a very specific warning about businesses like the one represented in the second link (although it’s definitely more fashionable), so beware…
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.
And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.
The results were announced today.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."
Bias on both sides The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
A brain-scan technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.
"The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.
Other relatively neutral candidates were introduced into the mix, such as the actor Tom Hanks. Importantly, both the Democrats and Republicans reacted to the contradictions of these characters in the same manner.
The findings could prove useful beyond the campaign trail.
"Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’" Westen said.
The researchers will present the findings Saturday at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
NEW YORK The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder’s Washington office — despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it.
General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, talked with reporters about the current controversy surrounding the National Security Agency’s warrantless monitoring of communications of suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Hayden has been in this position since last April, but was NSA director when the NSA monitoring program began in 2001.
As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment’s search standard of "reasonableness" without mentioning that it also demands "probable cause." Hayden seemed to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.
Here is the exchange, along with the entire Fourth Amendment at the end.
***
QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —
GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But the —
GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.
QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.
GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But does it not say probable —
GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —
QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —
GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."
And so what many people believe — and I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?
GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.
Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.
***
Here’s the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
A new Gallup poll released Monday showed that 51% of Americans said the administration was wrong to intercept conversations involving a party inside the U.S. without a warrant. In response to another question, 58% said they support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the program.
i’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, especially since even the government isn’t exactly sure about what rights they are stealing from us…
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they’ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
FORT MEADE, Md. – President Bush, defending the government’s secret surveillance program, said Wednesday that Americans should take Osama bin Laden seriously when he says he’s going to attack again.
"When he says he’s going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it," Bush told reporters after visiting the top-secret National Security Agency where the surveillance program is based. "I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously."
It was Bush’s first comment about bin Laden since the al-Qaida leader warned in a tape aired last week that his fighters are preparing new attacks in the United States. Bin Laden offered a truce, without specifying the conditions, and the White House responded that the United States would never negotiate with the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush’s NSA visit was part of an aggressive administration effort to defend the surveillance program. Experts and lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether it’s legal for the government to listen to conversations in the United States without a warrant, which the administration could get through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Four leading Democratic senators wrote Bush Wednesday saying they support efforts to do everything possible within the law to combat terrorism, but that the NSA program is an "apparent violation of federal law."
"If you or officials in your administration believe that FISA, or any law, does not give you enough authority to combat terrorism, you should propose changes in the law to Congress," wrote Sens. Harry Reid, Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin and Russ Feingold. "You may not simply disregard the law."
Reporters traveling with the president were only allowed to see a few minutes of Bush’s NSA tour, as he walked through the high-tech Threat Operations Center where intelligence experts monitor Internet traffic. He spoke to reporters from a podium set up in a hallway after completing his tour, but did not take questions.
In keeping with the NSA’s secrecy, reporters were required to leave their cell phones, pagers, laptops and wireless e-mail devices outside the complex. The White House negotiated so that the journalists could bring in cameras and video equipment, but they were allowed only to take photos of the president, not the inside or outside of the facility itself.
Bush said the NSA program is limited to communications between the United States and people overseas who are linked to al-Qaida. He said it has helped prevent terrorist attacks and save American lives, although the government has not given any specifics.
Bush urged that people "listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously."
His critics say the law requires him to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans.
"Obviously, I support tracking down terrorists," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said in a speech Wednesday. "I think that’s our obligation. But I think it can be done in a lawful way."
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the administration should have asked Congress to change the law if it wanted additional surveillance powers.
"Instead, a top lawyer in the Bush administration did just the opposite," Leahy said Wednesday, circulating 2002 testimony from a Justice Department official who said the administration had no position on a bill that would have made it easier to get warrants from the FISA court.
Bush said he had the legal right to do whatever he could to prevent further attacks and that the NSA program "is fully consistent with our nation’s laws and Constitution."
"I’ll continue to reauthorize this program for so long as our country faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups," Bush said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he’s eager to learn more. Asked on NBC’s "Today" show, if Bush broke the law, McCain replied: "I don’t know. I want to be perfectly clear. I don’t know the answer."
By TODD BISHOP AND JOHN COOK SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS
Washington’s attorney general has filed his first lawsuit under the state’s new anti-spyware law — alleging that a New York company’s software claiming to rid personal computers of spyware actually deposits a nefarious program instead.
The suit, which was filed Tuesday against Secure Computer LLC of White Plains, N.Y., alleges that the company’s spyware-scanning software falsely labels ordinary Windows system keys as spyware to induce computer users to pay $49.95 for the company’s Spyware Cleaner program. That program doesn’t actually clean spyware from the PC but rather modifies the computer’s security settings, the suit alleges.
Attorney General Rob McKenna is expected to announce the suit at a news conference today in Seattle along with Nancy Anderson, deputy general counsel from Microsoft Corp., which also has filed suit against Secure Computer.
"This lawsuit is intended to send a message to spyware perpetrators and to hucksters who market phony products that play on the public fear of spyware," McKenna said Tuesday night. He called the alleged tactics, especially the changing of security settings, "quite startling."
Microsoft’s lawsuit was prompted in part by complaints from the company’s customers, Anderson said. At the same time, online promotions for the Spyware Cleaner program allegedly capitalized on the company’s name, with phrases such as "Microsoft spyware cleaner" and "Microsoft anti-spyware."
Anderson described the case as an "important milestone in making sure consumers understand that they will be protected if they are preyed upon by deceptive practices." Microsoft previously cited the state’s anti-spyware law in a separate lawsuit against an unnamed defendant.
The law, which was enacted last year, made it illegal to illicitly install software on someone else’s computer to modify settings, collect information or perform other deceptive acts.
Both suits also make claims under anti-spam laws, alleging deceptive practices in e-mails used to promote the product. McKenna’s suit names defendants including Paul E. Burke, Secure Computer’s president, who didn’t return a message left on his phone in New York.
The suit alleges that Secure Computer, Burke and another defendant, Gary T. Preston of Jamaica, N.Y., made more than $100,000 by selling Spyware Cleaner through a network of affiliates. The suit, which also names some of those affiliates, asks the court to enjoin the defendants from deceptive practices and assess financial penalties.
Ben Edelman, an expert who has testified in anti-spyware suits, said he was familiar with Secure Computer and its tactics. He described it as "a deplorable practice" that "takes advantage of users in their moment of weakness." Edelman said there are other companies engaged in similar practices.
According to the attorney general’s suit, the defendants marketed the Spyware Cleaner product to computer users through pop-up advertisements and e-mails that told them their machines had been infected with spyware. The pop-up messages, which mimicked the appearance of Microsoft security boxes and used the Redmond company’s trademarked font, then asked users to perform a computer scan.
The messages were designed to alarm computer users, with one reading: "Warning — Your computer may be infected with harmful spyware programs," the suit says. Those consumers who followed through with the scan were then told that they had spyware on their computers.
"Deceived into believing that dangerous spyware is on their computer and there is no time to waste, the user is induced to purchase Spyware Cleaner," the suit says.
In light of recent events, to confustibulate federal examiners, I hereby propose a National Google Child Porn and Al Qaeda Day. (I already Googled Al Qaeda once just to check my spelling. Look, I am a terrorist!)
I arbitrarily propose noon on January 31st as a good time to do this, so that in case the feds ever do get their grubby hands on Google’s (our) data, they find a nice fat spike of activity that will keep them federal investigators tied up with useless searches for years to come!
Pass the word! Noon on January 31st is National Google Child Porn and Al Qaeda Day!
and for those of you who wonder what time zone, who the hell cares… a spike will be a lot more significant the longer it goes on… 8)
A provision in the “PATRIOT Act” creates a new federal police force with the power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true, as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.
“There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the ‘United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.'”
This new federal police force is “subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”
The new police are empowered to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.”
The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including “an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance” (SENS).
“A special event of national significance” is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a “protected person” such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and arrest people at their discretion.
The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers. What is “an offense against the United States”? What are “reasonable grounds”?
You can bet the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it is whatever the executive branch says.
The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing in the language limits the police powers from being used only in this way. Like every law in the U.S., this law also will be expansively interpreted and abused. It has dire implications for freedom of association and First Amendment rights. We can take for granted that the new federal police will be used to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.
Many naïve Americans will write to me to explain that this new provision in the reauthorization of the “PATRIOT Act” is necessary to protect the president and other high officials from terrorists or from harm at the hands of angry demonstrators: “No one else will have anything to fear.” Some will accuse me of being an alarmist, and others will say that it is unpatriotic to doubt the law’s good intentions.
Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact that the president and foreign dignitaries are already provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The naïve will not comprehend that the president cannot be endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the president is not present. For many Americans, the light refuses to turn on.
In Nazi Germany, did no one but Jews have anything to fear from the Gestapo?
By Stalin’s time, Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all members of the “oppressor class,” but that did not stop Stalin from sending millions of “enemies of the people” to the Gulag.
It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
“A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment,” an administration source said.
Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush’s authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.
Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush.
“Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president,” the source said. “If we work hard, there could be a tie.”
The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant.
The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying.
Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome.
“Impeachment is a remedy,” Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. “After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price.”
Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration’s argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.
On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush, accused the president of “indifference” to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government,” Mr. Gore said.
“I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country.”
Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration’s domestic surveillance program.
The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the “Gang of Eight.”
Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton.
“The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security,” an administration source said. “We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them, our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress.”
Q: My name is Tiffany Cooper. I’m a sophomore here at Kansas State and I was just wanting to get your comments about education. Recently 12.7 billion dollars was cut from education. I was just wondering how is that supposed to help our futures?
Bush: Education budget was cut — say it again. What was cut?
Q: 12.7 billion dollars was cut from education. I’m wanting to know how is that supposed to help our futures?
Bush: At the federal level?
Q: Yes.
Bush: I don’t think we’ve actually — for higher education? Student loans?
Q: Yes, student loans.
Bush: Actually, I think what we did was reform the student loan program. We are not cutting money out of it. In other words, people aren’t going to be cut off the program. We’re just making sure it works better as part of the reconciliation package I think she’s talking about? Yeah — It is a form of the program to make sure it functions better. In other words, we’re not taking people off student loans. We’re saving money in the student loan program because it’s inefficient. So I think the thing to look at is whether or not there will be fewer people getting student loans. I don’t think so.
<reality> Student Loans: On Dec. 21, 2005, the Senate passed $12.7 billion in cuts to education programs — “the largest cut in student college loan programs in history.” Vice President Cheney cast the deciding vote in favor of the cuts. The bill also fixed the interest rate on student loans at 6.8 percent, “even if commercial rates are lower.” Despite Bush’s claims, students will be left off the program. </reality>
Secondly, on Pell Grants, we are actually expanding the number of Pell grants through our budget. Great question. The key on education is to make sure that we stay focused on how do we stay competitive into the 21st century, and I plan on doing some talking about math and science and engineering programs so that people who graduate out of college will have the skills necessary to compete in this competitive world. But I think i’m right on this. I will check when I get back to Washington, but thank you for your question.
<reality> Pell Grants: Pell Grants have been frozen or cut since 2002; they are now stuck at a maximum of $4,050. In his 2000 election campaign, President Bush promised to increase the maximum Pell Grant amount to $5,100. “From 2004 to 2005, 24,000 students lost their Pell grants, according to a report pre-pared by the Congressional Research Service. This was the first drop in the number of students receiving the grants in several years; the number had been growing steadily since 1999.” </reality>
the car is close enough that they left it up to us whether they fix it or they total it… but we apparently only had “gap insurance” for the first year, and it just recently expired, so if we total it, they will just give us a check for what it’s worth now, not the total replacement cost, so we decided to fix it… but that was before we discovered that if the body shop goes over the estimate by more than a few hundred dollars (which is likely), the insurance company suddenly decides that it’s a total loss and automatically issues us a check for what it’s worth now, with no further questions asked. either way, it looks like we’re going to end up with a car, and if the insurance company give us a check instead, then we’ll not only end up with a far less expensive, but equally functional car, but we will also have enough money to fix our leaky roof and/or buy a shed, so it’s not all bad news.
i did some web design work for chris in exchange for all the acupuncture treatments he’s been giving me, but unfortunately, without totally redesigning his entire site, i won’t be able to get it to validate, because the previous “web designer” put everything in <table background=…>s and <font …>s rather than using css… <grumble><mutter>
i recently made a comment in the community that brought awareness of , the author of Schlock Mercenary, who also apparently looks (or at least looked) a good deal like me, while at the same time being about as different from me as you can get…
ORLANDO, Fla. — A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee.
The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won’t tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients’ rights.
Claudia Mejia gave birth eight and a half months ago at Orlando Regional South Seminole. She was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center in Orlando where her arms and legs were amputated. She was told she had streptococcus, a flesh eating bacteria, and toxic shock syndrome, but no further explanation was given.
The hospital, in a letter, wrote that if she wanted to find out exactly what happened, she would have to sue them.
“I want to know what happened. I went to deliver my baby and I came out like this,” Mejia said.
Mejia said after she gave birth to Mathew last spring, she was kept in the hospital with complications. Twelve days after giving birth at Orlando Regional South Seminole hospital, she was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center where she became a quadruple amputee. Now she can not care for or hold her baby.
“Yeah, I want to pick him up. He wants me to pick him up. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t,” she said. “Woke up from surgery and I had no arms and no legs. No one told me anything. My arms and legs were just gone.”
Her 7-year-old son, Jorge, asks his mother over and over what happened to her. Neither she nor her husband has the answer.
“I love her, so I’ll always stick with her and take it a day at a time myself,” said her husband, Tim Edwards.
The couple wants to know how she caught streptococcus, during labor or after. She doesn’t know. She knows she didn’t leave the hospital the same.
“And why, I want to know why this happened,” she said.
Her attorney, Judy Hyman wrote ORHS a letter saying, according to the Florida statute, “The Patients Right To Know About Adverse Medical Incidents Act,” the hospital must give her the records.
“When the statute is named ‘Patients Right To Know,’ I don’t know how it could be clearer,” Hyman said.
The hospital’s lawyers wrote back, “Ms. Mejia’s request may require legal resolution.” In other words, according to their interpretation of the law, Mejia has to sue them to get information about herself.
That’s the sticking point, the interpretation of the Patients Right To Know act, a constitutional amendment Florida voters passed a little more than a year ago.
Mejia’s other attorney, E. Clay Parker, said the hospital is not following the law
“We were forced to file this and ask a judge to interpret the constitutional amendment and do right,” Parker said.
Mejia hopes the right thing is done. She said not knowing exactly why it happened is unbearable. She only hopes she’ll be able to soon answer her little boy’s question, ‘What happened?’
“He told me everyday, ‘What happened,’ and I don’t have any answers for that,” she said.
ORMC said Mejia is requesting information on if there were other patients or someone on her floor with the streptococcus. They said, if they release that to her, that would be a violation of other patients’ rights.
MANHATTAN, Kan. – President Bush pushed back Monday at critics of his once-secret domestic spying effort, saying it should be termed a “terrorist surveillance program” and contending it has the backing of legal experts, key lawmakers and the Supreme Court.
Several members of Congress from both parties have questioned whether the warrantless snooping is legal. That is because it bypasses a special federal court that, by law, must authorize eavesdropping on Americans and because the president provided limited notification to only a few lawmakers.
“It’s amazing that people say to me, ‘Well, he’s just breaking the law.’ If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?” asked Bush. One of those who had been informed, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was sitting behind Bush during his appearance at Kansas State University.
Bush’s remarks were part of an aggressive administration campaign to defend the four-year-old program as a crucial and legal terror-fighting tool. The White House is trying to sell its side of the story before the Senate Judiciary Committee opens hearings on it in two weeks.
Back in Washington, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former National Security Agency director who is now the government’s No. 2 intelligence official, contended the surveillance was narrowly targeted. He acknowledged that the program established a lower legal standard to eavesdrop on terror-related communications than a surveillance law implemented in 1978.
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, government officials had to prove to a secretive intelligence court that there was “probable cause” to believe that a person was tied to terrorism. Bush’s program allows senior NSA officials to approve surveillance when there was “reason to believe” the call may involve al-Qaida and its affiliates.
Hayden maintained that the work was within the law. “The constitutional standard is reasonable. … I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we are doing is reasonable,” he said at the National Press Club.
Hayden also rejected suggestions that the NSA rank-and-file had problems with the electronic monitoring, saying that the agency’s independent watchdog told him Friday that “not a single employee” had registered a concern with that office about the program.
Democrats countered that many important questions remain.
“We can be strong and operate under the rule of law,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “These are not mutually exclusive principles — they are the principles upon which our nation was founded.”
In his remarks, Bush said that allowing the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists can hardly be considered “domestic spying.”
“It’s what I would call a terrorist surveillance program,” Bush said at Kansas State. “If they’re making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.”
He said he “had all kinds of lawyers review the process” to ensure it didn’t violate civil liberties or the law.
And he insisted that a recent Supreme Court decision backs his contention that he had the authority to order the program through a resolution Congress passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks that lets him use force in the anti-terror fight.
PAY ATTENTION PEOPLE – THIS IS YOUR GOVERNMENT TRYING TO TALK YOU OUT OF THE RIGHTS THAT ARE RIGHTFULLY YOURS!
“I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you what it means: It means Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn’t prescribe the tactics,” Bush said.
Bush and Hayden sought to paint the program as vital to national security. “Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the al-Qaida operatives in the United States,” Hayden said.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is to deliver a speech on the program Tuesday. And Bush was going to NSA headquarters outside Washington on Wednesday.
Last week, Gonzales sent congressional leaders a 42-page legal defense of the program. Vice President Dick Cheney defended it in New York last Thursday and briefed congressional leaders at the White House on Friday.
Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, meanwhile, has put Democrats on notice that the White House regards the issue as a political winner for Republicans in this year’s congressional elections.
Bush’s nearly two-hour appearance at Kansas State wasn’t all serious. Returning to a more casual format that he has used throughout his presidency to sell his policies, he fielded questions that ranged from Iran’s geopolitical ambitions to the sort of advice he gets from his wife, Laura.
i got an order for 2 ardhanarishvara murtis, but because of a mismatch in the html code for the web site, the person only paid $50, instead of the $64 that the web site says. of course the first thing i did when i realised it was to adjust the html code, but it’s too late for this order. i’m just going to eat the $14, and i’ve already made sure it won’t happen again… i guess this is a lesson i had to learn.
they were supposed to have an estimate ready on the car on friday, but it didn’t happen, so now they’re shooting for monday. the car is only worth $17k, and there’s approximately $13.5k worth of damage, but it’s close enough that they aren’t going to say whether they’re going to total it or fix it without some more hassle.
today is moe’s 29th birthday… i originally met her in physical reality when she was 19, soon to be 20 – i had known her as “josie” online for about 4 years before that, but there was never any inkling that we would be married and spend the rest of our lives together, or even a hint of online “romance” before we met in meatspace. we’re going to have dinner with a bunch of moe’s friends at maneki later on… happy birthday moe! 8)
they decided that the estimate to fix the car wouldn’t happen until today. if they decide to fix it, then they’ll already have it taken apart, and if they decide to total it, we’re going to end up with an equivalent car in either of the two situations that we’ll end up in, so the stress is off, somewhat… but nobody’s 100% sure of anything yet, because it’s apparently that close.
i got an order for a narmada sivalingam yesterday. i got a huge order about a week ago… $125 worth of murtis, a rudraksha mala and one package of incense, for good measure. hopefully UPS will show up today, because i called it in on thursday of last week, and it was sent out on friday of last week, and then i can get this huge order taken care of. i’ve got an acupuncture appointment this afternoon. i’m probably going to go to howling league with moe this evening.
Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast an audio tape it says is by the al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden.
In it, the speaker says new attacks on the US are being planned, but offers a “long-term truce” to the Americans.
CIA analysts have concluded the voice on the tape was that of Bin Laden, making it the first time he has been heard from since December 2004.
However, other analysts familiar with Bin Laden’s voice are divided as to whether the voice really is his.
The US quickly rejected the truce offer made on the tape.
“We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
The speaker on the tape said the reason there had not been an attack in the US since 11 September 2001 was not because of superior US security, but because the group had been engaged in activities in Iraq – and because operations in the US “need preparations”.
“The operations are happening in Baghdad and you will see them here at home the minute they are through (with preparations), with God’s permission,” he said.
US officials have said they believe Bin Laden hiding in a mountainous area on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
There is no clear indication of when the tape was recorded.
Last month, al-Jazeera aired a videotape it said dated back to September, showing al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
In it, Zawahiri declared that, despite a prolonged absence and rumours about ill-health or possible injury, Bin Laden was alive.
Truce offer
Despite the warning of renewed attacks, the speaker also offered the US the chance of a long-term truce in light of the fact that US public opinion polls showed growing opposition to the war in Iraq.
“We have no objection to responding to this with a long-term truce based on fair conditions,” the speaker said.
“We do not mind offering you a truce that is fair and long-term… so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan… there is no shame in this solution because it prevents wasting of billions of dollars.
“Your president is misinterpreting public opinion polls which show that the vast majority of you support the withdrawal of your forces from Iraq.”
Bin Laden made Europe a similar truce offer following the Madrid train bombings of March 2004.
Correspondents say it is an attempt to frighten the public and drive a wedge between them and their governments, which say it is necessary to stay to distance in Iraq, not pull out troops.
The BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says that in the US the immediate political effect of the tape will probably be to boost support for President George W Bush.
now i have no idea whether this is a “for-real” recording of bin laden or not, but the transcript of the tape sounds like a person who is more reasonable than we’ve been lead to believe. that it’s fabricated is extremely likely, especially considering that there was news that the immediate response to this was to say that we should reinstate the “patriot” act… we’ll just have to wait and see whether bush is lying again… 8/
My message to you is about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the way to end it.
I had not intended to speak to you about this issue, because, for us, this issue is already decided on: diamonds cut diamonds.
Praise be to God, our conditions are always improving and becoming better, while your conditions are to the contrary of this.
However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush in his comment on the outcome of the US opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq, but he objected to this desire and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy.
Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.
In my response to these fallacies, I say: The war in Iraq is raging, and the operations in Afghanistan are on the rise in our favour, praise be to God.
The Pentagon figures indicate the rise in the number of your dead and wounded, let alone the huge material losses, and let alone the collapse of the morale of the soldiers there and the increase in the suicide cases among them.
So, just imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts the soldier while collecting the remnants of his comrades’ dead bodies after they hit mines, which torn them. Following such situation, the soldier becomes between two fires. If he refuses to go out of his military barracks for patrols, he will face the penalties of the Vietnam butcher, and if he goes out, he will face the danger of mines.
So, he is between two bitter situations, something which puts him under psychological pressure – fear, humiliation, and coercion. Moreover, his people are careless about him. So, he has no choice but to commit suicide.
What you hear about him and his suicide is a strong message to you, which he wrote with his blood and soul while pain and bitterness eat him up so that you would save what you can save from this hell. However, the solution is in your hand if you care about them.
The news of our brother mujahideen, however, is different from what is published by the Pentagon.
This news indicates that what is carried by the news media does not exceed what is actually taking place on the ground. What increases doubts on the information of the White House’s administration is its targeting of the news media, which carry some facts about the real situation.
Documents have recently showed that the butcher of freedom in the world [US President Bush] had planned to bomb the head office of al-Jazeera Space Channel in the state of Qatar after he bombed its offices in Kabul and Baghdad, although despite its defects, it is [Al-Jazeera] one of your creations.
Jihad is continuing, praise be to God, despite all the repressive measures the US army and its agents take to the point where there is no significant difference between these crimes and those of Saddam.
These crimes include the raping of women and taking them hostage instead of their husbands. There is no power but in God.
The torturing of men has reached the point of using chemical acids and electric drills in their joints. If they become desperate with them, they put the drill on their heads until death.
If you like, read the humanitarian reports on the atrocities and crimes in the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
I say that despite all the barbaric methods, they have failed to ease resistance, and the number of mujahideen, praise be to God, is increasing.
In fact, reports indicate that the defeat and devastating failure of the ill-omened plan of the four – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – and the announcement of this defeat and working it out, is only a matter of time, which is to some extent linked to the awareness of the American people of the magnitude of this tragedy.
The wise ones know that Bush has no plan to achieve his alleged victory in Iraq.
If you compare the small number of the dead when Bush made that false and stupid show-like announcement from an aircraft carrier on the end of the major operations, to many times as much as this number of the killed and injured, who fell in the minor operations, you will know the truth in what I am saying, and that Bush and his administration do not have neither the desire nor the will to withdraw from Iraq for their own dubious reasons.
To go back to where I started, I say that the results of the poll satisfy sane people and that Bush’s objection to them is false.
Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims.
In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources.
On the other hand, the mujahideen, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again.
The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the capitals of the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.
As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures.
Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.
Based on the above, we see that Bush’s argument is false. However, the argument that he avoided, which is the substance of the results of opinion polls on withdrawing the troops, is that it is better not to fight the Muslims on their land and for them not to fight us on our land.
We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.
We are a nation, for which God has disallowed treachery and lying.
In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability and we will build Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the war.
There is no defect in this solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America, who supported Bush’s election campaign with billions of dollars.
Hence, we can understand the insistence of Bush and his gang to continue the war.
If you have a genuine will to achieve security and peace, we have already answered you.
If Bush declines but to continue lying and practicing injustice [against us], it is useful for you to read the book of “The Rogue State”, the introduction of which reads: If I were a president, I would halt the operations against the United States.
First, I will extend my apologies to the widows, orphans, and the persons who were tortured. Afterwards, I will announce that the US interference in the world’s countries has ended for ever.
Finally, I would like to tell you that the war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever as the wind blows in this direction with God’s help.
If you win it, you should read the history. We are a nation that does not tolerate injustice and seek revenge forever.
Days and nights will not go by until we take revenge as we did on 11 September, God willing, and until your minds are exhausted and your lives become miserable and things turn [for the worse], which you detest.
As for us, we do not have anything to lose. The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain. You have occupied our land, defiled our honour, violated our dignity, shed our blood, ransacked our money, demolished our houses, rendered us homeless, and tampered with our security. We will treat you in the same way.
You tried to deny us the decent life, but you cannot deny us a decent death. Refraining from performing jihad, which is sanctioned by our religion, is an appalling sin. The best way of death for us is under the shadows of swords.
Do not be deluded by your power and modern weapons. Although they win some battles, they lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are better than them. What is important is the outcome.
We have been tolerant for 10 years in fighting the Soviet Union with our few weapons and we managed to drain their economy.
They became history, with God’s help.
You should learn lessons from that. We will remain patient in fighting you, God willing, until the one whose time has come dies first. We will not escape the fight as long as we hold our weapons in our hands.
I swear not to die but a free man even if I taste the bitterness of death. I fear to be humiliated or betrayed.
Under the No Child Left Behind education law pushed through Congress by President Bush, the Pentagon now requires that high schools nationwide turn over student’s private information for military recruitment purposes, or face education funding cuts.
The lawmakers who drafted the legislation, which was a centerpiece to then Texas Governor George Bush’s election campaign, buried the recruitment language deep within the many layered 680-page law. Once the bill became law on January 8, 2002, high school administrators were surprised by the requirement, and some in Prince George’s County are unclear as to why the Department of Defense and the Department of Education worked together to mandate the requirement.
“I’m still not sure why this was required by law, or why the Department of Education was in on this,” Monica Goldson said, principal at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. “What’s the catch? Why would the Department of Education care about recruiting kids for the military? It almost seems like the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law means that the Pentagon doesn’t want to leave any child left behind for military service.”
According to the canonical 680-page law legislation that was believed to be purely of an educational purpose the Department of Defense has the authority to access student’s private records for military recruitment purposes. The provision reads, “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school student names, addresses, and telephone listings.”
The law also notes that students may opt-out of the Pentagon’s right to access their files, but only after they receive notice from the child’s parents stating that the information remains private. Some view the requirements as “financial blackmail” and are angered by the “reverse order of things” regarding the parental notification procedure. School administrators also fear that they could be labeled as unpatriotic and face education funding cuts, so they reluctantly comply with the requirements. In essence, the military can access student records at will, unless they hear otherwise, and according to some, the opt-out policy is a disingenuous stunt
“It doesn’t make sense the way the opt-out process works,” Goldson said. “Under the law, the military has the upper hand, because the vast majority of students and parents are unaware of the [recruitment requirement] in the first place, which gives the Pentagon the ultimate power over our student’s private information.”
The new military recruitment provision appears contentious for many reasons. Firstly, when the bill became public law schools were unaware that the Department of Defense placed the requirement in the law’s language, creating a polarizing environment for some county principals and teachers.
“This is a suspicious piece of legislation,” Andrew Pruski said, a history teacher and advisor for the student government at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. “I teach my students about the Soviet Union and [Joseph] Stalin’s abuse of power in the 1940’s and 1950’s during the Cold War. We openly discuss Nazi Germany, [Soviet] Russia, and other anti-democratic governments in world history and how those governments impact societies,” Pruski explained. “My students have been asking me, ‘How far is [American] government going to go?’ in terms of this military recruitment snooping, the war in Iraq, and other anti-democratic actions taken these last few years.”
The constitutionality of the military’s right to student files under No Child Left Behind has also been a contentious issue. The recruitment section of the law surprised Robert V. Percival, a constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore. “The constitutionality claim could be challenged,” Percival said. He pointed to three areas of law that could potentially undermine military access to student records, including the Commerce Clause, Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the 10th Amendment, and case law South Dakota vs. Dole. He also noted a fourth and poignant point that could challenge the military provision, which is the 1974 Buckley Amendment, also known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
“The [No Child Left Behind Act and the military recruitment section] shows an inconsistency with Congress and its role over the rights of children, their families, and the right to privacy regarding education under the Buckley Amendment passed in 1974,” Percival explained. “The Buckley Amendment gave students power over their records, such as transcripts, standardized test scores, and other private information, including their addresses and names.”
The Buckley Amendment, named after U.S. Republican Senator James Buckley of New York, was designed to ensure that student records would not be disclosed to others without the consent of the student or the student’s parents. The Buckley Amendment has been broadly implemented since its passage to cover “virtually all student-connected records not just academic records.”
David S. Bogen, professor of law at University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore, said that Congress can place “conditions on expenditures” when funding projects, but was concerned about the military’s new legal claim to private records. “I’m shocked by this,” Bogen said. He also voiced concern about the “chilling effects” such regulations would have on speech rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
“Schools are for school for education not the military,” Martina Jones said, SBMT Member and Parliamentarian of the Student Government Association of Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. Jones and other student government officials met to discuss the No Child Left Behind last Friday on campus, explaining that military recruiters routinely call them at home coining them as “military telemarketers” who continually bother them during dinner, or Spam their e-mail accounts with recruitment pitches. The student roundtable was also quick to point out that even though Congress passed the anti-telemarketing law last year, they were confused as to why military recruiters can continue to call them, blocking their caller ID with a “WIT 2001” message, a practice made illegal by the “Do-Not-Call” law.
“I have no idea how they got my e-mail or my phone number,” Amber Brown said, secretary of student government. “I try not to be rude to them when they call, but I’m firm, and just like telemarketers, I tell them I’m not interested.” Brown explained that she has no interest in joining the military and resents the phone calls and e-mails. “Me and my family don’t have any interests in the military. We use our minds…we’re more creative,” the high school senior said.
Students were also perplexed on how the military gained access to their SAT scores without their consent, a practice illegal under federal law. “A recruiter once called me and said that with my high test scores, that I would be a great military candidate,” Jones said. “How did they know my SAT score?” Jones explained. “How are they accessing my scores without me knowing about it?”
The Frederick Douglass students also theorized that once recruiters learn of their SAT scores, they specifically target students who have low-test scores, whereas students with higher test scores are called less frequently. “I’ve never got a call from the Army,” Jones said. “We have a theory that the military targets the kids with lower scores and continues to call them, hoping that they will sign-up for military duty,” she said. “They know that the students with lower grades and test scores have fewer opportunities, so [the military] preys on them,” Jones added. “Isn’t that leaving children behind?”
this is what having a camera on your cell phone is good for… i went over 155,555 miles on tuesday, while i was headed eastbound on highway 18 just west of auburn, and if it weren’t for the fact that i have a camera on my cell phone, it would be just another mile…
aaarrrrgghhh! which, according to their notation, is a3r4g2h3… for whatever it’s worth…
now this raises all kinds of questions… was she a smoker before her encounter with the dog? if so, why was she chosen for this procedure, especially since they had already determined that she was at risk for suicide? if not, was the woman who was the face donor a smoker? this could also be part of gender reassignment, if you wanted to take it that far: having the face of a donor of the opposite sex… i wonder about the ethics of such a procedure, whether it is cross gender or not, but… bizarre!
TUCSON, Ariz. – The world’s first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.
“It is a problem,” Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.
The woman’s French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference here this week.
The news about her smoking came even as American surgeons said that they were growing more comfortable with the French doctors’ decision to try the operation and that they hoped to offer such transplants to more patients.
The 38-year-old Frenchwoman received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor after being mauled by her dog last spring. The woman has been identified only as Isabelle because of French privacy laws.
The woman suffered a tissue-rejection episode last month but is now doing well, her doctors said. However, they said she has resumed smoking, which besides being bad in general for health is especially a problem after surgery because it impairs circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.
Some doctors have questioned the woman’s psychological fitness for the operation because of reports that she had taken sleeping pills in a possible suicide attempt when the dog attack occurred — an allegation Dubernard repeatedly has denied.
He said she received extensive psychiatric evaluation and counseling before the operation.
Some American doctors at the conference said it is time to stop debating whether the French operation was ethical or wise and focus now on making such transplants as safe and widely available as possible.
“Face transplants can be done and should be done,” said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, the surgeon who did the first hand transplant in the United States, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, in 1999.
Another Louisville transplant expert, Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, said: “A number of us here are interested in making this a widespread procedure available to the public. It’s the future, and could benefit millions of people.”
Problems with other novel types of transplants surfaced at the medical conference.
Doctors have been encouraged that success rates were roughly 90 percent among the 24 hand transplants performed to date, but a Chinese surgeon surprised the conference by reporting that up to half of the nine or so patients in his country have since rejected the new organs because they couldn’t afford immune-suppressing drugs.
One patient even asked to have the new hand amputated after the one-year period during which the hospital provided free medication ended, said Dr. Guoxian Pei, chief of orthopedics at Nanfang Hospital at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.
Dr. Frederic Schuind, a surgeon at Erasme Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, revealed that a hand transplant recipient in his country had made “a mild suicide attempt.” The patient had been deemed psychologically stable enough to undergo the operation even though he had attempted suicide as a teenager.
The incidents prompted several surgeons to say that no such transplants should be done unless surgeons first make sure patients are psychologically healthy and prepared to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.
“We need to alter the risk-benefit balance” before hand or face transplants are done more commonly, said Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh.
the estimate on the car won’t be ready until thursday, because when the insurance adjuster looked at it, he decided that they would have to completely dissasemble the damaged part of the car – which is the entire passenger side – to determine exactly what needs to be replaced… apparently it’s close enough to the line that they want to be absolutely sure, before they total it. another interesting fact: when i dropped it off at the shop, the guy asked me if it was an ’05 or an ’04, and i said i wasn’t sure and called moe… meanwhile he went out to look at the car, and came back and said it was an ’04 at almost exactly the same time that moe was telling me it was an ’05… that we paid for an ’05… so i wonder if it was really a leftover ’04 that they were selling at the ’05 price to naive buyers who didn’t know any better… 8/
bottom line, we can’t afford the rental car, so i’m taking it back.
from the seattle cacophony yahoo group, this interesting post by pox:
Just wanted to mention that March 14th (3/14) is Pi Day, and for yet another year it will go officially unrecognized at the State and Federal levels.
I’m sure we’re all outraged by the public’s complacence, and the MSM’s refusal to cover pi and other circle-related issues. Someone needs to take a stand. If not now, when? If not we or us, then who or whom?
Imagine hundreds of vampires with hula-hoops, marching through Westlake with round signs, distributing Smartees and old hubcaps, getting our vital message to the people, refusing to let Americans ignore the relationship between diameter and circumference any longer!
If there’s a nearby synagogue, we could just combine our march with the celebration of Purim, which is the same day. I’m sure the Jews won’t mind. I hear they respect geometry as much as anyone.
Ethos. Civics. Math. Yeah.
to which i responded:
i thought Pi Day was 22 july (22/7)…
to which pox responded back:
Heretic.
so now i’m a heretic in the cacophony group… i can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not…
moe and the dogs are okay, thank ganesha, but the car has definitely seen better days. we won’t have an estimate until at least tomorrow, but the guy said that he thought it was a total loss. in spite of the fact that our insurance is paying $16 a day towards a rental car, we still might not be able to afford a rental car, because the rental agency wants to charge us $38 a day for their cheapest car. if our car is totalled, then we’re going to return the rental car right away and buy a new car, but if they decide to fix our car i’m not sure what’s going to happen, especially since drunk puppet night and the moisture festival are both coming up soon…
speaking of which, in the process of cleaning out the car, i found a couple pictures from the moisture festival last year. we’re beginning to gear up for drunk puppet night, which starts in portland this year, on the 17th and 18th of february. as i sort of expected, we’re having a grand total of one rehearsal as a group before we start, and we’re rehearsing in seattle before we start in portland, so there will be no tech rehearsal at all. i don’t even know for sure where it will be in portland, although i sort of hope it will be where it was last year (i just checked – it will be!), because that will mean that the tech stuff will be split, and i’ll only have to worry about the sound. the following three weekends, which will be the last weekend in february and the first two weekends in march, drunk puppet night will be held at the columbia city theater.
moe gets home from orlando at 10:00 tonight, which will be approximately 1:00 am tomorrow according to her internal clock. tomorrow morning, we’re going to a dog agility trial with magick and zorah… we’ve got to be there at 7:00 am… i’m thinking moe intentionally did this to deal with jet lag, but at the same time, i wonder how much sleep she’s going to get. i get so confused when i’m dealing with transcontinental flights… she just called, and they’re boarding in orlando now, but according to her schedule, she’s not supposed to leave until 5:30 pm… now i know that her clock is 3 hours behind mine, but it’s still really confusing, and i have to think about it several times before i’ve got it straight… and then it’s exactly the same routine the next time i have to deal with it. i blame my brain injury, although there’s a good chance i would have had exactly the same problems before the injury.
i went and got water today, but on the way home, one of the bottles spilled about a gallon on the floor of the van, filling my shoe. i had to stop at a light, turn around and right two of the bottles – the other one didn’t spill at all. fortunately the light was still red when i turned back around, but there were some annoying pre-teenagers in a bible-camp bus that were waving and showing “honk for jeezis” signs. if i could, i would have told them that jeezis was a leprauchan, but unfortunately there was no way for me to do so.
there’s a bit of good news… apple has finally gone intel, which means that macs are soon going to be orders of magnitude less expensive, and/or you’ll be able to run mac os on a machine that you built out of spare parts, like my current linux machine. now all i’ve got to do is come up with a way to make the money for one or the other and i’m all set… of course, there’s always the option of installing mac os on the linux box, but then i’d have to convert everything, and, while i’m sure it’s possible and even relatively easy, at this point the other option sounds a lot better to me… i’m a geek, after all…
WASHINGTON — When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.
After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a “signing statement” — an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law — declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.
“The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief,” Bush wrote, adding that this approach “will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”
Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president’s signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year’s weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.
A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.
“We are not going to ignore this law,” the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. “We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment.”
But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law’s restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.
“Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case,” the official added. “We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it’s possible that they will.”
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.
“The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,’ ” he said. “They don’t want to come out and say it directly because it doesn’t sound very nice, but it’s unmistakable to anyone who has been following what’s going on.”
Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush’s decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails without a court order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The president and his aides argued that the Constitution gives the commander in chief the authority to bypass the 1978 law when necessary to protect national security. They also argued that Congress implicitly endorsed that power when it authorized the use of force against the perpetrators of the attacks.
Legal academics and human rights organizations said Bush’s signing statement and his stance on the wiretapping law are part of a larger agenda that claims exclusive control of war-related matters for the executive branch and holds that any involvement by Congress or the courts should be minimal.
Vice President Dick Cheney recently told reporters, ”I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it. . . . I would argue that the actions that we’ve taken are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president.”
Since the 2001 attacks, the administration has also asserted the power to bypass domestic and international laws in deciding how to detain prisoners captured in the Afghanistan war. It also has claimed the power to hold any US citizen Bush designates an ”enemy combatant” without charges or access to an attorney.
And in 2002, the administration drafted a secret legal memo holding that Bush could authorize interrogators to violate antitorture laws when necessary to protect national security. After the memo was leaked to the press, the administration eliminated the language from a subsequent version, but it never repudiated the idea that Bush could authorize officials to ignore a law.
The issue heated up again in January 2005. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales disclosed during his confirmation hearing that the administration believed that antitorture laws and treaties did not restrict interrogators at overseas prisons because the Constitution does not apply abroad.
In response, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, filed an amendment to a Defense Department bill explicitly saying that that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in US custody is illegal regardless of where they are held.
McCain’s office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
The White House tried hard to kill the McCain amendment. Cheney lobbied Congress to exempt the CIA from any interrogation limits, and Bush threatened to veto the bill, arguing that the executive branch has exclusive authority over war policy.
But after veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress approved it, Bush called a press conference with McCain, praised the measure, and said he would accept it.
Legal specialists said the president’s signing statement called into question his comments at the press conference.
“The whole point of the McCain Amendment was to close every loophole,” said Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice Department from 1997 to 2002. “The president has re-opened the loophole by asserting the constitutional authority to act in violation of the statute where it would assist in the war on terrorism.”
Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, called Bush’s signing statement an “in-your-face affront” to both McCain and to Congress.
“The basic civics lesson that there are three co-equal branches of government that provide checks and balances on each other is being fundamentally rejected by this executive branch,” she said.
“Congress is trying to flex its muscle to provide those checks [on detainee abuse], and it’s being told through the signing statement that it’s impotent. It’s quite a radical view.”
i’m shocked that it would come to this… it’s definitely time to start searching for another country to call home…
now everybody already knows this, but this is the guy who claims to be the source for the original new york times article that set off the whole thing…
Jan 10, 2006 — Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.
For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people’s conversations around the world.
“I specialized in what’s called special access programs,” Tice said of his job. “We called them ‘black world’ programs and operations.”
But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret “black world” operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.
“The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to get them,” he said.
Tracking Calls Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.
“If you picked the word ‘jihad’ out of a conversation,” Tice said, “the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing.”
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect’s phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.
“That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum,” Tice said.
The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times’ reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.
“As far as I’m concerned, as long as I don’t say anything that’s classified, I’m not worried,” he said. “We need to clean up the intelligence community. We’ve had abuses, and they need to be addressed.”
The NSA revoked Tice’s security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that’s the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had “no information to provide.”
Researchers at Hebrew University have found that extracts from the cannabis plant can help strengthen human bones, preventing osteoporosis, according to an Israel21c report.
An article on the Hebrew University research appeared this week in the prestigious American PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.) journal. The research team, headed by Prof. Itai Bab, worked in Hebrew University’s bone laboratory.
Substances produced mainly in the brain, called endocannabinoids, are made of fatty acids and exist in the bone and elsewhere. The substances bind to and activate two receptors – CB1 in the nervous system and CB2 in the immune system.
A high number of CB2-receptors were found in the bones of the mice and shown to be essential in preserving normal bone density. Mice lacking those receptors were shown to develop osteoporosis as they age.
Osteoporosis, a common ailment in the Western world, can lead to easily broken bones and disabilities.
The study shows that plants such as cannabis, which contain substances that activate CB2 receptors, can be used as a basis of drugs to help those suffering from osteoporosis. The researchers have developed a synthetic compound called HU-308 which succeeds in combatting osteoporosis in mice.
Though the cannabis plant is known mostly for marijuana, which comes from the flowers of the female plants, the extracts have no psychoactive side effects.
YOU
1. Name:
2. Date of birth:
3. Where you live:
4. What makes you happy:
5. Currently listening/the last thing you listened to:
6. Do you read my journal?:
7. If yes, what makes it especially good or bad?:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. Are you in love/do you have a crush at the moment?:
10. Favourite place to spend time:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. The best time of the year:
RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song, or album:
PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Look at my friends-list and tell what you like about one of our mutual friends:
4. Put this in your journal so that I can tell you what I like about you.
The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. THE FLAG CODE, Title 36, U.S.C., Chapter 10, § 176 (a). As amended by P.L. 344, 94th Congress, approved July 7, 1976.
I am posting this on my LiveJournal in opposition to The Patriot Act, which represents an extreme danger to the life, property and liberty of all persons living in the United States.
i got an order on 22 december which i wasn’t immediately able to fill, but everything had already been ordered and i was expecting it around 15 january, so i wrote to the person, who has an email address at aol dot com, and gave them four options for what i could do.
> 1) send you what we can and wait for the rest > 2) wait for the rest and send it all when it comes > 3) refund your order > 4) other, suggested by you.
i never heard back from them, so i chose option 2, since that’s what i would have wanted myself.
i got email from the same person, only at a different email address than the first one, a couple of days ago, asking where his order was. i responded again, to both addresses, saying that i had responded once already, and giving them the same options as before, only now i said that it would probably be shipping out some time in the coming week.
today i got an email the subject of which was “First Request for Information About Buyer Complaint: Case ID #PP-133-474-425” from paypal. apparently he hasn’t been getting the emails i have sent, and now is threatening my ability to do business because of it. at the same time, his package is sitting here on my desk, all wrapped and ready to ship out tomorrow. instead of sending it normal priority mail, now i have to overnight it to him, and then hope that he has enough knowledge of internet to cancel his complaint with paypal, because the only other option is for me to refund his money, and i’m not particularly inclined to do that when the problem is not mine, and i have lived up to what i said i was going to do.
EDIT: i’m going to do the only thing that makes sense, which is i’m going to overnight the package to him, with a tracking number, and then i’m going to get on paypal and resolve the dispute myself, by saying that i’ve already shipped it with the tracking number as proof…
By Declan McCullagh
Published: January 9, 2006, 4:00 AM PST
Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.
This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.
“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”
To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
There’s an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an “interactive computer service” to cause someone “substantial emotional harm.”
That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.
Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.
In each of those three cases, someone’s probably going to be annoyed. That’s enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won’t file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)
Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.
“Who decides what’s annoying? That’s the ultimate question,” Fein said. He added: “If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?”
Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material “with intent to annoy.” But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn’t have to worry.
“I’m certainly not going to close the site down,” Fein said on Friday. “I would fight it on First Amendment grounds.”
He’s right. Our esteemed politicians can’t seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.
It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.
If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he’d realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.
And then he’d repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.
Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans’ personal freedoms. Now we’ll see if the president rises to the occasion.
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they’ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.
unfortunately, this is now the case…
now what this means, for me,(apart from the fact that this is a clear violation of my first amendment rights) is that i have to take down the pages on The Church of Tina Chopp that detail our long, involved, and very amusing interaction with An Evil Anti-Tinite Whose Name We Dare Not Mention (because of previous interactions with her which were annoying, and possibly somewhat more than that as well), because she can now say that the existence of said pages are an annoyance to her, despite the fact that she’s the one who started the whole thing to begin with! furthermore, it’s remotely possible that she, or someone like her, will say that The Church of Tina Chopp, by it’s mere existence, annoys them (after all, that’s one of the most salient features of the organisation), and we will have to take the whole site offline!
SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ASSSASINATE THIS ASS, before he turns this country into a modern version of Nazi Germany!!!
projects like The Free Network Project are essential at this time, but i’m serious… somebody really needs to look into the possibility of going apeshit on his ass with a semiautomatic!
Highlight: At an environmental conference in Canada that brought together 189 countries, the United States, represented by Chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson, refused to make pledges to fight global warming past the year 2012, angering many European countries and activist organizations.
Summary:
The United States ruled out making extra pledges to fight global warming beyond 2012 on Tuesday, angering environmentalists who accused Washington of blocking a 189-nation conference in Canada.
“The United States is opposed to any such discussions,” Watson told a news conference of Canadian proposals to launch talks under the U.N.’s climate convention about new actions to combat global warming beyond 2012.
Environmentalists accused Washington of doing too little to fight a rise in temperatures from human activities that could lead to more storms, expanding deserts and worse floods, and could raise sea levels by up to three feet (one meter) by 2100.
“The failure of the United States to be willing to discuss future action here is the real issue,” he said, predicting Washington will only join a global pact after Bush leaves office.
Bush pulled out in 2001 of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, under which about 40 industrial nations have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
At Montreal, Kyoto backers plan to launch talks, likely to last several years, on new commitments beyond 2012.
Bush branded Kyoto too costly and said it wrongly excluded poor countries.
Many also hope to start wider parallel talks among all countries, including the United States and developing nations such as China and India, on new ways to fight climate change.
She said that new tougher measures were urgently needed to combat rising temperatures.
And British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech earlier on Tuesday that he believed that all major economies would sign up for a binding accord to succeed Kyoto.
But Watson reiterated that Washington had no plans to adopt Kyoto-style caps on emissions and rejected environmentalists’ predictions that the U.S. was dooming the conference to failure.
now we’ve been over this before… global warming is a fact! it’s not just some scare tactic that has been created by “environmentalists,” scientists and hippy-tree-huggers to get us to pay attention to them, it has been proven… DESPITE WHAT SHRUB AND CRONIES WANT US TO BELIEVE, and if we’re going to do something about it other than IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON (which is apparently what the dominionists want to do), we’re going to have to make plans for a lot longer in the future than 2012… have i mentioned recently that it has become necessary to
ASSSASINATE THIS ASS, before he turns this planet into a deserted wasteland!!!
Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.
“We have long believed that this administration has stolen much of its policy from Mr. Orwell’s writings,” said attorney Will Bilyalotz. “Expressly, ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm.’ In some cases, like the illegal surveillance of its own citizens, this administration has lifted the passages word for word from ‘1984.’ Just changing the year doesn’t protect the president from copyright laws.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while refusing to comment directly because of the “ongoing investigation,” reminded reporters that the Patriot Act had given the president the power to suspend copyright laws and, anyway, “No one can own words.”
Legal experts believe proving copyright infringement will not be easy. “Even if he is guilty, the president’s propensity for adapting Mr. Orwell’s ‘1984’ newspeak is so effortless, as if he made up the words himself,” said law professor Sue Yu Atdropohat. “Illegal borrowing of words or even fictional characters from published works has a high threshold of proof. The producers of the film ‘Being There’ have had their lawsuit against the Bush campaign tied up in court since 2000. After all, one man’s outright theft of ideas is another man’s malapropos.”
“Personally, I think this so-called intelligentsia is just jealous,” said Newt Gingrich. “Orwell could have only dreamed of great terms like ‘defeatist’ and ‘evil-doer.'”
Bilyalotz differs. “The president’s comments like, ‘This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table,’ is plain and simple, Mr. Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ (the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both of them).”
The president has regularly pointed out that he will do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, and that those who want to hamstring his ability to steal written material are only aiding the enemy. “9/11 has made us look at our plagiarism in a different way,” said the president. “As long as I am president or king, the American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And if that takes dissolving the Constitution, then so be it.”
“It was Mr. Orwell in ‘1984’ who first came up with ‘Victory Mansions’ and industrial-grade ‘Victory Gin.’ Now the president calls his book, a ‘National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.’ The president doesn’t go 10 seconds without using the word ‘victory.’ One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to put two and two together. Our greatest concern is not that the president uses Mr. Orwell’s words,” Bilyalotz said, “but that he’s actually using ‘1984’ as a governmental guidebook, and I’m afraid the president hasn’t read how it ends.”
In his weekly radio address, Bush said the “Spy on US” program has been reviewed regularly by the nation’s top legal authorities and Fox talk-show hosts, targeting only those people with “a clear link to these terrorist networks, which include Al-Jazeera and CNN.”
“Freedom is in its last throes,” Vice President Dick Cheney said. “First, they take away torture, now they want to take away spying on our own citizens. What’s next to go, Fox News?”
The revelation of the unauthorized bugging has delayed renewal of the Patriot Act, which includes a provision giving President Bush monarchial powers. “Not only will it make this country safer,” explained the president, “but it will ordain either Jenna or Barb as the country’s first queen without the risk of voter fraud or expensive campaigns.”
“This country is ready for a female queen,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “and we can’t take the chance that the next election could turn out to be a mushroom cloud.”
In other Patriot Act news, the White House has asked historians to remove Ben Franklin’s quote, “They that give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” from history books. “It’s wordy and confusing,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said. “And one thing this country doesn’t need in its fight against terrorism is more confusing words. At least that’s what we feel here in the Ministry of Truth.”
now i’ve been saying essentially the same thing ever since 9/11 but until now, nobody has been listening… hopefully people are starting to get the idea…
One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn’t win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.
If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.
Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation’s sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.
If I had been informed that our nation’s leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation’s security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.
If someone had predicted the president’s staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marine Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.
That’s no America I know, I would have argued. We’re too strong, and we’ve been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.
What is there to say now?
All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ”Happy Holidays” could be a disguised attack on Christianity.
I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America’s character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke — speaking metaphorically now — mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we’d follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.
Never would I have expected this nation — which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty — would cower behind anyone just for promising to “protect us.”
President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he’ll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president — or is that king? — has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.
Is that America’s highest goal — preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, “What’s wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?”
Bush would have us excuse his administration’s excesses in deference to the ”war on terror” — a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn’t know where tomorrow’s first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection — even when it’s beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.
Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It’s time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?
Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.
Ultimately, our best defense against attack — any attack, of any sort — is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn’t understand or respect that. Do we?
Doesn’t it seem like the world is getting dumber with every passing year? Well, maybe it is!
In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen[1] report large differences, amounting to more than two standard deviations, in the mean IQ of the populations of different countries around the world, and find that these mean population IQ scores correlate more strongly with economic development as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and long term economic growth than any other single factor.
It has been widely observed that the birthrate of countries tends to fall as they become more wealthy. Most countries in Western Europe now have birthrates below the replacement rate; in the absence of immigration, their populations can be expected to fall in the future.
Putting these two pieces of information together, one might expect that since low IQ countries tend to be less wealthy, they should also be expected to have higher birthrates than countries with high IQ. If population IQ and wealth remain constant, the average IQ of the world should then fall over time, since a larger portion of population growth will occur in low IQ countries. There are a lot of assumptions going into this conclusion, starting out with what IQ measures and what, if anything, it means. See the “Quarrels, Questions, and Answers” section below for discussion of some of these issues.
Year
Population×109
Mean IQ
1950
2.55
91.64
1975
4.08
90.80
2000
6.07
89.20
2025
7.82
87.81
2050
9.06
86.32
The animation above shows the global histogram of IQ and global mean IQ for the hundred year period from 1950 through 2050. Mean population IQ is taken from Lynn and Vanhanen’s[1] figures and yearly population estimates for each country from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3]. Taking these figures at face value, we find that world population and mean IQ evolve at 25 year intervals over the century as given in the table at the right.
Methodology The mean IQ of 185 countries, measured and estimated in Lynn and Vanhanen[1], were taken as the invariant IQ of each country over the 1950-2050 time period. (The figures are given in terms of countries existing as of the year 2000. For countries which came into being in the preceding 50 years due to decolonisation, breakup of the Soviet Union, etc., years prior to independence refer to the territory with borders identical to the present-day country. The list of countries includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, considered in some sense provinces of China, but with large populations, well measured demographically, and economic performance distinctly different from that of the People’s Republic; and Puerto Rico, a United States territory with different demographics than the parent country. The remaining 182 countries include all independent countries with populations greater than 50,000 with the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which no data were available due to the conflict throughout most of the 1990s.)
The 100 year population history and forecast for the 185 countries with measured or estimated mean IQ was obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3], using the mid-year population estimate or projection for each year.
For each year in the hundred year period, each country’s estimated population for that year was apportioned into bins of 5 IQ points using a normal distribution with the mean IQ for the country from Lynn and Vanhanen and the 15 point standard deviation defined for IQ scores. These country histogram bins were summed to create a global histogram for each year. Global mean IQ was computed by an average of country IQs weighted by their population.
Quarrels, Questions, and Answers
Don’t differing IQ figures for various countries simply measure cultural bias in the tests?
This is a possibility, and in certain cases undoubtedly plays a factor. Yet tests carefully designed to exclude cultural bias (for example, spatial relationship tests based entirely on pictures, memorisation of digit sequences, and pure eye-hand reaction time) produce results comparable to those of traditional IQ tests. Further, if IQ tests embody cultural biases of the largely U.K. and U.S. creators of the tests, it’s odd that populations of East Asian countries, with a variety of very different cultures, all test higher than those of the test makers.
Won’t economic development reduce the rate of population growth in the low-IQ countries?
Future population estimates for countries in the Census Bureau database already take this into account. These are, of course, consensus estimates which do not take into effect such impossible-to-forecast circumstances as environmental crises, plague, bad asteroid days, or, on the other hand, technological breakthroughs which accelerate economic development in third world countries. Looking 50 years ahead, only rapid demographic shifts in the near term will have much impact on the figures for 2050, since the parents of adults of that year are already mostly alive today.
Lynn and Vanhanen only actually have IQ data for 81 countries and they’ve estimated the rest. How reliable are those estimates?
I don’t know. In most cases their estimates were made by averaging known IQs of adjacent countries with similar demographic mix. In the few cases of countries with ethnically diverse populations, they estimated IQ based on a weighted average of IQs of the country of origin of each group. They tested this process by using it to estimate IQ of several countries with known IQ and the results correspond well with the measured IQs of those countries. Still, one should bear in mind that 56% of the country IQ figures are estimated, and not based on any actual in-country measurement at all.
And those 81 countries they have IQ data for–there seem to be an awful lot of fudge factors used in computing the numbers they cite in the tables. How trustworthy are they?
Fudge factors? Indeed. . . . More than 25 pages are devoted to explaining the “adjustments”, “corrections”, “calibrations”, and “weightings” which go into that table of 81 numbers. The state of the raw data is more or less hideous. There is no regular, standardised measurement of IQ in nations of the world. One is forced to use sporadic studies, published at widely spaced intervals, using a variety of tests with more or less cultural bias, on populations which may exhibit a variety of selection effects. (For example, if you only test high school children in a country where 75% of children do not attend high school, you can’t expect your results to be representative of the population as a whole.) Still, if you want to do this research, you have work with the data at hand.
If population mean IQ indeed correlates strongly with economic performance, then measuring IQ figures for developing countries and studying ways to increase IQ could play an important rôle in development assistance. A UNESCO program to regularly measure IQ of, say, 16 year olds in all countries could provide hard data and, potentially, by permitting assessment of the effectiveness of programs such as nutrition aid for mothers and infants, educational initiatives, etc., do a world of good. Alas, this entire topic is so politically radioactive there is little likelihood of this ever happening.
You’re assuming the mean IQ of countries won’t change over the hundred year period. How valid is that assumption?
Apart from the Flynn effect (discussed below), which doesn’t seem to have much effect on the relative IQs of countries, in cases where the data are available, national mean IQ does not seem to have varied much over the last 50 years. As long as the population makeup and general circumstances of a country don’t change, it’s reasonable to expect the mean IQ for a given country to remain much the same over the next 50 years. Population migration, however, can have substantial effects and is not taken into account in these data. The Census Bureau population estimates include migration, but the assumption of constant mean IQ may be invalid when the population of a given country consists of a large fraction of immigrants from regions with different mean IQ. This is particularly the case for Western Europe, where the indigenous population has fertility below the replacement rate, and the population includes an increasing proportion of immigrants predominantly from regions with lower mean IQ. To the extent immigrants have more children per family than the original population, the effect is magnified. Whether immigrant populations converge toward the original IQ of their new country as they assimilate is an open question. In all, since most present day and anticipated future population migration is from lower IQ to higher IQ countries, assuming constant IQ probably biases the global mean forecasts toward the high end.
Won’t the Flynn effect compensate for the downward demographic shift in IQ?
The Flynn effect is an undisputed yet enigmatic aspect of IQ testing. Shortly after the first IQ tests were standardised, it was observed that the scores of those taking them tended to rise from year to year, as much as 15 points (one standard deviation) per generation. To maintain a mean score of 100 for the population on which IQ tests were standardised, test makers were forced to make their tests increasingly difficult over the years. In other words, to get the same IQ score as your father, you must perform equally well on a substantially tougher test than he took.
If, for whatever reason, everybody were getting smarter, this would be wonderful news indeed. But a glance at the numbers shows that something very curious must be going on here. If IQ were, in fact, rising at a rate of 15 points per generation then, if the mean IQ of today is 100, that of our grandparents’ generation would have been about 70–generally considered the threshold of mental retardation. Clearly, anybody who’s spent time with their grandparents and other folks of that generation knows that’s utter nonsense.
The literature and music of a century or more ago is clearly not the work of marginally retarded minds, and its abundance indicates those who wrote it were not rare exceptions in a generally dull population. Consider genius in the past. Most people considered geniuses have IQs in the vicinity of 150, or 3 1/3 standard deviations above the mean IQ of 100. In a population with a mean IQ of 100, individuals with IQs of 150 occur with a frequency of about one in 2300 people–they’re rare, but every medium-sized town has one or more, and even a small country with a population of one million has more than 425 such geniuses.
Now, in a population with a mean IQ of 70, which naïve interpretation of the Flynn effect would deem our grandparents to have had, genius-level IQs of 150 would be 5 1/3 standard deviations above the mean and occur, on average, in only one out of 20,396,324 people. If we take the Flynn effect as 3 IQ points per decade, then we’d expect a mean IQ of 70 around the year 1900. In 1900, the world population was about 1.7 thousand million, which would imply there were only 80 people with genius-level IQs in the entire world of 1900. The merest glance at the history of that era will reveal how ridiculous a supposition this is.
Adults, whatever their opinion may be of “what’s the matter with kids today”, are most unlikely to cite “they’re just too doggone smart!” So, the Flynn effect is a conundrum: a wide variety of tests which agree with one another and reliably predict outcomes we identify with “intelligence” all indicate that the general population is becoming more intelligent at an almost dizzying rate, while other evidence for this (for example, individuals with Einstein-calibre intelligence being almost 10,000 times more common than a hundred years ago) is notably absent. There is no shortage of hypotheses for what’s going on, but little evidence to support any of them. Flynn himself believes that IQ tests measure test-taking and problem-solving ability, not genuine intelligence, and that this has risen over time as more and more children receive compulsory education and are subjected to ever more tests. Improved nutrition over the 20th century is often cited as a factor, as well as the introduction of egalitarian welfare state systems in developed countries tending to reduce poverty. But all of these are factors which one would expect to eventually reach a plateau, and that doesn’t seem to have happened, at least so far.
This isn’t a document about the Flynn effect (although it risks becoming one unless I wind this up rather soon), and since no solution to this long-standing puzzle is at hand, one can only speculate on what it really means. Since correction for the Flynn effect is substantial in Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ estimates, and can be expected to strongly influence IQ scores published in the future, it is essential one bear it in mind in any analysis of population intelligence trends.
IQ scores are normalised for a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 in the populations for which they were originally developed. Is the standard deviation the same in populations with higher or lower mean IQ?
I don’t know. This is a fascinating question about which I have found no research whatsoever. Absent any information to the contrary, in computing the global IQ histogram in the charts at the top of this document, I assume a standard deviation of 15 points regardless of the mean. Note that this assumption only affects the shape of the histogram; the global mean is independent of the variance of individual country populations.
Flynn, J. R. “The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978”, Psychological Bull. 95, 29 (1984).
Flynn, J. R. “Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure”, Psychological Bull. 101, 171 (1987).
Flynn, J. R. “IQ gains over time”, in Sternberg, Robert J.. ed. Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence. New York: Macmillan, 1994. ISBN 0-028-97407-7. (pp. 617-623)
“IQ Exists and Matters” Arguments
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve. New York: The Free Press, [1994] 1996. ISBN 0-684-82429-9.
Fraser, Steven. The Bell Curve Wars. New York: Basic Books, 1995. ISBN 0-465-00693-0.
Economic Development and Population Trends
Todd, Emmanuel. Après l’Empire. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. ISBN 2-07-076710-8. English translation: After the Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-231-13102-X.
this post is a long list of links that i’ve collected over the past two years or so, and saved because i thought i’d be able to classify them somehow. i haven’t had anywhere else to put them, so they’re going here.
Build your own Klingon disruptor from The Register (my favourite news source)… “An ex-US Navy engineer … for the price of $500… has built a ‘gun’ … can disable almost any piece of electronic equipment from 20 feet away.” “He claims to have built another machine capable of crashing computers, and cars from a distance of 100 feet. That one cost him less than $300.” whee!
Bullets Screen Saver for Windows – if you use windoesn’t, this is definitely the screen saver for you… if you don’t, then it’s an amusing look at how the other half deals with their computer crashing all the time.
To Foo or Not Tofu… foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud. this goes along with Metasyntactic Variables and RFC 3092, and needs no further explanation. if you can’t figure it out, be thankful you’re not a geek.
Badvertising on the Net – which is another link that i found while working for a windows development group… and an idea which, if i were a windoesn’t user, would probably be high on my list of things i need to do.
RFID-Zapper – make friends and influence people at a local mall near you… just don’t get caught, ’cause the people that put RFID tags on things are pretty protective of their stuff… and, for the moment, it is still their stuff…
Time Surfer for Mac OsX – now this is a bizarre bit of coincidence here… i found this, i don’t know, probably a year and a half or two years ago, and didn’t do anything with it, and eventually forgot that i had the link. then, last year at the oregon country fair, i sat down to rest one afternoon and noticed this thing sitting on the hay bale behind me, with a sticky-note attached to it that said “free – for YOU!”, so i picked it up. it was a small square, green package that looked as if it might be a book or something, closed with a zipper, but when i opened it, it was clear that i wasn’t going to be able to make any sense of it where i was, so i zipped it back up and brought it home with me, where i could examine it in detail without having to worry about losing the many little parts that were contained inside. it said “DREAMSPELL – The Journey of Timeship Earth 2013” and contained inside were everything one would need to fortell the future using the ancient mayan calendar… or something like that, i couldn’t figure it out, because the book was written in a teensy font and went on and on and on and on without getting to very much of a point at all. apparently the book contains the basics for reading the mayan calendar, and the other stuff is for using the mayan calendar to fortell the future, or something like that. anyway, i was going through my list of links the other day, and found this one which says “Time Surfer is a unique program for discovering the cyclic interwoven timing frequencies of the Mayan Long Count, Tzokin, Haab and the Dreamspell Calendars.” perhaps the time is right for me to look into this again, especially since the program is free…
the of and a to in is you that it he for was on are as with his they at be this from I have or by one had not but what all were when we there can an your which their said if do will each about how up out them then she many some so these would other into has more her two like him see time could no make than first been its who now people my made over did down only way find use may water long little very after words called just where most know get through back much before go good new write our used me man too any day same right look think also around another came come work three word must because does part even place well such here take why things help put years different away again off went old number great tell men say small every found still between name should Mr home big give air line set own under read last never us left end along while might next sound below saw something thought both few those always looked show large often together asked house don’t world going want school important until 1 form food keep children feet land side without boy once animals life enough took sometimes four head above kind began almost live page got earth need far hand high year mother light parts country father let night following 2 picture being study second eyes soon times story boys since white days ever paper hard near sentence better best across during today others however sure means knew it’s try told young miles sun ways thing whole hear example heard several change answer room sea against top turned 3 learn point city play toward five using himself usually
Source: The American Heritage Word Frequency Book by John B. Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman (Houghton Mifflin, 1971, ISBN 0-395-13570-2).
(this is the first night that moe is in orlando, and i can’t sleep… can you tell?)
i discovered this a while ago, but i just got around to checking it out, and it does, indeed, do what they say… first, make a high quality, high contrast scan of the 2D barcode on your driver’s license (according to the site, currently 39 states use 2D barcodes on driver’s licenses, but NC, GA, UT, IL, KY, and older licences from MN are currently non-decodeable for one reason or another) that’s between 1000 and 2000 pixels wide, and between 500kb – 1.5mb, and upload it here and you get to find out how the cops know so much about you after such a short period of time…
except that my license has the information from before we moved, which is why they put “please notify the DOL within 10 days of a change of address” warning on the back…
Tinky Winky, Lenny the shark, and SpongeBob SquarePants move on over. The next child icon caught promoting the homosexual agenda is none other than BARBIE!!
Here is a list of known Toon homosexuals to date:
The religious right is now attacking Barbie for promoting “gender confusion.” According to the men at the Concerned Women for America, Barbie is urging kids to go bi:
“This is directed at children aged four to eight… that’s a really young age to be directing something along the lines of bisexuality.”
Yes, Barbie is making four year olds want to have sex with other four year olds of the same gender. And the Concerned Men would prefer that children have sex with four year olds of the opposite gender, I guess.
What’s really going on here is that the religious right has been attacking Mattel for months, just like they went after Ford and Microsoft and Allstate and Kraft and every other major American company. This is just another way for them to attack Mattel and get Mattel to do something bigoted to make amends.
But claiming that Barbie is promoting bisexuality to four year olds, that’s just whacked.
PS They also attack Barbie for not being a good Christian because good Christian girls only want to serve the Lord, get married, stay at home and have kids. I’m not making this up. I guess if you’re a woman (or a doll) who wants a career, then you’re a dyke.
It is my belief that President George W. Bush is drinking again. Even worse, he may be mixing alcohol and anti-depressants — a dangerous combination for anyone, let alone the so-called leader of the free world.
No, I don’t have any proof of this, just random events and comments from those who work in and around the Bush administration and who tell me the President has acted in ways that suggest the use of alcohol and drugs. I’m a recovering alcoholic (sober 11 years, six months and 24 days) and I’ve run across a lot of relapsed drinkers who show the same symptoms as the President, including:
Blacking out while watching television alone;
Slurred speech and stammering responses to simple questions;
Anger and hostility in front of staff members;
Unexplained bruises on his face;
Trouble remembering recent events or comments.
During his trip to Mongolia last November, Bush openly sampled the local drink Airag, which is fermented milk with an alcohol content ranging from three to twelve percent. In other words, booze.
This was the same trip where Bush tried to evade reporters’ question by attempting to walk out a locked door and then turned sheepishly to the cameras and said he was “jet-lagged.” Some at the event said his stride was unsteady and his speech slurred.
“According to reports, President Bush may be drinking again,” David Letterman said in a late-night monologue. “And I thought, “Well, why not? He’s got everybody else drinking.”
Rumors that Bush was hitting the bottle surfaced in Washington two years ago. Sources told us the President was using anti-depressants in 2004 and we reported the story. The same sources told us last year he was drinking again and we reported it in August. The National Enquirer also ran a front page story on it but no mainstream media outlet picked up on the story.
On August 27 of last year, the Houston Chronicle reported on a party at Bush’s ranch, noting that:
Nothing the president said could be quoted, but it’s rare that reporters get uninterrupted access to him for 90 minutes, particularly when beer is served. Bush, who gave up drinking years ago, drank a non-alcoholic Buckler.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, we are warned to stay away from so-called “non-alcoholic” beers or “near beer” as it is called. The brew does, in fact, contain some alcohol and can trigger a renewed desire for more.
The November issue of the Journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, cites a study by team of California scientists who report that just the smell of non-alcoholic beer may be enough to trigger cravings and a subsequent relapse among certain alcoholics.
In my original articles about Bush’s bouts with anger and depression, I quoted Dr. Justin Frank, a George Washington University psychiatrist and author of the book: Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.
“Two questions that the press seems particularly determined to ignore have hung silently in the air since before Bush took office,” Dr. Frank says. “Is he still drinking? And if not, is he impaired by all the years he did spend drinking? Both questions need to be addressed in any serious assessment of his psychological state.”
Dr. Frank’s analysis of the President, which is based on watching and reading and not actual treatment of Bush, agrees with those who have told me the President is also taking anti-depressants.
“In writing about Bush’s halting appearance in a press conference just before the start of the Iraq War, Washington Post media critic Tom Shales speculated that ‘the president may have been ever so slightly medicated,’” he said.
Dr. Frank explains Bush’s behavior as all-to-typical of an alcoholic who is still in denial:
“The pattern of blame and denial, which recovering alcoholics work so hard to break, seems to be ingrained in the alcoholic personality; it’s rarely limited to his or her drinking,” he adds. “The habit of placing blame and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush’s personal history that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat.”
None of this, of course, proves Bush is drinking again or taking anti-depressants. The only evidence we have of Bush drinking is the sampling of a local, alcohol-based drink in Mongolia and his consumption of so-called non-alcoholic beer at a party in Crawford, Texas.
