The Ignorance and The Arrogance

Important story re (more of) Bush ignoring science and quelching dissent

Ah, the ignorance; ah, the arrogance ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070710/pl_nm/bush_surgeongeneral_dc;_ylt=Ak5T4NFkPW3aQ2kmzxUhDlBh24cA

Diary of a Madman ?

The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President
By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted January 17, 2007.

The longer Bush is in office, the more his psychology becomes clear. He's not a well-meaning doofus; he's a madman.

Back in the year 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote and was shoe-horned into office by the Supreme Court in spite of clear conflicts of interest on the part of Scalia and Thomas, the psychology of Little George was known to only a few.

To most of us he seemed like a doofus -- a more or less well-meaning guy who enjoyed running things like baseball teams and the State of Texas if not too much work was involved. Had been an alcoholic and a drug user, but had apparently come clean in some hazy, quasi-religious way -- that was his personal history to many Americans (if not to all those who met with Karl Rove behind closed doors and heard the truth).

At any rate, I remember thinking that Bill Clinton had done such a good job over the years getting the budget into a surplus and winning good feelings around the world that it really didn't matter who of the four who were running (Gore, Bradley, McCain, Bush) might win. They all seemed about the same in lots of ways.

What we really needed was some respite from Clinton's own penchant for mischief. I liked Clinton. I remember that The New Yorker magazine asked me for my take on the Lewinsky scandal, and I said that on balance, in spite of the brouhaha, I still preferred a president who would make love, not war. Clinton was a flawed human being, that was evident, but he knew it. He never didn't know it. And he was always trying to make amends.

But he was exhausting -- or the media made him exhausting. I thought we were due for a rest.

Little did we know, of course, that the neocons thought we were due for a war. Thinktank gun-jockeys looking for a fight. Do they personally have some human qualities? Who cares. May they rot.

At any rate, what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control.

The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the "perks" Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance -- goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George.

It's pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice. At the same time, his words (and ideas) were going to be supplied by Michael Gerson, who was his favorite speech writer for five or six years, a man who hides his unscrupulous neocon soul beneath a holier-than-thou, falsely modest self presentation. Christian soldier in every sense of the word, and someone who has largely escaped the contempt he deserves for the mess we are in.

At the same time, Little George has a hard time with bad news, so he was never going be told the truth -- he can't take the truth, as Jack Nicholson might say -- this is evident in the famous 9/11 film of Bush reading about his pet goat when he gets news of the WTC. Talk about dumbstruck and unprepared and feckless and doltish! No, I don't think Little George planned the Trade Center attacks. If he had, he would have practiced a smarmy fake reaction, and he didn't.

But he did get a feel, just a little feel, right after the attacks, of what it might be like to lead the nation. He got a feel and he liked it, and for the purposes of the neocons, it was a good feel and it gave them something to build on in their plan to overcome the cautious side of his nature, represented by B/S/B. The neocons, as we know to our sorrow, never pay back anything they owe, except perhaps with betrayal, so even though B/S/B got them into office, they were never going to listen to B/S/B unless they absolutely had to.

How do you build yourself a madman? Well, first you flatter him, and then you try never to make him angry, and then you feed him ideas that flatter him even more by making him seem to himself sentimentally visionary and powerful and righteous. You appeal to his already evident mean streak and his hot temper by reminding him all the time that he has enemies, and you cultivate his religious side so that the sense of righteous victimization inherent in extreme religion comes out.

If he were not already an ignorant, dependent, fragile, and rigid person, he would not be susceptible to this sort of conditioning, but by temperament and practice, he has nothing of his own to counter your efforts. Then you hire a few shyster-sycophants like John Yoo to tell him (ignorant as he is, with no actual understanding of the Constitution), that as president he can do whatever he wants.

So, here he is, Little George, caught between the devil (Cheney) and the deep blue sea (fifty-some years of being infantilized by B/S/B). Cheney and Rumsfeld, aided by Rice and Miers and Hughes, convince him that his masculinity will only be enhanced by doing all the masculine things he missed out on over the years, especially making war. And Gerson gives his war a virtuous, godly gloss.

And Gerson's words come out of his mouth so often that he believes them and thinks they are his. In the meantime, Karl Rove continues to think that he is the maestro, playing Little George (and his base and the rest of the nation) like his own personal piano. Playing the president, for Rove, means enhancing Little George's actual dependency while encouraging him to think that he's the boss (allowing him to call you "Turdblossom," for example, and isn't it telling that "turd" seems to be Bush's favorite imprecation, rather than, say, "fuck"?).

Bush is the worst possible president because he is simultaneously unusually ignorant for a president and unusually shallow, as well as desperate for a success he can call his own. I can see how in a certain sort of era -- say an era of prosperity and world peace (can you think of one? I can't) an unusually ignorant and shallow man could bump along in the presidency for a few years without creating havoc and destruction, but these years didn't happen to be peaceful and prosperous, they happened to be delicate and dangerous.

Clinton knew that, and he approached his compromising and self-contradictory foreign policy tasks with care. But Bush and his fellow boors were so blind that they adopted as their motto "anything but Clinton", sheer contrarianism and resentment. It wasn't enough to them for the US to be powerful, as it was in the Clinton years, or to be generally respected and appreciated -- they wanted something more sensational -- power they could feel, power that was erotic and fetishistic, power that was uncomfortable for others, power that would make them feel big by making others feel small, power that would show Clinton up.

That's the tit Little George has been sucking for the last six years -- the deluded propaganda of the neocons, addressed first to him and through him to the rest of us. What we saw the other night, when he proposed more war against more "foes" was the madman the last six years have created. This time, in his war against Iran, he doesn't even feel the need for minimal PR, as he did before attacking Iraq. All he is bothering with are signals -- ships moving here, admirals moving there, consulates being raided in this other place. He no longer cares about the opinions of the voters, the Congress, the generals, the press, and he especially disdains the opinions of B/S/and B. Thanks to Gerson, he identifies his own little ideas with God (a blasphemy, of course, but hey, there's lots of precedent on this), so there's no telling what he will do.

We can tell by the evidence of the last two months that whatever it is, it will be exactly the thing that the majority of the voters do not want him to do, exactly the thing that James Baker himself doesn't want him to do. The propaganda that Bush's sponsors and handlers have poured forth has ceased to persuade the voters but succeeded beyond all measure in convincing the man himself.

He will tell himself that God is talking to him, or that he is possessed of an extra measure of courage, or he that he is simply compelled to do whatever it is. The soldiers will pay the price in blood. We will pay the price in money. The Iraqis will pay the price in horror. The Iranians will pay the price, possibly, in the almost unimaginable terror of nuclear attack. Probably, the Israelis will pay the price, too.

Little George isn't the same guy he was in 2000, the guy described by Gail Sheehy in her Vanity Fair profile -- hyper-competitive and dyslexic, prone to cheat at games, always swinging between screwing up and making up, hating criticism and disagreement, careless of others but often charming. He is no longer the guy who the Republicans thought they could control (unlike, say, McCain).

