My Favorite Artists

Enlightening The Shadows

911 Enlightening The Shadows


"Barrington Moore put it well: ‘Doing nothing remains the real form of mass action.'" - Paul Wellstone

'We dump sick people,' ex-health insurer admits

A retired health insurance executive — in a shocking but not terribly surprising admission — confessed Wednesday that insurance companies deliberately confuse policyholders and attempt to dump sick patients to plump their profit margins.

“[T]hey confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors,” former Cigna senior executive Wendell Potter told senators at a hearing on health insurance Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
“Potter, who has more than 20 years of experience working in public relations for insurance companies Cigna and Humana, said companies routinely drop seriously ill policyholders so they can meet “Wall Street’s relentless profit expectations,’” Potter told the hearing, according to ABC News.

“They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment,” Potter added. “(D)umping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line.”

Read more...

Scumbags.

"Above and beyond the question of how to grow the economy there is a legitimate concern about how to grow the quality of our lives." - Paul Wellstone

My thoughts on the murder of Dr. Tiller

This space is reserved for my upcoming thoughts on the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller.

Developing...

Related...

• Coulter finds wit in abortion provider assassinations
  

"Marcia Timmel said, ‘I'm so small and the darkness is so great.' We must light a candle." - Paul Wellstone

Federal Court Says Religious Monument At Oklahoma Courthouse Is Unconstitutional

A unanimous federal appeals court yesterday ruled that county commissioners in Haskell County, Oklahoma unconstitutionally sought to promote their personal religious beliefs by erecting a Ten Commandments monument on the front lawn of the county's courthouse.

The decision by the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals comes in a challenge filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Oklahoma on behalf of a local resident.

"This decision is a victory for the cherished American value of religious freedom," said Daniel Mach, Director of Litigation for the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. "The government should not be in the business of promoting religious viewpoints. In our country, people should be free to express their faith – or to exercise their right to hold no belief at all – without government interference or favoritism."

In its decision, the court ruled that the monument violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution because a "reasonable observer would view the monument as having the impermissible principal or primary effect of endorsing religion." The monument is unconstitutional, the court ruled, because the proposal to erect the monument, its approval by the Haskell County Board of Commissioners, and the commissioners' expressly religious defense of the monument "strongly reflect a government endorsement of religion."

"This is a significant ruling for the citizens of Oklahoma," said Joann Bell, Executive Director of the ACLU of Oklahoma. "Religion should not be something that should be allowed to divide the citizens of this state, which is what happens when the government endorses one particular set of religious beliefs. All Oklahomans, of all creeds – and not just the beliefs of those in power – should feel welcome at the county courthouse."

The ACLU and the ACLU of Oklahoma filed a lawsuit challenging the display of the monument in October 2005, a little over a year after a Haskell County lay minister, who said "the Lord had burdened his heart" about having a Ten Commandments monument placed on the courthouse lawn, received permission from the Haskell County Board of Commissioners to build it.

Several days after the monument was put up, a dedication ceremony was held that included opening and closing prayers and remarks from several local pastors who talked about the religious significance of the monument. And in the months following the dedication ceremony, members of the Haskell County Board of Commissioners spoke frequently, publicly and often in expressly religious terms in defense of the monument, including statements like "That's what we're going to live by, that right there…The good Lord died for me. I can stand for him, and I'm going to."

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma ruled against the plaintiffs in August 2006, prompting an appeal to the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

A copy of yesterday's ruling is available online at: www.aclu.org/religion/public/39784lgl20090608.html

Additional information about the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief is available online at: www.aclu.org/religion

Additional information about the ACLU of Oklahoma is available online at: www.acluok.org

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." - Thomas Jefferson

Are You This Good?

If you can start the day without caffeine,
If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it,If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,
If you can overlook it when those you love take it out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can ignore a friend's limited education and never correct him,
If you can resist treating a rich friend better than a poor friend,
If you can face the world without lies and deceit,
If you can say honestly that deep in your heart you have no prejudice against creed, color, religion or politics,

Then, my friend, you are almost as good as your dog!

"Without trying, I'm different." - Paul Wellstone

US Democrats Overseas Pass Marijuana Resolution

The Democratic Party Committee Abroad, otherwise known as Democrats Abroad, passed a resolution [Editor's note: not a joint resolution yet...) on April 25 recommending the legalization of marijuana in all 50 states.

The news appears to have gone completely unnoticed by all mainstream outlets.

The Democrats Abroad are considered a state party by the Democratic National Committee, which affords them eight elected, voting members. They help U.S. citizens who are traveling and living outside the United States cast ballots in national elections.

The DNC maintains a pool of 200 voting members divvied up by individual states’ populations.
The resolution was first put forward by the Japanese branch of Democrats Abroad. After only minor debate, according to Daily Kos diarist YoYogiBear who says he created the resolution, it passed, moving up for debate by the Democratic Party Committee Abroad, where it was met with some resistance.

“Once the resolution passed our country committee, it was put on the agenda with the rest of the DA resolutions for consideration at our global meeting in DC,” he wrote. “A couple of members of the leadership of DA seemed to think that this issue was not an area of ‘core competence’ for our organization and questioned vigorously whether we should be considering any resolutions that contradicted President Obama’s position at all. Our primary function as a part of the DNC, according to the opponents, was to support the President and his agenda and to help elect Democrats. Implicit in their argument was that this issue would somehow hurt the Democrats and Obama though no evidence was ever presented to backup that assertion.”

The resolution was put to a voice vote during the Democrats’ Abroad April meeting in Washington, D.C.. After two attempts, it was passed.

In the 2008 election, Democrats Abroad aided the votes of American citizens in 164 countries, according to Toby Condliffe, a Democrats Abroad superdelegate to last year’s DNC.
President Obama opposed, but…

Although President Barack Obama made light of a question about marijuana legalization repeatedly promoted on his Change.gov Web site, efforts to topple marijuana prohibition have reached a fever pitch.

The president’s position on the matter, however, is unclear.

Read more...

It's time to end the decades old prohibition on probably the most useful plant on the planet. The law makes no sense in this case. Legalize it NOW!!!

"You wanna get rid of drug crime in this country? Fine, let's just get rid of all the drug laws." - Ron Paul

Lick Shots!

This is an Invasion!
The Evil Genius Green Lantern!
Immortal Technique, "The 3rd World"
(It's on now motherfucker - ha ha, drop)
You ain't got the right to bear arms, huh?
Sometimes you might have to brandish a motherfuckin' firearm
(Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, like shots)

Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
Lick shots for the revolution
Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
But watch, where the fuck you shootin'
Yo where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
Where the fuck you niggaz aimin' at?
Where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
This is only for the hardcore wherever you at, yeah

Volume 1 cop killa, hip-hop has never been realer
Volume 2 shot up the president like a gorilla
New York police state capital tried to swallow me
Locked me longer than Puerto Rico been a colony
Thirteenth Amendment slavery property
And now they signin' rappers that promote their philosophy?
Fuck that, nigga, hip-hop is not Republican
That's just the white motherfuckers that own the publishin'
And get the fuck out, if you want the foreigners gone
I paint the White House black and park my car on the lawn
Marry a Muslum girl and fuck her five times a day (WHAT?)
Every time right before we shower and pray (HA!)
You damn right the AK, symbolizes you're hard
But a holy war, is a conversation with God
You bitch niggaz misinterpret what you don't understand
Stackin the wrong sign can end up shootin your man
Shootin each other, shootin your brother
Aim the gun at the right motherfucker
And leave 'em colder than a prison in Russia
Or America's white power structure
Niggaz love to say "Fuck revolution!"
Until the jury come in and move for the prosecution
And then brothers act like a born-again Huey Newton
Forgot about the bullshit music they was producin'
But my niggaz aim precisely, through the confusion - AND

Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
Lick shots for the revolution
Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
But watch, where the fuck you shootin'
Yo where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
Where the fuck you niggaz aimin' at?
Where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
This is only for the hardcore wherever you at

I got a hundred shooters with me, Rugers shoot you through the kidney
Stand in front of the judge and lie quicker than Scooter Libby
I'm runnin' through the city - dear God
if I mark the racist Rush Limbaugh I wonder would you forgive me? (huh?)
Somebody told me Glen Beck as the plan's over
See ya, time to let him see a damn soldier
Flip your Landrover, I told ya I blam toasters
Gun pop off like the mouth of Ann Coulter
This is my gangsta religion
See I aim with precision, point blank the position
I'm black as the ancient Egyptians
Before European historians went and changed the description
I'm blamed for the 'caine in the kitchen
The C.I.A. playin' with the pigeons, same pain that I'm pitchin' (yea)
Listen, you dudes better watch the hook
I'm a boxer, coppers'll come up, Hoffa look
They wanna get rid of this conscious crook
Like I'm agnostic, a pocketful {?} gospel book
But I ain't goin' nowhere, that's the motherfuckin' truth
America don't care for its inner city youth – so I

Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
Lick shots for the revolution
Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
But watch, where the fuck you shootin'
Yo where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
Where the fuck you niggaz aimin' at?
Where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
This is only for the hardcore wherever you at

Puerto Rican superhero!
Yo, XL eternal my journal, Soujourner, Nat Turner
Cop murdered by the certain burner turned in the back of his sternum
He flirted with pullin' me over for bein' brown, I bust
Now he in the back of the truck with Don Imus
I must, take aim when I lick shots
Throw stray bullets like when Nas got off of Pharoahe Monch
These pigs wanna see us dead inside a jail cell
Turn us from Shawn Carters to Sean Combs to Sean Bell
My temper 'bout to break like levees in New Orleans
Catch Jimmy Lovine when he refinance his mortgages
Kid, illusion is dead, we movin' with the blue and the red
Latin Kings, Giuliani with a gat to his head
Y'all don't lick shots like killers aimin' at the Feds
Y'all lick shots like Jenna Jameson and Superhead
Pigs slice to Venice and beef at the benefits meet
Buried him on Venice Beach with the flies and the bees
Bzzzt - Chino, and Immortal Tech'
Kill shit like the Chinito at Virginia Tech (what's fuckin' with that?)
And Jacob ain't your friend, he's a fuckin' jeweler
BLAP, BLAP! I shoot the cats off your fuckin Pumas!

Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
Lick shots for the revolution
Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, lick shots
But watch, where the fuck you shootin'
Yo where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
Where the fuck you niggaz aimin' at?
Where you aimin' at? Where you aimin' at?
This is only for the hardcore wherever you at

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

Another One for the 'National Embarrassments' File

Today I received this email from LaRouche PAC:

Hitler's Program Has Been Revived by the Obama Administration

May 14, 2009 (LPAC)--What would you think about a scholarly article entitled: "What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician- Assisted Suicide?" If you knew no more than the title, you might wonder if it was written by the grandaddy of British utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham; or perhaps by LSD-pervert Aldous Huxley; or by Nazi doctor Karl Brandt.

Good guesses ... but wrong.

This is the title of a 1998 paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emanuel, a leading adviser to Budget Director Peter Orszag and a member of President Obama's elite 15-person Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is charged by the Obama administration with preparing the list of which medical procedures will henceforth be permitted, and which not, with an eye to cutting $2 trillion from health care payments--to be handed over to the bankrupt hedge funds and banks which run the HMOs.

Brandt, Goering, and Hitler himself have nothing on these modern Nazis. Ezekiel Emanuel's co-author of the mentioned paper, Margaret Battin--like Emanuel, a bio-ethicist--has written other papers with sick titles like "The Least Worst Death: Selective Refusal of Treatment"; "Terminal Sedation: Pulling the Sheet Over Our Eyes"; and "Assisted Suicide: Can We Learn From Germany?" Is this any different than Hitler's doctor Karl Brandt's defense of euthanasia at Nuremberg: "Death can mean deliverance. Death is life--just as much as birth. It was never meant to be murder."

And don't forget that, among the means identified at Nuremberg as causing the "murder and ill-treatment of Civilian Populations" was the "inadequate provision of surgical and medical services" -- exactly the policies being imposed on the U.S. today by Summers, Geithner, Orszag, and their British masters.

As Lyndon LaRouche stated unequivocally yesterday: "The Hitler program has been revived by the Obama administration."

"This is straight Nazi stuff," LaRouche elaborated. "It's not a quibble; it's not an interpretation. This is a direct copy of the philosophy of the Nazis. You cannot duck that issue. This is Nazi stuff. And it's explicit. We know all this stuff from Hermann Goering and so forth in the 1920s, and after that with their international connections, like certain Wall Street firms. We have been warned, and we act accordingly. People who condone this are criminals, because they either knew, or should have known, what they are doing. They either knew, or should have known."

LaRouche continued: "Please be careful: don't accept an invitation to sleep at the White House! It might be a longer sleep than you expected.... Every time the question comes up, we should say: `This is the tradition of the Fuehrer's program being maintained. You should be grateful to your insightful President, who has helped to bring this forward. And he's going to relieve some of the strains of the world by eliminating excess population.' We keep wondering where we heard that before!"

LaRouche emphasized that the entire HMO system has to be immediately eliminated. "Repeal the HMO's, period. Because only if you repeal it, do you open the gates for the easy route to the necessary reforms. After you get the HMO's repealed, after that, then you go with the other programs for rebuilding health care in the U.S., but not before."

"Don't accept any discussion or dialogue on Social Security and such issues," LaRouche advised. "First we have to reduce the costly mismanagement of health care by these insurance companies, by eliminating the HMO's. This will eliminate the biggest factor of waste in the health care system.

"The HMO's just took over and replaced Hill-Burton. There's no way of compromising on that; you have to be absolutely ruthless. The HMO is a parasite; there's no question about it. This is all criminal, and we have to deal with it as a crime.

"The point is people get hesitant, and they say: `In the meantime, what are we going to do?' In the meantime? There is no meantime! Either we get these guys out now, or there's no chance: mass death occurs. That's what happened with Hitler. There were Jewish communities that also said: `Look, don't fight it, it will go away.' It's the same thing today."

As for the Nazi behavioral economists, LaRouche said, "these guys have to go. Because either these guys are going to go, or the President is going to go. And the President has to think through that choice. Because the American people are not going to put up with this crap. And these guys are going to find that the American people are going to say to the President: `You get rid of those guys, or we get rid of you.' "

Naturally, I couldn't let that slide. Here's what I wrote back to their organization:

To whom it may concern,

I received an email regarding physician assisted suicide from your organization comparing Obama Administration policies with Nazi practices.

Apparently nobody within your group understands what physician assisted suicide is, as it is always at the request of the terminally ill patient. Furthermore, the premise with which you based your argument doesn't actually make an explicit connection, aside from your insistence that it does, between Nazis murdering Jews by the million in gas chambers (pregnant women, children, and anyone else deemed unfit for labor) for being Jewish and doctors who humanely put people out of their misery at the person or, in some cases, their family's request the way we euthanize animals whose quality of life has diminished to the point that they are beyond miserable.

Another factor that is very obvious from the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy you presented, is that nobody at your organization read the article in its entirety. Or even much past the title. Apparently you are in support of bankrupting terminally ill people so that pharmaceutical companies can make a fortune off those last days of a person's life. Perhaps it doesn't bother you either that insurance companies spend tens of millions of dollars every year, and rising, paying businessmen to find ways of not paying claims and lawyers to fight legitimate claims. Or that lawyers and businessmen call all the shots on what doctors and other medical professionals can and can't do for their patients thanks to healthcare being run like a business and not an institution.

The legitimate medical community is in support of this practice as is evidenced by the article being published in one of the most renowned and highly regarded medical periodicals in the world as well as full support from the American Medical Association. How insulting for people who have dedicated their lives to honorable careers in medicine to have religious fanatics with no credentials presenting themselves as if they are an authority on medical practices.

A suggestion, perhaps you might think a bit harder about the Holocaust before glibly comparing someone else to Hitler or the Nazis.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

imdougandirule

Related Articles...

• What is the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?
  
• Hitler's Program Has Been Revived by the Obama Administration

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." - Thomas Jefferson

Jesse Ventura is the MAN!!!

Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura laid into Dick Cheney on CNN Monday night for, among other things, supporting waterboarding and maligning a "war hero" during an interview on Sunday.

"I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion," the former wrestler who gained his first mainstream fame playing a role in the sci-fi actioner Predator told CNN's Larry King. "It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture."

King asked, "What was it like?"

"It's drowning," Ventura responded. "It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

"I don't have a lot of respect for Dick Cheney," Ventura said. "Here's a guy who got five deferments from the Vietnam War. Clearly, he's a coward. He wouldn't go when it was his time to go. And now he is a chicken hawk. Now he is this big tough guy who wants this hardcore policy. And he's the guy that sanctioned all this torture by calling it enhanced interrogation."

King asked, "Do you think Rush Limbaugh's a better Republican than Colin Powell?"

"No, not at all," Ventura said. "In fact, if you compare the two, let's look at Colin Powell, who's a war hero, who strapped it on for his country, and didn't run and hide."

King pointed out, "Twice."

"And then you look at Dick Cheney who ran and hid," Ventura said. "I have no respect for Dick Cheney. I have tremendous respect for General Powell."

Crooks and Liars has video of the Ventura interview at this link.

Sign the petition to put the Bush Administration on trial for war crimes.

Related...

• Jesus would permit followers to torture, some evangelicals believe
• Ex-FBI agent: Waterboarding produced 'no actionable intel'
• Ex-Powell aide: Why do 'Cheney lies' get 'so much air time'?
• Jesse Ventura: I'll waterboard Hannity into praising Obama
• Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, lasts six seconds before saying it's 'absolutely torture'
• Abu Ghraib inmate recalls abuse
• Interrogator: Torture may have cost 'thousands' of US lives
  

"I speak my mind. If it offends some people, well, there's not much I can do about that. But I'm going to be honest. I'm going to continue to speak my mind, and that's who I am." - Jesse Ventura

Wouldn't you know it...

I was planning a trip to England this summer with a couple of friends and as it turns out, they've been banned!

Fred Phelps and Mike Savage will not be allowed in the country anymore. Who knew that America's number one ally in the "War on Terror" would eighty-six two a right-wing neo-con and a religious fanatic just for being scum bags? Lol!

Interestingly enough, these two are the type to put France down at every opportunity while also praising England for its supporting role in Bush's phony War on Terror and yet France will still let them in!

Related articles...

• Named and shamed: the 16 barred from UK
• Michael Savage Banned From Entering UK: Country Publishes List Of People Not Allowed
• Michael Savage, Fred Phelps banned from entering Britain

"I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government's business. That position rules out the Republican Party for me." - Jesse Ventura

Healthcare: Public vs. Private

I keep hearing people ask, "Do you really want the government running something as important as healthcare?" Hmm....

The current, private healthcare system, in my opinion, is not working. The reasons are simple, business men at insurance and pharmaceutical companies call all the shots and supercede both you and your doctor. Due to relaxed regulations now, insurance companies can choose not to pay for procedures and treatments recommended and performed by your doctor after the fact so you're left holding the bill. And because it is privatized, it is all run like a business where repeat business and addictive treatments are not only tolerated, but encouraged.

First, as anyone who's dealt with them knows, it's a nonstop hassle dealing with insurance companies who, next to oil and companies, have one of the largest lobbies in Congress, but with one major difference, they donate to both Democrats and Republicans indiscriminately so they get favorable legislation regardless of who wins.

At one time in this country, insurance was illegal because it amounted to racketeering by the mafia, taking honest, hardworking peoples' money and providing little-to-nothing in return. Now that insurance companies can pick and choose what they will cover at any time, it would seem that they have returned to their roots. So you and/or your employer pay 250 dollars and up every month per person listed on your policy and you may or may not be covered when you see your doctor, go to the hospital, or buy a prescription.

