Reason's To Be Fed Up

bush doesn't talk about the dollar much, but when he does, he's got exactly one thing to say about it:

"We have a strong dollar policy."

It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that Bush's "strong dollar policy" is driving the greenback into the ground.

And THIS is yet another reason to be a Fed Up American!

The dollar is hitting record lows this week amidst fears that the mortgage-market meltdown will spread to other parts of the economy and as the Chinese make noise about moving more of their investments into euros.

But it is the underlying dynamics of the American economy -- continued massive trade deficits and a whopping national debt -- that have put the dollar in such a precarious position.

A true strong dollar policy, aimed at increasing the confidence of international investors, would require bush to do a bunch of things he doesn't want to do. For instance, he would have to stop borrowing so much money to fund his tax cuts and his wars. He would need to encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, rather than depend on it to keep propping up the domestic economy by decreasing them.

That sort of thing.

Instead, Bush just offers the strong-dollar line, without specifics, moves on and stays the course. That seems to be the catch phrase for everything this asshole president has done and EVERYTHING this president has EVER done has become a disaster.

Consider how eager he was to drop the subject last month during a Wall Street Journal interview:

WSJ: "There has been a lot of concern, obviously, about the value of the dollar around the world, and some calls for the U.S. to put more action behind its vow that we support a strong dollar. How do you respond to them, and do you think Treasury needs to intervene at all at this point?"

bush: "Secretary Paulson, of course, is our main spokesman on this issue, and he reflects the view of this administration that the strong dollar policy is the correct policy. And we also believe that the best way for a currency to become valued is through the market."

WSJ: "That's it?"

bush: "Yes."

WSJ: "Is the low dollar helping the trade deficit numbers that today were pretty good?"

bush: "The policy of the U.S. government, when it comes to the dollar, is a strong dollar policy, and that the currency -- the value of the currency needs to be set by the market."

WSJ: "Okay."

Here's bush talking to CNBC's Ron Insana in April 2005:

Insana: "And some people are wondering if you are prepared to make a forceful statement or take forceful action to boost the value of the dollar and help drive down the price of oil."

bush: "Right. Well, I, let me, I, I'll try to make a forceful statement right now. This government is for a strong dollar. We do believe the market ought to set the price of the dollar relative to other currencies, but we are for a strong dollar."

And here's bush talking to reporters in December 2003: "[T]he policy, the stated policy -- and not only the stated policy, but the strong belief of this administration is that we have a strong dollar."

Neil Irvin writes in today's Washington Post: "The value of the dollar fell sharply yesterday, as did the stock market, after the Chinese government signaled that it might slow its purchases of U.S. assets. . . .

"Top Chinese officials suggested at a conference yesterday that they would direct more of their future reserves into European assets -- that the euro, not just the dollar, would increasingly be a currency of choice. For years, China has kept its currency artificially low relative to the dollar by buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. assets, especially Treasury bonds. This has made Chinese imports inexpensive in the United States and made it cheap for Americans to borrow money.

"'We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones and will readjust accordingly,' said Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of China's National People's Congress. Another official said the dollar was losing its position as the world's default currency. . . .

"A cheaper dollar was not unexpected when the central bank cut interest rates. In fact, it is one of the ways that lower interest rates stimulate the economy. . . .

"But a weak dollar could also spur inflation. Part of the reason that prices for oil and other raw materials have risen sharply in the past month is that the dollar is worth less."

Patrice Hill writes in the Washington Times: "A spokeswoman for Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said he remains 'strongly committed to a strong dollar,' but the Bush administration has done nothing to prevent the currency's recent sharp drop against other major currencies."

So what happens if the central banks of Asian and oil-producing countries, which hold vast amounts of Treasury bills and the like, start losing their appetite for U.S. currency?

Carter Dougherty wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune: "Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States' proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar's value would result.

"But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world's largest economy. . . .

"'This is all pointing to a greatly increased risk of a fast unwinding of the U.S. current account deficit and a serious decline of the dollar,' said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an expert on exchange rates. 'We could finally see the big kahuna hit.'"

Roghoff who teaches at Harvard, wrote earlier this year in the Guardian: "Will the United States ever face a bill for the string of massive trade deficits that it has been running for more than a decade? Including interest payments on past deficits, the tab for 2006 alone was over $800 billion dollars - roughly 6.5% of US gross national product. Even more staggeringly, US borrowing now soaks up more than two-thirds of the combined excess savings of all the surplus countries in the world, including China, Japan, Germany, and the OPEC states. . . .

"In an era in which stock and housing prices are soaring, the central banks of Japan and China are holding almost two trillion dollars worth of low-interest bonds. A very large share of these are US treasury bonds and mortgages. This enormous subsidy to American taxpayers is, in many ways, the world's largest foreign aid program."

Rogoff marvels at how "America's government and consumers have been engaged in a never-ending consumption binge." He writes: "When a fiscally responsible government launches a war, it typically cuts back on other domestic expenditures and raises taxes. The Bush administration did the opposite. . . .

"Some day, the US may well have to pay the bill for its spendthrift ways."

bush of course famously transformed Clinton-era budget surpluses into huge deficits. And as a result, as Martin Crutsinger reported for the Associated Press this week, the national debt hit $9 trillion for the first time EVER!

As it happens, there was a president speaking to a joint session of Congress about the weak dollar yesterday. But it wasn't bush.

Francois de Beaupuy writes for Bloomberg: "French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a joint session of the U.S. Congress the Bush administration must stem the dollar's plunge. . . .

"Sarkozy's complaints that the U.S. currency's drop against the euro is undermining European competitiveness struck a discordant note in a summit intended to demonstrate an improving U.S.-French relationship."

Skeptical Questions

In contrast to the carefully coifed questions Bush generally gets from American television anchors, Bush's French and German interlocutors yesterday didn't hesitate to displayed the profound skepticism that accompanies any mention of Bush outside (and increasingly inside) the United States.

bush spoke warmly of Sarkozy, whom he described as "a man of deep values. He's got a lot of energy. He's a lot of fun to be around, plus he's a serious man and he wants to -- he's like me, he wants to solve problems: Here is a problem; let's go solve it."

But Poivre was more interested in grilling Bush about Iraq, Iran and the perversion of the American Dream.

Poivre: "So to a certain extent, you did contribute to giving greater power to Iran, because it no longer is facing its hated enemy on the other side. So now is there a true threat in Iran, and are you ready now to invade Iran as you did with Afghanistan and Iraq? So it is indeed true that Vice President -- is it true that Vice President Cheney has a plan for that?"

bush: "I don't know where you're getting all these rumors -- there must be some weird things going on in Europe these days -- because I have made it abundantly clear, now is the time to deal with a true threat to world peace -- that's Iran -- and to do it diplomatically and peacefully. And that's what I'm going to spend a lot of time on with President Sarkozy. But of course we want to solve these problems peacefully. . . ."

