U.S. ELECTION: 59,054,087 'Stupid' - 6,260 Sorry: "The site sprung up just days after the election and little more than a week later a response, ApologiesAccepted.com, appeared in cyberspace to welcome the gesture. That Europe-based site now counts 1,000-plus postings.

The two have elicited a number of counter-sites, including You'reWelcomeEverybody, which says its goal is ?to counter those who would pathetically apologise for the Bush victory.? It has nearly 200 submissions to date. "

Newsday.com - AP Washington: "On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will determine whether Raich and similar patients in California and 10 other states can continue to use marijuana for medical purposes. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | One gulp, and Bush was gone: "Offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W Bush library and legacy. 'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...' Thus he identified himself as more than the ruthless campaign tactician; he was also the invisible hand of power, pervasive and expansive, designing to alter the fundamental American compact.
Bush appeared distracted, and glanced repeatedly at his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where secret service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: 'Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there.' Bush replied: 'A submarine could take this place out.' "

its amazing how this lil' war is unfolding. what we have here is the abuse of intel taking backstage to charges that the intel was wrong.The New York Times > Washington > 2 Top Officials Are Reported to Quit C.I.A.: "Under Mr. Goss, it is a cadre of former House Republican aides, not Navy officers, who dominate the new management team. This month, they have toppled Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, in a way that former intelligence officials say has shown little regard for the tradition-bound clandestine service which has always prized rank, experience and lines of authority."

Stop ?Big Brother? from snooping around your medicine cabinet!: "Do you want the government to have a record of every prescription you get? Every painkiller? Every anti-depressant? Every sleeping pill? And then to pass that information along to law enforcement to prosecute you and your doctor if they don?t like what they find?

The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act (H.R. 3015) was passed by the House, but hasn?t been passed yet in the Senate so we still have time to stop it.

While masquerading as a law enforcement tool to help control the illegal use of painkillers, the national bill would cast a net so wide that tens of millions of suffering patients & doctors will be snared in suspicion. Not limited to prescriptions for painkillers, it would create a central database affecting tens of millions who are not even suspected of a crime. And the information will be shared with state and local law enforcement.

Prosecutors and law enforcement already second-guess doctors and prosecute them for prescribing ?too much? or if they decide the patient doesn?t ?deserve? treatment.

Overzealous prosecutors have already frightened many doctors out of prescribing pain treatment for the almost 50 million patients who suffer from pain. We can?t let them do it to the rest of us as well.

Do you want law enforcement deciding who ?deserves? medicines?"

they're crucifying dan rather. they will regret it.

BostonHerald.com - Business: Economic `Armageddon' predicted: "Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.

Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.

His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic ``armageddon.''

Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, ``it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.''

Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ``we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.''

The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe. "

they need 300,000 trained iraqi forces to ensure that the elections are able to take place. commanders are reporting that there are about 150,000 trained now. remember now, we had these same commanders telling us there were 120,000 when actually there were less than 20,000. and of those 20,000, only 1 in 5 were trained fully. that doesn't take into account the 80% desertion rate at many of the outposts. i'll have to find a reliable source on just how many iraqi FULLY trained forces there really are.

for future reference. the title says it all. how the GOP is earning their swastikas. Back-room dealing a Capitol trend - GOP flexing its majority power

i don't know the Bible worth shit. i couldn't even quote you any verse, other than say, oh, the lord is my shepard, i shall not want... but that's about it.

however, i can tell you the meaning of any verse you read to me.

November 22, 1963: The Day Democracy Went Into a Tailspin. Kennedy Assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Johnny, We Hardly Knew You. Since Then, the Texas Neo-Confederate, Neo-Cons Have Turned Democracy Into a Politburo.

No More Sham Elections, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF should say it all. and he's got remedies that should be given serious, and i do mean SERIOUS consideration.

fantastic article on jeff cohen's remarks at the ILCA workshop in d.c. on 11/12:

I had an ulterior motive in wanting to come to DC today.

I'm in search of the political genius who thought it would pass the smell test with swing voters if Kerry suspended his campaigning 12 days before the election and went duck-hunting in Ohio. Swing voters are often highly misinformed, but they're not stupid.

As labor communicators, you have an understanding of working people and swing voters that the high-priced Democratic Party strategists seem to lack. They pander to stereotypes of what a swing voter is. Democratic Party strategists need your help. And labor communicators can help in developing language that emphasizes economic and social justice as issues of morality and values.

You all know about journalists embedded with the troops in Iraq. I started out as a media critic at FAIR and, as if in a slow-motion nightmare, I ended up embedded inside the mainstream media. I've worked as a panelist/commentator over the years at all three cable news channels.