But my instincts tell me he is doing both alcohol and drugs and I believe as both a journalist and a recovering alcoholic that he needs to prove to Americans that he is not attempting to govern while under the influence.
Moreover, with rare exceptions (e.g., the John Tower affair) the press seems very reluctant to mention heavy drinking by officials, even when it’s widely known. Ted Kennedy’s drinking gets an occasional mention, but I’d bet that most of Pat Moynihan’s constiuents never knew their brilliant senator faced a permanent battle with the bottle. If Gary Hart’s drinking problem has ever made the newspapers, I’ve missed it, though his behavior in the Donna Rice affair made it pretty obvious. Those in the know understood that the frequent media references to Bill Weld’s “laziness” as Governor of Massachusetts referred to his persistent difficulty in keeping himself vertical after lunch, but again the voters didn’t. Even foreign leaders get the same delicate treatment: Boris Yeltsin’s “erratic” behavior was in fact quite regular and predictable, once vodka was entered into the equation.
Kleiman is right about Moynihan’s drinking. You could find the Senator at Capitol Hill watering holes most any night, lunching in many different directions at once while slurping down his drinks. A number of members of Congress are notorious drunks but their antics are almost never reported by the press unless they get nailed for DUI or caught frolicking nude in the Tidal Basin.
As a journalist, it is my duty to raise questions about the fitness of any elected leader. One may argue over whether or not it is proper to print speculation but, in this case, I believe it is justified.
I’m doing my job. I just wish the so-called “mainstream” media would do theirs.
I first suspected I was on the wrong planet round about May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher got elected as prime minister of Great Britain. The election of a more-or-less fascist leader by a more-or-less working class electorate struck me as a form of collective insanity. My fears about the planet were confirmed a year and a half later, when a third-rate B-movie actor in the obvious primary stages of senility got elected as president of the most powerful country in the world.
I was three weeks short of 17 when Thatcher got elected, so my alienation at the time was put down to the raging of hormones; and I was told I would ‘get over it’ and that it was ‘just a stage’ I was going through. Nobody told me that I was alienated because I was, in fact, an alien; that were it not for a cosmic accident two thousand years ago I would have been born on a more beautiful, more peaceful planet than The Earth. This was something I did not come to understand until many years later.
My planet is called Urf, and it’s about 100 billion miles away from Earth, on a different plane of existence: a lighter, happier, more-evolved plane. If you had a big enough telescope you would be able to see it’s mirror incarnation in this plane, and you would assume it’s uninhabitted, as it is coal black, surrounded by dense poisonous gasses. It was once inhabited by many species, including thinking biped, ape-like creatures who quickly learned how to dominate and subjugate the others. They were cleverer than the Earth-humans and became technologically advanced much quicker. You see, there was no dark age on Urf. The Urfians did not suffer from the debilitating effects of religion, as it had never occurred to the first primitive tribes to invent a god. You see, the planet Urf benefited from tectonic stability, so there were no volcanoes or earthquakes. And as it’s sun was less powerful, but nearer, the weather patterns were much kinder. The whole planet basked in late Spring-like temperatures, year round, making for a temperate, warm, fertile planet. There were no storms, no hurricanes, no droughts. The Urfian bipeds didn’t even have to deal with serious predators. The largest carnivorous beast on Urf was a creature called a pratwat, a bit like a pig, but with the teeth of a dog. It could take out an Urfian biped, with some effort, if necessary, but two bipeds with stout sticks could easily whip it’s ass. On Urf there was nothing for the Urfian biped to fear, so there was no need for a god. That’s not to say that they couldn’t have used some celestial guidance, because they most certainly could. Despite living on a fertile planet and having no real needs, like the first Earth humans, they were still spiritually backwards, like all creatures on all the planets on this particular plane of existence. You see, the energy vibration levels on this particular plane of existence are slow and almost treacly compared to the plane I was supposed to be born on, so it is harder to connect with the celestial energy of The One. Therefore the Urfians, like all Earthlings, like every creature on this plane of existence are all, without exception, spiritually stupid. No matter how evolved they are technologically, they are still, essentially, blind. They are incapable of recognising The One, of realising they are a part of The One. And so, they act out their individual roles, believing they are all separate from each other. They are incapable of seeing the finer energies that connect us all: seeing only the dense matter that is their physical bodies. Being blinded by this illusion of separation, the Urfian, like the Earthling, was essentially a self-serving creature. So, just like on Earth, on Urf there was a self-serving acquisitiveness which drove the Urfian; and they were as prone to folly as the Earthlings. They very quickly destroyed their planet, much quicker than the Earthlings are currently doing; and now the planet Urf is a burned out cinder. At least, that’s the way it is on this plane of existence.
Maybe you do not believe that there are more than three-dimensions because of your limited perceptions. The Urfians on this plane of existence also did not believe there were more than three-dimensions until the very end, when they developed the technology to rip through the fabric of their limited reality into another plane of existence, scorching their already seriously damaged planet with a sudden surge of raw celestial energy, wiping out every living being on their planet in the blinking of an eye. Urf, on this plane of existence, was wiped out just over 2,000 years ago; and serious damage was done to the veils that separate the different planes of existence. One day soon, quantum physicists on this planet will discover the multi-dimensional nature of the universe; and the scientists, presidents, generals and company directors will conspire to conquer the vast green planet that is The Earth, but on a fresher, more vibrant plane of existence. And should they use the same technology as their Urfian counterparts, they will succeed only in turning the Earth on this plane into a black, uninhabitable cinder.
Earthlings on this plane of existence, like the Urfians before them, have always suspected that there was something better around them which they could not see. In their very DNA is the knowledge that there are higher planes of existence; and imprinted in the soul is a yearning to transcend this limited, dirty plane of existence. Primitive Earthlings knew this yearning only too well, as their lives were simple, uncluttered and rooted in nature; and the gods that they invented and the religions and mythologies they dreamt up were a melange of their fears and wishes. The paradise which is a central pivot of all religions is the picture of a higher plane of existence imprinted in the mind of the primitive Earthling. It is this vision of heaven that spurs Earthlings on to self-improvement. It is an urge, an urgency, imprinted in every creature’s DNA. But that urge is very often re-routed because of emotional and spiritual stupidity and an inability to comprehend the presence of The One. In these particularly stupid and desperate times the transcendental urge can be sublimated easily by the likes of daemonic entities that incarnate into the almost vacant bodies of advertising executives and marketing directors: so the collective urge to become self-aware in order to reincarnate is tapped into and re-wired by misleading messages played out perpetually through the mass media. Most Earthlings, being stupid and devoid of true discrimination, are incredibly susceptible to these messages. Their desire for things they don’t need is immense. They are constantly dreaming about owning a bigger house, a faster car, a better television, a more powerful computer, a newer kitchen, more fashionable clothes etc; and they are constantly conspiring to find the wherewithal to purchase these goodies. They happily sell out their youthful principles to climb the greasy pole that is a career and increase their buying power. So they buy and buy and buy; and this flurry of purchasing is like a white noise that drowns out the wee, small voice that is true consciousness; the wee small voice which urges them to be good humans, to improve themselves, to reach upwards and magnetise themselves towards the light, so that upon death they are pulled upwards, out of this plane of existence to the next level.
It is cosmic law that you go to where you are drawn; and although the general flow is upwards, as spirits we can still go backwards. Earthlings on this plane can, upon death, be sucked back down to a lower plane of existence. Those who are so avaricious that they will, without conscience, happily destroy the lives of others in order to achieve their own material advancement are drawn back down to an elemental plane of existence after they die. The religious concept of Hell, just like the concept of Heaven, is very much based on the dreams and visions of primitive Earthlings, who, despite their simplicity, were wiser and more connected than those who live in this era of white noise and consumer goodies. These dreams and visions, in which they could see the higher plane that they imagined was paradise, also delivered to them frightening images of the lower, elemental plane.
Just as those on this plane of existence can be drawn back down to the elemental plane, so can those on the level above this one be drawn back down to this one. There are many things about this plane of existence that attract those who exist on the higher plane. Despite their knowledge and wisdom, and despite the peace and happiness enjoyed by all, many higher beings are attracted to this plane of existence. There is a physicality to this plane of existence that is very alluring. Higher beings do not have physical bodies as we understand them. Their ‘bodies’ are made of energy, and everyone’s energy is interconnected. Therefore the simple, physical pleasures that we enjoy are not available to higher beings. They don’t need to eat or drink or excrete waste products. They don’t need to breathe. They don’t even need a sense of smell. And as they do not procreate, they have no genitals. They do not enjoy the consolations that those on the lower planes enjoy. Many of the creatures in the higher plane, especially during their first incarnation, miss the sheer sensuality of the lower realms… and those that cannot tear themselves away from this illusion of yearning become utterly fixated with the lower realms. So much so, that some of them return in spirit bodies, just to observe the lower creatures enjoying the crass pleasures of their dense bodies. You have heard of angels, no doubt? These are not, as you suppose, messengers of God, but bewildered souls from a higher plane. To your eyes they shimmer or have haloes, for they are made of light… but their light is not as bright as those who remain in the higher plane. As soon as they visit the lower realms their bodies start to vibrate at lower energy levels and the light in them fades. Those who remain for a long time lose their shine altogether; and when they pass away, are reincarnated in a lower plane. It is usually lust for sex or fleshy sensuality that is these higher creatures’ undoing. You may even have seen or felt one near you at the height of coitus. They love to watch you all fucking, and they yearn to be inside you as you experience that brief bright love for another. Sometimes they even jump into your bodies as you orgasm, so that they can feel what you are feeling; even though the sheer denseness of your bodies asphyxiates to them; even though this process exhausts and debilitates them; even though they are cast out of your bodies after a mere few minutes. You may have experienced the strange, fleeting pleasure of being entered by one of these etheric voyeurs. The exchange of energy is intense, for you will have sucked up some of their light, just as they have sucked up some of your darkness. For hours or even days afterwards you will be walking on air. Sometimes even, you will fall in love.
Urfians are particularly prone to reincarnating on the lower plane. Because of the untimely destruction of our planet on the lower realm and because of the holes torn in the very fabric of reality, it is easier for us than for any other creature on any other planet to visit the lower realms. The death of our planet filled the higher beings with a strange melancholy, an almost intangible yearning for the lower realm. We were haunted by spectral apparitions of Urf as it had been, and for over 2,000 years, we have felt seized by the desire to visit the lower plane. So dangerous are the holes in reality, even beings from the plane that is above ours are drawn to the physical realm. Jesus was from this highest realm. So were many other prophets and messiahs. They surrendered to incarnation on the physical plane because they were overcome with compassion for the suffering of those who existed there.
As there were no beings on the burnt out planet that was the Urf of the lower realm, the Urfians would visit the nearest inhabited planet. Your planet. It is not by accident that your planet is called The Earth. It was named so by one of your kind who believed he’d had a vision of an angel, but in actuality had only had an encounter with an etheric Urfian tourist.
Just over two thousand years ago when the terrestrial Urfians destroyed their planet and tore holes in reality’s raiment the terrestrial planet Earth was swarming with Urfian etheric tourists. It was a crazy time for the terrestrial Earthlings: angels were seen everywhere and miracles were commonplace. The planet was teeming with beings from both the higher and the highest realms. During the first few centuries of the Christian calendar, the terrestrial planet Earth was like a holiday theme park for the Urfians; and they paid the price of their curiosity by being magnetised, and upon their death in the etheric, being reincarnated on Earth. Reincarnation on Earth soon cured the Urfians of their attraction to the place. One cycle of life on that miserable planet was usually enough to convince them that they should stick to their own realm. After about five centuries, Urfian visitations more or less ceased on Earth; and as a consequence, the nascent spirituality of the Earthlings withered away. A new dark age was ushered in. The angels disappeared; and dark forces ate away at the soul of The Earth’s religious institutions. For the next twelve hundred or so years, no Urfian set foot on the planet Earth, although, from time to time, observation parties would travel there, surrounded by protective shields of light, so that none of the Earth’s magnetic energy could touch them and effect an unwanted reincarnation. Then, some time in the mid-Eighteenth century the Urfian observation teams noticed disturbing changes on The Earth. The Earthlings, finally freed from the yoke of a religion that was rotten to the core, had begun to develop technologically. The invention of the steam engine sent alarm bells ringing all over etheric Urf. The Urfians were suddenly woken up to the fact that the Earthlings, despite their bumbling superstitious minds, might well develop technologically as the Urfians had done before them. Knowing the damage that the Urfians themselves had done to the fabric of reality, they were afraid that the Earthlings might develop sufficient technological skills to blast their way through to another level of reality, maybe even opening up doors to the lower realms, which would wreak havoc with the cosmos… or worse, the veils between all the realms would disintegrate and daemonic entities from the lowest realm would invade the very highest realm, which, on a cosmic level, would be like a super-volcano exploding, throwing up a giant ash cloud, and blanking out the sun. It would be the spiritual equivalent of an ice age, in which hell indeed would freeze over.
The etheric Urfians, guided by Urfian super-souls from the highest realm, knew what they had to do. They had to sacrifice themselves to try to prevent the possible destruction of the universe. Each etheric Urfian had to do a tour of duty on The Earth. One terrestrial Earth incarnation, with the specific purpose of subverting the Earthlings’ relentless drive towards technological advancement and the almost inevitable destruction of their planet. This plan was put into action at the tail end of the nineteenth century. Initially, a million etheric Urfians were dispatched to the terrestrial plane, arriving one by one on the Earth, at three minute intervals, travelling slowly, almost imperceptibly through the Earth’s atmosphere and gradually becoming cloaked in the dark magnetic muck that surrounds the Earth, camouflaging themselves, so that they would be entirely invisible to the Earthlings’ naked eyes. Although invisible, the relatively sudden presence of a million etheric beings on Earth was felt in many other ways. It is no coincidence that the late Victorians were morbidly obsessed with sex. They could feel the eyes of etheric beings upon them as they coupled; and in their ignorance, were certain that God was watching them… and judging them.
The sudden presence of so many invisible etheric Urfians on the terrestrial plane put considerable strain on the cosmos, causing tears in the veils that separate the realities. These tears nearly precipitated the events that the Urfians most feared, for they allowed a leakage of daemonic souls into the terrestrial plane. Daemonic souls are, in general, incredibly stupid, so it is rare that they find doorways into the terrestrial plane, but when they do, they wreak havoc. They instantly incarnate in human form by invading the nearest new-born and gobbling up their souls. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the result of the lowest of daemons incarnating on the terrestrial plane.
Once the etheric Urfians incarnated in terrestrial form the rips between the daemonic and the terrestrial sealed up and no more daemons got through. The first daemon incarnates – many of them ordinary, horrible, not-so-powerful citizens – mated with the terrestrial population and caused hideous mutations in the gene pool, which spawned bastard children like Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, who then, in an attempt to fortify the daemon gene, mated with other half-daemons, creating hideous abortions like Mark Thatcher and George Bush Junior. Osama Bin Laden likewise is a half-daemonic abortion. As was Uday Hussain and Baby Doc Duvalier. These daemonic abortions are way more evil than their parents, but fortunately they are very often a lot more stupid, and rarely get into positions of real power. The few that do, like Tony Blair, have a highly evolved and sophisticated conniving gene. Others, like the mental defective, George Bush Jr, have been more-or-less enthroned, as the acceptable, user-friendly figure-head of a daemonic cartel.
After the Urfians became aware of the damage that had been done by their mass exodus to Earth they slowed things down considerably; and with careful monitoring, worked out the optimum number of etheric beings that the terrestrial Earth could bear without damage. Throughout the twentieth century, at any given point in time, there have been just over 100,000 etheric Urfians on the planet Earth. Given that an etheric Urfian can survive for only six months in the poisonous atmosphere of the Earth, a total of twenty million Urfians have incarnated on the Earth in human form.
You would think that twenty million relatively highly evolved souls would have had a totally transformative effect on the terrestrial planet Earth, but sadly that has not been the case. You see, as they were incarnating on a strange planet, they lost all the reference points, which would normally trigger the deeply buried memories of their previous incarnations. The terrestrial planet Earth bore no relationship to the etheric planet Urf, unlike the etheric Earth, which was a lighter, brighter mirror of its terrestrial counterpart. When the Urfians incarnated on the terrestrial Earth, it was like their hard-drives were wiped clean. They completely forgot their previous existence and their purpose. All they had to go on was a feeling that they didn’t belong… and this feeling of not belonging was the motor that drove them on the road to self-discovery. Many incarnate Urfians eventually unravelled some degree of self-knowledge or self-awareness. Some even came to understand something of the nature of their purpose on Earth. Few ever truly realised that they had voluntarily incarnated on the terrestrial planet Earth from the etheric planet Urf, with the specific intention of waking up the Earthlings who were sleepwalking towards their own extinction… and possibly the extinction of the known universe. Despite that, they were driven by feelings, ideas, visions and dreams to subvert the Earthlings’ overwhelming desire to subjugate everything they could for their own ends. The Urfians infiltrated every strata of society and their desire for peace, love and understanding infected the Earthlings like a benign cancer. Without the presence of the Urfians the Earthlings would have managed to destroy the Earth by the year 2000, as Earthling prophets of old had previously predicted. Urfians are responsible for slowing down the march of technology and accelerating the spiritual awakening of the terrestrial Earthling race. They have worked tirelessly, if blindly, towards this end. During the first half of the century they worked slowly and painstakingly in the fields of art, literature, philosophy and politics to try to subvert the status quo of the Earthlings. In the second half of the century – after the unbelievable horrors of the 2nd World War – the Urfians were driven to use less subtle strategies. They infiltrated the light entertainment industries and in less than twenty years took almost complete control. It was Urfians who first mass-manufactured and distributed mind-altering drugs like LSD and Ecstasy. It was Urfians that were in the forefront of all the various hippie and new age movements. It was Urfians that founded pressure groups like the Greenpeace, Amnesty International and CND. It was Urfians that were at the forefront of the feminist movement. It was Urfians that spearheaded campaigns for civil rights and liberties for oppressed minorities. It was Urfians who campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty. It was Urfians who invented the birth control pill. It was Urfians who campaigned against censorship… and barely a one of them knew that they hailed from Urf. The common thread that bound them was a desire to make the Earth a better place.
At present there are approximately fifteen million Urfian souls currently incarnated in Earthling flesh (five million of the early pioneers have now served their tours of duty and are once again enjoying the delights of life on the etheric Urf). Of these fifteen million, few have come to the full realisation of their origins. Only a handful remember that they are from Urf. They work towards the Earth’s greater good because of some inner compulsion they do not quite understand. They work with dedication and vision, but rarely to their fullest potential. If they could be re-awakened to realise who they are and what their mission is they would truly be a force to be reckoned with. If they could open up their etheric eyes and revitalise their spiritual powers they would be able to defeat the daemonic forces that have taken control of the governments and multinational corporations. If they could connect together at an energetic level their power would be twenty times what it is now. If they could realise that they are part of The One they would be able to help the Earthlings learn that they too are part of The One. If they could help the Earthlings realise their true natures all the outposts of the evil empire would crumble: for it is their unwitting participation and cooperation with the system that keeps the wheels of evil turning.
Amongst the fifteen million, more than 75 percent are almost completely asleep. Not only do they have no clue about their origins, they are devoid of even the faintest urge to carry out their mission to improve the Earthlings and the Earth. They are, for all intents and purposes, Earthlings. The only thing that separates them from their Earth cousins is a nagging sense that they don’t belong. They feel different from others. Many feel entirely alienated from their peers, often suffering from attendant mental and emotional stress that Earthling doctors diagnose as mental illness. Others may find some sort of tentative foothold in human society, by choosing to work in fields that are not highly valued by Earthlings and therefore are less competitive, less aggressive environments. There is a very high per capita ratio of unconscious Urfians in the lower ranks of the caring professions. The arts also attract great numbers of Urfians, especially the least attractive, least financially rewarding art forms, like poetry. Few Urfians ever succeed in their chosen professions, not even in poetry. They do not have the determination, the drive or the ruthlessness that is necessary to rise far above the huddled masses. Ted Hughes, for example, was pure Earthling stock, whereas his wife, Sylvia Plath – who only really became truly famous after her suicide – was half Urfian.
There are nearly twelve million Urfians out there sleepwalking through their lives. They are like an army with no guns, no uniforms. They have the potential to help defeat the daemonic forces that have insinuated their way into positions of power on this planet. They have the potential to help awaken Earthlings to their true nature and prevent the destruction of the Earth… and possibly the universe itself. But they have not yet realised this potential.
(If you have read this message and it speaks to you, possibly you are an Urfian too. If you suspect you might be, now is the time to act, to work to prevent the Earth’s destruction. Channel your talents and abilities to help reawaken other unconscious Urfians: give them your love and support; nurture them. Use every means possible to open up Earthling’s eyes: subvert their thinking wherever possible; and where necessary, infiltrate the heart of the daemonic empire and destroy their systems from within. Remember, use only peaceful means; for evil only begets evil and will ultimately make the daemonic empire stronger…. act now, for time is quickly running out!)
Mooning deemed ‘disgusting’ but legal in Md. Man who exposed his buttocks during an argument walks free
By Ernesto Londoo
The Washington Post
Updated: 9:59 a.m. ET Jan. 4, 2006
WASHINGTON – Acquitting a Germantown man who exposed his buttocks during an argument with a neighbor, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled yesterday that mooning, while distasteful, is not illegal in Maryland.
“If exposure of half of the buttock constituted indecent exposure, any woman wearing a thong at the beach at Ocean City would be guilty,” Judge John W. Debelius III said after the bench trial, reversing the ruling of a District Court judge.
Debelius made clear his disdain for the defendant, calling the alleged act “disgusting” and “demeaning.” The outcome could have been different, he suggested, if the man had been on trial for “being a jerk.”
The case arose from a June 7 argument between the defendant, Raymond Hugh McNealy, 44, and a neighbor, Nanette Vonfeldt. Vonfeldt pressed charges against McNealy after he allegedly yelled and, according to Vonfeldt, threatened to “blow up my building” as she and her 8-year-old daughter walked out of their apartment, in the 20200 block of Shipley Terrace in Germantown.
“Then, for whatever reason, in full view of my daughter, he mooned us,” Vonfeldt wrote in a court document. The two had a long-standing feud over issues before their homeowners association, which held a heated meeting the night before, McNealy’s attorneys said. McNealy wanted Vonfeldt off the association’s board, his attorneys said.
The case went to trial Sept. 12 before Montgomery District Court Judge Eugene Wolfe, who ruled against the defendant. Indecent exposure in Maryland is punishable by as much as three years in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Victory for ‘beachgoers and plumbers’ McNealy’s attorneys appealed the verdict, arguing that indecent exposure in Maryland constitutes the willful public display of a person’s “private parts” — which, they argued, do not include a person’s buttocks.
Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Dan Barnett said the indecent exposure law in Maryland is ambiguous.
“In our minds, this was not a bathing suit scenario,” said Barnett, who supervises Montgomery County prosecutors who handle cases in District Court. “This was a grown man exposing himself to an 8-year-old girl.”
Defense attorneys cited a 1983 case of a woman who was arrested after protesting in front of the U.S. Supreme Court wearing nothing but a cardboard sign that covered the front of her body. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in 1986 that indecent exposure is limited to a person’s genitals.
James Maxwell, one of McNealy’s attorneys, said yesterday’s ruling should “bring comfort to all beachgoers and plumbers” in the state.
one of the following graphics is an actual result from my taking the quiz. the other two are bogus. can you tell which one?
Your Social Dysfunction: Paranoid
You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.
so i’m researching how to market Hybrid Elephant better than i have been (which is not at all), and i discovered, or, rather, i rediscovered that Hybrid Elephant has a web stats program already installed on the web server, so i decided to have a look. the last time i checked the stats was in november 2003(!), shortly after my injury. since then Hybrid Elephant has been averaging somewhere between 35,000 and 75.000 hits per month, or around 6,000 hits per week (the week of 6 november, 2005 had almost 35,000 hits!), and the weeks starting 11 december, 2005 had an average of 7,500 hits per week! my busiest day is usually tuesday, and the busiest hour of the busiest day is usually 12:00 pm, the most recent of which had 14,172 requests for pages. the large majority of hits (34.56%) come from the .net TLD, followed by 30.93% from the .com TLD, 16.12% from “unresolved numerical addresses”(?), and 2.74% from the .edu TLD… i’ve gotten 10,230 hits from the .uk TLD, 13,601 from the .hr TLD (croatia!), and i’ve even had 332 hits from the .arpa TLD… and i’ve gotten 1 hit each from andorra, macedonia, lichtenstein and cote d’ivoire… strangely enough, though, the most frequently requested directory is the objects directory (probably the murtis or the pipes, which i’ve gotten a bunch of emails about), and the incense directory comes in a disappointing #4… i’m pretty sure i’ll be able to make some use out of this information. what remains to be seen.
moe is going to orlando for a week. she’s attending some veterinary conference and taking some continuing education workshops, but she’s not taking me, because i’ve got to stay at home and take care of the pets.
i finally bought some beading needles, and made a sivalingam necklace. there are more to be made (i’ve got 9 more sivalingams) and i hope to be able to sell them on Hybrid Elephant
i joined the jew’s harp guild, which i didn’t even know existed before reading ‘s post about starting a LJ community for jew’s harpers… i’ve been playing the jew’s harp for 35 years, and i didn’t even know it existed… not only that, but they’re located in cove, which is near bay city, a place that moe and i have been through a few times in the past few years.
St. Gordy of Boenghytte proposed a public ritual vegetable sacrifice some time soon, and i suggested that he nominate some weekend day as “Tinite New Year” with the specific purpose of holding another public ritual vegetable sacrifice on that day. now i’ve got to wait until he actually does it. hopefully it will be some time before october…
“It’s pretty stunning that, rather than focus on whether the president broke his oath of office and broke federal law, they are going after the whistleblowers.” – Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLU, on the Justice Department probe of the leak of the warrantless eavesdropping
2005 was the year that the president of the United States declared proudly that he had broken the law repeatedly and with full intention, that he had the power to do so whenever he wanted to, and that he would continue to do so whenever he determined it to be desirable. This declaration was met with basic approval from much of the beltway chattering classes, prominent libertarian bloggers, and just about every small government conservative.
The issue is simple: Bush has declared that one man has the right to make the law whenever, in his determination, national security warrants it. While even I can understand the necessity of broad executive powers in emergency situations, we aren’t anywhere close to being in one of those. If Bush decides that personally shooting dissident bloggers or pesky journalists in the head is in fact necessary for national security, then no one can object. The fact that he has not, as far as we know, done any such thing does not matter in the slightest. By conferring dictatorial authority on himself Bush has declared that this is, in fact, a dictatorship even if he hasn’t (yet) bothered using such authorities to the fullest of his claimed ability.
It’s a mystery why Russert and the gang can giggle over their little roundtables, essentially ignoring what amounts to a military coup by our own president. He’s asserted the authority of commander in chief over the entire country, and not just the military to which the constitution grants him such authority. Yes, we hope and generally assume that this temper tantrum by our boy king will pass in 3 years, that the his overreach will not have long lasting effects, that the crisis will pass.
2005 was the year the president declared he was the law, and few of our elite opinion makers and shapers bothered to notice, or care.
well, i guess i’ll accept it… especially since there really is no founder for hinduism… but at the same time, i took the quiz 3 times, and i only got Buddha twice. the other time i got Jesus, and i simply couldn’t put up with that…
Siddhartha Gautama You two would probably really get along!
Founder of Buddhism “All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?”
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
this is the reason why the laws regarding ownership of intellectual property (specifically music) need to be trashed and re-vamped. i’ve been searching for copies of “Care,” “Big Night Music” and “Jam Science” by Shriekback, but can’t find them. apparently, according to discogs, “Jam Science” is rare because it was never approved for release by the band, and the only place i’ve been able to find it wants $45 for it… i’ve found a copy of “Big Night Music” on ebay that’s currently at $15.50, but it has 3 more days before the auction ends, and there are no shriekback torrents on mininova or isohunt or seedler. at this point, i’m at a loss for where else to look. i don’t even necessarily want the CDs, but the music on them would be good, and, because of the fact that the laws are such as they are, i am unable to find music that was good when it first came out, and even better now because it has so little to compare to.
Congressman John Conyers has introduced three new pieces of legislation aimed at censuring President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at creating a fact-finding committee that could be a first step toward impeachment. PETITION YOUR CONGRESS MEMBER TO SUPPORT THESE BILLS
Michigan congressman says he’s OK with spy program
WASHINGTON A congressman from Michigan says he’s O-K with the Bush administration’s use of warrantless spying techniques.
The comment from Holland Republican Pete Hoekstra comes amid revelations that the administration bypassed a secretive US court that governs terrorism wiretaps.
Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
He says he participated in at least six briefings on the spying program since August 2004.
Hoekstra said he is comfortable that the surveillance was aimed at al-Qaida terrorists and people associated with al-Qaida inside the US.
hurry it up, people! your senators and congresspeople are gullible fools who will go with the crowd! if “We, The People Of The United States” say take emperor shrub junior and his cronies out of office, they’re a lot more likely to take them out than they would be if we do nothing!
“Are there no secret prisons? If the poor would rather die than go there, then they’d better hurry up and do it and decrease the surplus population!” Ebeneezer Cheney says “Fuck the poor. Hard.” cheney casts the deciding vote to do just that.
George Bush is using the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on American citizens without the consent of any court. After initially refusing to confirm the story, the President has admitted to personally overseeing this domestic spying program for years.
These actions are explicitly against the law. But the administration says that other laws somehow allow for this unprecedented use of a foreign intelligence agency to spy on Americans right here in the United States. According to reports, political appointees in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote still-classified legal opinions laying out the supposed justification for this program.
Tim Abbott is a Vietnam veteran who lives in the Southwestern Virginia town of Hillsville, a conservative, blue-collar community that tends to vote Republican and bleed red, white and blue.
But, like an increasing number of veterans, Abbott is fed up with President George W. Bush.
“Bush talks a lot about freedom, courage, transparent government and the rule of law. He talks,” Abbott says. “His speeches are carefully choreographed before audiences of his faithful — often Christian fundamentalists or, to paraphrase Bush, Christian-fascists — and they must sign loyalty oaths to Bush. He speaks before audience after audience of soldiers and sailors who cannot speak except as directed by the White House.”
Normally, such comments would be risky in a mountain town where Patriotism rules supreme but Abbott expressed his views this week in an op ed article for The Roanoke Times and found many people agreeing with him.
“When I think of Bush, I do not think of liberty and courage, compassion and justice. No, I think of arrogance, greed and lies,” Abbott wrote. “He is a thug, a buffoon and a coward. Not only is he incompetent, he is corrupt.”
In normal times, these would be fighting words and Abbott would do well to avoid lunch at the Hillsville Diner, the Main Street eatery where the locals gather to discuss politics. But George W. Bush’s times are not normal times and Abbott is greeted warmly on the streets of Hillsville.
“In his Mission Accomplished foray, (Bush) wore a military uniform, something no president has done since Washington, and Washington only wore the uniform to quell a rebellion,” Abbott says. “Around the world he has replaced the Soviet Gulag with the Bush Gulag, where men may be tortured.”
Abbott’s comments come when this web site revealed that the Pentagon has ordered soldiers home from Iraq for holiday leave to give pro-war interviews to their hometown newspapers and television station. This does not surprise a veteran who learned about military duplicity in Vietnam.
“Others before whom he speaks may ask no questions. He runs from journalists, as we have seen in China, even on those rare occasions that he speaks before them,” Abbott says of Bush. “Even worse, he has paid journalists to say good things about him and his policies. He also produces propaganda from government offices that he offers as news reports. And any protests against his policies are diverted well away from his sight and hearing.”
In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with dozens of vets of Vietnam, Desert Storm and the present invasion of Iraq and most speak with anger towards Bush and his policies.
Soldiers serve under a code of honor, something they say Bush lacks.
“Bush is of a kind with the dictators; a strutting, sanctimonious buffoon who talks democracy but acts like Saddam Hussein,” Abbott says. “Bush might differ in degree from Hussein, not having been in power as long, but in behavior, with torture and the corruption of government, they are of a kind.
“While al-Qaida is an enemy of the values and principles of the United States and Western civilization and must be confronted, it can do no more than kill people and destroy property.
“Bush can subvert our principles and institutions. He is the greater enemy.”
a few years ago i did sound effects for a show called “Rock Opera,” which was a musical play (unfortunately it didn’t quite meet the definition of an “opera“) about a geology student who saves the world from republicans, by a friend of mine (the guy with the license plate that said “BE WEIRD”) and featured the vocal talents of the famous person commonly known as david ossman… the only reason that i mention this is because i just found out that david ossman is actually a resident of these parts, whidbey island to be specific. more evidence that only the really cool actually live around here.
eat human flesh… now these people say two very different things on their web site which makes me very suspicious of either their motives or their… food. they say “If you’ve never had human flesh before, think of the taste and texture of beef, except a little sweeter in taste and a little softer in texture. Contrary to popular belief, people do not taste like pork or chicken.” and then they say “Hufu™ contains no human or animal products”… which makes me wonder how they know it tastes like human flesh… but not very much. maybe i would try hufu, and it would certainly be a candidate for my “odd food” collection, but i don’t think i want to know about how they know so much about the taste of human flesh.
here is a site that i could post from, but so much of what they have to say is postable that i’ll just link to them instead: Censure Bush
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel’s office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.
Tom Daschle
Policy made in the heat of anger and rage is rarely in anyone’s long-term interest. When this policy involves an Administration asking for carte blanche and using 9.11 to justify creating the beginnings of a police state…well, that borders on criminal. Of course, the Bush Adminstration has long since demonstrated that criminality in the pursuit of power is nothing to lose sleep over. After all, when absolute power is the absolute goal, anything that contributes to achieving that goal is acceptable.
Congratulations, y’all. 51% of you gave the green light to the creation of a thugocracy that makes the Nixon Adminstration look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
In the wake of 9.11, no one wanted to be accused of coddling those responsible for killing 3,000 innocent Americans. We all wanted those responsible to pay for their crime. Few of us realized at the time what the government was proposing to do in the name of waging war on terrorists, and few were inclined toward sober and rational long-term thinking. In retrospect, what the Bush Administration was asking for was the ability to wage war on Americans- citizens who may or (most likely) may not be engaging in in terrorist activities. In effect, what Our Glorious Leader and his cabal were asking for was permission to create a system that could, and ultimately would, be used to spy and eavesdrop on their political enemies.
Too many within the Administration felt it perfectly justifiable to ask Congress to aquiesce in the erosion of American civil liberties in order to protect them. Yet, in the rush to look as if they were responding decisively and effectively, no one in the Administration stopped to ask the simple questions. Must we kill the patient in order to save it? What will the long-term effect be of allowing government to spy on American citizens? Is reacting in the heat of the moment, fueled by rage and a desire for retribution, really a recipe for sound policy?
In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president “was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that’s what we’ve done.”….
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to “deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided” the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words “in the United States and” after “appropriate force” in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas — where we all understood he wanted authority to act — but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.
In the end, Daschle’s refusal hardly mattered, because this Administration has proven adept at using whatever suits their purpose to argue that they were given Congressional approval to spy on American citizens. Ultimately, Our Glorious Leader and his cabal will use (or create) whatever justification they can latch onto in order to support whatever their position of the moment happens to be. This behavior is something that should offend reasonable and decent people. The idea that in order to protect the law, government must be allowed carte blanche to break the law is a patently absurd and unsupportable position. Creating the trappings of a police state to “protect freedom” and “prevent terrorism” should not be part and parcel of the world’s most successful and powerful democracy.
Interesting, isn’t it? A Democratic President has an affair with an intern and finds himself impeached. A Republican President lies his way into a war that has so far killed more than 2,000 Americans and seems to think it perfectly acceptable to break the law in order to “protect” it…yet his party and a majority of Americans see nothing wrong with this? If you can be impeached for getting a blow job in the Oval Office, should you not also be impeached for lying, breaking the law, fudging intelligence, and being responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 Americans?
It’s true, isn’t it? Being a Republican means never having to say you’re sorry…or be held accountable for your actions. I hope the 51% of you who voted to “re-elect” the Prevaricator in Chief are proud of yourselves…because ultimately, you are responsible for allowing this criminal and immoral behavior to continue unchecked.
the thing that worries me is the comment directly after the article, which says “I could care less if they have cameras all over my house, office, and wiretaps on my phones. I’m not doing anything wrong, so I’m not really worried about it.” it makes me think of that old song…
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
Recently I have been trying to figure out who President Bush reminded me of.
Was it Richard Nixon with his willingness to break the law to hold onto the presidency? Was it FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who bugged Martin Luther King Jr. and anyone he considered to be a political enemy?
And then it struck me. President Bush most closely resembles King George III of England. You remember him — he’s the guy whose high-handed rule led to the American Revolution.
I went back and re-read our Declaration of Independence. Our founding fathers cited King George’s various acts of tyranny– including housing foreign troops in the homes of colonials against their will.
The American Revolutionary War followed, which eventually led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill or Rights (the first 10 amendments).
And there it is in black and white: the fourth amendment. Let’s take a moment to look at the exact words of the fourth amendment to the Constitution adopted more than 200 years ago:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
Not bad for a group of farmers who were creating a new country — one that has survived for 216 years and is the oldest continuous democracy in the world.
Now the “new King George” would have us believe one of three things: (1) the president’s powers as commander-in-chief supersede the fourth amendment during the war on terror (2) the resolution adopted by Congress shortly after the 9/11 attack can be read to give the president the authority to conduct domestic wiretaps against American citizens without going to court to seek a warrant and (3) modern technology is such that the founding fathers could never have anticipated the need to conduct wiretaps without a warrant.
Let’s look at each of these arguments.
First, it takes a very broad reading of the commander-in-chief clause to justify any conduct as superseding the constitution. President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the U.S. Civil War, an action that was very controversial at the time; it is hard to equate the ongoing war on terror with the American Civil War, which threatened the very existence of the Republic.
Second, I was a member of Congress when we passed the resolution giving the president the authority to use all force necessary against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Congress clearly meant this as authorization to go into Afghanistan and find Usama bin Laden. No one ever thought this authorized our government to wiretap American citizens in our own country without court approval.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle wrote an op-ed piece in the Dec. 23rd Washington Post detailing how the Bush administration proposed last minute language to the 9/11 resolution which would have given the president the power to engage in domestic spying without a search warrant, and that this language was specifically rejected by the bills’ authors.
And third, the modern technology argument is an interesting one but is not very persuasive. Congress in 1978 passed legislation permitting spying inside the United States under certain circumstances. That law created a special court that can respond within hours to a request for search warrants. And the law also contained an exception, permitting the Attorney General to authorize wiretaps in an emergency situation and then seek a warrant within 72 hours.
And so the question remains, why did the president set up a system of wiretapping of American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA) without a warrant?
Does he simply want dictatorial powers? Does he so mistrust the court system (even a secret one specifically set up to make it easier to wiretap people inside the United States) that he doesn’t want any of the traditional checks on the power of the executive to violate basic civil liberties? Does he just want a political issue that makes him look tough and opponents (Democrats and some Republicans) look weak?
I used to think that extreme right wingers out West who wanted to arm themselves and undergo paramilitary training to be ready to resist tyranny in their own country were crazy. An argument now can be made that they were quite sane.
Let’s hope that a bipartisan political coalition is able to restrain this administration from actions that are inconsistent with the framework of liberty established by our founding fathers. Let’s don’t leave the defense of our freedoms to self-declared militias. We are a better country than that.
Reply to this post, and I’ll tell you a reason why I like you. Then put this in your own journal, if you want, and spread the love.
also
How many songs?
2890
Sort by artist First artist:
10cc
Last artist:
Wildman Fischer
Sort by song title First Song:
’39 by Queen
Last Song:
Zoot Suit Riot by The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
Sort by time Shortest Song:
Dialogue (4) by Godley & Creme (:04)
Longest Song:
Music with Changing Parts by Philip Glass (1:01:33)
Sort by album First Album:
60 Horses In My Herd by Huun Huur Tu
Last Album:
Zoot Suit Riot by The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
First song that comes up on shuffle:
The Harder They Come by Jimmy Cliff
How many songs come up when you search for “sex”?
14 by Nina Hagen (the album “NunSexMonkRock”), 5 by Frank Zappa, 1 by The Plasmatics
How many songs come up when you search for “death”?
3 by The Residents, 1 by Frank Zappa, 1 by Queen
How many songs come up when you search for “love”?
96 total: 4 by Queen, 1 by Meryn Cadell, 2 by Peter Paul & Mary, 25 by The Residents, 17 by Frank Zappa, 1 by Syd Barrett, 14 by Jai Uttal & The Pagan Love Orchestra, 1 by Richard Heyman, 3 by Bob Marley, 2 by Simon & Garfunkel, 7 by The Bobs, 2 by Tim Hart & Maddy Prior, 1 by The Persuasions, 1 by Steeleye Span, 2 by Cat Stevens, 1 by Nina Hagen, 1 by Peter Gabriel, 2 by Grace Jones, 1 by Santanta, 2 by David Bowie, 2 by Wildman Fischer, 2 by The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, 1 by Kate Bush, 2 by Jethro Tull, 1 by Brian Eno & John Cale, 1 by The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
Most Frequently Played Song:
6 way tie: Kill Your Television and Slow Down Krishna by The Bobs, RDNZL by Frank Zappa, Hara Shiva Shankara by Jai Uttal & The Pagan Love Orchestra, Dream Time In Lake Jackson by The KLF, and Chill Out by Steely Dan
returned from portland today. MIL was as dysfunctional as always, although now that she’s got multiple sclerosis as well, she’s even more helpless than before. combine that with the fact that ann, who is her housemate and landlord, started smoking again after having (seemingly) successfully quit, has been in and out of the hospital several times in the past few weeks, and suffered a stroke less than a week ago, and you get a concerned moe, who is sure that her mother can’t come and live with us (!!) but is wondering, at the same time, what she’s going to do if and/or when ann kicks off. it was a typically dysfunctional family x-mas eve dinner, with moe’s father, and his wife, ann, bill (a friend of the family who is somehow connected to ann), and moe’s mother (who is not, and never has been married to moe’s father) gathering for a dinner that was fixed at the last moment by moe, because ann (the traditional cooker of x-mas dinner) was too sick to do it… and then another, somewhat less dysfunctional x-mas day dinner with moe’s mother and step-grandmother… and ann and bill (again), once again gathering to eat a magnificently prepared dinner cooked by moe (again)… all of which was planned on the spur of the moment, since what was planned for both days fell through when ann got sick less than a week ago… all i can say is that i’m glad it wasn’t my family.
the following is a bunch of URLs that i collected before x-mas, but didn’t have time to post them before:
Washington – Already reeling from charges of massive corruption, widespread use of torture and illegal wiretapping, the White House angrily responded to yesterday’s disclosure in the New York Times that top administration officials had participated in numerous acts of cannibalism and sex with minors.
“My most important job as President is to protect the American People.” Bush stated emphatically during this morning’s hastily convened press conference, “September 11th changed everything, and I think the people understand that.”
While acknowledging that the rape and molestation of young children, as well as the consumption of human flesh might be disturbing to some, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales pointed out that such acts were technically within the law and had been approved by Congress in the broad powers given to the executive branch after the attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001.
Officials at the Times acknowledged that they’d known about the program for well over two years but had chosen to withold publishing its details until after the election because it “slipped our minds.”
The super-secret program, dubbed “Operation Freedom Patriot Eagle Flag”, was run primarily out of the office of the Vice-President.
US authorities have been secretly monitoring radiation levels at Muslim sites amid fears that terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons, it has emerged.
Scores of mosques and private addresses have been checked for radiation, the US News and World Report says.
A Justice Department spokesman said the programme was necessary in the fight against al-Qaeda.
Last week, President George W Bush admitted allowing the wiretapping of Americans with suspected terror links.
Mr Bush has defended the covert programme and vowed to continue the practice, saying it was vital to protect the country.
No warrants According to US News and World Report, the nuclear surveillance programme was set up after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
It began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team.
The Associated Press news agency said federal law enforcement officials have confirmed the programme’s existence.
The air monitoring targeted private US property in the Washington DC area, including Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle, the magazine said.
At its peak, three vehicles in Washington monitored 120 sites a day.
Nearly all of the targets were key Muslim sites.
“In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the programme,” the publication said.
“The targets were almost all US citizens,” an unnamed source involved in the programme told the magazine.
“A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs,” the source said.
Muslim anger Federal officials cited by US News and World Report said that monitoring on public property, such as driveways and parking lots, was legal and that warrants were not needed for the kind of radiation sampling it conducted.
They also rejected the claim that the programme specifically targeted Muslims.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice said the programme was necessary as al-Qaeda remained committed to obtaining nuclear weapons.
An FBI spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the news “comes as a complete shock to us and everyone in the Muslim community”.
He added: “This creates the appearance that Muslims are targeted simply for being Muslims. I don’t think this is the message the government wants to send at this time.”
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.
But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.
The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.
In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.
The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.
More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.
“Every time you make a car journey already, you’ll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car’s index plates will be read as well,” said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
“What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn’t at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles,” Mr Whiteley said.
The term “associated vehicles” means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes “You’re not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You’re interested in what’s moving with the stolen vehicle,” Mr Whiteley explained.
According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.
“The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured,” the Acpo strategy says.
“This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis,” it says.
Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. “Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism,” he said.
“The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don’t have access to. It’s part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we’d be negligent.”
i wonder if, when somebody outside of the seattle area can’t figure out where something is supposed to be mailed in washington state, whether seattle isn’t the default place for it to go, regardless of whether it is actually appropriate or not?
i’ve had the same PO box in seattle for over 10 years now. i originally rented it when i first moved back to seattle from bellingham in 1995. recently, like within the past 6 months or so, i’ve started getting mail at that box for “G. ‘Skip’ Downing” who is an architect, and for “FRANCISCO PINA CASTELLANO”. the mail for “G. ‘Skip'” has been things like building permits and stuff that i’ve been able to “return to sender – addressee unknown”, for the most part, because they’ve been in stamped, postmarked envelopes, but there’s been a few things that i couldn’t return because they’re presorted, which means there’s no postmark, which means that the post office, instead of returning them, just throws them away (regardless of what they tell you)… so i looked up “G ‘Skip'” on internet, and lo and behold, i found him… in GREEN BANK! (it’s not marked on the map because it’s a really small town, but it’s around lake hancock on the map) which is 56 miles north of seattle, and a different enough place that i can’t figure out how they got the two confused… but i was able to get in touch with the guy, and at this point if i get any more mail for him, i simply call him and we get things straightened out.
FRANCISCO PINA CASTELLANO, on the other hand, is a different matter. the most recent item of mail that i recieved that was addressed to him was from bank of america, and it was presorted, and i know from past experience that frequently items from banks that are presorted are commonly advertising, so i opened the envelope… and i was shocked to discover that i was holding a credit card statement. so i went into “find FRANCISCO” mode, and completely struck out… which didn’t surprise me too much, since a number of the charges on the statement were in alaska and idaho, and the farther away from seattle (or anywhere, i suppose) you get, the more difficult it is to find one person with any accuracy. so i immediately called bank of america, and their recommendation was to write “return to sender – addressee unknown” on the envelope… but that won’t work because the mail is presorted and it won’t get “returned to sender,” and i’ll have exactly the same problem next month, besides FRANCISCO PINA CASTELLANO not getting regular credit card statements will (hopefully) make him suspicious… and apart from all that (although i didn’t mention this to the bank of america customer service drone, there were other bits of information that i gave him that i couldn’t have gotten without opening the envelope) i had already opened the envelope anyway, so writing on it and sticking it back in the mail would be kind of pointless. basically i told them to note on his account that the address they had was incorrect, and contact him as soon as possible to get things straightened out, but that doesn’t mean that i won’t get other mail for FRANCISCO, and i’ll be right back where i started from.
in other news, we’re going to portland on saturday and coming back monday… which is about as much time as i think i can stand staying with monique’s mother… besides which, her “roommate” (i’ve always wondered about their actual relationship) just had a stroke recently, and, even though she’s a nurse and would, theoretically, know these things, my personal experience with brain trauma combined with what i know of ann, generally, seems to indicate that things are probably a lot worse than she’s letting on.
the solstice feast went off without a hitch, from the point of view of the fremont philharmonic anyway, i don’t know about anyone else… and i like it that way. this year the fremont solstice feast was in georgetown (not fremont, surprisingly enough), in a manufacturing warehouse on airport way, which is a lot smaller than the old safeway in ballard, which is where it was held for the past two years. advantages were that it had a backstage area (they called it the “green room,” although it was simply backstage) that was separated from the rest of the feast procedings, where i was able to keep my tuba. i didn’t see any disadvantages apart from the fact that it was on the opposite end of town from fremont, but i didn’t stay that long. my past experience with the feast is that it is put on by a group of people (the fremont arts council?) but apart from getting everything together, it’s really not anywhere near as organised as a community event needs to be, and it’s been that way for long enough that i get the impression that as long as something happens, they don’t really care that much. we were expected to play, but we got no notification that we were going to play, they said that we wouldn’t be able to get in between 4:00 and 6:00, but the place was wide open during that time (in fact, the doors were supposed to open at 6:00, but they didn’t actually open until almost 6:45), they had a scissor lift and a forklift in the space at 6:00, and they had lost the key to the scissor lift so they couldn’t actually move it… more “hippy ineptitude factor” going on here. moe couldn’t be there (she has to work) so i just showed up, played (in the dark, there were no stage lights until after we were done performing), ate dinner and left.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The trial of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, which has fallen into a pattern of grim testimony interrupted by theatrical outbursts, adjourned Thursday for more than a month. The trial resumes on January 24.
On Thursday, as in previous days, testimony about brutal treatment was interrupted by courtroom tirades by Hussein and his half brother.
Hussein charged Thursday that the Bush administration lied when it claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just at it lied by disputing his claims of being beaten.
“The White House lies once more,” Hussein said, “the No. 1 liar in the world. They said in Iraq, there is chemicals, and there is a relation to terrorism, and they announced later we couldn’t find any of that in Iraq.
“Also, they said that what Saddam Hussein (said) was not true,” he continued in an apparent reference to his claims Wednesday that he and all seven of his codefendants were beaten and tortured by their American captors.
Hussein: ‘We don’t lie’ “I have documented the injuries I had before three American medical teams,” he said.
Hussein later appeared to waver, saying the medical teams numbered “two, for sure, unequivocally.” He began to heal after eight months, he said, but bruises remain three years later.
“We don’t lie,” he said. “The White House lies.”
The U.S. State Department and a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said Hussein’s claims of beatings and torture were untrue.
Meanwhile, defense attorneys requested that the testimony of prosecution witnesses not be broadcast until all the witnesses have testified, saying they are watching each other’s testimonies and repeating them. The court said it would consider that request.
A day of disruptions Hussein and seven codefendants are charged with crimes against humanity, including the killings of 140 men and boys in the town of Dujail following a failed 1982 assassination attempt against Hussein there.
The trial went into a closed session Thursday at the end of an eventful day in which Hussein and his half brother, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti repeatedly disrupted the proceedings.
The judge closed the session after Hassan, the former chief of intelligence, asked to speak to him in private. On Wednesday, Hassan said he wanted time to talk to the judge about his health.
Earlier in the day, Hassan launched into long political diatribes, hurling insults at prosecutors, complaining about the conditions of their detention and challenging the legitimacy of the court.
Ranting about the food he is being served, Hassan said a New York Times magazine column mentioned that his ribs are showing because of weight loss.
Hassan also accused prosecutors of being former Baath Party members, implying they should not be leveling accusations against him. The attorneys threatened to walk out and resign from the case.
“This is not justice,” Hassan declared. “This is not democracy.” Asked to stop by prosecutors, Hassan said, “My talk is strengthening the court, and will give it credibility.”
Courtroom fracas At one point, a fracas erupted among Hassan, Hussein and prosecutors, prompted by Hussein’s claim that a guard had been rude to him. “He acted without your orders, so he should be disciplined,” Hussein said. “He is a small employee.” The guard was removed from the courtroom.
Hussein also challenged the validity of a witness, the first of two to testify Thursday from behind a curtain to protect his identity. The witness said he was 8 years old at the time of the Dujail killings, but testified his father, his three uncles and his grandmother were arrested and imprisoned.
“She complained to us about what had happened to her,” he said of his grandmother, who was released after four years. “They used to torture her before her children and they would torture her children before her. She said, ‘They tortured us, and we did not know for what reason.’ ”
Defense attorneys and Hussein complained about the witness because he was a child at the time, was not arrested and did not see any torture or killings personally.
“His testimony is documented and accepted, and he’s underage (at the time)?” Hussein asked. “This is something I would like to understand. Is this allowed? Is this permissible?”
Hussein claims he was beaten On Wednesday, Hussein said his American captors beat him “on every part of my body and marks are still on top of my body and that was done by Americans,” Hussein said. “Yes, we were beaten by the Americans, and we were tortured, everyone of us.”
Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi said he had visited the defendants in their cells and saw no signs of torture.
Christopher Reid, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said none of the defendants has been tortured or beaten.
Also on Wednesday, witness Ali Haj Hussein al-Haydari described more than four years of captivity and torture, and the execution of family members, including several brothers. His brother Hassan, who was among those killed, was one of six men who plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hussein.
More than 40 of members of his family were taken into custody by government agents. Al-Haydari also talked of “walking through dead bodies” at the headquarters of the Baath Party, the ruling party during Hussein’s regime.
Another witness said he was tortured three times with electric shocks during the initial 17-day period and beaten with cables during the time at Abu Ghraib.
“Even children were beaten with cables,” he said. “Children died at Abu Ghraib.”
… [S]ince the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] statute provides a five-year prison term for intentionally engaging in electronic surveillance under the color of law, and the surveillance has been ongoing since 2002 and has been reauthorized every 45 days, then Bush has violated this statute on at least 24 occasions. Since the action was also specifically approved by the Attorney General, then Alberto Gonzales, the current attorney general, has apparently violated this statute at least 7 times, and John Ashcroft, who preceded Gonzales, is responsible for at least 16 violations.
What we are seeing is a concerted effort to render the Fourth Amendment ineffective. FISA has been found to be constitutional, and contains an out that Bush has eschewed: this act allows a warrant to be issued if necessary up to 72 hours after the fact.
… Bush has become an enemy from which he swore to protect and defend the Constitution. Therefore, Congress must fulfill its obligation to protect and defend the Constitution by removing Bush from office. From what Bush himself has explained, there are at least 24 impeachable offenses just from this policy.
The bottom line is, like so many things the administration does, this is evil and retarded on so many fucking levels it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly I find most repugnant about it. The defenses offered thus far by administration apologists and certain other ignorami have been so poorly thought out and contemptuously asinine that I cannot even believe they are given airtime, let alone taken seriously by the so-called journalists of the American media…
These wiretaps are a flagrant affront to the rule of law, and – as with the McCain torture bill – it disgusts me that their legality has even been debated to the extent that it has. What the president has admitted to doing is clearly, facially illegal. God knows he’s done a lot of awful things during his tenure in office, and this probably isn’t the worst of it, but I can think of no other time when he has so openly admitted to what are pretty clearcut impeachable offenses. Any member of Congress who refuses to impeach Bush for this has absolutely no right to ever criticize any president for doing anything, ever again. Bush must be impeached for this. If not next year, then in ’07, hopefully with a congress slightly less detached from reality. But it’s totally on now. There’s no going back. To repeat my oft-spoken mantra: CALL YOUR FUCKING CONGRESSMAN. Call your senators. But especially your congressperson. The House of Representatives as sole authority to impeach officials. It is time they exercise that authority.
President Bush made an unapologetic defense Monday of a controversial program to spy on some Americans’ international phone calls without court warrants, vowing to continue it as long as the nation faces "an enemy that wants to kill American citizens."
Bush said during a news conference that the program "has been effective in disrupting the enemy," and is limited to people with "known al-Qaeda ties and/or affiliates."
Three Democratic senators called for suspension of the formerly top-secret program until Congress can hold hearings on its legality. "He is the president, not a king," said Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis., who was joined by Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island.
During his 56-minute news conference, the president also hailed last week’s elections in
Iraq and blasted senators who blocked reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. That law gave additional powers to federal law enforcement after the Sept. 11 attacks but is set to expire at the end of this month.
Senators from both parties raised civil liberties concerns about the Patriot Act as well as the domestic spying conducted by the National Security Agency. Four GOP senators joined most Democrats in blocking Senate renewal of the Patriot Act, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., called the spying "inappropriate" and promised hearings.
Bush justified the phone-monitoring program under the constitutional requirement that presidents protect and defend the country; he also cited the 2001 congressional authority permitting military force against al-Qaeda, passed after the 9/11 attacks. He said congressional leaders have been briefed on the program more than a dozen times.
In calling for suspension, Feingold, Levin and Reed said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 already gives the president power to quickly tap phones, intercept e-mails and seek a warrant after the fact.
"I’m at a loss to understand why they adopted this extreme legal procedure," Reed said.
In speaking with reporters, Bush also:
• Declined to say how many American troops he hopes to pull out of Iraq next year, saying it would be based on conditions there.
• Acknowledged that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has hurt U.S. credibility on other intelligence fronts, including allegations of nuclear development in
Iran. He said there’s been a lot of work to determine "what went right and what went wrong, as well as to build credibility."
• Called the Senate filibuster of the Patriot Act "inexcusable." He said, "I want senators from New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas to go home and explain why these cities are safer."
Bush’s Snoopgate The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times’ eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper’s editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn’t just out of concern about national security.
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Dec. 19, 2005
Dec. 19, 2005 – Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.
The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that "the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy." But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a "shameful act," it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.
No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had "legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force." But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing "all necessary force" in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.
What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow—as the president seemed to claim in his press conference—or in any way required extra-constitutional action.
This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.
In the meantime, it is unlikely that Bush will echo President Kennedy in 1961. After JFK managed to tone down a New York Times story by Tad Szulc on the Bay of Pigs invasion, he confided to Times editor Turner Catledge that he wished the paper had printed the whole story because it might have spared him such a stunning defeat in Cuba.
This time, the president knew publication would cause him great embarrassment and trouble for the rest of his presidency. It was for that reason – and less out of genuine concern about national security – that George W. Bush tried so hard to kill the New York Times story.
Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.
And tell your friends.
Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation’s oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call him “the Anti-Bush.”
Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela — not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (click here to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela’s democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.
Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does, Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn’t have 60 percent of its people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That’s why large majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to overthrow Chavez.
So this is the opposite of a boycott. Call it a BUYcott. Spread the word.
Of course, if you can take mass transit or bike or walk to your job, you should do so. And we should all work for political changes that move our country toward a cleaner environment based on renewable energy. The BUYcott is for those of us who don’t have a practical alternative to filling up our cars.
So get your gas at Citgo. And help fuel a democratic revolution in Venezuela.
Jeff Cohen is an author and media critic (www.jeffcohen.org)
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 – Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.
F.B.I. officials said Monday that their investigators had no interest in monitoring political or social activities and that any investigations that touched on advocacy groups were driven by evidence of criminal or violent activity at public protests and in other settings.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.’s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.
But the documents, coming after the Bush administration’s confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.
One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a “Vegan Community Project.” Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group’s “semi-communistic ideology.” A third indicates the bureau’s interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The documents, provided to The New York Times over the past week, came as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, the A.C.L.U. has been seeking access to information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored.
The F.B.I. had previously turned over a small number of documents on antiwar groups, showing the agency’s interest in investigating possible anarchist or violent links in connection with antiwar protests and demonstrations in advance of the 2004 political conventions. And earlier this month, the A.C.L.U.’s Colorado chapter released similar documents involving, among other things, people protesting logging practices at a lumber industry gathering in 2002.
The latest batch of documents, parts of which the A.C.L.U. plans to release publicly on Tuesday, totals more than 2,300 pages and centers on references in internal files to a handful of groups, including PETA, the environmental group Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group, which promotes antipoverty efforts and social causes.
Many of the investigative documents turned over by the bureau are heavily edited, making it difficult or impossible to determine the full context of the references and why the F.B.I. may have been discussing events like a PETA protest. F.B.I. officials say many of the references may be much more benign than they seem to civil rights advocates, adding that the documents offer an incomplete and sometimes misleading snapshot of the bureau’s activities.
“Just being referenced in an F.B.I. file is not tantamount to being the subject of an investigation,” said John Miller, a spokesman for the bureau.
“The F.B.I. does not target individuals or organizations for investigation based on their political beliefs,” Mr. Miller said. “Everything we do is carefully promulgated by federal law, Justice Department guidelines and the F.B.I.’s own rules.”
A.C.L.U officials said the latest batch of documents released by the F.B.I. indicated the agency’s interest in a broader array of activist and protest groups than they had previously thought. In light of other recent disclosures about domestic surveillance activities by the National Security Agency and military intelligence units, the A.C.L.U. said the documents reflected a pattern of overreaching by the Bush administration.
“It’s clear that this administration has engaged every possible agency, from the Pentagon to N.S.A. to the F.B.I., to engage in spying on Americans,” said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U.
“You look at these documents,” Ms. Beeson said, “and you think, wow, we have really returned to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when you see in F.B.I. files that they’re talking about a group like the Catholic Workers league as having a communist ideology.”
The documents indicate that in some cases, the F.B.I. has used employees, interns and other confidential informants within groups like PETA and Greenpeace to develop leads on potential criminal activity and has downloaded material from the groups’ Web sites, in addition to monitoring their protests.
In the case of Greenpeace, which is known for highly publicized acts of civil disobedience like the boarding of cargo ships to unfurl protest banners, the files indicate that the F.B.I. investigated possible financial ties between its members and militant groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front.
These networks, which have no declared leaders and are only loosely organized, have been described by the F.B.I. in Congressional testimony as “extremist special interest groups” whose cells engage in violent or other illegal acts, making them “a serious domestic terrorist threat.”
In testimony last year, John E. Lewis, deputy assistant director of the counterterrorism division, said the F.B.I. estimated that in the past 10 years such groups had engaged in more than 1,000 criminal acts causing more than $100 million in damage.
When the F.B.I. investigates evidence of possible violence or criminal disruptions at protests and other events, those investigations are routinely handled by agents within the bureau’s counterterrorism division.
But the groups mentioned in the newly disclosed F.B.I. files questioned both the propriety of characterizing such investigations as related to “terrorism” and the necessity of diverting counterterrorism personnel from more pressing investigations.
“The fact that we’re even mentioned in the F.B.I. files in connection with terrorism is really troubling,” said Tom Wetterer, general counsel for Greenpeace. “There’s no property damage or physical injury caused in our activities, and under any definition of terrorism, we’d take issue with that.”
Jeff Kerr, general counsel for PETA, rejected the suggestion in some F.B.I. files that the animal rights group had financial ties to militant groups, and said he, too, was troubled by his group’s inclusion in the files.
“It’s shocking and it’s outrageous,” Mr. Kerr said. “And to me, it’s an abuse of power by the F.B.I. when groups like Greenpeace and PETA are basically being punished for their social activism.”
HARRISBURG, Pa. – “Intelligent design” cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.
Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives, he said.
The ruling will not likely be appealed by the slate of new board members, who in the November election ousted the group that installed intelligent design, the new board president said Tuesday.
The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.
“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,” Jones wrote, calling the board’s decision “breathtaking inanity.”
“The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources,” he wrote.
The board’s attorneys had said members were seeking to improve science education by exposing students to alternatives to Charles Darwin’s theory that evolution develops through natural selection. Intelligent-design proponents argue that the theory cannot fully explain the existence of complex life forms.
The plaintiffs challenging the policy argued that intelligent design amounts to a secular repackaging of biblical creationism, which the courts have already ruled cannot be taught in public schools.
The judge agreed.
“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,” he wrote in his 139-page opinion.
The Dover policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade biology lessons on evolution. The statement said Darwin’s theory is “not a fact” and has inexplicable “gaps.” It refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, “Of Pandas and People,” for more information.
Jones wrote that he wasn’t saying the intelligent design concept shouldn’t be studied and discussed, saying its advocates “have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors.”
However, he wrote, “our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.”
The controversy divided the borough of Dover and surrounding Dover Township, a rural area of nearly 20,000 residents about 20 miles south of Harrisburg. It galvanized voters to oust eight incumbent school board members who supported the policy in the Nov. 8 school board election. The ninth board member was not up for re-election.
Said the judge: “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”
The board members were replaced by a slate of eight opponents who pledged to remove intelligent design from the science curriculum.
They also will likely drop the old plan now that the judge has ruled, new board president Bernadette Reinking said. “As far as I can tell you, there is no intent to appeal,” she said.
Reinking said the new board will likely move the subject of intelligent design into some undetermined elective social studies class. She said the board will need to talk to its attorney before determining specific actions.
Eric Rothschild, lead attorney for the families who challenged the policy, called the ruling “a real vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district.”
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which represented the school board, did not return a telephone message seeking comment.
It was the latest chapter in a debate over the teaching of evolution dating back to the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law that forbade teaching evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed his conviction on a technicality, and the law was repealed in 1967.
Jones heard arguments in the fall during a six-week trial in which expert witnesses for each side debated intelligent design’s scientific merits. Other witnesses, including current and former school board members, disagreed over whether creationism was discussed in board meetings months before the curriculum change was adopted.
It is among at least a handful of cases that have focused new attention on the teaching of evolution in the nation’s schools.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Georgia heard arguments over evolution disclaimer stickers placed in a biology textbooks. A federal judge in January had ordered Cobb County school officials to immediately remove the stickers, which called evolution a theory, not a fact.
In November, state education officials in Kansas adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into question.
SCIENTISTS have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.
The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.
Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.
According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.
The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.
“Mortalities due to offshore swimming may be a relatively important and unaccounted source of natural mortality given the energetic demands placed on individual bears engaged in long-distance swimming,” says the research led by Dr Charles Monnett, marine ecologist at the American government’s Minerals Management Service. “Drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice continues.”
The research, presented to a conference on marine mammals in San Diego, California, last week, comes amid evidence of a decline in numbers of the 22,000 polar bears that live in about 20 sites across the Arctic circle.
In Hudson Bay, Canada, the site of the most southerly polar bears, a study by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the Canadian Wildlife Service to be published next year will show the population fell 22% from 1,194 in 1987 to 935 last year.
New evidence from field researchers working for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast of Russia, has also shown the region’s first evidence of cannibalism among bears competing for food supplies.
Polar bears live on ice all year round and use it as a platform from which to hunt food and rear their young. They hunt near the edge, where the ice is thinnest, catching seals when they make holes in the ice to breath. They typically eat one seal every four or five days and a single bear can consume 100lb of blubber at one sitting.
As the ice pack retreats north in the summer between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the continental shelf off the Alaskan coast — one of the most food-rich areas in the Arctic.
However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.
“We know short swims up to 15 miles are no problem, and we know that one or two may have swum up to 100 miles. But that is the extent of their ability, and if they are trying to make such a long swim and they encounter rough seas they could get into trouble,” said Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS.
The new study, carried out in part of the Beaufort Sea, shows that between 1986 and 2005 just 4% of the bears spotted off the north coast of Alaska were swimming in open waters. Not a single drowning had been documented in the area.
However, last September, when the ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of Alaska, 51 bears were spotted, of which 20% were seen in the open sea, swimming as far as 60 miles off shore.
The researchers returned to the vicinity a few days later after a fierce storm and found four dead bears floating in the water. “We estimate that of the order of 40 bears may have been swimming and that many of those probably drowned as a result of rough seas caused by high winds,” said the report.
In their search for food, polar bears are also having to roam further south, rummaging in the dustbins of Canadian homes. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer who has been to the North Pole seven times, said he had noticed a deterioration in the bears’ ice habitat since his first expedition in 1975.
“Each year there was more water than the time before,” he said. “We used amphibious sledges for the first time in 1986.”
His last expedition was in 2002, when he fell through the ice and lost some of his fingers to frostbite.
NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”
Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.
The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.
The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.
The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung.
In the 1950s and ’60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.
The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a “watch list.” They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.
Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.
“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.
Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”
President George W Bush has admitted he authorised secret monitoring of communications within the United States in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.
The monitoring was of “people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organisations”, he said.
He said the programme was reviewed every 45 days, and he made clear he did not plan to halt the eavesdropping.
He also rebuked senators who blocked the renewal of his major anti-terror law, the Patriot Act, on Friday.
By preventing the extension of the act, due to expire on 31 December, they had, he said, acted irresponsibly and were endangering the lives of US citizens.
The president, who was visibly angry, also suggested that a New York Times report which had revealed the monitoring on Friday had been irresponsible.
America’s enemies had “learned information they should not have”, he said in his weekly radio address, which was delivered live from the White House after a pre-recorded version was scrapped.
‘Big Brother’
Senators from both Mr Bush’s Republican party and the opposition Democrats expressed concerns about the monitoring programme on Friday.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee , said there was no doubt it was “inappropriate”, adding that Senate hearings would be held early next year as “a very, very high priority”.
“This is Big Brother run amok,” was the reaction of Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy.
Senator Russell Feingold, another Democrat, called it a “shocking revelation” that “ought to send a chill down the spine of every senator and every American”.
But in his address on Saturday, Mr Bush said the programme was “critical to saving American lives”.
The president said some of the 11 September hijackers inside the US had communicated with associates outside before the attacks – but the US had not known that until it was too late.
“The American people expect me to do everything in my power, under our laws and Constitution, to protect them and our civil liberties,” he said.
Monitoring was, he said, a “vital tool in our war against the terrorists”.
He said Congressional leaders had been briefed on the programme, which he has already renewed more than 30 times.
‘Illegal leak’
Mr Bush harshly criticised the leak that had made the programme public.
“Revealing classified information is illegal. It alerts our enemies,” he said.
The New York Times reported on Friday that Mr Bush had signed a secret presidential order following the attacks on 11 September 2001, allowing the National Security Agency to track the international telephone calls and e-mails of hundreds of people without referral to the courts.
Previously, surveillance on American soil was generally limited to foreign embassies.
American law usually requires a secret court, known as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to give permission before intelligence officers can conduct surveillance on US soil.
so, spying on americans without warrants is okay, but telling americans that they’re being spied on without warrants is not okay…
i don’t often say this, but WHAT THE FUCK???
has anybody else noticed that this is one of the reasons why we are a separate country, and not an extension of great britain? maybe we should start calling him "king" george, instead of president shrub… 8/
WASHINGTON — President Bush held a year-end news conference on Monday, where he defended the use of a domestic eavesdropping program and called for Democrats to stop their “delaying tactics” and reauthorize the controversial Patriot Act.
Bush called the leak of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program, first reported in The New York Times last Thursday, as a “shameful act” disclosed in a time of war. That report said Bush had authorized the NSA to conduct surveillance of e-mails and phone calls of some individuals in the United States without court warrants.
“The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said. “This program has targeted those with known links to Al Qaeda.”
But the program will continue, Bush said, adding that he has reauthorized it over 30 times. “And I will continue to do so for so long as our nation faces the continued threat of an enemy that wants to kill our American citizens.”
The Justice Department likely will investigate who leaked information about the NSA program, the president added. A request for that investigation must come from the NSA itself.
The Monday event was Bush’s first full-fledged news conference since October and his ninth of the year. It came just one day after the president spoke to the nation in a prime-time television address from the Oval Office about the war in Iraq, urging patience and declaring that the United States was winning the battle.
On the eavesdropping issue, Bush said “absolutely” he has the legal authority to order such surveillance, and cited Article 2 of the Constitution, which he said gives him the responsibility and authority to deal with an enemy that declares war against the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Congress also gave him the authority to use force against Al Qaeda, he noted, to tackle an “unconventional enemy,” some of whom lived in U.S. cities and communities while planning attacks.
“We need to recognize that dealing with Al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement. It requires dealing with an enemy that declared war against the United States of America,” Bush said.
“After Sept. 11, one question my administration had to answer was, how, using the authority I have, how do we effectively detect enemies hiding in our midst and prevent them from striking them again? We know that a two-minute phone conversation from someone linked to Al Qaeda here and to Al Qaeda overseas can cost millions of American lives,” he added, saying some of the Sept. 11 hijackers made several phone calls overseas before the attacks.
He said the Sept. 11 commission – charged with probing the intelligence failures surrounding the attacks four years ago that left 3,000 people dead – said the United States intelligence community needs to better “connect the dots” before the enemy can attack again.
“So, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, I authorized the interception of communication with people with known links to Al Qaeda and people linked to known terror organizations,” Bush said.
Bush: We’re Protecting Civil Liberties (yeah right… by eliminating them)
The program is reviewed “constantly” to ensure it is effective and not infringing on Americans’ civil liberties, the president added. He also said congressional leaders have been briefed on the program more than a dozen times and denied the accusation that the program is a classic result of “unchecked power” in the executive branch.
