The dismal fifth-place showing by Senator Joseph Lieberman in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday serves as both reminder and motivator to the other Democratic presidential candidates on what it will take to win in November. For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement — one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.

You see, I am a Movement Liberal, and I am tired of getting my head stomped on for the last 20 years by the radical ideologues of the Movement Conservatives. The Presidency is not enough for me. They've wanted my head, and now I want theirs.

But isn't Anybody But Bush better than Bush, you ask? Think about it. What chance will a non-Movement Democrat have with a Congress and Supreme Court stacked with Movement Conservatives? If you thought what they did to Clinton was bad, remember, they have further consolidated their power since then, and they are going to be mad as hell if Bush gets beaten. (It couldn't after all be Bush's fault, could it?)

But that's only the start. Greenspan is going to extraordinary lengths to hold together the jobless recovery until after the election. After that, all bets are off. And where Bush has positioned the country, you can almost bet on a severe crash. If a Democrat is in, that Democrat will get blamed, and the Movement Conservatives will further entrench themselves. The worst of all possible worlds.

So no, it is not sufficient to simply win the Presidency; we must also bring along our "Movement" if we do. If the Democrats want to simply put up a "safe" candidate, then I just can't go along. Better to vote for Bush and have the chance that way of sweeping out the Movement Conservatives as they finish wrecking the economy and launch war after war. And if worse comes to worse, we can all just have four more years of fun trying to impeach the bastard.

A Benedict@Large Opinion.

• Register to vote in your State;
• Report a change of name to your voter registration office;
• Report a change of address to your voter registration office; or
• Register with a political party.

This on-line registration service is provided by the Democratic National Committee, though you need not register as a Democrat to avail yourself of it. I've used it myself (to alter my party affiliation), and it's quite easy.

Howard Dean has joined the list of victims of U.S. corporate media consolidation. Dean shares this distinction with Dennis Kucinich and the people of the formerly sovereign state of Iraq, among many others. Dean was stripped of half his popular support in the space of two weeks in January while John Kerry – tied in the polls with Carol Moseley-Braun at seven percent just two months earlier – rose like a genie from a bottle to become the overnight presidential frontrunner. Both candidates were shocked and disoriented by the dizzying turns of fortune, and for good reason. Neither Dean nor Kerry had done anything on their own that could have so dramatically altered the race. Corporate America decided that Dean must be savaged, and its media sector made it happen.

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.

In a highly unusual pairing, the Republican and Democratic party organizations for citizens living abroad have banded together against the Pentagon's Internet voting program for the presidential election.

Concerns about the security of the online ballots could cast the entire election under a cloud of suspicion, they said in a joint letter urging a halt in the program. The letter released yesterday is being sent to several congressional committees.

"We do not want to undermine confidence in our system of voting by discovering some real or imagined fraud in the November balloting," wrote the leaders of Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad.

• There are numerous vulnerabilities through which these systems could be hacked.

• Some of these can be addressed prior to the March primaries.

• Some additional vulnerabilities can be address prior to the November general election.

• Ultimately, Diebold election software has to be rewritten to meet industry security standards.

"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits" that allowed tampering, said Michael Wertheimer, the Red Team leader and a former security expert for the National Security Agency. Referring to the inconsistent application of security, he added, "It's like washing your face and drying it with a dirty towel."

William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security." He added, "It seemed everywhere we scratched, there was something that's pretty troubling."

[Additional coverage from the Washington Post.]

A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.

...

The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: Did he have a gun or a knife -- or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."

The cops roll their eyes -- another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"

The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? ...

Via Avedon from and an original post at The Great Divide.

In that post, I linked to a Telegraph/UK article where David Kay essentially reversed himself when he claimed that he doubted Iraq had any WMDs for years before the war, this time saying that "some components of Saddam's WMD programme" had been moved to Syria. Now why Saddam (or any dictator) would want to simply give anything like this away, especially to a neighbor, is beyond me and perhaps beyond rationality itself. Be that as it may, consider Kay's statement itself. If it is true, then it also most certainly is classified. If it is classified, then Kay could not say it to the Telegraph/UK without the permission for someone in that beehive of Neoconism, the Department of Defense. And even if it were disinformation, he'd still need DoD approval to say it.

From StageLeft now comes a statement by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts that there is "some concern Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had gone to Syria." One more finger pointing at Syria.

Now, on Syria's part comes the denial by Syrian Minister Ahmad al-Hassan: "This (allegation) is meant to mislead (the public opinion). So long as there were no weapons of mass destruction (found) in Iraq itself how can they be in Syria?" Of course, he's right on both points here. But then al-Hassan continues, "They are seeking to cover their failure," but here he is at least partly wrong. Sure, it would be nice to have a cover story for the failure, but in light of Kay's new allegation (reversal), clearly, there is a greater purpose: Syria is being set up.

O.K., I made that allegation in the earlier post, but wait. Just a while back, National Security Advisor, Condi Rice was denying the Syrian allegation: "... I want to be clear: So far we do not have indicators that can be considered authentic and serious that this had taken place." And just Saturday, Secretary of State Colin Powell was dancing around Kay's earlier statements saying that Iraq hadn't had WMDs in years; dancing, but certainly neither denying them nor updating them with Kay's latest allegation. What? Didn't he get the memo about Syria?

Of course, Powell didn't get any memo about Syria, because there was no memo about Syria. What's going on here is that we're back to the same old games where DoD is trying to whoop up the fever for (another) war by making end runs around State and the NSC. Forget the fact that DoD has amply demonstrated that it doesn't know how to run one of these wars, being a Neocon is never having to say you're sorry.

Children Must Play.

Which gets to the real point here. Bush is clearly trying to run for re-election as some sort of skilled Commander-in-Chief, and yet he can't even manage his own immediate staff. No doubt he is not even aware that his children are once again fighting, and one might easily suspect that he still doesn't even know about the first time. This is a skilled Commander-in-Chief?

No. This is the man Paul O'Neill descibed; disengaged and uninvolved. A "blind man in a roomful of deaf people". And he is also the man with his finger on the trigger of the most powerful arsenal in the history of the world.

This article previously appeared on Benedict@Large.

• DRE voting systems have been widely criticized elsewhere for various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities: that their software is totally closed and proprietary; that the software undergoes insufficient scrutiny during qualification and certification; that they are especially vulnerable to various forms of insider (programmer) attacks; and that DREs have no voter-verified audit trails (paper or otherwise) that could largely circumvent these problems and improve voter confidence. All of these criticisms, which we endorse, apply directly to SERVE as well.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

Arthur Silver, The Light of Reason: Well, leave it to the most hawkish of the hawks to prove my point ... that nothing -- not the facts, not the disintegration of all their arguments for war with Iraq in the cold light of day, not the fact that our military is close to the breaking point now -- nothing will slow the hawks down in their plans to "remake" the Middle East.

