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Hmm, SSPI, who are they? Ah, they used to be the Center for Science and Public Policy at Frontiers of Freedom. To quote Sourcewatch quoting the NYT: "Frontiers of Freedom, which has about a $700,000 annual budget, received $230,000 from Exxon in 2002, up from $40,000 in 2001, according to Exxon documentsâ. They also get tobacco money for their little public policy "research". Amazing how not-hard it was to find that.

But why stop there? Who is this McLean guy that wrote it? Let's consult his own description of himself: "John McLean has an amateur interest in global warming following 25 years in what he describes as the analysis and logic of IT." Apparently he has a Bachelor of Architecture.

So your no-consensus argument comes down to a piece written by a guy who isn't a climate scientist for an oil-industry funded think tank. Convincing. There's some criticism of the actual paper here, and more linked to from there.

Apart from accusing every climate scientist of some mass conspiracy, do you have an actual argument to make, or some actual climate scientists to quote?

Sorry, but the Heartland Institute has the is an dedicated to unregulated, free markets. They are a policy organization masquerading as a research group, one which has been accused of being funded heavily by Exxon. Now I usually view GreenPeace's "facts" with quite a bit of skepticism, but I do the same with anything coming out of the Heartland Institute. Both organizations are so hell bent on political influence, that they can't maintain the objective view needed to supply useful facts. At some point science-with-a-political-slant becomes political-rhetoric-with-a-scientific-slant. Both of these organizations are well over that line.

>Personally, I think these types of attack vectors are silly. People make all kinds of friendships and relationships
>throughout their lives, and to be held responsible for all the beliefs and actions of those friends or associates is just ridiculous.

Certainly, a candidate shouldn't be judged on their friendships alone, nor should those friendships be evaluated out of context. But McCain has publicly accepted the endorsements from Hagee, Parsley, and other unsavoury characters. These are not simply business associates or friends, whose political views he happens to disagree with. McCain publicly calls them his "spiritual guides". That seems like poor judgment at best, and hints that he might have some private views which voters should get to know more about before granting him control of the most powerful military on the planet.

The same standard should apply to all candidates, not just McCain and Obama, but also Hillary Clinton, whose connections with "The Family", a church group from the rightwing Dominionist movement, deserve similar scrutiny.

Do some more research about the church before you write this off.

The UCC is currently under investigation from the IRS for illegal campaign contributions to Obama.

They're known to have funded astroturf campaigns in support of the cable companies against telecoms - really! There's some irony there, though: you know those ads that various religions run? The UCC attempted to run a TV ad campaign, but the broadcasters refused to run it because it was so offensive!

But in any case, ignoring their illegal activities and merely questionable activities, we're left with one truth. When the UCC learned of Wright's rhetoric, did they condemn him? Of course not, they came out in strong support.

So it's not just a single pastor, it's the entire church, a church that Obama has been a member of for 20 years.

This isn't something new. This isn't something Obama should be shocked about. This is standard practice for the UCC.

Wow. You've completely convinced me that his tobacco-funded, tobacco-supporting research is actually rigorously reasoned science. Knowing this, I can now trust that this octogenarian physicist should be believed when he makes pronouncements on climate change that fly in the face of established science.

Thanks to you, I have seen the light.

The House has already indicated that it wants amnesty rejected, by passing their version of the bill without it, even as amnesty faced very vocal (though ultimately failed) opposition in the Senate. And John Conyers (D-MI), Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to head White House lawyer Fred Fielding insisting that there's no basis for amnesty. The House Intelligence Committee also rejected amnesty in approving the House bill. The Senate counterpart to Conyers' committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, was the one that produced a Senate bill rejecting amnesty (that failed to pass the Senate); the Senate committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) denounced amnesty as his bill was defeated, in solidarity with the House provisions. House Speaker Pelosi helped rescue the House bill from an October attempt by Republicans to stop it. So I think the House version of this "RESTORE Act" is a serious attempt by the House (its Republican minority notwithstanding) to stop amnesty.

But you're right not to have "faith" in politicians. Faith is a way of knowing something that can't be proven, and no one can know what these liars will do until after the check has cleared. But hope is different. It's a way of wanting something that hasn't been proven, fuel for doing something to get it. Which is why signing the petition to pressure the House to stand by its partial progress against amnesty is worth doing. Because giving up hope means being defeated, and that's how you help the forces against you win. Signing the petition is another small but useful blow against them.