What I've found inside TV news is a drunken exuberance for stories involving celebrity, lurid crime and sex scandal -- matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers that be, especially if they're conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything that could get you or your network accused of being liberal.

In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and also senior producer on the "Donahue" show, the most-watched program on the channel. In the last months of the program, before it was terminated on the eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management that every time we booked an antiwar guest, we had to book 2 pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to book 3 on the right. At one meeting, a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told that she would need to book 3 right-wingers for balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

When we look at the media's role in the 2004 election, we make a mistake to focus on election coverage per se. The basis for Bush's victory was in place way before 2004. At the end of last year, a huge study done by the University of Maryland's PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that most of those who got their news from the commercial TV networks held at least 1 of 3 fundamental "misperceptions" about the war in Iraq (and some held 2 or 3 of them):

-- that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11
-- that WMDs had been found in Iraq
-- that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Viewers of Fox News, where I worked for years, were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all 3 questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.

How can you have a meaningful election in a country where, according to polls, half or more of the American people don't know who attacked us on 9/11? They think Saddam Hussein was involved.

To help Bush mislead Americans, Fox News Channel required that the banner "War on Terror" run when Iraq was discussed.

I was at MSNBC when Tom Ridge was holding a news conference at Homeland Security in late 2002 about alleged new terror threats from Al Qaeda -- and MSNBC ran a lower third: "Showdown with Saddam."

At MSNBC, I was asked to debate Frank Gaffney, the former Reagan official who seems to live on TV, in a segment based on Gaffney's claim that not only was Saddam Hussein behind 9/11, he was also behind Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing! I'm not kidding.

Last month, PIPA released a new study that found majorities of Bush supporters, sometimes huge majorities, not only had major misunderstandings of the basic facts about Iraq, but they were misled on all sorts of other Bush positions. 74 percent of Bush supporters believed that Bush favors inclusion of labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.

60 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not have initiated a war with Iraq unless evidence established that Iraq had WMDs and was supporting the Al Qaeda terrrorists. This should have been a bloc of Kerry voters. But they were unaware the evidence did not exist.

These are faith-based voters -- not fact-based voters.

Among the reasons some of us worked for Bush's defeat was to get a new Federal Communications Commission. Many of us were ready to fight for the elevation of commissioner Michael Copps, a Democratic appointee, to FCC chair, replacing Michael Powell, Colin's son. Powell is the best friend of the media conglomerates. We need to stop Powell from any further media concentration over the next 4 years, and unions need to be in the forefront of that resistance.

Thanks to media deregulation started during the Reagan administration, and unfortunately continued by Bill Clinton: there are now 8 companies that largely determine what Americans see, hear and read through the media -- 8 companies sitting on the windpipe of the First Amendment.

We can thank Clinton's Telecommunications "Reform" Act of 1996 for the right-wing Clear Channel's dominance of radio and for the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group becoming the biggest TV chain in the country. Clear Channel owned 40 radio stations before the Telecom bill and 1200 soon after. Sinclair had 11 stations before the bill, and now has 62 TV stations.

TV news is dominated by 5 corporations.

NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the "Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial and GE's plastics division.

Fox News is owned by the right-wing Rupert Murdoch (and News Corporation), and does Murdoch's ideological bidding.

ABC is owned by Disney. You'll remember that CEO Michael Eisner said that Disney wouldn't distribute "Fahrenheit 911" because Disney "didn't want to be in the middle of a politically-oriented film during an election year." Eisner's comment was allowed to pass only because so few people realize that Disney is one of the biggest purveyors of political opinion this election year and every recent election year -- almost all of it right-wing political opinion. Each day in major radio markets nationwide, Disney radio stations serve up hour after hour of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, etc. etc.

CBS News, owned by Viacom, got taken in by forged documents -- and then censored accurate reporting critical of Bush, apparently at the behest of Viacom's CEO, Sumner Redstone. Six weeks before the election Redstone endorsed Bush on behalf of Viacom: "From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on."

Until broadcasting is demonopolized and removed from the control of these corporations, and until major insulated funding goes to genuine public broadcasting, misinformed voters will be easy prey for political demagoguery in election after election.

When I lecture about media in culturally conservative places, as I did this week in West Virginia, what comes as a shock to people, including the so-called "values voter," is that what they see as sleaze on TV and radio is not brought to them by the "liberal media" but by Republican-endorsing media moguls like Murdoch and Redstone.

