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The Bush Administration’s FY2005 Budget for the Environment: Putting Our Future at Risk

07.31.04 (8:48 am) [edit]

The Bush administration FY2005 budget released on Monday, Feb. 2, cuts spending on environmental projects by $1.9 billion compared with FY2004 spending, according to an analysis by several environmental groups.

President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2005 once again launches an assault on environmental protection in this country under the guise of fiscal constraints. The reality is that environmental activities are often singled out for disproportional reductions relative to other domestic programs, putting the nation’s air, land and water at risk. At best, the budget mirrors the President’s neglect of the environment demonstrated in his State of the Union Address, revealing a disturbing lack of solutions for our ongoing environmental challenges.

Although changes in funding vary greatly from one environmental program to another, certain broad trends have emerged from the Bush budget. First, the administration has persistently sought to hide the true effect of its budget cuts through a sideshow of shell games, sleights-of-hand, and other deceptive gimmicks. Second, the administration has repeatedly undermined the use of science in decision making, placing it in the service of politics. Finally, and most distressingly, it has greatly enlarged the environmental deficit that we are leaving to our children.

Here’s a quick look inside the numbers:

· Total spending on environmental programs is slated for a $1.9 billion reduction (-5.9 percent) compared to FY 2004, falling from $32.2 billion to $30.3 billion. However, the cuts do not stop there; the environment takes another whack in the President’s long-term budget plan, dropping to only $29.6 billion in FY 2006, with significant additional cuts falling on land conservation efforts.

· The real funding impact is even greater when comparing the budget proposal to the amount of money needed in FY 2005 to keep government activities at the same level as in FY 2004 (taking inflation and other changing expenses into account). Then the shortfall rises to $3.2 billion, a drop of a full 10 percent below current levels. Over the long-run inflation places huge tax on available resources -- by FY 2009 the gap between current levels and those proposed by the administration widens to $7.0 billion, a loss of nearly a fifth of today’s purchasing power.

· Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency would fall by over $600 million dollars with the biggest impacts falling on water quality and science and technology programs. Land conservation would fall far short of current needs, with the greatest deficiencies occurring in land acquisition, wildlife protection, and parks funding. Certain critical clean energy programs would also be slashed, such as federal R&D into energy efficiency and solar energy, while unjustified subsidies to polluters continue.

The following summary illustrates some of the most significant environmental cuts proposed in the Bush budget by agency.

(Please Note: This document is a compilation of views from several different environmental organizations. However, not all of the organizations work on all of the issues contained in this document. Therefore, the organizations that contributed to this document do not necessarily have views on all of the programs discussed in it.)

[b]Read the entire report [/b]on http://www.bushgreenwatch.org...

The Bush Administration’s FY2005 Budget for the Environment: Putting Our Future at Risk

07.31.04 (8:47 am) [edit]

The Bush Administration’s FY2005 Budget for the Environment: Putting Our Future at Risk

07.31.04 (8:45 am) [edit]

Anybody but Bush -- and then let's get back to work ...

07.31.04 (8:41 am) [edit]

[b]'Anybody but Bush — and then let's get back to work'[/b]

Last month, I reluctantly joined the Anybody But Bush camp. It was "Bush in a Box" that finally got me, a gag gift my brother gave my father on his 66th birthday. Bush in a Box is a cardboard cut-out of President 43 with a set of adhesive speech balloons featuring the usual tired Bushisms: "Is our children learning?" "They misunderestimated me" - standard-issue Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia.

Yet Bush in a Box filled me with despair. It's not that the president is dumb, which I already knew, it's that he makes us dumb. Don't get me wrong: my brother is an exceptionally bright guy; he heads a think-tank that publishes weighty policy papers on the failings of export-oriented resource extraction and the false savings of cuts to welfare. Whenever I have a question involving interest rates or currency boards, he's my first call. But Bush in a Box pretty much summarises the level of analysis coming from the left these days. You know the line: The White House has been hijacked by a shady gang of zealots who are either insane or stupid or both. Vote Kerry and return the country to sanity.

But the zealots in Bush's White House are neither insane nor stupid nor particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the corporations that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their boldness stems not from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but that the old breed finds itself in a newly unconstrained political climate.

We know this, yet there is something about George Bush's combination of ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives I've come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in the White House. Other side-effects include delighting in psychologists' diagnoses of Bush's warped relationship with his father and brisk sales of Bush "dum gum" - $1.25.

This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas - Iraq, the "war on drugs", Israel/Palestine, free trade, corporate taxes - he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and blissfully dull. That's why I've joined the Anybody But Bush camp: only with a bore such as Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put an end to the presidential pathologising and focus on the issues again.

Of course, most progressives are already solidly in the Anybody But Bush camp, convinced that now is not the time to point out the similarities between the two corporate-controlled parties. I disagree. We need to face up to those disappointing similarities, and then we need to ask ourselves whether we have a better chance of fighting a corporate agenda pushed by Kerry or by Bush.

I have no illusions that the left will have "access" to a Kerry/Edwards White House. But it's worth remembering that it was under Bill Clinton that the progressive movements in the west began to turn our attention to systems again: corporate globalisation, even - gasp - capitalism and colonialism. We began to understand modern empire not as the purview of a single nation, no matter how powerful, but a global system of interlocking states, international institutions and corporations, an understanding that allowed us to build global networks in response, from the World Social Forum to Indymedia. Innocuous leaders who spout liberal platitudes while slashing welfare and privatising the planet push us to better identify those systems and to build movements agile and intelligent enough to confront them. With Mr Dum Gum out of the White House, progressives will have to get smart again, and that can only be good.

Some argue that Bush's extremism actually has a progressive effect because it unites the world against the US empire. But a world united against the United States isn't necessarily united against imperialism. Despite their rhetoric, France and Russia opposed the invasion of Iraq because it threatened their own plans to control Iraq's oil. With Kerry in power, European leaders will no longer be able to hide their imperial designs behind easy Bush-bashing, a development already forecast in Kerry's odious Iraq policy. Kerry argues that we need to give "our friends and allies ... a meaningful voice and role in Iraqi affairs", including "fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts. It also means letting them be a part of putting Iraq's profitable oil industry back together."

Yes, that's right: Iraq's problems will be solved with more foreign invaders, with France and Germany given a greater "voice" and a bigger share of the spoils of war. No mention is made of Iraqis, and their right to a "meaningful voice" in the running of their own country, let alone of their right to control their oil or to get a piece of the reconstruction.

Under a Kerry government, the comforting illusion of a world united against imperial aggression will drop away, exposing the jockeying for power that is the true face of modern empire. We'll also have to let go of the archaic idea that toppling a single man, or a Romanesque "empire", will solve all, or indeed any, of our problems. Yes, it will make for more complicated politics, but it has the added benefit of being true. With Bush out of the picture, we lose the galvanising enemy, but we get to take on the actual policies that are transforming all of our countries.

The other day, I was ranting to a friend about Kerry's vicious support for the apartheid wall in Israel, his gratuitous attacks on Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and his abysmal record on free trade. "Yeah," he agreed sadly. "But at least he believes in evolution." So do I - the much-needed evolution of our progressive movements. And that won't happen until we put away the fridge magnets and Bush gags and get serious. And that will only happen once we get rid of the distraction-in-chief. So Anybody But Bush. And then let's get back to work.

[i][b]Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows. This column originally appeared in The Nation [/b][/i] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

The Wrongness of Bush/Cheney's Corporate Fascism

07.31.04 (8:39 am) [edit]

Why Kerry Will Win

07.31.04 (8:34 am) [edit]

[b]Why Kerry Will Win[/b]

IN THE CARD game of bridge, the word "convention" refers to a "coded bid." A partner names a suit of cards and cites a number, which the other partner understands, because of a prearrangement, to mean a different suit and a different number. A convention, in bridge, is a sly way of winning.

This week the Democrats have made a coded bid. Seeming to address each other, the nominees and their supporters have actually been sending a signal to another group entirely -- the crucial minority of Americans who have yet to choose between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Faulted for a lack of clarity on major issues, whether the war in Iraq or the nature of tax cuts, John Kerry has been dead clear on the most important issue of all -- his determination to win the confidence of the so-called "undecided" voters, that 10 to 15 percent of the population who will elect the next president. Nothing demonstrates Kerry's seriousness as a candidate better than his decision to give primacy to those who straddle the American political divide.

This approach can seem to play to Kerry's disadvantage -- visible in the growing chorus of editorial complaints about his fuzziness -- because he has often been seen to straddle a divide of his own. The trap in this strategy, of course, is the foolish thought that undecided voters will vote in the end for an undecided candidate. That is the worry of many who still eye Kerry with skepticism. I believe they are wrong.

Kerry's capacity for nuance and the elasticity of his commitments over time are being held against him, but such characteristics in a democracy can define political genius. In addition to being firm and clearheaded, a leader in a nation like ours must be able to be influenced both by shifting events and by the elusive phenomenon of popular mood. A leader listens. Just as there is a difference between indecision and flexibility, there is a difference between rigidity and commitment. True leadership consists, first, in responsiveness to the unarticulated longings of the people, and second, in the articulation of those longings in the real-world structures of politics.

In the late 20th century, the world made an unpredicted leap toward a new culture of nonviolence. In the West, that took the form of a mass movement away from the nuclear terror of the arms race, with millions of ordinary Europeans and Americans imposing a new demand on governments, a demand that eventually was heard.

In the East, the rejection of violence was at the heart of the democratic revolution that swept away the structures of the Soviet Union, and because the people embraced nonviolence, the dictators did. Against all predictions, the initiative on both sides of the East-West divide belonged to the people, and authentic leadership on both sides consisted in responding to pressures from below.

That the Cold War ended in a nonviolent way is a triumph of popular longing that forced changes in government, not the other way around. The same can be said for simultaneous events in South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, and Central America. Primacy was with the people. Peace became the process. However incomplete, that is the most important political fact of our time.

The revolution of nonviolence has only just begun, but it will continue to require a dynamic partnership between the people and leaders who know how to listen to the people's longings, articulate those longings, and shape politics accordingly. This is the new century's agenda, the context within which the American presidential campaign is unfolding.

Even the immediate complexities of the war in Iraq -- What now? -- have their urgency within the larger purpose of a global move away from war as an acceptable means of resolving conflict. Iraq, Afghanistan, "preventive war," the "war" on terrorism itself -- all of these are mere detours on the road to a different future, or else there is no future.

The question that John Kerry now puts to the nation, referring to President Bush and himself, is a simple one: Which of us is attuned to your deepest longings? Which of us can shape politics, at home and abroad, to fulfill them? In transcending the rigidities that characterize the president and his party, rigidities that undergird unfolding disasters at home and abroad, John Kerry is demonstrating a capacity for attention to the popular will -- as it actually exists.

No one has ever lived in this era before. The future is radically uncertain. In America, the only absolute is our bond with one another. In the world, the urgent task is for peace. Sound-bite certitudes are useless. Old solutions are dangerous. Easy answers kill. In John Kerry, we have a leader who dares to face us with these difficult facts of our condition. We can trust him because in this way he shows us that he has first trusted us.

[b]James Carroll's columns against the Iraq war have just been published in the book, "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War." [/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

President John F. Kerry Is Great!!! ... Why Kerry Will Win ...

07.31.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

Bush/Cheney's Fraud: Iraq Funds Are Focus of 27 Criminal Inquiries!

07.31.04 (8:30 am) [edit]

WASHINGTON — A comprehensive examination of the U.S.-led agency that oversaw the rebuilding of Iraq has triggered at least 27 criminal investigations and produced evidence of millions of dollars' worth of fraud, waste and abuse, according to a report by the Coalition Provisional Authority's inspector general.

The report is the most sweeping indication yet that some U.S. officials and private contractors repeatedly violated the law in the free-wheeling atmosphere that pervaded the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild the war-torn country.

More than $600 million in cash from Iraqi oil money was spent with insufficient controls. Senior U.S. officials manipulated or misspent contract money. Millions of dollars' worth of equipment could not be located, the report said.

"We found problems in the CPA's financial management, procurement practices and operational controls," Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the inspector general, wrote in the report. "These results are not surprising: The CPA faced a variety of daunting challenges, including extremely hazardous working conditions."

The report raises anew questions surrounding the occupation government under Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, who turned over control in June to an interim Iraqi government.

The coalition's failures continue to haunt the country today as Iraqis struggle with security issues and infrastructure problems with electricity, transportation and water.

The Times has reported on several cases in which a small circle of former Republican administration officials had drawn scrutiny for their actions in Iraq, including a deputy undersecretary of Defense under investigation by the FBI in connection with a telecommunications contract. In another case, officials have said, a former senior U.S. advisor conducted negotiations with a family connected to Saddam Hussein to form a new Iraqi airline.

Former CPA officials and contracting experts said they were surprised at the number of criminal investigations described in Bowen's report. They noted that criminal corruption charges in the U.S. involving federal contracting were rare.

The CPA has disbanded, and Pentagon officials did not return calls for comment.

Iraq was "a much more Wild West environment. It's a wartime environment," said Steven Kelman, a Harvard professor and contracting expert. "I wouldn't be surprised if, psychologically, some folks have the idea that they're risking their lives under difficult conditions. They justify that they're entitled to a salary increase."

The report cited several criminal cases under investigation, though it provided no names and few details.

In one case, a senior U.S. advisor "manipulated" the contracting system to award a $7.2-million security contract. The contract was later voided and the money returned.

In another incident, a contractor billed $3.3 million for nonexistent personnel working on an oil pipeline repair contract. A security contractor guarding the pipeline overcharged the CPA by $20,000. Both incidents are under criminal investigation.

In another example, a military assistant to a Pentagon employee gambled away part of a $40,000 grant issued to help coach an Iraqi sports team, the report found.

"In the early days, there was no record keeping. They were flushed with money and seized assets. People just didn't follow established procedures," said Charles Krohn, a former CPA official. "You were dealing with inexperienced people who didn't understand that there's always a day of reckoning."

Besides the more than two dozen criminal cases under investigation by the inspector general, about 35 other matters have been referred to other U.S. agencies for further investigation, said James Mitchell, an inspector general spokesman.

He did not know how many of the criminal cases involved U.S. citizens, or what actions the other agencies have taken in regard to the referrals.

So far, he said, none of the criminal investigations has resulted in a prosecution.

"It's only been a short time that we've been in business," Mitchell said.

The CPA inspector general's office began in January and has more than 100 employees continuing investigations.

Many of the report's findings concern the handling of Iraqi oil revenue, which was placed into a special account called the Development Fund for Iraq. All told, more than $20 billion passed through the account, which was not subject to the same stringent contracting and accounting rules as U.S. government money.

Several former CPA officials interviewed in the past have said the development fund was seen as a way to get quick approval for reconstruction projects without the hassle of burdensome contracting regulations.

Many of the former officials have also acknowledged that they frequently suspected or were told that officials used the money to pay bribes or buy favors for allies and family members.

"It's just like anybody who wanted something would get it [through the development fund] and then the money would go out," one former CPA official said. "Some people were working the system, trying to figure out how to get their hands on a lot of loose cash lying around."

CPA officials have vigorously defended their handling of the Iraqi money, saying that all actions were taken transparently. A recent United Nations audit largely backed up that assessment, with U.N. officials raising concerns that not all of the money that entered the fund could be adequately tracked.

Several of the CPA departments criticized by the report objected to the findings. In one case, inspectors questioned the location of $18.6 million worth of property owned by the CPA. Most of the material, including electric generators and cars, was later found.

Other CPA officials acknowledged the problems, but said that improvements were made as time passed.

"It is important to recognize that during the time frame this audit covered, [development fund] procedures were continuously being improved and modified," said U.S. Air Force Col. Don D. Davis, the CPA's former comptroller. "In fact, many of the findings identified in this report were already being addressed by this staff." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush/Cheney's Fraud: Iraq Funds Are Focus of 27 Criminal Inquiries!