The article is written in a distinctly misleading fashion. The letter from Dingell pretty clearly indicates that he is unhappy with the way the current FCC commissioner railroads through decisions without a proper public comment period. Now, public comment periods are almost invariably a Good Thing for consumers: lobbyists certainly don't need public comment periods to make their views known since they get to communicate them while they're having steak dinners with FCC commissioners, and historically public comment periods have resulted in huge uproars against industry-friendly policies. So the article is pretty clearly conflating two things that are AFAIK totally unrelated: (1) Congress is unhappy with the FCC, and (2) the cable industry is unhappy with the FCC. I see no evidence presented in the article for why we should believe that the interests of Congress and the cable industry are aligned.

Obama is the most inexperienced candidate running. He doesn't have a chance. He may be a good Democrat candidate, but there's no way he can get support outside of the Democrat party.

Then there's his religious background. Even if you are willing to ignore his Muslim heritage (and, yes, I know the madrassa thing was overblown), his current church is known for running astroturfing campaigns against telecoms, and astroturfing for Comcast. No, really! Google it, it's true.

You'd think if Romney being a Mormon is an issue, Barrack belonging to a somewhat crazy church should be as well, but no one seems to care.

every person pays taxes into Medicare, and most people get health care through insurance, which is virtually government run

(CHT), a think tank founded in 2003 in Washington, D.C., by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as a project of the Gingrich Group, is a for-profit consultancy and membership organization "comprised of corporations and organizations that all have a vested interest in transforming health and healthcare," its website states.

---

Premier Members...

        * America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)

Couldn't or wouldn't? When they were under pressure earlier this decade, Microsoft spent a lot of money lobbying/buying off US state and federal governments, creating fake "grass roots" campaign sites and paying for press releases from pro-corporate lobbyist groups such as the cato institute (source1 source2).

Wonder how often this happens in other industries related to government contracting.

Wonder how often this happens in other industries related to government contracting.

Yigal Carmon, MEMRI's founder, is a former advisor on terrorism to the Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, so he actually worked for both Labor and Likud governments. Praise for MEMRI should be taken with a grain of salt since it is almost always motivated by politics, not the quantity or quality of MEMRI's work. MEMRI has gained currency with most pro-Israel writers, as well as right-wing publications. For example, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, a influential foreign affairs columnist, has used MEMRI translations a number of times in his columns. MEMRI is cited in several publications, such as The Times, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, The Jerusalem Post, The National Review, The Toronto Sun, Wall Street Journal, Libertad, FrontPageMagazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Associated Press, etc.

According to the National Review, 250 donors--foundations and individuals--fund MEMRI's activities. Among these private donors is the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation , which gave MEMRI $100,000 from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, the Randolph Foundation gave MEMRI $100,000, and in 2004 the John M. Olin Foundation gave $5,000, according to Media Transparency.

MEMRI was co-founded by Meyrav Wurmser and Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, "both of whom were early critics of the Oslo accords."

* Elie Wiesel - Professional Holocaust survivor (as Uri Avnery refers to him), member of the Irgun Zvei Leumi [32], and professional moralist. "I hope you receive MEMRI's publications. I do. I find its material - translations and analyses of poisonous articles, hate-filled statements and slanderous accusations - vitally needed for the fight against antisemitism in the Arab world. Policy makers, legislators, teachers, and news commentators greatly benefit from its efforts to use truth in the service of peace." - Elie Wiesel, May 22, 2003[33]

You're right that these people exist, but they're not the same thing as neo-conservatives.

Neo-conservatives are a different breed of right-winger. They typically believe in some flavor of what's been called "National Greatness Conservatism" -- the idea that Americans need a Great Crusade against something (anything, really) to drive them away from petty everyday concerns and towards Big Accomplishments.

Many of the "founding fathers" of neo-conservatism were actually liberals who fell away from that ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by what they felt was American liberals' tepid opposition to communism, and found a home in the militant anti-Communist branch of the right wing. The Cold War became their organizing frame, and when Communism disappeared, they decried the nation's turn away from foreign policy, arguing that there were new Great Crusades we should be undertaking instead. They spent the 1990s trying to convince the Clinton Administration to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, for example, without success.

