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For The Trees
Who is our economy FOR, anyway? About the Authors: Dave Johnson John Emerson Richard Reich Thomas Leavitt
Recent Posts: BEST OF STF: Dave's: Articles not at STF: The ATLA Speech on building a progressive infrastructure Lowering the Bar The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law Who's Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors On the Right and their communications infrastructure: Why Republicans Win Win or Lose The "Conventional Wisdom" Machine Some History of the Conservative Movement HOW TO FIGHT BACK An Amplifier Of Our Own Don't Blame the Democrats How They Do It 1 2 3 4 Getting Rolled Other: You're Gonna Get Drafted Scalia and Self-Government Who is Our Economy For? Voting Machine Story Link Collection What's Wrong with this Picture? (Voting Machines) Like Meat in the Supermarket Get Active Thin Line 1 2 3 Fixing Social Security Seeing the Forest I, II, III "Incredibly Positive News" The Breadth of It The Republican Crony Club Moon Bush Ralph Nader is a Scab John's Best Of: Kerry Smear Page Bandar Bush 9/11 Commission Report Damages Bush -- if you read it Florida Goon Squad Intimidated the Supreme Court The Use and Abuse of George Orwell Zizka's Archives (John's previous identity) Zizka Sampler News Sources: AlterNet BuzzFlash Common Dreams Cursor Drudge Retort Information Clearing House Smirking Chimp TruthOut What REALLY Happened Links to Other Weblogs: |
 6/30/2004 Digby! Digby! Digby! Credibility Gap: "It's never easy to admit you were wrong. But, it is almost more important to realize why you were wrong than to admit it in the first place. If we could all wait to see how things turn out and then just say 'whoops, sorry' and all would be well, then life would be pretty easy. "The guy frequently says what I am thinking. He must be brilliant. --- Posted at 6/30/2004 08:44:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post  
Discussing The Movie Thanks to The Sideshow I learned of this, at A Level Gaze: "These guys voted to send thousands of our young men and women into harm's way. These guys voted to kill a whole mess of Iraqis. These guys voted to blow over 100 billion dollars in the interest of doing so.Have you noticed the full-scale media assault on Moore's movie? I have yet to see an HONEST criticism of the movie. And the moderates I see and read all seem cowed into picking up the right-wing line that there are "factual errors" in the movie. Bull. They can't make that case without making up stuff about what the movie says. And I have yet to see a single media outlet investigate the points Moore is making. Fat fucking chance of that, huh? How did Moore phrase it in the movie? "Imagine what they'd be saying if the Clinton administration had arranged to fly the McVeigh family out of the country after the OKC bombing." HOW many investigations of the Clinton administration did the Congress and Justice Department and press conduct? Has there been even ONE of the Bush administration? --- Posted at 6/30/2004 08:31:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush a Deserter: More Evidence I suppose everyone here saw this in Atrios, but I'll put it up anyway. There seems to be new information out about Pres. Bush's military service showing that he indeed was a deserter: "The proof of this is the “ARF Retirement Credit Summary” dated January 30, 1974, which shows that Bush was placed in an “Inactive Status” effective September 15th, 1973. This document is the proverbial “smoking gun” which proves that the Air Force considered George W. Bush to have been a deserter. Under Air Force policy in force at that time, the only way that someone in Bush’s position could be placed in an “Inactive Status” was if they were being “completely severed from military status.” And the only way that could happen is if someone had become permanently disabled, or deserted. Bush was not disabled. Instead, consistent with contemporaneous laws, regulations, and procedures, ARPC had reviewed Bush’s records, and found that he had failed to “satisfactorily participate” as a member of TXANG. Bush was then ordered to active duty, for which he did not show up. ARPC then certified him for immediate induction as a “non-locatee” (e.g. a deserter) through the Selective Service System. This is the only explanation that is consistent with Bush’s military records and Air Force policy of that era." Source (Paul Lukasiac) Background (from Orcinus) --- Posted at 6/30/2004 11:29:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
I think that we should have a Presidential election this fall While we're working to win the election, we should also takes steps to make it more likely that we'll have one. There have been lots of trial balloons put up about cancelling an election in the event of terrorism, and lots of suggestions that al Qaeda plans to disrupt the election, and suggestions that al Qaeda wants Kerry to win. Furthermore, even without al Qaeda, the Diebold mess is a disaster waiting to happen, as is the wrongful disenfranchisement of supposed felons in Florida and probably elsewhere. Democrats should put the Republicans and the media on notice that this time around we will fight just as hard as the Republicans do. We should assemble squads of staffers to go to problem areas to agitate if necessary -- just as the Republicans did in Florida last time. Everyone should know that we will not accept an unfair count this year, and that we are prepared to respond if we don't get one. This has to go beyond one funky little website. The idea has to circulate widely, and ultimately elected officials and Party leaders will have to be involved. If we allow the election to be stolen again, it will be. It was crazy to go ahead with an election a mere three days after the Madrid massacre..... But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. (David Brooks, March 16, 2004) The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission. Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel. (AP, June 25, 2004) A steady stream of intelligence, including nuggets from militant-linked Web sites, indicates al-Qaida wants to attack the United States to disrupt the upcoming elections, federal officials said Thursday. (AP, July 9, 2004) Osama bin Laden could have made a good living as a political consultant if he did not choose to kill babies instead. The al Qaeda/Ba'ath Party strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is, at core, a political one. They seek not just to pull Iraq into chaos, but to defeat President Bush as well. ("Terrorists for Kerry", Dick Morris, NY Post, June 5, 2004) "While a political resolution to the election might not be quick and might be a brawl, Souter argued that the nation would still accept it," Kaplan wrote. Souter tried desperately to get Kennedy to vote with the minority, according to the book, but he wouldn't flip. "He thought the trauma of more recounts, more fighting — more politics — was too much for the country to endure," Kaplan wrote. (Kennedy had been intimidated specifically by the "Brooks Brothers Riot" of paid Republican staffers which ended the recount in Miami-Dade County; that was the only actual violence that there had been, though a number of Republicans had stated their unwillingness to accept a result which made would put Gore in the Presidency). (Story: AP/CBS, Sept 10, 2001) Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year. (Salon, Sept. 23, 2003) --- Posted at 6/30/2004 07:56:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
George IV is worse than George III Abu Ghraib and the recent Supreme Court decisions have brought attention to the Bush Administration's horrible civil liberties record, but I think that the picture never quite gets talked about as a whole, and is worse than anyone realizes. (The fact that they went beyond what Justice Scalia was willing to accept tells you a lot). Consider the following propositions in their combined effect. All of them have been asserted by the administration or its defenders. 1. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to anyone but uniformed troops of a signatory. 2. American law does not apply to Guantanamo, which is controlled by the U.S. but is Cuban territory. 3. Illegal combatants essentially have no rights. The definition of "illegal combatant" is not restricted by the conditions of the single precedent case from WWII. 4. During the War on Terror, extraordinary wartime measures can be taken by the Commander in Chief. 5. There needn't be a declaration of war in the War on Terror, and the enemy isn't any specific group, much less a nation, but simply all terrorists. All enemies in the War on Terror are by definition illegal combatants. 6. The Congressional authorization of the first Iraq War remains in effect, and no further Congressional authorization is necessary. If not, then the authorization of the Afghan War remains in effect, with the same significance. 7. No one will be able to know when the War on Terror has ended. "The duration of the war" or even "the heat of battle" can last for years. 8. "Torture" is a meaningless word, and international agreements forbidding torture are quaint. 8. American citizens are not exempt from the above principles, even if arrested within the U.S. 9. Americans acting overseas in support of American policy are exempt from prosecution by any foreign government or international body, and the application of American law to their actions is limited. 10. Actions taken under these principles are not subject to American judicial review, nor does any international body have any authority over them. If you add it all up, it amounts to a completely free hand for the executive branch, the police, and the military. In the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and in American common law, you will read about "star chamber proceedings", "cruel and unusual punishment", the refusal of habeus corpus, "bills of attainder" and the like as the crimes of George III which justified the American revolution. But our present ruler, George the Fourth, doesn't see what the fuss was all about. P.S. I keep repeating this, but it remains true. Libertarians who still are considering voting for George Bush are pornographic human units with no redeeming social value. P.P.S. The social value of libertarians comes from their dedication to liberty, pretty much by definition, but if they vote for Bush they obviously have none, and thus are pornographic according to the Supreme Court definition: "In Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), Justice Brennan, writing for the Court, said for the material to be obscene, it must be 'utterly without redeeming social value.'" (Link) --- Posted at 6/30/2004 07:51:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/29/2004 New York Times Interviews Ronald P. Reagan (the son of you know who) [Brilliant stuff here. In this case, like father is not like son - he didn't vote for Bush in 2000, and he's not voting for Bush in 2004 either. Love the comment re: Cheney... "I don't think he's a mindful human being. That's probably the nicest way I can put it." -Thomas] QUESTIONS FOR RONALD P. REAGAN The Son Also Rises Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON Published: June 27, 2004 [...] How do you account for all the glowing obituaries of him [Ronald Reagan, Sr.]? I think it was a relief for Americans to look at pictures of something besides men on leashes. If you are going to call yourself a Christian -- and I don't -- then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it? It is unconscionable. It has put our young men and women who are over there, fighting a war that they should not have been asked to fight -- it has put them in greater danger. [...] --- Posted at 6/29/2004 11:43:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
I just saw Richard Just on CBSnews.com. I hadn't known that he's a TNR guy. The mystery is solved. Shafting Democrats is what TNR is for. And upward mobility is what TNR is all about. Probably some of the opportunistic, dishonest media people who got us into Iraq are going to be replaced by new, different, dishonest opportunistic media people, and Just is lobbying for one of the slots. So is Chafetz of Oxblog, whom I saw at the NYT recently. (Chafetz objected a few months ago when I called him an opportunist, but if he cares aboiut his reputation, he shouldn't act like one. "Counterintuitive liberals" and "life-long Democrats" can't fly under the radar any more.) I've been asking for sometime whether anyone in the media would be punished for their part in the Iraq fiasco. The answer is apparently yes -- the dispensable ones will be replaced by fresh new faces who are willing to write to the same script. Somerby won't run out of work. (And where does our Matt stand on all this? You might well ask. But I think that he's redeemable). --- Posted at 6/29/2004 07:29:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/28/2004 Steady Eddie on Brad Delong asked: "What concrete steps could be taken -- by a Kerry Administration, by concerned and informed individuals like many commenters on your blog, by those who can exert some influence on government including Congress -- to make these motivations more responsive to the information needs of a vibrant democracy?" My answer was: I'm not Brad, but a Kerry administration should put together a poison list of journalists who should only be talked to, on or off the record, by someone planning to write a resignation letter immediately thereafter. There shouldn't be too many names on it, but at least 30. Dishonesty, stupidity, inaccuracy, and bias should all be taken into consideration in making up the list. Their careers as Washington journalists should be completely ruined for at least four years, and hopefully forever, by this denial of access. Rove already has such a system in place, and he has used it successfully to control the media. If and when Kerry tries it, however, I expect a bunch of fucking bleeding heart liberals and counterintuitive Democrats to compare him to Hitler, Stalin, and Charley Manson, and compare the poor victim to Mother Theresa. Judith Miller is really a very fine person, you know. --- Posted at 6/28/2004 07:33:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Tell your Republican Senator to Go Cheney Himself In accordance with the new Cheney civility rules, we're asking you to contact your Republican Senator, if you have one, and tell him to go Cheney himself. If you have a Democratic Senator, ask him to tell a Republican Senator to go Cheney himself. Majority leader Frist can be told to go Cheney himself here. Other Republican Senators can be told to go Cheney themselves here. Good Americans Believe That No American President Should Ever Apologize For Anything. Especially Not to Terrorists like Leahy Not an Issue for Bush Not an Issue for Frist In a surprise move Dick Cheney has pushed forward an amendment to the recent Senate proposal to increase ten-fold the maximum penalty the Federal Communications Commission may issue for a decency violation on television and radio. The modification allows that the word "Fuck" can now be used in circumstances where it makes the person saying it feel better. UPDATE (thanks, 56k): "Fuck" won't get through the spamscreen. Use the word "Cheney" instead. The software above allows you to contact everyone who represents you, from the President on down, all at once! Here's my letter: Dear Senators: Pursuant the new Cheney civility rules, could Sen. Smith please go "Cheney" himself? And on behalf od the voters of Oregon, could Sen. Wyden please tell Sen. Smith to go "Cheney" himself, and also tell the presiding officer of the Senate, whether Sen. Frist or Vice President Cheney, to go p**s up a rope? Sincerely, John Emerson --- Posted at 6/28/2004 11:54:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Shoe, Foot, Other Foot OK, Greens and Nader fans, now YOU get to choose -- between Nader and the Greens. From the story Nader Plays Down Green Party Rebuff" "A day after not getting the Green Party's endorsement for president, Ralph Nader brushed off the rejection as an inconvenience, described the party as "strange," called the party's national nominating convention "a cabal" and predicted who the big loser in its decision not to endorse him would be."So ... shoe. foot, other foot. For those of you who don't get it, I'm saying the shoe is on the other foot. For those of you who don't get THAT, I'm saying that now it's the Greens who are the targets of unfair attacks and insults. And for those of you who still don't get what I am saying, think about this: if you don't feel it is fair for these things to be said about the Greens, and feel that the convention was not a "cabal", and don't think the TRUE Progressive vote should be divided up into smaller and smaller chunks, shouldn't that also make you think again about the things said about the Democrats -- the People's coalition that has historically banded together to oppose the moneyed interests, brought us worker protections and Social Security and Medicare and Civil Rights and overtime and weekends and vacations and environmental regulations and everything else that we have been able to accomplish over the objections of the rich and powerful? So, are the Greens just ANOTHER hack political party? What is most important, getting WHAT you want (or at least, as much of it as you can get?) or getting WHO you want? --- Posted at 6/28/2004 10:40:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/27/2004 President Bush's inability to answer impromptu questions or speak off the cuff is an embarassment, but the attitude displayed when he was asked some unfriendly questions in Ireland is rather frightening: White House staffers registered an official protest with the Irish government. To my knowledge that was the first hardball Bush interview since 1999 or even earlier. His handlers shepherded him very carefully through the 2000 campaign, and as President he has been handled with kid gloves. The way the Bush team has the American media cowed is bothersome indeed, but now they apparently want to extend his exemption from argument and skepticism to the whole rest of the world. This attitude of imperial entitlement has been matched only by the Popes and Chinese emperors of old. White House protests tough Bush questioning "On June 26, 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy arrived at Dublin airport aboard Air Force One for a triumphant Irish visit. Yesterday, June 26, 2004, President George W Bush left Shannon Airport on Air Force One having spent 19 hours in an armed camp." Sunday Business Post (Ireland) --- Posted at 6/27/2004 01:12:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