The small pathologies of Bush the candidate have, thanks to the purposes of the neocons and the religious right, been enhanced and upgraded. We have a bona fide madman now, who thinks of himself in a grandiose way as single-handedly turning the tide of history. Some of his Frankensteins have bailed, some haven't dared to, and others still seem to believe. His actions and his orders, especially about Iran, seem to be telling us that he will stop at nothing to prove his dominance. The elder Bush(es), Scrowcroft, Baker, and their friends, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gerson, and the neocons have made the monster and in the process endangered the country, the Constitution, and the world, not to mention the sanity of wretches like Jose Padilla (for an analysis of the real reason Gitmo continues to exist, see Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate, here.

Maybe the bums planned this mess for their own profit, or maybe they planned to profit without mess; maybe some of them regret what they have wrought. However, they all share the blame for whatever he does next.

Man With a Plan

As opposed to Bush and the Neocons, here's an actual PLAN for Iraq. Imagine that.

"The Way Out of War" by George S. McGovern and William R. Polk.

http://www.harpers.org/TheWayOutOfWar.html

Judging the Homeless?

We have all heard it a million times - "I feel sorry for the homeless, but I refuse to give them money because I know they will spend it on booze." And yes, they just might. But, I might add, who could blame them? I am not condoning alcoholism or the use of alcohol to avoid reality, but it is certainly understandable how one in their situation might choose to drink, to dull the emotional or physical pain, to make the cold seem a little less cold, to drown the monotony, to forget for a just a little while. Most of us have done the same more than once, right?

But more importantly, who are we to judge them or try to make decisions for them? Who are we to withhold charity because we do not approve of their decisions or lifestyle? Why should we allow are generosity to be conditional? Generosity should never be conditional. This is why I oppose the requirement by some homeless shelters that residents attend religious services and/or pray in order to stay in the shelter.

Of course we should encourage the homeless to make productive, healthy decisions. Of course, we should encourage them to spend their money on food rather than alcohol. But we need to stop judging them. We need to stop trying to make decisions for them. And we need for our compassion to be unconditional. We should not withhold generosity for fear that they might make unwise decisions.

"The most premeditated of murders"

"An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

Albert Camus---"Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death" (1966).

"Standard-issue Republican conflation" or "When in doubt, Cheat"

From the Boise Weekly
NOVEMBER 8, 2006

HOLD YOUR NOSE AND THINK OF CHAKE-CHAKE

GOP voter-blocking makes democracy fun, even worthwhile

By TED RALL

DAYTON, OHIO-- You'd never guess that my friend Ken is so cynical. He's white and Harvard educated and comes off as the ultimate straight arrow in his off-the-rack suit. "Whether I vote or not doesn't matter," he likes to explain. "There's no chance that the outcome will be affected."
Indeed, there's only one known instance of a modern election having been decided by a single voter. On January 18, 1961, the Afro-Shirazi party won the parliamentary seat of Chake-Chake on Pemba Island in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) by one vote, granting it victory in the general elections. Ken might feel differently if he lived in Chake-Chake.

Widespread apathy can affect millions of votes and hundreds of races on Election Day, leading to sweeping political changes and even optional pre-emptive wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people. But there's nothing that you, as an individual, can do to change such a trend. You can cast your one vote. Or not.

Even if you lived in Florida in 2000, which was declared a Bush win after the Supreme Court ordered officials to stop counting the ballots, the most that you could have accomplished was to have nudged Bush's margin down to 536 or up to 538. Even under ideal circumstances--reliable machines, politically neutral and incorruptible supervisors and a thorough process to ensure that every vote is counted--your vote, as an individual decision, cannot change which candidate wins or loses. Voting is a gesture, symbolically supporting the democratic process the way attending church flamboyantly expresses faith without demonstrating it--nothing more.

And these are not ideal circumstances.

This year's mid-term elections, coming on the heels of the brazenly stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, find the electorate in a grim mood that makes my friend Ken look like a relative Pollyanna. Eight percent of whites and a whopping 29 percent of blacks (up from 15 percent in 2004) told Pew Research Center pollsters that they don't trust the government to count their votes.

"This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we're having to go out of our way to counter them this year," says Democratic strategist Donna Brazile about get-out-the-vote drives directed at blacks, who vote Democratic at least 90 percent of the time. Given recent history, overcoming their distrust is an uphill battle.

The Republicans' theft of the key state of Florida in 2000 has been exhaustively documented by shelves of books and newspaper recounts. One, a July 15, 2001 New York Times report titled "How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote," looks at the GOP's propaganda campaign to pressure Republican-dominated canvassing boards to illegally accept hundreds of absentee ballots mailed in by overseas military personnel after Election Day. Based on this incident alone, Gore won Florida by 202 votes.

On November 24, 2000, vote counters for predominantly Democratic Miami-Dade county fled their office when scores of young goons hired by since-disgraced Republican leader Tom DeLay "trampled, punched or kicked" election officials, a scene that was broadcast on national television. "When the ruckus was over," reported The Times, "the protesters [sic] had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting."

Miami-Dade, it later turned out, put Gore over the top by thousands more votes.

Blacks, the most reliably liberal voting bloc, were specifically targeted by Republican operatives determined to deny them their right to vote. Police officers loitered outside polling places, threatening them with arrest if they did not produce identification cards. (This thuggery is illegal.) More than 200,000 "felons," most of them black and many of them without criminal records, were purged from voting rolls by the state's Republican-run board of elections. The truth is, Florida was never close. Exit polls, which had never been wrong, were again correct. Al Gore won by many thousands of votes.

In 2004, Ohio was the state that determined the race for the White House. Once again, the secretary of state was a partisan Republican who had campaigned for George W. Bush, J. Kenneth Blackwell. As they had done in Florida four years earlier, Republican operatives posted cops outside inner-city precincts to intimidate black voters. They "purged" the rolls of registered voters who had missed two consecutive elections, disproportionately targeting areas with a large African-American population. And Blackwell added a few ingenious new tricks.

"In several of the state's pro-Kerry cities," write the authors of the new book What Happened in Ohio?: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, "the secretary of state [Blackwell] effectively engendered a classic 'Catch-22' situation: as boards of election changed long-standing Democratic precinct locations shortly before the elections, Blackwell simultaneously disseminated out-of-date voter rolls to county officials, ensuring that many new voters would not be on precinct rolls given to poll workers. Then, to people who were confused as a result and did not end up at the correct precinct, he offered provisional ballots, but subsequently refused to count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct--which was often simply the wrong table in the correct building and room ... Because of voting machine shortages, misinformation sent out by the secretary of state's office and/or improper signage at the precincts, many people waited for hours in the wrong precinct line in a newly relocated precinct. Often, these people found themselves ineligible to receive a provisional ballot unless they stood again in a different line."

