Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy

Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy

Pound the table!

Ivo Daalder at the Brookings Institution hits another homerun.... here are some excerpts:

Trust Clarke: He's Right About Bush This, by any measure, was Richard Clarke's week. The former counterterrorism czar roiled Washington and the nation with his accusation that U.S. President George W. Bush had failed to understand the threat al-Qaeda posed to the United States before Sept. 11, and bungled the U.S. response afterward. It was a stinging indictment of the Bush presidency, delivered with stiletto precision. And the impassioned response from White House showed that it hurt. ~ The vehemence with which administration officials have attacked Mr. Clarke's motives brings to mind the old lawyer's joke: When the facts are with you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the table. Why are administration officials pounding the table so hard? Because confirmation of Mr. Clarke's basic accusations comes from none other than George W. Bush himself. Take the charge that the Mr. Bush did not make fighting al-Qaeda a priority before Sept. 11. In late 2001, Mr. Bush told the journalist Bob Woodward that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after Sept. 11. I was not on point." Mr. Bush knew Osama bin Laden was a menace. "But I didn't feel the sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

For more from Daalder, click here.

William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy

from t r u t h o u t... so on point that it's worth another read.

We Caught The Wrong Guy Saddam Hussein, former employee of the American federal government, was captured near a farmhouse in Tikrit in a raid performed by other employees of the American federal government. That sounds pretty deranged, right? Perhaps, but it is also accurate. The unifying thread binding together everyone assembled at that Tikrit farmhouse is the simple fact that all of them – the soldiers as well as Hussein – have received pay from the United States for services rendered. It is no small irony that Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, the monster under your bed lo these last twelve years, was paid probably ten thousand times more during his time as an American employee than the soldiers who caught him on Saturday night. The boys in the Reagan White House were generous with your tax dollars, and Hussein was a recipient of their largesse for the better part of a decade. If this were a Tom Clancy movie, we would be watching the dramatic capture of Hussein somewhere in the last ten minutes of the tale. The bedraggled dictator would be put on public trial for his crimes, sentenced to several thousand concurrent life sentences, and dragged off to prison in chains. The anti-American insurgents in Iraq, seeing the sudden futility of their fight to place Hussein back into power, would lay down their arms and melt back into the countryside. For dramatic effect, more than a few would be cornered by SEAL teams in black facepaint and discreetly shot in the back of the head. The President would speak with eloquence as the martial score swelled around him. Fade to black, roll credits, get off my plane. The real-world version is certainly not lacking in drama. The streets of Baghdad were thronged on Sunday with mobs of Iraqi people celebrating the final removal of a despot who had haunted their lives since 1979. Their joy was utterly unfettered. Images on CNN of Hussein, looking for all the world like a Muslim version of Charles Manson while getting checked for head lice by an American medic, were as surreal as anything one might ever see on a television. Unfortunately, the real-world script has a lot of pages left to be turned. Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, reached at his home on Sunday, said, “It’s great that they caught him. The man was a brutal dictator who committed terrible crimes against his people. But now we come to rest of story. We didn’t go to war to capture Saddam Hussein. We went to war to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons have not been found.” Ray McGovern, senior analyst and 27-year veteran of the CIA, echoed Ritter’s perspective on Sunday. “It’s wonderful that he was captured, because now we’ll find out where the weapons of mass destruction are,” said McGovern with tongue firmly planted in cheek. “We killed his sons before they could tell us.” Indeed, reality intrudes. The push for war before March was based upon Hussein’s possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 1,000,000 pounds of sarin gas, mustard gas, and VX nerve gas, along with 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, uranium from Niger to be used in nuclear bombs, and let us not forget the al Qaeda terrorists closely associated with Hussein who would take this stuff and use it against us on the main streets and back roads of the United States. When they found Hussein hiding in that dirt hole in the ground, none of this stuff was down there with him. The full force of the American military has been likewise unable to locate it anywhere else. There is no evidence of al al Qaeda agents