Our spying government

CNN has published a summary of Time Magazine's cover story. It's entitled, "Inside Bush's secret spy net". Here's part of what it says:

-- Around the White House, an abrupt change in the president's public schedule is known as an "audible," and generally, it's the last thing anyone wants to suggest to a boss so allergic to disruption that he makes everyone turn off their cell phones when he's in the room.

But last week, when USA Today broke a story that the federal government has been secretly keeping track of the phone calls that tens of millions of ordinary Americans make each day, it was George Bush himself who proposed an impromptu appearance before the television cameras. "I want to say something about this myself," he told aides who had gathered in the Oval Office.

To reporters, Bush offered no denial, or even much by way of explanation. "The intelligence activities I authorized are lawful," he said, without specifying which laws in particular had authorized them.

And he added, "So far, we've been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil."

There was a time -- say, four years and nine months ago -- when news that the government has been gathering up phone records might have the makings of a scandal, or even a constitutional crisis. But while there have been protests from civil libertarians and some criticism on Capitol Hill, early indications suggest the disclosures could actually give a political boost to a president who hasn't had many of those lately.

The day after USA Today broke the story that the National Security Agency (NSA) aimed to "create a database of every call ever made" within the U.S., as one of the paper's sources put it, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 63 percent of those who were asked said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to fight terrorism, and 44 percent said they strongly approved of it.

First of all, the president is a control freak. It's a serious character defect not to be able to tolerate a change in schedule or an ordinary disruption.

Secondly, it's beyond horrible that the spying scandal (yes, I will call it a scandal) could actually give Bush a boost. But I don't trust that poll. I'd like to know something about their sample. Because the CNN Quick Vote polls (admittedly not scientific) indicated the exact opposite - that people were "creeped out" and "bothered" by the spying. Is it only liberals who log on to the CNN web site? I doubt it very much.

The article ends this way:

White House officials hint that only long distance calls, not local ones, are in the database, but they won't go much further. Even some of the president's friends say they need more answers. And given Bush's expansive view of his powers in fighting terrorism, the revelation has only fueled speculation as to what else the government may be doing.

Well, I think the "hint" is pure spin. And I also want to knw what else the goverment may be doing. It's clear these people have no conscience and no respect for the Fourth Amendment at all.

McCain sells out

Well, you know by now that McCain gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University today, don't you? Here are a couple of passages from the report by CNN:

As a candidate in the 2000 presidential race, McCain had lambasted Falwell as an agent of intolerance. The former Vietnam prisoner of war, a potential presidential hopeful in 2008, has put aside his differences with the minister, who has large following among Christian conservatives.

...

After the commencement speech, Falwell told CNN that if McCain "continues on the track he's on now, he in fact could co-opt the religious conservatives of the country, in the same way President Bush did, to help him to the White House."

"Anybody but Hillary," said Falwell, referring to U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, the former first lady who has been mentioned as a possible Democratic candidate for president.

Falwell said that he and McCain argue "a good bit." "While we are both pro-life, pro-family, [on] a lot of things, like global warming and other issues ... we discuss pretty aggressively. But we do it as friends. And I very much respect the senator," he said.

He said McCain or others have a chance to gain the support of evangelical Christians if "he or she espouses the same values that we espouse,"

He also mentioned other "good people," such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee; Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania; and Sen. George Allen, R-Virginia.

McCain has no personal integrity. He's willing to get in bed with anybody if it will gain him the presidency. After all, he was willing to make nice with Bush who conducted a disgraceful smear campaign against him.

Disgusting.

NSA spying

Today's CNN Quick Vote:

Does it bother you if the U.S. government collects data on your phone calls?

Yes 76%

No 24%

Friday cat blogging!

Here's Henry on top of a suitcase that's on the top shelf of my utility room. He loves getting up there!
Photo by Ellie Finlay

The problem with the vote

Yes, it's Diebold again. This is what depresses me most about the current situation. The voting machines are run by Republicans and are easily hackable. This is explained in an article entitled, "Experts see new Diebold flaw: They call it worst security glitch to date in voting machines and a 'big deal'". Here's part of what it says:

Computer security experts say they have found the worst security flaw yet in the oft-criticized touch-screen machines that Maryland voters will use in this year's elections, leaving one computer scientist to warn that the state should have "stacks of paper ballots" on hand in case of a complete Election Day breakdown.

The machines, made by Diebold Elections Systems, are "much, much easier to attack than anything we've previously said," said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor who first cast doubt on the reliability of the technology in a 2003 report."

