Politics

I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.

— Ari Fleischer, as quoted in the New York Times

Does that make any sense at all?

(via Lambert)

Bush didn’t make any friends at his stop at the Senegalese island Goree yesterday. After touring the island site that was a launching ground for slave traders, Bush gave an anti-slavery speech. Unfortunately, all the residents of the island had been herded up and penned in a football stadium. So much for anti-slavery.

“We never want to see him come here again,” said N’diaye, hiking her loose gown onto her shoulders with a frown.

As the sun rose over Goree before Bush’s arrival, the only people to be seen on the main beach were U.S. officials and secret service agents. Frogmen swam through the shallows and hoisted themselves up to peer into brightly painted pirogues.

Normally, the island teems with tourists, Senegal’s ubiquitous traders, hawkers of cheap African art, photographers offering to take pictures and all the expected trappings of a tourist hot-spot in one of the world’s poorest countries.

On Tuesday, shutters on the yellow and red colonial-style houses remained shut. The cafes were closed and the narrow pier deserted, apart from security agents manning a metal detector, near the sandy beach. A gunship patrolled offshore.

“We understand that you have to have security measures, since September 11, but to dump us in another place…? We had to leave at 6 a.m. I didn’t have time to bathe, and the bread did not arrive,” the father-of-four said.

“We were shut up like sheep,” said 15-year-old Mamadou.

Absolutely disgusting.

(via Atrios)

I just stumbled across this video clip from the Guerrilla News Network — roughly 10 minutes of soundbites stitched together into a presentation that’s alternately frightening, funny, and poignant. Well worth the time to download and watch.

Culled from over 20 hours of television footage recorded over a one month period and across 13 networks, S-11 Redux is a sound-bite blitzkrieg that challenges the messages we have been fed from our mainstream media and the government it serves. Be warned — this video moves quickly and will require at least two viewings to digest its full impact.

(via grid)

Ever since the hanging chad and botched elections of 2000, there’s been a push to move to a newer, fancier, more high-tech electronic voting system that would eliminate the problems faced in that election. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Easier to count, data logs with accountability, and all sorts of fancy computerized goodies.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the reality looks to be falling far short of what is actually needed. New Zealand’s Scoop magazine has a very disturbing article examining Diebold’s electronic voting machines, and investigating just how secure they really are. It’s not good news.

The GEMS election file contains more than one “set of books.” They are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see them if you go into Microsoft Access.

You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.

Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you count them from room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in the files we examined was to count the votes from “room2.”

There’s a lot more in the article, none of it encouraging. A new frontier for voting? Or just more ways to botch up the system? I’m afraid it looks like the latter to me.

(via Lambert)

There’s an interesting online quiz that, for once, is actually a bit more serious than the standard “What [fill in the blank] are you?” quizes that float around fairly often. This one is the Presidential Candidate Selector, which uses a series of questions about how you feel on various issues to determine which candidate’s views are most in line with your own.

I ran through it, and here’s my results:

1. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH – Democrat (100%)
2. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT – Democrat (83%)
3. Sharpton, Reverend Al – Democrat (83%)
4. Edwards, Senator John, NC – Democrat (79%)
5. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL – Democrat (79%)
6. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO – Democrat (78%)
7. Kerry, Senator John, MA – Democrat (78%)
8. Lieberman Senator Joe CT – Democrat (69%)
9. Graham, Senator Bob, FL – Democrat (66%)
10. Libertarian Candidate (44%)
11. Phillips, Howard – Constitution (6%)
12. Bush, George W. – US President (1%)
13. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. – Democrat (-7%)

Overall, it seemed to do a fairly good job. I’ve known I’m not 100% in line with Dean’s views, but being 100% in agreement with a candidate is far less important to me than the combination of agreeing with most of what they have to say, and their viability as a candidate. I’ll probably want to take a closer look at Kuchinich — to this point, I’ve only given him a fairly cursory glance — but from what I know right now, I’m definitely sticking with Dean as my candidate of choice.

(via Robert)

There’s an excellent overview of Howard Dean in today’s Washington Post. It’s been getting linked to on quite a few sites, with quite a few different pull quotes used, but here’s part that made me laugh:

On a hot Sunday afternoon at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles, the California Teachers Association was nearing the end of a two-day conference. More than 800 delegates sat in a ballroom with the stuffy, bottled-up feel of an airplane. They were ready to go home. But first, Dean was going to speak.