He stressed that the program is limited to known Al Qaeda terrorists and for calls made from the United States to somewhere overseas, and vice versa. Calls between two U.S. cities are not monitored, he said, unless an order is granted by a secret court under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as they always have been, he said.
One of the principal provisions of the Patriot Act permitted the government to gain warrants in cases involving investigations into suspected terrorists in the United States – an expansion of powers previously limited to intelligence cases.
“I can fully understand why members of Congress are expressing concerns about civil liberties, I know that, and I share the same concerns,” Bush said. “I want to make sure the American people understand … we have an obligation to protect you and while we’re doing that, we’re protecting your civil liberties.”
When asked by one reporter if he could give an example of an attack that was thwarted by the eavesdropping program, Bush said: “No, I’m not going to talk about that because it would help give the enemy notification or perhaps signal them methods and uses and sources. We’re not going to do that.”
To highlight the importance of keeping the program details secret, Bush said that before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. intelligence community was listening to phone conversations with Usama bin Laden. But then details of the intercepts were leaked.
“We were listening to him, he was using a type of cell-phone, or a phone … and somebody put it in a newspaper that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team and he changed [phones],” Bush said. “I don’t know how to make the point more clear that anytime we give up … revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for, simply says to the enemy: Change.”
News of the program caused an uproar in Congress last week, and Democrats and Republicans have called for an investigation into it.
“This is just an outrageous power grab,” said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. on NBC’s “Today” show. “Nobody, nobody thought when we passed a resolution to invade Afghanistan and to fight the War on Terror … that this was an authorization to allow a wiretapping against the law of the United States.”
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intends to hold hearings. “They talk about constitutional authority,” Specter said. “There are limits as to what the president can do.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told FOX News on Monday that there’s “no doubt these intercepts can be crucially important to defending America.”
He noted that after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said he would use every legal power he could to prevent another attack, and there hasn’t been one attack on U.S. soil in four years. “He certainly acted with legal advice” and the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed on the issue, he added.
Added Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. “I happen to believe that some of the intercepts since Sept. 11 probably have thwarted, saved some lives … we’re at war. We want to protect our constitutional rights … but we’re at war.”
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday that the NSA program had yielded intelligence results that would not have been available otherwise in the War on Terror.
He stressed that it is not a blanket spying program of ordinary Americans but of overseas communications of potential Al Qaeda suspects in the United States.
“This is not a situation of domestic spying,” the attorney general said.
“Our position is that the authorization to use military force which was passed by the Congress shortly after Sept. 11 constitutes that authority,” Gonzales continued. It “does give permission for the president of the United States to engage in this kind of very limited, targeted electronic surveillance against our enemy.”
Gen. Michael Hayden, the deputy national intelligence director who was head of the NSA when the program began, said, “I can say unequivocally we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Sunday wrote to her Democratic colleagues, saying she expressed her concerns both verbally and in a classified letter to the administration when she was advised of the NSA activities. She said the administration “made clear” it didn’t think congressional notification or approval was required.
On Saturday, Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats sent a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill, requesting hearings on the issue and the appointment of a panel of outside legal experts to assist during those hearings. She said Rep. Jane Harman, the Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the administration reversed its decision to brief the committee on the details of the NSA activities to which the President referred in his radio address.
“The refusal to provide the committee with the information necessary to discharge its oversight responsibilities is reminiscent of an administration directive in October 2001, which severely restricted the flow of information from the intelligence community to the House and Senate Intelligence committees,” Pelosi said in the letter.
“We all agree that the president must have the best possible intelligence to protect the American people. That intelligence, however, must be produced in a manner consistent with our Constitution and our laws, and in a manner that reflects our values as a nation to protect the American people and our freedoms.”
Bush on the Patriot Act, Iraq
Bush also blasted those senators who held up reauthorization of 16 expiring provisions of the Patriot Act on Friday. Although those senators who filibustered the reauthorization and prevented a vote on them were in the minority, some Republicans were part of that group.
Critics of the law say they were willing to extend them for three or six months but will not permanently extend them before they can be further studies and to make sure they are not infringing on individuals’ civil liberties.
The provisions under debate, which expire Dec. 31, include: authorization for roving wiretaps, which allow investigators to monitor multiple devices to keep a target from evading detection by switching phones or computers; secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries; expanded abilities to share secret grand jury information with foreign governments; and watching terror suspects longer than other federal laws provide.
The rest of the overall act was made permanent in 2001, when Congress first voted on it.
Saying the Patriot Act has helped tear down legal and bureaucratic barriers to sharing intelligence information between U.S. agencies, Bush noted that many of the senators now filibustering the act voted for it in 2001.
“These senators need to explain why they thought the Patriot Act was a vital tool after the Sept. 11 attacks but now feel it’s no longer necessary,” Bush said, adding that the filibustering lawmakers “must stop their delaying tactics.”
“It is inexcusable for the United States Senate to let the Patriot Act expire,” he added.
The terrorists want to inflict more damage now than they did before Sept. 11, Bush continued, and “Congress has the responsibility to give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies the tools they need to protect the American people.”
He added: “In the War on Terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.”
On Iraq, Bush again reiterated themes he has voiced in the past two weeks, urging patience with the fledgling democratic progress there.
About 11 million Iraqis went to the polls to cast votes for a 275-member parliament last week. The high turnout and relatively low level of violence during the election marked what many say is a new beginning for Iraq.
“In a nation that once lived by the whims of a brutal dictator, the Iraqi people now enjoy constitutionally-protected freedom and their leaders now derive their powers from the consent of the governed,” Bush said Monday. “The Iraqi people still face many challenges … the formation of the government will take time as the Iraqis work to build consensus.”
He noted that the new government must prioritize the security, reconstruction, economic reform and national uniformity once it assembles.
“The work ahead requires the patience of the Iraqi people and the patience and support of America and our coalition partners,” Bush said.
When asked again whether he would consider some sort of timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal, Bush again refused to give such a timeframe, saying it shouldn’t the political whims of the hour that dictate U.S. military strategy and he will take his cues from military commanders on the ground.
“I can’t think of anything more dispiriting to a kid risking his or her life to see a decision made based on politics,” Bush said.
pointed out that impeachment won’t do any good, because
2. Vice President – Dick Cheney 3. Speaker of the House of Representatives – Dennis Hastert 4. President Pro Tempore of the Senate – Ted Stevens 5. Secretary of State – Condoleeza Rice 6. Secretary of the Treasury – John W. Snow 7. Secretary of Defense – Donald Rumsfeld 8. Attorney General – Alberto “Torture Lawyer” Gonzalez 9. Secretary of the Interior 10. Secretary of Agriculture 11. Secretary of Commerce 12. Secretary of Labor 13. Secretary of Health and Human Services 14. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development 15. Secretary of Transportation 16. Secretary of Energy 17. Secretary of Education 18. Secretary of Veterans Affairs
basically we’d have to impeach all those people as well… imagine "president" condoleeza rice, or "president" donald rumsfeld… what we need is another revolution.
i hope bush and his minions are spying on me… BOO! YAH! I AM A TERRORIST AND I AM PLANNING A REVOLUTION! feh on “president” shrubby junior!
the president openly admitted to violating the laws of this country and grossly exceeding his constitutional authority in a way that can only be described as despotic. he not only seems proud of this, he threatened those who exposed it with criminal prosecution.
U.S. President George W. Bush has defended his actions in the “war on terror,” amid mounting controversy over allegations that he let intelligence officers eavesdrop without warrants on U.S. soil.
Bush refused to confirm or deny a report in Friday’s New York Times, which said he allowed the National Security Agency to secretly intercept telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens and foreigners within the United States.
The president said it was against policy to discuss continuing intelligence operations.
However, he insisted his administration had stayed within the law while acting to protect Americans since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I will make this point: that whatever I do to protect the American people – and I have an obligation to do so – that we will uphold the law,” Bush said in an interview broadcast Friday evening on the PBS show The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
“And decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people.”
Senator promises to hold inquiry
A number of U.S. legislators demanded a congressional probe of the allegations on Friday.
“There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,” said Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee.
Specter promised to hold hearings in early 2006.
Senate rejects extension of Patriot Act provisions
The report caused an uproar in the Senate, where legislators were voting on whether to extend controversial eavesdropping provisions of the Patriot Act.
Some Republicans believe the provisions are a necessary part of the act, which is considered a key part of Bush’s “war on terror” and gave authorities greater powers to investigate suspects.
But the Senate rejected the proposals on a procedural vote.
NSA bugged hundreds of people: report
The National Security Agency usually monitors foreign sources and is usually required by law to get a court order before starting surveillance within the United States.
The Times story said the National Security Agency began to track communications of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people in the U.S. without judicial oversight after September 2001.
Citing secret sources, the paper said some NSA officials refused to work on the surveillance because they believed it to be illegal.
Eavesdropping foiled several attack plans: report
But the report also said the program uncovered several plots to launch attacks on the United States.
“This shocking revelation ought to send a chill down the spine of every senator and every American,” Democratic Senator Russell Feingold said.
The Times said it delayed publishing the story for a year to protect continuing investigations, and omitted some information that the White House said could help attackers.
WASHINGTON — A key Republican committee chairman put the administration of President George W. Bush on notice today that his panel would hold hearings into a report that the National Security Agency eavesdropped without warrants on people inside the United States.
Senator Arlen Specter said he would make oversight hearings by his panel next year “a very, very high priority.”
“There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,” said Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Other key bipartisan members of Congress also called on the administration to explain and said a congressional investigation may be necessary.
Senator John McCain appeared annoyed that the first he had heard of such a program was through a New York Times story published today. He said the report was troubling.
Neither Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice nor White House press secretary Scott McClellan, asked about the story earlier today, would confirm or deny that the super-secret NSA had spied on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002.
That year, following the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people inside the United States, the Times reported.
Before the program began, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders for such investigations. Overseas, 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at any one time.
“We need to look into that,” McCain told reporters at the White House after a meeting on Iraq with Bush. “Theoretically, I obviously wouldn’t like it. But I don’t know the extent of it and I don’t know enough about it to really make an informed comment. Ask me again in about a week.”
McCain said it’s not clear whether a congressional probe is warranted. He said the topic had not come up in the meeting with Bush.
“We should be informed as to exactly what is going on and then find out whether an investigation is called for,” he said.
Senator Joe Lieberman also said he needed more information.
“Of course I was concerned about the story,” said Lieberman, who also attended the White House Iraq meeting. “I’m going to go back to the office and see if I can find out more about it.”
Other Democrats were more harsh.
“This is Big Brother run amok,” declared Senator Edward Kennedy. “We cannot protect our borders if we cannot protect our ideals.”
Senator Russell Feingold called it a “shocking revelation” that he said “ought to send a chill down the spine of every senator and every American.”
Administration officials reacted to the report by asserting that the president has respected the Constitution while striving to protect the American people.
Rice said Bush has “acted lawfully in every step that he has taken.” And McClellan said Bush “is going to remain fully committed to upholding our Constitution and protect the civil liberties of the American people. And he has done both.”
The report surfaced in an untimely fashion as the administration and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill were fighting to save provisions of the expiring USA Patriot Act that they believe are key tools in the fight against terrorism.
The Times said reporters interviewed nearly a dozen current and former administration officials about the program and granted them anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.
Government officials credited the new program with uncovering several terrorist plots, including one by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting al-Qaida by planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, the report said.
Faris’ lawyer, David B. Smith, said today that the news puzzled him because none of the evidence against Faris appeared to have come from surveillance, other than officials eavesdropping on his cell phone calls while he was in FBI custody.
Some NSA officials were so concerned about the legality of the program that they refused to participate, the Times said. Questions about the legality of the program led the administration to temporarily suspend it last year and impose new restrictions.
Asked about this on NBC’s Today show, Rice said: “I’m not going to comment on intelligence matters.”
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the group’s initial reaction to the NSA disclosure was “shock that the administration has gone so far in violating American civil liberties to the extent where it seems to be a violation of federal law.”
Asked about the administration’s contention that the eavesdropping has disrupted terrorist attacks, Fredrickson said the ACLU couldn’t comment until it sees some evidence. “They’ve veiled these powers in secrecy so there’s no way for Congress or any independent organizations to exercise any oversight.”
Earlier this week, the Pentagon said it was reviewing its use of a classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States after a report by NBC News said the database listed activities of anti-war groups that were not a security threat to Pentagon property or personnel.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that while it appears that some information may have been left in the database longer than it should have been, it was not clear yet whether mistakes were made. A written statement issued by the department implied — but did not explicitly acknowledge — that some information had been handled improperly.
The administration had briefed congressional leaders about the NSA program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that handles national security issues.
Aides to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte and West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, refused to comment.
The Times said it delayed publication of the report for a year because the White House said it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny.
The Times said it omitted information from the story that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists.
Is the Pentagon spying on Americans? Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups
Lisa Myers
Senior investigative correspondent
WASHINGTON – A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.
“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It’s an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”
The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.
“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.
The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.
Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes – a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense – yet they all remained in the database.
The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.
Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”
The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.
“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”
Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.
Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.
The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.
“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.
The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens – many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.
But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.
“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.
Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.
Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.
CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.
One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,'” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”
“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.
Lotz agrees.
“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.
‘Slippery slope’
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.
Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.
“It’s absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.
“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”
The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”
Underlying all of the excesses and abuses of executive power claimed by the Bush Administration is a theory of absolute, unchecked power vested in the Presidency which literally could not be any more at odds with the central, founding principles of this country.
As this morning’s New York Times analysis put it in describing the rationale behind the Adminstration’s violations of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, pursuant to which it has been secretly spying on the commuincations of American citizens without judicial warrants:
A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration’s war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.
From the government’s detention of Americans as "enemy combatants" to the just-disclosed eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, the administration has relied on an unusually expansive interpretation of the president’s authority.
As the Times reports, Bush’s claim to absolute executive power has its origins principally in one document:
a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum [by the Justice Department’s John Yoo] that said no statute passed by Congress “can place any limits on the president’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response.”
The notion that one of the three branches of our Government can claim power unchecked by the other two branches is precisely what the Founders sought, first and foremost, to preclude. And the fear that a U.S. President would attempt to seize power unchecked by the law or by the other branches – i.e., that the Executive would seize the powers of the British King – was the driving force behind the clear and numerous constitutional limitations placed on Executive power. It is these very limitations which the Bush Administration is claiming that it has the power to disregard because the need for enhanced national security in time of war vests the President with unchecked power.
But that theory of the Executive unconstrained by law is completely repulsive to the founding principles of the country, as well as to the promises made by the Founders in order to extract consent from a monarchy-fearing public to the creation of executive power vested in a single individual. The notion that all of that can be just whimsically tossed aside whenever the nation experiences external threats is as contrary to the country’s founding principles as it is dangerous.
It cannot be said that the Founders were unaware of the potential for national emergencies and external threats. They engaged in a war with the British which was at least as much of an existential threat to the Republic as those posed by 9/11 and related threats of Islamic extremism. Notwithstanding those threats, the Founders, in creating an Executive branch, sought first and foremost to ensure that the President could never wield unchecked powers which would exist above and separate from Congressionally enacted laws.
Among recent Republican Administrations, this theory of the unchecked President is not new. Digby recalls Richard Nixon’s endorsement of it, and the theory came to life in the Iran-Contra scandal, where the Reagan Administration unilaterally deemed it necessary to U.S. national security to arm the Nicaraguan contras and then asserted for itself the power to circumvent the law enacted by the Congress which prohibited exactly that.
But the situation we have now is far more egregious, and far more dangerous, because the Administration is not even bothering to pretend now (as the Reagan Administration at least did) that the Executive acts undertaken really did adhere to Congressional intent, or alternatively, to the extent that such acts violated Congressional mandates, the acts were simply the by-product of overzealous and rogue officials who broke the law without the knowledge or approval of President Reagan.
The Bush Administration’s position now is almost the opposite of that posture, in that the Administration is expressly claiming that the President does have the right to violate laws of Congress because his executive power is absolute and thus cannot be restricted by anything. And rather than applying this theory of unchecked executive power to a single case (as the Reagan Administration did in Iran-contra), the Bush Administration has arrogated unto itself this monarchical power as a general proposition, applicable to each and every issue which can be said to relate, however generally, to this undeclared “war” against terrorism.
This view of the Presidency – which now exists not just in odious theory but in real, live, breathing form vested in George Bush – is precisely what the monarchy-fearing Founders insisted should never occur and, with the enactment of the U.S. Constitution, would never occur.
This absolute power claimed and enthusiastically exercised by George Bush violates not just specific Constitutional limitations, but the core principles of the Constitution: that we are a nation of laws not men; that each branch shall be “co-equal” to the others and checked and limited by the other two; and that the people shall retain ultimate power by vesting in them the right to enact supreme laws through the Congress which shall bind all other citizens, including the President.
That the Bush Administration’s claim to unchecked and supra-legal Executive power is squarely inconsistent with basic constitutional principles is conclusively demonstrated by James Madison’s Federalist No. 48, which is devoted to the principle that liberty cannot be maintained unless each branch remains accountable and subordinate to the others:
It was shown in the last paper that the political apothegm there examined does not require that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments should be wholly unconnected with each other. I shall undertake, in the next place, to show that unless these departments be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others, the degree of separation which the maxim requires, as essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained.
Similarly, Madison, in Federalist No. 51, defined the central objective for avoiding tyranny as ensuring that no branch be able to claim for itself powers which are absolute and unchecked by the other branches:
What expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. . . .
In particular, Madison emphasized in Federalist 51 that liberty could be preserved only if the laws enacted by the people through the Congress were supreme and universally binding:
But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.
Hamilton made the same point in Federalist No. 73. where he emphasized:
“[t]he superior weight and influence of the legislative body in a free government, and the hazard to the Executive in a trial of strength with that body, . . . ”
To the Founders, the defining characteristics of the tyrannical British King was that he possessed precisely those powers which the Constitution prohibits but which the Bush Administration is now claiming it can exercise. From Federalist 70:
In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred.
Based on the fear of such unchecked executive power, Federalist 69 emphasized that unlike the British King, who did possess the absolute power to nullify duly enacted laws , the sole power possessed by the President to negate a law enacted by the Congress — including with regard to matters of national security and war — is the President’s qualified (i.e., override-able) veto power:
Hence it appears that, except as to the concurrent authority of the President in the article of treaties, it would be difficult to determine whether that magistrate would, in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the Governor of New York. And it appears yet more unequivocally, that there is no pretense for the parallel which has been attempted between him and the king of Great Britain. . . .
The one [the American President] would have a qualified negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other [the British King] has an absolute negative. The one would have a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other, in addition to this right, possesses that of declaring war, and of raising and regulating fleets and armies by his own authority.
An extremely potent demonstration that the Bush Administration’s claim to unchecked Executive Power is fundamentally inconsistent with the most basic constitutional safeguards comes from one of the unlikeliest corners – Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 124 S.Ct. 2633 (2004):
The proposition that the Executive lacks indefinite wartime detention authority over citizens is consistent with the Founders’ general mistrust of military power permanently at the Executive’s disposal. In the Founders’ view, the "blessings of liberty" were threatened by "those military establishments which must gradually poison its very fountain." The Federalist No. 45, p. 238 (J. Madison). No fewer than 10 issues of the Federalist were devoted in whole or part to allaying fears of oppression from the proposed Constitution’s authorization of standing armies in peacetime.
Many safeguards in the Constitution reflect these concerns. Congress’s authority "or a longer Term than two Years." U. S. Const., Art. 1, §8, cl. 12. Except for the actual command of military forces, all authorization for their maintenance and all explicit authorization for their use is placed in the control of Congress under Article I, rather than the President under Article II.
As Hamilton explained, the President’s military authority would be "much inferior" to that of the British King:
"It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy: while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war, and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all which, by the constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature." The Federalist No. 69, p. 357.
A view of the Constitution that gives the Executive authority to use military force rather than the force of law against citizens on American soil flies in the face of the mistrust that engendered these provisions.
Both the Bush Administration’s theory of its own unchecked power and its indiscriminate and aggressive use of that power to violate Congressional law contradicts every constitutional principle created to ensure that we do not live under unchecked Executive tyranny. If the President is allowed to get away with secretly decreeing that he can violate the law and then doing exactly that, then there really are no remaining checks on Executive power — and we have, without hyperbole, arrived at the very definition of tyranny.
The country has, more or less with a quiet complacency, stood by while this Administration imprisoned American citizens with no due process, while the Administration sanctioned torture and then used it to extract “evidence” to justify those detentions, and while the Administration exploited the fear of terrorist acts to bestow onto itself unprecedented powers.
If the naked assertion of absolute power by the Bush Administration — and the use of that power to eavesdrop on American citizens without any judicial review — does not finally prompt the public regardless of partisan allegiance to take a stand against this undiluted claim to real tyrannical power, then it is impossible to imagine what would ever prompt such a stand.
UPDATE: The more one thinks about the fact that the New York Times was aware of this patently illegal behavior for a full year and concealed it from the public because the Administration told it keep quiet, the more disturbing that complicity becomes.
A congressional report made public yesterday concluded that President Bush and his inner circle had access to more intelligence and reviewed more sensitive material than what was shared with Congress when it gave Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq.
Democrats said the 14-page report contradicts Bush’s contention that lawmakers saw all the evidence before U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, stating that the president and a small number of advisers “have access to a far greater volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information.”
The report does not cite examples of intelligence Bush reviewed that differed from what Congress saw. If such information is available, the report’s authors do not have access to it. The Bush administration has routinely denied Congress access to documents, saying it would have a chilling effect on deliberations. The report, however, concludes that the Bush administration has been more restrictive than its predecessors in sharing intelligence with Congress.
The White House disputed both charges, noting that Congress often works directly with U.S. intelligence agencies and is privy to an enormous amount of classified information. “In 2004 alone, intelligence agencies provided over 1,000 personal briefings and more than 4,000 intelligence products to the Congress,” an administration official said.
The report, done by the Congressional Research Service at the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), comes amid allegations by Democrats that administration officials exaggerated Iraq’s weapons capabilities and terrorism ties and then resisted inquiries into the intelligence failures.
Bush has fiercely rejected those claims. “Some of the most irresponsible comments — about manipulating intelligence — have come from politicians who saw the same intelligence I saw and then voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein,” he said this week.
Feinstein, who is on the Senate intelligence committee, disagreed. “The report demonstrates that Congress routinely is denied access to intelligence sources, intelligence collection and analysis,” she said. The intelligence panel met yesterday to discuss the second phase of its investigation into the administration’s handling of prewar assertions. In July 2004, the committee issued the first phase of its bipartisan report, which found the U.S. intelligence community had assembled a flawed and exaggerated assessment of Iraq’s weapons capabilities.
The second phase, which examines the White House’s role, was agreed to in February 2004 but remains incomplete. Last month, Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed-door session to extract a promise from Republicans to speed up the inquiry. At the time, committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the report was nearing completion. But yesterday, committee aides said it is unlikely the report will be done before spring.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a former member of the panel, said the report should not be rushed. But he urged the White House to release more documents to support its claims. “The only way to be is certain is to look at what they saw and what we saw side by side,” he said.
i’m up to 00 gauge, which is where i wanted to be before we go to portland, so that i can frighten my in-laws. i have a 00 gauge plug with a pentacle on it which i intend to wear. it’s not that unusual as an earring – certainly less unusual than it could be considering that it’s 00 gauge – and i’m wondering if they’ll even notice it, and if they do notice it, if they’ll say anything to me about it. <evil grin>
the fremont philharmonic had a very productive recording session last night. we started at 5:00 pm and went until well after midnight, and we recorded about 12 songs, which is 8 more than we did the last time we had a recording session… of course the last time we recorded, the composer of the music, the trombone player, and the recording engineer were the same person (which is guaranteed to result in little, if anything good on tape), and we were recording in his bedroom on the hottest day of the year and all of his recording equipment was malfunctioning because of the heat. this time we had a professional recording engineer whose job it was to get as much on tape as possible without regard to what else the rest of the band was doing, which meant that fred was free to be the composer and the trombone player, we were recording in the hale’s palladium, which is a BIG place that has room for an entire symphony orchestra… when it’s not being a beer warehouse… and it was cold enough last night that we had to take a break about every two hours or so and run the heaters so that the microphones wouldn’t freeze. also, the fact that he is a professional recording engineer means that we’re having a CD release party on sunday(!) instead of farting around “mixing” and “mastering” for more than a year before releasing our current CD at the oregon country fair last year. we’re playing for a private party tonight and we’re playing for the fremont solstice feast (it’s official, although i still haven’t gotten written confirmation) on wednesday… although it’s not in fremont this year, it’s somewhere near alaska way off of airport way, in the south part of seattle. weird.
thanks to for this… Panexa is a new “drug” on the market, which is better than the older drugs that it replaces. Panexa is proven to provide more medication to those who take it than any other comparable solution. Panexa is the right choice, the safe choice. The only choice. Panexa – ask your doctor for a reason to take it.
The Christmas display in front of Joel Krupnik’s Manhattan brownstone has all the subtlety of a blood-splattered Santa.
Which, in fact, is what it is.
A knife-wielding Santa Claus holds a bloody head outside the home of Mildred Castellanos and Joel Krupnik. “It’s horrible, just terrible,” says neighbor Joe Nuccio, 79. “He’s got Santa Claus with a bloody knife in one hand and a doll’s head suspended in the other. That’s bloody, too.”
Bloody awful, for sure. But Krupnik, who couldn’t be reached Thursday, told the Associated Press it’s all to make this point: Christmas has become too commercial. Others have made similar points in Orlando (a gutted Rudolph dangling from a tree) and Miami (a hanged St. Nick).
And they’ve received similar reviews.
Estelle Farnsworth was so upset by the life-size Santa strung up in her Miami neighborhood that she called police. Santa’s hands were bound behind his back, his feet were tied together, and a noose was around his neck.
Have yourself a gory little Christmas, it seemed to say.
“I was absolutely furious,” says Farnsworth, 65. “Everybody was upset.”
A little girl in the neighborhood thought Santa had morphed into Satan and was going to get her, Farnsworth says.
Police told Farnsworth that desecrating Santa might be in poor taste but that it was constitutionally protected expression.
Like Krupnik, the neighbor who staged Santa’s mock execution wanted to express his dismay with the commercialization of the season, Farnsworth says.
Point taken, she says. But she believes it could have been done more tastefully.
“Why not put up a beautiful manger scene? He could have put up a sign on it that said, ‘This is the reason for the season of Christmas,’ ” she says. “Instead, he just lynched Santa Claus.”
Santa, mercifully, has been taken down in Miami, and Farnsworth’s neighborhood has returned to normal.
“It’s very well decorated now,” she says.
Not so in Nuccio’s neighborhood. Santa still leers at passersby, and Krupnik has a tree “decorated” with the heads of Barbie dolls.
Maybe Krupnik is bothered that Christmas has become too commercial, Nuccio says. “I am, too. All this nonsense about whether you should say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays.’
THE United States has set aside $500 million over the next five years to secure a vast new front in its global war on terrorism: the Sahara Desert.
Critics say the region is not the terrorist zone that some senior US military officers assert. They add that heavy-handed military and financial support that reinforces authoritarian regimes in north and west Africa could fuel radicalism where it scarcely exists.
The Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was begun in June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan countries where lawless swathes of desert are considered fertile ground for militant Muslim groups involved in smuggling and combat training.
“It’s the Wild West all over again,” said Major Holly Silkman, a public affairs officer at US Special Operations Command Europe, which presides over US security and peacekeeping operations in Europe, former Soviet bloc countries and most of Africa.
During the first phase of the programme, dubbed Operation Flintlock, US Special Forces led 3,000 ill-equipped Saharan troops in tactical exercises designed to co-ordinate security more effectively along porous borders and beef-up patrols in ungoverned territories.
Maj Silkman said Africa has become the most important concern of the US European Command (EuCom) because of rampant corruption, drug and human trafficking, poverty and high unemployment, which create a significant “potential for instability”, particularly in the Saharan region, where 50 per cent of the population is younger than 15.
The head of Special Operations Command Europe, Major General Thomas R Csrnko, said he was concerned that al-Qaeda is assessing African groups for “franchising opportunities,” notably the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat – known as GSPC by its initials in French – cited on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organisations.
The Algeria-based GSPC, estimated to have about 300 fighters and said to be linked to al-Qaeda, was accused of kidnapping European tourists in 2003 and has taken responsibility for a spate of attacks in the Sahara this year.
General Csrnko considers the group the main threat to security in the region, and has cited the potential for terrorist camps in the Sahara comparable to those once run by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Eucom officials say there is evidence that 25 per cent of suicide bombers in Iraq are Saharan Africans. Terrorist attacks such as the 11 March, 2004, Madrid train bombings that killed 191 persons have been linked to north African militants.
But some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that a higher-profile US involvement could destabilise the region.
“If anything, the [TSCTI] … will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall US presence and strategy,” said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia.
A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said that although the Sahara is “not a terrorist hotbed”, repressive governments in the region are using the “war on terror” to tap US largesse and deny civil freedoms.
The report said the regime of Mauritanian President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya – a US ally in west Africa deposed on 3 August in a bloodless coup – used the threat of terrorism to legitimise the denial of human rights.
Mr Keenan said the government of Algeria is an even worse offender, misleading Washington about the GSPC threat to acquire modern weapons and shed its pariah status.
Aside from the 2003 kidnapping issue, US and Algerian authorities have failed to present “indisputable verification of a single act of alleged terrorism in the Sahara”, Mr Keenan said.
“Without the GSPC, the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region,” he added, noting that an escalating American strategic dependency on African oil requires that the United States bolster its presence in the region.
Maj Silkman, however, said cultivating security, not oil resources, is the prime objective of the TSCTI. She said it is vital that other members of the international community get involved.
“Reducing the threat is not as much about taking direct action as it is in eliminating conditions that allow terrorism to flourish,” she said.
You are a sellout and a traitor. You would have killed the Fuhrer if you had the chance. You live in the now and justify your actions. You’ll repent shortly before you die but will it be enough?
this may be related to “straight edge” culture, but it’s still something worth considering… i’ve seen a number of people who have gotten various different cosmetic implants, and i’ve been considering getting rhinestone implants surrounding my scar, as well as a scalp tattoo… very definitely something worth considering…
cute overload is a place that actually wants pictures of our… disgustinly, sickeningly, overwelmingly cute little doggie… i’ll have to get on it.
SAN FRANCISCO – Add another creation to the strange scientific menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more exotic combinations. Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos.
Those mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each of their heads, a trace amount that doesn’t remotely come close to “humanizing” the rodents.
“This illustrate that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains doesn’t restructure the brain,” Gage said.
Still, the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans.
“The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics. “But I don’t think this research comes even close to that.”
Researchers are nevertheless beginning to bump up against what bioethicists call the “yuck factor.”
Three top cloning researchers, for instance, have applied for a patent that contemplates fusing a complete set of human DNA into animal eggs in order to manufacturer human embryonic stem cells.
One of the patent applicants, Jose Cibelli, first attempted such an experiment in 1998 when he fused cells from his cheek into cow eggs.
“The idea is to hijack the machinery of the egg,” said Cibelli, whose current work at Michigan State University does not involve human material because that would violate state law.
Researchers argue that co-mingling human and animal tissue is vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.
Others have performed similar experiments with rabbit and chicken eggs while University of California-Irvine researchers have reported making paralyzed rodents walk after injecting them with human nerve cells.
Doctors have transplanted pig valves into human hearts for years, and scientists have injected human cells into lab animals for even longer. But the brain poses an additional level of concern because some envision nightmare scenarios in which a human mind might be trapped in an animal head.
“Human diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, might be amenable to stem cell therapy, and it is conceivable, although unlikely, that an animal’s cognitive abilities could also be affected by such therapy,” a report issued in April by the influential National Academies of Science that sought to draw some ethical research boundaries.
So the report recommended that such work be allowed, but with strict ethical guidelines established.
“Protocols should be reviewed to ensure that they take into account those sorts of possibilities and that they include ethically sensitive plans to manage them if they arise,” the report concluded.
At the same time, the report did endorse research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.
Gage said the work published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is another step in overcoming one of the biggest technical hurdles confronting stem cell researchers: when exactly to inject the cells into patients.
The results suggest that human embryonic stem cells, once injected into people, will mature into the cells that surround them. No known human has ever received an injection of embryonic stem cells because so little is known about how those cells will mature once inside the body.
For now, Gage said his work is more geared toward understanding disease than to finding a cure.
“It’s a way for us to begin to tease out the way these diseases develop,” Gage said.
Human embryonic stem cells are created in the first days after conception and give rise to all the organs and tissues in the human body. Scientists hope they can someday use stem cells to replace diseased tissue. But many social conservatives, including President Bush, oppose the work because embryos are destroyed during research.
Stem cell researchers argue that mixing human and animal cells is the only way to advance the field because it’s far too risky to experiment on people; so little is known about stem cells.
“The experiments have to be done, which does mean human cells into non-human cells,” said Dr. Evan Snyder, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego. “You don’t work out the issues on your child or your grandmother. You want to work this out in an animal first.”
Snyder is injecting human embryonic stem cells into monkeys and is convinced that there’s little danger.
“It’s true that there is a huge amount of similarity, but the difference are huge,” Snyder said. “You will never ever have a little human trapped inside a mouse or monkey’s body.”
moe’s purse was stolen from the dog agility arena the other day. she got her credit cards cancelled, but only after whoever stole them tried to use them twice. and the dog agility arena is in a remote enough location that it was very likely one of her students that stole it. she still hasn’t gotten her driver’s license replaced, and social security is being really annoying about the whole thing: they give you a number that you are supposed to use as a formal form of identification, that the local law enforcement drones say you have to be able to prove at a moment’s notice… and then they say that they recommend you not carry your social security card with you (which is exactly the opposite of what the police say), and they don’t take any responsibility for helping you get things sorted out if someone steals it. they say that if someone steals your social security card that you are supposed to “keep an eye” on your social security earnings to see if someone else is reporting earnings, and you are supposed to notify the credit reporting agencies so they won’t just automatically approve credit without “checking with you” first, but you’ve got to do all of this stuff… it’s not something that social security can do for you, despite the fact that they’re the ones that issued the number to you in the first place… 8/ and they won’t issue you a new social security number under any circumstances… as though there are a limited number of combinations or something…
and the guy showed up and opened up my car… $141 dollars later, and $17 for the duplicate keys, i’ve already far overspent for this month…
i managed to lock myself out of my car, and i don’t have an extra key anywhere…
as soon as the locksmith guy comes to let me into my car, the first place i’m going to go is somewhere to have a couple of duplicate keys made, so that this has no chance of happening again.
finally some questions from the ask przxqgl anything poll that i posted a few weeks back…
— What is The Meaning of Life?
didn’t you read the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Universe? the answer is 42.
personally, i believe that the real answer is 23, but that’s my personal opinion…
— Are chemtrails real or just something for people who want to believe in a conspiracy that they can see proof of by looking no farther than the sky?
i see them, therefor they are real. personally i believe that they’re caused by high-altitude aircraft of some kind, and have observed such phenomenon, complete with resulting chemtrails, on a number of occasions… but, as with just about everything that i perceive, especially these days, it’s a matter of interpretation.
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your livejournal along with your seven songs, then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.
1. So – Tom Zé, The Best of Tom Zé
2. Cortina 3 – Tom Zé, The Hips of Tradition
3. Stuck On You – The Residents, The King and Eye
4. Life Would Be Wonderful – The Residents, Demons Dance Alone
5. Tourniquet Of Roses – The Residents, Fingerprince
6. He Also Serves – The Residents, Our Finest Flowers
7. Why Don’t You Like Me? – Frank Zappa, Broadway The Hard Way
1.
2. any other user who is on my friends list who wants to do this, since the last time i tried this i only got one response anyway.
Pablo Picasso should paint your portrait. You are a totally unique person. You are usually the first one to adopt a new mode of thought or the latest fashion. Everyone looks up to you. You are friendly and easygoing with everyone you meet.
girl on the phone: good morning, washington state department of licensing, what can we do for you today?
me: i’d like to change the address on my driver’s license please.
girl: okay, we can help you with that. hold on…
(computer noises in the background)
girl: okay, what can i help you with today?
me (thinking): ???????? WTF?
me: i’d like to change the address on my driver’s license please…
girl: all right, can i have your driver’s license number please?
me: – gives it to her… (what, do you think that i’d just post it where anyone can see it? come on…)
girl: okay, hold on…
(more computer noises in the background)
girl: okay, now could i get your driver’s license number please?
me: ????????????? BLOWN HEAD GASKET
…
in spite of a bad start, i actually managed to change my address on record. they don’t automatically issue me a new license, but if i wait 15 days, i can order one online.
By Shankar Vedantam
The Washington Post
Updated: 3:33 a.m. ET Dec. 10, 2005
The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.
These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.
“He had a fixed delusion about the world,” said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. “He felt under attack, he felt threatened.”
Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.
‘Ordinary prejudice’ or something more?
Advocates have circulated draft guidelines and have begun to conduct systematic studies. While the proposal is gaining traction, it is still in the early stages of being considered by the professionals who decide on new diagnoses.
If it succeeds, it could have huge ramifications on clinical practice, employment disputes and the criminal justice system. Perpetrators of hate crimes could become candidates for treatment, and physicians would become arbiters of how to distinguish “ordinary prejudice” from pathological bias. Thorny discussions about how mental illnesses are defined would get even more prickly.
Many urge more research, saying they are unsure whether bias can be pathological. Solomon, for instance, is uncomfortable with the idea. But several experts say that psychiatry has been inattentive to the effects of prejudice on mental health and illness.
“Has anyone done a word search for ‘racism’ in DSM-IV? It doesn’t exist,” said Carl C. Bell, a Chicago psychiatrist, referring to psychiatry’s manual of mental disorders. “Has anyone asked, ‘If you have paranoia, do you project your hostility toward other groups?’ The answer is ‘Hell, no!’ ”
The proposed guidelines that California psychologist Edward Dunbar created describe people whose daily functioning is paralyzed by persistent fears and worries about other groups. The guidelines have not been endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); advocates are mostly seeking support for systematic study.
Fears of a new defense for racism
Darrel A. Regier, director of research at the psychiatric association, said he supports research into whether pathological bias is a disorder. But he said the jury is out on whether a diagnostic classification would add anything useful, given that clinicians already know about disorders in which people rigidly hold onto false beliefs.
“If you are going to put racism into the next edition of DSM, you would have enormous criticism,” Regier said. Critics would ask, ” ‘Are you pathologizing all of life?’ You better be prepared to defend that classification.”
“I think it’s absurd,” said Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and the author of “PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine.” Satel said the diagnosis would allow hate-crime perpetrators to evade responsibility by claiming they suffered from a mental illness. “You could use it as a defense.”
Psychiatrists who advocate a new diagnosis, such as Gary Belkin, deputy chief of psychiatry at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, said social norms play a central role in how all psychiatric disorders are defined. Pedophilia is considered a disorder by psychiatrists, Belkin noted, but that does not keep child molesters from being prosecuted.
“Psychiatrists who are uneasy with including something like this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual need to get used to the fact that the whole manual reflects social context,” said Belkin, who is planning to launch a study on pathological bias among patients at his hospital. “That is true of depression on down. Pathological bias is no more or less scientific than major depression.”
Some extreme cases of paranoia
Advocates for the new diagnosis also say most candidates for treatment, such as the man Solomon treated, are not criminals or violent offenders. Rather, they are like the young woman in Los Angeles who thought Jews were diseased and would infect her — she carried out compulsive cleansing rituals and hit her head to drive away her obsessions. She realized she needed help but was afraid her therapist would be Jewish, said Dunbar, a Los Angeles psychologist who has amassed several case studies and treated several dozen patients for racial paranoia and other forms of what he considers pathological bias.
Another patient was a waiter so hostile to black people that he flung plates on the table when he served black patrons and got fired from multiple jobs.
A third patient was a Vietnam War veteran who was so fearful of Asians that he avoided social situations where he might meet them, Dunbar said.
“When I see someone who won’t see a physician because they’re Jewish, or who can’t sit in a restaurant because there are Asians, or feels threatened by homosexuals in the workplace, the party line in mental health says, ‘This is not our problem,’ ” the psychologist said. “If it’s not our problem, whose problem is it?”
Paralyzed by fear of others
Opponents say making pathological bias a diagnosis raises the specter of social engineering — brainwashing individuals who do not fit society’s norms. But Dunbar and others say patients with disabling levels of prejudice should be treated for the same reason as are patients with any other disorder: They would feel, live and function better.
“They are delusional,” said Alvin F. Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has long advocated such a diagnosis. “They imagine people are going to do all kinds of bad things and hurt them, and feel they have to do something to protect themselves.
“When they reach that stage, they are very impaired,” he said. “They can’t work and function; they can’t hold a job. They would benefit from treatment of some type, particularly medication.”
Doctors who treat inmates at the California State Prison outside Sacramento concur: They have diagnosed some forms of racist hatred among inmates and administered antipsychotic drugs.
“We treat racism and homophobia as delusional disorders,” said Shama Chaiken, who later became a divisional chief psychologist for the California Department of Corrections, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. “Treatment with antipsychotics does work to reduce these prejudices.”
Few immune to some level of bias
Amid a profusion of recent studies into the nature of prejudice, researchers have found that biases are very common. Almost everyone harbors what might be termed “ordinary prejudice,” the research indicates.
Anthony Greenwald, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychologist at Harvard, developed tests for such biases. By measuring the speed with which people make mental associations, the psychologists found that biases affect even those who actively resist them.
“When things are more strongly paired in our minds, we can respond to them more quickly,” Banaji said. “Large numbers of Americans cannot as swiftly make the association between ‘black’ and ‘good’ as they can between ‘white’ and ‘good.’ ”
Similarly, psychologist Margo Monteith at the University of Kentucky in Lexington found that people can have prejudices against groups they know nothing about. She administered a test in which volunteers, under time pressure, had to associate a series of words with either “America” or a fictitious country she called “Marisat.”
Volunteers more easily associated Marisat with such words as “poison,” “death” and “evil,” while associating America with “sunrise,” “paradise” and “loyal.”
“A large part of our self-esteem derives from our group membership,” Monteith said. “To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It’s likely a built-in mechanism.”
‘100 percent of people are racist’
If biases are so common, many doctors ask, can racism really be a mental illness?
“I don’t think racism is a mental illness, and that’s because 100 percent of people are racist,” said Paul J. Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. “If you have a diagnostic category that fits 100 percent of people, it’s not a diagnostic category.”
But Poussaint said there is a difference between ordinary prejudice and pathological bias — the same distinction that psychiatrists make between sadness and depression. All people experience sadness, anxiety and fear, but extreme, disabling forms of these emotions are called disorders.
While people with ordinary prejudice try very hard to conceal their biases, Solomon said, her homophobic patient had no embarrassment about his attitude toward gays. Dunbar said people with pathological prejudice often lack filtering capabilities. As a result, he said, they face problems at work and home.
“Everyone is inculcated with stereotypes and biases with cultural issues, but some individuals not only hold beliefs that are very rigid, but they are part of a psychological problem,” Dunbar said.
The psychologist said he has helped such patients with talk therapy, which encourages patients to question the basis for their beliefs, and by steering them toward medications such as antipsychotics.
The woman with the bias against Jews did not overcome her prejudice, Dunbar said, but she learned to control her fear response in social settings. The patient with hostility against African Americans realized his beliefs were “stupid.”
Balancing understanding with information
Solomon discovered she was most effective dealing with the homophobic man when she was nonjudgmental. When he claimed there were more gays and lesbians than ever before, she presented him with data showing there was no such shift.
At those times, she reported in a case study, the patient would say, “I know, I know.” He would recognize that he was not being logical, but then get angry and return to the same patterns of obsession. Solomon did not identify the man because of patient confidentiality.
Standing in the central yard of the maximum-security California State Prison with inmates exercising around her, Chaiken explained how she distinguished pathological bias from ordinary prejudice: A prisoner who belonged to a gang with racist views might express such views to fit in with his gang, but if he continues “yelling racial slurs, assaulting others when it’s clear there is no benefit” after he leaves the gang, the behavior was no longer “adaptive.”
Prison officials declined to identify inmates who had been treated, or make them available for interviews.
Chicago psychiatrist Bell said he has not made up his mind on whether bias can be pathological. But in proposing a research agenda for the next edition of psychiatry’s DSM of mental disorders, Bell and researchers from the Mayo Clinic, McGill University, the University of California at Los Angeles and other academic institutions wrote: “Clinical experience informs us that racism may be a manifestation of a delusional process, a consequence of anxiety, or a feature of an individual’s personality dynamics.”
The psychiatrists said their profession has neglected the issue: “One solution would be to encourage research that seeks to delineate the validity and reliability of racism as a symptom and to investigate the possibility of including it in some diagnostic criteria sets in future editions of DSM.”
yet another way to force people to think the way you want them to… as long as you’re the doctor. i see this as yet another way to keep “terrorists” and other outcasts in line.
WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Sunday he is prepared to strip Democrats of their ability to filibuster if they try to stall Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
“The answer is yes,” Frist said when asked if he would act to change Senate procedures to restrict a Democratic filibuster. “Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that.”
Democrats immediately called Frist’s words unhelpful and potentially incendiary. They said Senate Democrats are waiting for the Judiciary Committee to act on Alito’s nomination before they decide what they may do.
“Sen. Frist has thrown down the gauntlet at a time when the country least needs it,” said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. “The American people know that checks and balances are an integral part of our government.”
In recent weeks, Senate Democrats have questioned whether Alito, a federal appeals court judge, has the proper judicial temperament and ideology to replace retiring Justice
Sandra Day O’Connor.
Some have said that Alito’s views on issues such as voting rights and abortion could provoke a filibuster unless he allays their concerns about his commitment to civil rights. Alito’s confirmation hearings begin Jan. 9 before the committee.
Frist, R-Tenn., said Alito is qualified for the high court, noting that Alito was confirmed by the Senate for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Sam Alito, who has a modest judicial temperament … is someone who deserves advice and consent by the Senate,” Frist told “Fox News Sunday.”
Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in an interview that senators should be debating Alito’s qualifications on their merits rather than speculating about the possibility of a filibuster.
But, he added, once the committee acts, “all procedural options are on the table. But we are months away from facing these kinds of decisions.”
The filibuster is a parliamentary tactic whereby senators use their right to virtually unlimited debate to block measures, legislation or nominations. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster.
Passing a bill or confirming a nominee requires a simple majority — 51 senators if all 100 senators are present. The vice president can break 50-50 ties.
Under Frist’s scenario, the GOP would seek a parliamentary ruling that declares filibusters are not permitted against judicial nominees. That ruling ultimately would go before the full Senate for a vote, with a simple majority required to prevail. Republicans hold 55 seats.
If that plays out, it then would take a majority of senators present to vote to approve a nominee such as Alito.
Such a move carries great risk. Democrats have threatened to retaliate with a fight that could snarl Senate business for months. Also, it could backfire on Republicans if they were to lose majority control of the chamber.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.
Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today.
“I knew from the news that Mr. Seigenthaler was looking for who did it, and I did it, so I needed to let him know in particular that it wasn’t anyone out to get him, that it was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong,” Chase was quoted as saying in Sunday editions of The Tennessean.
Chase said he didn’t know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.
The biography he posted, which has since been replaced, falsely stated that Seigenthaler was linked to the Kennedy assassinations and had lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984.
The entry motivated Seigenthaler to write an op-ed piece for USA Today blasting Wikipedia’s credibility. He described himself as a close friend of Robert Kennedy and said he had worked with President Kennedy. He said “the most painful thing was to have them suggest that I was suspected of their assassination.”
Seigenthaler said he doesn’t plan to pursue legal action against Chase.
He also said he doesn’t support more regulations of the Internet, but he said that he fears “Wikipedia is inviting it by its allowing irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody.”
Chase said he created the fake online biography in May as a gag to shock a co-worker who was familiar with the Seigenthaler family. He resigned as an operations manager at a Nashville delivery company as a result of the debacle.
this is primarily for , who posted seigenthaler’s editorial the other day… i don’t support more regulations of the internet either, and i also believe that places like wikipedia are going to see new regulations okayed if their unregistered users keep clogging up internet with spam and other kinds of vandalism, but i also think it’s interesting that this guy actually resigned from his job, which didn’t have anything to do with internet or internet technology (he was an operations manager for a delivery company) as the result of this… it’s a big warning to everyone else who does this kind of thing… get caught and you could lose your job, even if that job has nothing to do with internet.
i forsee a big rise in the rate of unemployed people who have nothing better to do than vandalise internet in the near future…
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”
And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of paper” used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”
Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not. Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine – in the end – if something is legal or right.
Every federal official – including the President – who takes an oath of office swears to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living document.”
“‘Oh, how I hate the phrase we have—a ‘living document,'” Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”
As a judge, Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”
President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion.
Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights.
“We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,” Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way street.”
And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism. It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.
But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just “a goddamned piece of paper.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
Let us start out with the fact that the Constitution is actually written on parchment, not paper. A trivial point, I grant you, but one that reveals (along with your inability to correctly pronounce the word “nuclear”) a shocking lack of education in a head of state.
But to get to the point, the Constitution is not the parchment itself, but the ideas written upon it; ideas which form the foundations of our nation, ideas which would carry equal weight if written on stone, glass, metal, or even paper. These ideas are the soul of the nation. They include the recognition that the people of this nation have certain rights, rights which the government does not have the authority to remove. These rights include freedom of speech, to say what we think about the nation at any and all times, to write that opinion down and share it however we choose to. These rights include the freedom to worship as we choose, free from coercion. These rights include the right to privacy, in our homes and businesses, free from government intrusions other than in very specific and well-defined circumstances.
Maybe those rights are inconvenient to you, as such rights are always inconvenient to tyrants, but you are not allowed the choice which rights you will abide by or not. That too is spelled out explicitly in the Constitution.
The Constitution isn’t just a piece of paper or parchment. It’s a contract; the original contract with America. It’s the contract you yourself swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend against all enemies both foreign and domestic. You attached your name to that promise. You swore that oath before a judge of the United States Supreme Court, with your hand on a bible. That isn’t just scenery for the cameras. Swearing an oath before a judge carries legal obligations with that oath, and legal penalties for breaking that oath.
The election process by which you claim authority is defined in that Constitution. And as you claim authority by Constitutional process, so too are you limited by Constitutional process. If you act outside the limits of the Constitution, you are no longer acting as the President, but as a private citizen abusing the powers with which you were trusted. A government that acts outside the Constitution ceases to be the legal government of this land.
The Constitution exists not only to tell the government what it may do, but more importantly what it may not do. You, as the President, are not allowed to declare wars without the US Congress. You, the President, are not allowed to seize people at random and send them off to be tortured. And most of all, you, the President, and not allowed to lie to the people and to the Congress.
Every President before you, including your father, swore that oath to preserve, protect, and defend that Constitution. Millions of Americans died in wars in the firm belief that the form of government describes on that parchment was worth such a sacrifice. To state that the Constitution is just a “dammed piece of paper” is a slap in the face of every American who ever donned the uniform of the military forces of this country.
Go over to Arlington National Cemetery. It’s not that far from where you live. Look at those tombstones. By your statement, you have written across and every one the words, “Died for a goddamned piece of paper.”
at this point, i think impeachment is too good for bush… rather like how i felt about nixon as well… if he has so little regard for his “contract with america” that he’s capable of calling it a “goddamned piece of paper,” – or so little education that he doesn’t know the difference – someone ought to just shoot him now and put all of us out of his misery.
the shows went extremely well, in spite of (or, perhaps because of) the chaos and disorganisation involved. we got all of the music cues down for Babes, which is a shame since we probably will not be performing it again. the moisture festival benefit lasted until midnight and had an unexpected, although enjoyable (from my point of view, anyway) “strategic costume failure” on the part of one of the arialistas that resulted in her doing about three-quarters of her act topless. i’m sure mike hale (the owner of the hale’s palladium, where the whole thing was going on, and a notorious “christian” who has said that if the moisture festival features a burlesque night like last year, that we can find another venue for our shows) was mortified, but the audience loved it, and i heard the arialistas talking backstage, afterwards, and from what i understand, it wasn’t even too bad from the performer’s point of view as well. more tonight, and tomorrow night, and, possibly next week, then the winter feast, which we still don’t know whether we’re actually playing or not, but i’ve got it on the schedule anyway.
there’s been some drama here… not about anything on topic for the community (), but because of the fact that i used a swastika as my avatar… 8/ i had some help from the community, and there was further discussion here, but the upshot is that the closet-nazi, swastika-hater – a contradiction in terms if i ever heard of one – still hasn’t emailed me to say why nazis are so despicable that they’re interpretation of the swastika should be paramount, and thus it shouldn’t be used any longer, but the “christian” cross, which is just as despicable is okay for everyday use.
Machines will perform euthanasia on terminally ill patients in Israel under legislation devised not to offend Jewish law, which forbids people taking human life.
A special timer will be fitted to a patient’s respirator which will sound an alarm 12 hours before turning it off.
Normally, carers would override the alarm and keep the respirator turned on but, if various stringent conditions are met, including the giving of consent by the patient or legal guardian, the alarm would not be overridden.
Similar timing devices, known as Sabbath clocks, are used in the homes of orthodox Jews so that light switches and electrical devices can be turned on during the Sabbath without offending religious strictures.
Parliamentarians reached a solution after discussions with a 58-member panel of medical, religious and philosophical experts.
“The point was that it is wrong, under Jewish law, for a person’s life to be taken by a person but, for a machine, it is acceptable,” a parliamentary spokesman said.
“A man would not be able to shorten human life but a machine can.”
The bill, which was approved at the third and final reading in the Knesset by 22 votes to three with one abstention, will become law next year.
Danny Naveh, the health minister, described the passing of the law as a historic moment, saying: “This is one of the most important laws passed by the Knesset. It represents major moral value for the terminally ill and their families.”
It is expected that elderly Israelis will begin to leave “living wills” in which they stipulate whether they would allow the new euthanasia procedure to apply to them if they were to end up in hospital, dependent on a respirator and suffering from a terminal disease.
The Fremont Players & The Fremont Philharmonic present BABES IN THE WOOD
A Farsical Musical Comedy For The Whole Family! Friday, December 9, 2005 7:00 pm
Hale’s Palladium, 4301 Leary Way NW, Seattle
$10 adults and $5 kids/seniors
also, there’s a Moisture Festival Benefit show at the Hale’s Palladium friday and saturday evening. they’re going to be comedie/varieté shows, with a different list of performers every night, and will feature the fremont philharmonic, the zebra kings, the dangerous flares and a variety of bawdy, unseemly fun. leave the kids at home.
Rat brain flies jet Seriously
By Robin Lettice
Published Tuesday 7th December 2004 16:01 GMT
Florida scientists have grown a brain in a petri dish and taught it to fly a fighter plane.
Scientists at the university of Florida taught the ‘brain’, which was grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a rat embryo, to pilot an F-22 jet simulator. It was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds.
Click Here
“When we first hooked them up, the plane ‘crashed’ all the time,” Dr Thomas DeMarse, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, said. “But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory.”
The brain-in-a-dish was DeMarse’ idea. To produce it, 25,000 rat neurones were suspended in a specialised liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish.
The cells at first looked like grains of sand under the microscope, but soon began to connect to form what scientists call a “live computation device” (a brain). Electrodes monitor and stimulate neural activity in this network, allowing researchers to study how the brain processes and transfers information.
The scientists hope that their research will lead to hybrid computers with organic components, allowing more flexible and varied means of solving problems.
One potential application is to install living computers in unmanned aircraft for missions too dangerous for humans. It is also hoped that further advances will help in the search for cures for conditions such as epilepsy, The Age reports.
“The algorithms that living computers use are also extremely fault-tolerant,” Dr DeMarse said. “A few neurons die off every day in humans without any noticeable drop in performance, and yet if the same were to happen in a traditional silicon-based computer the results would be catastrophic.”
The US National Science Foundation has awarded the team a $500,000 grant to produce a mathematical model of how the neurons compute.
Mirecki hospitalized after beating
By Ron Knox, Eric Weslander
Originally published 05:37 p.m., December 5, 2005
Updated 06:31 p.m., December 5, 2005
Douglas County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the reported beating of a Kansas University professor who gained recent notoriety for his Internet tirades against Christian fundamentalists.
Kansas University religious studies professor Paul Mirecki reported he was beaten by two men about 6:40 a.m. today on a roadside in rural Douglas County. In a series of interviews late this afternoon, Mirecki said the men who beat him were making references to the controversy that has propelled him into the headlines in recent weeks.
“I didn’t know them, but I’m sure they knew me,” he said.
Mirecki said he was driving to breakfast when he noticed the men tailgating him in a pickup truck.
“I just pulled over hoping they would pass, and then they pulled up real close behind,” he said. “They got out, and I made the mistake of getting out.”
He said the men beat him about the upper body with their fists, and he said he thinks they struck him with a metal object. He was treated and released at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
“I’m mostly shaken up, and I got some bruises and sore spots,” he said.
Douglas County Sheriff’s Officials are classifying the case as an aggravated battery. They wouldn’t say exactly where the incident happened, citing the ongoing investigation
The sheriff’s department is looking for the suspects, described as two white males between ages 30 and 40, one wearing a red visor and wool gloves, and both wearing jeans. They were last seen in a large pickup truck.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 843-TIPS or the sheriff’s office at 841-0007.
Mirecki recently wrote online that he planned to teach intelligent design as mythology in an upcoming course. He wrote it would be a “nice slap” in the “big fat face” of fundamentalists.
The remarks caused an uproar, Mirecki apologized, and KU announced last week the class would be canceled.
Bushes’ ‘holiday’ cards ring hollow for some Christian conservatives wage war to put religion back into Christmas
By Alan Cooperman
The Washington Post
Updated: 11:14 a.m. ET Dec. 7, 2005
What’s missing from the White House Christmas card? Christmas.
This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy “holiday season.”
Many people are thrilled to get a White House Christmas card, no matter what the greeting inside. But some conservative Christians are reacting as if Bush stuck coal in their stockings.
“This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Bush “claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn’t act like one,” said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. “I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it.”
Religious conservatives are miffed because they have been pressuring stores to advertise Christmas sales rather than “holiday specials” and urging schools to let students out for Christmas vacation rather than for “winter break.” They celebrated when House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) insisted that the sparkling spectacle on the Capitol lawn should be called the Capitol Christmas Tree, not a holiday spruce.
‘Sent to people of all faiths’
Then along comes a generic season’s greeting from the White House, paid for by the Republican National Committee. The cover art is also secular, if not humanist: It shows the presidential pets — two dogs and a cat — frolicking on a snowy White House lawn.
“Certainly President and Mrs. Bush, because of their faith, celebrate Christmas,” said Susan Whitson, Laura Bush’s press secretary. “Their cards in recent years have included best wishes for a holiday season, rather than Christmas wishes, because they are sent to people of all faiths.”
That is the same rationale offered by major retailers for generic holiday catalogues, and it is accepted by groups such as the National Council of Churches. “I think it’s more important to put Christ back into our war planning than into our Christmas cards,” said the council’s general secretary, the Rev. Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman.
But the White House’s explanation does not satisfy the groups — which have grown in number in recent years — that believe there is, in the words of the Heritage Foundation, a “war on Christmas” involving an “ever-stronger push toward a neutered ‘holiday’ season so that non-Christians won’t be even the slightest bit offended.”
One of the generals on the pro-Christmas side is Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether this is sinister — it’s the purging of Christ from Christmas — or whether it’s just political correctness run amok,” he said. “I think in the case of the White House, it’s just political correctness.”
Retail boycotts
Wildmon does not give retailers the same benefit of the doubt. This year, he has called for a consumer boycott of Target stores because the chain issued a holiday advertising circular that did not mention Christmas. Last year, he aimed a similar boycott at Macy’s Inc., which averted a repeat this December by proclaiming “Merry Christmas” in its advertising and in-store displays.
“It bothers me that the White House card leaves off any reference to Jesus, while we’ve got Ramadan celebrations in the White House,” Wildmon said. “What’s going on there?”
At the Catholic League, Donohue had just announced a boycott of the Lands’ End catalogue when he received his White House holiday card. True, he said, the Bushes included a verse from Psalm 28, but Psalms are in the Old Testament and do not mention Jesus’ birth.
“They’d better address this, because they’re no better than the retailers who have lost the will to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” he said.
Donohue said that Wal-Mart, facing a threatened boycott, added a Christmas page to its Web site and fired a customer relations employee who wrote a letter linking Christmas to “Siberian shamanism.” He was not mollified by a letter from Lands’ End saying it “adopted the ‘holiday’ terminology as a way to comply with one of the basic freedoms granted to all Americans: freedom of religion.”
“Ninety-six percent of Americans celebrate Christmas,” Donohue said. “Spare me the diversity lecture.”
Diversity has been a hallmark of White House greeting cards for some time, according to Mary Evans Seeley of Tampa, Fla., author of “Season’s Greetings From the White House.” The last presidential Christmas card that mentioned Christmas was in 1992. It was sent by George H.W. and Barbara Bush, parents of the current president.
Seeley said the first president to send out true Christmas cards, as opposed to signed photographs or handwritten letters, was Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Merry Christmas From the President and Mrs. Roosevelt,” said his first annual card, in 1933.
Politicization of a holiday
Like many modern touches, the generic New Year’s card was introduced to the White House by John and Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1962, they had Hallmark print 2,000 cards, of which 1,800 cards said “The President and Mrs. Kennedy Wish You a Blessed Christmas” and 200 said “With Best Wishes for a Happy New Year.”
Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson continued that tradition for a couple of years, but it required keeping track of Christian and non-Christian recipients. Beginning in 1966, they wished everyone a “Joyous Christmas,” and no president has attempted the two-card trick since.
Seeley dates the politicization of the White House Christmas card to Richard M. Nixon, who increased the number of recipients tenfold, to 40,000, in his first year. The numbers since have snowballed, hitting 125,000 under Jimmy Carter, topping 400,000 under Bill Clinton and rising to more than a million under the current Bushes, with each president’s political party paying the bill.
The wording, meanwhile, has often flip-flopped. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter put “Merry Christmas” in their 1977 card and then switched to “Holiday Season” for the next three years. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, similarly, began with a “Joyous Christmas” in 1981 and 1982 but doled out generic holiday wishes from 1983 to 1988. The elder President Bush stayed in the “Merry Christmas” spirit all four years, and the Clintons opted for inclusive greetings for all of their eight years.
The current Bush has straddled the divide, offering generic greetings along with an Old Testament verse. To some religious conservatives, that makes all the difference.
“There’s a verse from Scripture in it. I don’t mind that at all, as long as we don’t try to pretend we’re not a nation under God,” said the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
When the angry phone calls and e-mails started arriving at the office, I knew the holiday season was upon us. A typical message shouted that we at the American Civil Liberties Union affiliate in Indiana are “horrible” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves,” then concluded with an incongruous and agitated “Merry Christmas.”
We get this type of correspondence a lot, mostly in reaction to a well-organized attempt by extremist groups to demonize the ACLU, crush religious diversity and make a few bucks in the process. Sadly, this self-interested effort is being promoted in the guise of defending Christmas.
For example, the Alliance Defense Fund celebrates the season with an “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas” campaign, implying that the ACLU has challenged such holiday greetings. (As part of the effort, you can get a pamphlet and two Christmas pins for $29.)
The Web site, WorldNetDaily, touts a book claiming “a thorough and virulent anti-Christmas campaign is being waged today by liberal activists and ACLU fanatics.” The site’s magazine has suggested there will be ACLU efforts to remove “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency, fire military chaplains and expunge all references to God in America’s founding documents. (Learn more for just $19.95 . . . )
Of course, there is no “Merry Christmas” lawsuit, nor is there any ACLU litigation about U.S. currency, military chaplains, etc. But the facts are not important to these groups, because their real message is this: By protecting the freedom of Muslims, Jews and other non-Christians through preventing government entanglement with religion, the ACLU is somehow infringing on the rights of those with majority religious beliefs.
In truth, it is these Web-site Christians who are taking the Christ out of the season. Nowhere in the Sermon on the Mount did Jesus Christ ask that we celebrate his birth with narrow-mindedness and intolerance, especially for those who are already marginalized and persecuted. Instead, the New Testament — like the Torah and the Quran and countless other sacred texts — commands us to love our neighbor and to comfort the sick and the imprisoned.
That’s what the ACLU does. We live in a country filled with people who are sick and disabled, people who are imprisoned, and people who hunger and thirst for justice. Those people come to our Indiana offices for help at a rate of several hundred a week, usually because they have nowhere else to turn. The least of our brothers and sisters sure aren’t getting any help from the Alliance Defense Fund or WorldNet Daily. So, as often as we can, ACLU secures justice for those folks for whom Jesus worried the most.
As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in Southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.
There are many more examples, because the ACLU is committed to preserving the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom for all. We agree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s firm rulings that this freedom means that children who grow up in non-Christian homes should not be made to feel like outsiders in their own community’s courthouse, legislature or public schoolhouse.
To our “Merry Christmas” correspondents and all other Americans, we wish you happy holidays.
Fran Quigley is the executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, www.iclu.org
The US is seeking to reassure allies over its handling of terrorism suspects as Germany seeks answers over the treatment of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who claims he was was jailed by the CIA for five months when mistaken for another man.
The issue arose as US President George Bush said the United States did not secretly move terrorism suspects to foreign countries that torture to obtain information.
In Italy, prosecutors and judges have issued arrest warrants against 22 alleged CIA operatives, accusing them of kidnapping.
The process, known as “rendition”, has come under the spotlight after reports that the CIA was operating secret prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects.
“We do not render to countries that torture, that has been our policy and that policy will remain the same,” Bush told reporters.
In a rare concession to critics of US policy, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded today that Washington may make mistakes in its war against terrorism and promised to put them right if they happened.
But her efforts to present a united front with European allies hit a bump when US officials took issue with comments by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the sensitive case of a German national who says he was abducted by the CIA.
Merkel told a joint news conference with Rice in Berlin that the United States had acknowledged it made a mistake in the case of Khaled el-Masri, who says he was flown to Afghanistan by US agents and jailed for five months last year before being freed.
Masri is suing the CIA for wrongful imprisonment but was refused entry to the United States on Saturday.
“I’m pleased to say that we spoke about the individual case, which was accepted by the United States as a mistake…,” Merkel said in response to questions about the Masri case, which has caused a furore in Germany.
But senior US officials, travelling to Romania with Rice on the next leg of her European tour, said Rice had not admitted a US mistake over Masri.
The US government had informed Germany about his detention and release but did not say that was a mistake, one senior administration official told reporters.
The differences marred the first stage of a delicate European mission by Rice, under pressure to respond to allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency has run secret prisons in eastern Europe and covertly transferred terrorist suspects across the continent.
In a sign that she could expect tough questions from other European nations later in the week, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot told his lower house of parliament that the US response to the allegations had been unsatisfactory.
The answers Rice had given were “not satisfactory” and he expected a “lively discussion with Rice and foreign ministers of NATO member states on Thursday in Brussels”, the Dutch news agency ANP said.
Rice refused to publicly discuss individual cases but acknowledged in general that mistakes could happen.
“Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens, we will do everything we can to rectify it,” Rice said.
A US civil liberties group on filed a lawsuit on Masri’s behalf today against former CIA director George Tenet and other officials, alleging wrongful imprisonment.
The US official with Rice said Masri was released from an Afghan prison after Washington realised it “no longer had evidence or intelligence to justify his continued detention”.
Asked if the United States had ever had evidence to hold Masri, he declined to comment further.
Rice did not directly address allegations over reports the United States had run secret prisons to hold terrorism suspects in eastern Europe, possibly in Romania and Poland, which Washington has refused to confirm or deny.
But she defended US methods in the struggle against militants.
“If you don’t get to them before they commit their crimes, they will commit mass murder,” she said.
President Bush reiterated that the United States did not torture.
“I don’t talk about secret programs, covert programs, covert activities.
Part of a successful war on terror is for the United States of America to be able to conduct operations, all aimed to protect the American people covertly,” Bush said.
“We abide by the law of the United States, that we do not torture,” he said.
“We will try to do everything we can to protect us within the law.”
MIAMI (AP) – An agitated passenger who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack was shot and killed by a federal air marshal Wednesday after he bolted frantically from a jetliner that was about to take off, officials said. No bomb was found.
The man, identified as Rigoberto Alpizar, a 44-year-old U.S. citizen, was gunned down on a jetway just before the American Airlines plane was about to leave for Orlando, near his home in Maitland.
It was the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks that an air marshal had shot at anyone, Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Doyle said.
According to a witness, the man frantically ran down the aisle of the Boeing 757, flailing his arms, while his wife tried to explain that he was mentally ill and had not taken his medication.
The passenger indicated there was a bomb in his bag and was confronted by air marshals but ran off the aircraft, Doyle said. The marshals went after him and ordered him to get down on the ground, but he did not comply and was shot when he apparently reached into the bag, Doyle said.
The plane, Flight 924, had arrived in Miami from Medellin, Colombia, just after noon, and the shooting occurred shortly after 2 p.m. as the plane was about to take off for Orlando with the man and 119 other passengers and crew, American spokesman Tim Wagner said. Alpizar had arrived in Miami earlier in the day from Ecuador, authorities said.
After the shooting, investigators spread passengers’ bags on the tarmac and let dogs sniff them for explosives, and bomb squad members blew up at least two bags.
No bomb was found, said James E. Bauer, agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshals field office in Miami. He said there was no reason to believe there was any connection to terrorists.
The concourse where the shooting took place was shut down for a half-hour, but the rest of the airport continued operating, officials said.
Mary Gardner, a passenger aboard the Orlando-bound flight, told WTVJ-TV in Miami that the man ran down the aisle from the rear of the plane. “He was frantic, his arms flailing in the air,” she said. She said a woman followed, shouting, “My husband! My husband!”
Gardner said she heard the woman say her husband was bipolar – a mental illness also known as manic-depression – and had not had his medication.
Gardner said four to five shots were fired. She could not see the shooting.
After the shooting, police boarded the plane and told the passengers to put their hands on their heads, Gardner said.
“It was quite scary,” she told the TV station via a cell phone. “They wouldn’t let you move. They wouldn’t let you get anything out of your bag.”
There were only 33 air marshals at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration hired thousands more afterward, but the exact number is classified.
this is all that’s left of the site that used to be at crosswalkbuttonhacks dot com (it’s not there any more, which is why there’s no link), which was apparently shut down by the FBI, because – you guessed it – the possiblity that terrorists could use the hacks to cross the street whenever they like…
woo.
… although it may be a hoax… someone has mentioned, i’m inclined to think rightly, that “3658 item” list looks a little fishy, combined with the hoaxer’s old standby “the FBI shut down my website,” and not only the fact that the mayor of kansas city is kay barnes, not roger gorman, but there’s no mention of the interview with the kansas city mayor that isn’t related to the spreading meme…
also, today is Krampusnacht – i hope you haven’t been naughty!
i’ve always wondered about the similarity between santa and satan…
Big Five Word Test Results
Extroversion (30%) low which suggests you are very reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive. Accommodation (44%) moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly selfish, uncooperative, and difficult at the expense of the well being of others. Orderliness (15%) very low which suggests you are overly flexible, random, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense too often of structure, reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment. Emotional Stability (58%) moderately high which suggests you are relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic. Inquisitiveness (78%) high which suggests you are very intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.
now that they’ve successfully stolen the election with no obvious uprising from the rabble, they’ve decided that they’re going to go one better, and start making anti-american statements to the public media. honestly, if someone had been making left-wing statements as egregious as these right-wing statements are, they would very definitely not be in the positions that these RIGHT WING TERRORISTS are currently.
somebody better do something, soon, otherwise we won’t have a country, or a world, to go home to much longer.
Ann Coulter
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”
“Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
“Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of ‘kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to the name Mohammed'”
Bailey Smith
“With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”
Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America)
“Yes, religion and politics do mix. America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.”
Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA)
“Don’t use the word ‘gay’ unless it’s an acronym for ‘Got Aids Yet'”
David Barton (Wallbuilders)
“There should be absolutely no ‘Separation of Church and State’ in America.”
David Trosch
“Sodomy is a graver sin than murder. – Unless there is life there can be no murder.”
Fob James (Governor of Alabama)
“Behind this judicial wall of separation there is a tyranny of lies that will fall… I say to you, my friends, let it fall!”
“A good butt-whipping and then a prayer is a wonderful remedy.”
Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church)
“If you got to castrate your miserable self with a piece of rusty barb wire, do it.”
“Hear the word of the LORD, America, fag-enablers are worse than the fags themselves, and will be punished in the everlasting lake of fire!”
“You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!”
“American Veterans are to blame for the fag takeover of this nation. They have the power in their political lobby to influence the zeitgeist, get the fags out of the military, and back in the closet where they belong!”
“Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death.”
Gary Bauer (American Values)
“We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.”
Gary North (Institute for Christian Economics)
“The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship.”
“This is God’s world, not Satan’s. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians.”
Gary Potter (Catholics for Christian Political Action)
“When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.”
George Bush Sr. (President of the United States)
“I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”
George W. Bush (President of the United States)
“I don’t think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision.”*
“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”
“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
“This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”
*Comment about Wiccans in the military
Henry Morris (Institute for Creation Research)
“When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.”
J. B. Stoner (White Supremacist)
“We had lost the fight for the preservation of the white race until God himself intervened in earthly affairs with AIDS to rescue and preserve the white race that he had created…. I praise God all the time for AIDS.”
“AIDS is a racial disease of Jews and Niggers, and fortunately it is wiping out the queers. I guess God hates queers for several reasons. There is one big reason to be against queers and that is because every time some white boy is seduced by a queer into becoming a queer, means his white bloodline has run out.”
James Dobson (Focus on the Family)
“Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world.”
“State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse.”
“Today’s children… They’re damned. They’re gone.”
James Kennedy (Center for Reclaiming America)
“The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ.”
James Watt (Secretary of the Interior)
“We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.”*
*Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Admin. Responsible for National Policy regarding the Environment
Jay Grimstead (Coalition on Revival)
“We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way.”
Jerry Falwell
“We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism…we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today… our battle is with Satan himself.”
“AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah’s chariotters.”
“The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.”
“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
Jesse Helms (Sen. R-NC)
“The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.”
“All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.”
“Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”
“Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.”
Jimmy Swaggart (Jimmy Swaggart Ministries)
“The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the Media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?”
“Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.”
“Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it…Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.”
John Ashcroft (Attorney General)
“Civilized people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.”
John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute)
“The [Supreme] Court, by seeking to equate Christianity with other religions, merely assaults the one faith. The Court in essence is assailing the true God by democratizing the Christian religion.”
Joseph McCarthy (Sen. R-WI)
“Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity.”
Joseph Morecraft (Chalcedon Presbyterian Church)
“Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody’s pseudo-right to worship an idol.”
Joseph Scheidler (Pro-Life Action League)
“I would like to outlaw contraception…contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure.”*
*I get the distinct impression that Mr. Scheidler’s poor wife isn’t guilty of feeling any pleasure…
Kay O’Connor (Kansas Senate Republican)
“I’m an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn’t have to vote.”
Keith A. Fournier (Catholic Way)
“We need a legal strategy which protects the rights of those of us who hold Christian convictions which will afford us the opportunity to contend once again for the mind of this culture.”
Laura Schlessinger
“I want to coin a phrase here, and I don’t mind help. What would be the communication version of “ethnic cleansing?” Because that’s what in particular the homosexual activists try to do.”
Lester Roloff (Texas Homes for Wayward Youth)
“Better a pink bottom than a black soul.”*
*Roloff opened a chain of homes for “wayward” youth in the state of Texas; he was later jailed in 1973 and again in 1975 for child abuse due to the punitive punishment techniques used in his homes. He would have been finished had he not of been specifically given permision to re-open his homes by, you guested it, Governor George W Bush.
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin
“George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”
Pat Buchanan (Presidential Candidate)
“Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.”
“There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The “negroes” of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.”
“Rail as they will about ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.”
Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition)
“The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers.”
“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different…More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”
“When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.”
“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”
“I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.”
“[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers.”
“[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns.”
Patrick Mahoney (Christian Defense Coalition)
“It is deeply troubling to have an appointed, unelected commission remove an elected official from office [Roy Moore]. The Court of Judiciary has overturned an election and crushed the democratic process through their actions.”*
*Interesting perspective coming from someone who’s President was appointed by a group of “unelected judges”, thus overturning a democratic election.
Paul Cameron
“I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it’s really a Godsend.”
“Homosexuality is a crime against humanity.”
“Causes of homosexuality include: ‘sex with animals'”*
“Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.”
*Paul Cameron was discharged from the American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association due to his unethical practices and biased research regarding Homosexuals. His “research” has since been discredited by the scientific community; however his work is still referenced by many fundamentalist organizations as credible.
Randall Terry (Operation Rescue)
“I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.”
“Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God’s law, on the ten Commandments. No apologies.”
“I don’t think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like – and if you have babies, you have babies.”
“When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed.”*
“There is going to be war, [and Christians may be called to] take up the sword to overthrow the tyrannical regime that oppresses them.”
*It is interesting to note that Randell Terry’s son is Gay
Jerry Vines (Southern Baptist Convention)
“They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity. Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a nine-year-old girl.”
Rick Santorum* (Sen. R-PA)
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [Gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything!”
*Now known as Rick “Santorum” Santorum
Robert Simonds (Citizens for Excellence in Education)
“As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families.”
“Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected…Government and true Christianity are inseparable.”
“We’ll take away their power and their money. Money comes from students. We’ll break their backs by taking 24 million kids out of the public schools.”
Robert T. Lee (Society for the Practical Establishment of the Ten Commandments)
“Raising your children under Americanism or any other principles other than true Christianity is child abuse.”
“You do not have the right to be wrong, regardless of what any man-made or demonic charter says.”
“Democracy originated in the mind of a rational being who has the deepest hatred for God.”
“Do you realize that the only thing that gives democracy existence is sin? The absence of democracy is perfect obedience to god.”
“The best way to insure the earth is never over populated is for sensible and righteous governments to clear all forms of atheism and heresy.”
Ronald Reagan (President of the United States)
“For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.”
Roy Moore (Former Alabama Judge)
“If they want to get the Commandments, they’re going to have to get me first.”*
“Worship With Your Vote”
*Interesting observation of the Radical Right, Judge Roy Moore commits peaceful civil disobedience by refusing to remove the Ten Commandments Monument from the Court. He is considered a Hero. Mayor Gavin Newsom commits peaceful civil disobedience by issuing same-sex marriage licenses. He is considered an Anarchist.
Rush Limbaugh
“Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”
“If you commit a crime, you’re guilty.”*
“There is only one way to get rid of nuclear weapons… use them”
*Seems logical enough, doesn’t it Rush?
Star Parker (Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education)
“Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now.”
Tony Evans (Promise Keepers)
“The demise of our community and culture is the fault of sissified men who have been overly influenced by women.”
William Rehnquist (Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court)
“The ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
Michael Savage (Savage Nation)
“Oh, you’re one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it.”*
*Statement made on live national television
I had a chance to talk to my hero, Frank Rich, a few months ago about election fraud and he claimed he didn’t know much about it. Perhaps he has his plate full unraveling the administration’s lies about Iraq, but with the midterm elections coming up someone has to take this issue on. I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some young computer hackers on bragging about how easy, embarrassingly easy, it is to switch votes on the Diebold machines. Bill Clinton once mentioned that India has flawless electronic voting while ours is mired in unaccountability. I hope Frank and other journalists and bloggers of his caliber read this article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman about the GAO report on the 2004 election. Paul Krugman and the NYTimes editorial board have been good on this issue in the past, but it has been a while since anyone has raised the subject.
The Government Accountability Office is the only government office we have left that is ethical, non-partisan and incorruptible. They investigate and tell it like it is. Thank God for them. This report is very serious and must get more attention. It has taken years for the mainstream press and Congress to finally understand what we in the blogisphere have known since 2000. This administration will distort and cheat about anything and everything to get its way. If this report got the attention it deserves and broke through the static of our 500-channel universe, it could be the coup de grace of the Bush White House.
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election finding
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
October 26, 2005
As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.
The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.
The government’s lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as “conspiracy theories” adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.
Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.
According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received “more than 57,000 complaints” following Bush’s alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.
The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”
The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that “public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines.” The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O’Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.
Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O’Dell’s statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.
Among other things, the GAO confirms that:
1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.
2. “It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
3. “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.
In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.
The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives — or less — to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.
The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:
The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.
A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry’s name saw Bush’s name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry’s margins in both counties were suspiciously low.
A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.
In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called “electronic transfer glitch” gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the “loaves and fishes” vote count.
In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county’s central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote – 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
Prior to one of Blackwell’s illegitimate “show recounts,” technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation—only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that “by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon – the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better.”
But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that’s exactly what happened.
GAO Report
Revised 10/27/05
WHAT TO DO NOW… it’s obvious that complaining through "appropriate" channels is going to have no effect whatsoever, so why not make use of the CIA’s own training manual for overthrowing a government. i plan to do just that.
our sacred cause needs to have more men and women join its ranks in order to perform these sabotage tasks. while the original document was intended to facilitate subversion of the nicaraguan government, the techniques may be applied to any other state or ‘military-industrial complex’ with which the individual is aggrieved. not only are some of these activities illegal, but encouraging people to engage in them is also illegal… big FUCKING deal!
okay, yesterday i got email from this guy, who had a question about my fëanorian font. from about the third grade until almost all the way through high school i would have loved to have his job, and here he is asking me a question, out of the blue. maybe i’m doing something right after all… i bet he’d like anguish languish…
finally, somebody saying something i can agree with about larry the cable guy. generally, when i’m around, the less said the better, but in this case i’m willing to make an exception.
Write 10 things that make you happy, in no particular order. Tag 5 people to do the same.
1. being strange enough that people wonder about me
2. moe
3. explosions… big ones
4. siva, parvati, ganesha, kartikeya, kali
5. playing with the fremont philharmonic
6. making things out of stone, wood and metal
7. high quality incense, murtis, rudraksha, buttons, etc., etc., etc.
8. moe again
9. a variety of weird music all the time
10. plenty of marijuana
So what would our founding fathers think? Dubya claims God put him in office, but what did statesmen of early America have to say?
Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826) 3rd American president, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat. Deist, avid separationist.
“Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”
“Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.”
“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus told us indeed that ‘God is a spirit,’ but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers generally, if not universally, held it to be matter: light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter.” [letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820]
“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.” [Notes on Virginia]
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes” [Letter to von Humboldt, 1813].
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” [Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823]
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own” [Letter to H. Spafford, 1814].
“But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”[in a letter to S. Kercheval, 1810]
“…an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, ‘Jesus Christ…the holy author of our religion,’ which was rejected ‘By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.'” [ From Jefferson’s biography]
James Madison, (1751-1836) American president and political theorist. Popularly known as the “Father of the Constitution.” More than any other framer he is responsible for the content and form of the First Amendment.
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” [April 1, 1774]
“…the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State” [Letter to Robert Walsh, Mar. 2, 1819]
“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together” [Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822].
John Adams 1735-1826, 2nd President of the United States
“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” [ in a letter to Thomas Jefferson]
“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”
“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.”
“But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”
“Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1500 years.”
“The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A federal judge ruled on Friday that police had a constitutional right to randomly search passengers’ bags on the New York City subway to deter terrorist attacks.
U.S. District Judge Richard Berman ruled the searches were an effective and appropriate means to fight terrorism, and constituted only a “minimal intrusion” of privacy.
“The risk to public safety of a terrorist bombing of New York City’s subway system is substantial and real,” Berman wrote in his opinion.
“The need for implementing counter-terrorism measures is indisputable, pressing, ongoing and evolving.”
Random bag searches began on July 22 after a second set of bomb attacks on London’s transit system.
In a statement, Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the ruling, calling bag searches a “reasonable precaution” that police would continue to take.
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), which had sued to stop the searches, plans to appeal, Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement. She said the “unprecedented” bag search program violated a basic freedom.
More than 4 million people a day ride the 101-year-old subway system, the nation’s largest.
The NYCLU had sued the city and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in early August, calling the policy of searching thousands of passengers a day without any suspicion of wrongdoing unconstitutional.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits searches without probable cause.
Police had argued random searches were a crucial deterrent to a possible attack.
The frequency of searches increased in October after Bloomberg said the FBI alerted him to a specific threat to the subway system. Searches were later reduced after the federal warning passed without incident.
You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
bizarre… firefox just crashed again. two times in a month, and i’m starting to wonder if something major might be wrong…
and because of the fact that firefox crashed, i can only remember a few of the multitude of things that i was going to post about tomorrow. brain injury plus faulty software equals… 8/
i learned that elaeocarpus granitrus is latin for rudraksha… now all i’ve got to do is find a picture of the actual tree, and not just a picture of the seeds…
Evangelical Christian pastor Jerry Falwell has a message for Americans when it comes to celebrating Christmas this year: You’re either with us, or you’re against us.
Falwell has put the power of his 24,000-member congregation behind the “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,” an effort led by the conservative legal organization Liberty Counsel. The group promises to file suit against anyone who spreads what it sees as misinformation about how Christmas can be celebrated in schools and public spaces.
The 8,000 members of the Christian Educators Association International will be the campaign’s “eyes and ears” in the nation’s public schools. They’ll be reporting to 750 Liberty Counsel lawyers who are ready to pounce if, for example, a teacher is muzzled from leading the third-graders in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
An additional 800 attorneys from another conservative legal group, the Alliance Defense Fund, are standing by as part of a similar effort, the Christmas Project. Its slogan: “Merry Christmas. It’s OK to say it.”
Fanning the Yule log of discontent against what the Liberty Counsel calls “grinches” like the American Civil Liberties Union are evangelical-led organizations including the 150,000-member American Family Association. It has called for a boycott of Target stores next weekend. The chain’s crime, according to the group, is a ban on the use of “Merry Christmas” in stores, an accusation the chain denies.
On his show last week, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly offered a list of other retailers that he says refuse to use “Merry Christmas” in their store advertising.
In signing on to “Friend or Foe” this month, Falwell urged the 500,000 recipients of his weekly “Falwell Confidential” e-mail to “draw a line in the sand and resist bullying tactics of the ACLU and others who intimidate school and government officials by spreading misinformation about Christmas.”
Standing on the other side of that sand line are religious, liberal and secular organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, whose national director, Abe Foxman, recently bemoaned the religious right’s efforts to “Christianize” America.
“This amped-up effort shows how these groups want to push into the classrooms more,” said Tami Holzman, assistant director of the Anti-Defamation League’s San Francisco office.
“There is no war against Christmas,” said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “There is no jihad against Christians. There is nothing going on around Christmas except these groups’ incessant fundraising.”
How the season of ho-ho-ho evolved into “Friend or Foe” shows how the nation’s culture wars have pushed into the season of giving. Each side wants its beliefs accurately represented around the nation’s winter hearth — its public schools and government spaces.
And if not, it will sue.
“It’s a sad day in America when you have to retain an attorney to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” said Mike Johnson, an Alliance Defense Fund attorney in Louisiana who will push the Christmas cause.
Organizers of the Christmas campaigns say many Christians feel aggrieved by the secularization of the season. They say teachers feel too intimidated to allow students to sing “Silent Night” in school, and they believe cities have every right to place a nativity scene in a public park.
Both activities are constitutionally protected, the Christian groups say, provided that the kids also sing secular songs and the cities put up nonreligious holiday displays as well.
Friends, according to “Friend or Foe” campaign sponsor Liberty Counsel, “do not discriminate against Christmas.” Foes are going to get a letter from one of the pro bono lawyers reminding them that “Christmas is constitutional,” not to mention a federal holiday.
“We’ll try to educate,” said Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel. “But if we can’t, we’ll litigate.”
Or boycott. The American Family Association called Thursday for a Thanksgiving weekend shunning of Target stores, saying the chain was refusing to allow the phrase “Merry Christmas” on in-store promotions and advertising.
“I don’t know where they’re coming from,” Target spokeswoman Carolyn Brookter replied. “We have no such policy on Christmas. You can see it in our stores.”
At one local Target, in Colma, most of the in-store advertising offers a generic “Gatherround.” One of the few advertising mentions of the C-word is above a Christmas card rack that says, “Celebrate Christmas.”
That’s not good enough for American Family Association President Tim Wildmon, who wants to see “Merry Christmas” signs displayed prominently “if they expect Christians to come in and buy products during this so-called season.”
And he isn’t worried if they offend people who aren’t Christian.
“They can walk right by the sign,” Wildmon said. “It’s a federal holiday. If someone is upset by that, well, they should know that they are living in a predominantly Christian nation.”
Where’s Wildmon shopping next weekend? “Wal-Mart,” he said.
That chain was briefly the target of a boycott called by the Catholic Rights League after an employee described Christmas in an unflattering way in a company e-mail. The employee has since left and the boycott is off, though the Catholic Rights League still criticizes Wal-Mart for tellings its employees to say, “Happy holidays.”
Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said the “Happy holidays” greeting is “more inclusive. With 130 million customers walking through the door and 1.3 million employees, it’s safe to say there are a lot of different faiths out there.”
The ACLU and its supporters believe they’re being drawn into a make-believe war. They say they’ve fielded fewer holiday-season conflicts in recent years and that everybody seems to know the rules, except those trying to make a political point.
“People are free to worship in their homes and their houses of worship and if they rent out a hall,” said the ACLU’s Jeremy Gunn, national director of the group’s Freedom of Religion and Belief program. “You have to ask, why do they want to worship in the public schools?
“That they’re doing this in the name of religion is very, very sad,” Gunn said. “It would be one thing if they’re talking about consumerism of the season or something, but they’re not.”
Other groups are actively countering the Christmas campaigns.
The Anti-Defamation League said it would send letters to school administrators nationwide on how to negotiate the “December dilemma,” emphasizing that “schools must be careful not to cross the line between teaching about religious holidays (which is permitted) and celebrating religious holidays (which is not).”
The issue is a dilemma for the Anti-Defamation League, too. It commissioned a poll last month of 800 adults, 57 percent of whom said Christianity was under attack. Among evangelicals, the figure was 76 percent.
“There’s a lot of fear out there,” said Finn Laursen, a retired school administrator who is now executive director of the Christian Educators Association International.
Standing in the middle of the fray are school administrators like Rob Kessler, superintendent of the 24,000-student San Ramon Valley Unified School District.
Kessler said it’s OK, for example, for a teacher to bring a menorah into class. “But what’s not OK is if a teacher would begin lighting candles and saying prayers,” he said. “Then it becomes a religious ceremony. But, honestly, we haven’t seen many instances of this in the last few years.”
The war has even spread to Bob Norris, head of the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of New York. He lent his organization’s name to the Alliance Defense Fund’s campaign because, he said, “The people who are fighting to save this country are in favor of Christmas.”
Sam Minturn, who heads the California Christmas Tree Association, said his group hadn’t taken a position on the issue. In fact, he doesn’t mind the term “holiday tree” — a phrase that angers some “Friend or Foe” campaigners.
“I don’t care what people call them, as long as they buy them,” said Minturn, who lives in Merced County. “Go ahead and call them a weed.”
the rest of it will have to wait until those particular ideas re-surface in what passes for my brain these days… 8/
i’d just like to say that as a news source, there’s nothing that even comes close to The Register. yeah, i know that it’s a geek thing, and a british geek thing at that, but there are a lot of other things they offer that don’t have anything to do with technology and are still a lot more on top of what’s actually going on in the world than anything amerikkka has to offer… and their attitude is priceless.
VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.
Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.
He said: “A neighbour came over shouting, ‘Don’t move that rock. You’ll kill the fairies’.” The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.
“Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn’t go down very well,” Mr Salter said.
In fact, even as his firm attempted to work around the rock, they received complaints that the fairies would be “upset”. Mr Salter still believed he was dealing with a vocal minority, but the gears of Perthshire’s planning process were about to be clogged by something that looked suspiciously like fairy dust.
“I went to a meeting of the community council and the concerns cropped up there,” he said. The council was considering lodging a complaint with the planning authority, likely to be the kiss of death for a housing development in a national park. Jeannie Fox, council chairman, said: “I do believe in fairies but I can’t be sure that they live under that rock. I had been told that the rock had historic importance, that kings were crowned upon it.” Her main objection to moving the rock was based on the fact that it had stood on the hillside for so long: a sort of MacFeng Shui that many in the village subscribe to.
“There are a lot of superstitions going about up here and people do believe that things like standing stones and large rocks should never be moved,” she said.
Half a mile into Loch Earn is Neish Island. From there the Neish clan set forth to plunder the surrounding country, retreating each time to their island. Early in the 17th century, the MacNabs retaliated from the next valley, carrying a boat over the mountains, storming the island and slaughtering most of the Neishes.
This summer Betty Neish McInnes, the last of that line in St Fillans, went to her grave — but not before she had imparted the ancient Pict significance of the rock to many of her neighbours.
“A lot of people think the rock had some Pictish meaning,” Mrs Fox said. “It would be extremely unlucky to move it.”
Mr Salter did not just want to move the rock. He wanted to dig it up, cart it to the roadside and brand it with the name of his new neighbourhood.
The Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on fairies but a spokesman said: “Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission.” Mr Salter said: “We had to redesign the entire thing from scratch.”
The new estate will now centre on a small park, in the middle of which stands a curious rock. Work begins next month, if the fairies allow.
i moved up to a 2-gauge and very quickly discovered that i could probably move up to a 0-gauge within a couple of days, as my 4-gauge hole is stretchy enough that 2-gauge makes practically no difference. i’m probably going to get a 0-gauge plug pretty soon, but not this week.
i got 20 rudraksha malas in the mail today, along with some other items that are going, as “christmas” gifts, to various people, some of whom might actually be reading this, so i won’t say anything more than that.
here is a link to a story about someone whose radical political and queer bumper stickers raised the ire of "christian" vandals to the point where they were destructive enough that the radical political queer’s insurance rates have gone up for the second time this year. the whole idea of "christian" vandalism is enough of an oxymoron that i’m having some difficulty wrapping my admittedly damaged brain around the concept, but that’s beside the point. the police were right up front about the fact that they probably aren’t going to figure out who did this. if they were "christian" bumper stickers which were vandalised by radical, political, queer vandals, i’m positive that the police would be a lot more willing to figure it out. after all, "christians" are fairly difficult to discern, because they are so common, but queer, radical, political vandals are uncommon enough that they stick out and can be picked out of a crowd fairly easily… 8/
reminder that you can ask przxqgl anything… anything at all. i’ll probably even answer…
By SALAH NASRAWI
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; 12:06 PM
CAIRO, Egypt — Iraqi leaders at a reconciliation conference reached out to the Sunni Arab community by calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces and saying the country’s opposition had a “legitimate right” of resistance.
A day after the communique was finalized by Iraqi Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders, Washington reiterated Tuesday that the United States would stay only as long as it takes to stabilize Iraq.
The communique condemned terrorism but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if they don’t target innocent civilians or institutions that provide for the welfare of Iraqis.
The leaders agreed on “calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces … control the borders and the security situation” and end terror attacks.
The preparatory reconciliation conference, held under the auspices of the Arab League, was attended by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers as well as leading Sunni politicians.
Sunni leaders have been pressing the Shiite-majority government to agree to a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. The statement recognized that goal, but did not lay down a specific time _ reflecting instead the government’s stance that Iraqi security forces must be built up first.
On Monday, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr suggested U.S.-led forces should be able to leave Iraq by the end of next year, saying the one-year extension of the mandate for the multinational force in Iraq by the U.N. Security Council this month could be the last.
“By the middle of next year we will be 75 percent done in building our forces and by the end of next year it will be fully ready,” he told the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.
On Tuesday, the State Department “the United States supports the ongoing transitional political process in Iraq, and encourages participation by all Iraqis in the political process.”
“President Bush has made our position very clear,” department spokeswoman Julie Reside said. “The coalition remains committed to helping the Iraqi people achieve stability and security as they rebuild their country. We will stay as long as it takes to achieve those goals and no longer.”
Debate in Washington over when to bring troops home turned bitter last week after decorated Vietnam War vet Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and estimated a pullout could be complete within six months. Republicans rejected Murtha’s position.
In Egypt, the final communique’s attempt to define terrorism omitted any reference to attacks against U.S. or Iraqi forces. Delegates from across the political and religious spectrum said the omission was intentional. They spoke anonymously, saying they feared retribution.
“Though resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships,” the document said.
The final communique also stressed participants’ commitment to Iraq’s unity and called for the release of all “innocent detainees” who have not been convicted. It asked that allegations of torture against prisoners be investigated and those responsible be held accountable.
The statement also demanded “an immediate end to arbitrary raids and arrests without a documented judicial order.”
The communique included no means for implementing its provisions, leaving it unclear what it will mean in reality other than to stand as a symbol of a first step toward bringing the feuding parties together in an agreement in principle.
“We are committed to this statement as far as it is in the best interests of the Iraqi people,” said Harith al-Dhari, leader of the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line Sunni group. He said he had reservations about the document as a whole, and delegates said he had again expressed strong opposition to the concept of federalism enshrined in Iraq’s new constitution.
The gathering was part of a U.S.-backed league attempt to bring the communities closer together and assure Sunni Arab participation in a political process now dominated by Iraq’s Shiite majority and large Kurdish minority.
The conference also decided on broad conditions for selecting delegates to a wider reconciliation gathering in the last week of February or the first week of March in Iraq. It essentially opens the way for all those who are willing to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis.
Shiites had been strongly opposed to participation in the conference by Sunni Arab officials from the regime of Saddam Hussein or from pro-insurgency groups. That objection seemed to have been glossed over in the communique.
The Cairo meeting was marred by differences between participants at times, and at one point Shiite and Kurdish delegates stormed out of a closed session when one of the speakers said they had sold out to the Americans.
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A teenage boy has been meditating in a Nepalese jungle for six months, and thousands have flocked to see him, with some believing he is the reincarnation of Buddha, police and media said Wednesday.
Ram Bahadur Banjan, 15, sits cross-legged and motionless with eyes closed among the roots of a tree in the jungle of Bara, about 100 miles south of the capital, Katmandu.
He’s supposedly been that way since May 17 – but his followers have been keeping him from public view at night.
A reporter for the Kantipur newspaper, Sujit Mahat, said he spent two days at the site, and that about 10,000 people are believed to visit daily.
Soldiers have been posted in the area for crowd control, officials said.
A makeshift parking lot and cluster of food stalls have sprung up near Banjan’s retreat, an area not previously frequented by visitors.
Many visitors believe Banjan is a reincarnation of Gautama Siddhartha, who was born not far away in southwestern Nepal around 500 B.C. and later became revered as the Buddha, which means Enlightened One.
Others aren’t so sure.
Police inspector Chitra Bahadur Gurung said officers have interviewed the boy’s associates about their claim that Banjan has gone six months without food or drink.
Officers have not directly questioned the boy, who appears deep in meditation and doesn’t speak.
“We have a team … investigating the claim on how anyone can survive for so long without food and water,” Gurung said.
Local officials have also asked the Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology in Katmandu to send scientists to examine Banjan.
Mahat said visitors can catch a glimpse of Banjan from a roped-off area about 80 feet away from him between dawn and dusk.
Followers then place a screen in front of him, blocking the view and making it impossible to know what he is doing at night, Mahat said.
“We could not say what happens after dark,” Mahat said. “People only saw what went on in the day, and many believed he was some kind of god.”
Buddhism teaches that right thinking and self-control can enable people to achieve nirvana – a divine state of peace and release from desire. Buddhism has about 325 million followers, mostly in Asia.
OTTAWA, CANADA (PRWEB) November 24, 2005 — A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics — relations with “ETs.”
By “ETs,” Mr. Hellyer and these organizations mean ethical, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that may now be visiting Earth.
On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: “UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.”
Mr. Hellyer went on to say, “I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”
Hellyer revealed, “The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.”
Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”
Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, “The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.”
Three Non-governmental organizations took Hellyer’s words to heart, and approached Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to hold public hearings on a possible ET presence, and what Canada should do. The Canadian Senate, which is an appointed body, has held objective, well-regarded hearings and issued reports on controversial issues such as same-sex marriage and medical marijuana,
On October 20, 2005, the Institute for Cooperation in Space requested Canadian Senator Colin Kenny, Senator, Chair of The Senate Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, “schedule public hearings on the Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, so that witnesses such as the Hon. Paul Hellyer, and Canadian-connected high level military-intelligence, NORAD-connected, scientific, and governmental witnesses facilitated by the Disclosure Project and by the Toronto Exopolitics Symposium can present compelling evidence, testimony, and Public Policy recommendations.”
The Non-governmental organizations seeking Parliament hearings include Canada-based Toronto Exopolitics Symposium, which organized the University of Toronto Symposium at which Mr. Hellyer spoke.
The Disclosure Project, a U.S.-based organization that has assembled high level military-intelligence witnesses of a possible ET presence, is also one of the organizations seeking Canadian Parliament hearings.
Vancouver-based Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS), whose International Director headed a proposed 1977 Extraterrestrial Communication Study for the White House of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who himself has publicly reported a 1969 Close Encounter of the First Kind with a UFO, filed the original request for Canadian Parliament hearings.
The Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, presented by the organizations to a Senate Committee panel hearing in Winnipeg, Canada, on March 10, 2005, proposes that the Government of Canada undertake a Decade of Contact.
The proposed Decade of Contact is “a 10-year process of formal, funded public education, scientific research, educational curricula development and implementation, strategic planning, community activity, and public outreach concerning our terrestrial society’s full cultural, political, social, legal, and governmental communication and public interest diplomacy with advanced, ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting Earth.”
Canada has a long history of opposing the basing of weapons in Outer Space. On September 22, 2004 Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin declared to the U.N. General Assembly, “Space is our final frontier. It has always captured our imagination. What a tragedy it would be if space became one big weapons arsenal and the scene of a new arms race.
Martin stated, “In 1967, the United Nations agreed that weapons of mass destruction must not be based in space. The time has come to extend this ban to all weapons…”
In May, 2003, speaking before the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada Lloyd Axworthy, stated “Washington’s offer to Canada is not an invitation to join America under a protective shield, but it presents a global security doctrine that violates Canadian values on many levels.”
Axworthy concluded, “There should be an uncompromising commitment to preventing the placement of weapons in space.”
On February 24, 2005, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin made official Canada’s decision not to take part in the U.S government’s Ballistic Missile Defence program.
Paul Hellyer, who now seeks Canadian Parliament hearings on relations with ETs, on May 15, 2003, stated in Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper, “Canada should accept the long-standing invitation of U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio to launch a conference to seek approval of an international treaty to ban weapons in space. That would be a positive Canadian contribution toward a more peaceful world.”
In early November 2005, the Canadian Senate wrote ICIS, indicating the Senate Committee could not hold hearings on ETs in 2005, because of their already crowded schedule.
“That does not deter us,” one spokesperson for the Non-governmental organizations said, “We are going ahead with our request to Prime Minister Paul Martin and the official opposition leaders in the House of Commons now, and we will re-apply with the Senate of Canada in early 2006.
“Time is on the side of open disclosure that there are ethical Extraterrestrial civilizations visiting Earth,” The spokesperson stated. “Our Canadian government needs to openly address these important issues of the possible deployment of weapons in outer war plans against ethical ET societies.”
the following was posted at Weekly World News dot com, so take it with a few grains of salt and a tongue in your cheek…
Controversial preacher says teenagers will stop having illicit sex no matter how strong the temptation if parents will make sure they never leave home without one of his trademarked “What Would Jesus Do?” condoms stashed away in their purse or wallet.
“WWJD condoms are a divinely inspired idea and they work like a charm,” says the Rev. Dr. Paul Morehead, whose short-wave radio broadcast from Montgomery, Ala., reaches an estimated 16 million listeners worldwide.
“Don’t tell me about hormones. Don’t talk to me about unbridled appetites of the flesh.
“When a young man and a young woman give in to Satan, when they strip down like animals in the wild and prepare themselves for a lusty round of heavy petting and full-blown sex, what better reminder for them to buck up than a WWJD condom with the image of our Lord and Savior right there on the package, and then, as a fail safe measure, also on the prophylactic itself?
“I’ve tested them with my own teenagers and hardly a weekend passes when one of them doesn’t come back home with a WWJD condom completely unrolled and dangling unused from his or her fingertips or pushed up under the seat of the car as a badge of honor.
“At the very moment their temptation was strongest, they turned back from sin after seeing the boldly-lettered WWJD logo that signifies, ‘Stop! Think! What would Jesus do in this situation?’ ”
Flabbergasted critics couldn’t disagree more.
They say putting Jesus Christ on condoms isn’t just tacky, it’s a sacrilege — and they openly wonder if preacher Morehead hasn’t lost his mind.
“If you give a child a condom, you’re pretty much telling him that sex is O.K. as long as you use protection,” fumes Marcia Kenderly, a born-again Christian with four daughters ranging in age from 13 to 18.
“Rev. Morehead says his own children show him their WWJD condoms as proof that even though they came close to having sex, they didn’t.
“But how can he be sure that instead of having sex with the condom, they didn’t have sex without it? I’m a married adult and I wouldn’t let my husband use one of those things.
“I feel like I’m committing a sin just thinking about it.”
Naysayers aside, Morehead has arranged for a manufacturer to produce 100,000 of the WWJD prophylactics that he plans to sell for $5 a pop over the Internet and through Christian bookstores nationwide.
“All the profits will go to a home I’m building for unwed mothers,” says the preacher. “A home that wouldn’t be needed if those girls had been carrying a WWJD condom.”
philately
replica watches
web site design
extramarital sex
debt elimination
making “easy money”
how to cheat casinos
bogus university degrees
refinancing my mortgage
stocks, bonds and equities
penis or breast enlargement
cheap, probably bogus software
advertising using an “opt in” list
advance fee, 419 or lottery scams
collection of delinquent court judgements
anything with a subject line resembling “??”
viagra, cialis, or any other erection medications
“hoodia”, or other weight-control or diet suppliments
medications for which one normally needs a prescription, but with no prescription
ANY BUSINESS OR SERVICE THAT ADVERTISES USING UNSOLICITED EMAIL!!!
I HATE SPAMMERS!
i don’t know WHO is encouraging these people, but i wish they would STOP!!
LONDON – A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.
The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.
The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was “humorous, not serious,” but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair.”
Blair’s office declined to comment on the report, stressing it never discusses leaked documents.
In Qatar, Al-Jazeera said it was aware of the report, but did not wish to comment.
The White House said it wouldn’t dignify what it called “something so outlandish” with a response.
The document was described as a transcript of a conversation between the two leaders.
Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing it to Leo O’Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O’Connor are scheduled to appear at London’s Bow Street Magistrates Court next week.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to “a damaging disclosure” by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom.
O’Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information.
According to the newspaper, Clarke returned the memo to Blair’s office. Clarke did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Press Association, the British news agency, said Clarke refused to discuss the contents of the document. PA quoted Clarke as saying his priority was to support O’Connor who did “exactly the right thing” in bringing it to his attention.
Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister in Blair’s government, called for the document to be made public.
“I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion,” he said. “If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn’t embedded with coalition forces,” the newspaper quoted Kilfoyle as saying.
Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying.
“If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in
Iraq began to spiral out of control,” he said. “On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”
Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster.
In April 2003, an Al-Jazeera journalist was killed when its Baghdad office was struck during a U.S. bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake.
In November 2002, Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera’s office.
so, are we at war with qatar now, or does bushy junior get to bomb whomever he pleases, for whatever reason he wishes, without having to run it by his consitiuents first? 8/
Beset with an unpopular war and an American public increasingly less trusting, President Bush faces the lowest approval rating of his presidency, according to a national poll released Monday.
Bush also received his all-time worst marks in three other categories in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. The categories were terrorism, Bush’s trustworthiness and whether the Iraq war was worthwhile.
Bush’s 37 percent overall approval rating was two percentage points below his ranking in an October survey. Both polls had a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Sixty percent of the 1,006 adult Americans interviewed by telephone Friday through Sunday said they disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president.
The White House has said it doesn’t pay attention to poll numbers and the figures do not affect policy.
“We have a proud record of accomplishment and a positive agenda for the future,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Wednesday.
“We look forward to continuing to talk about it. I mean, you can get caught up in polls; we don’t. Polls are snapshots in time.”
Bush, who received high marks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, also rated poorly in the new poll for his policy on terrorism. For the first time, less than half — 48 percent — of those surveyed said they approved of how the president was handling the war on terror. Forty-nine percent said they disapprove.
In November 2001, Bush had an 87 percent overall approval mark and an 86 percent rating on terrorism.
Bush has been under fire from Democratic lawmakers for the way his administration made the case to invade Iraq in 2003 and how it has handled the conflict since then.
The president fired back in a speech Monday, accusing Democrats of “playing politics.”
In the new poll, 60 percent said it was not worth going to war in Iraq, while 38 percent said it was worthwhile. The question was asked of about half of those surveyed and had a margin of error of five percentage points. The results marked a decline in support of seven percentage points from two months earlier.
Bush’s lowest approval ratings came on two issues that divide his own Republican Party.
On federal spending, 71 percent disapproved of his performance and 26 percent approved. The approval rating was the same on immigration issues, and the disapproval mark was 65 percent.
Sixty-one percent of respondents disapproved of Bush’s handling of the economy, and 37 percent approved.
The country appears to be split on whether Bush is a strong president and whether or not Americans personally like him.
When asked about his abilities, 49 percent of those surveyed said he was a strong president and 49 percent said he was a weak leader.
About 50 percent of people polled said they disliked Bush, with 6 percent claiming to hate the president.
Bush’s overall approval mark matched the 37 percent rating of newly elected President Clinton in June 1993.
When asked if they trust Bush more than they had Clinton, 48 percent of respondents said they trusted Bush less, while 36 percent said they trusted him more and 15 percent said they trusted Bush the same as Clinton.
For the first time, more than half of the public thinks Bush is not honest and trustworthy — 52 percent to 46 percent.
A week ago, President Bush campaigned for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore, who lost the election a day later to Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine. (Full story)
In the poll, 56 percent of registered voters said they would be likely to vote against a local candidate supported by Bush, while 34 percent said the opposite.
Only 9 percent said their first choice in next year’s elections would be a Republican who supports Bush on almost every major issue.
Forty-six percent said the country would be better off if Congress were controlled by Democrats, while 34 percent backed a GOP majority.
A large majority of Republicans — 80 percent — approve of Bush’s performance, compared with 28 percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats. Those results had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s approval rating has dropped 14 points since the start of the year, down from 54 percent in January to 40 percent.
His chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, resigned last month after he was indicted on charges including obstruction of justice and perjury. Libby is accused of lying to investigators and a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a CIA officer whose husband criticized the White House case for war.
ezra has a performance tomorrow at the broadway performance hall. he’s been selected as one of several artists to put on a show at On The Boards next june, for which he’s actually getting paid – paid to produce and direct a new piece of dance, as well as paid to perform it. he and i started out in the same way when we first went to college, but i think he’s got a better handle on how to turn his artwork into a paying job than i ever did. more power to him.
my second appointment with ned the PTSD counsellor was yesterday, but nothing happened except for the fact that i now have a “treatment schedule”. apart from that, i filled out the two forms that he forgot the last time, but had to be filled out by me before my first appointment with him. we talked about computers… 8/ he’s a mac fanatic who has to use a windoesn’t computer because that’s what everyone else uses… apparently he hasn’t heard that within the next year or so, he’ll be able to run the mac operating system on his intel platform. woo. that’s really specifically helpful with my current PTSD/depression. 8/
spam, spam.
moe called at 5:30 to say that she’s going to be home late… 9:30 or later… apparently they have to remove a rock from the innards of a 120 pound dog, who showed up a half-hour before they closed. i suppose that’s what she gets for working on mercer island, where the people have more money than brains, but will jump to get their dog surgery rather than paying attention to what they eat.
i found this article about whether cats are "christian" or not, but then i noticed that it was originally published by the watchtower society, so the emphasis is more on the "quotation marks" than they usually are with articles about “christians”…
A former CIA director has claimed that torture is condoned and even approved by the Bush government.
The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney “a vice president for torture”.
He said: “We have crossed the line into dangerous territory”.
The American Senate says torture should be banned – whatever the justification. But President Bush has threatened to veto their ruling.
The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.
Speaking of Bush’s claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: “I do not believe him”.
On Dick Cheney he said “I’m embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture.
“He condones torture, what else is he?”.
Admiral Turner claims the secret CIA prisons used for torture are known as ‘black sites’, terror suspects are picked up in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They are flown by CIA-controlled private aircraft to countries where there are secret interrogation centres, operating outside any country’s jurisdiction.
No one will confirm their locations, but there are several possibilities: The Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania is believed by many to be one such facility.
Admiral Turner’s remarks were echoed by Republican Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.
He said torturing to get information was immoral, was not effective and encouraged potential enemies to do the same to Americans.
Both Mr Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have repeatedly stated that torture by US forces is not condoned.
i suppose that’s a little bit of good news (in a strange way) for the canadian guy who was arrested in new york, after 9/11 and, with no word to ottawa that they were deporting a canadian citizen, was deported to syria, specifically for torture… 8/
Reply to this entry by posting a picture of yourself in the comments, then post this sentence in your own journal:
You do the Hokey-Kokey,
And you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about
You put your whole self in,
You put your whole self out;
You put your whole self in,
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey-Kokey,
And you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about
(in honour of simon, who teaches everyone that it’s "Hokey-Kokey")
after i decided to update, but before i even got to write anything, i was interrupted by spam. i wonder how many times that’s going to happen this evening?
i have a new avatar, which is also a piece of jewelry – approximately life size – which is currently in my ear, but not permanently… it’s only 4 gauge, and i’m shooting for 0 gauge, because there’s a plug at laughing buddha (micro$not and flash required to view) that i really want…
i got email from josh today about Drunk Puppet Night… apparently the venue that we’re used to, the Re-Bar, has been sold, and the new owners are art snobs and apparently don’t go for the kind of art we do, so DPN6 has been put off until late february or early march, and the new venue is in columbia city somewhere… i’ve heard of it, but i’ve never actually been there. and i still want to produce a frank-zappa-related puppet show, but probably not this year.
three more spams… 8/
also, i got email from simon about the upcoming moisture festival benefit, which will feature, among other things, the Fremont Players’ version of Babes In The Wood, and the Fremont Philharmonic. more details as they come in.
By William Neikirk
Tribune senior correspondent
Published November 12, 20051
WASHINGTON — While considering slashes in Medicaid and student loan programs, Congress is about to set aside up to $3 billion to help millions of Americans with old non-digital television sets buy converter boxes.
Each converter box is expected to cost the government $40 to $60, but supporters of the legislation don’t want to take any chances of being accused of denying Americans their right to a TV picture when broadcasting goes all digital.
Depending on how much money is allocated, the funding would go to purchase as many as 60 million “set-top” electronic boxes to make it possible for old, broadcast-only TV sets to continue receiving a picture when the broadcasting industry converts to all-digital transmission as soon as the end of 2008. Conservative groups have criticized the proposed expenditure as a giveaway, but the TV provision has received less attention because it is included in deficit-reduction legislation that has generated an uproar in the House for its spending reductions in programs affecting the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps.
The GOP leadership yanked the budget bill from the floor on Thursday because leaders had failed to gather enough votes to pass it, and its outlook is now uncertain. Some of the House’s spending cuts could be killed to make the bill more palatable, but there is no indication that the television provision is in jeopardy. The Senate has already passed its budget measure.
James Gatusso, a technology expert at the Heritage Foundation, called it “a subsidy for old TV sets,” and not the wisest use of federal money at a time of large deficits.
Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget-watchdog group, said that helping poor people buy converter boxes appears justified, but he added: “When the government subsidizes anything, it usually goes to people who don’t need it. I suspect that will be the case here.”
The money would be doled out without regard to income, though families that have broadcast-only sets tend to be poorer, industry officials said.
Both the House and Senate bills would require the industry to convert to all-digital broadcasting by a specific date–on Dec. 31, 2008, in the House bill and April 7, 2009, in the Senate measure. Old analog, or non-digital, sets could not receive a picture unless they are hooked to a cable or satellite system.
These provisions created some controversy, but nowhere near the uproar over proposed cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and student loan programs as well as tax cuts. One reason is that the government would take over the broadcasting spectrum and auction it off to private companies, raising $10 billion to $28 billion.
Rather than risk an uproar by millions of Americans, including an estimated 21 million households that have only non-digital sets, lawmakers decided to pre-empt the complaints with a purchase plan similar to one tried recently in Berlin.
“The potential for consumer outrage over one day waking up and finding out that you are simply incapable of receiving local news, information about a hurricane or tornado alert, or entertainment programs, is enormous,” said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.
Some conservative groups have criticized the proposed expenditure as excessive and unnecessary, complaining that it subsidizes old technology and amounts to little more than a government giveaway.
“I think it’s way too much,” said Gatusso, the Heritage Foundation analyst. He said neither bill requires people to reveal whether they have a cable or satellite hookup, and that subsidies would go to people who have extra broadcast-only TVs in bedrooms or dens.
“It certainly has elements of paying a bribe, but oftentimes paying a bribe is the better part of deficit reduction,” countered Barry Bosworth, a Brookings Institution economist. “By making this payment, they [Congress] will free up a spectrum that can be sold for money.”
There is big money to be made in the transition from analog to digital television, Gatusso said, adding that many companies have their eye on buying some of the spectrum so they can offer new wireless and broadband services. That will be the biggest corporate payoff, he said.
But two electronics firms, LG Electronics Inc. (which has Zenith as a subsidiary) and Thomson SA have been selected by the broadcasting industry to develop “high-quality, low-cost” prototype electronic boxes for manufacturers.
Congress has been debating the conversion to all-digital broadcasting for years, and now the industry offers both a digital signal and an analog signal, which has been in use since the first U.S. telecast in the late 1920s. But GOP leaders decided this year that it was time to set a hard date for the conversion, and then soften the financial impact by buying the converters for analog sets.
The House plan authorizes spending $990 million so the government can issue $40 coupons (a $10 co-pay would be required) to buy converter boxes, while the Senate authorizes $3 billion for a purchasing program with unspecified details as to how the money would be distributed. The House bill would limit the number of coupons per household to two.
Wharton said there are 73 million non-digital TV sets in the U.S. not hooked to cable or satellite. About 45 million of these are in 21 million households with no digital or satellite connections, he said, and many of those are low-income people. But Congress rejected limiting the subsidy to low-income families on grounds that it would be too difficult to administer.
Gatusso said the cost estimate has grown dramatically in the past year. When such legislation was considered a year ago, the estimate for buying converter boxes was as low as $100 million, only to jump as high as $3 billion in the Senate bill. “It is just astonishing,” he said. “It really is a classic example of foot-in-the-door spending.”
But Bosworth wasn’t as upset at the spending. “I would argue that it is a small price to pay,” he said, adding that one of the hallmarks of American government is that it “tries to protect the losers instead of picking winners.”
Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), one of the GOP moderates who protested provisions in the deficit-reduction act, had high praise for the television subsidy. “The economic development aspects of this bill are vastly understated,” he said.
The spectrum now in the hands of broadcasters will help launch a new wave of wireless and broadband businesses that enable the U.S. to better compete with Asia, he said.
ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska – President Bush escalated the bitter debate over the Iraq war on Monday, hurling back at Democratic critics the worries they once expressed that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the world.
“They spoke the truth then and they’re speaking politics now,” Bush charged.
Bush went on the attack after Democrats accused the president of manipulating and withholding some pre-war intelligence and misleading Americans about the rationale for war.
“Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past,” Bush said. “They’re playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible.”
The president spoke to cheering troops at this military base at a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan,
South Korea, China and Mongolia.
During the stopover, he also met privately with families of four slain service members.
After a Latin American trip with meager results earlier this month, the administration kept expectations low for Asia.
“I don’t think you’re going to see headline breakthroughs,” National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said on Air Force One. He dashed any prospect that Japan would lift its ban on American beef imports during Bush’s visit and said a dispute with China over trade and currency would remain an issue after the president returns home.
On Sunday, Hadley acknowledged “we were wrong” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but he insisted in a CNN interview that the president did not manipulate intelligence or mislead the American people.
Iraq and a host of other problems, from the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina to the indictment of a senior White House official in the CIA leak investigation, have taken a heavy toll on the president. Nearing the end of his fifth year in office, Bush has the lowest approval rating of his presidency and a majority of Americans say Bush is not honest and they disapprove of his handling of foreign policy and the war on terrorism. Heading for Asia, Bush hoped to improve his standing on the world stage.
“Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people,” Bush said.
He quoted pre-war remarks by three senior Democrats as evidence of that Democrats had shared the administration’s fears that were the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003. Bush did not name them, but White House counselor Dan Bartlett filled in the blanks.
“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.” – Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
“The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as (Saddam Hussein) is in power.” – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
“Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the president’s approaching this in the right fashion.” – Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., then the Democratic whip.
“The truth is that investigations of the intelligence on Iraq have concluded that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world – and that person was Saddam Hussein,” Bush charged.
In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted with 48 Republicans for the war authorization measure in late 2002, including 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Sen.
John Kerry of Massachusetts, and his running mate, John Edwards of North Carolina. Both have recently been harshly critical of Bush’s conduct of the war and its aftermath.
On Capitol Hill, top Democrats stood their ground in claiming Bush misled Congress and the country. “The war in Iraq was and remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history,” Kerry told a news conference.
Bush is expected to get a warmer welcome in Asia than he did earlier this month in Argentina at the Summit of the Americas, where Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez led a protest against U.S. policies and Bush failed to gain support from the 34 nations attending for a hemisphere-wide free trade zone.
Japan, the first stop on Bush’s trip, and Mongolia, the last, are likely to give him the most enthusiastic response, while China and South Korea probably will be cooler but respectful.
In South Korea, Bush also will attend the Asia Pacific Economic Conference summit in Busan, where 21 member states are expected to agree to support global free-trade talks. The summit also is expected to agree to put early-warning and information-sharing systems in place in case of bird flu outbreaks.
“It is good for the president to show up in Asia and say, `We care about Asia,’ because that is in doubt in the region,” said Ed Lincoln, senior fellow in Asia and Economic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
At Bush’s first stop, in Kyoto, Japan, the president will deliver what aides bill as the speech of the trip on the power of democracy, not only to better individual lives but contribute to the long-term prosperity of nations.
PITTSBURGH – Anger is good for you, as long as you keep it below a boil, according to new psychology research based on face reading.
People who respond to stressful situations with short-term anger or indignation have a sense of control and optimism that lacks in those who respond with fear.
“These are the most exciting data I’ve ever collected,” Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner told a gathering of science writers here last month.
Lerner harassed 92 UCLA students by having experimenters ask subjects to count backward on camera by 13s starting with an odd number like 6,233, telling them it was an intelligence test and then telling them they weren’t counting fast enough and to speed it up as they went along.
Wrong answers meant subjects had to start all over again.
Another test involved counting backwards by sevens from 9,095.
So angry …
The video cameras caught subjects’ facial expressions during the tests, ranging from deer-in-the-headlights to seriously upset. The researchers identified fear, anger and disgust using a psychologist’s coding system that considers the flexing of particular sets of small muscles in the face.
The researchers also recorded people’s blood pressure, pulse and secretion of a high-stress hormone called cortisol, which can be measured in the saliva and collected with a cotton swab.
The people whose faces showed more fear during the had higher blood pressure and higher levels of the hormone. The findings were the same for men and women.
Lerner previously studied Americans’ emotional response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks two months afterward and found that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control. People who reacted with anger were more optimistic about risk and more likely to favor an aggressive response to terrorism.
Go ahead, get angry
So in maddening situations in which anger or indignation are justified, anger is not a bad idea, the thinking goes. In fact, it’s adaptive, Lerner says, and it’s a healthier response than fear.
Chronic, explosive anger or a hostile outlook on the world is still bad for you, contributing to heart disease and high blood pressure, research shows.
The new research supports the idea that humans have more than one uniform response to stress and that fear and anger provoke different responses from our nervous systems and the parts of our brain, such as the pituitary, that deal with tough situations.
The results were published in a recent issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry.
BERLIN (Reuters) – Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of U.S. President George W. Bush, ruled out running for president in 2008 but left open the possibility of a subsequent bid in an interview with a German magazine published on Sunday.
Jeb Bush, who is scheduled to visit Germany this week, told Focus weekly he had not thought much about running for the office held by his father and older brother except to rule out the next election at the end of George W. Bush’s second term.
“You should never say never. But for the 2008 election, my answer is definitely no,” he said, in comments translated into German by the magazine.
Asked whether his answer meant a later challenge was possible, he said: “Let’s say there’s a vague chance.”
Bush, 52, said he spoke frequently with his brother and visited the White House whenever he was in Washington but he said the two mainly discussed family matters or sport.
i keep thinking that it’s just about over, and today someone reminded me that we’ve got 3 more years of that twerp… and if his brother even thinks about running for the white house it will be a sad day indeed for this country… 8/
i had a few links to record, but then my browser crashed and i lost ’em all… which is fairly strange… i think in all the time i’ve been running linux and firefox, the browser has crashed about 4 times… unlike windoesn’t, which i have to reboot at least once per “session”, because of frobulation and/or crashing behavior. nevertheless…
i don’t know which i like more, nihilist gum or bible gum… of course i actually bought the nihilist gum, because i couldn’t resist their "no flavour" punch line… although it’s faintly mint flavoured in actuality… perhaps it’s left over from manufacture of a different variety of gum.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they “voted God out of your city” by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.
All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce “intelligent design” – the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power – as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club.”
Eight families had sued the district, claiming the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The federal trial concluded days before Tuesday’s election, but no ruling has been issued.
Later Thursday, Robertson issued a statement saying he was simply trying to point out that “our spiritual actions have consequences.”
“God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in his eye forever,” Robertson said. “If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”
Robertson made headlines this summer when he called on his daily show for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
convert your gas-powered automobile to electric for about $3,000… a new gas powered car can cost upwards of $40k, and it’s guaranteed that “normal” people aren’t going to be able to afford gas in 5 or 10 years… get the jump on the craze, and maybe you’ll be one of the people that can afford gas in 5 or 10 years…
Spontaneously flammable chemical used for battlefield illumination
Contact with particles causes burning of skin and flesh
Use of incendiary weapons prohibited for attacking civilians (Protocol III of Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons) Protocol III not signed by US
Italian state TV, Rai, has broadcast a documentary accusing the US military of using white phosphorus bombs against civilians in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
Rai says this amounts to the illegal use of chemical arms, though the bombs are considered incendiary devices.
Eyewitnesses and ex-US soldiers say the weapon was used in built-up areas in the insurgent-held city.
The US military denies this, but admits using white phosphorus bombs in Iraq to illuminate battlefields.
Washington is not a signatory of an international treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus devices.
Transmission of the documentary comes a day after the arrival of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on a five-day official visit to Italy.
It also coincides with the first anniversary of the US-led assault on Falluja, which displaced most of the city’s 300,000 population and left many of its buildings destroyed.
The documentary was shown on Rai’s rolling news channel, with a warning that the some of the footage was disturbing.
The future of the 3,000-strong Italian peacekeeping contingent in Iraq is the subject of a political tug-of-war, says the BBC’s David Willey in Rome.
‘Destroyed evidence’
The documentary begins with formerly classified footage of the Americans using napalm bombs during the Vietnam war.
It then shows a series of photographs from Falluja of corpses with the flesh burnt off but clothes still intact – which it says is consistent with the effects of white phosphorus on humans.
Jeff Englehart, described as a former US soldier who served in Falluja, tells of how he heard orders for white phosphorus to be deployed over military radio – and saw the results.
“Burned bodies, burned women, burned children; white phosphorus kills indiscriminately… When it makes contact with skin, then it’s absolutely irreversible damage, burning flesh to the bone,” he says.
Last December, the US state department issued a denial of what it called “widespread myths” about the use of illegal weapons in Falluja.
“Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters,” the US statement said.
However, the Rai film also alleges that Washington has systematically attempted to destroy filmed evidence of the alleged use of white phosphorus on civilians in Falluja.
Italian public opinion has been consistently against the war and the Rai documentary can only reinforce calls for a pullout of Italian soldiers as soon as possible, our correspondent says.
Both the Italian government and opposition leaders are talking about a phased withdrawal in 2006.
President Talabani and the US say the continued presence of multi-national forces in Iraq is essential.
Washington, D.C. – President George W. Bush and the current Administration have now borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 U.S. presidents combined.
Throughout the first 224 years (1776-2000) of our nation’s history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions according to the U.S. Treasury Department. In the past four years alone (2001-2005), the Bush Administration has borrowed a staggering $1.05 trillion.
“The seriousness of this rapid and increasing financial vulnerability of our country can hardly be overstated,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-TN), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition and member of the House Ways and Means Committee. “The financial mismanagement of our country by the Bush Administration should be of concern to all Americans, regardless of political persuasion.”
The Blue Dogs have long expressed tremendous concern over mounting U.S. debt and are particularly troubled by our growing dependence on foreign governments to finance our debt. Earlier this year, the Coalition offered a 12 Step Plan to cure our nation’s addiction to deficit spending. The Blue Dog plan required, among other things, that all federal agencies pass clean audits, a balanced budget, and the establishment of a rainy day fund to be used in the event of a natural disaster.
“No American political leadership has ever willfully and deliberately mortgaged our country to foreign interests in the manner we have witnessed over the past four years,” continued Rep. Tanner. “If this recklessness is not stopped, I truly believe our economic freedom as American citizens is in great jeopardy.”
Monday, November 7, 2005; Posted: 5:30 a.m. EST (10:30 GMT)
PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) — In a clear jab at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, President Bush called on Latin Americans on Sunday to boldly defend strong democratic institutions and reject any drift back to the days of authoritarian rule.
Bush’s remarks in Brazil came after Chavez, the leftist leader and friend of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, spent the past two days hurling criticism at the United States at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina.
Eyeing three upcoming presidential elections in Latin America, Bush said citizens must choose “between two competing visions” for their future.
One, he said, pursues representative government, integration into the world community and freedom’s transformative power for individuals.
“The other seeks to roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor and blaming others for their own failures to provide for the people,” he said. “We must make tough decisions today to ensure a better tomorrow.”
Bush also urged Brazil, the continent’s largest economy, to use its considerable regional influence to prod into reality a U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas. Bush believes such a free-trade zone stretching from Alaska to Argentina would create jobs and lift the region’s 220 million poor to better lives.
That could be a tall order for Brazil.
At the Americas summit, the United States and 28 other countries supported setting a date to restart negotiations on creating the trading bloc. But because Brazil and four other nations preferred to wait for world trade negotiations to take place in December, no agreement was reached on new talks.
So Sunday, Bush appeared determined to move on from the divisions over the FTAA talks and focus on those World Trade Organization negotiations in Hong Kong. The talks are aimed at cutting tariffs worldwide.
In the hope that success in the global talks would invigorate the FTAA’s chances, Bush said he agrees with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that the United States must drop agriculture subsidies so it is easier for farmers in the developing world to compete.
Bush said the United States promises to reduce and then eliminate those “trade-distorting subsidies” — as long as Europe does the same.
“Only an ambitious reform agenda in agriculture, and manufactured goods, and services can ensure that the benefits of free and fair trade are enjoyed by all people in all countries,” Bush said.
Bush flew from Brazil to Panama, arriving Sunday night for a leisurely visit seen as a respite after the tense trade talks.
Panama stepped up security measures in preparation for Bush’s arrival. But a protest vigil drew less than 200 people on Sunday, on the heels of two days of festive independence-day parades with music and street dancing.
Patrol boats guarded the bay near the Panama Canal and several blocks were closed to traffic in front of a hotel where Bush was scheduled to stay. Several U.S. jet fighters appeared at the Panama City airport, and police were more visible in the capital.
Groups opposing Bush’s visit also planned a protest rally Monday afternoon, while Panamanian authorities extended independence celebrations through Monday in a move to reduce student protests.
Growing mistrust
His five-day trip, which concludes when he leaves Panama Monday, comes as there is growing mistrust in Latin America about the United States.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq revived memories of the “gunboat diplomacy” era of U.S.-Latin American relations of a century ago.
There also has been deep concern about the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that Bush alleged Iraq had. Disclosures of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere added strains.
“I fully understand there’s, at times, a view of America that is, in my opinion, not an accurate view,” Bush said earlier in the day at a roundtable with young Brazilian leaders.
Bush had good reason to make his push for freer trade, a better image for the United States and democracy here.
Brazil has influence with Venezuela and in Bolivia, where the leading candidate in the December 4 presidential election is the founder of the Movement Toward Socialism political party. Evo Morales has pledged to decriminalize the coca crop and end the U.S.-backed drive to end its cultivation.
Chile also holds its presidential elections in December and Brazil has balloting in October 2006.
“Only a generation ago, this was a continent plagued by military dictatorship and civil war,” Bush said. “The successful democracies of the 21st century will not be defined by blood and soil. Successful democracies will be defined by a broader ideal of citizenship — based on shared principles, and shared responsibilities, and respect for all.”
The president’s visit was also expected to cement relations with Silva, the leader of a country that represents a lucrative market for U.S. products that Bush would like to expand.
“We carry on tranquil and mature discussions on specific issues that always come up as part of any partnership on this scale,” Silva said after they met and before they dined on a what Bush called an “unbelievably good” Brazilian barbecue of beef, lamb, ox tail and some cheese.
Silva at first was distrusted by Washington because of his leftist origins. But he surprised many by curbing spending and bringing inflation down to less than 6 percent a year. He also enacted programs to distribute food and boost education among the poor.
Despite their opposing political leanings, the two share personal chemistry.
Bush joked that Silva promised to take him fishing, but not until after he leaves office because the “entourage is a little big to go fishing while I’m president.”
Heavily armed police officers wearing bulletproof vests outnumbered the 150 demonstrators who protested with banners saying “Fora Bush” (Get Out Bush) at the retreat’s entrance.
About 40 students also participated in a sit-in at a local McDonald’s that they called a symbol of U.S. capitalism.
“We will remain here until Bush disappears from the planet or leaves Brazil, whichever comes first,” said one demonstrator, Rosa Marques, a history student at the University of Brasilia.
finally, there are now 20 reasons to abandon christianity, and if that weren’t enough, there’s also a post that i found in that’s actually in ‘s journal, where he expounds on the fact that, apparently, scientists have discovered the secret of life… apparently, the proteins that make up RNA are predisposed to fuse with carbon atoms in the twisted lattice that makes up DNA if the proteins and the carbon (charcoal?) combine with formaldehyde under the correct, and surprisingly common circumstances. if it’s true, then the “christians” and their feeble attempts at arguing the “intelligent design” of the universe will be well and truly squashed… although if experience has taught me anything, it’s that convincing them of that fact will be the most difficult part of the whole deal.
This list summarizes some of the common features of descriptions of the behavior of the Bush Regime, I mean sociopaths.
Glibness and Superficial Charm
Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as “their right.”
Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.
Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
Incapacity for Love
Need for Stimulation
Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.
Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency
Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet “gets by” by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends; aberrant behaviors such as cruelty to people or animals, stealing, etc.
Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.
Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.
Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.
Other Related Qualities:
Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
Authoritarian
Secretive
Paranoid
Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
Conventional appearance
Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life
Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim’s affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
Incapable of real human attachment to another
Unable to feel remorse or guilt
Extreme narcissism and grandiose
May state readily that their goal is to rule the world
(The above traits are based on the psychopathy checklists of H. Cleckley and R. Hare.)
NOTE: In the 1830’s this disorder was called “moral insanity.” By 1900 it was changed to “psychopathic personality.” More recently it has been termed “antisocial personality disorder” in the DSM-III and DSM-IV. Some critics have complained that, in the attempt to rely only on ‘objective’ criteria, the DSM has broadened the concept to include too many individuals. The APD category includes people who commit illegal, immoral or self-serving acts for a variety of reasons and are not necessarily psychopaths.
finally, a meme i can believe in. why? because i know these people… and they really know nerds!
Your score is:
Your rating is:
800
171.31%
Additional Scoring Information:
You got an extra 400 points because you are actually running Linux right now. Your environment is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
But, you already knew that.
this and that… created and uploaded more stuff for Hybrid Elephant. got contacted yesterday by the american representative of the Rudra Centre, and Hybrid Elephant is now the washington state representative for the Rudra Centre, which is the largest provider of rudraksha seeds in the world, and also has ratna and a bunch of other things. also recieved, filled, and shipped (!) an incense order today… i really like it when they order stuff that’s in stock and they don’t have to wait around for delivery. 8)
removed the hybrid elephant P.O. box number from two more postal spam lists that it was on from the previous occupant, and i have two more that have to wait until monday, because by the time i checked the box, they were already closed for the weekend. i gather she (ellen or ella alexander) was a “christian” grandmother, or something like it, because since i opened the box, it has gotten literally hundreds of different catalogues for grandmother-like “gifts”, snow-globes, “antique” figurines and other “cute” and/or “biblical” crap. it’s busy enough that if i don’t check the box two or three times a week, it overflows, which is really frustrating, because i have to go through every piece of mail to find the one or two things that are actually addressed to the business.
i moved up two more sizes in my quest to buy a 0-gauge ear-plug. i had an 8-gauge spiral, and i’m at up to a 4-gauge now. also met with ned the ptsd counsellor, finally, for the first time yesterday. he said it would be nice if he could see me again next week, but that next week was already booked, so he’s got me in two weeks. as i suspected, nothing was accomplished, and he forgot a couple of very important forms that i was supposed to have filled out before having seen him, so i have to pretend like the appointment in two weeks is actually the first appointment… and this is after being put off by him for two weeks and getting confused about the actual date for a week… 8/
By WAYNE PARRY
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) – Five Muslim football fans were detained and questioned during a game at Giants Stadium because they were congregating near an air duct on a night former President Bush was in the stadium, the FBI said Wednesday.
Some of the Muslims said they did not know they were in a sensitive area, and they complained that they were subjected to racial profiling while they were praying, as their faith requires five times a day.
“I’m as American as apple pie and I’m sitting there and now I’m made to feel like I’m an outsider, for no reason other than I have a long beard or that I prayed,” said Sami Shaban, a 27-year-old Seton Hall Law School student who lives in Piscataway.
At a news conference Wednesday, Shaban said he and four friends had just gotten to the Sept. 19 New York Giants-New Orleans Saints game when they left their seats to pray. Around halftime, 10 security officers and three state troopers approached the men and told them to come with them, Shaban said.
The men were questioned and then were not allowed to return to their seats, but were instead assigned to seats in another section, Shaban said. Three guards stood near them, and escorted them to their cars when they left the stadium, he said.
FBI agent Steven Siegel, a spokesman for the bureau’s FBI office, said the men had aroused suspicion because they were congregating near the main air intake duct. Bush was in the stadium that night as part of a fundraising campaign he and former President Clinton were leading for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
“You had 80,000 people there, Bush 41 was there, and you had a group of gentlemen gathering in an area not normally used by the public right near the main air intake duct for the stadium, and a food preparation facility,” Siegel said. “It was where they were, not what they were doing.”
The site is now fenced off and is no longer accessible to fans.
“We do not profile anyone that comes into our arena, stadium or racetrack on any basis,” said George Zoffinger, president of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which operates the stadium. “There was no profiling of our customers. I want to make that clear.”
if they weren’t profiled, then how come the site is now fenced off? what if it was a group of “christians” “praying”? if it was such a sensitive area, then why didn’t someone think of that before bushy junior showed up? huh?!?
By DAVID ESPO and LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writers
Friday, November 4, 2005
(11-04) 17:10 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) —
Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session.
Cheney told his audience the United States doesn’t engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.
The vice president made his comments at a regular weekly private meeting of Senate Republican senators, according to several lawmakers who attended. Cheney often attends the meetings, a chance for the rank-and-file to discuss legislative strategy, but he rarely speaks.
In this case, the room was cleared of aides before the vice president began his remarks, said by one senator to include a reference to classified material. The officials who disclosed the events spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the discussion.
“The vice president’s office doesn’t have any comment on a private meeting with members of the Senate,” Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Cheney, said on Friday.
The vice president drew support from at least one lawmaker, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, while Arizona Sen. John McCain dissented, officials said.
McCain, who was tortured while held as a prisoner during the Vietnam War, is the chief Senate sponsor of an anti-torture provision that has twice cleared the Senate and triggered veto threats from the White House.
Cheney’s decision to speak at the meeting underscored both his role as White House point man on the contentious issue and the importance the administration attaches to it.
The vice president made his appeal at a time Congress is struggling with the torture issue in light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States houses about 500 detainees at the naval base there, many of them captured in Afghanistan.
Additionally, human rights organizations contend the United States turns detainees over to other countries that it knows will use torture to try and extract intelligence information.
Cheney’s appeal came two days before a former senior State Department official claimed in an interview with National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” that he had traced paperwork back to Cheney’s office that he believes led to U.S. troops abusing prisoners in Iraq.
“It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff during President Bush’s first term, said Thursday.
Wilkerson said the view of Cheney’s office was put in “carefully couched” terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that “were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.” He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.
Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Mayfield declined to comment on Wilkerson’s remarks.
The Senate recently approved a provision banning the “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The vote was 90-9, and an identical provision was added to a second measure on a voice vote on Friday.
Comparable House legislation does not include a similar provision, and it is not clear whether anti-torture language will be included in either of two large defense measures Congress hopes to send to Bush’s desk later this year.
The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption in cases of “clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States.” The president would have to approve the exemption, and Defense Department personnel could not be involved. In addition, any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations, according to draft changes in the exemption the White House is seeking.
Cheney also has met several times with McCain, including one session that CIA Director Porter Goss attended in a secure room in the Capitol.
grumble, bomb, mutter, president george bush, gripe, kill republicrats, complain… 8/
ATLANTA — A woman accused of helping her husband kill their daughter because they believed she was demonic has pleaded guilty to murder.
Valerie Carey, 29, has been sentenced to life in prison for the child’s death at a downtown Atlanta motel last year. She’s agreed to testify against her husband as part of a plea bargain. Investigators said Christopher Carey stabbed the child with a knife until it broke.
Police found 8-year-old Quimani Carey on the floor of a extended stay motel room after finding the couple walking naked down a busy street in freezing temperatures. They were carrying their two other children.
Quimani’s arms had been broken, she had been strangled and she had been stabbed several times, prosecutors said. Authorities said pages from the Bible had been torn out and thrown on the girl’s body. Testimony indicated that the girl’s father believed she was demonic and had been implanted with a chip that sent signals to the planet Jupiter, which would allow the family to be tracked.
The woman pleaded guilty to several charges, including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and first- and second-degree cruelty to children. During the court proceeding, testimony indicated that the man and woman both suffered from dual psychosis, a condition in which they both believed and saw each other’s delusions.
Valerie Carey will be eligible for parole after serving a set number of years in the death of her daughter. Quimani was killed Jan. 19, 2004.
Prosecutors said they were told by relatives that the mother had suffered from a history of mental illness.
“We thought the rapture would take the four of us to heaven,” a tearful Valerie Carey said to the judge during sentencing. “But I ended up in jail and a mental hospital. Everything I thought was real in my life proves to be false.”
Prosecutors had recommended life in prison with the possibility of parole for the mother and life in prison with no parole for the father.
Christopher Carey, 31, remains jailed without bond and faces a death penalty trial if he does not agree to a plea deal.
