Sounds like a job for the Crank Police, but hey, a story about

W. sexually assaulting a black woman?

This is a job for TCS!

- jer 10:35 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Steve Martin on the WMDs

It All Depends on What You Mean by 'Have'

Let me try and clear it up for you. I think what you were trying to say was, "At any time, did anyone in Iraq think about, wish for, dream of, or search the Internet for weapons of mass destruction?"

Of course they did have. Come on, Iraq is just one big salt flat and no dictator can look out on his vast desert and not imagine an A-test going on. And let's face it, it really doesn't matter if they had them or not, because they hate us like a lassoed shorthorn heifer hates bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

- rob 8:18 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Bush Team Kept Airing Iraq Allegation

Officials Made Uranium Assertions Before and After President's Speech

This is just one lie of hundreds. This time it is really really really obvious he lied. When the press start covering the really really obvious lies then the ball will really start rolling.

- rob 1:04 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Advice for young parents

When your young child swallows some poison call the poison control immediately, do not induce vomiting unless they say it is okay. If they do say it is okay and you don't have any ipecac syrup handy, show them a picture of this:



Vomiting should occur immediately.

Yes, that is real, you can buy it at KBToys. Maybe as a gag gift?

- rob 12:56 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Good News

Bush Approval Slips in Pew Poll

Why does Bush fight against the Truth, because the truth hurts him. The truth is slowly getting out, and Bush is hurting because of it.

- rob 12:43 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

To be an Oil Man is to be untouchable.

Immunity for Iraqi Oil Dealings Raises Alarm

An executive order signed by President Bush more than two months ago is raising concerns that U.S. oil companies may have been handed blanket immunity from lawsuits and criminal prosecution in connection with the sale of Iraqi oil.

The Bush administration said Wednesday that the immunity wouldn't be nearly so broad.

But lawyers for various advocacy organizations said the two-page executive order seemed to completely shield oil companies from liability — even if it could be proved that they had committed human rights violations, bribed officials or caused great environmental damage in the course of their Iraqi-related business.

"As written, the executive order appears to cancel the rule of law for the oil industry or anyone else who gets possession or control of Iraqi oil or anything of value related to Iraqi oil," said Tom Devine, legal director for the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers.

Why not make it so they can't be sued, I mean as it is you can hire rapists who force people to work for the oil company as slaves, and the administration will try to stop you from suing anyway. This just makes it more simple. You think hire rapists and forced labor is harsh, but Ashcroft seems cool with it:

Ashcroft's Justice, Burma's Crimes, and Bork's Revenge

So it must be okay, since Ashcroft is a good Christian.

- rob 12:31 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Thanks to MoveOn.org.

Rep. Brown of Ohio:

Mr. Speaker, I will not consume the entire 50 minutes.
Many Members of Congress are receiving hundreds of letters each and aggregately tens of thousands of letters questioning this Congress' refusal to get to the bottom of the misinformation campaign on Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have signed an on-line petition which states that Congress should support an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration's distortion of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Unfortunately, the leadership in this House, the Republican leadership in this body, has refused to allow serious debate on this misinformation campaign, has refused to appoint an independent commission, has refused even to hold congressional hearings on what did the President tell the American people, were the reasons that he stated to the American people justifiable, were they truthful, and/or were they misleading to the American public and as reasons given for the attack on Iraq.

As I think about it, I look at American history and I think of another time when Members of Congress were not given the opportunity to debate a major national issue that affected national security, that affected the way of life of so many Americans, that affected issues of justice. Think back to more than 150 years ago when John Quincy Adams, a former president who came back to this body after he was President, and in those days, in the 1830s and 1840s, this Congress, with a very conservative leadership, actually passed a rule to prohibit the discussion or the debate of the issue of slavery in the House of Representatives. So in the halls of Congress, slavery, one of the great shames of this country, slavery was not even allowed to be discussed on the floor because of the ruling of the legislative leadership in those days.

Today, Members of Congress have been precluded in any kind of legislative vehicle, any kind of investigation from debating this issue of the administration's distortion of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps the President did nothing wrong, perhaps he did, but we have not really been able to debate that here.

So what John Quincy Adams did in the 1830s and 1840s was collect letters from his constituents, he called them petitions, and he read those petitions, those letters on the House floor. In other words, he let the people of the United States speak for themselves, using his voice. He was the megaphone to allow them to speak.

Many Members of Congress the last two nights, and we will continue in the nights ahead, are doing the same thing. They are taking many of these letters that we have received, people who have signed a petition saying Congress should support an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration's distortion of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, and simply read those letters and allowed people to speak directly. It really is a night, as it was last night and the night before, for the people to take over the People's House, and Members of Congress, who are elected by 630,000 people, as all of us are, simply the mouthpiece for these constituents.

- rob 12:09 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

The Bush Motto: You Tell the Truth, You Pay the Price

Iraq Arms Critic Reacts to Report on Wife

Eventually the streets of Washington, D.C. will be awashed in blood and Fox News will report their were traffic problems, and all the experts will talk about a celbrity scandal.

- rob 12:06 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Intelligence shouldn't exist just to serve policy

An ex-CIA analyst describes how the Bush Administration reached the conclusion first and demanded the intelligence second.

It does not speak well for a director of Central Intelligence to shy away from serving up the intelligence communitys best estimate anyway (''without fear or favor,'' the way we used to operate). But better no NIE, I suppose, than one served up to suit the preconceived notions of policymakers. But the pressure became intense late last summer after the Bush administration decided to make war.

The marketing rollout for the war was keynoted by the vice president, who in a shrill speech on Aug. 26 charged, ''Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.'' An NIE was then ordered up, essentially to support the extreme judgments voiced by Cheney, and its various drafts were used effectively to frighten members of Congress into voting to authorize war.