working with Hussein, and Bush was forced some weeks ago to publicly acknowledge that Hussein had nothing to do with September 11. The Niger uranium story was debunked last summer. Conventional wisdom now holds that none of this stuff was there to begin with, and all the clear statements from virtually everyone in the Bush administration squatting on the public record describing the existence of this stuff looks now like what it was then: A lot of overblown rhetoric and outright lies, designed to terrify the American people into supporting an unnecessary go-it-alone war. Said war made a few Bush cronies rich beyond the dreams of avarice while allowing some hawks in the Defense Department to play at empire-building, something they have been craving for more than ten years. Of course, the rhetoric mutated as the weapons stubbornly refused to be found. By the time Bush did his little ‘Mission Accomplished’ strut across the aircraft carrier, the occupation was about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of the Iraqi people. No longer were we informed on a daily basis of the “sinister nexus between Hussein and al Qaeda,” as described by Colin Powell before the United Nations in February. No longer were we fed the insinuations that Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11. Certainly, any and all mention of weapons of mass destruction ceased completely. We were, instead, embarking on some noble democratic experiment. The capture of Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis dancing in the streets of Baghdad, feeds nicely into these newly-minted explanations. Mr. Bush and his people will use this as the propaganda coup it is, and to great effect. But a poet once said something about tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. “We are not fighting for Saddam," said an Iraqi named Kashid Ahmad Saleh in a New York Times report from a week ago. "We are fighting for freedom and because the Americans are Jews. The Governing Council is a bunch of looters and criminals and mercenaries. We cannot expect that stability in this country will ever come from them. The principle is based on religion and tribal loyalties," continued Saleh. "The religious principle is that we cannot accept to live with infidels. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him, said, `Hit the infidels wherever you find them.' We are also a tribal people. We cannot allow strangers to rule over us." Welcome to the new Iraq. The theme that the 455 Americans killed there, and the thousands of others who have been wounded, fell at the hands of pro-Hussein loyalists is now gone. The Bush administration celebrations over this capture will appear quite silly and premature when the dying continues. Whatever Hussein bitter-enders there are will be joined by Iraqi nationalists who will now see no good reason for American forces to remain. After all, the new rhetoric highlighted the removal of Hussein as the reason for this invasion, and that task has been completed. Yet American forces are not leaving, and will not leave. The killing of our troops will continue because of people like Kashid Ahmad Saleh. All Hussein’s capture did for Saleh was remove from the table the idea that he was fighting for the dictator. He is free now, and the war will begin in earnest. The dying will continue because America’s presence in Iraq is a wonderful opportunity for a man named Osama bin Laden, who was not captured on Saturday. Bin Laden, it has been reported, is thrilled by what is happening in Iraq, and plans to throw as much violence as he can muster at American forces there. The Bush administration spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this Iraq invasion, not one dime of which went towards the capture or death of the fellow who brought down the Towers a couple of years ago. For bin Laden and his devotees, Iraq is better than Disneyland. For all the pomp and circumstance that has surrounded the extraction of the former Iraqi dictator from a hole in the ground, the reality is that the United States is not one bit safer now that the man is in chains. There will be no trial for Hussein, at least nothing in public, because he might start shouting about the back pay he is owed from his days as an employee of the American government. Because another former employee of the American government named Osama is still alive and free, our troops are still in mortal danger in Iraq. Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His capture means nothing to the safety and security of the American people. The money we spent to put the bag on him might have gone towards capturing bin Laden, who is a threat, but that did not happen. We can be happy for the people of Iraq, because their Hussein problem is over. Here in America, our Hussein problem is just beginning. The other problem, that Osama fellow we should have been trying to capture this whole time, remains perched over our door like the raven.

Claim vs. fact

from the Center for American Progress (courtesy of Salon.com)... another instance of self-incrimination from the administration that seems incapable of apologizing for something without making it worse that it was to begin with.

