Enter a scarf-clad, color-coordinated group of singers.
Condoleeza Rice
Sung by the New Christian Minstrels
to the tune of "Winter Wonderland"
PDB
Are you listening
FBI
Memos glistening
The hijackers came
But she's not to blame
Nine-eleven Condoleeza Rice
And in August he'll be on vacation
She will have to brief him on the threat
Mention that Osama hates the nation
Maybe with an airplane or a jet
Later on
The Commission
Won't be down
With her vision
A failure to spot
What three thousand got
Nine-eleven Condoleeza Rice
An elaborate fanfare of jubilant trumpets. With tears of joy in his eyes, host Pat Sajak introduces the President of the United States.
As George W Bush takes center stage with the ecstatic studio audience applauding and speaking in tongues, the Seal of the President of the United States appears from above him and descends into place behind his head like a halo. In flowing white robes Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan sing "Alleluia! Alleluia!" as a choir of Caucasian angels, strumming miniature golden harps, wordlessly intones celestial melodies from on high.
In an abrupt change of mood, Alan Jackson and Toby Keith enter, flanking the President, playing a jaunty tune on their guitars.
Spider Hole
Sung with a Texas twang by George W Bush
to the tune of "Jingle Bells"
Dashing to Iraq
With a stopoff in Kuwait
Overspend a lot
Catch the guy I hate
Cheney makes a face
Loves inflicting pain
‘Cause everything they’re losing there
Is Halliburton’s gain!
Oh, spider hole, spider hole,
Shock and awe and bomb
Oh what fun it is to try
To neutralize Saddam!
Silo nukes, Baathist gooks,
Nothing there? My bad!
Oh what fun to fry the guy
Who tried to kill my dad!
Cue nine-minute standing ovation.
See you in 2005 — sure to be a stinking, rotten year!
NASD announced today that it has censured and fined First Command Financial Planning Inc., a Fort Worth, TX broker-dealer, $12 million for making misleading statements and omitting important information when selling mutual fund investments with up-front sales charges of up to 50 percent through a monthly installment method known as a "Systematic Investment Plan."
From that $12 million, First Command is ordered to pay restitution to thousands of customers who purchased a Systematic Investment Plan between Jan.1, 1999 and the present who terminated the plan and paid an effective sales charge greater than 5 percent. All money remaining will be payable to the NASD Investor Education Foundation, to be used for the investor education needs of members of the military and their families. The Foundation will use the funds to support educational programs, materials and research to help equip members of the military community with the knowledge and skills necessary to make informed investment decisions. It is anticipated that the Foundation will receive approximately $8 million.
A mother who admitted killing her baby girl by severing the child's arms was guided by a Bible passage in which Jesus refers to cutting off body parts to cast away sin, the woman's attorney said today.
Dena Schlosser, a 35-year-old housewife with a history of mental illness, has referred to the New Testament passage since the killings, said attorney David Haynes. He told The Associated Press that he believes the passage influenced her method in killing 10-month-old Margaret.
In the Book of Matthew, Jesus says, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."
Schlosser was charged with capital murder Nov. 22, after she told a 911 operator she had severed her baby's arms. Police found her in the living room, covered in blood, still holding a knife and listening to a church hymn.
Haynes, a Christian who teaches Bible classes at his church, said Schlosser was severely mentally ill at the time of the killing and misinterpreted Christ's words. Haynes believes Christ was simply encouraging followers to cast out anything that came between them and God.
"Many things can be justified if you chop a couple of verses out of the Bible and say 'OK, these words mean what they say and say what they mean," Haynes said.
Somebody please explain that to 51% of the American population, which is on the fast track to becoming the collective antagonist of a third-rate Stephen King potboiler: "Police found her in the living room, covered in blood, still holding a knife and listening to a church hymn."
FOX is turning a grown adopted child's search for her father into a reality/game show called "Who's Your Daddy."
On the Jan. 3, 90-minute special, the woman will face eight men — one is her father, and the fakes' goal is to trick her into thinking they are.
If, after three elimination rounds, she picks out her real father, she wins $100,000. If she picks the wrong one, the fake daddy gets the big-bucks prize.
Don Weston used to feel special cruising the world in his 100-foot yacht. Yet on a recent morning at the International Boat Show here, the retired Cincinnati businessman stood on his upper deck, overshadowed by giants.
Next door was the Corrie Lynn, a 130-foot cruiser with a king-sized Jacuzzi, five cabins, retractable plasma TV screens and twin jet skis. Down the dock was the 197-foot Alfa Four, with an indoor gym, swimming pool and helicopter pad. The talk of the show was billionaire Paul Allen's new pleasure boat, Octopus, which extends over 400 feet and has a basketball court, music studio and personal submarine. That's about to be topped by a yacht under construction in Dubai for a Saudi client. It's expected to exceed 500 feet, the size of a small cruise ship.
"I used to think I had a good-sized boat," sighs Mr. Weston. "Now it's like a dinghy compared to these others. How big are they going to get?"
The yacht business reflects a new arms race breaking out among the wealthy. With the population of millionaires soaring to more than two million in the U.S., the rich are finding it harder to set themselves apart. Many are turning to supersized luxury consumer products to rise above the pack. Today's super-wealthy, and the companies that serve them, are creating a whole new category of high-end products that are priced beyond the reach of mere millionaires.
