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care to name specific gripes about Wal-Mart?

You're joking, right?

• They keep wages way too low, straining state welfare systems who have to pick up the slack so that Wal Mart employees can, oh, eat and pay rent, and not die from preventable diseases.
• They force their development plans on unwilling towns and counties, increasing sprawl and erosion.
• The illegally disrupt organization attempts by their employees.
• They lobbied relentlessly to weaken the definition of "organic" food, and then started selling food that can now be called "organic" but isn't by any sane definition of the word.

You've really never heard any of these, or other, complaints about Wal-Mart?

They're all being charged for funny accounting tricks.
No one's been charged for deliberate economic sabotage to the businesses and private citizens of California. Essentially, they're getting away scott free on this issue, which I think is perhaps more sinister. Read more quotes from the case and note how the Guvernator didn't take them to task for blatant screwing over of California.

Gray Davis lost his election over the energy crisis, and Schwartzenegger does nothing to punish the parties responsible. I'm not saying that Davis was a great governor, but I doubt that he'd have let Enron walk away scott free.

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant--but one had to assume the worst

"It's going to be called 'The Flattening,'" he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.

It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called 'The World Is Flat.' It didn't matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s. -- Flathead by Matt Taibbi

See, I told you.

"Gorgeous nerd Annalee Newitz..."

http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/Columnists_ tech.jpg

You, sir, need to get a cock.

What the fuck.

Dude, look at her picture, by "gorgeous" she IS clearly being judged by her ideas!

Annalee Newitz a "nerd"? This is a woman who, after a visit to New York City, actually wrote a column fretting about how difficult it was to figure out the New York subway system. I mean, come on. Maybe it would be more appropriate to introduce her as "pony-loving Annalee Newitz..."

Gorgeous nerd Annalee Newitz...

Regal isn't playing with a full deck anyway... http://www.alternet.org/story/34016/

While I'm sure if there was money, Google would censor, I'm not sure there's enough profit in Iran to bother. (they're bowing down for China in return for access to a potentially huge market)

Its another American company that's profiting (illegally) from denying Iranians uncensored net access.

There's reports on the net that Adult diaper loving Secure Computing did not sell the software to Iranian ISPs, but given the actions of other US companies when faced with trade restrictions, I have trouble believing them.

Well I do believe the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=us+incarcerati on+rate&btnG=Search&meta=

How about a 17 year old getting 10 years (and put on the sex offender list for the rest of his life) for having oral sex (intercourse would have been okay) with a consenting 15 year old at a crazy party. There was a video, and apparently the jury felt it was a no brainer, but the judge was very definite about the "find guilt or innocence according to the letter of the law" line (to bad they didn't know that that is not actually a requirement if the jury finds the law to be seriously unjust -- see jury nullification).

http://www.wilsonappeal.com/
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/bawnews/w ilson0111
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/LegalCenter/story? id=1693362&page=1

Or how about the California man who was growing medical marijuana for critically ill patients under a California law and the DEA busting him (claiming federal jurisdiction) and rigged the jury (very selective picking of members and forbidding mention of the fact that what he was doing was legal in California).

http://www.green-aid.com/
http://www.alternet.org/story/14973/
http://www.reason.com/sullum/020703.shtml

Or how about screwing around in pretty much every country under the sun. I have to say, having been through it, that the history learned in schools is quite selective (almost false by selective omission -- no wonder it keeps getting repeated). Checkout out (for instance) how Hawaii was illegally annexed at the request of the sugar barrens.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/history index.htm
http://www.unpo.org/news_detail.php?arg=28&par=51
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=hawaii+annexed &btnG=Google+Search&meta=

So, yeah, I'd have to say there is a long history of some pretty screw culture in the US. Maybe the whole thing will tip over someday due to the growing accumulation of fat cats and lawyers at the top.

One of the authors of the Washington Post article cited above is Rita Katz, director of the stupidly named "The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which seems to be an asinine play on SETI. The SITE website is actually very light on real original content. As I revisited it tonight, I found that they have given citation for their copy and paste of the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report, which is the entire contents of SITE's "terrorism library". A year ago, they did not offer this bit of enlightening data. This should be enough to question the veracity of the whole story.