When 9/11 came, they found one they could run with; and since many neocons had risen by then to positions of leadership in the Bush Administration, they successfully pitched a "war on terrorism" as the new cause for National Greatness. The Iraq project that had been their hobby-horse for a decade was taken out of storage and repackaged as "the central front of the war on terror". And the rest is history.

Neo-conservatism has nothing to do with fundamentalist Christianity; in conversation neocons will typically talk down about the fundamentalist wing of their party, seeing them as rubes and hicks. Conversely, fundamentalists feel that the neocons' obsession with foreign policy leads them to ignore domestic social issues that are core to the fundamentalist agenda, like limiting abortion.

The fundamentalists do exist, and they are still strong (watch Mike Huckabee -- a former preacher who has absolutely nothing to say about foreign policy -- in the upcoming primaries if you don't believe me), but they're not the same thing as the neocons. The closest thing to a neocon candidate in 2008 is probably John McCain, who flirted with identifying himself as a "national greatness conservatism" in the past, and who shares their strong foreign policy orientation.

I think that what's really bad is the work by the American Chemical Society to undermine Open Access. Did the executives at ACS ever bother to poll their members to see how they feel about the issue? Or did they just do what was in the interest of their own salaries since it is now clear that ACS management is getting bonuses based on publishing profits?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Chemical_Society

Well, not surprising once you find out who three of his top five campaign contributors are Disney, Viacom and Time Warner.

Here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Leahy#Money_in_politics

It's unfortunate that we live in a world where interests groups can set up 'grass-roots' web-sites to give their cause a fake air of respectability / newsworthiness / gravitas. Without WHOIS, the layman would have one less tool to find connections and follow the money.

I've been modded down before for citing one example (Flaimbait), but I believe the example is warranted. In the US 2004 Elections, the Swift Boat movement was portrayed in parts of the media as just a bunch of Vietnam Vets that wanted to get their opinion out there. WHOIS tied their websites to a think-tank named The Donatell Group, and gave SourceWatch.org the ability to show how orchestrated this 'grass-roots' effort really was.

I'd be interested to see exactly WHO is pushing for this curbing of WHOIS...

One Friedman Unit, also known as "one Friedman" or "one F.U.", equals six months. The term is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting of journalist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the time period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. FAIR cited his use of the phrase as early as 2003. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Friedman_(Iraq_War_time_unit)

Until the professional gig pans out, why not come and edit Ron Paul's page on Congresspedia?

Conor Kenny here, I work on the Wiki the Vote project (it's great work if you can get it!)

This is one of the big problems in political discourse, no doubt. People have found that if you create a political debate about the facts, the media will back off and treat it as an open question. "Verifiable facts," for us, means that there's an outside, verifiable source that is credible. We're a little squishy on what makes a credible source, and leave that up to a case-by-case debate. We have a few advantages, though:

We don't have a "neutral point of view" policy - if your point of view is stupid and intellectually dishonest, we don't have to include it.

Because we're part of the larger SourceWatch wiki, we also have a lot of profiles of those fake front groups (remember those ads talking about how carbon dioxide was natural, so why were people concerned about it?), which means that even if someone quotes one of those groups, we can just wikify the link and let people click through to see that the group is a wholly financed arm of ExxonMobil (as was the case in that instance).

Verifiable means verifiable. It actually creates quite a hurdle to have to go cite something if you're just making stuff up.

But, yeah, it's a difficult business. But it's worth doing, so that's why we're here.

Instead of hating, why not come over and try it out? I'm happy to help out if you want to email me.

best,

Conor Kenny,

Managing Editor,

Congresspedia.org

ckenny (at) congresspedia.org

I clicked around a bit and found myself on the SourceWatch:Ground rules page. Good ideas, but an awful lot of red links. Several important topics haven't yet been defined, such as:

* "become a sysop"
* "language and rhetoric"
* "using discussion pages"
* even "wikifying"

Of course, since it's a collaborative project, I guess the users get to define those topics. Would it be overly cynical to start the "become a sysop" topic with a redirect to "Please select a giving amount or enter your own desired amount"?