I'm bipartisan now Nothing Cheney does is OK with me, but I like the precedent he set when he told Senator Leahy to go fuck himself. Just as an evil priest can perform a valid sacrament, a loathsome Vice President can set a binding precedent. As you know, I have expressed my principled opposition to civility many times, both here and elsewhere. Few agree with me, and I get my allies wherever I can find them -- most often in the Republican Party. Let the wild rumpus begin! --- Posted at 6/27/2004 12:55:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Fahrenheit 9/11 I think that the Democrats who are distancing themselves from Moore's film are being terribly stupid. This film is going to be EXTREMELY effective with "gut-thinking" (M), "intuitive" (F) moderates, independents, and undecideds. These are exactly the voters the Democrats need. Not everyone makes up his or her mind reasonably after the careful examination of evidence. Many decide on the basis of hunches and feelings. The Republican Party has paid a lot of attention to this demographic, and their efforts have generally been successful -- to the extent that many assume that these voters are hopeless, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. They aren't; it's just that the Democrats haven't approached them effectively. You really can't talk too openly about this -- Republicans are very quick to scream that Democrats think that the American voters are stupid. I don't put it quite that way. I just say that people who make decisions based on whims tend to get suckered a lot, and that the Republicans have done a great job of suckering them. (Of course the Republicans don't call the voters dumb, because when you're suckering someone you always tell them how smart they are). If Moore's manipulative, demagogic, cheesy tricks succeed in wising these voters up, then Moore will have done the Democrats an enormous, and mostly undeserved, favor. You gotta play the game the way it's played. I don't know how many times liberals and Democrats have told me "Well, I'd rather lose than descend to that level". I just don't know what to say when I hear someone saying that. Sometimes it just seems that the Democrats really deserve to lose. --- Posted at 6/27/2004 12:29:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/26/2004 OH MY GOD! There is a new campaign ad viewable at The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush that you will not BELIEVE! (Click the big, green "Watch!" button.) It's called The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party and it shows people like Al Gore, Howard Dean, Al Gephardt and John Kerry morphing into HITLER! It starts with Gore in a speech, morphing into Hitler, with a crowd shouting "Seig Heil!". It goes on like that. YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT! Go watch before they pull it down!!! --- Posted at 6/26/2004 08:36:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/25/2004 The Fear Here's the transcript of Bush's Feb. 8, 2003 radio address: "THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Powell briefed the United Nations Security Council on Iraq's illegal weapons program, its attempts to hide those weapons, and its links to terrorist groups.And so it was off to war, glorious war. And, of course, the bonus that Bush would be a "war President" for the election. --- Posted at 6/25/2004 08:28:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/24/2004 John Quincy Adams and George Walker Bush I saw the following quote in a fundraising pitch from The Independent Institute*: "During this time, President Bush has become the first full-term president since John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) NOT to have vetoed a SINGLE bill." Information from the Office Clerk of the House confirms this statement(http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0801767.html). It is certainly an attention getting statistic... I don't rightly know what to make of it, other than it only re-emphasizes the exceptional nature of the Bush Presidency. * Yes, I'm aware of where their money comes from, like everyone else on the right. At the same time, I have a lot more respect for truly libertarian institutions like this. These folks are generally a lot more coherent and consistent than their brethren... and they've been consistently and highly critical of the Bush's administration's policies re: the war in Iraq, civil liberties, and expansion of police power. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/24/2004 11:57:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Greens vs Dems I posted a comment in the ongoing Greens vs Dems debate, and thought I would elevate it to a post. (I can do that. So can the other posters here, by the way.) Changing the minds... The Green's idea is that they are forcing the Democratic Party and the country back to the left. I agree that this needs to happen. In fact I used to BE a Green because I believed this strongly. But if you study what has happened to America it is not the Republican PARTY that has moved the public -- and therefore the Democratic Party -- to the right, it is their network of well-funded think tanks and advocacy/communication organizations. By changing public attitudes, they can elect candidates that reflect the changes their efforts have brought. Parties reflect the public. What is needed is not a change in the Democratic Party, but a means to change public attitudes, which would then change the candidates and parties. Parties don't tell the people what to think -- people's thinking tells the parties what to do. Parties respond to the voters. Change the people, then the Parties will change. To accomplish this, we need to fund organizations that are able to reach the general public through marketing, and work to restore Progressive values of community, sharing, nurturing and democracy -- and counter the Right's propaganda. That's what the Right has been doing -- pounding the public with "free-market" and "linertarian" and "personal responsibility" messaging -- and we need to do it right back. This is not the job of just a radio network, it requires a long-term effort with strategic funding designed to reach the long-term goals. It requires many organizations doing research into public attitudes and language and messaging, etc. That's what the Right does. They have over 500 organizations working on this, and they are well-funded. As the public is moved back from the Right's constant ideological drumbeat, THEN the Democratic Party will respond. --- Posted at 6/24/2004 09:46:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ANOTHER Fine Mess He's Gotten Us Into! Three years ago North Korea did NOT have nukes. Bush insulted them and called them part of the "axis of evil" and then refused to negotiate with them, forcing them into a crash program to develop nuclear weapons. So here we are. Our military is completely tied up in Iraq, and North Korea is threatening to set off nuclear weapons. N. Korea Threatens to Test Nuclear Weapon: "WASHINGTON (AP) - North Korea told the United States on Thursday that it would test a nuclear weapon unless Washington accepted Pyongyang's proposal for a freeze on its atomic program, a senior administration official said."It REALLY, REALLY matters who you vote for. REALLY. This is a case where the "lesser of two evils" literally means not ending the world. --- Posted at 6/24/2004 03:03:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Terrible Cost "Price of war": The Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus have released a study on the costs of the Iraq war. Here are the human costs as cited by the groups, but the report also includes security, economic and social costs.Who you vote for does make a difference. If not to you, it certainly did and does to those listed above. --- Posted at 6/24/2004 11:41:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
October Surprise! October Surprise! Take the poll - what will Bush do to hold on to power? --- Posted at 6/24/2004 09:37:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Supreme Court Backs Cheney The same Supreme Court that ruled that President Clinton basically had to go on television in his underwear (no attorney-client privilege, OK to proceed with private suit that supposedly wouldn't get in the way of running the country, etc.) ruled that courts can take more time deciding whether to make Cheney disclose who and what went on with his "secret energy task force." One thing we know about the task force is that it involved maps of Iraq's oil fields even before 9/11. If we know that, and they still want the rest of it secret, what is it they want to keep the public from knowing? --- Posted at 6/24/2004 09:06:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Denial of Service Attack on my personal weblog. It appears that someone has launched a denial of service attack on my personal weblog - the post at this URL: http://www.thomasleavitt.org/personal/blog/index.php?p=530, accounts for 150 out of the last 200 accesses, and 670 out of the last 1000 ... most of them from a small number of similar IP addresses. Given that the post is entitled "Nader endorses Camejo!", it doesn't seem unreasonable to draw the conclusion that someone angry about Nader's selection of Camejo as his VP is trying to exact their revenge. Which is amusing, given that I've already stated that if the race is close in California, Kerry is likely to get my vote... despite the fact that I run a web site entitled UnrepentantNaderVoter.com. Not to mention my rather ambiguous feelings about Nader's campaign, also previously stated. :) Anyway, I've decided turn my personal blog off, for the moment, to prevent the rest of the server from getting hammered. Seems like the Republicans aren't the only types who believe in censorship. :/ --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/24/2004 04:53:00 AM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/23/2004 If I were the devil I don't know why but my political/personal inbound emails run 4 out of 5 right wing, and often it's on its third or fourth generation of forwards. Half of these emails have longer headers than text. While I've stopped trying to respond to those where I just don't recognize any names (which is most because what few right wing friends and family I have remaining have long since learned I "REPLY ALL" my responses and dropped me from their email lists) in yesterday emails I received a special request from mom. Mom , ever the diplomat, has so far avoided being removed from family and friends GOP_chain ebombs but is finding it harder to ignore them. So mom, knowing my penchant for not keeping my mouth closed (sure, now it's handy . . .), forwarded me the latest and asks if I can help her formulate a response. Half hour later and I've whipped out a quick Fisking of a perennial favorite of Death Pools around the country; Paul Harvey. I sent it back and didn't give it any thought until I got word today that it's being printed up and passed around. Our most gracious host, Dave, sent me a link months ago to guest post and told me "Whenever inspiration strikes . . ." So, in the spirit of "It would be a shame to waste a good Fisking" I present for my opening post: Paul Harvey, If I Were the Devil, Fisked If I were the devil, I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world; I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings; This kind of simplistic logic suggests that man is the opposite of God, and the devil is the opposite of God, so therefore man (or in this case man's effort) is equal to the devil. If I were the devil I'm quite sure I would appreciate this kind of logic. I'm not sure who else would though. Of course there are many that would argue the devil has already gained "control of the most powerful nation in the world" through the person of George Bush, but I doubt that's what Paul had in mind with this statement. I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around; If you were the devil what would you think of invading and occupying, at a cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, a nation that was not a threat to the US, was not involved in recent attacks against our country and had in fact been a subsidized client state of the US only a decade ago? If I were the devil I'd love the oil and use our troops to steal it. I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue; If I were the devil I would cut taxes (especially on those most able to afford them) until entire states bordered on bankruptcy. Then I'd cut vital public services including infrastructure, transportation, education, school nutrition programs (as the devil this would be one of my favorite cuts), police and fire protection. Can't very well ensue social chaos without cutting education, Police and fire. I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership; Considering the inexplicable level of support for Bush I think the devil has already won this one. I would make it legal to kill unborn babies; If I were the devil I would make it mandatory to torture semantics. I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient; If I were the devil I would make it socially acceptable to prolong a person's un-treatable suffering and agony as long as possible, and invent machines to make it convenient. I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings; See both "mandatory to torture semantics" from above and "invading and occupying." I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit; If I was the devil I would insist that God be taught in the schools. Outside of the fact that I, the devil, couldn't exist without God, nothing brings out the absolute worst in people like instilling the belief that their God is the only correct God (as the devil I'm telling both sides this one, hee hee hee). Now couple this with cuts to education and law enforcement and I'd be one very happy devil. I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them; Not that Jesus was a sports hero, but he did do a ton to help promote wine. If I were the devil I'd take credit for tobacco though. I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member with my agenda; If I were the devil I'd want royalties from Fox. I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation. Does this explain why the holiest are forbidden to marry and have families? If I were the devil it might make sense, but as it is it doesn't. I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation; If I were the devil I'd forbid divorce. Misery loves company and oh how much company I'd have were that the case. I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and call it art; If I were the devil I would compel people to repress their most depraved fantasies and then, when they inevitably act out on them behind the scenes, have them repeatedly shuttled to new parishes to start over again (and again, and again), and call it rehabilitation. Or denial. The devil doesn't know the difference anyway. I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted; If I were the devil I'd want to convince the world to be as intolerant as possible of others who are different. If I were the devil I'd be agreeing with what Paul Harvey really thinks on this one. I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct; If I were the devil I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves exclusive spokesmen for God's word and refer to their agenda as Divine. Of course others may refer to it as an inquisition . . . or a Crusade. I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive; If I were the devil I would persuade people that the Bible is just as relevant today as it was when it was written 2,000 years ago. Especially Leviticus. He'd be my favorite. Death for mixing your fibers, death for working on Sunday, death for talking back to your parents, tips on selling your daughters into slavery . . . what's a devil not to like? Anyone who doesn't believe that everything Leviticus espouses is the path to a richer, more fulfilling life is naive. I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional; If I were the devil I would close the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer, faithfulness and obedience, to the exclusion of all other concerns, are the only things that matter. Much easier to work my magic* without free will messing things up. * An example: "Look, over there! The devil is in that man. KILL HIM! Ohh now look over THERE! Another possessed by the devil. You must, for the sake of your saftey, kill them too." It's almost too easy. Hmmm... I guess if I were the devil, I'd leave things pretty much the way they are. Good day. Hmmm . . . I guess if I were the devil I'd agree things are going my way, but not for the reasons Paul Harvey thinks. --- Posted at 6/23/2004 02:20:00 PM by Thumb Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Rewriting History I wrote about this the other day, but today Tony Blankley's column is out. Here's what he says: "But it is that third point about failing to catch Bin Laden where Clinton probably, and correctly, realizes he is historically most vulnerable. Whether or not Clinton tried as hard as he could, the cruel, objective fact of history is that Bin Laden and his al Qaeda emerged on Clinton's watch. He failed to nip it in the bud, and it has now blossomed into a malignant worldwide danger. "Notice how he says "on Clinton's watch?" Actually, bin Laden and al-Queda "emerged" on Reagan and Bush I's watch -- and were funded and trained by them. Speaking of things happening on someone's "watch," what happened on George W Bush's watch? --- Posted at 6/23/2004 10:28:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/22/2004 Clinton the Most Progressive Thomas posted some Green propaganda so I'll just ask one question. Can you name an issue where Clinton was not the most Progressive president we've had since FDR? Update - Unless you have an absolutely perfect candidate, who agrees with every single position you have, 100% of the time, then aren't you voting for the "lesser evil" every time you vote, no matter who you vote for? In other words, "lesser evil" is just meaningless words, designed to sound good but actually confusing the real issues. You have to compromise, even if you vote for yourself. --- Posted at 6/22/2004 06:40:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Nader's selection of Peter Camejo as VP Nader has picked Peter Camejo, Mr. Avocado himself (an avocado is Green on the inside, and Green on the outside), as his running mate/VP. For those of you not in the know, Camejo ran as the Green Party of California's candidate for Governor in 2000 and 2002, earning respectable totals in both campaigns (over 5% in the 2000 race, and 200,000+ votes in both races). This is a political masterstroke (at least, if you look at it from the perspective of a Nader campaign supporter): 1. It (negatively) seals the fate of an independent Green Party candidacy by David Cobb. Faced with the double-whammy of a Nader/Camejo ticket, each of which draws upon a significant and not necessarily overlapping segment of the Green voter/activist population, it seems inconceivable that a Cobb campaign could gain any traction at all, even within the confines of the Green Party itself. Having Camejo running as the "Green" half of a Nader/Green "fusion" ticket* pretty much renders Cobbs' "Safe States" campaign pointless, and narrows even further a base already considerably shrunken by defections to the Nader campaign. A Cobb campaign would be a "rump" campaign in the most classic sense of the word, and I think most activists within the Green Party will recognize that and vote accordingly. 2. It renders whatever decision the Green Party makes in Milwaukee about endorsing Nader more or less irrelevant - with Camejo having delivered a big chunk of the Green grassroots to the Nader camp, all the convention can do is make it more or less difficult for Nader to obtain a few ballot lines. What will the convention decide? Who knows... my sense is that the momentum for a Nader endorsement is building, but at the same time, if Camejo's decision has finally put the last nail in the idea of an independent Green candidacy via David Cobb, as I think it has, it may very well result in a substantial number of the party's delegates opting to sit this one out, rather than putting the Green Party in the position of supporting and being a proxy for a candidate (or a pair of candidates) over which it has no control whatsoever. Why Camejo? 