Megayachts have grown in size from a typical length of 80 feet to 110 feet in the mid-1990s to well over 150 feet today. The market for luxury yachts has more than tripled since 1997, with some boats costing well over $100 million. Dozens of boats longer than 200 feet are now under construction.
[...]
The luxury boom stems from a huge increase in personal fortunes. The wealth held by millionaires world-wide rose to $28.8 trillion as of the end of 2003, according to a separate Capgemini-Merrill study, up 11% from $26 trillion in 2001. That's more than the annual gross domestic products of the U.S., Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. Those at the very top appear to be doing especially well recently. The wealth controlled by individuals in North America with more than $30 million in financial assets -- such as stocks and bonds, but not including real estate -- jumped 45% to $3.04 trillion in 2003 from $2.1 trillion in 2002, according to Capgemini-Merrill.
A generally rising stock market over the past decade, soaring executive compensation, higher real-estate values and lower taxes on the wealthy are all cited as explanations for the rising wealth. Also, more and more entrepreneurs who started family businesses after World War II are cashing out because of industry consolidation, creating what private bankers like to call "major liquidity events." Today's instant multimillionaires tend to be younger than the rich of the past, and more likely to splurge on lifestyle goods to differentiate themselves from hoi polloi affluent people.
Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University who studies wealth, likens modern-day big spenders to nobles at the court of France's Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715. To ensure the nobles' loyalty, Louis continually raised the "entry price" of being in his court, requiring them to wear increasingly expensive clothes and keep larger and larger homes. The nobles' need for greater wealth made them even more dependent on the king's good graces, and left them less money to spend on arms.
It is obscene for a class of people owning 400-foot yachts with helicopter pads to talk of the "hedonism" of same-sex couples that want to marry.
Here's your real "ownership society." These are the people George W Bush calls his "base," and it was for them he created the biggest deficit in American history by cutting their taxes, growing the government, invading Iraq, and masquerading that he shares the so-called moral values of those with less than eight figures in liquid assets.
Coveted invitations to join the Bush-Cheney inauguration celebration at the highest levels — $250,000 and $100,000 — have begun landing in the mailboxes of wealthy Republicans and corporate chieftains across the country.
And our town's Nancy Kinder is part of the national team in charge of harvesting those top-tier sponsorships.
As finance chair of the Presidential Inauguration Committee, Kinder, along with committee leaders Bill DeWitt, Brad Freeman, Mercer Reynolds and Jeanne L. Phillips, has the megaresponsibility of raising $45 million, the price tag for the four days of inaugural festivities. Kinder was offered the plum position directly by the White House.
With only a few weeks to raise that super sum, Kinder, who was one of the top female fund-raisers in the country for the Bush-Cheney campaign, is charging full steam ahead. But don't expect to see her in the D.C. office that has been reserved with her name on the door. This high-powered fund-raiser is conducting her inaugural business from home base.
The high rollers who pony up at the six-figure levels, with only 100 available in each category, earn multiple tickets to a variety of parties and special events during the Jan. 18-21 celebration. And despite the high price tag, Kinder says the VIP packages are going fast.
She adds that the pricy sponsorships allow ordinary citizens to enjoy the four days of festivities at a more reasonable price. It will cost regular folks $150 each to attend an inaugural ball.
Nancy Kinder is better known as the wife of Richard Kinder, an ex-president of Enron Corp., Bush’s top career patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
During the 2005 fiscal year, the federal government will spend $170-million to support programs that preach that sex is to be reserved for marriage only, and a number of the recipients of those dollars will be faith-based. That's more than double what was spent in 2001.
But unlike Bush's energetic concern over educational accountability and standards reflected in No Child Left Behind, the curricula for abstinence-only sex education programs are not vetted for accuracy. (There was an attempt by Democratic lawmakers in 2002 to require medical accuracy as a condition of receiving money for these programs, but that effort was voted down by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.)
So rather than getting the tools they need to make sensible choices about their health and bodies, young people are being told outrageous lies, such as how 5 to 10 percent of women who have abortions will become sterile (when there's no correlation between elective abortions and sterility) or how condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31 percent of the time (when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that consistent condom use resulted in a zero transmission rate.)
The congressional study, conducted by the Special Investigations Division of the Committee on Government Reform at the behest of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., found "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health" in more than 80 percent of the most popular abstinence-only curricula.
The result is not that young people are scared off sex until marriage. (Even most of those who take virginity pledges engage in premarital sex.) It's that they don't bother taking precautions against sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. They are led to believe that condoms are ineffective.
"We hear from kids all the time about the myths they've been fed," said Marilyn Anderson, director of education at Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida. "The whole idea is to scare kids and make them think they'll get HIV by having sex. But what's walking into our clinic says that kids are having sex, just without condoms."
$170 million just to say "Just Say No"! "That's more than double what was spent in 2001." They weren't kidding when they said 9/11 changed everything.
Shit like this just makes me want to get high and have sex.
If the stock market's glory days are over, why borrow against the future to invest in a losing gamble?
Assuming the US had privatized Social Security on the first day of the Bush presidency in January 2001, then using the Dow Jones Industrial Average as our yardstick, your hypothetical retirement nest egg would have lost 0.4% over the course of the four years of his first term up until the market's close on Friday. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 10,587.59 on the first day of Dubya's appointment to the presidency, and closed at 10,543.22 Friday.) A net loss of 0.4% is even worse than the crappy yield you get in a savings account at your neighborhood bank. And, to make matters still worse, we are clearly moving into a period of renewed inflation in which your money will be worth less. Goodbye, life savings!
