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1) What is the Justice Department doing about the harrassment of Black Voting Leagues in Florida? If the answer (which I suspect it is) is "nothing" than this a clear case of government being used in a partisan and heavy-handed manner. It's also racist and classist. 2) I don't know about your state, but the Georgia GOP's website already lists already lists their delegates as well as the alternates for all to see. Just plug the name into Switchboard and you can get their addresses. Conclusion? This is a disingenuous, partisan, racist, classist abuse of the Justice Department. Someone else want to argue that point?

We are not running out of oil.

Are you sure ?

The first example that you could think of is Abu Ghraib, but from what I've read the incident was quite isolated, and it doesn't reflect American culture very well.

You clearly don't read much, or if you do, you spend a lot of time in the fiction section. Try reading some news. Here I'll help you out:

Israeli interrogators in Iraq

Terror defendant: U.S. interrogators threatened life

Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture

Leaked Torture Memo: Full Text

The above sentiment seems about fifteen years out of date. To borrow from this story, nothing embarrasses people in Washington anymore:

Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Enron made campaign contributions totaling more than $5.7 million between 1989 and 2001. Republicans received 73% of this money. Ken Lay was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush during Bush's time as Governor of Texas. During the 2000 campaign, Lay allowed Bush to use Enron corporate jets to fly from stump speech to stump speech. So close were these men that Bush granted Lay a nickname: 'Kenny-Boy.'

About this time my '.com' was watching venture capital dry up. We had a meeting with Arthur Andersen to discuss our accounting product and I distinctly remember the 23 or 24 year guy not having the slightest clue why he was even meeting with us. Uniterested and pathetic questions. No wonder every audit firm in the universe used to APPROACH US at tradeshows - they must've thought EVERYONE was on the take.

Well my life since then plays like a broken country album. And Larry Ellison still looks like the devil. I hate this mellenium so far.

Socialists?

You are mistaken, aren't you. Or perhaps you like to take every opportunity to run a smear-campaign against socialism at every opportunity because you've been force-fed pro-capitalist shit since the time you were born.

The weapons certainly did come from the US, and the best ones at that. Russia and France sold Iraq conventional weapons: tanks ( as you pointed out ) and rockets. But the US gave Iraq chemical and biological weapons.

Links? Sure.

Arse-hole Rumsfield shaking hands with Iraq over a biological weapons deal.

A long blurb about the history of the Iran / Iraq war.

Robert Byrd questions the US Senate over the US's shipment of "witches' brew of pathogens," including anthrax, botulinum toxin and gangrene.

And don't call me a moron you fucking arrogant moron.

Not long after 2001-09-11 attrocities, I saw the words 'NUKE 'EM' scrawled in the grime on the back of a semi truck trailer traveling down the highway.

That the USA didn't rain down instant death and destruction on the homeland(s) of those perceived responsible for the attacks shows a commendable measure of restraint on the USA's behalf not to 'replay' Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a ghoulish(?) coincidence, the death toll at Pearl Harbor (1941-12-07) is about the same as that of '9/11'. Is it no wonder that the events of 2001-09-11 are now inextricably linked to the date 'which will live in infamy': 1941-12-07?

What a day '9/11' was....

The attacks were vivid, simple, and brutal.

THEY GOT THE WHOLE WORLD TO TAKE NOTICE--the hallmark of such activites.

As an 'encore' of sorts, we now have the terrible events of '3/11' in Madrid, Spain (2004-03-11).

How does one defend against such attacks by using 'the right tool for the right job' without the 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' results one would get using nukes in retaliation against the homeland(s) of the perpetrators of such attacks? Take a look at what happened in the past:

Pearl Harbor: 2,403 dead. Source.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: 350,000 dead. Source.

Take a look at what is happening now in Iraq:

US soldiers killed: 544 Source.

Iraqi civillians killed: 8,700-10,000+ Source.

The punishment(s) doesn't seem to fit the crime to me....

>> 911 would have happened whether Gore won or not, planning for it was in progress for years before the actual event.

... and intelligence organizations were gathering information about it for a year or more as well. Read up a bit on the hand off of security issues from the Clinton to Bush administrations, and consider whether the Gore administration would have dropped the ball so badly when they would have been the same people continuing with their work, instead of a brand new team.

Well, it sure seems to me that all of these reporters were intimidated this time around. Or don't you think the two events mentioned above warrant coverage?

I don't know what these events may have looked like to reporters back then, and I'm not willing to speculate. This is skirting the real issue, which is that TWA 800 wasn't an act of war against the US.

