"In the great comedy of human endeavor, where enterprise, government, art and science converge, the pillar of achievement, seeking to rise above man's greed, delusion and stupidity, provides a guiding...did I ever tell you that I was born with antlers?...I'm hungry now, I want a sandwich."
Home for the holidays...David Brooks, NY Times columnist and PBS political analyst, asked readers this week to play a little game of "You're the president." He believes that "FISA shortcomings," in his words, practically forced the Bush administration to evade legal and legislative oversights when it designed its secret program of spying on Americans.
Brooks' game defines four choices, none of them perfect, from which the president chose the only acceptable option, according to Brooks. After long and hard thought, intensive research, and consultation with "conservative" legal advisors, the following options were the only ones that Brooks -- and apparently the entire Bush administration -- could imagine:
Image by David Swanson
The AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, an alliance of over 100 grassroots organizations, has launched a new campaign called CensureBush.org in order to support new legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers that would censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investigate the Administration's possible crimes and make recommendations regarding grounds for impeachment.
'Fair and balanced,' or tilting?
"Balance is our No. 1 goal," Peter Slen, Washington Journal's executive producer and part-time host, once said, adding: "We keep official stats on the Washington Journal, OK? Republicans, Democrats, conservative, liberal, moderates—we try to stay within the week nearly perfect as far as the balance goes."
Extra! studied Washington Journal's guestlist, tabulating all 663 guests who appeared on the show in the six-month period from November 1, 2004 to April 30, 2005. Guests were classified by gender, ethnicity, party affiliation (if any) and occupation. The study also looked at the think tanks most prominently represented on the show.
Among the most striking findings:
Bush's authoritarian presidency is America's greatest threat
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." - Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, Scene IV, Act i.
With the world's most powerful military at his command, George W. Bush approved policies three years ago that enpowered and encouraged members of the U. S. military to spy on American citizens -- people like you and me:
Under the programs, civilians and military personnel at defense installations are encouraged to file reports if they believe they have come across people or information that could be part of a terrorist plot or threat, either at home or abroad. The Talon reports are fed into a database managed by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, a three-year-old Pentagon agency whose budget and size are classified.
[....]
The Talon reports -- the number is classified, officials said -- can consist of "raw information" that "may or may not be related to an actual threat, and its very nature may be fragmented and incomplete," according to a 2003 memo signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
"On the surface, it looks like things in the database that were determined not to be viable threats were never deleted but should have been," [a senior defense department official] said. "You can also make the argument that these things should never have been put in the database in the first place until they were confirmed as threats."
Previously, surveillance on American soil was generally limited to foreign embassies.
American law usually requires a secret court, known as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to give permission before intelligence officers can conduct surveillance on US soil.
A few miles out of Washington, on Route 1 to Baltimore, lies an inconspicuous military installation called Fort Meade. You would not notice it unless you knew what to look for. In fact, on most road maps, Fort Meade does not exist. And yet it contains the largest mass of secrets in the world.
Though invisible on the map, 38,000 people work at the agency every day, more than the CIA and FBI put together - every one of them sworn to a lifetime of secrecy. They have their own police force, shopping malls and sports complexes - and their own television network, complete with newsreaders.
According to author James Bamford, who has studied the NSA for years, each one of their dozen largest listening posts around the world picks up more than two million communications an hour - cell phones, diplomatic traffic, emails, faxes. That works out at 500 million hours every day.
New tests fuel doubts about vote machines in Florida
... Republican apparatchiki not concernedWASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office [political appointment of Jeb Bush] said any faults [Leon County election chief] Sancho found were between him and Diebold.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - In his final push before elections in Iraq, President Bush on Wednesday touted this week's election as a milestone for the Iraqi people and described how 2005 has been a historic year for the Middle East.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - President Bush embraced Sen. John McCain's proposal to ban cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terrorism suspects on Thursday, reversing months of opposition that included White House veto threats.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - In Congress, where numbers are everything, the math on the Patriot Act suddenly seems to be moving in favor of Sen. Russell Feingold.
He was a minority of one four years ago, when the Wisconsin Democrat cast the lone Senate vote against the USA Patriot Act in the traumatic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. The law, he said then, gave government too much power to investigate its citizens. Ninety-nine senators disagreed.