On the other hand, the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 3,255.99 on the first day and closed at 10,587.59 on the last day of the Clinton presidency. Using the index as a broad barometer of the wealth contained in personal investments and 401(k) plans, American assets realized a gain of 325% after the eight years of his administration.
If you want to make a case against Social Security privatization then the pseudo-CEO presidency of George W Bush is Exhibit A, associated as it is with executive entitlements, a rock-solid pattern of incompetence, a total lack of accountability, a history of nonperformance, an oil-industry policy rubber stamp, scandals among his biggest contributors (Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc.), and a dangerously weakened dollar concurrent with higher oil prices.
Maybe the only way privatization could really work is with a Democrat in the White House. That's how wealth is not only more evenly distributed, but properly generated, as recent history shows.
First Command Financial Services, a financial company that caters to military officers, has stopped selling an archaic type of mutual fund with upfront sales charges that can eat up half of an investor's first-year contributions.
First Command, based in Fort Worth, had sold the funds, called contractual plans, to hundreds of thousands of military families over the years, marketing them as a disciplined way for service members to invest a fixed monthly amount over as many as 20 years.
Because of their high fees, the funds largely vanished from the civilian market decades ago. An article in The New York Times in July reported that they were still being sold to military families, and the House passed a bill in October that, among other things, would have barred the sale of new contractual plans. A similar Senate bill did not come to a vote before Congress recessed for the year.
First Command also acknowledged yesterday that it expected to face disciplinary action soon by regulators at NASD and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
[...]
Supporters of the bipartisan bill that passed the House in October said yesterday that First Command's decision, while welcome, did not eliminate the need for Congressional action to protect military families from expensive and unsuitable financial products.
The House Financial Services Committee "would have preferred the outright ban contained in the legislation which passed the House," said Peggy Peterson, a spokeswoman for the committee. "Nonetheless, the decision moves the marketplace in the right direction."
Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat on the committee, said, "A lot of questionable financial companies and products, besides these funds, are being marketed to enlistees on the base. We still have to make it clear that these enlistees are not an A.T.M. machine."
Lamar C. Smith, First Command CEO, said that his company's decision to stop selling the plans did not mean that it regarded the products as improper or unsuitable.
Neither are they illegal. What the products are, however, is a cruel and calculated abuse of the relative youth and financial inexperience of American soldiers held captive to their sales pitches.
Okay, so they've stopped selling them. What about the "hundreds of thousands" they have sold already? What happens to the financial prospects for those accountholders? You guessed it — FUBAR.
What First Command calls a "disciplined investment" is actually a rigorously planned, orderly way for soldiers to screw themselves. Not alone, but with an awful lot of help from the people who gave First Command, and only First Command, face-to-face access to meet with men and women in uniform. Somebody somewhere gave the go-ahead for First Command's financial "planners" to sell crazy-expensive mutual funds and unnecessary life insurance to enlistees. That kind of exclusivity comes at a price. You have to ask yourself: What kind of hidden reward is waiting for the ones who gave First Command access to soldiers in the first place?
You would expect the American government to protect soldiers, those whose mission is to protect Americans. But who is "up-armoring" them against unscrupulous life insurance salesmen?
Darleen Druyun's acid tongue and hardball negotiating style were famous among Pentagon contractors when she was a top Air Force acquisition official. But it was family loyalty that helped send Ms. Druyun to prison and set off the biggest Pentagon procurement scandal since the 1980s.
Even as she hammered out multibillion-dollar weapons deals, Ms. Druyun took time out to keep bedside vigils when her elder daughter, Heather, was hospitalized for asthma and her other daughter broke both arms in a horseback-riding accident. At the Pentagon, where she browbeat generals and defense-industry executives alike, former co-workers recall Ms. Druyun pausing during meetings to beam with pride over a framed charcoal drawing of an eagle in her office. "That's Heather's work," she would say.
Ms. Druyun, 57 years old, admitted in October that she steered billions of dollars worth of contracts to Boeing Co. out of gratitude for Boeing's hiring of Heather, Heather's future husband and eventually herself. That confession, in a signed statement to the court, came as a shock to many because previously she had admitted only to breaking conflict-of-interest rules in her job talks with Boeing -- the crime for which she has been sentenced to nine months in prison. Ms. Druyun pleaded guilty partly to protect her daughter, whom prosecutors had threatened to charge over her role as a conduit in the illegal job talks.
The government is now conducting its biggest Pentagon corruption investigation since bribery marred Ronald Reagan's defense buildup in the 1980s. Investigators are scouring dozens of contracts, trying to determine how many of Ms. Druyun's deals were tainted. They're also trying to figure out how to stop civil servants from building fiefdoms as Ms. Druyun did over a decade.
[...]
In late 2000, Ms. Druyun's professional and personal lives began to overlap. According to court statements by Ms. Druyun and others, she contacted Mr. [Michael] Sears, Boeing's chief financial officer, and asked him about a possible job for Heather's then-boyfriend and future husband, Michael McKee, who had a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from Ohio State University. Mr. Sears promptly met the young man, and he was hired into Boeing's prestigious Phantom Works defense research unit in St. Louis.