Aren't you admitting here then that somebody can control the coverage, even if it means keeping all these reporters quiet? It seems to me you can't have it both ways... either the capability exists, or it doesn't.

It's not black and white. You can, under some circumstances, and you can't under others. I'm saying that the circumstances of the two events are different, and that you can't infer from one to prove claims relating to the other.

One theory I've heard is that the reason they had to keep TWA 800 quiet was because the accident involved a test of a missile banned by international treaty.

Still, not the same thing. It's not an act of war on the US.

What's funny is that you can probably better support the TWA 800 hypothesis than the 9/11 Israeli connection hypothesis, which doesn't make sense.

I will point out that the link you gave disputing the stories in the Washington Post and Haaretz is to a post in a newsgroup!

It's a verbatim quote from a post to a Yahoo discussion group. The original post is cached here. The author is Marc Ash, editor of truthout.com, and this is how much he likes Bush, in case you were wondering.

Didn't you earlier chastise me for basing my opinions on the above two papers?

No. Check your facts.

Well, it sure seems to me that all of these reporters were intimidated this time around. Or don't you think the two events mentioned above warrant coverage?

I don't know what these events may have looked like to reporters back then, and I'm not willing to speculate. This is skirting the real issue, which is that TWA 800 wasn't an act of war against the US.

Aren't you admitting here then that somebody can control the coverage, even if it means keeping all these reporters quiet? It seems to me you can't have it both ways... either the capability exists, or it doesn't.

It's not black and white. You can, under some circumstances, and you can't under others. I'm saying that the circumstances of the two events are different, and that you can't infer from one to prove claims relating to the other.

One theory I've heard is that the reason they had to keep TWA 800 quiet was because the accident involved a test of a missile banned by international treaty.

Still, not the same thing. It's not an act of war on the US.

What's funny is that you can probably better support the TWA 800 hypothesis than the 9/11 Israeli connection hypothesis, which doesn't make sense.

I will point out that the link you gave disputing the stories in the Washington Post and Haaretz is to a post in a newsgroup!

It's a verbatim quote from a post to a Yahoo discussion group. The original post is cached here. The author is Marc Ash, editor of truthout.com, and this is how much he likes Bush, in case you were wondering.

Didn't you earlier chastise me for basing my opinions on the above two papers?

No. Check your facts.

That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.

Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.

All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.

In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.

Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.

The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.

We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.

"I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the elimination of the Taliban. I thought that group was a clear and present danger to the United States, and I supported what the President did."

-- Howard Dean, interview with truthout

they said in septermber they've NEVER used this power of the patriot act

They are lying.

The only reason anyone cares about doing computerized voting is because the companies that make voting machines want us to care. After the 2000 debacle, Diebold and others jumped on the opportunity to tell us how screwed up our voting system is and that voting with their crappy Windows CE and Access database would somehow solve the problem. The problems surrounding Florida and the 2000 election really had little to do with dangling chads and more to do with voter fraud and disenfranchisement. More about disenfranchised voters here and here.

The corporations that seek to make millions upon millions of dollars selling computerized voting machines are feeding our cultural desire for everything to be fast and computerized. They know we don't want to wait two or three days to have all the votes tallied by volunteers - that's just backwards. We need to use computers to do all that counting because that's what computers do well - counting that is. As usual we are solving the wrong problem with the wrong solution. There is no reason we can't vote with pencil and paper and have our votes counted and with proper exit polling we would know the winner of the horse race the same day. In a close race the results may not be certain for a couple of days, is that so aweful to wait 2 or 3 days to find out the winner and be certain he/she is in fact the winner.

We are so fickle in this country and have such a short attention span that we become easy prey for the corporations that seek to make millions and millions of dollars selling districts these inferior voting machines/computers that simply don't work and seem to invite fraud. Can we have a healthy democracy if we don't have a voting system that is accurate and can be trusted? I don't understand people who so quickly toss democracy into the gutter for the sake of convenience or a false sense of security, I think it's insulting to all the men and women who have died to protect our democracy. Let's get the voting process right in this country or we are going to be in serious trouble very quickly. All the people that were pissed after the 2000 debacle may not just sit on their hands next time and so oh well.

Read more about this topic here here and here. This is a serious problem that we can't just sit by and watch play itself out - get involved.

*Very informative* articles by Votescam.com
http://votescam.com/chap1.html (1 of 5 chapters)

Technological excerpts:
"Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.