Next is the issue that healthcare professionals generally do not heal, they only treat symptoms. Because it is run like a business and not an institution, they want repeat customers. It doesn't bother anyone at any hospital or doctor's office if you have to wait in line - job security for them, or that the insurance company refuses to pay claims, or even that insurance companies spend tens of millions of dollars every year paying people to figure out how not to pay claims. They have a business to run and businesses run on profits. And while that in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, the standard in the industry to treat symptoms by prescribing medicines almost seems like a racket in and of itself.

Commercials air on every channel during every show on television advertising medicine, granted they list the possible side effects, but the public is being constantly bombarded through the various forms of media to just relax and take a pill. Pharmaceutical companies push drugs on doctors by providing all kinds of free office products with their logo on them (pens, pads of paper, etc.), boxes and boxes of free samples of the medicine, and who knows what other perks come with prescribing these medications to patients? Ethics, in the legal aspect, in this area have diminished over the the past 10 - 15 years.

And worse, the healthcare professionals, rather than lobby to be able to make their own decisions and not be controlled by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, lobby to keep their competitors like chiropractors, acupuncturists, and other nontraditional healthcare practitioners from being covered by insurance, which insurance and pharmaceutical companies are only too happy to go along with. Holistic healing and alternative medicine won't buy a new Leer jet or pay for all those executive retention bonuses.

One prime example of public vs. private, here in California we deregulated energy utilities over a decade ago. Even I was for it at the time. We were all led to believe that we would be able to pick our electrical provider, like we do with our cell phones, and that competition would raise the quality and lower the price. Well, 13 years later, my electricity is no better. It also isn't cheaper, in fact, it is quite a bit more expensive, and since deregulating, we have had numerous periods of rolling blackouts. So the price has continued to go up, while the quality has gone down. Great! Let's privatize everything!

What happened is that once regulations were removed, energy providers no longer had to keep ahead of the demand. They quit building new power plants, they quit improving existing ones so their operating costs went down, and as the demand steadily increased, the supply remained the same. That sent the prices through the roof. And as the demand surpassed the supply, we began to experience rolling blackouts where entire grids were shut down and millions went without power for hours and even days at a time.

And while that may be good for energy companies and their investors, it is not good for the people, either economically or environmentally.

A public healthcare system would be more likely to have the goal of healing people rather than just treating symptoms because they will already be inundated with patients, and slow service has yet to prove to be an effective deterrent in this industry. And because pushing bogus ailments, like RLS (restless leg syndrome,) would only give more people more reasons to see a doctor where they just get prescribed more medicine, it would be self-defeating to continue that practice. From my own personal experience, I can't remember the last time I went to a doctor's office where I wasn't inundated with advertisements for every medicine on the market, many who offer free samples of their medicines like a crack dealer giving the first dose away for free. But in this case, it's perfectly legal, and somehow acceptable.

One could argue that the government is inefficient and/or incompetent, however when one considers the alternative, greedy and self-serving, it's not a hard choice. It's a nice thought that the market could regulate itself, however it rarely does because with no government regulation, those with the means to do so can and do manipulate the market for their own gain and at the expense of everyone else. Just take a look at the current economic situation.

Related...

• Our Fantastic Healthcare System. Pay Up Front-Or Go Home and DIE!
  

"Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers." - Paul Wellstone

Swine Flu, the Media, and Reality...

It's a PANDEMIC!

Be afraid everyone! 100 people in America have been confirmed to have the swine flu. That's 0.00000033 percent of the national population.

At the time of this post, 252 cases of the swine flu have been reported worldwide. That works out to be 0.000000042 percent of the global population.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Related...

• Have Cheap Drugs & Greed Created a Pandemic?
  
• Dr. Paul Pans Pandemic Threat
• The Truth About Swine Flu
  

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." - Thomas Jefferson

Constitution Upheld by Supreme Court... Finally!

In an unusual reversal of roles today in the case Arizona v. Gant, traditionally right-wing Supreme Court Justices formed a majority in a decision which expands our Constitutional Fourth Amendment rights.

Hard to believe, I know.

In a surprising 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today reversed, what legal experts refer to as a "bright line" rule, which had permitted warrantless car searches after an arrest for any reason, whether there was any concern for officer safety or the preservation of evidence or not.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in this decision, held that the police may only search the passenger compartment of a vehicle, pursuant to the arrest of a recent occupant, if it is reasonable to believe that the arrested person might access the car while it’s being searched, or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which that person was arrested.

Interestingly enough, the votes were contrary to common stereotypes and a 180 degree reversal from how "conservative" and "liberal" justices have voted in the past. The majority, which limited police powers, included the two most right-wing justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The minority, which would have expanded police powers, included the two least conservative justices, Kennedy and Breyer.

The events leading up to the court's decision were summarized in the court's decision, available here.

On another note, it seems somewhat suspicious, on the political agenda side of things, that the most conservative justices would vote to limit the powers of the democratic controlled executive branch when not long ago they were upholding the republican controlled executive branch's vast expansion of powers. Equally as suspicious are the two most "liberal" justices voting to affirm executive powers when, again, not long ago they were voting to restrict expansion of powers.

Regardless of how it came to be, this is a step in the right.. er correct direction.

Related articles...

• Supreme Court strikes a blow for the Fourth Amendment (a.k.a. Scalia's got your back, this time)

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference." - Thomas Jefferson

Freddie Mac Official Found Dead in his Home of 'Apparent Suicide'

Part of me says, "Good riddance," but another part wonders if he found out something that he tried to hold over the head(s) of powers that be.

Related articles...

• Freddie Mac official found dead
• Police investigating death of Freddie Mac official
• Freddie executive death apparent suicide: police source

"The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy." - Paul Wellstone

Open Your Eyes...

Before You Die.

We're here bcause of you.
We're here because you were there.

We've arrived from every corner of the planet to this nation to seek the fulfillment of a promise of America.

We were promised a better life in our home countries, where we were told that privatizing water and electricity will make things run more efficiently.

Instead the quality remained almost the same and the price was increased until it became an unaffordable luxury.

Some corporations are more efficient than government, but their motivation is not the health or the well being of the people; it's only about profit, everything else: their image, their human resources, their public relations, only exist to protect the reality behind it.

Once upon a time, we were told that nationalization would prevent growth by limiting competition; that our countries were nothing without the companies that invested in us and so they privatized everything. Everything in our country was owned by people that had no connection to our culture, by those who never had our interests at heart, they didn't care about our survival or well being, they just wanted to turn a profit by raping our land, by exploiting our people, our industry and our resources.

They took everything we built and made it theirs. First by creating racism to justify slavery, building the capital for capitalism, and then when they gave us what they call liberty, everything we had was still owned by them. Our governments told us that socialism was the real enemy and that we would have freedom, but the foreign powers and corporations were the ones with real freedom; the freedom to take all the wealth generated by our work and our land and gave us only a small percentage of the scraps from the table.

Their lust for power and their greed drove them to betray not only us but themselves and the word of their own God.

And while some used missionaries and donations to off set this abuse, other countries and companies were blatant with their crimes, using war, disease, and sanctions that killed millions.

They supported corrupt governments that were almost like the old slave masters in their oppression of the people, because their loyalty was to those who enable them, restored them and kept them in power, they became the bastard children of American industry, kleptocracy, governments of thievery. They protected the corporations and went to war against their own people to preserve those profits.

The puppet rulers were given billions of US tax dollars to fund civil wars, right wing death squads, execute political dissidents, sympathetic clergy and, even overthrow democratically elected governments. And so the age of revolution began again; they painted it as godless terrorist versus the free world and the market.

But the free market has never been free, because the market does not regulate itself. It is manipulated like a puppet and it survives because of its image. Destroy the image and the enemy will die.

Such is the same in the rap industry. But the major label super powers treat the underground like the 3rd world. When they need new assets, new honest to prostitute a side-ins and put on a shelf to use their songsWhen they needed new concepts, music and publishing to steal from the producers, they came to the underground, to the 3rd world, they took our culture, our property and our industry and our resources, even using our own people to help them exploit us.

But behind the mask of efficiency, they claimed that we need them to succeed. They're no better than us; they're economic advertising was always a lie, a few got rich but most were given an illusion of wealth, almost as if it was designed for failure.

Opportunity comes at the price of soul and the music, so remember what they are underneath the fancy architecture, glittering rented jewelry, the cars, the IMF loans, the seeds with suicide genes, 20 year contracts and oil bloody money.

Build your defenses my independent brothers and sisters. They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. They paint the 3rd world (underground) as savage and backward. But the super powers are no less corrupt; they've just learned to disguise it better, ‘cause they fix elections too, they embezzle tax money, they go to war for resources, they fund terrorism for their own benefit, and when there's enough at stake... history's taught us that they'll even assassinate their own president.

Open your eyes before you die.

When's Payday?

So I finished my wife's and my taxes last night and couldn't help notice that there was no line anywhere that addressed the redistribution of wealth republicans promised would happen after Obama took office. It was all the talk during the election from the Republican Party, yet when he took office, I didn't receive a dime.

Not the first week.

Not even in the first month.

And still nothing to this day.

OK, I thought maybe it would show up in this year's tax forms/booklets... Nope. Nothing. Nada.

Could this have all been a ruse by the Republican Party? A little fear mongering to scare people into thinking that their paycheck would be at risk? Nah!!!

I guess what they didn't take into account is that most people aren't wealthy and therefore wouldn't have wealth taken from them, but given to them if that were really to happen. Lol! But then again, I doubt they ever appealed to the common sense vote.

And perhaps most disturbing is that with all the talk about wealth redistribution, nobody even mentioned what is really happening, wealth hoarding. When promises and verbal contracts are no longer worth the paper they're printed on, the few with all the money cling to every dollar they have and tell everyone that we all have to "weather the storm together."

What they don't tell anyone is that it was their policies and practices that put us in this mess.

And the kicker is that a bunch of these clowns are out today having a "tea party," or a tea bagging party as my mother-in-law unknowingly kept saying with a straight face, as if this is some grassroots effort (sponsored by the republican party and FOX News of course) to effect change. What's ironic is that none of these people refused to pay their taxes! I mean, for the love... at least have the huevos to refuse to pay your taxes if you're going to protest paying them!

But I'm still confused as to when I will be receiving somebody else's money. When's my payday?

"The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy." - Paul Wellstone

PAYBACK

These fuckin snakes man
Fuckin up our lives
I'll take a piss in your oil fields
I want some motherfuckin payback so, yo

I wanna run for president, and the focal point when I'm campaigning
Is to put FEMA to work on a plantation at Camp David
Demand payment for New Orleans with the best of swordsmen
Launching missiles at the White House while Tech's performing
On the lawn and I just let 'em burn till death's confirmed
Laid to rest with worms cause otherwise they'll never learn
I'll form a cruel intent, put anthrax through the vents
From out a package I got in the mail that you just sent
But I got a better punishment for these Republicans
I'd let 'em live so they can see us overthrow the government
Let's fuck with them, have the first lady beat me off
Till my semen's launched, then I skeet across her face like Peter North
And I won't leave a doubt what we about when I cream her mouth
Or leave her trout bleeding out on Condoleeza's couch
I'll seek this route without regrets, and drink a brew then think of you
Cause if it's the last fuckin thing I do I'll...

Yeah, Immortal Technique, Rassy
Nigga, I never forget nothing nigga

Fifty-one percent of the World Bank is owned by the US treasury
Robbing third world countries out all they resources and equity
When Afghanistan was fighting the Russians
Reagan and Bush gave Bin Laden weapons and told him, "Get to bussin'"
We even called 'em freedom fighters
Financed the cost with CIA imported cocaine
That whole Iran Contra Scandal, niggas took the blame
Started a war on drugs
Meanwhile Russia's defeated, America thinks more oil for us
Take over, set up a public government, Arabs ain't bearing it
So the same freedom fighters, George W. call 'em terrorists
Poetic justice, payback's a bitch, these fuckin hypocrites
Like Bill O'Reilly, right-wingers deserve what they get
Rush Limbaugh, drug addict, Giuliani, sex scandal
I wanna thank white supremacists then show you how my tech's handled
My neck's nano-technologically designed
It spits SARS to all you stupid ass execs that capital resigned

I am vindictive!

Huh, hahaha
Yeah I got something for you motherfuckers haha
You want it? HERE YOU GO!

The first payback that I would accomplish
I'd draft children from the senate and congress
Pompous religious right made suicidal
When I exposed Joe Cephas for ghost writing the Bible
Making nuclear silos, bomb the world with hydro
Chinese dragon sized blunts in Maracaibo
Huh, and everyone flashing a gun on a DVD
I'd make them niggas shoot it out with NYPD
And every fucker that didn't buy my CD
I'd stab the revolution in their neck with an IV
See me, own the world, I'd give it back to the poor
I'd give a last name to every single son of a whore
Hard to the core, fuck with the gay list
Niggas pop on they block but they globally nameless
I'd show the hood real gangsters and make 'em famous
Namely Virginia, where my connect for cocaine is
I'd make everybody fuckin have the world darkening
I make rap-about lyrics, not beats and marketing
Replace every raped virgin's broken hymen
Holding De Beers reclining, while they choke on they diamonds
My designing's like Francis Ford Coppola rhyming
Building a universe inside solitary confinement
I'd reverse Rockefeller laws and bring Mumia home
And serve the President freestyling offa the dome

A message to the outgoing president
Hey I got a great idea nigga... Kill yourself
Hahaha, you know it's so funny, I thought about it the other day
You should probably kill yourself
Ah why don't you kill yourself?
Hahahahahah, kill yourself

"Just as the Columbia, we think, represents man's finest aspirations in the field of science and technology, so too does the struggle of the Afghan people represent man's highest aspirations for freedom... I am dedicating, on behalf of the American people, the March 22nd launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan." -- President Ronald W. Reagan

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -Thomas Jefferson

Another Open Letter From Me

I find it interesting that a lot of the people who hate Obama! can't really point to anything concrete that he's doing or done without embellishing, spinning, or outright lying. I'm not saying he's perfect or a great President, far from it. But he just started.

When George W. Bush was running for President, we called him a draft-dodger and a spoiled brat, which he was/is. And the way he circumvented States authority to use the Supreme Court to hand him the election with less popular votes than Al Gore made him a joke for the first 8-1/2 months he was in office until 9/11, only making headlines on his repeated vacations to Camp David. We didn't call him the worst President ever then because, frankly, no one could have predicted how bad it would really be. Just as no one can predict now how good or bad Barack Obama's Presidency will be. Time will tell. And contrary to the lip service we have been receiving from many dedicated republicans, we actually hoped for the best when Bush took office.

One thing many of you will have to accept is that there will probably not be a President as bad as Bush for a long time, democrat, republican, or other. Hoping for it just so you can rub it in the noses of democrats does nothing to advance your platform of patriotism. Bush may not be the worst ever, but he's in the top 5, maybe even 3, worst Presidents of all time. And saying Carter was the worst or one of the worst is just a cheap shot. He wasn't even close to the worst, he was just relatively ineffective. But he is the only President to preside over a lasting peace deal in the Middle East. And he is a great man regardless of politics.

The problem with the republican party today is that many of you have completely forgotten what it means to be conservative. There was a time when republicans represented states rights, small government, a strict interpretation of the Constitution, and traditional values. Then the neo-cons began to infect and eventually hijack the party, and while the agenda is extremely conservative, the means of fulfilling it are not. And in that regard, it's not a matter of conservative versus liberal, rather authoritarian versus libertarian.

The real shame is how republicans so easily embraced this style of rule. And now as the party and its supporters struggle to rediscover themselves, it's interesting to see that what once united them under a common banner, and was seemingly unstoppable for a period of time, may ultimately be responsible for their demise.

The irony is that the party that once represented pure capitalism may have inadvertently demonstrated to the world that a free and open market might allow some people to make as much or as little as they want, but it's a damn expensive system to sustain at over one trillion and counting...

In regards to capitalism, I'm not sure we have a major political party that really wants that. One party wants to hand out money to the poor and needy with no checks/balances and no reform to a flawed system that encourages people not to work while the other hands out money to the wealthy and large corporations who don't really need the money but know they will get it if they ask, in the form of massive tax breaks and federal subsidies, also with no checks or guarantees that the money will be spent wisely and not on million dollar getaways for execs.

Capitalism stays out of it. Level the playing field so everyone has the same opportunity and then step back. If a bank wants to make bad loans, let them. They shouldn't be in business, and won't if they continue with that practice and no one bails them out. If an automaker wants to manufacture giant, gas guzzling vehicles that no one wants or can afford, let them go out of business for not understanding the market. Furthermore, they continued to manufacture more and more vehicles even as sales continued to drop. Another company will open up and provide jobs because people will still buy cars, keep their money somewhere, etc.

Most importantly, we don't need to fight wars so oil companies can have lucrative deals and then hand no-bid contracts to companies who used to employ the vice-president. All charged to the country's credit card. Of course. Thanks China.

Believe it or not, I don't hate conservatives and I am not a democrat. I would actually like very much to see the republican party become truly conservative again, but I don't see that happening as long as they continue to admire and emulate the likes of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, et al.

Real conservatives are more like Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater. But I'd start with Thomas Jefferson. Just my opinion.

“Aggressive wars, income taxes, national IDs, domestic spying, torture regimes, secret prisons, Federal Reserve manipulation — we don’t have to take it any more.” — Ron Paul, Sept 27, 2007

Worst Vice-President Ever Gets Airtime at Politico, Warns of New Attacks

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.

But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.

Read more...

Dick Cheney needs to just shut the fuck up once and for all. He is lucky to still be walking around free as far as I'm concerned. He should be sitting in a 6 x 8 waiting for the due process he never afforded others.

And though I have no doubt that he can call his friends in Al Qaeda and have them organize an attack on a moment's notice, he just needs to shut his mouth and go gently into that good night. Buh-bye! Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

Hey Dick, shut your fuckin' pie hole already. Nobody is listening to your lies anymore. And shame on Politico for even giving this sack of shit any air time.

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape." - Thomas Jefferson

Wall Streeters "Can't Live on $150,000 to $180,000 a Year"

Another snippet for the I Shit You Not File: In the New York Times, a head hunter for banks defends the $18 billion in taxpayer-subsidized bonus payouts to Wall Street executives and traders by insisting that those executives and traders can't be expected to live on $150,000 to $180,000 a year - I shit you not:

"Without a doubt, $18 billion is a lot of money, but it's a drop in the bucket on Wall Street," said Gustavo Dolfino, president of the WhiteRock Group, a headhunter for the banks. "These bonuses are down, and the salaries are not enough for these people. They can't live on $150 to $180,000, so they haven't saved any money. They put it on credit lines and at bonus time, they thought they'd pay it off."

The median household income in the United States is about $49,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau - and that's for full, multi-person households. But Wall Street would have believe that individual executives and traders "can't live on $150,000 to $180,000 a year," and so the same taxpayers whose median household income is $49,000 a year must subsidize their bonuses.

Welcome to the kleptocracy.

See article...

Where do these guys get the balls?

It just never ceases to amaze me.

“Why don't we call on the credit card companies to be accountable? ... They need to be held accountable for their predatory lending practices.” - Paul Wellstone

Days before leaving office, Bush's lawyer told Rove not to turn over any documents

Four days before leaving office, and ten days before House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) subpoenaed him to testify, President Bush's White House Counsel instructed Karl Rove not to appear before Congress or turn over any documents relating to his time at the White House.

The letter, on White House stationery, was addressed to Rove's D.C. lawyer, Robert Luskin, and addressed questions of whether the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff was obligated to appear before Congress relating to the firing of nine US Attorneys.

"Please advise Mr. Rove (i) that the President continues to direct him not to provide information (whether in the form of testimony or documents) to the Congress in this matter... and not to appear before Congress in this matter," then-White House Counsel Fred Fielding wrote.

The Jan. 16, 2009 letter was acquired by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and printed online Thursday evening.

At its heart, Fielding's letter reflects President George W. Bush's decision to continue to argue that "[t]he President and his immediate advisors are absolutely immune from testimonial compulsion by a congressional committee," even after leaving office, citing a 2007 memorandum the Justice Department prepared. Ironically, the memo was prepared by the very department that Congress is trying to garner information about.