Blackwell is off to bigger and better things this year, running for governor. But Republicans are still trying to stop Democrats from voting. In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, desperately trailing GOP Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen mailed a sleazy letter to 14,000 Latino Democrats warning that "If you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration, and possible deportation." Standard-issue Republican conflation: Naturalized immigrants are allowed to vote.

Intellectually, I know Ken is right. My vote can't change a thing. But I'll do anything George W. Bush doesn't want me to do. Even if I have to pretend I live in Chake-Chake.

Mission Abandoned ?

New York Times

November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

As Bechtel Goes
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn't accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq's population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers' money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they've already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there's no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn't and didn't? Finally, if we've given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There's no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers' dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq's new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called "the most essential civil security project in the country." It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we'll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that's easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen's jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn't.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.

But that's all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered," he declared. "You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people." But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.
And we're not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don't know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

Speaking Their Mind

Subject: FW: NY Times editorial
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:34:41 -0700

Editorial
The Difference Two Years Made
Published: November 5, 2006

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

That is why things are different this year.

To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House — and for the most part, the Senate — during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition — and even the more moderate members of their own party — out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.
Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.

After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush — and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

Vote early and vote often

The Revolution says Vote No on Prop 2 in Idaho

From Defenders of Wildlife:

Election Day is just four short days away -- and greedy out-of-state developers are trying to pull a fast one on Idaho voters. Don't be fooled by their elaborate and deceptive campaign attacking the protections for our wolves, salmon and other imperiled creatures.Proposition 2 -- the so-called “takings” initiative -- offers a no-win situation for our communities and our wildlife, all for the benefit of profit-hungry special interests.If passed, greedy developers could skirt the laws that protect our environment or force local communities to pay out millions -- even billions -- to land speculators, corporations and other special interests.
With only four days left before Election Day, here are three simple things you can do to stop Prop 2:

Learn More
Visit our web site to learn more about this harmful measure.

Spread the Word
Forward this email to as many other Idahoans as you can.

VOTE NO ON PROP 2
On November 7th, do your part to reject Prop 2 -- for our wildlife, our wild places and our communities.Two years ago, voters in Oregon passed a similar measure. Since then, wealthy developers in that state have filed nearly 3000 claims demanding over $5 billion in compensation from local taxpayers. Oregon communities can no longer regulate growth and development in a way that protects their way of life -- and urban sprawl is now a greater threat than ever to the state’s precious wildlife habitat, farmlands and open spaces.It’s such a mess in the state that, according to a recent poll, Oregon voters now oppose the measure by nearly a 2-1 margin.Don’t make the same mistake. Reject Prop 2 this November 7th.If the greedy developers win this fight, our communities and wildlife lose. It’s up to us to stop Prop 2 and ensure Idaho's wildlife and communities get the protection they deserve. VOTE NO on PROP 2 -- it is one of the best things you can do this November 7th to protect local communities and our wildlife.For more information, please visit our web site. Please don’t forget to forward this message on to all your friends, family, and neighbors in Idaho.


From Idaho Conservation League:

Vote to Protect Clean Air, Clean Water, and Quality of Life on November 7!
By voting NO on Proposition Two, you will be protecting Idaho.
Proposition Two could cost taxpayers millions if not billions of dollars.
Proposition Two allows speculators to dodge local land laws putting our quality of life at risk.
Proposition Two is being funded by New York City tycoon Howard Rich. It is not for Idaho, and its costly for taxpayers.
Proposition Two will change the character of our neighborhoods and rural lands forever. We cannot let outsiders do that to Idaho.
Vote NO on Proposition Two on November 7.
For more information on Proposition Two, go to www.neighborsprotectingidaho.org .

Keeping Score

The League of Conservation Voters, perhaps the preeminent enviro-political organization, has released its latest rendition of its Environmental Scorecard, in which it rates the voting record of each US Senator and Representative.

The Environmental Scorecard may be found here

Separate But Unequal

On October 25, 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court (Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow, et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris, etc., et al. (A-68-05)) ruled that "every statutory right and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be made available to committed same-sex couples."

The Court held:

"Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married
heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds
that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex
couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the
civil marriage statutes.

A victory for justice, right?! Well ...

The Court dropped the ball on the issue of whether gays or lesbians should be allowed to be "married". Instead the Court deferred the issue to the state legislature.

"The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex
couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process."

So, equal rights, but not necessarily the same rights. Protection, but not Equal Protection. Hmmm... equal but separate, separate but equal. Where have I heard that before ...

You'll pardon me if this victory feels a little hollow.

"This Land Ain't Your Land ..."

From The Wilderness Society:

Stop the Public Lands Giveaway!

A little-known 19th Century statute is threatening to crisscross your public lands with a spider web of roads and development. The bill attempts to use an antiquated mining law loophole to allow the bulldozing and paving of thousands of miles of new roads through federal lands, and to open pristine areas to development and off-road vehicle use all across the West.

H.R. 6298 would re-interpret an obscure rights-of way law known as Revised Stature 2477, part of the 1866 Mining Law, to turn over a huge number of old rights-of-way claims on federal lands to state and local governments. Removing federal protections from these lands, which include national parks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, wilderness areas, and other sensitive federal lands, would have major consequences and serious environmental impacts throughout the West.

Even worse, the bill would hand over many lands that have little connection to legitimate transportation needs, and many that were never truly used as highways at all. Every place where there has ever been a cow trail, old mining track, dirt footpath, carriage way, off-road vehicle route, or even a river could be at risk. This bill has established such a low bar for proving a claim that essentially any line that has ever appeared on any map at some point in the last two centuries could be considered to be a "highway."

In addition, the bill would also waive the environmental review and public involvement requirements** of the federal National Environmental Policy Act, taking away the public's right to have a voice in the decisions affecting our public lands.

Lands at Risk

The bill jeopardizes millions of acres of public lands, including:

o Alaska: Thousands of miles of claims have been made, including areas within Denali National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and Katmai National Park, some of the world's most pristine wild lands;

o California: San Bernardino County has alleged more than 2,500 miles of routes in the Mojave National Preserve;

o Utah: There are an estimated 15,000 claims in the state, including jeep trails, cow paths, streambeds, and long-abandoned mining tracks, many within the proposed "America's Redrock Wilderness Act;"

o Colorado: Moffat County, Colorado has claimed 240 miles of trails through Dinosaur National Monument, including part of the Yampa River itself.



From The Revolution :
Get off your ass and do something! Write your congresspuppet http://action.wilderness.org/campaign/stop_RS2477



** Sound familiar?! Bush and his Republican Band of Eco-Butchers are at it again

All Bush is saying, is give War a chance

Concerning North Korea's recent apparent nuclear testing:

What do we expect? Do as we say, not as we do? You're part of the Axis of Evil, and we attack Axis of Evil countries preemptively, but don't defend yourself? We can violate the spirit and letter of the agreement, but you may not?