- rob 1:58 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Voice of free Iraq walks out on US

Some damn penny pincher in the Bush Administration doesn't realize that hards and mind via cheap good press saves millions upon millions of dollars military spending (not to count maybe even a life or two).

Last April Mr Rikabi, who had been head-hunted by the Americans, announced the overthrow of the Iraqi regime from a tent near Baghdad airport. Many Iraqis still recall his exact words: "Welcome to the new Iraq. Welcome to an Iraq without Saddam, Uday or Qusay."

He then helped to recruit a team of journalists that started TV transmissions lasting up to 16 hours a day. But the channel was dogged by a lack of money and resources.

The station was provided with only three studio cameras and five portable cameras, Mr Rikabi said. For the five portable cameras, they were allowed only 10 rechargeable batteries lasting 15 minutes each.

The best-paid journalist got a salary of $120 a month, compared with the minimum of $500 a month paid by other Arab networks, he added.

There was also a clothing allowance for newsreaders, but only to clothe the visible top half of their bodies.

Stephen Claypole, who was a public affairs adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, said: "It's very typical of everything the Americans get involved in. They announce large budgets and the money is never released."

- rob 1:56 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

The Bush Administration on WMD

List O' Lies

- rob 1:54 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Al Gore speaks out

Al Gore winner of the popular vote of the country and Florida in 2000 speaks out (This is the full speech, making one really long scroll):

Former Vice President Al Gore
Remarks to MoveOn.org
New York University
August 7, 2003

-AS PREPARED-

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank you for your investment of time and energy in gathering here today. I would especially like to thank Moveon.org for sponsoring this event, and the NYU College Democrats for co-sponsoring the speech and for hosting us.

Some of you may remember that my last formal public address on these topics was delivered in San Francisco, a little less than a year ago, when I argued that the President's case for urgent, unilateral, pre-emptive war in Iraq was less than convincing and needed to be challenged more effectively by the Congress.

In light of developments since then, you might assume that my purpose today is to revisit the manner in which we were led into war. To some extent, that will be the case - but only as part of a larger theme that I feel should now be explored on an urgent basis.

The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me -- not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.

Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.

The way we went to war in Iraq illustrates this larger problem. Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn't really happen with this war -- not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons that we didn't have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how these false impressions got into the public's mind, it might be healthy to take a hard look at the ones we now know were wrong and clear the air so that we can better see exactly where we are now and what changes might need to be made.

In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:

(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.

(2) Saddam was working closely with Osama Bin Laden and was actively supporting members of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, giving them weapons and money and bases and training, so launching a war against Iraq would be a good way to stop Al Qaeda from attacking us again.

(3) Saddam was about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs that he had made into weapons which they could use to kill millions of Americans. Therefore common sense alone dictated that we should send our military into Iraq in order to protect our loved ones and ourselves against a grave threat.

(4) Saddam was on the verge of building nuclear bombs and giving them to the terrorists. And since the only thing preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal was access to enriched uranium, once our spies found out that he had bought the enrichment technology he needed and was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa, we had very little time left. Therefore it seemed imperative during last Fall's election campaign to set aside less urgent issues like the economy and instead focus on the congressional resolution approving war against Iraq.

(5) Our GI's would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and Representative Democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.

(6) Even though the rest of the world was mostly opposed to the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and then contribute lots of money and soldiers to help out, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US taxpayers would get stuck with a huge bill.

Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong.

For example, according to the just-released Congressional investigation, Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of Sept. 11. Therefore, whatever other goals it served -- and it did serve some other goals -- the decision to invade Iraq made no sense as a way of exacting revenge for 9/11. To the contrary, the US pulled significant intelligence resources out of Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to get ready for the rushed invasion of Iraq and that disrupted the search for Osama at a critical time. And the indifference we showed to the rest of the world's opinion in the process undermined the global cooperation we need to win the war against terrorism.

In the same way, the evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama Bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction. So our invasion of Iraq had no effect on Al Qaeda, other than to boost their recruiting efforts.

And on the nuclear issue of course, it turned out that those documents were actually forged by somebody -- though we don't know who.

As for the cheering Iraqi crowds we anticipated, unfortunately, that didn't pan out either, so now our troops are in an ugly and dangerous situation.

Moreover, the rest of the world certainly isn't jumping in to help out very much the way we expected, so US taxpayers are now having to spend a billion dollars a week.

In other words, when you put it all together, it was just one mistaken impression after another. Lots of them.

And it's not just in foreign policy. The same thing has been happening in economic policy, where we've also got another huge and threatening mess on our hands. I'm convinced that one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including:

(1) The tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs.

(2) We wouldn't have to worry about a return to big budget deficits -- because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue.

(3) Most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families, not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed.

Unfortunately, here too, every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs -- net losses for three years in a row. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression. As I've noted before, I was the first one laid off.

And it turns out that most of the benefits actually are going to the highest income Americans, who unfortunately are the least likely group to spend money in ways that create jobs during times when the economy is weak and unemployment is rising.

And of course the budget deficits are already the biggest ever - with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we've had bigger ones -- but these are by far the most dangerous we've ever had for two reasons: first, they're not temporary; they're structural and long-term; second, they are going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby-boomer retirement surge starts.

Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."

Ominously, the capital markets have just pushed U.S. long-term mortgage rates higher soon after the Federal Reserve Board once again reduced discount rates. Monetary policy loses some of its potency when fiscal policy comes unglued. And after three years of rate cuts in a row, Alan Greenspan and his colleagues simply don't have much room left for further reductions.

This situation is particularly dangerous right now for several reasons: first because home-buying fueled by low rates (along with car-buying, also a rate-sensitive industry) have been just about the only reliable engines pulling the economy forward; second, because so many Americans now have Variable Rate Mortgages; and third, because average personal debt is now at an all-time high -- a lot of Americans are living on the edge.