Not content to leave bad enough alone, David Kay has some news for us, beyond the fact that with regard to Iraq's "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq": "I don't think they existed." No, Mr. Kay has this additional tidbit to impart:

David Kay: We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons. But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved.

No, no, no. This doesn't even begin to make sense. This is too transparent. This is the Neocons trying to set Syria up. And they don't give a damn if Syria has WMDS or not. Just like they didn't give a damn if Iraq did or not.

"There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," he said.

"War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."

He said it was no use having an army that did nothing but train.

Just one more "bring 'em on" moment.

You've really got to hand it to these guys. They are consistent. They've been calling for our exit from the UN since before Ronald Reagan. But the "tooth fairy"?

The United Nations is the tooth fairy of American politics: Few adults believe in it, but it's generally regarded as a harmless story to amuse the children. Since 9/11, however, the U.N. has ceased to be harmless, and the Democratic presidential candidates' enthusiasm for it has ceased to be amusing.

The United Nations has emerged at best as irrelevant to the terrorist threat that most concerns us, and at worst as an obstacle to our winning the war on terrorism. It must be reformed. And if it cannot be reformed, the United States should give serious consideration to withdrawal.

The U.N. has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States' ability to defend itself. If these limits ever made sense at all, they do not make sense now.

But allow me to digress. I attributed this to Perle, because Frum probably wrote the article (and the book -- he was a speechwriter for the Chimp), but the ideas all belong to Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle, who is a consultant to Rummy and, let's not forget, a very rich arms broker. No conflict of interest there, is there, Dick?

But there's more:

The trouble is that the U.N. defines aggression in outdated ways. For the U.N., "aggression" means invasion across national borders. Send Nazi shock troops into Poland -- that's aggression. Give sanctuary to thousands of anti-American murderers, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, that's not aggression.

In other words, under U.N. rules, the U.S. is obliged to let terrorists strike first before retaliating -- and might even be prohibited from striking second.

We need new rules recognizing that harboring terrorists is just as much an act of aggression as an invasion and that those who are targeted by terrorists have an inherent right to defend themselves, preemptively if necessary.

Of course, it won't be easy to persuade the U.N. to adopt these changes.

And finally:

In a little more than a decade, our world has been transformed, first by the fall of the Soviet Union and then the events of 9/11. Everything has changed -- except for the U.N. It remains an invention of a vanished era, designed to solve vanished problems.

Listen up, Dick. You too, Dave. Spend a little time brushing up on your composition skills. Otherwise, you just might end up getting published in the LA Times and looking STUPID.

Oil and politics make an intoxicating cocktail ­ addictive, but with deadly consequences. It has always been so.

Just look at the events of the past three decades: the rise of OPEC in the early 1970s and its spectacular initial success in setting global oil prices; the 1973 Arab oil embargo that shook Western economies to the core; last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq, a country that happens to possess the world’s second-largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia. Not to mention the often repeated call by neoconservatives in America to “occupy” Arab oil countries.

Just a few weeks ago: the arrest of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, head of the Yukos energy firm, when he “defied” a Kremlin directive by trying to sell a major stake of his firm to ExxonMobil.

To understand the meaning of the Kremlin’s move against Yukos, it is important to appreciate that ExxonMobil is one of the world’s two largest corporations, along with General Electric, and the biggest of all oil companies. It is therefore a major player in American politics.

The bottom line in all these episodes is the same: Oil is the one strategic commodity of the world that governments, from superpowers to minor states, will never allow to be free of political control.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it? ...

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again across Latin America, in Africa and in Central and Southeast Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media don't just support the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a moral position they have chosen to take; it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media work.

In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the very least, the marginalization--of dissent.

So what is the Standard's problem? It seems that Edwards hasn't named his campaign contributors. Well, wait a minute. All of that is reported quarterly by law. So Edwards waits until then? So does Bush.

But, oh no, it must be those evil trial lawyers sending Edwards money. Well duh? He was one. You might expect them to like his candidacy.

I'll tell you. If this is the best that Bill Kristol's boys can do against Edwards, they should save their typespace. I would have been ashamed to put my name on such a shabby article.

But the Pentagon is standing by the system, which could get its first test Feb. 3 in South Carolina. ...

So far, seven states have signed on to the experimental system: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

Internet voting has been viewed as a possible cure for some of the ills that afflict the mechanics of American democracy. Recently, the technology has seemed to move ahead of any serious consideration of whether it is actually a good idea to allow home computer owners to choose a president in the same way they order bath towels online or send e-mail to their relatives. But now there are grave questions about whether even the technology makes sense.

Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report this week, concluding that the program should be halted. These four are the only members of a 10-member advisory committee to issue a report on the program. Their findings make it clear that the potential for hackers to steal votes or otherwise subvert elections electronically is too high. Congress should suspend the program.

The intentions behind the Pentagon's plan, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, are laudable. Military personnel overseas, and other Americans abroad, face obstacles to registering and voting. The new program would ease the way by allowing them to use any computer hooked up to the Internet. This year, it would be limited to voters abroad who are from one of 50 counties in seven states, but it could eventually be used by all of the estimated six million American voters overseas.

But the advantages of the Pentagon's Internet voting system would be far outweighed by the dangers it would pose. The report makes it clear that the possibilities for compromising the secrecy of the ballot, voting multiple times and carrying out vote theft on a large scale would be limited only by the imagination and skill of would-be saboteurs. Viruses could be written that would lodge on voters' computers and change their votes. Internet service providers, or even foreign governments that control network access, could interfere with votes before they reached their destination.

This week's report — which was written by respected scientists, including Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University — is not the first to call Internet voting into question. A March 2001 study conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and financed by the National Science Foundation found that Internet systems like the Pentagon's "pose significant risk to the integrity of the voting process."

There is every reason to believe that if federal elections can be tampered with, they will be, particularly when a single hacker, working alone, might be able to use an online voting system to steal a presidential election. The authors of this week's report concede that there is no way of knowing how likely it is that the Pentagon's voting system would be compromised. What is clear, however, is that until the vulnerabilities they identified are eliminated, the risks are too great.

While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ”a legal person”, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.

What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres.

