If you like your freedoms, ... thank a protester.
-Brian Terrell, director of Catholic Peace Ministry
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A television shot of a little boy losing his dog during Katrina rescue operations was the catalyst for the House to pass legislation Monday that would require pets to be considered in emergency-preparedness plans.
"The dog was taken away from this little boy, and to watch his face was a singularly revealing and tragic experience," said Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and sponsor of the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act. "This legislation was born at that moment."
The bill, which passed 349-24, would require state and local preparedness offices to take into account pet owners, household pets and service animals when drawing up evacuation plans. Offices that fail to do so would not qualify for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, with Lantos a co-chairman of the Congressional Friends of Animals Caucus, said estimates are that some 600,000 animals died or were left without shelter as a result of Hurricane Katrina. He added that the lack of pet rescue plans also put many pet owners in danger.
"When asked to choose between abandoning their pets or their personal safety, many pet owners chose to risk their lives," he said.
The Humane Society of the United States cited a recent Zogby International poll that found that 49 percent of adults say they would refuse to evacuate if they couldn't take their pets with them.
Immigration is the big issue right now. Earlier today, the Senate voted to build a 370-mile fence along the Mexican border. ... Experts say a 370-mile fence is the perfect way to protect a border that is 1,900 miles long.
--Conan O'Brien
Anything to make the rich richer and funnel tax dollars away from the people.Most stunning was the sudden relevance of the New York press, headlining in a timely manner the crucial context to keep in mind: that this is the month when billion dollar bids will be submitted for a megamammoth border contract called SBInet (the Secure Border Initiative Network). Bidders will include such military-industrial behemoths as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Most interesting is the last-minute entry of the European-based Ericsson company, because they provide surveillance along the Russia-Finland border, matching up nicely with the ideological model of the USA-Mexico border pushed by the fascist crowd's cold-war compulsions.
On the question of ideological models, it would be prudent to consider that the Vice President's description of the next Mexican border sounded a lot like the Israeli border with Palestine. In this context, the Bush-Cheney troop deployment will provide free of charge to the winning bidder of border security services a cadre of perma-temp employees who are already trained, dressed for photo-ops, and security-cleared (in case you missed the simultaneous news this week that the agency in charge of security clearances was shutting down because of poor budgeting).
The Republican Party has been reduced to one principle – its own power. It protects the Bush regime from accountability and covers up its lies and misdeeds. Under the myths and lies that enshroud 9/11, the Democrats have collapsed as an opposition party.
The Bush regime has destroyed Iraq without being able to defeat the resistance. Its greater casualties, however, are the American people, voiceless with no political representation, defenseless in the face of police-state depredations such as illegal warrantless surveillance, the possibility of property seizures, and indefinite detention without charges.
The Bush regime's war on terror has defeated truth and the constitutional protections of liberty in the United States. No conceivable number of Muslim terrorists could inflict comparable damage on America.
Think you've been hearing a lot about global warming lately? If a new climate-focused group hatched by Al Gore has its way, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
After nine months of behind-the-scenes planning and wrangling, the Alliance for climate Protection is now nearly ready for prime time. Gore spoke about the alliance in an exclusive interview with Muckraker. He said the group aims to raise big bucks for a single goal: "To move the United States past a tipping point on climate change, beyond which the majority of the people will demand of the political leaders in both parties that they compete to offer genuinely meaningful solutions to the crisis."
Practically speaking, this means launching a massive media and grassroots education campaign trumpeting the urgency of global warming and targeted at all manner of Americans -- "NASCAR fans, churchgoers, labor-union members, small businessmen, engineers, hunters, sportsmen, corporate leaders, you name it," said Gore -- with the assumption that "where public opinion goes, federal policy will follow."
With a leadership team that includes Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser to presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford; Carol Browner, head of the U.S. EPA under Bill Clinton; and other heavies, the alliance could considerably pump up the volume of the green movement's barely audible public outreach on global warming. It plans to raise "tens of millions at least," said Browner. The group's official launch date is not confirmed, but will likely be in the coming weeks. The search for a CEO is under way, and board meetings have already commenced.