Poivre: "But in spite of all your efforts, the United States today have a worse image today than they had seven years ago; people find Americans less likeable pretty much everywhere in the world. Do you have your own share of responsibility, or is this inevitable because the United States is the most powerful country in the world?"

bush: "Look, first of all, I think most people respect America and they like Americans. They may not necessarily like the President. And so -- but I've always been the kind of person, Patrick, to make decisions based upon what's right, as opposed to trying to be the popular guy. . . ."

Poivre: "In the past we used to say that the American Dream was freedom, but today it seems to be repression, more self-focused society."

bush: "That's absurd to say the American Dream is repression. Freedom is the absolute we're helping people achieve. . . . I understand people's -- the image may not be as good as one would like, but people respect what America stands for. They may not like the decisions I have made, but I don't see how you can be a leader if you worry about public opinion polls all the time, particularly in a world in which there's a lot of problems that require strong leadership."

Question "Do you think that the nuclear threat that Iran poses right now is larger than the threat Iraq posed about five or six years ago?"

bush: "I think they were both dangerous. I think both of them could have been solved diplomatically. Saddam Hussein chose to ignore the demands of the free world and Security Council 1441 -- which, by the way, Germany voted for initially. And I think they're both dangerous. And I think therefore the lesson of Iraq is that we can work together and solve questions peacefully now. . . ."

Question: "But you still have as a last option the military option. Do you think that that could be an option in the future? You even mentioned the possibility, the chance of third world war -- you were serious about that?"

bush: "Oh, absolutely serious. I said, if you want to avoid World War III. I didn't say I'm for World War III."

Question: "Oh, no, I didn't say that. But you mentioned it in that respect, yes."

bush: "But I said if you -- the reason I said that is because this is a country that has defied the IAEA -- in other words, didn't disclose all their program -- have said they want to destroy Israel. If you want to see World War III, you know, a way to do that is to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. And so I said, now is the time to move. It wasn't a prediction, nor a desire.

"And do I think we can solve it? I do. Should all options be on the table? You bet. But I firmly believe we can solve this problem diplomatically and will continue to work to do so. . . .

"I've committed our troops into harm's way twice, and it's not a pleasant experience because I understand the consequences firsthand. And so I owe it to the American people to say that I've tried to solve this problem diplomatically. And that's exactly what I intend to do."

"Every aspect of bush's foreign policy has now collapsed. Every dream of neoconservatism has become a nightmare. Every doctrine has turned to dust. The influence of the United States has reached its lowest point since before World War II, when the country was encased in isolationism. . . .

"Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's presumption that successful war would instill fear leading to absolute obedience and the suppression of potential rivalries and serious threats -- the 'dangerous nation' thesis of neocon theorist Robert Kagan -- has proved to be the greatest foreign policy miscalculation in U.S. history."

Iraq Watch

At the brief press availability yesterday, a French reporter referred to Iraq as a quagmire.

bush's response: "I don't -- you know, 'quagmire' is an interesting word. If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you'd be saying, god, I love freedom -- because that's what's happened. And there are killers and radicals and murderers who kill the innocent to stop the advance of freedom. But freedom is happening in Iraq. And we're making progress."

Bush's optimism is not shared by the American people, however.

CNN: "Opposition to the war in Iraq has reached an all-time high, according to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Thursday morning.

"Support for the war in Iraq has dropped to 31 percent, and the 68 percent who oppose the war is a new record, up slightly from last month. The last time a majority supported the war was in 2003, when 54 percent answered affirmatively.

"Despite a recent drop in violence in Iraq, only one quarter of Americans believes the United States is winning the war, while 62 percent believe neither the Americans nor the insurgents are winning."

Here are the results Respondents were also asked: "If the U.S. government decides to take military action in Iran, would you favor or oppose it?" Seventy percent said they would oppose it.

Rejecting Bush

Wall Street Journal: "A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Americans have turned sharply away from President Bush and toward domestic issues favoring his partisan adversaries. Majorities believe the Iraq war can't be won and want most U.S. troops withdrawn by the dawn of a new president's term in 2009. . . .

"Just 20% of Americans said the next president should take an approach similar to Mr. Bush's, while 71% want a different approach."

The results show Bush's job approval rating at 31 percent, with 63 percent disapproving.

Bush on Oil

Question: "Mr. President, with oil approaching $100 a barrel, are you concerned that your hard words for Iran on its nuclear program are helping drive up oil prices, which can end up hurting the U.S. economy?"

bush: "No. I believe oil prices are going up because the demand for oil outstrips the supply for oil. Oil is going up because developing countries still use a lot of oil. Oil is going up because we use too much oil, and the capacity to replace reserves is dwindling. That's why the price of oil is going up."

But experts agree that supply and demand is just one factor contributing to rising oil prices -- and maybe just a small factor in the recent price spikes.

For instance, as written in The Washington Post last week, "traders who treat oil like any other commodity are widely thought to be driving prices upward, bolstered by a weak dollar and money flowing out of stock markets and other investment vehicles."

Some analysts think that as much as $40 of the per-barrel price increase is a result of the falling dollar.

"Oil traders said that even if the chances of military conflict with Iran were small, the huge run-up in oil prices that would result encourages some speculators and investment funds to bid up the price of oil, adding a premium of $3 to $15 a barrel."

Torture Watch

Joseph Galloway writes in his McClatchy opinion column about why the bush administration is so fixated on denying the obvious fact that waterboarding is torture.

Writes Galloway: "The president, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their cronies and legal mouthpieces such as David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are doing all they can to avoid one day facing the bar of justice, at home or in The Hague, and being called to account for crimes against humanity.

"They want a blank check pardon, and they'll continue searching for attorneys general and judges and justices and senators and members of Congress who'll hand them their stay-out-of-jail-free cards.

"As they squirm and wriggle and lie and quibble and cut deals with senators, they claim that 'harsh interrogation methods' are necessary to prevent another 9/11. But as terrified as they are by terrorists, they also fear that one day they may be treated no better than some fallen South American dictator or Cambodian despot or hapless Texas sheriff; that they might not be able to leave a guarded, gated compound in Dallas or Crawford, a ranch in New Mexico or the shores of Chesapeake Bay for fear of arrest and extradition."

America: Freedom to Fascism

Full movie can be viewed at:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173

This is one powerful movie.

If you're not Fed Up after seeing this, you must be in a coma.


*****

Get Involved!

As of last Wednesday, all ten states currently listed as defendants in the National Clean Elections Lawsuit were served with the Summons and Complaint. The action is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public.

The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public. In many cases, states have officially authorized voting "systems" that leave virtually no paper trail from which to audit the vote.