To carry out this choice bit of war profiteering, Halliburton hooked up with Altanmia Marketing of Kuwait. Altanmia was given exclusive rights to ship Kuwaiti gasoline to Iraq -- "even though it had no prior experience transporting fuel," U.S. Congressional investigators report. So what is the firm's actual expertise? Investments, real estate -- and acting as "representative agents for companies trading in military and nuclear, biological and chemical equipment," The Wall Street Journal reports.

In other words, Halliburton's new partner traffics in the essential elements of WMD -- the very stuff whose spread and sale the United States is ostensibly dedicated to stopping around the world. Ostensibly. But as always with the Bushists, the rhetoric of "security" is a thin rag to cover their unquenchable thirst for state-supported brigandage.

The problem has always been what President Eisenhower loosely called “the military-industrial complex.” That is, if the USA comes to terms with all the rogue states of the world who were aligned with Moscow or Beijing in the Cold War, there would no enemies to guard against or to defeat if they were deemed imminent threats. Public support for defense spending would dry up and the Pentagon would wind up living on crumbs, as it was in the 1930's.

This was not to be however. Bush, Sr. refused all solicitations by the Libyan government. Hart questions why:

I anticipate (sic) obvious questions in response to these facts. Why me? The only plausible explanation is that I had publicly condemned (based largely on my experience on the Church committee, which revealed previous assassination plots) President Reagan's attempt to assassinate Gaddafi by long-range bomber in 1986. Was I singled out? Not really; others had been approached. Do I believe the offer was rejected because the Swiss would demand jurisdiction over the bombers in the 40 feet between airplanes? Not in the least. Was the offer rejected because the intermediary was a Democrat? The first Bush administration will have to respond to that question.

This account suggests, and strongly so, only one thing: We might have brought the Pan Am bombers to justice, and quite possibly have moved Libya out of its renegade status, much sooner than we have. At the very least it calls into serious question the assertion that Libya changed direction as a result of our preemptive invasion of Iraq.

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

Let's look at some potential and actual problems:

• Technical:
  • Viruses can easily corrupt voting computers and servers, possibly rendering them inoperable. If this were not detected and corrected in advance, voters may be denied the opportunity to vote. Even if these could be detected in advance, there is no guarantee that skilled personnel will be available to correct the problem.
  • Viruses can easily corrupt the voting computers and servers in a manner that misrecords or deliberately alters the votes cast. These viruses can also be programmed to delete themselves once voting was completed.
  • Even viruses that do not attack the voting computers and servers themselves can cause the communications lines that carry their messages to become overloaded, thereby denying voters the opportunity to vote.
  • Soldiers stationed in areas subject to power failures could be denied the opportunity to vote by such a failure.
  • Systems such as Carnivour could easily intercept and even change internet votes

• Practical:
  • It is the responsibility of each voting supervisor to verify the eligibility of every person casting a vote to actually be eligible to cast a vote in their district. Military write-in voting offers at least a cursory opportunity for the voting supervisor to just that. The system being implemented by the military will simply forward vote totals to the various districts. Voting supervisors will thus be placed in the position of accepting a mere vote count without any possibility of verifying that individuals are eligible.
  • Voting supervisors will be unable to inspect the voting computers being used to insure that they meet local standards.
  • Paper trails and systems audits will be impossible for voting supervisors.

• Political:
  • Most troublesome is the fact that this system essentially militarizes a portion of our voting system, bring it under direct control of the military. Inspection by elected officials and/or their appointees will be impossible. The military simply should not be a part of our voting process beyond their current role of providing all soldiers the opportunity to vote.
  • This system is being suggested as a "pilot test" of a future national voting system. This would have the potential of bringing the majority of our voting system under military control. Since the military is effectively under the control of the Executive, the Executive could literally order the military to tamper with the vote.

This article also appears at Black Box Notes.

WASHINGTON - A House committee recommended legislation Wednesday that would provide for fast special elections if a terrorist attack killed or incapacitated many House members.

The measure would require expedited elections under "extraordinary circumstances" when the speaker of the House announces that vacancies in the 435-member chamber exceed 100.

The bill stipulates that parties choose candidates within 10 days of that announcement and that state elections be held within 45 days.

The legislation has also been approved by the House Administration Committee and now goes to the full House for consideration.

Pardon me if I smell a rat.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

George Bush doesn't want you to know. And so Health and Human Services didn't tell you.

George Bush didn't want you to know about the quality of asbestos-tainted air at Ground Zero after 9/11. And so the Environmental Protection Agency didn't tell you.

George Bush doesn't want you to know that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer. And so the National Cancer Institute won't tell you that anymore.

George Bush doesn't want you to know that there is no link between education about condom use and increased sexual activity. And so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won't tell you you that anymore.

Here's what George Bush wants you to know.

Some people lie by omission. Some people lie by comission.

George Bush is good at both.

Daschle: "When I was driving around South Dakota this summer, I met a nurse in Sioux Falls who has cancer. She told me that she couldn't afford the $1,500 a month her drugs cost. She told me that she was going to die, that she was a lost cause. But, she said, we must solve this problem; don't turn more people into lost causes."

• Why the Bible Belt supports Bush's big-dollar marriage push: This is just too funny. Avedon quotes extensively from a Newsday article that takes note of the fact that conservative Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics. Avedon's cut is funny enough, but the original will have you rolling.

  As Avedon concludes however, it's not nice to laugh at other people's troubles, but maybe they should stop marrying their cousins?

• Why I'm not a libertarian (Just scroll down from the above link): I'm not a libertarian, but as Avedon points out, it easy for many of us liberals to find common cause with those who are and visa-versa; there is a shared commitment to individual rights. Avedon offers some quite worthwhile comments on her feelings on this, but the bulk of this article is long excepts from a 1997 article by Seth Finkelstein called Libertarianism Makes You Stupid. While I think the article title is a bit overblown (there are some libertarians out there doing seriously good writing), this article is perhaps the best deconstruction of the flaws of libertarianism that I've seen to date. I won't get into its line of argument here, but if you're ever arguing political philosophy with a Libertarian, you'll want to have this article bookmarked. There is a definite reason why Avedon has kept it handy for so long.

• Not from Avedon, but worthwhile in light of the Libertarian article above. Libertarianism is regarded as quite conservative and quite to the right of center. Even its adherents acknowledge that it is well to the right of mainstream conservatism (as opposed to the "New Right", ... which most Libertarians detest, by the way). So how to explain the newly-emerging bond between Liberals and Libertarians? After all, they are almost polar opposites on the scale.