These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave -- and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies -- will forever be in doubt. Consider these points:

1. The "Shouptronic" was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.

2. It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's dear knowledge.

3. It completely lacked an "audit trail," an independent record that could be checked in case the machine "broke down" or its results were challenged.

4. Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic "much more risky" than any other computerized tabulation system because "You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check."

A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: "The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major".

A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering."

William Rivers Pitt gets some questions answered.

the problem with letting profit motivated organizations control essential resouces is where the responsibility lies. they don't want to provide you with power/water ... they want to charge you money. they are only accountable to their share holders not their customers. now true, letting the gov. control is a form of monopoly but at least you can vote to change the gov. you can't do much of anything to change a private/public company.

what happened on the east coast might have been a problem with the grid but what happened in california was because not generating power ment more money for the power barons.

water degulation
a good reason the lights went out the american press won't tell you about

Then should we attack Israel and every other country that breaks a UN resolution? Iraq has been by no stretch of the imagination any threat to the US or even to its neighbors since 1991. They could barely contain the Kurds. I don't pretend to whitewash Saddam's murderous regime, but we pick and choose which thugs to go after. And Saddam was no threat to us. If we were enforcing the UN resolutions why the hell wasn't the UN on board? Because the UN inspectors made it clear that they didnt need an invasion to do so. Look up "Hans Blix" on google if you want more information, but you should know this since you claim to read the news.

The fact that Saddam was uncooperative with U.N. weapons inspectors was worrisome regardless of what was known. You'd think he'd want to prove he was clean so sanctions would be lifted and Iraq could get on with normal life.

I can't account for Saddam's twisted thinking but as I said it is not our job to enforce UN resolutions, and the UN wasn't pressing for our assistance here.

Me: our intelligence agencies knew their WMD were nonexistent from the beginning and there was no threat to US national security.

You: Wow, you must have access to information that no-one else has access to.

Yeah, I do, really obscure sources like the New York Times. Even Fox news was reporting on this. I guess you missed it. The CIA (prior to the recent fuss about "yellow cake") was telling the Bushies they couldn't find an al Qaeda link and that they thought most of the evidence for WMD was weak. The Bush Administration wound up creating a separate intelligence agency in the Pentagon whose sole purpose seems to have been to produce a different intelligence estimate than the CIA. Here's an article about some of this from the Washington Post. I don't feel like doing more of your research for you; suffice to say that if you don't believe any of my claims you're free to look them up. Some links might be easy to find on the warblog I was keeping on the war for a while, if you care to look (though a lot of the links have probably expired). Also I would recommend The Agonist; he does a really good job of culling a lot of this information from mainstream news sources. I'm not in the habit of making stuff up or believing everything I read on the internet.

So it's not terrorism, it's guerilla warfare.

Talk about self serving definitions -- you define Saddam's attacks on his own people as terrorism but suicide bombers attacking the UN building and American soldiers as guerrilla warfare. I don't particularly care what you want to call it; my point is that our involvement in Iraq has increased the threat and power of Islamist fundamentalist organizations who wish to do harm to the US and who wish to institute theocratic goverments in the Middle East. Call it what you will, but I see that as a much greater threat to US national security than Saddam gassing his own people twenty years ago (as horrible as the latter admittedly is).

So how is the U.N. supposed to know if any particular dictator is just being a pain in the ass or really has something to hide? Saddam *HAD* WMDs, that's common knowledge and accepted.

If you define chemical weapons as WMD, fine, but those kind of WMD are hardly a threat to anyone (except someone who invades Iraq), and they have been an accepted part of conventional warfare since WWI. But the UN inspector Hans Blix made it clear that he was confident of the inspectors' ability to keep Iraq's WMD t

Has anyone ever considered that the Patriot Act(s) might just be a defense mechanism for PNAC (Project for a New American Century)? The PNAC needed some large reason to forge the plan for Pax Americana - global leadership by the USA. The warning flags for the 9/11/01 attacks were ignored/squelched and with the attacks Bush had a reason for PNAC planning to be brought to fruition.

Now the Patriot Act(s) were developed for three purposes - Placate the press and public by showing the administration is 'getting tough on terrorists', FUD for the populace and crushing dissent/sedition. Seen any massive riots lately? Maybe it is apathy, maybe it is not wanted to be labeled a seditious terrorist. Want proof that the administration doesn't care about international terrorists getting into the US? How about Bush putting a one-year delay on the new 'secure' passport, how about the fact that anything can still enter the country covertly (drug prices gone up lately; must be the supply/distribution is safe). Bush is more worried about homegrown dissent than any international terrorist. Hell, with these closed-system voting machines he won't have any trouble winning a re-election and after that Jeb will be ready for eight years.