Within two months, Ms. Druyun sought Mr. Sears's help again, this time to find a job for Heather. In a puzzling move, Ms. Druyun called Mr. Sears a few days later attempting to withdraw the request, according to the Air Force general counsel's office. But Mr. Sears had already set the wheels in motion. Heather, then 24 years old with a degree in communications, was hired by Boeing's defense unit as a college recruiter.
Around the same time, Ms. Druyun approved a $412 million contract modification for Boeing's C-17 -- the same plane she had helped save a decade earlier when it was a McDonnell Douglas project. She dealt with Mr. Sears on the contract modification. Then in June 2001, Ms. Druyun awarded Boeing a $4 billion upset win over Lockheed to upgrade Lockheed's own C-130 cargo planes. She now admits she "was influenced by her perceived indebtedness to Boeing" and that an "objective" decision maker "may not have selected Boeing." It is illegal for government officials to allow personal benefit to impact their official duties.
In 2002, Heather became afraid that she might lose her job -- it's not clear why -- and she conveyed those fears to her mother, according to Ms. Druyun's court statement. Ms. Druyun again contacted a high-ranking Boeing executive with whom she was negotiating contracts. Heather was transferred to another post in the human-resources department.
Lockheed and other Boeing rivals didn't protest the now-suspect contract decisions while Ms. Druyun was in power, and officials of those companies say they didn't suspect favoritism. Nonetheless, Ms. Druyun made clear to associates that she admired Boeing. In 2001, she briefed Air Force Secretary James Roche on the contest between Boeing and Lockheed to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a multipurpose plane slated to be the biggest Pentagon program ever. She started by extolling the virtues of Boeing's management, says a participant at the meeting. "After 20 minutes, Roche interrupted and asked her, 'Are you going to actually talk to me about the airplane?' " this person says. The Air Force chose Lockheed a few months later on the strength of its airplane design.
"She started by extolling the virtues of Boeing's management."
That is so fucking sad. The chief procurement officer of the Air Force is a billion-dollar shill so her asthmatic daughter Heather can get a job. It was June when I first took a look at Dragon Lady's daughter, Heather McKee.
The long article (3,000 words!) in today's Journal by Andy Pasztor and Jonathan Karp is good reporting with a lot of details I haven't seen before, and I'm tempted to excerpt a lot more. But despite all the hand-wringing about the family's medical conditions (Druyun has diabetes; her husband has a heart condition), Druyun was the sole reason that billions in taxes were wasted in diverted contracts. Those billions belonged to Americans, millions of whom also have diabetes and asthma and heart conditions. And they don't have the US Treasury at their beck and call as Druyun did.
The cost of dynasty behavior is incalculable. Billions from taxpayers in the case of Boeing; thousands of lives in the case of Iraq.
Family values will kill us all — until we realize that the family is the human species itself.
...Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.
He also identifies the specific battle in the class warfare that's being waged by the right today as having its roots a couple of decades ago. If, as Republican operatives would like us to believe, the Social Security trust fund isn't an entity indepedent of the federal government, then "...[the] Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice."
Typical GOP strategy: profit by getting someone else to sacrifice. Does that strategy sound familiar to anyone serving in Iraq? Vietnam veterans who couldn't get into the Texas Air National Guard? Uninsured minimum-wage employees? Blue States that pay the expenses of the Red States?
The good news is this — you can do better. Your best defense against unscrupulous profiteers sticking their hands into your pockets is to educate yourself. Since you're already on the Internet looking for more information, you might consider taking a look at these sites:
Military.com offers an overview of money management and investing.
That's just education, which is useless unless you follow it with action. When you're ready to start plunking down some money, take a look at the firms that offer investments:
USAA has a miilitary-friendly approach to investing with none of the baggage that First Command has.
Vanguard is another stable company known for solid management and low expenses, in stark contrast to First Command which is known for the exact opposite.
If you want me to cover something more specifically on this site, leave a comment or email me. I can't give individual advice but I can try to point you in the right direction.
News Corp.'s Fox News has reached an agreement to become the primary news provider to radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc.
The pact stands to greatly boost the radio presence of Fox News, which rolled out its service last year, as it looks to compete with the much more entrenched CBS Radio, a unit of Viacom Inc., and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Radio.
Under the terms of the five-year deal, which starts next year, as many as 172 of Clear Channel's news and talk stations could eventually carry Fox's radio service, which includes news updates of up to five minutes per hour and syndicated talk shows by some of its cable news personalities, including Alan Colmes.
The Clear Channel partnership will give Fox News's nascent radio unit close to 300 stations, including 37 in the top 40 markets. There are options in the deal that could increase the number of Clear Channel stations affiliated with Fox News over time. Fox News said that if all options are exercised, its service could have more than 500 affiliates by mid-2005.
The teaming of Fox News and Clear Channel is sure to raise eyebrows among some media-watchdog groups. With about 1,200 radio stations, Clear Channel of San Antonio has become a lightning rod for concerns about consolidation in that industry. Fox News, for its part, often is accused of having a conservative bias, although Mr. Colmes is among the news operation's liberal commentators.
Ah, at least token Alan Colmes will be there, the Stepin Fetchit of the liberal community. I feel so much better now.
Choose the Blue. What America does is shop and consume. Forget about moral values and culture wars and abortion nonsequiturs and thinly veiled biblical references. Commerce is the one language here everyone understands &mdash consumers, businesspeople, and even politicians. And now you can speak your political preferences with your wallet by shopping Blue.