The spectrum of debate in our country keeps getting pushed further rightward by corporate media. Look at what passes for left-right debates in the distorting lens of national TV. Many complain about the Fox News pairing of forceful, telegenic Sean Hannity on the right against the less telegenic, often backpedaling Alan Colmes. But Fox News Channel did not invent the narrow center-right, GE to GM spectrum. That was firmly in place thanks to PBS and CNN years before Fox News Channel was invented. Indeed, FAIR has recruited thousands of members and subscribers over the years through full-page magazine ads with pictures of folks like Michael Kinsley, Mark Shields and others -- with the headline: "I'm not a leftist, but I play one on TV."

Almost all those who regularly represent the left on TV support corporate globalization and NAFTA; a TV rightist like Pat Buchanan opposes it. TV leftists tend to defend the immorality of media corporations while only rightists attack it. On CNN and NBC this election season, Time magazine's Joe Klein was presented as the left side of the debate against various hardcore rightwingers. A few months ago in a Time column, Klein hailed the corporate sponsored Democratic Leadership Council for supporting "fiscal responsibility and free trade" within the Democratic Party and for "gleefully assaulting the reactionary left -- the trade unions and bureaucrats."

Every day on TV and radio, you can hear from regular hosts and pundits who are proud allies of the anti-abortion movement, proud allies of the NRA movement, proud allies of the religious right movement. You don't hear from regulars who are proud allies of the labor movement.

Moving briefly from punditry to what passes for "objective reporting," too many reporters have become easily manipulated by Republican operatives. They allowed false and defamatory Swift Boat ads to dominate coverage for weeks; their fact-checking of campaign and debate claims has often meant that if they identify 2 huge whoppers from Bush, they have to inflate or invent 2 Kerry claims in the name of a false balance that actually distorts the news. FAIR has written thousands of words this year on "false balance" in election coverage.

Ending on good news: The movement to challenge media bias has never been stronger among progressive and union activists, and the movement to challenge media concentration has never been stronger. We had a real victory in 2003 in resisting FCC proposals to allow even greater media consolidation, with a coalition that started with groups like Free Press and FAIR and MoveOn and Common Cause and then attracted groups on the right to the effort: the NRA and the Parents Television Council. One easy way to get involved in these battles is to sign up for activist alerts at FAIR's website: http://www.fair.org.

Jeff Cohen founded FAIR, the New York-based media watch group. He's been a nationally-syndicated columnist, TV commentator and communications director of the Kucinich for President campaign.

ya know, blogger is getting to be pathetic with its servers. takes forever to get connected any more. ANYhoo... on with the show.

today's entry is the first up in a new series i'm carrying over from ITM: HYPOCRISY ALERT. today's mark from vermont is a doozie.

"The results of the presidential election of 2004 are still being parsed for what they say about the electorate’s supposed closer embrace of traditional cultural values. But for the network television executives charged with finding programs that speak to tastes across the nation, one lesson is clear. The supposed cultural divide is more like a cultural mind meld. Representatives of the four big broadcast networks as well as Hollywood production studios said the returns on display in the nightly television ratings bore little relation to the message apparently sent by a significant percentage of voters.

a blurb in the nytimes that i think sums up john ashcroft right nicely:

Criminal charges of civil rights violations were brought against 84 defendants last year, down from 159 in 1999, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The study also found that the number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation or another federal investigative agency recommended prosecution in civil rights cases fell by more than one-third, from more than 3,000 in 1999 to just over 1,900 last year. Federal court data also show that the government has sought fewer civil sanctions against civil rights violators.

One of the study's authors, David Burnham, said the results showed that civil rights enforcement dropped across the board in President Bush's first term in office. "Collectively, some violators of the civil rights laws are not being dealt with by the government," Professor Burnham said. "This trend, we think, is significant."

It is unlikely the decline has occurred because of fewer civil rights violations occurring, the study suggests. The number of complaints about possible violations received by the Justice Department has remained at about 12,000 annually for each of the past five years.

The Justice Department had no comment about the study.

When he announced his resignation on Nov. 9, Attorney General John Ashcroft listed as one of the department's accomplishments a statistic that showed the number of civil rights prosecutions was slightly higher over the past three years than the previous three-year period. Mr. Ashcroft also said the department had tripled the number of defendants charged in human trafficking cases compared with the previous three years.

...

Civil rights cases made up a tiny fraction of the Justice Department's total of 99,341 criminal prosecutions in 2003. The study found, however, that only civil rights and environmental prosecutions were down from 1999 to 2003 as the total caseload rose by about 10 percent.

By far the biggest criminal prosecution category is illegal drugs, at about 33,100 cases last year, followed by immigration, weapons violations, white-collar crime and others. The study was based on data collected from the Justice Department, federal courts and Congressional budget documents.

the perfect example of how georgie bush will cause a problem, then publicly whine about the problem being a problem.