  In fact, it is the scale itself that is the probem. By it's one-dimensional nature, you can only be left of center or right of center, and nuance is excluded. Enter The Political Compass.

  What the political compass does is add a second dimension to one's political orientation. I won't explain that here because the site starts out with a test to place the visitor on this two-dimensional scale, and they don't want the test results to be prejudiced by foreknowledge of what they are trying to measure. That said however, I found it pretty much nailed my view of myself, and though a few personal friends complained about their scores, I found those scores to be pretty much in line with how I viewed their politics.

  Anyways, the test is fun, and you'll be placed among a chart of major political personalities. (For the record, I'm really close to the Dalai Lama.) If you haven't taken this test yet, go ahead, have some fun.

  [Note: If you've taken the test before, they've added a new chart with all of the Presidential hopefuls on it.]

Al-Qaeda has issued a chilling new call to arms to recruits who remain undetected by security agencies. In a terrorist manual published on the internet, Osama bin Laden says: "After Iraq and Afghanistan will come the Crusader invasion of Saudi Arabia. All fighters all over the world must be ready." ...

It is directed at new volunteers who are 'below the radar' of counter-terrorist authorities and who cannot break cover to undergo formal training in terrorist techniques. Like bin Laden, Zawahiri is quoted in the publication, called 'The Base of the Vanguard'. Other writers encourage the use of weapons of mass destruction.

"That's certainly not something Wal-Mart would condone."

We need to get this jerk out of the White House and Ashcroft out of Justice. They simply will not accept responsibility for their inactions.

Max also thinks it is crazy that a few people – maybe even only Paul Wolfowitz – with only a few impoverished thinktanks behind them (AEI, PNAC, the Olin, Bradley and Smith-Richardson Foundations) can create and control American foreign policy. He says neocons have been "relatively influential" only because their arguments are so good, not their connections. That’s probably why Dick Cheney placed so many previously connected thinktank guys in key positions at the Pentagon, within his own office, and in parts of the State Department so as to more easily roll those who weren’t convinced of the wisdom of those good neo-con arguments. ...

Max also denies that neocons are unilateralists, or Manichean simpletons who cherish the idea of noble lies and the stealthy practice of electoral politics by other means. Well, of course they aren’t unilateralist or Manichean–if you are with them, then you are certainly not against them.

That said, we must remember the "chads" and Florida, 2000. Paper is hardly infallible, and it's fallibility is hardly restricted to hanging chads. I side with those who Lynn has mentioned who want machine produced paper ballots that then become the actual vote itself. This would remove entirely the need for an audit of any voting machines that were actually used by voters. If an error occurred on that paper ballot, it could simply be torn up, and the voter could vote again. If a similar problem occurred on that same voting machine, local offficials would be immediately aware of it, and could simply disable that machine. All of this would be fully observable by poll watches from any party that chose to have one present.

But on to my objections.

Let's start with billionaire George Soros, the Democrats anointed billionaire savior. They should get to know him better. According to voting rights activists, Soros is a proponent of Internet voting, the most insecure voting technology on face of the planet. He's also a disciple for Direct Democracy (i.e., the initiative process). Think about that. For anyone who wants to control a government, the combination of the Internet voting and Direct Democracy is a fascist's dream-team. Through control of vote-counting technology, not only could "someone" pick our legislators, they could also pass their own legislation. They could be a true Wizard of Oz.

In this speech, Soros skewers the Bush administration for its decision to invade Iraq, and indeed, it may be almost solely for this action that he wishes to see Bush defeated in the coming election:

Underlying the Bush doctrine is the belief that international relations are relations of power not law, and that international law merely serves to ratify what the use of power has wrought.

This dogma can be very appealing especially when you are powerful, but it contradicts the values that have made America great. And the rest of the world cannot possibly accept it.

andThe invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the Bush doctrine and the rest of the world had an allergic reaction to it. Nobody had a good word to say about Saddam Hussein yet the overwhelming majority of the people and governments of the world opposed the invasion because we did it unilaterally, indulging in pre-emptive military action.andIf we reelect Bush in 2004 we endorse the Bush doctrine and we will have to live with the consequences. We shall be regarded with widespread hostility and terrorists will be able to count on many sympathizers around the world. We are liable to be trapped in a vicious circle of violence, ... 2004 is not an ordinary election; it is a referendum on the Bush doctrine. The future of the world hangs in the balance.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to the dangers than most Americans because of my background. I was born in Hungary and I am Jewish. The Nazis occupied Hungary and the Jews were deported. I would have perished if my father had not had the foresight to procure false identities for his family. Then Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union and my life could have been wasted if I had not emigrated. So I learnt at a very early age how important it is what kind of social system prevails. I chose freedom, first in England and then in America.

As a student I was greatly influenced by Karl Popper, the philosopher. He showed that there was something common to both the Nazis and the Communists. They believed they had the final answers. But the ultimate truth is not within our reach. So the final answers can be imposed only by force or repression. He advocated a different approach: A social system based on the recognition that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth and might is not necessarily right.

Few outside of those who have studied philosophy have heard of Karl Popper, but that is also true of most philosophers. Great philosophical works are hardly bedtime reading. One must "eat" these works with intensity, much as one approaches a Thanksgiving feast. Popper has written two such works, both direct descendents of Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), in which Kant demonstrated that for human beings, captive to their own limited senses, absolute knowledge is impossible.

If this was so, thought Popper, what to make of science? Could it be that science does not prove anything, and if this is the case, what good is science? Popper's answer comes in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (1935), in which he argued that it is not the role of science to prove anything, but rather to establish theories in such a manner that they can be proven false ("falsifiablity"). When a scientific theory is established in this manner (and all real scientific theories are; "creation science" is a theory, but it is not a scientific theory because it is not stated in a falsifiable manner), they are either proven false or become accepted as "the current state of science". This acceptance is not proof that the theory is correct; merely that no one has yet proven it false. But it remains as "science" until someone can.

In fact, argued Popper, this explains exactly how scientific discoveries gradually replace each other, earlier ones being approximations, and later ones being simply refinements of those approximations. Just as Newtonian physics was "the answer" for hundreds of years until being superceded by the physics of Einstein, so also with all of science. Of course, this was not the work of Popper's to which Soros was referring, but it important to understand, as it is at the core of what becomes Popper's later masterpiece (and the one to which Soros referred), "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945).