It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes -- and the die -- were cast.

Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good choices about our future, maybe it is time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time.

At first, I thought maybe the President's advisers were a big part of the problem. Last fall, in a speech on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, I called on the President to get rid of his whole economic team and pick a new group. And a few weeks later, damned if he didn't do just that - and at least one of the new advisers had written eloquently about the very problems in the Bush economic policy that I was calling upon the President to fix.

But now, a year later, we still have the same bad economic policies and the problems have, if anything, gotten worse. So obviously I was wrong: changing all the president's advisers didn't work as a way of changing the policy.

I remembered all that last month when everybody was looking for who ought to be held responsible for the false statements in the President's State of the Union Address. And I've just about concluded that the real problem may be the President himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one.

But whether you agree with that conclusion or not, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican -- or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump -- you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn't working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.

Earlier, I mentioned the feeling many have that something basic has gone wrong. Whatever it is, I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future -- allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.

That last point is worth highlighting. Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem -- the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.

Americans have always believed that we the people have a right to know the truth and that the truth will set us free. The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth -- and a shared respect for the Rule of Reason as the best way to establish the truth.

The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other's agendas.

There are at least a couple of problems with this approach:

First, powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who work their way into the inner circle -- with political support or large campaign contributions -- are able to add their own narrow special interests to the list of favored goals without having them weighed against the public interest or subjected to the rule of reason. And the greater the conflict between what they want and what's good for the rest of us, the greater incentive they have to bypass the normal procedures and keep it secret.

That's what happened, for example, when Vice President Cheney invited all of those oil and gas industry executives to meet in secret sessions with him and his staff to put their wish lists into the administration's legislative package in early 2001.

That group wanted to get rid of the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming, of course, and the Administration pulled out of it first thing. The list of people who helped write our nation's new environmental and energy policies is still secret, and the Vice President won't say whether or not his former company, Halliburton, was included. But of course, as practically everybody in the world knows, Halliburton was given a huge open-ended contract to take over and run the Iraqi oil fields-- without having to bid against any other companies.

Secondly, when leaders make up their minds on a policy without ever having to answer hard questions about whether or not it's good or bad for the American people as a whole, they can pretty quickly get into situations where it's really uncomfortable for them to defend what they've done with simple and truthful explanations. That's when they're tempted to fuzz up the facts and create false impressions. And when other facts start to come out that undermine the impression they're trying to maintain, they have a big incentive to try to keep the truth bottled up if -- they can -- or distort it.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, the White House ordered its own EPA to strip important scientific information about the dangers of global warming out of a public report. Instead, the White House substituted information that was partly paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. This week, analysts at the Treasury Department told a reporter that they're now being routinely ordered to change their best analysis of what the consequences of the Bush tax laws are likely to be for the average person.

Here is the pattern that I see: the President's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

For the same reasons they push the impression that government is bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests. And what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth should be left alone, rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.

Perhaps the biggest false impression of all lies in the hidden social objectives of this Administration that are advertised with the phrase "compassionate conservatism" -- which they claim is a new departure with substantive meaning. But in reality, to be compassionate is meaningless, if compassion is limited to the mere awareness of the suffering of others. The test of compassion is action. What the administration offers with one hand is the rhetoric of compassion; what it takes away with the other hand are the financial resources necessary to make compassion something more than an empty and fading impression.

Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.

Whenever both houses of Congress are controlled by the President's party, there is a danger of passivity and a temptation for the legislative branch to abdicate its constitutional role. If the party in question is unusually fierce in demanding ideological uniformity and obedience, then this problem can become even worse and prevent the Congress from properly exercising oversight. Under these circumstances, the majority party in the Congress has a special obligation to the people to permit full Congressional inquiry and oversight rather than to constantly frustrate and prevent it.

Whatever the reasons for the recent failures to hold the President properly accountable, America has a compelling need to quickly breathe new life into our founders' system of checks and balances -- because some extremely important choices about our future are going to be made shortly, and it is imperative that we avoid basing them on more false impressions.

One thing the President could do to facilitate the restoration of checks and balances is to stop blocking reasonable efforts from the Congress to play its rightful role. For example, he could order his appointees to cooperate fully with the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, headed by former Republican Governor Tom Kean. And he should let them examine how the White House handled the warnings that are said to have been given to the President by the intelligence community.

Two years ago yesterday, for example, according to the Wall Street Journal, the President was apparently advised in specific language that Al Qaeda was going to hijack some airplanes to conduct a terrorist strike inside the U.S.

I understand his concern about people knowing exactly what he read in the privacy of the Oval Office, and there is a legitimate reason for treating such memos to the President with care. But that concern has to be balanced against the national interest in improving the way America deals with such information. And the apparently chaotic procedures that were used to handle the forged nuclear documents from Niger certainly show evidence that there is room for improvement in the way the White House is dealing with intelligence memos. Along with other members of the previous administration, I certainly want the commission to have access to any and all documents sent to the White House while we were there that have any bearing on this issue. And President Bush should let the commission see the ones that he read too.

After all, this President has claimed the right for his executive branch to send his assistants into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading. That's been the law ever since the Patriot Act was enacted. If we have to put up with such a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism prevention, surely he can find a way to let this National Commission know how he and his staff handled a highly specific warning of terrorism just 36 days before 9/11.

And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD "Total Information Awareness" program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.

The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American.

But the most urgent need for new oversight of the Executive Branch and the restoration of checks and balances is in the realm of our security, where the Administration is asking that we accept a whole cluster of new myths:

For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was an effort to strike a bargain between states possessing nuclear weapons and all others who had pledged to refrain from developing them. This administration has rejected it and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a new program to build a brand new generation of smaller (and it hopes, more usable) nuclear bombs. In my opinion, this would be true madness -- and the point of no return to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- even as we and our allies are trying to prevent a nuclear testing breakout by North Korea and Iran.