"I was disappointed that the bill didn't pass. I thought it was going to pass up to the last minute."
-gwbush

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/22/politics/22panel.html?ei=5094&en=28092337b6be3110&hp=&ex=1101099600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=

"There's been a lot of opposition to this from the first," Roberts said on "Fox News Sunday." "Some of it is from the Pentagon. Some of it, quite frankly, is from the White House, despite what the president has said." As a result, he added, "I just don't see it [being approved] as of December 6."
--sen pat roberts

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2475-2004Nov21.html?sub=AR

(reprinted here for educational purpose)

The Revised Constitution of God’s United States

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Excerpted from America 2014: An Orwellian Tale Copyright 2004

The Revised Constitution of God’s United States

A Patriotic Citizens Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

(Passed by Congress and Ratified in 2009)

Preamble: We the people of God’s United States, in order to provide for the common defense, in balance with the blessings of liberty and our position as the Freest Country on Earth ™, do ordain the replacement of the Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with law, and ratified as per the original, outdated Constitution of the United States, by two thirds of both Houses of Congress, as well as the Legislatures of three fourths of the fifty states, in the year of our Lord 2009, to hereafter be known as The Patriotic Citizen’s Bill of Rights. The full force of the provisions of these Amendments are effective immediately, and the Judicial Branch of the Government of God’s United States is hereby instructed to interpret any disparity between the original Articles of the Constitution and its original Amendments, and this revised and updated Patriotic Citizen’s Constitution, in favor of the latter.

Amendment I: With the exception of the state-sanctioned religion of Christianity, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any other religion or prohibit the private, non-subversive exercise of any religion. Nor shall Congress abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances; although the President and his appointed agents may do so, in Time of War, or serious threat of war or terrorism, to protect the Country and its people, as he, in his sole discretion, deems fit in the exercise of his duty as Commander in Chief.

Amendment II: A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state of Patriotic Citizens, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, unless such people are suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security.

Amendment III: No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law, as determined by the President and Commander in Chief, and administered by the Department of Homeland Security.

Amendment IV: Except during Time of War, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. During Time of War, as defined by the President and Commander in Chief, representatives of the Department of Homeland Security may take any and all measures necessary to search the homes, effects, electronic communications or records of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, and it shall be a federal crime, as prescribed in federal criminal statute 841 (d) 1, as described in Patriot Act V, to inquire about such searches, or to inform the subjects of such searches, or the public, of any actions taken under this statute by representatives of the Department of Homeland Security.

Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in Time of War or public danger. With the exception of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists; no Patriotic Citizen shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation, unless deemed necessary by the President and Commander in Chief or the Department of Homeland Security.

Amendment VI: In all criminal prosecutions except those involving suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, Patriotic Citizens accused of crimes shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII: In suits at common law which do not involve the Government of God’s United States, Government officials, Party Members or Party Institutions, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required of any Patriotic Citizen, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted, with the exception of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists. Should abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists be found guilty, by any state or federal court, of any criminal offense, then their voting privileges for any public election shall be permanently revoked.

Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage such rights to unborn children, from the very moment God Almighty breathes life into their eternal souls. In any and all cases, including rape, incest, and health emergencies, any persons infringing upon the life of the unborn, whether mothers, relatives, health care providers, or their co-conspirators, shall be subject to the full force of state statutes concerning homicide or attempted homicide.

Amendment X: During Time of War the President, Vice President, and all other elected officials who are members of the Nationalist Party, the only Party found by the American people to be a Patriotic Citizens Party, are exempted by federal, state and local term limit legislation, including Amendment XXII of the outdated Constitution of the United States, prescribing a two term limit to the Office of President.

In Time of War, as determined by the President and Commander in Chief, all political parties, with the exception of the Nationalist Party (“The Party”), are suspect and illegal until such Time of War has passed, and it shall be a criminal federal offense to lobby, propagandize, assemble, or vote for any political person or action that is not part of the official Party. It is henceforth the duty of all Patriotic Citizens to vote for and provide support to the Party, until such time as the President, in his sole discretion, determines that God’s United States is no longer at war.

This Patriotic Citizens Constitution expands the rights, and responsibilities of Citizens in the following manner:

All Patriotic Citizens of the United States shall enjoy the right, and responsibility, of receiving and watching Interactive TV. Such responsibilities include an obligation to watch requisite public service announcements, as determined by the President in Time of War. It shall be a federal offense, in Time of War, to tamper with or disable the security delivery or monitoring functions of any Interactive TV device.