That in itself was unusual. The 333,000-member union, the largest in the state, is stingy with invitations to politicians. But Dean, the only current presidential candidate invited to speak to the association so far, had generated a buzz. Some union officials had heard Dean speak in April at the state Democratic convention in Sacramento, and they wanted to hear him again. Others, who hadn’t heard him, wanted to know what the fuss was about.

Dean came on like Beethoven, capturing the crowd with his first four notes.

“I taught eighth-grade social studies for three months,” he said, “so I can personally say that I am the only person running for the presidency of the United States that knows what it’s like to stand up without being able to go to the bathroom for five hours.”

Bingo.

After 15 minutes, Dean told the audience he was going to wrap it up.

“Awwww” pulsed through the ballroom.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen that ,” said Wayne Johnson, who was the union’s president until the end of June. “No one in all the years I’ve been with this organization, no speaker, has ever had that kind of reaction.”

(via newsguyatl)

The Government Information Awareness website just might be one of the coolest things I’ve stumbled across recently, thanks to this article from Wired News.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab unveiled the Government Information Awareness , or GIA, website Friday. Using applications developed at the Media Lab, GIA collects and collates information about government programs, plans and politicians from the general public and numerous online sources. Currently the database contains information on more than 3,000 public figures.

The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know personal details about citizens, then citizens have a right to similar information about the government.

GIA was inspired by the federal government’s Terrorist Information Awareness, or TIA, program.

[…]

GIA allows people to explore data, track events, find patterns and build profiles related to specific government officials or political issues. Information about campaign finance, corporate ties and even religion and schooling can be accessed easily. Real-time alerts can be generated when news of interest is breaking.

“History shows that when information is concentrated in the hands of an elite, democracy suffers,” said Csikszentmihályi. “The writers of the Constitution told us that if people mean to be their own governors, they must arm themselves with information. This project brings that American spirit of self-governance into the era of networked information technology.”

GIA site users can submit information about public figures and government programs anonymously. In an attempt to ensure the accuracy of submitted data, the system automatically contacts the appropriate government officials and offers them an opportunity to confirm or deny submitted data.

But like an FBI file, information is not purged if the subject denies its veracity; the denial is simply added to the file. McKinley wryly added that those government officials who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from GIA.

I spent a few minutes poking around on the GIA website, and I’ve gotta say, this is an impressive, and potentially extremely useful site. For examples, take a look at their pages for Seattle Representative Jim McDermott, or Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Unfortunately, their page for President George Bush leaves a bit to be desired just yet.

Anyway, good stuff, and a great project.

Public opinion of the war in Iraq is starting to shift — most prominently at the military bases that have supplied the troops currently stationed in Iraq.

“I want my husband home,” Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. “I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they’re not welcome.”

Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. Since major combat for the 150,000 troops in Iraq was declared over on May 1, more than 60 Americans, including 25 killed in hostile encounters, have died in Iraq, about half the number of deaths in the two months of the initial campaign.

Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.

“They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back,” said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.

The signs of discomfort seem to be growing beyond the military bases. According to a Gallup poll published on Tuesday, the percentage of the public who think the war is going badly has risen to 42 percent, from 13 percent in May. Likewise, the number of respondents who think the war is going well has dropped, from 86 percent in May to 70 percent a month ago to 56 percent.

(via xowie)

Very interesting Alternet article from last week that I just picked up on looking at the way Bush uses langauge to his advantage. Not in the way he consistantly mangles words and phrases, but in the way he uses domineering language and empty statments to put himself in a nearly unassailable position.

George W Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language — especially negatively charged emotional language — as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.

President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others. Abusive language has been a major theme of psychological researchers on marital problems, such as John Gottman, and of philosophers and theologians, such as Josef Pieper. But little has been said about the key role it has come to play in political discourse, and in such “hot media” as talk radio and television.

Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will.

Of course, this was before his “Bring ’em on” gaffe of last week. How do you explain that one away, aside from pure blundering incompetence?

(via Larry Halff)

Well, there are now \$25 million bounties out for both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. I’m sure that’ll help.

(sighs)

(via Leah)