Read more...

I understand that this is good for politicians, but what good is it for the people?

"This is a loophole that must be plugged" - Paul Wellstone

The draft-dodging, drug-addicted, hypocritical, hillbilly blowhard is at it again!

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has launched a campaign to express their outrage at Rush Limbaugh for attacking President Barack Obama, before he really even gets started.

On his radio show last week Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail as president. The Democrats have responded with an web advertisement and online petition and Limbaugh lashed back today with his own "reverse petition" campaign.

"Last week, Rush Limbaugh actually said that he 'hopes' President Obama fails to meet America's challenges," the DCCC petition states. "Jobs, health care, our place in the world - the stakes for our nation are high and every American needs President Obama to succeed. Stand strong against Rush Limbaugh's Attacks — sign our petition, telling Rush what you think of his attacks on President Obama."

Limbaugh talked about how he wants Obama to "fail," during an appearance on FOX News' Hannity last Wednesday.

"I am hearing many Republicans say that — well, we want him to succeed and prominent Republicans," Limbaugh had said. "Yes, we wanted — they have laid down. They have totally — they're drinking the Kool-Aid, too."

Last week, on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart posited that Limbaugh's words could be considered "arguably treasonous."

Read more...

Interesting that he is distancing himself further and further from his base. But it makes sense for Republicans to try and work with Democrats in this time of economic crisis. As many people may recall, when 9/11 happened, Democrats crossed the aisle and worked with Republicans

Sign petition...

I signed it. And here are the comments I included:

Rush Limbaugh.

Isn't this the same guy who prayed for riots at the Democratic National Convention this past summer?

Isn't he the same person who called wounded army veterans "phony soldiers" because they supported an orderly withdrawal from Iraq?

Isn't he the one who said that the Virginia Tech killer was a liberal?

Isn't he also the guy who accused Michael J. Fox of faking Parkinson's and then mocked him by shaking in his chair on air?

And is he the one who said, "There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become consumed by them. 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," as well as many other strongly worded comments about people who buy, sell, and use drugs before he was caught with several illegal prescriptions for Oxycontin?

Lastly, (well, not lastly, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head) isn't he the guy who has been married and divorced multiple times yet preaches about the sanctity of marriage?

There's nothing shocking or insightful about any of his comments. As far as I'm concerned he is nothing more than a draft-dodging, drug-addicted, hypocritical, hillbilly blowhard.

"This is no time for timidity." - Paul Wellstone

Haggard faces more gay sex accusations

Fallen evangelical pastor Haggard faces claims he had relationship with ex-church volunteer

Jan 24, 2009 01:23 EST

Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard's former church disclosed Friday that the gay sex scandal that caused his downfall extends to a young male church volunteer who reported having a sexual relationship with Haggard — a revelation that comes as Haggard tries to repair his public image.

Brady Boyd, who succeeded Haggard as senior pastor of the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, told The Associated Press that the man came forward to church officials in late 2006 shortly after a Denver male prostitute claimed to have had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with Haggard.

Boyd said an "overwhelming pool of evidence" pointed to an "inappropriate, consensual sexual relationship" that "went on for a long period of time ... it wasn't a one-time act." Boyd said the man was in his early 20s at the time. He said he was certain the man was of legal age when it began.

Reached Friday night, Haggard declined to comment and said all interviews would have to be arranged through a publicist for HBO, which is airing a documentary about him this month.

Boyd said the church reached a legal settlement to pay the man for counseling and college tuition, with one condition being that none of the parties involved discuss the matter publicly.

Boyd said a Colorado Springs TV station reached him Thursday to say the young man was planning to provide a detailed report of his relationship with Haggard to the station. Boyd said the church preferred to keep the matter private, but it was the man's decision to go public.

The disclosure comes as Haggard, 52, is about to give a series of high-profile interviews to promote the cable documentary about his time in exile. He is scheduled to appear on CNN's Larry King Live on Thursday, the date of the documentary's premiere, and already has taped "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

In early 2007, New Life Church disclosed that an investigation uncovered new evidence that Haggard engaged in "sordid conversation" and "improper relationships" — but didn't go into detail. Earlier, a church board member had said there was no evidence that Haggard had sexual relations with anyone but Mike Jones, the former male prostitute.

Haggard confessed to undisclosed "sexual immorality" after Jones' allegations and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and from New Life Church, where he faced being fired.

Anticipating criticism of the settlement with the former church volunteer, Boyd said Friday that it was in the best interests of all involved. He would not name the volunteer or the settlement amount.

"It wasn't at all a settlement to make him be quiet or not tell his story," Boyd said. "Our desire was to help him. Here was a young man who wanted to get on with his life. We considered it more compassionate assistance — certainly not hush money. I know what's what everyone will want to say because that's the most salacious thing to say, but that's not at all what it was."

He said that "secondarily, it's not great for our church either" that the story be told. Boyd said Haggard knew about the settlement two years ago.

Read more...

This guy just can't stay out of the news. I wonder if he still thinks he's "cured."

"Never separate the life you live from the words you speak." - Paul Wellstone

Obama reverses 'global gag rule' for family planning funds

"I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate," says the President

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama overturned what he described as an "unwarranted" eight-year ban on US government funding for family-planning groups which carry out or facilitate abortions overseas.

Shortly after he signed an executive order canceling the restrictions, on the third full day of his presidency, Obama said in a statement the ban had "undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries," and that the issue had become too politicized.

The so-called "global gag rule" cut off US funding to overseas family planning clinics which provide any abortion services whatsoever, from the operation itself to counseling, referrals or post-abortion services.

First introduced by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1984, it has been repeatedly overturned by Democratic administrations and reintroduced by the Republicans.

Obama's action reversed the orders of president George W. Bush, who when he came into office in 2001 immediately froze funds to many family planning groups working overseas.

"It is clear that the provisions ... are unnecessarily broad and unwarranted under current law," Obama said.

For too long, he added, the ban "has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us."

The order won Obama praise from Democratic lawmakers, family planning and women's rights groups, and drew angry condemnation from pro-life organizations and Republicans.

Read more...

I'm reminded of the book, The Swan Song by Robert McCammon (Author.) The story begins with a nuclear war where much of the entire world was decimated and the survivors endured a seven year plus nuclear winter which embodied most of the story. For over seven years it was dark as night out all the time from the fallout and the people never saw the sun through the black clouds.

At the end of the book, there was a momentary break in the clouds where the sun briefly shone through. For that moment, everyone stopped what they were doing and gazed toward the sun. It was then that they knew they could move on with hope for the continued improvement of environmental conditions as they rebuild society, but most importantly, that the lessons of what brought them to the brink of annihilation would be remembered for a long, long time.

"We can remake the world daily." - Paul Wellstone

Obama signs executive order to close Guantánamo Bay

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Barack Obama issued four executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration on the war on terror, including one requiring that the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay be closed within a year.

A second executive order formally bans torture by requiring that the Army field manual be used as the guide for terror interrogations. The order essentially ends the Bush administration's CIA program of enhanced interrogation methods.

A third executive order establishes an interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases.

A fourth executive order delays the trial of Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident who has been contesting his detention for more than five years as an enemy combatant in a military brig without the government bringing any charges against him.

The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay became a lightning rod for critics who charged that the Bush administration had used torture on terror detainees. President George W. Bush and other senior officials repeatedly denied that the U.S. government had used torture to extract intelligence from terror suspects.

Obama's move will set off a fierce legal struggle over where the prison's detainees will go next.

Watch experts debate the Gitmo dilemma »

Officials said new White House Counsel Greg Craig briefed congressional Republicans Wednesday afternoon about the three upcoming executive orders

"The key question is where do you put these terrorists," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement issued Wednesday. "Do you bring them inside our borders? Do you release them back into the battlefield?"

Rep. Bill Young of Florida, the top Republican on the Defense Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday the executive orders "will leave some wiggle room for the administration."
Young said he has "quite a bit of anxiety" about transferring detainees to United States facilities.

iReport.com: Closing Gitmo a 'risk'

"Number one, they're dangerous," he said. "Secondly, once they become present in the United States, what is their legal status? What is their constitutional status? I worry about that, because I don't want them to have the same constitutional rights that you and I have. They're our enemy."

Watch what may happen to Gitmo's inmates »

He said he asked Craig what the government plans to do with two recently built facilities at Guantanamo, which he said cost $500 million. He said Craig had no answer, but pledged to discuss the issue further.

Young said he suggested reopening Alcatraz, the closed federal prison on an island outside San Francisco, California -- in Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's district.

"Put them in Alcatraz, where supposedly they can't escape from," Young said, but added the suggestion "didn't go over well."

The revelation coincided with a judge's decision on Wednesday to halt the September 11 terrorism cases at the behest of President Obama. On Tuesday, he directed Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ask prosecutors to seek stays for 120 days so terrorism cases at the facility can be reviewed, according to a military official close to the proceedings.

See article...

Ah, the rule of law is being restored.

Thank you President Obama!

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape." - Thomas Jefferson

Post #720

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

The Day We've Waited For For Eight Long Years

OBAMA!

Read President Obama's inaugural speech and see video here.

"The future will not belong to those who sit on the sidelines. The future will not belong to the cynics. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Paul Wellstone

Victims 'thank' Bush for 'worst Christmas present' ever

Bush pardons mortgage fraudster who escaped restitution

Father gave $28,500 to RNC this year

Click to view image

President George W. Bush has characterized the recent US housing crisis as a product of greed and Wall Street excess.

But that doesn't seem to have been Bush's opinion when he pardoned Isaac Toussie, 30, of Brooklyn, the son of a New York real estate developer, who defrauded the Housing and Urban Development Department government for millions of dollars and pled guilty to inflating the incomes of at least 100 families to make them eligible for federal loans in the lead-up to the worst housing crisis the United States has ever had.

Toussie was among 19 pardoned by President George W. Bush in his semi-annual pre-Christmas clemencies.

What's more, Toussie's father gave $28,500 to the Republican National Committee this year, according to a RAW STORY analysis of federal campaign finance records available at the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets.

Robert and his son were sued in 2001 in what was billed as the largest real-estate discrimination lawsuit ever filed in New York State on behalf of some 400 families. They said they were duped into buying overpriced and shoddily built properties.

The two were accused of being in cahoots with more than a dozen lenders to defraud minority home buyers, most of whom had imperfect credit records.

Toussie admitted to mortgage fraud and to defrauding Suffolk County by issuing letters that inflated the value of a property the county and a town bought by $2.7 million.

As Politico's Ben Smith notes, Toussie and "his father were poster children in a 2002 BusinessWeek piece on the dark side of the housing boom."

Issac Toussie was sentenced to five months in prison and five months' home detention in 2003 and was fined $10,000. He escaped restitution after prosecutors said that records had been destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Read more...

Very interesting.

"The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy." - Paul Wellstone

Bush's Final(?) Dump on America

EPA Allows Cruise Ships to Dump Toxic Waste One Mile Off Shore...

With an apparent hat-tip to Saddam Hussein's post-Gulf War strategy, George W. Bush continues his scorched earth policy on the way out the door. Earlier this month his EPA announced a new last-minute rule allowing mining companies to dump their waste into mountain streams. Last Friday, he continued to take his dump on America, by issuing a permit to allow cruise ships to dump "untreated graywater" --- including oil, grease, metals, pesticides, viruses, fecal coliform bacteria from human sewage, medical and dental waste, detergents, and cleaners --- just one mile off shore of coastal U.S.A.

"A large cruise ship on a one-week voyage can generate one million gallons-which would fill 33 large swimming pools-of graywater," say Friends of the Earth in a press release issued last week (posted in full below) following the announcement.

Hope you folks in Florida will remember to thank the Republicans in 2010...

Read more...

After paying a few scientists to say that there is no global warming and that the climate change we are witnessing is not the result of generations of pollution, rather it is just the sun, why should this come as any surprise?

If you think about it, this is just one more example of Bush, the "Environmental President." He's just making it so these poor, downtrodden corporations don't have to waste so much fuel going out further to dump their untreated waste in the ocean.

"Only after the last tree has been cut down.
Only after the last river has been poisoned.
Only after the last fish has been caught.
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."

- Cree Indian Prophecy

GOP consultant killed in plane crash was warned of sabotage

The Republican consultant accused of involvement in alleged vote-rigging in Ohio in 2004 was warned that his plane might be sabotaged before his death in a crash Friday night, according to a Cleveland CBS affiliate.

45-year-old Republican operative Michael Connell was killed when his single-passenger plane crashed Friday into a home in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. The consultant was called to testify in federal court regarding a lawsuit alleging that he took part in tampering with Ohio's voting results in the 2004 election.

Without getting into specific details, 19 Action News reporter Blake Renault reported Sunday evening that 45-year-old Republican operative and experienced pilot had been warned not to fly his plane in the days before the crash.

"Connell...was apparently told by a close friend not to fly his plane because his plane might be sabotaged," Renault said. "And twice in the last two months Connell, who is an experienced pilot, cancelled two flights because of suspicious problems with his plane."

Renault called Connell's death "untimely."

Read more...

Consider that Connell could have come right out to the entire world saying that he rigged Ohio's results, showed exactly how he did it, and provide irrefutable evidence to back up his claim, and half of this country still wouldn't believe it.

But at least the circumstances are suspicious enough to warrant further investigation.


“If we go to witnesses, it will be a spectacle,” - Paul Wellstone

'Karl Rove's IT guru' Mike Connell dies in 'plane crash'

A top level Republican IT consultant who was set to testify in a case alleging GOP election tampering in Ohio died in a plane crash late Friday night.

Michael Connell -- founder of Ohio-based New Media Communications, which created campaign Web sites for George W. Bush and John McCain -- died instantly after his single-prop, private aircraft smashed into a vacant home in suburban Lake Township, Ohio.

"The plane was attempting to land around 6 p.m. Friday at Akron-Canton Airport when it crashed about three miles short of the runway," reports the Akron Beacon Journal.

Connell's exploits as a top GOP IT 'guru' have been well documented by RAW STORY's investigative team.

The interest in Mike Connell stems from his association with a firm called GovTech, which he had spun off from his own New Media Communications under his wife Heather Connell’s name. GovTech was hired by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to set up an official election website at election.sos.state.oh.us to presented the 2004 presidential returns as they came in.

Connell is a long-time GOP operative, whose New Media Communications provided web services for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Republican National Committee and many Republican candidates. This in itself might have raised questions about his involvement in creating Ohio’s official state election website.

However, the alternative media group ePlubibus Media further discovered in November 2006 that election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted on the servers of a company in Chattanooga, TN called SmarTech, which also provided hosting for a long list of Republican Internet domains.

“Since early this decade, top Internet ‘gurus’ in Ohio have been coordinating web services with their GOP counterparts in Chattanooga, wiring up a major hub that in 2004, first served as a conduit for Ohio's live election night results,” researchers at ePluribus Media wrote.

A few months after this revelation, when a scandal erupted surrounding the firing of US Attorneys for reasons of White House policy, other researchers found that the gwb43 domain used by members of the White House staff to evade freedom of information laws by sending emails outside of official White House channels was hosted on those same SmarTech servers.

Given that the Bush White House used SmarTech servers to send and receive email, the use of one of those servers in tabulating Ohio’s election returns has raised eyebrows. Ohio gave Bush the decisive margin in the Electoral College to secure his reelection in 2004.

IT expert Stephen Spoonamore says the SmartTech server could have functioned as a routing point for malicious activity and remains a weakness in electronic voting tabulation.

"...I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman," said RAW STORY's Investigative News Editor, Larisa Alexandrovna, on her personal blog Saturday morning. "This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.

"He has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don't know why. He apparently ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully."

"Mr. Connell has confided that he was being threatened, something that his attorneys also told the judge in the Ohio election fraud case," concluded Alexandrovna.

An FAA investigation into the causes of Connell's plane crash is underway, but no results are expected for several weeks.

See article...

Ah, the small plane crash.

I don't know why they would have killed him. There's no such thing as justice in this country anymore. If there was, the people who brought us to economic ruin would be in jail rather than figuring out how to spend their billions in bailout money.

“Right now the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.” - Paul Wellstone

EXCLUSIVE: Legal minds respond to landmark 9/11 civil suit against Rumsfeld, Cheney

April Gallop, whom the Army News Service called a "hero" after she was awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, will not likely be triggering another such response from internal government media.

On behalf of Spc. April Gallop, who served in the Network Infrastructure Services Agency as an administrative specialist, California attorney William Veale on Monday filed a civil suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.

The suit alleges they engaged in conspiracy to facilitate the terrorist attacks and purposefully failed to warn those inside the Pentagon, contributing to injuries she and her two-month-old son incurred. Additional, unnamed persons with foreknowledge of the attacks are also named.

First news of the suit was carried exclusively by RAW STORY. Full text of the claims may be read here.

"Everything happened so fast," Gallop said in an Oct. 2001 published report. "I remember thinking that we had been bombed."

After rescuing one of her coworkers, the two began searching the smoldering debris that used to be April's office for her two-month-old son Elisha. She pulled him out and escaped the smoke-filled building, out onto the Pentagon's lawn, and collapsed.

Though thankful she survived the event, "I'm still angry at the enemy," she said. "They will pay."

Years later, she's pursuing that payment in the form of a civil suit.

"I remember being so disgusted at the frequency of random drill exercises taking place for us to evacuate the building," Gallop told George Washington blog in a 2006 interview. "It seemed as if they always happened when I had to take care of certain things."

Yet on September 11th, the day when our lives were threatened, not one alarm."

April sustained a mild brain injury, but still struggles with Post Concussive Syndrome and hearing loss. Her son also suffered a mild brain injury which has since spiraled out into a learning disability.

On the attack, Gallop's recall is somewhat different from the official story. She continued, "I have been misquoted on numerous occasions. That happens when individuals have ulterior motives. But here is my statement for the record.

"I was located at the E ring. From my inside perspective, with no knowledge of what had actually happened on the outside, it did sound like a bomb. And we had to escape the building before the floors, debris etc. collapsed on us.

"And I don't recall at anytime seeing any plane debris. Again, I don't know what plane debris would look like after hitting a building. But I would have recalled unusual looking pieces similar to plane parts."

"What they don't want is for this to go into discovery," said Gallop's attorney, Mr. Veale, speaking to RAW STORY. "If we can make it past their initial motion to dismiss these claims, and we get the power of subpoena, then we've got a real shot at getting to the bottom of this. We've got the law on our side."

Does it have a chance?

Read more...

Wow. Another one that will probably get thrown out at some point, but for the moment, this is a step in the direction of finding out the truth of what actually happened.

“Right now the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.” - Paul Wellstone

Jello Biafra Writes An Open Letter To President-Elect Barack Obama

My Friends (couldn't resist, I had to say it),

Here, by semi-popular demand, are the suggestions I sent to Obama's Change.gov site for citizen input. It veers from writing to Obama himself to writing for the people who may actually read this. A lot of these ideas may be familiar from my albums and spoken word shows. For the most part I stayed away from the big no-brainers covered by others, and from ideas he would never agree to in a million years.

I did not vote for him because of his record in Congress voting for the PATRIOT Act, the anti-immigrant wall, numerous corporate breaks and subsidies, the FISA bill legalizing all the NSA's illegal wiretapping, etc. Nevertheless I, too, felt moved by his speech in the park that night in Chicago, seeing Jesse Jackson cry and wondering how Martin Luther King, Jr would have felt. I can only imagine how much this would have meant to Wesley Willis.

And, yes, I am glad that the adult version of the Eraserhead baby and his pitbull pal were not handed the keys to the White House.

I guess that's why it hurts so much more when the guy we all wish we could hang out with when we see him on TV turns around and backs the wrong position on something important. We expect this from the Clintons and Bidens of the world, but it hurts more with Obama because he knows better. He even said so on the FISA/NSA spying bill that he so eloquently opposed before he changed his vote. His economic and national security teams so far lack anyone from the "change" side of the Democratic Party. Not a good sign.