Patriotic Citizens are also entitled to an expanded right of Pharmacological Happiness, and all providers of health insurance must fully cover the cost of providing such Pharmacological Happiness. In the event that the Department of Homeland Security establishes, in it sole discretion, that a citizen is psychologically imbalanced, then representatives of the General of Homeland Security shall have the right, in Time of War, to define Pharmacological Happiness within the context of the needs of God’s United States, and to medicate and/or genetically reform law-breaking criminals as they deem necessary.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Excerpted from America 2014: An Orwellian Tale, available from BuzzFlash.com.

from the bush's mass graves department:

BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

why do i allege that we can't win this 'war on terrorism'? because this 'war' is a fraud. a fraud is perpetrated when you sell something that isn't what you say it is. and now that we understand that nobody really has a grasp on what 'terrorism' really is, how can it be disputed that we are fighting an unknown enemy. and when you fight an unknown enemy, there is no way in hell you can win. from the
LAT:

WASHINGTON — Five months after embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government's influential annual report on global terrorism, internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors — as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on.

In a 28-page report, the State Department's Office of Inspector General blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define terrorism and terrorist attacks were so inconsistent that they couldn't be relied upon.

from GAWKER:

Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins , along with 2 massive secret service men, tried to have dinner. they were told by the maitre'd that they were full and would be for the next 4 years. upon hearing, the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots... it was amazing!!! [Ed: We're hearing that this is actually true.]

from the proof-that-there-is-a-vast-right-wing-conspiracy department:

Environmentalists fear that oil exploration would ruin the refuge despite claims from the oil companies that modern techniques would keep environmental damage to a minimum.

Ironically, the oil companies have not been pushing for drilling. It is the Bush administration, backed by local politicians in Alaska, that has kept up the pressure. For the Republicans, a decision in their favour is the chance to give the environmental movement a real bruising.

As Tom DeLay, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, said three years ago, a pro-drilling vote would "crack the backs of radical environmentalists." As for Alaska's politicians, the arrival of oil companies in the refuge would bring in more revenues.

Of course, the Republicans do not describe the issue as the chance to put those pesky environmentalists in their place. The administration's position is that the US needs to develop more domestic energy sources, including the proven oil reserves in Alaska, to lessen America's dependence on foreign oil.

But not by much. Americans use 19 million barrels of oil each day, or 7 billion barrels of oil annually. The US interior department estimates that the refuge could have anywhere from 5.7 billion barrels to 16 billion barrels. Even erring on the generous side, the area would yield at most two years' worth of oil, although most estimates put the supply at no more than six months.

That seems precious little oil for the high level of effort expended and the inevitable environmental damage that would ensue. Experts predict that oil production from the refuge could not begin for at least 10 years and the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan congressional thinktank, estimates it would take at least 15 years.

So why are Republicans so keen to open up Alaska for more drilling when the prospects are so meagre? Environmentalists suspect that the real motive is to set down a marker. If the White House gets its way on such a contentious issue, there will be no holding back oil companies from other wilderness areas, such as the Rocky Mountains region and parts of New Mexico.

But even if the administration wins its battle in the Arctic, much is happening at the state level that runs counter to the administration's thinking.

more juicy stuff for those of you trying to defend yourselves against the evangelical warriors.

a MUST READ!

rock ridge institute writes:

Right-wing commentators have insisted that in both cases the problem was caused by a few misguided and troubled individuals. No need for any further scrutiny; the only issue is to punish the bad guys. But this resort to the “bad apple” theory is actually the leading edge of “the new right-wing permissiveness”. Conservatives have long blamed the permissiveness of liberals for many of our society’s most intractable problems–crime, delinquency, and drug use. But the Right now has embraced a more insidious form of permissiveness that is creating an “anything goes” moral culture. The elements of this new permissiveness are the bad apple theory and the idea that reliance on a “higher authority” eliminates the need for moral judgments. Together these undermine a culture of moral responsibility.

just saw thomas frank (what's wrong with kansas) on jon stewart. it appeared that tom was walking over jon's head. amazing. jon, you need to learn that we're not all dumb.

if ever there was any doubt about the nuGOP being the party of hate:

"If I had one dirty bomb ... I could eliminate all the liberals in Fresno at once." – right-wing Fresno (CA) City Council member Jerry Duncan on August 15, 2003
Fresno Bee

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too." – Ann Coulter
Reason

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." – Ann Coulter
American Politics

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past — I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people’. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability’. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed. (This sounds complicated, but in practice what usually happened was that a battalion of soldiers was sent to the offender's home town, where they killed everyone they could find, on the principle neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet — ‘let God sort 'em out’.) – John Derbyshire
The National Review, February 15, 2001

and speaking of the draft, or one that is being denied in the works, we have this tidbit from louisana:

ALEXANDRIA (AP) - When Larry Chevalier took his son to get his first driver's license, he was floored to discover that to get it, the boy had to preregister for a nonexistent military draft.