Claim vs. fact The Center for American Progress has been digging into the archives to help clarify claims made by the Bush White House as it tries to repair the damage from revelations made in the 9/11 commission public hearings and the newly released book by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Today in a speech in New Hampshire, President Bush defended his administration's actions before 9/11, saying: "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people." But CAP quickly found previous reports that the president was told of the possibility that al-Qaida was exploring the use of airliners as terror weapons, including against U.S. targets: FACT: On August 6, 2001, President Bush personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." -- Dateline NBC, 9/10/02 (Transcript in Nexis) FACT: U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that Islamic terrorists had considered "crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations." -- LA Times, 9/27/01. FACT: A 1999 report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council "warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon." The report specifically said, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives … into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House." -- CBS News, 5/17/02. CAP also found this nugget, showing that the State Department under Bush downplayed the importance of the threat of Osama bin Laden in its annual terrorism report in early 2001. "The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there's no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and 'personalizing terrorism.'" -- CNN, 4/30/2001. -- Geraldine Sealey

the Chomsky Blog: Turning the Tide

Turning the Tide

Link to Fafblog!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Link to Fafblog!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth

Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism. By Fred Kaplan

wow

Cost of War

The War in Iraq Cost the United States $107,992,478,984 Instead, we could have provided 1,956,562 students four-year scholarships at public universities .

hey you

read this

the check is in the mail....

State Comptroller: MCI Owes Md. $130 Million Updated: Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004 - 5:39 PM ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Comptroller William Donald Schaefer has filed income tax claims totaling $130 million against MCI/WorldCom, but the comptroller isn't expecting a big payoff any time soon. With the company in bankruptcy, Schaefer said Wednesday the money is "unlikely to be paid in full, as recent income statements show extensive losses." While he cautioned against expecting a windfall in state revenues, the comptroller said the state nevertheless should be "vigilant in fighting for our money." The comptroller's office filed the claim in New York bankruptcy court. It is based on court victories won by the comptroller's office seeking taxes from corporations that use Delaware holding companies to shield income earned in Maryland from the state corporate income tax. (Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Ya think?

from The Guardian

Bush is a fear president The US president is determined to use national anxiety to his advantage, Albert Scardino and John Scardino observe Wednesday March 24, 2004 Fear has had a cabinet position in two of the most radical presidencies in American history, those of Franklin Roosevelt and the current Bush. Spain has known similar fear at similar times, but the Spanish response has been a mirror image of the American reaction.

Outsourcing because....

US students aren't good at science and math? AeA Paper Finds That Offshoring Is Just One Element in a Rapidly Changing and Dramatically Competitive World

Soros Grants Urbana Group $200,000 for Community Wireless Grant

from Wi-Fi Networking News:

Wi-Fi Networking News: Urbana Group Gets $200,000 Community Wireless Grant They started with Pringles cans and moved to ruggedized containers, but a $200,000 grant should let them expand further: In this Illinois college town from whence Mosaic sprung 11 years ago, two community wireless networkers have received a $200,000 grant from George Soros’s Open Society Institute to try to affordably build out downtown Urbana.

Castellanos was fired by Jesse Helms?