1. There was a very strong "Draft Camejo" movement in the Green Party, folks who've been seeking to ensure that an authentically Green voice is heard this November, one that the media will have a hard time silencing. Camejo, even as the VP of a Nader ticket, fits that bill very well, and I think most of the Draft Camejo types will very willingly come on over to a Nader/Camejo ticket, regardless of whether the Green Party officially endorses it. 2. Camejo's always been a bit of a wildcard, willing to go his own way, regardless of whether or not the party establishment has bothered to line itself up behind him or not (such as when he plunged into the race for Governor of California during the recall election), and this fits. It also, as I point out above, pretty much seals off any potential for a strong campaign by a separate Green Party nominee. * See: The Challenge of 2004: GREEN PARTY UNITY (from Peter Camejo) and Robert Caldwell's essay, For a Green-Nader Candidacy. What do I think, personally? I don't know. I like Camejo, and I like Nader, but I'd like them both more if they were the official nominees of the Green Party itself, rather than independents making an end run around party process. I'm a Green, first, not a Naderite or an "independent progressive". I believe that the most effective way to work for the long term transformation of American politics (and thus the preservation of life on this planet) is build the Green Party into a credible and effective alternative to the politics of the status quo, as represented by the duopoly. I don't see how an independent campaign by Nader and Camejo does this, and so I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for it. That said, Kerry's done nothing to earn my vote as of yet, and quite a bit to lose it... under normal circumstances; but we're not in normal times, and Bush strikes me as incredibly dangerous (or rather, those around him). Enough so, that I'm willing to concede that I might hold my nose in November and cast a vote for him, if things look close in California. Put it another way: you're not likely to see me pounding the pavement, or writing a check, or holding a fundraiser, or manning a phone, for any candidate for President of the U.S. this fall. Ray Glock-Gruenich (Green) for Congress in the 17th District, anyone? :) --- Posted at 6/22/2004 06:02:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Clinton Record – Let’s Not Forget [Got this from the VoteNader web site. Thought some of you read meat types might want to rip into it. Personally, I could name a half-dozen other things not mentioned here off the top of my head, starting with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and DOMA (the "Defense of Marriage Act", that pissed me off... -Thomas] During the flurry of mass media attention being devoted this week to
Wouldn’t President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick
What the Clinton-Gore administration did:
--- Posted at 6/22/2004 05:50:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Cleaning Up Republican Messes I took a break from work and was clicking through the channels, and stopped on Crossfire for a minute. Right-winger guest Tony Blankley was saying that Clinton's "failure to nip bin Laden in the bud" will damage his reputation in the future. How many variations of "9/11 was Clinton's fault" have you heard? Well, let's nip THIS in the bud right now. Here's a 1998 story about bin Laden's Bush/Reagan CIA training and funding. This is just one of many such stories. Once again, Clinton is being scapegoated by the people who created the mess in the first place, because he didn't sufficiently clean it up for them. For example, while he managed to bring us the longest economic expansion in history, as well as starting to pay down the debt, he didn't make the economy strong ENOUGH to withstand what Bush was going to do to it. So they say the economic mess is Clinton's fault. Reagan and Bush funded and trained the Afghan resistance, including bin Laden, and then dropped them, no follow-up, didn't even get the shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles back from them. Now they blame Clinton for not seeing what bin Laden was going to do ON BUSH'S WATCH and doing more to prevent it -- even though Clinton had made bin Laden the #1 priority, and was going around the country giving speeches warning about terrorism, and trying to get anti-terrorism bills passed that the Republicans were filibustering. (One they filibustered because Clinton wanted tags in explosives so we could learn where bombs were made.) So it's all Clinton's fault because he didn't clean up the Republican mess ENOUGH. --- Posted at 6/22/2004 01:51:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/21/2004 Let's not be hysterical Al-Qaeda is not the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Stalin and Hitler controlled enormous military forces located within or adjacent to the heartland of Europe, and Hitler was the master of one of the most productive economies and one of the most technically advanced nations in the world. (The USSR was no slouch either). By contrast, all Muslim nations are economically weak. None of them has an industrial base or significant scientific or technical capacities. None of them has a genuinely fearsome military. Furthermore, Islam is not united.The Shia / Sunni division is the most prominent, but there are many internal divisions within these large groupings too. There are twenty or more Muslim nations, and they are often intensely hostile to one another. Muslims speak more than ten major languages. All Islam has is oil money and popular support. The popular support is broad but not necessarily deep; most Muslims are not militants and give nothing more than lipservice to the cause. Only the Islamists' ability to recruit suicide bombers makes them a threat at all. Doesn't this tell us that we're going to be able to handle this? Doesn't it tell us that the hysteria about the collapse of Western civilization is unnecessary? The 9/11 attack was unprecedented for America, but other nations have suffered much worse attacks (either absolutely or in proportion to their populations) without going insane. One example is El Salvador, which lost about 1% of its population to terrorism over about a decade. Some of the hysteria (at the popular level) comes from people who have personal emotional problems and need to vent -- go to "Little Green Footballs" or "The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler" if you don't believe me. But at the elite level, it comes mostly from politicians and policymakers whose agendas can't be fulfilled unless the American people are petrified with fear and obsessed with rage. We should figure out what we have to do, and do it -- but without the hysteria, please. The United States has the most powerful military in the history of mankind. More than anything, we need a calm hand on the controls: the head cases should butt out. --- Posted at 6/21/2004 10:23:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Another Republican Assault on Labor Rights Nathan Newman writes about the Bush administration's National Labor Relations Board's latest assault on the rights of workers. This is worth reading to get more of an idea of the kinds of things that happen with Republicans run the country. This case is an example of why so few union people are Greens. Ralph Nader says there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, but this kind of thing shows why people in the Labor Movement so strongly support Democrats and don't succumb to the Green's call to split the coalition. Union people are living in a reality where they see every day how their jobs and rights are on the line. They understand about getting what you CAN get, incremental improvement, and the harm that can be done when people demand ideological perfection over pragmatic compromise. --- Posted at 6/21/2004 08:15:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/19/2004 Digby! Digby! Digby! Hullabaloo: "Let's face it, for many people in this country (and probably the president himself) all the high flown phony rhetoric about 'freedom and democracy' notwithstanding, this war is about killing arabs. For them,the terrorists were arabs therefore all arabs are terrorists. They couldn't care less about WMD or terrorist connections to Iraq.They wanted to make an example of somebody. It's pretty much nothing more than straight out bigotry." --- Posted at 6/19/2004 10:37:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/18/2004 ENRON TAPES - Archival postings now easily available. I've created a section under my personal web site (with the very capable assistance of Godmoma, my wife and in-house web designer) to make the various postings related to The Enron Tapes that I've made on this blog more easily accessible. I encourage folks to link back to this site, and of course to Seeing The Forest as well. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/18/2004 11:11:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Google on what our elected representatives in Congress care about. Google search results: biodiversity site:house.gov - 401 biodiversity site:semate.gov - 254 iraq site:senate.gov - 20,300 iraq site:house.gov - 36,800 ecology site:senate.gov - 353 ecology site:house.gov - 582 "national security" site:house.gov - 28,500 "national security" site:semate.gov - 12,600 rainforest site:senate.gov - 64 rainforest site:house.gov - 113 military site:house.gov - 71,700 military site:senate.gov - 28,500 extinction site:senate.gov - 349 extinction site:house.gov - 496 bomber site:house.gov - 638 bomber site:house.gov - 329 submarine site:senate.gov - 548 submarine site:house.gov - 1000 How about some of the Green Party's 10 Key Values? "Ecological Wisdom" site:senate.gov - 1 "Ecological Wisdom" site:house.gov - 0 "Nonviolence" site:senate.gov - 28 "Nonviolence" site:house.gov - 115 "Social Justice" site:senate.gov - 4830 "Social Justice" site:house.gov - 8600 "Grassroots Democracy" site:senate.gov - 3 "Grassroots Democracy" site:house.gov - 18 "Feminism" site:house.gov - 3 "Feminism" site:house.gov - 9 how about a variant? ... not much better feminist site:senate.gov - 31 feminist site:house.gov - 103 sexism site:senate.gov - 23 sexism site:house.gov - 48 racism site:senate.gov - 191 racism site:house.gov - 576 "tax cut" site:senate.gov - 4390 "tax cut" site:house.gov - 9810 "environmental sustainability" site:senate.gov - 33 "environmental sustainability" site:house.gov - 64 "south america" site:senate.gov - 512 "south america" site:house.gov - 899 africa site:senate.gov - 3660 africa site:house.gov - 6510 china site:senate.gov - 4930 china site:house.gov - 13600 germany site:senate.gov - 2330 germany site:house.gov - 5460 "hate crime" site:senate.gov - 120 "hate crime" site:senate.gov - 214 pornography site:senate.gov - 998 pornography site:house.gov - 2090 Pretty interesting, eh? I suspect that most of you can guess what I think about the bipartisan priorities of our elected officials in the face of global ecological devastation and mass injustice worldwide. Someone with more coding chops than myself might be able to create a pretty interesting website out of this. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/18/2004 05:07:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
FreewayBlogger - Another Great One FreewayBlogger.com has another good one: 
--- Posted at 6/18/2004 11:01:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Pretty Serious Stuff Putin Says Russia Warned U.S. on Saddam: "Russian President Vladimir Putin , in comments sure to help President Bush, declared Friday that Russia knew Iraq's Saddam Hussein had planned terror attacks on U.S. soil and had warned Washington. "So Russia warned the US? And the CIA and no other agencies of the government have ANY recollection of this? Even though it would save their ASSES right now to be able to say this happened? This is Putin's second venture into the US elections in a week. Last week he said the Democrats have "no moral right" to criticize Bush. So we have some kind of deal between Putin and Bush to help Bush in the election. And we already know that Bush has a deal with the Saudis to lower gas prices at the pump in time for the election. (Raising them dramatically and then lowering them a little bit SEEMS like a reduction to the voters, yet brings in the cash as well.) What's coming? Watch your backs. --- Posted at 6/18/2004 07:09:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - What people don't get about this case: it isn't about Enron alone. The Enron Tapes and the Snohomish vs. Enron hearing aren't just about a few potty mouthed "bad apples" at Enron engaging in opportunistic exploitation of regulatory loopholes (as Enron's PR people would like you to believe). They highlight a fundamental problem of our system of governance: the balance of power between corporations and the average human citizen is way out of whack. This is a point that those of us on our side of the issue would be well served to bring to the fore. Enron lobbied our legislators and regulatory agencies with the conscious and deliberate intent of creating a non-transparent marketplace full of inefficiencies that they could then exploit (see Dr. Carl Pechman's testimony, quoted in previous posts). AND OUR LEGISLATORS AND REGULATORS LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT... or rather, they did not intervene, because they saw nothing unusual in the process as it happened. This doesn't always result in disaster (apparently New York state managed the deregulation process better), but it happens way too often. The technical term for this is "regulatory capture". (1) This term was created approximately thirty years ago by Richard Posner, so it is not a new problem - just an ever more pressing one. The theory is ultimately very logical, and meshes with that of another political truism: those with the most concentrated interest in a particular aspect of governmental policy will have the most influence over it... and since, in many cases, the entities with the greatest interest are those being regulated, and have the most resources to devote to influencing the regulators and legislators, the result is pretty predictable -- and especially dangerous, due to the amoral imperatives fostered by corporation based capitalism, as I'll discuss later on. And it doesn't matter which party is running things. This particular instance was a bi-partisan effort: it happened under a Republican Governor and was initiated by a Democratic representative in a legislature throughly controlled by a strong Democratic Party majority (AB1890 passed the State Legislature unanimously, 77-0 in the Assembly and 39-0 in the Senate), and it blew up under a Democratic governor and a Democratic, then Republican President. This goes beyond partisan ideology - what we are talking about here is the fact that elements of corporate America have systematically subverted our government's regulatory apparatus for private gain. This happens over and over and over again, regardless of which party is in power, at any level. In this particular instance, it just happened to go sour in a very big, and very public way. The movie "The Corporation", subject of a feature article in Metro Santa Cruz (an alternative weekly newspaper published in my home town) posits that this is part and parcel of the behavior fostered in those participating in the economic structures of corporation based capitalism. I haven't seen the actual movie yet, but it is clear from the article that the movie's creators believe that until we change from a system based on the corporation as the basic operational economic unit, a system which makes amoral behavior not only legal, but essentially mandates it, all efforts to remediate the problems our society faces will be futile. The fact that the motivations of those influencing our government and regulatory processes are essentially amoral would explain a lot, eh? It would also explain why, under this particular administration, so heavy with corporate types, amoral behavior has become par for the course. I'll end this by re-emphasizing my core point: the Enron tapes are about more than Enron, they are about the fundamentally corrupted nature of our system of economic and social governance, as exemplified by Enron's efforts to influence the regulatory structure it would in turn operate within; our side needs to bring this aspect to the fore of the discussion, and not let itself be distracted by the more sensationalistic aspects of the case, which are essentially trivial in nature, and not particularly relevatory (which is one reason why I think that the phenomenon of these tapes simply hasn't produced the political and social firestorm one might have expected, given their inflammatory nature). 1. This is an economic term describing a situation where one operator (or group of operators) in the market uses its influence or resources to extract a regulatory decision, or lack of decision, for their own benefit rather than the benefit of society as a whole. It is associated with patterns of behaviour on the part of a regulatory body in one, or a combination, of the following situations: * the regulatory body is tending to further producer interests over consumer interests. * the regulatory body has become overly protective towards the regulated entities. * the regulatory body is tending to adopt objectives that are very close to those of the entities it is supposed to regulate. (Definition source: www.betterregulation.ie/ getFile.asp?FC_ID=18&docID=48) P.S. As a Green, I have to point out that Ralph Nader and the Green Party have made untrammeled corporate power a major theme from day one. In a sense, it can be said that the Democratic Party's systematic neglect of this issue has created the political breathing space for Naderism and the Green Party to emerge as an visible force in American politics, as it is clear from polls and surveys that their strongest support comes from those folks who see this as a core issue. In my opinion, John Kerry and the Democratic Party (as well as the nation as a whole) would be much better off if they attempted to secure their "left flank" by addressing this issue directly, rather than continuing the obviously futile (and rather annoying) tactics they've used to date. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/18/2004 01:26:00 AM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/17/2004 Stick It To Bush See the Bush Voodoo Doll, in the ad on the right side of this page! A great Father's Day gift! --- Posted at 6/17/2004 10:18:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Rumsfeld Must Go! Rumsfeld Ordered Secret Arrest in Iraq, WASHINGTON - At the request of CIA Director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the military to secretly hold a suspected terrorist in Iraq , a Pentagon spokesman said.LIARS! We can't trust a word this man says. WHY IS HE STILL THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE?! And, as a result, no American captured in a war will ever again be safe from torture or other crimes. And, from the story, there's this gem: Maj. David Kolarik, a spokesman for the military's Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said all prisoners are treated "in accordance with the principles" of the Geneva Conventions "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."In other words, we follow the rules when we feel like it. --- Posted at 6/17/2004 09:07:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/16/2004 Very Strange E-mail Problem Has anyone out there heard of a problem like this? I can't send file attachments. If I attach a picture or a Word file, it never arrives at its destination. I can, however, attach a very short text file and it arrives. This started yesterday morning. I thought it was only through my nuthouse account. But then I also couldn't send attachments through another account. So I went to another computer - a Mac now - and sent some files through Hotmail and .Mac accounts. THOSE files also did not arrive. I find that I CAN send files through my Comcast account that comes with the cable modem service. The files sent yesterday still have not arrived. Any ideas? --- Posted at 6/16/2004 08:00:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/15/2004 Still Dead Ronald Reagan is still dead! --- Posted at 6/15/2004 08:29:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Suicidal Tendencies Today's paper is running a "comic strip" that in essence tells people not to read newspapers because they are pro-terrorist and have a, quote, "blame America first attitude". This link is good for a short period only, for the particular comic I am referring to. But later you can go here and look up the week of June 14. (The week of June 7 begins the attack.) How do the newspaper serve their interests by publishing a cartoon that INSULTS half of their readers, with right-wing stuff that divides the country to the point of fomenting civil war? I mean, if you BELIEVE that half the country is pro-terrorist, which puts you LIFE at risk, and anti-American ... --- Posted at 6/15/2004 08:24:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/14/2004 What The Left Coaster Said Hatch and McCain on Their Knees: "What's unfortunate is that John McCain has lost whatever pair he has left and doesn't cite the Pentagon for contempt of Congress too. It's hard to imagine what's more appalling--executive public servants with so little regard to serving the people openly, or two such distinguished, senior members of the United States Senate forsaking their duty in such loathsome, obsequious, craven capitulation to ethical principles and their oversight responsibilities" --- Posted at 6/14/2004 10:14:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - The Web Site www.enrontapes.com Coverage of the Enron Tapes should be on major media outlets (CNN, NBC) tonight. The site above contains individual links to each of the 82 publicly released audio files and associated transcripts, as well as the motion and testimony describing them and documenting their significance. It also contains links to information on the Snohomish PUD Web site. Disclaimer: My wife and I received (a small amount of) financial compensation to design and assemble this site on behalf of my former employer and Snohomish, their client. She is a professional web site designer, and I assist her with content development and grunt HTML coding. :) --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/14/2004 03:26:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Whatever It Takes the american street: Proto-fascist thuggery: "None of this will ever be directly connected to George W. Bush, of course. There's no need. There are too many people out there willing to do whatever it takes to keep him in office. Whatever it takes."Whatever it takes. Watch your backs. --- Posted at 6/14/2004 09:36:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/13/2004 Abu Ghraib 6-13 Abu Ghraib 6-13 http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002017.html I am astonished by the silence of a lot of libertarian types about a lot of things. What a bunch of frauds! If I’m not mistaken, the inexplicably-respected Jane Galt recently signed on to the Bush team (tacitly, by her use of the word “we” in a political context). Volokh’s shame over his squeamishness (i.e., decency) is rather sickeningly characteristic of our times. In law, philosophy, PR, political consultancy, and advertising, “rationality” is regarded as the willingness to argue for or against any position whatsoever. I read somewhere (Hannah Arendt??) that most of the anti-Nazi resisters (and shelterers of Jews) were naive, simple-minded people who had a gut feeling that something was wrong. Whereas Eichmann had a Kantian explanation for what he did. There’s a second factor. The 9/11 attack was not an unprecedented murderous attack on civilians. There were several technically and organizationally unique aspects to 9/11, but the murderousness was normal-range. The reason that 9/11 is thought to be a world-historical event is that it was an attack on the militarily most powerful nation in the history of the world. It was an attack on someone who was able to retaliate. At some point the Bosnians, the Salvadorans, the Guatamalans, the Ruandans, the Timorese, and many other have had to learn to forget about murderous episodes which were absolutely much worse, and proportionate to population enormously worse. But these are powerless peoples. Even the French, the Germans, the Poles, et. al. — larger, more prosperous nations — have had to learn to go on with their lives. Where does the belief come from that this particular attack is so uniquely horrible that it justifies forgetting about a century or more of attempts to reduce the inhumanity of warfare? As far as I know, it comes from America’s historical impunity. We’ve really been very favored and don’t know how to deal with this. The secrecy of the adversaries adds to the urgency, but now that we’re focussing on them they have become much less mysterious. I think that the worst interpretation of what’s happening is the best. The Bush plan is to fight an endless war against a nebulous enemy, and to use the war as a pretext to ram through a lot of programs which are often unrelated to the war, together with an enormously increased police and surveillance powers and much less oversight or Constitutional limitation on the executive. Libertarians who fail to realize this are pornographic and entirely without redeeming social value and absolutely worthless for any human purpose and should be mercifully put to sleep. Remember, we’re talking about people who are thrown into a rage by the very idea of the unconstitutional Smithsonian Institute and the unconstitutional National Academy of the Arts. http://philosophy.thereitis.org/displayarticle248.html --- Posted at 6/13/2004 04:25:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What 800-lb. Gorilla? The hapless winger hack at the Portland Oregonian, David Reinhard, has revived the Iraq - 9/11 connection. It's mostly based on a possible meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in the Czech Republic, with some new twists. Reinhard's case probably can be traced back to Edward Jay Epstein's work, which has been partly refuted by Spinsanity. But really, who cares? We know a lot about al Qaeda. They had and still have high-level supporters (both in government and among private citizens)in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistan. One of the hijackers may even have received money (indirectly, of course!) from Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. The Saudi gorilla is right there in the room, but the wingers are still running all over the place trying to catch the Iraqi mouse. Perhaps there was some connection between Iraq and the hijackers, but if you're trying to figure out what happened on 9/11, Iraq isn't the place to look. Saudi Arabia is the place to look. Something that might be considered is tracking cash transfers to al Qaeda from Saudi Arabia. But they're much more interested (5.2 times more interested, to be precise) in tracking money going to Cuba. Why? Because there are a lot of Cuban votes in Florida, to begin with. But the real reason is that several members of the Bush administration have reasons to be a bit touchy about investigations of cash transfers from Saudi Arabia. Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud can tell you more. Or you can just go to my Bandar Bush page. --- Posted at 6/13/2004 02:41:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Reagan is the Greatest American President Ever, Except Maybe Van Buren The wingers have disappointed me; the only prominent self-described conservative to describe Reagan as the greatest American President of all is Larry Kleiman, of Clinton-impeachment infamy, and he did it several years ago. Perhaps the rest of them are reluctant to unseat the founder of the Republican party, especially since people might then start talking about the fact that a significant part of the Republican core constituency really, really hates Lincoln. Note that Van Buren has strong support from a hyper-winger. If you read the PDF, you'll find that he also ranks Harding and Coolidge in the top five. You can't make this stuff up. After playing a memorable clip of one of President Ronald Reagan's speeches, Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman praised the life of the greatest American president. Historians seldom give the eighth president of the United States the recognition he deserves. Van Buren’s avoidance of foreign wars, successful fight to reduce central authority, unsurpassed ideological clarity and enduring positive influence on the Democratic Party make him arguably the president most responsible for the freedoms enjoyed by the American people. "The SBL organization is group of US patriots dedicated to having the Statue of Liberty sent back to the French. We believe that the French Government has effectively betrayed the safety of the United States of America by refusing to accept the fact that Saddam Hussein is a danger to every freedom-loving nation and by blocking any UN resolution to oust Saddam from power.....As Liberty Island is an important tourist attraction, we believe a better, more American statue should be put in Liberty's place. Here is our suggestion: Ronald Reagan" Simply put, Bell said he believes that Reagan is the greatest American president. Commissioner Roger Baenziger reserved his comments for the Central Park Ceremony, where he referred to Reagan as the greatest American president. "As far as I'm concerned, he was our greatest American president," he said. While the site is still under development, it contains some vital and important information about the man who many consider the greatest American president. My name is Reid Davis. I am a civilian. I just want to say that a carrier named after the greatest American President is awesome. Also out in force Thursday were post-Reagan Reaganites, those too young to ... be 18 years old, but I know he was the greatest American president ever." (Get the whole story by registering!). --- Posted at 6/13/2004 02:04:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/12/2004 BREAKING NEWS! Ronald Reagan is still dead! --- Posted at 6/12/2004 05:16:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Am I Against "Conservatives"? Thanks to Digby (Dibgy! Dibgy! Dibgy!) I found this Mike Finley piece: "But my enemy is not conservatism (which is rooted in wariness of human nature) but corporate radicalism (rooted in laissez-faire, let-it-rip economics) - what was called fascism just before Hitler confused the term - government that works hand in glove with select large corporations, with amassed wealth. Our current government is 'fascist' in the 1920s Italian sense of the word. It is a radical form of assisting the wealthy to increase and maintain economic power. This is not a good thing. It seeks to undermine democracy and turn the nation into a 'market' and nothing more.(Digby found it through Avedon Carol.) --- Posted at 6/12/2004 04:38:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bridging the Gap on Health Care This is important: From SEIU's Fight For The Future Blog: 
Bridging the Gap on Health Care Before you finish reading this blog post, five more people will have lost their health care coverage. Nationwide, 44 million people have no health insurance, and 80 percent of those without coverage come from working families.June 19 is next Saturday. --- Posted at 6/12/2004 04:05:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Host a Kerry House Party! --- Posted at 6/12/2004 12:09:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Digby! Digby! Digby! Continuing my occasional Digby! Dibgy! Digby! series, we have this today: "The stench of defeat is starting to rise off of him. I watched it happen to Carter and Senior. People keep a little distance. They don't look him in the eye. The winner's gloss is replaced by a sheen of desperation. He's got trouble. You can smell it." --- Posted at 6/12/2004 11:55:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/11/2004 Mathew Gross: Going Negative Mathew Gross: Going Negative: "It's not just the hollowness of Bush's 'uniter, not a divider' rhetoric that we're dealing with any longer; it's the reality that only through division can he win."Bush's toxic negativity is poisoning the public environment. It sets us against each other, and is a recipe for an unmanagable country after the election - if there even is one. Watch your backs. --- Posted at 6/11/2004 08:48:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Researcher's Haiku How long do birds live? Go look on the internet Everything is there --- Posted at 6/11/2004 08:20:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/10/2004 Ad Sale No BlogAds ads right now, so ads are cheap for a while. Got something you want to sell to thousands to informed, influential readers like yourself? Click on "Advertise at Seeing the Forest" over on the right. --- Posted at 6/10/2004 07:04:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
A True Honor I am honored, I say, HONORED to be mentioned in a piece that contains this line: "I should add that if Capitol Hill Blue really can be trusted, Rove has much bigger problems than being called an idiot by a GOP consultant, which is really like being called smelly by a wart hog with a bowel control problem."My name anywhere near that line ranks WAY up there in my lifetime achievements list. --- Posted at 6/10/2004 04:32:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Not Calming Down Rebels Launch an Array of Attacks Across Iraq. --- Posted at 6/10/2004 09:10:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Once Again, Democrats Not Invited GOP Leaders Eulogize The 40th President. This was a "state funeral." But only Republicans were invited. And some ex-heads of state from other countries. Presidents Carter and Clinton, for example, were excluded. So ex-heads of foreign states attend a STATE FUNERAL, held in the US CAPITAL ROTUNDA, but not former Presidents of the United States, which has been the tradition until now. Yet barely a mention in the press. Compare the Democrats' response to this nasty snub with the way Paul Wellstone's funeral was handled. The Republicans used that as a political stunt, and took back the Senate as a result. But the Democrats don't even mention what the Republicans have done here -- thereby ACCEPTING being excluded from the life of the country! ACCEPTING the Right's politicization and division of everything in American life. Well they are supposed to represent ME, and are failing me by accepting that the Republicans exclude me and the rest of my half of the country from participating in America. They are being clear about this, it is THEIR country, not OUR country. Democrats are NOT invited to participate in America anymore. Update - another story, "CLINTON FURIOUS AT REAGAN SNUB" --- Posted at 6/10/2004 08:48:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/09/2004 Pandagon: Killing the Middle Ezra at Pandagon has chimed in on the discussion (continued in the post below this one) of how to deal with the Right, and the comments are many and interesting. Go read, and join in - leave a comment there and/or here. --- Posted at 6/09/2004 10:13:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Not Getting the Point Matthew Yglesias responds to the Matt Stoller post I pointed to (twice) yesterday. (Which is similar to this scary piece I wrote yesterday.) He doesn't seem to get the point. I left this comment: Your post misses his point and makes his point at the same time. You're talking about "the merits of pragmatic compromise" and wishing you could have good-faith debates on issues with these guys, while they're creeping up on you carrying a noose.Matt left a coment too, This attitude is what I'm pointing at. The passive voice 'are given sufficiently solid defeats...' implies a certain reticence in realizing that WE are the ones who must administer the defeats. Moreover, the question is not just of electoral defeats, but of punishment. If you accept that this is essentially a criminal gang running a fraudulent political apparatus based on increasing their amount of power and institutionalizing the placement of certain monied classes above the law, then electoral defeats don't begin to address the political problem that we must deal with. Well, they begin to, but only just.(Matt uses more words than me.) Richard and Thomas - what do YOU think we should do with them after the election? (Assuming your boy Ralph doesn't siphon off enough votes and get Bush back in.) --- Posted at 6/09/2004 02:59:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
A Beautiful Comment Over at The Smirking Chimp they posted my "Country in Crisis" piece, and someone left this comment: "Remember that great scene from Jackie Brown, with Jackson and de Niro in the van? That's the situation on a global scale now: the rest of the world is sitting next to America and asking, in Samuel L. Jackson's voice, "What happened to you man? Your ass used to be so beautiful!" And America, like De Niro, has no answer."Beautiful. --- Posted at 6/09/2004 01:09:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Reagan Picture on Money The wingnuts are proposing that Reagan's picture replace Hamilton's on the $10 bill. I'm thinking it would be MUCH more appropriate to put Reagan's picture on T-Bills! After all, he printed about $4 TRILLION of them, didn't he? --- Posted at 6/09/2004 12:13:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why THAT ad? Take a look at the Right Wing Conspiracy ad (on the right there...) that Google for some reason puts at this site. Huh? Update - Now it's Reagan ads. One commenter points out that this could be construed as "incentivising" people to click on the ads. Don't click on the ads, because then the right-wing advertisers have to pay Seeing the Forest for the clicks. --- Posted at 6/09/2004 07:59:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/08/2004 Another Must-Read The Choice This Year Is Between Empire and Democracy: "When Attorney General William Wirt delivered Thomas Jefferson's eulogy on October 19, 1826 in the Hall of the U.S. House of Representatives, he noted how Jefferson believed in democracy, national humility, and abhorred empire. Jefferson well understood, Wirt noted, the danger of past empires as well as the dangerous possibility of a future president who may seize more power than the Constitution intended.There's more. Go read. --- Posted at 6/08/2004 09:01:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