"We're just glad it's all over," said Betty Beatty, whose husband, Gale, was teaching a line dancing class at the recreation hall.
"They bugged us with their phone calls something terrible," said Betty, who voted for Buchanan because "with all her calls, Jennings, Jennings, Jennings, I wouldn't have voted for that woman if she were the only one running."
"The campaign was so ugly, so nasty, by the time the election came along I decided I couldn't trust either one of them," said Cheryl Crawford, a La Casa voter who cast a ballot in all the other categories, but left Jennings-Buchanan blank.
Crawford was one of only a handful of voters on Thursday who acknowledged protesting the campaign in the same way.
But most everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who refused to vote in that race.
Some were concerned that they may have missed the ballot line -- easily overlooked, they said, at the top of the second page, just before the gubernatorial candidates.
"I just didn't see it," said Monique Nadeau, who realized her oversight after reading newspaper accounts of the Jennings-Buchanan undervote.
Some residents suggested that the age of many of the voters in the 55-and-over community affected their ability to maneuver the electronic balloting equipment.
But Roger Lumley, who is about to turn 84, insisted that "the machines were very simple. Everything seemed to run smoothly." If people didn't vote in the District 13 race, he said, "I think it was all the backstabbing."
The phone calls were the worst of it, he said, "two and three and more a day -- most of them seeming to start out as an appeal from Jennings but I had a feeling," he said, that some of them were calls from her opponent's organization.
"I think many, many people were simply disgusted by the tone and tactics of the campaign, just turned off by it," said David Surles, a retired engineer who lives in La Casa with his wife, Fran, an on-premises real estate broker.
"One is just as bad as the other" he said, "and I would expect that a lot of people felt that way. Not voting for either one of them was a way of saying, 'Aha, I'll show you.'"

Which civil liberties have you personally lost as a result of Bush's regime? Be specific.

No problem.

A link from Fox"News" supporting the admin is supposed to mean something? Read the section called Iraq War. The PIPA study tells it all...

Exactly. Some figures:
$460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget
$147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq

Not counting the money already spent on the perpetual "War on Terrorism".

Bush Appointee?

Nicole R. Nason, of Virginia, was nominated January 17, 2006, by President George W. Bush to be Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the Department of Transportation.

At the time of her nomination, Nason was serving "as Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Governmental Affairs. Prior to this, she served as Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Congressional Affairs for the United States Customs Service. Ms. Nason also served as Communications Director and Counsel to Representative Porter J. Goss. Earlier in her career, she served as Governmental Affairs Counsel at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Ms. Nason received her bachelor's degree from the American University and her JD from Case Western Reserve."

There is no need to carry on any "postmodern textual analysis". The facts of the case are damning enough, the real astonishment is how thoroughly brainwashed everyone is about what REALLY happened in Tiananmen square.

The chinese people at least know that the government keeps the truth from them so that they are not so trusting of the "facts" of any matter. Most chinese people i talk to about June 4th know that something went on that the government is keeping from them.

Americans on the other hand PASSIONATELY believe that what you have is the truth, of course, because of what YOUR NEWS MEDIA showed you, clips of tanks etc... juxtaposed with sensational headlines and most people are under the impression that it's safe to say that over 1,000 people were killed by fellow Chinamen during this event.

However if you do more research, specifically, interviews with journalists http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Denying _the_Tiananmen_Square_massacre that were in Beijing at the time who vehemently deny the sensationalist "tanks killing students in the square version of events" that the American News Media concocted for the world to see.

Or even read the transcripts done with nearly ALL the student leaders who escaped to America, detailed interviews that cover the entire 2 months of events that led up to June 4th, interviews with Wu Er Kaxi, Wan Dan, etc... NOT ONE of those student leaders put one iota of truth into the "tianmen square massacre" version of events that is so popular "truthiness" today, infact the only student leader who has ever claimed the massacre was student leader Chai Ling, who while making the statement to HK television WAS NOT EVEN IN CHINA on June 4th having fled earlier to escape. So Chai Ling's "eyewitness" account of events to Hong Kong television which was picked up worldwide(guess why? it wouldn't be because it was the most sensational statement that anyone would make(much more exciting than the more mundane statements given anywhere else)), and the eyewitness is not even in the square on the night that it happened.

Chai Ling in her interview with Phillip Cunningham, days before June 4th said the following.


"My fellow students keep asking me, 'What should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?
"And what is truly sad is that some students, and famous well-connected people, are working hard to help the government, to prevent it from taking such measures. For the sake of their selfish interests and their private dealings they are trying to cause our movement to disintegrate and get us out of the Square before the government becomes so desperate that it takes action....
"That's why I feel so sad, because I can't say all this to my fellow students. I can't tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to wake up the people. Of course, they will be willing. But they are still so young..." [cries] http://www.tsquare.tv/film/Totnost.html

So basically, she is willing to gamble with other people's lives to make a political point while escaping to become the reverred "dissident" that she is today. I wonder who's political textbook she has been reading?