You know you're a redneck if... AllPolitics - North Carolina News

Bounced by Helms, Consultant Rebounds By Robert Marshall Wells, CQ Staff Writer Apr. 30, 1996 North Carolina Republican Leroy Pittman, one of four GOP House candidates competing in the state's 8th District, took to the television airwaves last week to boost his name recognition heading into the May 7 primary. Pittman, a businessman and county commissioner in south-central Union County, is hoping for a shot at 11-term Democratic Rep. W.G. "Bill" Hefner this fall. But Pittman must first fend off his leading competitor, well-known car dealer Sherrill Morgan, the 1994 Republican nominee, who held Hefner to 52 percent last time out. Pittman's campaign is giving National Media Inc. a continuing role in Tarheel State politics. The Alexandria, Va.-based consultancy, headed by Alex Castellanos, was abruptly fired by North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms earlier this month after a relationship of many years. No explanation for the ouster was offered, but the firm was jettisoned just after the running of a Helms ad that was unusually hard-hitting for primary season, labeling both contenders in the Democratic Senate primary as extreme, gay-rights-supporting liberals. The Pittman ad was tame by comparison. It offered viewers a brief background of the candidate, highlighting his intentions to pursue a balanced federal budget and strengthen families. Copyright © 1996, Congressional Quarterly Inc. All rights reserved.

Joe Allbaugh, his wife... and the California energy crisis

Company With Ties To VP Cheney's Energy Task Force Faces Criminal Indictment For Gaming California Electricity Market

Three years ago, while California’s energy crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney secretly met with half-dozen corporate executives of the country’s largest energy companies to hammer out a national energy policy for President George W. Bush. Cheney appeared on a number of news programs in May 2001 to promote his new energy policy, which turned out to be a boon for the energy industries, but abandoned consumers and environmental groups. Naturally, during some of those interviews, Cheney was asked whether a handful of the energy companies that sold electricity in California and stood to benefit financially from the new policy were behaving like a “cartel” and manipulating prices in the state’s deregulated electricity market. ---cont "Reliant, TXU and Entergy each paid Diane Allbaugh $20,000 for consulting work during the last three months of 2000, according to her January 2001 financial disclosure report. It's unclear whether she lobbied the energy task force on behalf of Reliant, TXU and Entergy, which would have certainly been a conflict-on-interest (sic), but her husband, Joe Allbaugh, "has participated in task force talks with a direct bearing on the energy companies' interests generally, such as environmental rules for power plants and electricity deregulation--a specialty of his wife's," the Times reported. " Where is Joe Allbaugh?

TalkLeft: Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes - Open Thread

TalkLeft: Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes - Open Thread

Robin Roberts

Robin Roberts

In These Times * Funding Terror

Investigating the role of Saudi banks.

Influence and bailouts a business tradition in Bush family

Business: Influence and bailouts a business tradition in Bush family

Not only is there a brand new planet...

...apparently it may also have a moon.

"baby school stuff"

forget it kids.... no naptime anymore. That's baby school stuff.

Preschool naps may become a thing of the past. The Washington Post reports, some education leaders want to end the practice of even the littlest students taking an afternoon nap during pre-kindergarten programs. Prince George's County schools chief Andri Hornsby recently told lawmakers he wants to get rid of "all the baby school stuff." If he gets the funding to make the pre-K program in Prince George's full day, Hornsby says he'll end napping. Anne Arundel County has already done the same in that district's pre-K program. Supporters of ending naps say students today need all the study time they get. But those who want to let the kids sleep say young children need 10 to 12 hours of sleep to function well, and many aren't getting that at home.

Huh?

Press Ignores 9/11 Widow's Bush Treason Suit The attorney files(sic) a 62-page complaint in federal district court (including 40 pages of prima facie evidence) charging that "President Bush and officials including, but not limited to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft and Tenet": 1.) had adequate foreknowledge of 911 yet failed to warn the county or attempt to prevent it; 2.) have since been covering up the truth of that day; 3.) have therefore abetted the murder of plaintiff's husband and violated the Constitution and multiple laws of the United States; and 4.) are thus being sued under the Civil RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organization) Act for malfeasant conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wrongful death. The suit text goes on to document the detailed forewarnings from foreign governments and FBI agents; the unprecedented delinquency of our air defense; the inexplicable half hour dawdle of our Commander in Chief at a primary school after hearing the nation was under deadly attack; the incessant invocation of national security and executive privilege to suppress the facts; and the obstruction of all subsequent efforts to investigate the disaster. It concludes that "compelling evidence will be presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power, and testimony [that] Defendants failed to act and prevent 9/11 knowing the attacks would lead to an 'International War on Terror' which would benefit Defendants both financially and politically." "Ellen Mariani's RICO suit against Bush, et al." is available online here.

