Politics

…for the Bush/Cheney re-election ticket in 2004:

Re-Elect Pass the Buck and Wag the Dog for President in 2004!

I love this from a Powell briefing in Africa:

But to think that somehow we went out of our way to insert this single sentence into the State of the Union address for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the American people is an overdrawn, overblown, overwrought conclusion.

It’s a non-denial denial!

“…went out of our way” — Who said the Bush administration ever needed to go out of its way to lie?

“…this single sentence…” — Right, the one that implied that Saddam was threatening us with nuclear weapons?

“…for the purpose of deceiving the American people…” — But for some other purpose it would be OK?

“…overdrawn, overblown, overwrought…” — Every “un” but “untrue”!

A good lawyer must have crafted that sentence, eh?

(via Lambert)

Howard Dean’s statment in response to the recent revelations (confirmations?) that the premise for the war in Iraq was based on lies:

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s statement yesterday — that he only found out that the Niger documents were forgeries — “within recent days” was stunning.

What is now clear is that there are those in this administration that misled the President, misled the nation, and misled the world in making the case for the war in Iraq.

They know who they are. And they should resign today.

There will be investigations, and the truth will come out — the American people must know the truth — and those in this administration must be held accountable for their failure to give us the truth before we went to war.

But we do not need to wait for the investigations to rid these people from our government — they can resign on their own today.

I am now convinced more than ever that it was a mistake to have given this administration a blank check to engage in this war — as too many in Congress did when they supported the Iraqi war resolution.

The CBS report is being linked to all over the ‘net (as well it should be). Dean has set up a petition calling for the resignation of the guilty parties, and both Kuchinich and MoveOn have similar petitions.

(via Mathew Gross, Lambert, and Kos)

U.S. report on 9/11 to be ‘explosive’:

A long-awaited final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be released in the next two weeks, containing new information about U.S. government mistakes and Saudi financing of terrorists.

Former Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and who has read the report, said it will be “highly explosive” when it becomes public.

[…]

The report will show that top Bush administration officials were warned in the summer of 2001 that the al Qaeda terrorist network had plans to hijack aircraft and launch a “spectacular attack.”

Hill would not discuss details of the report, but said it will contain “new information” about revelations made last year, when the joint House-Senate investigation held nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions.

The final report was completed in December. Since then a working group of Bush administration intelligence officials has “scrubbed” the report, objecting to additional public disclosures.

Could be very, very interesting.

But — keep in mind that no matter what the report contains, it has already been “scrubbed” by the Powers That Be. Who knows what was lost at that point. And, additionally, as Kos points out:

…people are going to play the expectations game. In this case, the administration has an interest in really hyping the report, leaking suggestions that it will be, well, “explosive”. That way the actual report can’t live up to the expectations and the press will think, “oh, it’s really not that bad”.

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)