Similarly, the Kyoto treaty is an historic effort to strike a grand bargain between free-market capitalism and the protection of the global environment, now gravely threatened by rapidly accelerating warming of the Earth's atmosphere and the consequent disruption of climate patterns that have persisted throughout the entire history of civilization as we know it. This administration has tried to protect the oil and coal industries from any restrictions at all -- though Kyoto may become legally effective for global relations even without U.S. participation.

Ironically, the principal cause of global warming is our civilization's addiction to burning massive quantities carbon-based fuels, including principally oil -- the most important source of which is the Persian Gulf, where our soldiers have been sent for the second war in a dozen years -- at least partly to ensure our continued access to oil.

We need to face the fact that our dangerous and unsustainable consumption of oil from a highly unstable part of the world is similar in its consequences to all other addictions. As it becomes worse, the consequences get more severe and you have to pay the dealer more.

And by now, it is obvious to most Americans that we have had one too many wars in the Persian Gulf and that we need an urgent effort to develop environmentally sustainable substitutes for fossil fuels and a truly international effort to stabilize the Persian Gulf and rebuild Iraq.

The removal of Saddam from power is a positive accomplishment in its own right for which the President deserves credit, just as he deserves credit for removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. But in the case of Iraq, we have suffered enormous collateral damage because of the manner in which the Administration went about the invasion. And in both cases, the aftermath has been badly mishandled.

The administration is now trying to give the impression that it is in favor of NATO and UN participation in such an effort. But it is not willing to pay the necessary price, which is support of a new UN Resolution and genuine sharing of control inside Iraq.

If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.

And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:

For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

I am proud that my party has candidates for president committed to those values. I admire the effort and skill they are putting into their campaigns. I am not going to join them, but later in the political cycle I will endorse one of them, because I believe that we must stand for a future in which the United States will again be feared only by its enemies; in which our country will again lead the effort to create an international order based on the rule of law; a nation which upholds fundamental rights even for those it believes to be its captured enemies; a nation whose financial house is in order; a nation where the market place is kept healthy by effective government scrutiny; a country which does what is necessary to provide for the health, education, and welfare of our people; a society in which citizens of all faiths enjoy equal standing; a republic once again comfortable that its chief executive knows the limits as well as the powers of the presidency; a nation that places the highest value on facts, not ideology, as the basis for all its great debates and decisions.

- rob 12:47 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Arianna Huffington is in

Arianna is in; Feinstein is out

California, where the fun is. Well, where the mess is really, but its a fun mess if you don't mind the truth that this recall is a huge big freaking mess and California is now the new Florida. Good job GOP.

- rob 2:59 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Excellent Flash piece: Army of One.

- rob 2:48 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Some quick little housekeeping notes:

Thank you to these four blog sites for linking to TCS:

Conservatives Suck, who has been linking to us for just over three days now.

Úr Neanderdalnum , who has been linking to us for 18 plus days. Being an average American, however, I can’t read a single word on that site. But I’m sure it is very interesting, because, I mean, hey, they link to us don’t they?

Fismo.com, whose been linking to us for 113 days and who sometimes (though not often) posts here as well.

And from Japan, we’ve got Pure Land Mountains, who has been linking to us for an amazing 120 days almost as soon as we started.

Okay it isn’t a lot, but I think its cool, I mean, besides fismo I have no idea who these people are (though I think I’d like their politics), and heck I’ve never even met fismo. That’s the internet for you.

Now how’s the money raking in you ask? Well you don’t really, and quite frankly neither do I, but right now we’ve got:

An amazing $14.13 from our Store.
6 grey shirts, 4 white shirts, 4 mousepads, 2 bumper stickers, and one women’s T
I don’t know what the designs were on these items because I’ve changed them around two much.

An outstanding $3.88 from being an Amazon Associate (8 books shipped).

So that's over $18 bucks! What are we going to do with that? I’m starting to have ideas, so stay tuned.

- rob 2:45 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Now it can be revealed: George Bush is really Lex Luthor!



From DC Comics discription of JLA (Justice League of America) #83:

President Luthor has Qurac on his hit list, and heaven help any hero who stands in the way! Now Superman finds himself in a living nightmare as his fellow Leaguers fall one by one to Lex's executive order: support the war or be "neutralized!"

For more detail about this issue, go to Art Imitates Reality a blog posting that has a summary of all the action, including this:

Batman - "We have no intelligence to corroborate your findings."
Wonder Woman - "There's no impending threat."
Superman - "Why can't you just wait until you have more proof, we've lived with this problem for years."

And the best line given to Superman in years, "But I will know the truth, and I will not feel ashamed or be called Un-American for demanding it."

Supes, you're my hero!

- rob 2:11 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Neo-Cons will lie to stop anything they don't like.

Editorial: Robinson ambush / The anatomy of a smear

The Every Voice Network Web site, a liberal Anglican site, reported Tuesday that the alleged inappropriate behavior "occurred when Robinson touched a married man in his 40s on his bicep, shoulder and upper back in the process of a public conversation at a province meeting around two years ago." Oh, please.

The phony accusation that Robinson was linked somehow to porn on the Web was easy to track down. It was a deliberate, calculated lie, apparently held in reserve until the last minute in case the first vote, in the House of Deputies, went against those opposed to Robinson's elevation to bishop -- which it did on Sunday.

The question of whether Robinson should be a bishop is -- and probably will remain for some time -- an issue for the Episcopal Church. But the smear is an issue for the larger community as well, for it demonstrates just how low some people will stoop when honest, reasonable debate is going against them. In fact, it links to the same sort of behavior in the American body politic.
...