07.31.04 (8:27 am) [edit]

Triumph of the Trivial

07.30.04 (4:42 pm) [edit]

Under the headline "Voters Want Specifics From Kerry," The Washington Post recently quoted a voter demanding that John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "what they plan on doing about health care for middle-income or lower-income people. I have to face the fact that I will never be able to have health insurance, the way things are now. And these millionaires don't seem to address that."

Mr. Kerry proposes spending $650 billion extending health insurance to lower - and middle-income families. Whether you approve or not, you can't say he hasn't addressed the issue. Why hasn't this voter heard about it?

Well, I've been reading 60 days' worth of transcripts from the places four out of five Americans cite as where they usually get their news: the major cable and broadcast TV networks. Never mind the details - I couldn't even find a clear statement that Mr. Kerry wants to roll back recent high-income tax cuts and use the money to cover most of the uninsured. When reports mentioned the Kerry plan at all, it was usually horse race analysis - how it's playing, not what's in it.

On the other hand, everyone knows that Teresa Heinz Kerry told someone to "shove it," though even there, the context was missing. Except for a brief reference on MSNBC, none of the transcripts I've read mention that the target of her ire works for Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who financed smear campaigns against the Clintons - including accusations of murder. (CNN did mention Mr. Scaife on its Web site, but described him only as a donor to "conservative causes.") And viewers learned nothing about Mr. Scaife's long vendetta against Mrs. Heinz Kerry herself.

There are two issues here, trivialization and bias, but they're related.

Somewhere along the line, TV news stopped reporting on candidates' policies, and turned instead to trivia that supposedly reveal their personalities. We hear about Mr. Kerry's haircuts, not his health care proposals. We hear about George Bush's brush-cutting, not his environmental policies.

Even on its own terms, such reporting often gets it wrong, because journalists aren't especially good at judging character. ("He is, above all, a moralist," wrote George Will about Jack Ryan, the Illinois Senate candidate who dropped out after embarrassing sex-club questions.) And the character issues that dominate today's reporting have historically had no bearing on leadership qualities. While planning D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower had a close, though possibly platonic, relationship with his female driver. Should that have barred him from the White House?

And since campaign coverage as celebrity profiling has no rules, it offers ample scope for biased reporting.

Notice the voter's reference to "these millionaires." A Columbia Journalism Review Web site called campaigndesk.org, says its analysis "reveals a press prone to needlessly introduce Senators Kerry and Edwards and Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, as millionaires or billionaires, without similar labels for President Bush or Vice President Cheney."

As the site points out, the Bush campaign has been "hammering away with talking points casting Kerry as out of the mainstream because of his wealth, hoping to influence press coverage." The campaign isn't claiming that Mr. Kerry's policies favor the rich - they manifestly don't, while Mr. Bush's manifestly do. Instead, we're supposed to dislike Mr. Kerry simply because he's wealthy (and not notice that his opponent is, too). Republicans, of all people, are practicing the politics of envy, and the media obediently go along.

In short, the triumph of the trivial is not a trivial matter. The failure of TV news to inform the public about the policy proposals of this year's presidential candidates is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.

P.S.: Another story you may not see on TV: Jeb Bush insists that electronic voting machines are perfectly reliable, but The St. Petersburg Times says the Republican Party of Florida has sent out a flier urging supporters to use absentee ballots because the machines lack a paper trail and cannot "verify your vote."

P.P.S.: Three weeks ago, The New Republic reported that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to announce a major terrorist capture during the Democratic convention. Hours before Mr. Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan announced, several days after the fact, that it had apprehended an important Al Qaeda operative. - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...

Bush Administration Dismantles Health Protections for Miners

07.30.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

The Bush administration, which has already delayed strong, new health protections for miners, is considering further weakening those standards as it prepares revised rules regulating miners' exposure to underground diesel fumes.

Workers breathe in diesel exhaust from machines used to extract metals and non-metals in the confined spaces of underground mines. Numerous studies show that exposure to such fumes at current levels causes 83 to 800 excess lung cancer deaths per 1,000 workers each year. Other studies show that inhaling diesel particulate matter causes cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary problems. [1]

Under the Clinton administration, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) developed strict new rules reducing the concentration of diesel particulate matter to which workers could be exposed. When the final rule was issued in 2001, mine operators were given a year and a half to make modest reductions in the amount of diesel exhaust workers were exposed to in their mines. They were given six years to make more substantial reductions.

But the Bush administration extended the deadline for modest reductions by a full year -- an act that was illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act and MSHA's own statute, because the agency failed to hold a public comment period before making the change. [2] Last year, the administration further weakened protections for miners by reopening the rulemaking process and issuing a compliance document that allowed mine operators to all but ignore the tougher diesel standards if they had any difficulty in meeting them. [3]

"It says 'you don't have to ask for an extension, just mention it to the inspector the next time he shows up,'" said Celeste Monforton, senior research associate in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University, in an interview with BushGreenwatch. "What's the point of having a rule if you can just basically make the rule go away?"

MSHA is in the process of preparing a final rule on the issue, but it's unclear when the rule will be issued or what protections it will contain. "If anything, the rule should be even more stringent," said Monforton.

While the Clinton administration sought to steadily increase MSHA's budget and hire more mine inspectors, President Bush has held spending level or cut spending on mine safety enforcement. Congress, however, has regularly appropriated more than President Bush has requested for the agency.

Notwithstanding the increased appropriations, the Bush administration has done little to strengthen health and safety protections for miners. The few regulations proposed by the administration have mostly weakened those protections.

###

[b]SOURCES: [/b]- http://www.bushgreenwatch.org...

[1] "Part III: Risk Assessment," Diesel Particulate Matter Exposure of Underground Metal and Nonmetal Miners, Final Rule. Federal Register 66 (13): Jan. 19, 2001.
[2] Federal Mine Safety & Health Act of 1977 (Public Law 91-173), section 101(a)(9).
[3] "Metal and Nonmetal Diesel Particulate Matter (DPM) Standard Compliance Guide" (Final Version, August 5, 2003), p. 6.

Bush Administration Dismantles Health Protections for Miners

07.30.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

Bush Administration Dismantles Health Protections for Miners

07.30.04 (8:32 am) [edit]

Bush EPA Slows Enforcement of Power Plant Air Pollution Rules

07.30.04 (8:28 am) [edit]

Between 1999 and 2001, the Clinton administration filed lawsuits alleging violations at 51 electric power plants owned by nine utilities. Several of the cases were settled, but most have stalled out under the Bush administration.

The lawsuits involve the issue of New Source Review (NSR), under which utilities are required to add modern new air pollution controls when they expand or upgrade their facilities.

But when Greenwire reporter Darren Samuelsohn recently reported on a document containing the names of 22 utilities that have allegedly ducked the NSR requirements over the last five years, news stories began reporting that those utilities might be facing enforcement actions by EPA. [1]

Not a chance, said Eric Schaeffer, who quit his post as EPA's top enforcement officer two years ago in protest over the Bush administration's reversals on environmental protection. "The word inside the agency is that Leavitt (EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt) is furious that this news is out," Schaeffer told GRIST magazine. "In fact it's a political embarrassment. It just shows how the administration is holding up prosecutions recommended by its own staff."

Indeed Bush's assistant administrator for air and radiation at EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, has made it his top priority to cripple the NSR rule. He has already loosened the way smokestack industries measure their baseline emissions under the rule. And in total-wipeout mode, Holmstead shepherded through a rule change that actually exempted power plants from installing state-of-the-art pollution controls when they upgrade. That coup, however, was at least temporarily blocked when a group of state attorneys general won a stay in D.C. circuit court.

The leaked list of 22 possible violators includes some of the nation's largest power producers, such as Reliant (now Centerpoint Energy), Allegheny, and subsidiaries of the Southern Company. "We've known about these cases for a while," says Schaeffer, who now heads the Environmental Integrity Project. "A lot of them have been sitting for years because there's been a mandate from the White House to keep them from happening."

Another obstacle is the fact that the Justice Department lacks sufficient funding to pursue more than 15 environment-related cases per year. It is already in the process of suing eight large companies over NSR issues. Justice has requested a 39-percent increase in its budget for Environment and Natural Resources, and Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT) plans to request that the Senate Judiciary Committee press for those funds.

###

This story was jointly produced by BushGreenwatch http://www.bushgreenwatch.org... and Grist Magazine http://www.gristmagazine.com/... . For more on this story, visit Grist Magazine. http://www.gristmagazine.com/...

###

[b]SOURCES:[/b] - http://www.bushgreenwatch.org...

[1] "Second Wave of NSR Cases Await Bush Administration Action," http://www.eenews.net/sr_nsr.... Greenwire, Jul. 14, 2004.

Bush EPA Slows Enforcement of Power Plant Air Pollution Rules

07.30.04 (8:27 am) [edit]

Bush EPA Slows Enforcement of Power Plant Air Pollution Rules

07.30.04 (8:26 am) [edit]

Bush's Fraud: Key Health, Environmental Data Vulnerable to Obscure Law

07.30.04 (8:23 am) [edit]

The Data Quality Act, a little-known law inserted into a huge 2001 budget bill, is undermining government protections of public health and the environment. The Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has overseen the law's implementation, has obscured and even omitted the situation from a new report to Congress.

"The law was written by Congress, but it was very vague. OMB put the meat on the bone, so they are reluctant to admit there are any problems" says Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst with OMB Watch, http://www.ombwatch.org/ a non-profit organization that monitors the OMB. "The new law is a tool for them to be involved with agencies and influence their actions. OMB is a White House office. It's problematic to have a political office overly involved in the regulatory process."

The Data Quality Act was added as a brief rider to the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2001, and took effect in October 2002. It directed the OMB to instruct federal agencies on setting standards for the quality of scientific and statistical information they use and distribute. It also required agencies to accept and review challenges to their data.

OMB Watch has found that in its report to Congress, OMB significantly undercounted the number of challenges made under the law, and understated the extent to which industries are challenging information that affects their business interests.

In one case, the Animal Health Institute, a trade organization for companies in the animal health and pharmaceutical industry, challenged data from the Centers for Disease Control showing that use of a particular antibiotic in poultry leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food.

This resistance makes it more difficult to treat people sickened by bacteria from eating undercooked poultry. The AHI alleged that the Center's recommendations were based on flawed data, and tried to have them removed from the Center's materials.

OMB reported to Congress that there have been no slowdowns in the regulatory process as a result of the law. However, it did not ask federal agencies the amount of time or money they are spending on implementation, or for input on how the law is affecting the speed with which agencies make and implement regulations.

Industries are also trying to use the law to block distribution of information. Although so far no such challenges have succeeded, the attempts suggest how the law could chill even intra-agency information disseminations.

For instance, a timber industry coalition has repeatedly challenged U.S. Forest Service data on the Northern Goshawk. The service considers the bird a "sensitive species," a designation that limits logging and other activities in its habitat. Industry's petitions sought to "correct" the data by having the agency withdraw entire documents or whole sections of documents--in effect "de-publishing" information.

"'Don't correct, just withdraw'," says OMB Watch analyst Cheryl Gregory, describing industry's tactics for changing the Forest Service's rules. "That would open the entire area to logging."

Moulton is most concerned that Congress is not getting the information it needs to assess the impact of the Data Quality Act on public health and the environment. "We want the General Accountability Office to do an independent study, to find out what the true impact of the law has been. OMB is too close to give an objective report."

###

[b]TAKE ACTION[/b]

Tell Congress to investigate the Data Quality Act http://capwiz.com/ombwatch/is... .

Bush's Fraud: Key Health, Environmental Data Vulnerable to Obscure Law

07.30.04 (8:14 am) [edit]

Bush's Fraud: Key Health, Environmental Data Vulnerable to Obscure Law

07.30.04 (8:11 am) [edit]

A Picture IS Worth A Thousand Words:-- Take A Good Hard Look At These PICTURES!!! ...

07.30.04 (8:02 am) [edit]

[b]A picture [i]is[/i] worth a thousand words:-- Take a good hard [i]look[/i] at what Bush/Cheney have done to our nation. Bush and Cheney are [i]despicable[/i]!!!

And we [i]haven't[/i] as yet seen the pictures of Bush/Cheney's thugs raping and sodomizing of little children because they are [i]covering-up [/i]their War Crimes!!!

Check-Out[/b]: "Abu Ghraib Cover-up Intensifies" on http://www.tblog.com/template...

[b]Torture and Abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison ... The Red Cross warned the Bush administration who knew over a year ago and did nothing to stop this ...[/b]

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[b]Its the "liberation" of the Iraqi people and it isnt pretty.[/b]

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[b]These are just some of the photos that led to an investigation into conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison, once Saddams torture palace, and now run by the occupation authorities, as revealed in a shocking report broadcast by CBS on[i] 60 Minutes II[/i][/b].

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[b]Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, in charge of the occupiers detention facilities throughout Iraq, has been dismissed from her post, and 6 U.S. soldiers face charges[/b].

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[b]"This is international standards," said Karpinski, in an earlier interview with CBS. "It's the best care available in a prison facility."[/b]

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[b]Anybody can see that.[/b]

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[b]Below, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for military jails in Iraq, and has now been suspended in the abuse probe, meets with Donald Rumsfeld.[/b]

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[b]And even more disturbing screen shots made available from Global Free Press http://globalfreepress.com/ via [i]TheMemoryHole[/i] http://www.thememoryhole.org/... [/b].

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[b]These images are from the [i]60 Minutes II [/i]broadcast. CBS says that it has twelve of these photographs, though there are dozens more. Among them:

The Army has photographs that show a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner[/b].

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Jesus, jihadis, and the red-state blues ...

07.29.04 (8:26 am) [edit]

In this week of John Kerry's nomination, we should all give President Bush his due. Iraq boils up in his face. Over half his fellow Americans now think his war wrong-footed, if not pig-headed. Spies and other professional observers openly confirm what a few of us amateurs warned from the start, that American troops in Iraq give bin Laden an unbeatable banner to recruit his suicidal Fools of God. And from within Washington's most secret places, loose lips let slip how Team Bush consistently misled the American people about everything from Saddam's weapons to how the United States tortures captives around the world while observing "the spirit of the Geneva Conventions." Yet the stalwart Mr. Bush soldiers on, bravely telling the same tall tales, now about Iran as well as Iraq.

Critics accuse him of lying: I fear worse. Either Mr. Bush still believes the intoxicating fables that Iraqi exiles fed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neo-conservative crapologists, or else he feels no need to get facts straight as long as he does the Lord's Work. Having followed his "higher Father" into a faith-based war in Iraq, the poor Prophet Bush now casts his eye across the Euphrates, waiting for Revelation and listening to Iranian expatriates, some of whom work with the shadowy spies of Gen. Sharon.

Ah, Babylon. We are, it would seem, approaching the End Time, for which millions of American Christians fervently pray. The Israelites have rebuilt their kingdom, as prophesied, and Jesus will soon return to earth, where He will raise his believers bodily into the heavens in what they call the Rapture.

That is the good news. The bad, at least to me, is that two-thirds of the Hebrews - having rejected Christ again - must perish in their Great Tribulation. Satan the Anti-Christ, Armageddon, and eternal damnation to follow.

Scoff at your peril. Apparently, our president doth not. Nor do his fundamentalist mentors, from the Rev. Billy Graham and son Franklin to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and a host of others, all Christian Zionists and staunch supporters of the Jewish State. Now we see the hot times they have in mind for Jews.

How far does Mr. Bush go with this "dispensational theology," as believers call it? No one seems to know. But he swims in their Apocalyptic current, which might explain why he so blithely gives the Islamic jihadis the endless war they crave.

Believers in a radically politicized jihad, or holy war, fervently seek a righteous, rejuvenated Islam, one that recaptures all lands that Moslems once ruled, especially those now dominated by Jews and Christian "crusaders." Organizing themselves for over a hundred years in clandestine groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis directly shaped both Hamas and al-Qaeda. But now thanks to Mr. Bush, his overly militarized War on Terror, his use of torture and sexual humiliation, and his sending troops to occupy Iraq, the once small minority has gained greater support among the world's Moslems than anyone could have reasonably expected.