The following quote is from HouDeJian, a taiwanese singer songwriter that penned the anthem for the June4th movement, he raised money in Hongkong for the students and then joined the hunger strike in beijing. Unlike Chai Ling he was at the square on the night and morning of June 4th.


"Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others clai

I don't buy that. I can say "the Chinese government killed student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989." There is no bias in that statement, its just a fact.

I am sorry, that is FULL of BIAS of the worst kind, and the wikipeadia article on the "Tiananmen Square massacre" is fully representative of groupthink bias. The "facts" as you'd like to point out are hidden behind sensational media coverage. In fact there was NO massacre in Tiananmen square, EVERY SINGLE STUDENT LEADER of the student movement in tian an men sqaure(i.e. Wu er Kaxi, Wan DAN, Feng Cong De, HOU DEJIAN etc...) i.e. these people were there on the night of June 4th in the square itself and subsequently locked up. They are on the record(interviewed in the U.S.A either after release or on escape) as saying that there was NO Massacre in tianmen square.

The only student "leader" who says otherwise is the now much reviled Cai Ling, who immediately after the event was on HK television in an interview that was broadcast all over the world saying that "tanks had crushed students while they slept". The problem is of course that Cai Ling was NOT in the square on the night of June 4th, she had fled earlier to HK.

Don't believe me? American Journalists in Beijing at the time deny the FACT that you so gladly point to. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Denying _the_Tiananmen_Square_massacre

Of course, this begs the question why 90% of the people believe that there was a "massacre" in the square itself.

Look at the last 7 years of american politics and media coverage of it, the answer isn't far away.

"Oh the biting nerd humor! The wit!"

Boy, did you miss the boat on this one. When the grandparent said federal prison is like a series of tubes, the humor wasn't that Stevens is and old man or misused lingo. GP expressed anger at a power-hungry, influence-peddling, democracy-subverting, tax-and-spend person. GP may not have been polite or subtle, but you missed the point.

It's too bad when you appreciate the money he helped bring into Alaska you don't realize where it came from. I probably paid more for the bridge to nowhere than you did. Or did you think he created money magically? It came from someone else who is now poorer. They just didn't have a representative who was as good at undermining our democratic principals.

Yes, the irony of misusing lingo was funny, but you didn't get it. You got dirty money from a guy with an ethics problem and then prefered to look the other way.

Let's get your facts straight, 1.) It IS UNNATURAL. 2.) It IS HARMFUL. 3.) genetic pollution HAPPENS OFTEN.

Genetically Modified High Frutcose Corn Syrup is harmful to people's health and GM crops don't grow by themselves.

Organic farms are increasingly finding that via cross-pollination their pure food has been contaminated with GM DNA thus ruining their businesses.

It is illegal to grow GM maize in Mexico..

"Genetic pollution" and collateral damage from GE field crops already have begun to wreak environmental havoc. Wind, rain, birds, bees, and insect pollinators have begun carrying genetically-altered pollen into adjoining fields, polluting the DNA of crops of organic and non-GE farmers. An organic farm in Texas has been contaminated with genetic drift from GE crops on a nearby farm and EU regulators are considering setting an "allowable limit" for genetic contamination of non-GE foods, because they don't believe genetic pollution can be controlled. Because they are alive, gene-altered crops are inherently more unpredictable than chemical pollutants--they can reproduce, migrate, and mutate. Once released, it is virtually impossible to recall genetically engineered organisms back to the laboratory or the field.

Large-scale genetic contamination of imported cottonseed in Greece

http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/gepollution.cfm
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/pollution.cfm
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsant o_and_Genetic_Pollution
http://www.globalchefs.com/column/archive/col011po l.htm
http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/environmentalscienc e/casestudies/case15.mhtml

And on and on and on and on and on and fucking on...