Katz obtained a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is speaks Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. She has both personal and financial issues which could bias her analysis.

• Katz is Iraqi born, and her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family emigrated to Israel.
• Katz is/was a paid consultant for the law firm, Motley-Rice, which file a 1 trillion dollar lawsuit on behalf of the 911 WTC victims.
• Katz is author of the book Terrorist Hunter (HarperCollins, 2003) in which she writes of infiltrating US-based Arab groups to investigate terrorist connections as a private investigator, and receives a plug for the book in every bio blurb that is published with her articles.

Katz got her terrorism expert start working for Stephen Emerson, who himself has credibility issues.

Katz was the anonymous source for a 60 Minutes segment that alleged a chicken farm supported terrorism, and for which both CBS and Katz were sued by Gainesville, Georgia based Mar-Jac Poultry Inc., as well as two Virginia-based muslim charity orgs, for libel.

Katz was also a principle player an an egregious example of of post-911 governmental misuse of prosecutorial powers in the case brought against a Saudi Arabian Computer Science doctoral student at the University of Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen.

Al-Hussayen was charged with giving material support to terrorist, for doing volunteer web mastering of the site of the Islamic Assembly of North America, an organization which the government has never charged. He was also charged with 11 minor visa violations, one being that his student visa didn't allow him to work, and he had received $300 from the Islamic Assembly of North America spread out over his five years of volunteer work for it.

The jury in Idaho acquitted on all three terrorism charges, and 3 of the visa charges, but hung on the remaining 8 visa charges.

The main thrust of the material support charges stemmed from the website Al-Hussayen worked on having published 4 fatwas by 4 radical immans on it. A government expert witness blew holes in that theory when he admitted that he had published the very same speeches on his anti-terrorism website.

When Katz testified, she admitted to the same visa violations that Al-Hussayen was charge with, only she had earned real money in violation of her entry terms.

Katz's testimony ended Friday with questioning about her own visa problems when she entered the United States. Katz testified that as a new immigrant in 1997, she misunderstood work permit requirements related to her visa and was employed, in at least one job and possibly two, before she was legally authorized to work. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she detailed those problems in her autobiographical book, in which she expressed disgust for burdensome government re

Here's your evidence. This lady is a VA nurse who wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper about how poorly Bush has been handling the Iraq war and huricane Katrina.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/33027/

She's been under investigation by the FBI since then, and they're threatening to throw her in jail on sedition charges. They've been using scare tactics like interrupting her in the middle of her work at the hospital and confiscating her work computer "to look for evidence".

The future is arriving faster than you think.

Very good. Now, look at a breakdown of education by county in those states, and in most of them you're going to find the counties with the highest rate of college education voted Republican.

Wrong. I went through this painful process in 2000 and the uneducated bible belters in the most rural counties were the most likely to vote Republican. If the most educated voters tend to vote Republican, one would expect that the Republicans would easily carry states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Instead, they carry states like Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas.

Um, wrong again. Blue collar workers are more likely to be smokers than white-collar workers. How many Republican labor unions do you know of?

No, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. You mistake the educated union leaders, who recognize that the Democrats are their allies and that the GOP is their enemy, from the rank and file who believe that prayer in school is good, teaching creationism is better, and that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.

The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the web as a potential military adversary. The "roadmap" speaks of "fighting the net," and implies that the internet is the equivalent of "an enemy weapons system."

In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration's perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War.

"Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place," Rumsfeld said.

For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.

CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent. Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.

As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.

1. the muslims were provoked: true

Provoked perhaps deliberately. Here are the 12 cartoons that were actually published. However it might be much of this furor is over three cartoons that were never published.

This is from the following article...

"The dossier contained at least three cartoons that had never been published in Denmark. These were brutally offensive; indeed, they were incendiary. One shows Mohammed as a pedophiliac demon. Another shows Mohammed with a pig snout. The third shows a praying Muslim being raped by a dog."

And confirmed here...

"...three other pictures that had been sent to Muslim e-mails by anonymous people"

I think it's highly irresponsible and inflamitory to go on a tour protesting with 12 cartoons that were published in the popular press and sit them along side 3 that came via "anonymous email".