Now add more than two dozen senators to Feingold's side, including the leaders of his party and some of the chamber's most conservative Republicans, and the balance of power shifts.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.
In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.
Apples found her Halloween photo to her liking, so she has honored us with an appearance at the Christmas holidays.
Apples (Appalachian Bloom) is Kuz'n Kirk's 'deerly' beloved hound. She loves dressing up any time there's a party.
Online dating banned; study and work abroad limited 
MINSK, Belarus - Belarusian lawmakers on Wednesday passed legislation that would crack down on Internet dating and online spouse searches in the latest in a series of stringent government controls backed by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
[...]
Lukashenko has made his nation of 10 million people a pariah in the West by stifling dissent, persecuting independent media and opposition parties and prolonging his power through elections that international organizations say were marred by fraud.
More....
What are we non-billionaires to do?
This article was published 13 Dec 2005 by Fortune:
Richard Rainwater doesn't want to sound like a kook. But he's about as worried as a happily married guy with more than $2 billion and a home in Pebble Beach can get. Americans are "in the kind of trouble people shouldn't find themselves in," he says. He's just wary about being the one to sound the alarm.
[....]
Rainwater is no crackpot. But you don't get to be a multibillionaire investor—one who's more than doubled his net worth in a decade—through incremental gains on little stock trades. You have to push way past conventional thinking, test the boundaries of chaos, see events in a bigger context. You have to look at all the scenarios, from "A to friggin' Z," as he says, and not be afraid to focus on Z. Only when you've vacuumed up as much information as possible and you know the world is at a major inflection point do you put a hell of a lot of money behind your conviction.
[....]
Such insights have allowed Rainwater to turn moments of cataclysm into gigantic paydays before.
[....]
The next blowup, however, looms so large that it scares and confuses him. For the past few months he's been holed up in hard-core research mode—reading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? He has some $500 million of his $2.5 billion fortune in cash, more than ever before. "I'm long oil and I'm liquid," he says. "I've put myself in a position that if the end of the world came tomorrow I'd kind of be prepared." ....
Fortune article...
Plant it, grow it, rotate it, burn it
This is not such a ridiculous concept for Steven Hobbs, farmer working the land at Kaniva, eighty kilometres west of Dimboola near the Victorian/South Australian border. He's gone into production of his own bio-diesel fuel to beat the rising commercial fuel prices. "My experience began... five years ago when I was first exposed to the idea of growing bio-diesel as a farmer," he says. "Initially it started as a philosophical statement... I believe in farmers making themselves more sustainable."
The material Steven uses to produce his own fuel is found in his own backyard. "Being a farmer I actually already grow it. I grow canola... and traditionally [farmers have] sold it into... [the] human consumption market," he says.
"Essentially bio-diesel is a modified vegetable oil. A chemical process that's used to remove the glycerol component from the molecule... essentially transforms the vegetable oil into a... renewable fuel... that has very much the same characteristics as conventional fossil diesel, except it has the advantages of reducing emissions up to 60 per cent. And it's also a renewable source of energy," he says.
Yet the idea of renewable energy is not new to Australian farmers. "It's not a new idea - every farmer in Australia used to do it, they used to allocate 25 per cent of their cropping area for oats to cut for horses. Horses were organic tractors, if you want to put it that way," he says.
For Steven, the current global trend upwards in fuel prices provides great incentive for Australian farmers to get in on the fuel market, and to help reduce fossil emissions contributing to the greenhouse effect.
Meredith, Australia--One of the most revered and long running music festivals in Australia celebrates its 15th birthday the only way it knows how - at full capacity and full volume.
Barefoot running at its best
What begun as a time-filler because of a band no-show at a Meredith Festival over a decade ago has now become one of the strangest music festival traditions in Australia; at around 3pm on the Sunday, nude and underpanted participants in the Meredith Gift line up for a dash to grab a pair of undies from the dust in front of the stage. Cheating is encouraged. Dogs are allowed (but must be underpanted). The prize? A slab of beer and a t-shirt.
This year's Gift attracted corporate sponsorship as well as hundreds of (mostly) male competitors, competing first in an all-in dash, finishing with a ten member final full of the kinds of emotion and group-hugging we've come to expect in Australian sports stars.