Click here to read a news article from New Hampshire's Union Leader

More Plaintiffs Needed

Thus far, the lawsuit been brought against ten states: Iowa, Texas, Florida, New York, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, South Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.

Due to mounting public interest, it has been decided to do everything possible to add the remaining forty states as defendants. To do this, we need at least one citizen from each of those forty states to step forward to be a plaintiff.

It has also been decided, in an abundance of caution, to increase the number of plaintiffs from each of the fifty states to two or three.

Therefore, we are calling for additional citizens to become plaintiffs in the clean elections lawsuit. Citizens need to be at least age 18 and be registered to vote in the state where they reside. They should have a passion for liberty and for making sure every vote is counted. They should also be able and willing to stay with the action through “thick and thin.” Remember, discontent brings change, but change also brings discontent.

To summarize, we need at least one plaintiff from each of the ten states already sued to function as "back-up" plaintiffs (in case one of the original plaintiffs drops out for some unanticipated reason), and we need at least two plaintiffs for each of the balance of the 40 remaining states.

Click here if you have in interest in becoming a plaintiff. Please enter all the contact information requested. There is no cost to become a plaintiff.

If interested, please join one of our group conferences (to be scheduled later). We will provide prospective plaintiffs a brief overview of the legal process, your responsibilities as a plaintiff and we will attempt to answer any questions you may have. We will notify potential plaintiffs

The lawsuit is being coordinated with Jim Condit's election fraud watchdog group, Citizens for a Fair Vote Count. Its website is www.votefraud.org.

It would be good to have representatives of other “election integrity” groups participate as plaintiffs.


http://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org

Iraqi's Love Freedom?

Another delusional answer by Bush at a joint presser with France’s President Sarkoz yesterday.

It’s getting to the point that when I hear someone mention the word “freedom,” I cringe because he has perverted it. You don’t invade a country that has not attacked us and then talk about freedom to the rest of the world. Bush does his best not to talk about reconciliation in Iraq either at the presser, but then came this question.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. My question is on Iraq. Mr. President, this morning you talked at length about Afghanistan, Iran, but not Iraq. And I wanted to ask both of you, is France reconciled with the United States, the United States is reconciled with France? So what about Iraq? Can France, for instance, help to get out of the Iraqi quagmire? And President Bush, where do you stand on Iraq and your domestic debate on Iraq? Do you have a timetable for withdrawing troops?

BUSH: I don’t — you know, “quagmire” is an interesting word. If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying, god, I love freedom — because that’s what’s happened. And there are killers and radicals and murderers who kill the innocent to stop the advance of freedom. But freedom is happening in Iraq. And we’re making progress.

The latest CNN poll shows that Americans are still overwhelming against the Iraq war.

Apparently the American public is smart enough to realize that military progress isn’t really that meaningful without political progress, and we haven’t seen a dime’s worth of that.

Unless and until we do, I don’t expect this trend to change.

In Theatres November 16

A fictional story inspired by true events, REDACTED is a unique cinematic experience that will force viewers to radically reconsider the filters through which we see and accept events in our world, the power of the mediated image and how presentation and composition influence our ideas and beliefs. A profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed and received in an era with infinite channels of communication, REDACTED utilizes a variety of created source material-video diaries, produced documentary, surveillance footage, online testimonials, news pieces-to comment on the extreme disconnect between the surface of an image and the reality of ideas and the truth, especially in times of strife.

Centered around a small group of American soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Iraq, REDACTED alternates points of view, balancing the experiences of these young men under duress and members of the media with those of the local Iraqi people, illuminating how each have been deeply affected by the current conflict and their encounters with each other. The charged apotheosis of Brian De Palma's filmmaking career, REDACTED caps off a body of work which has explored the politics of image-making and reception more fully than any living filmmaker.

America Is #1???

The Few, The Proud, The Marines Part 2

Students Feel Wrath Of School Officials

Over 70 students participated in a sit-in against the Iraq War on All Saint's Day, Thursday, November 1st.

It began third hour when dozens of student gathered quietly in the lunchroom at Morton West High School in suburban Chicago, and refused to leave. Administrators and police became involved immediately and locked down the school for a half hour after class ended. Students report that they were promised that there would be no consequences besides cutting classes if they took their protest outside so as not to disturb the school day.

The students agreed and were led to a corner outside the cafeteria where they sang songs and held signs while classes resumed. "At first they tried to make us like leave the school, " said Jerry Petrack, who was with the protest from the beginning. Petracek referred to the massive walk-out for immigrant rights in 2006 that guided their decisions that morning.

"They were like, 'march the streets' or whatever and we were like 'no, we don't wanna leave the school because last time there was a protest outside the school and kids got arrested,' and we remembered that."

Despite the caution tape and a police line set up between the protesters and the student body, many other students joined the demonstration. Organizers say they chose November first because it is the Christian All Saints holy day and a national day of peace.

They wrote a letter and delivered it to Superintendent, Dr. Ben Nowakowski who was present at the time, stating the reason for their protest.John Acevedo, a junior says he has been thinking about the world since he was a freshman. " I've noticed that there are many students that do not really notice anything that is going on in the world. They focus on themselves or their music and I really wanted to show and lead them on to these ideas that what really is happening in the world."Adam Swarek says that a lot of people thought they just wanted to cut classes. "It was a lot more spiritual than that."

"Basically, you know the school has people in military uniforms that you know stand out there and they give away prizes for doing pull-ups and doing this and that and what they're basically representing and trying to put out there is murder and killing. That's all that basically represents when it comes down to war, you know. Like, what else is there?So we were just trying to do something opposite, like peaceful and they took it as insubordinate."

Deans, counselors and even the Superintendent tried to change the minds of a few, mainly those students with higher GPA scores to abandon the protest. The school called the homes of many of the protesters. Those whose parents arrived before the end of school and took their students home, or left before the protest ended at the final bell, received 3-5 days suspension. All others, an estimated 37 received 10 days suspension and expulsion papers.

Parents report that Nowakowski stated those who are seventeen will also face police charges.Parents who are frantically trying to spare their child's expulsion flooded the school yesterday to file appeals on the matter.

So far, Superintendent Nowakowski has held firm on the punishments. They are expected to find out the results of the appeals on the 10 day suspensions on Tuesday. However, the expulsion orders still stand. Parents and students report and the school's videotape shown to some of the parents confirms that the students were non-violent in their action and there was no damage to property.

The protest came on the heels of a recent incident on October 15th, when a student reported hearing that another student had a gun on campus. The story of the eyewitness was deemed unreliable and the school was not locked down. Later that week (October 19), the Berwyn police, acting on a tip arrested one of the youths originally questioned about gun possession and he allegedly confessed to carrying an unloaded semi-automatic handgun that day.