At the time "The Open Society" was written, many were arguing that democracy was "inefficient"; that the overhead of educating voters created a drag on changes to government (i.e., law) that might be necessary. The American system was successful merely because of the great natural resources they possessed, but, all other things being equal, an aristocratic form of government could certainly implement needed reforms far more quickly and therefore more efficiently. (This coincides with the Platonic philosphy (embraced by Strauss and his heirs, the Neocons) that a "gifted elite" was the best form of government.)

No, argued Popper, in perhaps the most brilliant re-write of a philosophical work ever. Whatever the current form of government, that is merely today's approximation of the best government. But since human beings can never have absolute knowledge of anything, that government must also be falsifiable. It must be open to examination to anyone who can prove it to be "wrong". And the only system of governing that Popper saw that allowed for this is democracy. Popper had simply looked at the "efficiency" of "scientific discovery", and he applied it to governments. The "open society" of science, in which anyone can prove a theory to be wrong, was identical to governments. They are merely a "best approximation" of what a government should be, and only democracy allowed for the successive refinements needed to advance it in the exact same manner in which scientific discovery advances.

And this is what George Soros believes. It is also why Lynn Landes is way of base in this criticism. One cannot be merely "influenced" by Popper. One either "gets it", or one does not. George Soros gets it.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

Cheney devoted the (Los Angeles World Affairs Council) speech to a frightening characterization of the war on terrorism and the new kind of mobilization he said it demanded. He sounded the alarm about the increasing prospects of a major new terrorist attack and the extraordinary responses that are required. While many of his remarks echoed past comments by the president and senior officials, Cheney struck a surprisingly dour note and suggested only an administration of proven ability could manage the dramatic overhaul necessary for the nation's security apparatus. ...

He also said the administration was planning to expand the military into even more overseas bases so the United States could wage war quickly around the globe.

Strong growth has also begun to bring down the unemployment rate -- and that is a critical objective ...

Our administration and Congress have also addressed other urgent needs in domestic policy -- among them ... reforms in the forest management to help prevent the kind of catastrophic wildfires you have seen here in Southern California this past year.

Starting in on foreign policy:

Then ... came the announcement by Libya's Colonel Muammar Ghadafi that his regime would voluntarily reveal and dismantle its nuclear and chemical weapons programs, as well as its longer range missiles and biological weapons-related efforts ... the welcome commitments from Colonel Ghadafi, will bring greater security to the American people, and to our friends and allies.

But then he really starts to kick it:

Yet especially in moments of success, we need to remember the long-term nature of the struggle we are in, and the serious dangers that still exist.

On the very night this nation was attacked, President Bush declared that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and those who support them. This principle, it's come to be known as the Bush doctrine ...

Saddam Hussein had a lengthy history of reckless and sudden aggression. His regime cultivated ties to terror, including the al Qaeda network, ... Year after year, the U.N. Security Council demanded that he account for those weapons and that he comply with all the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire. Year after year, he refused.

We have, today, more than 125,000 Americans serving in Iraq. They are confronting terrorists every day in that country, so that we do not one day meet the same enemies on the streets of our own cities. At the same time, American and coalition forces are treating Iraqi citizens with compassion, ...

The use of military force is, for the United States, always the last option in defending ourselves and our interests. But sometimes the last resort must be taken.

As President Bush has said, America seeks the "global expansion of democracy, and the hope and progress it brings, ..."

And as the world has witnessed in ... Afghanistan, people liberated from dictatorship welcome the arrival of freedom, welcome the chance for a better life, welcome the responsibilities of governing their own country.

But now we're on to the Q&A:

Illegal immigration: There's no question it's a serious problem. The President last week announced a new initiative ... where they, in effect, come in when they know there is a job there, a job that an American will not fill, to regularize that flow. ... It's also a humane measure, as well, at the same time.

Israel/Palestine: The difficulty we have -- and it is a continuing problem -- is that after years of effort, it's become clear that as long as Yasser Arafat is the interlocutor on behalf of the Palestinians, as long as he is in control, we think any serious progress is virtually impossible.

Department of Defense: I think if I had to speculate that we'll see -- one of the legacies of this administration will be some of the most sweeping changes in our military, and our national security strategy as it relates to the military, and force structure, and how we're based, and how we used it in the last 50 or 60 years, probably since World War II. I think the changes are that dramatic.

But remember, these are just small snippets from a 30 minute appearance during which Cheney spent the majority of his time telling us that we would be at war for generations. You could carve out your own set of quotes from this and trash this idiot savant even more.

But the point is: Is this guy serious? If he is, then he is a very sick man, ... and we ain't talkin' pacemakers here.

This post previously appeared on Benedict@Large.

The plan was simple. Rather than spend money on a Madison Ave ad campaign, MoveOn would simply appeal to their many members. Certainly there were a few that would be able to come up with quality 30 second issue ads for them to air. And indeed there were. Quite a few, in fact. The winning ad was "Child's Pay" [about 4Megs, and you need QuickTime], and the plan was to run it during the Super Bowl. Oops!

It seems that CBS, owned by media giant Viacom and the network airing the Super Bowl, has declined MoveOn's request to air that ad during the Super Bowl. A single 30-second ad on the Super Bowl costs a record $2.25 million, but CBS doesn't want it? [Advertisers already signed up include Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Philip Morris, the tobacco giant. Several Hollywood studios have also pre-booked slots to promote forthcoming movies. The British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is using the event to launch Levitra, a rival to anti-impotence drug Viagra. Sex is OK for the Super Bowl, but issues are not.]

In announcing their decision however, CBS went much further; they will never air any MoveOn ad due to their "longstanding policy of not airing issue ads". Oh, really? The anti-national healthcare "issue ads" you ran back in 1993? Come on, CBS. Get real. You are bowing down before the threat of Karl Rove's punishment. After all, you are the network that caved about playing the Reagan docu-drama, aren't you?

Of course, this is just the beginning. Watch for NBC (owned by GE), ABC (owned by Disney), and naturally (the Rupert Murdoch-owned) FOX to quickly fall in line. In other words, MoveOn has $7.5 million to spend on ads, and none of the networks want it. Suddenly, all of these networks have found some "higher morality" as they devote their coverage to helicopters following Michael Jackson's limosine.

And the right-wing's imperial Presidency fantasy is once again alive and kicking:

Not inaccurately, the Bush presidency has been called imperial ... The evidence? Its "preemptive" and "preventive" military policy, its contentions that it can go to war regardless of whether Congress approves, its policies calling for American world domination, and its unprecedented blending of national security policy and domestic law enforcement. In my view, these policies and positions not only easily establish the Bush presidency as imperial, they also rank it beyond anything in the annals of the modern American presidency. This may be the most imperial Presidency our history has yet seen. ...