It was not clear how long Valerie Carey would have to serve before she is eligible for parole. The judge ordered that she continue to receive mental counseling while incarcerated.
today was a computer and web day… it just goes to show how i can not have a job, and still sit in front of this goddamn box for 8 hours straight… i took care of the agility fun web site stuff for diana, which included a schedule rewrite, threenewhowling league pages and a deletion on the about us page. then i got to playing around with cafepress dot com stuff – which i figured i would have to do right away, since mr. tinachopp has already stolen one of my ideas – so i got hybridelephant up and running and made a bunch of buttons, stickers and magnets, and then i updated the hybrid elephant pages with the new information, and i also updated my livejournal links list…
of course, this was all in between bouts of frantically processing spam, which must have taken up at least an hour and a half… i don’t remember whether i’ve said this recently, but SPAM SUCKS… i don’t do business with spammers under any circumstances, and yet there is an overabundant profusion of spam, which leads me to believe that most of you do do business with spammers… i would like to say STOP IT! okay?
home made PVC flame thrower – wonderful… more terrorist plans available on internet. what will they think of next?
these people allegedly have a functioning trebuchet, with which they sacrifice vegetables launch pumpkins. more pictures coming, but not soon enough to suit me.
and speaking of vegetable sacrifice, here’s Dr. Dick Chopp, Urologist… keep me away from him… for more reasons than just the fact that his name is Chopp
Hybrid Elephant has a new outlet for buttons, stickers, magnets and so forth, which is cafepress dot com… more stuff will be added as time goes on, but this should be sufficient to get a few people riled up… 8)
yesterday was troll-o-ween. it went a lot better than the rehearsals made me think it was going to go. the vegetable sacrifice went extremely well, and there were about 300 people in the crowd by the time i sent the pumpkin on it’s final road to snake destiny. we finished off with an after party that included free beer and pizza, and was still going strong when i left at midnight… and today is deepavali, one of the hindu “christmases”, which is the “festival of lights”…
apart from that, it has been a surprisingly unsatisfactory week so far. yesterday i had to go back to pick up stuff that i had forgotten three times from as far away as 15 miles – stupid brain injury. plus i got a call from farah who accused me of stealing one of their font-matching books – which i did not do… in fact i left my centering ruler there because i realised it wasn’t with the rest of my tools after i left and i didn’t feel like bothering with going back to pick it up… as if they’re going to know how to use a font-matching book anyway… and there’s apparently somebody who has taken it upon themselves to create a cafepress dot com web site selling t-shirts that say “Tina Chopp is God”, but he’s not giving any credit, or any compensation to The Church of Tina Chopp, and now that he’s done it, not only is his cafepress “store” called “tinachopp”, but if i decide to do anything with Tina Chopp on cafepress at this point, he can accuse me of stealing his idea… 8/
today didn’t start out very well either… our roof has a leak, which i discovered this morning – trying to sleep off the partying until midnight and then driving 45 minutes home – and while we can afford to put on a new roof now that we’ve moved, the guy who is going to do it for us is on vacation until friday. while i was hassling around with stuff related to the roof leak i discovered that the lower shed also has a leak, and the lower shed has important stuff like the 2 rows of back seats for moe’s car – which are now wrapped in plastic – and my drill press and band saw, which are now rusty and sitting in our living room until i can find a more permanent home for them – which will not be soon, as about half of the living room and three quarters of the office are still stacked floor to ceiling with boxes that there isn’t enough room to unpack. then there was a threatening phone call from the people who financed moe’s car who are trying to collect october’s payment, which was made online at the beginning of october, but apparently hasn’t appeared on the appropriate desk for who knows what reason. and i’ve been trying to make an appointment to have my car worked on since last friday, but every time i call the guy he says “call back tomorrow”, or “call back monday”, or “call back thursday” and giving me some lame story about how he’s got two cars on the lift and can’t clear them because he can’t get parts, or some goddamn thing like that.
and when moe asked me what’s wrong, and i said that i was depressed because of the way things have been going, she asked me when my appointment with the ptsd counsellor is, as though one appointment with a counsellor is going to solve everything. admittedly, she said that she realised that one appointment wasn’t going to help, and that it would take a long time to get through this, but that just made me feel worse… 8/
this is the first year i can recall in which i knew about standard time happening some time before it actually happened. this year, i heard about it last monday and i actually put it on my schedule, so now i know what time it is.
tomorrow is troll-o-ween, otherwise known as the troll’s birthday. also there’s going to be an “Osiris Ranebo Memorial Vegetable Sacrifice” as part of the festivities. be there if you’re in the area, but don’t if you’re not… we don’t want people who are going to come from outside the area and make trouble (like they have done in the past) which will make it more difficult to make arrangements for next year.
my appointment with ned, the ptsd counsellor, got postponed again. now it’s next thursday. 8/
thanks to , who pointed me towards people who dream in musicals, now i wonder if there are other people who dream, or hallucinate in operas… because while i was unconscious for 9 days during my injury and subsequent surgery, i had this massively complex hallucination which was an opera that featured a young, idealistic tow-truck driver and a sleazy used car salesman, both of whom were dressed in pure white uniforms, which then transmogrified into a huge chorus of people dressed in red uniforms singing about how brain surgery was similar to automotive repair and featured huge angiogram images projected on the backdrop. it was a clear enough hallucination that i wrote down an outline for the story, including most of the songs…
Ottery St Mary Tar Barrels… if i weren’t already a member of Cirque de Flambé, i would wonder why… as it is, i wonder if there’s any significance to the fact that it’s held on the same day as Guy Fawkes day…
NEW YORK–The phone rings with a blocked caller ID but I know who it is. My friend the film critic has just put down the same article I’ve just finished reading, a front-page blockbuster in the New York Daily News. It says that George W. Bush knew about Karl Rove’s scheme to blow CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover for years, that he was Rove’s partner in treason from the start, that his claims of ignorance were lies. The News article is anonymously sourced but we know it’s 100 percent true because the White House won’t deny that Bush is a traitor.
“So they’ll impeach him now, right?”
My friend asked the same thing in 2001 when recounts proved Bush lost Florida, when the 9/11 fetishist admitted that he’d never even tried to catch Osama, when WMDs failed to turn up in Iraq, and when his malignant neglect killed hundreds of Americans in post-Katrina New Orleans.
“This means impeachment. Right?” Wrong.
Any one of Bush’s crimes towers over the combined wickedness of Nixon and Clinton. And there are so many to choose from! How many times has Bush “made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” (a key count in the Nixon impeachment)?
Stop laughing, you.
Unfortunately for my friend and the United States, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. Nixon and Clinton faced Congresses controlled by the other party. Because Bush belongs to the same party as the majorities in the House and Senate, nothing he does can get him impeached.
Our failed Constitutional system means we’re stuck with this disastrous demagogue for three more years. Gloat now, Republican readers, but party loyalty’s stranglehold on impeachment can easily take the form of a complacent Democratic Congress overlooking the misdeeds of a batty Democratic president.
Any safe can be cracked; every system of safeguards breaks down eventually. We can’t get rid of Bush because the Founding Fathers, who were smart enough to think of just about everything, dropped the ball when they drafted the article that provides for presidential impeachment. Because there were no national political parties back in 1787, their otherwise ingenious system of checks and balances failed to account for the possibility that a Congress might choose to overlook a president’s crimes.
Small parties were active on the state and local level during the late 18th century, but James Madison, George Washington and most of the other Founders despised these organizations as harbingers of petty “factionalism” that ought to be banned or severely limited. Washington used the occasion of his 1796 farewell address to decry “the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he warned. “It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection…In governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged.” Voting blocs were the enemy of good government.
In the new republic, Madison wrote in his seminal Federalist No. 10, political arguments should be considered on their own merits. Since candidates for and holders of political office would be judged solely as individuals, Congressmen would focus on the greater good rather than political alliances when weighing whether to impeach a president. Even when parties began to emerge as a national force in 1800, few politicians would have argued that a Democratic-Republican president should be safe from impeachment unless the Federalist Party happened to control Congress.
Another Constitutional breakdown, concerning the separation of powers, occurred in June 2004. More than a year after the Supreme Court decided in Rasul v. Bush that the nearly 600 Muslim men and young boys being held incommunicado at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to have their cases heard by U.S. courts, they remain in cold storage–no lawyers, no court dates. The Bush Administration simply ignored the ruling.
“[Bush’s] Justice Department,” Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “sees [the ruling] through the sophisticated legal prism known as the Toddler Worldview: Anything one doesn’t wish to accept simply isn’t true.” Because the Founding Fathers never anticipated the possibility that the nation’s chief executive would treat its final judgments with the respect due an out-of-state parking ticket issued to a rental car, the Supreme Court has been rendered as toothless as a gummy bear.
The more you look, the more you’ll find that our Constitution has been subverted to the point of virtual irrelevance. The legislative branch has abdicated its exclusive right to declare war to the president, who was appointed by a federal court that undermined the states’ constitutional right to manage and settle election disputes. Individuals’ protection against unreasonable searches have been trashed, habeas corpus is a joke, and double jeopardy has become routine as those exonerated by criminal court face second trials in civil court. Our system of checks and balances has collapsed, the victim of a citizenry more interested in entertaining distraction than eternal vigilance.
Where evil men rule, law cannot protect those who sleep.
blaugh… after spending almost an hour crafting this post, for some reason livejournal decided not to post it anyway, and now i’ve got to see if i can craft it again without losing my train of thought… 8/
i’ve decided to moderate the posts in because of the profusion of adsforothercommunities, encouragement to donate money, secular poetry, artwork, and random blurbs that belong in somebody’s blog, but not in a community about sivaism… i also updated the community information page to reflect this. i did it because i want to be a place where people can come with questions, answers and experiences related to sivaism, without having to sift through a bunch of other stuff. i am not saying this stuff shouldn’t be posted, but it should not be posted in a community about sivaism… i’m definitely not doing this to pick on any individual person…
admittedly, now that i look at it, most of the random blurbs, secular poetry and so forth were, indeed, coming from , but i’m not doing this specifically to pick on . i suppose i should expect things like this being the moderator of a community – you can’t please everyone, but that’s why she has her own blog – so that if you don’t want to look at random blurbs that don’t concern you, you don’t have to.
now, to more frivolous stuff…
anybody remember TENEX? the first email is 34 years old now, and the @ sign is a common everyday occurance, but there was once when we were not being bombarded by spam on a regular basis. if you want to know who to kill…
i gave a button that says “I AM A TERRORIST!” to this person yesterday. she said that her web site wasn’t very exciting, and she was right. if any of the rest of you want buttons, magnets or stickers that say "I AM A TERRORIST!"…
Tight corsets cause nymphomania, orgasms can kill and wasps are a turn-on. John Naish looks at the top sex tips over the ages
Mating. Reproduction. Nothing is more crucial to humanity’s survival, so it would be logical to expect us to have got it sussed early in our evolution. But since the start of civilisation, the fundamentals of human sex — where to put it, how and when — have been absurdly confused by a parade of moralists, pundits and visionaries all claiming to know the magic secrets and only too happy to pass them on at a very reasonable price.
Just as every generation thinks that it invented sex, we also think we invented lovemaking manuals, or at least based them on a few prototypes such as the Kamasutra and Marie Stopes’s 1918 Married Love. But today’s maelstrom of books, videos and DVDs has a far richer, more twisted heritage than that.
The tradition of bestselling love guides goes back to the Ancient Chinese. Our earliest known manuals were first written in 300BC and buried in a family tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan province. Recent translation reveals the timeless nature of the subjects they tackled.
Written as Cosmo coverlines, they would look like this: Four Seasons of Sex — and Why Autumn is Hot, Hot, Hot; Wild New Positions; Tiger Roving, Gibbon Grabbing and Fish Gobbling; Aphrodisiacs to Keep You Up All Night!Plus Exclusive! Your Love Route to Immortality.
As ever, it was all nonsense: home-made Viagra recipes involved ingredients such as beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails. The books also promised that any man who had sex with a different virgin every night for 100 nights without ejaculating would live for ever (albeit rather uncomfortably).
These odd beginnings set a trend: weird tips from strange authors, many of whom became manual martyrs. Ovid, the Roman poet, advised women on the best positions to suit their bodies in his poem Ars Amatoria. For example: “If you are short, go on top/If you’re conspicuously tall, kneel with your head turned slightly sideways.” The prudish Emperor Augustus banished poor Ovid to a chilly outpost of empire (a small town on the Black Sea in modern Romania).
Medieval European sex advice followed the strait-laced trend: most of it said “don’t”. Pleasure paved Hell’s roads and misogynistic manuals such as De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) claimed that females used sex to drain men of their power and that some hid sharp shards of iron inside themselves to injure innocent lovers.
A technological breakthrough in the Renaissance put us back on our lascivious tracks. The printing press enabled publishers to churn out dodgy books faster than the Church authorities could ban them. Readers were treated to gems such as Mrs Isabella Cortes’s handy hint from 1561 that a mixture of quail testicles, large-winged ants, musk and amber was perfect for straightening bent penises. The era also brought us the earliest recorded recommendation of slippers as a sex aid (“Cold feet are a powerful hindrance to coition,” warned Giovanni Sinibaldi in his 1658 book Rare Verities.) But to find history’s oddest advisers, we must look to the Victorians and Edwardians. William Chidley, for example, believed that he could best promote his ideas by walking around in a toga. Chidley, an Australian, advised readers in his 1911 pamphlet The Answer that heavy clothing caused erections, which would lead to sexual overexcitement, illness and death, as well as being “ugly things” of which “we are all ashamed”.
He urged people to live on fruit and nuts and to practise a method of flaccid intercourse apparently based on horses’ sex lives. Yet it wasn’t his ideas that got him repeatedly arrested, but his silk toga, which the authorities thought indecent. After his death, supporters continued propounding his theories into the 1920s.
For the ultimate proof that you don’t need relevant qualifications to become a world expert, we turn to Marie Stopes. She was married and in her late thirties when she wrote one of Britain’s most enduring sex guides, Married Love. But she was also a virgin.
Stopes was inspired by her betrothal to Reginald “Ruggles” Gates, who, she told a divorce court, had failed ever to become “effectively rigid”. When Married Love hit the shelves early in 1918 it outsold the bestselling contemporary novels by a huge margin. By 1925, sales had passed the half-million mark.
Stopes was a fan of Hitler’s eugenics and arrogant enough to offer Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw advice on writing. Her main sex-manual innovation was a theory that women have a “sex tide” of passion that ebbs and flows on a fortnightly basis — and woe betide the man who didn’t understand this. In case her second husband, the manufacturing magnate Humphrey Verdon Roe, got it wrong, she made him sign a contract releasing her to have sex with other men.
So that’s our sexual forebears, a weird lot with funny ideas. Compared with them we might appear at the zenith of sexual enlightenment. Our age is remarkable for the sheer volume of sex advice being consumed: one woman in four now owns a sex manual, says a survey by the publishers Dorling Kindersley. Everyone from porn stars to the car-manual firm Haynes has one out. Well, I wonder. In 50 years’ time, I foresee the students at a university faculty of s exual semiotics studying the early Twenty-Ohs with the same mirth, incredulity and horror that shake us when we consider our ancestors’ obsessions. Perhaps they will wonder why we bought so many manuals, videos and DVDs but seemed to have so little time or energy left for sex. Maybe they will link our obsession with orgasms to our endless need to go shopping. They might also connect our avid consumption of sex advice to our growing terror of personal embarrassment and “getting it wrong”. They may even have a name for us; perhaps the erotic neurotics.
Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice, by John Naish (HarperElement £9.99), is available from Times Books First at £9.49 p&p free.
Wisdom of the ancients
How to pull
“Pick the woman’s worst feature and then make it appear desirable. Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks ‘fascinating’.” Philaenis, papyrus sex manual (2BC)
Go blondes!
“All women are lascivious but auburn blondes the most. A little straight forehead denotes an unbridled appetite in lust.” Giovanni Sinibaldi, Rare Verities: the Cabinet of Venus Unlock’d (1658)
Buns and corsets cause nymphomania
“Constricting the waist by corsets prevents the return of blood to the heart, overloads sexual organs and causes unnatural excitement of the sexual system. The majority of women follow the goddess Fashion and so also wear their hair in a heavy knot. This great pressure on their small brains produces great heat and chronic inflammation of their sexual organs. It is almost impossible that such women should lead other than a life of sexual excess.” Dr John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (1888)
On the other hand . . .
“The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.” Dr William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1858)
Indian enlargement
“Rub your penis with the bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing it for ten nights with oils, rub it with the bristles as before. Swelling will be gradually produced. Then lie on a hammock with a hole in it and hang the penis through the hole. Take away the pain from the swelling by using cool concoctions. The swelling lasts for life.” Kamasutra, translated by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. “Bunny” Arbuthnot (1883)
Climaxes can kill
“Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination, epilepsy and defecation have occurred in young men after first coitus. Lesions of various organs have taken place. In men of mature age the arteries have been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or prostitutes has caused death.” Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a Manual for Students (1933)
How often?
“The ordinary man can safely indulge about four times a month. More than that would be excess for a large majority of civilised men and women.” Lyman B. Sperry, Confidential Talks with Husband and Wife: a Book of Information and Advice for the Married and Marriageable (1900)
Single-handed signs
“Look at the habitual masturbator! See how thin, pale and haggard he appears; how his eyes are sunken; how long and cadaverous is his cast of countenance; how irritable he is and how sluggish, mentally and physically; how afraid he is to meet the eye of his fellow, feel his damp and chilling hand, so characteristic of great vital exhaustion.” Dr Henry Guernsey, Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects (1882)
Never marry these women
“Redheads. Any girl named after a mountain, a tree, a river or a bird. Ones with rough hands or feet. Ones who sigh, laugh or cry at meals. Any girl with inverted nipples, a beard, uneven breasts, flap ears, spindle legs or who is scrawny. Girls whose big toes are disproportionately small. Girls who make the ground shake when they walk past.” Koka Shastra, The Indian Scripture of Koka (12th century)
And, if you can’t find it, don’t worry
“The clitoris, while important, is not nearly as important as many of us have been taught or led to believe.” Edward Podolsky, Sex Technique for Husband and Wife (1947)
But whatever you do …
“Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.” Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)
there are numerous bit torrents of all of the residents music available, including several albums (or whatever they’re called when they’re bit torrents) of stuff i haven’t heard before… now i need more disk space… 8/
miscellaneous bits and pieces from the past week or so…
Study turns pot wisdom on head – Lab rats given drug 100 times as strong as pot
By DAWN WALTON
Friday, October 14, 2005
Calgary — Forget the stereotype about dopey potheads. It seems marijuana could be good for your brain.
While other studies have shown that periodic use of marijuana can cause memory loss and impair learning and a host of other health problems down the road, new research suggests the drug could have some benefits when administered regularly in a highly potent form.
Most “drugs of abuse” such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine and nicotine suppress growth of new brain cells. However, researchers found that cannabinoids promoted generation of new neurons in rats’ hippocampuses.
Hippocampuses are the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory, and the study held true for either plant-derived or the synthetic version of cannabinoids.
“This is quite a surprise,” said Xia Zhang, an associate professor with the Neuropsychiatry Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
“Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months,” he added.
The research by Dr. Zhang and a team of international researchers is to be published in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, but their findings are on-line now.
The scientists also noticed that cannabinoids curbed depression and anxiety, which Dr. Zhang says, suggests a correlation between neurogenesis and mood swings. (Or, it at least partly explains the feelings of relaxation and euphoria of a pot-induced high.)
Other scientists have suggested that depression is triggered when too few new brain cells are created in the hippocampus. One researcher of neuropharmacology said he was “puzzled” by the findings.
As enthusiastic as Dr. Zhang is about the potential health benefits, he warns against running out for a toke in a bid to beef up brain power or calm nerves.
The team injected laboratory rats with a synthetic substance called HU-210, which is similar, but 100 times as potent as THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the compound responsible for giving marijuana users a high.
They found that the rats treated regularly with a high dose of HU-210 — twice a day for 10 days — showed growth of neurons in the hippocampus. The researchers don’t know if pot, which isn’t as pure as the lab-produced version, would have the same effect.
“There’s a big gap between rats and humans,” Dr. Zhang points out.
But there is a lot of interest — and controversy — around the use of cannabinoids to improve human health.
Cannabinoids, such as marijuana and hashish, have been used to address pain, nausea, vomiting, seizures caused by epilepsy, ischemic stroke, cerebral trauma, tumours, multiple sclerosis and a host of other maladies.
There are herbal cannabinoids, which come from the cannabis plant, and the bodies of humans and animals produce endogenous cannabinoids. The substance can also be designed in the lab.
Cannabinoids can trigger the body’s two cannabinoid receptors, which control the activity of various cells in the body.
One receptor, known as CB1, is found primarily in the brain. The other receptor, CB2, was thought to be found only in the immune system.
However, in a separate study to be published today in the journal Science, a group of international researchers have located the CB2 receptor in the brain stems of rats, mice and ferrets.
The brain stem is responsible for basic body function such as breathing and the gastrointestinal tract. If stimulated in a certain way, CB2 could be harnessed to eliminate the nausea and vomiting associated with post-operative analgesics or cancer and AIDS treatments, according to the researchers.
“Ultimately, new therapies could be developed as a result of these findings,” said Keith Sharkey, a gastrointestinal neuroscientist at the University of Calgary, lead author of the study.
(Scientists are trying to find ways to block CB1 as a way to decrease food cravings and limit dependence on tobacco.)
When asked whether his findings explain why some swear by pot as a way to avoid the queasy feeling of a hangover, Dr. Sharkey paused and replied: “It does not explain the effects of smoked or inhaled or ingested substances.”
and, almost exactly the same article from UPI:
Marijuana may spur new brain cells
By STEVE MITCHELL
Senior Medical Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 (UPI) — Scientists said Thursday that marijuana appears to promote the development of new brain cells in rats and have anti-anxiety and anti-depressant effects, a finding that could have an impact on the national debate over medical uses of the drug.
Other illegal and legal drugs, including opiates, alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress the formation of new brain cells when used chronically, but marijuana’s effect on that process was uncertain.
Now, a team led by Xia Zhang of the department of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon may have found evidence the drug spurs new brain cells to form in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, and this in turn reduces anxiety and depression.
Marijuana appears “to be the only illicit drug whose capacity to produce increased … neurons is positively correlated with its (anti-anxiety) and anti-depressant-like effects,” Zhang and colleagues wrote in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The paper was posted online Thursday.
In the study, rats were given injections of HU210 — a synthesized version of a cannabinoid chemical found in marijuana — twice per day for 10 days.
Zhang told United Press International this would be “a high dose” of smoked marijuana, but he added he is not certain how many equivalent joints it would take or whether patients now using the drug typically would be getting this much HU210.
Although HU210 was injected, Zhang said there would be no difference if it was obtained by smoking marijuana.
The rats showed evidence of new neurons in the hippocampus dentate gyrus, a region of the brain that plays a role in developing memories.
Zhang’s team suspected the new brain cells also might be associated with a reduction in anxiety and depression, because previous studies had indicated medications used to treat anxiety and depression achieve their effect this way.
To find out, they treated rats with HU210 for 10 days and then tested them one month later. When placed in a new environment, the rats were quicker to eat their food than rats that did not receive the compound, which suggested there was a reduction in anxiety behaviors.
Another group of rats treated with HU210 showed a reduction in the duration of immobility in a forced swimming test, which is an indication the compound had an anti-depressant effect.
Asked how he thought the findings might impact the debate over using marijuana to treat medical conditions, Zhang said, “Our results indicate cannabinoids could be used for the treatment of anxiety and depression.”
He added that his view is “marijuana should be used as alcohol or nicotine,” noting “it has been used for treating various diseases for years in other countries.”
Last June the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the federal ban on marijuana supersedes the laws of certain states that allow the substance to be used for medicinal purposes, such as the treatment of pain, nausea in cancer patients and glaucoma. Eleven states have passed laws legalizing marijuana use by patients with a doctor’s approval, including California, Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
The Bush administration, through the Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Agency, began conducting raids in California in 2001 on patients using marijuana. Two of those arrested by the DEA — Angel Raich, who suffers from brain cancer, and Diane Monson, who used the drug to help alleviate chronic back pain — sued Attorney General John Ashcroft, requesting a court order to be allowed to grow and smoke marijuana, which led to the Supreme Court decision.
Paul Armentano, senior policy analyst with the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told UPI he thought the findings “would have a positive impact on moving forward this debate, because it is giving … a scientific explanation that further supports long-observed anecdotal evidence, and further lends itself to the notion that marijuana, unlike so many other prescription drugs and controlled substances, appears to have incredibly low toxicity and as a result lacks potential harm to the brain that many of these drugs have.”
The DEA Web site, however, contends that “marijuana is a dangerous, addictive drug that poses significant health threats to users,” including cancer and impaired mental functioning.
Armentano said this is a distortion of what scientific studies actually show. Studies in animals indicate marijuana actually may protect against many forms of cancer, rather than cause the disease, he said. In addition, studies in marijuana smokers have found little evidence of cognitive deficits, and even when they do, the defects disappear if the person stops smoking for 30 days.
Tri-Lamb Material 69% Nerd, 43% Geek, 65% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd and Dork, earning you the coveted title of: Tri-Lamb Material.
The classic, “80’s” nerd, you are what most people think of when they think “nerd,” largely due to 80’s movies like Revenge of the Nerds and TV shows like Head of the Class. You’re exceptionally bright and smart, and partly because of that have never quite fit in with your peers or social groups. Perhaps you’re realized, or will someday, that it is possible to retain all of the things that you like about being brilliant and still make peace with the social cliques around you. Or maybe you won’t–it’s really not necessary. As the brothers of Lambda Lambda Lambda discovered, you’re fine just the way you are and can take pride in that. I mean, who wants to be like Ogre, right!?
At your darkest moments, you feel frustrated. At work and school, you do best when you’re organizing. When you love someone, you tend to worry about them.
In friendship, you are emotional and sympathetic. Your ideal careers are: radio announcer, finance, teaching, ministry, and management. You will leave your mark on the world with organizational leadership, maybe as the author of self-help books.
finally, Original Pussy Beer… i have in mind specifically when i post this, because he’s a beer conoisseur, but i’m not sure i would go that far myself…
now i’m really glad i got fired from minuteman press. they gave me a raise last week, just before i was fired. i got my final check in the mail today, and they raised me .50 cents an hour, so instead of making $11.00 an hour, i was making $11.50 an hour… this is despite the fact that i told them when they hired me originally that i needed to make $14.00 an hour minimum, and from what i understand, other people in the same position at other shops in the area are making between $17.00 and $21.00 an hour. if i was still working there, there would definitely be some mighty complaining being done, and i’d probably quit simply because of that, if they hadn’t already fired me. they were complaining about how my mistakes were costing them money, but i get the impression that if they’re paying that little, they should expect to get work from their employees that matches.
i saw dr. kim yesterday. the first thing she did was recommend medications. she only did a cursory physical exam and she doesn’t even know me at all.
when i said i wasn’t interested, she tried really hard to convince me, but honestly, the more she tried to convince me, the more i was convinced that i don’t need medications… especially since she said that if my home situation and my work situation was the way i wanted it, that i probably wouldn’t need medications… i figure that if i have a choice between living the way i want, or taking drugs, i’ll choose living the way i want every time and if the only other option is taking drugs that i wouldn’t need otherwise then i’ll decide not to take them anyway. i’d rather be depressed than take drugs i don’t need.
i’ve got an appointment with ned, the ptsd counsellor, tomorrow… 8/
Ok listen up you ass jockeys because I’m only going to say this once. If I thought I’d have you morons putting idols of me nailed to a goddamned cross up all over the place, I would’ve requested something more aesthetically pleasing. You think I like coming down to earth disguised as a nubile co-ed and seeing reminders of how I died everywhere?
Newsflash: I didn’t die for your sins. I died because some so-called friend of mine ratted me out. That is no big deal. Happens all the time. But man, it fucking hurt up there. And it was hot, too.
But what’s with this nonsense about the bible? Quit fooling yourselves. It is a PARABLE, a story meant to tell you how to live your life. If you believe the earth was created in seven days, I have a freaking bridge to sell you in Manhattan. Asshat.
It’s true: I am a republican. But only because I support state’s rights above federal involvement, not because I think this bullshit in my name is more right than what Vishnu’s got cooking up across the sea. Those whacky bastards are blue and have many arms, did you know that? Fucking crazy!
Do me a favor. People who live in glass trailers shouldn’t throw stones. So please stop heaving rocks in my name, or I’ll come down there and put my neener up to your dome and pop a cap (I’ve been hangin’ with Tupac recently, he’s sweet).
And stop asking what I would do. Daddy gave you free will for a fucking reason, you fucking nutcase. Use it.
But since you keep asking: What would I do? Man, I’d bang your sister, that’s what. But she has crabs. A burning bush, so to speak.
Ok you lot, put that in your pipe and smoke it – this is my word.
Ps – I am currently incarnated as a handsome, virile young man. If you seek to repent, kneel before me. But only if you are an attractive woman who owns black stiletto boots that go up to your knees (and you’re willing to leave them on).
sigh… how come when i am mailed something funny it turns out to be fake?
oh well, i’ll post it anyway.
In light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (excepting Kansas, which she does not fancy).
Your new prime minister, Tony Blair, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary
2. Then look up aluminum, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘favour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘ise’. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up vocabulary).
3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as “like” and “you know” is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.
4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.
5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you’re not adult enough to sort hings out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you’re not grown up enough to handle a gun. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler.
A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
6. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will star tdriving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.
7. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) – roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it.
8. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.
9. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.
10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie MacDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.
11. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full Kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).
12. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable.
13. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.
14. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due backdated to 1776).
in spite of the fact that i’m probably a lot happier not working for that bunch of morons any longer, i’m really depressed. on the other hand, now that i’m not working, i got in touch with moe’s friend kim, the social worker, who re-scheduled my appointment with dr. kim (no relation) for monday, and an appointment to see ned the ptsd counsellor on thursday, so that’s supposedly a good thing, but i’ll believe it when i see it…
malcat is moving to LA, which means that he’s selling his house on delridge. i went over there this morning to cut a hole in the front wall of his downstairs apartment so that he could have a pest inspection before selling the house. it was supposed to be a 24×24 hole, but it ended up being a 24×48 hole because half of it, the first part of the hole, had a whole bunch of studs and house-exterior on the outside which prevented me from going all the way through… which, of course, wasn’t apparent until after i had already cut through the sheetrock… fortunately, mal’s moving, and he told me that any problems would, by definition, not be my fault regardless of what i did, so i’m relieved about that.
UNICEF bombs the Smurfs in fund-raising campaign for ex-child soldiers – “The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters’ village is annihilated by warplanes… The animation was approved by the family of the Smurfs’ late creator, ‘Peyo’.”
i’ve been a fan of them for a long time, but ®™ark has a bunch of projects that make me really wonder who pays them to do this kind of shit. really. it sounds like a lot of fun, but being a corporate saboteur doesn’t sound like a way to pay the bills…
Near Impossible Your life has been 66% difficult.
Dear Lord. Based on your family, money, political context, and personal situation — during the important years of your development — it appears your life was NEAR IMPOSSIBLE. What does this mean?
Well, the “difficulty” of your life is a measure of how rough you had it. In your case it appears the dice were thrown snakeeyes — so much went wrong during your development years that it’s become hard to succeed.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
well, the question i posed at the end of this entry has been answered. the answer is 21 weeks and 6 days.
i got fired today. there were a bunch of jobs that got screwed up because the artwork either wasn’t there at all and i had to create it – which i did incorrectly because of the fact that they only had old, incorrect samples to go by and they were unwilling to send the job to the customer for proofreading because it was a reprint of a job that had been printed before, regardless of the fact that it was over a year since we printed the job the last time – or the artwork was there, but it was incorrect from the beginning and, being as how that was the only artwork that was there for those particular jobs, i assumed that it was the correct artwork, even though it had been superceded before i got there, and for some reason the new artwork had been deleted and the old artwork had been saved – all before i even started working there – but because these jobs got screwed up "on my watch" so to speak, even though they were screwed up before i even started working there, i got blamed for their screwups… and as a result, majid went on a flaming, part-farsi (or whatever language it is that he speaks) tirade, made up a whole bunch of completely arbitrary "rules" which wouldn’t really affect anything except majid’s state of mind (or lack thereof), but would only make my job that much more difficult if i actually followed them, and said that if i couldn’t abide by them, that i was fired…
so, i’m fired now.
part of me is relieved that i don’t have to go to work and work with that crew of blithering idiots any more, but part of me is wondering how long it will be before i’m living in a motorhome somewhere, or worse…
and yet another part of me is just waiting to see, now that i’ve got the network a lot more organised than it was before i got there, how long it will be before they’ve totally fucked everything up and come whimpering to me asking me to fix some thing or another that i was able to get to work, but now that i’m gone they can’t figure it out any longer… i wonder how much i would charge to fix said screwup then…
Johnny Jetpack Propulsion Laboratories is my friend nathan arnold and various other folks (including me). their scheduled launch of Johnny Jetpack was unexpectedly cancelled by the tight-assed seattle city council member david della, park superintendent ken bounds and virginia swanson, special event coordinator for the city of seattle. complaints and harassment are in order.
The predatory tactics used by military recruiters to lure in youth from our schools and universities feed on desperation by offering dreams of cash for college, marketable skills, a signing bonus, and promises of cushy desk jobs. “Green card” soldiers fight for the hope of citizenship. Recruiters have been known to deceive by offering that which they cannot guarantee.
The recruiters, as a tangent, are doing little more that what George W. Bush did. They both invent reasons to persuade us to kill and die. Where the recruiters paint visions of a better life for the recruits, Bush offered us the opportunity to defend ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. Then, after the proof could not be found in the pudding, he shifted it to establishing the first democratic domino in the region. Later, it became about taking on Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This shifting logic is the equivalent of the shifts a new recruit experiences when he or she enlists. Instead of training as a medic in sunny Florida as promised, the bright-eyed recruit ends up on the front lines in sunny Iraq.
Obviously, then, this is more than just about the dishonesty of quota and bonus-driven recruiters, this is about the politics of the war these recruitment efforts are part of. Thus, military recruiters are predictably becoming the lightening rod for the anger of the betrayed public. On schools and universities, student activists who confront recruiters are facing expulsion, arrest, and other attacks.
Thanks to the Solomon Act universities lose some government funding if they deny recruiters access to our future leaders. Those student-activists trying to boot the recruiters off campus face more than the Department of Defense, they have a budget-obsessed university administration to work against. The danger is that they will prioritize free money from the government over free speech for the students.
Before we can talk about whether campus recruiters should leave, we have to make sure there can be a debate. At George Mason University, specifically, the students have to fight for the freedom of speech just to protest the presence of the recruiters. Last Thursday, Tariq Khan, a student there who served for four years in the Air Force, simply stood inside the student center with a handful of pamphlets and a small sign taped on his chest. He shared on the sign his personal experiences with the recruiters: they lie. It said, “Recruiters lie. Don’t be deceived.”
Khan just stood there, mostly silent. He offered his literature to anyone who asked for it. Before he knew it, a ROTC student and his side-kick, a lumpy right-winger, were yelling at him. With foam coming out of their mouths, they called him a “pussy.” They talked with enthusiasm about the thrill of getting to kill Iraqis. The ROTC student grew angry with Khan’s calm demeanor. Several people tried to intervene by joining the debate. Finally, the ROTC student grabbed the sign and ripped it. Khan calmly began to write another notebook paper-sized sign.
Campus security arrived and told Khan he was violating school policy by being there. Instead of arresting the ROTC student for assault and the willful destruction of property, the officer sought to remove Khan for “tabling” outside of the area where tabling is permitted. Khan did not even have a table with him.
Khan refused to leave, believing the Constitution protected his right to just stand there. The officer began to handcuff him. Khan did not resist, but he did not comply. He saw it rightfully as an unjustified arrest. Soon, some freedom-loving students were chanting “kick his ass,” and a few actually helped the officer subdue Khan. Though he was non-violent the entire time, they caused him several injuries. A witness saw the officer “putting him in a headlock, choking him, and then proceeding to throw him against the stage.” He was later charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct.
I wonder if the recruiters who reeled in Khan fresh out of high school fed him the fancy talk about defending our freedom–the same freedom that got him a gash on his forehead. They probably just told him about the great marketable skills he would learn, and all the money he would get for college. Instead, they had him cleaning bathrooms and doing menial labor–the type of work that requires no skills and no plans for comfortable living. And the money his four years of service brings him is not quite enough to pay for four years of college.
We could blame the officer for acting improperly, like we could fault Lyndie England and other bad apples. Clearly, the problem here is a policy framework that criminalizes free speech and those who practice it. If universities want to benefit from recruiters telling students about the freedoms they have to fight for, at least let those freedoms be practiced on campus. Otherwise, students might just realize that the biggest threat to freedom is not foreign enemies, but those claiming to protect them.
Please sign this petition calling on the university to drop the charges: http://fawcettweb.com/peace/
Will Youmans has a blog: www.kabobfest.com.
Pinky You scored 28% sweetness, 51% intelligence, 42% rage, and 61% lunacy!
You are Pinky! When a little bit of brains meets a lot of wacky, they’re sure to find you there. Try not to hurt anyone, though!
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.
But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.
On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High. “At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”
She says the student was upset.
“He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis.
She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.
“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”
Then they got down to his poster.
“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”
At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.
The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.
“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”
A person in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”
Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.
Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.”
Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”
Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”
today massoud asked me if i knew of any way to make a “snapshot” on a windows machine. turns out he meant a “screen shot” but that still doesn’t take away from the fact that he was sitting in front of a windows machine when he asked me this, had been for at least 45 minutes, had been staring directly at the keyboard, and had somehow missed the key that says “PRINT SCREEN” right in front of him…
today there were two jobs that needed to be reprinted because of chaos. the fact that i got yelled at because of other peoples’ stupidity is the upshot of the whole deal, but this is how it went down. on job #1, there were two parts, a “shell” or masthead that gets printed in two colours, and an “imprint”, which gets printed on the shell. they wanted 20,000 shells, but only 1000 imprints, which means that they’ll be using the shell for jobs in the future as well. the last time we printed this particular file (the shell, not the imprint) was over a year ago, well before i started working there, and when i went to find it, as i generally expect with documents that haven’t been printed for a year or more, it wasn’t in the right place on the network… in fact it was the only file i could find like it on the network anywhere, and it was in a folder that was originally labeled “trash” when i first started, but that’s a separate issue entirely. i used that file and updated it with a new work order number. i do it this way because i’ve been bitten in the ass by files that weren’t in the right place on the network, so i re-created them – from defective prints and/or other incorrect information – and caused even more chaos than there was already, so i have gotten into the habit of using old files for jobs that are being reprinted so that won’t happen as much.
so we printed the 20,000 shell masters, and the 1000 imprints… then we discover that the address on the masthead is the wrong address.
the file which i found in the folder labeled “trash”, the only file like it anywhere on the network, had the old address on it!
why the hell they decided to save that file, and not the one with the new, correct address on it, is so far beyond me that it boggles the mind.
the other job is a similar story: i created 2 new business cards from an old file that i found on the network, which was the correct file, but for some reason, out of two columns of cards, one column was off center – not enough that i could see it when it was on the computer, nor enough that it was perceptible to greg, but when it came to cutting the cards they were off center enough that the whole job has to be reprinted.
naturally, it was discovered that both jobs had to be reprinted around the same time, which, coincidentally, was also the time when majid was alone in the shop with me and greg… and majid lost it. he yelled at me, and what he yelled made sense in that they were english words that made sense together in a sentence, but that sentence had absolutely nothing to do with the problem. what he yelled at me was “i want all jobs to print as .pdfs from now on. no more printing native files, convert everything to .pdf before printing it.” the only thing that converting every job to a .pdf before printing would do is add an extra, unnecessary and sometimes impossible task to the job. he also spent quite a bit of time yelling at greg as well, but i didn’t pay much attention to that because i was busy fixing the screwed up files (which i did, and had new plates output in about half an hour), and then he stormed out of the shop and was gone until after lunch, and just before i left for the day – at 2:30, because of lack of work.
i’ve collected a huge quantity of files that would have been lost, because they were in the folder which had been labeled “trash” and if it weren’t for the fact that i was warned by my immediate predecessor to not do so, i would have thrown it away without even looking in it. why they decided to keep the old masthead artwork – which i had to change, convert to .eps and re-import into the “shell” document before producing new plates, and why they decided to keep a file full of business cards that were off center without fixing them is pure, unadulterated stupidity, yelling at me is adding rudeness and yelling something that doesn’t address the problem is the PRIMARY reason why i HAVE TO get out of there. have to, have to, have to, HAVE TO, HAVE TO!!!!
if it weren’t for my injury, i don’t know whether i’d be able to take it or not, but since my injury there is NO WAY i can take this level of stupidity.
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.
The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.
“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.
The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.
Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.
But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”.
The document shows how far the Catholic Church has come since the 17th century, when Galileo was condemned as a heretic for flouting a near-universal belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible by advocating the Copernican view of the solar system. Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible.
In the document, the bishops acknowledge their debt to biblical scholars. They say the Bible must be approached in the knowledge that it is “God’s word expressed in human language” and that proper acknowledgement should be given both to the word of God and its human dimensions.
They say the Church must offer the gospel in ways “appropriate to changing times, intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries”.
The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”
They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.
“Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”
Of the notorious anti-Jewish curse in Matthew 27:25, “His blood be on us and on our children”, a passage used to justify centuries of anti-Semitism, the bishops say these and other words must never be used again as a pretext to treat Jewish people with contempt. Describing this passage as an example of dramatic exaggeration, the bishops say they have had “tragic consequences” in encouraging hatred and persecution. “The attitudes and language of first-century quarrels between Jews and Jewish Christians should never again be emulated in relations between Jews and Christians.”
As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing.
Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb.
The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”
In their foreword to the teaching document, the two most senior Catholics of the land, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, explain its context.
They say people today are searching for what is worthwhile, what has real value, what can be trusted and what is really true.
The new teaching has been issued as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council document explaining the place of Scripture in revelation. In the past 40 years, Catholics have learnt more than ever before to cherish the Bible. “We have rediscovered the Bible as a precious treasure, both ancient and ever new.”
A Christian charity is sending a film about the Christmas story to every primary school in Britain after hearing of a young boy who asked his teacher why Mary and Joseph had named their baby after a swear word. The Breakout Trust raised £200,000 to make the 30-minute animated film, It’s a Boy. Steve Legg, head of the charity, said: “There are over 12 million children in the UK and only 756,000 of them go to church regularly.
That leaves a staggering number who are probably not receiving basic Christian teaching.”
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
UNTRUE
Genesis ii, 21-22
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man
Genesis iii, 16
God said to the woman [after she was beguiled by the serpent]: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Matthew xxvii, 25
The words of the crowd: “His blood be on us and on our children.”
Revelation xix,20
And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshipped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with brimstone.
CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. (If you lose, then we ask that you make a donation to the apostolate of CAI). Obviously, we at CAI don’t think anyone CAN prove it, and thus we can offer such a generous reward. In fact, we may up the ante in the near future.
You can submit your “proofs” to our e-mail address [email protected]. We will then offer a response. Both your “proof” and our response will be posted on the CAI science page at our website. If you do not want your actual name listed, we will change your name, but your contents will be posted. If you do not want either your name or your contents posted, then you are not eligible for a reply from CAI nor the $1,000 reward. CAI will be the sole judge of whether you have successfully proven your case. But since CAI is built on its reputation of honesty and truthfulness, rest assured that if you do indeed prove your case, you will be rewarded the money.
Now a word of caution. By “proof” we mean that your explanations must be direct, observable, physical, natural, repeatable, unambiguous and comprehensive. We don’t want hearsay, popular opinion, “expert” testimony, majority vote, personal conviction, organizational rulings, superficial analogies, appeals to “simplicity,” “apologies” to Galileo, or any other indirect means of persuasion which do not qualify as scientific proof.
The $1,000 Challenge will go on indefinitely. So, if you’re up for the challenge, take your best shot!
Some may be tempted to say, “Oh this silly. Everyone knows the earth goes around the sun. What is CAI trying to prove, anyway?! What difference does it make?” Well here’s the long and short answer to that question. It directly effects how you view God, Scripture, the Church and Modern Man.
* It effects your view of Modern Man because if he is wrong about the two teachings he has proposed as fundamental to modern knowledge (Evolution and Heliocentrism) this suggests that many other things man believes about the world are suspect of falsehood. As we know, modern man has continually used the Copernican model and its variant forms (Galileo, Kepler, et al) in an effort to weaken both the authority of Scripture and the authority of the Church to hold them accountable for the way they live their lives. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “We don’t have to take the Bible literally because, as we all know, the sun doesn’t go around the earth, but Scripture says it does. So why should I trust the Bible?”
If Scripture can be dismissed by claiming that it is mostly a collection of myths and fables from ignorant and primitive people; and if the Church can be faulted for siding with an aberrant view of cosmology; then modern man thinks he has found the ultimate excuse for relieving himself of being bound by either Scripture or the Church.
That is not all. If one examines the so-called “scientific proofs” for either Evolution or Heliocentrism, the proofs simply do not exist. Yet modern man, so desperate to find his excuses, has turned mere theories into “facts,” and has thereby convinced the world that IT, not the Church or Scripture, is the king of truth.
* It effects your view of the Church because if it can be proven that, after the Church clung so tenaciously to the view that the sun revolves around the earth, but that now the Church finally has to admit she was wrong about one of its more authoritative teachings in the seventeenth century, this does not bode well for convincing modern man to abide by the Church’s official teaching on ANY issue. Unfortunately, this is precisely the attitude we have seen from modern man. Man, because he has convinced himself that his “science” has turned Scripture into superstitious myths and fables; and the Church into a mere purveyor of the same; has become so cock-sure of himself in the little world he has created, that he not only has no need for God, he has attacked, and thinks he has destroyed, the very foundations of that belief. The modern Church, because she has been weak in fighting this issue, and indeed, ever since the days of George Terrell and Teilhard de Chardin has been infiltrated by free-thinking evolutionists, it totters to-and-fro, in one instance apologizing and condoning, and in other instances drawing back and distancing itself, resulting in no sure-footing for the world to rest upon. Meanwhile, a recent poll of young people in Europe reveals that 47% of them attribute their spiritual apathy to the difference between the theological and scientific explanations for the origin of the world. As for the Church’s previous condemnations of Copernicanism and Galileo, here are the facts: The Inquisition of 1615 in Rome declared the position of Galileo to be “scientifically false, and anti-Scriptural or heretical, and that he must renounce it” (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol 6, p. 344). Following this was a decree from the Congregation of the Index on March 5, 1616, prohibiting various heretical works, and among them were those advocating the Copernican system. As for the Pope at that time, Paul V, “there is no doubt that he fully approved the decision, having presided at the session of the Inquisition, wherein the matter was discussed and decided” (Ibid, p. 344). To Galileo’s dismay, the next Pope, Urban VIII, would not annul the judgment of the Inquisition. The Encyclopedia concludes: “That both these pontiffs [Paul V and Urban VIII] were convinced anti-Copernicans cannot be doubted, nor that they believed the Copernican system to be unscriptural and desired its suppression. The question is, however, whether either of them condemned the doctrine ex cathedra. This, it is clear, they never did” (Ibid, p. 345). So despite what anyone says, the Catholic Church has never endorsed the Copernican theory and no pope has ever annulled the decrees of Paul V or Urban VIII. The only thing the Church has done is apologized for the treatment of Galileo in a 1992 address by John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Science.
* It effects your view of Scripture. Scripture is very clear that the earth is stationary and that the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, “flat-earthers” are not accepted here, since Scripture does not teach a flat earth, nor did the Fathers teach it). If there was only one or two places where the Geocentric teaching appeared in Scripture, one might have the license to say that those passages were just incidental and really didn’t reflect the teaching of Scripture at large. But the fact is that Geocentrism permeates Scripture. Here are some of the more salient passages (Sirach 43:2-5; 43:9-10; 46:4; Psalm 19:5-7; 104:5; 104:19; 119:90; Ecclesiastes 1:5; 2 Kings 20:9-11; 2 Chronicles 32:24; Isaiah 38:7-8; Joshua 10:12-14; Judges 5:31; Job 9:7; Habakkuk 3:11; (1 Esdras 4:12); James 1:12). I could list many more, but I think these will suffice.
Now, of course, someone will immediately object: “Well, we don’t have to interpret these passages literally.” Says who? The Church has made no dogmatic teaching saying that we don’t have to take these Scriptures literally. In fact, Leo XIII taught in Providentissimus Deus (1893) that, in the first instance, Scripture MUST be interpreted literally, unless there is some compelling reason to interpret it otherwise.
In fact, I find it quite puzzling that Catholics, who would die for a literal interpretation of the Scripture “This is my body” in Matthew 26:26; or “unless a man is born of water and the Spirit” in John 3:5; or “upon this rock I will build my church” in Matthew 16:18; or “he who sins you shall forgive they are forgiven” in John 20:23, suddenly become so anti-literal when even clearer passages (i.e., those teaching Geocentrism) permeate Scripture. A common epithet foisted upon Catholics who disbelieve in Evolution and Heliocentrism is that they have “a Protestant mind-set,” based on the prevailing opinion that some Protestants are known to read the Bible more literally. Yet isn’t it ironic that to the Protestant mind it is the CATHOLIC who maintains the crassly literal interpretation of Scripture when, for example, passages such as Matthew 26:26 are interpreted by the Catholic Church to mean that we actually eat Jesus’ body — something absolutely repulsive to Protestants.
So it seems that the issues before us are not those revolving around whether one is Catholic or Protestant; rather, it’s a matter of which Scriptures someone decides to interpret literally and which he decides not to interpret literally. Of course, that polarity leaves the whole thing wide open for discussion, which is precisely what we are seeking to do at CAI (except the passages that have been dogmatized by the Church).
* Finally, it also effects your view of God because God says that, even though for Him all things are possible (Matt 19:26), there is one thing that is absolutely impossible for Him: and that is to lie (Titus 1:2). Again, if we are to base our understanding of a passage, such as Matthew 26:26, on the precise literal meaning of Jesus’ words because we believe that He actually said what He meant and could not lie to us, then why do some people find it so easy to read the above passages which speak about a stationary earth and a moving sun as mere figures of speech? The only reason is that people believe science has proven that the earth goes around the sun. If they are right then, of course, we would have to interpret those passages figuratively.
But the $64,000 question is: Are they right? Mind you, this cannot simply be a case of saying that the Heliocentric model works. Mathematically speaking, as several astronomers have told me, one could make Jupiter the center of the universe and work out a mathematical model in which all the motions of the heavenly bodies are accounted for, but a mathematical model is not necessarily reality (which is precisely the problem with modern science, since much of it is mere mathematical hypothesis, not necessarily physical reality).
The main question they have to answer is: Can it be proven, by direct and irrefutable scientific evidence, that the Heliocentric system is the ONLY viable system to understand the universe. I can safely tell you that the answer to that question is an unqualified NO, and thus I don’t make the “CAI $1000 Challenge” lightly. Even the more astute heliocentric physicists have admitted as much. As the famous physicist Hans Reichenbach has said: “Here lies one of the reasons which led the scientists to accept the Copernican system, even though it must be conceded that, from the modern standpoint, practically identical results could be obtained by means of a somewhat revised Ptolemaic system” (From Copernicus to Einstein, p. 18). Hence, even if there is a possibility that the Heliocentric system is wrong and the Geocentric right, then it would behoove Scriptural exegetes to reserve their opinion on the passages of Scripture which teach Geocentrism, for science has not proven their case against them.
By the same token, did the Church seek advice and counsel from science when she, after interpreting Matthew 26:26, took a dogmatic stand on its literal meaning? Of course not, for science had nothing to offer in the way of irrefutable proof that Transubstantiation could not occur. In the same way, science has no irrefutable proof that the earth revolves around the sun, and this, in my opinion, demands a literal interpretation of the Geocentric passages in Scripture. If someday science can prove, irrefutably, that the earth indeed goes around the sun, then we will understand all those passages figuratively, but not until that time; and it is my opinion that we will NEVER have to do so.
If someone wants to argue that the Catholic Church takes Matthew 26:26 literally because the Tradition of the Church as far back as the early Fathers binds us to do so; well, the same can be said about Geocentrism, since all of the Fathers, without exception, were Geocentrists, even in the face of several Greek astronomers (Aristarchus of Samos; Heraclides of Pontus) who were already advocating Heliocentrism one thousand years before Copernicus.
So, if you’re so inclined, take your best shot! We’re laying our reputation on the line in order to bring this vital truth to the world, and we at CAI have the courage to do so.
Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics International
May 7, 2002
another short day… i left at 11:30 this morning because i finished up all the work there was to do, and they said they wouldn’t have any more until at least tomorrow. massoud is back, but so far there has been no change in the network, apart from the fact that the colour and black and white composite printers are working intermittently. i’ve discovered that the really old mac – the tower without USB – actually has more RAM than the newer old mac – the imac – which means that there are a few jobs that i can work on on the imac, but if i want to send the job for plates i have to do it from the tower because otherwise it prints the fonts incorrectly in spite of the fact that the right fonts are activated.
You’re a hydra. You have many different outlooks on life, and know how to utilize each one to make the best of any situation. Others may mistake this for hypocrisy or even insanity, but you know yourself better than that. Indecision is your greatest flaw. Your alignment tends slightly towards *evil*. What mythical beast are you? brought to you by Quizilla
it seems like just the other day there were so many links on my desktop that i had to update in order to clear them off, and there’s already a whole pile of new links, and i have to update again.
i finally got in touch with moe’s friend kim, who set me up with a counsellor to help me deal with PTSD, and she re-encouraged me to apply for SSI disability again, despite the fact that they’ve already turned me down twice. she says they always deny everyone three times. i wonder how the people who really can’t work end up getting through the whole thing. also she says that they start accumulating money for you starting the first time you apply, so when they do actually accept your application you get a large lump sum that’s all the accumulated money from the first time you applied… and it’s already been two and a half years since the first time i applied… if i apply again, and again (emphasis on "if"), i’m going to buy a computer or something with my first check… although it would be a good thing for me to consider, because i can work while on disability, and there’s free health care coverage which i don’t currently have. of course i’ve never actually needed health care coverage, except for that one time… but half a million in medical bills for 2 months of brain surgery and hospital care is a pretty big exception…
work is work… massoud had to go back to iran for something or another, and he left the network in a workable, but different and not entirely put together state. there’s no word when he’s going to be back. i left at noon yesterday, and at 3:45 today because there wasn’t anything for me to do. also i spent a whole bunch of time doing bindery and cutting jobs because there was no typesetting. majid has been being really nice to me, but he’s been arguing with greg when he thinks i’m not listening. today greg said that he couldn’t do a job because of restrictions caused by the press, and majid said that he was tired of hearing greg’s excuses and he would be hiring a new press operator soon, and training them himself… <shudder> the mere thought of having to break in a new press operator, especially one who has been "trained" by majid, is enough to make me want to quit now.
Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.
“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.
“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”
Rep. DeLay Calls Indictment ‘Baseless’
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – A Texas grand jury on Wednesday indicted Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates on charges of conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post. A defiant DeLay insisted he was innocent and called the prosecutor a “partisan fanatic.”
“I have done nothing wrong. … I am innocent,” DeLay told a Capitol Hill news conference during which he criticized the Texas prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, repeatedly. DeLay said the charges amounted to “one of the weakest and most baseless indictments in American history.”
In Austin, Earle told reporters, “Our job is to prosecute abuses of power and to bring those abuses to the public.” He has noted previously that he has prosecuted many Democrats in the past.
Republicans at the Capitol selected Rep. Roy Blunt (news, bio, voting record), R-Mo., the current Republican whip — No. 3 in the leadership ranks — to fill the vacancy temporarily.
Reps. David Dreier of California, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Eric Cantor of Virginia, the chief deputy whip, will assist Blunt with some of the majority leader duties.
Republicans expressed their backing for DeLay, the first House leader to be indicted in office in at least a century.
“He will fight this and we give him our utmost support,” said Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois following a private GOP meeting.
DeLay said he was certain the indictment would be dismissed and shrugged off the charges as a “political witch hunt” designed to drive a wedge in the Republican ranks.
“If the Democrats think we’re going to go crawl in a hole and not accomplish our agenda, I wish they could have been a fly on the wall” of the closed-door meeting, DeLay said after the session.
The indictment accused DeLay, 58, of a conspiracy to violate Texas election law, which prohibits the use of corporate donations to advocate the election or defeat of political candidates. Prosecutors say the alleged scheme worked in a roundabout way, with the donations going to a DeLay-founded political committee, then to the Republican National Committee and eventually to GOP candidates in Texas.
The indictment stems from a plan DeLay helped set in motion in 2001 to help Republicans win control of the Texas House in the 2002 elections for the first time since Reconstruction.
Indicted with DeLay were two of his associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay’s national political committee.
The grand jury’s foreman, William Gibson, told The Associated Press that Earle didn’t pressure members one way or the other. “Ronnie Earle didn’t indict him. The grand jury indicted him,” Gibson told The Associated Press in an interview at his home.
Gibson, 76, a retired sheriff’s deputy in Austin, said of DeLay: “He’s probably doing a good job. I don’t have anything against him. Just something happened.”
The Texas Republican temporarily stepped down from the No. 2 leadership post that he had held since 2002, as required by House rules.
Blunt said he was confident DeLay would be cleared of the allegations and return to his leadership job.
Criminal conspiracy is a state felony punishable by six months to two years in a state jail and a fine of up to $10,000.
At the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the president still considered DeLay — a fellow Texan — a friend and an effective leader in Congress.
“Congressman DeLay is a good ally, a leader who we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people,” McClellan said. “I think the president’s view is that we need to let the legal process work.”
The indictment puts the Republicans — who control the White House, Senate and House — on the defensive. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., also is fending off questions of ethical improprieties. And less than a week ago, a former White House official was arrested in the investigation of Jack Abramoff, a high-powered lobbyist and fundraiser.
The indictment accused DeLay of a conspiracy to “knowingly make a political contribution” in violation of Texas law outlawing corporate contributions. It alleged that DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee accepted $155,000 from companies, including Sears Roebuck, and placed the money in an account.
The PAC then wrote a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee and provided the committee a document with the names of Texas State House candidates and the amounts they were supposed to received in donations, the indictment said.
The indictment included a copy of the check.
The charge against the second-ranking, and most assertive Republican leader came on the final day of the grand jury’s term. It followed earlier indictments of a state political action committee founded by DeLay and three of his political associates.
DeLay’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said he preferred a trial as soon as possible, at least by the end of the year. Asked when DeLay would turn himself in, DeGuerin said, “I’m going to keep from having Tom DeLay taken down in handcuffs, photographed and fingerprinted. That’s uncalled for.”
The grand jury action is expected to have immediate consequences in the House, where DeLay is largely responsible for winning passage of the Republican legislative program.
Democrats have kept up a crescendo of criticism of DeLay’s ethics, citing three times last year that the House ethics committee admonished DeLay for his conduct.
“The criminal indictment of Majority Leader Tom Delay is the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people,” said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Democratic chairman Howard Dean cited the problems of DeLay, Frist and Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff at the center of questions about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.
“The Republican leadership in Washington is now spending more time answering questions about ethical misconduct than doing the people’s business,” Dean said.
At the White House, McClellan bristled at a question about Democratic claims that Republicans have grown arrogant in their use of power after years of controlling the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.
McClellan said the Republican Party has made policy that has improved the lives of Americans, and the White House stands by that record.
DeLay retains his seat representing Texas’ 22nd congressional district, suburbs southwest of Houston.
As a sign of loyalty to DeLay after the grand jury returned indictments against three of his associates, House Republicans last November repealed a rule requiring any of their leaders to step aside if indicted. The rule was reinstituted in January after lawmakers returned to Washington from the holidays fearing the repeal might create a backlash from voters.
Associated Press Writers Kelly Shannon and April Castro in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
it’s 10:20 pm and moe’s not home yet. she’s usually home by this time, and she’s not answering her cell… i hope everything’s okay… (it is… it’s now 10:40 pm and she just walked in)
so i started my job in may. shortly after i started, we did a job for pagliacci pizza which was a 2 colour, 2 sided take out menu. majid said that we’ve done this before, and i should set it up 4-up on 11×17, work and turn so that we can save a plate, so that’s what i did. the next day there’s a big fight between greg, the press operator and majid which goes on for most of the morning. the fight is over the paper that majid bought for the pagliacci job. it’s recycled glossy stock, which builds up way more static than non-recycled gloss (although that and the fact that it’s recycled are the ONLY differences), and thus it sticks together and won’t run smoothly through the press… which makes it practically impossible to print an 11×17 job. after reprinting the job twice over the next 4 days, finally majid decides that we can print the job if he cuts the paper in half and i re-set the job 2-up rather than 4 up… which makes three plates rather than two.
the next time we did the job, around the end of june, i would have expected majid to have learned that either he not buy recycled paper or he should charge more for the job if it is to be printed on recycled paper. i would have expected majid to have learned that if he bought recycled paper, that the job shoudn’t be set 4-up work and turn, despite the fact that it saves a plate… and i have a brain injury for god’s sake! but no… the same fight happened between greg and majid – although we only had to reprint the job once this time before he figured it out this time…
the next time we did the job, around the middle of august, it was the same deal: 11×17 4-up, recycled paper, big fight between greg and majid that takes most of the morning, two reprints of the job…
we just got the job in again today… guess how he wants me to set it up? 11×17 4-up. i ask him what paper he’s bought for the job. recycled gloss.
8-/
either he’s INCREDIBLY stupid, or something else is going on that i’m not aware of…
my new mantra is going to be “i want to quit my job, i want to quit my job, i want to quit my job…”
UPDATE i’m running sound for the hurricane survivors’ benefit concert at the Hale’s Palladium saturday. appearing will be Jamais Trop Tard, The Canote Brothers and Les Femmes d’Enfer at 3:00 pm, and The Honky Tonk Revue, How’s Bayou, The Rolling Blackouts, The Dangerous Flares and Jo Miller at 8:00 pm. come down to 4301 Leary Way NW for sausages, gumbo, red beans and rice, beer, and more music than you can shake a stick at. $15 suggested donation.
… all at the same time… 8)
here is a mirror of the page you get when you’re in the united arab emirates and you try to access a url that is somehow in violation of whatever kind of rules they have about such things in the united arab emirates… you realise, of course, that as well as seeing this web page, if you’re in the united arab emirates, the caliph of securing internet from horny anti-islamic bastards like you now has your IP address and there’s a chance that, if whatever site it was that you were trying to look at is heinous enough, you’ll be getting a visit from the goon squad of the ministry of securing internet from horny anti-islamic bastards like you… rather like they want to turn the US into eventually…
waveland is what the kingdom of heaven will look like… and, you know, i think it probably is…
i’m stuck in my office because moe’s current netflix movie is one that i really don’t want to see, which is "The Ring 2"… 8/
on the other hand, that means that i get to listen to my new CD, which is the overture to Kolas Breugnon, Second and Third Piano Concerti, and The Commedians, by Dmitry Kablevsky. i got it because it has the commedians on it, but once i had it i realised that i have played kolas breugnon as well, so it’s even more cool… and i’d be willing to bet that even the most non-musical among you have heard at least one piece of music on this CD: the 2nd movement of the commedians – Galop – is one of those pieces of music that have numerous saturday morning cartoons based around it.
the mac is finally reformatted… i bit the bullet and moved to the machine with no USB for 2 days while i wiped and reformatted the newer of the old macs, but now it’s running a lot more smoothly, and it doesn’t take 20 minutes to boot up… i don’t know what was on the disk, but for some reason, when you rebooted the machine, it took about 15 minutes of a flashing blue world icon before it even started the boot sequence, and then it flashed the “i can’t find the system” icon for another 5 minutes or so before it actually found the system and booted up… i low level formatted the drive and reinstalled the operating system and it still happened, but then i zapped the PRAM and that did it, which leads me to believe that some time in the unknown past, somebody who didn’t know what they were doiing had access to a system-level utility that allowed just anyone to set the esoteric and unknowable settings in the PRAM, which they did, before conveniently deleting whatever utility it was. in any event, it doesn’t do that any more. i really like having ATM on my machines, because it means that i can have all the fonts in a central location, and use the same font files for every workstation. all i had to do was connect to the network and upload the font archive and i was up and running.
massoud has been "doing things" to the network… i’m not sure of everything he’s doing, but the black and white and colour composite printers alternately work a lot faster, or they don’t work at all, but they don’t tell you they’re not working, they just don’t work. i’m not sure if i like it or not. also he’s rigging up an exchange server (gag)…
i took the price list for pipes off of the hybrid elephant site today because i don’t know when i’m going to get my workshop set up, and i’ve gotten three inquires about them in the past month… great… just when i start to attract some paying customers i have to shut down the most lucrative part of my business because i don’t have room to set up my workshop… 8/
now last year, i was _THE ONLY PERSON_ to show up for the public ritual vegetable sacrifice, so unless you have extenuating circumstances that prevent your attending (with the exception of those Tinites who live in other states) i expect to see you in attendance, otherwise bad things could happen… like a cancellation of future vegetable sacrifices all together. you have been warned.
First let me say that I love my country and all that it has…or had…to offer. But my love for my country is an adult relationship type of love. That means that even though I love her, I understand that she is not perfect. I also understand that she has problems, and I do what I can to help her work thru them.
I also understand that when she gets sick, she needs me there even more than usual. But this particular form of sickness is the kind that she will have to admit to first before anyone is able to truly help her.
It is a sickness that is somewhat akin to an addiction. That is something I know plenty about. I was a Chicago Cubs fan for many years…
America’s Battered Wife Syndrome
by Gail Thomas
Dear America,
As a friend of the family I can’t sit back and watch you do this to yourself without saying something. Consider this a long distance intervention.
Your man is no good. He treats you like crap, lies to you, abuses you, bullies you, exploits you, takes your money. As a friend I want to tell you that you deserve better. You deserve a person that treats you with respect, cares about your welfare, and your children’s welfare, but that’s not George and it never will be.
Do you tell yourself that he’ll stop, or that it won’t get worse? He won’t ever stop, every insult, injury and death he has caused are a line that once crossed will never be uncrossed. Forget the dream. You will never have the American dream with George. You have to forget about what might have been, what George might have been, and realise that at the end of the day you are what you do, and look at George’s track record…
Notice how he’s alienated all your friends? Who can blame them, they can’t understand why you stay with him when he treats you like shit and embarrasses you in front of everybody. The more his public behaviour overshadows yours, the more doubt creeps over them, they wonder if they knew you as well as they thought they did. You seem to have changed – if you condone his behaviour- and your silence can create the impression that you do. People are more inclined to take things at face value when they feel alienated. Your friends remember the good times you had together, the heroic battles you fought together, all of the intricate interweavings between their families and yours through time and space. Do you even recognise yourself anymore America? He is a drunken, coke-addled loser and he always will be, you should kick him out of your house today before he can destroy any more members of your family, your history, your culture, before he decimates your bank account so irretrievably that China and Saudi Arabia repossess all your stuff.
YOU CAN DO BETTER! You are an amazing country, beautiful, interesting, funny, positively glamorous, you wouldn’t stay single for five minutes, you know that suitors would be competing for your affections and any one of them would be ten times better than George. And how can you stand his god-awful Stepford’s answer to Marie-Antoinette mother, piping up with another casual atrocity every time she opens her mouth.
Because of George and his friends global warming is now upon us – I know what it has cost your family already, combined with George’s complete uselessness and indifference in a crisis. It would probably now be possible for a mathematician to calculate exactly how much of all of our futures we are losing for every minute you stay with that sick, twisted, idiot.
I see you doing what everyone in your position does – you end up looking to the perpetrator for comfort because theres no one else left, and look at how he reacts for Christ’s sake, look at what he did to New Orleans, and you should know that yet again he did it in front of all of your friends, all of us saw nothing happening whilst thousands died, all of us heard Ray Negen and the president of Jefferson Parish (I must heard him 30+ times now and I still cry every time) and all of us heard George’s bloody mother. We have been trying to help and he won’t let us. We are all appalled and aghast, it breaks our hearts to see him hurting you like this, and you not fighting back, you just take it and take it as it slowly spirals down into the pits of hell. What will it take America, will you let him kill you before you’ll kick him out? This is not rhetoric America, he is killing you every day you stay with him. If I had described your relationship with George to you back when you were still with Bill you never would have believed me. He degrades you in little increments, every day he erodes your assets as well as your dignity, your reputation, your legacy and your life America.
All of our TV crews were rescuing survivors as they filmed the devastation because there was nobody else there to help them, all of us saw the victims being treated like some sudden new insurgency, with suspicion and hostility. Those poor people, the heart & soul of New Orleans, the very people whose culture and history made New Orleans beloved around the world, He just left your brothers and sisters to die. Can you really continue in your relationship with George after this? There is a degree at which cognitive dissonance becomes outright delusion. He is a maniac, he is destroying your life, please, please leave him, just leave him, only you have the power to make it stop.
He is selling out your family business, if you let him continue like this how are you going to live? How are you going to feed your children, what happens if you get ill? Everything he has ever touched has turned to shit, he puts any idiot that’ll kiss his ass into positions of power and New Orleans is the result. Kick him out America! Do it today! I know it feels like you would be leaping into a void, but I promise you, you will be leaping out of one. Your friends will come back as soon as they see you are back to your old self, they really miss you. I know that less than 36% of your heart is still in it. Go with the 67% of you, that 36% is just that vestigial, primitive part of the brain that clings to the familiar no matter how badly the familiar sucks.
It all comes down to you, America. I know no-one likes other people passing comment on their relationships but this is an extreme situation. You are in very real danger, he is hurting you everyday and he is hurting us, your friends as well. But only you can make it stop. We are all rooting for you, although we don’t get to talk to you very often anymore, because he cuts us off from you. We are on your side, we will all be over the moon the day you finally kick him out. You know he really should be thrown in jail for the things he has done to you. Him and all of his gangster friends.
Please, please, do it America, you know I am right. If not for yourself then do it for your brothers and sisters and children. Do it before he kills any more of your family or anyone else’s. We are all really worried for your welfare.