All these issues, plus the expected announcement of whether uniforms will be established in the school should make the next Board of Education meeting on Wednesday at 7:00pm at the Morton East campus very well-attended.

See the link below for the Superintendent's statement on the matter:www.jsmortonhs.com/news/contentview.asp

For letters or phone calls of support, please see information below:
Dr. Ben Nowakowski, Superintendent
District 201
2423 South Austin,
Cicero, IL 60804
bnowakowski@jsmorton.org
(708) 222-5702

Mr. Lucas, Principal
Morton West High School
2400 S. Home Ave.
Berwyn, IL 60402
jlucas@west.jsmorton.org
708-222-5901

Mr. Jeffry Pesek, PresidentBoard of Education,
District 201
3145 South 55th Avenue
Cicero, IL 60804
708-802-1863

For the rest of the Board Members see:www.jsmortonhs.com/board/default.asp

For parent contact:

Pam Winstead
708-749-3163,
serp@comcast.net

Alma Moran
708-717-4202,
qtalmita@yahoo.com

Adam Szwarek
847-587-8849,
tsq9743@aol.com

Related* http://www.chicagosuburbannews.com/cicero/...page/x357267163* http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/con...0,6942690.story

Morton West High School students suspended over an anti-war protest at the school last week returned to the Berwyn school today to demand they be allowed back in classes.
The kids were accompanied by about 20 parents and anti-war activists at a press conference in front of Morton West. About 25 students were suspended and face expulsions after staging a protest against the Iraq war.

Breaking the rules to “promote peace and recognize that people are dying every day” is a damned good program. These students are a hell of a lot smarter than most adults — and far more decent and civilized.

Sign the petition to help the Morton West students.

http://www.petitiononline.com/mortonw/petition.html

Christian Corruption Investigated

CBS News has learned Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is investigating six prominent televangelist ministries for possible financial misconduct.

Letters were sent Monday to the ministries demanding that financial statements and records be turned over to the committee by December 6th. According to Grassley's office, the Iowa Republican is trying to determine whether or not these ministries are improperly using their tax-exempt status as churches to shield lavish lifestyles.

The six ministries identified as being under investigation by the committee are led by: Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn.

Three of the six - Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar - also sit on the Board of Regents for the Oral Roberts University. A spokesperson for Joyce Meyer Ministries provided CBS News with an IRS letter to the ministry dated October 10, 2007, that stated: "We determined that you continue to qualify as an organization exempt from Federal income tax."

The letter could not be independently verified in time for this story. The ministry also pointed to audited financial statements for the last three years that are posted on the organization's Web site. In a statement, Benny Hinn's spokesperson, Ronn Torossian, said the ministry was in the process of determining the best course of action in response to the Senate investigation. "World Healing Center Church complies with the laws that govern church and non-profit organizations and will continue to do so," Torossian wrote.

In a statement to CBS News, Creflo Dollar called his ministry an "open book" and said he would comply with any "valid request" from Grassley. But he noted that the inquiry raised questions that could "affect the privacy of every community church in America." The other three ministries did not respond to requests for comment from CBS News on Monday. Because they have tax status as churches, the ministries do not have to file IRS 990 forms like other non-profit organizations - leaving much financial information largely behind closed doors.

The letters sent Monday were the culmination of a long investigation fueled in part by complaints from Ole Anthony, a crusader against religious fraud who operates the Dallas-based Trinity Foundation, which describes itself as a watchdog monitoring religious media, fraud and abuse. "We've been working with them for two years," Anthony told CBS News.

"We have furnished them with enough information to fill a small Volkswagen." Anthony said after twenty years of working with media organizations to expose televangelists, he saw little reform. He says that's why he turned to another tactic, going straight to Grassley. He is confident that Grassley's inquiry will be different, "What we hope is that this will lead to reform in religious nonprofits."

The structure of many televangelist organizations - in which the leadership is often concentrated in one person or one family - has itself been the target of criticism. "Churches like these are ruled as a dictatorship," says Rod Pitzer, who directs research at Ministry Watch in North Carolina, which provides advice for donors to Christian organizations.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/06/cbsnews_investigates/main3456977.shtml

My Response to K.O. KO's bush

Wow!

That is the one word that comes to mind when you hear Countdown's Keith Olbermann lay the smackdown on bush's ego by using a powerful weapon.

The TRUTH.

I saw the show live as it unfolded into over ten minutes of raw emotion and Olberman looked exhausted at its conclusion.

What a great feeling that must have been to get all that off your chest.

You have become Fed Up.

I reviewed the video.

I reviewed the audio.

I listened to it over and over again.

Becuase it stirs something in me that hits a level of intensity where I MUST say that:

I AM FED UP!

I'm not putting up with it any longer. I have seen through your lies mr. bush, on more than one occasion and remained somewhat silent. THAT is going to change. I am on to your game, the game you play with lives.

Your quest for leaving a legacy will work against you. You will NO DOUBT go down in history as being THE WORST president America has ever had. The worst leader of what was once a great nation the world has ever seen.

The absolute WORST!

And this will be your demise.

You are a horrible, despicable disgrace for a human being. You seem to have the onset of senile dementia and you are unfit to carry on your duties as president. You are unfit to make decisions. Your record over the last near seven years as president and your performance as Texas governor prove these points.

So America, we need to let bush and all of our elected leaders know that We The People are watching.

We ARE Fed Up and we will not allow our country to be hijacked any longer.

We will fight.

Our voices will be heard and our voices can be heard the loudest in the voting booth.

I see it more and more everyday, how people are letting it out, telling the world that they are Fed Up.

Perhaps we DO have a chance.

K.O. KO's bush

My Guest Sunday November 11, 2007

Most Americans know the truth.

America is in deep trouble.

We are on the wrong track.

* This year, the national debt increased by more than $500 billion*. It's more than 9 trillion dollars. We are selling our grandchildren into debt slavery.
* Civil liberties are collapsing. Bush Republicans ignore our civil rights.

America needs answers.

My guest on Sunday, Libertarian candidate for president George Phillies, thinks he has those answers.


The Libertarian Party has those answers: Answers true to our traditions.

Answers that will bring us Peace

Freedom

Prosperity.

bush's Lap Dogs

In October, with Osama Bin Laden still at large, the Central Intelligence Agency announced the creation of a new spy unit. Headed by a top deputy and staffed with a select corps of agents, the operation was charged with gathering intelligence on a single man - a foe who was threatening to undermine the president's War on Terror.

The CIA's new target? John Helgerson, the man appointed by President Bush to expose wrongdoing at the CIA. As inspector general of the agency, Helgerson came under attack from his superiors simply for trying to do his job: He was aggressively investigating torture at the CIA's secret prisons.