The Weekly Standard is important in this. Executive Editor Fred Barnes gave the Robinson story a major boost -- after it was shopped to other news outlets that refused to bite -- when he posted information about the controversy on the magazine's Web site Monday. Barnes asserted that, "Episcopalian bishop-elect Gene Robinson has some curious affiliations," meaning the porn Web site.

No he doesn't, but Barnes does. He's not simply a journalist in this; he's a conservative Episcopalian of outspoken views who sits on the board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. It's a conservative group which believes that mainline Protestant churches "have thrown themselves into multiple, often leftist crusades -- radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, sexual liberation and so forth." The group vigorously opposes gay rights within the church.

Also fascinating is who funds the institute. The most prominent names on the list of contributors are Olin, Scaife and Bradley, the same folks who bankrolled the Clinton wars.

So we come full circle. Gene Robinson, meet Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. But there is a difference: In Clinton's case, years of digging eventually produced evidence of private sexual misbehavior. Robinson appears guilty of nothing at all -- save being a gay man who wants to be a bishop. For some, unfortunately, that is enough to justify all sorts of innuendo and dirty tricks. Be warned: This is the way they play.

- rob 2:04 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Now this is a campaign promise you can get behind:

If elected, I will immediately resign. This action will make Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante the governor of California.

This is the entirety of my platform. I take no position on any issue other than the recall.

www.flemmingforgovernor.org

- rob 1:57 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Got this from Atrios.

In Dowd's column: Neocon Coup at the Department d'État, there's this quote from Wolfowitz:

[Wolfwoitz] told Charlie Rose about his vice-regal trip to Iraq, where he said at last grateful Iraqis were thronging. "As we would drive by, little kids would run up to the road and give us a thumbs up sign," he said. (At least he thought it was the thumb.)

You know what Dowd was getting at, and she was right while being wrong. It was the thumb, and as we can see at this handy Global Business Etiquette page the thumb's up can mean many things:

Thumbs up:
With an outstretched fist, the thumb is extended straight up.

"Thumbs up" as a positive gesture quickly gained popularity in the U.S.A., especially as a visual signal in noisy environments. Pilots unable to shout "All's well!" or "Ready!" over the noise of their engines used it frequently. With a slight backwards tilt, this gesture is used for hitchhiking. However, in most of the Middle East and parts of Africa (notably Nigeria), this symbol can be obscene. It Japan, the thumb is considered the fifth digit; a raised thumb will order five of something!

The emphasis was mine.

- rob 1:39 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Ebay bans Dawson artist's controversial 'cards'

A Yukon artist has been censored by eBay for making fun of the Bush administration.

Dawson City artist John Steins has been ordered off the popular auction Web site for mocking Bush and other U.S. leaders in a series of hand-painted drawings.

Steins' art project is a parody of the "most wanted" deck of playing cards issued in the Iraqi war.

"George Bush is the ace of spades and (U.S. Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld is the queen of spades and so far down the line," Steins says.

Ebay apparently banned the cards after receiving complaints from pro-Bush Americans

So eBay is more frightened by a few raving Bush lovers (and here's some of their fine emails) than by the huge majority of Americans that understand that freedom means that some people will make playing cards of things that you don't like. What kind of American do those raving Bush lovers want? If they got it, would they want to live there? If they go it, would they be allowed to live there?

What's next? Is Peta going to get ebay to stop this guy from selling his Hunting Dog Cards? Or is NOW going to stop this auction of 1965 nude playing cards?

Is ebay going to stop this auction of Bill Clinton and his ladies nesting dolls? I hope not, I think we need more political nesting dolls, that is much more cooler than playing cards. Wouldn't have been cool if every soldier was given a top ten most wanted Iraqis nesting doll! That would have been fun.

- rob 1:35 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Dean's running ads in Texas, now that George is sitting there for a month: http://howarddean.tv/

- rob 5:03 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

It's great when politicians feel free to suddenly tell the truth. A pity that isn't evey day.

TRANSCRIPT: Hollings Not to Seek Re-Election in 2004

"I said no I can tell you this categorically, we've got the weakest president and weakest government in the history of my 50 years of public service. I say weak president in that the poor boy campaigns all the time and pays no attention to what's going on in the Congress. Karl Rove tells him to do this or do that or whatever it is, but he's out campaigning. And I really don't think our friend Mark Sanford likes the job. As a result the state and the country – your state, my state, our country – is headed in the wrong direction with respect to our finances.

"You can see it at the state level. They are firing a thousand teachers.

"And at the national level, we've got Enron accounting galore. The President said two weeks ago on page one of his budget report that we have a $455 billion deficit at the end of next month; that's when the end of the fiscal year terminates. The truth of the matter is, you turn to page 57 of the report and you'll see it's $698 billion.

- rob 2:52 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

The voting machine story is now getting out to the techie mainstream.

Wired News: More Calls to Vet Voting Machines

Within a half-hour of examining the code, Rubin's team found its first red flag. The password was embedded in the source code. "You learn (not to do) that in security 101," said Tadayoshi Kohno, one of the report's co-authors. "The designers didn't follow standard engineering processes."

Other "stunning flaws" Rubin said the team found in Diebold's source code included voter smart cards that could be manipulated to cast more than one vote, software that could be reconfigured by malicious company workers or election officials to alter voters' ballot choices without their knowledge and machines that could be electronically broken into through remote access.

"The people who wrote this code didn't have very good security training," Rubin said. "They didn't use encryption."

and

Wired News: Voting Suit Gains Momentum

Diebold responds to Rubin's report on their website in a pdf titled: Diebold Election Systems exposes flaws found in recent voting system report

It's a pretty flimsy little 2-page piece. I hope it is just a press release and not their full response, as it is very weak.

