Excerpt: There is total chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is dealing with the IAEA, sweating out a possibility of nuclear extermination, Syria just got lit up by Israel, the Palestinians are in about the worst shape ever, Russia and China are new best buds, torture, renditions, mini-nukes, global economy crash, depleted uranium, GIs going haywire due to the stress, mercenaries without a law, everyone in the world hates America, global warming seems to be accelerating the glacier melts at an alarming rate, not to mention the ice-free passages in the northern regions, but is it possible that we are indeed being out-thought? That all this is on purpose?
Excerpt: After 6.75 years in office most of the members of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve are "loyal Bushy" appointees. A lot of the original crew members resigned without much in the way of explanation. When Greenspan receives his "Hero of the Peoples' Republic" medal and a pat on the back, "Heckuva job, Greenie!", you will want to look into the overall personnel situation at the Federal Reserve.
Excerpt: Good news from California's Alameda County -- a judge has voided election results after the county botched its response to a contested race conducted on Diebold electronic voting machines. The judge ordered that the disputed Measure R -- an initiative addressing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries -- go back on next year's ballot.
Excerpt: Days after a controversial organization began collecting voter signatures for a ballot measure to change California's winner-take-all presidential vote, a founder of the GOP-backed group says its major players are resigning - and the group will fold - due to lack of funding and support.
"The levels of support just weren't there," said Marty Wilson, the Sacramento-based fundraiser, in a telephone interview Thursday.
Excerpt: We've allowed true evil-doers to set up an enormous maze of pitfalls and traps for any good-hearted or well-intentioned person to traverse, while constructing a super-wide express lane for villains to easily slide right into our highest seats of power, and easily deflect all attempts to pry them out again.
So what's a real people's hero to do in such a situation?
Excerpt: They are slaughtering a lot of innocent people the world over. People disappear at random into the secret prison system to be tortured and kept indefinitely. Our leaders steal, they pillage, they rape, they torture, they starve people. They refuse to help people that are being slaughtered by others because it is our ally slaughtering them, or because they don't have any more natural resources for big corporations to steal. We watch them take away what our forefathers laid out for us as our natural rights as human beings and they tell us it's for our own good. When people are being beaten and tasered for having the nerve to speak out, speak up, or speak against, American citizens actually cheer!
Excerpt: A voter seeking to cast a ballot is first told to produce a photo ID. Is that intimidation or a prudent safeguard against election fraud? The Supreme Court said Tuesday it intends to decide, stepping into a controversy that blends race, partisan politics and the Constitution.
Comment: Isn't this the same Supreme Court that was asked by the Republicans to throw the election for Bush, and said 'sure'? Marshall S.PERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede Democratic-leaning minorities from voting in 2008.
Backers of the new laws say they're aimed at curbing vote fraud. But the statutes also could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as ``vote caging,'' which the GOP attempted in Ohio and Florida in 2004 before public disclosures foiled the efforts, said Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief in the Bush administration who's now with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
Comment: A "controversial" tactic? I'm no lawyer, but my admittedly un-informed impression is that vote caging is simply illegal under federal law. Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Sept. 26, 2007: It is too late by Leon Fisher, Unknown News
Excerpt: You see the rot setting in everywhere -- rising prices, the housing bust, a wildly fluctuating stock market, foreign governments getting rid of dollars for other more stable currencies such as the Euro, stagnant wages, no health benefits, increasing numbers of homeless, America's cities and states dangerously close to bankruptcy ...
Excerpt: Another one for you to file under "fox guards the henhouse": The Senate rules committee votes tomorrow (Wednesday) on whether to give Hans A. von Spakovsky a full six-year term on the Federal Elections Commission. For Senate Democrats to even consider allowing someone with von Spakovsky's background to sit on the independent agency tasked with protecting the integrity of federal elections is beyond incredible. If von Spakovsky is confirmed, it will be yet more evidence that Democrats have no more regard for the rule of law, or the integrity of the Justice Department, than Karl Rove does.
Excerpt: Can you do it in time? Can you drop your hatred for other cultures and religions in time to band together against the enemy? If you can't -- well, it's been a good ride.
