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Politicians generally do release their tax information every year. You can find Bush's info with just a little googling.

Ok, I'll bite. The Center for Public Integrity reports that FCC officials had accepted nearly $2.8 million in travel and entertainment expenses over the past eight years, mostly from the telecom and broadcast industries they regulate. This extends to Michael Powell, who seemingly maintained the status quo. Recently however the department has changed its policies and is requesting more federal funds for travel to replace what was once paid for outside of the goverment.

The cost of maintaining and upgrading the wiring in rural areas has not been paid for already.

Damm, I wonder why

Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist.

The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech or Privacy.

Anyone who chooses to exercise Free Speech becomes 0wned by whomever wants to profile&dossier 'em, and anyone who chooses to exercise Privacy has the right to not say anything.

I wonder, in this Majority Rule ( and all others must Obey & Conform & Belong ) world, whether "free speech" will win, or whether "privacy" will win...

... keeping-in-mind that no individual has as much capability to make a meaning known ( or to do-so as a means of suppressing competing meaning ) as does a marketing-department, and
.. also that Total Information Awareness programs, whether called STASI or Satan, or any other label
( humour is: "satan" means Accuser, and TIA + Patriot-II exists so that authority can accuse without having to have correct information, and without you having the right to see the basis for your accusation, and without you having the right to defend yourself in level-playing-field and without anyone, anywhere having the right to know you've been accused/convicted/disappeared.. read the link. )
.. depends entirely on no-one having valid privacy...

Perfectly Brilliant.

A lot of companies are going to be developing applications that require high-precision GPS. Suppose, say, 10 years from now, the U.S. threatens to turn SA back on unless everybody toes the line on the some issue. All these people with high-precision GPS apps will then pressure their governments to back down. A European political or economic leader is not going to happy about such a scenario, and can hardly be blamed for spending a few bucks to prevent it.

And if the situation were reversed, an American president who said, "Oh, we can just use the European GPS network" -- well, how would you feel if were dependent on the goodwill of a foreign country for a basic resource?

Oh, wait a sec. Strike that last question!

I am sure such a net connection could be transformed into an eavesdropping device and I am even more certain that the Patriot Act I, Patriot Act II and other similar legislation would allow such draconian chilling effects imposed on us.

clickety click

Stepping out of the terrorism context, what about the recent wave of corporate fraud investigations? Are all those guys poor?

Are they in jail? We live in a country where kids with no prior record are being jailed for years at a time for having, not selling, drugs at rock concerts. A car thief can expect to spend years in jail, but George W. Bush violated securities laws multiple times and he's in the White House.

No, more corporate cash did not go to Gore. I think it was about 2/3 to the Republicans.

Excuse me? Please provide a source for the '2/3' number - this is highly dubious, and I suspect you're making it up. Are you aware Al Gore's OIL company just bought one of Enron's interests in the Middle East? The Democrats play the moneygrubbing big-bidness game quite well, thank you.

After the election Gore was trying to get a recount, but the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to stop the recount. Those 5 were all Republican appointees.

The supreme court vote to HALT THE RECOUNT was 7-2, the 5-4 vote to decide whether they would adhere to Florida law in requiring all recounts to be completed by December 13th.

You think they'd have messed with 767's if they had nukes? This isn't a game.

You think they'd have done anything at all if the CIA, through Pakistan's ISI, hadn't trained them to be extremists? Like you said, this isn't a game - I just wish states and their "intelligence" arms would realize that next time someone involved with them feels like installing a military junta or training "freedom fighters" to "uphold policy". Nations in both East and West are guilty of this, and until these deadly cloak-and-dagger games of subversion and manipulation stop, there will be more incidents involving "blowback," where innocent civilians - like WTC employees, and women in Afghanistan - get caught in the crossfire of others who should know better.

And you wonder why people trust their governments less and less...

>No, he wasn't. The CIA has nothing to do with him. The CIA offered to help him against Russia, he refused.

You information must be based on the "plausible denials" issued to the mainstream press after the terrorist attack.

According to a these excerpts from scholarly treatise published by Yale University Press and written by somebody "who was there", Bin Laden did benefit from CIA funding and training. Note that the book was written well before Sept.11, while the frantic denials have come after that date.

Putting 2 and 2 together (CIA's aggressive support for Afghan "Freedom Fighters", and Bin Laden's key role in fighting the Soviets), maybe those denials aren't so plausible after all.