Believers in the End Time desperately need Israel to keep hold of the Holy Land, or else - as they read Biblical prophecy - Jesus will not return to whisk them away. A quintessentially American messianic movement reaching back to the 1830s, the End-Timers historically shied away from politics. But now they regularly mobilize the Republican faithful and boast of a fellow-traveler in the White House. With bin Laden filling in for the Anti-Christ, no wonder they look to the most powerful nation on earth to give them other-worldly hope.

The two groups of holy warriors - Islamic and Christian - reinforce each other at every turn, holding the rest of the world hostage. Except in their often brilliant use of political tactics, neither lives by reason. Both threaten those of us who try.

Make no mistake: Their competing holy wars are not - or at least not yet - a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Without the politically polarizing impact that Mr. Bush has created among Moslems the world over, the jihadis would have little hope of successfully hijacking Islam. Without his radically breaching the wall that has, however inconsistently, separated church and state in America, the End-Timers would still have freedom to believe what they want, but no easy way to impose it on how Washington walks in the world.

Mr. Bush makes the difference. Believing he hears the Voice of God, he encourages two groups of diametrically opposed religious zealots to drag us all into their Apocalypse. Stop the World, said the playwright. I want to get off.

To be fair, the End-Timers hardly stand alone in pushing Mr. Bush's buttons. He also listens to the secular neo-conservatives, who - more than anyone - sold him on the glories of a new, beneficent, and wonderfully profitable American empire, beginning in Iraq. He also does the bidding of the Pentagon's favorite base-builders and weapons-makers, the media cartels, his and Mr. Cheney's friends in Big Oil, and a fundraisers list of other corporate greedsters. Fit ENRON in where you will.

But, all this is American politics as usual, and the Democrats have their own fat cats and sacred cows. What's new - and terrifyingly different - is the irrationality the End-Timers bring, and how Mr. Bush answers their prayers in the Middle East.

Truly believing in a real-time Jesus and his Rapture, the End-Timers will never willingly walk away, no matter how much they endanger the rest of us. Nor will the Islamic jihadis. We, their hostages, have to stop them both, demanding nothing less than a return to reason, both in the White House and the Middle East.

The first step, but only the first, will come in working night and day to elect the eminently reasonable John Kerry, who has the good grace to keep his religious beliefs to himself, at least most of the time. As deeply as I oppose his dangerously open-ended commitment to keep American troops in Iraq until it becomes secure, we would have to be as grossly irrational as Mr. Bush, or as high as his "higher father," to leave the present bunch anywhere near the levers of power. The risks are much too great.

Voting in Florida in the last election, I cast my ballot for Ralph Nader. Voting absentee this year, but still in Florida, I hope to undo at least some of the chaos I helped to create.

The second step begins November 3, the morning after the election. Should Bush win, those of us who oppose his self-righteous ways must build the kind of grassroots movement that can limit the damage he does, whether in Iraq, Iran, or our American homeland. Should Kerry win, we must create the same political groundswell, forcing him to accept the reality of Iraq. No matter how reasonable he tries to be, the nationalistic Iraqis will not accept foreign domination, whether the occupying forces come from America, Europe, or their Arab neighbors. And the longer Washington tries to make Iraq secure, the stronger the jihadis will grow.

The third step is by far the most difficult. We must work with those Israelis and Palestinians who seek to compromise, and find a solution that a majority on each side can accept. The Geneva Accord is a good place to start, and we should press Washington to support it as part of a more even-handed approach.

If we are ever to isolate the Islamic Fools of God, we can have no higher priority than finding a mutually acceptable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which - whether we like it or not - will mean dividing the Holy Land between the two peoples. Without a viable Palestinian state living in peace with Israel, the jihadis will have a festering sore to exploit, gaining the ear of millions of Muslims who would otherwise reject them.

Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists, right-wing Israeli settlers, and Christian Zionists will all object to getting only part of what they think their due. The Palestinians and Israelis will each have to forcefully curb their own die-hards, and we Americans will have to gently quarantine ours. If rationally fighting terror and making a just peace delays the return of Jesus and his Rapture, the End-Timers had best pray for their sins.

[i][b]A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.[/b][/i] - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...

Jesus, jihadis, and the red-state blues ...

07.29.04 (8:24 am) [edit]

Jesus, jihadis, and the red-state blues ...

07.29.04 (8:23 am) [edit]

Jesus, jihadis, and the red-state blues ...

07.29.04 (8:21 am) [edit]

Democratic National Convention Platform: Choosing Reason Over Ignorance

07.29.04 (8:18 am) [edit]

[b][i]Vote For Reason Over Ignorance:-- Vote For John F. Kerry[/i] ...[/b]

[u][b]Ronald Reagan Jr. Chooses Reason Over Ignorance & Therefore Urges You To Vote For John F. Kerry!!![/b][/u]

RONALD Reagan Jr, the son of one of the Republican Party's great heroes, stood before the Democratic Party faithful yesterday and urged their presidential candidate, John Kerry, on to victory.

Angered by the Bush Administration's religiously based restrictions on stem-cell research that could cure Alzheimer's disease, which was afflicting his father when he died, Mr Reagan said voters faced a clear choice.

"We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology," he said.

"It does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and wellbeing of the many."

He spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where Mr Bush's divisive policies and Iraq and the damage it had done to America's reputation dominated, despite the theme being Senator Kerry's "lifetime of strength and service".

Senator Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, said her husband, as president, would not "mistake stubbornness for strength" and would make America "shining, hopeful, and bright once again".

Senator Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, is polling well behind President George W. Bush on the pivotal issue of fighting terrorism, so his wife offered reassurance.

"John is a fighter. He earned his medals the old-fashioned way: by putting his life on the line for his country. No one will defend this nation more vigorously than he will, and he will always be first in the line of fire," she said.

"But he also knows the importance of getting it right.

"For him, the names of too many friends inscribed in the cold stone of the Vietnam Memorial testify to the awful toll exacted by leaders who mistake stubbornness for strength," she said.

The surprise yesterday was a little-known Senate aspirant and rising star, Barack Obama, the son of an African goat herder, who electrified the room by calling for an end to the darkness of the Bush years.

"When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going," he said.

Party patriarch Senator Ted Kennedy tore into Mr Bush for invading Iraq and "squandering the enormous goodwill" America enjoyed after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

He said in his four decades in politics, no poll was more urgent and important or carried more profound consequences.

"The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George W. Bush," he said.

Some of the most raucous applause came for the party's youngest campaigner.

Ilana Wexler, 12, told cheering delegates that Vice-President Dick Cheney's language should earn him some schoolroom-style discipline.

"Recently, the Vice-President used a really bad word," Illana said, referring to a profanity Mr Cheney recently hurled at an opponent in the Senate. "If I said that word, I would be put in a timeout. I think he should be in a long timeout."

Illana gained attention after she founded KidsforKerry.org, an online organisation of young people who are trying to rally support for the Democratic presidential hopeful, even though they're too young to vote.

She is trying to spread the message that children count, and has so far raised several thousand dollars for the Massachusetts senator. - http://www.heraldsun.news.com...,5478,10274341%255E663,00 .html

[u][b]Stem-Cell Research Takes Center Stage[/b][/u]

Ron Reagan's speech today to the Democratic National Convention is expected to focus attention once again on the debate over stem-cell research, and the Bush administration's disconnect with many in the U.S. scientific community.

Reagan's scheduled speech coincides with increasing pressure in Congress for relaxation of administration-imposed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. Many foreign governments are easing their rules, prompting fears that the United States may be left behind in the race for curing diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's.

In May, a bipartisan group of more than 200 House members called on Bush to loosen the limits on the stem-cell pool available for federally funded research. In June, 58 Democratic and Republican senators joined that call.

On Friday, Japan eased its rules on cloning to facilitate stem-cell research — joining Britain, Singapore, South Korea and Australia in providing an environment where the potentially lifesaving research can flourish.

Some prominent U.S. scientists have moved all or part of their laboratories abroad to take advantage of the more favorable atmosphere.

And in California, voters are to give a yea or nay on the November ballot to a $3-billion bond proposal to finance stem-cell research.

The embryonic stem cell is a primitive form of cell that can be isolated from the embryo days after conception. It has the innate ability to develop into any other type of cell found in the body. Unformed and unprogrammed, these cells presumably can be coaxed into producing new brain cells, insulin-producing pancreas cells, heart muscle and a host of other tissues that could take the place of damaged or diseased cells.

The key is figuring out precisely what chemical signals are needed to induce the transformations. That research requires a large number of cells — far more, some scientists say, than now are available under the federal guidelines.

Despite renewed interest in such research following President Reagan's death from Alzheimer's disease, some scientists think that the brain damage associated with that disorder is too extensive for stem cells to reverse.

Opposition to the research comes primarily from religious groups, which contend that the 5-day-old human embryos from which the cells initially are obtained are humans.

The federal restrictions on stem-cell research are one of many areas in which members of the scientific community have said that politics is interfering with science. This month, more than 4,000 scientists — including 48 Nobel laureates and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences — issued a letter accusing the administration of distorting and suppressing science to suit its political goals.

Scientists repeatedly have criticized Bush for his stands on climate change, pollution, energy research and alternative fuels, among other subjects. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Reason Over Ignorance

07.29.04 (8:15 am) [edit]

Reason Over Ignorance

07.29.04 (8:14 am) [edit]

Vote For Reason Over Ignorance:-- Vote For John F. Kerry ...

07.29.04 (8:12 am) [edit]

Bush's Mistake on Stem Cells

07.29.04 (8:07 am) [edit]

President Bush labored mightily to make juggling antiabortion votes with health industry lobbyists look like balancing science and ethics. His stem cell policy has something to make everyone unhappy.

Bush also showed that he won't be the science president. Arsenic in water: The data is in; don't act on it. Global warming: The data is suggestive; think about it. "Star wars": The tests failed; implement it. Stem cells: The research is promising but not good enough; slow it down.

The president's rules for federal dollars for research go like this: No for cloning humans. (A good, but easy call.) Yes for work on stem cells from adults, placentas and umbilical cord. (These do not cause loss of human life -- never mind that these are the cells people are trying to trick into cloning.) Yes for research on stem cells that already are growing in laboratories. Yes to an oversight committee headed by a scholar who is opposed to stem cell research.

And then the surprise. The president rejected the views of a large majority in the Senate, his health senator (Bill Frist of Tennessee), Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, former First Lady Nancy Reagan and actor Christopher Reeves. They all favored limited research on cells taken from fertilized and dividing cells produced during in-vitro fertilization that will be discarded.

Government-imposed genetics morality has a sad history. "Exhibit A" is Nazi race hygiene, a pseudoscience that provided temporary solace to a society that murdered Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and persons with disabilities and chronic disease.

Bush is pursuing "Exhibit B": the Soviet Union. It labeled Darwin's "survival of the fittest" evolution as immoral capitalism.

The Soviet genetic dogma, Lysenkoism, said that if you tried very hard to be tall, that your body could make tall-stuff that you would pass along to your kids. If you lived near other tall people, their stuff would help you. In other words, the government could make you a better person.

This genetics by perfection of the state was costly. The Soviets lost a billion rubles planting weak crops in clusters around strong ones to be reeducated. Genetics education was wrecked. The discovery of DNA was censored. Scientists who objected went to Europe or Siberia.

The president's moral code will retard science, be costly, and drive talented scientists to Europe.

Basic research at universities creates the foundation for future science. Universities cannot physically comply with Bush's firewall between federal and private stem cell research. European universities will perform the research for the health technologies of 2050.

With universities sidelined, corporations will patent information, like the genetic code, that should be in the public domain. Health care products will be more costly.

Some of our best genetic scientists will go to Europe, depriving us of teachers, researchers and valuable patents for the next generation of health science.

Does anyone believe that we will not buy the medical fruits of this research from Europe when it becomes available? It will probably delay some lifesaving technologies, perhaps a safe supply of blood, or a new transplant to cure diabetes, or ways to repair torn nerves or skin. It does not resolve the moral issue.

Bush said that he agonized over whether these early embryos were human life -- but he did not give an answer. Private research without federal rules will continue.

The president could have avoided this issue. Rules were in place. For political reasons, he offered to revisit them. Now, he has forged a costly and unstable solution that will have to be revisited and revised.

This is a mess of his making. Congress will probably decide to override. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Bush's Mistake on Stem Cells

07.29.04 (8:06 am) [edit]

GOP's bad marriage ...

07.28.04 (10:00 am) [edit]

SOME REPUBLICANS in Congress can't seem to get enough of a bad thing. After conservatives in the Senate suffered an embarrassing defeat of their attempt to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, the GOP House members last week decided to enter the constitutional battle.

Too bad their legislative weapon is aimed directly at the nation's federal judiciary. In an outrageous display of partisan shortsightedness, House Republicans voted to prohibit the federal courts from overturning parts of the Defense of Marriage Act.

While it would be easy to dismiss the move as ridiculous election-year grandstanding and obliviousness to the concept of separation of powers, the House's action is much more dangerous, barring the federal courts from considering the constitutionality of legislation. Moreover, it is a clear example of wielding legislation to target one minority group.

If the Senate were to pass the legislation -- a highly unlikely event - - it would stop the courts from guarding constitutional freedoms all Americans hold dear. One can only shudder to think what might have happened if Congress passed legislation blocking federal courts from ruling on racial discrimination issues during the civil-rights battles of the '60s. Similarly, other minority groups could find themselves singled out for legislative retribution if the measure became law.

By attempting to remove the judicial branch of government from challenges to the 1996 federal law that says states cannot be forced to recognize same- sex marriages from other jurisdictions, GOP House members are throwing a political wrench into the nation's system of checks and balances.

At the very least, the proposed legislation is probably unconstitutional. But there's little doubt that it's a supremely bad idea to strip the federal courts of their authority. This bill should be rejected quickly by the Senate. - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin...

Outrageous!!! ............ Bush Plan Excludes Public From Environmental Review ............

07.28.04 (9:54 am) [edit]

[b]Bush Plan Excludes Public From Environmental Review[/b]

A new directive proposed by the Bush administration would grant broad environmental exemptions to numerous government agencies under the guise of national security. It would also exclude the American public from decisions that can have long-term health and environmental consequences.

Under directives for carrying out the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), agencies such as the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and many others would be given "categorical exemptions" from following federal environmental regulations if they invoke reasons of national security. Such exclusions would enable agencies to conduct activities in secret that could have serious implications for public safety - such as using or storing hazardous chemicals in close proximity to residential areas and schools without letting citizens know about their risk of exposure.

The directive would also allow the degradation of public resources -- such as the building of new roads through national forests for use by the Border Patrol -- with no input from the public whatsoever. While these agencies would still have to conduct environmental reviews before taking action, those reviews would not be subject to public scrutiny or public comment. [1]

"This rule is just one example of how the Bush administration uses 9/11 and the threat of terrorism generally to instill fear and basically prevent the public from learning what it has a right to know," Brian Segee, associate counsel for Defenders of Wildlife, http://www.defenders.org/ told BushGreenwatch http://www.bushgreenwatch.org... .

"There are legitimate reasons to keep some information secret," he said. "But these should be narrowly defined. Does the fact that Border Patrol is blazing a road through a national forest need to be kept secret? We don't think so."

Segee submitted a nine-page letter to the Department of Homeland Security criticizing the proposed directive on behalf of Defenders of Wildlife http://www.defenders.org/ , the Ocean Conservancy http://www.oceanconservancy.o... and the National Audubon Society http://www.audubon.org/ . The Natural Resources Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/ also submitted detailed comments, asking that certain exclusions -- such as those related to the disposal of hazardous wastes -- be deleted from the document. [2]

The period for submitting comments to the Department of Homeland Security has been extended until August 16.