By the authors' own admission in Section 1.3 of the report, they did not independently verify the current or past use of the code. Subsequently, Diebold Election Systems has determined that the section of the code that Rubin and his colleagues allegedly reviewed represents a very small percentage of the entire code needed to conduct an election. It is unfortunate that no one in the industry nor the election community was involved in their analysis. If all had been included, several points would have been brought to the authors’ attention and Mr. Rubin would not have:

• Limited his research to a very small percentage of the overall computer code required to conduct an election.

Okay, I'm going to interrupt here. Diebold says their system is proprietary, it would not have let him analyze more source code. The only reason Rubin could analyze any was because Diebold was stupid enough to put source code on an unprotected ftp site. Very stupid.

And if you notice that even in a small piece of code that the developers embedded passwords right in the code, looking at more would just increase the horror stories.

Unless of course all the rest of the code was security fixes that somehow took precedence over the code analyzed in the report. Oh, yes, I'm sure that is what is going on. Seriously if a portion of code has egregious security errors, the whole of the code is not, somehow, secure. More of Diebold’s response and my comments:

• Incorrectly run this software on a device on which it was not designed to work, using an operating system under which the software was not designed to run.

Well, next time I’m sure John Hopkins will steal a machine.

• Erroneously attributed weaknesses to the operating system used to test the software as it is not the same operating system used by Diebold Election Systems.

So it was tested on a slightly different version of security prone Windows?

• Failed to realize that election officials at the federal and state levels subjected the entire system to extensive and rigorous tests. This is contrasted with Mr. Rubin, and his team, who spent less than a month analyzing a very small percentage of the overall computer code required to conduct an election.

Hmm…. Election officials at state and federal level who have trouble programming their VCRs ran extensive and rigorous tests, while Mr. Rubin spent a month and found a lot of bugs (on even just a portion of their code at that). Please. Maryland did have a security “expert” group review multiple voting machines and their recommendation was to buy none. Maryland went ahead and threw money away anyway.

• Wrongly asserted that a voter could take a corrupted smart card to a voting booth and cast multiple votes. Mr. Rubin failed to recognize how the voting process actually works. In reality, voting booths are quite open and in clear view of qualified election officials who constantly monitor the voting process. In addition, a count of actual votes cast is compared to the number of people who voted at any one location.

Okay, has Diebold ever seen a polling place in action? A seventy year old volunteer is not “constantly monitoring the voting process.” And if a “qualified election official" (another name for 70 year old volunteer) has a clear view of how you are voting, then they are breaking the law. No one sees what you are doing. That’s the point of secret balloting. True, you probably would be noticed if you opened up the machine and started drilling, but if you put in another card from your pocket? No one would notice that.

Second point. Say if a polling place suddenly realized they had more votes then people who voted at that polling location. What then? Are all votes thrown out? (no paper trail remember) That would be the only way to fix the situation, which would be a great way of limiting the votes of a polling district that leans towards a certain party.

• Failed to recognize that both federal and state election training procedures are designed to ensure the integrity of elections, regardless of the voting technology employed.

That would be the training like in Florida: Most of the problems in Miami-Dade and Broward during the Sept. 10 primary were blamed on lack of county poll worker training, a failure to practice using new voting systems, and poor organization.

"It is not any kind of failure in the technology," Smith said. "It has been a gross failure in training and practice." Of course having a majority of machines not properly boot up in some polling sites might have been considered a failure in the technology. For that piece of 2002 Florida flashback go to: Florida Sends SOS On Elections, and for more detail about the fiasco go to Florida Primary 2002: Back to the Future.

Now back to Diebold:

• Wrongly alleged that anyone can breach the integrity of the ballot despite the fact that unlike a personal computer on which the analysis was based, the voting terminal does not have a standard keyboard or disk drive. This eliminates much of the easy access required to accomplish some of the security breaches alleged in the paper.

• Incorrectly cited Microsoft® Windows® communications weaknesses which have been widely publicized over the past several years. These weaknesses only apply if the voting terminals are connected to the Internet or some other public network. This is never the case. As the terminals are not connected to such a network, there are no opportunities to exploit these weaknesses even if they exist.

Okay, so you won't have easy access, is that a security procedure, "make it inconvenient to circumvent an election?: And “even if they exist” is an amazing statement, are they arguing that MS Windows’ security problems are an urban myth? I think even Bill Gates would be surprised about that. The fact is the system uses a modem. If you get the number they access and the protocol they use, you going to be able to have some fun. I doubt they are using a VPN or even 128 bit encyption. Heck if they did those things and WERE on the internet, they'd probably be more secure then they are now.

- rob 1:45 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Bush is losing some important fans. The CATO Institute has been pretty pro-Bush thus far (weird considering I would think of him as a libertarian nightmare), but they are starting to wake up.

'Conservative' Bush Spends More than 'Liberal' Presidents Clinton, Carter

The new estimates show that, under Bush, total outlays will have risen $408 billion in just three years to $2.272 trillion: an enormous increase in federal spending of 22 percent. Administration officials privately admit that spending is too high. Yet they argue that deficits are appropriate in times of war and recession. So, is it true that the war on terrorism has resulted in an increase in defense spending? Yes. And, is it also true that a slow economy has meant a decreased stream of tax revenues to pay for government? Yes again.

But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively.

Bush is one of those cut taxes and spend types. Does he not understand how credit works?

How else can one explain the administration publishing a glossy report criticizing farm programs and then proceeding to sign a farm bill that expands those same programs? How else can one explain the administration acknowledging that entitlements are going to bankrupt the nation if left unreformed yet pushing the largest historical expansion in Medicare one year before the election? Such blatant political maneuvering can only be described as Clintonian.

But perhaps we are being unfair to former President Clinton. After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush's three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

Sadly, the Bush administration has consistently sacrificed sound policy to the god of political expediency. From farm subsidies to Medicare expansion, purchasing reelection votes has consistently trumped principle. In fact, what we have now is a president who spends like Carter and panders like Clinton. Our only hope is that the exploding deficit will finally cause the administration to get serious about controlling spending.