(the following snipet was stolen at random from: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Dangers-of-High-Fruc tose-Corn-Syrup&id=28535 )

High Fructose Corn Syrup

High fructose corn syrup is made by treating corn (which is usually genetically modified corn) with a variety of enzymes, some of which are also genetically modified, to first extract the sugar glucose and then convert some of it into fructose, since fructose tastes sweeter than glucose. The end result is a mixture of 55% fructose and 45% glucose, that is called "high fructose corn syrup." Improvements in production occurred in the 1980's making it cheaper than most other sweeteners. I remember in the 1980's when the price of Pepsi dropped from about $3 for a sixpack to about $1.50. In 1966 refined sugar such as sucrose was the was the leading sweetener / additive. In 2001 corn sweeteners accounted for 55% of the sweetener market. Consumption of high fructose corn syrup went from zero in 1966 to 62.6 pounds per person in 2001. A 12 ounce soda can contain as much as 13 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup.

Once again, the dangerous combination: fructose and glucose.

When high fructose corn syrup breaks down in the intestine, we once again find near equal amounts of glucose and fructose entering the bloodstream. As covered in recent newsletters, the fructose short-circuits the glycolytic pathway for glucose. This leads to all the problems associated with sucrose. In addition, HFCS seems to be generating a few of its own problems, epidemic obesity being one of them. Fructose does not stimulate insulin production and also fails to increase "leptin" production, a hormone produced by the body's fat cells. Both of these act to turn off the appetite and control body weight. Als

His relationship with powerful lobbyists makes him (or any other Democrat congressman) no better than the ones in the other side. They are all puppets, hold in the hands of the same puppeteer. Naive are the ones that thing that party allegiance is guarantee of anything at all.

The politic system is rotten, third party can't win (even if they had more support, there are so many hurdles for an independent candidate to overcome), majors parties are in fact one, people are cattle and vote based on frivolous fads and superstitions instead of on important issues and past actions.

The "manifest destiny" ended up being a self defeating prophecy, U.S. people got so used to the idea that U.S. fate is to lead the world that forgot to care about their own house and get a decent leadership for themselves.

And it really is so apropos on this day of forgiving acts against the country. Is 200 so far from 205. And let us not forget that it is better to lie, knowing full well that the letter was phony, but also knowing that your fanbois will defend you to the end. And one can also take solace that one can just become incompetent during the presidency, and not recall any matter of importanct, and people will just forgive you for anything, even dooming a generation to drug addiction.

So kids, take it from your national leaders, when you lie, lie big. If Bill had said he had never taken drugs after a certain date, a lie that your current president made, he would have been off the hook. But he decided to only make little lies, which is why he got into trouble.

If China can effectively whitewash one of the most brutal subjugations of all time

Your post is even more scary than what's going on in china. The chinese people at least know that the government keeps the truth from them so that they are not so trusting of the "facts" of any matter. Most chinese people i talk to about June 4th know that something went on that the government is keeping from them.

You on the other hand PASSIONATELY believe that what you have is the truth, of course, because of what YOUR NEWS MEDIA showed you, clips of tanks etc... juxtaposed with sensational headlines and most people like you are under the impression that it's safe to say that over 1,000 people were killed by fellow Chinamen during this event.

However if you do more research, specifically, interviews with journalists http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Denying _the_Tiananmen_Square_massacre that were in Beijing at the time who vehemently deny the sensationalist "tanks killing students in the square version of events" that the American News Media concocted for the world to see.

Or even read the transcripts done with nearly ALL the student leaders who escaped to America, detailed interviews that cover the entire 2 months of events that led up to June 4th, interviews with Wu Er Kaxi, Wan Dan, etc... NOT ONE of those student leaders put one iota of truth into the "tianmen square massacre" version of events that is so popular "truthiness" today, infact the only student leader who has ever claimed the massacre was student leader Chai Ling, who while making the statement to HK television WAS NOT EVEN IN CHINA on June 4th having fled earlier to escape. So Chai Ling's "eyewitness" account of events to Hong Kong television which was picked up worldwide(guess why? it wouldn't be because it was the most sensational statement that anyone would make(much more exciting than the more mundane statements given anywhere else)), and the eyewitness is not even in the square on the night that it happened.

Chai Ling in her interview with Phillip Cunningham, days before June 4th said the following.

"My fellow students keep asking me, 'What should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?
"And what is truly sad is that some students, and famous well-connected people, are working hard to help the government, to prevent it from taking such measures. For the sake of their selfish interests and their private dealings they are trying to cause our movement to disintegrate and get us out of the Square before the government becomes so desperate that it takes action....
"That's why I feel so sad, because I can't say all this to my fellow students. I can't tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to wake up the people. Of course, they will be willing. But they are still so young..." [cries] http://www.tsquare.tv/film/Totnost.html

So basically, she is willing to gamble with other people's lives to make a political point while escaping to become the reverred "dissident" that she is today. I wonder who's political textbook she has been reading?