From United For Peace & Justice:

Dear friends,

North Korea's apparent nuclear test is chilling evidence of how the Bush administration's policy of shunning negotiations has failed. There is no doubt: People in the U.S. and around the world are far less safe than we were five years ago.

If North Korea did test a nuclear explosive device, it is a setback to the global efforts to stop the spread of nuclear arms. It could destabilize northeast Asia, the wider Asian continent, and have negative repercussions around the world. As a supporter of the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide, starting here at home, United for Peace and Justice views this development with alarm.

But the primary blame for this situation lies with the Bush administration, not North Korea. The nuclear test is a direct reaction to the Bush administration’s policy of shunning negotiations and threatening North Korea with war and regime change.

In 1994 North Korea signed an agreement with the U.S. to suspend its nuclear weapons program and allow international inspections and monitoring of its nuclear facilities. In return, the U.S. agreed to not make military threats against North Korea, to supply fuel oil to replace the lost nuclear power, and to help build two modern atomic power plants.

But beginning in 2002, the Bush administration slowly gutted its part of the agreement. It branded North Korea as part of an “axis of evil,” threatened war, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants, tightened a long-standing economic embargo, and obstinately refused direct bilateral talks. The White House even threatened the limited use of nuclear weapons in a regional conflict with North Korea. All of this in a context that goes back more than 50 years. The U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty that world formally end the Korean War and still maintains some 30,000 troops in South Korea.

As the Bush administration geared up to launch war on Iraq -- another country named as part of Bush's "axis of evil" -- North Korean officials had reason to worry that the U.S. might attack their country, too. Predictably, the North Korean government responded by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelling atomic energy agency inspectors, and beginning to develop nuclear weapons.

For eight years (1994-2002) direct negotiations with the North Korean government reduced the threat of nuclear proliferation and war on the Korean peninsula. So why are Bush administration officials telling us it’s impossible to negotiate with North Korea?

They, and their neoconservative allies, are calling for sanctions, isolation, and even military threats to impose "regime behavior change." But this is the same recipe that brought us the disastrous Iraq war, and will only deepen North Korea’s resolve to develop nuclear weapons, potentially setting off a new nuclear arms race in the region.

There is only one way to address the current crisis: Direct negotiations with North Korea. The Bush administration must negotiate an agreement providing assurance it will not launch military attacks against North Korea, offering material aid, and taking steps towards normalizing relations in return for a commitment from North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. As even former Secretary of State James Baker said earlier this week, “It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

In Cahoots?

I really hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I shy away from tales of secret deals between world giants and power giants. But this seems too coincidental to ignore.

Noticed that gas prices have dropped dramatically in the past few weeks? And why? Generally, gas prices are dependent on the stability of world oil supplies and the greed of Big Oil executives. Now we know the second factor hasn't changed. But the first factor, if anything, has gotten worse in the past months. So in theory, and following time-tested supply and demand economics, the price of gas should have RISEN recently.

Instead, we have seen a dramatic drop in gas prices in the past few weeks. The past few weeks, leading up to an election. The past few weeks, in which House and Senate seats thought to be solidly in Republican corners are hotly contested. The past few weeks, in which the Republicans' deathgrip on the US Congress appears to be in serious jeopardy.

How could this happen? Statistics consistently show that Big Oil contributes to political candidates at an astronomical amount and rate. They also show that Big Oil tends to contribute to Republican candidates over Democratic candidates at a rate of nearly 3 1/2 to 1. Clearly, Big Oil is solidly in the Republican camp.

We could write books about how the Republican leaders are Big Oil's bitches.

Big Oil has allies in the White House and Congress, who support more oil over alternative energy sources, support drilling efforts over conservation efforts, support tax breaks for the wealthy and big business over individuals and the middle class, and support deregulation of environmental standards over protecting the environment.

Big Oil remains Big Oil with a Republican congress. Big Oil can read polls and feel what we all feel, which is that the tide may be changing and the Republicans may be out on their asses. It's about fucking time. Big Oil knows that Americans are becoming more aware of the poor state of affairs, and the poor state of the economy, under Republican rule. All of which bodes very poorly for Big Oil's opportunity to continue to fleece the people, the country and the planet for trillions in profits.

They must keep the power status quo. So, the Powers-That-Be in Big Oil agree to drop prices, dramatically increasing that ever-elusive presidential "approval factor" by artificially manipulating public perception of the reality of the economy in favor of Republicans. Historically, the gas pump is one of the first places where the consumer forms their public opinion of the economy.

In other words, dramatically lower gas prices equates to a happier populus, which equates to less voter dissatisfaction, which leads to lower turnout at the polls and a decreased "throw-the-bums-out" attitude. All of which provides substantial assistance to the Republican hold on power.

But wait a minute, I'm suggesting that the Big Oil tycoons voluntarily lose profits. Hard to believe, right? Not if you consider the long term, the Big Picture, the stakes they hold in the Oil War Game. In the long run, keeping the Oil Whore Republican party in power tips the cost-benefit analysis so far in their favor, it's a wonder they don't engage in this type of abhorrent behavior more often.

...Or maybe they do ...

WWF is not a ridiculous pro wrestling league

From the World Wildlife Fund:

WWF Pledges Amazon Commitment at Clinton Global Initiative

At the Clinton Global Initiative in New York this September, WWF affirmed its commitment to the Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) Program, which conserves 193,000 square miles of the Amazon's richest and most threatened habitats. Using conservative estimates, WWF calculates that ARPA will reduce deforestation by preventing 250 million tons of carbon from being released by the continued forest burning and clearing that would otherwise destroy these irreplaceable habitats, home to such gorgeous birds as the blue-fronted Amazon. That equates to keeping approximately 120 million passenger cars off the road for an entire year! WWF pledged to raise $70 million, on top of the $15 million already contributed, over the ten-year duration of the program.


P.S. Kudos to President Clinton for continuing his good work.

Power to the Sisters

The Revolution CAREs

Find out how CARE is empowering women around the world to be catalysts for change in their communities.

Read more about their work to fight global poverty or download their Annual Report.

Not Guilty

Another victory for Justice, from our friends at the Innocence Project:


http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/100706ManFreed.html

Brooklyn Man Free After Wrongfully Convicted 21 Years Ago

BROOKLYN--- DNA tests prove that Scott Fappiano did not commit a rape in Brooklyn for which he was convicted in 1985. Twenty one years after he was wrongly convicted of rape, Scott Fappiano was released from prison Friday.

Fappiano was convicted based on significantly flawed eyewitness identification procedures and his innocence was almost impossible to prove because New York City's trouble evidence preservation system lost items that could be subject to DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project. Ultimately, the Innocence Project located evidence at a private DNA lab which had merged with another private lab that had received two items of evidence from Fappiano's case in 1989 and kept it in storage. A wealth of other evidence that could have been tested years earlier was never located in the New York Police Department's storage facility.Fappiano was released from custody after the Innocence Project filed a motion to vacate his conviction.