###

[b]TAKE ACTION[/b]

Comments may be faxed to 202-772-9749 or sent via email to ADMIN-S&E@hq.dhs.gov.

###

[b]SOURCES:[/b] - http://www.bushgreenwatch.org...

[1] Department of Homeland Security website.
[2] NRDC letter, Jul. 14, 2004, Defenders of Wildlife letter, Jul. 14, 2004.

Outrageous!!! ............ Bush Plan Excludes Public From Environmental Review ............

07.28.04 (9:52 am) [edit]

Outrageous!!! ............ Bush Plan Excludes Public From Environmental Review ............

07.28.04 (9:46 am) [edit]

Ronald Reagan Jr. Chooses Reason Over Ignorance & Therefore Urges You To Vote For John F. Kerry!!!

07.28.04 (9:33 am) [edit]

[b]Democrats' Reagan coup[/b]

RONALD Reagan Jr, the son of one of the Republican Party's great heroes, stood before the Democratic Party faithful yesterday and urged their presidential candidate, John Kerry, on to victory.

Angered by the Bush Administration's religiously based restrictions on stem-cell research that could cure Alzheimer's disease, which was afflicting his father when he died, Mr Reagan said voters faced a clear choice.

"We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology," he said.

"It does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and wellbeing of the many."

He spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where Mr Bush's divisive policies and Iraq and the damage it had done to America's reputation dominated, despite the theme being Senator Kerry's "lifetime of strength and service".

Senator Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, said her husband, as president, would not "mistake stubbornness for strength" and would make America "shining, hopeful, and bright once again".

Senator Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, is polling well behind President George W. Bush on the pivotal issue of fighting terrorism, so his wife offered reassurance.

"John is a fighter. He earned his medals the old-fashioned way: by putting his life on the line for his country. No one will defend this nation more vigorously than he will, and he will always be first in the line of fire," she said.

"But he also knows the importance of getting it right.

"For him, the names of too many friends inscribed in the cold stone of the Vietnam Memorial testify to the awful toll exacted by leaders who mistake stubbornness for strength," she said.

The surprise yesterday was a little-known Senate aspirant and rising star, Barack Obama, the son of an African goat herder, who electrified the room by calling for an end to the darkness of the Bush years.

"When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going," he said.

Party patriarch Senator Ted Kennedy tore into Mr Bush for invading Iraq and "squandering the enormous goodwill" America enjoyed after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

He said in his four decades in politics, no poll was more urgent and important or carried more profound consequences.

"The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George W. Bush," he said.

Some of the most raucous applause came for the party's youngest campaigner.

Ilana Wexler, 12, told cheering delegates that Vice-President Dick Cheney's language should earn him some schoolroom-style discipline.

"Recently, the Vice-President used a really bad word," Illana said, referring to a profanity Mr Cheney recently hurled at an opponent in the Senate. "If I said that word, I would be put in a timeout. I think he should be in a long timeout."

Illana gained attention after she founded KidsforKerry.org, an online organisation of young people who are trying to rally support for the Democratic presidential hopeful, even though they're too young to vote.

She is trying to spread the message that children count, and has so far raised several thousand dollars for the Massachusetts senator. - http://www.heraldsun.news.com...,5478,10274341%255E663,00 .html

Ronald Reagan Jr. Chooses Reason Over Ignorance & Therefore Urges You To Vote For John F. Kerry!!!

07.28.04 (9:30 am) [edit]

Reason Over Ignorance ...

07.28.04 (9:28 am) [edit]

Ronald Reagan Jr. Chooses Reason Over Ignorance & Therefore Urges You To Vote For John F. Kerry!!!

07.28.04 (9:26 am) [edit]

Ronald Reagan Jr. Chooses Reason Over Ignorance & Therefore Urges You To Vote For John F. Kerry!!!

07.28.04 (9:22 am) [edit]

... PRESIDENT CLINTON: "Making the right choices" ... Let's "Send John Kerry" to the White House!!!

07.27.04 (9:45 am) [edit]

[u][b]Text of Bill Clinton's speech[/b][/u]

[b]The following is a transcript of a speech by William J. Clinton at the Democratic National Convention:[/b]

Thank you. I am honored to share the podium with my Senator, though I think I should be introducing her. I'm proud of her and so grateful to the people of New York that the best public servant in our family is still on the job and grateful to all of you, especially my friends from Arkansas, for the chance you gave us to serve our country in the White House.

I am also honored to share this night with President Carter, who has inspired the world with his work for peace, democracy, and human rights. And with Al Gore, my friend and partner for eight years, who played such a large role in building the prosperity and progress that brought America into the 21st century, who showed incredible grace and patriotism under pressure, and who is the living embodiment that every vote counts -- and must be counted in every state in America.

Tonight I speak as a citizen, returning to the role I have played for most of my life as a foot soldier in the fight for our future, as we nominate a true New England patriot for president. The state that gave us John Adams and John Kennedy has now given us John Kerry, a good man, a great senator, a visionary leader. We are constantly told America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom, faith, and family. We all honor the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world.

We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure America leading the world toward a peaceful future. Our differences are in how we can best achieve these things, in a time of unprecedented change. Therefore, we Democrats will bring the American people a positive campaign, arguing not who's good and who's bad, but what is the best way to build the safe, prosperous world our children deserve.

The 21st century is marked by serious security threats, serious economic challenges, and serious problems like global warming and the AIDS epidemic. But it is also full of enormous opportunities-to create millions of high paying jobs in clean energy, and biotechnology; to restore the manufacturing base and reap the benefits of the global economy through our diversity and our commitment to decent labor and environmental standards everywhere; and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious and racial differences, because our common humanity matters more.

To build that kind of world we must make the right choices; and we must have a president who will lead the way. Democrats and Republicans have very different and honestly held ideas on that choices we should make, rooted in fundamentally different views of how we should meet our common challenges at home and how we should play our role in the world. Democrats want to build an America of shared responsibilities and shared opportunities and more global cooperation, acting alone only when we must.

We think the role of government is to give people the tools and conditions to make the most of their lives. Republicans believe in an America run by the right people, their people, in a world in which we act unilaterally when we can, and cooperate when we have to.

They think the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their political, economic, and social views, leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on matters like health care and retirement security. Since most Americans are not that far to the right, they have to portray us Democrats as unacceptable, lacking in strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America. But Americans long to be united. After 9/11, we all wanted to be one nation, strong in the fight against terror. The president had a great opportunity to bring us together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the world in common cause against terror.

Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice: to use the moment of unity to push America too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors finished their jobs, but in withdrawing American support for the Climate Change Treaty, the International Court for war criminals, the ABM treaty, and even the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Now they are working to develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first. At home, the President and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices indeed. For the first time ever when America was on a war footing, there were two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top one percent. I'm in that group now for the first time in my life.

When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. At first I thought I should send them a thank you note -- until I realized they were sending you the bill.

They protected my tax cuts while:

-- Withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving

over 2 million children behind

-- Cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of job training

-- 100,000 working families out of child care assistance

-- 300,000 poor children out of after school programs

-- Raising out of pocket healthcare costs to veterans

-- Weakening or reversing important environmental advances for clean air

and the preservation of our forests.

Everyone had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans, who wanted to do their part but were asked only to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. If you agree with these choices, you should vote to return them to the White House and Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats.

In this year's budget, the White House wants to cut off federal funding for 88,000 uniformed police, including more than 700 on the New York City police force who put their lives on the line on 9/11. As gang violence is rising and we look for terrorists in our midst, Congress and the President are also about to allow the ten-year-old ban on assault weapons to expire. Our crime policy was to put more police on the streets and take assault weapons off the streets. It brought eight years of declining crime and violence. Their policy is the reverse, they're taking police off the streets and putting assault weapons back on the streets. If you agree with their choices, vote to continue them. If not, join John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats in making America safer, smarter, and stronger.

On Homeland Security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for Weapons of Mass Destruction. The one billion dollar cost would have been paid for by reducing the tax cut of 200,000 millionaires by five thousand dollars each. Almost all 200,000 of us would have been glad to pay 5,000 dollars to make the nearly 300 million Americans safer-but the measure failed because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House decided my tax cut was more important -- If you agree with that choice, re-elect them. If not, give John Kerry and John Edwards a chance.

These policies have turned the projected 5.8 trillion dollar surplus we left-enough to pay for the baby boomers retirement-into a projected debt of nearly 5 trillion dollars, with a 400 plus billion dollar deficit this year and for years to come. How do they pay for it? First by taking the monthly surplus in Social Security payments and endorsing the checks of working people over to me to cover my tax cut. But it's not enough. They are borrowing the rest from foreign governments, mostly Japan and China. Sure, they're competing with us for good jobs but how can we enforce our trade laws against our bankers? If you think it's good policy to pay for my tax cut with the Social Security checks of working men and women, and borrowed money from China, vote for them. If not, John Kerry's your man.

We Americans must choose for President one of two strong men who both love our country, but who have very different worldviews: Democrats favor shared responsibility, shared opportunity, and more global cooperation. Republicans favor concentrated wealth and power, leaving people to fend for themselves and more unilateral action. I think we're right for two reasons: First, America works better when all people have a chance to live their dreams. Second, we live in an interdependent world in which we can't kill, jail, or occupy all our potential adversaries, so we have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. We tried it their way for twelve years, our way for eight, and then their way for four more.

By the only test that matters, whether people were better off when we finished than when we started, our way works better-it produced over 22 million good jobs, rising incomes, and 100 times as many people moving out of poverty into the middle class. It produced more health care, the largest increase in college aid in 50 years, record home ownership, a cleaner environment, three surpluses in a row, a modernized defense force, strong efforts against terror, and an America respected as a world leader for peace, security and prosperity.

More importantly, we have great new champions in John Kerry and John Edwards. Two good men with wonderful wives-Teresa a generous and wise woman who understands the world we are trying to shape. And Elizabeth, a lawyer and mother who understands the lives we are all trying to lift. Here is what I know about John Kerry. During the Vietnam War, many young men -- including the current president, the vice president and me-could have gone to Vietnam but didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background and could have avoided it too. Instead he said, send me.

When they sent those swift-boats up the river in Vietnam, and told them their job was to draw hostile fire-to show the American flag and bait the enemy to come out and fight-John Kerry said, send me. When it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam-and to demand an accounting of the POWs and MIAs we lost there-John Kerry said, send me.

When we needed someone to push the cause of inner-city kids struggling to avoid a life of crime, or to bring the benefits of high technology to ordinary Americans, or to clean the environment in a way that creates jobs, or to give small businesses a better chance to make it, John Kerry said send me.

Tonight my friends, I ask you to join me for the next 100 days in telling John Kerry's story and promoting his plans. Let every person in this hall and all across America say to him what he has always said to America: Send Me. The bravery that the men who fought by his side saw in battle I've seen in the political arena. When I was President, John Kerry showed courage and conviction on crime, on welfare reform, on balancing the budget at a time when those priorities were not exactly a way to win a popularity contest in our party.

He took tough positions on tough problems. John Kerry knows who he is and where he's going. He has the experience, the character, the ideas and the values to be a great President. In a time of change he has two other important qualities: his insatiable curiosity to understand the forces shaping our lives, and a willingness to hear the views even of those who disagree with him. Therefore his choices will be full of both conviction and common sense.

He proved that when he picked a tremendous partner in John Edwards. Everybody talks about John Edwards' energy, intellect, and charisma. The important thing is how he has used his talents to improve the lives of people who -- like John himself -- had to work hard for all they've got. He has always championed the cause of people too often left out or left behind. And that's what he'll do as our Vice President.

Their opponents will tell you to be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards, because they won't stand up to the terrorists -- don't you believe it. Strength and wisdom are not conflicting values -- they go hand in hand. John Kerry has both. His first priority will be keeping America safe. Remember the scripture: Be Not Afraid.

John Kerry and John Edwards, have good ideas:

-- To make this economy work again for middle-class Americans

-- To restore fiscal responsibility

-- To save Social Security; to make healthcare more affordable and college

more available

-- To free us from dependence on foreign oil and create new jobs in clean

energy

-- To rally the world to win the war on terror and to make more friends

and fewer terrorists.

At every turning point in our history we the people have chosen unity over division, heeding our founders' call to America's eternal mission: to form a more perfect union, to widen the circle of opportunity, deepen the reach of freedom, and strengthen the bonds of community.

It happened because we made the right choices. In the early days of the republic, America was at a crossroads much like it is today, deeply divided over whether or not to build a real nation with a national economy, and a national legal system. We chose a more perfect union.

In the Civil War, America was at a crossroads, divided over whether to save the union and end slavery -- we chose a more perfect union. In the 1960s, America was at a crossroads, divided again over civil rights and women's rights. Again, we chose a more perfect union. As I said in 1992, we're all in this together; we have an obligation both to work hard and to help our fellow citizens, both to fight terror and to build a world with more cooperation and less terror. Now again, it is time to choose.

Since we're all in the same boat, let us chose as the captain of our ship a brave good man who knows how to steer a vessel though troubled waters to the calm seas and clear skies of our more perfect union. We know our mission. Let us join as one and say in a loud, clear voice: Send John Kerry. - http://www.newsday.com/news/p...,0,1751325.story?coll=ny-homepage-bi g-pix

... PRESIDENT CARTER: "You can't be a war president one day- claim to be a peace president the next"

07.27.04 (9:44 am) [edit]

[b]Following are the remarks made by President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention in Boston on Monday night, as recorded by the Federal News Service, Inc.:[/b]

Thank you very much. My name is Jimmy Carter, and I am not running for president. But here's what I will be doing -- everything I can to put John Kerry in the White House with John Edwards right there beside him.

Twenty-eight years ago, I was running for president, and I said then I want a government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate as are the American people. I say this again tonight, and that's exactly what we will have next January with John Kerry as president of the United States of America.

As many of you may know, my first chosen career was the United States Navy where I served as a submarine officer. At that time, my shipmates and I were ready for combat and prepared to give our lives to defend our nation and its principles. At the same time, we always prayed that our readiness would preserve the peace. I served under two presidents -- Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower -- men who represented different political parties; both of whom had faced their active military responsibilities with honor.

They knew the horrors of war, and later, as commanders in chief, they exercised restraint and judgment. And they had a clear sense of mission. We have a confidence -- we had a confidence that our leaders, both military and civilian, would not put our soldiers and sailors in harm's way by initiating wars of choice unless America's vital interests were in danger. We also were sure that these presidents would not mislead us when issues involved national security.

Today -- today our Democratic Party is led by another former naval officer, one who volunteered for military service. He showed up when assigned to duty -- (cheers, applause) -- and he served with honor and distinction. He also knows the horrors of war and the responsibilities of leadership. And I am confident that next January he would restore the judgment and maturity to our government that nowadays is sorely lacking. I am proud -- I am proud to call Lieutenant John Kerry my shipmate, and I'm ready to follow him to victory in November.

As you all know, our country faces many challenges at home involving energy, taxation, the environment, education and health.

To meet these challenges, we need new leaders in Washington whose policies are shaped by working American families instead of the super- rich and their armies of lobbyists in Washington.

But the biggest reason to make John Kerry president is even more important. It is to safeguard the security of our nation. Today our dominant international challenge is to restore the greatness of America -- (cheers, applause) -- based on -- based on telling the truth, a commitment to peace, and respect for civil liberties at home and basic human rights around the world.

Truth is the foundation of our global leadership, but our credibility has been shattered, and we are left increasingly isolated and vulnerable in a hostile world. Without truth, without trust, America cannot flourish. Trust is at the very heart of our democracy, the sacred covenant between a president and the people. When that trust is violated, the bonds that hold our republic together begin to weaken.

After 9/11, America stood proud, wounded but determined and united. A cowardly attack on innocent civilians brought us an unprecedented level of cooperation and understanding around the world.

But in just 34 months we have watched with deep concern as all this good will has been squandered by a virtually unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations.

Unilateral acts and demands have isolated the United States from the very nations we need to join us in combatting terrorism.