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Gore has been a strong proponent of using paid advertising. He and some board members said the alliance could do for climate change what the Truth Campaign, launched in 1999, has been credited with doing for the anti-smoking crusade -- trigger a cultural and political shift with print and television advertising.
Already climate skeptics are mounting an opposition with paid ads of their own. This week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, unveiled two 60-second TV ads pillorying "global warming alarmists." They'll air in more than a dozen cities nationwide, timed to coincide with the release of Gore's documentary. "
We'll be quick to respond," said [board member Larry] Schweiger, explaining that the alliance plans to issue a request for proposals to major advertising and design-consulting firms in the next few weeks.
As you no doubt know, the biggest embassy IN THE WORLD is being built in Baghdad, at a cost of...are you ready for this?
...$600,000,000+ - at TAXPAYER EXPENSE.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
-FDR
There's a simple, elegant saying. If you want peace, work for justice. Amen.
Who gets to decide what is just?
There's a simple, elegant saying. If you want peace, work for justice. Amen.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman who follow this story closely and wrote a book about what really went down in Ohio comment in a recent story in the Free Press published in Columbus Ohio, "there has been barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with the electronic voting machines."
The public on the other hand not only believes that there are problems but many insist that the elections were stolen. Write Wasserman and Fitrakis: "A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennsylvania residents, found that "39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let's look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically."
"Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%; FOX 0.5%.
"With 99% of Fox viewers believing that the election was "legitimate," only the constant propaganda of Rupert Murdoch's disinformation campaign stands in the way of a majority of Americans coming to grips with the reality of two consecutive stolen elections."
With civil liberties, anti-terrorism, racial incitement, freedom, toler-ation and liberty now high on the public agenda, this may be the moment to give an airing to Thomas Helwys. He was one of the 17th-century founders of the Baptist denomination, but his relevance today stems from what he wrote in The Mystery of Iniquity, a small work published in 1612 and claimed by Baptists as the first full plea for religious liberty in England and Wales.
In the aftermath of the Reformation, when Dissenters, Catholics and Jews found all kinds of doors closed to them and were frequently persecuted for their faith, the central issue for Helwys was neither rights nor toleration, but liberty. Religious liberty, of course, but what he had to say provided a sound foundation for other kinds of liberty as well. Pleas for toleration too often came only from the persecuted seeking toleration for themselves, and usually with scant toleration for the views of others once they got into ascendancy.
For Helwys, religious liberty was a right for everyone - heretics, Turks and Jews, whoever they were, whatever they did; even for Roman Catholics, when the memory of the Gunpowder Plot was still acute. Anything less was a loss to the community, as well as to the individual. No parliament could legislate against it. No monarch could overrule it. He reminded James I that he too was a mortal, "dust and ashes" like the rest of us, with no power over the immortal souls of his subjects. James responded by putting him in prison, where he remained until his death.
Baptists may not always have lived up to his ideals, but with the exception of the ultra-conservative wing of the Southern Baptists in the US, they still bridle at the slightest threat to religious liberty.
Mine safety issues have been a key concern of lawmakers ever since two accidents in January killed 14 West Virginia coal miners.
Earlier this week, a key Senate committee endorsed a bill to make coal mining safer. The legislation would require miners to have at least two hours of oxygen available instead of one as under the current policy. It also would require mine operators to store extra oxygen packs along escape routes.
The bill also would require mines to have two-way wireless communications and tracking systems in place within three years. It now goes to the full Senate.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration recently issued a temporary rule requiring coal operators to give miners extra oxygen, but miners have been pressing Congress for a permanent fix.
In the January 2 Sago mine explosion in West Virginia, one man was killed in the blast and 11 others died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Randal McCloy Jr., the only miner who survived, has said at least four of the miners' air packs did not work, forcing the men to share.