The following quote is from HouDeJian, a taiwanese singer songwriter that penned the anthem for the June4th movement, he raised money in Hongkong for the students and then joined the hunger strike in beijing. Unlike Chai Ling he was at the square on the night and morning of June 4th.

"Some people said that two hundred died in the Square and others claimed that two thousand died. There were also stories of tanks r

Tim Griffin, Michael Elston, Paul McNulty, Monica Goodling
Sara Taylor, Bradley Schlozman, Steve Biskupic, Alberto Gonzalez, David Safavian, Lurita Doan, Ken Tomlinson
Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Ted Stevens, Kyle Foggo, Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Curt Weldon, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Tobin
Scooter Libby, Manuel Miranda, Darleen Dryun, Thomas Scully, Chuck Mcgee, Pete Domenici
Porter Goss, Brant Bassett, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ed Buckham, Steven Griles, Mark Foley, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Lay, Conrad Black, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Roger Stilwell, Tony Rudy, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, William Heaton, Adam Kidan, Neil Volz,

No, fanboys tend to be a spontaneous thing. Microsoft's astroturf is much more calculated, and has involved a company called DCI.

DCI have funded groups like Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), and the Association for Competitive Technology to shill for MS in the past.

The current astroturf campaigns here and in other blogs is likely to be coordinated by DCI or a similar PR firm.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Microso ft

more generic stuff: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astrotu rf

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Front_g roups

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Microso ft

more generic stuff: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astrotu rf

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Front_g roups

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Microso ft

more generic stuff: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astrotu rf

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Front_g roups

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be sufficiently self-aware to spend the rest of his days agonizing over the fact that he's been such an abysmal failure.

His record, as president, matches perfectly his business record.

The thing that scares me the most is I vaguely recall him saying something like, "I want to preside over the Rapture prophesied in Revelations" (which of course requires an Armageddon), and forcing Russia to change the direction their nukes are pointing seems like a good first step down the road to Hell for all of us.

I definitely remember him saying, "I want to be a war president."

(Holy fuck, when I started this I didn't realize that I'd find so much evidence to link to. Wow.)

So they hid it behind spaghetti and made it fuzzy like they did in the IPCC 4th Assessment. Would I be close?

Shall we see who is the biggest abuser of censorship? Step right up.

Then I find this article.

I just need to voice my thoughts out loud. Feel free to correct me on anything.

Title 18 (18 USC), Chapter 73 has a lot to say about what penalties someone will face for deleting anything that may be evidence in any Governmental department investigation (section 1519 makes for particularly good reading), and the 'deleting' of emails that were meant to be sent from .gov addresses (but instead were illegally sent from and to websites set up by Donatelli Group, the same organization that set up both the 2004 Bush re-election site, the Republican national Committee site, AND the Swift Boat 'independent' sites) certainly constitutes that. But this isn't my point. Although having emails like this one (that have the Trifecta of Jack Abramoff, using government facilities illegally for partisan reasons, and asking people to direct official emails illegally to a non-governmental email address for government business because "there could be lawsuits etc.") are certainly fun bedtime reading. If only because it makes you wonder what lawsuits Bush-Cheney were avoiding by leaving the email servers clean of incriminating evidence.

And the talking points now seems to be fogging the issue isn't my point either. Even though it's true that Gonzales could have said "I let 'em go because I can, end of story", and that would have been OK. But he didn't... under oath, he said all eight were fired for poor performance, and records later showed the fired people had (for the vast majority of them) excellent performance reviews. Not just 'meets expectations', but 'exceeds expectations'. It was just that one of them had managed to get people like Duke Cunningham convicted and palms were sweating, for example.

No, the fascinating thing for me is the scale, the person, and the timing of it all. Not just one email, but five-hundred. Not sent to an email address that bounced the emails back to sender as undelivered, but sent to a person that has so far batted 1.000 on his investigations of an Admin that has batted .000 in all major issues that have come to a head (sorry for that analogy ... for those non North American Scum, let's use a cricket analogy and say the reporter has hit six sixes in an inning against opponents that were all out for a duck when they were at bat). And the emails didn't just arrive in dribs and drabs, but landed like manna from heaven, all late one night as offices in Washington were dark, just as the story was starting to cool because of the lack of emails.