On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It's a totally different ballgame," he said.

The new problem is being described as an intentional hole left in the system to allow elections workers to update voting software easily. Instead of using pass codes or other security protocols, anyone with access to a voting machine could install new software that could easily disable a precinct full of machines, Rubin said.
...
Rubin said he fears that the latest security problem could be serious enough to cause an Election Day "meltdown" that could put precincts of machines out of action. He recommends that counties have a pen-and-paper alternative on hand as insurance.

When are we going to get election reform in this country? What we need is hand counted (by observers from both parties) paper ballots. It's the only way for elections to be free and fair.

Courtesy of AMERICAblog.

I wish the fundamentalists would heed this counsel:

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

~~Ralph Waldo Emerson

29%

Well, well, well. He's broken 30. This is a Harris poll reported by the Wall Street Journal:

President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January. Approval ratings for Congress overall also sank, and now stand at 18%.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” This has been the trend since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction. Iraq remains a key concern for the general public, as 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. The immigration debate also prompted 16% of Americans to consider it a top issue, down from 19% last month, but still sharply higher from 4% in March.

The Harris poll comes two days after a downbeat assessement of Bush in a New York Times/CBS News poll. The Times, in analyzing the results, said “Americans have a bleaker view of the country’s direction than at any time in more than two decades.”

Let's see how low he can drop. And remember, these are people who probably get their new from mainstream sources.

Domestic spying

Here's the latest CNN Quick Vote:

How does the report that the NSA is building a database of Americans' phone calls make you feel?

Creepy 77%

More secure 23%

What's with the 23%??? They like being spied on?

Simply outrageous

All right. Read this:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
...
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.

The above quotes are from an article entitled, "NSA stymies Justice Dept. spying probe".

I am simply at a loss for words. It's clear we now have a dictatorship in this country. The law is being utterly flouted.

The Madness of George W. Bush

From an article entitled "The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis":

With Bush as president it’s as if we’re in a car going over the speed limit being driven by a drunk adolescent who has fallen asleep at the wheel. It’s our responsibility to recognize the extreme danger of our situation and come together to do something about it, whatever that might be. If not, if we continue to passively and helplessly watch what is playing out in front of our very eyes, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. To quote Abraham Lincoln, "We--even we here--hold the power, and bear the responsibility." Now is the time to join together and creatively express our true voice. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. says "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

~~ Paul Levy

Creating insurgents

The Los Angeles Times has an article entitled, "Aiming for a More Subtle Fighting Force" that talks about Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who has been training U.S. troops to be more culturally sensitive and to use less force:

We have to understand that the way we treat Iraqis has a direct effect on the number of insurgents that we are fighting.... For every one that I kill, I create almost 10 more.

- Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli

You'd think that would be obvious. But at least somebody's trying to get it across.

Our sword of Damocles

How easily we forget the warnings:

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or madness.

-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

What used to be

This is from a comment found on Smirking Chimp. It's good:

There was a time not so long ago when what distinguished liberals from conservatives was not their ends so much as their means. We might have disagreed on the best way to improve public education, but no one would have suggested that it could simply be discarded. We might have argued about the most effective way to maintain our infrastructure, but no one would have suggested that it could be ignored. We might have disagreed over our interpretations of the Constitution, but no one would have suggested it was irrelevant.

And no one -- no one -- would have dared to suggest that torture was acceptable as public policy.

I remember that time. I miss it sorely.

Our health

Here's another article that exposes how poor our health is when compared with another developed country - in this case, Great Britain. The article is entitled, "U.S. health care gets shamed again". Here's an excerpt:

That study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week that compared the health of U.S. and British citizens spoke volumes about America's health care system.

Researchers from the U.S. and England were just trying to discover why poor people are less healthy than rich, but were astounded when their studies showed that poor people in England are actually as healthy as rich people in America and healthier when it comes to cases of diabetes, blood pressure and cancer.

But even more astounding to them was when comparing all white Brits with white Americans, regardless of income, the Americans have more diabetes, more heart disease, more respiratory problems and many more other diseases as well.

"It was a bit of a big shock," Michael Marmot of University College in London told National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." "I just didn't imagine we'd find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England."

Jim Smith of the Rand Corp. and one of the Americans who worked on the research added that, at first, no one wanted to believe the data.

But the results were quite clear it just isn't clear why.

For example, smoking rates are about the same for both countries. The British have a higher rate of heavy drinking, but more Americans are obese.