Besides telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children, and die the GOP has done a fine job of getting government out of our lives.
Would you believe the above billboard was censored by Clear Channel? Here's what Campaign for America's Future has to say:
We empowered our supporters to send a message of their choice to Wal-Mart -- through a prominent billboard that we reserved less than one mile from Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., World Headquarters. We received thousands of excellent slogan submissions, and narrowed the field to ten finalists. Tens of thousands of our supporters voted on the finalists and a clear winner emerged, "Wal-Mart: Killing Local Businesses One Main Street at a Time."
After selecting the winning billboard slogan, supporters contributed enough money to publish it for one month. We designed the billboard artwork and submitted it to the billboard leasing company -- the Fort Smith, Ark., division of Clear Channel.
Unfortunately the division president, Bob Sadler, decided unilaterally -- and based on what we believe are partisan political grounds -- to censor and deny the posting of our slogan.
Nearly 12,000 Campaign for America's Future emailed Bob Sadler to demand that he not censor the truth about Wal-Mart, and publish our billboard. He has yet to deliver an official response, and we're currently exploring legal options to pressure him and Clear Channel to overturn the censor.
Simply outrageous.
And now read this found on Wal-mart Watch:
“America, as we know it, can’t afford Wal-Mart,” said Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future. “People across America are starting to realize the stark reality: Wal-Mart’s triumph is the defeat of middle-class America. If Wal-Mart sets the pace, Americans will pay the price, in declining wages, rising health care costs, longer hours, worsening workplace conditions and rising personal taxes to offset soaring corporate subsidies."
Please don't shop there. Those low prices represent the exploitation of people all over the world and the destruction of local businesses. Be willing to pay a decent and appropriate price for the goods you buy. That willingness translates into a better quality of life for us all.
* A progressive is someone who cares about the other guy. It's as simple as that!! (Lawrence F. - San Francisco, CA)
* A progressive is someone who realizes that she did not get where she is completely on her own. She had help along the way ... and wants to make sure others have the same opportunities, no matter where they started. (Colleen R. - Silver Spring, MD)
* A progressive ... believe[s] in liberty balanced with responsibility, economic opportunity balanced with just and open structures, and peace based upon being a global partner not a benevolent empire. (Norman B. - Cambridge, MA)* A progressive is a person who thinks the best is yet to come ... (Craig S. - Fort Collins, CO)
Polls now show an ominous turn. Majorities around the world think Americans are greedy, violent and rude, and fewer than half in countries like Poland, Spain, Canada, China and Russia think Americans are honest.
"We found a rising antipathy toward Americans," said Bruce Stokes of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, which interviewed 93,000 people in 50 countries over a four-year span.
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Kohut finds a significant decline among those holding "favorable" views of the United States. In Brazil, 52 percent held a favorable view of the United States in 2002; by the following year that had dropped to 34 percent. In Russia, the pro-America portion of the population dropped from 61 percent to 36 percent over a year.
President Bush also said in his speech that immigrants have to learn English. The immigrants said, "Hey, you first."
--Jay Leno
... In the midst of a half-trillion-dollar war, in an age of stagnating wages and skyrocketing health care, fuel and housing costs, and in the face of exploding deficits and entitlements, the Republican-controlled Congress is set to pass yet another multi-billion-dollar tax cut, nearly ninety percent of which will go to the richest fifteen percent of Americans.
As if this shocking fiscal indiscipline weren’t enough to make anyone sleepless with confusion and worry for our children’s future, these selfsame Republicans, a majority of whom profess themselves “born-again” through Jesus, are brazen enough to once again enrich the rich while governing under the banner of “compassionate conservatism."
Now I’m not out to question anyone’s faith. But would the same Jesus who put first those who society counted least and put last, and who proclaimed his ministry was to “bring good news to the poor," have rejoiced at the news of yet another tax cut for the wealthy paid for by borrowing and by budget cuts for our nation’s growing poor?