Sounds to me like we have a Deep Throat type of leak at the White House. In years to come, the books written by people on the inside will talk of the air of paranoia in the Halls of Power as the top-feeders demanded to know who was where at the time the emails were sent.

That's the big story right now. I bet the air of paranoia setting in the Halls of Power right now has been cranked up to 11. That's the angle I want covered. In years to come, when someone writes the book on what happened, I want to know how much shouting there was (I'm guessing "a lot").

The best summary of climate change "skeptics" and their various bogus motivations and conflicts is, as usual, from http://sourcewatch.org/

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_cha nge_controversy

When evidence/source/authority is at issue, go to Sourcewatch first.
    http://openpolitics.ca/evidence/source/authority

The best summary of climate change "skeptics" and their various bogus motivations and conflicts is, as usual, from http://sourcewatch.org/

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_cha nge_controversy

When evidence/source/authority is at issue, go to Sourcewatch first.
    http://openpolitics.ca/evidence/source/authority

Steven J. Milloy is NOT a scientist but industry-paid hack, is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. For years, Milloy has been scamming people on Fox News and on his junkscience site.

This guy has been bought and paid for many times over by companies like Phillip Morris and Exxon Mobil.

This report from the Union of Concerned Scientists documents how Milloy, headed a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke. Milloy also served as a member of the small 1998 Global Climate Science Team task force that mapped out ExxonMobil's disinformation strategy on global warming. Between 2000 and 2004, ExxonMobil gave $50,000 to Milloy's Advancement of Sound Science Center, and another $60,000 to an organization called the Free Enterprise Education Institute (a.k.a. Free Enterprise Action Institute), which is also registered to Milloy's home address.

ExxonMobil also gave $130,000 to Milloy's "Free Enterprise Action Institute" between 1998-2005. The organization is registered under Milloy's name and home address.

Milloy is also the former director of the "National Environmental Policy Institute". Yet another industry front group providing disinformation on climate science to which ExxonMobil gave at least $75,000.

As others have stated, Milloy never mentions the large amounts of mercury being released from coal-fired power plants that has resulted in levels of mercury so high in lakes and streams of New England that state health agencies have to warn pregnant women and young children not to eat too much fish caught from these waters. Milloy never mentions that his friends in the power industry (and unfortunately the current administrators in the EPA) fought tooth and nail to prevent the installation of equipment on the power plants to remove the large amounts of mercury released to the air.

As has been pointed out, the mercury in the CFL bulbs (unlike that being released from power plants) is contained and the bulbs can be recycled. Should we eventually move to other solutions with less potential for mercury contamination like LED bulbs. Absolutely! But LED bulbs are even more expensive now than CFLs.

What people like Milloy do and have done for years is nothing less then criminal: Take money from industry to lie and confuse Americans about the dangers of smoking, concerns about global warming, and other health, safety, and consumer issues.

Steven Milloy isn't a reporter, he's a lobbyist who's worked for the tobacco industry (arguing that second-hand smoke is a myth) and the oil industry (ditto for global warming). This is an op-ed, not a news article.

From SourceWatch:

Milloy has spent much of his life as a lobbyist for major corporations and trade organisations which have poisoning or polluting problems. He originally ran NEPI (National Environmental Policy Institute).... NEPI was dedicated to transforming both the EPA and the FDA, and challenging the cost of Superfund toxic cleanups....

NEPI was also associated with the AQSC (Air Quality Standards Coalition) which was devoted to emasculating Clean Air laws. This organisation took up the cry of "we need sound science" from the chemical industry as a way to counter claims of pollution -- and Milloy became involved in what became known as the "sound-science" movement. Its most effective ploy was to label science not beneficial to the large funding corporations as "junk"....

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=User:Bo b_Burton

Bob Burton is a freelance journalist based in Canberra, Australia. Bob is part-time editor of SourceWatch and has been a regular contributor to PR Watch.

- With Nicky Hager he co-authored Secrets and Lies: the anatomy of an anti-environmental PR campaign (Craig Potton Publishing New Zealand 1999; Common Courage Press USA 2000) revealing a campaign by Shandwick New Zealand for a government-owned logging company, Timberlands. - - He can be contacted at bob AT SourceWatch.org

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=User:B ob_Burton"

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One webserver-sized grain of salt coming right up!

Payment is not the only source of bias. So is ideology.