''I just can't believe it,'' said Chevalier, whose 16-year-old son, Nathan, did fill out the form to register with the Selective Service so he could get his license.

''They wouldn't let him get it otherwise,'' Chevalier said Saturday.

Even a 15-year-old boy who wants a learner's permit in Louisiana must provide information to be forwarded, when he turns 18, to the Selective Service System, which would run a military draft if one is set up again.

headline says it all: Government looking at military draft lists

The Selective Service System (SSS) and the U.S. Department of Education now are gearing up to compare their computer records, to make sure all men between the ages of 18 and 25 who are required to register for a military draft have done so.

The SSS and the education department will begin comparing their lists on Jan. 1, 2005, according to a memo authored by Jack Martin, acting Selective Service director.

While similar record checks have been done periodically for the past 10 years, Martin’s memo is dated Oct. 28, just a few days before the Nov. 2 presidential election, a hard-fought campaign in which the question of whether the nation might need to reinstate a military draft was raised in debates and on the stump.

It took several more days, until Nov. 4, for the document to reach the Federal Register, the official daily publication for rules and notices of federal agencies and organizations.

The memo was also produced after the U.S. House voted 402-2 on Oct. 5, against House Resolution 163, a bill that would have required all young people, including women, to serve two years of military service.

why doesn't anybody recognize that the insurgency didn't start until months after baghdad fell.

from zogby (for the full version of I SMELL A RAT):

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.

The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.

"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.

The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result.

Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county. They key phrase is "certain counties"--there is extraordinary variance between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.

How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.

The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county. I compared this ‘expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.

The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the ‘actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote--three times more than predicted by my model.

Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the ‘actual' result.

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties--barely exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model--an extremely unlikely result.

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots--not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result--in four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.

The second rat

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep ‘suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.

They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote -- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.

What to do?

This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.

(11/12/2004)
- By Colin Shea, The Freezer Box

how anybody can not believe war crimes have been committed in fallujah, is beyond me.

from the AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq Nov 14, 2004 — In the weeks before the crushing military assault on his hometown, Bilal Hussein sent his parents and brother away from Fallujah to stay with relatives.

The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of the former insurgent stronghold.

"Everyone in Fallujah knew it was coming. I had been taking pictures for days," he said. "I thought I could go on doing it."

In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein's northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.

"Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out," he said.

"There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."

By Tuesday afternoon, as U.S. forces and Iraqi rebels engaged in fierce clashes in the heart of his neighborhood, Hussein snapped.

"U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house," he said.

Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River, which flows on the western side of the city

"I wasn't really thinking," he said. "Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn't think there was any other choice."

In the rush, Hussein left behind his camera lens and a satellite telephone for transmitting his images. His lens, marked with the distinctive AP logo, was discovered two days later by U.S. Marines next to a dead man's body in a house in Jolan.

AP colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, who by then had not heard from Hussein in 48 hours, became even more worried.

Hussein moved from house to house dodging gunfire and reached the river.

"I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river."

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."

"I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

He met a peasant family, who gave him refuge in their house for two days. Hussein knew a driver in the region and sent a message to another AP colleague, Ali Ahmed, in nearby Ramadi.

Ahmed relayed the news that Hussein was alive to AP's Baghdad bureau. He sent a second message back to Hussein that a fisherman in nearby Habaniyah would ferry the photographer to safety by boat.

"At the end of the boat ride, Ali was waiting for me. He took me to Baghdad, to my office."

Sitting safely in the AP's offices, a haggard-looking Hussein offered a tired smile of relief.

"It was a terrible experience in which I learned that life is precious," he said. "I am happy that I am still alive after being close to death during these past days."

the war crimes is evident here. we USED to be the GOOD guys.

what's all this frist-cats thing about? freeperville *GASP!* provided the answer:

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was a successful surgeon in his home state of Tennessee before being elected to the Senate in 1994. Now the Republican leader is being challenged by animal "rights" activists to "atone for" unauthorized medical experiments he conducted on cats.

Frist admitted in his 1989 book that, while a student at Harvard Medical School, he adopted cats from animal shelters and practiced surgery on the animals. In adopting the cats, however, Frist told shelter staff members he wanted the animals for pets. All of the cats died as a result of the surgeries.