skippy on ashcroft skippy, on ashcroft's contempt of congress today, in you'll just have to trust us, we hate torture. --- Posted at 6/08/2004 07:10:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Worse and Worse - Country in Crisis In Salon.com | The Reagan legacy, Rick Perlstein writes: "It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."I think Republican administrations actually have been worse each time, moving farther and farther to the right as well as into greater illegalities. I think this reflects the extent to which their party has been increasingly taken over by this far-right, post-Bircher, Scaife-funded, fanatical cult-like corporate/Christian/libertarian "movement conservatism." Nixon had to resign for things that Reagan picked up and did from day 1 without apology. Reagan, of course, instructed underlings to violate the law and lie to Congress about it. Bush I used parts of the government to obstruct the Iran/Contra investigations, then pardoned several criminals who had worked for him. And Iran/Contra -- and avoiding the mistakes that led to exposure -- was the model for the current Bush's first day in office - with this Bush this proudly hiring convicted (but pardoned by Dad) felons! Elected Democrats and moderate Republicans keep letting far-Right conspirators off the hook, and failing to expose the true nature of their activities to the public. Perhaps this is because they honestly did not and do not recognize them for what they are. Some of Nixon's cronies went to jail -- none of Reagan/Bush I's. Worse, the Carter and Clinton administrations did not ask for a full accounting of the transgressions -- political and financial -- of the prior administrations. In a way, this signaled to the public to expect such activities as part of "business as usual." By allowing the Right to publicly get away with an "everybody does it" excuse, the legitimacy of our democratic form of government was eroded. I believe that had Clinton recognized that the Republican Party has truly changed into a dangerous revolutionary movement intent on overthrowing our form of government, and taken action, purged the government of far-right ideologues and begun an investigation into his predecessor's political crimes as well as how money was siphoned out of the Treasury under Reagan and Bush, he would not have gone through the impeachment, and we would not be facing the national and international disaster we face now. I think it is hard now to avoid seeing the true nature of the group that has taken over the Republican Party. The record is certainly clear, their intentions are clear, their activities are clear, and it's time to take a stand. After seizing control of the country by the narrowest of margins in 2000 the Republicans have illegally excluded Democrats and the public from almost all aspects of management of the government. They have positioned ideological agents throughout the departments, agencies and the courts. In one of their first acts in power they allowed companies like Enron to "harvest" the people of California and Oregon, and appointed FERC members would not do their job to stop this. Their tax cuts, that went to only a few, have bankrupted the country and spent our Social Security retirement money. They have handed out our country's natural resources, and given the right to pollute our air and water for profit to a few rich cronies. They have launched aggressive war in an imperialistic scheme to bring the Middle East's oil supplies under their control. And they increasingly poison the public environment with lies. They are intentionally dividing the country right down the middle. Matt Stoller writes about what they are telling the public in their presidential campaign, "In other words, even if a Democrat wins an election, it's just a prelude till his negatives can be driven up and a political castration opportunity appears.In The War at Home, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton write, The Republican party's hard right - "movement conservatives," as they like to call themselves - hold views and long-term objectives that are considerably to the right of mainstream public opinion, but they had managed to maneuver themselves into a position of control over nearly every branch of the American government. As we will explore, politics for them is not a debate. It is, quite literally, a "war by other means."We have to realize that we are dealing with an organized revolutionary conspiracy to seize power, enrich the few, and subject us to an ideological/theocratic/imperialist dictatorship. They often describe THEMSELVES as being modeled on the old Communist Party and their methods for infiltrating and seizing power. "You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate," he explains in The Art of Political War. "You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.'"This is an emergency and we must recognize it as such. These people will go to all costs to succeed, including fomenting civil war. If Kerry does win this election AND take office, he has his work cut out for him -- there are some things to take care of right away -- if he expects to also govern the country. We simply MUST expose widely the Right's anti-democracy agenda. Crimes have been committed and this is not an occasion for a healing amnesty. We have to stop them once and for all. We need a complete financial accounting for the entire four years of Bush. Every single recipient of rigged no-bid contracts, tax break in exchange for "contributions", or any other corrupt activities should be prosecuted and put in jail to ensure that this does not happen should another right-wing administration take office. Further, we need to implement SYSTEMIC changes to prevent anything like the "conservative movement" from happening again. This crisis has exposed the vulnerability of our system. Let's look at it this way for a minute. Suppose that the intentions of the Bush people are entirely on the up-and-up. But looking at the way they have eroded accountability, oversight, and constitutional protections, suppose some OTHER people, with less-than-honorable intentions, examine these openings and see this as an opportunity to step in and seize power. The mechanisms for this are all in place, including the mechanisms to squash opposition and dissent. The Patriot Act, for example, allows the government to spy on anyone the President designates as an "enemy." And new technologies enable comprehensive tracking of a person's every action. We already have a precedent of Congress looking the other way and avoiding their oversight responsibilities no matter how extreme the transgression. We already have the precedent of the Justice Department covering up instead of investigating crimes. We already have the precedent of the Courts overruling law in favor of ideology. Stauber and Rampton again, The likelihood that those powers will be abused has increased, moreover, as the conservative movement accuses its ideological adversaries of "treason," "terrorism" and "un-Americanism," threatening long-standing traditions of tolerance and diversity.It is time for those who think this is the OLD Republican Party to take their head out of the sand and see that things have changed. Turn on the radio and listen to Limbaugh or Hannity for ten minutes -- yes they ARE the mainstream of the Republican Party now -- and you'll KNOW that the country is crisis. --- Posted at 6/08/2004 02:00:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Purpose of Iran/Contra I'm tired of hearing the Right apply noble (to them) intentions to the Iran/Contra perpetators. The COVER STORY was that they used the money to supply the Contras. Whatever else it was, this was a typical corrupt right-wing scheme to grab the money and run. Lawrence Walsh was the independent investigator for the Iran/Contra case. His final report is available here. It is well worth browsing. On Ollie North: North stood trial beginning in February 1989 on 12 counts. On May 4, 1989, he was found guilty of three counts, including aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding and altering official documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity from Secord.Remember, these were the things they could PROVE. But their motivation for bringing financial enrichment charges was the pattern they saw of diversions of cash for private use. Of $16 million, only $3.8 million made it to the Contras. And this does not count another $10 million that the Sultan of Brunei wired to North's operation, but was diverted to another Swiss account. The cover story for that was that someone transposed two numbers on the wire transfer and the money "disappeared." General Richard Secord was Ollie North's partner-in-crime. From Walsh's report: One of Secord's central purposes in establishing and carrying out the operations of the Enterprise was the accumulation of untaxed wealth in secret overseas accounts. Testimony and records obtained from the Enterprise's Swiss financial manager, Willard Zucker, show that Secord personally received at least $2 million from his participation in the Enterprise during 1985 and 1986, that he set up secret accounts to conceal his untaxed income, and that he later lied and encouraged others to lie to keep it concealed.I remember Secord testifying that he bought a Ferrari... --- Posted at 6/08/2004 12:51:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
An Update I forgot to mention 100,000 killed in Guatemala in the post "Gaddafi Regrets Reagan Died Without Facing Trial". --- Posted at 6/08/2004 12:13:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Talk vs Action Tired of hearing right-wing lies about how Clinton didn't do anything to stop terrorism? Take a look at this: "However, Clarke says Clinton chose not to attack Iran but ordered an 'intelligence operation' that seemed to have worked.So Clinton actually DID something, AND KEPT QUIET ABOUT IT, even now, because it was a classified intelligence operation. He has chosen the good of the country over the good of his political party. Compare that to the current administration's treatment of classified intelligence, AND their success against terrorism. Remember, 9/11 occurred ON HIS WATCH. --- Posted at 6/08/2004 11:27:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What He Says What he says here. More coming. I've been thinking about this for some time, and working on a piece for weeks. Great minds think alike. Or maybe it's that the obvious becomes obvious. Even if Kerry wins, we have a huge fight on our hands, and we'd better all realize it! Watch your backs. --- Posted at 6/08/2004 08:54:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/07/2004 666 A comment to a post below reminded me of one of my favorite Reagan facts. RONALD WILSON REAGAN Number of letters: 6 6 6 Anagram - INSANE ANGLO WARLORD And, lest we forget, after he left office a group of rich supporters BOUGHT HIM A RESIDENCE, and it was at 666 St. Cloud Road. Nancy had the address changed to 668. Speaking of rich supporters, Reagan had what was called a "kitchen cabinet." Not long after his election one of the members of this group was found ... orgy scene ... model killed with baseball bat ... oh, just read about it here. --- Posted at 6/07/2004 12:50:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Reagan Headlines over at Drudge: REAGAN HATERS UNITE: PALAST: 'KILLER, COWARD, CON-MAN GOOD RIDDANCE, GIPPER ... MORE PROOF ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG'...I report, you decide. (Maybe Hitchens isn't as bad as all that after all...) Randi Rhodes just said, "He lived long enough to not be our worst president ever." I remember that Reagan's first week in office involved taking down the solar panels that President Carter had installed on the White House roof, and pardoning the FBI agents who had been convicted of illegal activities involving spying on, intimidating and breaking into the houses of Nixon's political opponents. Update - More memories -- When Reagan was inaugurated President the TV showed a split screen, with the hostages that the Iranian government was holding being released about ten minutes after he was sworn in -- just about the right amount of time for someone now working officially for the President of the United States to sign something with the full authority of the U.S. Government. And we started shipping weapons to Iran about two weeks later. --- Posted at 6/07/2004 12:22:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Wingnut Letter Got this in the e-mail today: You are a nut and belong in a nuthouse.... obviously you don't know anything about business or economics. Look at the historical tax rates and compare it to recessions and depressions here in the US. By overtaxing the people, it only creates less investment. God where did you go to school and how can someone be this dumb in a land like America. If I as a businessman have more money not taxable, DUH, I spend it on investments which hire more people who get paychecks and guess what idiot..... they then pay more taxes. Take you anti liberal, anti American left wing communist thought to another country. We have had enough of you and the garbage you throw out. Academically if you cannot understand maybe the joke below will give you some foresight.OK, violating the first rule of Seeing the Forest, I'm going to go through the trees. "obviously you don't know anything about business" He's right. Oh, wait, I did run a corporation for over ten years, and was recently VP Marketing and Sales for a tech company. But he is right, except for that. "Look at the historical tax rates and compare it to recessions and depressions here in the US." Well, I have, and, obviously, he hasn't, because he would discover that higher tax rates at the top coincides with periods of high GNP growth. Probably that is because we have a consumer economy, and more money in the hands of consumers means higher growth. And putting more of the tax burden on corporations and the rich means more money in the hands of average people. Remember, in 1993 Clinton RAISED taxes on the rich while cutting them on the low end. What followed was the greatest economic expansion in our history. And Bush CUT taxes on the rich while raising them on everyone else by cutting services, and what followed has been a long period of zero or slow job growth and massive concentration of wealth to the top few percent. If I as a businessman have more money not taxable, DUH, I spend it on investments which hire more people who get paychecks and guess what idiot..... they then pay more taxes. Actually these businessMEN ship the money to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, lay off their workers and hire in lawless countries where they only have to pay a dime a day. Smart businessWOMEN invest when there is DEMAND, and do so regardless of the taxes. And, even if they DON'T have a ton of cash they GO GET IT when there is demand. And, by the way, taxes are not a cost. Costs are deducted. As for his "joke" I have a math degree, and clearly he doesn't. But aside from that, his line "Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore" implies that the rich will just leave the country after taking what they can get from it. Now THAT'S a patriotic joke. But let's just sum it up in simple terms. In the 20's we cut taxes on the rich and corproations, wealth became concentrated and we had the depression. Then we raised taxes on the rich and came out of the depression. Clinton raised taxes on the rich and we had the greatest economic and job expansion in our history. Bush cut taxes on the rich, no jobs and massive debt. Update - I received the following after informing the writer that I had responded on the blog :"I believe Cuba and China are still communist... you may want to move.." --- Posted at 6/07/2004 09:09:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Oh, I'll Vote for Bush, Then Reagan died, so I guess I'll vote for Bush instead, then. (In case you don't get it, that is the official Bush/CHeney 04 website you're looking at. Their website might only look like this for a few days...) --- Posted at 6/07/2004 08:23:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/06/2004 Gaddafi Regrets Reagan Died Without Facing Trial I report, you decide. Yahoo! News - Gaddafi Regrets Reagan Died Without Facing Trial: "Muammar Gaddafi said Sunday he regretted that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan had died without ever being tried for 1986 air strikes that killed dozens of people, including the Libyan leader's adopted daughter."Approx. 70,000 Nicaraguan civilians and an untold number of Central American death squad victims expressed their agreement. Update - And 100,000 killed in Guatemala. --- Posted at 6/06/2004 02:55:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush losing it, bigtime... [Read this, NOW. This is NOT fiction - this is a real reporter with deep ties to those on Capitol Hill. After you're done, forward it on to all your friends who are still considering whether to vote for Bush. Scary does not begin to describe the situation when this man holds the keys to the nuclear football. Oh, my, God. -Thomas] Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides By DOUG THOMPSON Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue Jun 4, 2004, 06:15 President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind. In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.” Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home. [... continued at link above ...] --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/06/2004 02:52:00 AM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