Low-income Americans find themselves today in a more precarious position than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly forty million Americans live in poverty every day. Many millions more are living in near-poverty, working hard, and often without benefits, doing all the things society tells them that they should to get ahead. And yet they’re falling further behind, watching the American dream sail away.
Republican leaders seem to believe that the solution to poverty is to grow the economy out of the problem. And yet despite nearly two decades of generally robust economic growth poverty, especially severe poverty in single-parent families with children, has risen dramatically. Even now, in the 21st century, we do not even have to leave our country to find third-world poverty.
Republican leaders also seem to believe that the blame for poverty lies with the individual poor people themselves. Poor people are the authors of their own poverty. If you’re poor, you must not be smart enough. You must not be willing to work hard enough. In the eyes of these Republican leaders, poverty is proof of bad character, and confirms a personal flaw.
And who did Jesus speak for? The dispossessed, widows, orphans. The hungry, the homeless, the helpless. The least, the last, the lost. Jesus reminded his followers that as they have done to the least of these, they have done to him. Few plainer words have been spoken.
So, late at night, I wonder: How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich and pro-business? What of the biblical imperatives for social justice and for uplifting the poor? How did compassion come to be reserved primarily for the rich and the unborn, with little or no interest in those who Jesus put first?
An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.
This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values....
The phrase "values voters," which has become ubiquitous, subtracts from social comity by suggesting that one group has cornered the market on moral seriousness...
Let's say you have a brother who just can't manage money or pay his bills. He's in debt up to his eyeballs. His kids aren't getting adequate medical care or education because of his spending.
Five years ago, he did have money, but blew it all, and more, on a wasteful and destructive foreign adventure that made your family a lot of enemies. Last week, however, he topped that.
He arranged to borrow a whole lot, most of it, presumably, from the Chinese. But he didn't use it to pay his bills; he gave most of it to a bunch of millionaires who didn't need it, to curry favor with them.
So you tell me: Is it time that we stepped in and did an intervention, or whatever it's called, before our family is ruined forever?
Guess what: Surprise, surprise — this is a story about you, dear comrades! Your recklessly insolvent brother is our own smirking, stoop-shouldered George W. Bush, the worst president in history.
Today the press is so weak, and we are so used to his outrages, that we barely noticed the latest atrocity — another $70 billion tax cut, nearly all of it for the well-to-do to wealthy. The worst part is not that it is unfair, though it is. The worst part is that it hastens the collapse of our economy. The Seattle Times quoted Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, a financial consulting service based in Philadelphia."
If you do the math," he said "under any kind of reasonable economic assumptions the budget deficit will be 10 percent of gross domestic product 20 years from now. That's untenable. The economy will break before we get there."
That's from a conservative investor. Even if you are totally in sympathy with Puddin'head George's values, share his belief we should be launching a military crusade to save the world from radical Islam, and even if you think the war in Vietnam — oops — Iraq can be "won," you cannot be happy about his wrecking of our own economy.
It is not incompetence with these people. They know exactly what they are doing. They intend to wreck our economy as an excuse to dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
You know who I feel sorry for is Osama bin Laden because all that hating us for our freedom, and now he has to come up with a completely new reason to hate us.
--Bill Maher
The question presents itself: Are Americans guilty of treason when they turn their backs on the Constitution? Treason is betrayal of country. And what defines country? In the United States, the Constitution defines country. The Bush regime's assault on the Constitution is an assault on America.
Moreover, it is a far more dangerous and deadly assault than a terrorist assault on buildings.
Ask yourself, gentle reader, what are we without the Constitution? Without the Constitution, how do we differ from the hapless subjects sent to Soviet and Nazi death camps? The Constitution protects our rights, and without our rights we are nothing.