Excerpt: We are trapped in the demented psychosis of G. Bush. His dementia is our living nightmare and there's not much 'we the people' can do about our current hell. Congress refuses to act, and where could the American people turn for a "redress of grievances?" Congress is closed to regular Americans, and listens only to the special interest monied corporate elite.
Excerpt: Cable giant Comcast violated the law by broadcasting video news releases without identifying them as sponsored programming, the Federal Communications Commission announced today. The ruling came in response to a complaint from Free Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, a media watchdog group focusing on VNRs.
Rulings such at these by the FCC have become increasingly less frequent over the past seven years. At the same time, the use of VNRs has become more wide spread.
In April of 2006, a study by [the Center for Media and Democracy] revealed that, over a ten month span, 77 television stations from all across the nation aired video news releases without informing their viewers even once that the reports were actually sponsored content.
Excerpt: Thank goodness we have a convenient group of people to blame -- that'll be helpful when the economy bottoms out and we're tempted to blame our elected officials. We can blame brown people instead. Amazing how this stuff just keeps working ... generation after generation.
Excerpt: I love hoaxes, especially the really wild ones that hang on for a long time, like Y2K. I don't like that it is done. I like them in the same sense that I deplore free range graffiti but admire the art. This is going to displace Y2K and cold fusion in my ranking, if it takes off and becomes a grown-up hoax.
Excerpt: The first thing out of Petraeus's mouth before Congress, when he got his breath and microphone back, was, "I'm not a puppet of this administration. Just look at the stars all over the uniform, and pay no attention to that ring-string-thing on my back. The Administration will not pull it whenever you finish one of your speeches and actually ask a question. ..."
Sept. 24, 2007: On winning by Rudolph M., Unknown News
Excerpt: I have worked as a "temp" or "contractor" for nearly all of my "career", in banking, insurance, phone, shipping, cable TV, education, and more. What I saw in nearly every company was a bunch of Lifers, pacing themselves for retirement in the far off future. I saw asses super-glued to seats, and meekly subservient workers going along to get along, reluctant to rock the boat or effect change. I saw half-assed effort, and plenty of people who either knew they could not be fired, or who always did just enough to not get fired.
Excerpt: The bad guys don't always win. Just most of the time. The rest of the time it's puny little guys like us left standing proud on the field of battle, after the great beasts have slunk away to lick their wounds -- and try devising a sneakier way to get rid of us.
Excerpt: It's past time to start taking your world back. Or there will be absolutely nothing for you to take. You will either become a fighter, a martyr, or a slave.
Excerpt: It is not unreasonable to believe that the U.S. dollar index will fall by 50% during the next two to three years. That will be extremely damaging to the poor of America assuming that they eat food, shelter indoors at night, and do things like wear clothes, use energy to stay warm in the winter, and buy stuff for their children.
Excerpt: Senator Clinton's thinking insults our intelligence and is almost delusional. Tax credits? To poor people? Requiring someone who is broke and out of work to prove that he has health insurance in order to get a job? How many people in the inner cities are going to be able to afford to front the insurance premiums and then wait 12 months to get their tax credits?
Excerpt: A fight over White House secrecy has taken a new twist, with Senate officials confirming Wednesday that a Republican senator is secretly blocking a bill that would reverse President Bush's 2001 executive order allowing ex-presidents to seal their records indefinitely.
Excerpt: She's hinted as much previously, and her new security requirements issued in the wake of her landmark "Top-to-Bottom Review" of e-voting systems would seem to preclude them, but CA Secretary of State, Debra Bowen has now given her most direct comment to date on the matter of voting machine "sleepovers".
"Sleepovers don't comply with the security requirements," Bowen said in response to a question we submitted on the matter during a conference call with the Secretary sponsored by the Courage Campaign.
"It's really simple," she added, after a pause following her immediate, direct reply to the question.
Excerpt: Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said it is possible that the euro could replace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of choice.
Comment: Such a development could make for bigger changes in our world than the average American realizes.
America will lose a ton of clout and flexibility once the dollar is no longer the favored reserve currency. Our government would have far less freedom to print money, and problems which are merely tough today could become impossible to fix tomorrow.