This is one of my favorite quotes... "The Greens are the only constituency in America whom the Democrats believe they can convince by insult." --Sam Smith, in Greening the Golden Triangle (courtesy of CounterPunch) Few things more true have ever been said. For the curious, Sam Smith is the editor of the Progressive Review. This article is mandatory reading for Democrats seriously interested in understanding where the hell Greens are coming from. If you're wondering what prompted me to post this little gem, read on... In response to my posting re: pro-Kerry or anti-Bush, I received an email that started off thusly: "Longing for Nader or Kucinich is infantile." Not quite what I'd expect from someone attempting to seriously persuade me to their point of view. Seriously folks, and here I address my friends in the Democratic Party: Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. You're spent four years roundly berating every Green in sight, and what has it gotten you? Not much, so far as I can see... Nader still pulls 7% in the polls, and any Greens or Nader supporters (the two are not synonymous, by the way) that the tactic would've been effective with have long since been persuaded. It's time for a different strategy folks. ... here's another great quote: "...the Democrats have spent the last decade in a masochistic effort to convince people that they were really just nicer Republicans, expanding the prison population and undermining social democracy to prove it. They should not be surprised if those whom they convinced included many Greens." Now, clearly, a lot of you (judging by the tenor of the comments left here) are highly dissatisfied with this strategy, even if you haven't come to the conclusion that the solution is to abandon it for the Green Party. The responses to my pro-Kerry or anti-Bush posting (21 comments and counting - I obviously hit a button) back me up on this: y'all are a lot more anti-Bush than you are pro-Kerry. Unfortunately, anti-Bushism is hardly a sustainable ideology. Which brings me to the primary point of this posting: how do we move beyond ABBA, and beyond Kerry's politics of triangulation, to facilitate the creation of a vision for a successful and sustainable progressive politics that has a snowball's chance in hell of making an impact on the American political system? Much as I admire and respect Nader and Kucinich, clearly, they haven't come up with the right formula. It seemed for a moment like Dean had a handle on this (despite my reservations about his politics, I was fascinated enough by the Dean phenomenon to devote a category exclusively to him on my blog), but obviously something went wrong. Not to mention that, after the fact, it seems that the major validation of his approach, the ability to very quickly raise large sums of money over the Internet via appeals to the grassroots, wasn't that hard for Kerry to emulate once he became the clear front-runner. I read a very thoughtful post-Iowa analysis by a no longer starry eyed Dean volunteer ("Losing My Religion", by Katy Bulter, in Salon) that explores the subject of why Dean failed, and which may offer some lessons for our movement as well. Kerry's victory in Iowa was not an accident, as this article makes clear... Dean appears to have failed to connect, in a very fatal way, with a substantial number of the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. The next candidate to come along can't afford to make that same mistake. NOTE: I'm a Green (and have always been one, ever since I first registered to vote in 1990), so that tells you a little bit about what *I* think the solution is (it's called a "forklift upgrade" by us folks in the tech industry), but I'm curious to hear what YOU have to say on the subject. :) Again: the question for discussion is, how do we go beyond ABBA to create a sustainable vision for a succesful more or less left of center politics in this country? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/06/2004 12:49:00 AM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/05/2004 The Greatest American President, Part II OK, it turns out that there were already people calling Ronnie the greatest American President of all. Links below. Lots of people called him the Greatest American President Since Lincoln, or the Greatest American President of the Twentieth Century. Nobody actually came out and said that Lincoln sucked, but then I didn't dig very deep either. The most famous person so far to call Reagan the greatest President of all was Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, who is mostly famous for his Clinton-impeachment activities. One admirer proposed replacing the evil French Statue of Liberty with a statue of Ronald Reagan: here's the Google cache. One contrarian, however, calls Martin Van Buren the greatest of American Presidents. Klayman: http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2000/430.shtml Gallup poll: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/03/reagan.html Family values: http://www.familyfirst.com/archives/003148.html Military: http://www.military.com/HomePage/UnitCreatedPage/0,11003,200190,00.html Tennessee: http://www.knoxcounty.org/current/mrrmabe.html Free term paper: http://www.freefortermpapers.com/show_essay/32844.html --- Posted at 6/05/2004 07:07:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Greatest American President of Them All? No, I don't think so either, but I am willing to bet that someone will say so. --- Posted at 6/05/2004 03:38:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Another in the E-mail Another one just in: President Bush gets out of his helicopter in front of the White House carrying a baby pig under each arm. --- Posted at 6/05/2004 12:15:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Fools rush in: What the hell is going on? (Part II) I'm a bit astonished about the lack of speculation about what's going on in Iraq, the CIA, the State Department, the Bush Administration, etc. Probably it's a sign that nobody really knows, and it's so messy that no one is willing to take a chance. So fools rush in, etc. What are the relationships between Chalabi's disgrace, Allawi's nomination as Prime Minister, and Tenet's resignation? The only people who seem to be talking are Chalabi's neocon defenders, who blame the liberals, but fail to mention that the raids on Chalabi seemingly had President Bush's support. The fact that Chalabi's "security chief" Aras Karim Habib has apparently taken refuge in Iran makes Chalabi's guilt seem pretty probable. While the U.S. always knew that Chalabi was in contact with Iran, his willingness to compromise American security the way he did apparently went beyond what we were willing to accept. There were already good reasons not to want Chalabi is the Iraqi head of state, and raiding his office and accusing him of spying had the added advantage of putting the neocons on the spot. So my theory is that the anti-Chalabi activity comes from the CIA, who got Bremer's and possibly Bush's support (though it might also be possible that Bremer simply presented Bush with a fait accompli.) Meanwhile Brahimi of the UN, seemingly with US approval (probably by Powell's State Department), had selected Adnan Pachachi, a moderate, secular Sunni, as the first Prime Minister of the new Iraq. The IGC, however, which was not really supposed to play a big role in the process (a process which had been devised specifically for the purpose of freezing the IGC out) refused to accept Pachachi (after smearing him as an American tool) and instead nominated one of their own members, Iyad Allawi. Allawi has a rather unsavory reputation as a former Ba'athist who worked with Western intelligence services while in exile from Iraq. He is a political rival of Chalabi, but also his nephew, and it's most reasonable to guess that their clan hedged their bets by placing members in more than one faction. Chalabi himself is now cultivating the Shia leader Sistani and has declared his support for Allawi. Both Chalabi and Allawi are making anti-American nationalist noises from time to time, though Allawi has asked the American troops to stay to protect him (though at least he didn't call them "blond slaves" the way the Saudis do). One issue between Chalabi and Allawi is that Allawi opposed Chalabi's de-Ba'athification campaign, and Ba'ath people are increasingly being rehabilitated and taken into government service. My interpetation here is that Chalabi was ultimately behind the IGC's initiative, and that the CIA and State Department endorsed it, willingly or not, at the cost of alienating the U.N. one more time and also of making the State Department look like idiots. (And Bush too, since he's been talking about the U.N.'s role for over a month). So the CIA is in the driver's seat so far, and we can look forward to a tough, old-fashioned Iraqi police state which the Chalabis will loot as fast as possible (given the precariousness of their mandate). "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' So why did Tenet quit? Well, the rest of the CIA thought he was too close to Bush and didn't fight hard enough against the neocon deceptions, so they wanted him out. And the CIA is going to be heavily-criticized in the 9/11 report, and he can be the fall guy for that. And the neocons all hate him too, for completely different reasons. So even though the CIA is winning, Tenet isn't. The Bush goal, seemingly, is to neutralize the Iraq situation in any way whatever, regardless of who it is that ends up holding nominal Iraqi sovereignty. An election looms, and Bush will accuse the naysayers of treason, etc. And meanwhile, the Plame affair grinds on. What's with that? My previous post. Chalabi is probably the smartest guy in the game William Beeman: "The choice of Iyad Allawi as prime minister designate of Iraq further cements Ahmad Chalabi's hold on power -- virtually guaranteeing that he and his family will be the future rulers of Iraq." (Subscription) [Allawi] ran the IGC's security committee, which is responsible for training the new Iraqi police, army and intelligence services. However, an overall impression within informed circles in Iraq is that his excessive focus on security will push him in the direction of building strong security at the expense of even stymieing efforts to build democracy. Adnan Pachachi, the man who turned down the Iraqi presidency earlier this week, accused rivals on the now defunct Governing Council of indulging in "dirty politics at its worst" in organising a smear campaign against him. Put another way, the demand to bring U.S. troops home will be presented by the president - at the Security Council and in the campaign - as aid and comfort to the terrorist enemies of Iraq and America. “Short-term expediency to get George Bush re-elected” is the verdict on the new transitional Iraqi administration from leading Iraqi expert Toby Dodge. Chalabi cultivates Sistani Sistani's support for the new government is conditional Vincent Cannistero on Aras Karim Habib --- Posted at 6/05/2004 10:56:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Poll: Are you FOR Kerry, or AGAINST Bush? O.K. folks, question time: How many of you are FOR Kerry, more than you are AGAINST Bush? What's your sense on how the people around you feel? Do you know any Kerry partisans? What's the ratio of Kerry enthusiasts to Bush bashers in your circle? --- Posted at 6/05/2004 12:51:00 AM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/04/2004 Bush Conspiring With Foreign Government to Influence Election Go read Whiskey Bar: Oil's Well That Ends Well. This is a blatant as can be, and as illegal as can be. But there is no law, because The Party controls the Justice Dept. and the Congress and the media and everyone who matter will look the other way. Just like always. --- Posted at 6/04/2004 10:20:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - California energy markets: deliberately designed "... to provide wealth for Enron and others of its ilk." I don't want to flood Dave's blog, but I have to say this: Even more astonishing to me than the sheer calumny of Enron's trading staff, was the sheer absurdity of the way the California energy market was structured... I'm not an expert here, by any means, but it is my understanding that California choose to adopt a "bi-lateral" trading system - one in which sellers and producers contracted directly with each other to buy and sell power, and no public "market clearing price" existed in most cases... a structure that Dr. Carl Pechman contends, in his testimony of February 27th, 2004 (page 59 and onward) was deliberately fostered by Enron, with the goal of ultimately being able to profit from it due to what they believed were superior methods of garnering information about the true market price of energy (many of them based on "inside information" gained from various deals they had put together to manage other companies energy trading and sales). This is opposed to a "stock market" like model (POOLCO is the term, see pages 62-65 of Dr. Pechman's testimony), in which there are publicly disclosed bids and offers, which all eventually resolve to a single market price. Here's a direct quote from Dr. Pechman's testimony: "...many of the traders were benefiting from a market that they themselves had helped design. The market had been designed to be very inefficient to allow gaming, and to provide wealth for Enron and others of its ilk." The following paragraphs of his testimony describe, in detail, exactly what Enron did to ensure that inefficient markets were created - ones with plenty of opportunities to "steal" ... oops, let me rephrase that, "arbitrage" millions of dollars a day, and the reasons why the inefficiencies in question were artificial in nature. If you care about understanding what happened to California, as I said in a previous posting, you've GOT to read Dr. Pechman's testimony (warning: 15 megabyte PDF). It is only 98 pages, and worth every minute spent downloading and reading it. What this translated into, in practice, was an utterly insane system in which you had traders sitting around randomly calling each other to say, "Hey, you got any energy? No? Have you heard that anyone else is selling?" "Yeah, I hear that Bob over in Podunk's been selling for the past few hours." Then the energy trader calls Bob at Podunk Energy, Inc. and Bob says, "Nope, sold it all a few minutes ago... but I hear that Mary over at Pipsqueak's got some. Don't think it'll come cheap though." Then the energy trader calls Mary at Pipsqueak, and they cut a deal - often at a price that varied significantly from the one the trader cut just a few minutes before with someone else. Sometimes, Enron's traders would arrange to buy energy from one company, and then, before closing the deal, put them on hold, call up another company, and sell it at a premium, before going back and closing the first deal. Pretty cool if you're running a swap meet, not very cool if you're a ratepayer at either end of that deal. Meanwhile, Joe Blow a couple of desks over is spending half his day trying to track down a 2 megawatt discrepancy in a power schedule. And Anna Podana is trying to figure out why her notes say Enron sold 25 megawatts to Bigassenergyco, but Bigassenergyco says they bought 30. When she calls them up, the trader over there says, "Oh yeah, sorry about that, I guess I wrote it down wrong." Doh! I'm serious. This is the kind of craziness I listened to every day. It is a bleedin' miracle that the system worked as well as it did! The system was completely dependent on very labor intensive and error-prone manual accounting / papershuffling (whole categories of people existing to do nothing more than call each other up all day and arrange accounting "swaps" that canceled out debts the companies owed each other - at least this was my understanding of what they were doing) and subject to simple human error at every step of the way (something that appears to have happened regularly). As someone who built a multi-million dollar business on automating stupid, repetitive, human-error prone processes, what I heard just blew my mind. The politicians who allowed this system to be created oughta be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, and the Enron executives who promoted it ought to be sentenced to breaking rocks on a chain gang for the next fifty years! Even then, that hardly makes up for seeing my energy bill go from $120/mo. to $600/mo. and counting before I was finally forced to sell my house (for that and other reasons). --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 08:56:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - The Snohomish vs. Enron case itself... The Seattle Times has one of the best "in-depth" articles covering the legal/regulatory battle that produced the tapes themselves. At the most simplistic level, the dispute comes down to this: Did Enron's gaming practices and other activities constitute a violation of the tariffs (federal regulations) that allowed them to charge a "free market" price for energy? Did, as Dr. Carl Pechman contends in his testimony on February 27th, 2004 (warning: 15 megabyte PDF), these practices not only affect short term prices, but long term prices (driving them up) - and thus require that the price Snohomish contracted to pay Enron be recalculated on a "fair market" basis... thus, presumably, wiping out the $122 million dollar premium Enron claims it is entitled to as a result of the contract being canceled (its anticipated profit over the life of the contract)? I can't quote specifics that I don't know are in the public record yet, but it is absolutely clear to me, having heard numerous discussions between Enron and its customers, that the latter were extremely alarmed by the unprecedented level of volatility and potential exposure that the short-term fluctuations in pricing induced by Enron's gaming practices created, and that their behavior changed dramatically as a result - specifically, many of them started considering signing contracts for much longer durations than they had ever considered before (as Snohomish did), and many of them started looking seriously at energy "products" offered by Enron and others that purported to allow them to "hedge" their risk against future volatility of this type. The volatility created a "market" for Enron and others that simply had not existed up to that point - and Enron's employees were not at all hesitant to serve that market or encourage consideration of such "products" - especially considering that while such contracts were usually priced at a discount to the then current price of energy, said prices were also at significant premiums to long term historical prices for energy. In other words, California ratepayers and taxpayers shouldn't be left holding the bag for the high-priced contracts that Gray Davis was strong-armed into signing at the height of the energy crisis, because said prices were the product of artificial manipulations by Enron's traders (and others... this isn't just about Enron, a hell of a lot of other folks were playing the same games). Side note: Dr. Pechman's testimony, and the accompanying exhibits, consists of a 15 megabyte PDF file of graphic images of text - but, it is well worth reading, even absent the specifics the case, it is a fascinating overview of how the American power system works. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 08:11:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES -- Quote from Dr. Carl Pechman's testimony (expert witness) "The evidence I now present has never [my emphasis] before been analyzed by the Commission or FERC Trial Staff's witnesses. The recordings demonstrate an extremely callous abuse of consumers, large pattern of misconduct, and reckless disregard of government authority by Enron..." (my emphasis again) ... and he's right. This is good stuff - straight from the horse's mouth: the Enron traders and managers themselves. Raw evidence of the most valuable and indesputable sort. Another question I have to ask... why was it left to a small public utility district in the state of Washington to expose this material to the light of day? Where was the State of California? Where was the Justice Department (who served the original warrants for these tapes along with the FBI)? The Snohomish P.U.D. has $120 million+ at stake in this battle, a large sum to their ratepayers, but pennies in comparison to California's exposure -- why didn't the state ask the same question that Snohomish did - "where are the tapes"? From the supplemental testimony asking leave to file these documents, it also appears that there was substantial resistance to their release from the Department of Justice, which claimed a desire to preserve the ability to use these materials in criminal prosecutions - a reasonable position... until you consider that these tapes sat in a warehouse At Aspen Systems Corporation for an extended period (at least a year or two), inaccessible to anyone and presumably likely to stay that way indefinitely. Why? Again, even in an era of limited budgets, one has to ask why these tapes didn't surface earlier? Why was the DOJ dependent on a tiny little public utility to put up the cash to get these tapes into a useable format? What else is out there?!? --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 07:42:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES -- Footnote... FERC Trial Staff "aligned with Enron"? Footnote 35 of Snohomish's motion to file supplemental testimony (i.e., the transcripts of The Enron Tapes): "The audio recordings also refute positions taken by FERC Trial Staff that are, alarmingly, aligned with Enron." The also here is a reference to the fact that the tapes emphatically refute contentions by Enron's "expert witness" that Enron "engaged in little to no gaming practices, caused little to no economic harm, and earned little to no unjust profits". The footnote above follows that paragraph. Not knowing the particulars of the case, I can't comment on what positions Snohomish's counsel is referring to - but it is worth asking the question: "Why would FERC's lawyers be on Enron's side?" --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 07:31:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Unvarnished Right If you want an unvarnished look at the right wing's true agenda, take a look at the platform of the U.S. Constitution Party. These people are seriously scary... and then take a look at the Texas Republican Party's platform and ask yourself whether the difference is one of kind or degree (I vote for the latter). That Constitution Party platform is what the Texas Republicans WISH they could write. For the short of time among you, Theocracy Watch has a good summary of the most extreme elements. CalPundit also has a good analysis of the year 2000 version. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 05:21:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - Full set of The Enron Tapes now available from FERC! Feast your ears on this (but make sure your children's are protected): Here's the filing: Public Utility District 1 of Snohomish County, WA fowards Exhibit SNO-245, a CD containing .wav audio files that correspond to transcripts etc re Enron Power Marke ting Inc under EL03-180 et al. And this should take you directly to the full list of audio files (all 82 of them, I think). As I mentioned before, complete transcripts of all the posted audio files are available (10 megabyte PDF of graphic images, non-searchable). Anyone out there have a sheet fed scanner with OCR software that could convert these back to text format (they're a good candidate, the font and files are very clean)... I'd love to count how many times "fuck" can be heard in these files. :) You can match up the posted sound files with the posted transcripts, by looking at Exhibit SNO-162 (starts on page 26 of the automatically generated PDF from FERC). The ears of a lot of former Enron employees must be burning right now. :) Which may be why the #2 person in Enron's Investor Relations department pleaded out two days after the transcripts went public. To look at even more files, do a search here and enter "EL03-180*" in the "docket" field, along with a suitably broad date range... we were told that there was ANOTHER team of listeners out there, composed of lawyers(?) who had access to the same set of raw materials that my group did. Presumeably, at some point, whatever they've found will be made public, and posted to the FERC web site. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/04/2004 04:47:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Stuff I Come Across I spend a good part of each day researching the Right on the web. Sometimes its for articles, sometimes for reports, sometimes for pieces I post here. I'm currently doing research (not on the Right, for once) for a union project. Anyway, all of this has me reading a lot of stuff written by right-wingnuts and their organizations. I'm immersed in it, and I "have my arms around" a certain amount of it... But the extent of it, and the intensity of it ... even I am continually shocked, depressed, disillusioned, discouraged, stunned, horrified and terrified by what's going on out there. But I digress. ;-) I want to share with you something I came across this morning. I'm sharing it because I think it helps explain the mindset of anti-Semitism. This is NOT (I think) reflective of the mainstream Christian Right's thinking, it's by (apparently) an actual fringe wingnut (I hope) - as contrasted with the mainstream Right wingnuts that many who don't know better THINK are the fringe. If you start reading this, it's sort of hilarious and saddening at the same time. From the "Caucasian Pride Report" here is A Report To The People: "Between the Christians whose beliefs and faith are in God and the Son of God; and the Jews who are devotees and followers of Satan there is nothing capable of existing together. Those who espouse the Judeo-Christian lies betray God and Jesus Christ, the Son of God. They must remain absolutely separate.Anyway, it goes on and on. There are several websites that reference this guy or his book... Scary stuff. --- Posted at 6/04/2004 10:39:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What the hell is going on? I don't really know what's going on either in Iraq or within the Bush administration, but nobody else seems to either, and as far as I can tell, very few seem to completely appreciate the weirdness and importance of the present situation. As far as I can tell, there are five or more factions fighting within the Bush administration, and more than that in Iraq, and new alliances and new double-crosses are happening every day. I think that from an American point of view, we're seeing a Bush attempt to find a face-saving solution in Iraq before the election, and an internal struggle within the administration to find a scapegoat for a policy which, ironically, they still have to insist was successful. Tenet, the CIA, and the FBI are pointing to Rumsfeld and the neocons, who richly deserve blame regardless of what you think about the CIA and FBI. Bush himself apparently is twirling around in circles trying to figure out what happened to the adults who were supposed to be taking care of him. In Iran the various factions, including but not limited to Chalabi, realize that the U.S. is no longer capable of doing much of anything and are playing us for fools. If this war accomplishes anything, it should lay rest to the idea that Republicans are good on defense issues. NEOCONS: Some are still defending Chalabi, even though it's pretty clear that Bush was ultimately behind the raids on him (seemingly after getting information from Blair, from Jordan, and from the CIA). This apparently means that the neocons know that they're not going to be able to distance themselves from Chalabi the way Bush has been doing. (Bush's recent self-defense require people to forget completely things Bush said about Chalabi three months ago, but that's par for Bush and it seems to work with his imbecile base). ARAS KARIM HABIB: Chalabi's "security chief" hasn't been mentioned anywhere since May 23. Supposedly he's taken refuge in Iran, which sounds pretty damning. His job description seems to indicate that he was in a position to do a lot of damage. ALLAWI: The new prime minister is a nephew of Chalabi, but apparently a rival; it's not certain that he's a Chalabi stooge, though their supposed rivalry might be a smokescreen -- their differences may be limited to the division of the spoils. In any case, both are expatriates, with little Iraqi support. Allawi apparently went from being a Ba'athist goon to being a CIA resource. ALLAWI'S SELECTION: Apparently the U.S. originally intended for Brahimi of the U.N. to play a major role in setting up the new government, but the Interim Governing Council (a corrupt U.S.-appointed group which Brahimi was trying to freeze out) hijacked the process by naming Allawi as Prime Minister, and later also chose a President not wanted the U.N. or the U.S. By doing this they protected their own position while setting themselves up to pose as independent nationalists. (Some have speculated that this was all a U.S.-staged charade meant to give credibility to the new government). Brahimi and the U.N. clearly were humiliated in this episode. Brahimi says Bremer was behind it (he seems to have been behind the Chalabi raids too), but a special envoy named Robert Blackwill who had recently been sent from Washington also played a role. Seemingly the winners were the I.G.C, where Chalabi is probably behind the scenes; U.S. support seems to have been after-the-fact. TENET: He was under attack both because of 9/11 unpreparedness and because of his support for Bush WMD argument, and Chalabi claims that Tenet was behind the Chalabi raids. Perhaps he was asked to quit, and perhaps he did so voluntarily to separate himself from the Bush administration. Some say he quit because he couldn't get Bush to fire Rumsfeld and the neocons. (Because of Tenet's involvement with Bush, it seems likely to me that there are also other CIA factions acting independently, motivated by the neocons' Chalabi connections.) PS: Originally I was also going to cover the Plame affair too, which also part of the U.S. internal power struggle, but this is complicated enough already, right? But there definitely is a power struggle going on within the Bush administration, and all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. John Micah Marshall on Tenet's resignation, June 3 Josh Micah Marshall, June 3 but written earlier Guardian: How Brahimi was sidelined, June 3 (print) Kevin Drum, June 3 Allawi (Cockburn in Salon) The LA Times lacks confidence, June 2 Time Magazine on Allawi, June 1 Highly unfriendly summary of Bush Iraq policy Chalabi and Aras Karim Habib, New Yorker, May 31 --- Posted at 6/04/2004 06:46:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/03/2004 Gore'ing John Kerry I recently received an innocent seeming email from a relative of mine who is even more radically anti-Bush than I am... It contained a series of jokes (some of which were even funny) in which various political and public figures answer why the chicken crossed the road (a copy of it is enclosed below). Just another joke email, right? NO! I read through the first couple of jokes, and even laughed. Then I got to this one: JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road I am now against it. A one line throwaway, positioned right below a couple of fairly funny anti-administration jokes and an much long Nader joke that does Nader no harm with his core constituency (neither does the GWB joke, for that matter) - more on the Nader joke, later. Not particularly funny, not particularly memorable - especially after you've read the whole thing. The punch line is great. But... My reaction was to do a doubletake... Kerry best known for being a waffler?!? It seemed out of left field - surely that isn't the first thing most people think of when Kerry is mentioned?!? Yet, if you search Google, this meme is all over the place ("Kerry flip flop" - 37000 hits, "Kerry waffle" - 16000, "Kerry liar" - 90000 vs. 66,000, 49000, and 224,000 for Bush, one of the most polarizing Presidents in history with a 4 year lead at accumulating references). Methinks the key to the Bush re-election strategy is thus revealed: tag Kerry with a negative character trait meme early on and Gore him to death by creating uncertainity in the minds of swing voters. Think I'm being paranoid? Last night, as I walked out of the home of a pair of devoutly anti-Bush types, what was the topic of discussion? Reasons why Gore... oops, excuse me, Kerry, is not a flip-flopper. It is working that well, folks. If we're talking about it, what is the vast undecided middle talking about and debating? You got it. Folks, we need to stop this meme in its tracks (ironic that I'm talking about it, yes). We need to make a personal commitment to not talk about it, to not forward on emails referring to it, to totally invalidate the idea every single time it is raised and paint it as a Republican scheme to undermine Kerry's credbility and integrity. Here's the email... I noticed, after searching through Google, that it has mutated a bit - the first hit has the Al Gore joke leading off, and no Hans Blix (among other changes).
Side note: I'd lay odds that thirty years from now, when no one knows who the hell Al Gore is, they'll STILL be making the same jokes... Your grandchildren will know nothing about Al Gore except that he claimed to have invented the Internet, the Republican hatchet job was that through. Sigh. Side note two: RALPH NADER The chicken's habitat on the other side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrial greed. The chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV. ...this is obviously put forth as a hyperbolic extension of Nader's normal anti-corporate rhetoric. What the author doesn't get is that this is "red meat" to Green folk and Nader supporters, and not exaggeration at all. We expect our candidates to talk like this. It certainly isn't the way typical politicians talk... and it's presence, right below a "reminder" that Kerry is a waffler, just serves to remind folks like me why I voted for Nader in 2000. Brilliant, eh? Get Kerry from the right AND left and do no damage to GWB that matters. I wish the operators on our side were half as clever at manipulating memes. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/03/2004 07:03:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - Enron Audio Tapes now public! Filing listing exhibits associated with the sound files. These correspond to exibits SNO-179, SNO-203, SNO-221, SNO-222, SNO-223, SNO-224, SNO-227, SNO-230, SNO-240. These are the files that have been distributed to the news media over the past few days. "Grandma Millie" is in here, along with "Burn, baby, burn..." and all the other quotes you've seen recently.
There are another 73 audio tapes which it is my understanding will eventually become public (and available via the FERC web site), probably sooner rather than later. It is unclear what will happen to the rest of the 2600+ hours of audio... my personal hope is that some enterprising news reporter or author gets ahold of it via a FOIA request (or some equivalent). Even with all the confidentiality restrictions and exclusions, there's enough material there to fill a full length novel (or two) and to get a picture of the character and style of each of the individuals involved and how much they knew (or didn't know) about what was going on and the potential legal ramifications. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/03/2004 06:24:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Repeat Here. Don't be an asshole. --- Posted at 6/03/2004 09:45:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Get Yourself a Beer, George Because the future's uncertain, and the end is always near. --- Posted at 6/03/2004 09:40:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
See The Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer See the Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer here. (It's very popular, so keep trying.) --- Posted at 6/03/2004 08:57:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Enron Tapes In case you missed this, one of the transcribers of the Enron tapes has posted a guide for readers. --- Posted at 6/03/2004 08:34:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/02/2004 Dog People My wife and I are dog people. So we enjoyed the Redneck Pet Carrier over at South Knox Bubba. --- Posted at 6/02/2004 10:33:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Just Arrived This just arrived in my inbox: George Bush is out jogging one morning and notices Little Hannah on the corner holding a box. Curious, he runs over and says, "What's in the box, kid?" --- Posted at 6/02/2004 05:48:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
the american street Lots of stuff over at the american street today, as every day. --- Posted at 6/02/2004 01:58:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - Enron: Weeding out the weak... This is Matt Motley, a trader at Enron's West Power desk, talking to another trader... MATT: Yeah, that’s a bunch of bullshit. You know what – you know what really pisses me off? TOM: The price caps? MATT: The price caps! You know what -? TOM: Fucking bullshit. It would take care of all the weak. Get ‘em out. Another gem: MATT: We need to get the fucking um – [...] - environmentalists on this shit. CBS News picked up on this one: MATT: Tell you what – you heard this here first: When Bush wins – TOM: Caps are gone. MATT: That Fuckin’ Bill Richardson, he’s fuckin’ gone. The fucking, ah, Clinton, he’s fuck – all these fuckin’ ah, socialists are gone – TOM: Yeah. MATT: And who’s the biggest, ah, single contributor to the Bush campaigners? TOM: You. MATT: [laughs] Enron. TOM: Enron. What? MATT: Enron. TOM: Is it Enron? MATT: Yeah. TOM: Jesus Christ. Is it – is that true? MATT: Yeah, I think it is. TOM: The biggest single contributor. MATT: Yeah, the biggest corporate contributor to the – TOM: Holy – MATT: [simultaneous] TOM: Really?! That’s huge. MATT: And number one. TOM: That’s huge. MATT: Ken Lay’s going to be Secretary of Energy. TOM: Get out of here! MATT: No. [laughing] MATT: But ah – TOM: Can you imagine that? Why not, though? Why not? He could be, right? MATT: Yeah. And why not? Who – you know, who’s to say why not? He could be. TOM: That would be awesome, actually. MATT: That would be - how great would that be for all the players in the market! TOM: It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay be Secretary of Energy. MATT: He would open these markets up. --- Posted at 6/02/2004 12:52:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Worse Yet Every single day there is news that shocks me, makes me wonder that the effect of the Bush administration on our country is EVEN WORSE than I even imagined any given yesterday. It just gets worse and worse. Today we learn that someone in the Bush administration told Chalabi that we have broken Iran's encryption and are listening in on their most secret communications. -- and he told Iran. So now we can't listen in on Iran anymore AND they are changing any agents, operations, nuclear activities, etc. we might have learned about. But even THIS is even worse than it sounds. You see, this also tells ALL THE REST of the world that we are probably able to listen to their communications, so now North Korea and China and all the rest are busy changing their codes, and operations, etc. But it's even worse than that. You see, Chalabi ALSO has Saddam's secret police files, because WE gave them to him. Which likely means Iran has them, which means any new Iraqi leadership will be Iran's bitch. Matthew Yglesias thinks Bush it's even worse, too: "The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent." :-) --- Posted at 6/02/2004 11:34:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