- rob 1:40 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

More depression.

Afghans on Edge of Chaos

U.S. forces have their hands full trying to subdue attacks in Iraq. But with the slow buildup of a national Afghan army, an inadequate U.S. and coalition presence and poor progress on reconstruction projects, Afghanistan is spiraling out of control and risks becoming a "narco-mafia" state, some humanitarian agencies warn.

Already the signs are there — a boom in opium production, rampant banditry and huge swaths of territory unsafe for Western aid workers. The central government has almost no power over regional warlords who control roads and extort money from truck drivers, choking commerce and trade.

If the country slips into anarchy, it risks becoming a haven for resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. And the point of U.S. military action here could be lost — a major setback in the war against terrorism.
...

U.S. promises of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan raised Afghan expectations, but security and reconstruction woes are undermining support for the coalition among ordinary Afghans. Their disappointment and disillusionment plays into the hands of anti-government militants.

Weird... Bush's lies seems to do well over here. Unless.... Oh, they believed him, didn't they?

- rob 1:33 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Death marches at double in Iraq but US public unaware - War on Iraq

Just to be depressing. Here is a way to be sad, check this site everyday: Defense department Press Releases

- rob 1:01 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Krugman

Everything Is Political

Here's the story: Treasury has an elaborate computer model designed to evaluate who benefits and who loses from any proposed change in tax laws. For example, the model can be used to estimate how much families in the middle of the income distribution will gain from a tax cut, or the share of that tax cut that goes to the top 1 percent of families. In the 1990's the results of such analyses were routinely made public.

But since George W. Bush came into power, the department has suppressed most of that information, releasing only partial, misleading tables. The purpose of this suppression, of course, is to conceal the extent to which Mr. Bush's tax cuts concentrate their bounty on families with very high incomes. In a stinging recent article in Tax Notes, the veteran tax analyst Martin Sullivan writes of the debate over the 2001 cut that 'Treasury's analysis was so embarrassingly poor and so biased, we thought we had seen the last of its kind.' But worse was to come.

For his June 22 interview with Howard Dean, Tim Russert asked the Treasury Department to prepare examples showing how repealing the Bush tax cuts would affect ordinary families. Presumably Mr. Russert thought Treasury would provide a representative selection — that is, like many in the media, he doesn't yet understand the extent to which Treasury has become an arm of the White House political machine.

In any case, the examples Treasury provided to Mr. Russert and others in the media were wildly unrepresentative. To give you a sense: the Treasury's example of a 'lower income' elderly household was one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income. In fact, only about one elderly household in four receives any dividend income, and only one in eight receives as much as $2,000. Not surprisingly, the 'Russert families' gained far more from"

HaHa. A lower income elderly household receives $2,000 a year in dividends?!? Of course, by Snow's thinking that is poverty. That's the money he spent last week on poddle grooming.

- rob 1:00 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

You too can make your state vote Republican for only $55.6 million

Voting Machine Study Divides Md. Officials, Experts (TechNews.com)

For some in Maryland, the report yesterday by Johns Hopkins University computer security experts that electronic voting machines could easily be hacked into set off alarm bells. But for others, including the state officials who recently signed a $55.6 million agreement to put the units in every voting precinct by March, the report is one more example of "technological hysteria."

To quote a faithful Maryland reader (and I will often in this post): Do determinations by Johns Hopkins University, Caltech and MIT constitute "'technological hysteria'"? It is meaningless that Diebold officials assure us that their system is safe. Microsoft officials assure us that Windows is being made safe, yet Windows vunerability problems are escalating daily.

Margaret A. Jurgensen, director of Montgomery County elections, says recent voters loved the new machines.

With regard to the "voters loved the machines" contention, that certainly does not include those registered Democrats at my precinct who in the primary had Republican options come up on the screen, and were told they could vote in the Republican primary or not at all.

The push was championed by then-Secretary of State John T. Willis, who dismissed the Hopkins report as "technological hysteria."

"To say I can duplicate a Smart Card, sure, you can postulate all kinds of things, but there are so many checks and balances," he said. "I have 100 years of election data. If someone would try to monkey around precinct by precinct with the vote results, I'd know."

With regard to the statement of former Secretary of State John T. Willis that "'I have 100 years of election data -- If someone would try to monkey around precinct by precinct with the vote results, I'd know'" I have a question: "So, the election is over, and you see an unusual voting pattern. What now?"

We know what happened in Florida when problems with the voting were discovered in Palm Beach County (butterfly ballots) and Duval County (two-page ballots that I suppose were similar): Nothing. It was determined to be impractical to hold a re-vote. If you carefully read the analysis of the Florida vote in the Washington Post ("Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush -- But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Talley..." by Dan Keating and Dan Balz, November 12, 2001) and add the numbers, it becomes clear that if either Palm Beach County or Duval County had found it praticable to have a revote, Al Gore would be president of the United States today -- by a margin of over 5,000 Florida votes (well over 10,000 votes, maybe 15,000, if both counties voted again). It wouldn't be any more practical to have a revote after electronic voting concerns surface than after butterfly ballot concerns surface.

In 2001, four out of the five members of the technical group that was asked to recommend to the state which electronic voting system to buy instead recommended against buying any at all. The state ignored the advice.

"They didn't take us very seriously then," said Tom Iler, director of Information Technology for Baltimore County who served on the group. "I suppose it's not very surprising that they're not taking this study very seriously now."

And that explains why Bush won Maryland in 2004.

- rob 4:16 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

It's Monday.