If you have ideas or comments, don't just send them to me, send them to Change.gov! Even I have the audacity to hope that if one of these ideas penetrates up top, it is a chance worth taking. Tom Hayden is one of many who have pointed out that it is up to this movement to drive Obama, not the other way around.

Jello Biafra

OPEN LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA

PREAMBLE GAMBLE

Dear Mr. Obama,

Congratulations on your recent victory, and for helping build such a strong mandate for change. In that spirit, please do not forget the other aisle you need to reach across. All the relief and publicity for the middle class won't do anything for the 40-100 million Americans who are starving, unemployed or just plain poor.

You have gone out of your way to build a bridge to those of us fed up with war, pollution, inequality, corporate lawlessness and business as usual. You have energized a whole new generation who is far ahead of their elders in knowing what urgently needs to be done. I have never seen such an outpouring of heartfelt emotion, hope and support for an American politician in my life, and I remember Kennedy well. You are the first president in my lifetime to have a bona fide grassroots movement behind you and ready to rock. I hope those crowds' hope and urgency has penetrated deeply enough that you won't let that bridge be washed away.

I remember another person who had the audacity to exploit and toss aside people's hope, and his name is Bill Clinton. Democrats fail time and again when they shirk responsibility and settle for being dealmakers instead of leaders. As important as it is to find common ground and build consensus for change, our situation is so dire we cannot afford any more dealmakers. The people voted for a leader. Anything less risks breaking the hearts of an entire galvanized generation who may then decide it is not worth it to get involved and participate any more.

Strong medicine is needed. Here are some ideas:

IRAQ – TRY THIS!

The closest thing to a solution I have heard was offered clear back in April 2004 by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (www.oic-ico.org). The OIC is comprised of 57 Islamic countries ranging from West Africa clear over to Southeast Asia. At their annual meeting they found six member nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Yemen and Morocco) willing to pony up enough of their own troops (approx. 150,000) that our troops could have gone home! Who slammed the door on that one? Colin Powell, on the grounds that having the Islamic soldiers under UN command instead of Americans was out of the question.

WHY??!? Wouldn't a neutral force of Muslim peacekeepers make a lot more headway than the disaster we've made? Wouldn't they at least command a lot more respect, resulting in a huge drop in violence? Surely the non-stop carnage and Iracketeering we have spawned is Exhibit A that we need to get over this colonialist illusion that other countries' problems can only be solved by Americans. The OIC's proposal for US withdrawal and peace in Iraq must be revisited immediately, and also considered for Afghanistan.

We must end not just our military occupation of Iraq, but our economic occupation NOW. Iraq is not ours to sell, and neither is its oil. Your promise not to leave any permanent US military bases in Iraq is a good start. But you have also backed leaving US troops in Iraq to "protect American assets like the Green Zone." The Green Zone is not our "asset." We stole it and we have to give it back. I hope you don't seriously believe we can get away with that giant feudal fortress of an embassy we are building, ten times the size of any other in history. We cannot afford to waste any more money on this, or down the black hole of the Bush administration's crony backroom deals with corrupt, incompetent private contractors like Blackwater, KBR and Halliburton. We need to fire them and they need to leave—NOW.

We do owe the Iraqi people help, and we have an obligation to clean up the mess we have made. That goes double for Afghanistan. But I can't see this getting done unless someone other than the United States is in charge. Let us also not forget the 2 million-plus refugees stuck outside Iraq who are draining the economies of Iraq's neighbors, especially Jordan and Syria.

TERROR – STRATEGY AND DIPLOMACY, NOT WAR

Even if we kill off every insurgent and terrorist-sympathizer from sea to shining sea, what will their kids be like? And theirs? Wake up. The major cause of terrorism is not evil, it's poverty. Michael Moore said it best after 9/11: "Will we ever get to the point that we realize that we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?" What do we need an empire for anyway? Ever notice how much happier the British and Europeans are now that they don't have to worry about policing colonial empires anymore?

Many experts and heads of state, in the Middle East and beyond, agree that the best way by far to pull the rug out from under the terrorists and reduce their attacks dramatically is a just and humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel's right to exist is threatened most by the fact that hardcore zealots are running the show on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. If we don't have the courage to stand up to them, who will? As painful as withdrawal to Israel's pre-1967 borders will be, our future depends on it. So does Israel's. As Reagan said to Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall!"

Threatening Iran made for great red meat on the campaign trail. But any attack on Iran—by us or using the Israelis as a proxy—will blow up in our face worse than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It will wipe out any good will and benefit of a doubt we have left in the eyes of the rest of the world. Iran is three times the size of Iraq and much more mountainous. The people there already hate our guts, thanks to our overthrow of their democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954, ushering in 25 years of torture under the Shah. Backing and aiding Saddam Hussein in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that cost a million lives did not help either.

So, alas, we will not be "greeted as liberators." But we could run straight into a worldwide "Day the Earth Stood Still" if Iran responds by blocking all oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. Iran knows full well they wouldn't even have to blockade the narrow Strait of Hormuz. All they would have to do is sink a tanker or freighter or two and no other ships will move. Not from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, nothing. Surely we can do better than this. Even Robert Gates seems to think so. Reckless threats against Pakistan will not solve anything, either.

JUST SAY NO TO TORTURE

Closing Guantanamo Bay is not enough. All torture, detentions without trial, kidnappings ("renditions") and illegal and unnecessary spying must end—and end with transparency now. Otherwise we are no better than Saddam Hussein or the Nazis. The whole world knows this and the whole world is watching. What about the 20,000 people we still have locked up without charge in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan???

The USA PATRIOT Act is just about the worst mistake our government has made since FDR threw over 100,000 Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps during World War II. Even you panicked and voted to make the PATRIOT Act permanent. It should be repealed and flushed down the toilet immediately—all of it. Even worse is the Military Commissions Act, in which Senators who should know better, such as Robert Byrd, Sherrod Brown, Ken Salazar and even John McCain voted with the majority to legalize torture, kidnapping and secret trials with secret evidence, wiping out the centuries old human right to habeas corpus. Again, isn't this what our "greatest generation" fought so bravely in World War II to stop the Nazis from doing to us?

What galls me most is that all this iron-fisted trashing of our basic human rights has not caught and convicted one significant terrorist! Even the FBI admits that torture doesn't work.

Meanwhile, if we're serious about preventing another terror attack, why is only 10% of the cargo entering our ports on ships ever inspected? Sure, no airliners have been hijacked by a terrorist wielding the wrong-sized shampoo bottle. But those cargo containers are big enough to smuggle in a small arsenal of rocket launchers and shoulder-fired missiles that could actually bring down a plane; dirty bomb material; or even Bin Laden himself. I sometimes wonder if he's driving a cab in Manhattan right now.

RESTORE THE RULE OF LAW

This means investigating and prosecuting each and every Bush administration official and their cronies who may have committed crimes while in power. Otherwise the lesson learned is you can get away with anything you want because the next administration will be too spineless to take action. For crying out loud, DO NOT make the same mistake Bill Clinton did when he let the rampant corruption, perjury and even terrorist acts of the Reagan and Bush I regimes go unpunished in the interest of moving on from the past. The crime here is this: Not only does everyone involved assume they have license to break even more laws the next time they hold power, but those who should be in jail for the lying, arms smuggling, assassinations and drug dealing in the Contra-gate scandal (like Elliot Abrams, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage and Robert Gates among others) are instead handed even more powerful positions where they have done even worse damage. Can you imagine the havoc and hooliganism if we put our heads in the sand after Watergate, let bygones be bygones, and G. Gordon Liddy wound up as director of the FBI? Secretary of Defense Haldeman? Attorney General Ehrlichman? Karl Rove's chair occupied by Colson, Magruder or Segretti?

Watergate and even Contra-gate pale in comparison to the wholesale lawlessness this time around. From Jack Abramoff's bribes, to outing Valerie Plame; from lying about weapons of mass destruction and getting thousands of people killed; from wholesale fraud and attacks on the right to vote, to the gutting of the Justice Department, to torture and other possible war crimes—this can't be allowed to go on.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were bad enough. But it is equally critical that lower-echelon culprits lacking household names like John Yoo, David Addington (nicknamed "Cheney's Cheney"), and General Geoffrey Miller be held accountable for their alleged involvement in torture and other serious crimes. Otherwise, they could one day rise to Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, or even the Supreme Court and pick up right where they left off in their blood-soaked shredding of the Constitution.

Even a South African-style Truth Commission would be an important step in preventing this from ever happening again. Otherwise, why should I or anyone else obey the law when my own government does not even pretend to? Even if Bush pardons the most blatant war criminals, all we have to do is fulfill President Clinton's promise to join the rest of the world in the International Criminal Court and they might not get away with it after all. We must come clean and drain the swamp now or it is just going to get dirtier. A lot dirtier.

Rule of law must also be restored when it comes to the NSA, FISA and domestic spying. The Internet revolt by your own followers was right. Your vote for letting the NSA, and even the phone companies, off the hook for massive illegal spying on American citizens was a very bad mistake. These are the exact same crimes that got Nixon thrown out of office for Watergate. Now Watergate is legal too? I have to say it—this doesn't remind me of Nixon as much as Italy's ordeal under Silvio Berlusconi. In Italy I have heard the joke again and again that "Berlusconi has to stay in power or else he'll go to jail." Sure enough, every time Berlusconi gets indicted for yet another crime, his majority in Parliament simply changes the law and he goes free. There should be zero tolerance for Berlusconi disease.

Plus, does this much spying even make sense? What are we gaining here besides a bigger avalanche of useless data? If 9/11 was an inside job, it was not one of conspiracy but colossal, runaway incompetence. We were already spying on way too many people, collecting way too much data that no one had time to analyze. Thus finding the real terrorists before they struck was like looking for a needle in a football stadium.

I have a feeling you may sign an important bill or two right from the podium during your inauguration speech. It might be an economic stimulus package or lifting the ban on stem cell research. How about also signing your first executive order declaring all of Bush's presidential signing statements he added on to bills he signed to be null and void. These things will go a long way toward restoring the rule of law.

STAMP OUT ELECTION FRAUD – RESTORE THE RIGHT TO VOTE

I never thought that after all these years we would once again find ourselves fighting for our right to vote. In the United States of America? It is well-established now that every election at least since 2000, including the midterms, has been marred by widespread vote fraud, especially via the hacking and manipulations of electronic voting machines. But these widespread crimes have never been fully investigated, let alone prosecuted. Even the US Civil Rights Commission recommended prosecuting then-Governor Jeb Bush over all the fraud and voter intimidation in Florida during the 2002 election. But his brother's Justice Department declined.

It is obvious the Help America Vote Act has backfired and done the opposite. Optical scan machines are not the answer at all. They have now been proven to be just as hackable as the notorious paperless touch-screens. They should all be junked once and for all. Digital is not always better, and voting should not be privatized. Any system where the people's votes are counted in secret behind closed doors has no place in a democracy. Nor is there room for contracting out the verification of our registration forms to the same corrupt biased companies that manufacture the phony voting machines.

We can't just let this massive, widespread vote stealing go on and pretend it isn't happening. It may be too late to reverse the wreckage of all the stolen elections. But again, a Truth Commission to prove how it was done and who did it is essential to the survival of our democracy. Anyone in Congress with a spine for this? The people have a right to know.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM – THE EASY WAY

I am sure you would agree that this election campaign was way WAY too long. Other countries, including one just north of us, limit campaign time to between 30 and 60 days. Election fever is much more focused so voter participation is higher. Why can't we do this? Sure, these other countries use parliamentary systems (another change I hope for) where the party in power calls an election and it takes place a short time later. But think of what we could save—and what we would gain—if we limited campaign time to 90 days. There could be 30 days between announcements and the primaries, followed by a 30-day primary season, then a 30-day home stretch to Election Day. Anyone who jumps the gun by jockeying, soliciting contributions or electioneering too early is automatically disqualified.

I hope you would also agree that campaigns for high office have become obscenely expensive. We now have a full-blown Election Industrial Complex. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't need $750 million to run for President? The way our campaign contributions and lobbyists work today has another name in other countries. It's called bribery.

Another way to restore sanity is to go national with a law enacted by popular vote in Nevada. If you don't like any of the candidates for an office in Nevada, you are allowed to vote None of the Above. If N.O.T.A. wins, they have to re-run the election with all new candidates.

You say you want more people to get up and get involved? Lower the voting age! To get people's attention I have suggested lowering it clear down to age 5. But more realistically, I suggest showing people they have a stake in our democracy by allowing ages 14 and up to vote on school boards and school bond issues, 16 and up for local offices and ballot measures, and 18 and up for everything else. Overcoming voter apathy is hard, but when young people cast votes and see results, they'll stick with it long term.

RETHINK AND SHUT DOWN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Prohibition is as absurd and fruitless today as it was when Eliot Ness ran around shooting up Chicago trying to stamp out illegal beer. The world is laughing at us while real people are being robbed, jailed, assaulted and even killed. We have more people locked in prison than any country in the history of the world. But our drug use rate has barely dropped at all. The blood and violence from gangs and narco-traffickers that have left Colombia and Mexico on the verge of becoming failed states is spilling across our borders. This is no country for old men—or old laws.

Could we do worse than to at least try the Harm Reduction programs used most successfully in Holland and other parts of Europe? As unorthodox as this sounds, decriminalizing (not legalizing) even harder drugs, making them available on prescription from the government for free, along with a safe place to use them, has led to a much lower crime rate—and even addiction rate—than ours. Why? The free prescriptions mean the addict does not have to rob and kill people to pay the drug gangs' high prices, and the gangs are put out of business. Dealers are still treated harshly and rehab is strongly encouraged. This could also save up to $50 billion a year for rehab and education that is otherwise wasted by throwing people in prison.

This also frees up billions and billions of dollars to treat the addicts when they want to get off drugs—which will be sooner rather than later. Rehab costs 2/3 less than prison. Our mushrooming prison-industrial complex is draining our money so badly that state after state is slashing funds for education—education!—to pay for throwing more and more people in prison. In California, a prison guard now makes more money than a teacher. So much for family values.

What is wrong with this picture?!??? As president I suggest the commuting of federal prison sentences of all small-time non-violent drug offenders to time served and releasing them immediately. Then strongly urge governors to do the same at the state level. Again, think of all the wasted taxpayer dollars this will free up for more important things like education and rehabilitation. Estimates run as high as $50 billion nationwide.

This does not mean any of these drugs should be legalized, just decriminalized. That is, strictly regulated like alcohol and tobacco, with big-time dealers and gangs treated as harshly as ever. For another way to fight the drug lords, consider this. In 2005 the United States spent $780 million on drug eradication in Afghanistan. Where on earth did it all go? It worked so poorly that $600 million of poppies and heroin escaped into the market anyway.

Do the math: We could have saved a whopping $180 million if we had simply gone to the suppliers and bought the drugs, and then destroyed them so they won't keep making people sick and killing my friends. As sickening as it is to even think of doing business with drug cartels, can anyone think of a better way to cut off the supply? A counter-argument is that this will actually force the gangs to drive the street price way up. But with Harm Reduction programs already in place they will have nothing to sell, no place to sell it, and no suckers willing to buy.

And for crying out loud, isn't it time to finally get real and decriminalize marijuana? If current strains are more potent than the old days, so what? Study after study still proves that marijuana is less harmful—and less addictive—than alcohol or tobacco. Nowadays, going overboard against marijuana has not only flooded our prisons to the breaking point, it has driven the price of cannabis so high that young people are going straight into crack cocaine and methamphetamines. Is this wise?

On top of that, it is not just oil we are dangerously low on, we are running out of wood. If we ever hope to turn the tide on global warming and save what is left of our forests, we must remove all bans on the cultivation of cannabis for its many industrial uses—including the strain of hemp that has no THC in it to get anyone high but is still banned anyway. Recycling is not enough. Why chop down millions of trees to make paper when we can use hemp or kanaf and then grow another crop of paper a few months later? It does not get any greener than this. It will also help rescue a lot of family farms.

Finally, the Joe Biden-authored Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (formerly known as the RAVE Act), passed as a rider to the Amber Alert Bill, is as big a disgrace as the PATRIOT Act. It has no place in a free society and should be repealed immediately. Long-term rescue of our social fabric and society, not to mention our southern neighbors, depends in major part on enacting humane drug laws.

RESTORE BALANCE TO THE SUPREME COURT

Even George Will complained that Bill Clinton's Supreme Court nominees were too moderate; that the court needs a good progressive or two for the full and thorough consideration of each issue. Balancing the court means choosing a justice or two with the passion and spirit of a Thurgood Marshall, John Marshall or William O. Douglas, even if you do not fully agree with them. You may only have a two-year window before a mid-term Congress cramps your style.

MEDIA REFORM

The Federal Communications Commission should get off their high horse about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" or naughty words that everyone says anyway, and instead focus on the rampant hate speech and outright lies that are falsely broadcast as impartial news. Sure, celebrity bullies like Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have a right to say what they want. But when no one—even the target of a personal attack—is allowed the right to reply, the very idea of an informed democracy goes out the window. Was that their goal in the first place?

Nowadays, mainstream corporate media deliberately dumbing down the news, omitting key facts and sides of the story, or neglecting to report the story altogether is the worst form of censorship going on in America today. Since the big mergers, most debate that gets aired at all is restricted to right wing versus ultra-right wing, while the rest of us are allowed to laugh along with Stewart and Colbert. What kind of democracy are we when freedom of speech—or the equally important right to communicate—belongs only to the oligarchs who control the airwaves?

There used to be a law called the Fairness Doctrine that guaranteed the right of reply, without Bill O'Reilly yelling at you to shut up every 15 seconds. It was allowed to expire late in the Reagan years, and urgently needs to be renewed. Your stated opposition to this puzzles me. What better tool is there for "opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible" than making sure they are allowed to be seen and heard in the first place? And how about some enforcement of the laws guaranteeing that the public, not corporations, owns the airwaves. Even the big corporate media barons should again be required to renew their FCC license to broadcast every five years, complete with public hearings.

I also do not think anyone should be allowed to graduate from high school until they pass a class on media literacy. Sadly, we do not yet have the curriculum. In the meantime we must all pitch in with the teaching—to both adults and children.

ECONOMIC STIMULUS – START WITH PEOPLE WHO NEED IT MOST

I'm glad there seems to be a sense up top that national security, the economy, climate collapse and the environment are all intertwined. Think about it. No rogue state or terrorist threatens our national security nearly as much as our collapsing economy. The growing gap between the rich and poor is what is tearing apart the lives of average Americans and their families.

National security means:

• Everyone has a home.

• Everyone has enough decent food to eat.

• Everyone can drink the water without having to buy it in a bottle from Coke or Pepsi.

• No one has to worry about getting their hand cut off at work or having their job outsourced overseas.

• Everyone can be who they are without fear of being detained and tortured without trial.

• Everyone can vote without fear, knowing their vote will be counted—accurately.

• Every woman has the right to choose what to do with her own body.

• Everyone has enough money for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

• Everyone, even if they don't have money, has the right to see a doctor if they're sick or hurt. In so many other countries this is a guaranteed human right by law.

Stimulating and reviving the economy will only succeed from the ground up. This means getting a lot more money quickly to the people on the bottom who need it the most. When they finally have some cash in their pocket they will be more than eager to spend it. Stores perk up, jobs are saved, and the train is finally rolling out of the station. This is why leaders as diverse as Martin Luther King, Milton Friedman and even Richard Nixon have at different times proposed a guaranteed annual income so that everyone can participate and keep our economy humming. Raise the minimum wage to a living wage: $9.50 an hour helps, but $12 an hour is closer to a true living wage. Welfare should not be a dirty word, especially after PBS reported last month that if you count all the Americans who have given up looking for work because they can't find any and dropped off the radar screen, unemployment is actually around 12%! So please remove the time limits on unemployment compensation, welfare benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children that were slapped on the least fortunate during the Clinton years.