The winners? Surely the 10,000 people who came for a pleasant three day outing at a farm just outside of Meredith...
SHANGHAI, Dec. 9 -Residents of a fishing village near Hong Kong said Friday that as many as 20 people were killed by the paramilitary police this week, in an unusually violent clash that marked an escalation in the widespread social protests roiling the Chinese countryside. Villagers said as many as 50 other residents remained unaccounted for since the shootings on Tuesday.
It was the largest known use of force by security personnel against citizens since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That death toll is still unknown, but is estimated to have been in the hundreds.
Dec. 13 update: China and India beat US on direct investment destination.BEIJING - The commander of paramilitary forces who opened fire on villagers protesting land seizures has been detained by the authorities in connection with the shootings, an extraordinary response that suggested high-level concern over whether the crackdown was justified.
MIAMI -- Lakeland left no doubt it has the best high school football team in the state and perhaps the country Friday night, capturing its second straight Class 5A championship in a 39-10 rout of Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas.
Going wire-to-wire as America's No. 1 team in the USA Today poll, the Dreadnaughts (15-0) posted their 30th straight victory before a crowd of 16,147 at Dolphins Stadium. It was Lakeland's fifth state championship and fourth in the last 10 years. The national championship that becomes official on Tuesday will be its first.
"I definitely didn't expect the score to be like that," said Billy Lowe, who was the quarterback in the Lakeland High program's biggest victory. "We're national champions, undefeated. It's the best feeling I've ever had in my life."
Thoughts of a US soldier in Iraq
Does the US flag still have its meaning or has it become just another symbol to be used for gain, political or otherwise?
When will it be enough? Over 2000 have died here in Iraq. What will they pay the war contractors with when the money is gone? Will they pay them with THEIR own sons and daughters?
I think not, for the day the money runs out we shall declare VICTORY, withdraw our troops and start the victory parades back home. The amputees won't be marching in the parade, the dead won't be smiling and waving, and it (victory or parades) won't give the children back their mothers and fathers.
What will that victory be? It will be a victory forged on the anvil of bankruptcy and only the deaf will hear it. After that the cameras will stop rolling and we won't show Iraq any more....
AFA's Wildmon gobbles up the affection; will Ford wake up with regrets?
We know how much the gay bashers love to bring 'round their brand-spanking-new Jags and Land Rovers, and spin off to join the congregation in praying for the (gay) sinners they love (to hate) so much.Gay and lesbian advocacy groups sharply criticized Ford Motor Co. for agreeing to stop advertising in gay-themed publications in the face of a boycott by the conservative American Family Association.
Jerry Reynolds, an influential Ford dealer in Garland, Texas, who joined company executives in the meeting with AFA officials last week, said many dealers were concerned about the boycott. In the end, he said Ford made the changes because of financial concerns.
Retitled to reflect reality
Dobson's religious facade fails to mask the hate
Denver--Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group based in Colorado Springs, is withdrawing funds from Wells Fargo because of its alleged involvement in "pro-gay" causes.
"Focus on the Family has elected to end its banking relationship with Wells Fargo, motivated primarily by the bank's ongoing efforts to advance the radical homosexual agenda. These efforts are in direct opposition to the underlying principles and purpose of Focus, and thus a decision of conscience had to be made, and a stand taken," said a statement on the Focus Web site.
More ....
Ole Miss News Online, Oxford, MS--The primary sign of maturity is the changing of opinions once held. As children, everything seems black and white, good and bad. That kind of reasoning makes sense to an undeveloped mind. But as we age, things happen in our lives, for good or even for bad, that make us change, make us think and force us to see the world in a different way.
[....]
I hated the idea of homosexuality, the act itself. Being a Southern Baptist prude with an aversion to all things sexual in nature certainly didn't help. I also had an audience to cater to, an audience that I had begun to associate myself with personally -- those on the Christian right. I wanted them to like me, to support me. But they never understood, for the most part, my ideas of compassion and love toward the gay community. So I sold out.
All I can do is offer an apology. It may not be taken right away -- if ever -- and I understand. I had my own opinions, but acceptance was more important to me. Foolish, I see now in retrospect....
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