Like the other twenty-eight inspectors within the executive branch, Helgerson is supposed to be immune from such political meddling. Created in 1978 as a post-Watergate check on Nixonian abuses of power, the inspectors bypass the chain of command within their own agencies and report their findings directly to Congress. By law, the president must appoint these watchdogs "without regard to political affiliation" and "solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability."

But as the investigation of Helgerson makes clear, the administration is more interested in turning the watchdogs into lap dogs. Just as he politicized every other facet of government from FEMA to the Farm Bureau, President Bush has ignored the law and stocked the inspector general posts with inexperienced cronies. According to a study by the House Oversight Committee, more than a third of Bush's inspectors previously held a political post in the White House, compared to none of Bill Clinton's appointees. Judging from their résumés - deputy counsel to the Bush-Cheney transition team, special assistant to Trent Lott, senior counsel to Fred Thompson, daughter to Chief Justice William Rehnquist - Bush's appointees seem more qualified to be partisans at a neoconservative think tank than America's last line of defense against fraud and abuse.

What's more, fewer than one-fifth of the inspectors appointed by Bush had previous experience as auditors, compared to two-thirds of Clinton's appointees. "The IGs have been politicized and dumbed down," said Rep. Brad Miller, oversight chair of the House science committee.

Rather than root out wrongdoing, Bush's appointees - men with nicknames like Moose and Cookie - have actually helped the White House cover up corrupt defense contracts, conceal the theft of sensitive rocket technology and whitewash a host of scandals from Abu Ghraib to Medicare prescription drugs. "Not only has this administration been aided in avoiding scrutiny by a compliant Republican Congress, they installed inspectors general who were not going to use their positions aggressively - if at all," says Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Even worse, inspectors have often been hand-selected by the very Cabinet heads they are supposed to oversee - a practice that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a lonely Republican voice for executive accountability, blasts as "directly contrary to the spirit of the law." As a result, the administration often treats inspectors more like employees than independent auditors. "Cabinet secretaries expect their inspectors general to be members of the 'team,' rather than watchdogs who call things as they see them," says Clark Kent Ervin, who came under fire as Bush's first inspector general in Homeland Security for exposing weaknesses in airport security.

No one epitomizes the politicization of Bush's inspectors general more than Janet Rehnquist. The chief justice's daughter, who served as a former White House counsel to Bush's father, was named IG of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001. She quickly eviscerated her own investigative staff, lightened penalties for fraudulent Medicare contractors and doled out political favors to the Bush clan. In 2002, in direct response to a request by Jeb Bush's chief of staff in Florida, Rehnquist postponed an embarrassing audit of the state's pension system until after Jeb's re-election.

Rehnquist eventually resigned under a cloud: The Government Accountability Office rebuked her for having "compromised" the independence of her post. But her acting successor, Dara Corrigan, soon became an accessory to one of the greatest taxpayer heists of all time, ignoring a congressional demand to investigate whether the White House had lied to Congress about the true costs of the Medicare prescription-drug bill. And Rehnquist's permanent replacement, Daniel Levinson, had no prior experience as an auditor, having proved his mettle for the job by serving as chief of staff to Rep. Bob Barr, the Republican ringleader of the Clinton impeachment. "Bush has disregarded the requirement of the law to make these people non- partisan investigators with the background to do the work," says Waxman.

If Rehnquist fits a pattern of Bush nominees who, according to Grassley, "weren't qualified to do the job in the first place," Howard "Cookie" Krongard stands as a glaring example of those who "are qualified to do the job - but don't." Before being appointed IG of the State Department in 2005, Krongard had an impressive résumé, having served as general counsel for the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche.

But far from putting that experience to work as inspector general, he has set about dismantling his own investigative team, which, according to House documents, currently has twenty vacancies for twenty-seven positions. "Under the current regime," Krongard's assistant inspector general for investigations wrote in an e-mail made public by the House Oversight

Committee, orders are "to keep working the BS cases ... and not rock the boat with more significant investigations." Most troubling, Krongard has stonewalled explosive allegations that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was built with the indentured labor of Filipino workers who were flown to Iraq at gunpoint. Rather than launch a formal investigation, Krongard announced he would personally tour the construction site - and then gave the contractor, First Kuwaiti, six months' advance notice of his visit and allowed the company to handpick the six employees he interviewed. In the summary report he dashed off to Congress, Krongard whitewashed the problem: "Nothing came to our attention," he wrote, "that caused us to believe" the allegations. At a July hearing, Krongard confessed to Congress that he took few notes during his "investigation," saying he didn't want to make the people he was investigating "uncomfortable."

Abuses in Iraq were also covered up by Joseph Schmitz, who served as Bush's inspector general at the Pentagon. What Schmitz lacked in relevant training to monitor the Defense Department's $400 billion budget - "I am neither an accountant nor an auditor by background," he admitted to Congress - he more than made up for with his political pedigree. The son of a former GOP congressman, Schmitz worked for both Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, and his brother served as a deputy counsel to George H.W. Bush and as a "pioneer" fund-raiser for George W. Bush.

Schmitz served Bush well as inspector general. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, he declared - without any formal investigation - that the scandal was the work of "bad eggs" in the junior ranks, not a direct result of the interrogation techniques approved by the president. He also turned a blind eye to war profiteering by contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. "I haven't seen any real deliberate gouging of the American taxpayer," he said in 2004. "But we are looking." Not very hard, apparently: Schmitz sent only a single auditor to Iraq, and then quietly called him home in 2003 after just three months on the job.

According to those who worked with him, Schmitz spent much of his time as inspector general obsessively researching the history of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, George Washington's inspector general for the Continental Army. He also devoted three months to personally redesigning the inspector general's official seal to incorporate von Steuben's family motto: "Always under the protection of the Almighty."

But Schmitz always made time to shield administration officials from criminal investigation and congressional oversight. In 2004, according to Congressional documents, Schmitz blocked an inquiry by his own staff into John Shaw, an undersecretary to Donald Rumsfeld who was suspected of steering a lucrative Iraqi contract to an associate. Distrust in the IG's office grew so intense that Schmitz's senior staffers reportedly used code names for officials they were investigating so that their boss wouldn't torpedo their efforts. In a report to Congress, Schmitz also omitted testimony by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and blacked out the names of White House officials suspected of colluding with Boeing on a fraudulent deal that would have cost taxpayers $5 billion.

Under fire for withholding evidence from Congress to shield the very officials he was supposed to be investigating - as well as for spending more than $100,000 in public funds on a ceremony honoring von Steuben - Schmitz resigned in 2005. He soon found a more comfortable home, however, at the helm of one of the shady contractors he had failed to properly oversee. He is now chief operating officer of the Prince Group, parent company to the mercenary security force Blackwater USA.