But where will the money come from when we burn it all up shoveling it down the mouths of the dragons on Wall Street? You are right to point out that trickle-down supply-side economics never trickled down. It wasn't supposed to. How will this be any different? To the average taxpayer this so-called bailout looks more like the last great looting of our treasury before Bush and his cronies get the hell out of dodge. There is also growing concern about the appearance of self-dealing by officials with connections to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

So far your own economic team seems alarmingly slanted toward the robber barons who helped create this mess in the first place. Where is Joseph Stiglitz? Where is Robert Reich? Are we still all in this together? Your Economic Advisory Council is supposed to be a council, not a choir! You say you want a support staff that debate and give you diverse ideas. So even if you do not agree with them, how about adding William Greider or Doug Henwood or even Naomi Klein as well?

GREEN JOBS THROUGH GREEN AID

Let's move even faster on climate collapse. The clock is ticking…

Your proposal to spend $150 billion on our crumbling infrastructure is a good beginning. But it is only 10% of the $1.5 trillion in urgent repairs the American Society of Civil Engineers says we need right now to avoid more disasters like the freeway bridge collapse in Minnesota. This does not even account for restocking the Bush-depleted Superfund to clean up toxic waste, or creating affordable housing for everyone. Your plan states, "We'll put people back to work rebuilding our roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel efficient cars and the alternative energy technology that could free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead." Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to spend whatever it takes to weather-strip and winterize old homes and buildings now if the owners can't afford it. It will reduce our swollen carbon footprint dramatically and save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years. How about aid for solar panels? Home windmills too? Not just tax breaks, aid. Most people just don't have the money for this. Time magazine reported in 2001 that an American farmer could get $50 for an acre of wheat and $2000 for an acre of wind power. We either pay to do this now or pay a lot more later. Europeans are already way ahead of us on this one.

Also, look for ways to accomplish two or three things at once with every renewal project. Replacing the water or sewer lines? Lay fiber optic cable! Our not-so-liberal mayor in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, nixed that idea because there was not enough graft in it for telecom companies. His own silly plan for wi-fi towers fell on its face, so a smart opportunity was wasted.

AUTO AID – REQUIRE GREENER CARS

Ever seen a documentary film called Who Killed the Electric Car? They worked so well their owners did not want to give them back. But when their leases came up, Detroit snatched them away and destroyed them. Now Detroit wants a great big handout? Then another? Then another? There should be no bailout for carmakers if all they are willing to offer in return is more fuel-hogging clunkers like the Ford Flex. No aid until they bring back the electric cars! If the Chevy Volt is so great, why aren't they selling them now? For almost 30 years, people who go to design schools have told me that the car designers almost always pursue jobs overseas because Detroit is still unable to adapt as quickly to fresh ideas for the future.

So far "clean coal" seems to be about as clean as our mountains of "clean nuclear waste." Again, no aid to big coal companies unless they end their environmentally devastating "mountain top removal" plundering once and for all.

TRAINS MAKE SENSE – PEOPLE ARE READY

Another crucial way to fight global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil is to wake up and get serious about a nationwide high-speed rail system and better rapid transit in the cities. Again, Europe, Japan, and even China are way ahead of us. When I do my speaking tours in Europe it is so much easier and less expensive than traveling here: Just take my backpack and go. Even a normal train is often faster than flying. No traffic jams getting to the airport, no long security lines, no baggage claim wait, no traffic jams back into the next town. I just get on the train and get off the train, right downtown. The scenery is pretty cool too.

Amtrak has hemorrhaged money year after year. But ridership is finally going up, in spite of the decimated service. People have finally grown so fed up with traffic jams, fuel prices and the arrogance of our bumbling airline industry that a proper train system would now do very well. Just ask former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, another intriguing choice for a high position in your administration. Californians finally passed a bond issue to begin work on a long-overdue bullet train system between San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles. People I have talked to in random conversation are almost as excited about this as they are about your own election. A similar initiative passed in Florida in 2000, but Governor Jeb Bush impounded the funds.

Surely we can find the money by canceling a few aircraft carriers, tanks and planes we don't need, and by shutting off the faucet for the hundreds of billions wasted on Reagan's star wars fantasy—now known as "missile defense." Are those new installations in the Czech Republic and Poland really worth all the grief they're stirring up with the Russians? The Czech and Polish people don't even want them there!

Green energy technology should also be shared, even given, to the Chinese ASAP. Here on the West Coast I have to wipe a brown sooty film off my windshield every couple of days—and my car is in a garage! It is coal dust from Chinese factories. They open a new coal plant ever few days. According to Mother Jones, sustaining an American lifestyle for a Chinese middle class predicted to reach 600 million will require the resources of several more Earths!

COMPETE GLOBALLY – TAKE BETTER CARE OF OUR PEOPLE

Other countries prefer a healthy workforce and are willing to pay for it. Here we stick our workforce with fat, greedy insurance companies who serve no purpose but to act as a tollbooth or a gatekeeper and charge exorbitant fees before a person can even see a doctor. The result, of course, is the most expensive healthcare system with the least benefit for the buck of any in the industrialized world. You say the big insurance companies "should have a place at the table." Aren't these companies the problem?

Other counties want their workforce to be as well-educated as possible to better care for themselves and compete in the global economy. So they are willing to pay to make sure this happens, instead of kicking them in the face with back-breaking student loans and cutting school funding to the bone.

Other countries want their children to grow up well-nourished and loved instead of dysfunctional. They are happy to pay welfare for single parents to stay home with their little ones, and for 12-18 months maternity leave with 80-90% pay for either parent to make sure no child is left behind.

Traveling overseas it is not hard to notice that many European countries, and not just Scandinavia, have a higher standard of living than we do, and the gap is widening. The reason is they are willing to pay for it.

HUMANE TAX REFORM

Please do not break your promise to raise income taxes on the wealthy and close those Titanic-sized loopholes that allowed two-thirds of US and foreign corporations who do business here to pay no tax at all between 1998 and 2005. We used to have a tiny tax on security speculation and stock transactions. Britain still does. If the annual amount of wheeling and dealing in the stock market really amounts to the reported $500 trillion a year, a mere 1% tax could raise $5 trillion per year and Wall Street would not even feel it! Other ways to raise badly needed revenue without hurting Joe the Plumber would be to tax companies who pollute, divert funds overseas, and ship jobs out of the country, as well as taxing stock windfalls rewarded by Wall Street for balancing the bottom line with employee layoffs.

Last September the Bush administration quietly dynamited Section 382 of the tax code allowing big banks to run off with as much as $140 billion dollars in new tax breaks that many suspect are illegal. Was this illegal? Please enforce the law and stop the bleeding now.

We could also follow the lead of Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, and even the state of Maine and encourage cities to start their own municipal or community banks. Being a non-profit, these banks would provide low-cost loans for homes and small businesses. They would also save cities millions of dollars apiece that they now waste on private banking fees.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D - IL) proposes generous tax breaks and shareholder advantages to "patriotic corporations" who limit management salaries to 100 times the lowest-paid fulltime worker. I think 10 times is better. Shareholders need better legal tools to limit runaway CEO pay and looting by top executives.

Schakowsky would also give tax breaks to corporations that: produce at least 90% of their goods and services in the United States; spend at least 50% of the research and development budgets here at home; stay out of employee organizing drives; are clean with the EPA, OSHA and the NRLB; and provide their employees with generous and portable pension funds and health insurance. They must also agree not to price-gouge consumers.

So how do we convince Americans that it is in our best interest to help pay for all of this? It would help if you use your power to inspire and persuade, to get through to people in this country that not all taxes are automatically bad, especially when spent in a way that benefits them directly. Starting with the Boston Tea Party in kindergarten, it is drilled into us that taxes are this terrible violation of our freedom. As adults we have had 30 plus years of media sermons from both parties that we are no longer a community, but a marketplace, and that competitiveness is more important than caring about one another. Isn't it interesting that the people least interested in paying taxes are often the first to complain when a government service they take for granted doesn't work any more?

To wise people up and chip away at this I suggest pointing out what happened to California when voters passed Proposition 13 and gutted what was once the number one education system in the country, if not the world. It is now almost dead last. According to the ACLU, some schools in Los Angeles are not only short on books and desks, they don't even have toilet paper. Californians also voted down an initiative guaranteeing universal healthcare after the Disease Industry ran a blitz of TV ads claiming it would raise people's taxes. They banked on people failing to do the math and see how a slight tax increase would dramatically reduce their own medical bills.

Another example is the tale of two of the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River. In the 1990s, Rock Island, IL voters were willing to raise taxes to build a floodwall. Voters in Davenport, IA rejected a wall three times because it would raise taxes. Guess whose town was devastated the next time the Mississippi flooded? To raise local money for local and state projects voters have to be shown that it is worth raising taxes to pay for these things.

Taxes also wouldn't hurt so much if the people had more say in where their money went. How about placing 12-15 categories in US income tax forms so people can vote what percentage of their tax money they want spent where? I'll bet education, the environment, infrastructure, and services would go straight up and our bloated military cash cow would go straight down.

HELP PEOPLE RESIST FORECLOSURES

To fight the plague of foreclosures, I suggest following the lead of the Cook County Sheriff in Chicago by declaring a moratorium on foreclosure evictions. Debts to predatory lenders should be forgiven at once. Many families are fleeing their homes because they are so frightened of the cruel Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, they are willing to default on their mortgage just to keep up with their credit card debts. You voted against this law. Now let's get rid of it. I am inspired by City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston who have said "Yes We Can" to reviving the Depression-era practice of volunteer rolling brigades who show up to defend people's homes from eviction, and if need be take all the furniture and belongings back from the curb into the house. In addition, they alert the media to help shame the banks and predatory lenders from coming back. In many cases it has worked.

The most intriguing proposal flying around the Internet is for everyone who files an individual tax return to be given $1 million dollars on the condition that they use it to pay off their mortgage in full (thus bailing out the banks) and buy an American car within the next three years. Whatever is left over is theirs to keep and invest. Unfortunately the math does not add up. Even the staggering estimated total of $8 trillion thrown at our collapsing economy would only bring $57,971.01 for each of the 138 million individual tax returns filed each year. Too bad, it is an interesting idea.

"THIS MOVEMENT IS NOT JUST ABOUT ONE PERSON…"

I'm glad to hear you say that, but I keep waiting for you to expand and take it further. To point out how much it also matters who is in the Senate, who is in the House, the Governor, the State legislature, mayors, city councils, school boards, ballot initiatives, county commissioners, you name it. To say that if a person is not satisfied with what is going on in their community, they should get involved. If they are not satisfied with how they are being represented, they should consider running for office themselves. A lot of inspired people would. What else can we do in the meantime to make things better? What simple, easy steps can we take in our own lives? You have two more chances—Inauguration and the State of the Union. Before people return to the slumber of Soundbite McNews.

Bill Clinton could have won back Congress in 1996 if he had used his popularity, convention speech and pulpit for something besides his own shoo-in re-election. But he didn't. I was in the room for Al Gore's acceptance speech in 2000. He didn't bother either. It was just about one person.

I'll be amazed if Mr. Obama or anyone close actually reads this, so this last part is for you folks who have. To me, if there is an Obama movement, it is more like the Pope-mobile. You know, that cage of bulletproof glass on wheels that rolls around with the Pope inside, waving at his adoring flock, "Yo! I'm here! Look at me, I'm the Pope!" Then everybody goes home. But who is driving the Pope-mobile? Can a crowd organize to block the wrong turns and steer it in a better direction?

I did not vote for you, but I dearly want you to succeed at delivering the change you have promised. We have very little time and may not get another chance. Recent history shows we have eight years maximum before the pendulum swings back the other way—and hard. She may lose once or twice, but I fear the Pitbull with Lipstick will one day be bigger than Reagan.

In many ways, people seem to be looking to you as their new great-and-powerful Oprah as much as they look at you as their President. This can be useful too. To revive people's sense of community and what it entails. To persuade people that voting for small local tax increases brings much greater benefits for everyone down the road. To encourage people to not just recycle but look for ways to stop wasting so much. Those same European countries whose standard of living seems to be higher than ours use a fraction per capita of natural resources we do. How do they do it? Think of all the forests we could save just by showing people how much paper they can save just by writing on the other side before they throw it away? Imagine if lawyers figured this out.

HONOR AND RESPECT YOUR MOVEMENT

Please don't ever forget why so many people who had given up hope are investing so much of their hearts and hope in you. If that hope is shattered and they feel betrayed, a great deal more will collapse for good.

So to keep your movement alive—and help it grow beyond you—keep those texts and e-mail lists alive! Keep your Blackberry. Does it matter if it all becomes public record? How about a posting a daily log of what you did and who you and your staff met with, including lobbyists. Why not keep all those campaign offices you opened all over the country alive too? Convert them to branch offices. Senators and House members have branch offices all over their districts. You now represent the whole country. Keep the branches.

Above all, be a leader, not a dealmaker. There are times when cutting a deal is the same as cutting and running. To put it mildly, we can't afford that anymore. There are no sails left to trim.

And if this is a movement about change and not just about one person, it is up to the movement to drive the President, not the other way around. Please do not stand in the way.

Sincerely,

Jello Biafra

See letter...

"One man with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson

Cheney admits authorizing detainee's torture

Monday, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney made a startling statement on a nation-wide, televised broadcast.

When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called "high value prisoner" at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture.

"I supported it," he said regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes in US courts for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

He added: "It's been a remarkably successful effort, and I think the results speak for themselves."ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," he said.

The prisoner in question, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who the Bush administration alleges to have planned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of Guantanamo's "high value targets" thus far charged with war crimes.

Former military interrogator Travis Hall disagrees with Cheney's position.

"Proponents of Guantanamo underestimate what a powerful a propaganda tool Guantanamo has become for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, despite several Department of Defense studies documenting the propaganda value of detention centers," he said in a column for Opposing Views.

"For example, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has monitored numerous Al Qaeda references to Guantanamo in its recruitment propaganda materials," continued Hall. "Improvements to Guantanamo’s administration of judicial mechanisms will not make its way into Al Qaeda propaganda. Nothing short of closing Guantanamo will remove this arrow from its quiver."

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison and pull US forces out of Iraq. Cheney, however, has a different timeline for when Guantanamo Bay prison may be "responsibly" retired.

"Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," he told ABC.

Problematic to his assertion: Mr. Bush's "war on terror" is undefinable and unending by it's very nature, and Cheney seems to recognize this as fact.

Asked when his administration's terror war will end, he jostled, "Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that."

See article and video...

What he's essentially done is admit to committing and participating in War Crimes.

The fact that an indictment in another similar case was dropped, despite a plethora of evidence presented, suggests that he won't have to answer for his crimes. Besides, I think Bush has already pre-emptively pardoned Cheney and himself for any and all charges that might be brought against them in the future.

I suspect that this admission is, at least in his mind, the last chance he will have to give us all the finger. He's already had other indictments snuffed out, what's one more?

Interesting to note from the article: "Mr. Bush's 'war on terror' is undefinable and unending by it's very nature."

Not so unlike the Cold War. I wonder how so many people lived for 15 years without an ambiguous battle against somewhat imaginary enemies in between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the NWO/War on Terror.

I wonder if the WoT will go on for forty years until people get tired of politicians building their careers on 'anti-terrorism' rhetoric.

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

If There Was Any Truth in Advertising...

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." - Thomas Jefferson

Iraqi Throws Shoes At Bush During Press Conference

BAGHDAD — On an Iraq trip shrouded in secrecy and dissent, President George W. Bush on Sunday hailed progress in the unpopular war that defines his presidency and got a size-10 reminder of opposition to his policies when a man hurled shoes at him during a news conference.

"This is the end!" shouted the man, later identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt.

Bush ducked both shoes as they whizzed past his head and landed with a thud against the wall behind him.

"All I can report," Bush joked of the incident, "is a size 10."

The U.S. president visited the Iraqi capital just 37 days before he hands the war off to President-elect Barack Obama, who has pledged to end it. The president wanted to highlight a drop in violence in a nation still riven by ethnic strife and to celebrate a recent U.S.-Iraq security agreement, which calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

"There is still more work to be done," Bush said after his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, adding that the agreement puts Iraq on solid footing.

"The war is not over," Bush said, adding that "it is decisively on it's way to being won."

It was at that point the journalist stood up and threw his shoe. Bush ducked, and it narrowly missed his head. The second shoe came quickly, and Bush ducked again while several Iraqis grabbed the man and dragged him to the floor.

In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam Hussein with their shoes after U.S. marines toppled it to the ground after the 2003 invasion.

Read more & see video...

Notice the look on the "other guy's" face.

Related...

• 'This is a Farewell Kiss, Dog' Iraqi Throws Shoes at Bush (VIDEO)
• Arab world 'hails Bush shoe attack'
• Bush, after dodging shoes: 'It's one way to gain attention'
• THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS rally for Bush shoe attacker.
• Iraq TV demands release of Bush shoe attacker
  

"Without trying, I'm different." - Paul Wellstone

Marijuana Legalization Tops List of Questions for Obama in Online Poll

"We're tremendously excited about the promise of tools like this that offer Americans a level of access that has historically been hard to come by."- Obama Team

(SALEM, Ore.) - I am not surprised that the number one thing Americans are asking President-elect Barack Obama is whether or not he is going to legalize marijuana.

Generations are changing and evolving and the taboos around cannabis are slowly falling away.

American industries can harness the power of this multi-billion dollar, still mostly black market business. The attitude of people in this country is in a mode of great anticipation and change.

Barack Obama is already on the record saying he does not want to use the Justice Department to bust state operated medical marijuana dispensaries.

People submitting questions in this Online event seem to identify the legalization of medical marijuana and marijuana overall, as a top priority.

I included the top ten and a link to the page that allows you to see all of the other questions that people seek to have answered by Barack Obama.

Other hot topics are Wall Street, Stem Cell Research, and for a lack of better terms, retribution against the Bush Administration for things like illegal wiretapping and the authorization of torture.

Since its launch Wednesday, the "Open for Questions" tool processed over 600,000 votes from more than 10,000 people on more than 7,300 questions.

Voting came to a close Friday, December 12th, at 12:00 AM Eastern Time, so that the team can prepare answers to some of the most popular questions.

Pilot projects like "Open for Questions" depend on feedback from users to better understand how to make participation intuitive and productive.

Obama's team stated, "Participation in Open for Questions outpaced our expectations, and we're looking forward to rolling it out again next week. We're tremendously excited about the promise of tools like this that offer Americans a level of access that has historically been hard to come by."

By voting questions up, users have been able to convey to the team which major issues -- including the auto industry, health care, ethical standards, and others -- are the most important to this community.

As one of the only essentially mainstream news organizations Online that covers legal medical marijuana seriously, Salem-News.com has earned a worldwide and national reputation as the only Website that offers an experienced doctor who is an expert on the subject, for question and answer interviews based on visitor's questions.

Dr. Phillip Leveque is a World War Two veteran and his education, background and experience in multiple specialties, places him among the most qualified doctors in the nation. He writes from the perspective of an Osteopath, Pharmacologist and Toxicologist.

I am glad to see the value of this natural herb gaining acceptance for its potential value as a legal and taxable commodity, and we do not consider this as any kind of an underground or taboo subject when we report about it. Medical marijuana is legal in Oregon and many other places, and the patients have very few places to turn. We are glad to fill that void.

Over the next few days, some of the most popular questions selected by the Change.gov community will be answered by the Transition team, and their responses will be posted on their site.