Based on your post, I thought you might find this commentary interesting. Oh, and Murtha and Kennedy and not the left. You might try the Political Compass for some perspective.

• Judith Miller
• Deborah Howell
• Armstrong Williams
• Tim Russet

...and so on and so forth. I suppose that picking a few from the other side would spoil the image you're trying to convey?

--MarkusQ

P.S. And before you start drawing unfounded conclusions about my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative registered Republican, who happens to hold my side to a higher standard than the "opposition". Where I was brought up, cheating to win meant you had lost, no matter what the scoreboard said.

• Judith Miller
• Deborah Howell
• Armstrong Williams
• Tim Russet

...and so on and so forth. I suppose that picking a few from the other side would spoil the image you're trying to convey?

--MarkusQ

P.S. And before you start drawing unfounded conclusions about my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative registered Republican, who happens to hold my side to a higher standard than the "opposition". Where I was brought up, cheating to win meant you had lost, no matter what the scoreboard said.

You cannot talk intelligently about politics because most discussions are framed around questions like "Do you support Democrats or Republicans?" instead of substantive commentary like these on the Iraq War or the U.S. use of torture around the world, ignorance of public officials, and ignorance of the American people about the facts of the current administration. I don't support either majority party, and even if I did, its not even the point.

It's like being in a crowd with half screaming "Less Filling!" and the other half screaming "Tastes Great!" - and neither side aware that there isn't a drop of beer in sight. Wake up folks.

http://www.alternet.org/story/31260/

Right, and we are better than the chinese. I have not seen bejing invading a foreign country the last few years on bullshit reasons... I could be wrong...

"The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never figure out where the butter is. "Where's the butter?" Nora Ephron's legendary riff on marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. "Where's the butter?" actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we're out of butter. Next thing you know you're quitting your job at the law firm because you're so busy managing the butter. If women never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the children will grow up with robust immune systems."

Sounds like a trap that you might have fallen into, and even if you haven't, it's important to be aware of "the butter question" in case you get into this situation in the future.

In case you plan on having kids, I also want to quote this stunning piece (from the same article):

"Bad deals come in two forms: economics and home economics. The economic temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman's income. If a woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000 decides to have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000, the couple reason that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes $30,000, just enough to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home. This totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together and the demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits. Instead, calculate that all parents make a total of $150,000 and take home $90,000. After paying a full-time nanny, they have $60,000 left to live on."

...which is so incredibly true that I'm amazed it's even looked at any other way. Remember that if you stay home to take care of the kid, this calculation assumes that your salary would have remained the same indefinitely -- an invalid assumption for a career-oriented woman.

I sincerely hope you haven't fallen prey to the butter question. However, if you have, now is the time to reassess who does the work in your marriage. Do it like you would any other job -- figure out which parts you can outsource (grocery shopping? You can shop online and get groceries delivered. Cleaning the house? You can hire someone) for very lit

Here's a recent story by her concerning CP80, the latest attempt to make pornography go away: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/30342/. *Don't* *miss* the "educational" Flash video by CP80 about pr0n http://www.cp80.org/solutions/CP80-Flash-Overview. html , which is a contender for the title of "The 'Reefer Madness' of anti-porn propaganda". Anybody know of others?

The Feds do take white supremicists seriously: White Supremicists, White supremacist gets 40-year sentence, A Whiter Shade of Christmas

Burning down an empty house is not a "terrorist" activity

I think every living black american would disagree with you on that one. The implicit threat is elemental.

I wish I knew the magic formula for getting a submission accepted

IANAMagician, but try this:

1. Google's inherently non-evil news aggregator confirms that BSD isn't dead
2. ????^H^H^H^HNetcraft confirms that Linus Torvalds has killed Roland Piquepaille
3. Constitution! As overlord! Profit!