His replacement, Lt. Gen. Claude "Mick" Kicklighter, isn't likely to be any tougher on fraud and waste in the administration. A Rumsfeld and Wolf- owitz loyalist, Kicklighter previously served in an administration post that has become virtually synonymous with fraud and waste: The general was in charge of transforming the Coalition Provisional Authority in its final days into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

A few inspectors - nearly all of them holdovers from the Clinton administration - continued to do their jobs. Nikki Tinsley of the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the White House actively misled residents of Lower Manhattan about toxic dangers after September 11th. Earl Devaney of the Interior Department worked tirelessly to bring down Steven Griles, the former deputy secretary now imprisoned for his complicity in the Jack Abramoff scandal. And Glenn Fine of the Justice Department exposed the FBI's illegal abuse of the Patriot Act to spy on average Americans. "A lot of the trouble for Alberto Gonzales came out of the work the inspector general did," says Rep. Miller. "It's the perfect example of why we need competent, tough, independent IGs."

To squelch such independence, the president has turned to his ultimate loyalist, Clay Johnson III - his prep-school pal from Andover and roommate at Yale. As a top official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Johnson has made no secret that the administration expects inspectors to be seen and not heard. Testifying before Congress, he asserted that the "proper relationship" of the IGs is "to work together" with the agency heads they are supposed to monitor. Johnson also disparaged aggressive IGs like the Clinton holdovers, calling them "junkyard dogs."

To keep the inspectors in line, Johnson has browbeaten them into signing what amounts to a loyalty oath. According to Ervin, the former inspector for Homeland Security, Johnson held a meeting with the IGs and demanded that each of them sign a series of "principles" promising to work "in partnership" with their cabinet secretaries. "Clearly, the intent was to intimidate people," says Ervin, who refused to sign and was soon out of a job. Ervin's replacement, Richard Skinner - who had previously done a heck of a job as the acting inspector general of FEMA - now prints Johnson's loyalty principles at the front of his semiannual reports to Congress.

No inspector general has been more criticized for his lack of independent oversight than Robert "Moose" Cobb, who served as associate White House counsel under Alberto Gonzales before being appointed inspector general of NASA in 2002. According to a report by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, an office run by fellow IGs to police the work of their peers, Cobb helped cover up the theft of nearly $2 billion in rocket-engine data from NASA's servers. The council also found that Cobb had tipped off Sean O'Keefe, the head of NASA, to impending FBI search warrants, and sought O'Keefe's input on how he should structure his "independent" audits.

Cobb wasn't nearly so considerate of those under him: According to the council, he berated subordinates as "knuckle-draggers" and "fucksticks," causing more than half of his staff to quit. As his own hand-picked assistant testified before Congress, "Mr. Cobb's arrogance, his abusive, bullying style, absence of managerial experience, limited understanding of investigative processes, egotism and misplaced sense of self-importance make it impossible for him to successfully manage and lead an organization."

The president's council concluded that Cobb should be subject to discipline "up to and including removal." But Clay Johnson left Cobb's punishment up to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who asked only that Cobb work with an "executive coach" to further his "professional growth."

Such ineptitude and blind loyalty have implications far beyond the hurt feelings of disgruntled staffers. NASA, which funds much of the government's research into global warming, has been accused of trying to silence agency scientists like James Hansen, who warn that the world has less than a decade to forestall a climate catastrophe. "I would like an independent NASA watchdog investigating whether government scientists are free to research climate change," says Miller, oversight chair of the House science committee.

Now that the Democrats have regained control of Congress, they are seeking to restore a measure of independence to the inspectors general. Under a bill passed by the House on October 3rd, IGs - who now serve strictly at the pleasure of the president - would be given seven-year terms and could be fired only for cause.

"The government needs more junkyard dogs," says Sen. Grassley, a Republican veteran of six administrations. But even if the current bill becomes law, Grassley notes, real oversight won't happen without change at the top to encourage honesty from below. "Whistle-blowers are the essence of IGs doing their job," he says.

"The government is too big - you don't know where the skeletons are buried, you don't know where the fraud is being committed. You've gotta have leads, and the leads come from whistle-blowers. We need a president who will hold a Rose Garden ceremony honoring these people. Everyone from the top of the federal bureaucracy down to the janitor needs to know that whistle-blowers are patriots - and not the skunks at a picnic."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110407D.shtml

The Threat From Iran

If you listen to White House officials, Iran’s nuclear-weapons program is already a reality. There’s no hesitation on the rhetoric — the program, top administration officials say, is an unfortunate reality that demands our immediate attention.

As Dick Cheney recently put it, “Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

With this in mind, it’s probably worth taking a moment, now and again, to point out that there’s no conclusive evidence that such a program actually exists.

Let me repeat that for the intelligence challenged:

there’s no conclusive evidence that such a program (nuclear weapons) actually exists.

Despite Asshole bush’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger “World War III,” experts in and out of government say there’s no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, bush’s point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

If conclusive proof exists … bush hasn’t revealed it.

Nor have four years of IAEA inspections.

Something to keep in mind the next time we hear the bullshit that comes from the White House.

source: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/11/05/evidence-of-irans-nuclear-weapons-program-still-elusive/

SNL's Take On The Democrat Haloween Party

The dems will leave no stone unturned to get a shot in at Hillary.

Confessions Of World Criminals

Legalize It

Chicago, IL- New estimates price marijuana (cannabis) at a $113 billion dollar industry in America annually noting that marijuana prohibition costs $41 billion annually between the money spent on enforcement and lost potential tax revenue. These estimates come from the study, “Lost taxes and other costs of marijuana laws,” by Jon Gettman and made a splash in Forbes magazine.

The study examined reports from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Library of Congress, and even High Times magazine. Taxes lost due to the illegality of cannabis total $31 billion while just over $10 billion is spent on enforcing marijuana prohibition, resulting in the loss of $41 billion every year.

Cannabis prohibition has entered its 70th year and while history looks at alcohol prohibition as a complete failure the public has somehow managed to overlook the present lost cause of cannabis prohibition.

Alcohol prohibition lasted only 13 years but was such a failure that the government decided to repeal the 18th Amendment. Despite that our government insists on continuing to enforce a law that undermines the constitution just as much as the 18th Amendment did and is even more of a failure.

Not only does marijuana prohibition cost taxpayers tremendously, it also compromises the freedoms and liberties that are granted in the constitution and are sources of national pride.

Once people accept that cannabis regulation is the best alternative to the current prohibition our nation will look back at this time as an infringement upon our civil rights and an extension of Jim Crow. Illinois is consistently one of the worst states in America when it comes to racial disparities for male drug offenders admitted to prison. Our nation needs to end marijuana prohibition and begin to earn taxes from an industry that is literally growing.

Regulations will provide safeguards for drivers, children and society in general from the harms of marijuana use and those regulations will likely be broken too because there is not complete compliance with any law, nevertheless there will be regulations to protect.