The Questions Americans are Asking Barack Obama

Currently in the lead: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"
- S. Man, Denton

Second place question: "What will you do as President to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration and how will you ensure that our system of checks and balances is renewed?"
- Kari, Seattle

Third place question: "What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?"
- Diane, New Jersy

Sixth place question: "Will you lift the ban on Stem Cell research in your first 100 days in office?"
- James_M, Nashville, TN

Fifth place question: "What will you do to promote science and mathematics education to Elementary and Middle School students?"
- JasonWyatt, Raleigh, NC

Sixth place question: "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor - ideally Patrick Fitzgerald - to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?"
- Bob Fertik, New York City

Seventh place question: "13 states have compassionate use programs for medial Marijuana, yet the federal gov't continues to prosecute sick and dying people. Isn't it time for the federal gov't to step out of the way and let doctors and families decide what is appropriate?"
- Greg, Minnesota

Eighth place question: "What do you plan to do to our food industry to make it more sustainable? Will there be changes to our farming policies?"
- Jentry, Lincoln, NE

Ninth place question: "What will you do to end the use of mercenary forces (ie Blackwater) by our military?"
- Betsie, Mtn Home, AR

Tenth place question: "What will you do first to reduce pollution/waste and incentivize greener behavior across the country?"
- Diane, Boston, MA

To learn what others are asking Obama, visit the Website "Open for Questions" and read many more inquiries for President-elect Barack Obama. That Website can be found at: change.gov/page/content/20081211_openforquestions

See article...

"We can remake the world daily." - Paul Wellstone

Senate report:

RUMSFELD TO BLAME FOR TORTURE

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees," claims a Senate Armed Services Committee report issued Thursday.

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate's findings.

The report determined that placing the blame on "a few bad apples," as Bush administration officials attempted to do in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, is inappropriate.

The policies were adopted after government assessments determined waterboarding and other torture techniques were "100 percent effective" at breaking the wills of US officers who underwent the military's Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program.

The report finally claims that Rumsfeld's torture policies "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority."

See article...

Is this a dream? Is it really happening? Or will this just be another teaser like the Cheney/Gonzales indictments?

For now, I'm holding my applause.

Related...

• 200 torture suits filed vs. Rumsfeld, US firms
• SUPREME COURT: GITMO TORTURE CASE REVIEW
  

"The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy." - Paul Wellstone

Our Mutual Joy

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

By Lisa Miller NEWSWEEK
Published Dec 6, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).

The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.

If the bible doesn't give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.

Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.

Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL, 55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their "head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job. Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards, radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."

Religious wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"? Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997 of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that the society no longer holds."

We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
You were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
More wonderful than that of women.

Here, the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.

In addition to its praise of friendship and its condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The boy needed two human parents, after all.

In the Christian story, the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."

The practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over "holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships," he says.

Still, very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage. Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing" ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains: should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."

More basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.

See article...

White men used to vote in favor of maintaining slaves legally. At one time the majority ruled and they were allowed to own other people. Problem is, the people who were directly affected by it weren't allowed to vote. Then they were considerd to be 3/5 of a human so that the states who allowed slavery, could be eligible for more federal funding, representation, etc. Notice how they wanted it both ways. They actually wanted the slaves to count as a whole person, but settled for 3/5.

Then came the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. Black men then became citizens and were legally allowed to vote. Whites feared that so they invented poll taxes and literacy exams that were culturally biased to disenfranchise black men from voting, and when that failed, to make it too expensive. Of course, not everyone had to pay a poll tax, only some. The courts struck that down because it was unConstitutional to prevent a male citizen from voting.

Men were still able to prevent female citizens from voting. When a majority of men were allowed to vote on whether or not women should be able to vote, guess how it went? Again, we had to look to the Constitution and shy away from the mob.

Even after Women's Suffrage, segregation was still legal as long as it was deemed that separate facilities were equal. The assumption was that if every kid had a school to go to, that was equal. Everyone had a bus to ride, a drinking fountain to drink water from, a place to live, etc. However, it became evident (after almost a century) that separate facilities were nowhere close to equal, and the court again struck it down as unConstitutional.

People really believed that women and minorities were inferior to white, Christian men for a long time in this country. A lot of people thought blacks were savage animals incapable of civilized living. They used passages out of the bible to justify their beliefs and further the agenda of oppression.

These same people also believed that men are dominant over women, and that's just how it is. Women don't need to vote because their husband will do it for them. And who wants an unmarried woman voting anyway. Again, the bible was used to justify this.

I wonder how many people who believe that homosexuality is a sin also believe that women are subservient to men and that blacks should still be slaves. After all, it says so in the bible.

Related...

• 'Traditional' marriage has changed a lot
  

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference." - Thomas Jefferson

Sen. Vitter calls auto bailout 'ASS BACKWARDS'

Louisiana Sen. David Vitter had some colorful language to describe a proposed $15 billion loan to Detroit's big three, calling the deal "ass backwards."

The hooker-patronizer's colorful language caused some blushing at MSNBC, a network that may still be overly sensitive about on-air profanity.

"Can I say this?" wondered congressional correspondent Mike Viqueira. "'Ass backwards.' He said it on the floor of the Senate and it was on public television, so I guess I can say it. ... That's an indication of the significant Republican opposition in the United State Senate."

Afternoon anchor Contessa Brewer joked that Viquera should have just said "bass ackwards" to avoid the profanity. But she reminded him, "We have heard some language on the floor of the Senate ... which should not be repeated on television, from people higher up than David Vitter." It's not clear exactly what she meant, but the anchor was probably referring to Dick Cheney's infamous f-bomb laden outburst from 2004.

See article and video...

Although I am against the bailout, I think Senator Vitter (R-LA) has ulterior motives.

This bailout would be like going into a bank and asking for a $300,000 home loan when you don't have a job, have a mediocre credit rating, and have no plan to either prove that you can pay it back or that you have even taken any steps at changing the practices that brought you to bankruptcy. You, however, claim to be the backbone of the community and that not loaning you the money will result in the existing economic crisis getting worse.

After "careful consideration," the bank decides to give you half of the money you've requested, $150,000, and will give you the rest if you actually get a job by the end of March. And even if you don't, they'll probably give it to you anyway.

Related...

• "Ass-Backwards" Auto Bailout Deal Will Get Filibuster, Says Senator
• Money For Prostitutes? Yes! Money For Auto Workers? Hell, No!
  

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government." - Thomas Jefferson

BOYCOTT AMERICAN AUTOMAKERS!

White House, Congress agree on auto bailout plan

The White House and Democratic congressional leaders said they had reached a deal in principle on a 15-billion-dollar rescue for the ailing automotive industry that could be ready for a vote Wednesday but many lawmakers remained skeptical of the bailout.

Even as details of the plan were still being hammered out, Democratic party leaders worked to rally support for a possible vote on the package in the House of Representatives.

Senator Carl Levin from Michigan, the base for the auto industry, said he understands that an "agreement has been reached," and that it was only a matter of time before a bill was ready for a vote.

"This gets us to the 20 yard line, but getting over the goal line will take a major effort," he said.

The White House said "a great deal of progress has been made" on the legislation to shore up the ailing Detroit Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

In the most elaborate intervention in US industry in years, the tentative deal calls for emergency government loans to the car companies within days to be overseen by a "car czar" appointed by President George W. Bush.

In return, the automakers by March 31 would have to cut costs, settle debts and make other changes to show a path to viability or otherwise face possible bankruptcy.

The government could choose to revoke the loans if the companies failed to make progress, or could refuse further assistance after March 31 if there was no realistic survival plan for the Big Three, officials said.

A senior administration official said the main concern for the White House was certifying the companies can prove they are "viable" and that taxpayers would not foot the bill for a fresh round of loans in coming months.

But there remained unresolved disputes with the White House over details of the bill, including a provision supported by Democrats that would ban the automakers from joining lawsuits challenging limits on greenhouse gas emissions in some US states.

Read more...

Read also: Angry Ford dealer blasts imports...

Unbelievable. I mean, I believe it, I'm just not happy about it. I think it's time to just boycott these inferior products altogether. A real capitalist buys the product they want without regard to where the company that made it is headquartered. Quality and price are all that matter.

Not that I would ever buy one anyway. I owned them all and they were all garbage. Completely unreliable, high maintenance, and inefficient fuel consumption. Once I bought my first Toyota, that was it for me and American cars. My wife and I drive Nissans, Hondas, and Toyotas, and let me tell you, none of them have their hands out. They also don't have guaranteed contracts, and even favorable legislation, with every gov't agency in the country to provide vehicles, not the least of which are for law enforcement.

Every American car I ever owned, I had to be mindful of the fact that it just might not start in the morning on any given day. Or that it might break down on my way to work or somewhere else - that was the primary reason why I have been a AAA member for 18 years. Used to use all of my free tows every year until I bought a Toyota. I haven't called AAA in years.

American automakers are/were in the pockets of big oil and did their bidding without question. Rather than manufacture fuel efficient cars, they made bigger, high maintenance gas guzzlers, and rather than sell an electric car, they manufactured a fleet, refused to sell them, and then destroyed them.

Let 'em hit up their buddies at Exxon, Shell, Mobil, and Chevron for a bailout. I'm sure they have plenty of money to dole out after 21 quarters of record profits.

I do find it humorous that a Ford dealer blasted import automakers for both making better products and understanding the American market better than any American company. Even considering that most of the police cars in this country are Fords. And I'll go so far as to say that if it wasn't for the unfair advantage American automakers have enjoyed for generations, they would have each been out of business decades ago.

What these bailouts amount to is responsible people picking up the tab for greedy, irresponsible people. And as big of a "socialist" as I am, even I can see the self-defeating nature of this practice.

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." - Thomas Jefferson

What Happened to GM's Popular 1996 Electric Car?

Now Would Be a Good Time for Congress to Ask the Automaker Why They Killed Their Perfectly Good and Much-Beloved All-Electric Car in 1999...



I haven't been able to watch all of the Capitol Hill hearings with the Big 3 automaker CEOs, but caught a fair portion. I've yet to hear anybody ask GM CEO Rick Wagoner why the hell his company killed their perfectly good, and rather popular, fully electric car which was introduced in CA in 1996.

The EV1 was much beloved by its owners (leasers, actually, since they were not allowed to buy them). There were waiting lists to be able to get one, before finally, three years later, with little or no explanation, GM announced they would not be renewing any of the leases on those cars and those who used them would have no recourse but to give them back.

Customers were outraged, heartbroken even. Many had tried to buy them outright --- and even sign contracts that they'd not hold GM accountable for any future problems or repairs --- but they were all turned down. When the devoted customers learned the planned fate of the cars --- and discovered, by helicopter, that they were all being rounded up in the desert --- they took up a round-the-clock, 24/7 vigil in an effort to block what GM had planned for them.

Incredibly, not only had GM taken back the cars, they were actually sending them, in perfectly good working order, to be shredded --- yes, literally shredded. As EV1 supporters tried to physically block the movement of cars to the shredder, they were threatened with arrest if they didn't get out of the way to allow the perfectly usable, and almost brand new cars to be taken out by trucks to be completely destroyed.

Why? That was never really made clear, at least not in the excellent 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? which detailed the entire heartbreaking tale of the cars which ran quickly and quietly, and without a drop of gasoline.

Read more & see trailer...

Yes, a great question. Why?

Answer: because they are/were in the pockets of big oil. And that's who they should be asking for a bailout from. JMO.

“If you want to do something for consumers, that is what you have to do as president.” - Paul Wellstone

Celebrities Record Hysterical Anti-Proposition 8 Musical!

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Oh man, this is most definitly the funniest thing I’ve seen all month! In protest of California’s Prop 8 — a ballot proposition that changed the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman — a few outspoken stars recently got together to record a little musical diddy!

"Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future." - Paul Wellstone

Cheney, Gonzales indictments dropped

A judge in Raymondville, Texas has dropped indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Judge Manuel Banales, after surviving a motion to have him removed from the case, threw out eight of the indictments brought by Willacy County District Attorney Juan Guerra, including those against two special prosecutors, two district judges, and a district clerk.

Judge Banales ruled the grand jury returned the indictments against Cheney and Gonzales unlawfully. Banales also tossed an indictment for corruption against State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat.

Charges were brought against Vice President Cheney and former AG Gonzales for blocking the investigation into a prisoner's murder in a private prison in Raymondville.

See article...

Interesting choice of words: "after surviving a motion," Judge Manuel Banales threw out the indictments.

I wonder who didn't survive the motion.

“Right now the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.” - Paul Wellstone

Bush Administration Ignored Clear Warnings

Under pressure from banking industry, U.S. government eased lending rules

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

“Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories,” California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

“These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages,” David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

The administration’s blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

“We’re going to be feeling the effects of the regulators’ failure to address these mortgages for the next several years,” said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, who warned regulators to tighten lending rules before it was too late.

Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come. Many executives remain in high-paying jobs, even after their assurances were proved false.

In 2005, faced with ominous signs the housing market was in jeopardy, bank regulators proposed new guidelines for banks writing risky loans. Today, in the midst of the worst housing recession in a generation, the proposal reads like a list of what-ifs:

• Regulators told bankers exotic mortgages were often inappropriate for buyers with bad credit.
• Banks would have been required to increase efforts to verify that buyers actually had jobs and could afford houses.
• Regulators proposed a cap on risky mortgages so a string of defaults wouldn’t be crippling.
• Banks that bundled and sold mortgages were told to be sure investors knew exactly what they were buying.
• Regulators urged banks to help buyers make responsible decisions and clearly advise them that interest rates might skyrocket and huge payments might be due sooner than expected.

Those proposals all were stripped from the final rules. None required congressional approval or the president’s signature.

“In hindsight, it was spot on,” said Jeffrey Brown, a former top official at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, one of the first agencies to raise concerns about risky lending.

Federal regulators were especially concerned about mortgages known as “option ARMs,” which allow borrowers to make payments so low that mortgage debt actually increases every month. But banking executives accused the government of overreacting.

Bankers said such loans might be risky when approved with no money down or without ensuring buyers have jobs but such risk could be managed without government intervention.

“An open market will mean that different institutions will develop different methodologies for achieving this goal,” Joseph Polizzotto, counsel to now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, told U.S. regulators in a March 2006.

Countrywide Financial Corp., at the time the nation’s largest mortgage lender, agreed. The proposal “appears excessive and will inhibit future innovation in the marketplace,” said Mary Jane Seebach, managing director of public affairs.

CONTINUED : Bankers blaming brokers

Last I checked, Congress didn't vote a $700 billion bailout for the borrowers, but did for the lenders. I guess the banks do expect the rest of the world should be looking out for them.

Incidentally, the loans written during the Clinton administration did not collapse. The loans that have collapsed were written later, after further deregulation and raising of debt limits. Even though the GOP controlled Congress and the White House, they are, somehow, not responsible for anything that happened during that period of time. It's all the fault of the Democrats.

If one is to look closely, they would see that the majority of the bad loans were not covered by CRA. The banks chose to make them of their own free will. As long as the home values kept increasing, they didn't care, because value appreciation would allow borrowers to refinance when ARM rates started to reset, and value appreciation would cover any foreclosure losses. Once prices leveled off, ARM borrowers could no longer refinance, foreclosing loanholders could no longer get their money out, and the whole house of card came tumbling down.

These banks did not get "bonuses" for making more loans. They chose to make them, competed to make them, and then got stuck with them, when people making $50K were unable to make the payments on a $400K house once the rates reset. Now my home value is reduced because of these foreclosures around me are sitting on the market.

The stupid thing is that, as the lending department in each bank was turning around, packaging their loans and reselling them, their investment department was buying these packages of loans from other banks. As long as housing values continued to grow at 10% a year, these portfolios appreciated in value. As soon as housing prices leveled off (about two years ago) the foreclosures became inevitable, but the banks kept lending until the whole system collapsed.

Huge numbers of the collapsing loans weren't to low income or minority borrowers. It happened at all levels. The bankers just threw common sense totally out the window.

"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people." - Ron Paul

Why Bush's presidency was an Epic Failure

Karen DeYoung at the WaPo had an interesting report on the change of style that Obama is bringing to the White House, particularly in how it approaches the military:

Obama has been careful to separate his criticism of Bush policy from his praise of the military's valor and performance, while Michelle Obama's public expressions of concern for military families have gone over well. But most important, according to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity, is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.

"Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders," said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid," Nash said. "In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting."

There's no better way to lose a war than to have your on-the-ground decisions be forced through an ideological prism. And it was obvious even to outsiders that this was how Bush was conducting the Iraq war -- indeed, it was the decisive factor behind the very decision to invade in the first place. It's even more telling that the military minds involved saw that this was occurring too.

But in truth, this constitutes not merely the entire Bush approach to governance, but conservative governance as well. Thus -- to use one example out of many -- during Bush's tenure there was not a single economic problem that could not be solved by anything other than tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of the financial sector.

Of course, we now realize that this was simply a prescription for gobbling PCBs after a diagnosis of cancer.

So when we hear conservatives tell themselves that the reason they lost this last election was their failure to adhere to "conservative principles," we know they're continuing to cling to the very reason they lost. Because such adherence inherently means that these "principles" -- that is, conservative dogma about how they believe the world ought to be, particularly the insistence that government itself is the problem, when the reality is that bad governance is the problem -- trump their ability to face realities on the ground.

From the outset, it's clear that reversing that approach is the most fundamental aspect of the "change" that Barack Obama intends to bring to the White House. And that is a very good sign indeed.

See article...

Another shocking revelation about the Bush Administration.

Related...

• Bush admits to ABC: I was 'unprepared for war'
• Bush steps up fight over congressional authority

"No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it." - Thomas Jefferson

Bush Pardons Bald Eagle Killers

Grass-Roots Effort Paves Path to a Pardon

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: November 29, 2008

For Leslie O. Collier, the operator of a 600-acre grain farm, it was not so much the felony conviction for killing two bald eagles that stung the most, and that stung plenty. It was the loss of his hunting rifles that went with it.

For his mother, June S. Collier, it was the pain of seeing her son’s name sullied in their town of roughly 5,000 people in southeastern Missouri, where the family had lived, farmed and hunted for four generations.

And for Lanie Black, a former Missouri state representative and a close family friend, it was the perceived injustice of the felony branding that prompted him to help Mr. Collier and his mother as they began, roughly a decade ago, to seek the ultimate redemption: a presidential pardon.

The effort proved successful last week, when Mr. Collier, 50, became one of 14 people to receive pardons from President Bush, one of the stingiest granters of them in modern history.

The presidential pardon — providing absolution to felons, often in the final days of a presidency — is as American a tradition as Thanksgiving. The framers of the Constitution established presidential pardon power to help a president spread goodwill, particularly at crucial moments after insurrection or rebellion.

Public attention has usually focused on the more celebrated or disputed cases, like George Washington’s pardons for the participants of the armed Whiskey Rebellion against high liquor taxes in 1795; Gerald R. Ford’s preemptive pardon of Richard M. Nixon in 1974; and Bill Clinton’s pardon in 2001 of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose former wife was a major contributor to his presidential library.

Public speculation on the expected next round of pardons from Mr. Bush has mostly focused on Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., and other administration officials involved in challenged policies like the domestic wiretapping program, or former Representative Randy Cunningham of California, who was convicted of fraud.

But in recent history, the list of those who have received pardons has been dominated less by convicts with connections to the upper echelons of American power than by people of modest means in the heartland — an odometer cheat from Mississippi; a bootlegger from Tennessee; Mr. Collier — whose relatively minor crimes ultimately led them to be labeled felons.

For most of them, it is a leap of faith to file an application with the pardon attorney’s office at the Justice Department, which culls through thousands of requests before making recommendations to the president that he is under no obligation to follow.

Read more...

It's illegal to kill bald eagles because they are endangered. Bald eagles are also the national symbol. Bush pardons bald eagle killer.

Nuff said.

Related...

• NY Times Urges Bush Not To "Abuse Pardons"; Bill Kristol Urges Bush To Pardon Torturers And Wiretappers

“I really tried to never do anything I don't believe in, so I don't want to change it now. I really don't,”- Paul Wellstone

Texas DA reveals evidence against Cheney

Hopes media won't 'let it die'

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra spoke to two Texas television stations Wednesday night regarding his investigation of injustice within the prison systems which led to the indictment by a Texas grand jury of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, along with other officials.