Bill Maher on Washington 'outsiders'

New rule... You can't be a Washington outsider if you're already president.

Hearing President Bush these days constantly complain about "the politicians" and John Kerry being part of a "Washington mind-set," and saying things like "I got news for the Washington crowd" is like hearing Courtney Love bitch about junkies. "Washington insider" is by definition a function of one's proximity to the president. That's you, Mr. Bush. You're ground zero. Ever wonder, sir, why everyone stands and they play music when you enter a room? When you're given check-writing privileges by the Federal Reserve, you just might be a Washington insider. Lemme try to explain it to you in a different way: You're not "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" -- you're the Washington part. We need a Mr. Smith to mess with you. You're not on a mission you reluctantly accepted, like the old farts in "Space Cowboys." You campaigned for this job, and now you're doing it again. And having been the Grand Poobah for three years, it's a little late to be selling yourself as some fish-out-of-water cowboy visiting the big city on assignment. You're not McCloud, you're the grandson of a senator and the son of a president and CIA director. For 15 of the last 22 years you've had a key to the White House. The last thing that happened in Washington without the Bushes getting a piece of it was Marion Barry's crack habit. "The Exorcist" happened in Georgetown, but Satan had to run it by Jim Baker first. So knock off the regular-guy act -- and by the way, that also goes for John Forbes Kerry, the other white meat. Two Skull and Bones preppies, these guys are, from Nantucket and Kennebunkport, who use the word "summer" as a verb and probably had monogrammed beer bongs in college. Please, John Kerry: Stop rolling up your sleeves at campaign rallies like you're about to man a register at Costco. You're a Boston Brahmin who married not one but two eccentric heiresses -- you're not Joe Sixpack, you're Claus von Bulow. I think your current wife is great, but hello, she inherited the Heinz fortune! She's the ketchup lady! -- which explains why sometimes he's gotta smack her on the bottom to get her to come. Look, fellas, we've got almost eight months till the election. That's a long time to hold in your gut. To pretend you're something you're not. Let's just be real and admit that finally, and unfortunately, true class warfare has come to America. Yale class of '66 vs. Yale class of '68.

Firefighters to go after Bush 'loudly and aggressively'

from The Hill.com Firefighters to go after Bush 'loudly and aggressively'

Going negative

a piece from Salon.com about the man (and the firm) with the mission of scaring the American public into voting for George W. Bush.

Going negative He's the father of the modern attack ad, and he's behind the Bush campaign's new wave of anti-Kerry spots. Alex Castellanos is known as vicious, irresponsible -- and effective. By Eric Boehlert March 15, 2004 The Bush campaign launched its first negative attack ad on television late last week, earlier than in any presidential race in history. For an incumbent president to abandon the elevated surroundings of his White House Rose Garden so speedily reveals anxiety about an opponent ahead of or tied with him in the polls. Bush's 30-second spot portrays Sen. John Kerry as "wrong on taxes, wrong on defense." It claims that he would raise taxes by $900 billion. (A Kerry spokesperson says the $900 billion number was "made up"; Kerry's plan is to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.) Then the ad paints Kerry as weak on terrorism.

About time

that liberals fought back.