Hallelujah! I have been on my knees praying to Jesus Christ for a site like this since Scalia 2000.
Gloria Thomas never thought much about the jelly bracelets her two teenage daughters in the Huntsville school district had been wearing for the past year until she stumbled upon a color code chart in one of their notebooks.
For some students the plastic bracelets, which come in a rainbow of colors, are more than a trendy fashion statement. They're also props for sex games, a trend gaining momentum in other districts nationwide.
"I called the school on Monday and they acted like they didn't know about it," Thomas said. "I can't believe they're actually letting these kids wear these bracelets."
Huntsville school officials acknowledge that some students wear the bracelets, but they have not witnessed any inappropriate behavior associated with them.
Thomas' 13-year-old daughter, Monica, said both boys and girls wear the bracelets. The game begins when a boy notices a girl wearing a bracelet. He then tries to break or snap it off her wrist. The game works the same when a boy wears the bracelet.
If successful, the person wearing the bracelet is supposed to perform a sexual act that's determined by the bracelet's color.
According to one Web site, black represents sex, green represents outdoor sex, orange represents a kiss, red represents a lap dance and clear is anything goes.
Brilliant! A five-color alert system. These kids actually did learn something from Tom Ridge!
George Bush's victory in the US presidential election will be challenged in Ohio's supreme court today, when a group of Democratic voters will allege widespread fraud.
President Bush clinched re-election by winning the state of Ohio on November 2 by a margin of 136,000 votes over the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. Despite claims of fraud and technical glitches, Senator Kerry decided that they were not big enough to affect the result and conceded the election on November 3.
However, Cliff Arnebeck, a lawyer representing a group of voters challenging the Ohio result, claimed new analysis of various anomalies suggested it was rigged.
"We'll be calling for a reversal of the result based on evidence developed in the course of litigation," Mr Arnebeck told The Guardian yesterday. "Exit polling and substantial irregularities excluded votes that should have been counted. There is evidence that votes cast for one candidate were moved to the column of the other candidate."
Mr Arnebeck, a legal adviser to a liberal group, Alliance for Democracy, said the "contest of election" lawsuit will be presented to a judge from the Ohio supreme court today on behalf of at least 25 disgruntled voters. He said he expected other voters and organisations to join the case.
Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, has until Monday to certify the result. His office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday but his spokesman, Carlo LoParo, told the Associated Press news agency: "There are no signs of widespread irregularities."
Mr Arnebeck said that hearings held in Ohio cities have brought to light new evidence of malpractice. He said one voter of a pro-Republican group caught destroying Democratic registration documents in Nevada before the election, had also been operating in Ohio.
Critics of the Ohio count have also pointed to the case of an electronic voting machine found to have credited President Bush with 3,893 extra votes in a suburb of Columbus where only 638 people voted. State officials have said those votes will not be included in the final certified totals.
There have also been complaints focused on punch card ballots, of the type which caused chaos in Florida in 2000. Voting involves making a hole in the ballot against the chosen candidate by punching out a small piece of card, a chad, with a stylus.
In the 68 Ohio counties where the ballots were used this year, according to some groups protesting at this year's election, vote counters were unable to determine a vote for the president, but did register votes for other offices.
The veteran civil rights leader, Reverend Jesse Jackson, is spearheading the call for an Ohio recount. "We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," he said earlier this week.
Kenneth Blackwell is the new Katherine Harris, another GOP functionary whose function is to cause voting malfunctions.
(Here's the background on those mysteriously non-existent but solidly pro-Bush 3,893 votes.)
I think they are afraid because of the declining power of the United States. Its formerly strong economic foundations have been undermined in the last three decades, since the oil shocks began.
To be more specific, the United States' own oil production peaked and then began to decline in 1970. I think few people realize (it is a sort of super-secret, though out in plain view) that oil found in the lower 48 was one key, perhaps the most important key, to the economic mega-power of the United States. When we became a net importer of oil, all that changed... but nobody is supposed to understand or mention it.
This loss of economic power was not, in my opinion, the fault of either political party, but rather just a matter of circumstances. True, our country could have handled the transition much better, but we got stuck in a particular mindset. I am being charitable, but what's the point of bitterness and recrimination now?
Now the Neocons feel obliged to take a snarling, hyper-masculine, militarized approach to the world because they perceive that our weapons are all we have left. It's like the facade of a movie set - a false front - and they desperately want to do something to recreate that economic power (their "new American Century") before the world figures it all out, dumps the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and tries to move forward in the reality-based world, which, of course, the Neocons hate and in which they cannot possibly live.
Ralph
A concise and brilliant analysis of the last 34 years in the USA.
Ralph is evidently also connected to a blog called Newsfare. Check it out.
Wake up, municipalities! This one's simple. Outlaw any unpaid outdoor political advertising originating with the advertising distributor. Or just ban billboards outright. That's what rich communities do!
You gave Clear Channel this pulpit, and you can take it away.
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The first time Jose Ramirez saw a human body ripped apart by a rocket, it took hours for him to regain his composure. Nothing in his training as a Navy medical corpsman had prepared him for the sight of the dead Marine brought in September to the military field hospital outside Fallujah.
"I walked around in shock," said Ramirez, 26, of San Antonio, a Navy petty officer third class attached to Bravo Surgical Company. "I've seen people die before on the emergency room table. But what I was trying not to do, what I was trained not to do, is look at the patient with tunnel vision. It reminded me that I had to get prepared."