In 1983, the NYPD officer and his wife were asleep when a man broke into their home, restrained the man and raped his wife. At trial, the only evidence against Fappiano was an eyewitness identification from the rape victim, the cop's wife--an identification that was made in lineups that the Innocence Project said were deeply flawed and unreliable. The victim's cop husband viewed the same lineup but did not select Fappiano who was five inches shorter than the 5'10" perpetrator described by the victim.

Despite blood-typing tests which excluded Fappiano as the source of what police initially believed was critical crime scene evidence left by the perpetrator (cigarettes and stained clothing), the prosecution twice took the case to trial. At his trial in 1984, the jury could not reach a verdict, voting 11-1 for acquittal, and he was retried in 1985, when the jury convicted him. He was sentenced to a term of 20 to 50 years in prison.

"Scott Fappiano's case is the starkest yet in a long line of New York cases where innocent people were convicted based on eyewitness misidentification. In case after case, we have proven that faulty eyewitness identification procedures in New York lead to wrongful convictions", Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison said. "Nobody can look at these cases and say there isn't a serious problem---yet New York still hasn't taken problems with eyewitness identification seriously and implemented reforms". The Innocence Project also said that the NYPD's inability to locate evidence in Fappiano's case demonstrates the urgent need to reform the city's system of collecting, preserving and retrieving such evidence.

Earlier this summer, another Innocence Project client, Alan Newton, was exonerated a full 12 years after he initially requested DNA testing. In his case, the evidence was finally located in the NYPD Pearson Place Warehouse, in the exact location it was supposed to be in the first place. On Tuesday, Oct. 10, the New York State Assembly Committee on Codes is holding a public hearing in Manhattan on evidence preservation and retrieval problems. Newton is expected to attend the hearing. "Scott Fappiano could have been exonerated more than three years ago, when the Innocence Project began searching for the evidence in his case, if the NYPD had adequate policies and procedures for its evidence warehouse", Morrison said. "New Yorkers have to wonder have many innocent people are sitting in prison because the NYPD can't find evidence that could be subjected to DNA testing". Indeed, the DNA which established Fappiano's innocence, a 23-year-old pair of sweatpants, were only located because a portion of that material happened to have been preserved outside the NYPD's custody. Last year, Orchid Cellmark Inc, a DNA laboratory based in Princeton, NJ, discovered two vials of DNA material containing spermatozoa from the perpetrator of the rape for which Fappiano had been convicted. The material had been submitted to a now-defunct DAN laboratory, Lifecodes, for attempted, but unsuccessful, DNA testing in the case in 1989, and, following a corporate acquisition of the former Lifecodes lab, Orchid Cellmark obtained and diligently catalogued dozens of boxes of Lifecodes' old DNA materials. New DNA teting by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office scientifically confirmed that the evidence came from this case and that Fappiano was not the rapist.

In New York City, the Innocence Project has six open cases and 17 closed cases where evidence in NYPD custody has still not been found after years of searching. At Tuesday's legislative hearing, the Innocence Project will share details about some of those case and the organization's efforts to work with NYPD leadership to resolve the systemic problems.There have been 183 DNA exonerations nationwide. In 75% of these cases, eyewitness identification played a role in wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project which is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. 10-07-06
© 2006 North Country Gazette

That pesky Sixth Amendment ...

From People For The American Way :

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 – License to Torture?
S. 3930 PASSED

After a much-publicized disagreement between some prominent Senate Republicans and the White House over the president’s proposed bill on military detainees, the so-called “mavericks” on the Senate Armed Services Committee capitulated and allowed passage of a bill – The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (S. 3930) – that undermines Sixth Amendment rights granting the accused access to the prosecutorial evidence, leaves the Bush administration wide latitude in interpreting Geneva Convention mandates, and abandons Habeas Corpus rights that date back to the Magna Carta. This unconstitutional legislation comes as a response to Supreme Court decisions rebuking the Bush administration’s detainee and military tribunal policies, and legitimizes the un-American practices of indefinite detentions and the harsh mistreatment of detainees, more characteristic of oppressive dictatorships than a free society. The House had already passed similar legislation granting President Bush his requested expansion of executive power.

Wake up and Dissent

"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people"
-- Louis Brandeis

Spring Has Sprung

Climate changes shift springtime

A Europe-wide study has provided "conclusive proof" that the seasons are changing, with spring arriving earlier each year, researchers say.

Scientists from 17 nations examined 125,000 studies involving 561 species.

Spring was beginning on average six to eight days earlier than it did 30 years ago, the researchers said.

The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, shows changes to the continent's climate were shifting the timing of the seasons, the scientists said.

One of the paper's lead authors, Tim Sparks from the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), said the findings did not go as far as pointing the finger of blame at human-induced climate change.

"We can't tell that from our study but experts have already shown that there is a discernable human influence on the current climate warming."

But Dr Sparks said it did show that there was a direct link between rising temperatures and changes to plant and animal behaviour.

"We need to look at change over very large areas and we need to examine as many species groups as possible because there has been some mild criticism that people have cherry-picked the results they presented.

"We have gone for the most complete coverage possible that we could in Europe to try to see if there was still this effect," he said. "It is very conclusive that there is."

The team examined 125,000 observational series of 542 plants and 19 animal species in 21 European countries from 1971 to 2000.

The results showed that 78% of all leafing, flowering and fruiting records were happening earlier in the year, while only 3% were significantly delayed.

Dr Sparks said horse chestnut trees, which grow all over the continent, were particularly good indicators.

"It is a good example because it is easy to identify, and it has distinctive phases of leafing, flowering and producing conkers."

He hoped the findings would now focus attention on the potential consequences of changes to the behaviour of plants and animals.

"If you have species that are dependent on each other changing at different rates, that could just break down the food web.

"For example, caterpillars feed on oak trees, and birds feed on the caterpillars. Unless these species remain synchronised, there could be problems for any one or more of those elements of the food web."

"Political" Science

With regard to the Bush Administration's take on science, I think the problem is more complex than a tendency to simply disregard sound environmental and ecological science. I think that the Administration has its own set of scientists, if you will, who will produce just the type of scientific findings that will justify their actions. Make no mistake, science is not inherently objective and value neutral. That it takes on this appearance makes it dangerous at times. You can pretty much make science say whatever you want or need it to. The problem, I would argue, is that science, insofar as it is used in the policy-making arena, is far too political. We need to disentangle science and politics.

Science, Schmience; Laws, Schmlaws

Last week in The Revolution, we discussed a major environmental court victory, in which a federal court blasted the Bush administration's attempted repeal of the so-called "Roadless Rule", which would open up forests to logging, construction and harmful development. The Court indicated that Junior and the Eco-Butchers failed to consider the environmental impacts of its decisions. The Court reinstated the "Roadless Rule," protecting more than 58 million acres of national forest.