Cheney's stake in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies that run the detention centers, was cited in the indictment. Cheney is accused of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees through his ownership interest.

Gonzales is accused of using his position during his time as Attorney General to block an investigation into abuses at the detention centers, located in south Texas.

Democratic state Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. is also named in the indictment, Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said. Lucio's attorney, Michael R. Cowen, called Guerra a "one-man circus." "In the March 2008 Democratic Primary," he added, "70 percent of the Willacy County voters elected to remove Juan Guerra... Now, with only a few weeks left in his term, Mr. Guerra has again chosen to misuse his position in an attempt to seek revenge on those who he sees as political enemies."

Guerra told KVEO 23, an NBC affiliate in Texas, that "elected officials were embedded into the prison business and that it goes all the way to the top."

"Now that these indictments have seen the light of day, Guerra says, it's important they are not quashed," the station reported.

"I'm going to try and do what I can do," Guerra told KVEO. "Impose it to you guys, and educate you guys, so you don't let it die."

On ABC affiliate KRGV Newschannel 5, Guerra showed "records that he says could be used to prove Dick Cheney is guilty of criminal activity."

"Greed will get you discovered and arrested every time, and that's what happened to Cheney," Guerra said

See article...

I'm sure he will get pardoned, but I really hope he rots for everything he's done both to this country and in the name of this country.

“If we go to witnesses, it will be a spectacle,”- Paul Wellstone

Bush quietly works to torpedo climate rules

White House emailing mayors to oppose greenhouse gas limits

On his way out the door, President Bush seems to be taking one last shot at torpedoing court-ordered action to restrict global warming.

Top Bush administration figures have been e-mailing sympathetic mayors and other allies encouraging them to oppose Environmental Protection Agency rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Supreme Court last year ordered the EPA to craft a proposal to limit the emissions under the Clean Air Act, but the White House made clear it doesn't like the idea.

"At the time, President Bush warned that this was the wrong way to regulate emissions. [House Energy and Commerce Committee] Chairman John D. Dingell called it 'a glorious mess,' " Jeremy J. Broggi, associate director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. "And many of you contacted us to let us know how harmful this rule would be to the economies of the cities and counties you serve."

"The Bush administration," Eilperin says, "...is sending out a message to some of its allies: Tell us how much you don't want us to regulate emissions linked to global warming."

The e-mail appears to be one is a series of steps Bush is taking to leave as many as his fingerprints as possible on federal policy before he leaves office. The administration is pushing through an array of parallel deregulatory policies including lifting barriers to mountaintop coal mining and ocean-fishing along with easing standards governing drinking water quality.

Regarding the EPA emissions policy, the White House reminded mayors of an upcoming Nov. 28 deadline to comment on the proposal. When executive branch agencies craft regulations they account for comments from the public in their decision-making process; a stream of negative comments from Republican mayors opposed to air quality regulations could lead the agency to develop a more lax proposal.

An environmental advocate condemned what seemed a bald attempt from the administration to block moves to improve air quality and decrease global warming.

"It appears there is no bottom to the administration's pit of disdain for regulating greenhouse gases," S. William Becker, executive director for the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, told the Post.

"On the eve of the comment deadline on one of the most important environmental issues of our time, the White House is resorting to scare tactics, including rhetoric from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to incite opposition among elected county and city officials."Among other environmentally-challenging rules the White House is proposing, via the Christian Science Monitor:

Mountaintop mining. The proposed new rule would allow mining companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop-­removal mining closer to rivers and streams.

Endangered species consultation. The rule would alter implementation of the Endangered Species Act by letting federal land-use managers approve projects like highways, mining, or logging without consulting federal habitat managers and biological health experts responsible for species protection. Currently, consultation is required.

Air pollution near national parks. The proposed rule would ease current restrictions that make it difficult for power plants to operate near national parks and wilderness areas.Runoff and air pollution from factory farms. Under new rules, factory farms could let their runoff pollute waterways without a permit. (The rule circumvents the Clean Water Act, allowing for self-regulation.) Another rule would exempt factory farms from reporting air pollution emissions from animal waste.

New Source Review changes. The rule would change the Environmental Protection Agency’s New Source Review program, which requires new facilities or renovating facilities to install better pollution-control technology, by making fewer facilities subject to its requirements.

Environmental impacts of fishery decisions. The rule would transfer the responsibility for examining the environmental impacts of federal ocean-management decisions from federal employees to advisory groups that represent regional fishing interests. The rule would also make it tougher for the public to participate in the environmental assessment process required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

See article...

What a complete and utter scum bag. I really, really hope that he and his entire administration are arrested on the spot on 1/20/09. Seize their assets and hand them all over to The Hague while we figure out if there is even a possibility of giving them a fair trial here.

And to the lowlife neocons who still support this swine, don't even bother asking what laws he broke. That has been asked and answered repeatedly ad nauseam. We have tried to explain it in layman's terms, we've cited evidence from a variety of sources, and we've even provided some legalese to back it up, and it is all to no avail.

You have proven yourselves to be incapable of being reasoned with. You blame everyone else of partisan politics, while refusing to compromise even a little. It's your way or the highway. Period.

Well now that your little party is over, we'll be hitting the road. So long!

“This is one big, huge gigantic leap sideways, or backward.” - Paul Wellstone

Gay Adoption Ban Ruled unConstitutional

Miami judge rules against Florida's ban on adoptions by gay people, finds 'no rational basis'

StaffAP News
Nov 25, 2008 10:38 EST

A Miami judge has struck a blow against a Florida law banning adoptions of children by gay people.

Miami Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman ruled Tuesday there was "no rational basis" for prohibiting gays from adopting children.

The ruling will allow 47-year-old Martin Gill to adopt two young brothers he has cared for as foster children since 2004.

Florida has one of the strictest bans on gay adoptions in the country. A judge in Key West ruled in September that the ban was unconstitutional, but that ruling has had limited legal impact.

Attorneys for the state said they would appeal Lederman's ruling. The appeal will ultimately decide what happens to the state ban in place since 1977.

See article...

A step in the right- er... correct direction.

"We can remake the world daily." - Paul Wellstone

Bush Administration faked savings to privatize jobs

President George W. Bush's Labor Department misled Congress in an effort to prove outsourcing jobs to private companies was more efficient than assigning the jobs to government employees, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.

The report (pdf here) found that the Department used fictional projected numbers to improve "savings reports" -- even when real numbers were already available. And when the government did find private firms to take a government job, that employee generally was either reassigned to another task with the same title or promoted.

The effort was called "competitive sourcing," aimed to increase government efficiency by having federal and private organizations compete for providing services. While part of a federal government approach since 1955, the Bush Administration has made the approach a key element of the President's Management Agenda under the Office of Management and Budget.

An investigation revealed, however, that the Labor Department -- under direction from Bush budget officials -- deliberately withheld information about true costs.

According to the report, the Department of Labor "excluded a number of substantial costs in its reports to Congress -- such as the costs for precompetition planning, certain transition costs and staff time and post competition review activities -- thereby understanding the full costs of this contracting approach."

The report noted that this approach was consistent with "guidance" given by the Administration's Office of Management and Budget.

In addition, the report found the Department's "savings reports" were "not reliable: a sample of three reports contained inaccuracies, and others used projections when actual numbers were available, which sometimes resulted in overstated savings."

Most workers were also demoralized as the government tried to find private firms to take over their jobs, the probe found.

Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao began having workers compete for their jobs in 2004. Few employees have lost their jobs. But when the government found a private company to take over their position, 84 percent were reassigned to different positions with the same title or were promoted.

Since implementation, 22 employees were laid off or demoted, all of them African American.

The senator who commissioned the report, Iowa's Tom Harkin, along with the House committee that oversees the Labor Department, David Obey, said in a letter Monday that the report proved "the negative impact the Bush Administration's failed policies have had" on the Department.

"Under the direction of this White House, the Department of Labor has increasingly attempted to move work performed by Federal employees to private contractors" and, in so doing, hurt workers' morale and "grossly overstated savings," they wrote. "We look forward to working with the Obama Administration to strengthen the Department of Labor as it undertakes the critical missions of making sure our workplaces are safe; protecting employee pensions, health benefits and rights; and providing workers with the skills they need to compete successfully in the 21st century economy."

See article...

The Bush Administration misled Americans? Say it ain't so! But hey, why we talkin' about old shit?


“I think this is really a good example of the commercial calculus and ties taking precedence over everything else. It's sort of like the almighty dollar is triumphing over a lot of other values that we have as a nation.” - Paul Wellstone

Mormon Prop. 8 Aid Investigated

California agency to investigate Mormon role in campaign to ban gay marriage

AP News
Nov 24, 2008 22:42 EST

California officials will investigate whether the Mormon church accurately described its role in a campaign to ban gay marriage in the state.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission said Monday that a complaint by a gay rights group merits further inquiry.

Executive director Roman Porter says the decision does not mean any wrongdoing has been determined.

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, accuses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of failing to report the value of work it did to support Proposition 8.

A representative from the Salt Lake City-based church could not be reached for comment.

See article...

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I find it interesting that these "Christians" are so concerned with legislating an obscure part of the bible that they are willing to violate at least one of the Ten Commandments to attain their agenda. It's as though they are willing to forego the religious principles they believe in just to get those very principles mandated by law.

The ends don't justify the means. They had to make false statements in their ads to scare people into voting their way. They violated one of the Ten Commandments by publicly lying. Somehow, I doubt their god will look to favorably upon that.

The other aspect is why are factions from Utah funding a state prop in California? Do they even realize that we have more money than pretty much the rest of the country combined and could easily flood their local media with ads that will influence voters to change the laws in their state. I wonder how much they would like that....

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." - Thomas Jefferson

Congress Roasts Auto Executives Over Bailouts

I watched a few minutes of the second day of hearings in Congress about bailing out the auto companies. There were two funny moments.Walter Jones of N.C. began by holding up one picture of a US car, "Made in China" he said. Next picture, "Made in China". Next, "Made in Mexico". ... "Made in Germany."

Then, "I have one question for you..." And his question was about jobs for Americans... but I was so enthralled by his prefatory comments I was excitedly hoping he would just say, "I have one thing to say to you, GO F*CK YOURSELVES."

Another congress-critter asked, "Have you asked China for a bailout?" The auto exec replied that their China operations were profitable. "Have you asked Mexico for a bailout?" Our Mexican business is OK...

Funny. These companies invested heavily overseas and have great wealth amassed abroad. Now they want more money from us, in exchange for nothing. Like asking a rape victim to pay for the rape test kit!

Most of these companies, B of A, Citibank, car companies, drug companies, computer companies, etc.... most of them have profitable overseas subsidiaries. So my feeling is, if they need money now they should sell off their overseas stuff -- or else... to paraphrase the Congress-Critter, "You are a global company. Have you asked the globe for a bailout?

"The other interesting thing was seeing a fleet of private jets parked at an airport. Supposedly these jets were flown to D.C. by the auto execs. They didn't want to fly commercial, but decided to go in luxury. Probably ate filet mignon, had BJ's and Bloody Mary's, and then headed to the golf course after the hearings on the Hill.

In my opinion, this is a farce. It is beyond tragedy now to see these clowns pretending to be serious leaders of too-big-to-fail corporations. They must have attended GW Bush's business school! The sooner these guys are forced into retirement the better. Let the workers own the means of production!

See article...

Not that anyone really expects them to fly with the rest of us on a commercial airliner, but...

The Big 3 couldn't even "carpool" to their Congressional hearing, they each had to take their own private jet, each costing more than 25,000 dollars. Apparently they need the bailout just to maintain their own perks.

I say FUCK THEM! Fuck them all! How dare these clowns, who were in the pockets of big oil manufacturing giant, gas-guzzling SUVS and other vehicles while the cost of gasoline continued to go up, ask for money to save their inferior-product-making asses. Maybe they should ask the oil companies for a bailout. They broke their own records in the profit department for over 5 years, they should have plenty of money to bail out the morons who did their bidding.

Next will be the airlines asking for another bailout. Then the insurance companies. It will never end as long as greedy executives of these large corporations know that all they have to do is threaten to close or move overseas and they'll get a blank check to do as they please.

Where's my bailout? Or do they only go to people who make poor financial decisions, run businesses into the ground, and create economic turmoil to everyone around?

“... a virtual wish list for multinational corporations.” - Paul Wellstone

Number of juveniles held at Guantánamo almost twice official Pentagon figure

On Sunday, the Pentagon admitted that 12 juveniles -- those under the age of 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place -- have been held at Guantánamo Bay (as opposed to the figure of eight that was submitted to the UN in May). But a RAW STORY count, drawn from the Pentagon's own records, reveals that the total number of juveniles held at Guantánamo is at least 22 -- nearly double the official Pentagon figure.

In a submission to the 48th Session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (PDF), the Pentagon claimed that it had only held eight juveniles during the life of the Guantánamo Bay prison. It acknowledged that three Afghans under the age of 16 were released in January 2004 (as reported in the New York Times), stated that another three juveniles were repatriated between 2004 and 2006 and claimed that it was only holding two prisoners who were juveniles at the time of their capture: the Canadian Omar Khadr and the Afghan Mohamed Jawad, who are both facing a trial by Military Commission. The much-criticized Commission was created by the Defense Department as part of "terror trials" conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Last week, the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, based at the University of California, issued a report pointing out that, contrary to the Pentagon's assertions, at least 12 prisoners were juveniles at the time of their capture. The report correctly stated that, in addition to Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad, Mohamed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident born to parents from Chad, was still imprisoned. Just 14 years old when he was seized in October 2001, El-Gharani had traveled to Pakistan to study information technology, but had been rounded up in a random raid on a mosque, tortured in Pakistani custody and then held in U.S. detention, first in Afghanistan, and then in Guantánamo.

The report also asserted that the Pentagon had forgotten to include Yasser Talal al-Zahrani. Al-Zahrani, a Saudi national, was 17 when he was seized in Afghanistan, andwas one of three prisoners who died in Guantánamo (apparently by committing suicide) in June 2006.

After the report was issued, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had revised its figure from eight to 12, and said it had provided a corrected submission to the United Nations. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon claimed that the problems arose because many of the prisoners did not know their dates of birth. But as the director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas explained the Center's report had drawn on the Pentagon's own sources, specifically the list of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo from January 11, 2002 until May 15, 2006, which included their names, nationalities, and dates of birth.

Close scrutiny of this list reveals that the Pentagon will need to revise its figures once more, as, by its own account, a total of 22 prisoners were juveniles at the time of capture. Moreover, contrary to the Pentagon's account, five of these prisoners are still being held.

This imprecision seems to reflect the Pentagon's lack of concern for whether prisoners were juvenile at the time of capture. Under the terms of Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), the U.S. administration is required to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict," but in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference, "This constant refrain of 'the juveniles,' as though there's a hundred children in there -- these are not children."

Although the three juveniles released in January 2004 were held separately from the adult population and given some educational and recreational opportunities, there is no evidence that the rest of the juveniles held at Guantanamo received any preferential treatment whatsoever. In many cases, they were subjected to the kind of chronic abuse that has earned Guantanamo (and the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan) a reputation as facilities where the use of torture was routine.

Read more...

When you lower yourself to using the same tactics, you are no better than the enemy you decry.

Torturing children. It's still hard to swallow that this is being done in my name.

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape." - Thomas Jefferson

Ten Questions That Must Be Asked of Obama Before He's Sworn In

In order to make sure Barack Obama will not be a president like George W. Bush, there are ten urgent questions that he must be asked before he takes the oath of office.

1. Mr. Obama, if the biggest terrorist attack ever on American soil were to take place while you're president, would you:

A.)Finish the children's book you're currently reading.

B) Do something.

2. Mr. Obama, if a major American city were to go under water, would you:

A) Fly over the city and wave to the drowning people below.
B) Do something.

3. If the planet were heating up and we were all going to look like the Ghost Rider in twenty years, would you:
A) Sign a treaty with almost all the other nations to decrease the emissions causing the warming.
B) Flick off the rest of the world and giggle like a school girl.

4. If using a certain type of cell, scientists could make amazing breakthroughs in treatments and cures for horrible diseases and ailments, would you:
A) Allow it.
B) Save the lives of those poor cells! And keep them in a jar on your mantle after naming each one.

5. Mr. Obama, if somebody called you on a lie you told, would you:
A) Think that perhaps it was wrong of you to lie to the American people.
B) Commit treason by revealing their wife as a CIA agent.

6. Mr. Obama, if you wanted a substance to make our cars go, what is the maximum number of U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians you'd be willing to kill to get it?
A) 1,000,000
B) 500,000
C) 100,000

7. If Congress passed a bill to make sure every American child had healthcare, would you:
A) Let it pass.
B) Use your mighty pen to show those sickly brats who's the f*cking boss. “What's the big deal? A little cystic fibrosis?? Walk it off!”

8. If an Asian tsunami killed more than 350,000 people, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters ever known, how much money would you have the United States donate to help the survivors rebuild:
A) $25 million--less than is spent every two hours in Iraq.
B) A larger amount of money than that.

9. Mr. Obama, if you ever went hunting, would you:
A) Shoot your friend in the face.
B) Not shoot your friend in the face.

10. If your greatest accomplishment after eight years as president was the creation of a "no call list" for telemarketers, would you:
A) Join the witness protection program.
B) Create a grand library to commemorate that feat.

See article...

I love 23/6!


“I think we can do better. That is what Robert Kennedy always said. I think we can do better too. Won't you join me in the effort?” - Paul Wellstone

Vice-President Dick Cheney, former AG Alberto Gonzales Indicted

McALLEN, Texas — A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.

The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra's tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

Cheney's indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.

The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.

Gonzales' attorney, George Terwilliger III, said in a written statement, "This is obviously a bogus charge on its face, as any good prosecutor can recognize. Hopefully, competent Texas authorities will take steps to reign in this abuse of the criminal justice system."

Willacy County has become a prison hub with county, state and federal lockups. Guerra has gone after the prison-politician nexus before, extracting guilty pleas from three former Willacy and Webb county commissioners after investigating bribery related to federal prison contacts.

Another indictment released Tuesday accuses state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. of profiting from his public office by accepting honoraria from prison management companies. Guerra announced his intention to investigate Lucio's prison consulting early last year.

Lucio's attorney, Michael Cowen, released a scathing statement accusing Guerra of settling political scores in his final weeks in office.

"Senator Lucio is completely innocent and has done nothing wrong," Cowen said, adding that he would file a motion to quash the indictment this week.

Last month, a Willacy County grand jury indicted The GEO Group, a Florida private prison company, on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release. The three-count indictment alleged The GEO Group allowed other inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks. The death happened in 2001 at the Raymondville facility, just four days before de la Rosa's scheduled release.

In 2006, a jury ordered the company to pay de la Rosa's family $47.5 million in a civil judgment. The Cheney-Gonzales indictment makes reference to the de la Rosa case.

None of the indictments released Tuesday had been signed by Presiding Judge Manuel Banales of the Fifth Administrative Judicial Region.

A second batch of indictments targeted public officials connected to Guerra's own legal battles.

Willacy County Clerk Gilbert Lozano, District judges Janet Leal and Migdalia Lopez, and special prosecutors Mervyn Mosbacker Jr. — a former U.S. attorney — and Gustavo Garza — a long-time political opponent of Guerra — were all indicted on charges of official abuse of official capacity and official oppression.

Garza, the only one who could be immediately reached Tuesday, called it a sad state of affairs.
"I feel sorry for all of the good people this unprofessional prosecutor has maligned," Garza said. "I'm not at all concerned about the accusations he has trumped up."

Lozano said in a story for Wednesday's edition of the Valley Morning Star that he wasn't surprised by the indictments.

"Guerra had made comments that he was going out (of office), but that he was going to take several officials with him," Lozano said. "I know that he has made comments that I am in his hit list."

