October 12 is the two-year anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole stationed in Yemen.

Two years on, we should remember two things: that this had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq, and that soldiers die when leaders make mistakes.

Take a quiet moment to remember the seventeen men and women who died on October 12, 2000. There is general information about the USS Cole here and a memorial page here.

{ 5:08 PM }

.

It's a very bad idea to dismantle the constitution. But good ideas come from Ozten.

{ 4:48 PM }

.

The extreme urgency of invading Iraq is disproven by Junior's month-long August vacation (except for the fundraisers) and his scheduled 14-day congressional Republican campaign blitz leading up to November 5, when he plans to invade America again, this time on the taxpayers' dime. So says The Washington Post.

Now that the knock-kneed Senate has given Junior the unlimited powers of war he and his cabal craved, all that stands in his way between him and Total Domination of Everything Everywhere is the rest of Congress, since he already owns the same Supreme Court that overturned the 2000 election of Al Gore.

This is not funny.

A midterm election may never have been quite so important in our lifetimes. It is especially crucial for first-time and occasional voters to get to the polls this year, and throw the GOP out of Congress onto their greasy fat asses.

You're either with us, or you're with the criminal CEOs and warmongers.

{ 9:41 AM }

.

Is Get Your War On coming to your home town?

Buy the book. I did.

{ 5:02 PM }

.

Bush = Enron. He can't distance himself from the greedy swine that ran Enron and Tyco, because he belongs in the pen with them. Bush Junior personally approved the movement of assets to an off balance sheet entity to hide losses (i.e., what Enron did), according to HarvardWatch, an alumni and student group which monitors the university's investments, as reported in The Guardian:

Over the summer political rivals made capital of a 1991 insider dealing investigation into the future president by the SEC. Mr Bush sold 212,140 shares for $849,000 two months before the company reported a $23.2m quarterly loss but the SEC closed the case without taking action.

Picture very clouded... Vision blurry... Can't seem to remember... Whose father was president in 1991?

Here are the smoking memos (#1 and #2) and here is HarvardWatch.

Links courtesy of Oliver Willis via MetaFilter.

{ 1:13 PM }

.

When television personalities ad lib, the world cringes. This morning on CNN Paula Zahn mentioned that Madonna was starring in a remake of Swept Away, which she extemporaneously described as "a romantic movie from the fifties."

Swept Away was a parable of the economic classes told in sexual politics, written and directed by Lina Wertmuller in 1974. "Rape-oriented" and even "perversely erotic" might be appropriate words to describe it, but not "romantic." Here's a review from Slant.

How do the most clueless people like Paula get in the catbird seat? Does it have anything to do with hairstyles, excellent dental work, or slavish obedience to corporate masters?

Note to Paula's producers: find more compliant model-spokespersons who read from prepared and fact-checked scripts, or find more intelligent hosts.

{ 9:04 AM }

.

The American Dark Ages. American theocracy keeps rearing its ugly head, as shown when a candidate for chairman of the FDA's panel on women's health policy can make insanely medieval statements like these:

"Jesus stood up for women at a time when women were second-class citizens," Dr. Hager says. "I often say, if you are liberated, a woman's libber, you can thank Jesus for that."

And:

...Dr. Hager has written that it is "dangerous" to compartmentalize life into "categories of Christian truth and secular truth."

And:

"Jesus still longs to bring wholeness to women today," the jacket [of Dr. Hager's book] says.

One nation "under God"? Whose God? Men's or women's? The East's or the West's? Yours or mine or Dr. Hager's?

Thanks to the source, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times.

{ 9:18 AM }

.

Jamming the watchers. A simple laser pointer can temporarily disable a surveillance camera. So says this artist/technologist in The New York Times. As the invasion of privacy, especially in public places, grows under Ashcroftism, we must be aware of who is watching us and we must take care to watch them as well. Camera-jamming may become a controversial new tactic in the war against the American police state. From the article:

Philip E. Agre, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, [says,] "Everyone can watch the common people, but that has nothing to do with the political question of who can watch the powerful."

Or, as Johnny Cochran put it in his perverse but effective defense of OJ Simpson, "Who polices the police? You police the police."

{ 8:48 AM }

.

Welcome to the US police state. Here are several shots of the military filming protesters in Washington DC, courtesy of Memory Hole.

{ 5:23 PM }

.

"The bottom-line question that will not go away, and which was left unanswered in Cincinnati, is what is driving Mr Bush down this path? Is it a desire to draw attention away from his poor to chronic domestic policy record? Is it an attempted diversion from the stock market collapse, America's rising unemployment and its corporate malfeasance scandals? Is it all about oil? Or the mid-term elections? Or his own re-election bid in 2004? Or is it a personal, Bush family vendetta against Saddam?"

From America's great misleader by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian.

{ 4:04 PM }

.

Apathy is not the answer. A number of the young antiwar protesters have been quoted as saying that they don't vote because the system is so corrupt, politicians are so slimy, etc. They are right about the corruption and the slime, but people under 30 don't seem to realize the leverage and political power they have.

If only a few thousand young voters had gone to the polls instead of staying home in Florida in 2000, we would have a different president now. Compare what could have been our current situation if young people had turned out the vote: it is highly doubtful that President Gore would yak incessantly about the Iraqi threat. In fact, you could argue that there's a good chance that 9/11/01 might never have happened the way it did if Gore were president, because he might not have tried to schizophrenically placate and then alienate the Taliban as the Bush administration appears to have done. And Gore's family and friends and advisors are not the oil-drenched millionaires the Bushies are.

The point is this: young voters could have helped avoid the possibility of sending young soldiers to war. Or helped young workers get better jobs or medical coverage at work. The economy flew like an eagle under Clinton; it's in the toilet under Bush Junior. Young people who didn't vote helped Bush get elected.

Young non-voters can sit back and complain, but young voters help determine the quality of their own future. Here are a couple of places to get started.

{ 9:48 AM }

.

Bush's Iraq speech yesterday contained the following (from the Washington Post transcript):

Some citizens wonder, "After 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?"

And there's a reason. We have experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people.

Connecting al Qaeda and Hussein is of course a fraudulent linkage, but he never even answers his own question (even including the lengthy paragraphs that follow in the full speech).

Why now? If the Iraqi threat is so overwhelming and so imminent, why did Bush spend the month of August relaxing at his Texas ranch? True, he did leave the ranch periodically for Republican fundraising at record-breaking levels. But if the Iraqi menace is bearing down upon us, why wasn't he in the Situation Room with deputy rancher Cheney, protecting our thirst for oil from his Axis of Evil?

{ 9:27 AM }

.

An image from Ozten's photo gallery of the October 6 antiwar demonstrations in Seattle.

{ 6:21 PM }

.

Scott Ritter speaks as a Republican, as a veteran, as a former UN weapons inspector, and, most importantly, as an American against the impending war on Iraq waged by the Bush administration. Reported by The Guardian.

Interesting how what ought to be the American mainstream debate seems to emanate almost entirely from Great Britain.

{ 2:28 PM }

.

Bill Clinton speaks to a British Labour Party conference, delivering a speech in intelligible English that would be inconceivable coming out of the pie-hole of "fool-me-once" Junior. Reported by Salon.

{ 9:48 AM }

.