Not a week later, and the same result. On Monday, a federal judge in Alaska blocked the sale of oil and gas leases within 389,000 acres of shallow lakes and wildlife-rich tundra in northern Alaska, including some of the more important wetlands in the Arctic. Again, science and the environment were ignored, in the name of oil development. The decision, by Judge James K. Singleton Jr., focused on the administration's failure to to adhere to environmental requirements, but also touched on the lack of appropriate input and review.

This is not really news to those who have followed this administration and don't wear fucking blinders. However, this is a combination of three of the worse attributes of this Clan of Fascists: no respect for the law, no respect for the planet, no respect for science, and no respect for the public's right to know and participate.

I can't figure out which is worse in a president: Refusing to follow the rules, completely ignoring science, or blatantly shutting out the public from participating in their democratic government.

So True

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools."

- John Muir, naturalist, writer, conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club

"The Wrong War"

THE WRONG WAR

Backdraft: How the war in Iraq has fueled Al Qaeda and ignited its dream of global jihad.
By Peter Bergen
July/August 2004 Issue

President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror." In fact, the consensus now emerging among a wide range of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals is that the opposite is true: The invasion of Iraq not only failed to help the war on terrorism, but it represented a substantial setback.

In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement -- a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. "If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he'd want under his Christmas tree," one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble "Afghanistan 1996," a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations.
***
Read the full article http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/07/07_401.html

Taking Care of Your Mother

A land ethic is part of our moral responsibility to care for Mother Earth because of her intrinsic value.

The beauty, the power, the majesty are valuable, and should be valued.

As a Mother, she gives us life, and that too is deserving of protection. But this protection should go beyond that necessary for the survival of humans. We have a duty to repair the damage we have done, to prevent future deterioration of the planet, and to place a high priority on preserving her beauty.

In and of itself, the beauty, the power and the majesty deserve protection, when she cannot alone protect herself.

War on the Poor

"Bush does not seem to understand that, while it is not a sin to be born to privilege, it is a sin to spend your life defending it. John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that. They knew the narrowness privilege can breed. This administration, despite its early pledges of "compassionate conservatism," has in fact adopted policies that amount to a war against the poor and the middle class.

The Bush tax and budget cuts were not made in order to jump-start the economy or balance the budget; they were simply massive cash transfers. Social programs are being slashed to pay for the war in Iraq, tax giveaways for the wealthy, and new defense contracts for arms makers who just happen to be big Republican campaign contributors."

from Campaign 2006: The Issues, the Stakes, the Prospects
Commentary: The choices are stark, the consequences are momentous.
By Arthur I. Blaustein
September 19, 2006
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/09/issues_stakes_prospects.html

War May Have Been a Bad Idea (Imagine That)

From AlterNet: http://us.f389.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?search=&Idx=1&YY=91871&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b


Another Reason to Declare Peace:

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
The Bush administration claims the US occupation of Iraq is combating the threat of terrorism. Sixteen US government spy agencies have drawn the conclusion that the war, in fact, increases this threat. Let's bring this report to the attention of our members of Congress this week as we call on them to legislate a concrete and rapid plan to end the US occupation! Read the article in the New York Times.

A Land Ethic

Over fifty years ago, the prophetic Aldo Leopold argued for a "land ethic," asserting that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." My question (up for philosphical debate) is this: is a land ethic our moral responsibility because there is something intrinsically valuable about the nature environment and all of its components (an ecocentric position)? Or, is a land ethic our moral responsibility because of what the natural environment provides for the human race, ie. a means of survival (more of a utilitarian argument)? Before you jump to the "both" conclusion, think about the different policy and management implications of each.

Feminization of poverty

Here's a great article about a panel Hillary Clinton chaired:

“Women do 66 percent of the work in the world, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 5 percent of income and 1 percent of the property,” said Ann Veneman, the former secretary of agriculture who is now executive director of Unicef. “We need to convince not only governments, but major multinational corporations who do business in these countries, to help be a partner in changing conditions.”

There's a reason we have laws, mr. president

This is why accused terrorists need some form of hearing. How truly disturbing. And yet, Junior and the Neocons press on, pushing for a system in diametric opposition to the same legal principles our country was founded upon.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14897315/?GT1=8506

TORONTO, Sept. 18 - Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to
Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program,
which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries forinterrogation by often brutal methods.
The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer
consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda "watchlist," without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that
day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O'Connor.

Coffin-sized dungeon

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced
to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

O'Connor concluded "categorically there is no evidence" that Arar did anything wrong or was a security threat.

Although the report centered on Canadian actions, the counsel for the commission, Paul Cavalluzzo, said the results show that the U.S. practice of renditions "ought to be reviewed."
"This is really the first report in the Western world that has had access to all of the government documents we wanted and saw the practice of extraordinary rendition in full color," he said in an interview from Ottawa. "The ramifications were that an innocent Canadian was tortured, his life was put upside down, and it set him
back years and years."

Arar, who came to Canada from Syria when he was 17, said in Ottawa that he was thankful that he had been vindicated. He expressed surprise and anger at learning Monday that Canadian authorities also
had asked U.S. authorities to put his wife on the al-Qaeda watchlist.

"Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," he said at a news conference. He said the individual Canadian officials should be held accountable: "Justice requires no less."
[. . .]
Since Sept. 11, the CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people in its effort to dismantle terrorist networks. Many of them have been secretly taken by
"extraordinary rendition" to other countries, hidden from U.S. legal requirements and often subject to torture.
[. . .]

Fervent Messianism

The Disastrous Rule of a Mayberry Machiavelli
By Sidney Blumenthal, AlterNet. Posted September 20, 2006.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/41808/

Bush ran as a moderate, tacked right and governed ineffectually -- before 9/11. Since then he has become the most radical American president in history, and arguably the worst.

The following is an excerpt from How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006).

No one predicted just how radical a president George W. Bush would be. Neither his opponents, nor the reporters covering him, nor his closest campaign aides suggested that he would be the most willfully radical president in American history.

In his 2000 campaign, Bush permitted himself few hints of radicalism. On the contrary he made ready promises of moderation, judiciously offering himself as a "compassionate conservative," an identity carefully crafted to contrast with the discredited Republican radicals of the House of Representatives. After capturing the Congress in 1994 and proclaiming a "revolution," they had twice shut down the government over the budget and staged an impeachment trial that resulted in the acquittal of President Clinton. Seeking to distance himself from the congressional Republicans, Bush declared that he was not hostile to government. He would, he said, "change the tone in Washington." He would be more reasonable than the House Republicans and more moral than Clinton. Governor Bush went out of his way to point to his record of bipartisan cooperation with Democrats in Texas, stressing that he would be "a uniter, not a divider."