Welcome to the new American Century. Please check rights, freedoms, education, employment, pay, pension, food, water, air and life-as-you-knew-it at the door...

Here are some links you might want to follow...
PNAC article
PNAC homepage

"Iraq continually violated those resolutions and was as uncooperative with the inspectors as it felt it could get away with without provoking another war."

Here are a few sources that contradict that claim:

Annan Calls Iraqi Cooperation 'Good'

Head of Atomic Energy Agency Will Tell Security Council
Saddam Has Done `Quite Satisfactory' Job in Cooperating

Iraq's cooperation active: Blix

I'm afraid that it is clear in retrospect that there was nothing that Iraq could have done that would have prevented the US from invading. I hope that you will understand that this is not an anti-american statement, but merely an observation of fact.

How to rig an electronic election.

here's a news source to back up the skimping on aids money. maybe i was wrong.
maybe it was only 1.5 billion. and maybe we havn't even paid up on our previous promises.
information about how effective condoms are used to be found at the cdc
this article from the villiage voice is about the pressure nonprofits are feeling to conform to the bush admin's line. it also includes info on USAID orgs and the pressure they are experiencing in relation to aid prevention/contraception work abroad.

as for the visas, hard to say. i dont think it really matters either way for this admin. whats good for America as a whole is irrelevant to these folks. but it sure is good for corporate America.

here's a news source to back up the skimping on aids money. maybe i was wrong.
maybe it was only 1.5 billion. and maybe we havn't even paid up on our previous promises.
information about how effective condoms are used to be found at the cdc
this article from the villiage voice is about the pressure nonprofits are feeling to conform to the bush admin's line. it also includes info on USAID orgs and the pressure they are experiencing in relation to aid prevention/contraception work abroad.

as for the visas, hard to say. i dont think it really matters either way for this admin. whats good for America as a whole is irrelevant to these folks. but it sure is good for corporate America.

Black Box Voting

The source code for the software used in one voting machine was discovered on the Internet, on an unprotected FTP site belonging to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. The software, when compiled and run in tests, showed that it appears to be the code used in the company's AccuVote-TS touch-screen terminals.

This software has been analyzed in detail at Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States. I think your stomach will start turning just a couple paragraphs in. No, let me start it turning for you: the backend database for this state-of-the-art touch-screen votiong machine is Microsoft Access. But that's only part of the story. Wait until you read about the hidden tables. More details here: How We Discovered The Backdoor. The actual code from the FTP site is here: Original Data.

I don't know about you, but I became a little nauseous reading this.... It's quite the yee-opener.

Some more on "problematic" election results:
Florida Ballots Project

Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

NY TImes: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say

The most stomach churning thing of all, I think, is the Christian Right connection to Deibold and ES&S.

If you find this stuff credible, spread the word around.

Krugman writes: "Lobbying jobs are a major source of patronage -- a reward for the loyal. More important, however, many lobbyists now owe their primary loyalty to the party, rather than to the industries they represent. So corporate cash, once split more or less evenly between the parties, increasingly flows in only one direction."

Cynthia McKinney is a hard-core anti-semite. When she finally lost her election, her father went on the national media blaming "the Jews". She had strong support from American anti-semitic groups, including some which have funded terrorist organizations.

"Um, no. There are no direct quotes of McKinney saying anything of the sort."

Yes there are. Here's one: "Today's revelations that the administration, and President Bush, were given months of notice that a terrorist attack". This is from McKinney herself.

She did not ask tough questions. She was making things up fueled by her anti-semitic terrorist friends.

No links to "irrefutable evidence" like that presented by Powell at the UN?

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
- Secretary of State Colin Powell before the United Nations, 2/5/03

Wasn't that a nice announcement for a 'cut and paste' job from a student paper?

Blair-Powell UN Report Written by Student

I will automatically assume that she does not (or soon will not) have the public's best interests at heart, and it has nothing to do with DoubleClick.

It has to do with the current Administration. I know, flame away, but the cronyism I've seen on display is... staggering. Absolutely staggering.

www.takebackthemedia.com
www.gnn.tv
www.pbs.org/now/
disinfo.com
www.truthout.org
www.propagandamatrix.com
www.indymedia.org
www.rense.com
www.infowars.com

4 principal nations agree with 'us' (including the US), and the remainder agreed to put their names on a list. Or do you think Cameroon and Eritrea are offering any sort of logitical support?