Your friend,
Gail
Gail Thomas is am a British/ Australian dual national living in Sydney with her American partner. Her website is 12thharmonic.com
i don’t really feel like updating, but it’s been a week and i’ve got so many links on my desktop that things are getting crowded… 8/
massoud, majid’s brother, the so-called "networking expert", had a question for me today. he was "buying a server system for a company" (God knows who, although i think i have a fairly good idea, and God help whoever it is) and wanted to know what X and O stood for…
i shook off my first inclination, which was to say that X was kisses and O was hugs (although it took longer for me to shake it off than it would have before my injury) and asked him to show me what he was talking about. he took me to his laptop, where he showed me the following, which i have reproduced simply with HTML:
Windows 2000
Windows ME
Windows XP
some server code
O
O
X
some other server code
O
X
X
if he doesn’t know what X and O stand for, i wonder if he knows what ETH0 stands for… 8/
today pete, the other "graphic artist", asked what "operating system" i was using on the PC. i told him that PC has windows 2000 on it, but it was my impression that it and XP were enough alike that it was pretty difficult to get lost. he poked around for a few more minutes and then asked me how to get to web mail… so i showed him that web mail was already started, through firefox, which i chose from the task bar. he was somewhat taken aback and said that he had never used "those extra toolbars" (which come with firefox, not the OS) before…
he’s like my mother-in-law… doesn’t know the difference between an application and the operating system.
we’re running out of room on the web mail server, and majid’s only "solution" has been to install yet another email client to download the messages from a month ago, which he’s too anal to delete. we have three years worth of email in various places on the network because "there are times in this industry when people decide they’re not going to pay for work… we have to protect ourselves…"
we did a business card for a guy who has an office in bellevue and an office in england. the most recent set of changes came in via email this morning, which i printed and added to the job box. the email said that after a change in the phone number, they approved the job to print so that someone could pick up the finished cards on friday. i made the change and output plates for the job. later on, majid yelled at me because the phone number was different from the one on the proof copy that he found inside the box… but he hadn’t seen the change, or the new proof copy, which were stapled together and paper clipped to the work order on the outside of the job box, right in front of him!!!
i worked late today. we were doing 5 business cards for a company whose business card layout was 8 up, in spite of the fact that it could be 10 up, but majid has said that he doesn’t want me to mess around with files that already exist, and this one already existed 8 up, so i left it alone, just duplicated the layers necessary to typeset new business cards. so now the business cards have been approved to print and majid says that the layout is wrong… these cards don’t bleed, so they can be printed 10 up, so i stay late to make the changes, despite the fact that our press operator is going to be gone until monday…
meanwhile, majid, massoud and "mike the idiot" were all in my (very small and cramped) office space trying to get one of mike-the-idiot’s reformatted PCs to work – it won’t boot at all, it just keeps cycling between the POST and trying to load windoesn’t, but never quite gets there. massoud is digging through the guts of the computer on the floor while majid and mike-the-idiot have a conversation about macs and me in farsi. i don’t understand a word of farsi, but i understand when both majid and mike-the-idiot say things like "typesetter" and "graphic artist" and "bruce", all of which they are both saying with great regularity. at one point i get the very strong impression that mike-the-idiot was saying something along the lines of "majid, you’re the business owner… if you say no more macs, use windows, bruce will have to accept it, otherwise he won’t have a job."
now mind you, i don’t understand a word of farsi, so i could be way off base here, but even still… i’m in the room here guys, doing stupid stuff that you didn’t want done originally, but then changed your mind about. if you’re going to have a conversation about me, at least be polite enough take it in the other room, or have it in a language i understand! and for that matter, i hope he does say "no more macs, use windoesn’t" because that will give me the excuse i need to quit right then and there. i’d love to see his face as i punch out and walk away with no notice…
in other news, the fremont philharmonic is playing at the wallingford wurst festival from noon until 1:15 pm, saturday. be there or be oblong.
here’s something strange… i’ve been nominated for the 8 Hunks of Hanukkah, whatever that means… go vote, or something…
moe and i went and saw The Bobs perform at the triple door last saturday. i’m still getting over seeing dan bob instead of joe bob, but moe has been a fan for almost 20 years, and she’s seen a lot more bobs come and go than i have. it was cool to see matthew bob after the show, because i work with him now, and he’s famous… 8) somebody in charge of mailing things from the bobs’ mailing list sent me a copy of the 20/20 CD, which was entirely unexpected (i already have one copy of it), but cool in a confusing sort of way.
i wonder why i haven’t heard of jeezis-is-lord dot com before? maybe it’s because "THIS WEBSITE IS BEING SYSTEMATICALLY BANNED!"… or maybe it’s just boring and predictable.
this morning i was listening to the radio on the way to work and i happened to hear the fab faux perform “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and an interesting thing happened to me. i actually heard the lyrics in a new way, and instead of going to work thinking that today was going to be a repeat of yesterday, where nothing would get done and i would become even more frustrated with my state as a wage slave, i went into work having “layed down all thought, surrendered to the void” “that you may see the meaning of within”… and i noticed that exactly the same things happened to me today whether i felt that way or not, but because i “surrendered thought” before going to work, i found that majid’s idiocy, which is getting worse and worse as time goes on, didn’t affect me at all…
yes, majid wants me to use a G3 PowerPC that doesn’t have any USB ports while i’m reformatting my G3 imac – in between working on all the jobs that have been piling up for the past week while we battle with a computer network that doesn’t network – which would be good enough if it weren’t for the fact that it has a screen that’s too dark, but he hasn’t made any noises about going to indesign, especially since all of the jobs are located on the network and for some unknown reason, indesign wants things to be local otherwise “bad things”™ happen – crashing with occasional loss of data and/or network – to indesign… but you know, so what? he’s bound and determined to do what he wants to do, regardless of how mind-numbingly stupid it is, regardless of how much i complain, so why should i care? he doesn’t pay me enough to care, so i’m just going to stop.
meanwhile, this is ganesha chaturti, so happy ganesha chaturti everyone!
i really need to find a better job. this one sucks SO BAD…
the mac on my desk, a charcoal G3 imac from about 1999, is dying. majid just recently bought a new mac, one of those cool LCD monitors that has no box, just a mouse and keyboard that plug into the back, and a slot to put in CDs and stuff, but i don’t know whether he can install Os9.x on it, much less whether he wants to… and, of course, the colour printer and the black and white printer are both old enough that the manufacturers don’t make drivers for OsX, and have no intention of doing so, so the new mac is pretty much useless at this point. we also have a PowerPC G3 desktop box, which is likely going to end up on my desk when the one that’s there now finally bites the dust, but that hasn’t happened yet because there’s still software to be installed, printers to be connected to and the little minor detail that IT DOESN’T HAVE USB, which means that i have to put up with an obnoxious mouse with a ball that doesn’t work well at all, or use my optical mouse without installing the USB-only drivers for it, which means that i’ll get none of the “extra features” like one-button copy and paste, or three functioning buttons, that are the main reason why i use it.
and majid’s brother, massoud, has finally shown up – majid promised me that he’d be here on the 18th of august – but instead of being a networking expert, as majid had lead me to believe, so far he’s done nothing but sit around and poke through web sites and help majid bring in two “new” monitors that he bought “reconditioned” at best-buy (for $80 apiece), and then help majid carry one of them out again the same day because it caught fire when he turned it on…
and that’s not to mention the fact that i’ve got a huge pile of jobs that have been stacking up for the past 3 days while i battle with the computer to keep it alive, which majid and farah are getting more and more uptight about, but not uptight enough to do anything OTHER than blame the guy who is supposed to be doing them, but instead is doing a job he should be getting paid 5 times as much for so that he can do the job eventually…
and when i actually am able to work on a job, one of the more recent ones has been to make a PDF from a freehand file that we’re sending to "mike-the-idiot" (who doesn’t even support macs at all), but i can’t do it because for some reason the PDF comes out with no background, in spite of the fact that it clearly has a background in freehand… which frustrates the hell out of me, and makes me look like an idiot, even though i’m sure anybody who tried it would have similar difficulties.
and when i complain about jobs that get changed without customer approval “because that’s what they’ve always had before” (in spite of the fact that it’s not what they proofed, and not what we have a signed release to print from the customer, and, when the job is printed – incorrectly – the customer rightly refuses to pay for), i get told that i’d better get used to using indesign and windows, because that’s the direction we’re going to go, and if i don’t like it, my resignation is welcome on majid’s desk at any time…
a few things that i’ve got collected during the past week or so:
boingboing gets copied by ken schram, but gets no credit, probably because they’re boingboing…
i found out what happened to joe bob, had a couple of performing groups i work with get mentioned in a round about way, and read an article by richard bob about auditioning a new bob…
more bush being bush, when he has ample opportunities to act like a president, instead he’s cussing, being rude and flipping people off.
much chaos at work, but i’m too tired to complain. to say that i want to quit would be an understatement. i’ll probably update more tomorrow.
i wonder why people always have to blame someone else when they cause a problem. example: i got the following note on the windshield of my car the other day:
Thanks! due to your idiot parking skills, i needed a can opener to get in my car – you left less than 6″ room between cars.
when i parked, i parked dead in the center of the parking space, with plenty of room on either side. there was a car on the driver’s side, which i parked with enough room for the driver (me) to exit normally, without squeezing. on the other side, there was nobody. no car was parked on the passenger side of my car when i parked. when i returned. the car that was parked on the driver’s side of my car was still there, and there was a car parked on the passenger’s side of my car, which had not been there when i parked, but was parked dead in the center of the parking space, with plenty of room to open the doors, so i’ve got to assume that the note was left by someone who parked crooked in the passenger’s side space and couldn’t get out, and they blamed me for their parking job.
why they decided to blame me is beyond my ability to figure out, but it’s a good thing they left before i got back, because if i had seen who wrote the note, i probably would have given them something to complain about… like a key down the side of their car, or a nice big door dent… 8/
Sermon for August 25, 2005
‘Listen up, you Christo-Fascist bullies’
——————————————————————————–
You Apostles Of Perpetual Psychosis — It’s High Time Somebody Called You Out.
…
Listen up,… every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis — it’s time that you were called out.
The time is long past due the rest of us ceased our cowering and stood up to you Christo-fascists bullies. The hour has come round that we look you straight in your bulging, true believer eyes, and told you that we’ve had it with your smugness, with your blood-drenched crusades, with your victim mentality — and with the madness begot by this cracked-brain belief system of yours, which all began (according to your sacred delusions) more than two thousand years ago, when, at the behest of a wicked cabal, a mob of mammon-worshipping, blood-lusting rabble went on a cosmic killing-spree and murdered your god.
First off, let’s get one thing straight: No one ever killed anyone’s god (not Jews, nor Romans, nor Geeks playing Dungeons and Dragons) — Although it’s time somebody nailed you, you collection of conflated failures at Christian martyrdom, to a metaphysical cross of reality.
It’s high time someone told you outright that you must be suffering from holy water on the brain, if you think we can’t see you for what you are: a klavern of counterfeit prophets waxing psychotic for other cretinous hypocrites. Also, you can cease playing the persecuted party, whenever someone stands up to you — because we’re no longer buying that ploy. Remember, you’re the ones who threw the first, epitaphic stones. It was you who labeled us a mob of Hell-bound, Satan-pimping sodomist … Although — as much fun as that sounds — I must ask you, where do you get the unmitigated gall to make such insane claims? When did the golden light of the sun abandon its position in the eastern horizon and begin rising, each morning, from out of your silly, neo-Iron Age asses?
And tell me this, you medievalist simps, you delusional, retrograde dip-shits — how is it possible that you became privy to such timeless truths — that the mind of the “One True God” is available to you, and that God’s words and wishes resonate through yawning millennia to be understood only by you — and you alone?
Looking back on the rise of you Christo-fascist bastards, I’m mortified as to how it came to be socially and politically acceptable for you to bandy such vicious and demented assertions in the public arena, without them meeting with the derision they deserve … And don’t bother going into one of your pat victim-swoons over being called on it, because when you go so far as to claim that you alone have been bestowed with the secrets of boundless creation — and that anyone who chooses not to buy into your version of events will be condemned to the torments of eternal damnation — then you can bet your fatuous asses that your asinine assertions will be ridiculed. What in the blue blazes did you expect, for us simply to fall to our collective knees before you?
Yet, I fear that’s exactly what you expect from us.
Could I suggest an alternative idea? Would you simply let the rest of us be? Would it be possible for you to keep your life-defying delusions to yourself — keep them within the airless confines of your bigotry-riddled churches and the cramped quarters of your own minds?
If that’s the way you choose to spend the passing hours of this finite life, it’s fine by me. But when you start your habitual proselytizing, then you should be prepared to be told that a great many of us think your cosmological conceptions are a steaming pile of behemoth dung.
And, while we’re on the subject, for the longest time, I’ve been wanting to tell you this: If Jesus died for my pathetic sins — then he flat-out overreacted.
What makes this situation all the more unsettling is you believe these creepy, death-enamored myths are literally true. Instead, I suggest you try the following: Rather than attempting to commune with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost (or Casper the Friendly Ghost) or the Lucky Charms Leprechaun — why don’t you attempt to channel the departed spirits of Voltaire or H.L. Mencken? There will be no otherworldly conjuring (or con jobs) required to perform this miracle: simply go to the public library and check out their books.
Once there, you might want to stop by the science section, as well, where you could happen upon a few delusion-decimating tidbits such as the following: While your bible tells you that the earth is a shade over seven thousand years old, the actual figure is (approximately) 4.6 billion years. How do you account for the slight discrepancy of say … 4,599,993,000 years? And that number is derived when calculated against the approximated age of the earth — not that of the universe, which is estimated to be between ten to twenty billion years old. You can do the math on that one, all you reality-challenged Children of the Lord.
And those aren’t the only things in your bible that just don’t add up. In your Book of Joshua (10:13) it is stated that God commanded the sun to stand still in the sky … Really now? Pardon me … but how is it possible that this omniscient god of yours, who you believe created the earth and heavens, all by his divine lonesome, didn’t realize the simple fact that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth?
Furthermore, he was apparently ignorant of numerous smaller details as well, such as, wherein Matthew (13: 32) he identified mustard seeds as “[…] the smallest of seeds.” How can it be that the creator of the universe could have had such an embarrassing lapse of basic knowledge on the subject of botany?
And what about the many other lapses in logic (flights of fantasy that are insane by any standard, with the exception of the sublime logic found in the idiom of cartoons) such as the one about the fellow who survived, for three days and three nights, in the stomach of a monstrous fish (Jonah 1:17) — and what was up with that wacky, talking donkey in Numbers (22:28)? We’re in Looney Tunes territory now, all you highly suggestible Idiots of God. Plus, in a cartoon universe, such as the one described in the Book of Exodus, why didn’t The All-Mighty, instead of leveling plagues and pestilence upon the guilty and innocent alike in Egypt, simply, drop an ACME anvil down from heaven on the head of Pharaoh and been done with it?
Which brings up the subject of the deplorable cruelty of your deity of choice. Ergo, isn’t this a lovely, little passage from Deuteronomy (32:23-25)? “I will spend mine arrows upon them … The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.”
Then there is this lovely bit of divinely inspired baby killing and faith-based rape from Isaiah (13:9,15-18): “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger … Every one that is found shall be thrust through … Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes… and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them…. [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”
Worse, your striving to make these pathological ravings manifest have resulted in tragic consequences. As is the case with your current, genocidal adventure in Iraq, where you believed the vengeful ghosts of the Crusades could be dispatched, dissolved in the beatific light flaring from the bombs that your holy (armchair) warrior, Commander and Chief ordered dropped from Kabul to Bagdad … In your madness, you believed you could make the citadels of the New Jerusalem manifest in Mesopotamia. Upon every bomb detonation, you were certain that the heathen hordes cowered before your righteous fury, that ghost and demon would flee back to Hell, and the wicked would trembled before your sacred fury. Now, of course, that all worked out just like you saw it in your head beforehand — didn’t it?
As we speak, your Armies of the Lord (who more closely reassemble a collection of economic conscripts) wince and stumble, blinded by blown blood and squalls of searing sand … The desert wind taunts you true believers; your visions of conquest evaporate, as the pitiless sun glares down upon the folly of yet another legion of hubristic Crusaders, who came to free the heathen hordes from their brutish ignorance — by way of relieving them of the confusing burden of their untapped wealth.
Of course, the only small recompense you ask from these monumental ingrates is unfettered access to their oil. And the only reason for that is: a purpose as exalted as yours requires a great amount of energy to sustain its radiant glory; such a selfless enterprise of holiness demands a few rewards for the long suffering Christian martyrs on the home front — because American’s God-kissed flocks of pious consumers must be permitted to sit, in perpetuity, high above the roadways of the land, serene within their over-sized pick-up trucks, SUVs, and RVs — their junk food-bloated countenances must never be darkened by want, doubt, nor self-reproach.
In accordance with this self-referential lunacy, you sermonized that Satan’s earthly emissaries, such as Hugo Chávez, should be righteously slaughtered — because he and his ilk scheme to deprive American drivers of their God-given right to the oil, which, inconveniently, happens to be located beneath lands belonging to inconsequential people. Those brown-skin, oil hoarding wretches, down in Venezuela and their false idol-clutching counterparts in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, must be taught that God, seated upon his golden throne, scorns the sight of their iniquitous ways. The Kingdom of the Lord stands before us, you proclaim … If we listen closely, we can hear the voice of God above as he counts his money. Furthermore, the era of George W. Bush has brought a new revelation: If America’s plutocratic class had even more blood money — then the Baby Jesus would smile.
The Reverend Pat Robertson, Mary Fowler — and every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis — listen up. Given the self-evident fact that your beliefs bring little relief to your own troubled souls and have, on the whole, served to engender tragedy worldwide, don’t you think it’s time you gave it a rest for while. In other words, this is a polite way of suggesting to you that you shut your pie-in-the-sky hole and take stock of the things you’re saying — because your utterances are becoming sicker and sadder, by the hour.
If not, you could, at least, in the words, of Tom Waits, “Come down off the cross — we can use the wood.”
by Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist, and philosopher bard, exiled to the island of Manhattan. He may be contacted at: [email protected].
and
Posted 8/22/2005 11:01 PM Updated 8/23/2005 1:46 PM
By Gene Puskar, AP
Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez
VIRGINIA BEACH (AP) — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested on-air that American operatives assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.” ‘We have the ability to take him (Chavez) out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,’ Robertson said.
“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network’s The 700 Club.
“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.
“You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war … and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
Robertson, 75, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002.
Electronic pages and a message to a Robertson spokeswoman were not immediately returned Monday evening.
Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost 59% of Venezuela’s total exports.
Venezuela’s government has demanded in the past that the United States crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan “terrorists” in Florida who they say are conspiring against Chavez.
Robertson has made controversial statements in the past. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
so i called the "free" counselling service, but after waiting on hold for a half an hour to speak to a receptionist to make an appointment with someone who is supposedly going to recommend that i see this "free" counsellor, i had to go back to work, so i never got ahywhere. i called the person who recommended this service to me, a friend of moe’s who said it was "an honour" to help me, but she’s on vacation until 11 september, so it doesn’t look like i’m going to get anywhere for a while. i suppose it would be easier if i didn’t have to have a job, but the people who have control over my life say that i’m not eligible to recieve disability benefits because of my work and how much i earn… which makes no sense whatsoever, because i originally applied for disability benefits last december, before i got my job, and i was unemployed for nine months before that, and i’ve only had sporadic employment since my injury… but these people, who don’t know me, are in charge of my life, and they say it is so, so it must be so. it’s a good thing i’m not as depressed as i was a couple of weeks ago, because if i were, there’s a good chance that i’d be suicidal by now.
part of the reason i’d probably be suicidal is because of the fact that there’s still no solution in sight concerning my lack of workshop space. moe and i had a "discussion" about it earlier in the week, but what it came down to was that moe wants me to be looking for something more like a shed than a workshop. she suggested a 10×10 foot metal shed with a ceiling that slopes from 8 feet to 6 feet, with no floor, insulation or electricity, which would be almost useless, and when it wasn’t completely useless it would be a major annoyance. we got into a fight because she couldn’t understand why it would be almost completely useless as a workshop, and i was unable to say why it would be because of the fact that, for some reason probably having to do with my injury, i can’t express myself in the way that i used to. before my injury, i’m sure i would have had plenty of explanations for her, but now all i can do is gesture, make unintelligible noises and cry… and mostly the crying is because i know what i want to say, but i am unable to find the words to say it. all i can say is that something is going to have to happen soon, otherwise i am definitely headed for another bout of extreme depression, for which there is no solution in sight.
i managed to make it through one whole week without writing any complaints about majid and his computer idiocy, but that’s primarily because of the fact that his computer idiocy has been limited to his personal computers, and not the ones that i have to use. there’s a pretty good chance that he’s got the sober virus, or something like it, on at least two of his personal computers, but that’s probably because he hasn’t run virus scans on them since before i started working for him. i’m holding my breath, waiting for his virus to latch onto my windoesn’t machine, at which point i’m going to demand a 300% pay raise to do computer and network troubleshooting for him as well as typesetting.
also, it’s been another week of nothing but spam, and that in copious quantities. it’s a "good thing" the government passed the CAN-SPAM act last year… my spam quotient has risen by almost 50%, i hate to think what it would be like if CAN-SPAM hadn’t passed… 8/
i wonder how i ever managed to get into the rehab center when i did… if i were trying to get in as an inpatient now, i’d be out of luck. i called them today at the recommendation of the doctor who treated me when i was an inpatient, 2 years ago. after being transferred four times, each by a person who said something along the lines of "we can’t help you at this number, but let me transfer you to a number where there are people who can help you", essentially what it comes down to is that if i don’t have any insurance, they can’t help me… so, my options at this point are 1) forget about counselling and deal with the depression as best i can on my own, or 2) accept counselling from the people who provide it for free as a service to the "down-and-out", winos, drug addicts, derilicts and other ne’er-do-wells. i’m sure the second option is full of well meaning people who will very likely help me somewhat, but i can’t help thinking that i’d get much better counselling, and much better treatment in general if i had insurance…
one step closer to normalcy… i now have an ethernet hub installed, which means that i now have a network: i can share information on one machine and access it from another machine. i also have internet access from all machines. this may sound ordinary, but it’s not. i’m still surrounded by boxes, i don’t have all of the shelves installed, i don’t have a workshop space set up, i don’t even know where i’m going to put my workshop, i still hate my job, don’t get paid enough and i have no insurance(!!)
so i’ve got internet access from all of my computers… whoopee… 8/
You’re probably a pretty chill person. We are here and that is that. You realize some truths about reality and existence – and you are comfortable with your place in the world. For the most part, you have no objections to being who and what you are. Congratulations, you’re probably a re-incarnated enlightened master. You should found your own school of higher learning or spiritual mastery.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
well, i’m still going to search out some kind of treatment for what might be PTSD, but things are a lot better today… today majid got the very clear and definite message that indesign, whether for windows or mac, is probably not going to be the best decision for our shop, and i didn’t even have to do anything. first, it turns out that both the black and white laser printer slash copier, and the colour laser printer slash copier, both of which are machines that cost multiple thousands of dollars to replace, are old enough that the manufacturers don’t make drivers for either windows XP, or mac osX, and have no plans to make them in the future… second, for some unknown reason – but apparently confirmed by adobe tech support – indesign CS2 wants documents that you are working on to be local, and not on the network… if it’s on the network, something bad happens to indesign, and it shuts itself off with no warning… precipitously… to be specific, it crashes, and not very gracefully. previous versions of indesign apparently don’t do that (i’ve tried it with indesign CS and 1.5 on both mac and windows and have had no problems opening documents over the network), and all of the documents that we work on are on the network… and quark works over the network with no problems… i REALLY wanted to say "i told you so" to majid, but i somehow kept my mouth shut… he was fuming… he spent 4 hours on the phone with tech support and he just bought the software, so now is definitely the time to find major flaws in it… hee hee…
also, i went over to gunnar’s today after work, and he got me really stoned, so i’m feeling a lot better than i have for a while…
i’ve been feeling REALLY depressed recently. it seems as though my life is getting exponentially more difficult on a daily basis, and i simply don’t have the energy to keep up any longer. i live in a tiny house that only has enough space for me to unpack about a quarter of the stuff that i currently own, and the rest of it, and most of moe’s stuff as well, is stacked around me in boxes, in the bedroom, in the dining room, in the living room, in what passes for my office (which was supposed to be my workshop as well, but there isn’t enough room), and in both of our unheated, uninsulated sheds outside. in one of the sheds – the more waterproof of the two, but that’s not saying much – i have three or four stacks of boxes that contain books and papers and suchlike, and my drill press and band saw (along with a bunch of other stuff), and i’m afraid that if i don’t move them to a less damp environment pretty soon (thank god for the relatively dry weather we’ve been having so far), they’re going to be a growing mass of mold and rust by the time i finally get around to doing anything about it.
and the reason i live in a house that is not big enough is that i was unemployed for 9 months immediatly prior to my moving here, and then when it was settled that we were going to move here, i got a job, so now i have to work 9 hours a day, plus at least an hour and a half commute each way (and that’s if moe gets off work on time, which she frequently doesn’t), and when i get home i’m SO EXHAUSTED that i barely have enough energy to take a shower, much less do the myriad of other things that have to be done, like mowing the lawn, or unpacking boxes, or dealing with incense orders…
then there’s the fear that i’m soon going to be living in a place that could very easily turn into one of those places… you know, the ones that have boxes of moldy books, and piles of dirty dishes, and dirty laundry, and animal filth everywhere, and nobody who cares enough to do anything about it, and you wonder how it is that people can actually live that way…
then there’s my job itself… to say that i hate my job is a simple, but understated way of putting it. specifically, i hate that my bosses have so much control over me and what i do for 9 hours a day, five days a week, and yet they know practically nothing about the nuts and bolts of the business they are in. i hate the fact that when i get frustrated, i have even more difficulty than usual in talking, when it’s essential that i be able to communicate clearly and effectively, especially when i get frustrated. i hate that i have an easier time showing people something than i do telling them about it, especially when those people are my bosses, and they have very little time to be shown things that don’t really concern them anyway. i hate that i am the only native english speaker in the shop (greg doesn’t count, because, although he was born in the united states, he’s black and from new orleans, so he might as well be a non-english speaker), and even when i am not frustrated, simply saying something is frequently a challenge. i could go on for days…
i have my computers sort of set up, but i can only use one of them at a time, because i haven’t had the energy, time or space to attach them to the ethernet hub that i bought last weekend. i have to make an invoice for dr. howard for the business cards i made for him four months ago, but i can’t, because that’s on the other computer. i have an incense order that’s been sitting on top of a stack of boxes, half filled, for a month and a half, and there’s no telling when i’m going to get around to ordering the rest of the incense so that i can fill it. i’ve got to take out the trash and the recycling – AGAIN – for all the good it’s going to do. i eat lunch because i get a lunch break, but i have not eaten breakfast or dinner for a long time (a month and a half?), because there’s no food, and even if there was, i’d have to cook it before i could eat, and then i’d have to clean up afterwards, and i just don’t have enough energy to commit to doing that. i’ve got to take a shower (for some reason, after my injury, my sweat stinks even more than it used to). and somewhere in there i’ve got to get enough sleep to make it through another day just like it tomorrow… which NEVER happens…
The Fremont Philharmonic The Fremont Philharmonic, 050807 – The last performance of Cirque de Flambe in Seattle. back row, left to right: Kiki (Robin) Hood, human theremin, percussion, Alan Friedman, drums, Kim Porto, flute, salamandir, tuba, popgun, dangerous substances, Pam McRae, clarinet, Stuart Zobel, guitar, Jeremy Reinhold, baritone horn, composer, Fred Hawkinson, trombone, composer. front row, left to right: Sasha Malinsky, drums, John Cornicello, keyboards, photography.
really, i’ve had a rough week with majid and his PC/indesign fantasies, which are getting more unrealistic and more idiotically single-minded as time goes on – apparently his friend mike, who owns a minuteman press in downtown seattle, said that he made the decision to go with PC and indesign two years ago, when indesign was first released, and hasn’t regretted it… but he’s not a designer or a typographer, he’s a business owner, and there’s a good bet that if you asked his designer(s), you’d get an entirely different response… and it is my guess that he would experience less overall chaos if he made the decision to go with any platform and application combination and stuck with it for any length of time – but that still doesn’t mean that he’s getting things done the most efficiently, or the right way. alhthough he hasn’t fired me yet, i’m officially looking for a new job, because he probably will eventually, and if he doesn’t i’m going to walk out on him as soon as i can… 8/
my right arm has been more than ordinarily tired, to the point where i actually have to look at it before i can get it to do anything… like typing… this has already taken about twice as long as it would have ordinarily, because of misspellings and backspacing and extra spaces and suchlike… it looks like more acupuncture is in my future. my next appointment is next saturday, just before chris goes to bali for his honeymoon… i’m hoping he’ll pick me up a pair of gongs while he’s there.
and that’s not to mention the cirque performances, which are going extremely well, although it looks like tonight will be the last night we ever perform in seattle, because the mayor has decided to raise the rates for our safety permits from $800 for six nights to $866 per night (which we can’t afford)… hell we’re lucky to make $800 in six nights… so the probability that we’re going to start performing on the road has just increased exponentially.
now i have to go and get some "stuff" which will make my continued survival more bearable, and an ethernet hub, so that i can have all of my computers online, rather than the lame one-at-a-time feature that i’ve currently got… and then i’ve got another cirque performance which will get out around 1:00 am, whereupon i’ve got to go home and sleep so that i can get up and get ready for work at 5:30… oy! 8/
yet another review of the cirque de flambé show… now this is more like it… although it’s not as good a review if you’re not in the band, but i’m in the band, so this is an excellent review…
Friday, August 5, 2005
Flambe’s latest gig passes silliness torch
By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic
Cirque de Flambe’s “In the Shadow of the Giant” will be at Magnuson Park from today through Sunday, featuring a variety of flaming and incendiary devices.
Uh-oh. The goony clown’s pants are on fire.
And — whoopsie-daisy — the fabulous Mademoiselle Mimi’s tres petite dog Fifi didn’t quite make it through that flaming hoop intact. She’s just a furry little pile of ash now.
All this can mean only one thing: The circus is back in town. Or, more specifically, Cirque de Flambe, the Fremont-based pyromaniac troupe, is at it again in Magnuson Park.
If you’ve never been to a Cirque de Flambe show, here are the basics of their latest blazing pratfalls show, “In the Shadow of the Giant.”
There is a ringmaster/authority figure clomping around the parking lot/playing area on stilts, whom the rest of the anarchic characters love to hate.
There is an enthusiastic live band (the rather grandly named Fremont Philharmonic), which specializes in deranged oompah and snake-charmer music. There is a large contingent of brave and blasé firemongers, The Flaming Fromaggios, who do a lot of juggling and other fiery shticks.
And, as the ringmaster emphasizes, the audience must “suffer the little clowns, because they know not what they do” — wisecracking, firecracking clowns, whose express purpose in life is to burn things up and be annoying.
If this sounds an awful lot like previous Cirque de Flambe productions, it’s no misfire. (Hey, they’re not trying to reinvent the Roman candle in every show.)
The experience is, as ever, funky, silly and funny — if your idea of fun is watching a Tin Man-style robot get attacked with blazing bazookas.
Some bits are cool, some get boring. Many are stupid beyond belief. But every now and then there is a truly dazzling act in the cheerfully ragged and strangely lovable extravaganza.
Such as? Take the double-Dutch rope-jumping bit. How do they jump around those fiery strands of rope without getting scorched? And though it goes on forever, the flaming-hips routine, with flaring hula hoops, is quite impressive.
Kids in the audience are reminded more than once not to try this sort of stuff at home.
And there’s a safety crew on hand at all times, in case a fiery stunt gets carried too far.
Sitting on bring-your-own chairs or blankets, however, you won’t find much cause for worry. Just remember to dress warmly (the breeze off Lake Washington was very chilly the night I attended). Pack your own snacks along with the comfy seating. And don’t forget to bring the kids — anybody’s kids.
Children just lap up Cirque de Flambe. Think about it: It’s like their wildest dream come true. A whole bunch of people playing with matches (as well as lighters, dynamite, cherry bombs and other incendiary devices) — and getting away with it.
another review of the cirque performance from the weekly (weakly?), from someone who is not as critical as joe adcock, but i personally feel that joe’s review was better… oh well…
Fire?
Shadow has a little spark.
by Lynn Jacobson
Seattle’s friendly band of firebugs, Cirque de Flambé, is back with a 90-minute revue of pyrotechnical circus acts performed in a lakeside parking lot in Magnuson Park. Directed by Burning Man vet Maque DaVis, In the Shadow of the Giant (ends Sun., Aug. 7; 206-770-7602) is framed as a sort of showdown between a tyrannical ringmaster and his mischievous clowns.
Aside from a few tasteless bimbo jokes, the show is perfect for school-aged kids on summer vacation. First, there’s the thrill of staying up late (it starts at 9:30 p.m.); then, the excitement of periodic explosions, flaming jump ropes, and fire leaping out of performers’ mouths. And what kid wouldn’t love to see two clowns running around with sparks shooting out of their butts?
Children are also more likely than adults to forgive the show’s amateurish aspects: numerous dropped props, in expert physical humor, and clunkily ad-libbed lines. According to Cirque’s Web site (www.cirquedeflambe.com), it’s an all-volunteer circus, and, to be blunt, it shows. Many of the cast members are no doubt graduates of Cirque’s Fremont-based workshops—enthusiastic, but still learning their trade. If you go expecting to see performances on a level with what you’ve seen at Cirque du Soleil or Big Apple Circus, you’ll be disappointed. Of course, the ticket prices ($10 children, $20 adults) are about a third of what you’d pay for entry-level Soleil tickets, so it’s a fair deal.
No denying the show is a feat of organization and engineering. The onstage cast numbers over two dozen, and on Sunday night, there looked to be at least that many people offstage handling fire effects and safety. The brassy Fremont Philharmonic, led by Fred Hawkinson on trombone, oom-pah-pahed bravely throughout, despite high winds off the lake and clouds of gnats attracted to the lights. And the audience, half of whom forgot their lawn chairs and blankets, sat gamely on the cement, huddling against the chill. None of this mattered a whit to the kids, who were transfixed, fireworks in their eyes.
a review of the cirque show by a person who reportedly hates shows like that… it’s not universally good, but if i didn’t know anything about either the show or the reviewer, i’d be tempted to go and see it anyway…
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Cirque de Flambe’s antics can be blazing amazing
By JOE ADCOCK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER THEATER CRITIC
Playing with fire combines risk and thrills. In the case of Cirque de Flambe — “flaming circus” in permissive French — the risk is self-indulgent sloppiness. The thrills derive from uniquely sensational feats of skill and daring.
Some of the Cirque’s 27 performers juggle fire. Others swing it around on ropes and bars. Some play jump rope (even double Dutch) with flaming ropes. Others spin flaming hula hoops. Providing non-pyrotechnical thrills is Primary Element: three clever acrobats who twine and combine like rubbery Lego pieces. Their accomplishments involve extraordinary strength, flexibility and balance.
For a literally blazing finale, the cast members whirl exploding fireworks up and down and around and around.
The 10-member Fremont Philharmonic, masters of fluctuating rhythms, supplies admirable musical backup. Sometimes the tunes are subtle and insinuating. At other times they are swingy and nostalgic.
The Cirque has been a Seattle institution for eight years. The current production is called “In the Shadow of the Giant.”
A dozen clowns play out the archetypal clown thing: one, the giant, tries futilely to impose order. The rest succeed in creating chaos. The whip-cracking ringmaster, on stilts, fawns on the glamorous skilled performers. He bullies and denigrates his fellow zanies. His rebellious minions retaliate with weapons ranging from a 1940s foundation garment (worn by a buxom “nurse”) to a chainsaw (watch out for those stilts).
The clowning often involves failed pyrotechnics. The stunts are not uniformly ingenious or funny. Whether they are amusing, they do go on and on. A clown with his pants on fire or a blazing stuffed toy dog are among the striking but unduly extended bits.
It is easy, however, to feel affectionate indulgence toward the Cirque. The lame stuff is harmless. And the effective stuff is amazing.
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yeah, i’d say an attack on the FBI’s level of incompetence is entirely warranted…
so there’s been this job floating around the shop for the past couple of weeks. it’s not high priority, or, rather, it wasn’t high priority until today, and it was one of those jobs that, when i originally looked at it 2 weeks ago, i said would have to be redone from scratch before it would print, and majid disagreed with me, so i said he could do it… so today, majid says that he can’t get it to colour separate – it’s only two colours to begin with, yellow and black – and when he can get close, it doesn’t print correctly. he wants me to recreate the document…
o-kay…
it was originally an illustrator file, saved as an .eps and placed in indesign. i imported the original illustrator file into freehand and almost immediately discovered that part of the reason why it wouldn’t print correctly is because it was made out of three individual sections, layed over a solid background, where it had to be one contiguous section in order to avoid some extremely arcane and rather nasty bizarreness in the postscript code required to draw that particular figure, that causes it to print out strangely… as it had been doing.
so i made a new layer, and traced around the logo, so that i had my one contiguous section, and then recreated the rest of the logo, saved it as a colour separated .eps, and had colour separations out of quark for him inside of 40 minutes, as well as finishing two other jobs at the same time.
majid was in awe.
if he gets a new version of indesign without also getting a new version of quark, then he’s a bigger fool than he appears to be, and it’s guaranteed that i will not be working for him very long.
okay, if i understand this correctly, if you click here, you will be taken to a gallery of some of my pictures from the oregon country fair… but i’m not sure if i understand it correctly or not, so if you’re not taken there, i would appreciate it if you would tell me, so that i can fix it.
cirque de flambé performs "In The Shadow of The Giant" next weekend (the last weekend in july) and the weekend after that (the first weekend of august) at sand point-magnuson park, friday, saturday and sunday, 9:30 pm curtain. bring yer own seating and be prepared to watch things blow up and people get set on fire – quality family entertainment for $20 ($10 for under 13). tickets here.
majid is going to, theoretically, have two new computers next week, but i’m not sure how, or if i get to say anything about what they are, or what software goes on them, or anything like that, in spite of the fact that i’m sure going to be expected to operate them as efficiently as possible in the shortest period of time possible… but all this is still in theory, as he has been threatening to do this for the past month, and has yet to do anything like it. compound that with the fact that, for some mysterious reason, when i installed service pack 4 on windows 2000 friday, something broke, or something that was broken is now fixed, or something like that, and the result was that i got 40-some emails from as much as 2 weeks ago, AND farah’s email client, which is on a completely different computer that’s running windows XP and hasn’t been working right for a week or so, suddenly was fixed as well. of course, this is all my fault, because i am now the person with the most knowledge about computers, and particularly email, in the office, but it’s windoesn’t, which means that i know practically nothing. when everything had cooled down (after it was discovered that we lost 2 customers as the result of not having our email work correctly) they asked me what we could do to prevent such a thing from happening in the future, and were not happy when i my response was to say that we should move away from so much reliance on microsoft for things that are essential to the business, like email… oh well… so much for being the person in the office with the most knowledge about computers. good thing i’m only a typesetter. i’ll let him pay someone else three times as much to tell him the same thing, ’cause i don’t care.
two more incense orders are ready to ship, and i’ve got one incomplete order, and one order that i’ve not even started on left to order. the one i haven’t even started on is the one who ordered 6 sixteen-inch tubes of sandalwood, and i’ve recently taken all of the sixteen-inch tubes off the site, because they’re difficult to ship, so i’ve got to decide what i’m going to do with the last customer. plus i’ve got an order for a ganesha murti that’s going to be arriving next week some time. also i’ve got a bunch of new products to add to the site as well; some new murtis, and rudraksha malas (with crystals and without). unfortunately it’s probably going to have to wait until at least after the cirque de flambé performances before i do anything about it.
i’ve got 5 incense orders, 4 of which are partially complete, and they along with the remaining one will be entirely complete when the package i’m expecting tomorrow or monday arrives. i’ve also got an order for a niruta ganapati murti that i’m going to have to order on monday, because the supplier is only open monday through thursday. i’ve also recently got an inquiry about a pipe, but i basically put the guy on hold, because i don’t have my shop set up yet… and i’m not sure i will, because i’m coming to the conclusion that there isn’t enough room for me and hybrid elephant in this tiny office. i wrangled around and put up my steel shelves, and immediately filled them up with no appreciable space cleared, and i’ve still got a drill press and a band saw and half of the shed full of stuff that hasn’t been unloaded yet. i’m thinking that there’s an office building down the hill that has a sign up that says “cheap rent” that i should look in to, but i’ve got to run the idea past moe before i actually do anything about it.
meanwhile, i’m still a wage slave. today is friday, so i get a brief respite from wage slavery, but i’m still gonna go back to work on monday. i finally finished whittling down the pile of 15-20 jobs that sprang up while i was away. majid is threatening to buy a new mac and then buy adobe creative suite, which includes indesign, and then not buy real typesetting software, and his reason is “because more people use indesign and windows”… which is true, but that doesn’t mean that we have to follow the crowd of people who don’t know any better into the jaws of chaos by accepting a standard of quality that is less than 100%. and besides, adobe has sweetheart deals for local folks, which is why more people use it locally, but from what i understand, the farther you get away from seattle, the more quark-like the world of printing becomes… and who can blame them for using software that works, rather than software that has terminal microsoft disease? unfortunately majid knows little enough about computers that he’s likely to listen to the advice of someone he knows (who also knows nothing about computers) rather than a person (me) with 20 years’ experience in the printing industry, who has been using the computer for typesetting almost ever since it was first available for such things. 8/
my computer broke a couple of weeks ago. it was working when i left for work, and when i got home, it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t restart. after fucking around with it for a couple days, i discovered that it was probably the power supply that had failed, but i didn’t have the time to determine if it was for sure or not, and i had to go play with the hippies for 4 days, so i didn’t get around to actually doing something about it until today. i actually took my computer somewhere, bear computers, and they fixed it for me while i was at work. now my main linux computer works again, which is good because windows, which was taking the place of linux (sort of) during the interim, seems to have developed a disagreement with the monitor – something linux doesn’t do – so i’m thinking something may be wrong with the video card, or whatever laptops have instead of video cards. thrill-a-minute… i get one computer working and another one breaks. i wonder if it will ever end?
the oregon country fair is over for another year – my second year attending, and tonight is the second anniversary of my injury. the hippie ineptitute factor seems to have attacked someone else this year. stuart and i drove to portland wednesday night, and proceded to veneta on thursday morning, i had no problems getting registered, we drove in to chela mela meadow(!) and unpacked the car in record time – i finished setting up camp around 1:30. i still had to wait in line about an hour and a half to get the priveledge of paying the hippie $5 to cut my wrist band off and make a laminated card out of it (the wristbands remind me too much of being in the hospital, and besides, the laminated card is a “collectors item”), but all in all, OCF was excellent. we played at the ritz sunday night, i actually took 5 one-hour saunas in 4 days, and left feeling cleaner than i came. it rained on saturday, but we were more prepared for the rain than we were in vancouver, so it wasn’t that bad, and besides, our stage – the “morningwood odditorium” – was one of the few venues that was covered, and so we got the people who were looking for shelter from the rain right when we were starting our shows. i latched on to the end of one of the parades featuring “The Fighting Instruments of Karma”, a group from seattle(!) which features a sousaphone player who has a really beautiful silver sousaphone, and took a whole bunch of pictures of people taking pictures, which i’m going to post in one form or another once i get my mac working. i got my little sivalingam “wrapped” in silver by a craftsman, so now i’m a “lingayat”, or a “person who wears a miniature sivalingam around their neck”, something i’ve wanted for quite a while. we did a burlesque show friday night that was so well recieved that we did another one on sunday night, after the ritz. hacki was there, who is a clown from germany that was part of the moisture festival, and his acts were sheer genius. it was also really cool to hang out with him backstage and smoke pot. i didn’t even remember that i had a computer until i came home…
of course, i came home and was suddenly struck with how much work there is to do… i still have a couple rooms full of boxes that need to be unpacked, i still have no shelves in the office, so i’ve got nowhere to unpack those boxes anyway, i’ve got 4 incense orders and a murti that i’ve got to order for customers, i’ve got to get the post office box and the billing address for hybrid elephant changed in reality and on the web site, but i still need an ethernet hub so that i can have more than one computer on at once…
and then there’s my job… sigh… i REALLY HATE being a wage slave… i returned to work on tuesday, and majid was frantic because “internet went down on thursday”, the day i left, and majid couldn’t figure out how to get it working again until monday – apparently earthlink changed something and it required that majid reboot his ethernet router – but he couldn’t figure out why his email wasn’t working… he wanted me to reboot the router, and unplug the router and connect the computer directly to internet, and a bunch of other useless tasks, and didn’t think that it was something wrong with outlook at all, until i looked at the server settings and discovered that his outgoing email server was set to 127.0.0.1… and then there was the job that i had sent to proof just before i left, which returned with an approval while i was gone. majid said he looked for the file, but couldn’t find it, so he ended up reproducing the file based on a scan of the file that i had sent out, except that it was wrong, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. i found the file in about 2 minutes, determined that he actually hadn’t looked for it – because its name included the work order number, which is how i found it – fixed the problem that majid had introduced by scanning the document and had plates ready for it in about 5 minutes… there were several other jobs like that, which were problems because majid doesn’t know what he’s doing, which i fixed almost immediately… but this is only wednesday! it feels like it should be thursday, because of all the screwups, chaos and hassle i’ve had to deal with since returning, combined with the fact that i REALLY didn’t want the oregon country fair to end just yet anyway…
meanwhile, my physical birthday was monday, big deal, and the cirque de flambe performances at sand point/magnuson park start in 19 days.
i’ve got to take a shower and shave my head, then i’ve got to start a load of laundry before bed. tomorrow i’ve got to get up extra early, because i’m not carpooling to work, so i’ve got to leave at 6:45 instead of 7:30. after a full day of work, i’ve got to come home and finish packing, then i’m going to the oregon country fair for the weekend. i’ll be returning on monday, which is my physical birthday (i’m going to be 45… wow!). then three days later (next thursday) is the 2 year anniversary of my brain injury.
my computer is dead, and i don’t know when it is going to be fixed. the problem is most likely either with the power switch on the front of the case, or the power supply itself, but i won’t know until i return from OCF, and probably not even then. it turns out there are no studs, or at least no discernable studs in the interior walls of this house, which doesn’t surprise me too much given it’s vintage, but it makes putting up shelves in the office a problem, and until i get shelves up, i essentially don’t have an office, which is not a good thing.
my primary machine, my linux computer, is broken. it was working fine on thursday morning when i was getting ready for work, and it was down and wouldn’t start when i got home. it may be just the power switch, but it may be worse… and, of course, i won’t have any time to do anyting about it for at least a week, because of barbecue, work, OCF, and a myriad of other things.
meanwhile, i’m almost caught up with the orders that came in during the time when we were moving, and i’ve got two new orders in the past two days… that’s good, i guess…
You Are 20% American
You’re as American as Key Lime Tofu Pie Otherwise known as un-American! You belong in Cairo or Paris… Get out fast – before you end up in Gitmo!
acrobat 4, 5, 6 – files must be saved at a high resolution (“for printing”)
acrobat files that are meant to be printed on the press (instead of digitally) should be colour separated where necessary. if they’re not colour separated, we CAN NOT print them on the press.
we MIGHT be able to accept other page layout file formats as long as one of the above applications can open it.
we CAN accept microsoft word and microsoft publisher files, but we reserve the right to re-set the files using industry standard page layout applications if they give us problems. we CAN NOT get colour separated files from microsoft word.
if your file uses a particular font, please advise us of this when the file is delivered to us and be prepared to deliver the font files if necessary. we have a lot of fonts, so usually this is not necessary, but if you want a particular font and we don’t have it, your document WILL NOT print with the font you want unless it is provided to us.
GRAPHIC FILE FORMATS PREFERRED
native format files we can accept:
freehand 7, 8, 9, 10 – line art, greyscale, spot colour, CMYK illustrator 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 – line art, greyscale, spot colour, CMYK photoshop 4, 5, 6, 7 – line art, greyscale, CMYK The GIMP – line art, greyscale, spot colour, CMYK corel draw – line art, greyscale, spot colour, CMYK
CMYK stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK. it is the way that files that are in “full colour” are printed. RGB stands for Red Green Blue, which is the way files that are in “full colour” are displayed on a computer screen. CMYK is an “additive” colour mode, whereas RGB is a “subtractive” colour mode. since printing is a process of “adding” ink to create a printed document, RGB is not an option, because it is not possible to take away ink once it is layed down. ALL FILES WHICH ARE IN A COLOUR MODE OTHER THAN CMYK WILL BE CONVERTED TO CMYK BEFORE PRINTING.
we MIGHT be able to accept other native file formats as long as one of the above applications can open it.
we CAN scan hi-res printed graphics. they will be turned into bilevel (one colour) .tif files, greyscale .eps files or CMYK .eps files, unless we receive specific instructions to do otherwise.
we CAN also accept the following graphic file formats
.jpg
.png – MUST be 600dpi resolution or higher. colour files will be printed as greyscale, or as CMYK. .gif
these file formats, plus scans, will most likely be converted into one of the following file formats, which are also acceptable:
.tif – one colour, no greyscale (line art only), 600dpi resolution or higher .eps – CMYK, greyscale, or spot colour (if it’s set up for spot colour), 600dpi resolution or higher
dpi stands for Dots Per Inch. it is the industry standard measurement for the resolution of a printed graphic. it corresponds with ppi, which stands for Pixels Per Inch, which is the industry standard measurement for the resolution of a graphic on a computer display.
graphic files that are lower than 600dpi resolution will print, but they will look grainy and not at all like they look on your computer screen. this is because your computer screen is 72dpi resolution, regardless of what your screen resolution (ppi) is. the rule of thumb when it comes to creating graphics for printing is “bigger is better”. we can always make something smaller if necessary, but making things bigger is guaranteed to make the printing customer dissatisfied.
we CAN accept other graphic file formats, but we will probably convert them to either .tif or .eps before printing.
if your document contains graphics, you MUST include the source file for the graphic as well as the actual document, if you want your finished, printed document to contain graphics. if they’re not there, we WILL contact you to get them before we print your document, which wastes time and makes a tight deadline harder to keep.
CLEAN UP THE FILE! don’t leave unused graphics or bits of type on the pasteboard, but outside of the printing area of the document. also, don’t include layers that are “invisible” in the document that you wish to print. doing this leads to wasted time finding the links and fonts that are not used. the only things that should be in the file are things that are going to print. if it’s not going to print, then leave it out of the file all together.
where possible, make sure that the “paper size” of the document is the size of paper you want the finished print to look like. exceptions to this would be business cards that print on a “master” or imprints on already printed postcards.
where possible, put crop marks, registration marks, bleeds and so forth on a separate layer. they’re good for layout and proofing, but they’re not always so ideal when it comes to printing.
if the file was made for use on a macintosh, then you should compress the file before emailing it, because if you don’t, then what we receive on this end is a file that cannot be printed, or rescued for any purposes. please use stuffit compatible with Os9, or zip to compress your files.
i am beginning to hate indesign. i don’t really know what it’s like on the mac, but on the PC, we’re running indesign CS version 2, i think (although it could be version 3, for all i know), and it has already screwed up several jobs which i could have done more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes on the mac, using quark… except that for his own perverse reasons, majid insisted that i do the jobs using indesign, and then was surprised when they didn’t come out the way he (and i) expected. of course it’s my fault… it couldn’t possibly be the fact that THE SOFTWARE IS DEFECTIVE!!! it doesn’t matter that mistakes like a text box getting slightly narrower than it was originally set, thus making the text it contains go from one line to two lines, don’t happen when i use the mac and quark – i was supposed to notice that it had happened before the job got printed, and certainly before it was due TODAY…
the week has gotten even more chaotic than it was before. i have 2 rehearsals, one yesterday and one tomorrow, plus my job, and when i get home, i still am in the middle of box hell despite my concerted efforts to end it, we’ve got a housewarming party on monday, and now, much to my chagrin, moe has decided that we have to go to portland to see her mother’s brother’s daughter (does that make her a cousin or a niece to moe? i’ve never been able to figure that out…), a person who i know only vaguely, get married – an act which everybody that i know, including moe’s mother, think is the worst possible mistake she could make, what with the fact that she’s just graduated from high school, her intended is in the military and will soon be shipped to iraq, and other "wonderful" things like that. so, instead of busting my ass getting ready (and probably failing, but at least i tried) for the party, i’ve got to go to the wedding of someone i don’t know and act like what she’s doing is the most wonderful thing ever, in spite of the fact that nobody believes it… which means that i will fail to get ready for the party, which will make moe upset… 8P
Redmond, WA – Microsoft purchased evil from Satan for $2.7 billion after many months of tough negotiations.
“We’ve been after Satan for some time,” said CEO Steve Ballmer. “Negotiations were tough, but I think both Microsoft and the Prince of Darkness are happy with this deal.”
Microsoft already controls 15% of the evil market, and with this purchase that number nears 100%. The Department of Justice voiced concerns over one corporation controlling so much evil, and launched investigations.
“We feel that there are real opportunities with evil, and that when evil is integrated into our next generation of Windows products consumers will appreciate evil on their desktop,” said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. “Businesses haven’t been able to fully realize their evil potential. With evil integrated into Office XP, corporations big and small will begin to see enhanced evil productivity.”
“Evil is a real growing market,” market strategist Frank Dresgan of Merrill Lynch explained. “Microsoft is a little late in the game, but even when they enter a market late they still tend to dominate. I think we’ll see the same results with evil.”
“I’ve been dealing with Microsoft for some time,” Lucifer said. “I’ve been at this evil thing for millions of years, and wanted a way out. I considered an IPO, but then Steve-O and Billy came along and told me about their ‘Evil Everywhere’ plan. I just couldn’t refuse.”
Evil was founded by Satan close to the beginning of time. It has been growing steadily ever since, although most of the growth has accelerated in the past five years with the development of the Internet. Satan plans to retire to a small island in the Bahamas and write a column for the local newspaper.
it’s sunday evening. i should be rested and ready to go to work tomorrow, and to go to rehearsal afterwards, but i’m fucking tired… i worked all day yesterday emptying out the POD, and performing at myron and marylin’s wedding until 11:00 last night, and i got up and finished emptying out the POD today (it’s scheduled for pickup tuesday or wednesday) while watching out for the guy from craigslist who came and picked up the refrigerator and the other guy from craigslist who came and picked up the washer and dryer. now i’ve got to put two working television sets on craigslist and see if we can get rid of them as well, because they don’t accept televisions at the transfer station. i’m slowly getting things whipped into shape, but that doesn’t negate the fact that moe has scheduled a housewarming barbecue for july 4th, and approximately 30 people have confirmed that they’re going to be here, so i’d better speed up the whipping if everything is going to be presentable by then.
the oregon country fair is july 8, 9, and 10, a little more than a week away, and i’m not ready for it yet, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s going to happen whether i’m ready for it or not. this year i’m going to spend more time at the ritz.
i may be making progress towards ending the chaos at work. this morning majid and i were talking about what to do with the computer situation (lack of filing system, problems with the PC, etc.), and he told me that i had convinced him. later on this afternoon, farah asked me why majid had it in for the mac, and i told her that i didn’t know, but i did know that for applications that did what i wanted to do, consistently, i much prefered the mac to the PC, and she said she would “talk to him” about it… in the way that makes me think she’s getting really fed up with the lack of filing systems that my predecessors have foisted off on me, and other suchlike stuff. i’m slowly formulating a file system: i’ve got most things in one of three places, depending on whether it is for a bellevue customer, a woodinville customer, or i’m not sure. there’s still at least five folders called “trash” in various places on the network that contain large quantities of customer files, in alphebetized folders that i’m not sure about… i found a customer file that wasn’t anywhere else on the network, that i needed to complete a job today, in one of those “trash” folders the other day… 8/
today is our 7th wedding anniversary, and if you didn’t know, i married the best, the sweetest, the most caring, the most loving (hoo yeah!), and the most beautiful woman in the whole world… sorry for all you other people who may think that you’re that person (or are married to that person), but you’re wrong: that person is MY wife, I’M married to her, and you can’t have her! 8)
by the way, a six-legged puppy was dumped at a temple in port klang, malaysia, recently… no shit, there’s really a town called port klang – probably reminiscent of all those gamelan orchestras…
also, the world beard and moustache championship inspires me… i may never get to the point of competition myself, but they certainly give a fine example of an ideal to live up to…
i’m getting really fed up with spam… the spammer’s most recent trick is to send me spam to my hybrid elephant email address, that appears to be from my hybrid elephant domain, but which is really from rr.com and contains a virus… fortunately, their virii attack windows only, and as i am a linux and mac user, i laugh at their feeble virus attacks and report the hell out of them anyway, but i have to be very careful not to report myself in the process. it’s irritating that i have to deal with it at all… any business which uses spam for adverising definitely does not have the priveledge of reciving business from me!
okay, now that i’ve actually had the chance to sleep, and don’t have to rush away to my job or to a rehearsal, i have the time to update a little…
the vancouver performances were rained out, which i probably could have told you would happen right from the beginning… what were they thinking, scheduling fire performances in the pacific northwest (well, okay, pacific SOUTHwest, because we were in canadada) in may anyway? ultimately, i spent three days and two nights standing around in a parking lot, in the pouring rain, without enough protective clothing, or even a rain coat, waiting for them to make the decision not to perform, combined with bits of frantic scurrying around unloading and loading the truck, trying (more or less successfully) to get the band gear under the canopies so that it wouldn’t get soaked, and rescuing the surrounding temporary fence which had blown over. i did get the chance to go to punjabi market, where i bought 5 music CDs and a kilo of incense (which, miraculously, i managed to keep dry), and we went out to a big chinese dinner the first night, and i had ostrich congee, which was a lot better than i expected, but on the whole, what with the motorhome being my ultimate destination, the whole trip was a wash. they did offer me a per diem, but i told them that the per diem was for when i had actually performed something.
today’s (yes, today’s) performance is for the fremont solstice parade, and i have to leave in about half an hour so that i can find parking reasonably close to where we are going to perform. this year’s scandal/controversy is over the members of a performance group called PURE, People Undergoing Real Experiences, which has been kicked out of the parade because they were going to run a float which was a pirate ship, and have people suspended by body piercings from the pirate ship… and fremont kicked them out of the parade because "they might frighten the children". personally, if the naked bicyclists are okay, then i don’t see what’s wrong with people who are clothed suspending themselves from hooks, but i’m just the tuba player. EDIT: there were a ton of naked bicyclists all throughout the parade – way more than there were last year – and the PURE group actually crashed the parade, but instead of suspensions from their body piercings, they were bound and gagged and carried signs with the international “not” symbol over a hook – thus meeting the parade organisers’ requirements of having no words in their display… also my parents were there, across the street from the stage where the fremont philharmonic played. i saw them, and said hello. they asked how i was doing, several times, and then walked away without saying goodbye. lame.
tomorrow is the fremont street fair, and the first two performances of "Babes in The Wood", which is another traditional british panto whose story, for those of you who don’t know, is a cross between robin hood and hansel & gretel, only it’s set in medieval england (so they’re "trevor" and "abigail" instead). sasha is friar tuck ("allow me to introduce myself… i’m fire truck. no, wait, i’m trier… er… i’d better be careful, there are kids present…"), but sasha is going to amsterdam and israel, so bradley is his "understudy", with the emphasis on "under"… he’s not the best, but he was the director for last year’s "jack and the bean stalk" and he works cheap.
this year’s performances of babes in the wood are directed by matthew stull, otherwise known as matthew bob, much to the chagrin of moe, who has expressed her extreme jealousy that i get to work with one of the bobs when she introduced me to the bobs music just a few years ago, whereas she’s been a FOB (friend of the bobs) for over 20 years.
whew, we’ve finally got internet at home… things will be back to more-or-less normal soon…
things are relatively quiet for a change. the only people in the shop are me and the press operator, greg. farah is at woodinville and majid went off with some guy who spoke persian (or farsi or something that majid also spoke, but that i don’t) and who said he was a buddhist (he asked me if i was jewish, people keep doing that, i wonder why?). i’m caught up, which i get the impression didn’t happen too often before i started… however we’ve got one job which is a full colour, two sided postcard from a senior care company which didn’t know how to spell “alzeimers” or “atmosfere” and wanted us (well, me) to “design a postcard” around a microsoft word document which was a copy-and-paste job from their web site, with no graphics… so i wonder if we’re even going to get paid for this one.
we still don’t have internet at home… as i suspected would happen, when i called wednesday and the guy said that the order was “expedited” and someone would be calling me within 48 hours, it didn’t happen. we did get an automated call at 7:30 am, saturday (grumble, mutter) which said that our DSL service had been hooked up and was available as of 6th june, which it was, only our provider was not drizzle, like we requested, but MSN, which we specifically did NOT request, but when moe tried to hook up her computer last night, it still didn’t work. as of 8:00 am this morning, any further delay in getting our internet hooked up is going to cost someone at qwest $120 an hour for my loss of business.
getting shelves put up, and with the exception of internet, got the computers all hooked up and ready to go. ordered 2 boxes full of boxes from uline for incense storage, so now i don’t have to keep all my incense for sale in milk crates. things are settling in slowly.
well, it’s just about over. we finally moved into the house on tuesday of last week, and the phone was hooked up on friday last week, but we still don’t have internet, and who knows when we will have it, because of qwest, so i get to update between jobs. things are going as well as can be expected at work, despite the fact that my bosses are without a doubt the stupidest business owners on the planet – when someone makes an order, they recieve a proof copy, which is exactly the same as it will look when it comes off of the press. then it is their job to proofread it to make sure everything is the way it should be, the spelling is all correct, the typesetting and layout is correct and so forth… except that with farah and majid, they only require the customer to proofread for spelling, and only on the stuff that has changed… the customer is not required to proofread for typesetting or design on jobs that are being reprinted. that, combined with the fact that they have absolutely no backups of any kind, and only a rudimentary filing system makes it practically impossible for me to get any job right the first time, and it means that if the customer doesn’t like what we have printed for them, for any reason, we have to reprint it again (and, potentially, repeatedly) for free, until we get it right. it’s a wonder they have stayed in business this long… also, because of the fact that their customers have not had to take responsibility for their mistakes, they subsequently have developed a long list of extremely spoiled customers who go out of their way to make sure that their jobs are done "right" regardless of what kind of garbage they submitted, and if it’s not done right, guess whose fault it is?
whooy… not much time: new job is going okay, in spite of the fact that majid and farrah know practically nothing about computers, but still insist that i use a PC and indesign for the work, in spite of the fact that it would be more accurate more of the time if i did it on a mac with quark instead… but they’re the bosses, so it’s time for some subtle education on my part, which i’m not sure if i’m ready for it or not. still don’t know when we’re going to close on the house, but presumably it should be this week some time… we hope… fingers crossed… meantime, living in a 30 foot motorhome in juanita (the owner said bothell, but it’s really juanita, regardless of what the owner says), which is small, but tolerable as long as we know it’s not forever. later.
today may be the last time i update until we get moved into our new house. but we still don’t know when that will be, because we still don’t know the closing date. moe has told her mom that it’s going to be the 17th, but that’s more to make her mom feel good than anything else, because we really don’t know. meanwhile, i’ve got a cirque de flambé performance on the 20th through the 23rd, and i start a NEW JOB (!!!!!) on wednesday the 11th, at which time we’re going to be staying with some friends (tom and wanda, people that moe knows through dog agility) in a 35 foot motorhome in butt-hell. anyway, i’ll try to update again sooner, but there’s no telling when or how, so it’s kinda up in the air.
bad news is that we’ve still not found out the closing date on our new house, which means that we’re going to have to spend a week or two living in a 35 foot motorhome in bothell (known by the people who live there as “butt-hell”). and there’s still the remote possibility that the financing won’t go through at all, which will mean a “slightly longer” stay in “butt-hell”…
good news is that i (finally) got a job. i start wednesday at minuteman press in bellevue, on 130th, very close to where i used to work when i worked at software dot com, before it got swallowed by openwave.
by the way, happy no pants day… and regardless of what some people think, i’m wearing my oh-so-trendy utilikilt and wondering why i don’t wear it more often. next we should think about having a no pants month… 8)
i got a “new” car yesterday – i hope it lasts a little bit longer than the last one, which was the only one to break the tradition – it’s a 96 mazda protegé (maintaining my tradition of never owning a car that is newer than 10 years old) that was a rental car in washington and oregon before i got it (which knowledge came to me from carfax), but the title has been lost, which means i can’t legally transfer my license plates that say GANESHA until after i’ve applied for a new title, and there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen before i go to canadada on the 20th, so i’m still planning on going with someone else… and i still don’t know who that is yet. 8/
NAKHON PATHOM, Thailand (Reuters) – In an era of chiseled supermodels and bizarre weight-loss diets a Thai beauty contest celebrated women with a bit of flesh Sunday when heavy-weight contestants battled for the Miss Jumbo Queen crown.
The annual contest, which aims to raise awareness and money for Thailand’s dwindling elephant population, allows full-sized women weighing over 176 pounds to show weight-conscious Thais that big is beautiful.
This year, 24 women participated in the contest at the Samphran Elephant Ground and Zoo, 38 miles west of the capital Bangkok.
“I want to show people that just because I’m fat doesn’t mean I’m any less beautiful or talented,” said 18-year-old winner, Tarnrarin Chansawang, who weighed in at 242 pounds.
Tarnrarin, a bubbly business student and tuba player from Bangkok, took home several prizes, including a Jumbo-sized trophy and $50,000 baht ($1,270).
Judges also looked at other talents of the contestants who mesmerized hundreds of spectators with raunchy dance numbers and revealing costumes.
In keeping with Jumbo tradition, a side award for Miss Jumbo Universe went to university student Thanchanok Mekkeaw for weighing in as the heaviest competitor in the pageant at 400 pounds.
That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion.
“I don’t know,” Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday.
“You don’t know?” replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. “Aren’t you the judge?”
Against a backdrop of state and federal efforts to pass a parental notification law for teen abortions, the exchange was typical of L.G.’s pluck as she argued that she had the right and capability to make her own decision, despite a move by the Department of Children & Families to seek a judge’s permission for her abortion.
“I think if I want to make the decision, it’s my business and I can do that,” she told the judge.
The DCF is the teen’s legal guardian after she was taken away from her parents for abuse or neglect. State law allows minors to have abortions without notifying their guardians. Experts say the law extends to wards of the state, raising the question of why this girl’s decision has ended up before a judge.
DCF Secretary Luci Hadi requested a judge’s ruling, according to a department statement released Friday. DCF attorneys filed an emergency motion Tuesday morning, the same day L.G.’s caseworker was prepared to take her to a clinic for the abortion.
“The Department of Children and Families has the custodial responsibility to do what is in the best interest of the child,” the department said.
Alvarez had ordered a psychological evaluation to determine L.G.’s mental condition and whether she would be harmed by terminating the pregnancy or giving birth.
The case is now before the 4th District Court of Appeal where it has been fast-tracked after attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency appeal Wednesday, arguing that neither the judge nor DCF should be involved in L.G.’s decision.
While delaying any ruling until the appeals court decides, Alvarez held a hearing Thursday to weigh arguments.
DCF attorney Jeffrey Gillen said he was concerned L.G. was more likely to suffer “detrimental effects” if she underwent an abortion because she had psychiatric or behavioral problems in the past.
L.G., who told Alvarez she had run away at least five times from her youth shelter, maintained, “It would make no sense to have the baby.”
“I don’t think I should have the baby because I’m 13, I’m in a shelter and I can’t get a job,” the girl said as Alvarez and her guardian ad litem, assigned to shepherd her in the legal system, questioned her.
L.G. laid out different reasons for wanting an abortion.
“DCF would take the baby anyway,” she said, but later added: “If I do have it, I’m not going to let them take it.”
She also questioned the health risk of carrying the fetus to term.
“Since you guys are supposedly here for the best interest of me, then wouldn’t you all look at that fact that it’d be more dangerous for me to have the baby than to have an abortion?” she asked. Alvarez called that “a good point.”
Dr. Ethelene Jones, an expert in obstetrics and gynecology, testified earlier in the hearing that abortions are “definitely” safer than full term pregnancies for girls L.G.’s age.
“At her age and at her stage of gestation … her risk of death from an abortion procedure is about 1 in 34,000,” said Jones, who has held positions at Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. “The risk of death in pregnancy is about 1 in 10,000.”
L.G. said her caseworker had taken her on three visits to clinics, and risks and alternatives to abortion were discussed.
Lynn Hargrove, the court-appointed psychologist, testified L.G. had a “mild mood disorder” but did not have “a significant psychotic or delusional thought process” that would interfere with rational decision making.
J.G. is 14 weeks pregnant, witnesses testified, which would indicate she became pregnant after she ran away from a group home in late January and was missing for a month.
She had sex with “a boy” but refused to disclose his name to Alvarez saying: “That’s not really necessary.”
The judge blasted the DCF, saying the agency never asked the court to issue an order to take the child into custody after her most recent disappearance.
“To say that I am angry at that would be an understatement,” Alvarez said. “To rush into this court on an emergency basis because this child is pregnant and wants an abortion, I don’t know where our priorities in life are. The priority should have been to make certain that an order to take her into custody was issued as soon as possible, and that she was found and taken off of the streets or wherever she was. But nobody cared.”
Munoz said DCF immediately notified law enforcement in Pinellas County when the girl ran away Jan. 29.
Munoz declined to specify what agency was notified, saying that could compromise L.G.’s privacy rights by leading to information about where she was living.
“As we do in all instances when a child runs away from their placement, we immediately notify law enforcement, submit a report into the Missing Child Tracker System, and notify other state agencies as appropriate,” the agency said in statement Friday.
i think it’s about time we rethink this: california has always been "the nuttiest state in the union", but i think it’s time for that honour to be passed on to florida…
archie mcphee has band-aids, but they’re not what they appear… they’re actually band-aids! weird!
somebody took my idea of writing grafitti in the moss on buildings to it’s logical conclusion… writing grafitti with moss… and beer! but i’m not sure that the beer couldn’t be substituted for some other moist product that isn’t beer, so that the beer could be consumed by the person writing the grafitti…
aaahhh, grafitti and mind altering substances – the beginnings of a religion!
also, 6th may is no pants day… wearing my kilt is a necessity!
i applied for my passport (!) so i can go to canadada (!) today. i went at 8:30 this morning, but the office doesn’t open until 10:00, so i took the paperwork and returned home. tried again at 11:00, and actually got in the door this time, but the lady said the name on my birth certificate doesn’t match the name on my driver’s license – well DUH! – and no, my social security card is not enough for the department of clownland security folks, they’ve got to actually see the paperwork, which is buried in one box, presumably in the back of the POD, and they won’t accept my paperwork without it. so i go back home, unpack the whole POD, digging through every box, because i don’t know which one i put it in, freak out, find it, and go back at 12:30… but the person who accepted the application is not the person who has to see the stuff, and according to the person who accepts the application, i won’t actually get the passport and supporting paperwork back for 5 to 6 weeks, unless i want to pay an extra $60 so they will "expedite" it back to me in 2 weeks (meaning that she put it in an express mail folder instead of in the regular mail). finally i raise my right hand and say "yes" when she asks me if all of the information is correct to the best of my knowledge. now the US department of state has my birth certificate and my certificate of name-change, which means that if, for some "god-knows-what" reason i’ve got to prove my identity to someone, i can’t do it… presumably they’re going to mail it all back to me, but with everything else in an uproar, there’s no telling what is going to happen.
we still don’t know whether we’ve got financing for our new house yet, and probably won’t until after the 10th, which is when we have to move out of our current place. the real estate agent says not to worry, but he doesn’t know who he’s talking to here… i’m an expert at worrying… and it’s worse, because i keep wondering what will happen when we’ve moved out of our current place, and then discover that the financing for the new house didn’t go the way we all want it to go, and we end up without a house. everybody says that won’t happen, but i say "why won’t it happen" and so far nobody has an answer to that question. and it’s even more worse because, since my injury, i’ve been worrying about everything a lot more than i used to.
EDIT: i’m fairly sure that this entry by wasn’t meant for me, but i’m not sure… and even if it wasn’t, it’s strangely appropriate to my current condition…
the house is definitely looking like we’re moving at this point: the basement and the back bedroom are empty, the garage is my “staging area” for moving stuff into the pod, so it has been cleared out, but currently has a whole bunch of stuff that has been packed but not moved yet in it, the office has one wall that needs to be finished, but everything else is out, the living room is about half finished, i’m taking ezra’s last bit of stuff to him this afternoon. what remains is the bedroom and kitchen (which get packed at the same time, according to moe’s “secret patented method for moving”), and the computer stuff, which actually gets packed last, because that way they get unpacked first.
we have to move out of our current house by the 10th of may, but we don’t know when we’re going to find out when we can move in to our new house yet, because the financing is still up in the air. the stress is getting palpable.
combine that with the fact that the cirque de flambé has an “international” show (in vancouver, canadada) to do at the end of may, and i haven’t even tried to get into canadada since the fiasco eight years ago which happened because of the fact that my “criminal record” (i was convicted of shoplifting 20 cents worth of candy from a bulk candy bin at the grocery store 15 years earlier) had been expunged and i didn’t know that it mattered… so i ended up having to pay $350 CN (which i didn’t have) for a “humanitarian discretionary entry” in order to get into the country, because it was either that, or forfeit a week’s vacation (which cost significantly more than $350 CN)… i’ll have to remember all my paperwork from that… and i still don’t know whether they’re going to want a passport, or if they’ll just accept my birth certificate and driver’s license… and the fact that i still don’t have a car, so i’ll be relying on someone else to transport me and my stuff.
plus, the only email i have recieved for about 2 weeks (apart from various legitimate mailing-list banter which doesn’t involve me) has been spam… and spam has been REALLY bad the past few days. i’m feeling discouraged and depressed because the only people who want to be in contact with me are ones who are trying to scam me in some way.
I am: -19% Republican.
“The Marxists are too reactionary for you. With people like you around, America collectively thanks God for John Ashcroft.”
other links: boom… really! hallucinogen myths put to rest – see? all the drugs i took in college may have actually been good for me, like i’ve been saying all along!
we are moving some time after 7 may and before 15 may, but we’re not sure of the exact date yet. the basement and the back bedroom are completely clean, i’ve gotten rid of the old futon bunk bed and taken three pickup loads to the dump. i’ve still got the stair climber, the old recliner, an inflatable boat, a box of books and 3 bicycles that need to be donated. all that’s left is the remainder of the garage, the remainder of the office, remainder of the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom, but the last vestiges of the office (the computers) are probably going to be saved until the last possible moment, because they have to be hooked up at the new place first. also, the kitchen is mostly packed already, it’s just a matter of actually putting stuff in boxes. supposedly ezra’s going to come by on friday and pick up the rest of his stuff, but i’m going to see if i can’t arrange to meet him sometime and just take it to him, because it’s getting in the way currently.
the Cirque de Flambé has performances in vancouver bc, the 21st and 22nd. at this point i still don’t have a car, so i’m planning on car-pooling with someone, but i don’t know who yet.
Joel-Peter Witkin: Known for photographing human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcasses, people with odd physical capabilities & fetishists
“When I produce a photograph that totally satisfies, a part of me actually dies. And I think that death is an aspect of myself being burned away or dissolved, because that part of what I had to work out is taken care of.”
adobe develops microsoft disease… time to start moving away from adobe applications now, especially on the mac… time to have an Os9.x machine on which you can run freehand, and a W2K machine on which you can run homesite. oh well. competiton was overrated anyway: microsoft has already proved that it’s possible to dominate the market, tell the consumers what they want, and spam them into oblivion, and nobody will care, so why can’t adobe do the same thing?
first, there’s "senator" frist, who defended his effort to strip democrats of their ability to block votes on "president" shrub junior’s court nominees… the filibuster is one of democracy’s last ditch measures to make sure that people aren’t subjected to government which is not by, for, and of the people. the essential criminalisation of things like the filibuster and protection from self-incrimination should make everyone sit up and take notice!
then, when they’re through trying to take away another vestige of the democracy that failed, they decide that you’re not paying enough in taxes, that one fifth, or more, of your income isn’t enough, and they have to have more of your hard earned cash to support the massive war effortwaste of environmental resourcessweetheart deals with places like enron and halliburton… um… er… things that aren’t evil in one way or another…
i am a terrorist! if something isn’t done to rescue our own people right here at home, from the stupidity of our own government, SOON you’re all going to wish that it had!