Let us not forget that the Soviets lost the Cold War because the American people combined the exercise of power with the adherence to basic principles based on sustained bipartisan support. We understood the positive link between the defense of our own freedom and the promotion of human rights. But recent policies have cost our nation its reputation as the world's most admired champion of freedom and justice.

What a difference these few months of extremism have made. The United States has alienated its allies, dismayed its friends, and inadvertently gratified its enemies by proclaiming a confused and disturbing strategy of preemptive war. With our allies disunited, the world resenting us, and the Middle East ablaze, we need John Kerry to restore life to the global war against terrorism.

In the meantime, the Middle East peace process has come to a screeching halt. From the first time since Israel became a nation, all former presidents, Democratic and Republican, have attempted to secure a comprehensive peace for Israel with hope and justice for the Palestinians. The achievements of Camp David a quarter century ago and the more recent progress made by President Bill Clinton are now in peril.

Instead, violence has gripped the Holy Land, with the region increasingly swept by anti-American passions. This must change.

Elsewhere, North Korea's nuclear menace, a threat far more real and immediate than any posed by Saddam Hussein, has been allowed to advance unheeded, with potentially ominous consequences for peace and stability in Northeast Asia.

These are some of the prices our government has paid with this radical departure from basic American principles and values that are espoused by John Kerry. In repudiating -- in repudiating extremism, we need to recommit ourselves to a few common-sense principles that should transcend partisan differences.

First, we cannot enhance our own security if we place in jeopardy what is most precious to us; namely, the centrality of human rights in our daily lives and in global affairs.

Second, we cannot maintain our historic self-confidence as a people if we generate public panic.

Third, we cannot do our duty as citizens and patriots if we pursue an agenda that polarizes and divides our country.

Next, we cannot be true to ourselves if we mistreat others.

And finally, in the world at large we cannot lead if our leaders mislead.

You can't be a war president one day and claim to be a peace president the next - http://www.tblog.com/template... - (cheers, applause) -- depending on the latest political polls.

When our national security requires military action, John Kerry has already proven, in Vietnam, that he will not hesitate to act. And as a proven defender of our national security, John Kerry will strengthen the global alliance against terrorism while avoiding unnecessary wars.

Ultimately, the basic issue is whether America will provide global leadership that springs from the unity and the integrity of the American people or whether extremist doctrines, the manipulation of the truth will define America's role in the world. At stake is nothing less than our nation's soul.

In a few months, I will, God willing, enter my 81st year of my life. And in many ways, the last few months have been some of the most disturbing of all.

But I am not discouraged. I really am not. I do not despair for our country. I never do. I believe tonight, as I always have, that the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the American people will prevail.

And so I say to you -- and so I say to you and to others around the world, whether you wish us well or ill, do not underestimate us Americans.

We lack neither strength nor wisdom.

There's a road that leads to a bright and hopeful future. What America needs is leadership. Our job -- our job, my fellow Americans, is to ensure that the leaders of this great country will be John Kerry and John Edwards.

Thank you, and God bless America. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

... AL GORE: "Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger" ...

07.27.04 (9:39 am) [edit]

[b]Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger

by Al Gore

American Constitution Society
Georgetown University Law Center[/b]

When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.

It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he - the president - label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty - even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.

What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together.

What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power - even without a declaration of war by the Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.

How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current President's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief.

I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.

Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?

Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history - a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.

Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent - that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.

That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war.

Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."

In more recent decades, the emergence of new weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarily increase the war powers of the President at the expense of Congress do not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president - when added to his other powers - carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution, and in the process, threatening our liberty.

They were greatly influenced - far more than we can imagine - by a careful reading of the history and human dramas surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic. They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined his military commander role with his chief executive role, the Senate - and with it the Republic - withered away. And then for all intents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for seventeen centuries, until its rebirth in our land.

Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander-in-chief role and his head of government role to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America.

In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case in the 1950's, the single most important Supreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, "The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new Executive in their image...and if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian."

I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.

We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked on September 11th, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. But just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country that, according to the best evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bi-partisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us.

As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.

A little over a year ago, when we launched the war against this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al Qaeda, and not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind. And, of course, over the course of this past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, the President and the Vice President are arguing with this commission, and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right, and that there actually was a working co-operation between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The problem for the President is that he doesn't have any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite of that, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like to pause for a moment to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. And I think it's particularly important because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government.

To begin with, our founders wouldn't be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it's so important particularly for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda isn't true. Among these Americans who still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the President's decision to invade Iraq. But among those who accept the commission's detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly.

And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the President took us to war when he didn't have to. Almost nine hundred of our soldiers have been killed, and almost five thousand have been wounded.

Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there's a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they'll not only lose support for the controversial decision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they've picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.

But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the President's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to this editorial from the Financial Times: "There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny - however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense."

Of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with the promised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92% of Iraqis, while only 2% see them as liberators.

But right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie -- visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resorted to statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70% of the American people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident - the President and Vice President deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe's top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "an exaggeration."

And at least some honest voices within the President's own party admitted as such. Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, "Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda...I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda."

But those voices did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the President and Vice President used carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed al Qaeda.

In the fall of 2002, the President told the country "You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam" and that the "true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government."

By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network."

But after the invasion, no ties were found. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaeda monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al Qaeda. By August, three former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al Qaeda claim was "tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies." And earlier this year, Knight-Ridder newspapers reported "Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence" of a connection.

So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead of the candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence. Vice President Cheney insisted even this week that "there clearly was a relationship" and that there is "overwhelming evidence." Even more shocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: "Was Iraq involved with al-Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." He then claimed that he "probably" had more information than the commission, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults.

The President was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." He provided no evidence.

Friends of the administration tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an Al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the commissions files yielded definitive evidence that it was another man with a similar name - ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument.

They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.

That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad decisions also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage.

To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with Al Qaeda. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission "finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie" - a clear statement of the obvious - and said there is no "fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said." He tried to deny that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression of linkage between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire."

Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking government officials "the toughest of the tough questions." Rather went so far as to compare Administration efforts to intimidate the press to "necklacing" in apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as "an obscene comparison." "The fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Rather explained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush Administration.

Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the Administration's policy "makes it complicated and more difficult" to fight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a certain extent my station, was intimidated by the Administration."

The Administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the President's consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President...you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.

Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report "without fear or favor" our democracy will disappear.

Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again. We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions.

We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.

When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.

But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President's policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse - and even torture and murder - by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." At least we don't have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.

By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant and overbroad." But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo - that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information - most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush, meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.

I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.

The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the Bush administration to ignore the United Nations, do serious damage to our most important alliances in the world, violate international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.

And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fools gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress, courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation.

If the congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.

Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles, "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them...to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men."

The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal... If the president, for example approves something, approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president's decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law."

Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as President before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis.

The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.

In some ways, our current President is actually claiming significantly more extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting them see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who picked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassing memos justifying and enabling torture.

Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that saved the country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government.

Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the President on what they vote for and what they don't vote for. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form, and instead, they let the President's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they believed that the power of the Congress was the most important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the Executive branch.)

This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the Administration to the American people.

Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has to say about their secrecy: "The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government - cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters."

Here are just a few examples, and for each one, you have to ask, what are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?

More than 6000 documents have been removed by the Bush Administration from governmental Web sites. To cite only one example, a document on the EPA Web site giving citizens crucial information on how to identify chemical hazards to their families. Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bush administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American citizens.

To head off complaints from our nation's Governors over how much they receive under federal programs, the Bush Administration simply stopped printing the primary state budget report.

To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language.

They've kept hidden from view Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They have fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and lobbyists advised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the new laws.

And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing they simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades. For this administration, the truth hurts, when the truth is available to the American people. They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?

In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing Constitutional power grab by the President. So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties - again on his personal discretion - and he will continue to intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for re-election.

War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the President, nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the Secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the National Security Advisor.

Always before, we could look to the Chief Executive as the point from which redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a President and an administration for whom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.

In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend up on a debased department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution" are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Bush's Dark Pages in Conservation History ...

07.27.04 (9:19 am) [edit]

A crucial struggle over land stewardship is taking place south of my home on the Greater Otero Mesa, a 1.2-million-acre stretch of grassland that looks pretty much the way it did when Coronado explored the region almost 500 years ago. As much as half of Otero Mesa still qualifies for protection under the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act, which was enacted when I headed the Interior Department under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. This law prevents industrial development on designated federal land "retaining its primeval character and influence."

But the Bush administration, determined to ransack public lands for the last meager pockets of petroleum, has turned my old department into a servile, single-minded adjunct of the Energy Department. It is intent on opening Otero Mesa and other wild lands to oil and gas exploration under the guise of reducing our ever-growing dependency on imported oil.

Here in New Mexico, where citizens cherish sublime landscapes, the administration's attack on the mesa is a heated issue. Gov. Bill Richardson has been joined by lawmakers, environmental groups and thousands of citizens in opposing drilling on Otero.

This crusade is part of a wave of public resentment across the West over the dark chapter that President Bush and his aides are writing in the history of the American conservation movement. From California to Colorado, Montana to Arizona, drill rigs pockmark the West's wild places, licensed by a White House that views opening of the nation's last untrammeled country to private development as a prime economic priority.

For the last 50 years as a congressman, as Interior secretary, as a citizen activist and a historian, I have been involved in the conservation cause. Until the last few years Americans have taken pride in the fact that our country has set the standard for innovative ideas about resource stewardship, and has seen them emulated throughout the world.

The word "conservation" — and the concept of science-based management of resources — did not exist until Teddy Roosevelt became president. He initiated the reforms and raised the banner, halting raids on the public's resources and creating millions of acres of national forests, parks and wildlife refuges.

Even during the Great Depression, the second President Roosevelt enlarged his cousin's legacy. FDR put people to work replanting forests, bringing electricity to rural areas and enlarging the nation's national parks.

A third wave of conservation got underway in 1961 when Kennedy called for the establishment of wilderness reserves and the addition of seashores to the park system, inspiring conservationists to revive ideas that had been shelved after Pearl Harbor.

My office sorted through the results: Should I urge the New Jersey governor to oppose the powerful New York Port Authority's plan for a super jetport in order to preserve the Great Swamp? Should I travel to Maine to help Sen. Edmund Muskie stop a dam that would flood the storied Allagash River? Could I persuade the budget people to spend $30 million more to prevent development inside the new Point Reyes National Seashore in California? We did all that, and more.

In those days, partisan lines were never drawn where conservation issues were concerned. Kennedy's Wilderness bill passed the Senate by a vote of 78 to 12, with only six members of each party voting no. Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the bill largely because of the leadership of a farsighted Californian, Thomas Kuchel.

From 1961 to 1981, every president — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter — gave his unwavering support to environmental reforms. Richard Nixon set a high goal by declaring that the 1970s should be the "environmental decade." He created the Environmental Protection Agency and approved laws to protect endangered species.

As the country moved rightward with Reagan, the rhetoric may have been negative, but in the end no effort was made to repeal important environmental laws. George H.W. Bush had a positive record, and although Bill Clinton was stymied by a hostile Congress, he used his executive powers to achieve positive results.

Overall, it's a record that bolsters my thesis that this administration is rowing against the tide of American history. Otero Mesa symbolizes its narrow focus. Bush and company have not put forward a single positive new conservation concept. They have systematically lowered pollution regulations to please favored industries. They have allowed park and forest maintenance to be neglected and under-funded. I view these events and developments with dismay. This is a time for straight talk, for those who love the land to make their voices heard before more damage is done to the resources we all own.

[b]Stewart L. Udall has written, edited or contributed to dozens of books, most recently "The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West" (Shearwater Books, 2002).[/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Bush's Dark Pages in Conservation History ...

07.27.04 (9:18 am) [edit]

Bush's Dark Pages in Conservation History ...

07.27.04 (9:15 am) [edit]

The CPD ...

07.27.04 (9:12 am) [edit]

[b]The Committee on the Present Confusion

by Patrick J. Buchanan [/b]

With full-page ads in [i]The Washington Post[/i], [i]The New York Times [/i]and [i]The Washington Times [/i]trumpeting its slide down the spillways, [u]The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD)[/u] has been relaunched.

[[u]CarteBlanche's comments[/u]: [i]CPD are same neo-con nutjobs who came up with the insane "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) demanding that the USA take-over the world[/i]!!!]

The 1970s committee of Republican hawks and neoconservatives denounced détente and called for clarity, courage and perseverance in the Cold War against a Soviet empire that had overrun Southeast Asia and was on the march in Africa and close to strategic superiority.

The declaration of principles and purposes of the new committee, however, help explains why support for Bush's war is crumbling. It is pure mush. It reads like the final communique, negotiated in some all-night session of deputies, of a contentious meeting of the G-8.

"America faces its greatest threat in a generation," declares CPD. "An organized global movement – assisted by rogue regimes – has adopted mass terror as a weapon to achieve political goals."

OK, fine. But nowhere is this "organized global movement" even named. If it is al-Qaeda, why not say so? But if it is al-Qaeda, it is hard to think of any regime, rogue or not, that supports it. Even the Iranians, whose diplomats were murdered by the Taliban, helped us finish them off. Who, then, are the rogue regimes? And what are the "political goals" this "global movement" hopes to achieve?

Of late, al-Qaeda has been targeting the Saudis. Perhaps CPD did not wish to name this political goal of the terrorists, because so many of the neocon signers of the CPD ad share a similar desire to see the Saudi monarchy dumped over.

"We are joined together," the ad declares, "by the recognition that no accommodation can be made with terrorists..."

But terrorism is a tactic, a weapon used in wars of liberation by the IRA, the Irgun, the Stern Gang, the Mau Mau, the Algerian FLN, the Viet Cong, the ANC and a dozen other movements. Not only have we made accommodations with the regimes that came out of these movements, we are giving most of them foreign aid. And some of the ex-terrorists, like Menachem Begin and Nelson Mandela, have gotten Nobel Peace Prizes.

One imagines most signers of the CPD declaration would consider Arafat a terrorist. But not only does Yasser share a Nobel Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, he was handed Hebron by Benjamin Netanyahu and offered 95 percent of the West Bank and co-tenancy of Jerusalem by Ehud Barak. Can it be that four Israeli prime ministers have engaged in accommodation with terrorists?

Was FDR wrong to accommodate Stalin to defeat Hitler? Was Nixon wrong to go to Beijing and accommodate Mao Tse-tung in the Shanghai Communique? Were not Stalin and Mao two of the greatest terrorists of the 20th century?

Bush's father made an accommodation with Hafez al Assad, who had slaughtered thousands of Muslims in Hama, for help in ousting Saddam from Kuwait. Was he wrong to do so? In ousting the Taliban, George W. Bush enlisted a Northern Alliance of warlords whose hands were soaked in blood. Was he wrong to do so?

"No accommodation can be made with terrorists ..."

[b]OK. Why, then, does CPD not denounce Bush for trumpeting his deal with Muammar Gaddafi and letting this instigator of the Berlin discotheque bombing and Lockerbie massacre out of the sanctions box? Is President Bush not accommodating a terrorist in return for his surrender of WMD?[/b]

The new CPD calls for "strategic clarity" and for "educating the American people on the nature of the danger." But what CPD is offering is none of the clarity of the Cold War, nor any of the passionate certitude of "Remember Pearl Harbor!"

The closest it comes to educating us about the enemy we face is this line: "Victory over terror inspired by radical Islamists – fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere – will also be a long struggle."

But Saddam Hussein was "not inspired by radical Islamists." He was a secular despot. He despised Islamists. He fought an eight-year war with the leading Islamist state, Iran. And why is there not a single mention of Israel and Hamas in the entire ad? Is this the dog that didn't bark?

Something is fishy here. While that CPD ad has 40 signers, only three are big name Republicans: Sen. John Kyl, Jack Kemp and Ed Meese. The rest of the list reads like the head table at the annual American Enterprise Institute dinner. Yet, Pete Hannaford, a former Reagan aide, told the Post he put this all together after talking with a "variety of friends."