It has been widely reported, apparently without causing Americans any unease, that the Bush regime has awarded Halliburton $385 million to build concentration camps in the United States. Who are to be the inmates? Certainly not terrorists. The Bush regime has proven inept at catching terrorists, and those few who are captured are kept offshore out of the reach of the courts where they can be tortured and abused. The camps are certainly not for illegal aliens who both political parties want to give amnesty and citizenship.
Concentration camps epitomize the horrors and inhumanity of the Stalin and Nazi era. Why is the Bush regime building concentration camps in America?
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Disease spread by global warming could kill an extra 185 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of the century and turn millions more into refugees unless rich nations take action now, a report said on Monday.
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Christian Aid said it based its estimate of 185 million deaths due to disease on figures from the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Global warming should allow carriers like mosquitoes to expand their ranges.
Melting ice caps and glaciers were not only eroding coast lines at a rapid rate but were also raising sea levels and reducing reliable sources of fresh water.
At the same time changing weather patterns were increasing the incidence of floods and droughts, with arid regions becoming drier and wet regions getting wetter.
These changes would increase tensions as key resources like water and fertile land became more scarce, the religious charity said, noting the farmers in northern Kenya were fighting over a diminishing number of waterholes to feed their cattle.
"The unfolding disaster in east Africa, where 11 million people have been put at risk of hunger by years of unprecedented drought, is a foretaste of what it to come," the report said.
"In this sense, the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists," Christian Aid said, declaring that it was switching its campaign goals to focus on the four great effects of global warming -- pestilence, floods, famine and war.
A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.
...
About two-thirds say they're concerned that the federal government might be gathering other information about the public, such as bank records and data on Internet use, or listening in on domestic phone conversations without obtaining a warrant.
Two-thirds are concerned that the database will identify innocent Americans as possible terrorism suspects.
The United States Congress is currently drafting a bill known as "The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Efficiency Act of 2006", known as "COPE." This means privatizing the Internet, by allowing such private corporations as AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon and others to actually own it, and, in the process operate the internet and other digital communications services as private networks. The bill very, very clearly states that "certain classes of Internet providers may-- not unreasonably-- impair, interfere, restrict or limit applications or services such as Web sites or voice-over IP phone connections."
On April 26, 2006, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications rejected an amendment to the bill (the Markey Amendment written by Ed Markey, D-Mass) that would have strengthened provisions for network neutrality. That amendment was defeated by a vote of 28 to 8.
...
If we are deprived of free and complete and independent access to the Internet, we will lose the last vestige of getting the real news, and the last vestige of free and open communication available to any of us.
I just wrote a scathing letter to my legislative representatives, stating -- amongst other things -- "Please remember: I am old, but I sure vote." All of you who read this, must do the same. Let them know how you feel. Let them know. After all, you are undoubtedly reading this very article on an internet site, are you not?
If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.
So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.
The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.
There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country.
Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, new figures show, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change.
Satellite measurements show the area covered by Arctic winter sea ice reached an all-time low in March, down some 300,000 square kilometres on last year -an area bigger than the UK.
Scientists say the decline highlights an alarming new trend, with recovery of the ice in winter no longer sufficient to compensate for increased melting in the summer. If the cycle continues, the Arctic ocean could lose all of its ice much earlier than expected, possibly by 2030.
Walt Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, which collected the figures, said: "It's a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out."
Experts are worried because a long-term slow decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the "tipping points" in global warming. In this scenario, warmer weather melts ice and drives temperatures higher because the dark water beneath absorbs more of the sun's radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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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.
Does it bother you if the U.S. government collects data on your phone calls?
Yes 76%
No 24%
Here's Henry on top of a suitcase that's on the top shelf of my utility room. He loves getting up there!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.
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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.
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.”
How does the report that the NSA is building a database of Americans' phone calls make you feel?
Creepy 77%
More secure 23%
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.
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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.
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
You'd think that would be obvious. But at least somebody's trying to get it across.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
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.
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.
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.
There's no conventional military solution to terrorism. If there were Israel would be the safest country in the world.
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.(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.
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.
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.
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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."