America's liberals to 'bash Bush' with talk-radio network By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 13 March 2004 After a decade of battering from the right on the airwaves, America's liberals will finally have their first ever talk radio network later this month, featuring an array of celebrated and less celebrated Bush-bashers, spearheaded by the comedian Al Franken. Air America Radio, owned by Progress Media, will launch on 31 March on stations covering four of the biggest US media markets, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. By the end of the year the project's backers plan to be on the air in a dozen markets across the country, offering an ideological alternative to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, who have long had the field to themselves. "We are going to stick it to Bush," Mr Franken said as final plans for the network were announced this week. "Bush is going down in November, and then we're putting it to the rest of the right-wing media." The kingpins of right-wing radio however seem notably unimpressed by the upstart challenger, saying liberal radio will never take root. "It's a very tough job," Mr Savage said. "It sounds easy, you get up there and attack Bush. But it's a phenomenal demand that no one can understand until they try it." Media specialists also point out that the stations where the network will launch have much lower ratings than those of the established right-wing stars - meaning that Air America will have to spend heavily on promotional advertising. But Air America, which says it has $20m of financial backing, insists it is in for the long haul. It promises "compelling and entertaining programming" - in other words that it will take on the conservatives at their own game, avoiding the liberal tendency to nuance and political correctness, qualities which may be worthy but tend not to make riveting radio. The clearest pointer to the intended future direction is Mr Franken himself, comedian, author and perennial baiter of the right. Last year, he was briefly taken to court by Fox News, as Rupert Murdoch's TV network tried to gain an injunction to block distribution of Mr Franken's best-selling book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Fox's objection was that Mr Franken had stolen the network's tagline "Fair and Balanced" to mock it. The move backfired however as Fox became a laughing stock, and sales of the offending volume soared. The suit was quickly dropped. Air America Radio's weekday programming will run from 6am to 11pm with a separate weekend line-up. Mr Franken's flagship show will be called The O'Franken Factor a title deliberately echoing Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, anchored by its top-rated conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly. Among the new network's other big names are Janeane Garofalo, the actress, who will co-host the main evening show, and Chuck D, a hip-hop artist, who will co-anchor a morning programme. The weekend hosts include Robert F Kennedy Jr, environmentalist and nephew of former President John F Kennedy. And for all the predicted difficulties ahead, Air America Radio may yet surprise everyone. The country is politically polarised as rarely before, and the success of anti-Bush literature suggests a market for left of centre views may exist on the airwaves as well. In addition to Mr Franken's diatribe, the New York Times top 10 non-fiction bestsellers included three other books which criticise Mr Bush: Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country; the recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill; and Kevin Phillips' portrait of the Bush family's wheelings and dealings, American Dynasty.

Smearing the messenger

from Salon.com

Smearing the messenger The Bush machine aims its poison darts at another military hero -- Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. By David Talbot March 15, 2004 | There they go again. Whenever the Bush machine is put on the defensive, it immediately goes on the offensive, and character assassination is one of its favorite weapons. I'm not talking about the attacks on John Kerry's patriotism. I'm talking about the poison-tipped assault on another military veteran, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, whose damning eyewitness account of how neoconservative zealots in the Defense Department bulldozed the facts and drove the country to war was published in Salon last week ("The New Pentagon Papers"). Kwiatkowski's right-wing critics could not challenge her facts, not a single one, so they immediately reached for the tar brush. The Wall Street Journal smeared her as "something of a right-wing crank." Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Los Angeles Times, trashed her as "flaky." Then Clifford May, a hit man for the Republican National Committee, was given free reign by John Gibson, host of Fox News' "The Big Show," to drag the 20-year Air Force veteran through the mud after Fox turned off her microphone -- one more bold display of the network's commitment to fairness and balance. Once she was silenced, Gibson and May smeared Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski as an "anarchist" with "radical associations" to political weirdoes like Lyndon LaRouche. The truth -- never an interest of these right-wing hatchet men -- is that the former Air Force intelligence officer comes from a politically conservative family and subscribes to a libertarian philosophy. She once gave an interview to a LaRouche publication -- the full extent of her "association" with this political fringe. By the RNC man's strained logic, the fact that she also spoke to Fox News should make her a Rupert Murdoch acolyte. If I were part of the Bush reelection team, I would want to cloud reality too. The disturbing reality that Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski presented was of an administration driven by ideologues so determined to rush into an Iraq war that they would not let intelligence or expertise or facts get in their way. We are all now paying for the folly of these men, none more than Kwiatkowski's former colleagues in the military, who are fighting and dying in Iraq. The fact that many of Kwiatkowski's neoconservative opponents have never served their country in uniform makes the Bush machine's personal attacks against her all the more repellent. Unlike Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski's character assassins, she served her country honorably for 20 years -- and she is serving America again by bravely telling the truth about the policies of deceit that led us to war.