"It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," Frist wrote in Transplant: A Heart Surgeon's Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine.

images of dr. mengele come to mind

from zogby:

Asked the question of the greatest moral crisis facing our country, 31% of Catholics chose poverty and 31% chose greed, compared to only 20% who chose abortion, and 11% that chose same-sex marriage. Further, more Catholic voters were turned off by messages from conservative leaders trumpeting ‘non-negotiable’ issues, as opposed to Catholic groups who held up a broad range of moral issues. According to Zogby, 25% of voters said that conservative Catholic messages touting ‘non-negotiable’ issues made them more likely to vote for Sen. John Kerry, whereas only 20% said these messages made them more likely to vote for President George W. Bush. Fifty-six percent said these messages had no effect on them at all."

another letter writer points out something that many forget:

what did george w. bush have that john kerry didn't have? he had all those republican radio talk shows that saturate the country behind him. for instance, rush limbaugh is on the air for three hours every day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year from one election to the next. that's full-time campaigning, and rush is only one of many republican talk-show hosts. i would be willing to make a small wager that limbaugh alone has won many a convert to the republican party.

so one has to wonder, what with alll these advantages (non-stop, suffocating radio, red-biased cable, twice as much campaign money, false smear ads), bush still came so close to losing (i actually think he did lose, since ohio was basically stolen)

from a letter writer in iowa city

the popular vote indicates that president bush has a "mandate" to continue along his current path. again, please note that president bush won by the smallest margin of any sitting president in history and whereas he got more votes than any previous presidential candidate, so did john kerry. kerry won more votes from americans than any previous presidential candidate including ronald reagan and bill clinton.

what irony. russia lecturing America on democracy. from yesterday's pravda:

The stance taken by Bush and Blair in blowing their trumpets so often spells out two things: first, that they are deep-down uneasy with what they have done, indeed Tony Blair nearly resigned earlier this year and contemplated changing from Anglicanism to Catholicism, which, however noble a quest, reveals that he is troubled inside and second, this Anglo-Saxon Alliance remains and continues to be an insult to the international community which through the United Nations Organization, made one simple request: that Washington and London adhere to international law.

They did not because they had committed their troops in the area before bothering to find out the facts and were not man enough to back down. Bush and Blair do not stand for freedom and democracy or anything else because free and democratic states must follow the principles of freedom and democracy, namely debate, discussion, dialogue and the UN Security Council is the proper forum for crisis management, not the rule of the rifle.

Bush behaved like an American settler, taming the wilderness with the bullet and the Bible. Blair followed him because he would do anything to gain protagonism. It is as simple as that.

the lapdog media has a long history of protecting the bushit empire, and now they're out to destroy those who dare question their credibility. what a joke. what a sad, dastardly-evil joke.

couldn't have said it better myself, from TIA on DU:

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

3- That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)

6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election

globe and mail has this interesting tidbit:

WASHINGTON -- What do moral values have to do with legalized brothels? Not much in Churchill County, Nevada, or so it seems.

Last week, the small county in northern Nevada voted 71 per cent for the re-election of President George W. Bush, whose campaign leaned heavily on fundamentalist Christian values such as opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.

On the same ballot, voters also crushed an effort to ban the county's legalized brothels by a margin of nearly 2-1.

"It totally blows me away," said Alan Perazzo, head of the Coalition to End Prostitution in Churchill County. "I'm as confused as the next guy. We voted 72 per cent for Bush and 63 per cent to keep the brothels."

from the chitrib:
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water, The Washington Post reported. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Consortium News

George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

i'm confused. if the bush administration (i.e., allawi) will not negotiate with terrorists, then what was all the negotiations going on before this assault? we are not fighting terrorists. we are fighting iraqis who want more than what they're getting.

josh marshall puts the bushit win into perspective:

Another measure of the Bush landslide.

President Bush won reelection last Tuesday with 286 electoral votes (over Kerry's 252).

That is the second lowest electoral margin for the winning candidate since 1916 when Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes by a margin of 277 to 254.

(ed. note: Between 1900 and 1912, the size of the electoral college went from 447 to 531 -- only seven fewer than there are today. So comparisons to elections more than one hundred years ago don't work unless the electoral spread is judged in percentage terms.)