Two months later, when the first wounded American and Iraqi troops arrived at the hospital after storming Fallujah, Ramirez had braced for the worst.
"It doesn't hit me when I'm working on a patient. But after we're cleaning up, and I see the blood on the floor or I see someone bagging a piece of arm or leg, I know it's going to be in my mind for the rest of my life," Ramirez said.
Fifty-one U.S. troops have been killed and 425 wounded since the ground assault on this insurgent stronghold began on Nov. 8.
Happy Thanksgiving to our troops, from everyone in the Bush administration, Republican congressional leaders, Halliburton, Antonin Scalia, and those 31 Red States!
The scheming in Washington as President Bush prepares for his second term is easily explained. It's the insurgents versus the Washington establishment, and the insurgents are winning.
Mr. Bush finds himself in the unusual position -- for a president, anyway -- as leader of the insurgents. Unlike other presidents who came to Washington with bold plans, Mr. Bush has not been housebroken by establishment forces. Even Ronald Reagan made peace with Washington. Mr. Bush hasn't. He wants to impose a breathtakingly conservative agenda in his second term, one that has prompted cries of protest from establishment figures like David Gergen, aide to four presidents, and the voice of the Beltway, the Washington Post.
[...]
If Mr. Bush is anxious his insurgency might fail, he hasn't let on. On the contrary, he exudes confidence that, despite the establishment, he'll succeed in his second term. Mr. Bush did make one bow to the establishment last week. He showed up in a tuxedo at the British embassy for a party honoring Ms. Rice. "One tux a term," a White House official said. "That's our idea of outreach to the Washington community."
The title of the article is "Bush the Insurgent." As far as cute pundit metaphors are concerned, Barnes laid a big rotten egg.
Is this the way conservatives support our troops — by comparing their commander-in-chief favorably to their enemy?
Conservative Christian groups across the country are protesting a film about the life of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, calling it a Hollywood whitewash of the man they hold largely responsible for the sexual revolution and a panoply of related ills, from high divorce rates to AIDS and child abuse.
[...]
"For those who think of people of faith as poor, uneducated and easy to command, I'm sure it would be amusing to see people praying outside of theaters," said Focus on the Family* spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick. "But we want to have a serious intellectual conversation about who Kinsey was and what he did."
[...]
[Robert] Knight [director of the conservative Culture and Family Institute in Washington] acknowledged, however, that some opponents of the Kinsey film may be reluctant to try to punish its distributor, Fox Searchlight, owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
"Fox has a schizophrenic personality. Conservatives appreciate Fox news channel for bringing balance, but the Fox entertainment network, on the other hand, has clearly been the leader in driving TV into the sewer with its non-stop sexual emphasis," he said.
Fox isn't the only one with the schizophrenic personality. If Christians consider Murdoch's combination of pro-Bush messaging for political power and pro-sex messaging for commercial power to be "balance," then they will have even more difficulty with the word "integrity."
If you want to "have a serious intellectual conversation about who Kinsey was and what he did," consider speaking with someone other than these folks.
*"Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based broadcasting empire of psychologist James Dobson, has been working for nearly two years -- ever since it learned that director Bill Condon was planning to make the film -- to enlist scholars outside the evangelical Christian community to help 'debunk' Kinsey's research, Hamrick said."
All drugs have a risk-benefit profile, but if the risk is murder-suicide, it more than defeats the therapeutic purpose of the drug, wouldn't you say?
Unless of course the therapeutic purpose of Lariam is just an illusion overshadowed by the profit motive of those who enforce its use by the troops. Pushing a profitable drug over an effective drug makes loads of sense to those making the profit.
And it's timely too: profitability over reality is the same hidden motivation that appears behind lots of catastrophic decisions nowadays.
From UC Berkeley: "The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in [Florida] counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the probability is less than 0.1 percent."
"Who killed Margaret Hassan?" asks Robert Fisk. After all, her death means more to those who feel they must prove they are fighting "evil" than to those who are the supposedly evil ones.
For most of us, white-collar crime in the name of Jesus Christ is just an abstraction, a few lines unceremoniously noted in the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, until you receive (as I did) the following email from a woman named Sandy Tucker who gave me permission to share it with you:
This is my story…
I was widowed in 1984 and my accountant/financial planner invested $50,000 into Wells Real Estate Fund I as a B Investor. According to Wells Real Estate personnel, today my $50,000 is not worth a cent.
For many years, I communicated with Mr. Wells, both verbally and in writing, to determine what the outcome of my investment might be, but the lies always overshadowed any honesty, and therefore I never knew the real truth of my Fund I investment as a “B” investor.
During these past 20 years, I never received one cent of return on my money. I truly believe that he thought his investors would die before he had to answer to them, and I am sure that many have.
I will be 61 years old in November and still hanging in there, working two jobs to make a living, and fighting to the end to bring resolve to this situation before I die.
Fifty thousand dollars may not mean much to Leo Wells, or Ken Lay, or Neil Bush, or any of those who have profited handsomely from the Christianization of American politics, but it means an enormous sum of money to one 61-year-old Christian widow.
In her lengthy email, Ms. Tucker also included detailed descriptions of Wells's funny business with prospectuses as well as the class action lawsuit that resulted. All to no effect. Her money is all gone, and the "Christian" businessman who has yet to be publicly disgraced (let alone prosecuted) for his actions has not answered for it.