Frist Defends Effort to End Filibusters
Sunday, April 24, 2005
By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent
WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was telling conservatives on Sunday that judges deserve “respect, not retaliation,” no matter how they rule, and he defended his effort to strip Democrats of their ability to block votes on President Bush’s court nominees.
“I don’t think it’s radical to ask senators to vote. I don’t think it’s radical to expect senators to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities,” said Frist, whom Democrats have accused of engaging in “radical Republican” politics.
A potential candidate for the White House in 2008, the Tennessee Republican made no overt mention of religion in a brief address taped for a rally Sunday evening in Louisville, Ky., according to a text of his remarks released before the event.
Instead, Frist seemed intent on steering clear of the views expressed by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and other conservatives in and out of Congress who have urged investigations and even possible impeachment of judges they describe as activists.
“Our judiciary must be independent, impartial and fair,” Frist said in his taped remarks.
“When we think judicial decisions are outside mainstream American values, we will say so. But we must also be clear that the balance of power among all three branches requires respect — not retaliation. I won’t go along with that,” Frist said.
The event, organized by the conservative Family Research Council, was being held in a church and was to be broadcast around the country. Fliers for “Justice Sunday — Stopping The Filibuster Against People of Faith” said the filibuster, a tactic used by the minority party to stall debate and sometimes scuttle votes on presidential nominees, is “being used against people of faith.”
The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate said on Sunday that the Constitution prohibits a religious test for a person to be appointed to a public office.
“What’s happening today with the Family Research Council is wrong,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told “Fox News Sunday.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking on the same show, said the Family Research Council should not question whether Democrats are people of faith or religious bigots.
“I don’t think that helps the country and I don’t think it’s fair,” Graham said.
For months, Frist has threatened to take action that would shut down the Democrats’ practice of subjecting a small number of judicial appointees to filibusters. Barring a last-minute compromise, a showdown is expected this spring or summer.
While a majority of the Senate is sufficient to confirm a judge, it takes 60 votes under Senate rules to overcome a filibuster and force a final vote.
Rather than change the rules directly, Frist and other Republicans have threatened to seek an internal Senate ruling that would declare that filibusters are not permitted against judicial nominees.
Because such a ruling can be enforced by majority vote, and Republicans have 55 seats in the 100-member Senate, GOP leaders have said they expect to prevail if they put the issue to the test.
Democrats blocked 10 appointments in Bush’s first term. The president has renominated seven of the 10 since he won re-election, and Democrats have threatened to filibuster them again.
Republicans pushed two of the nominees — including Texas Supreme Court Judge Priscilla Owen — from the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on party-line votes.
In his remarks, Frist singled out Owen for praise, possibly indicating she will become the test case for the expected showdown.
“She has received praise from both parties,” he said of Owen, nominated for a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Justice Owen has also been a leader for providing free legal services to the poor. And she has worked to soften the impact of legal proceedings on children of divorcing parents,” Frist said.
Frist said that “even though a majority of senators support her, she has been denied an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate. … Justice Owen deserves better. She deserves a vote.”
In his remarks, Frist noted that some Republicans are opposed to ending judicial filibusters, fearing that they may someday want to use the same tactics against appointments made by a Democratic president.
“That may be true. But if what Democrats are doing is wrong today, it won’t be right for Republicans to do the same thing tomorrow,” he said.
Frist also said that the Democrats’ filibuster against Bush’s nominees was the first time ever that “a judicial nominee with majority support had been denied an up-or-down vote.”
Republicans held a Senate majority for six of President Clinton’s eight years in office and frequently prevented votes on his court appointments by bottling them up in the committee, knowing the nominees would be confirmed if allowed to go to a vote by the full Senate.
One nominee, Richard Paez, a district court judge when he was nominated, waited more than four years before being confirmed to the appeals court.
Frist’s comments on the independence of judges follow DeLay’s campaign against the federal courts since judges refused to order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.
After the death of the brain-damaged Florida woman, despite swift congressional passage of a law giving federal judges jurisdiction to review her case, DeLay said, “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” He later apologized, saying he had spoken in an “inartful” way.
Commission Says Too Many Tax Breaks Exist
Sunday, April 24, 2005
By MARY DALRYMPLE, AP Tax Writer
WASHINGTON – As taxpayers recover from finishing their annual filing chores, a presidential commission studying the tax laws has reached the conclusion that there are just too many deductions and credits.
Three credits and a deduction help taxpayers cut college costs. Special urban and rural tax zones encourage investment and job creation. Dozens of other tax benefits help families raise children and save for retirement, encourage adoption, nudge drivers toward hybrid cars and push businesses to invest in new equipment.
“We have lost sight of the fact that the fundamental purpose of our tax system is to raise revenues to fund government,” according to President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.
The commission’s chairman, former Florida Sen. Connie Mack, said its nine members have been surprised at the number of tax deductions and credits.
“It wasn’t until we really had the opportunity to listen to so many different people talk about so many different aspects of the code that it really sunk in about how much and how often the code is being used these days to either create incentives or disincentives for either investment or behavior,” Mack said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The White House budget office ranks the cost of a deduction for businesses that provide health insurance to employees as the top tax break, worth $126 billion next year. Also high on the list are the popular mortgage interest deduction, a capital gains break for home sales, a deduction for charitable contributions and the child tax credit.
The list includes many tiny tax breaks. Among them are ones that encourage biodiesel fuel, help the elderly and disabled, make interest on educational bonds tax-free and allow teachers to deduct the cost of school supplies.
The problem comes when taxpayers try to decipher the rules that govern those credits and deductions. The tax breaks often overlap and typically come with pages of instructions and qualifications.
“It was clearly stated that the level of complication has become so great that in many cases it ends up deterring the activity that you’re trying to encourage,” Mack said.
Bush has asked the panel to preserve tax breaks that promote homeownership and charitable giving.
Tax breaks started proliferating in the 1990s for two reasons, said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
“There’s always been this political reward for claiming to do something new rather than merely cleaning up or slightly expanding something that already exists,” Steuerle said.
Lawmakers want to brand their own education tax breaks, for example, which means there are multiple deductions, credits and special savings accounts instead of one tax break everyone can use.
Tax breaks also provide benefits without creating a government spending program. But the proliferation of tax breaks end up costing the public because they mean lawmakers cannot lower income tax rates, Steuerle said.
“They make it look like smaller government, when in fact it’s actually bigger government,” he said.
The tax breaks amount to billions of dollars.
Tax benefits that provide indirect subsidies to homeowners add up to more than the entire budget of the Housing and Urban Development Department.
The earned income tax credit for low wage workers is bigger than any welfare program, including food stamps.
The tax break for businesses that provide health insurance is growing faster than almost all other domestic programs.
Some critics say no one tracks the tax breaks to find out if they succeed in promoting the behavior lawmakers want to encourage. Limitations often mean that some breaks are not available to wealthier taxpayers or poorer ones.
“It is worth noting that the deductions are of little or no benefit to the 40 percent of taxpayers who don’t owe taxes,” Fred Goldberg Jr., a former Internal Revenue Service commissioner, told the presidential panel.
Would taxpayers give up some of those deductions and credits to make the whole system simpler? Not likely.
“Anytime you’ve got a benefit, wherever it happens to be, whether it’s spending or taxes, people don’t want to give them up,” Mack said.
This summer, the panel plans to recommend ways to make the tax laws simpler and fairer.
windoesn’t is acting up again. the 1.03 update for firefox is out, but when i ran the update, it stalls out starting just before it loads my “homepage” (which is a html file on my local network): the menus won’t work, although there’s a “double-click to check for updates” button in the wrong place on the toolbar which does work (although, as i expected, it doesn’t find any updates, because there aren’t any) and the only thing that does work is the “X” box in the upper right corner which quits the program. i checked the task manager and there’s only one firefox process, which goes away when i quit (which is what i expect), and i uninstalled, cleaned out the registry of every occurrance of “firefox” and then re-installed 1.02, but it still gave me the same problems when i got 1.02 installed, which leads me to believe that something in the windoesn’t operating system is getting in the way, but not in a way that i’ve been able to figure out. i’ve updated and run 2 different virus/spyware/malware deteciton programs with no results, and linux version of 1.03 works without a problem (which i expect), but it’s kind of irritating when i have to post things on the web before checking their validation, because my validator on windows is dependent on a local version of firefox… 8/
EDIT: it’s fixed, and linux, which broke afer the first posting of this message, is fixed as well. apparently something was not called correctly when i installed my extensions, and starting it up in safe mode, disabling and uninstalling, then re-installing the extensions fixed it for both platforms.
this was borrowed from who borrowed it from : “this is the meme where you throw some lyrics into Babelfish and translate them into Dutch and French and German and Yakian Discordian and then post three hints as to what the song is and people have to guess it.”
i’m actually going to do a number of these, but this one is, in my opinion, terrifically easy if you know my musical tastes at all:
It is a song regarding the vegetable, it is you regularly, it real for and holds effective calls the any vegetable.
The call it the name.
Mention today, if you receive from the course.
Calls are good any vegetable and the chances, which will answer the vegetable at you!
1) it is a song by my favourite artist.
2) it is a song which invokes a deity for which i have an affinity.
jeez, do i really need to post three? okay…
3) it is the song that the Tinite High Priest sings before a special yearly celebration.
from
You are a stone key, and you unlock old and magical secrets. What you have to offer is powerful and difficult for many to understand, but invaluable to the few who can truly grasp it. Give the things you have carefully and wisely, because not everyone will use them for good.
BERLIN (AFP) – Hundreds of toads have met a bizarre and sinister end in Germany in recent days, it was reported: they exploded.
According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre (three feet).
It is like “a science fiction film”, according to Werner Smolnik of a nature protection society in the northern city of Hamburg, where the phenomenon of the exploding toad has been observed.
“You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding.”
He said the bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size.
“I have never seen such a thing,” said veterinarian Otto Horst. So bad has the death toll been that the lake in the Altona district of Hamburg has been dubbed “the pond of death.”
Access to it has been sealed off and every night a biologist visits it between 2:00 and 3:00 am, which appears to be peak time for batrachians to go bang.
Explanations include an unknown virus, a fungus that has infected the water, or crows, which in an echo of the Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds”, attack the toads, literally scaring them to death.
habemas papam… white smoke and a new nazi… benedict XVI, for whatever that’s worth…
also, i’m sure nobody else will remember this (it’s odd what you remember and what you forget as the result of a brain injury), but bob larson’s old talk show line – 1-800-821-TALK (8255) – has turned into a toll-free pornography line. i couldn’t have wished for a more appropriate outcome. by the way, if any of you do know what i’m talking about, ralph ewggleigh (otherwise known as “wraith ugly”, the “witch” who bob ranted at incessantly for the first few years he was on the radio, who then “committed suicide” only to be “resurrected” by the Church of Tina Chopp), can now be reached at ugly at fuckthatshit dot org…
although i am not responsible for what happens if you send him spam…
one of the advantages of cleaning house in preparation for moving
does anybody know who this person is? her picture was amongst a bunch of otherwise tossable paper junk i just don’t know who it is, or why i’ve got it…
by the way, that’s stuff i’m selling, not stuff that i want… just to be clear about it.
it’s official… we sold our house today, which means that we are moving at the end of the month. it’s remotely possible that we actually will be moving into the "glorified trailer" near star lake, but we won’t know for sure until monday. meanwhile i made a button that says “IN WALLA WE TRUST” for someone named ariel who lives on mercer island, and i’ve filled three incense orders and i’ve got another one sitting on my desk which i’m going to have to order one of the three items that they ordered, but that should be fairly easy.
How much is enough?!
A Social Justice Quiz
Twenty Questions By BILL QUIGLEY
1. In 1968 the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. How much would the minimum wage be today if it had kept pace with inflation?
2. In 1965, CEOs in major companies made 24 times more than the average worker. In 2003, CEOs earned how many times more than the average worker?
3. The US is composed of 3,066 counties. In how many of the nation’s 3,066 counties can someone who works full-time and earns the federal minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment?
4. How much must the typical US worker must earn per hour hour if they dedicate 30% of their income to housing costs.
5. How many million workers in the US earn poverty-level wages of less than $8.20 an hour?
6. What are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Tennessee?
7. What are Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia?
8. In 2001, the average financial wealth for black householders was about what % of the average for white households?
9. The median financial wealth for blacks is how much of the corresponding figure for whites?
10. Over the entire 28 year history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. In the ten years since the Clinton administration implemented the current U.S. border strategy with Mexico, how many people have died trying to cross?
11. Where does the US rank worldwide in the imprisonment of its citizens?
12. In 2004, the direct reported US military budget was how much for each second of the year?
13. In 2003, the US military budget was how many times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender?
14. In 2003, the US military budget was how many times as large as the combined spending of the seven so-called “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria)?
15. The difference in income per head between the richest nation and the poorest nation in 1750 was about 5 to 1. Today the difference between the richest nation and the poorest nation is what?
16. Of the 6.2 billion people in the world today, how many live on less than $1 per day, and how many live on less than $2 per day?
17. The richest 1% in the world receive as much income as what percentage of the poorest?
18. The Congress under President Bush has been more generous in helping poor countries than under President Clinton. In 2003, the US increased official development assistance to poor countries by one-fifth. Where does the US contribution rank in the top 22 countries in proportion to our economy?
19. Americans give how much per day in government assistance to poor countries?
20. Americans spend how much on soft drinks each day?
…
ANSWERS
1. The minimum wage would be $8.70 today if it had kept pace with inflation. Brennan Center, NYU Law School, November 3, 2004.
2. In 1965, CEOs in major companies made 24 times more than the average worker. In 2003, CEOs earned 185 times more than the average worker. “Wages” in State of Working America 2004-2005, Economic Policy Institute, www.epinet.org
3. In four of the nation’s 3,066 counties can someone who works full-time and earns the federal minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment. New York Times, “Study Finds Gap in Wages and Housing Costs,” December 25, 2004.
4. In fact, the typical US worker must earn $15.37 an hour if they dedicate 30% of their income to housing costs. New York Times, “Study Finds Gap in Wages and Housing Costs,” December 24, 2004.
5. How many people in the US earn poverty-level wages of less than $8.20 an hour? More than 30 million workers. William Quigley, ENDING POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job at a Living Wage, 24 (Temple 2003).
6. What are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Tennessee? The total population of these states represents the number of people in the US living below the official poverty line. William Quigley, ENDING POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job at a Living Wage, 23-24 (Temple 2003).
7. What are Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia? The total populations of these state populations must be added to the states above if you count all the people below 125% of the official poverty line, a total of 22 states. William Quigley, ENDING POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job at a Living Wage, 23-24 (Temple 2003).
8. In 2001, the average financial wealth for black householders was about 12% of the average for white households. “Minorities,” in State of Working America 2004-2005, Economic Policy Institute, www.epinet.org
9. The median financial wealth for blacks was $1,100, less than 3% of the corresponding figure for whites. “Minorities,” in State of Working America 2004-2005, Economic Policy Institute, www.epinet.org
10. Over the entire 28 year history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. In the ten years since the Clinton administration implemented the current U.S. border strategy with Mexico, more than 2,500 people have died trying to cross. Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. Marc Cooper, “On the Border of Hypocrisy,” December 5, 2003, LA Weekly.
11. Where does the US rank worldwide in the imprisonment of its citizens? First. The US imprisons over 700 persons per 100,000. Russia is second with 584. Sentencing Project, Facts About Prisons and Prisoners. www.sentencingproject.org
12. In 2004, the direct reported US military budget was over $399 billion, $12,000 a second. www.globalissues.org
13. In 2003, the US military budget was more than 8 times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender. www.globalissues.org
14. The US military budget was more than 29 times as large as the combined spending of the seven “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). Even if you add China and Russiaís military spending to that of the seven potential enemies, all nine nations together spent $116.2 billion, 27% of the U.S. military budget. The US military budget is more than the combined spending of the next twenty three nations. www.globalissues.org
15. The difference in income per head between the richest nation and the poorest nation in 1750 was about 5 to 1. Today the difference between the richest nation, Switzerland, and the poorest nation, Mozambique, is about 400 to 1. (David S. Landes, THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS, xx, W.W. Norton 1998).
16. Of the 6.2 billion people in the world today, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day, 2.8 billion live on less than $2 per day. 2002 UN Human Development Report.
17. The richest 1% in the world receive as much income as the poorest 57%. 2002 UN Human Development Report.
18. The Congress under President Bush has been more generous in helping poor countries than under President Clinton. In 2003, the US increased official development assistance to poor countries by one-fifth. Where does the US contribution rank in the top 22 countries in proportion to our economy? Last. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Land of Penny Pinchers,” New York Times, January 5, 2005.
19. Americans on average give how much per day in government assistance to poor countries? 15 cents. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Land of Penny Pinchers,” New York Times, January 5, 2005.
20. Americans spend how much on soft drinks each day? 60 cents. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Land of Penny Pinchers,” New York Times, January 5, 2005.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing” oriented society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967.
Bill Quigley is a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at [email protected]
so we’re not going to be living at the end of a gravel road that is off another gravel road near star lake, because of the fact that we can’t get financing for the “trailer” in spite of the fact that the people who are in charge of our current mortgage said they would loan us money… we’ve recinded our offer, and our real estate agent (who should have known that this was going to happen) says he’ll be able to get our earnest money back, but if not we’re going to make him eat it, because he should have known that this was going to happen, but lead us down the garden path anyway. meanwhile, we’ve found another house which looks about right, although we haven’t seen it yet… we’re going to see it tomorrow, so hopefully it will work out. our current house is still in the process… the buyer’s agent was going to meet with the buyers this evening, after they get off work, so we still don’t know anything for sure.
US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA05-102A — Multiple Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Components
Overview
Microsoft has released a Security Bulletin Summary for April, 2005. This summary includes several bulletins that address vulnerabilities in various Windows applications and components. Exploitation of some vulnerabilities can result in the remote execution of arbitrary code by a remote attacker. Details of the vulnerabilities and their impacts are provided below.
I. Description
The list below provides a mapping between Microsoft’s Security Bulletins and the related US-CERT Vulnerability Notes. More information related to the vulnerabilities is available in these documents.
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-020: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (890923)
VU#774338 Microsoft Internet Explorer DHTML objects contain a race condition
VU#756122 Microsoft Internet Explorer URL validation routine contains a buffer overflow
VU#222050 Microsoft Internet Explorer Content Advisor contains a buffer overflow
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-02: Vulnerability in Exchange Server Could Allow Remote Code Execution (894549)
VU#275193 Microsoft Exchange Server contains unchecked buffer in SMTP extended verb handling
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-022: Vulnerability in MSN Messenger Could Lead to Remote Code Execution (896597)
VU#633446 Microsoft MSN Messenger GIF processing buffer overflow
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-019: Vulnerabilities in TCP/IP Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service (893066)
VU#233754 Microsoft Windows does not adequately validate IP packets
II. Impact
Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may permit a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable Windows system, or cause a denial-of-service condition.
III. Solution
Apply a patch.
Microsoft has provided the patches for these vulnerabilities in the Security Bulletins and on Windows Update.
good news/bad news… and since there’s nobody to choose which comes first, you get my choice, and i’m not sure which is which.
we’ve had two offers on our house, and despite that, we continue to have to let total strangers walk around and “preview” the house, because the offers are not finalised yet: one of them was an investor who had bunches of money he was willing to throw at us with no contingencies or prerequisites, but he suddenly developed some “family emergency” or something like that, which made him have to leave for europe, so he withdrew the offer. the other one is from a family who is buying their first house, and their offer comes with some things that make us question whether they are actually going to get what they are asking for, and may end up not going through at all because they may want us to spend money to fix things – which is why we’re selling in the first place: we don’t have enough money to pay the mortgage, let alone fix things that they may want to have fixed before they’ll actually give us money.
however, the owner of the house we want to buy wants to sell to us, and has basically said that she’s ready to move at the end of april, so we’d be able to move in around the 1st of may… except that when the people who finance our mortgage, who have already approved a new mortgage based solely on moe’s income, found out that the “house” is actually a “glorified trailer”, they changed their minds and now say that they won’t lend us money unless we put up 30% of the cost of the “trailer” as a down payment. apparently the house is a “single-wide”, which are the most frequently defaulted-on mortgages of any out there, and despite the fact that we have great credit, they say that a “single-wide” is more like a car (or, more specifically, a trailer) than a house, and they’re afraid we’ll move it somewhere else (as if)… so they’re willing to loan us money to buy the “single-wide” if we’re willing to put down 30% to start with, but not at all if it is to be a “no down payment” mortgage, which is what we can afford… and if we recind our offer at this point, we’ll lose our earnest money, which we can’t afford to do.
SUCK!
the whole thing has put enough stress on moe that i’m starting to worry about her, along with all of the other things i’ve got to worry about. 8P
oh, yeah… the moisture festival is done for another year. i’m told that we won’t have to wait until next year to “get moist” again, but nothing apart from that.
apparently kids in japan play a game called kancho, which involves “kids clasping their hands together, sticking out their first fingers, and shoving them up your butt”… here’s a link to the whole story for the morbidly curious, as well as a link to the JET Programme, for those who want to go and find out for themselves whether it’s really true or not.
Leftist Hatred Behind Pie-Throwing Thugs… “Pie-throwing thugs attacking conservative speakers on college campuses are motivated by left-wing hatred…” or they could just be getting totally fed up with doing things according to the rules and getting shot down, overridden, and out-“voted” at every attempt. hrmph!
oh, all right, i’ll update my journal, in spite of the fact that the same things are going on now that were going on a week ago (stress over not having a job, stress about moving to an as-yet-unknown place, stress about my car’s deteriorating condition, moisture festival performances, etc.), if for no other reason than to get the mass of links off of my desktop.
the moisture festival is in the middle of it’s second week of performances, and everything is going amazingly well, although as disorganised as ever. apparently hobbit wrote to someone at the moisture festival back in february, but nobody responded. oh well, better luck next time, ‘eh? there’s a review of the moisture festival, and a whole bunch of pictures taken at the moisture festival by john cornicello, who is the fremont philharmonic’s keyboard player, but there’s only one of me. we’ll have to fix that…
please note, what you can see of the hat was given to me by now that i’ve got the photo on a server which doesn’t prevent me from linking to graphics of my own face… grumble, grumble…
through not very much poking around i found my father’s web site. the last time i talked to him, i called to ask for a copy of my birth certificate, about a month ago. he said he would send it to me, and then hung up with no further comment. that was the first time i spoke to him since my injury, almost 2 years ago, and i’ve not been in contact with him and the rest of my "family-of-origin" for maybe 3 years before that. i wish i could have expected more from him, but he’s been that way for close to 20 years, so i don’t know why i should expect anything else from him. he sent me a certified letter with the original of my birth certificate (!), but it was addressed to my old name, which i haven’t used for more than 20 years.
along the same lines, i found another species of salamander on the web, Aneides flavipunctatus, whose name i like almost as much as Ambystoma tigrinum (the Tiger salamander, which is a "Mole salamander" according to the family name, but which isn’t listed at wildherps.com).
turning the corner, there’s an article i rather liked about the "chaliban" – the "christian" taliban which is slowly and insidiously taking over this country – which has been hypocritical enough to allow the government to pull the plug on a 6-month-old baby with a fatal form of dwarfism (over his mother’s objections), and hypocritical enough to allow tom delay to pull the plug on his own terminally-ill father, but hypocritial enough to rush in and repeatedly try to deny michael schiavo’s attempts to pull the plug on his brain-damaged, used-to-be human wife, terri… similarly, there is now evidence that a good deal of the information that "we" used to "justify" going to war with iraq came from a drunken liar… dude… where’s my country?
more linky-links…
Pope Joan – myth, or what? huitlacoche is a south american "delicacy" made from corn smut… EDIT: the original article, with more pictures, can be seen at The Sneeze – not for the squeamish or weak of heart… don’t say i didn’t warn you… i mean it!
here are a number of articles by Swami Abhedananda about jesus and "churchianity", which i have bookmarked for future reference. the robo-urinal, which is bizarre enough that they included a picture of it, to assuage any skepticism…
thanks to
reefer "madness" – or, more accurately, reefer sarcasm. they’re grasping at straws here… DON’T SAY CLICK HERE, and other dangerous words that i’ve been warning people about for years now… but people still ask me to use it anyway, which really frustrates me…
well, we’re officially moving… soon… but we still don’t know where yet. there’s a 2 bedroom manufactured home (read "glorified trailer") near star lake, or one of those small lakes in auburn (i’m not sure exactly which lake it is) that we’ve made an offer on, but we haven’t heard anything yet. in spite of that, we put the house on the market yesterday and we’ve already got a bunch of calls. i’ve been busting ass cleaning up and doing yard work…
and doing moisture festival performances, which are going really well, in spite of the fact that they’re somewhat disorganised. everybody’s going on when they’re supposed to go on, but when they’re supposed to go on is sort of transitory, and doesn’t get decided upon until right before the show, and in some cases (like last night) they change the order halfway through the show… plus they claim (for example) that there are sound effects for the thunder/lightning/rain effect at the beginning of the show that are on mini-disc, but the sound person (who isn’t me, because i’m in the band, more on this later) doesn’t know anything about it, and doesn’t have a mini-disc player that they can plug into the board anyway… so minutes before the show, john and i are running around trying to find hacki’s son myron to see if he has a mini-disc player (which he doesn’t), and yelling across a crowded performance hall to the sound person telling her that i will do the sound effects "manually" with a thunder drum and a metal sheet… and then, when it came time to do it, they skipped over that part without telling me, so i was all set and they began the next number and i was standing there holding my "props" looking like a fool… and it wasn’t even april fool’s day! i said earlier that i would also be running lights and sound, but this won’t be possible because i’m in the band, which has got to be available during every performance, at a moment’s notice, to go on and "cover", in case something goes wrong… plus it is a big enough performance this year (!) that sound and lights are actually two positions and the sound person, by necessity, can’t run lights as well.
anyway, for those of you in the boston area, MIT is giving a day-long workshop called regarding evil that i’d really like to attend if it weren’t on the wrong side of the country, and along the same lines, now that there’s more than one of us saying things like this, perhaps there’s a slight bit greater a probability that we won’t blow ourselves up before we can actually save the planet, Death was arrested and charged with theft from a cemetary in (where else) san francisco (i’ll let you figure that one out), and now there is further proof that people are Tinites whether they like it or not!
images by Jim Kirwan
this is an advertisement? for what??
more "advertising" by the same artist… what is he advertising, anyway??
finally, thanks to , iCopulate for all those lonely iPods out there… i’m pretty sure the west has too much money, and too much time on their hands.
terri schiavo died a few minutes ago… now the battle is for where and what manner she will be buried. michael says she will be cremated and buried in pennsylvania, the parents want her not cremated and buried in florida…
The 2005 Moisture Festival, A springtime celebration of comedie and varieté featuring Fyodor Karamazov, Du Caniveaux, The Fremont Players, Zebra Kings, Lelavision, Kevin Joyce, Martha Enson, PK Dwyer, Godfrey Daniels, Dangerous Flares, Artis the Spoonman, Flordigan Can Can Girls, Dr. Calamari and Acrophilia, Berlin’s Hacki Ginda, Avner the Eccentric. Tom Noddy the Bubble Guy, Rhys Thomas Jugglemania, Buttrock Suites, Magical Mystical Michael, Circus Contraption, The Aerialistas, Canote Brothers, Henrik Bothe, Baby Gramps, The Peculiárs, Amanda Starr, Widow Twankey, Cirque de Flambé, Christian Swenson, Savannah Fuentes, The Fremont Philharmonic, Janet McAlpin’s Madame X, Frank Olivier plus Late Night Burlesque! with Indigo Blue, Wade Madsen Ultra, and More!
Dates: March 30 – April 10th
Location: Hale’s Palladium, 4301 Leary Way NW, Seattle, WA
Ticketing Information:
Kids: $5.00
Matinee show: $10.00
Evening show: $15.00
Late show: $10.00
Fri. and Sat. night shows: $20.00
You are quite existentially aware. However, you deny your connection to what is around you and those you stand in relation to. You feel what is around you is chaos and randomness. In order to respond to this you feel it is most important to explore your own power. You are quite individual but likely more pessimistic.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
amusing, in a scary sort of way when you think about it, the Furry Home Page (thanks to ) at Furry Elementary School, in sandusky, ohio… and the reason it’s scary is because if you look at it with anything other than internet exploder (which i do by default, since micro$nooze doesn’t make IE for linux, and even if they did, i wouldn’t use it anyway), it looks like shit… it looks like it was made by a 5 year old who doesn’t know anything about HTML, because it doesn’t validate… but instead of making sure it’s compliant with industry standards for such things, instead, the perkins school district, whose ultimate purpose is "Excellence in education for all", makes it everyone else’s fault on their "technology" page, by saying that if you use firefox (which, while good, is the only alternative they offer, ignoring mozilla, or safari, or konqueror, or galeon, or…), "some web sites, including those of Perkins Local Schools and NOECA, may not appear as the web designer intended, and some dynamic content may not function correctly."
wull yeah, if the "web designer" has a pole up his ass and can’t write HTML because he relies on micro$hit to do all of the important stuff for him because he doesn’t understand how to do it himself, yeah, i can see how that might happen…
i wonder how much money micro$not has thrown at the perkins school district… i wonder if there are any computer users who run mac or linux systems in the perkins school district… if i was in sandusky, ohio, i would have some words with the school district’s network administrator, or their "webmaster" or whoever he is – i’d email him, but there appears to be no email address for Philip Alldredge – and if that didn’t work, i’d consider moving to another school district just on principle.
i don’t have much to say, but i’ve got a lot to say about it…
about terri schiavo… just about as much has been said about the case as can be, but i’d like to add my two cents. much as the "CULTure of life" would like to ignore the fact, people actually don’t grow new brains… and that’s exactly what terri schiavo would have to do in order to be anything other than a persistent vegetable for the rest of her natural-born days, i don’t care how many "sounds" you hear coming out of her!! to illustrate this, here is a graphic:
the dark areas on the left are places where there used to be brain material, but are now spinal fluid… i don’t care how much wishing and believing the parents do, i don’t care how much they wish that they heard her say "i want to live", their daughter simply won’t grow back even a fraction of that brain material. she’s a vegetable!QUIT APPEALING THE DECISIONS OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN YOU AND LET HER DIE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!
if you want to stop the government from doing "cat" scans without your knowledge, then you’ve got to see Pet Foil Hat Technology… some people will buy anything…
and then, we have the "Art Outlives Politics" section of the post, which includes the recent actions by banksy, and Will SpongeBob Make You Gay?, yet another attempt by the religious right to control anything that might prove to make people realise how insidiously stupid the religious right is…
okay, this is getting really annoying… my LJ style changed again! without me doing anything to it… i don’t know what is going on, but among other things, i changed my password, just in case.
i’m distressed and depressed, so i don’t feel like updating that often. i’m still here, and things are still as good as can be expected, considering that i’ve experienced a brain injury and been unemployed for almost 9 months, and there’s a good chance that we’re going to have to move pretty soon, which means that i may have to go another year or more before i actually get a chance to have the poppies that i successfully planted earlier this year actually grow to maturity in my yard… and i won’t have the multicoloured roses all over the yard… oh, yeah, i can plant more, but then i’ve got to wait for them to grow, which won’t be this year, and probably won’t be next year either. there’s so much more about this that i could say, but that’s what i’m thinking about right now. i’m not particularly disappointed at leaving our current location, it’s just that i don’t know where we’re going to end up yet… and the last time this sort of thing happened in my life was shortly before (as in a couple of years before) i broke up with ruth. and i can already hear moe saying that she’s NOT ruth, but old habits die hard (even if what i’ve been experiencing recently can’t exactly be described as a "habit")… and i have the added "bonus" of having my injury now, so if we did break up (for God-knows what reason), i’d be even more out of it than i was the last time. thus distress and depression.
according to ezra (who talked with her last week) katharyn is out of the state loony bin in steilacoom. apparently she was transferred to some regional care-center in bellingham, but as she has basically told her care-givers not to give any information about her to anyone, including ezra, and as she still maintains to ezra that she was "kidnapped" (in spite of the fact that she is now a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic), ezra has been unable to find out an awful lot more than that.
i’ve noticed that, about every 2 weeks or so, something gets messed up on the livejournal server such that my livejournal style gets changed from it’s current "component" style to "generator" style, which is definitely undesireable, and means that i’ve had to learn all of the nuances of the "component" style so that when it changes i can change it back as soon as possible. i would prefer it if it didn’t happen at all, but at least i’ve been able to learn all of the twiddly little details enough that i can tell almost immediately when it’s about to change, and change it back again fairly quickly.
okay, ezra has this goal of putting up 100,000 stickers that have this stylised picture of a bald man with the words "the bald man is watching you", similar to the picture shown here. this is a story that he told me about one recent expedition to help realise this goal. he says he was out putting up stickers recently in pioneer square, and there was a person standing outside of an art gallery smoking a cigarette who saw him and inquired if he was the one responsible for the stickers (which he is). she said that she is a member of a nationwide group of people who have been subjected to "testing" by the U.S. government, which she’s not supposed to talk about (<ding ding> wacko alert going off…). she said that in seattlle, there’s a guy named frank, who is paid by the government to make sure that members of this group who have been subjected to this "testing" actually don’t talk about it, and, coincidentally, he looks exactly like the bald man. now this is a person who, previously, didn’t know about ezra, or who was responsible for the bald man, but she said that she had a friend who lives in seattle, who is also a part of this group of people who have had this "testing" done to them, and this friend of hers had drawn a picture of this woman (her name is lynn) punching this guy named frank. she showed it to ezra, and he said that indeed, it looks almost exactly like the bald man. i said that, if it were happening to me, it would either inspire me to put up more stickers, or it would scare me enough that i would stop putting them up all together, with my particular preference being towards the former, and he agreed that he felt the same way. at that point, we got to talking about internet domains and suchlike, and there’s a good chance that the bald man is going to end up with a domain which people can go to, to find out more information (such as it is) about the bald man.
i’ve noticed that on some (but not all, which is what makes it weird) of my livejournal pages, instead of my name being "?????????", which is what i would expect, it is "महà¥?शà¥à¤µà¤°à¤¦à¤¸", which leads me to believe that the FPI character set is not making it on to all of the pages. does anyone else notice that, or is it just me?
You scored as Chaotic Good. A Chaotic Good person is someone who has little intrinsic respect for laws or authority, seeing them as insufficient to sustain what’s right. These people work according to their own moral compass which, while good, is not necessarily always aligned with that of society. Despite their chaotic tendancies, these people are good at heart.
yesterday was π day in the united states (3/14), but it won’t be π day until 22 july (22/7) in the rest of the world.
(courtesy of some guy i used to work with)
I thought we were all sufficiently geeky to see the significance of today, 3/14.
If 3/14 isn’t enough, look at the rest of the schedule: 3/14, at 1:59, for 26 minutes. That’s 3/14 1:59 26′. Or, smooshed together, 31415926.
The 22/7 part was especially obscure, it was supposed to be a joke about how 22/7ths (3.1428571428571428571428571428571…) is an excellent approximation for Pi (3.1415926535…), and thefore 22/7 (July 22nd for those European metric chaps) is an approximation for Pi day (3/14). There’s a good lesson for engineers in this, as 22/7ths is a “good enough” version of Pi for all but the most demanding applications, despite being a (literally) infinitely less complex expression than Pi. Something for us to keep in mind to temper the natural tendency to “overengineer” solutions.
More resources on Pi and Pi Day:
Pi Day Mission Statement
Pi Day openly promotes the celebration of mathematics education, the collective enjoyment of mathematics, and the ageless, multicultural interest in pi. Educators, students, and parents are encouraged to join together in a variety of public activities, expressing in imaginative ways, their passion for the longstanding creative nature of mathematics.
2006 is the 300th anniversary of Pi, in that the first recorded use of the Pi symbol to represent this ratio was in a book in 1706, so maybe we’ll have a bigger celebration next year. Any maybe a real blowout in 2020 (314 years after publication)?
now you know.
i’m not sure what is happening but it’s probably not going to be entirely good. we only have $1000, and we need $2600 this month. i’m not sure what’s going to happen, but we’ve already shut off our cable service, and moe is working on finding us a cheaper cell phone provider… we’ve also talked about selling the house, and the new car, and moe’s new computer, but that’s all we’ve done, and at this point i don’t know how much of it is going to actually happen. i’ve also applied (again) for disability benefits, in spite of the fact that i already applied once and was denied… because i understand that they deny everybody the first time around in hopes that we’ll get discouraged and look for help somewhere else, but i’m desperate at this point: i’ve already applied for 14 jobs this week, and i don’t have any hopes of hearing back from anyone, because i haven’t heard back from anyone in 8 months.
meanwhile, somebody sent me a check, so now i have to go make a pipe. it’s a good thing i have a whole bunch of creative outlets (i’ve made 3 more sets of runes since sunday, and i’m now the sound effects coordinator – read "funny noise maker" – for the cirque and the players), otherwise i’d really be going nuts.
i wonder if has seen this… if not, it seems like an appropriate link for him.
blatantly stolen from… without even responding to the one he posted (although i probably will eventually)
1) Does my username suit me?
2) Is my journal’s title cryptic or descriptive? What do you think it means?
3) Does my journal expand your knowledge of me?
4) Do you think my bio describes me well?
5) Which of my interests surprises you the least?
6) Which of my interests surprises you the most?
7) Which of my interests needs explaining?
8) Which of my userpics suits me best?
9) Which of my userpics suits me least?
10) Which of my userpics needs explaining?
yay! cirque du soleil has dropped their appeal, which means that now we have "successfully defended our trademark" in court. now, if they sue in civil court (which they still have the opportunity to do), we would very likely win, and at that point, macque said that we would very likely countersue for damages, harrassment and whatever else he could think of… at which point we could very likely own cirque du soleil! we’re gearing up for a very busy year, which includes shows in canada in may, three weeks of shows in seattle, and a show in reno in august or september, along with the fremont players’ shows at the moisture festival, the oregon country fair and other places, and all of the stuff that the phil is doing as well. also, nathan is coming back!! which means we have johnny jetpack to look forward to this season as well… WOO HOO!
Top 10 advantages of being a member of a circus family:
10. The bearded lady will always save your ass in a bar fight.
9. Being able to tell the teacher, “The lion ate my homework.”
8. You never get yelled at for dangling your sister from high places.
7. You can run off and join corporate America.
6. If you get tired of Beppo the Mime’s snoring – you can just close your eyes.
5. No matter how many of you there are in the family, you can rest assured you will all fit into the family Volkswagen.
4. Watching Mom kiss dad goodbye every morning before she loads him into the cannon and fires him off to work.
3. All Spandex laundry loads
2. Buying Elephant-Chow is cheaper with the circus discount.
1. When your rebelious kids run away… they end up in medical school.
in other news, i suppose i should have been more skeptical from the very beginning, but now there is a conflicting version of the details surrounding the capture of saddam hussain, which makes a lot more sense than the "official" version. also, remembering all those arguments made 1,500 deaths ago is one way of saying "i told you this was going to happen", especially when i told you this was going to happenbefore any of those deaths occurred! maybe i’m psychic, but somehow i doubt that’s going to make a lot of difference. and the muslim community in spain has finally issued a fatwa against osama bin laden, as if it is really necessary to do so to show the rest of the world that islam condemns attacks on innocent people… and, again, i seriously doubt that it’s going to make an awful lot of difference anyway. 8/
i took my car in to have the valve cover gaskets replaced, so now it doesn’t spit oil and smoke as much. but it still generates a funny smell from time to time, so i took it in again. this time he said that i have to have a whole bunch of seals and an O-ring replaced, and he said that it would be the easiest to replace by doing all of them at the same time as i get my timing belt replaced. the seals and O-ring are apparently not that expensive of themselves, but the cost comes with the labour, and it is multiplied exponentially if i have them replaced separately. it’s my impression that hahn replaced the timing belt a little more than a year ago, shortly before i actually bought the car, so i don’t think i have to replace the timing belt yet, but that brings up two other issues, which are 1) if hahn replaced the timing belt, did he also replace the seals and O-ring, and if so, why have they failed already, and 2) honestly, i don’t have the funds to replace all of these parts at this point, so what happens if i drive it anyway? the guy said i shouldn’t drive it that much, and if i do, i should check my oil every day, but i’m paranoid.
while i was waiting for the diagnosis of my car, my cell phone rang (i have it set so that it plays the theme from "Uncle Meat" by frank zappa), and the salesperson on the other end (i know it was a salesperson because they started the "conversation" by assuring me that it wasn’t a sales call) said that "president" bush needed my help… riiiiiight… obviously they have no clue who they’re talking to. looking back on on the situation now, i wish i would have said something witty and acerbic, but as it is, i said forget it, and hung up.
in the past 3 weeks i’ve made 3 orders from om imports, and i’m getting pretty close to having "enough" incense again, but not quite. i just ordered 6 different auroshikha fragrances, 2 tulasi fragrances, a hem fragrance, and 2 tapestries. also, i got email from the guy at glow industries, checking up on me to see if i got the catalogue he sent… but i’m still not sure whether i want to represent them with hybrid elephant or not… however moe suggested that i probably could carry some of the more questionable items at The Church of Tina Chopp, and when i pointed out that the church isn’t really set up to sell stuff, she said "why not? every other church does it…" which got me to thinking about what it would take to set up something for the church… more thought is required.
thanks to , i have links to the biscut-eating dummy, boobies, more boobies, and furries from japan, and, thanks to i have another in my long list of reasons why i am a terrorist, Senator Byrd is correct to equate Bush with Hitler… too bad bringing hitler into it will do more to make the religious right see us as lunatics, but it can’t be helped, especially when they’re right for a change.
English Genius You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 83% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!
Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope you enjoyed it!
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.
You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.
By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions.
When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.
Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.
To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.
ooooohh-kay… i suppose the fact that i had an injury to my left hemisphere does nothing to influence that… or, maybe (as kitty pointed out) now i have enough room to grow more brains than most people have…
i got my first order of more than $50 yesterday. somebody from sammamish, which is right up the road from me, so to speak. too bad i have to charge them sales tax, but i don’t think it matters that much. he ordered auroshikha rose, sandalwood, jasmine, frankincense, and myrrh, all of which i am getting (hopefully) in a shipment tomorrow. now all that needs to happen is that there needs to be more people like him. check it out!
i got a dealer’s catalogue from "Glow Industries" (no link, ’cause they don’t have a web site!), which, according to reliable sources (the indian representative for Sital, somebody ironically named "Guru"), is the US outlet for Sital brand incense. they have been trying to get me to check out their catalogue for at least a year (through the use of spam, which is why it hasn’t been working), and i finally gave in and ordered a catalogue from them to get them off my back. apparently they either are not the US outlet for Sital any longer, or they don’t have Sital products in their catalogue, but i’m not sure which. they have a lot of "body jewelry", but no indication of whether it is made with surgical steel or not. they push the fact that they are suppliers of "Satya Sai Baba" nag champa incense, but they are apparently unaware of the fact that i don’t carry sai baba incense because of the fact that everyone who sells incense carries sai baba incense, and it’s really not that good anyway, compared to the champa fragrances i do carry. they also carry a whole bunch of products that make me wonder whether i really want to represent them or not… things like "tobacco accessories" including "hand-blown glass pipes", "cigarette" rolling machines, and "grundge-off", and "adult toys" including dildos, vibrators, pocket pussies, and Ms. Pinky (after whom the frank zappa song is named).
i have another "random" (i know it’s random ’cause the computer printed form letter they sent me says so) job search log review tomorrow. just so that everyone knows ahead of time, i have four job contacts on my log for the date in question (12th february), which is one more than the minimum required, but i’ve been averaging 8 to 10 job contacts per week (this week i have 10 job contacts, and it’s only monday). i still find it somewhat hard to believe that somebody is getting paid, by the state, to check my job contacts to see if i actually made them or not, and to "recommend job search activities" to me (which, so far, has been one recommendation for a job that was posted 6 weeks previously – meaning that by the time i got the recommendation they had already hired somebody else). WAGE SLAVERY SUCKS!!
You scored as Hinduism. Your views are most similar to those of… Hinduism! Consider becoming Hindu, if you aren’t already.
Belief-O-Matic Your Results: The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.
Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.
How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.
both of these are easily predictable, although the second one is somewhat more comprehensive… but scientology? secular humanism?? mormons?? jehovah’s witnesses??? and my beliefs are more compatible (which isn’t saying that much) with a non-theist than with "mainline to conservative christian/protestant" or with jehovah’s witnesses, despite the fact that i chose "most important" in response to the question about how important the section on worship is compared to the other sections.
i originally followed this link because it contained the term "Fire Vortex", but it turns out that the whole page deserves a lot more perusal than just the fire vortex link… but i’m going to have to change computers to be able to listen to the whole thing, because my main (linux) computer doesn’t have any sound hardware. on the other hand, this link doesn’t require sound hardware, but i still wouldn’t recommend it unless either you or your partner are masochists.
Chavez Says Washington Plots His Murder, U.S. Denies – uh… yeah. "We have enough evidence… If anything happens to me, the person responsible will be the president of the United States"… and if they were planning chavez’ assasination, do you think they would cop to it? i think not.
Judge: Schwarzenegger Delayed Nurse Laws – let’s elect him president next… can we please? that way we can suffer even more when we get wounded in the (inevitable) war and have to wait in line because there aren’t enough nurses to go around because the government is doing "new studies" to make sure that the nurse to patient ratio isn’t too great…
ezra performed in this year’s BFA Dance program this evening at the Broadway Performance Hall. it went really well. ezra was the solo dancer in the first piece. of course, i really liked the piece that used Knee 5 from Einstine On The Beach (an opera by philip glass that drove my parents up the wall), and there was one where the sound score started with a bunch of sounds from the audience – people coughing and rustling papers, along with a couple of people with photo flash units (after having been specifically told that, in order to protect the safety of the dancers, no flash photography would be allowed made it really obvious to me that it was part of the performance, but apparently not everyone is so observant, as the people next to me started making "uh-oh" noises). it was a really good show, and of course, was all the better because my kid was in it.
here is a good article about anarchy with which i totally agree, so if you’re a department of clownland security mole you should take note: i don’t often classify myself politically (although i am a terrorist). also, there’s a bloticle (blog article?) about "birth control" for republicans that is along the lines of something that might actually work. i’m big on karma too… kinda strange mixture, but it works for me.
You are… unique to say the least. Though the events around you often seem complex, even convoluted, you tend to drift off into your own world. It’s nicer there. People tend to think you’re joking, even when you think you’re being serious. Though, seriousness is taxing for you. You’d rather play all the time than do boring work of any type, and perhaps that’s why inane dribble tends to issue forth from your mouth.
ZORT!
moe did this meme as well… hers was… wait for it…
Pesto the pigeon???
oh well, what did i expect?
oh, by the way, the cirque de flambé got written up in Exhibitor Magazine… W00t! also i’ve gotten two orders with the new shopping cart, and i haven’t been doing anything different, which i think is a good sign. i ordered a whole pile of incense which came today, and another huge pile which is scheduled to be delivered on tuesday. check it out!
i’ve had a set of original dubé juggling clubs for about 25 years, i bought them from jack bosco, of the bosco boys (the juggling team before the flying karamazov brothers started happening). before my injury i either really liked them, or really hated them (depending on how much juggling i was doing), because they were extra heavy, and had lead tape wound around the handles.
recently there have been a series of workshops for the cirque and other folks (those who are now in charge say that we have to have workshops that are open to the public in order to keep our 401C3 tax exempt status, but i’ve never heard of it before, and we were 401C3 tax exempt for 4 years before those who are now in charge showed up, so i don’t know if i really believe them or not). the workshop that was given this week was on club swinging, and the big bois with poise were supposed to show up for it because there is a lot of similarity between spinning poi and swinging clubs, and at this point just about anything would help, so i went. because of the fact that tim “fyodor karamazov” (the instructor of the workshop) had requested that if we had clubs of any variety, to bring them, i dug out my dubé clubs (which i haven’t touched since my injury).
i would expect that clubs, whether they are for juggling or swinging, would be sturdy, and resist breaking. as i said, i’ve had this set of dubé clubs for 25 years, and i have juggled (and, thus, dropped) them a lot during that time, so i was quite surprised when, in the first five minutes of the workshop, i dropped, and broke two of my set of three clubs!
dubé has a warranty on all their products for the lifetime of the original owner… but i bought them from jack bosco, so i’m not the original owner… but i bought them 25 years ago, so not only do i not have the receipt any more, but i sort of wonder if anybody will notice that i’m not the original owner or not. what i am sure of is that they don’t make this variety of clubs any more.
does anybody else remember these? they used to put emblems like this on LPs (those things on which people bought music before compact disks) to dissuade people from copying them onto cassettes (which people used to make music more portable before the ipod). did anybody else believe them? apparently not, because music is still being converted from one format to another with great abandon, despite the fact that "it’s illegal", and as far as i have been able to tell, music isn’t dead… at least not yet. along the same lines, i modified my master license application so that now, $20 later, i own the trade name Rent-A-Geek, but i found out that there are two other businesses in king county that also use that name, not to mention the one in philadelphia, the one in maine, and a few other places i found thanks to a $6 business name search… so now i’ve got to consider getting the name trademarked, so that nobody else can use it, because if i don’t then someone else may do the same thing, and despite the fact that i’ve been doing business under that name for 10 years, i may not be able to use it any longer. if anything is killing the creative person’s ability to do business, it’s that kind of thing.
how much inside is another example of a guy who, if he’s making enough money doing things like that (which may or may not actually be happening), then there’s a good chance that i can do it too… on the other hand, he could be making enough money at it by being in the primary business of nepotism, i’m not sure.
mahasivaratri is next tuesday. happy mahasivaratri everyone.
welcome wireheads… i wonder how long it will be until this form of "therapy" turns into a recreational pastime… it also gives new, more sinister meaning to the fact that THERAPIST and THE RAPIST are spelled exactly the same way.
apparently there’s a local radio station in philidelpha which has been running advertisements for a business which has a very similar name to one of my DBA aliases, Rent-A-Geek, so this is for the people who have been calling me today: i have been doing business as Rent-A-Geek for 10 years, and before that for 10 years i did business as Hire-A-Geek, which was an offshoot of a business that a friend of mine ran called Hire-A-Punk, which goes all the way back to the mid-1970s. other people may do business as rent-a-geek, but they aren’t the original, i am. if you want tech support in philadelphia, you’re welcome to email me, or call me on the phone, but if you are using software that i am not familiar with, and/or have a system that requires major, hands-on surgery, either pay to fly me to philidelphia (or wherever you are) or you’re going to strike out trying to get help from me.
now, time for a trade name search and another master license application.
another neuropsychological evaluation is completed. last week was the psycological tests, this week was the neurological tests, so they were doing things like blindfolding me and then giving me different shaped blocks and watching me fumble around trying to find the correct holes for them to fit into, or holding my hand behind a screen and drawing on my fingertips and then asking me to identify what they drew. they had a list of four numbers, 1 through 4, and a stack of 60 cards which had one to four different coloured shapes, and they asked me to categorise them, but they kept changing the rules about how they were categorised, so that when i categorised them incorrectly they could evaluate my ability to figure out that the rules had changed and how long it took me to figure out what the new rules were. it wasn’t anywhere near as mentally taxing as the last time, and it was also two hours less time than the first one. now i have to wait until my "counsellor" from DVR (who i have never met) gets around to scheduling a feedback appointment, at which point i get to go and meet him and the neuropsychologist to figure out what to do next.
meanwhile, i’ve been scheduled for yet another "random" job search log review, which i gather will be exactly like the last time. i find it rather odd, and somewhat suspicious that in all the times i’ve applied for unemployment in the past, i have never been subjected to these "random" occurrences, and now, for some reason, i’ve managed to get 2 of them in three months. it makes me wonder who is saying what that is negative about my job search, and why they are saying it… because nothing is going on, except for the fact that i am looking for work and not finding any, like 10% of the rest of the population of this state… and it’s the reason why i’m having a neuropsychological evaluation for the DVR, and that sort of thing. i suppose it’s probably typical, and i’ll probably come to expect this kind of thing eventually, but at this point it’s more bizarre than anything else.
and speaking of bizarre, somebody did a college-level project on MIDI-hamster control, which is about as bizarre as they come. i suppose it’s useful in that the guy learned about different ways to control a synthesizer, and i’m sure nobody else has done a project like this, but still… weird!
and then there’s the medicare toad test (thanks to and the annals of improbable research) which is even more bizarre, but only because the toad actually scored higher than the medicare customer service representatives… they’d probably come up with some reason to pay the toad less, as well.
10 things that i have done that you probably haven’t:
1. climbed a 150 foot sheer “sea-stack” on the water side, with no equipment
2. performed in the kennedy center and on the white house steps in 1976
3. rode, as a passenger, through the longest freight (not passenger) train tunnel in the world, three times in a two-week period
5. crossed the deception pass bridge below the street level, twice
6. made several months worth of long distance calls using william f. buckley’s credit card
7. passed myself off (successfully) as a “witch” in front a group of over 300 “christians” who would have killed a witch, given the chance
8. been “initiated” in four of the world’s major religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam)
9. survived a medical conditon which results in death or severe brain damage 75% of the time
10. had an 8th hole cut in my skull
here’s what i looked like on july 21, after having the big clot seen in yesterday’s animation removed.
i made this animation half the size, but i extended the display time on the last 4 frames, so you can see my craniotomy and the swastika-shaped plate in my skull.
i learn something new every day. today it was that the CD that they gave me at the hospital that has all the pictures of my brain has even more pictures of my brain than i imagined possible… there are movies of my brain in varying stages of repair… this, for example, which is what i looked like on july 14th, 2003…
tomorrow i’m going to put together one from later on, when i have the pins and clips in place… that is really interesting!
a lot of new stuff on hybrid elephant, but not much of it is visible… the main thing is the ability to accept credit cards and the shopping cart, which is thanks to paypal. there’s actually less content, but only until i get the buddhist and egyptian statues scanned and written up.
hunter s. thompson died yesterday. admittedly, i’m not as familiar with his work as i could be, i haven’t read any of his books and i’ve only read a few of his articles, but i get the very strong impression that if it weren’t for hunter thompson, i would be a very different person today, so i’ve got a lot of respect for the man, in spite of the fact that i don’t know that much about him. i’ve complained in comments in other people’s journals about this, but now it’s time for me to complain in my own journal about the fact that all the cool people have been dying recently – jimmy smith, shirley chisholm, HST – and none of the people who deserve to die have been dying for a long time. it’s time we did something to change this. any suggestions?
okay, drunk puppet night was invited to invade portland saturday night, and it was REALLY cool. it took place in the portland center for the performing arts, winningstad stage, which unlike the rebar, the jewelbox and new city theatres, and other places where i’ve been performing recently, is a real theatre, complete with 300 hanging lights, 100 more lights that are in storage in back (just in case), a computerised lighting board, and enough microphones that each act had their own mic, which had it’s level set before the theatre opened and then was simply muted until it was needed. there was only one major screwup, when i couldn’t get the CD for one of the acts, a shadow puppet show called "Eat", to start (it would play for the first couple of seconds and then stop automatically), and when i finally got it running i realised that the volume was turned down, so i had to start it all over again, but it was relatively minor compared to some of the things that went wrong at the rebar. not only that, but i got my name on the program as the "lighting and sound designer", so it’s going to look really good on my resume. after the show we went to dinner at bistro montage, which was nice, although rather crowded which surprised me given that we got there about 1:00 in the morning. the food was good and i got an aluminium foil snail in which my leftovers were wrapped.
i’m kind of disappointed though, because i’ve put a lot of energy into coming up with ideas for the puppet show based on a frank zappa song, and when i mentioned it to josh, without any further discussion, he said "not in my puppet show production". it makes me think that i probably should confirm that i can actually do the show before i get involved any further in planning. it also makes me feel like, if i can’t do the show based on frank zappa music, then i might just as well not do any puppet show at all for drunk puppet night, and at that point i would also think about not doing lights for it as well… so i guess maybe i should talk with josh about the potential reality of the show before going any further.
on my way out of portland yesterday, i was requested by moe to "drop by" her mother’s house, because she had something for her, but they didn’t (or wouldn’t, i was never able to tell exactly which) tell me what it was that i’d be picking up. so i got marginal directions for how to get to monique’s mother’s house from where i was staying, and actually made it to monique’s mother’s house after only getting lost once… because they changed the freeway signs on the I205 offramp near clackamas town center (they don’t say that any more, which is what threw me). however, i only got lost once, and it was only for about 15 blocks, until i realised that i actually knew where i was anyway. in fact, there was a moment, before i got on the freeway, where i was travelling away from downtown on hawthorne, and i could have turned right on 39th, instead of left, and i think i would have been able to get there anyway, even without the marginal directions. i know that, before my injury, i wouldn’t have had any problems with this, and i’m glad to see that this ability has been retained afterwards, even if it is more instinctive than conscious at this point. it makes me feel as though i’ve probably got a lot of knowledge that is more instinctive than anything else at this point, and i’ve just got to trigger the instincts for it to come out.
one of ezra’s friends from cornish bought a building in old fairhaven (don’t ask me how a college student buys an entire building in a historic business district… i am not even sure i want to know), and renovated it as a performance space and "dance club" – which is something i think bellingham has needed for a while now. ezra was in charge of the first performance in the space, which happened last night, and actually performed himself, as well.
i worked all day yesterday and succeeded in putting a "shopping cart" that works on the incense portion of Hybrid Elephant. i’m probably going to do the same thing, eventually, to the other parts of the site as well, but it was a lot of work, i want to make sure that it’s done correctly, and i’m going to portland for a knock-off "drunk puppet night" tomorrow so i don’t have enough time to spend 14 hours straight on it (like i did yesterday). depending on how it works i will probably add it next week some time.
in fact, "drunk puppet night" is interfering with my ability to attend the crazylands ten year reunion… i finally get reconnected after at least 3 years of being in a splatted state and not being able to get anyone’s attention because so few people log in these days, just in time for the 10 year reunion, and it turns out to be on the same day, at the same time as DPN. according to nexus, who should know since it’s his machine, the last time i logged in was in august of 2003, which is impossible for me to have done, because i was in the hospital in august of 2003… nevertheless, nexus said that i was logged in, idling, not responding to says and being automatically logged back in when i timed out (which, in spite of everything else, doesn’t sound like me), and had been that way for a couple of months, so he splatted me. of course, i didn’t know anything about this, because i was in the hospital, and by the time i actually tried to login again, i had already been splatted. according to what i recall, which is hazy at best, about the time i quit openwave, greg and i were having a disagreement about something relatively trivial, like idling in my locked room, or something like that, and he dragged me (which is not a "permanent" condition) and i never went back until i tried to login after my injury and couldn’t. you can tell that i’m a true SPOD (Superior People Online Daily) because even after my injury this kind of thing concernes me: somebody guessed my crazylands password? well, it wasn’t too difficult, but the first thing i did when i was un-splatted was to change it to something more secure.
here’s an oral history by phil ager, who was the dean of fairhaven college when i was a student there.
i got my "dealer’s package" from the label company, so now i have to figure out how to add stickers to the Hybrid Elephant web site. it’s pretty competitive (500 stickers retail 8.5 cents per 2" diameter sticker, plus whatever i charge for the artwork, or submit your own artwork for a "discount", and that’s just for 2" diameter circles… there are a lot more different shapes and sizes) but i’m not sure how i can advertise them on the site… it’s clear that i can’t sell individual stickers…
i went and got fitted for a tuxedo yesterday, and i should be able to pick it up today. one of the clowns in the cirque de flambe worked out a deal with the tux shop where he was able to order a whole pile of "defective" tuxedos and sell them to us for around $50 each… now all i have to do is figure out what i do that requires a tuxedo. the "defect" in mine is a teensy pulled thread in the right arm of the jacket, that i would never have even noticed if there weren’t a circle around it drawn with chalk, so for $50, there’s a good chance that i’ll be able to figure out something.
we’re gearing up for the moisture festival already, which is at the end of next month. kim still hasn’t figured out whether she wants to do tech stuff or not, but i got email last night that seems to indicate that i could do the entire show if i wanted to… but i’m not sure how i’d be able to manage actually performing on stage and doing sound and lights at the same time, so i don’t think i’ll be doing that. apart from that, however, i’m open to doing any or all of the rest of the shows.
if this guy is able to make money, then there’s bound to be a way for me to make money… there just has to be… maybe i could make t-shirts and sell them to unsuspecting japanese people…
by the way… this is a great song. it has been ever since it first came out, and i’ve never heard it on the radio… which is, perhaps, one of the reasons why it’s so great.
whoo boy… it’s been a tough day. i got up at my normal “work” time, i.e. when moe got up, around 6:30 am or so, and took the bus downtown, to avoid having to pay for for 5 hours of parking, because i had an appointment for a neuropsychological examination… except that as the bus was pulling into downtown, i realised that i had neglected to print out the address of where i was supposed to be. so i called moe at work, but she couldn’t find a phonebook listing for the doctor, and i wasn’t even sure of the doctor’s name anyway. i was vaguely remembering that it was somewhere near broadway and madison, but there are all different kinds of medical offices in that neighborhood, and i didn’t know the correct address… but i managed to figure it out, with the help of the old lady information person at swedish hospital.
then, i actually had one half of my neuropsychological evaluation (the other half is going to be another 5 hours on friday next week), which literally wore me out mentally. they had me listening to lists of letters and numbers and then telling how many numbers in the list, or listing them back, with the numbers in numerical order and the letters in alphabetical order… or repeating them back, only in reverse order… they had me read a list of nonsense words like zoop and prefqua… they told me three short, and relatively meaningless stories (one about a woman named thompson from south boston who reported to the police that she was robbed of $56, that she has 4 children, and the rent was due, one about a guy named joe garcia from san francisco, who was getting dressed to go out when the TV program he was watching was interrupted by a weather bulletin concerning a storm, and the third was meaningless enough that i don’t remember what it was about at all), and then asked me to repeat them back, as close as i could get to verbatim, 2 hours later… which didn’t happen… and the math questions! i’m not very good at math anyway, even before my injury… but they asked me questions that i wouldn’t have known before my injury: probability questions, the area of an irregular polygon and that sort of thing. there were also questions for which i knew the answers, like “what does the aphorism ‘shallow streams are noisy’ actually mean?”, and questions which i new the answers to, but i didn’t know how to describe them… aphasia questions, like what is the definition of “fortitude”, and questions which i don’t really know the answers to anyway, like “why do we have to pay taxes?” they had me duplicate designs with 9 blocks, including the final design which didn’t actually show the individual blocks, so i had to figure out which way the entire 9-block set as a whole was oriented, as well as figuring out how to duplicate the design… but i did that one, unlike the exact same test that they gave me when i was in the hospital.
then i had an hour-long interview with the phd neruropsychologist (he’s a doctor, but not an MD), where i had to tell him all of the ways i felt my injury had changed me, and also went into my relationship with my parents, and the fact that i spent 15 years in counselling. i thought about mentioning what i’ve heard about AS, but i know that would just complicate things even more, and i’m also aware of the fact that a professional (who it’s not happening to) has a vastly different opinion than a person who actually has a "qualitative" impairment about what, exactly, is a "qualitative" impairment, so i decided to keep my mouth shut for the moment.
so, after 5 hours of tests and an interview, i was spit out of the medical system again, and left to find my way home on the bus. before i left downtown seattle, i checked my seattle PO box (two pieces of actual junk mail and two pieces of mail addressed to others, one to box 368, and one for the architect who hasn’t had that box for 10 years). naturally i was a quarter short on both the bus from downtown seattle to renton, and the bus from renton to home, in spite of the fact that i bought coffee (that and a cookie were all i’ve had to eat today) on the way. when i got home, i turned around and went out again, this time in my car, to check my renton PO box (one piece of junk mail that was a duplicate of the two i got in seattle, plus a catalogue for stuff that i never have ordered (and probably never will), and a CD backup copy of WinRAR). also i went and bought my sweetie ob-flowers and ob-chocolates. obviously, i celebrate valentines day, but then again, i’m not culturally hindu. maybe things would be different if i were culturally hindu, but then i wouldn’t be who i am, so i can’t really say what would happen. also, there’s this article about pornography not having it’s beginnings at the same time as the photographic process, but it’s not really news to me, because i am hindu, and familiar with things like angkor wat.
i found another possibility for a Drunk Puppet Night performance, that’s not based on a frank zappa song! it’s called "They’re Made of Meat" and unlike my idea for the frank zappa song (which hasn’t yet been codified), this should be really easy.
i went to the post office yesterday, and to my surprise, i received two huge boxes. when i got them home, i discovered that you can, indeed, order huge quantities of priority mail flat rate boxes for no charge… i.e. free. now all i have to do is figure out what the priority mail flat rate fee is, and i’ll be in business, so to speak.
at the same time, somebody has to make those boxes. if they’re free, they can’t be getting paid too much, which makes me wonder why there is a waiting list for DVR. if they’re willing to pay the people who manufacture the postal service boxes nothing, then why can’t the also pay the DVR people nothing as well, and make them do their jobs anyway? or is it because the DVR people are smart enough to not work when there isn’t enough money, and the people who manufacture boxes are… what? prisoners? slaves?
take "christians" for example… not being content to rouse rabble in their own country regarding same-sex marriage, there are an increasing number of right-wing "christian" americans who have been calling the canadian government, petitioning against the civil marriage act… and, to their credit, for the most part the canadian government has been telling them to shut up. you’d think that any intelligent life-form (i’m not sure they’re actually human) would get the idea.
okay, it has come to my attention that i haven’t explained my "handle" here, . let’s change that, shall we? in the book The Magic of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, one of the characters, a boy named Kiki Aru discovered a "magic word" that would transform anything into anything else. according to the book, the word was "pyrzqxgl". unfortunately, this word was outlawed by royal edict, and thus, even though we have a transliteration of the letters in the word, nobody now knows how to pronounce it… i’ve been working on a few theories, but i get the very strong impression that it’s actually transliterated incorrectly: the word isn’t "pyrzqxgl" or "peerz-kwux-gull", it’s more like , or "pirzix-quiggle"… but, obviously, that’s not exactly right either. i’ve been told that "pruh-zuks-ka-gull" is also not correct. i’ve been through a number of handles in various places on internet, including mahiswaradas on crazylands, tesla on batcave, resort, and a few others, and MrBlint on several other talkers, MUDs and MOOs. i’m not as likely to interact with people in live situations on internet as much these days, because my injury has made it difficult to type anything like fast enough to keep up, even taking frobulation into account.
The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra is very definitely interesting. i’d have bought their CDs already, but i’ve got to figure out the conversion rate for euros. along the same lines, there’s Odd Music, a gallery of weird instruments, including one of my favourites, the contrabass sax.
finally, this could be just the beginning of more worse things to come. "collapse in blood circulation" huh… what makes a person experience that? well, getting shot or tortured, having a heart attack, experiencing a head trauma…
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 2005
Contact: Nancy Aldrich, Artistic Director
(503) 284-7562
* *
Tears of Joy Theatre /SATURDAY NIGHT SHOWCASE /presents:
*/Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab/*
*NOT FOR KIDS!*
*Strong language-Adult Content*
*Saturday February 19, at 8:00pm*
* *
*WINNINGSTAD THEATRE, 1111 SW BROADWAY, PORTLAND, OR*
Individual tickets: $12 – $15 plus service charges
Box Office: (503) 248-0557 or (360) 695-0477
www.tojt.com
Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab* brings some of the best of “Drunk Puppet Nite” from Seattle. It is subversive, ugly, ridiculous, sublime, controversial,
lovely, righteously political, literary and definitely NOT FOR KIDS.
Tears of Joy Theatre’s SATURDAY NIGHT SHOWCASE presents*/ Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab/*, for one night only, Saturday, February 19 at 8:00pm at the Dolores Winningstad Theatre in Downtown Portland. Tickets are $12 – $15 and can be purchased by calling the box office at (503) 248-0557.
The members of the*/ Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab/* are the originators of the annual /Drunk Puppet Nite/ in Seattle and are pleased to bring their special blend of puppet lunacy to Portland this February. */Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab/* will present a collection of their best professional pieces of puppet theatre. These performances are sometimes dark, crude, lewd, occasionally silly, and will haunt and entertain adult audiences who are brave enough to attend.
Monkey Wrench will descend upon Portland’s Winningstad Theatre, hot on the heels of a sold out run of Drunk Puppet Nite in Seattle’s Re-Bar. Among the selections they will bring are: “Henry Box Brown,” the true story of an American slave who mails himself to freedom, “Barney and Betty Hill,” the story of an alien abduction from the 1950’s, “Eat,” a love story with a horrific ending, “Homage a Lola Flores,” an exquisite flamenco performance, “The Sexual Life of Plants,” “We all Fall Down” and “Primitive Instincts.”
———————————————————————-
*/Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab/*, a cluster of Seattle area puppeteers, are working to expand the public definition of puppetry and performance by joining artistic excellence with a special blend of the surprising and the bizarre. The Lab uses live music, experienced actors, and puppets of all kinds to re-invent performance in their daring productions. These productions include _Frankenocchio_, _Halfpenny Opera_ and _The Mermaid Who Broke My F***ing Heart_.
Photographs available by request
Kris Bluett Woolen [email protected]
Tears of Joy Theatre
PO Box 1029 Vancouver WA 98666
www.tojt.com (503) 248-0557 or (360) 695-0477
something is wonky with spam assassin and spamcop. for years, i’ve been subscribed to the disinformation newsletter, and it’s been getting delivered to my disinformation mailbox on my computer without problems… until about a month or so ago. apparently they’re putting something, i’m still baffled as to exactly what, that spam assassin is identifying as "disguised porn". i figured that if i whitelisted it, it would solve the problem, but it still goes to my spam mailbox instead of where it’s supposed to go. i’m about ready to chalk another one up to demons, because i can’t think of anything else that i could do to fix the problem.
i found a message on alt.brain that was someone raving about deaf children who spontaneously developed a sign language, which could have been very interesting… but then i looked at the place which hosts the article, world science, and i realised that i’d seen this before… someone else used an article from this source to "prove" some point or another, whereupon another person warned him against believing anyone that says that alien TV is a reality… just goes to show you: don’t believe everything you read on internet.
After reviewing your application for vocational rehabilitation services and information about your disability, I have determined that you are eligible for services. Your eligibility is based on a determination that:
1. You have a physical or mental impairment;
2. The imairment hinders your ability to prepare for, get, or keep a job that matches your abilities and capabilities; and
3. You require vocational rehabilitation services to prepare for, get, or keep a job.
Due to limited funds, there is currently a waiting list for services. By law, when DVR cannot serve everyone who is eligible, it must establish an order for selecting individuals from the waiting list. The order must give priority to individuals with the most significant disabilities first, individuals with significant disablilities second, and individuals with disabilities third.
By reviewing records about your disability, I have established your priority category. You will be placed on the waiting list for this category by the date you signed the applicatiojn for DVR services. The results of this review are as follows:
Priority Category #3 – Individual with a disability
Date of Application: 12/03/2004
…
Your priority classification is provisional pending more current medical information. A neuropsychological examination will be arranged for you.