The fact that five cases currently before the Supreme Court address the question of presidential powers -- and whether or not the Bush presidency has exceeded them -- speaks for itself. Bush has had almost twice as many such cases before the Court as Nixon had, in half the time.

Dean himself offers no analyses on these cases, but clearly, the Cheney case could prove to be the most threatening to the administration itself. The detainee cases, if lost by the administration, would simply invovle the implementation of procedural changes regarding its detention policies. The Cheney case however is more similar to the Watergate tapes case in that if lost it would provide an open window into the secret workings of the administration. The damage of course would then depend on what was then viewed through that window, and this could be disasterous. We would almost certainly see that the vice president was dividing up the spoils of an Iraq war a full six months before 9/11. Worse still, we might see that Cheney was also doing this for Afghanistan, something my research shows to be a high probability. If this were to prove to be the case, the only question left then would be whom to impeach.

Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.

But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

It's all out in the open now. The fact that the president of the United States and his top advisers deliberately concocted a false case for an illegal and unnecessary war -- in plain terms, that they committed cold-blooded, premeditated mass murder -- was confirmed last week by the most impeccable mainstream sources: George W. Bush's own Cabinet officials, speaking for the record in America's major media.

Remarkably, the "extremist views" and "paranoia" of the "lunatic fringe" -- those "Bush-bashers" who for months proclaimed that the Regime's lust to conquer Iraq was part of a long-planned scheme of looting and dominance that had nothing to do with September 11, 2001 or defending America from terror -- are now issuing from the mouths of the Regime's inner circle.

In this, his newest article, he suggests that we got Bush II because we failed to fully prosecute all the crimes of Republican operatives from Nixon on forward. I'm not sure if Jim is right, but he is in at least one sense: we didn't prosecute these bastards when we had them nailed. And look at the crimes they are commiting now, feeling quite sure that they can now do so with impunity.

But that's not why I don't want him on the dime. Look, you know when you pick some change out of your pocket and find one that looks funny and you think, "Oh, that's probably just some small piece of devalued curreny from some third world nation," and then you promptly throw it away? Well, I know what the dime looks like, and if it starts looking different, I'll probably just start throwing it away. Yeah, I know that it's just some small piece of devalued curreny from some first world nation, but putting Ron's bust on it, isn't that kind of like having him saying, "Hey, I'm the guy who devalued this!"

But there's a bigger (or smaller) reason than that. Put it this way: The dime's too damned small. I mean, it's the smallest coin we have and that's hardly befitting of the size of the legend of the man. I mean, we could put him on a new silver dollar, but what with that Susan B. Anthony thing being a flop, I'd hate for a similar fate to befall Ron. Then we'd have to go through this whole argument again over which dollar bill to put him on and who we had to kick off to do so. And I've even thought about that a bit.

Look, the biggest bill we print anymore is the hundred. Come on. Is that really big enough to befit the man's legendary status? And if we start printing something bigger, it's liable to just be Susan B. Anthony redux, and then we'd be right back where we started.

So I was thinking about this, because you know that they're not going to let up until they get something of more significance than an airport or some obscure federal building. And I think I've come up with the perfect answer: Mars. Yup, the Red Planet. Think about it. Isn't he supposed to be the guy that ended the Red Planet on Earth? So what could be more befitting than renaming Mars after him? And you really can't get much bigger than Mars.

Besides, it fits in nicely with Bush's new Mars Mission plans, which apparently have not been very well received in some Republican camps. But if you're going to actually name the planet after Ron, well, what Republican wouldn't support the plan then?

And it does solve the problem of what to do when we get there. I mean, it would be just too corny to try one of those "one small step for man" pronouncements again. So instead we can have the official renaming ceremony as we plant the flag there. It'd be a TV ratings coup.

And then we could all go outside at night and look up in the sky and say, "Ah, there you are Ronald Reagan, bigger than life." And it will be true!

Besides, it would almost be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Back when Ron was still President, someone asked me, "Is that man from Mars?" And even back then I thought he was.

This news had hardly cooled off, when news of Paul O'Neill's tell-all book (CBS and Time articles) came out about his days in the White House, not only painting a very unflattering portrait of Bush's leadership (or lack thereof), but also saying that the administration started planning the Iraq invasion from almost day one, and that O'Neill himself never saw any hard intelligence supporting the administration's pre-war claims against Iraq before he left in December of 2002. (The administration's subsequent claim that O'Neill was not in a need-to-know position is laughable. O'Neill was a member of the National Security Council.)

And just when you'd think the administration couldn't have had a worse week, out comes a 56-page report published by Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute claiming that the Iraq not only was an unnecessary and ill-advised distraction to the war on terror, but that it had significantly damaged the American military by severely over-stretching its resourses. The report, called "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism" [373 KB PDF] was written by visiting professor Dr. Jeffrey Record, who believes "that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul," and "calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power."

Had enough yet? Hold on. The American Conservative's January 19th issue will feature the third and final installment of former Pentagon insider Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski's exposé on the Neocon's disinformation campaign there, "Open Door Policy: A strange thing happened on the way to the war":

Soon after, I was out-processed for retirement and couldn’t have been more relieved to be away from daily exposure to practices I had come to believe were unconstitutional. War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to Congress and the American people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq—more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate it.

One thing is certain however. The President's speechwriters will be working a lot of overtime in the coming days. Too bad they don't get paid time-and-a-half, huh?

And when you're done reading about Grover, try Bush's Conspiracy to Riot. While it's over a year old, it's good to remind ourselvesjust how far the New Right is willing to go to place their people in office. Nothing must be considered beneath them.

Well, there is a reason my brother and I are taking care of our own mother first, before we worry about your mother. It's great to love your own mother, but I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.

But Aaron Weaver's life finally ended in tragedy last week when the 32-year-old US soldier died in a helicopter - another Black Hawk - shot down by a rocket attack near Falluja by Iraqi resistance fighters.

In a grim reminder of another movie, the Second World War epic, Saving Private Ryan, Weaver's family are now trying to save his two brothers from a similar fate and are asking the military to change the men's deployment away from the frontlines. One brother, Ryan, 30, is a helicopter pilot in Baghdad and the other, Steve, 39, is also a pilot, weeks away from being posted to Afghanistan.

As the steady trickle of body bags returning from Afghanistan and Iraq increasingly unsettles military families across the US, Weaver's family have taken up the mantle of Private Jessica Lynch in becoming the latest ordinary Americans to attract national media attention that has made them figureheads for the conflict in Iraq.