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
This isn't part of some White House shake-up. This is a scandal-plagued Bush appointee resigning just as an investigation into another Republican corruption scandal hits too close to home.
Former Republican lawmaker and current CIA Director Porter Goss's name has surfaced time and time again in the Republican bribe scheme, which began with a focus on disgraced Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham and his Republican lobbyists (hmm, do I think I mentioned "Republican" enough in that sentence?).
It is Goss's hand-picked #3 man at the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo who is under serious investigation in connection with a massive bribery scheme that touches on sweetheart deals, million dollar contracts, and yes, even hookers.
You will recall that Ken Silverstein, based on a source, noted that the prostitution scandal could touch a former lawmaker "who now holds a powerful intelligence post."
Speculation abounded that Porter Goss fit that description perfectly.
It may not be the hookers. It may not be his possible participation in a million-dollar bribery scheme affecting our national security. It may be that he hated his job, and the CIA hated him. Or it may just be that Goss decided to spent time with his family.
But the press has a duty to find out why one of our nation's top intelligence officials just up and quit all of sudden on a Friday afternoon.
Human rights groups have condemned the "barbaric" murder of a 14-year-old boy, who, according to witnesses, was shot on his doorstep by Iraqi police for the apparent crime of being gay.
Ahmed Khalil was shot at point-blank range after being accosted by men in police uniforms, according to his neighbours in the al-Dura area of Baghdad.
Campaign groups have warned of a surge in homophobic killings by state security services and religious militias following an anti-gay and anti-lesbian fatwa issued by Iraq's most prominent Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Ali Hili, the co-ordinator of a group of exiled Iraqi gay men who monitor homophobic attacks inside Iraq, said the fatwa had instigated a "witch-hunt of lesbian and gay Iraqis, including violent beatings, kidnappings and assassinations".
"Young Ahmed was a victim of poverty," he said. "He was summarily executed, apparently by fundamentalist elements in the Iraqi police."
Niagara Falls, Ont., May 4, 2006 - Canada's Anglican bishops unanimously endorsed a motion expressing "grave concern" about proposed legislation in Nigeria that "would prohibit or severely restrict the freedom of speech, association, expression and assembly of gay and lesbian persons." Their motion also called criticized the (Anglican) Church of Nigeria for its support of the legislation.
The legislation is inconsistent with the United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the bishops said in their motion, which was passed at their spring meeting held April 22-27. They said they were "especially grieved" by the support for the legislation given by the Church of Nigeria, noting that the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops called upon churches to "listen to the experience of homosexual persons."
The proposed laws, said the bishops, "criminalize civil and religious same-sex marriage as well as the public and private expression of same-sex affection, all public affiliation between gay persons and even publicity, public support and media reporting of the same." The proposals "would make the very act of listening to homosexual persons impossible."
In unusually strong language, the bishops said they "disassociate" themselves from the actions of the Church of Nigeria and called upon Anglicans around the world to listen to and respect the human rights of gay people.
President Bush says the national anthem should only be sung in English, but he was apparently singing a different tune during his first run for President and at his inaugural festivities.On the campaign trail in 1999, Bush would often sing along as the national anthem was sung in Spanish during stops in Hispanic communities, GOP scholar Kevin Phillips wrote in his book "American Dynasty."
PARIS (AFP) - Environmental scientists in the Netherlands say they have found evidence that climate change can decimate migrating bird species by affecting the date when their main food supply becomes abundant.
A small long-distance migrating bird called the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) spends the northern hemisphere winter in West Africa, returning to northern Europe in the spring to breed.Dutch researchers have been following the species for decades, using nestboxes in forests, observations of their arrival and departure and monitoring availability of their staple food, which is caterpillars.
They have found that the earlier arrival of warm weather causes the caterpillars to emerge sooner -- and as a result, the flycatchers may arrive too late to properly feed their young. The birds breed, but without having an adequate food supply for the nestlings.