[RANT] #3 is particularly important because many world citizens, both at home and abroad, are so often appalled by the willingness of the people of the USA to see its government stomp all over the Constitution on behalf of paranoia, insularity, xenophobia and rampant corporatism. This restoration of faith and hope may be as small as the proportion of renewable elements in that there Patriot Act, but it means a lot. It's disappointing that it took a superannuated grunt like Jack Murtha to flip the switch in DC, but right now the world citizen will take what he/she can get. [/RANT]

More of the story here.

why isn't there a CTO (Congressional Technology Office)? There's ... a non partisan office that exists to advise Congress on budgetary issues ... It's unreasonable to expect that all Congresscritters can be knowledgeable techies. They should have a non partisan agency to advise them about these issues

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, there was such an agency.

The Office of Technology Assessment was such a congressional body, founded in 1972, and it lasted until 1995, when the Gingrich Congress came in, it was disbanded.

More about that here, here, here, and of course on Google.

Are you that dense? The whole scandal was about corporations and businesses bribing Saddam Hussein in order to get oil deals from him when the U.N. program restricted Iraq's oil exports to exchanges for humanitarian aid. The corporations and CEO's responsible for the scandal undermined the U.N.'s resolution. The key players who benefited from the scandal were Siemens, Daimler Chrysler, Volvo, atleast one Halliburton firm and more than 2000 other companies. It was a corporate scandal if anything.

"Companies buying oil at cut prices would funnel extra money to Iraq through "surcharges" while those receiving money from Iraq for humanitarian goods and services would return a portion in "kickbacks", the report found." -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4440804.stm>

You can read more details here as well: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/27792/

*Eyeing my troll mod and flame collection* YAH THINK ???

Darn it, I left out my left-leaning source..

http://www.alternet.org/walmart

A.A

P.S
I hate the fact that I had to wait 5 minutes to post this.

Just because the NY Times, CNN, the LA Times, and the Washington Post dare to print something other than Undying Praise for the Fatherland does not make them left-leaning. It makes them journalists doing their jobs. I think the non-U.S. news coverage of the same events is more aggressive, such as the CBC, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the BBC. I take the truth as an average of these sources, along with some help from FAIR and the Columbia Journalism Review.

If I want left-leaning, I can go to the Independent Media Center, the Alternative News Network, The Raw Story, or the Fifth Estate.

The communists who introduced these drugs into the United States knew that. Hence why they exist in our society today.

You mean these communists?

I'll be writing an open letter to the Justice Department about this. It worries me precisely because Max Hardcore is a creepy fucker, and because it'd hard to explain that yes, I am sticking up for that lady who liked stories about toddlers being fucked solely because of the principle of the thing---'cause this isn't so much about Max Hardcore or kiddie porn stories, it's about getting their foot in the door.

The only legal justification for cracking down on real child porn (Again from SCOTUS case law) is the fact that real children where exploited in the production.

Mmm. And that's why that nonsense about "simulated kiddie porn" was struck down. But now we've got those asinine record-keeping regulations which seem designed to stamp out amateur internet porn.

I was all excited about Lawrence v. Texas, when Scalia, in his dissent, made it clear that a whole raft of morality-based laws and procedures were now in danger, that legislatures would be "confined to preventing demonstrable harms". Which seemed fairly obvious to me, but perhaps only because I'm some sort of flaming liberal.

Regardless, we now seem to be moving in the opposite direction. I'm disappointed.

For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case. It's just become conventional wisdom for them without question.

For each of the three misperceptions [about the war in Iraq], the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/25438/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/02.ht ml
They didn't know exactly when, but they knew it was inevitable.

http://www.alternet.org/story/24871/
...and certain people didn't listen (or didn't care).

To learn more about Hugo Chavez's term as President of Venezuela, go to:

"Why Hugo Chavez Won a Landslide Victory"
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-01.htm

or:

"Hugo Chavez is Crazy!"
http://www.alternet.org/story/16255/

To learn more about George Bush's term as President of the United States, go to any gas station.

Why not? Texas already has a president with a Summer reading list without a reader.

So this 'AIDS is not caused by HIV' meme is nothing but FUD, please don't spread it any further.

Negative information has been known about for some time. A study at the University of Maryland revealed its existence in the media realm a couple years ago.

Fox News. The More You Watch, the Less You Know.(tm)

Well, it's been tried with cola -- why not beer?