'We're not trying to get the other two out of the service. We're just trying to get them from suffering the same fate,' said Mike Weaver, the men's father, who has asked the Pentagon to make the deployment shift.

Army regulations allow for deployments to be changed for emergency reasons, such as bereavement or illness. A military spokesman said the situation would be looked at, but pointed out that the two surviving brothers might not want to be redeployed. Any formal request to change their mission would also have to come from the soldiers themselves.

He pointed out that redeployment was only possible for active service personnel and that Steve Weaver, who is only one year away from retirement and is normally based in Hawaii, had not yet been sent to Afghanistan.

Aaron Weaver's death has a particular resonance as he had won a medal for saving a fellow soldier's life during the ill-fated 1993 US intervention in Somalia.

His efforts were featured in Black Hawk Down, which portrayed the Battle of Mogadishu when 18 US Rangers died in a fight with Somali militiamen. During the fight, Weaver volunteered to head into combat as a reinforce ment after two helicopters had been shot down, leaving their wounded crews surrounded by hostile forces.

He also survived a long struggle with testicular cancer and continued his service in the military despite his illness. He signed a medical waiver specifically so that he could be sent to Iraq.

His last journey, in a medical helicopter that was clearly marked with red crosses, was to have a cancer check-up to see if the disease was still in remission. But now flags in his home town of Clearwater, Florida, are flying at half mast.

'It was the life he chose,' Mike Weaver told a local TV station. 'He went willingly and even pulled strings to get himself there when he really didn't have to go.'

Ryan Weaver was on duty just 60 miles away when his brother's helicopter went down. The Weaver family is steeped in military life and tradition. As well as the three brothers, all of whom are helicopter pilots, a sister is also in the air force, though not posted overseas. Mike Weaver himself is a former US marine.

Aaron left behind a wife, a stepson and a young daughter. 'I still don't believe it. I can see his face,' said his mother, Kelly. 'He's just a beautiful boy, so strong and so smart. I just hope he didn't suffer. I'm so proud of him.'

His father echoed that sen timent, saying that his son had survived so much only to die while a passenger in an air ambulance. 'Having survived that [Somalia] and having survived cancer, I didn't dream that something like this would have happened to him,' he said.

In all, nine US soldiers died in the Falluja helicopter, including troops who were based across America, from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. US investigators said yesterday that an initial examination of the incident had shown that the plane was shot down by guerrillas.

'The investigation has not concluded, but preliminary reports are that the helicopter was shot down by ground fire,' said US Army spokesman Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt.

But what O'Neill missed is even bigger. They also planned the Afghanistan War at the same time. And it was about the same thing and planned by the same person.

The White House is backing former HUD cabineteer Mel Martinez, popular with the state's Latino community that they so much want to attract, and with that sort of backing, Martinez should be a shoe-in over Harris, right? Well, not so fast. Mr. Martinez has had some past friendships with local Democrats, a violation of the loyalty oath now demanded by of Republican hopefuls, and then there is the matter of Governor Jeb.

The President's brother, it seems, is quite territorial, and is none too happy about being left with an underfunded "No Child Left Behind" mandate by his brother. He's told the White House to back off, a wish that most brothers would perhaps honor. The problem is, Karl Rove is not Jeb's brother.

But why is Jeb being so territorial about a Harris candidacy that might undermine his brother's chance at re-election? Well it seems that there is some avid speculation (dubbed "The Rumor") that Jeb and Kitty are or have been somewhat of an "item", much to the chagrin of Jeb's wife, Columba, who through a hissy-fit during one of Kitty's visits to the governor's mansion. Well, all's fair in love and war, and besides, don't Republican's think that women are supposed to screw their way to the top?

Racial appeals are essential to the GOP’s formula in its southern heartland, the base upon which it builds national electoral victories. Just one year ago, President Bush chose the week of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday to restate his opposition to affirmative action, a theatrically timed message to the party’s race-base. Could such a party really be longing for an influx of ordinary Black voters into their Deep South precinct gatherings? Of course not.

The Republican Party’s central strategic concern is to suppress or contain the Black vote at any and every opportunity, through gerrymandering, election day challenges and intimidation, voter rolls purges, theft of ballots, felony disenfranchisement – every trick in the proverbial book. George Bush lives in the White House because of a successful assault on Black voting rights in Florida. He hopes to repeat the process in November. ...

So, where did the Republicans come up with the goal of capturing 25 percent of the Black vote? From nowhere – they just made it up and threw it out there to give the lie an air of earnestness, in the certain knowledge that corporate media would treat absolute nonsense as serious, newsworthy political business. Just as assuredly, African Americans would seize on the figure as containing some morsel of meaning, and start looking around to see if there was something that they had missed. The fantasy figure also provided an opening for hacks like Jonetta Rose Barras to write opinion pieces for papers like the Washington Post.

The BLACK CoMMentator also has a fabulous political cartoon with this article which you can view here. The BLACK CoMMentator comes out every Thursday. Bookmark it. It is simply one of the best written alternative weeklies there is.

Today's Terror   Threat Level:

I feel safer now.

A lengthy and detailed article from today's Washington Post. Of course, Kay's group has found much more, and even some significant and credible planning for WMDs, but they seem to share a common characteristic: they were abandoned shortly after our first war against Iraq. And Kay's group discovered something else: an official high-level Iraqi memo saying that the UNSCOM and CIA 1995 debriefings of defector Hussein Kamel, then leader of Iraqi weapons development, were both correct and complete in his claims that Iraq had abondoned fully the development of banned weapons. [The UNSCOM debriefing transcript (PDF) of Kamel's testimony to them was available on the internet prior to the start of our second Iraq war and he explicitly stated in it, "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (See also the FAIR media advisory on this.) The CIA debriefing is not, but is reported to be almost identical in matters of fact.]

David Kay of course is leaving as head of the that inspection team, and why not? Much of his staff has been reassigned to counter-insurgency intelligence, and of course they are needed there. You have to give Kay some well due credit however. There must have been some very real pressure on him to shill his findings for the press, and clearly, he did a fairly good job at not doing that, especially given the initial doubts of those who opposed the war.

But the inspection teams, reduced as they are, will continue their work, perhaps for another year -- or if you are counting, until after the elections.

And so we have paper rockets ... and 9,000 dead.

BTW: Mouse-over the photo.