American secrets to the Axis of Evil? Who cares? OK, so it turns out that America's main man in Iraq was sending American secrets to Iran over at the Axis of Evil, and that someone in U.S. government was illegally giving these secrets to him. This story is (very slowly) working its way through the media, but there's no urgency or excitement. Another little Middle East scandal, tee hee. Aren't those guys funny over there? Besides getting rid of a few people in the defense department immediately, and President Bush this fall, there really needs to be some turnover among our opinion leaders. The Chalabi story isn't causing a buzz because practically the whole media establishment was complicit, especially the foreign-policy fatheads. The only noise you're going to be hearing about this thing is the discreet swish of ass-covering. --- Posted at 6/02/2004 08:22:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Schwarzenegger and Enron. Thomas Leavitt has some juicy stuff from the Enron tapes down below, so I thought I'd dig out the old stuff about Schwarzenegger and Enron. Schwarzenegger met with Enron shortly before the election. It's impossible for me to believe that he was not actively complicit in the looting of Calfornia and the fake energy crisis. There should be another recall, but there won't be. Everyone hates Grey Davis, but (at least in the end) he actually did a fairly good job fighting Enron -- the voters just preferred to elect one of the bad guys. The Schwarzenegger election was one of the worst ever. Even without the Enron meeting, Schwarzenegger was a total fake. And it was the moderates who elected him -- the right wing had their own wacko candidate, who got about 15%. The goddamn Kennedy family even pitched in, or some of them anyway. It was completely, completely depressing. Greg Palast on Schwarzenegger and Enron Meteor Blades (from Kos) on Schwarzenegger and Enron --- Posted at 6/02/2004 07:00:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Chalabi's Nigerian Letter "Hello, my name is Ahmed Chalabi. I am unable to access my funds in the oil-rich nation of Iraq. I am writing to you because I know that you are an honest and well-intended person. If you can forward me eighty-seven billion dollars I assure you that you will be richly rewarded for your generosity...." I still don't know what's going on in Iraq. Josh Micah Marshall doesn't either, and he's really been working on the story. (Just page down for the last couple of weeks, and watch him trying). Apparently the Iraqi Governing Council, which was supposed to be frozen out of the new government, has hijacked the process, making the UN completely irrelevant, and the US has ratified what happened (but apparently only after the fact). The new Prime Minister, Allawi, is a cousin or something of Chalabi, whose home and office were just raided, apparently with American approval, and who is being accused of sending American secrets to Iran (which remains a member of the Axis of Evil, as far as anyone knows). So is Allawi a rival of Chalabi's or his stooge? Does anyone know? Are the Americans who support Allawi different people than the Americans who are trying to bust Chalabi and his American friends? My reading is that nobody is on charge either in Iraq or in Washington D.C., and that anything might happen. (Sort of like a bloody situation comedy, I guess.) One theory is that the Chalabi raids were fake, meant to give Chalabi street cred with the Iraqis. That seems unlikely to me, however -- there would have been less messy ways to do that, which would have had fewer damaging domestic (US) repercussions. Americans, including the best and brightest, have a strong tendency to underestimate the political skills of third-worlders. Economically, technically, and militarily the third world is weak, but many of their leaders have learned how to play their weak hands very skillfully. And in fact, many of them have thousands of years of experience at playing political games. Chalabi is an MIT-Chicago math PhD, which suggests that he's not too dumb. Iraq also has a continuous 5,000-year history of bureaucracy, which means that Iraqi skills at bureaucratic infighting, (deception, manipulation, conniving, double-crossing, etc.) are going to be highly sophisticated. By contrast, our own representives are mere political science PhD's (also from Chicago). It's no wonder they were snookered. One of the beauties of American life is the degree to which it is actually possible to be successful while remaining straightforward and honest, but this doesn't translate well in diplomacy. Many versions of the "Nigerian letter" scam depend on convincing previously-honest citizens that they, personally, have finally been awarded a chance to get in on some of the crime action. Maybe that's what happened in Iraq. For many, Chalabi's criminal past was actually part of his appeal. --- Posted at 6/02/2004 06:11:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
6/01/2004 Moore Gets Distributor Yahoo! News - Moore Documentary Gets U.S. Distributor: "Michael Moore (news)'s award-winning documentary 'Fahrenheit 9/11' has picked up a U.S. distributor and will hit theaters June 25. " --- Posted at 6/01/2004 10:06:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
ENRON TAPES - The ENRON Tapes and "Grandma Millie" For the past three months, I've been working more or less full time as a research assistant for an expert witness contracted by Snohomish County P.U.D. No. 1 to testify on their behalf before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in a dispute between them and Enron. The details of the case are available on the FERC web site, as part of case No. EL03-180-000, and can be found by visiting this URL ( http://elibrary.ferc.gov/idmws/search/fercgensearch.asp ) and doing a search for: EL03-180* The documents in question that I helped research and prepare are available at this URL: http://elibrary.ferc.gov/idmws/nvcommon/NVViewer.asp?Doc=10152323:0 (note: this is a 10 megabyte PDF file that will load into a Java based viewer on the FERC website - the lawyers filed this as scanned photoimages of the original documents) These are redacted (sections relating to personal matters immaterial to the case have been removed) transcripts of 82 audio files that the team of researchers I worked with identified as particularly relevant to this case - this is out of 2600 hours of audiotape salvaged by the FBI and stored in a warehouse for several years, until Snohomish managed to pry them out of the hands of Ashcroft's Justice Department and get them transfered to digital format (the document cited below tells the story of this in detail). My sense is that, while we skimmed off the cream of these tapes, there's still a lot more that could be uncovered. I have to be careful about what I say, given that the case in question is still pending, and that I've signed confidentiality agreements designed to protect the privacy of the individuals heard on these tapes - but: the documents above are public. And CBS News has broken the story big time... http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/eveningnews/main620626.shtml including posting copies of the Yoder-Hall Memo (an internal Enron document put together by their lawyers) that outline the nature of the games played by Enron traders to manipulate prices and California's energy trading system in search of profit at the expense of California ratepayers (of which I was one, seeing my utility bill soar from $120/mo. to $600/mo. before I started turning everything off in a desperate attempt to keep it down). As the CBS News report so vividly demonstrates, the employees at Enron's West Power trading desk were arrogant, crude, and often utterly indifferent to the effects that their machinations and the California energy crisis were having on ratepayers... the Grandma Millie tape, in particular, is one of the most appalling. CBS News, given their limited time, can only give you the barest flavor of how utterly venal these folks were. Here's the full excerpt, sourced from the FERC website (this is Exhibit SNO-224, on page 331-339 of the FERC's dynamically generated 11.3 megabyte PDF) - this is been Bob Badeer (a trader at Enron's West Power desk in Portland, CA, where all these tapes were recorded) and Kevin McGowan (in Enron's central office in Houston, TX, as he mentions in the transcript): KEVIN: So, BOB: [laughing] KEVIN: So the rumor’s true? They’re fuckin’ takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California? BOB: Yeah, grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fuckin’ vote on the butterfly ballot. KEVIN: Yeah, now she wants her fuckin’ money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fuckin’ 250 dollars a megawatt hour. [laughter] BOB: You know – you know – you know, grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know? You’re not going to – [laughing] BOB: Grandma Millie – another great excerpt (this tape is full of 'em): KEVIN: Fuckin’ stock market and Enron, everything else, Jesus. BOB: Oh, Enron! Oh! Oh, dude. KEVIN: Not kidding. BOB: Kid, it even hurts, I don’t – I guess it could hurt worse, but it doesn’t you know, holy shit, its’ that – that thing got smoked. KEVIN: Oh, god – I can’t handle it any more. BOB: I can’t either man. ... seriously pathetic, dude. They are moaning and groaning like you wouldn't believe. and, of course, here's a great example of their attitude re: California consumers... KEVIN: There was a guy he was yesterday, he’s – he’s some consultant for some fuckin’ other business we’re supposed to be starting or whatever. BOB: Right. KEVIN: He came in, he – and I wasn’t – I didn’t even meet the guy. I was sittin’ here, he was talking to George McLellan and George’s desk, he’s like, yeah, you know, I’m in California now and my small consulting business, my energy costs have gone from 100 to 500 dollars a month. It’s unbelievable, I don’t know what to do. I just turned from my desk, I just looked at him, I said, ‘MOVE.’ [laughter] KEVIN: The guy was like horrified. I go, look, don’t take it the wrong way: ‘Move; it isn’t getting’ fixed any time soon,’ BOB: You know man, it’s unbelievable, it’s like at that – that’s the – that’s the best thing that [inaudible] about it. That’s so beautiful. [laughter] KEVIN: Oh best thing that could happen is fuckin’ an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put ‘em fuckin’ candles. BOB: I know. Those guys – just cut ‘em off. KEVIN: They’re so fucked and they’re so, like totally BOB: They are so fucked. You have to hear it to really get it. Two good ole' boys chucklin' to each other about how fucked over California is. Just unbelieveable. And note the politics - as CBS News reports, these guys were gung-ho capitalists and ecstatic about the idea of a Bush Administration and the possibility of Ken Lay having a major voice in national energy policy. And, as the excerpt above demonstrates, many of them had nothing but contempt for Al Gore. Kevin even says that everyone in his office is betting on Bush to win (except him - he's doing the contrarian thing). More later... much more, as I have more time to sort through the files on the FERC website. --Thomas Leavitt --- Posted at 6/01/2004 07:36:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
More dirt on Judith Miller Here are some updates on my Judith Miller post below. Yes, I indeed do believe that malicious gossip and schadenfreude are healthy and nutritious, when part of a balanced diet of factual reporting, analysis, and advocacy. Nothing is too bad for that bitch. Cache from the time when Miller was actually listed as an expert by Richard Pipes' Middle East Forum advocacy group(this is no longer on the web) Did she fuck her way to the top? Nobody likes Judith! Steve Gilliard: it's unusual for a reporter to be as thoroughly disliked as Miller is. Perhaps her primary loyalty was not to journalism: one proposed alternative Miller's father ran a Mafia hangout (see more below) More on the Riviera / Marine Room Mafia hangout Part I of a series on Miller; Part II; Part III; Part IV. --- Posted at 6/01/2004 05:29:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Blog for Victory | America Coming Together I didn't know that America Coming Together has a weblog: Blog for Victory. While you are there, sign up for their newsletter. Maybe throw them some money. They're organizing ads and door-to-door visits with voters in 17 crucial swing states. --- Posted at 6/01/2004 04:56:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Terror and intimidation at home... Lori Haigh, owner of the Capobianco Gallery, has been driven out of business by insults, threats, and physical assault for showing a work of art whose subject was the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. servicepeople in the Abu Ghraib prison. I'm not terribly surprised - something not generally talked about is the flood of truly vicious hate directed at anyone who offends the American right. Fortunately, in most cases, it is all hot air - but as this incident demonstrates, it can go a lot further than that. From the San Francisco Examiner: [...] The painting, titled "The Abuse" by East Bay artist Guy Colwell, shows Pfc. Lynndie England and another soldier smiling gleefully as they look upon a trio of naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners who are hooked up to electrical wires. In the background, a third American soldier is escorting a Muslim woman in a dress into the torture chamber. [...] Book publisher Ron Turner, whose company Last Gasp published Colwell's art, was sympathetic. "She got threats," he said. "She is a single woman with two kids trying to be a business woman and there are crazies threatening to roast her children." [...] *** Here's a link to the image: http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/2004/05/boy-im-glad-im-here-in-montreal.html and a reworked image posted to the San Francisco Indymedia web site: http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/05/1695105_comment.php#1695107 *** It gets worse... according to the Associated Press, someone punched her in the face on Thursday, giving her a black eye and bloodied brow (pictures on KRON 4 site and SF Gate site). But the real concern leading her to shut down the gallery was for the safety of her children, 4 and 14 who hang out with her at the gallery on a regular basis. Quite understandable, from my point of view, as a parent. My friend Renee Amiri videotaped the gallery's closing on Saturday, and blogged about it, in response to the limited coverage this has received in the press. Any doubt that this type of violence is the true face of the American right, aided and abetted by the vitriolic demagogues they sponsor, should be erased by the comments following Renee's posting... "you richly deserved it" "I was quite pleased in reading that the traitor Haigh was dealt a blow from a TRUE AMERICAN." "you call her a hero, I call her a fuckin dumbass" "Ahh I just love reading the comments of typical socialist kalifornians. You should all move to north korea." note the parroting of Michael Savage's "islamofascist" meme in this posting: "What about an art show on the Killing of Mr. Pearl or even the painting of Nick Berg getting his head sawed off by a group of islamofasist's done in human blood. Now that would be good. Wake up. Do you think that the people you support with your sympathy will allow you to just get away with a black eye? A woman with your ideas would be dragged into the street and stoned to death by the very people you support. (If you were lucky)." Comments of this sort are not atypical. I get them on a daily basis in response to various websites I run. It is also interesting to see how the right-wing's echo chamber tactics play out at the grassroots - on this, and numerous other forums (as a casual search of Google will reveal), wingers are doing their best to suggest that this is all just an opportunistic scam by a psychologically disturbed individual with a failing business, posting all sorts of allegations without any documentation whatsoever (she was behind on her rent, the IRS is after her for back taxes from a lawsuit settlement, etc. etc.). A search for information on Google reveals nothing about either of these items - so where are they getting this information from? A quick scan of Freeper response reveals a flood of speculation about the viability of her gallery business and whether she is faking these incidents in order to break her lease, but no hard evidence whatsoever... and this gets echoed elsewhere as "fact". *** There are also some great comments (note the generally higher level of literacy/spelling ability and coherency), here are my favorites (wish we had more folks like this in the military... hell, running things in Washington): I am a United States Marine. I was as shocked, disgusted, and angry as I have ever been when I heard about the abuses perpetrated by our own people on those we had come to "liberate". There is absolutely NO reason to have done what they did. To defend them is to condone their actions. NOT to scrutinize what happened is to allow it to happen again. Americans DO NOT treat prisoners this way. They are protected by the Geneva Convention. The White House says so. If WE had been the prisoners and this was done to us, you know we would all be howling MAD it happened, and demand retribution. I served my time in Iraq during the war, and probably will find myself back there sooner or later. I am appreciative of the time I was there for the children, women, and some men that I met. They smiled (the kids loved me), they waved (the women would peek out from the curtains in their house to get a glimpse of me), and they chatted (the men were inscrutable). And yet I would gladly exchange my next tour of duty in Iraq to post myself at the front door, in uniform, to defend Lori and the artists she hosted. Americans. It is amazing to me that the very concept of liberty gets so clouded in our minds. The offending piece of art must have really struck a nerve, huh? Personally, I think the ones that are struck the most by it are the ones who look inside themselves and see the potential to do the same thing lying in wait in their own hearts. Indeed, to spit in her face; to physically attack her and damage her - only lives down to the perversion portrayed in the art. But I am with her. Do not let the obtuse, witless bully prevail. I wish her the best. Posted by: Joan at May 30, 2004 10:42 AM Lori, I am sorry to hear about the hassling you have been receiving and that you felt you should close your doors. While I think Colwell's painting is in incredibly poor taste and I feel it is more fitting as a cartoon on the opinion page of a liberal newspaper, it is his right to create such pieces and it is your right to show them. Some of my fellow service men and women have let the rest of us down. They have violated principles they were taught in basic training/boot camp. They have forgotten lessons taught to them in their technical schools and every year after that. They have brought shame on those of us who wear or have worn the uniforms of the United States' military. They will be punished. The people who are hassling you should direct their attention to the people who caused and committed the abuse. By attacking you, these people have shown that they are as bad or worse than the people who committed the abuse in the first place. I have men down range and in harm's way as I write this. The actions of their fellows and consequences thereof already weigh heavily on their minds. The actions of people who threaten or attack you does a great disservice to our men and women in uniform and is even more disheartening to them--it goes against the very principles we have sworn to defend. Respectfully, Master Sergeant John Bloodgood I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906 Posted by: John Bloodgood at May 30, 2004 03:26 PM --- Posted at 6/01/2004 01:41:00 PM by Thomas Leavitt Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
2004 Democratic National Convention Blog The new 2004 Democratic National Convention Blog needs a name. Go participate! --- Posted at 6/01/2004 12:02:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Corporation Say No Doc Searls has a story about Clear Channel buying up a patent on musicians making CDs of their concerts to sell at the end of the concert. Now only Clear Channel can make the money from that. --- Posted at 6/01/2004 08:33:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
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