Oh, and as for that "bit of a caffeine-like hit", that's no surprise, since guarana, like mate, is a source of the actual real thing, not some imaginary-elf-land "more natural/healthy" alternative.

As the PIPA report (pdf) found, FOX makes you stupid.

Except that I believe it was justified, and I don't believe that, by and large, we were deceived. Myopic on the stated reasons? Perhaps. Unnecessarily rushed? Probably. Distracting from the proper goal of the time? Almost certainly. But not unjustified. A few friends in the military have served in Iraq, or will be serving. They are proud of what they have done, and some have volunteered to re-up knowing that they will be going directly back.

As for civilian casualties, columnist Molly Ivins has cleared up the scale here. A partial quote summarizing the section stated, "There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong." I really do believe that there is progress being made, and in ten years, we'll look back on the area the same way we looked at Germany in the mid-50s -- friends, though possibly with enemies at the border. We'll see.

You might find this an interesting read: The Trouble with Dilbert. A snippet:

Dilbert cartoons calcify the essence of the repressive workplace. ...

"Historically," Ralph Nader has pointed out, "you control people by lowering their expectations." This is true in the workplace and other spheres of life. The diminishing of what we could or should expect -- from ourselves, and each other, and institutions -- normalizes what we find unpleasant or worse. For corporate elites, that diminishment is a pleasure to behold. In Nader's words: "If our expectations are low, they have control."

You say "Military recruiters recognize the more limited future of these kids and that they have something to offer them. Military recruitment is usually a win/win proposition." If we had responsible leaders who used war as a last resort, you might be right. But in the current debacle, it's atrocious the some people justify getting poor Americans to fight a war led by hawkish politicians who won't put themselves or their families in harm's way.

About 1700 young Americans have been killed in action thus far, it shouldn't be only the poorer families be the ones to risk their children's lives in order to have a better future. Do you support these 1700 deaths, along with tens of thousands of cases of physical and psychological injuries, such that other soldiers have a chance to lead a better life?

When you say the military takes care of you, that sentiment is greatly questioned by those in active duty. Where were you stationed during your service, and how many of your fellow soldiers were killed on the front line?

Also due to the current recruiting crisis, military recruiters have resorted to unethical practices to get people to enlist. Shouldn't these potential recruits make the decision to join on their own, without pressure from the recruiter?

The current class gap recruiting policies are nothing more than a technique to allow poor soldiers fight a war that the rich politicians support but don't want their own family members fighting in.

Also - there are ways for high school parents and students to "opt out" of the recruiting campaign. If you're a high school student or parent of such a student, you might find these links helpful:

• Resource Center for Non-Violence
• Leave My Child Alone
• ACLU sues Albuquerque school for violating privacy provisions

heatlh care

We don't want the government to give us health care, we either want them to reign in the cost *or* provide universal *insurance* coverage. It isn't even about using tax dollars, it's more about revoking the corporate charters of HMO companies or doing something about rising costs. I for one *demand* mental health parity, but last time someone did that they died in a plane crash. Of course, not supporting mental health parity in the private insurace sectors affects those without mental health problems (Crime rate. drug/alcohol use, homelessness, domestic violence... all lead to more crime thus costing the tax payer a bundle. Let's ignore the fact that those who aren't covered under private insurance are eligible for public services anyways...).

retirement

Well, we don't want old people to starve do we? You might, but I guess your political views demand that sort of thing...

education

As far back as education goes in America, it's been controlled by the states (and their governements). Private schools are one thing, but the government isn't taking those schools over, and never have. And to be brutally honest, public schools serve two purposes in America: to Americanize and Industrialize the young. Of course we don't think about those students who are second generation Americans... (see link at bottom)

freedom means freedom to fail

Yeah, I can see that point. But is that okay with most Americans? Considering 94% are said to be Christians I doubt it. Then again, what passes for Christianity now a days in America is appaling. I'm not a Xian, but let's be consistent. If "under God" stays in the pledge, the 10 commandments stay in courts and "in god we trust" stays on the dollar bill then welfare stays.

You are free to fail, but shouldn't there be a freedom to not fail as well? Is it fair that society should stack the deck against the weakest among us?

Source: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pedro31.html