My "homeless period" lasted perhaps eight years. Though I was frequently homeless during that time, it was perhaps only a quarter of that time that I was actually homeless. I refer to it as my "homeless period" because during this time I was required to submit to outrageous demands simply to have a roof over my head. It might have been a motel room with cockroaches that took 90% of my minimum wage takehome pay, or it could just have been half the rent for one tenth of the benefits of where I stayed. It did not matter. Mostly, it beat sleeping under a tree. Not always, however. Once in a while, the demands got so outrageous that I would simply pack my stuff and go back to that tree.

I met Ken Goti early on during this time when I first went to a labor poll. Kenny had actually been a pilot on an aircraft carrier during his service years. He actually had steered one of those big ships for several years.

In a labor poll, most of the people you work with are not that good. That is perhaps why they are there. Others, however, are quite extraordinary. Kenny was one of these. He was the one that everyone else wanted to work with.

Though I knew nothing of the trades when I first when to these pools, I quickly became one of these few desired work partners. It's simply called getting the job done. A few of us (like Kenny) seemed to instictively know how to do this. That's why people followed us. People like us however needed to be spread across different contracts to quiet the protests of those who had hired our labor pool, and both of us were often sent out on a contract simply to quiet these protests. The hiring company would see that they had gotten someone who was real good, and they would be happy.

It was for this reason that it was actually many years before I ever got to work with Kenny. In fact, he requested me on his assignment. It was a great experience. Working with Kenny made working for minimum wage seem easy. There was a real sense when you were working with Kenny that your work actually made a difference. I've held many higher paid jobs since then, but none with more satisfaction that those few days provided. I was very good, and thought myself the best, but after those days working with Kenny, I understood that I was merely second best. Not below Kenny by much, but below just the same. I didn't mind it a bit though. Neither Kenny nor I were ever ones to make such comparisons back then, and I make mine here only in requium. But let me back up a little here.

By the time this had happened, my homeless period was ended. By this time, I knew quite well the almost insurmountable difficulties of escaping homelessness. I took it upon myself to try to provide that escape on many occasions to many people. A roof and no rent, and use it wisely. This was a disaster. I was being ripped off left and right. Until Kenny came along.

I was walking home one night when I encoutered him with his posssessions on his back. "What's up?" I asked. He also couldn't stand his roommate, and was going to the trees as I had often done before. I certainly by this time understood his sentiments, but I said no, come stay with me.

I told Kenny that I would not charge him rent; that to do so would only delay his exit from my offer. I also told him that I would not place a timelimit on the offer, knowing by this time how very difficult it is to escape homelessness.

Kenny took me up on my offer, and it was two weeks later that he said that he had gotten a place and was moving out. My only success in offering the help that I wanted to provide.

You have to understand what Kenny was. Kenny was forever reaching out. He was forever reaching out to his coworkers, inspiring them to be better. He was forever reaching out to his superiors, trying to show them that he was really that much better. And he really was that much better.

Ken Goti was reaching out as he always did when the scaffolding he was working on collapsed. Ken Goti died in that collapse. When he did, our country lost one of the best citizens it had.

What has been there for a few years is that George Will has converted from being an advocate for conservatism to being an apologist for it. Actually, he hasn't been apologizing for that old-style conservatism he used to advocate for at all, but rather for the new style of "conservatism" that has replaced it, the style of "conservatism that has more in common with pre-World War II Germany than it has with anything we used to call conservative. And that needs every apology it can get.

So what was it that changed George? He was, after all, being well compensated for defending traditional conservatism. Why would he "defect" from his quite successful career? In a nutshell, he fell victim to greed, a greed that has now been exposed.

George Will has sold out to his greed:

It turns out that George Will was among a number of prominent individuals to receive $25,000 per day of conversation on a board of advisers for Hollinger International, a newspaper firm controlled by magnate Conrad Black. Although Will has often scorned the convenient forgetfulness of others, the Times reported that "Mr. Will could not recall how many meetings he attended." But an aide confirmed the annual $25,000 fee.

Even for a wealthy commentator, that's a hefty paycheck for one day of talk. But it didn't stop Will from lavishing praise on Black in print -- without a word about their financial tie.

Yes, George Will, and you must especially be too good now that Conrad Black has been fired for his own unethical conduct. You must place distance between yourself and your patron Saint Conrad.

You see, George, you sold yourself out a long time ago. You thought that just because you are a very smart man, no one would notice. But the chickens are now coming home to roost, and you in all of your glory are feigning moral indignation? You feign nothing to me, Mr. Will, because I saw a long time ago that you had sold out. It has just taken me a long time to find out to whom. And it isn't just Conrad Black, is it?

Pat Robertson said Friday that God told him President Bush will be re-elected in a landslide:

I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way.

The Lord has just blessed (Bush). I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him.

I predict that Pat Robertson in 2004 will continue to use his multimillion broadcasting empire to promote George Bush and other Republican candidates,. Maybe Pat got a message from (Bush political adviser) Karl Rove and thought it was from God.

Meanwhile, the Pope has called for a New World Order, and Jesus converted to Islam. I have no idea if these three events are related.

While we're at it, isn't it time to update the Axis of Evil list? I mean, it's hardly a list with only two countries on it. So let's toss in Syria and "Bombs away!" And while we're at it, isn't it time to knock Saudi Arabia down a peg or two? After all, we hardly need them for our military bases any more, and isn't that really our oil anyways?.

But let's not stop there. France has been a bit too uppity lately. Time to start greasing them up for a place on the list. And while doing that, let's force the rest of Europe to declare sides in the Paris-Washington squabble. After all, you're either with us or against us, right? That'll fatten the list up nicely.

So will the President actually read Perle's new manifesto? Well, maybe not (he's not much of a reader, you know), but one thing's for certain: With the Twin Towers of Neoconism (the VP's office and the Pentagon) filtering everything the President reads and hears, you can bet that he won't be reading much else.

And will Perle make much money on book sales? It will hardly matter if these policies are adopted. His residuals from all the defense contracts this will require will make him a billionaire many times over. Welcome to endless war. Or at least endless until we turn into a bankrupt banana republic.

We have successfully boycotted before. We knocked Mike Savage off of TV and and pulled a half dozen sponsors from "Oxycontin Rush". It is time to do it again, but this time with a larger target.

Write to FOX to express your outrage. Tell them that you are only watching them to identify and boycott every sponsor they have. Maybe we can't shut them down, but we can hurt Rupert Murdoch in the only place he cares about.

Do whatever you have to to watch this. It is absolutely drop dead good.

From Wired News: "Bush-Bashing Ads Move Online".