And, why do you think waiting won't help? I'm of the opinion that Saddam was under a microscope, and the inspectors were very close to deciding that there was very little, if anything else, to be found. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK trotted out nice high-res photos of the threat, and stated the thread. And the international community (such as it was) went along, because the threat was clear, and documented. Colin Powell certainly didn't help his case by falsifying nuclear arms details from a university term paper (and the fact that no one got fired over that is a major embarrasment). Had the inspectors finished and not found anything, that could have been even more embarrasing for the embattled US envoys.

I don't have any intelligence information, obviously. I'm not privy to any of that, and an cognizant of that fact. I am aware that the Inspectors repeatedly asked for this intelligence, the whereabouts of these WMDs, and was rebuffed. As was the CIA and the FBI, who are still asking for that information to this day. People are resigning over this left and right. This is public knowledge, and can be corroborated by the resignation speeches those people have released.

I can resort to 'a lot of Americans' as it's not a generalization, it's what I can witness. You do sound cocky when you simply decree your opinion of matters to be 'the truth'. But you seem like a reasonable person so I apologize.

If you're interested in learning where I formulate my opinion, read this.

Roadmap for War on Iraq and the New American Empire brought to by:

Elliott Abrams , Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney , Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes , Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle
Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld , Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz

xyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzy

MSN Slate
Truthout
The Guardian
BBC
Reuters

"We should be deluding neither ourselves nor the American people that there is any way the FBI, despite the various improvements you are implementing, will be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq."

Er, wow. Well, it occurs to me that Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide phenomenon, so it's not American media that's flawed, but that corporate agendas exert a baleful influence worldwide.

For further reading:

Paul Krugman of The New York Times on US/Europe media differences

His Master's Voice - The Guardian on the uniform pro-war line taken in all 175 Murdoch papers worldwide

It's been almost completely concluded that 9/11 happened because of US Intelligence failures.

Yeah, an intelligence failure like this? Or this? Or this? Or this? As opposed to the US Gov planning to invade Afghanistan before 9-11, to get a nice fat oil pipeline in there, and thus pissing off Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia being the country that almost all the highjackers came from, and the country funding Al Q'aida (sp?), and... err... the country supplying a very large portion of the USA's oil needs.

This TIA thing is research into how to improve it and prevent another 9/11.

War is good for business; there's arms manufacturers to please. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a good explanation, written by "Emannuel Goldstein"(sp?). It is also a nice handy tool to crush dissent. A simplistic example would be the way Ford in the UK filtered out, with the help of the government, "subversives" from job applicants, for fear of union activity. Now we all know how much the US Corporate Government loves worker's unions!

It has nothing to do with spying on anyone. And everything to do with spying on everyone, collectively. Googling for dissenters, if you will.

Try this: The disinfo quiz. And this: The ACLU Quiz.

The only intelligence failure in this world is that of the people happy to just sit on their lazy ignorant arses and be spoonfed the "news" by their governments and Big Corps, instead of taking a few minutes to find out what's really going on.

Sorry if I've hurt anyones delicate idealistic feelings, but it has to be said.

Ali

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2002

Journalist Helen Thomas condemns Bush administration

By Sarah H. Wright
MIT News Office

Veteran journalist Helen Thomas brought the grit and whir of a White House press conference to Bartos Theater on Monday evening, speaking with passion about the media's role in a democracy whose leaders seem eager for war.

Actually, the 82-year-old former United Press International reporter didn't just speak: she surged into her topic, giving everyone present an immediate sense of the grumpy wit and fierce precision that gave her reporting on American presidents Kennedy through Bush II such a competitive and lasting edge.

"I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter," said Thomas, who is now a columnist for Hearst News Service. "Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'" Her short list of answers seems not to vary from war, President Bush, timid office-holders, a muffled press and cowed citizens, pretty much in that order.

Angered by what she views as the Bush administration's "bullying drumbeat," Thomas referred early and often to her own hatred of war, quoting from poets and politicians to bear down on President Bush and his colleagues.

Winston Churchill, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis Brandeis, George Santayana, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. all made appearances in Thomas' sweeping portrayal of what she sees as the administration's betrayal of both the character and will of the American people and the principles of democracy.

"I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimize Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam," she said to enthusiastic applause.

Thomas ignored the clapping just as she once ignored the camera flashes and shouting matches of the Washington press corps.