But the heart of the matter is this, in her words: "Any man, whether an individual or a business owner, who professes to be a Christian and puts God in control would never do to anyone, including widows, what he has done to me and hundreds of other investors."
For twenty years she has borne this burden alone.
Investing and religion are a difficult mix at best, partially because the timeframes are at odds. Ms. Tucker brought up the Wellsian concept of an investment afterlife, which of course does not exist: "I truly believe that [Leo Wells] thought his investors would die before he had to answer to them, and I am sure that many have." Bad investments like those held by Leo Wells's investors are the real "death tax."
The ultimate problem with government and business leaders invoking the name of Jesus Christ, as Leo Wells and George W. Bush do with great regularity, is that unsuspecting Christian voters and investors assume that their beliefs are shared. This assumption is a fatal mistake.
Although I am not a Christian, I do know of at least one Commandment that bears repeating: "Thou shalt not steal." But American faith-based elites are more concerned with publicly displaying the Ten Commandments than with actually following them.
Unfortunately, for all Americans who are also Christians as well as for the rest of us, expecting justice from self-anointed dispensers of "morality" is too much to ask.
If there is indeed an afterlife, Leo Wells will burn in it.
If you want to go after white-collar crime carried out by hypocrites, you need to find someone who has already been successful in such investigations. Some like John Kerry.
Darleen Druyun never showed the taxpayers who employed her anything like appreciation, let alone love. Maybe we can get Druyun's priest brother Edward Lofton to help pray for return of the billions of tax dollars squandered by his sister and her daughter Heather. After all, he gives radio lectures on what "love" is.
Shouldn't the 38 soldiers who have died in the curiously-timed offensive in Falluja since Election Day say something about the importance of our civic transactions as voters?
Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling wants his trial moved out of Houston because one-third of area residents polled associated his name with negatives like "pig," "snake," "economic terrorist" and the "financial equivalent of an ax murderer."
[…]
Skilling's co-defendants — ex-Chairman Ken Lay and former chief accounting officer Rick Causey — joined in the request. It argues there is pervasive anti-Enron prejudice in the Houston area, in part because of the stake this community had in Enron's fortunes and in part because of prejudicial publicity.
The filings showed that 31.8 percent of Houston area survey respondents used negative descriptions when asked about Skilling. That was about three times the percentage of people in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix who came up with negative responses when asked about Skilling.
"He is the devil," said one Houston-area respondent.
"Jeff Skilling is an arrogant, conniving, pompous, brilliant crook," said another Texan surveyed by Philip K. Anthony's DecisionQuest firm.
There was also this amazing coincidence: "The filings showed that 31.8 percent of Houston area survey respondents used negative descriptions when asked about Skilling" and "...Houston-area respondents were at least twice as likely to know someone who has been harmed by Enron's fall. About 33 percent of the Houston respondents knew someone affected."
Could there be a correlation? Does personal knowledge of victims have anything to do with the public's perception of culpability?
And what's wrong with the other non-negative 68 percent? Why aren't they paying attention to their neighbors' misfortunes?
...52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County— Bristol, Florida and environs— where it’s 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida’s panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long “Dixiecrat” histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn’t of itself suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn’t mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
In the next four years, drug makers, health-care companies and financial-service concerns expect to benefit from Bush efforts to rein in legal costs and extend dividend and capital-gains tax cuts. Wall Street companies are looking for a flood of new investment if Mr. Bush succeeds in opening the Social Security system to privately owned accounts. Fast-food chains are less worried about a higher minimum wage and auto makers about tighter fuel-economy standards -- both areas where a Kerry administration planned to make changes.
Many industries invested heavily in the Bush campaign as much to avert a victory by Sen. John Kerry as to help ensure four more years for Mr. Bush. Health-care and drug companies contributed $26 million to Mr. Bush and the Republican Party, knowing the Massachusetts Democrat planned to have the federal government bargain directly with drug makers on Medicare prices and allow drug imports from Canada.
While Congressional Democrats will probably continue their push for such measures, Mr. Bush's victory, along with Republican gains in the House and Senate, greatly diminish the Democrats' chances. Another Kerry proposal, to change the way pharmacy-benefit managers do business, seems unlikely to go forward.
The election news pushed shares up, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting a gain of 101.32, or 1%. Drug, oil and defense stocks -- all anticipated beneficiaries in a second Bush term -- posted sharp gains.
In other words: Your retirement money will mysteriously vanish when CEOs like Enron's Ken Lay decide they'd rather tank the stock and invest in Aspen real estate. Your paycheck will not even remotely keep up with the cost of oil and natural gas. Your expensive-to-fuel car will pollute more. Your medicines and health care — when you can get them at all — will be dramatically more costly.
Health care and drug companies paid only $26 million to loot billions from consumers and the US Treasury. The Bush administration is truly the bargain of the millennium — if you're a big business.
Bewildered at Ground Zero. I am a New Yorker not by geography but by sympathy. The people at the receiving end of 9-11-01 voted four-to-one against the candidate that exploited the deaths of their neighbors and friends and family members in order to provoke the needless deaths of soldiers' neighbors and friends and family members.
And the pundits continue not to challenge the Republican abuse of the word "values," as if there were no other definition of what it really means.
"It's absolutely essential that ... on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States...."
He's right.