Plus, towns and counties could still ban cannabis just as some currently do with alcohol. Until cannabis prohibition is repealed the American public will continue to be the real victim, more specifically the prisoners and their families.

Contact
Dan Linn Executive Director, Illinois NORML danlinn@illinoisnorml.org or call 847-341-0591

New Rules

Draft Diplomats, Not...well, not ANYone

LOL!

These little bitches are a-skeered.

Foreign service officers were screaming at the Director General’s Town Hall meeting on Iraq staffing because they are being forced to serve in Iraq. Jack Crody was especially honest calling it a “death sentence” if they are forced to go. The State Dept. didn’t even have the guts to tell them face to face. They read about it in the Washington Post.

Crody: Who will take care of our children? Who will raise our children if we’re dead or seriously wounded?

I absolutely have no respect for the whole process because you’ve demonstrated a lack of respect for your own colleagues.

Thomas: Thank you for that comment. It’s full of inaccuracies, but…that’s OK.—Don’t you or anybody else tell me the people in HR do not care about foreign service officers. I find that insulting.

Q: You may care, but you don’t articulate it. You roll your eyes, but we have polled the foreign service. 12% of your foreign service believes that Secretary Condi Rice is fighting for them. 12%.

Thomas: That’s their right, they’re wrong.

Q: Sometimes if it’s 88-12. Maybe the 88 % are correct.

Thomas: 88% of this country believed in slavery at one time, were they correct? (grumbling) So don’t come here with that.

OMG, Harry Thomas used slavery to tell them to go f*&k themselves! Only in BushWorld. Condi then tells the Diplomats: ”Iraq jobs must be filled”

More than 200 diplomats have been told they are in a pool of people who may be forced to go to Iraq to fill 48 positions for which no qualified candidates had volunteered.

The Wit & Wisdom Of Rum-Dum

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.

Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."

In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual." Pessimistic news reports -- "our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost" -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."

The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just keep taking hits."

The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice -- as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary -- Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a long war," he wrote. "Iraq is only one battleground."

Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. "Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran," he wrote in his April 2006 memo.

Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

If radicals "get a hold of" oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have "an enormous national security problem."

The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is "getting run out of Central Asia" by the Russians, who are doing a "considerably better job at bullying" than Washington is doing to "counter their bullying."

As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.

"I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters' op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible," he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried "chronic troop shortages in Iraq" while the Pentagon buys "high-tech toys that have no missions."

On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a "better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard." A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.

On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven "mistakes" columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay -- which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had "gone sour."

"Please have someone find precisely when I said 'dead-enders' and what the context was," he ordered Smith in September 2006.

A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined "is disgraceful," Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that "one welcome dividend" of Rumsfeld's departure was that the United States would "now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down."

Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, "I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been." He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army.

"We need to get that story out," he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.

Waterboarding Demonstration

You tell me. Is THIS torture?

Onward Christian Soldiers

We’ve seen a growing body of evidence of late that far-right social conservatives really are prepared to break with the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani is the GOP’s presidential nominee.

An LAT/Bloomberg poll released last week, for example, found that Giuliani is still the frontrunner for the nomination, but “about one-third of GOP voters said they would consider supporting a third-party candidate in the general election if the party nominee supported abortion and gay rights.”

A new survey conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found even more striking results.

A solid majority of Republican white evangelicals (55%) say they would at least consider voting for a conservative third-party candidate if the general election is between Giuliani and Clinton. Overall, 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say they would consider backing a third-party candidate who holds more conservative positions than Giuliani on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

So, more than half of white evangelical Republicans are prepared to withhold support from the GOP next year — and according to the data, these evangelicals comprise more than a third of the party.

No wonder Giuliani is trying to reposition himself as pro-life.

There is no doubt in my mind that America needs a strong third party candidate that can keep up with the democrats and republicans because quite frankly, I don’t like ANY of them. But how can a third party candidate be taken seriously without some type of voter reform?

The voter reform that I personally would like to see is people actually getting out and voting. It is stunning that America, as a voting nation, the staple of democracy ranks so poorly in voter turnout. People need to start trusting the system again.

The way to do this is through updating the current voting process:
· Maybe instead of a weekday where the polls close at 6PM, on a day that people are at work, make it a weekend. An ENTIRE weekend.
· Educate the people as to who is running, for what and what they stand for.
· Create a fool proof method of voting where security cannot be compromised. (I know, easier said than done. But we put people on the moon. It CANNOT be impossible)
· Make voting mandatory. A democracy cannot be a democracy when our elected leaders were placed into office by less than 25% of the population.

Now if I was a third party candidate for president and I caught wind of a group with such influence as the Christian Coalition and their comments about the conservative republican candidates, I would be trying to get their attention. This just might level the playing field a bit.

However, I would not support this candidate because I don’t feel religion has a place in governing a society.

Which is the topic of a whole other discussion.

Billion Dollar Baby

THAT is what the Iraq Occupation means to bush's buddies.

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put in August: “Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon’s had doubled.”

Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first bush and his defense secretary, Lil' Cheney, were severely cutting the military budget for high-ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer-existent Soviet military. Sure, they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.

Not so bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9/11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.

The bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 knives, but bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein’s army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.

Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so-called war on terror, a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from high-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand. As Columbia professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: “With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings, or naval fleets—the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. ... It does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.”

That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in bush’s 2008 budget requests.

Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of mujahedeen terrorists, once our “freedom fighters” in that earlier Afghan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War.

“The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget,” writes Lawrence J. Korb, “surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense. ... And, much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower.”

Thanks to bin Laden and bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11; they should give bin Laden his cut.

Marines Love Iraqi Children

Asshole

Christians Get Thrown To The Lions

I LOVE IT!!!

These Christian cocksuckers got just what they deserved.

PRAISE GAWD!!!

Decent Right-wing evangelical leaders (whatever that is) want to throw these people under the bus, but do they really disagree, or is it just bad publicity:

A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.

Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.

. . . Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "God hates fags."

. . . The church members testified they are following their religious beliefs by spreading the message that soldiers are dying because the nation is too tolerant of homosexuality.

Clearly these people are out of their minds with hate and fear. Here's an opinion by Apologetics Index, an organization that provides resources on cults and other religious wackos:

The Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas, is a hate group masquerading as a Christian church. Led by the Rev. Fred Phelps, the misguided members of this church target homosexuals and a range of others with messages of hate. The church’s ourageous protest actions - the group prefers to picket funerals(!) - have earned the Phelps and his ilk much media coverage.

The church’s web site, www.godhatesfags.com, is deservedly listed as a hate site by many internet watchdog organizations. Its content is the verbal equivalent to what you would find in any other sewer. The same is true for its companion web site, www.godhatesamerica.com.