Banales dismissed indictments against Guerra last month that charged him with extorting money from a bail bond company and using his office for personal business. An appeals court had earlier ruled that Garza was improperly appointed as special prosecutor to investigate Guerra.

After Guerra's office was raided as part of the investigation early last year, he camped outside the courthouse in a borrowed camper with a horse, three goats and a rooster. He threatened to dismiss hundreds of cases because he believed local law enforcement had aided the investigation against him.

On Tuesday, Guerra said the indictments speak for themselves. He said the prison-related charges are a national issue and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury. Asked about the indictments against local players in the justice system who had pursued him, Guerra said, "the grand jury is the one that made those decisions, not me."

See article...

It's about muthafuckin' time! But we must not stop there. The entire Bush Administration should be handed over to The Hague for war crimes trials. They need to receive justice the likes of which the world has never seen in order to ensure that we don't see anything like this again in our lifetimes.

“I believe that we will deeply regret this stampede to pass this legislation and the way in which we have taken all the human rights, religious freedom, right to organize, all of those concerns and we just put them in parenthesis, put them in brackets, as if they don't exist,” - Paul Wellstone

JOIN THE IMPACT: PROTEST FOR LGBTQ RIGHTS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15!

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." - Thomas Jefferson

WHAT IS THE IMPACT?

Last Tuesday night was a bitter-sweet celebration. We came together to witness the first black man who will become our president, yet watched in sadness as Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, and California all voted down equal rights for all citizens.This is not a four-state issue. This is an issue of equality across America. Stand up and make your voice heard! Visit the main www.jointheimpact.com to learn more, or read our mission statement.

The San Diego protest will take place at 6th Ave. and Upas St. in Bankers Hill/Balboa Park at 10:00 AM on Saturday, November 15.

Contact: sarabrooks@gmail.com or go to: http://protest8sandiego.wordpress.com/ for more information.

Find your city's protest...

"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them." - Paul Wellstone

The Hague for Dick Cheney?

By Scott Horton

Gene Burns is one of the nation’s most popular talk radio hosts. For years he has dismissed accounts of torture; America, he has said, does not torture. But last night, after watching Torturing Democracy and realizing that he had not understood how important and serious an issue torture had become, Burns abruptly changed his tune.

Here’s a transcript of his remarks.

I now believe that some international human rights organization ought to open an investigation of the Bush Administration, I think focused on Vice President Dick Cheney, and attempt to bring charges against Cheney in the international court of justice at The Hague, for war crimes. Based on the manner in which we have treated prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and the manner in which we have engaged in illegal rendition–that is, surreptitiously kidnapping prisoners and flying them to foreign countries where they could be tortured by foreign agents who do not follow the same civilized standards to which we subscribe.

I’ve always said that I’ve thought that even at Guantánamo Bay the United States was careful to stay on this side of torture. In fact, you may recall that on a couple of occasions we got into a spirited debate on this program about waterboarding, and whether waterboarding was torture. And I took the position that it was not torture, that it was simulated drowning, and that if that produced information which preserved our national security, I thought it was permissible.

And then I saw Torturing Democracy.

And I’m afraid, now that I have seen what I have seen, that I was wrong about that. It looks to me, based on this documentary, as if in fact we have engaged in behavior and practices at Guantánamo Bay, and in these illegal renditions, that are violations of the international human rights code.

And I believe that Dick Cheney is responsible. I believe that he was the agent of the United States government charged with developing the methodology used at Guantánamo Bay, supervising it for the administration, and indulging in practices which are in fact violations of human rights.

A large part of the population still credits the Bush Administration’s absurd claim that it never embraced or applied torture to detainees as a matter of policy. Two recent documentaries, Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (for which I was both a consultant and interviewee) and Sherry Jones’s PBS feature Torturing Democracy investigate the administration’s policies and conduct. Both draw from decision-makers inside the administration and soldiers on the frontline.

The administration did its best to spike both films. Taxi was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, but with Discovery Communications then in the process of going public and facing sensitive SEC clearances, executives apparently decided not to risk provoking the anger of the White House. As I reported elsewhere, PBS also found that it had no network space for Torturing Democracy until January 20, 2009—the day the Bush Administration decamps from Washington.

Why was the administration so concerned about these two films? The conversion of Gene Burns supplies the answer. No one who sits through these films, I believe, will be able afterwards to accept the official version of events. George Bush has good reason to be afraid of too many Americans watching these documentaries.

See article...

It's too late for impeachment, but not to arrange the arrest of Cheney and the rest of the gang on 1/20/09, seize their assets, and hand them over to the Hague for War Crimes while we figure out how to give them a fair trial here for treason and High Crimes.

“Commercial ties and trying to sort of make all the profit that we can make has trumped all concern for human rights. And that's not what our country is about.” - Paul Wellstone

Bush has two regrets; 23/6 provides the other 37...

Wish I'd been a little more awesome.

In an interview on Veterans Day, President Bush was asked to reflect on his regrets over his two terms in office. Bush said he regrets, "saying some things I shouldn't have said," like "dead or alive" and "bring em on." Bush also said he wishes he hadn't spoken in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq in 2003.

Okay, that's two! Looks like he needs help with the others, so we threw together a brief list of some (thirty-seven) of the things Bush should probably be regretting right about now.

A Quick List Of Stuff George Bush Should Regret (Off The Tops Of Our Heads):

1. His existence
2. His decision to go into politics
3. Not learning how to better run oil companies so he wouldn't have to go into politics
4. His decision to run for president
5. His decision to run for a second term as president
6. Every word spoken into a microphone since January 20th, 2001
7. That time in 2001 when he shouted at Dick Cheney, "You know what, screw it. You run the country if you're so smart!"
8. Ignoring the way Alberto Gonzales was always saying, "Geneva Convention, Schmeneva Schmonvention!"
9. Those times when he let Donald Rumsfeld make decisions
10. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative. Not cool!
11. That time when he said "Osama, Saddam. What's the damn difference?"
12. Letting the country fall into economic ruin
13. Not getting Scooter Libby to take the fall for some more stuff
14. That "wait for this to blow over" position on Katrina
15. Not learning how to keep from smirking while addressing the nation about certain issues, such as Katrina
16. Not figuring out how to control the weather to keep Katrina from happening
17. Not giving more people hilarious nicknames, like "Turd Blossom"
18. That "Iraq" kerfluffle
19. Not giving more speeches in front of banners that read, "Danger: Under Construction" or "Not Finished" or "This Mission is going to take at least six or seven years, if we're lucky!"
20. Saying, "all right Harriet, you've talked me into it."
21. Never really savoring the good moments.
22. Giving up alcohol
23. Giving up coke
24. Going back on coke
25. Giving it up again
26. Betting Cheney $1,000 they'd lose in 2004
27. Not getting to know Terri Schiavo better
28. Not constantly losing wars
29. Beating Dad's "years in office" record.
30. Thinking, what the heck, it's just a pretzel
31. Not flipping the bird more often at Cindy Sheehan from behind the tinted windows of his passing limo
32. Not taking it as a bad sign that Karl Rove has a forked tongue
33. Responding to a report titled "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside The United States" by repeating the title in a mocking, high-pitched voice that made Cheney laugh real hard
34. Not saying, "Brownie, we should sit down for a performance review in the next week or so"
35. Not calling it, "No Super-Gifted Child Left Behind"
36. Those twenty or twenty-five times when he should have offered his resignation but decided to "wait it out"
37. Not doing more to avoid the inevitable indictments sure to come next February once they start finding out about "the real bad stuff"

Did we miss any? Add your own to the comments section!

See article...

Lol!

"Congratulations, you have a sense of humor. And to those who didn't: Go stick your head in the mud." - Jesse Ventura

Begich ahead of Stevens in Alaska Senate Race

Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Democratic opponent Mark Begich are neck-and-neck for Stevens' seat as Alaska continues counting absentee and early ballots not counted on Election Day.

On November 4, Stevens led by about 3,000 votes against Begich, the current mayor of Anchorage. The state's Division of Elections, reports the Anchorage Daily News, has counted about 43,000 absentee ballots on Wednesday, with 35,000 more expected in the next week. As of Wednesday evening, Begich was in the lead by three votes, with 125,019 against Stevens' 125,016.

Whether 84-year-old Stevens keeps his seat for long if he prevails is unclear.

On October 27, he was convicted of seven federal felony counts for false statements made on financial disclosure forms between 1999 and 2006 to conceal over $250,000 worth of gifts and services from Alaska oil services contractor VECO, including a remodel of one of his houses.

Regardless of the appeals process, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said on November 1, Stevens will face an ethics investigation followed by his ejection from the Senate, where he has served since 1968.

"I'd be interested to know who the Republican Party leadership is rooting for," the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday night, citing a "taint of corruption."

"I don't think they want Ted Stevens to come back," he said. "I think they want a clean break with the last eight years...and they would almost rather--I don't say they would rather--but I think it is a debate whether they want Senator Stevens back or not."

See article and video...

Hard to believe that a man who was just convicted on seven felonies would even still be running let alone being neck and neck with his opponent. There are two things I think of when I think of soon-to-be-former Senator Ted Stevens:

1. When he rabidly barked at a Democratic colleague during an ethics trial that she was out of order for wanting oil execs to testify under oath, and 2....

Update 11/13/2008:

• Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens now losing by 814 votes; Franken-Coleman recount to last for another month

“If we go to witnesses, it will be a spectacle,” - Paul Wellstone

Mormons Resigning Despite Strong Heritage, Citing 'Hatred' by LDS Church

by Andrew Callahan
Wed Nov 12, 2008 at 09:06:59 AM PST

Mormons continued to register their resignations with, and post resignation letters to Signing for Something this week, citing "hatred" and "discrimination" among their chief reasons for quitting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These resignations come among the continuing backlash against the Mormon Church's involvement in passing California's Proposition 8 last week to take away the right of civil marriage for gays and lesbians.

Excepts of a few recent letters are posted here, with links to the full letters.

I am a gay man who, after serving a [Mormon] mission to the Netherlands, left the mormon church (although not officially) as they have no place for me. I’ve always felt that I didn’t need to upset my family or make waves by requesting that my name be removed from the records. After all, I didn’t recognize the church’s authority anymore so what was the point?

Andrew Callahan's diary

Since the LDS church has decided to VERY PUBLICLY extend their hatred beyond their realm I’ve decided that the time has come to make my voice heard, too. I resigned membership recently as has one of my friends from California who was recently married to his partner of 28 years. See complete letter here:

http://signingforsomething.org/...

But now I see that there isn’t a community or a place for me. There’s not a place for the people I love. The Church is not a place for anybody who believes in equal rights and the Constitution of the United States of America. The Church is not pro-marriage, it is anti-gay. The leadership fights for bigotry and hate. The God I grew up with was perfect in His Love and Justice. Shame on the men who act so disgracefully in His name. See complete letter here:

http://signingforsomething.org/...

The ABC TV station in Salt Lake City did a news story:

Entire families are resigning:

As a member of the LDS church I was always taught to love one another and to treat everyone with a certain amount of respect. The position the church took on this particular issue went against everything I learned from the church. Not only was the church’s position discriminatory, but it was also hateful.

I found it extremely strange that it took the church 14 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act to allow black members to hold the priesthood. I just excused this inaction as a mistake, but now as I see history repeat itself I realize that it wasn’t a mistake and the Mormon Church will always discriminate.

My whole family has been traumatized by the church’s efforts and will be sending in letters of resignations. See the complete letter here: http://signingforsomething.org/...

Emotions run deep.

For 45 years I served in every calling I was asked, in leadership, in service, in every capacity. I did it because I knew I was serving my Heavenly Father, a loving God. I continue to serve him and in doing so, I am resigning from this organization that I believe to be corrupt from the egos of mere men, that has strayed so far from its’ original mission to serve God and His people. See the complete letter here:

http://signingforsomething.org/...

Resigning despite deep roots and strong ties:

I served an honorable and successful mission for the Church, and I am well aware of what is at stake. Though I will never forget–and do not regret–that experience, I cannot in good conscience remain a member of the Church.

I do not take this step lightly. My family connection with the Church is old and deep: my forebears were among the first handcart pioneers, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley in September of 1856. They endured much hardship for what they believed to be a just and righteous cause, and I am proud of that heritage. It is now time for me to honor their memory and take a stand for what I myself believe to be right.

The Church’s involvement in the effort to rescind a basic Constitutional right from California citizens is shameful and misguided. These are people whose desire to marry would only strengthen that civil institution, and would benefit and further family stability. And the campaign to deny them this right was a campaign of fear and lies, for which The Church should feel the deepest shame.

In offering their imprimatur to a mendacious, divisive, and unworthy political cause, Church leaders have, it seems to me, gone against both the spirit and the letter of Scripture, to wit:

"We believe that religion is instituted of God; and that men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others;" See complete letter here:

http://signingforsomething.org/...

Even some not resigning are suffering abuse from family members:

I believe in the rights of all people, that two homosexual people who love and want to be with each other should have the right to do so. I believe that this right should be granted unto all people . . . .Every day as I drove to and from school I would pass by a major intersection where members of my church took turns holding signs promoting Prop 8 and telling fellow supporters to honk in agreement.

. . . One day I came home and my brother was at our home visiting with his children. He bluntly asked me if I had honked or not. I was startled by his accusing tone and told him I had not. His eyes took on a blind rage as he demanded the reason to why I hadn’t honked. I lied and told him my horn wasn’t working but he didn’t buy it. He told me with a vinomous voice, "that is the stupidest and worst excuse i’ve ever heard." It was difficult for me to hold my tongue as he continued to harrass me, but soon I simply left the room telling him I had homework to do. At this point I knew that my true political beliefs could never be revealed to my family. . . . I will not resign from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because I truly do love my religion, but that does not mean that I am willing to go against everything I know to be right just because our prophet has told me to. I think the church has no right to assume the inner thinkings of its members and take such an open stand of any political issue. . . . I love God, I love ALL people, I try to live the way God wants me to, I pray, I repent, I read the scriptures, I go to church.

I WILL NOT BE TOLD WHAT TO BELIEVE! So here I am, going against the church i’ve stood up for so many times, and for what? for the rights of the people, our people, we as the people. So sorry Bretheren, I love you, but I will not at this time stand by you as you attempt to make me your soldier of a war I don’t wish to fight. . . . I WILL STAND FOR WHAT I BELIEVE IN! Whether you will stand by me or stand against me, I WILL PREVAIL! And as my sunday school teachers have always taught me, "if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for everything." This is me standing, this is me choosing a side, and this is me telling all people that I WILL NOT STAY SILENT!

See the entire letter here: http://signingforsomething.org/...

See article and video...

Wow.

“The future will not belong to those who sit on the sidelines. Thefuture will not belong to the cynics. The future belongs to those whobelieve in the beauty of their dreams.” - Paul Wellstone

Idaho Students Chant 'ASSASSINATE OBAMA!'

Madison County, Idaho was once dubbed "the reddest place in America" by Salon, but that didn't make it any less shocking when elementary school children started chanting "assassinate Obama on the school bus.

Matthew Whoolery told KIKD News he found out about the chanting from his second and third graders, who had no idea what the word "assassinate" meant.

"They just hadn't heard anything like this before," Whoolery stated. "I think the thing that struck us was just like, 'Where did they get the word and why would they put that word and that person together?'"

Whoolery, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Rexburg, is not an Obama supporter, but he was shocked that any public official would be threatened in that way. "I don't think that the majority of people in Rexburg have extreme ideas like that, but we were just surprised that it would go that far," Whoolery told KIKD.

The Madison County School District has sent out an email saying that students are to be told this sort of behavior is unacceptable.

According to an article which appeared in Salon in 2006, "You've heard of Jesusland, but Rexburg, Idaho, is something more. It's not just a small town in rural Eastern Idaho. It's a small town in rural Eastern Idaho completely dominated by a fast-growing Mormon college, Brigham Young University-Idaho."

"Through this conservative convergence," the article continues, "Rexburg and surrounding Madison County may well be the rosiest place in all of red America. Need numbers to prove it? In the 2004 presidential election, 93 percent of Madison County's votes went to George W. Bush or minor-party conservative candidates -- arguably the reddest result of any county in the entire country."

The population of Madison County is not only heavily Republican but also 97.7% white. One of Rexburg's lone Democrats, a professor at the university, told Salon that "she remembers the time when a group of classmates followed her third-grader home, shouting out 'baby-killer' all along the way. She took it up with the teacher, who didn't seem to mind."

The full KIDK story can be read here.

Here's the statment that grabbed my attention:

"I think the thing that struck us was just like, 'Where did they get the word and why would they put that word and that person together?'"

Uh, they heard it from their parents. They heard it from adults. They heard it from other kids.

Elementary school kids chanting to assassinate the President. What a world.

There's a shocking double standard to how death threats against politicians are treated in this country based on whether the person being threatened is a republican or not.

Don't think no one noticed that Colorado’s U.S. Attorney, Troy Eid, had so easily dismissed conspiracy charges against the three white-supremacist tweakers who were caught planning to assassinate Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August.

As it turns out, those suspicions were fully warranted. Based on the evidence, the FBI believed there was probable cause to charge the men with conspiracy to kill Senator Obama. However, US Attorney Troy Eid, a Karl Rove appointee, said there was insufficient evidence to indicate a true threat, plot or conspiracy against the senator.

The language used by Eid in dismissing the gravity of the case was because they were "more aspirational, perhaps, than operational." But, when it was the Liberty Seven - a group of black, Muslim men who were also described by the FBI as "aspirational rather than operational," there was no hesitation by the Justice Department in bringing charges.

Another item of note is when a black man in prison sent a threatening letter containing baby powder to John McCain, Troy Eid brought down the full force of the law, complete with press conferences and public declarations that "We won't stand for threats of this kind in Colorado."

But when it’s a group of white men with rifles, disguises, and all the calling cards of a conspiracy – as well as open admissions to it – Troy Eid isn’t worried. After all, they're just a bunch of harmless, tweakers, right? Just like Timothy McVeigh.

But then again, when you’re a Karl Rove operative promoted to deliver justice the Republican way, as Troy Eid is, that’s the way the scales fall. His failure to take this matter seriously is itself a serious matter. When law-enforcement officials let this stuff slip by, they send a dangerous message to other would-be plotters out there. And next time, they may in fact be a little older and a lot more competent.

Related:

• Why Is the National Press Ignoring Small-Town Racism?
• Student Convicted in Plot to Assassinate President Bush
• Letters threatening Obama sent to Florida offices
• Official Republican website sold "waterboard Obama" swag
• Racist Republican Party mailing depicts Obama surrounded by KFC, watermelon, and food stamps

“This is one big, huge gigantic leap sideways, or backward.” - Paul Wellstone

The Mystery Man Behind Prop H8

Who is funding California’s Prop 8, the country’s most controversial ballot measure? The Mormons’ donations are well known, and are a source of outrage among the church’s more moderate elements. But little attention has been focused on two of the proposition’s biggest individual donors: Elsa Broekhuizen, the mother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., the reclusive theocratic millionaire who inherited $300 million from his famous father at age 18.

When I profiled Ahmanson in a 2004 article for Salon.com, I became the first journalist in 20 years to interview him. Yesterday I resurrected my reporting for The Daily Beast, updating it to cover Ahmanson’s recent machinations, particularly his role in Prop 8. As I wrote, Ahmanson few Americans have heard of Ahmanson — and that’s the way he likes it. His extreme politics and eccentric personality reveal the draconian underside of a ballot measure billed by its proponents as “pro-family.”

During a 1985 interview with the Orange County Register, Ahmanson summarized his political agenda: “My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.”

Though Ahmanson’s rhetoric has softened over the years, his politics are derived from the radical Christian Reconstructionist theology of R.J. Rushdoony, a far-right theologian who advocated replacing the US Constitution with biblical law. “God’s government prevails,” Rushdoony wrote, “and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Those eligible on Rushdoony’s long list for execution included diso