Trying to remove the suspicion that falls on conservative Republicans, he pledged that he would protect the solvency of Social Security. On foreign policy, he said he would be "humble": "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us." Here he was criticizing Clinton's peacemaking and nation-building efforts in the Balkans and suggesting he would be far more restrained. The sharpest criticism he made of Clinton's foreign policy was that he would be more mindful of the civil liberties of Arabs accused of terrorism: "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that." This statement was not an off-the-cuff remark, but carefully crafted and presented in one of the debates with Vice President Al Gore. Bush's intent was to win an endorsement from the American Muslim Council, which was cued to back him after he delivered his debating point, and it was instrumental in his winning an overwhelming share of Muslims' votes, about 90,000 of which were in Florida.

So Bush deliberately offered himself as an alternative to the divisive congressional Republicans, his father's son (at last) in political temperament, but also experienced as an executive who had learned the art of compromise with the other party, and differing from the incumbent Democratic president only in personality and degree. Bush wanted the press to report and discuss that he would reform and discipline his party, which had gone too far to the right. He encouraged commentary that he represented a "Fourth Way," a variation on the theme of Clinton's "Third Way."

In his second term, Clinton had the highest sustained popularity of any president since World War II, prosperity was in its longest recorded cycle, and the nation's international prestige high. Bush's tack as moderate was adroit, shrewd and necessary. His political imperative was to create the public perception there were no major issues dividing the candidates and that the current halcyon days would continue as well under his aegis. Only through his positioning did Bush manage to close to within just short of a half-million votes of Gore and achieve an apparent tie in Florida, creating an Electoral College deadlock and forcing the election toward an extraordinary resolution.

Few political commentators at the time thought that the ruthless tactics used by the Bush camp in the Florida contest presaged his presidency. The battle there was seen as unique, a self-contained episode of high political drama that could and would not be replicated. Tactics such as setting loose a mob comprised mostly of Republican staff members from the House and Senate flown down from Washington to intimidate physically the Miami-Dade County Board of Supervisors from counting the votes there, and manipulating the Florida state government through the office of the governor, Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother, to forestall vote counting were justified as simply hardball politics.

The Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, by a five-to-four margin, perversely sanctioned not counting thousands of votes (mostly African-American) as somehow upholding the equal protection clause of the 15th Amendment (enacted after the Civil War to guarantee the rights of newly enfranchised slaves, the ancestors of those disenfranchised by Bush v. Gore). In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that counting votes would cast a shadow on the "legitimacy" of Bush's claim to the presidency. The Court concluded that the ruling was to have applicability only this one time. By its very nature, it was declared to be unprecedented. Never before had the Supreme Court decided who would be president, much less according to tortuous argument, and by a one vote margin that underlined and extended political polarization.

The constitutional system had ruptured, but it was widely believed by the political class in Washington, including most of the press corps, that Bush, who had benefited, would rush to repair the breach. The brutality enabling him to become president, while losing the popular majority, and following a decade of partisan polarization, must spur him to make good on his campaign rhetoric of moderation, seek common ground and enact centrist policies. Old family retainers, James Baker (the former Secretary of State who had been summoned to command the legal and political teams in Florida) and Brent Scowcroft (elder Bush's former national security adviser), were especially unprepared for what was to come, and they came to oppose Bush's radicalism, mounting a sub rosa opposition. In its brazen, cold-blooded and single-minded partisanship, the Florida contest turned out in retrospect to be an augury not an aberration. It was Bush's first opening, and having charged through it, grabbing the presidency, he continued widening the breach.

The precedents for a president who gained office without winning the popular vote were uniformly grim. John Quincy Adams, the first president elected without a plurality, never escaped the accusation of having made a "corrupt bargain" to secure the necessary Electoral College votes. After one term he was turned out of office with an overwhelming vote for his rival, Andrew Jackson. Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, also having won the White House but not the popular vote, declined to run again. Like these three predecessors Bush lacked a mandate, but unlike them he proceeded as though he had won by a landslide.

The Republicans had control of both houses of the Congress and the presidency for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was elected. But Eisenhower had gained the White House with a resounding majority. He spent his early years in office trying to isolate his right wing in the Congress, quietly if belatedly encouraging efforts to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy. Eisenhower greeted the Democratic recovery of the Congress in 1954 with relief and smoothly governed for the rest of his tenure in tandem with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. The outrageous behavior of the Republicans during the brief period in which they had held congressional power and unleashed McCarthy was a direct cause of their minority status for 40 subsequent years. But the Republicans who gained control of the Congress in 1994 had not learned from their past.

The Republican radicals in charge of the House of Representatives remained unabashed by their smashing failures of the 1990s. They were willing to sacrifice two speakers of the House to scandals of their own in order to pursue an unconstitutional coup d'état to remove President Clinton. (It was unconstitutional, strictly speaking, because they had rejected any standards whatsoever for impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee in contradistinction to the committee's exacting standards enacted in the impeachment proceedings of President Nixon.) Now these Republicans welcomed the Bush ascension as deus ex machina, rescuing them from their exhaustion, disrepute and dead end. They became Bush's indispensable partners.

Immediately upon assuming office, Bush launched upon a series of initiatives that began to undo the bipartisan traditions of internationalism, environmentalism, fiscal discipline, and scientific progress. His first nine months in office were a quick march to the right. The reasons were manifold, ranging from Cheney and Rumsfeld's extraordinary influence, Rove's strategies, the neoconservatives' inordinate sway, and Bush's Southern conservatism. These deeper patterns were initially obscured by the surprising rapidity of Bush's determined tack.

Bush withdrew from the diplomacy with North Korea to control its development and production of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell, after briefing the press that the diplomatic track would continue, was sent out again to repudiate himself and announce the administration's reversal of almost a decade of negotiation. Powell did not realize that this would be the first of many times his credibility would be abused in a ritual of humiliation. Swiftly, Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, and presented a "voluntary" plan that was supported by no other nation. He also withdrew the U.S. from its historic role as negotiator among Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs, a process to which his father had been particularly committed.

In short order, Bush also reversed his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and canceled the federal regulation reducing cancer causing arsenic levels in water. He joked at a dinner: "As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water. To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating." He appointed scores of former lobbyists and industry executives to oversee policies regulating the industries they previously represented.

As his top priority Bush pushed for passage of a large tax cut that would redistribute income to the wealthy, drain the surplus that the Clinton administration had accumulated, and reverse fiscal discipline embraced by both the Clinton and prior Bush administrations. The tax cut became Bush's chief instrument of social policy. By wiping out the surplus, budget pressure was exerted on domestic social programs. Under the Reagan administration, a tax cut had produced the largest deficit to that time, bigger than the combined deficits accumulated by all previous presidents. But Reagan had stumbled onto this method of crushing social programs through the inadvertent though predictable failure of his fantasy of supply-side economics in which slashing taxes would magically create increased federal revenues. Bush confronted alternatives in the recent Republican past, the Reagan example or his father's responsible counter-example of raising taxes to cut the deficit; once again, he rejected his father's path. But unlike Reagan, his decision to foster a deficit was completely deliberate and with full awareness of its consequences.