Given that fact, it seems worth pointing out that this election, rather than being a decisive win or a "landslide", was actually, by every objective measure, one of the half dozen or so closest presidential contests in modern American history, along with 1876, 1916, 1960, 1968 and 1976.

election problems nicely laid out at DU.

from keith oberman, who only now has put a smile on my face knowing that there are still some reasonable anchors over at cnn. anyway, he writes about ohio, and the bushfix saga that is rolling up to be a story with some headlines (hopefully, God willing):

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

somehow i knew this whole relationship with chalabi was going to backfire. the picture of him sitting next to laura bush during bush's SOTU speech after the invasion of iraq, is just priceless now. from the NY Times:

The two main religious Shiite parties in the interim Iraqi government have already banded together. But they face a formidable challenge to their prominence from an unlikely and possibly anti-American alliance that is looming between Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile and Pentagon favorite, and Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric who ignited two deadly uprisings against the Americans and the interim government.

are libertarians jumpin on the "stolen election" bandwagon? over on lew rockwell's site, one could certainly think so.

I want to know the truth and I'm not afraid to acknowledge that it appears that we have been bamboozled again in this election. There is too much evidence and I'm throwing a red flag on the field. Let's take a timeout, have an instant replay and review the evidence from all angles and then make an informed decision. The stakes are too high. Here's what makes me very uncomfortable;

1. WASHINGTON – November 4 – Teresa Fedor, [via Greg Lestini]
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment "Issue 1," and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

2. Susan Truitt, Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

3. Bob Fitrakis, an attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election – like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

2. John Zogby, considered to be the "gold standard" of presidential polling, predicted that John Kerry and John Edwards would win with over 300 electoral votes. Following Zogby’s prediction to the letter, the preponderance of the exit polling stated that John Kerry would carry all of the major battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Oregon. These exit polls were interpreted as further confirmation of Zogby’s final predictions.

3. When comparing the exit polls to the actual "official" final results, it appears that EVERY state that had electronic voting, without paper trails, had an "unexplained" advantage for Bush of about 5%.

And it appears that EVERY STATE that had paper trails on their Electronic Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

So it appears that they remotely electronically messed with the electronic voting results in every state where they could get away with it (because there was no paper trail to disprove it in those states).

Does this sound like something Karl Rove might do to guarantee a victory for Bush? Don't answer – it's a rhetorical question.

SO HOW WAS THE ELECTION TECHNICALLY STOLEN?

Roz Hill explains how easy it is to steal an election with paperless electronic voting machines.

So, here are the numbers (so far): 112,596,922 voters counted in the presidential race. Bush has been consistently polling at 45%, which SHOULD have given him 50,668,614 votes, instead of 58,073,612. This translates into 7,404,998 votes being siphoned off from Kerry votes. Now, how does that magic work???

Taxpayers get hit with a bill for $3600 (or more) for EACH of the touch-screen "voting" computers, which are nothing more than dedicated COUNTERS except that they are marketed by Republicans (who vowed to ensure Bush's victory); and the American people have not been allowed to examine or certify the software in these units.

Here is how easy it is to "make magic";

We need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) = Tally

If V = B, add 1 to B
If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3
If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T
This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it would make it look like Bush had a huge popular win, which is precisely what happened.

At this point, why has no one raised the spectre of criminality or a criminal conspiracy to inflate votes for Bush and deflate tallies for Kerry via hacking the computerized voting machines?

In addition, it is highly suspicious to note that the scale of Bush’s vote far exceeded the best of the pre-election polling, which could certainly be explained by this scenario.

Time out is over and you've seen the evidence.

Is it too painful to acknowledge that we have been bamboozled or are you going to demand the truth?

then the kicker, for all the bush sympathizers out there, who voted for the king because he would do more than kerry to keep them safe.

SUCKERS!

WASHINGTON - Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of federal records shows.

The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq (news - web sites), North Korea (news - web sites), Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.

After the attacks, Bush grouped North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq together as an "axis of evil" countries with both weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists.

A Treasury Department (news - web sites) spokeswoman said that despite the smaller average fines, the administration was doing a good job of enforcing economic penalties against nations considered sponsors of terrorism. Molly Millerwise said the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, "is committed to ensuring that U.S. entities abide by U.S. sanction laws. We are not in the business of making money."

so you see, black is white, wrong is right. and you're stupid for not drinking the kool-aid.

and while all that is going on in iraq.... it's just not enough killing for king georgie. from the mercurynews:

Counterterror specialists look for ``chatter'' in Islamic extremist circles preceding an attack. There is a lot of chatter going on today in Washington -- only this time, it is about an American attack on Iran.

In seminars and hallways, there is eager anticipation of an airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Sure, the talk goes, we may not get all those buried nuclear labs. But a few waves of cruise missiles and bombers will set Iran's program back several years, enough time to pursue regime change in Tehran.

The Iran buzz is loud enough to have prompted an unusual statement by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Thursday that any attack on Iran would be ``inconceivable.'' In a message meant for Washington and for countrymen nervous about joining yet another war, Straw added: ``I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop.''