No way. This is a front group. Somebody had to pony up the hundreds of thousands of bucks to pay for these ads. Who's behind it?

Says the Post, "Initial costs have been made from a grant from two businessmen whom he (Hannaford) declined to identify..."

[b]Now we're getting somewhere. As Deep Throat said, "[i]Follow the money[/i]!" [/b]- http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a...

Dubya Makes Deals With Islamic Terrorists!!! ... [Neo-Cons are Dangerous Hypocrites!!!]

07.27.04 (9:11 am) [edit]

Dubya Makes Deals With Islamic Terrorists!!! ... [Neo-Cons are Dangerous Hypocrites!!!]

07.27.04 (9:04 am) [edit]

What happens when the rule of law is eroded?

07.27.04 (8:57 am) [edit]

[b]'When the law goes flat'[/b]

Amidst all the outrages of the Bush Administration -- raiding the Federal treasury, starving education and social services, trashing the environment, launching an aggressive war -- it is all too easy to overlook the erosion of the rule of law. Yet the law is the institution that most immediately affects us all, because the law, as established by the founders of our nation, protects us all from the reckless power of abusive government -- from what Hamlet called, "the insolence of office."

To be sure, laws can be petty or even silly, especially in local jurisdictions. Far worse, they can be cruel and unjust when enacted by oppressive regimes such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. But this is not the case in the United States of America. Our laws are founded on our Constitution, ratified with "the consent of the governed," and devised, in the words of the Preamble, "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty." When our courts are functioning properly, laws judged to be in violation of these Constitutional objectives and protections are ruled null and void.

The protection of the law, and the loss of that protection, is the central theme of Robert Bolt's play and movie, "A Man for All Seasons," which dramatizes the life and martyrdom of Thomas More. In the play, More warns his son-in-law:

"[i]Would you cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide.., the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast..., and if you cut them down... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake[/i]."

Thomas More's offense, which eventually cost him his life, was his refusal to recognize the supremacy of the English Monarch over papal authority. More, a legal scholar, believed that so long as he remained silent, the law would protect him, even from the sovereign, Henry VIII. But when that law was "flattened" as it became subordinate to and a political weapon of that sovereign, Thomas More's fate was sealed.

The fate of Thomas More, and of countless others throughout history who have fallen victim to the corruption of law by the wealthy and powerful, must stand as a warning to all Americans today. For the evidence of the corruption of law in the hands of the present administration and its party is compelling to any who have the eyes to see and the judgment to appreciate the threat. Put bluntly, the Bush administration is literally an "outlaw" regime -- it has placed itself outside the law that both constrains and protects the rest of us.

I will examine five of the many offenses by the Bush Administration against the rule of law: the election of 2000, the unequal enforcement of the law, the violation of international treaties, the infringement of civil liberties, and the attempt through so-called "tort reform" to deny ordinary citizens the protection of civil law.

[b]The 2000 Election: [/b] To begin, we must never forget that this administration was conceived in lawlessness. Thousands of Florida voters were unlawfully "purged" and denied access to the polls. Military ballots postmarked past the deadline were counted. In Miami-Dade county, an official act of ballot counting was shut down by a "yuppie riot" of GOP staff members -- an event as blatantly illegal as the disruption of a trial or of a debate on the floor of the Congress. Yet no one was ever charged, much less punished, for this lawlessness.

Article Two, Section One of the U.S. Constitution explicitly states that "each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors." Thus it is the business of the states, as interpreted by the Supreme Courts of the states, to select the presidential electors. Accordingly, the Supreme Court of Florida ordered the continued counting of the ballots, and that decision was upheld by two appellate federal courts. No matter. In a legally indefensible ruling ("limited to the present circumstances"), clearly concocted with the sole purpose of putting George Bush in the White House, five Republican judges on the Supreme Court ordered an end of the vote counting and, in effect, selected the President. (See my "A Day of Infamy," http://www.igc.org/politics/i... and a collection of legal and journalistic responses to Bush v. Gore: "We Dissent." http://www.igc.org/gadfly/dis... ).

Subsequently, [u]more than 600 Professors of law signed a petition of protest[/u], http://www.the-rule-of-law.co... which included the following:

[i]We are Professors of Law at American law schools, from every part of our country, of different political beliefs. But we all agree that when a bare majority of the U. S. Supreme Court halted the recount of ballots under Florida law, the five justices were acting as political proponents for candidate Bush, not as judges[/i].

[b]The Unequal Enforcement of the Law:[/b] Carved above the entrance to this same Supreme Court, are the words "Equal Justice under Law." Would that it were so. Unfortunately, there are two kinds of "justice." There is one standard of justice for the wealthy murderer with a team of high-priced attorneys, and another standard for the poor murder suspect with the court-appointed lawyer. There is one law for wealthy users of powdered cocaine or oxycontin, and another for poor black users of crack cocaine. There is one law for the corporate executive who fixes energy prices, another for "Grandma Millie" who must pay those inflated prices. There is one law for the Republican donor who cheats thousands of taxpayers of billions of invested dollars, and another for Democratic contributor, Martha Stewart, caught "dumping" $50,000 of stock on an "insider tip." There is one law of perjury for Casper Weinberger, Eliot Abrams and Oliver North, all of whom escaped fine and imprisonment due to "technicalities" and presidential pardons, and another law for President Bill Clinton caught, at last, in a "perjury trap" over a non-material sexual indiscretion.

[b]The Violation of International Treaties:[/b] Article Six of the Constitution decrees that "all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land." But not, apparently, to this Administration which has casually ignored and violated numerous treaties at its convenience. The most outrageous has been the violations of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, and specifically at the Abu Ghraib prison. In a March 6, 2003, memo from the Pentagon "working group," we read: "In light of the President's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the President's ultimate authority in these areas." Regarding this memo, Molly Ivins wrote http://www.workingforchange.c... : "Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown -- forget that 'no man is above the law' jazz. We used to talk about 'the imperial presidency' under Nixon, but this is the real thing."

[b]Civil Rights:[/b] George Bush's violation of the rights of citizens' is open and flagrant. Until very recently, at least three U. S. Citizens (that we know of) were incarcerated without specific charges, without access to counsel, without expectation of a jury trial -- all this in violation of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights). Even worse violations of basic judicial rights were visited upon the non-citizens held at Guantánamo. But now, at last, the courts have dug in their heels, as the very Supreme Court that appointed Bush to his office, finally drew the line and ordered that U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi be allowed access to his lawyer and be formally charged. (The Supremes "punted" the similar case of Jose Padilla back to the state court).

Even so, the Bush Administration's aspirations to "transcend" the law remain a constant threat. Last month, the conservative legal journalist, Stuart Taylor, Jr., http://www.progressivetrail.o... wrote:

"[i]These warped analyses [by the Defense Department legal team] are not just the work of a few lawyers carried away with clever circumvention of the law. They reflect an attitude deeply entrenched in the Bush White House -- including Bush and Dick Cheney as well as (White House counsel Alberto) Gonzales -- that whenever the president invokes national security, he enjoys near-dictatorial powers and is quite literally above the law. ... These perversions of the law would allow Bush to seize, imprison, and torture anyone in the world, at any time, for any reason that he associates with national security. Little did the Framers suspect that their Constitution would be twisted by a president to claim powers more appropriate to Roman emperors, Russian czars, and King George III[/i]."

Anyone claiming to be an authentic "conservative" who can still support this president, is engaging in an extraordinary feat of mind-bending.

[b]"Tort Reform:" [/b]Finally, we come to the issue of "tort reform," brought to public attention by the selection of "trial attorney" John Edwards as the Democratic Candidate for Vice President.

Libertarians, and in particular the libertarian faction of the Republican party, have long contended that tort law -- court mandated compensation for damages -- would accomplish all that government regulation attempts to achieve, and that it would do this more effectively and at less cost. Unfortunately, history clearly testifies that it simply won't work. Furthermore, the attempt to have tort law take on the same task as regulation would entail a re-establishment of the same sort of bureaucracy that the libertarians deplore. This is a bold charge that I make against the libertarian "tort and court" remedy. Because I have defended this criticism of libertarianism at length in a published article, "With Liberty for Some," I will not repeat that argument here.

But just suppose that the libertarians are right: that the work of the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other regulatory agencies, can all be accomplished through the threat of personal lawsuits against private corporations. This proposed alternative to government regulation is insincere, to say the least of it. For if the Republicans really believed that the courts could and should protect the citizens and consumers from injuries from the corporations, then they would be in the vanguard of those who would at least retain, and perhaps even increase, the legal penalties imposed upon offending parties and corporations. And, of course, the opposite is the case.

Instead, they propose "tort reform" which would make access to the courts prohibitively expensive for ordinary citizens. In addition, this so-called "reform" would result in "settlements" unlikely to fully compensate for damages, and would exact costs to large corporations sufficiently small to have virtually no deterrent effect. Such "reform" would truly be a "flattening" of the law, leaving little or no protection for private citizens from corporate abuses, damages and injuries. But, of course, that's precisely the objective of "tort reform."

In short, the GOP and its corporate sponsors want it both ways: no protection of the consumer-citizen through enforcement of government regulation, and no protection of the consumer-citizen through punishing court settlements. The corporation as screwer -- the citizen as screwee.

[b]In Conclusion:[/b] The founders of our Republic resolved that the inalienable rights of every citizen would be protected by the equal application of the rule of law. They understood that in a well-ordered polity, justice, embodied in the rule of law, is above politics; the law sets the rules and defines the constraints of acceptable political activity. The Law is the "referee" that assures "fair play." And it does so blindly, with equal fairness to the various factions. The law protects the individual citizen from the abuse of power, from the lowliest citizen to the President. This is what Robert Bolt's Thomas More had in mind, when he said that "I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."

The blindfolded Lady Justice makes no distinctions: all are to be protected equally by the law. And when the blindfold is torn off and the scales of justice are weighted in favor of the rich and powerful, and against the opposing parties and dissenting citizens, then the lowliest citizen is not safe. Worse still, when that citizen comes to appreciate this fact, he will no longer look to the law for justice and protection. Law, for the citizen, will then have ceased to be his protector, and will instead have become his oppressor - a political tool of a sovereign that has thus forfeited his right to govern. "When in the course of human events" such misfortune befalls a public, the time has come to replace the government -- peacefully if possible, but forcibly if necessary.

[u]If you disagree, then your argument is not with me, it is with all the signers of the Declaration of Independence[/u].

[b]Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org).[/b] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

What happens when the rule of law is eroded?

07.27.04 (8:55 am) [edit]

Freedom From Religion, Revisited ...

07.26.04 (11:04 am) [edit]

[b]Our Founding Fathers[i] did [/i]intend a fire-wall of separation between church and state. Prominent historians http://members.tripod.com/~candst/ confirm that the Founding Fathers based our US Constitution and governmental structure upon the European Enlightenment. This is historial fact.[/b]

However, Bush's over-zealous form of "christianity" not only represents an anathema to our secular form of government, but also is a hypocritical form of religiosity used by extremist fanatics who prey upon the weak. The right-wing "christian" movement is dangerous because it is not based upon principles that Jesus Christ himself taught-- but like the "islamic" terrorists, is a twisted and convoluted form of fascism meant to enslave people-- the Founding Fathers would have been disgusted with this intolerant and bizarre corruption of our system of government where they intended us to use rational thought to solve problems and promote the General Welfare and not superstitious creeds thrust down our throats for pernicious motives by power-hungry demagogues.

[u][b]What Would Our Founding Fathers Say About Bush's So-Called "Christianity"???[/b][/u]

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society." - Thomas Jefferson, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu...

[b]Our Founding Fathers were adament in creating a "wall of separation between church and state" and would have been appalled at the pressure brought to bear to impose hateful intolerence & divisive ideologies by so-called "religious" zealots and tyrannical fanatics like the traitorous & hypocritical Bush (unfit to be president) who is corrupting our system of democracy ... Bush's bizarre and corrupt so-called form of "Christianity (sic)" pathetically has resulted in:[/b]

1. Bloody warfare based upon heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods (e.g. phony WMDs posing a so-called "imminent threat" to our national security, phony links between Al Qaeda & Saddam Hussein, cynically manipulating the fear & anger of Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, unlike the Saudis: Bush's buddies, etc.) for which he should be impeached;

2. Lack of compassion, lack of action to help over 45 million Americans without health care coverage (while Bush brags & smirks about Iraqis getting health care-- that is, when they are not being murdered, tortured, raped, ridden like donkeys, and abused in atrocities committed on orders from Bush, Cheney, Rice & Rumsfeld ...)-- so Americans live in miserable pain, diseased or go bankrupt with over 18,000 Americans dying each year because they can't afford health care;

3. Lack of concern, lack of action about skyrocketing poverty in the U.S.A. with over 25 million families desperately trying to to make ends meet, living below an out-dated poverty-line established over 40 years ago-- over 4 million Americans who are homeless-- between 9-15 million Americans without jobs;

4. Highest gap between the Hyper-Rich Haves & the Impoverished Have-Nots in over 75 years, with America's backbone, the Middle-Class shrinking;

5. Inflation (e.g. higher gas prices, higher costs in goods & services, more people losing their homes because they can't pay their mortgages) hitting the Middle-Class and Working people very hard, while corporations, wealthy oligarchs & hyper-rich plutocrats are awarded immoral tax cuts, tax loopholes and tax boondoggles and living like Emperor Caligulas-- supported by the rest of us who are saddled with Bush's record-level deficits and historically high debts-- that are hurting the value of the dollar and our standard of living.

Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling all around us (e.g. Bush's "Leave No Child Behind" Failure has Left Lots of Children Worse Off because no funds were allocated to enable teachers to teach [Why do you think that the rich send their kids to private schools with 15 kids/class instead of the 30-40/class sizes that public school teachers have to contend with?]!-- No money for fire-fighters-- No money for roads, hospitals, schools, etc.), while the so-called "Christian (sic)" Bush is spending over $5 Billion/Month on Iraq (over $124 Billion thus far in Iraq, with no end in sight!)-- Bush's gang of neo-con thugs bribed the embezzler, crook & liar Ahmed Chalabi with over $33 Million (including $340,000/Month) for false information, and Chalabi betrayed our nation by selling national security secrets to Iran (Which Neo-Con Traitors in the Pentagon gave their "pet" Chalabi Top-Secret US information? Shouldn't these Neo-Con Traitors including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton-- who have gotten us into this mess be fired and tried for treason?) Condi Rice was appointed head of the Iraqi Stabilization Group (ISG) back in October 2003 by Bush and the situtation has continued to spiral out-of-control ever since! Why is Rice still in office, as she is over-rated, incompetent and a liar?

Where are all of these so-called "Christian (sic)" "values"??? Americans are being damaged, harmed and impoverished by a reckless, ruthless gang of neo-con warmongers for war-profiteering... There is nothing "Christian" in their heinous War Crimes and Rape of America.

It is sad to watch the cynical manipulation of uneducated, well-meaning, but foolish so-called "Christians (sic)" who stand behind a dangerously stupid buffoon Bush who acts like a Nazi thug instead of an American. These misguided people are suckered by the Bushies who are using them/us as cannon-fodder, slave labour & sheep to further their own sordid & squalid aims. Those who profess to "love life" should be concerned (or outraged) over Bush's abortions of over 900 U.S. Soldiers and between 11,000-16,000 innocent Iraqi Civilians (pregnant women with unborn kids are amongst his casualties) with the death toll rising day-in-and-day-out and no end in sight... Moreover, do these so-called "Christians (sic)" approve of murder, rape, torture, putting a harness on the elderly and riding them like a donkey, and abuse of prisoners??? We've learned of the rape and sodomy of little children at Abu Ghraib http://www.tblog.com/template... too!!! Is this what we have to offer to the world??? If so, it is no wonder that the Arab world wants none of it... The rest of the world wants none of it ... Conscientious and thoughtful Americans want none of it either...