"Where is the outrage?" she demanded. "Where is Congress? They're supine! Bush has held only six press conferences, the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. I'm on the phone to [press secretary] Ari Fleischer every day, asking will he ever hold another one? The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul."

Like any star, Thomas, who resigned from UPI in 2000, appreciated her audience's thirst to get the insider's view of our national leaders, and she gave generously, in snapshots, though the Reagan and both Bush regimes were cast in darker hues.

"Great presidents have great goals for mankind. During my years of covering the White House, Kennedy was the most inspired; Johnson rammed through voting rights and public housing; Nixon will be remembered for his trip to China and for his resignation; Ford for helping us recover from Nixon; and Carter for making human rights the centerpiece of foreign policy," Thomas said in an even, respectful tone. She just sighed over Clinton, who "tarnished the Oval Office."

Thomas' mood became visibly more somber at the mention of Ronald Reagan's military buildup and at the name Bush. Again and again, Thomas warned the MIT audience, "It's bombs away for Iraq and on our civil liberties if Bush and his cronies get their way. Dissent is patriotic!"

After her talk, Thomas participated in a panel discussion with MacVicar Faculty Fellows David Thorburn, professor of literature, and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science. Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, introduced the speakers.

"Helen Thomas offered a very powerful indictment of the current behavior of the Bush presidency in her comments on the incoherence and inconsistency of Bush's policies and the danger to civil liberties of Bush's rhetoric," said Thorburn.

He compared the lack of public awareness of an antiwar movement in 1965 and 1966 with the wide public debate about Iraq going on today. "An aroused citizenry can instruct the government," he said.

Stewart also focused on the current public debate about Iraq, declaring that it may be a "hopeful sign. The polls say Americans don't want to talk about Iraq - they want to talk about the economy, about education. But the press has continued to point out the important thing. Everyone knows there's been a dance between the President and Congress over Iraq."

Thomas didn't let the press off the hook, though. "Everybody learned the lessons of Vietnam, including the Pentagon. In Vietnam, correspondents could go anywhere - just hop on a helicopter and report on the war. Now we don't have that access. It's total secrecy. The media overlords should be complaining about this. I do not absolve the press. We've rolled over and played dead, too," she said.

Asked to advise young journalists, Thomas pounced. "Remind the politicians you interview that you pay them, that they are public servants. Remember every question is legitimate. And don't give up. There's always a leak. There's always someone who's trying to save the country," she said.

The talk was sponsored by the MIT Communications Forum.

I wonder how Eric would like it if someone "modded" his article to change the conclusion and then posted it on their website?

I think this is a more interesting question than everyone else who has yet responded to the thread.

First of all, even a literal quotation with certain small twists in a serious work has been accepted as "satire" by U.S. courts. The question is, when the work infringes commercially with potential profit in the same target audience market then the work is no longer considered satire. But satire is some of the most protected speech in the U.S. (unless it is directed against judges or law enforcement, which gives the authors a much rougher time.)

Second of all, the fair use doctrine of the Berne convention and U.S. law allows the extensive literal reproduction of and derivation from news articles. Many nonprofit and commercial sites take advantage of this fact. You could claim that a changed conclusion results in a derivative work, even if you copied all the quotes and facts verbatim.

Third of all, every single reporter in the world LOVES it when his or her work shows up in thousands of email inboxes, even in edited or truncated form. The only real problems in this realm occured when freelance work with limited publication rights started ending up verbatim in LEXIS/NEXIS, which was a big messy lawsuit around 1995 or so. If anyone is losing anything in article redistribution, it's the publishers, not the reporters, and even the publishers in practice acknoledge that the free advertising from widely-disseminated quality work is worth a lot more than the possible market value loss.

Fourth of all, I think this is a remarkably good idea. Why don't you do it and ask the author what he thinks of it?

I have a feeling that there is more to the question than was meant to be in it. An interesting experiment awaits!

Fear not, my friend! Our fearless selected, not elected, leader: George W Bush, is planning on having a veritable SWAT team to deal with these rich moneybags. Of course, the shenanigans he pulled at Harken Energy Corp. were "legitimate disagreements over accounting practices." The disagreement, apparently, was that some people thought that you should be held responsible for doing illegal acts, while others felt that rich shits like the Bushes don't need to be held to the same standard as a black guy stealing $23.50 from a vending machine (10 years jail).

Oh gosh no. It makes perfect sense. We all know that the war against Afghanistan is to provide American Oil Companies with a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan". The photo is just one reporter behind enemy lines at Disney trying to get the truth out.