Domestic policy adviser John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, who had accepted his position in the White House on the assumption that he would be working to give substance to the president's rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," resigned in a state of shock. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire magazine. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis ... Besides the tax cut ... the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."

After just four months into the Bush presidency, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who had served for 26 years as a moderate Republican in the House and the Senate, left his party in response to Bush's radicalism. "In the past, without the presidency, the various wings of the Republican Party in Congress have had some freedom to argue and influence and ultimately to shape the party's agenda. The election of President Bush changed that dramatically," Jeffords said on May 24, 2001. Overnight, the majority in the upper chamber shifted to the Democrats.

Bush spent the entire month of August on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. His main public event was a speech declaring federal limits on scientific research involving stem cells that might lead to cures for many diseases. Bush's tortuous position was a sop to the religious right. On August 6, three days before his nationally televised address on stem cells, he was presented with a Presidential Daily Brief from the CIA entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." CIA director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States "the system was blinking red." The Commission reported: "The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature ... We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States."

By September 10, Bush held the lowest job approval rating of any president to that early point in his tenure. He appeared to be falling into the pattern of presidents who arrived without a popular mandate and lasted only one term. The deadliest foreign attack on American soil transformed his foundering presidency.

The events of September 11 lent Bush the aura of legitimacy that Bush v. Gore had not granted. Catastrophe infused him with the charisma of a "war president," as he proclaimed himself. At once, his radicalism had an unobstructed path.

Bush's political rhetoric reached Manichaean and apocalyptic heights. He divided the world into "good" and "evil." "You're either with the terrorists or with us," he said. He stood at the ramparts of Fortress America, defending it from evildoers without and within. His fervent messianism guided what he called his "crusade" in the Muslim realm. "Bring them on!" he exclaimed about Iraqi insurgents. Asked if he ever sought advice from his father, Bush replied, "There's a higher Father I appeal to."

After September 11, the American people were virtually united in sentiment. Support for the Afghanistan war was almost unanimous. "The nation is united and there is a resolve and a spirit that is just so fantastic to feel," said Bush. But two weeks after he made this statement, in January 2002, his chief political aide, whom he called "The Architect," Karl Rove, spoke before a meeting of the Republican National Committee, laying out the strategy for exploiting fear of terror for partisan advantage. "We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America," said Rove. His strategy was premised on the idea that Republicans win elections by maximizing the turnout of their conservative base; his method was to polarize the electorate as much as possible. Rove's tactic was to challenge the patriotism of Democrats by creating false issues of national security in which they could be demonized. September 11 gave his politics of polarization the urgency of national emergency.

Sidney Blumenthal, author of "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006)," writes a column for Salon and the London Guardian.

Every little bit helps

From World Wildlife Fund

12 easy steps for individuals to reduce their CO2 emissions
http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/involved/individuals.cfm?enews=enews0906c

Here's 1 for our Mother

And you all thought environmental victories under King George the Eco-Butcher were an endangered species! (Alright, so did I)

In short, BushCo violated the law (yes, a shocker, I know) (actually, 2 laws), specifically the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, when they repealed the 2001 Roadless Rule. The court reinstated the 2001 Rule nationwide and enjoined any management activity contrary to the Rule (except in the Tongass National Forest -- The court did not extend the Rule's protections to the Tongass because the Bush Administration had previously exempted the Tongass through a lawsuit settlement with the State of Alaska)

Regardless, we'll take 'em however we can get them. Chalk 1 up for Mother Earth.


Statement from The Wilderness Society President William H. Meadows on the Historic Court Decision Reinstating the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule

WASHINGTON, DC (Sep. 20, 2006) - “Today’s ruling is a victory for the millions of Americans from all walks of life who have told the US Forest Service, time and again, to protect our last wild national forests. Our national forests belong to the American people, who deserve to be heard when it comes to the fate of our wildest, most unspoiled forests. In fact, since 1999, millions of Americans have spoken loud and clear that they want the wildest parts of our national forests to stay that way.”

“This decision is a stark repudiation of the Administration’s push to ignore the public’s wishes and turn over our public lands to special interests. In the past two months, trees have fallen in Oregon as the first timber sales in roadless areas were rammed through in defiance of the wishes of the people and the Governor. We hope that today’s decision will mean the end to such short-sighted and ill-considered timber sales.”

“The one disappointment in today’s decision is that it also retains the controversial ‘Tongass exemption,’ which keeps the nation’s largest national forest – the Tongass in Alaska – from enjoying the same protections as the rest of America’s national forests. There are 9.3 million acres at stake on the Tongass, more than in any other forest, and they remain temporarily exempted from protection and open to industrial-scale logging. President Bush’s 2003 temporary exemption of the Tongass was justified by a Tongass forest plan that the 9th Circuit has since thrown out as illegal. Leaving the Tongass out of the Roadless Rule now won’t pass the red-faced test.”

“As we continue to work to gain protections for the Tongass National Forest, we applaud today’s monumental decision, which clearly finds that the Bush Administration's roadless plan is flawed and most appropriately restores the valuable protections and preservations for America’s most pristine areas.”

“History will show the 2001 Roadless Rule to be the right policy for protecting our nation’s unspoiled forests and today’s court decision to be a historic correction.”

If At First You Don't Succeed ...

... Lie and Cheat

The Bush administration used illegal wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping techniques on Americans, all in the name of "fighting terrorism". They were rebuked by the courts, and told in no uncertain terms that such actions were illegal and in violation of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Bush administration imposed illegal detentions without due process of law and used illegal and immoral torture techniques on detainees, all in the name of "fighting terrorism". They were rebuked by the courts, and told in no uncertain terms that such actions were illegal and in violation of Geneva Conventions and time-honored military protocol.

So ...

Bush plays the terror and fear card, again, lies about the threat as well as the devil lurking in the details of his proposed legislation, and tries to do what he has already been told by the highest courts of the land is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, or all of the above. In other words, he tries to cheat rather than play by the rules.

The first piece of legislation would ratify the illegal NSA warrantless spy and wiretapping program, allowing warrantless spying on Americans with no judicial oversight. (Anyone remember "checks and balances" from 7th grade Social Studies? Yeah, uh, Bush was gone that day, sneaking booze from his Dad's liquor cabinet)
The second piece of legislation would modify the Geneva Conventions to Bush's twisted and illegal interpretation. Now, Sen. Frist has proposed legislation (S. 3886) which combines these two little slices of evil into one single fascist power grab.

Be afraid, people, be very afraid.

sources from The Revolution

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/26722prs20060913.html
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/index.html
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=21251&afccode=htcct5
http://actions.pfaw.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=enJHKINrFqG&b=848149&aid=7511