Hindsight is often touted as better than foresight, yet such a truism should not blind us to an imminent threat before it happens. Like someone who takes up with an abusive mate and rationalizes the threat to life and limb until the battering leaves undeniable, indelible scars, there are good reasons right now to expect the worst when it comes to the survival of the free Internet. Now unfolding is a legal-political-corporate plot for turning a vibrant, democratic Internet into a global web of corporate and government deceit. The tell-tale signs exist but as in domestic abuse, the perpetrators (federal government and a small group of interconnected, powerful telecom and mainstream media monopolies) have done their utmost to keep it hidden behind closed doors.
Under the veil of a virtual mainstream media blackout, on June 27, 2005, the United States Supreme Court granted giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon the legal right to dominate and control the Internet. It ruled that broadband Internet was an information service like cable TV rather than an interactive telecommunication service like the telephone (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services). This gave these behemoths the green light to exclude Independent Service Providers (ISPs) from using their pipes, thereby laying the foundation for a corporate dominated and controlled Internet. Succinctly, in controlling the conduit of communication across the Internet, these companies now had acquired the legal right to control the content (Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, And Why Corporate News Censored the Story). Moreover, in writing this decision, the Court also left the door open for telephone companies like ATT to control telephone modem connectivity to the Internet. As a result, just three weeks after the decision was handed down,
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seized the opportunity to grant this right, effectively ushering in the beginning of the end of free-access Internet.
Presently, behemoth telecom corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are poised to set up toll booths on the Internet. According to this plan, only content providers with deep pockets would be given optimum Internet connectivity. This would leave the rest of the Internet community running slowly or not at all. The net result would be the demise of Internet neutrality. No longer would all of us have an equal voice within the freest and most comprehensive democratic forum ever devised by humankind. This would accordingly be yet a further maneuver in the gradual dismantling of the free, democratic Internet.
Indisputably, the Internet is currently on a path of becoming an extension of the corporate media, owned and operated by a few giant corporations that control the information Americans receive. This erosive trend threatens to infect the Internet just as it has radio, broadcast, and cable TV. The transition, however, has not been politically benign. Rather, big money has teamed with neoconservative politics to usher in an age in which quid pro quo between mainstream media corporations and government largely define what Americans see and hear.
There are only two ways an assembly plant worker can hurt his or her employer: Do a lousy job, or ask too much money for it.
Neither applies to the employees of this city's Ford assembly plant, which opened in 1925 to build Henry Ford's Model T, and today rolls out a new F-150 pickup truck -- the world's best-selling vehicle model -- every 67 seconds. Of the three Ford plants producing the F-150, Norfolk has the highest productivity -- utilizing the fewest workers per truck -- and the lowest rate of defects.
So what have the 2,275 hourly workers in Ford's most efficient plant producing its most profitable product earned for their efforts? The end of their livelihoods. Ford on April 13 an nounced that the Norfolk Assembly Plant will close by 2008.
To listen to Ford, Norfolk was victimized by little more than geography; the plant is farther from the company's Detroit hub than the other F-150 plants, so the company is hoping to save the cost of shipping parts to the East Coast. Translation: It's not the Norfolk workers' fault. But they're going to pay anyway.
''If I'm in business to make money, I want to make money,'' quality control specialist and United Auto Workers Local 919 member Rick Page, 51, told me when I visited the plant April 19. "I can understand that Ford wants to bring everything closer to their hub.
''But the F-150 is the No. 1 best-selling vehicle in the world, and we build the highest quality F-150 of any plant in the country,'' said Page, whose father worked at the Norfolk plant, and whose son works there today. "We're one of the most efficient and productive plants of any in the United States. We have good people here. We take pride in what we do. And we feel we got slapped in the face.''