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Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons (washingtonpost.com)

Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons (washingtonpost.com)

Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A20 The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents.

Mr. Wilson will out Mrs. Wilson's outer

Ambassador's book to reveal who he thinks leaked wife's CIA identity, publisher says

By Curt Anderson ASSOCIATED PRESS 2:55 p.m. March 2, 2004 WASHINGTON – Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson will reveal the name of the person he thinks leaked his wife's identity as an undercover CIA officer in a book due out in May, his publisher said Tuesday.

Click here for more on the book.

Which came first?

reproduction..... ? or marriage?

The Diminishing of John Ashcroft

by Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice

The Diminishing of John Ashcroft When I read some of those descriptions [of me in the press] I get scared of me. —Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. News & World Report, January 26, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In January of 2003, I, hardly known as a conservative or Bush admirer, was invited by David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, to appear at its annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It was the first time a Voice writer had been asked to speak at this center of conservative activism. Joining me at the panel on civil liberties, the Constitution, and the Bush-Ashcroft Patriot Act was Bob Barr, an authentic conservative Republican but also a libertarian. He and I led the attack on the attorney general's dismantling of parts of the Bill of Rights. Before us was an audience of Bush enthusiasts, but some seemed to be rather receptive to what we were saying. Preceding the 2004 Conservative Political Action Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, the president, in his January 20 State of the Union speech, emphasized that sections of the Patriot Act were due to expire on December 31, 2005. At that point, pleased to hear the expiration date, some members on both sides of the aisle applauded. Despite that applause, the president went on to urge Congress to be sure to renew those sections of the act. At the conservatives' conference, Vice President Dick Cheney echoed Bush, but, as David Kirkpatrick reported in The New York Times (January 25): "Mr. Cheney drew a less enthusiastic response when he called on Congress to extend the anti-terrorism law. . . . Many conservatives fear that the act and other administration moves give the federal government too much power. In recognition of a new alliance on the issue, the American Civil Liberties Union set up a booth at the conference for the first time this year." The presence of the ACLU is considerably more telling than the debut of a Voice writer at the main event of the American Conservative Union last year. Also, significantly, Bob Barr has become a privacy consultant for the ACLU while working for the American Conservative Union. As the Times reported, before Dick Cheney was at the podium, "Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee, vowed that extending the [Patriot] act before reviewing its results by 2005 would happen 'over my dead body.' " It is through the very conservative Sensenbrenner's committee that all of Ashcroft's legislative proposals must clear. But its chairman, who deals only with legislation, couldn't stop Ashcroft's executive order in May 2002 that greatly loosened FBI surveillance guidelines, allowing agents to covertly attend and monitor public meetings without any prior specific leads indicating that anyone present was engaged in anything that might be related to an investigation of terrorism. At the time, however, Sensenbrenner said publicly and angrily that he didn't want this country to go back "to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King." The conservative-libertarian opposition to Ashcroft has been building steadily around the country, and in this session of Congress, a number of bills to roll back parts of the Patriot Act without waiting for December 31, 2005, have been introduced by Republican conservatives and co-sponsored by some libertarians on the Democratic side of the aisle. A growing number of members of Congress have been listening to more and more of their constituents across the land who have been telling their representatives to undo some of the damage the attorney general and the president have perpetrated against the Bill of Rights. Due to the organizing efforts of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union, there are now 250 cities, towns, and counties and three state legislatures (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont) that have passed resolutions instructing their members to protect the civil liberties of the residents of those places, and many more resolutions are in progress elsewhere. By 36 to 13, the New York City Council passed its resolution on February 4, requesting that Congress report periodically any data on New Yorkers that federal agencies have scooped up under the Patriot Act. To find out how to organize a resolution in your own town or city, go to bordc.org/tools.htm. In a resounding news article in the January 20 Boston Globe, ("Resistance to Patriot Act Gaining Ground: Foes Organizing in Communities"), Thanassis Cambanis reported: "More than two centuries ago, the patriots of Brewster [Massachusetts] shut down the Colonial courts on Cape Cod in one of the first acts of resistance against the tyrannical rule of King George III. "Now, deliberately evoking its Revolutionary history, Brewster Town Meeting has formally condemned the antiterrorist USA Patriot Act, united against the laws of a different leader named George. . . . The grass-roots opposition has forged an unlikely alliance of people angry at Washington's domestic handling of the war on terror." In Brewster, anger at the Patriot Act has drawn together libertarians, an anti-tax group, and a Unitarian congregation, as well as a more traditional coalition of civil libertarians and anti-war activists. A similar story has played out in 16 Massachusetts communities, and 16 more, including Salem, Waltham, Watertown, Gloucester, Beverly, and Bedford, are preparing measures against the Patriot Act this spring. "[This] bipartisan groundswell in communities across the nation," the Globe continues, "will reshape the national debate if it continues to accelerate with support from disparate groups, from gun owners to librarians to fiscal conservatives." There is even support for revising some of the language of the Patriot Act from Marc Racicot, chairman of George W. Bush's re-election campaign! The November 3 Weekly Standard quotes Racicot as saying: "I'm not aware of any act, or any piece of legislation . . . that has ultimately ended up in a situation where it did not have to be refined." Racicot added that he expects there will be "refinements [to the Patriot Act ] . . . so that it does not end up invading the civil rights of any American." Tell that to the president and the attorney general! So why isn't the Democratic Party making the Bush-Ashcroft war on the Bill of Rights a central part of the presidential campaign—joining the groundswell extending from Brewster all across the country?