Yet, the per person spending on health care in the United States is nearly double that of England, which, of course, has a national health care system that covers every citizen of the country.

None of the researchers was willing to say it, but the fact that Americans have an enormous number of people without health insurance can't be overlooked as a cause. Tens of millions of our citizens even those who are working full-time jobs go without basic health care because of the high out-of-pocket costs, often until it's too late.

Why aren't we ashamed as a nation? That's the part I don't understand.

Military solution?

Good point:

There's no conventional military solution to terrorism. If there were Israel would be the safest country in the world.

- Bradley Whitford

Infant mortality

Maybe you knew this, maybe you didn't. But we all need to know that, as CNN reports, the U.S. has the second worst newborn death rate in modern world. Only Latvia is worse. Here's part of the report:

(CNN) -- An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

"The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn rate is higher than any of those countries," said the annual State of the World's Mothers report.

The report, which analyzed data from governments, research institutions and international agencies, found higher newborn death rates among U.S. minorities and disadvantaged groups. For African-Americans, the mortality rate is nearly double that of the United States as a whole, with 9.3 deaths per 1,000 births.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst place in the world to be a mother or child, with Scandinavian nations again taking the top spots in the rankings by the Connecticut-based humanitarian group.

Well, that's really a claim to fame - that we do better than Latvia. Our record in this regard is truly a national disgrace. But it once again proves that the so-called "pro-life" movement is anything but. They are anti-abortion, yes, but they don't really care about saving and preserving the lives of infants that are actually born. They don't support affordable pre-natal care for mothers who are poor. They are happy for there to be millions of uninsured families throughout our nation. If President Bush really believed in a "culture of life" he would do something to create a culture that indeed supports life.

31%

Bush's numbers just keep going down. Look at this:

WASHINGTON — President Bush's approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in the November elections.

It's from a USA Today article called "Bush approval rating hits new low". No kidding.

Christian fascism

I want to beg you to go over to Theocracy Watch and read an article by Chris Hedges entitled, "The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism". It's a November, 2004 publication but was just sent to me yesterday by Tulsa Interfaith Alliance. Some of the information about Reconstructionism and Dominionism I already knew but I didn't know how inevitable their takeover seems to be shaping up. Here are a few passages:

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
...
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has included in his campaign to end abortion: a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."
...
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampt," the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.

The article then goes on to report on the ascendency of the Reconstructionists and Dominionists and to describe just what those movements believe and wish to impose on the rest of the country - indeed the world. It's a long article but riveting reading and I really recommend that you read it all and take it very seriously.

What's wrong with Hillary

I want to recomend an interesting analysis written by prominent blogger Markos Moulitsas (of Daily Kos) about the political future (and past) of Hillary Clinton. It's entitled, "Hillary Clinton: Too Much of a Clinton Democrat?" and it's published in the Washington Post. Here are some key excerpts:

Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic rivals in the polls and in fundraising. Unfortunately, however, the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment -- led by her husband -- that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad.
...
Despite all his successes -- and eight years of peace and prosperity is nothing to sneeze at -- [Bill Clinton] never broke the 50-percent mark in his two elections. Regardless of the president's personal popularity, Democrats held fewer congressional seats at the end of his presidency than before it. The Democratic Party atrophied during his two terms, partly because of his fealty to his "third way" of politics, which neglected key parts of the progressive movement and reserved its outreach efforts for corporate and moneyed interests.
...
Yet staying away from big ideas seems to come naturally to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps first lady Clinton was so scarred by her failed health-care reform in the early 1990s that now Sen. Clinton shows no proclivity for real leadership as a lawmaker

Afraid to offend, she has limited her policy proposals to minor, symbolic issues -- such as co-sponsoring legislation to ban flag burning. She doesn't have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name. Meanwhile, she remains behind the curve or downright incoherent on pressing issues such as the war in Iraq.

On the war, Clinton's recent "I disagree with those who believe we should pull out, and I disagree with those who believe we should stay without end" seems little different from Kerry's famous "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" line. The last thing we need is yet another Democrat afraid to stand on principle.

I agree. I don't understand why we don't learn from the Republicans who are certainly successful at winning elections. They energize and affirm and lean to their base. Instead of leaning to our base, we stupidly lean to their base too. It drives me crazy! But of course, all this is moot unless we do something about election fraud. We can run the best candidate in the universe and as long as the Republicans are counting the votes, they will win.