If CEO-gods get the credit for corporate successes, shouldn't they bear the responsibility for failures? Yet when was the last time you heard of a top corporate executive being fired -- without a golden parachute -- for racking up nine- or 10-figure losses? The Norfolk workers are paying for management's failure to adapt to a changing marketplace. And they are paying for the refusal of politicians to establish tougher fuel-efficiency standards, to structure free-trade agreements to protect the jobs of American workers, or to create a national health insurance plan that would allow U.S. companies to better compete with the rest of the industrialized world, where national health insurance lowers business costs.
Yet when capitalists in the contemporary free market make bad decisions, the blameless typically suffer far more than the culpable. These days, if the corporations' strategies succeed, good U.S. jobs flee overseas. If they fail, good domestic jobs just disappear.
President Bush introduced former Fox broadcaster Tony Snow as the new White House Press Secretary. See, this is the perfect example of wasteful government spending. I mean, why is the president paying someone to join his staff and tow the party line when he was doing it on Fox for free?
--Jay Leno
The event itself had more planning than a Superbowl half-time show. The former ABC television producer, Andrew Sforza, who had become Bush's Leni Riefenstahl, arranged all of the details: the multiple camera angles, the lighting, the staging of the sailors, the direction of each shot, the mise en scène, nothing was left to chance. Sforza had a team of nearly one hundred production technicians on the ship preparing (or "advancing") for the President's triumphal landing. Sforza, who is famous for contracting expensive lighting rigs from Europe set on barges that bathed the Statue of Liberty in light as a backdrop for one of Bush's photo-ops, hired associate producers, set builders, grips, lighting and sound specialists, assistant directors, and managers who worked with the major television networks to provide direct feeds and other accommodations. Sforza's set designers dictated the specific colors each of the lines of sailors would wear, the colors of the air deck smoke that was used, the monumental music played. They also made sure there were plenty of black, Latino, and female faces in the frame.
George W. Bush's approval rating in an Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted for CNN this week is 32 percent. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone magazine has an excellent article on Bush by Princeton professor Sean Wilentz titled "The Worst President in History?"
Comedian Jeff Foxworthy has a famous routine listing things that indicate you might be a redneck. Well, there are things that may indicate whether Bush is the worst president in history.
If you put on blinders, cherry-pick intelligence and Pinocchio the country into war, you might be the worst president in history.
If you treat the worst terrorist attack in the history of the nation as the best thing that's happened for you politically, you just might be the worst president.
If after Sept. 11, 2001, the ports are as easily accessible as Paula Abdul by an American Idol contestant and the borders look like the Pamplona bull run, you might be the worst president.
If your toilet paper has the Kyoto Treaty, Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution imprinted on it, you might be the worst president in history.
If your administration blows the cover of one of our CIA agents like Moe getting back at Larry for accidentally hitting him with a two-by-four, you could qualify for the worst president in history.
If your prisoner interrogation methods look like something out of the "Saw" movies and you're franchising secret prisons around the world, you might be the worst president.
If you can turn the largest surpluses in American history into the largest deficits faster than MC Hammer and never once veto a Congressional spending binge, you might be the worst president.
The Boston Globe is now reporting that the president believes he has the authority to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. And those are just the laws passed on his watch. As we've already seen with the FISA statute, the president also feels he has the right to ignore laws passed by previous administrations as well.
If the president feels he is free to ignore a great number of laws - and he is on the record as implementing that belief by disobeying some long established laws - there is a whole different government running the country than we think there is.
There is the government with the laws we think we have. And the government with the laws the president secretly says we have. This secret set of decisions on which laws will and won't be applied is what makes up the new shadow government.
The idea that the president would say he has the authority to ignore the strictures of laws passed by the United States Congress might seem like some sort of liberal exaggeration to some. It seems so outlandish. But don't take anyone's word for it, ask the administration -- they readily confirm it.
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This is an extraordinary power grab. There is no precedent for it, or justification. It is grossly undemocratic. I cannot believe the President of the United States of America says he has the power to ignore laws passed by the people's representatives.
George Bush has crossed the Rubicon. These are not the powers of a president. They are the powers of a dictator.