C.I.A. Admits It didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.

Another Bush administration lie exposed. from the NYTimes.... Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.

"The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons. "Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as 'high value and moderate value' in the weapons hunt."

Republican Terrorists

Chris Nelson shows irrefutable evidence that the GOP actually does create little terrorists, and then follows it up with some very good suggestions to the Left on how to counter these lame-brained constructs of conservative ideology. Because these are issues I find personally aborrhent, I'll keep most of my choice comments to myself. But I'll leave a couple of passing thoughts: -are people REALLY so foolish that they honestly think liberals hate America? -is driving a wedge through the middle of the American voting public still a winning strategy for the folks at the RNC? Check out this email from the level-headed right.

From: "Baker, J." [liberalbasher@sbcglobal.net] To: [webmaster@awolbush.com] Subject: Comments . . . Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 22:33:11 -0500 You people are beyond evil. George W. Bush will be re-elected to a second term, and hopefully it will drive die-hard idiotic leftists to commit suicide, that would be the bonus round! Instead of bitching about how much you hate George W. Bush and how he stole the election and went AWOL from the National Guard, why don't you rotten cocksuckers spend your time and money and offer up a candidate who isn't a god-damned America-hating lunatic? You people are utterly useless to humanity and wholly better off dead, burning in eternal damnation. Ya know, I think it's too bad that we can't follow Saddam's model of dealing with opposition - just open up mass graves and start torturing, maiming, and murdering liberals and leftists by the millions - toss them into the ground, and fill the holes up with dirt. I would love to volunteer for such duty! Eat shit and die, all of you! J. Baker Phoenix

Nice. See what happens when you peddle filth?

Ben Franklin... on the Patriot Act

a man ahead of his time.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759