—–
so, "president" shrub junior has proposed a new budget for the coming year that includes cutting back on health care for poorer and middle-class americans, and a huge increase in military spending that doesn’t even include the "operations" in iraq and afganistan (which will be addressed in a separate, special budget request), erases scores of programs, slices medicaid and disabled housing but still worsens the federal deficits by $42 billion over the next five years, and scientists now working on a whole new generation of nuclear weapons… their way of thinking totally escapes me: a "safe" nuclear weapon?? but at the same time, they don’t have enough money to help me, a person whose brain exploded, because i’m "not disabled enough" to suit the guy who made the determination… i’d like to see him live through the same brain injury…
i suppose that if i were more affected by my injury, i’d have a greater chance of getting assistance, but if i were more affected by my injury, the possibility of getting meaningful, creative work would be significantly reduced… i’ve worked in "sheltered workshops" before, which primarily employ severely handicapped adults, and i would rather be a vegetable or outright dead than i would to work in a place like that as anything other than a "normal" person.
moe has to teach for 9 hours today, without a break… she’s got her four regular classes, plus she’s taking over for another teacher this week. she left the house at 6:30 this morning, and today’s sunday… she really needs a break.
despite the fact that it comes from another blog, and has no actual basis in any reality that i’m familiar with, i like the idea of Tao Shielding. it’s definitly worth thinking about, if nothing else, and may actually work its way into my own mythology in some way or another.
hey… check this out… the state of new york may actually allow same-sex marriages, despite complaints from "christians" and other republicans. it’s a good idea that has waited too long to come out of hiding… and who knows? it may actually have some effect nationally as well.
and the next time you enjoy a piece of chocolate, remember that it very likely came from here.
i updated my journal’s style yesterday. it’s different, and i’m not sure how to get it more like i want, but it’s close enough that i’ll let it be for a while.
i was just accosted by a spider. apparently it dropped from the ceiling, but i didn’t see it until it landed on the edge of my glasses… just within my range of vision, but too close for me to actually see. fortunately i didn’t freak out and squish it, but it took me a minute or so to locate it and transport it safely to the cat tree, where i’m sure one of the cats will squish it if they bother to wake up.
pliny’s birthday was yesterday, and the fleamont thrillharmonic played a lot more time than we originally arranged for when we first made the engagement… pliny’s two other bands didn’t show, and it turns out that at least two other phil members are vaguely assocaiated with various people who it turns out (not too surprisingly) are also friends of pliny’s, so we stayed and played two extra sets, plus we got a potential gig playing for pliny’s cousin ben’s wedding, and another potential gig playing for fricker’s follies at the rendezvous. it turns out that i know both of the owners of the rendezvous, so the probability that we are going to get more gigs from this is relatively high. also, i spoke with "professor" don ehlen, who promised to hook me up with someone who can give me some advice about painting my car (you thought i’d forgotten about that, didn’t you).
along the same lines, the phil is playing at the late night cabaret this evening. i’d invite you all to come, but most of you are out of state, and i don’t think i’ve got enough extra space to put you all up for the night.
you would think that people who run linux would be aware of the fact that most computer virii are directed towards windoesn’t, but apparently there are people who actually attempt, with a certain amount of success, to get windows virii to run on linux, just to see what they will do. it doesn’t seem to have much of a point to me. what they will do is obvious: you will get infected, and potentially infect others, which is Not A Good Thing™.
and speaking of "Not A Good Thing™", you would think that she would be safe from accusations of pirating music, but no… just another example of why the whole system needs to be defenestrated.
i had to include this link because it’s not only someone doing interesting artistic things with macintosh computers, but it’s someone doing interesting artistic things with antique macintosh computers! i’d like to see someone do the same thing with windoesn’t computers that are that old… wait… windoesn’t didn’t even exist in those days. ahhh, those really were the days…
a few days ago i commented about how "doctor" james dobson was ranting about spongebob squarepants’ attempts to make people more accepting of homosexuals. it appears that he and his ilk are at it again… only this time it’s a lot more apparent that they’re lying about just about everything in order to raise a stink. maybe if we ignore them, they really will go away.
and finally, i leave you with The Cuddly Menace… good night, sleep tight… don’t let the bedbugs… um…
today is pliny’s 40th birthday. it’s strange to think that i have known pliny since he was 14. he really hasn’t changed, except that his ideas are more mature. the fremont phil is playing at his birthday party at the rendezvous grotto this evening. tomorrow, the fremont phil is playing at the new city theatre for the late night cabaret. it’s also presumably when i am going to collect whatever money (at least $20.50, for the buttons) i am owed for drunk puppet night.
i was recently contacted by aaron c, who had a potential job for me at schemalogic, which is the place i contracted for last year. they are still privately funded, and going from one handout to the next, but this year they no longer have fred-the-netgod working for them, so i was initially a good deal more skeptical about them than i was the last time around. i went and interviewed with andrew, who remembered me from the last time, and everything sounded like i was supposed to start last week… but last week came and went with no word about it, so i called aaron last friday to find out if he had heard anything. he said he hadn’t, and he would get back to me. well, i called him again today, and there’s apparently no more job, because the guy who interviewed me wasn’t clear about exactly how the testing should be done initially. so, there’s no job any more. it’s not like it surprises me that much, and, as i said before, i’m a good deal more skeptical about them than i was in december of 2003, right after my injury and getting fired from minuteman press… and it is exactly the reason why i’m not really sure that i want to be a professional computer geek anyway, unless it’s working for myself, and doing other things as well.
speaking of which, i used to work for micro$haft, and i still have friends who work in the macintosh business unit, so i was a little (emphasis on little) amused when i saw this thing in wired about how ipods are a “career-limiting move”… when i worked there, it was common knowledge that billg had a mac on his desktop, so i have no doubt that he’s currently got an ipod. whether he is discreet about it or not, i assume, is for other people to determine…
and if this guy was in a “christian” church, he would have been arrested for sexual abuse of a child with no further warning, but because he’s jewish… ??? there is definitely something wrong with the world.
i bought a colour printer yesterday. nothing fancy, just a deskjet 3845, but it’s pretty much exactly what i needed for making colour buttons, and it does an awesome job. unlike “jobs” i’ve had in the past, where one printer is replaced by another one, i’ve actually got both printers on the network at this point… which is to say, mac os 9 sees one printer, mac os 10 sees two printers, linux sees two printers but can only print to one of them (the local one, i don’t know why), and windoesn’t sees… do you have to guess?
that’s right, windoesn’t see any printers at all… ✻✼✽✾✿ windoesn’t anyway.
drunk puppet night ended last night. we had a "cast party" at the six arms, on capitol hill, but i spent 40 minutes driving around looking for a parking place before i found one, which made it almost midnight by the time i got there, so i basically just showed up for long enough to give the CDs of peoples’ music back to josh and then went home. today i went to a housewarming party/rehearsal for the fremont phil at john’s new house, where i learned that i’ve been recruited to run lights and sound for the moisture festival, which is actually a paying gig. according to what i now understand, there are actually a fair number of “lights-and-sound” gigs out there, if you just know who to ask, and one of the people i talked to last night knows one of the people to ask, so things are not looking as dismal as before.
Microsoft dominance poses security risk is not a joke, despite it’s similarity to the other link i posted last time. it’s enough of not-a-joke that the report’s appearance cost the author of the report, dan geer, his job – not because of the fact that it’s not true, but because of the fact that it “wasn’t approved” by his employer, a microsoft affiliate called @stake. it’s exactly this kind of thing that is one of the primary reasons why i do not want a job as a computer geek.
i just installed a bit torrent client on windows, because of a deal at kiddierecords.com in which they’re posting mp3s of a new kiddie record a week for the year of 2005. i may actually get all of them, but for sure i’m going to get the tales of uncle remus, which i actually had as a kid, and gerald mcboing-boing, which is next week’s bit torrent. let’s hear it for sound-scavangers, which is how i learned about all of this stuff. if nothing else, the kiddie records are going to make outrageous sound sources.
here is an article about the things you can’t say, why you can’t say them, and why there are several good ideas about why to say them anyway, one of which is humour. along those lines, the news from central ohio is that a "Hebron pastor is charged with abuse"… i suppose the fact that he was the associate pastor of the "Licking Baptist Church" wasn’t warning enough. of course, this has absolutely no bearing on myself, as i live in washington, but i couldn’t resist posting the thing about the "Licking Baptist Church" associate pastor.
drunk puppet night is going amazingly well, and this is it’s final week of production. i sold 31 buttons since last week. ezra is supposedly coming to tonight’s performance, which reminds me, i need to call annette. the next thing is pliny’s 40th birthday at the rendezvous, followed by the late night cabaret at the new city theatre, then the art sharing in bellingham (possibly), followed by winningstad theatre in portland. i’m not sure how much, if anything, these things will pay, but moe sez if they don’t pay anything, then we’re going to have about $200 until she gets paid again… typical wage slavery.
there’s a new(?) meme out there, which is "What Hindu God or Goddess are you like?" i’m not going to post my response, because it’s entirely predictable (in fact, all of the answers are pretty predictable, although i doubt that it includes deities like balaji, jagannath or nagaraj), but here it is for any of you who might be interested. there’s also this:
These statistics were generated using the LJ Stats Web Interface by . Original idea from ‘s LJ Comment Stats Wizard.
it’s no wonder i’m suspicious of these things… there is NO… 8/
here is a place in the netherlands that makes 3 dimentional models of subjects which were once the subjects of historical painters like hieronymous bosch, salvador dali, and m.c. escher.
Maneki Neku
i’ve been playing around with the idea that the tanuki (an animal similar to the maneki neku) is one of my "totem animals", and i’ve made an icon out of one, for those of you who haven’t noticed.
Tanuki
a tanuki is a real animal, Canis Nyctereutes procyonoides viverrinus, or "japanese raccoon dog", but it is also an animal from japanese folklore which has magical powers of transformation, likes to fuck, and is perpetually broke, which isn’t that desireable, but it describes me fairly well. along the same lines, scientists have recently succeeded in creating the first animal human hybrids, or chimeras. the first question that springs to mind is where are the "christians"? they’re usually all over things like this, trying to get them banned or something. the second question is, of course, should things like this be banned? interesting as it may be, it’s just a matter of time before someone rampaging through the human genome like a bull in a china shop will permanently break something and then where will we be?
Microsoft’s AntiSpyware Tool Removes Internet Explorer – i saw this and my first response was to burst out laughing… but then i realised that this is internet, and there’s a good chance that it’s a joke (particularly since this is posted on the same server)… but even if it is, it’s a good joke!
Tuesday January 25, 09:52 AM British Hindus fight to reclaim swastika
By Paul Majendie
LONDON (Reuters) – Hindus have launched a campaign to “reclaim” the swastika from its Nazi past and reinstate the 5,000-year-old emblem as a symbol of good luck.
They were stung into action when European parliamentarians called for a Europe-wide ban on Nazi insignia after Prince Harry provoked international outrage by wearing a swastika armband and Nazi costume at a party.
“What we have decided to do is to reclaim the swastika,” said Ramesh Kallidai, secretary-general of the Hindu Forum representing 700,000 Hindus in Britain.
He said of the Hindu religious symbol purloined by Adolf Hitler for his National Socialist Party: “It has been used for 5,000 years to promote life. It brings good luck and wards off evil.”
Ever sensitive to the concerns of millions of Jews who suffered the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, he told Reuters: “For Hindus, the misuse of the swastika is as repulsive as it is to everyone else.
“It’s like saying the Ku Klux Klan is burning crosses so let’s ban the use of crosses worldwide.”
Pictures beamed worldwide of the queen’s grandson wearing the Nazi uniform at a costume party prompted deputies in the European parliament to call for a ban on Nazi insignia, an idea that the European Commission said was worth considering.
“The Hindu Forum was inundated with calls over the proposed ban,” said Kallidai. “If it came into force, that would mean if Hindus use the swastika for religious purposes as they have done for 5,000 years, they risk breaking the law.”
First came a media campaign to put their case. Then Hindus pressed parliament to debate the issue and lobbied deputies both in London and Strasbourg to support them.
Next comes a major conference in London and public awareness workshops across Britain.
“We have already spoken to the Board of Deputies of British Jews and want to have a dialogue with them. Everyone must understand that the swastika has nothing to do with hatred and is purely for worship.”
A spokesman for the Jewish Board told Reuters: “We respect the Hindu Forum’s desire to take back the Swastika but our line of caution is that Neo-Nazis and racists continue to use the Swastika as a potent symbol of hatred.”
To the millions who suffered in World War Two, the swastika is a loathed emblem of hatred, racism and xenophobia.
But to Hindus, it is a revered symbol, derived from the Sanskrit “svastika” and meaning “Good to be.”
“In Gujarat, when a baby has its first haircut, a swastika is painted on the top of its head to ward off evil. You find it on the door of the house as a good luck charm. It appears on wedding cards and holy paintings,” Kallidai said.
But he fears it will be a tough battle eradicating the swastika’s nightmare image.
“It is a very uphill climb because a 5,000-year-old symbol became associated 65 years ago with hatred, destruction and xenophobia,” said Kallidai. “This could take a number of years.”
i have to file for unenjoyment “benefits” every week, on sunday. during the week, i keep a record of all of the places i’ve looked for work (which averages around 7 or 8 places a week), and then, on sunday, i call and answer a bunch of questions for an automated machine which then dispenses my meager check in the mail each week… except that this week, it quit working. so i called the “telecenter” early this morning, which is where you call when you’re having a problem, and talked to the guy who said that apparently two weeks ago the machine didn’t accept my claim for some unknown reason… which is odd, because i got no indication from this machine that anything was different than any of the other hundreds of times i’ve called and successfully filed my claim. because of this foul up my claim was cancelled as of thursday last week, and has to be re-opened, which means that both this week and next week i’ve got to be out there looking for work, but i don’t get benefits… and this is because of nothing i have done wrong, but because there was a screwup somewhere in olympia. the guy said that they can’t even tell what went wrong, because they deleted my answers for that week on saturday. they hold on to the answers for 2 weeks, and then they’re purged from the system… but if that’s the case, how could they tell that i had been overpayed one week, back in october, and actually sent me a computer printout of my responses to the computerised questions, back when my check was almost $400, over a year ago?
grumble, mutter, bomb, george w. bush, mutter, republicrats, democretins, grumble…
week two of drunk puppet night ended last night. it went surprisingly well considering that the producer and director of the show was in washington DC with his giant puppets. the house was packed, which is very good, and i sold 14 buttons, which isn’t outstanding, but it’s something. reminder for all you people in the seattle area: only one more week of drunk puppet night, then you’ll have to wait until next year.
"doctor" james dobson speaks out against spongebob squarepants, even when he’s wrong. this strikes me as being very similar to when bob larson spoke out against boy george… if he wants to discourage people from being influenced by spongebob, the worst thing he could do is to speak out against him. any attempt to "speak out" is just as good as saying "here’s something at which i think you should take a closer look". and what is he talking about? "doctor" dobson is concerned that spongebob is "being exploited by an organization that’s determined to promote the acceptance of homosexuality among our nation’s youth." in other words, spongebob is a terrorist. why don’t these "christians" learn from history? it’s as though they don’t really care about "christianity" as much as they care about getting their own name out there, and making a few bucks.
along the same lines, but in a completely different direction, there’s a web site that encourages people to make their dog’s pile of shit into a political statement. not only is it warning about the dangers of "bush-think," it’s a biohazard warning label, so people will be more aware of where they’re stepping. it’s especially good when you’re out collecting dog shit you’ve run out of little pooper-scooper bags. as an aside, it’s instructive to realise that The Book of Dog Shit is number six on the google results page when you search for Dog Shit… just goes to show that the religion of Tina Chopp has more influence than you realise.
guess what? yesterday was “inauguration day” and i didn’t do anything except go to the first performance of the second weeks run of DPN, which went very well indeed, despite the fact that the producer and director of the show is in washington DC with his giant puppets this week. i mean, really… i didn’t vote for the man, and in general, i think that he’s the most innately stupid president that this country has ever had, so why bother celebrating his inauguration, or even protesting it? all of the other people who did protest it (i heard that there were around 400,000 protesters downtown yesterday) just end up making the stupid people who voted for him think that they’re having another party, so why bother? “The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive.” — Ilbert Geis. if enough americans ignore the president, maybe he’ll go away… and maybe he’ll go away more quickly than the 4 years it would ordinarily take… and if not, then the fact that i have ignored him will make it that much better when we actually elect a president with two brain cells to rub together.
i found this site, which goes a long way towards describing what’s going on here, but that still doesn’t make it any less amusing… and i still think these japanese are crazy.
today is moe’s birthday, but i don’t think her birthday present is going to arrive in time, so i’ll just have to wait. as it is, i’ve got her three presents, one of which she asked for, one of which isn’t actually good until 5th february, and one of which hasn’t arrived yet. if i’m lucky, the postman should deliver it today, but if not… well, her official “birthday party” isn’t until sunday, so i may have a reprieve until then. she’s off getting her drivers’ license renewed at the moment.
hey look… they’re starting to take this whole phenomenon seriously. maybe now they’ll develop the idea that ethics are for everyone… at the same time, it makes me wonder what’s next. thanks to Bunger Mulkin! i now know what happens when you drive a truck under an overpass that is slightly lower than the truck’s maximum height… you wake up the neighbors, but apparently, you don’t notice yourself… i bet this guy had a bunch of explaining to do when he got back to the budget rent-a-truck office. also, again, thanks to Bunger Mulkin!, i know where to go to get a tinfoil hat for my entire house… oy!
i got this really outrageous recording the other day from Toast And Jam. according to the liner notes, the artists used “music you dislike to create music you like”. it’s an interesting method, and one which i am going to have to try myself, but that doesn’t make the music on this recording less outstanding. if i were still a radio broadcaster, i would recommend that everyone go out and buy this recording. excellent!
scan my interest list and pick out the one that seems the most odd to you. i’ll explain it to the best of my ability, since i will be the first to admit that some of my interests are, indeed, quite odd. then you post this in your journal so other people can ask you about your interests. … then we can all be one big happy family with nobody like this hanging around screwing things up for the rest of us.
here’s an article i rather liked about audio luddites and their effects on seattle, and (thanks to ) i don’t know what this is, but i think i want one… babelfish translates the text as “Luxurious edition desk-top type of interior accessory “suicide bombing button”. Installing in the reception table, and on etc. the foot warmer please enjoy. As for function this as a switch completely being not to be, please note.”
i finally got buttons updated (my prices were 20 years old!) and added to the hybrid elephant site, and i’ve got about 150 left to make for (at the old price). i also had an interview at snowdogs, which was rather interesting. the guy said that he had a resume for me from 2001 and wanted “up to date” information, in spite of the fact that i have communicated with people at snowdogs as recently as april of 2004. he didn’t actually have anything for me, but if the information they’ve got in their database is from 2001, i wonder what they’re actually doing in their big fancy office in belltown anyway… sitting on their thumbs? i told him that i’m still available, but in the long run i’m not available for positions in the computer industry. he said he would look for testing positions for me, and we left it at that.
i know, more-or-less, what’s going on here and here, but it still leaves me wondering what the hell is going on. these japanese are crazy…
an interview with the bobs on dr. demento last week (part 1 and part 2), which isn’t as good sound quality as all that, but most of it is just words with no actual singing, so it’s bearable, and amusing.
drunk puppet night just finished it’s first week’s run, and it’s shaping up to be an excellent show. josh was saying last night that i am the number one best tech person he’s ever worked with. i suspect that it’s because i’m also an artist and i understand what it’s like to be up on stage performing with tech people who just want a list of cues and don’t even bother to follow the script. i’m responsible for providing music for pre- and post-show, but josh has stipulated that there will be no frank zappa (which i don’t really understand, but he’s the boss), so i’ve developed an idea for next year’s DPN, which is a puppet show based on the zappa song called “Mr. Green Genes”… magnificent! i told josh about my idea, and he encouraged me, saying that he’s really looking for puppet shows that push his buttons. jill and her new boyfriend, rick, came up to see the show, and stayed overnight at my house. among other things, jill told me that she’s going through the legal steps to have “officer” lee’s adoption annulled, which is definitely several steps in the right direction.
i’ve recently realised that my button making machine is a good way to suppliment my income, so i’ve been making buttons for the past few days. hybrid elephant is really wonderful that way… i come up with a new money making scheme, and all i have to do is post it on hybrid elephant to see if it will really work. i haven’t posted the buttons on the site yet, because i’ve been too busy making buttons, but as soon as i have a free half-hour or so, it’s going up there. along the same lines, i got a call from aaron c. on friday that he has a potential “job” for which they’re interested in interviewing me… and it’s at schemalogic… i don’t really know what to expect, though, because in the little more than a year since my last contract there, they have laid off or fired almost the entire crew and hired new people. at the same time, aaron said that my name was the only one that came up while they were discussing how to procede with the project that they would have me working on, so it probably won’t be that bad.
i’m starting to get really fed up with the cirque web team. this woman named Q has taken it upon herself to take over just about everything from macque, which could be a good thing except that she seems to think that this makes her in charge of everything, which it doesn’t. i put up a trial site based on what we already had on the web, just to get the ball rolling, and her response was to say that she would prefer a “more modern” design… in spite of the fact that the web as it exists now has only been in existance for a little more than 10 years. she bases this preference mainly on the fact that she has a degree in communications, and has been requested to sit in on initial consultations with clients in a corporate setting, but she’s been a member of the cirque for only a year, and there are other people with more seniority both in the cirque and on the net, who are just as qualified as her to be making decisions. if nothing else, regardless of what kind of degrees she’s got, she’s a very poor communicator, and that’s not just from a web-site perspective (she taught the poi class i took last summer, and she couldn’t understand how my brain injury makes poi difficult for me). i’m ready to quit the team, even as it is just getting started, which is not a good sign. i’m probably going to stick with it for a while, just to see if things get better, but i’m not holding my breath.
i finally got infected. i searched for viruses last friday, and i came up with two on my windoesn’t machine… i don’t really understand exactly how i got infected, because i don’t install software, i don’t do email on this machine, and i’m very careful about the links i click, but they’ve found a way in somewhere. it’s just more fuel for the rant that is posted here. so i went to the symantec web site, because they’re one of the biggest manufacturers of AV software for windoesn’t, and paid for a downloaded version of antivirus 2005, which, i then discovered, doesn’t work on my operating system, which is W2K server. as far as i can tell, there’s no way to tell from their web site that AV2005 doesn’t work with server operating systems, and, as far as i can tell, they don’t make an AV system that works with W2K server… so i called (and spent over an hour waiting on hold) and gave them my story, and the guy said that i would get a refund. i then went to the mcafee web site (because they’re another big one), and paid for another antivirus program (which i made sure would work on my system before i bought it), which should be delivered by UPS tomorrow. then i got an email from symantec telling me how to download their software (which i had already done, which is how i discovered it won’t work), so i called again (and waited another half hour or so on hold) to complain, and they said that if i had already downloaded their software i would either have to pay for it, or fill out a “letter of destruction”, proclaiming that if i didn’t really destroy their software i’m subject to a massive fine or something. they gave me a link to find the letter of destruction, which i found and filled out, and i thought the matter was settled… then, yesterday, i got another email from symantec, saying that the software i had “ordered” wasn’t available, and had to be back ordered. so i called again (and waited on hold for about 45 minutes), and the guy said that i hadn’t filled out the letter of destruction, which i said i had… i also complained about the fact that they don’t say that it won’t work with W2K server, there’s no phone number posted ANYWHERE on their web site, and that when i did finally get their phone number, i had to wait on hold for an extremely long time, and i felt as though for as little time i had spent actually dealing with them that i had been the recipient of extremely poor customer service, and that i was going to go with mcafee because of it… so he sent me another link to the letter of destruction, which was the same as the first one, which i filled out again, and hopefully this time they’ll get the message. the moral of the story: use linux.
At The Re-Bar
1114 Howell St. at Boren Ave., Seattle
Thursday, Friday & Saturday.
January 13-15; 20-22; 27-29.
Show at 8:00 SHARP; Door open at 7:00
21 and over only w/ID
Tickets $15
Thurs. Jan 20 pay-what-you-can
For info and reservations call Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab (206) 675-4500
http://www.monkeywrenchpuppetlab.org
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the 5th Drunk Puppet Nite!
Once again, Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab is hosting Drunk Puppet Nite at Seattle’s Re-Bar. Drunk Puppet Nite is an evening of puppetry from beyond the pale; a chance for Seattle’s best, and most notorious, puppeteers to expose their ids in public. We dare to enter the nether realms of puppetry. Drunk Puppet Nite is subversive; it’s ugly, it’s ridiculous, it’s sublime, it’s controversial, it’s lovely, it’s righteously political, it’s literary.
The truth is, no one knows what to expect from Drunk Puppet Nite. Over these three weekends, our puppeteers have no boundaries. Performers include Clay Martin; Matt Fontaine & Tamara Paris; members of Circus Contraption, Cry of the Rooster, Islewilde, Tears of Joy; Thistle Theater and all of your Monkey Wrench favorites! No two evenings are the same.
Monkey Wrench is a cluster of Seattle area puppeteers who are working to expand the public’s definition of puppetry by bringing their blend of the surprising, the bizarre and the artistically excellent to audiences around the Puget Sound. Monkey Wrench is the group responsible for Frankenocchio, The Mermaid who Broke my Fucking Heart, Halfpenny Opera and the upcoming Dracula.
For more information call Monkey Wrench at (206) 675-4500.
moe left at 7:12 am, which meant that i had to wake up at 4:30 to take her to the airport. she’s scheduled to be in san francisco at around 9:00 am, then she leaves SF at noon, and isn’t scheduled to land in orlando until 8:00 pm… which always throws me. the fact that a four hour flight actually takes 8 hours because of shifting time zones is boggling to me. at least i’m not having to live through it. i hope she comes home soon. i already miss her…
digging around in the garage, i found this, printed in “old fashioned” type on computer paper:
Ye anciente obscure weirdnesse spelle
Assemble magickkal tools: magickkal knife, magickkal dagger, magickkal sword, scissors, whip, chains & rubber candles. Lock yourself in a closet and face Pittsburgh. Pour water in a paper bag; add salt, pepper, two cloves garlic, one ripe tomato. Bake at 358 degrees.
Chant: “I excersise thee, O sprites of Walter, casting out yuckies and grossness. Kiss my nose.”
Walk in triangles pouring the mixture on your feet. Pound on a bell. Cast the circle out the window and jump after it. Light 6 candles with a burning sock. Face the 4 quarters and revoke the incrementals. Sprinkle incense in your hair and light it. Fill your pockets with sand and dance naked on the roof. Recite the Middle Pillow, visualise Gro-Lites down your spine and goose the first entity to cross the circle.
Point your magickkal twanger, froggie, drink the spirits, uncast of thousands and collapse in a stupor. Fly to Cleveland and debauch. Repeat twice a day for life.
WARNING: On peril of risk to body & soul, be utterly certain that you prefckqua or a plage of foul marmots will grossly and then eat up your favourite. Tear or burn along the line.
EDIT: she called from san francisco at about 10:30. apparently they disembarked at the international gates, which is on the opposite end of the airport from where she is leaving from, and she had to go through the department of clownland security checkpoint again before being allowed to procede to her departure gate. it’s a good thing she had a 2 hour layover before she had to depart, she said that people who had another flight to catch in 30 minutes were screwed.
moe is going to orlando for a week, and she’s leaving tomorrow. this has something to do with continuing education that is required to maintain her license, but it ultimately means that i get to stay at home for a week and be depressed because i can’t find a job, while my wife goes off gallivanting halfway around the world to further her already impressive career. not that i don’t want her to go, it’s just that i’d be a good deal happier about it if i were going with her, even if it would mean that i get to sit around in a hotel room for a week while moe attends her symposium on organisms that grow inside dead animals and how to tell them apart. i’ve actually got a friend in orlando that i haven’t seen for a very long time (1975), and if i were there, i could be out looking for him, because i don’t know if the address i have is any good or not, while moe is in class, and there’s a good chance that she won’t have much time herself, so it’s a good bet that i won’t find out if he really lives there or not until much later… not to mention the fact that it means a week of sleeping by myself. i suppose it’s partial payment for her missing a month of sleeping with me while i was having my injury.
i got a reminder that it’s time to pay my annual combined excise tax but honestly, i don’t remember even using any annual combined excises during the past year, so i’m not sure i have to pay anything.
jill may be coming up next week for drunk puppet night, and if she does, i’m going to invite her to stay here, because that way she won’t have to face a four hour drive home at midnight, or whenever it’s over. something seems wrong about inviting the woman i fantasised about when i was 17 to spend the night in my guest bedroom when i’m 45, but what the hell… it’s only one night, moe will be home from orlando, and that way she won’t have to pay for a hotel… besides, i’m not 17 any more.
now admittedly, i’ve submitted to a fair amount of brain damage since then, but i seriously wonder what criteria they’re using to make these "diagnoses"…
the mars rover spirit has been on mars for a year now. pretty good considering that it was only intended to last for 90 days, and there’s no spare batteries. too bad we’re so hung up on the war in iraq and afghanistan to pay any attention. the internet is shit is a rant by someone who is disappointed that McNewspaper isn’t the happening thing any more, but their basic premise is still sound. the more geeky it gets, the less shit-like it becomes, but on the whole i tend to agree. at the same time, if it weren’t for internet, i would never have found out about eric doeringer who makes illegal objects as art. if he is able to make a living at it, then i should be able to pull it off as well…
shirley chisholm died saturday. i mention this only because i have seen no other mention of it on internet. admittedly, i haven’t been paying that much attention, but at the same time, i would have hoped that she was enough of a hero to everyone else that more would have been said about her death. i should have known better…
i went to 47° 58′ 23.7″ n, 122° 31′ 20.1″ w today. it was the first day in over a year that we have taken the dogs to the beach, because of various injuries (mine, then the dog’s knees), and only the second time we have ever been to the double bluff off-leash area, but paddy and magick both remembered it and were making all kinds of noise by the time we actually got parked. i imagine that if i give it the right information, the device that i’ve got that gave me the coordinates above could tell me exactly how far away from home i was, but i haven’t figured out what information that is or how to give it to the machine yet.
i recently commented in someone’s journal, and got banned from commenting as a result, because i had the audacity to disagree with the person when they said i am clueless and brainwashed… i may be clueless about his specific situation, but if he’s going to be that negative about a comment in his journal, and ban me with essentially no warning, then i don’t think i want him as a friend anyway… this is exactly the reason i was hesitant about taking up this "hobby" to begin with. so far i think i’ve done pretty well at staying clear of "drama", and i don’t want to start up with it now. enough said.
it seems vaguely appropriate until you realise that by changing one answer (no prizes for guessing which one) results in extacy, which i have never tried.
if you like coil (which i do), you can download all 197mb of "Full Cold Moon", a tribute album dedicated to the memory of jhonn balance, from here.
xmas was full of driving and in-laws, which is to say, somewhat boring, and somewhat scary, but way better than it would have been at my parents’ house. i didn’t get what i wanted
but i got something almost as cool
and, as i predicted, around 100,000 innocent civilians were killed within 24 hours of xmas… but the fact that it was because of natural causes doesn’t matter, because the tamil tigers have refused even to talk with the sri lankan government, in spite of the fact that one of the provinces hardest hit by the tsunamis is under their control. no word on what’s happening in iraq or afghanistan, but i assume that it’s bushiness as usual.
drunk puppet night begins in a couple of weeks. as far as i know, we get one rehearsal before it starts, which is better than none at all, but considering that we’ve got at least 20 different acts which occur more or less randomly over a 3 week run, it should be interesting, to say the least.
the web site for the cirque doesn’t have an initial meeting scheduled yet, but it probably will within the next week. if it doesn’t, then i’m going to schedule one myself, because the work really needs to be started.
i’m so fucking frustrated with the whole thing that i can’t even type straight… which means that this is taking even longer than it would otherwise. of course, once it’s typed nobody will recognise that, which is even more frustrating.
for those who can’t be bothered to actually read more than one web site, dominionism is a “militant post-millennial eschatology which pictures the seizure of earthly power by the church as the only means through which the world can be rescued”… and, by logical extension, if that earthly power isn’t seized by the church, then the world will continue it’s “downward spiral” into chaos, madness, and, potentially, islam. no matter that the world will continue to exist, it will be so emmeshed in evil and hatred (which means “no war” and “equality for everyone”) that we won’t be able to get anything done…
meanwhile, donny rumsfeld is under scrutiny for not caring enough about the troops that are already over there “fighting for freedom” that he’s not providing them with adequate body armour, and signing letters of condolence to families of troops killed with a “rubber stamp” (“but there’s so many of them, and i’ve got so many more important things to do”), more prisoner abuse has surfaced, which the government says will be “thoroughly investigated” (meaning they’re trying extra hard to sweep it under the rug as quickly as possible, in the hope that if it’s “investigated” quickly enough, nobody will notice that these muslim “terrorists” that are being abused are just as human as the rest of us), and the president’s approval rating has fallen below 50% one month after his election – THE FIRST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY to have that happen.
meanwhile, there are still homeless people around the world, there are still sick people who don’t have any way of paying for necessary medications and hospitalisation, there are still orphaned children with nobody to take care of them, there are still people who don’t have any means of supporting themselves and nobody seems to care about these things. they (YOU) are so caught up in the “war on” terror, or drugs, or whatever, and they (YOU) are so caught up in their materialistic fanasies that they (YOU) don’t even seem to notice these things at all. ALL of these things could be adequately addressed by application of 10% of the current budget that’s being spent, instead, on war in iraq, war in afghanistan, war on drugs, war on terrorism… in short, WAR!
one thing is for sure… there won’t be a “christmas truce” this year (like there was in world war I). i wonder how many innocent civilians will be killed on christmas because “terrorists” hate our “freedom”? i wonder if it’s even possible any more for individual people to say “that’s enough,” to go and make friends with the “enemy,” and dispense with war all together. it’s too bad that it wasn’t more permanent 100 years ago, because if it were, we’d be looking at a totally different society today. one in which there are no homeless, sick, orphaned, out of work people anywhere!
i had a performance last night. before my performance, i went out to buy a single present for a family member. it took me an hour and a half to drive less than 10 miles to and from (thus making me late for my performance), because of people who are hung up on the wrong message. they can’t seem to get it through their heads that they WON’T HAVE this kind of “xmas” much longer because it will all come crashing down around them when the “war” on terror finally comes to their doorstep.
my whole life i’ve heard the “peace on earth, good will towards mankind” message, but, oddly enough, i’ve only heard this kind of message around xmas time… the rest of the year, it seems like the message is “peace and good will to people who are “christian” and to hell with everyone else” (or, as one LJ user put it, “christmas is a time for giving and loving and snow and happiness and if you don’t stop trying to ruin it i am going to kick your ass”). it’s kind of amusing, in a sick and twisted sort of way. like the people who say it are just parroting what their parents have parroted to them. nobody pays attention when someone refuses to go back into combat because it’s combat, in spite of the fact that there have been at least two such cases in the past year… as long as it’s not xmas, almost everybody is either willing to go, or votes for the guy who lied to get us into the war in the first place, while people like me are left wondering where our next mortgage payment is coming from.
i could write for hours, but i’ve got to go to my “random” job search log review, a lovely conflagration in which i sit and listen to information i’ve heard at least three times before, being read from powerpoint slides (with trendy, eye-catching “clip art”) for an hour and a half, and then spend another half an hour waiting in line to have some flunky at the unenjoyment office check to make sure i’ve really been keeping track of the jobs i said i applied for (i know it’s “random”, because it says so on the computer printed form letter they mailed to me), otherwise i won’t be getting any more unemployment benefits… a lovely way to be looking at “xmas”… 8/
from here, but since it may not stay up as long as i’d like…
Bhutan Bans Smoking in World First
Fri Dec 17, 6:04 AM ET
GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) – The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan banned smoking in public and tobacco sales on Friday, the first country in the world to do so.
The ban by the reclusive, predominantly Buddhist state follows a decision by its national legislature in July to curb smoking to promote national well-being.
“A total ban on the sale and smoking of tobaccos has been imposed in the country from December 17,” said Lily Wangchuk, a spokeswoman at Bhutan’s embassy in New Delhi.
“It is for the well-being of the people, to protect the environment and preserve our culture,” she told Reuters.
People who cannot kick the habit can import tobacco for personal use, but at a 100 percent tax. They can only smoke indoors in the privacy of their homes.
Shops and businesses defying the ban face fines starting at $225, a steep amount by Bhutan’s standards, and repeat violators would risk losing commercial licenses.
Bhutanese officials said only an estimated one percent of the country’s 700,000 people smoked or used tobacco. The loss to tobacco businesses was not immediately known.
Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, is governed by a monarchy which believes in tight controls.
The tiny country, home to breathtaking mountains and scenic valleys, restricts foreign tourists to avoid the erosion of its culture. Television was banned until 1999 for the same reason.
The ban was not expected to be opposed, one commentator said.
“People won’t go against the order because they follow what the monarchy says,” said Kinley Dorji, editor of Kuensel, Bhutan’s only newspaper.
But residents of Samdrup Jhongkhar, a Bhutanese town near the Indian border, were not so sure. They said smokers were upset by the ban and predicted that cigarettes would be smuggled in from India.
“I will now have to pay more to smoke. It will become a luxury,” said Prem Dorji, a Samdrup Jhongkhar resident. “Common people will be worst hit as they won’t be able to give up the habit easily and will be forced to pay exorbitant prices.”
i wonder what it would take to emigrate to bhutan. from what i understand, they’re not particularly fond of “foreigners”, but neither am i (speaking of “foreign” thought patterns: the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on intellectualism, etc.). it’s a buddhist monarchy, too, which means that they’re constrained from participation in more conventional wars… i believe christian evangelism is illegal there, as well.
much as i hate to do this, at the same time, i’m that close to obtaining a free ipod, or so they claim, so forgive me if you’re offended by things like this, but i’ve got to see how far they’ll really go…
there’s this site that claims to be giving away free iPods (i haven’t seen mine yet, but they’re reporting it on TV as a genuine offer, so it’s either a genuine offer or they’ve pulled the wool over more peoples’ eyes than just me)…
all you have to do is join and complete an online offer (which means submitting your email address to thousands of potential spammers, so be sure to use a throw-away email address), and then refer friends to do the same (like what i’m doing now). i know it’s verging on spam, but bear with me, okay?
to help me get my iPod, click this exact link to join, or copy and paste it into a browser: http://www.freeipods.com/?r=12545079
have fun and beware of spam. who knows… i may actually get a free ipod out of the deal.
i just came from the annual close-of-season meeting/potluck/party for the cirque de flambé… it turns out we’re not playing in spokane for first night, because they didn’t bid for a band, so that’s one thing i don’t have to worry about. consensus among the attendent rabble was that it would be a good idea for us to come up with a 5-year-plan for the cirque, because 1) bizarre and exotic places like brazil, oman, and the united arab emirates have expressed interest in having us go and perform for them – really, no shit… and 2) the cirque du soleil has filed an appeal on our copyright (which they contested to begin with, but was given to us anyway), which means that maque is going to have to find an attorney who knows what colour paper to file his briefs on, otherwise they’re going to be summarily thrown out. i bought two cirque de flambé belt buckles…
and then i find out that i’m getting a belt buckle, complete with belt, as a part of my costume for Big Bois With Poise, so now i’ve got two extras… i can’t decide whether i want to give them as presents, sell them, or hang on to them until after the copyright fiasco has been straightened out…
DVR, the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, has become interested in the fact that i’m "unemployed" (although i gather that’s somewhat of a politically incorrect term these days, in spite of the fact that it’s true) since my injury. they gave me a list of professions that are "in demand" and a list of professions that are "in decline", from which i’m supposed to choose, or something like that… the problem is that musicians are listed on the "in demand" side of the list, but musical directors and composers and musical instrument repairers are listed on the "in decline" side, which strikes me as pretty pointless… sure, you can have all the musicians you like, but they can’t play anything, there’s no one to lead them, and even if they could play something, their horns are broken and there’s nobody to fix them… also art directors and graphic designers are "in demand" but graphic artists are "in decline", which makes me think that the list is put together by the crazy person they keep under the dome in olympia… maybe they expect the actual graphic art to just appear or something… and i’m just sniffing around the edges at this point. DVR has just taken my application last week, and they’ve got a 9 month waiting list for people who have "category 1" disabilities, which are the most severe… and in spite of the fact that i can prove that my brain actually exploded, i don’t think they’re going to classify my disability as "category 1".
i’ve already got updates on the absurd thing that happened to me web page, but nothing substantial. i just found out the likely reason for the screwup… it doesn’t make it any less absurd, though… in fact, it makes it even moreso.
georgeanne clark died november 25, and today was her wake… she would have approved, except that she would not have had the party be intoxicant free, which it was, for the benefit of those “family members” who choose to be abstinent at this point in time… if she had been there personally, she would have been sucking up the intoxicants of various varieties, both legal and illegal, with the best of them. i went, and saw for very likely the last time, the vastly extended (distended?) dysfunctional quasi-family of which georgia was mother/grandmother/drug dealer, all in one place. i’m pretty sure that’s a good thing, too, because much as everyone was putting on a good face for georgia, i could tell almost immediately upon walking in to the house that there are hatreds that run extremely deep among some of those people. i saw jim for the first time since my injury. he was one of the people i was talking about whose hatreds run deep… i sat in on the edge of a conversation with tall paul, gunnar and jim where they were talking about the direction georgia’s house had gone since gunnar and tall paul moved out. my philosophy generally is to avoid speaking evil of the dead. they set up music gear, and gunnar and matt and joe and leonard and a girl that played mandolin whose name i don’t remember, but probably should, played… i would have played except they didn’t have a keyboard, and i couldn’t remember the chords even if they had had one. tall paul is looking a lot better than he was the last time i saw him, but then, the last time i saw him, he was living in his truck which was parked next to georgia’s house. matt has cut his hair, and moved to california. he’s a good deal balder than he was the last time i saw him, as well… snicker…
the fremont philharmonic played for the 132nd Annual Lighting of Lenin in fremont last night, and next saturday and sunday they’re having a fund raiser for the 2005 moisture festival at hale’s ales in fremont, where the fremont phil is performing at least three times in various different forms. also, there’s going to be an art sharing in bellingham on friday, which in which i’m planning on performing, and i have to do some final tweaks on kenyth’s flute while i’m there. supposedly we’re playing for winter feast, which, i believe, is the 21st, and again, supposedly, we’re playing first night in spokane on 1 january, but i haven’t heard anything definite about either one, and i’m not too enthusiastic about either performance. the winter feast is another one of those “good old boy” events where, if you’re not one of the “good old boys” you’re not invited, except in my case i’m invited because i play in the band that’s providing entertainment… moe and i went to winter feast 2 years ago, when the phil played, and it was a typical pagan community gathering, which is to say, not worth moe and i not even being invited if it weren’t for the phil. i was even sworn to secrecy about the location of winter feast until after it was over, for fear that “unauthorised” people would show up… it was the segway, by the way, which is probably where it’s going to be again this year… i’m not too enthusiastic about first night in spokane because it’s an overnight gig, but they’re only providing us with 5 motel rooms, and i probably will have to attend without moe, which is a miserable way to spend the new year… but i haven’t heard anything definite about either one, so i might as well say i don’t know anything.
also, this absurd thing happened to me the other day… so absurd that i had to post a separate web page about it… it’s that absurd… really!
thanks to , the Patron of Inflatable Reindeer of The Church of Tina Chopp, and because this is, among other things, the season of Bizarre Holidays…
" tried to do the Silly Fake Mustache Meme last month, but I’m not sure how well it got off the ground. Maybe I’ll have better luck with it, because everyone seems to think I’m cool for some reason. Hey, if we’re lucky it could turn into the next Veginostrum — or at least confuse the hell out of folks browsing the Recent LiveJournal Images page."
(that’s by the way, i have no illusions about whether people think i’m cool or not.)
halfpenny opera ended last week, and i’m going to really miss working with those people. it was a good show, they ended up paying me, which was more than i expected, and i made a bunch of contacts from it, including a for-sure job doing lights for drunk puppet night in january, and another for-sure job for a weekend in portland in february. seanjohn, halfpenny opera’s "mack the knife", really is giving up his evil ways and pursuing a job in real estate, although he’s still going to do the first friday cabaret, the next one of which is in feburary.
on the other hand, it’s almost december and i still don’t have a regular job… which is a good thing and a bad thing, as so many things in life are: there’s not much of a chance of my finding regular work, either as a tester or as a graphic artist, until at least february, because of the "holidays"… and the presence of those "holy-days" requires that i have had a job recently, so that i can afford the inevitable material glut that is their result, so my prospects for a "merry x-mas" are slim to none… which doesn’t matter much anyway because i don’t celebrate "x-mas", although a number of people who i hang around with, and who expect me to "be there for the holidays" (i.e. my inlaws) do…
on the other hand, i believe that the philharmonic is doing something for winterfeast, in december, plus i’ve more or less committed to going to bellingham for the art sharing, i believe that cirque de flambe is doing first night in spokane, and drunk puppet night is every weekend in january, so the fact that i don’t have a "real" job, once again, plays to my advantage… it’s too bad all these things don’t pay…
i lost two auctions on ebay. one for $250 worth of belt pouches, and the other for a proximity coat. neither of them are things that i particularly need, but they’re both things i could have put to good use.
i think magick, our australian sheperd, is trying to herd me. whenever monique is home, magick hangs around with her, regardless of where i am… and when i get up to go into the other room, or if i’ve been sitting in the other room for a while and make some noise, even a keyboard noise or something small like that, magick barks, and she barks loudly and sharply enough that my right arm jerks. it’s really irritating, especially since i can’t control the jerking, and it has affected my computer a couple of times as a result – i’m mousing with my right hand, magick barks, i jerk and the mouse drags the window to a place where i can’t access the menus. this is usually not a problem, because most of the applications i use have keyboard commands that i know, and i can just use the keyboard commands, but occasionally they have keyboard commands that i don’t know, and that’s where it gets to be a problem. there’s a possibility that we’ve found a solution, which we discovered over the past few nights (while monique was home sick), but if it is the solution, it’s going to mean training magick to do something other than barking, which will take a while.
check out Animusic… i got their DVD (which is fantastic, by the way) last year, and this year they sent me a web-coupon – EMN4 – which is good for $4 off anything at the animusic online store before 31 december. i’m not sure whether i’m going to use it or not (their new DVD isn’t available until sometime next year), and they said that it was okay to share the code number, as long as it was only used once per customer.
1. When did you first “friend” me? 2. Why did you first “friend” me? 3. What posts of mine do you like to read the best? 4. What would you like me to write about that I don’t? 5. Do you think we would be friends in real life? 6. How often do you read my journal? 7. What do we have in common? 8. Will you post this in your journal so I can answer?
now i know that this is likely to cause some controversy among those muslims who read this journal, but remember… i’m hindu, and hinduism doesn’t have a concept that is equal to blasphemy, so calm down and read the article – then blast away at it, if you can… but just remember, hinduism is the oldest religion continually practiced on the planet, so it’s kinda difficult to find something religious that hasn’t been affected by hinduism in some way or another…
You are dreamy and mystical, with a natural psychic ability.
You love music, poetry, dance, and (most of all) the open sea.
Your soul is filled with possibilities, and your heart overflows with compassion.
You can be in a room full of friendly people and feel all alone.
If you don’t get carried away with one idea, your spiritual nature will see you through anything.
okay, this is just cool in spite of the fact that it points out just how much of a geek i really am… particularly pngreader, which is a tool for encoding other works of art (graphic, movie, text, and music files) as graphic files. so much for intellectual property… yes, a song on a CD is intellectual property, and an unauthorised mp3 of that song is, technically, a "violation" of the intellectual property holder’s rights concerning that property, but what about graphic that encodes that mp3?
if you run this graphic through the right decoder you get an mp3 file that contains the song Burn Hollywood Burn, by Public Enemy. how can you control it? what’s to say that it’s not just another graphic, and doesn’t encode anything? and if you don’t have the proper tool to decode it, how can anyone else prove that it is, in fact, a mp3 file and not just another graphic?
oh, there are all sorts of problems that this type of software will now create. i can hardly wait! }8-)
and that’s not to mention all of the other goodies to be found at runme.org. definitely some place where i am going to have to do some intensive browsing.
also, if it hasn’t been said enough already, JOHN ASHCROFT RESIGNED!!! now if he had only resigned over some tawdry scandal, that would be really sweet, but i’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
i finally got the plushies i ordered (i ordered them around the 15th of october, and just got them a couple of days ago): a baby nyarlathotep, a cthulhu plushie and a cthulhu hand puppet. they’re really cute. i made the baby nyarlathotep into an icon, if you hadn’t noticed.
apparently the fact that i suffered a brain injury makes me eligible for job placement and training opportunities for which i wasn’t eligible without the brain injury, so maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, but i don’t think so. i’m waiting for a call back from the representative for CARES of Washington, but i’m not holding my breath… i’ve been waiting for a reply to an email i sent to the worksource lady who ran the classes i was forced to take about two weeks ago, and so far i haven’t even gotten a received notice, much less an actual reply. they put phone numbers and email addresses on their cards, but i get the impression that they’re the same as they ever were when it comes to actually responding to them.
i heard from jill a few days ago. apparently, with all of the cancer-related problems she’s been having (which she’s surviving handilly, in spite of how life-threatening they appear to be), since i saw her at the oregon country fair, her husband of 25 years met someone else and she has moved out. you’ve got to wonder how a person could be so heartless, but if anyone is prepared to face this challenge, it’s jill.
okay, if anyone is searching for something to get me for christmas (even though i don’t celebrate it, i still give presents, so don’t be shy), this is what i had in mind:
(the one i want is the black wool one, 58.5 cm)
now it’s $150, so i don’t expect it, but it’s out there, if anyone wants to step up… i’d be eternally grateful…
alternately, if you don’t want to spend $150, you could get me this one
there’s one thing about the technogocical community in brazil that really impresses me: they essentially have no micro$oft, and they like it that way. here’s what i’m talking about.
i particularly like this statement:
“In 1556, not long after the Portuguese first set foot in Brazil, the Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha was shipwrecked on its shores and set about introducing the gospel of Christ to the native “heathens.” The locals, impressed with the glorious civilization the bishop represented and eager to absorb it in its totality, promptly ate him. Thus was born Brazilian culture.”
now if we could only convince people that those who threaten our way of life (or who we want to know more about) are good for food, we could solve all sorts of problems in the united states…
1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable pony, or a comical garbanzo bean, or a llama in a car. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions, and share the love.
also, as if you needed any more reasons to hate microsoft, what i’ve suspected all along about powerpoint is actually true: "It induce[s] stupidity, turn[s] everyone into bores, waste[s] time, and degrade[s] the quality and credibility of communication." why else would THE U.S. GOVERNMENT use it!?
on a different note, there’s evidence that the world isn’t bound for hell just yet (thanks to )… God willing it will have some effect, since nothing else we do seems to affect anything whatsoever.
i’m torn between apathy, because i know that regardless of who is elected, things probably won’t change that much (and it will continue to remain more or less the same until someone gets tired enough of seeing things go the same way again and actually does something about it), and saying "OH… MY… GOD!" and immediately moving to one of the 9 countries listed in the Index of Economic Freedoms as being more free than the US…
even if (God willing) shrub-boy does something smart for a change, like dying, we’re still going to have to deal with the republican backlash for a long time to come. this is definitely looking like a place i would rather not live.
i’ll be glad when all of this political furor has died down, but i’m pretty sure it won’t be gone by tomorrow, which is what i’d really like. i mean, why are all those political signs all over the place? littering is illegal, but putting up political signage with no intention of ever taking it down is not, and personally i’d rather see heaps of rotting garbage in the street than the over-abundance of political signs that have cropped up within the past few weeks. it’s not as though they’re being there is going to automatically make me change the way i vote… i’m actually sort of offended because somebody put a “george bush” sign in our front yard (fortunately it was at night and i found it when i came home from the halfpenny opera at 1:00 in the morning, and removed it before anyone had the chance to see it), as though having the sign in our yard was going to change the way we think about this whole thing – if anything, it would have the opposite effect. i’m pretty sure that the people who put them up, especially the ones on the freeway on and off ramps, and by the side of the road in areas which are not residential, are not going to be the ones who take them down… and i’d be willing to bet that there will still be john kerry and george bush signs still up 6 months from now.
i’m still unemployed. oh joy. i’m going to “worksource” (which is the modern, “politically correct” term for the unemployment office) today to talk with someone about finding a job, but i’m not holding my breath. i’m thinking that i might go back to school, but i’m not sure whether i can or not, because i’m not sure whether i’m eligible for any kind of financial aid. i’m still determining whether i want to be employed or not, anyway. i’m not sure that i want to support the concept of wage slavery in any way, and being employed is one of the biggest ways i can see for doing that.
trolloween, and the first week of halfpenny opera went down without a hitch. moe didn’t go to trolloween because she had to work in the morning (see what i mean?), and she’s going to go to halfpenny opera on thursday of this week… if there were just some way that i could make my participation in these events pay money, then i wouldn’t have to worry so much about not having a “regular” job… well, i’ve got a worksource appointment this morning, so i’m probably going to talk with the person about that then.
recently i was made aware of this, and this, which make me think that i should update my “I AM A TERRORIST” page, but i’ve been so uninspired to even read the news that i’m not sure whether i’m actually going to do it or not. i keep thinking that if i ignore the news enough, eventually it will go away… and besides, i’ve got more interesting things to do anyway.
Monkeywrench Puppet Lab is proud to present Halfpenny Opera – In these troubled times, our only heroes are troubled men. What can an honest man do in a world where all the cops are criminals, all the saints are whores and all the politicians are on the take? A sad and sordid story of love in a time of greed and cynicism. A satire of the classic tale of political corruption, with original music, puppets and actors. – October 28 – November 20, Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm at the Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater, 2322 2nd ave. Tickets can be had at Brown Paper Tickets for $12 or $10 if you’re a student or a senior. November 4 and 11 are “pay-what-you-can” nights for those of you for whom $12 is too much.
unless you’re using linux or mac, but if you’re smart enough to use linux or mac, you’re probably smart enough NOT to use AOL…
—–
Security for Internet Users Deemed Weak
By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer
WASHINGTON – Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers.
One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it.
Bill Mines, a personal trainer in South Riding, Va., did not fare much better. His family’s 3-year-old Dell computer was found infected with viruses and more than 600 pieces of spyware surreptitiously monitoring his online activities.
“I was blown away,” Mines said. “I had a lot of viruses and other things I didn’t know about. I had no idea things like this could happen.”
The Internet always has had its share of risky neighborhoods and dark alleys. But with increasingly sophisticated threats from hackers, viruses, spam e-mails and spyware, trouble is finding computer users no matter how cautiously they roam online.
The technology industry is feeling the pain, too.
Spurred by the high costs of support calls from irritated customers — and fearful that frustrated consumers will stop buying new products — Internet providers, software companies and computer-makers are making efforts to increase awareness of threats and provide customers with new tools to protect themselves.
Still, many computer users appear remarkably unprepared for the dangers they face.
The study being released Monday by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance found that 77 percent of 326 adults in 12 states assured researchers in a telephone poll they were safe from online threats. Nearly as many people felt confident they were already protected specifically from viruses and hackers.
When experts visited those same homes to examine computers, they found two-thirds of adults using antivirus software that was not updated in at least seven days.
Two-thirds of the computer users also were not using any type of protective firewall program, and spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of those in the study.
The survey participants all were AOL subscribers selected in 22 cities and towns by an independent market analysis organization.
The alliance, a nonprofit group, is backed by the Homeland Security Department and the Federal Trade Commission, plus leading technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft, eBay and Dell.
The group’s chief, Ken Watson, said consumers suffer from complacency and a lack of expert advice on keeping their computers secure. “Just like you don’t expect to get hit by a car, you don’t believe a computer attack can happen to you,” Watson said.
“There really is quite a perception gap,” agreed Daniel W. Caprio, the Commerce Department’s deputy assistant secretary for technology policy. “Clearly there is confusion. We need to do a better job making information and practical tips for home users and small businesses available.”
Wendy Avino, an interior decorator in Lansdowne, Va., said researchers found 14 spyware programs on her borrowed laptop and noticed that her $50 antivirus software was not properly configured to scan her computer at least monthly for possible infections.
“We don’t go in funny chat rooms, I don’t open funny mail,” Avino said. “If it says ‘hot girls,’ I delete it. We do everything in the right way, so how does stuff get in there?”
She complained she was misled believing her commercial antivirus and firewall programs would protect her from all varieties of online threats; most do not detect common types of spyware.
“It is very complicated for the average home user,” said Ari Schwartz, an expert on Internet threats for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington civil liberties group.
“There’s a lack of accountability all around, from consumers who don’t believe they should have to do this to companies who blame the consumer. It’s finger-pointing back and forth,” Schwartz said.
Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates said the company spent nearly $1 billion on its recent upgrade to improve security for customers using the latest version of its Windows software (and that was before the study which found spyware and malware on the computers of those people who participated in the study… IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!).
AOL purchased full-page advertisements in major newspapers this month pledging better security for its subscribers. Dell has begun a campaign to educate customers how to detect and remove spyware themselves.
The government is increasingly involved, too.
The FTC this month filed its first federal court case over spyware. The House overwhelmingly approved two bills to increase criminal penalties and fines over spyware. The Homeland Security Department offers free e-mail tips for home Internet users to keep themselves secure.
Thung or Feeblens V is another piece i’ve worked on recently. it’s another random, "hands off" piece that could be longer, but isn’t because of size limitations. my impression is that it’s not very accessible either, but i never know how other people will take it…
got a gig doing lights for the monkywrench puppet laboratories “Halfpenny Opera” which i’ve been hearing about and seeing bits and pieces from (at the late night cabaret, with seanjohn as Mack the Knife) for the past year. the performances are coming up pretty soon, and they’re going to be at a “professional” venue, the rendezvous jewel box on second avenue. i’ve never done lights for a “professional” show before, but the concept isn’t too difficult to understand, and i’ve run a light board before, so it won’t be anything new. it even pays a little bit, although my guess is that i’m going to be paid with comp tickets and alcohol a lot more than with money.
trolloween is coming up soon and the theme this year is "the trials of trollmetheus", and it’s a trouser affair. the fremont trollharmonic is going to perform, as well as a bunch of trolls (of course), the fire-breathing troll gods, vamolá, and the usual suspects. i’ve recently made a new acquaintance who is turning out to be a tremendous source of inspiration to me. he’s put me one step closer to being able to create the ganesha mask that i’ve been fantasizing about for 10 years or so (i’m probably going to take his mask-making workshop this spring), and is even more interesting because of his apparent survivial in spite of not having a “regular” job outside of making masks and puppets for the fremont arts council.
i recently got a catalogue from Art & Culture, which is a predominantly vaisnava resource outlet. i’ve been considering adding some of what they’ve got to the selection of stuff at hybrid elephant, but i haven’t decided what yet, although i’m not sure that i’ll offer things like the marble radhakrsna set (temple-style, for dressing and decorating) for $1800, until i’ve got some more reliable business… they’ve got everything from tablas, mridangams, sitars and tamburas to yantras, incense, t-shirts, murtis, books, and everything else imaginable. i’m slowly getting the last of the old inventory on the web site, and i’ve still got a bunch of new stuff for which i’ve still got to write pages.
the vegetable sacrifice was tremendously disappointing, and i’m still upset about it. not only that, but i’ve applied for 11 jobs so far this week and have gotten no responses, and a recruiter called me with a testing position that i’d be perfect for, except for the fact that it requires a level of coding that i’m not even close to… it’s becoming quite difficult to get beyond being depressed about things. if it weren’t for the fact of the show, and the minimal positive bump i’ve gotten from the mask-making connection, and the fact that it’s so boring to be depressed for any length of time, i’d be headed in that direction very strongly at this point… at the same time, i suppose that the fact that i’ve been able to identify the fact that i’m depressed, and i’ve been able to identify specific steps i can take to alleviate that depression is a step in the right direction.
there’s a meme that i’ve seen recently, but i’ve waited a while to post it myself. of course, the first thing i did was to delete the first two columns of interests completely and then re-do the thing, because i so do not need to be identified by interests that are universal or popular. in fact i considered deleting all of my "common" interests as well, but not for now…
meme to be added with a (non-windoesn’t) system that is unicode compliant… which would be linux this time.
this is why i’m depressed: i plan for months, pretty much ever since i get out of the hospital… i send out notifications a month in advance and a week in advance, i say that it’s going to happen rain or shine, and still i was the only person at the vegetable sacrifice! and then i got back in time to be invited to go and see team america with moe and scott and nancy, and while it had some extremely funny parts, it also had a vomit scene that puts the one in the meaning of life to shame (in spite of the fact that the vomit was coming out of a puppet), and overall, it wasn’t funny enough to offset the fact that i put a lot of energy into something that totally bombed… and then moe left to go do treatments at the clinic and then she’s going out for sushi with a woman that she’s trading dog lessons for sushi with, so i’m alone and depressed.
today is the ritual vegetable sacrifice… 1st real sacrifice since my injury… there was a vegetable sacrifice last year, but only one person other than me showed up. it’s 10:30 am, and the ceremony starts at 1:00 pm, i have to be there at 12:00. at this point, i’ve had two people say they might show up, but it’s been raining all morning – it’s not raining now, though. i said that we would have a sacrifice whether it was raining or not… we’ll just have to see.
the past few days have been spent more or less successfully fighting off depression…
all told i applied for 17 jobs this week, but i don’t have any prospects yet, and i’ve got to do it all over again next week. i talked with the woman at sacred traditions and she said that she would probably be placing an order for incense, unlike what she said last time i talked with her a couple of years ago, shortly after they first opened, when she said that the only incense they were going to carry was their own brand. i also talked with the manager of stargazer’s, but there’s no telling what she really thought… she asked me about palo santo, which is not really an incense, but i can get it, if she wants to buy a whole bunch of it.
it’s difficult, though… a lot of people are out of work around here, plus i’ve got a brain injury, which doesn’t make a lot of difference to me (apart from the fact that i still can’t type as fast as i used to, and sometimes i either don’t or can’t say things in an understandable way, and once i’ve said whatever it is, i’m just as confused about it as the people who are listening to me, and i don’t know why), but who knows how much difference it will make to the person who has to choose between my resume and the one of someone who is not brain-injured. and that’s not to mention the fact that i’m already predisposed towards depression, even before my injury. so far i have been, as i said, more or less successful, but i’m not sure how much longer i can be so, especially if things continue to go the way things have been going recently.
i keep getting random catalogues in the mail. it’s probably because of hybrid elephant, but it’s still strange. recently i’ve gotten two different catalogues from suppliers of packaging materials, boxes and lables, and today i got a catalogue addressed to “gifts and accessories buyer” for “enchanted world of boxes” which is really strange… it’s “polish boxes”, not boxes for packing things in… kind of decorative, keep gifts in, or perhaps give them as gifts type of boxes.
magick was in a big hurry to rush out into the back yard last night, and caught one of her toes in the groove for the sliding glass door and ripped out her toenail. with both her knees having been surgerized recently, that only leaves her with one leg that is not injured in some way. moe has been really upset about it, primarily because magick’s been going stir crazy with being kept in her kennel all the time for her knees, and now that she’s allowed to start working again, this toenail thing comes up.
I offer my humble salutations to Lord Mahesvara – who has a garland of serpents around the neck; who has three eyes; whose body is covered with ash (vibhuti); who is eternal; who is pure; who has the entire sky as His dress and who is embodies as the first letter Na.
I bow to Lord Mahesvara, who is embodied as Makaara (letter Ma), whose body is anointed with holy waters from the river Ganges and sandal paste, who is the sovereign king of the Pramatha Ganas and who is adorned with innumerable divine flowers such as Mandaara.
I offer my salutations to Lord Shiva, who is the resplendent sun for mother Gauri`s lotus face, who is the destroyer of Daksha`s sacrificial ritual, who is the blue necked Lord (due to the Haalahala poison which He agreed to consume), whose banner bears the emblem of a bull and who is embodied as the letter Shi.
I prostrate before the God of Gods, who is worshipped and prayed to by great sages such as Vashishta, Agastya and Gautama, whose eyes are sun, moon and the fire and who is embodied as Vakaara (letter Va).
Prostrartions to the sacred Lord who is the Yaksa incarnate, whose hairs are long and matted, who holds Pinaaka (trident) in His hand, who has the entire sky as His attire and who is embodied as the letter Ya.
Stotra 6:
Panchaaksharam Idam Punyam
Yah Pateh Shiva Sannidhau
Shivaloka Mavaapnothee
Shivena Saha Modate
Whoever repeats this prayer composed with the five holy letters before Lord Shiva, attains that supreme abode of His and enjoys the eternal Bliss.
and so i’m getting one. i’m also getting a plush nyarlethotep…
and, finally, http://www.necfiles.org/ is the place where you can discover the background for all of this.
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html – tree octopus? i can’t tell whether it’s serious or just someone with a lot of time on their hands… The TRUTH About “Belgium” tends to make me think that it’s someone with a lot of time on their hands… a lot of free time… oy…
http://www.freedomware.us/stars/microshaft/index.php – he’s a wacko, but he’s an interesting wacko… kind of like the guy at http://www.digicrime.com/ – but only if you’re using windoesn’t and internet exploder.
p.s. i need the following frank zappa CDs to complete my collection: Uncle Meat, Waka Jawaka, Hot Rats, Burnt Weenie Sandwich, Chunga’s Revenge, Shut Up N’ Play Yer Guitar, Strictly Genteel and The Grand Wazoo. they’re officially going on my wish list, if anybody’s interested.
Name a CD you own that no-one else on your friends list does:
????? ????? by Anuradha Paudwal
Name a book you own that no-one else on your friends list does:
how about five books: De Arte Magica by Aliester Crowley
The Philokalia
?????????????
The Boo Hoo Bible
The Books of Tina Chopp
??????????? by Adi Shankaracharya
Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that no-one else on your friends list does:
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T
debates: didn’t watch them. i’m probably going to vote for badnarik. I872: no, I884: no, I892: yes, R55: reject, I297: yes. unenjoyment has mandated that i go to “job hunter orientation” and “job search preparation” classes, which i need about as much as i need another hole in my head, but if i don’t go, they deny my meagre unemployment check, which is now half of what it was, and will probably last another 6 months. meanwhile i’ve applied for 13 jobs so far this week, but no possibilities at this point. we’re doing allad’din at the tacoma mall in december, because they want us to perform, but babes in the wood is not ready yet. music, but nothing amazing yet.
i went to bellingham yesterday and came back today. i saw darol and collette, and gave them my old imac. they’re both so computer illiterate that they may actually be able to use it for something. i certainly can’t anymore, and it’s just as well that i gave it to collette and darol, because i was thinking about how else i might get rid of it. i stayed at serendipity last night, with ken and kamalla, and their housemates lucy and phyllis. there was an art sharing last night, and ken, kennyth and i played together in celebration of 25 years of playing together… and now that i come to think about it, that was our second public performance, too… the first one was at the end of the show and everybody left during it, except for ken yanik, who was asleep. i also saw david mason, who has parkinsons disease now, but i understand that he still has moments where he is as bright as he’s ever been. leslie conton was there, also. ken has a new friend, by way of phylis, who is a very young guy named aaron (yes, another one) who may be the third member of and more. i’m currently playing a piece that ken, aaron and i did with reason, that’s pretty amazing. i started out with the original sound, then ken took over and made his part of it, then aaron tried his hand… we went back and forth all morning with it, and it turns out that there’s a whole genre of music called "glitch" which it fits into very nicely. if you’ve got reason, here is a link where the rps is located, but if you don’t, then you might as well not bother.
kamalla has this fantasy of turning the property that the blue house, kennyth’s house, serendipity, the yellow house that i lived in, the wind-up neighbor’s house (which was owned by kathy veterane, and is now owned by karl meyer), and the field on the other side of the yellow house, into a combination intentional community and teaching center. i have heard a number of wild-ass schemes for doing that kind of thing in varions different parts of bellingham throughout the years, but if anyone’s going to do it, i think that kamalla has a better chance of it than anyone else i know about. she’s got enough interest already that some people from the findhorn community are giving talks there, one happened today, but i couldn’t hang around for it. if such a thing does happen, eventually, i’m going to have to be a part of it in some way or another.
moe approached me with another “eventually” idea, as well. apparently micah has this fantasy of him opening up a mammal center somewhere in california – at this point it looks like santa barbara, but this is all just a fantasy at this point – and if he does, he plans on offering moe a job, which would mean moving to santa barbara. as much as i hate the idea of living in california, i’ve actually been to santa barbara a couple of times, and it’s enough different from both LA and SF that i could probably handle it.
it was good to see all the people from bellingham again, and i’m definitely going to have to plan on going up there next month for the art sharing, if nothing else… now all i have to do is find a job. soon.
gunnar has finally got a web site where he can keep his amazing fractal drawings. i just shipped out a wholesale purchase of om gayatri incense for someone in california… now all i need to do is get more of those kinds of people to buy my incense and stuff and i wouldn’t have to worry. another major site update is coming soon. i’ve got some new jewelry, a new ganesha statue, and a bunch of “new” incense (which is to say, the last of the old inventory) that i have to add to the site. i’m still going to carry incense from sugandha prabhu, i’m just not going to rely on him as my main supplier any more, because he’s not well, and even when he is, he’s more than a little flaky.
i saw ezra and his new (as of yesterday afternoon) apartment yesterday. he said that he wanted to be closer to school, and i don’t blame him. he’s got a schedule that only a 20-something college student could handle, from 9 in the morning until 8 to 10 at night, every day with no days off… i wonder how long he’s going to be able to keep it up. he also said that he moved partially because cornish is giving him several tons of money for rent, tuition, books and supplies, and so forth, which is probably a good thing since i can’t afford to give him money myself and katharyn’s in a mental institution. he seems to be doing a much more successful job of getting money for going to college than i ever did.
i’m going to the vedanta socity in about half an hour. swamiji’s lecture today will be “After death experiences existance” (brain injury) which should be interesting since it is subtitled “Fact or fiction”, and i’m pretty sure that swamiji will come down on the side of “fact”, but i’d like to see how he’s going to prove it.
more memes to ponder. i could just post a link to quizilla dot com (or whatever) and let whatever comes of it happen, but i’d like to post only those memes which i have personally come in contact with, even if i do only post links to them and not my actual results.
i don’t use windows… for much! so when i ran virus scan, found a bunch of spyware applications (on my recently installed system mind you) and deleted them, i wasn’t too worried when the result was an error message telling me that c:\winnt\system32\bridge.dll wasn’t installed… but i just got rid of the error message! apparently there’s a registry key that doesn’t get changed back when you eliminate spyware using “unusual” (that is to say “manual”) methods. in case you’re wondering, open the registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\run\ and the key that loads bridge.dll should be apparent (it contains the words “rundll”, “bridge.dll” and “load”. delete that key and you won’t get an error message any more!
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highlights of swamijis lecture (which i need to remember): there are five types of proof; direct perception, inference, comparison, reliable testimony and “non-perception” (the latter of which is not accepted by all schools of philosophy). existence after death can be proved by the fourth variety – reliable testimony – because the scriptures say so, and because people who have “super-sensual knowledge” say so. you can question this if you want to, but the only other way to prove it is with direct perception, which we will all have, eventually, but unfortunately for those of us who are left, the one who has this direct perception will be unable to share it with anyone else.
he included a descripiton of what a “non-perceptive” proof might be as well: a husband says “i left my wallet on the dresser, would you go and get it for me?” to his wife, so the wife goes and finds that it’s not there… that is a “non-perceptive” proof: the wife, by her “non-perception” of the wallet, proves that her husband didn’t leave it on the dresser…
there are actually two bodies which make up an individual (which is stuff i knew before): the “gross” body, which you can perceive, and the “fine” body, which is made up of as many as 17 or as few as 11 (depending on how you count them) limbs; the five sense organs, the five motor organs, the five energies (prana, upana, etc., which can be combined, as prana manifests differently depending on whether it is ingesting, digesting, excreting, etc.), buddhi and manas or “cognative ability” (which can be combined as “mind”). the mind is the “mirror” which reflects divinity resulting in the soul. thus where the mind is, the soul is as well.
the wurst festival went as planned and was pretty much the same as it was last year, except for the fact that i wasn’t recovering so immenently from a brain injury this year. i actually got a chance to look around a little, although there wasn’t much. basically it’s a church/school/neighborhood party that’s gone a little overboard: they had a bunch of inflatable “rides”, a dunk-tank, a few food booths, a few more sales booths and that’s it… although they did have a really nice mixing board, which i assume they had last year as well, i just didn’t notice.
the tacoma gig was excellent if you were the audience, but it was so-so from a performer’s point of view. we started performing at 5:00 and finished at 10:00, after a “parade” (in which the rich, starched-collar patrons of the two museums involved wandered from one museum to the other while the band – especially the tuba player who has an upright tuba, no strap, and a brain-injured right hand that doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to – struggled to keep up), and a two hour “break” in which we had to frantically get set up and ready for the show while the rich patrons had dinner. my book ended up in the back of alan’s truck during the parade, and then alan disappeared, so i didn’t get my book back until just before we started, but it all worked out. the show was only a half an hour, but we included all of the best parts from august’s show, and macque added a new twist to pyrochaotica without telling anybody: two pyro-fountains at the end, which were loud enough that they drowned out the band for a couple minutes. the effect was sensational though – a fountain of crackling sparks going about 75 feet in the air, along with the standard compliment of other pyro stuff, with the backdrop of puget sound and the glass museum. there will probably be pictures eventually. it’s kind of odd, though, because one of the organisations that was putting the whole thing on was the philanthropy northwest society, but apparently they didn’t think to provide the “hired help” with important things like food, and passes to get in to the dressing room. we had a dressing room, but we had about 30 performers and only four passes, so there was as much searching for someone with a pass to get in as there was just about anything else, and i went home hungry. it’s presumably a good thing though, because now we can put the show on our “resume” and people will know that we can interact with highbrow society without getting under their skin, which will mean more performances in the future.
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