This is why Bush-Cheney are wanting to somehow put stricter rules on investors. But it's hard to imagine how they could stem this tide (which they themselves helped mightily to accelerate with their incompetence, greed, and belligerence).
And much good could come of America being humbled this way. For instance, we could be forced to shrink our military spending down to something much more fitting to the modern world. But we average Americans sure won't like the extra suffering it'll entail at street level for a generation or two!
And if we come to feel TOO humiliated and impoverished along the way, we could end up ripe for dictatorship, much as happened to Germany after WWI (paving the way for the rise of Hitler). But don't take my word for it: read the history books!JR MooneyhamPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: Take a look at the leadership that is closest to you -- your boss perhaps, or your local officials. Folks, face it, to a great extent these are not well-balanced people. And as you go up the hierarchy, it just gets worse.
Excerpt: The Iraq war turned quagmire turned civil war shows no
sign of letting up now or in our immediate or long-term future. America is
stuck. ongress is without a clue and President Bushy-Bush-Bush, well, insane
no longer holds any imminent definition.
Excerpt: This week I listened to music, not news, and was only able to come up with these shocking fair and balanced breaking news stories... The whole thing was caught on tape.
Excerpt: All over America "Papers, please!" is the new reality in the fight against ourselves -- or, more precisely, the fight against our fears. External passports are mandatory for Americans coming or going, and soon internal "passports" will be required to travel, do banking, receive government services, or to engage in commerce.
Excerpt: In his speech last night, President Bush made a case for progress in Iraq by citing facts and statistics that at times contradicted recent government reports or his own words.
Comment: Here's a rare but decent effort at fact-checking from the Washington Post, with a few samples of Bush statements from last night at odds with the facts and/or previous Bush statements. Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: The Democratic leadership may believe--rightly or wrongly--that [ending the occupation of Iraq] would entail unacceptable political costs. But that's very different from being unable to affect policy. To insist, as many media outlets have, that the Constitution makes it impossible for Congress to stop the war obscures the actual choices facing the nation--by confusing "can't" with "won't."
Excerpt: I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.
Excerpt: Why are the US borders wide open, with very few inspections of imported goods? Why are there thousands of "porno cops" but few internet security cops? Why are street people and potheads a police priority?
Because even with explicit warnings by experts about what can happen detailing how it will happen, the "authorities" are either incompetent bunglers or complicit conspirators, hoping for a new crisis so that they can increase their authoritarian powers and budgets.
Excerpt: Consequently, post-WWII history and governmental policy does not seem to make sense from any conventional perspective. All the nipping and tucking, fixing and scamming by organized crime preparing its nest, has resulted in what appears on the surface to be wildly irrational actions by nations and powerful individuals.
In reality, though, what looks irrational is merely the result of a great multiplicity of covert moves with hidden, criminal motives, all in the service of an ignorant, domineering set of people who cooperate to ensure that each other's current illicit businesses prosper.
Sept. 11, 2007: Why doesn't the Republican Party want Ohio's voting machines tested?
Excerpt: Ohio Republicans have blocked a proposal to test electronic voting machines prior to the 2008 presidential primary.
By a 4-3 vote, Republicans on Ohio's State Controlling Board blocked Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's proposed $1.8 million unbid contract for voting machine testing. Brunner had already set aside the $1.8 million for the test. Her specific request to the Controlling Board was a waiver for competitive bidding. Her office had hoped to complete all testing by November 30, 2007.
Excerpt: I didn't get sober because of or through Alcoholics Anonymous. I got sober because I was tired of humiliating myself. I was tired of being sick and hung over every morning. Finally, the smell of alcohol made me want to throw up, although fortunately not if it was on someone else or in someone else's glass.
Excerpt: Over historical time, religious institutions have been taken over by rapists, and set to serving their agenda. That's why most religious traditions sanctify the rape of women under the guise of male superiority and male control of women's bodies and reproductive capacities, or even of children. This same basic attitude of condoning and enabling rape can be found in all powerful institutions, because rapists inevitably come to control them.
Excerpt: Infobabble [is] something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or other construct.
Excerpt: Try not to be afraid of your own frickin' shadow. Don't jump through your bedroom window shrieking in fear every time you hear a noise. Please make some effort not to be a drooling idiot, a whimpering coward terrorized easily by tall tales.