On November 2, make the right choice. Vote for John F. Kerry.
I will no longer be writing between now and Election Day.
God bless America — and God damn George W Bush and Dick Cheney to hell everlasting.
The U.S. Army, in what could be the final twist in a complicated and drawn-out controversy, is laying the groundwork to let Halliburton Co. keep several billion dollars it was paid for work in Iraq that Pentagon auditors say is questionable or unsupported by proper documentation.
The Army has acknowledged that the Houston-based company might never be able to account properly for some of its Iraq work, and has hired a consulting firm to estimate what Halliburton's services "should cost."
[...]
...some disgruntled Pentagon officials describe the effort to broker an outside settlement with KBR as unusual in a contract of this magnitude. The company has taken heavy criticism from inside the Defense Department and from Congress for its accounting practices in Iraq.
KBR so far has billed about $12 billion in Iraq; almost $3 billion of that remains in dispute. Pentagon records show that $650 million in Halliburton billings is deemed "questionable," a term government auditors use when they see strong evidence of overcharges or contracting irregularities. Another $2 billion is considered "unsupported," meaning that KBR remains unable to provide sufficient paperwork.
[...]
Some Defense officials claim that despite a series of similar alerts running into this summer, Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputies applied little pressure on the Army to force KBR to clean up its act. Instead, they say, the problems continued to mount into 2004 as massive bills piled up that lacked sufficient documentation or were branded as questionable by Pentagon auditors.
[...]
To lead the effort to reach a settlement, the Army early this month hired Virginia-based Resource Consulting Inc., which does a wide range of government contract work, mainly for the military, and is heavily staffed with retired military officials. The Army also has assembled a "Special Cost Analysis Team," made up of Army contracting and financial officials, to work alongside the consultants.
Bills still under scrutiny include charges for services rendered as far back as the spring of 2003. Auditors have concluded that of nearly $900 million in outstanding bills for fuel and transportation costs from Kuwait to Iraq, about $250 million is regarded as "questionable."
The biggest area of dispute surrounds the way that KBR and its subcontractors billed for millions of meals, totaling more than $900 million, served to U.S. and coalition troops last year. Auditors have completed reviews for billing at about a quarter of the dining facilities in Iraq and Kuwait and have reported to the Army that KBR overcharged by an average of around 40%. Questionable charges could approach nearly $400 million after a final review of the remaining dining facilities, Defense officials say.
This story and the mammoth deceits behind it dovetail nicely with the Iraq "reparations" slush fund, from which Halliburton will be paid by the UN for "lost corporate assets and profits" from the first Gulf War.
[LAWRENCE] O’DONNELL: [On Scarborough Country] Well, this is a God—this is also a God who gives the gift of freedom. He says that‘s a gift from the almighty, that the Afghan people got this gift from the almighty this year. What was George Bush’s God doing to those people up to now? You see, that’s the problem with this. For very simple-minded religious people, that stuff works. That is a minority of the American population.
[DAILY HOWLER:] Yikes! It’s been years and years since major scribes took pot-shots like that at professed religion. As the debate proceeded, Bob Zelnick sensibly said that he’d judge Bush’s policies, not his faith. But O’Donnell wasn’t finished:
O’DONNELL: The danger of simplification is that God wants him to do what he is doing. God wants people to be free; therefore, I, George Bush, will free them. That‘s a dangerous political implication.
Any privileged connection to supposedly divine truths should be suspect in the reality-based community. And public announcement of the frivolousness of private logic becomes more important every day, as the religious charade increasingly enters discourse between citizens who are forced to question each other's unquestionable beliefs.
I'm voting for John Kerry because I'm a Christian. I know that my second cousin, George Bush, claims that he is the anointed leader of the American people and that God told him to run for office. I believe he may even believe that. I don't.
My Christian faith leads me to a concern for the poor and the marginalized, yet Bush's actions in office have repeatedly cut funding for health care, aid to failing schools, jobs programs, after school programs, Head Start, and many more services that provide real help and hope to those living in poverty. Under the Bush administration, over a million additional people have dropped below the poverty line. 1.2 million more have gone into "deep poverty," which is one-half the $18,810 for a family of four that defines "poverty."
The Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park Service offering a creationist book for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores was “under review at the national level by several offices,” no such review took place, according to materials obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the real agency position was expressed by NPS spokesperson Elaine Sevy as quoted in the Baptist Press News:
“Now that the book has become quite popular, we don’t want to remove it.”
[...]
“Promoting creationism in our national parks is just as wrong as promoting it in our public schools,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, “If the Bush Administration is using public resources for pandering to Christian fundamentalists, it should at least have the decency to tell the truth about it.”
The creationist book is not the only religious controversy at Grand Canyon National Park. One week prior to the approved sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, NPS Deputy Director Donald Murphy ordered that bronze plaques bearing Psalm verses be returned and reinstalled at canyon overlooks. Superintendent Alston had removed the bronze plaques on legal advice from Interior Department solicitors. Murphy also wrote a letter of apology to the plaques’ sponsors, the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary. PEER has collected other instances of what it calls the Bush Administration’s “Faith-Based Parks” agenda.
As a form of delusional but protected speech, I have less problem with the sale of the book in the store (assuming accounts of the actual geologic record are also for sale) than I do with the plaques defacing the canyon overlooks, an aesthetic/environmental defamation that removes options rather than provides new ones. The schools are another matter altogether.