Let "We the People" reject the hypocrisy of the corrupt Un-Christian, Un-American Bush regime and their over-zealot followers who would make Jesus Christ weep with shame for their heinous & callous treatment of American people and other peoples around the world (especially the Iraqis and the Afghanistianis who have been mercilessly massacred, tortured, etc.) ... And, who would make Our Founding Fathers weep, for we are NOT a so-called "Christian (sic)" nation and this ugly, arrogant and self-righteous religiosity is tinny, false, abhorrent and destructive to our Republic For Which It Stands (Our Republic Stands for our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, and NOT the Bible) ...

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In a highly informative interview by Bill Moyers (NOW with Bill Moyers http://www.pbs.org/now/societ... ) with Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (excerpt on http://www.beliefnet.com/stor... ), they explore the dangers of our society being turned into a fanatical religious totalitarian system if we do not go back to the roots of our government, our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... Indeed, Ms. Jacoby cites John Adams, 2nd President of the U.S., who in the Treaty with Tripoli (1796-97), reassures the Barbary States of Northern Africa that the United States of America is "not to be founded on Christianity" http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/j... ...

"We the People" must extricate ourselves from the dangerously stupid and corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta[/i], comprised of vile traitors who are undermining our nation's heritage, system of laws and historical role in the world community ...

[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith[/b]: http://www.tblog.com/template...

...... Bush blew it — the inescapable 9/11 conclusion ......

07.26.04 (8:45 am) [edit]

[i]'I think everyone knows what happened could have been prevented. Of course, they'd never admit that' [/i]- Melodie Homer, Marlton, N.J.

[i]'It was very upsetting that the president on Aug. 6, 2001, at the daily briefing ignored the notice about al-Qaeda. It was a very strong warning and it was ignored. That's one that we know about. How many more warnings that we don't about?'[/i] - Judy Reiss, Lower Makefield, Pa.

These women, whose husband and son, respectively, were killed in the 9-11 attacks, have only to finish their thoughts…Bush blew it.

It happened on George W. Bush's watch. He was in charge, he was warned that a disaster was in the offing, he refused to put forth his best efforts to avoid any attacks and nearly 3,000 Americans died.

The 9-11 commission was too timid to say it and even made some stupid comments to cover their cowardice. Headline writers for the major newspapers stated that the commission blamed unnamed people in many posts in the current and previous administrations.

Homer and Reiss, who were quoted in Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer, came as close as anyone to telling the truth: The immediate blame must be laid on Bush.

Certainly, the Bush administration is not alone in setting the stage for the 9/11 attacks, but Bush put out a welcome mat for terrorists. One might even wonder if this amounts to criminal negligence.

Deep in the middle of its lead story on the 9-11 report, on an inside page, Friday's New York Times caught the essence of the situation when it reported that the Clinton administration responded to a scare by mobilizing domestic agencies while the Bush administration did not bother to do same after they received warnings.

The Times story reports: "Different sections give contrasting accounts of responses by national security advisers under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush. It describes how Mr. (Sandy) Berger, (then national security adviser) under Mr. Clinton, took the lead in December 1999 in mobilizing the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies to address the so-called millennium plot, in which attacks planned in Jordan and Los Angeles were disrupted. By contrast, the report describes (current National Security Advisser) Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, as not having regarded the coordination of domestic agencies as part of their responsibility after they took office in 2001, even as warnings of a possible attack continued to grow."

Then, according to the Times, the report proclaimed these words of the pre-9-11 Bush administration: "The domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute."

Notice the indirect phrasing? Here's another way the commission could have worded it: "The Bush administration never mobilized in response to the threat. It did not give the agencies direction, and it did not provide them with a plan to institute."

The cowardly phrasing is very relevant because the commission was downplaying as much as possible Bush's most serious blunder. Sticking to the context of the commission's findings, we do not know if the attacks would have been prevented if Bush had done more, but the commission lays it out starkly enough: Bush did not do what he could.

Isn't this enough? The commission wrote, "Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them."

We'll never know, and that's because Bush was not "flexible and resourceful" enough to even attempt "any single step or series of steps."

To put this into perspective, let's say you're on the board of directors of a company and your CEO is called on the carpet: "Mr. Bush, you received warnings of a potential attack on our headquarters building and you refused to mobilize all the company's divisions to prevent it, and 3,000 of our employees died as a result."

Bush: "Well, mobilizing these divisions does not guarantee that this would have prevented anything."

Perhaps Manhattan's District Attorney would have said to Bush: "We're talking about the murder of 3,000 people, which of course is a capital crime. No, you did not do this yourself, but you had warnings that something like this might happen and you did not follow through.

"This means that you knowingly facilitated the murder of 3,000 human beings on my judicial turf. At the least, that's reckless endangerment. We could also call that criminal negligence."

Some people would be fired and maybe prosecuted for a disaster of these proportions. Oh, I forgot, Bush never lied about his sex life.

[i][b]Bruce S. Ticker is publisher of CRISIS: ISRAEL which can be accessed at www.crisisisrael.com.[/b][/i] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

"Wildlands at Risk" Report Details Bush Administration's Assault on Wild America

07.26.04 (8:40 am) [edit]

The Sierra Club released today a "Wildlands at Risk" report highlighting 25 places across the country where the Bush administration’s unprecedented assault on our public lands could have lasting impacts. With Americans heading to the great outdoors this summer, "Wildlands at Risk" is a sampling of wild places across the country, many of them popular vacation spots, that represents the kinds of threats America’s wildlands face from Bush administration policies.

The report is available at http://www.sierraclub.org/wil...

The Sierra Club is also running a print ad today in the following cities to highlight these same threats to public lands: Charleston, West Virginia; Denver, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; Asheville, North Carolina; Athens, Georgia; San Antonio, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Phoenix, Arizona. The ad will run in Anchorage, Alaska, tomorrow. The ad can be viewed at: http://www.sierraclub.org/pre...

"The stories in this report show the scope and magnitude of the Bush administration’s assault on America’s wild heritage," said Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director. "The administration’s policies are reversing decades of progress on public lands protection and could destroy forever some of our most cherished hiking, hunting, fishing and camping spots."

Just last week, the Bush administration revoked critical protections for America’s last remaining wild forests, replacing the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule with a convoluted system that forces Governors to petition the Forest Service to not construct roads in or otherwise develop inventoried wild roadless forest areas. The administration also indicated that it intends to permanently exempt the national forests in Alaska from the wild forest protections. The administration has also moved forward with tens of thousands of new oil and gas leases, many of them in once ‘protected’ and environmentally sensitive places, as part of a departure from the traditional "multiple use" principle which formerly guided public land management.

"Hunters, hikers, boaters, anglers and families all seek the recreation and solitude that their public lands provide," said Pope. "As owners of our great public lands estate, all Americans, not solely oil and timber companies, should be able to enjoy these special places."

"Wildlands at Risk" highlights the following 25 places:

Alaska: Tongass National Forest; Teshekpuk Lake; Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Arizona: Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument; Kaibab National Forest

California: Sierra Nevadas; Giant Sequoia National Monument

Colorado: Dinosaur National Monument

Georgia: Chattahoochee National Forests

Idaho: Owyhees Canyonlands

Minnesota: Superior National Forest

Montana/Wyoming: Rocky Mountain Front and Powder River Basin

North Carolina: Great Smoky Mountains National Park

North Dakota: Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Oregon: Zane Grey roadless area

Pacific Northwest: Salmon

Texas: Padre Island National Seashore

Utah: Fisher Towers

Vermont: Lamb Brook Wilderness

West Virginia: Appalachia/Moutaintop removal; Monongohela National Forest

Wisconsin: Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest

Wyoming: Yellowstone National Park; Upper Green River Valley

"Wildlands at Risk" addresses why each of these places is special and worthy of protection, how Bush administration policies threaten their beauty, integrity and sustainability, and how we can do better so that future generations can explore these same wild places.

[b]CONTACT:[/b] Sierra Club
Annie Strickler (202) 675-2384 - http://www.commondreams.org/n...

"Wildlands at Risk" Report Details Bush Administration's Assault on Wild America

07.26.04 (8:37 am) [edit]

"Wildlands at Risk" Report Details Bush Administration's Assault on Wild America

07.26.04 (8:34 am) [edit]

A "Christian"???

07.26.04 (8:32 am) [edit]

[u][b]What Would Our Founding Fathers Say About Bush's So-Called "Christianity"???[/b][/u]

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society." - Thomas Jefferson, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu...

[b]Our Founding Fathers were adament in creating a "wall of separation between church and state" and would have been appalled at the pressure brought to bear to impose hateful intolerence & divisive ideologies by so-called "religious" zealots and tyrannical fanatics like the traitorous & hypocritical Bush (unfit to be president) who is corrupting our system of democracy ... Bush's bizarre and corrupt so-called form of "Christianity (sic)" pathetically has resulted in:[/b]

1. Bloody warfare based upon heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods (e.g. phony WMDs posing a so-called "imminent threat" to our national security, phony links between Al Qaeda & Saddam Hussein, cynically manipulating the fear & anger of Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, unlike the Saudis: Bush's buddies, etc.) for which he should be impeached;

2. Lack of compassion, lack of action to help over 45 million Americans without health care coverage (while Bush brags & smirks about Iraqis getting health care-- that is, when they are not being murdered, tortured, raped, ridden like donkeys, and abused in atrocities committed on orders from Bush, Cheney, Rice & Rumsfeld ...)-- so Americans live in miserable pain, diseased or go bankrupt with over 18,000 Americans dying each year because they can't afford health care;

3. Lack of concern, lack of action about skyrocketing poverty in the U.S.A. with over 25 million families desperately trying to to make ends meet, living below an out-dated poverty-line established over 40 years ago-- over 4 million Americans who are homeless-- between 9-15 million Americans without jobs;

4. Highest gap between the Hyper-Rich Haves & the Impoverished Have-Nots in over 75 years, with America's backbone, the Middle-Class shrinking;

5. Inflation (e.g. higher gas prices, higher costs in goods & services, more people losing their homes because they can't pay their mortgages) hitting the Middle-Class and Working people very hard, while corporations, wealthy oligarchs & hyper-rich plutocrats are awarded immoral tax cuts, tax loopholes and tax boondoggles and living like Emperor Caligulas-- supported by the rest of us who are saddled with Bush's record-level deficits and historically high debts-- that are hurting the value of the dollar and our standard of living.

Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling all around us (e.g. Bush's "Leave No Child Behind" Failure has Left Lots of Children Worse Off because no funds were allocated to enable teachers to teach [Why do you think that the rich send their kids to private schools with 15 kids/class instead of the 30-40/class sizes that public school teachers have to contend with?]!-- No money for fire-fighters-- No money for roads, hospitals, schools, etc.), while the so-called "Christian (sic)" Bush is spending over $5 Billion/Month on Iraq (over $124 Billion thus far in Iraq, with no end in sight!)-- Bush's gang of neo-con thugs bribed the embezzler, crook & liar Ahmed Chalabi with over $33 Million (including $340,000/Month) for false information, and Chalabi betrayed our nation by selling national security secrets to Iran (Which Neo-Con Traitors in the Pentagon gave their "pet" Chalabi Top-Secret US information? Shouldn't these Neo-Con Traitors including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton-- who have gotten us into this mess be fired and tried for treason?) Condi Rice was appointed head of the Iraqi Stabilization Group (ISG) back in October 2003 by Bush and the situtation has continued to spiral out-of-control ever since! Why is Rice still in office, as she is over-rated, incompetent and a liar?

Where are all of these so-called "Christian (sic)" "values"??? Americans are being damaged, harmed and impoverished by a reckless, ruthless gang of neo-con warmongers for war-profiteering... There is nothing "Christian" in their heinous War Crimes and Rape of America.

It is sad to watch the cynical manipulation of uneducated, well-meaning, but foolish so-called "Christians (sic)" who stand behind a dangerously stupid buffoon Bush who acts like a Nazi thug instead of an American. These misguided people are suckered by the Bushies who are using them/us as cannon-fodder, slave labour & sheep to further their own sordid & squalid aims. Those who profess to "love life" should be concerned (or outraged) over Bush's abortions of over 900 U.S. Soldiers and between 11,000-16,000 innocent Iraqi Civilians (pregnant women with unborn kids are amongst his casualties) with the death toll rising day-in-and-day-out and no end in sight... Moreover, do these so-called "Christians (sic)" approve of murder, rape, torture, putting a harness on the elderly and riding them like a donkey, and abuse of prisoners??? We've learned of the rape and sodomy of little children at Abu Ghraib http://www.tblog.com/template... too!!! Is this what we have to offer to the world??? If so, it is no wonder that the Arab world wants none of it... The rest of the world wants none of it ... Conscientious and thoughtful Americans want none of it either...

Let "We the People" reject the hypocrisy of the corrupt Un-Christian, Un-American Bush regime and their over-zealot followers who would make Jesus Christ weep with shame for their heinous & callous treatment of American people and other peoples around the world (especially the Iraqis and the Afghanistianis who have been mercilessly massacred, tortured, etc.) ... And, who would make Our Founding Fathers weep, for we are NOT a so-called "Christian (sic)" nation and this ugly, arrogant and self-righteous religiosity is tinny, false, abhorrent and destructive to our Republic For Which It Stands (Our Republic Stands for our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, and NOT the Bible) ...

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In a highly informative interview by Bill Moyers (NOW with Bill Moyers http://www.pbs.org/now/societ... ) with Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (excerpt on http://www.beliefnet.com/stor... ), they explore the dangers of our society being turned into a fanatical religious totalitarian system if we do not go back to the roots of our government, our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... Indeed, Ms. Jacoby cites John Adams, 2nd President of the U.S., who in the Treaty with Tripoli (1796-97), reassures the Barbary States of Northern Africa that the United States of America is "not to be founded on Christianity" http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/j... ...

"We the People" must extricate ourselves from the dangerously stupid and corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta[/i], comprised of vile traitors who are undermining our nation's heritage, system of laws and historical role in the world community ...

[b]Courtesy of WinstonSmith[/b]: http://www.tblog.com/template...

Bush, A "Christian"??? LOL!!!

07.26.04 (8:29 am) [edit]

What Kind of Christian is Bush, Really?

07.26.04 (8:22 am) [edit]

Iran next on US hit list?

07.25.04 (7:34 am) [edit]

[b]Iran next on US hit list?[/b]

US President George W. Bush has found a new target for his second term if he is re-elected in November. It is Iraq's http://english.peopledaily.co... neighbour, Iran http://english.peopledaily.co... .

Tensions between the United States http://english.peopledaily.co... and Iran are building.

On Thursday the bipartisan panel probing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington cleared Iraq of links to the "operational" masterminds, which was previously used as an excuse to justify war against Baghdad. But the panel's report spotlighted Iran's links to the al-Qaida organization.

The commissioners ruled out any direct involvement by Iraq or its former President Saddam Hussein in the attacks, instead reserving their most accusatory tone for Iran another member of Bush's so-called "axis of evil."

The panel said Iranian operatives maintained contacts with al-Qaida for years and may have provided transit for at least eight of the 19 men who crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The commission said that "intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al-Qaida figures" after Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan http://english.peopledaily.co... from Sudan http://english.peopledaily.co... in 1996.

Before the report was released, Iran's alleged links were widely covered by the US media.

Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, reported that Iran relaxed border controls and provided "clean" passports for the so-called "muscle hijackers" to travel to and from bin Laden's camps between October 2000 and February 2001.

Newsweek said the Iranian finding in the commission's report is based largely on a December 2001 memo discovered buried in the files of the US National Security Agency.

The memo, according to Newsweek, says "Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia http://english.peopledaily.co... who were travelling from bin Laden's camps through Iran."

Still, we heard similar ruses the US gave for targeting Iran with what it did to Iraq.