Excerpt: The state of the union is a shambles. Forget Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule". Between the misbegotten "War on Terror"; the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan; the out of control national debt; the totally wrecked financial and monetary systems; and the trashing of America's reputation in the civilized world, the thing that got broken by the Bush Regime was the United States.
Excerpt: Up to 70 percent of first responders are ill as a result of 9/11 contamination. If a similar rate of illness holds true for those who lived and worked near the Twin Towers, the number of seriously ill New Yorkers could climb to 300,000 in the near future. About 70,000 New Yorkers so far have listed themselves with the World Trade Center Health Registry, a database that tracks the health impact of the 9/11 attacks. The registry has been criticized for excluding large numbers of those potentially sickened outside a designated one-square-mile area. Despite the insistent denials of city and federal officials, tens of thousands of New Yorkers were unnecessarily exposed to a chemical brew without even the most rudimentary precautions. Today New York City is still mired in a fog of cover-ups and half-truths regarding its environmental welfare.
Excerpt: The U.S. medical establishment appears to have turned a blind eye to the abuse of military medicine at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, doctors from around the world said in a letter published Friday in a prestigious British medical journal.
Health care workers in the U.S. military seem to have put their loyalty to the state above their duty to care for patients - and American regulatory bodies have done nothing to remedy the situation, said the letter that appeared in The Lancet.
It was signed by some 260 people from 16 countries, nearly all of whom are doctors.
The letter compared the ongoing role of U.S. doctors working at Guantanamo, who have been accused of ignoring torture, to the South African doctors involved in the case of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died while being detained by security police.
Excerpt: "Torture, arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention in violation of right to counsel, incommunicado detention, any country that wants to equip itself either through legislation or just through its practices with these kind of tools uses the example of the United States," Louise Arbour tells Democracy Now! "If I try to call to account any government, privately or publicly, for their human rights records, the first response is: first go and talk to the Americans about their human rights violations."
Excerpt: Unfortunately, and sadly, there is no possibility of change via the ballot box. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering, incumbents rarely lose and their replacements are drawn from within the enormously corrupt Two-Party Machine. Always.
And there is no point in looking to the Democrats for salvation, or for progressive change. The Democratic Party sold out to corporate lobbyists long ago, and is nothing but a septic tank of incompatible philosophies held by compromised, unprincipled politicians.
Excerpt: This year's Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren't paying attention.
"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.
Sept. 5, 2007: Solidarity by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Excerpt: It is hard for those crushed against the pavement by the authoritarian boot to sympathize with victims who's losses are hard to identify with, maybe particularly celebrity academics like Finkelstein, but the fact remains that the enemies of our enemies must be our friends if at all possible. The academic realm is a particularly vicious battlefield in this war against the weak and, simultaneously, against truth.
Excerpt: Sen Hatch’s ‘turbo-coal’ will be a new and user-friendly kind of super coal and will give added benefit to power plant generators across these United States.
Excerpt: It sucks to have problems at work, but that's America, and I don't "find myself furious" over some college teacher getting splashed with a few drops of cold water from the real world.
Excerpt: Always be very polite, courteous and sober even when you are crazy-mad. The key to getting what you want is persistence and having a good record of the facts of the situation, not trying to "motivate" people with anger, whining, threats, etc.
Excerpt: Do Bush and his inner circle of Neo Con lunatics truly believe that an encore of "Shock and Awe" is going to cow a nation which sacrificed a million men to repel an Iraqi invasion during the 1980s? Does the Bush cabal think there will be no retaliation against our forces in Iraq and our fleet in the Persian Gulf, against Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia?
Excerpt: In an effort to provide better control and coordination, the federal government is launching an ambitious ID program for rescue workers to keep everyday people from swarming to a disaster scene.
Comment: This might sound hokey but, criminy --we have to rely on each other. That's the essence of what society is, and it's beyond bonkers to try to make it illegal for people to help each other in a life-and-death situation.
And hello? If there's any lesson to be learned from recent catastrophes, it's that you can't count on government to be there in an emergency. Anyone who doesn't understand that should stroll through the ruins of New Orleans ... Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
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