The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 120

2. Transportation Security Administration
And here's another great Republican plan that had to be nixed about ten seconds after it was announced. It was revealed last week that recent intelligence reports detail a new plot by terrorists to - you guessed it - hijack airliners and crash them into buildings. Yes, yes - de ja vu, I know. And Our Great Leader just happens to be on vacation again. How convenient! I hope he's not too busy chopping down trees and roasting weiners to read his intelligence briefings this time. But anyway, shortly after this familiar plot was revealed, the Transportation Security Administration was thoroughly embarrassed by MSNBC who reported that despite the new terror warnings, air marshal coverage was being scaled back on international and cross-country flights (yes, the most vulnerable ones) because - get this - they didn't want to pay for the air marshals to stay in hotels. Yes, we're spending $4 billion every month in Iraq, but we can't afford to put up an air marshal in a Super-8. Priorities, priorities. Obviously, once this was made public, the red-faced TSA had to flip-flop and announce that despite a $900 million budget hole (thanks George) they wouldn't be cutting back air marshals after all - of course not, don't be silly, why, that would be thoroughly irresponsible! Well, quite.

- rob 4:08 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

US anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban

Okay... why isn't this being covered by an American paper?

- rob 4:02 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

‘They’ll Say Anything’

Last week I had some of an interview with Clark, but this week is Dean's week as he's on the cover of Newsweek and Time. Here's some of the Newsweek interview (a Dean/Clark ticket sounds really good).

People who visit your home region might wonder why there has been so little economic development in Vermont versus New Hampshire.
Well, we have a much lower unemployment rate than the national average. We’re either seventh or ninth in high-tech jobs. If you want to build shopping centers, of course, New Hampshire’s going to be ahead of Vermont because they have no sales tax and we do.
...

You say the president has broken promises. Which ones?
His environmental record is widely understood to be probably the worst in most people’s lives. His promise to create jobs—he lost jobs not created them. His promise of tax cuts in the middle class—most people’s middle-class taxes went up because their property taxes increased. His promise that he would make the next generation more financially secure. It certainly was the opposite of that. He’s massed trillions of dollars’ worth of debt. The list goes on forever.

- rob 2:56 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Muting the Call to Service

Being a McSweeney's fan, It always nice to read Dave Eggers. This editorial is a nice piece about another war Bush is waging, the war against helping the disadvantaged. It is a purposeful war.

AmeriCorps needs an emergency infusion of $100 million just to maintain its current operations. While the Senate voted to appropriate the money, the House of Representatives refused to approve the emergency funds — and then adjourned for the summer. Meanwhile, the administration has been largely silent — and it remains unclear whether it will press Congress to provide the funds in September.

Which is confusing, considering how vocal President Bush has been about the need to maintain and even expand our national service programs. At one time, in fact, the president proposed expanding AmeriCorps to 75,000 members. "We need more talented teachers in troubled schools," the president said in his 2002 State of the Union address, the first after 9/11. "U.S.A. Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers."

Bush talks like a compasionate conservative, but he's happy to see the programs die. I mean what did programs like that ever do for his family or friends? These programs seem to be for poor people. Blah. Don't poor people have enough advantages, like low taxes. Why do they need to get a decent education too?

- rob 1:49 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Click on the picture of the man if front of the Texas Govenor's mansion for a detailed update of Texas.

Remember Bush is a uniter and not a divider. Just look at Texas.

- rob 1:16 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

The Pentagon has some explaining to do

After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.

Those observations changed everything.

A lot of people who don't like Rummy are retiring (or being forced to retire) from the Pentagon. Get used to scary stories about our defense department.

- rob 1:11 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Want to be scared?

State Dept. Changes Seen if Bush Reelected

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration's national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises.
...

Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration. Rice appears to have an edge because of her closeness to the president, though it is unclear whether she would be interested in running the State Department's vast bureaucracy.

Oh that sounds GREAT! With Wolfowitz as Secretary of State, we'd lose even the UK as an ally, and with Rice....

“He’s trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody ever said that it was going to be the next year.” - Condoleeza Rice in PBS interview, 7/30/03

I agree, Bush and Cheney are nobodies:

”[Iraq] could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.” - George Bush, 10/8/02

“This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.”- George Bush, 9/28/02

“Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.” - George Bush, National Radio Address, 9/14/02

“Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.” - George Bush, speech to U.N., 9/12/02

“The intelligence community also had high confidence in the judgment that, and I quote, ‘Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material,’ end quote.” - Vice President Dick Cheney, 7/23/03

Cheney was able to quote that so well because he wrote it down on the napkin himself.

- rob 1:02 PM - [PermaLink] -

----

Subscribe to the TCS Feed

Having trouble with some of the poor English on this site?
Imagine what it looks like when translated by a machine:

Search TCS

Archive

Archive Index Page

What is this?

This is a "team" blog.  We are a bunch of Americans, whose rising distress in our leader's decisions brought us together to make this site.  As Bush said, he's a "uniter."  Many of us have never even met.
That's the internet for you.

This Century Sucks Store

Buy our cool stuff.
And tell everyone what you feel.  

We have a little Store you can visit.  

Our store's selection of items is constantly growing. Come see what we have.

 

We're also Amazon Associates, so if you want to buy something from Amazon, please search for it below, and we will get a few bucks from the sale.

Search Now:

Sites we often like:

Tin Foil Caps

The Free Speech Zone

The office of the independent blogger

Buzzflash

Tom The Dancing Bug

VerifiedVoting.org

Get Your War On

This Modern World

Eschaton / Atrios

Daily Kos

Contribute to America's Future

It is now more important then ever.

Donate to the Democractic Congressional Campaign Committee

Donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Some More Site Mottos

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American people."
- Teddy Roosevelt



"Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response."
 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt



"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions, but laws must and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
- Thomas Jefferson



"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."
- James Madison



"I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves."
- John F. Kennedy



"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

More Sites we often like:

more coming...

"There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America." - Bill Clinton.