Phelps and his followers say his civil rights advocacy in the early 1960s was “the Lord’s work.” They insist it arose from the same strict reading of the Bible that propels them to savage homosexuals. Daughter Abigail Phelps, one of several children who live near their father in the Westboro Baptist Church compound in Topeka, says Phelps “isn’t flip-flopping” from one extreme to another.

But Topeka civic leaders counter that Phelps’ metamorphosis from civil rights lawyer to anti-gay scourge was motivated by his craving for publicity and gadfly’s obsession with stirring up trouble. “He’s made himself an institution in town by attacking people,” said Bill Beachy, an official with the Concerned Citizens of Topeka, a local civic group.

But exactly how far fromt the mainstream of Right-wingers are Phelps and WBC? They claim a well-known Presidential candidate is a "believer":

Church members released an open letter to Thompson this week, saying he had discussed his views on homosexuality with them while handling the case of a woman who had sued the state's Republican attorney general for sexual harassment.

"We know what your position used to be on the homosexual question — and it was wonderful, and we saw eye to eye," church members said in the letter to Thompson.

Is this wishful thinking, or true pot, meet kettle? I don't know, but it's interesting.

Regardless, both the Right-wing "base" and the WBC wackos are far out of touch with the middle of the American electorate, which is a good thing for the Progressive Left.

The WBC are who will be left behind. And while I agree with the violence shown in the above video, the point is that these people are actively seeking these confrontation.

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

Apparently the news about Larry Craig didn't make it to La Center.

That's where Republican Rep. Richard Curtis lives. There's really no other way to figure out why Curtis thought he could call the cops, tell them every little detail of his sexual encounter with a man he picked up at an "erotic boutique," and expect the matter would be kept quiet.

Craig, on the other hand, thought that pleading guilty in Minneapolis would keep his airport cruising for boy love in the toilet quiet.

But from the start of Curtis' trouble — when he awoke in Spokane's fanciest hotel after a night of sex with a man known in some circles as "Stallion" who said he had left with Curtis' wallet and explicit photos of the legislator — he was hoping to control the damage to his reputation and his marriage.

Curtis didn't call the Spokane cops.

Instead, he called a friend in the Washington State Patrol on the other side of the mountains because, a police report says, he was worried "the local police would talk and it would get out to the press."

The State Patrol is not the Legislature's private police force and the trooper called his superiors who made sure the Spokane Police Department was contacted. And once Curtis made his call, it was impossible that his troubles would remain a private matter. It's all in the report written by a Spokane detective after he, another local cop and a State Patrol officer, showed up at the hotel to talk with Curtis.

Curtis stated he only wanted his wallet back and wanted to keep the incident as low key as possible. He did not want to pursue charges.

What's odd about this case — among many other things — is it is not clear if there was any wrongdoing on Curtis' part that would threaten his career. Certainly his activities will embarrass him and his family. And I don't think anyone can help but feel sorry for his wife and children who have to deal with the fallout of the husband and father they thought they knew was a flaming closet gay.

But Curtis is not being charged with any crime and could have been a victim himself. With Larry Craig, it was his guilty plea that Republican Senate leaders leaned on in calling for his immediate resignation.

Thats why it was announced this morning that hes quit the legislature.

His personal life is obviously in turmoil and it is difficult to imagine he can manage to do the public's business under these circumstances.

For some reason Curtis told police a story with great detail about his night with Cody "Stallion" Castagna. He told them where they met, what they did, where they did it, and where in the hotel room police could find DNA evidence of his tryst. (BLECH!!!)

He volunteered to give a swab of his cheek so police could have a sample of his DNA. He didn't seem to hold anything back, though he waved investigators away from the bag with the nylon rope and toy stethoscope in it, saying it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. The detective wrote in his report:

"I told Curtis that I wanted to collect evidence in this case so that it could be secured in case it was ever needed in the future. If he wished no further action taken, I would still have any critical evidence in case he changed his mind or the suspect continued to threaten Curtis in the future. I told Curtis that the toothpaste was already out of the tube. Curtis told me he was just trying to "put the cap back on the tube." I told Curtis that the suspect may victimize other people in the future and Curtis acknowledged that part of his job was to protect people in the State of Washington. Lt. McGovern told Curtis no matter what happened, we would have to document the case in report form regardless of whether or not the case was prosecuted. Curtis said he wished he would have just paid the additional money to the suspect because he didn't wish the case to be prosecuted. If the incident became public it could cost him his marriage and career."

Curtis hasn't said anything about the Spokane incident except to tell the editor of the Columbian that he is not gay, did not have sex with a man, and did nothing wrong.

Well two out of three ain't bad I guess.

He has hired one of the state's most prominent defense attorneys, Seattle's John Wolfe. Wolfe is currently representing Ben Stevens, the Alaska politician and son of Sen. Ted Stevens, whose name has come up in that state's burgeoning political scandal.

As for Curtis' political career, Republican leaders aren't saying much. House Republican Leader Richard DeBolt is expected to release a statement later today. House Republicans aren't really ignoring the story. In the e-mailed compilation of news stories the caucus sends out each morning, there are nine about Curtis. The Columbian talked to a few local GOP officials who mostly expressed the sort of shock you'd expect, like this from Ryan Hart, vice chairman of the Clark County Republican Party.

"He's been a great representative, and at this time all I can say is we are stunned by the news," Hart said.

No End In Sight

For most Americans, following the tragic and utterly depressing ins and outs of the bush regime’s mad rush to war in Iraq and their devastating and willful agenda of death and destruction both by lethal weapons and gross incompetence, can get very overwhelming… very fast.

First time film maker Charles Ferguson has written, directed and produced a documentary so powerful and so precise that 102 breathtaking minutes will catch most people up with most of what’s gone down in Iraq in the last 4 years.

The movie tells the unembelished story of what the bush regime has wrought in the Middle East through the eyes and through the words of reliable on-the-scene actors like Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, bush’s first Iraq “viceroy,” General Jay Garner, as well as through the experiences of Iraqi civilian leaders and American military personnel in Baghdad.

It is showing in NYC and DC now, opens throughout the L.A. area today and all over the country a week from today.

No End in Sight doesn’t attempt to draw conclusions about whether the tragic melding of arrogance and ignorance– bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cronies– purposely created the chaos that has destroyed civil society in Iraq; the movie just documents that destruction in the most compelling way the medium of film can be used and leaves the conclusions to the viewer. The uniqueness of this film lies in Ferguson’s ability to bring the viewer right into the space of the decision makers (if not The Decider).

“The film,” he explained, “is the first detailed dissection of the extraordinary way in which some of these decisions were made– in secret, by a small number of men who had virtually no relevant experience and who either failed to consult with, or overruled, the people on the ground and the military.”