"We are digging into the facts to determine if there was an Iranian connection (to September 11)," Bush told reporters this week, adding that he had long expressed his concerns about Iran.

"After all, it is a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to exercise their rights as human beings," he said.

Iraq was labelled "totalitarian" too, before it was "liberated" by the US-led coalition forces.

Virtually from the moment of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the White House began searching for substantive links between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and Saddam Hussein.

After the search for weapons of mass destruction one of the US justifications for invading Iraq proved futile, the Bush administration turned to other defenses such as forcibly ousting Hussein.

Earlier this month the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a separate investigation of the administration's rationale for launching the war against Iraq, reported finding "no credible information" that Iraq possessed "foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks or any other al-Qaida strike."

All the motives for the war on Iraq have fallen apart.

Now the US is pointing its fingers at Iran and threatening to get tough.

Since May, the US Congress has been moving towards a joint resolution calling for punitive action against Iran if it does not fully reveal details of its nuclear arms programme.

In language similar to the pre-war resolution on Iraq, a recent House resolution authorized the use of "all appropriate means" to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weaponry terminology often used to approve pre-emptive military force. The resolution passed 376 to 3, exhibiting Washington's growing anxiety about Iran.

At a media briefing on Wednesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the US is working to get Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

McClellan claimed the US is engaged in a broad war on terrorism thanks to the threats it faces in the world.

"It's a strategy that recognizes that we must confront threats before it's too late, before they fully materialize," McClellan said. "And that's what we're doing around the world in not only Iran, but North Korea and elsewhere. And we've been pursuing these efforts for quite some time."

Tough tones were also heard from American politicians.

In a forceful address at the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus in Jerusalem on Monday, US Senator Sam Brownback (Rep., Kansas) labelled Iran the leading supporter of terrorism around the globe.

Urging the world to identify and then expose evil, Brownback called on Iran, Syria http://english.peopledaily.co... , Sudan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) http://english.peopledaily.co... to renounce terrorism, singling out Iran as what he attempted to make others to believe to be the "epicentre" of international terrorist funding.

A decision on how to deal with Iran will not be made until after the US elections in November, the Kansas senator said, noting that America is awaiting the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran's nuclear activity.

In his address, Brownback, who serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, noted that 46 non-democratic countries are left in the world, with the bulk of them in the Middle East.

With the US presidential election around the corner, the Bush administration's Iran policy may remain unclear.

However, President Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.

As early as almost three years ago Iran was blacklisted with Iraq, Syria, Sudan and the DPRK.

A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the London Times that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership.

"If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran," the official was quoted as saying.

He hinted at a possible military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, explaining there was a window of opportunity for destroying Iran's main nuclear complex at Bushehr next year that would close if Russia http://english.peopledaily.co... delivered crucial fuel rods.

Should all these mean that Iran will come into the military crosshairs of the United States? Following the US and Britain, Australia http://english.peopledaily.co... released its reports on Thursday admitting it used "thin, ambiguous and incomplete" intelligence on Iraq's WMD to justify waging war on Iraq.

How could the intelligence services in these countries have been so wrong about Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction?

All these countries' reports ignored the role of politicians and laid all the blame at the door of the intelligence agencies.

It is a travesty of justice.

How can the US trust the reliability of its intelligence on Iran after the information on Iraq turned out to be so incomplete? - http://english.peopledaily.co...

Iran Next? (Neo-Cons Drooling...)

07.25.04 (7:33 am) [edit]

"Rooted in Rapine" ...

07.25.04 (7:19 am) [edit]

[b]Lost in Space[/b]

SOMEWHERE IN THREE SISTERS WILDERNESS, Oregon — [i]As I scribble these words in my notebook, I'm totally lost.

My two sons and I are backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail, but the trail disappeared under three feet of snow several miles ago. So we set out cross-country, camping last night on a patch of green surrounded by snow.

At the moment it's dawn at our bivouac, right about timberline, and my sons are still sleeping, blithely confident that we'll find our way again. And, truth be told, so long as one has food, shelter and a compass, it's gloriously liberating to be lost in a snowy wilderness[/i].

That was a couple of weeks ago, and we eventually hiked beyond the snow and stumbled across a trail again. But I strongly recommend the practice of getting lost in the wilderness, and our government should give us more opportunities to do so.

A focus of the American environmental movement has been conservation, and that's why there is such rage at the Bush administration's efforts to log, mine or drill patches of wilderness from the Arctic to Florida. President Bush has done more than any other recent president to shift our environmental balance away from conservation and toward development.

Mr. Bush's Healthy Forests initiative, in its harsh early version, allowed logging companies to pillage federal land. The latest assault is President Bush's decision to overturn the Clinton administration's "roadless rule," protecting nearly 60 million acres of national forests from road building and development.

Presidential fingerprints on a country usually fade quickly, but an exception is the decision to preserve or develop the wilderness. Teddy Roosevelt's imprint on 21st-century America is enormous because he preserved wild spaces for future generations, while Mr. Bush's 22nd-century legacy may be the permanent scarring of those same spaces.

Yet the environmental movement is wrong to emphasize preservation for the sake of the wolves and the moose alone. We should preserve wilderness for our sake - to remind us of our scale on this planet, to humble us, to soothe us. Nothing so civilizes humans as the wild.

That means that we not only have to preserve wilderness, but we also must get more people into it. It's great that we have managed to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But virtually the only visitors who get to enjoy it are superwealthy tourists who charter airplanes to fly into remote airstrips.

So how about a hiking trail from Arctic Village going north to the Brooks Range, allowing many more people to enjoy the refuge? How about polar bear ecotourism in Kaktovik? Why not democratize the chance to hear wolves howl or be menaced by grizzlies?

The greatest opportunity for a conservation legacy, just waiting for some politician to grab it, is a proposed east-west hiking trail across America. The 7,700-mile sea-to-sea route, as sketched on maps, runs from Cape Alava in Washington State to Cape Gaspé in Quebec (see www.c2c-route.org/C2C/about_C2C.htm).

The U.S. already has three great long-distance hiking trails: the Appalachian Trail in the East, the Continental Divide Trail in the Rockies and the Pacific Crest Trail on the West Coast. They are steadily getting more users, and the trend toward ultralite backpacking is making trail hiking more appealing.

At a time when America is struggling with obesity and fewer Americans have daily contact with the outdoors, we should not be sealing off the wilderness but rather increasing access to it for those on foot or horseback. Canada is building the world's longest hiking trail, a 11,000-mile path called the Trans Canada Trail, and Europe is building a dazzling collection of distance trails, including the 6,500-mile E4 European Long Distance Path, from Portugal to Cyprus. But the U.S. is dozing on the couch.

I wish that Mr. Bush's environmental policy wasn't rooted in rapine. But I also wish that the green movement fought as hard for interactions between humans and our environment as it did against blind development. If environmentalists applied a small fraction of the energy they devoted to fighting snowmobiles in Yellowstone to push for the coast-to-coast trail, we would now have one.

We should give our descendants every chance to show their children how puny we humans are in a wilderness, by taking them hiking and getting them bitten by mosquitoes, hopelessly lost and totally exhilarated. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

Bush's Environmental Policy "Rooted in Rapine" ...

07.25.04 (7:18 am) [edit]

"Rooted in Rapine" ...

07.25.04 (7:16 am) [edit]

Missing the point on the Berger thing ...

07.24.04 (9:00 am) [edit]

[b]Missing the point on the Berger thing... [/b]I'm reading Alterman http://msnbc.msn.com/id/34498... , and Talking Points http://talkingpointsmemo.com/... , and Kevin http://www.washingtonmonthly.... , and[i] Slate[/i], and everyone else, and it's like they're blind. They're all caught up in what Berger did or didn't do and how bad was it and why aren't the Republicans investigating Plame, etc...

Just not getting it at all. Just missing the point. Just seeing the trees and missing the forest.

Here is what is going on. [i][b]The Republican Noise Machine is saying this proves Clinton is to blame for 9/11.[/b][/i] Got that? Just as the 9/11 Comission releases its report, they are saying that the proof of Clinton's guilt was there, and Berger took and shredded that proof. Let that sink in a while. This theme is ALL OVER THE MEDIA - at least the media that matters to the voters they want to reach. Never mind that he only took copies of drafts of the documents, and they still have the originals -- that small fact is slipping WAY under the radar, and no one on "our side" even seems to understand that is the central issue.

Here's a sample headline: Clinton Spook Sandy Berger is Caught Destroying Terror Evidence. http://www.insightmag.com/new...

"[i]Berger stuffed highest-classified documents, including leather-bound after-action reports on Millennium attacks, into his clothing to get them out of the National Archives before they were reviewed by the 9/11 Commission. ... After-action documents showing the Clinton "response" to al-Queda terror plans still are missing. ... Stolen documents were all the originals of after-action drafts, and Berger was caught in a sting, when given another copy, by stealing it too[/i]."

[b]Never mind that this is just a lie. That doesn't matter[/b].

Here's an example of a small-town newspaper editorial, One Sandy Berger and a side of lies: http://reviewappeal.midsouthn...

"[i]The central question now is, what was he trying to hide?

We know that some of the discarded documents had to do with the foiled Millennium bombing plot and what the administration did with the gathered intelligence afterward. Attorney General John Ashcroft testified in April about the documents we now know Berger was trying to hide. "The NSC's Millennium After-Action Review declares that the United States barely missed major terrorist attacks in 1999 - with luck playing a major role,- Ashcroft told the Commission[/i]."

Even Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said this, http://www.speaker.gov/librar...

"[i]Was Mr. Berger trying to cover-up key facts regarding intelligence failures during his watch? What happened to those missing documents[/i]?"

and this, http://speaker.house.gov/libr...

"[i]What could those documents have said that drove Mr. Berger to remove them without authorization from a secure reading room for classified documents? What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets[/i]?"

[b]Which coincidentally exactly parallels what Limbaugh is saying[/b]. http://seetheforest.blogspot....

I checked Instapundit (for the first time in at least a year) and got so disgusted I just left without gathering any quotes to link to. I never, ever read Andew Sullivan, so you're on your own as to what he is saying. (And this is the first time I have ever used his name on this blog.)

AND they are now working to EXPAND the story. This is the tactic of overwhelming http://www.uexpress.com/tedra... . By the time anyone can refute the lies put out at 8am, the lies put out at 9am and 10am are what is being talked about. Here are a couple of examples: Did Sandy Berger "Fry" Flight 800 Records?, http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/...

[i]So, what does this link between Bill Clinton and Flight 800 have to do with the current John Kerry presidential campaign? Well, perhaps nothing, except that John Kerry also referred to Flight 800 as a terrorist incident in a televised interview. The problem is that, with the upcoming release of the final report of the '9-11' Commission, the general public will have the opportunity to refresh their memory about the link between Flight 800 and terrorism[/i].

and Sandy Berger's Curious Military Records, http://www.newsmax.com/archiv...

"[i]I think it's ironic that Kerry, who takes every opportunity to tout his military record, picks as his [informal] adviser on national security and reportedly short-lists as a potential secretary of state a man with the military service record of Sandy Berger," B.G. Burkett, co-author of "Stolen Valor -- How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History[/i]," tells NewsMax.

[u][b]Once again, just so you get it[/b][/u], [i][b]they are saying that this proves that Clinton is responsible for 9/11, that it is a big cover-up, and that this proves Kerry is somehow implicated in trying to hand the country over to our enemies.[/b][/i]

This has been planned for MONTHS, from the day the 9/11 Commission was formed. It took TIME to research and put together that story about Berger's military records. Limbaugh surely didn't put that complicated 3-part smear http://seetheforest.blogspot.... together himself. And - and this is important - all these talking points and military record research, etc. were obviously prepared before the story leaked this week. - http://seetheforest.blogspot....

------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -------------------------

[b]For the facts instead of Reducto's and Noguru's (and their idiot clone: stepdad) endless lies and dishonest propaganda, please refer to:[/b]

No Oversight, No Shame ... http://www.tblog.com/template...

Clinton/Berger Stopped Terrorist Attacks- Bush/Rice Did Nothing: That's Why They Attacked Berger http://www.tblog.com/template...

Bush Gorges on Berger: Even Though Officials Think It's Much Ado About Nothing!!! http://www.tblog.com/template...

------ Attack and Distract!!! ... Ha ha ha!!! ...... http://www.tblog.com/template...

It's The Timing, Stupid!!! ... http://www.tblog.com/template...

The Malicious Bush Attack (6 Months Old) on Sandy Berger to Distract Our Attention ... http://www.tblog.com/template...

Sandy Berger 'Story' in Perspective http://www.tblog.com/template...

Clinton/Berger Thwarted Over 15 Terrorist Attacks -- Bush/Rice Let 9/11 Happen!!! http://www.tblog.com/template...

Sandy Berger Revelations: No Documents Missing, "Technical Violation" Because He Took A Copy!!! http://www.tblog.com/template...

Politically-Motivated Smear of Sandy Berger to Distract Us From Bush's War Crimes!!! http://www.tblog.com/template...

Missing the Point ...

07.24.04 (8:58 am) [edit]

Missing the Point ...

07.24.04 (8:54 am) [edit]

Not destroyed after all: Bush's military records fail to dispel AWOL charges ...

07.24.04 (8:41 am) [edit]

[b]Not destroyed after all: Bush's military records fail to dispel AWOL charges[/b]

[b]GW Bush Went AWOL: http://awolbush.com [/b]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some of President Bush's missing Air National Guard records during the Vietnam War years, previously said to be destroyed, turned up on Friday but offered no new evidence to dispel charges by Democrats that he was absent without leave.

His whereabouts during his service as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard in the United States during the Vietnam War have become an election-year issue. Bush's Democratic presidential challenger, John Kerry, is a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

The Pentagon, which had announced two weeks ago that the payroll records had been accidentally destroyed, blamed a clerical error for previous failure to find them.

In May 1972, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign and, he has said, to perform his Guard service there for a year. But other Guard officers have said they have no recollection of ever seeing him there.

Bush was the son of a U.S. congressman at a time when National Guard service was seen as a way for the privileged to avoid being drafted for Vietnam War duty.

Questions over his record resurfaced this year as Bush sought, in the midst of the Iraq war, to cast himself as a "war president" in his drive to win reelection on Nov. 2.

The documents released on Friday by the Pentagon included two faded computerized payroll sheets showing Bush was not paid during the latter part of 1972 and offer no evidence to place Bush in Alabama during the latter part of 1972.

Still, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said: "They show the president served in the military and completed his service, which is why he received an honorable discharge."

[b]"UNANSWERED QUESTIONS"[/b]

The Democratic National Committee called the "supposed discovery" of Bush's payroll records late on Friday -- on the eve of the Democratic National Convention -- "highly questionable."

"If the Bush administration continues to search, maybe they'll find answers to the long list of unanswered questions that remain about George W. Bush's time in the Air National Guard. Bush's military records seem to show up as randomly as he did for duty," said DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera.

In February, the White House released hundreds of pages of Bush's military records. The White House included a footnote to those earlier records saying that files for the 3rd quarter of 1972 had apparently been lost in microfilm processing.

Defense Finance and Accounting Service spokesman Bryan Hubbard said the microfilm payroll records were found in a Denver facility.

"We're talking about a manual process for records that are over 30 years old," Hubbard said.

He said officials had previously looked in the wrong place for the records relating to the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972, and concluded incorrectly that they had been destroyed.

Hubbard said that after the Pentagon announced two weeks ago that the records were lost, officials went back to double check, and found an "unlabeled binder" that led them to the right place.

The Pentagon had announced on July 9 that microfilm payroll records of large numbers of service members, including Bush, were ruined in 1996 and 1997 in a project to save large, brittle rolls of microfilm.

[b]From Reuters[/b]: http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...

------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----

[b]Bush Records Show No Flight Service During July-September '72

From Bloomberg News [/b]

July 23 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush didn't accumulate any flying hours between July 1972 and September 1972 when he was serving in the Alabama National Guard, according to payroll records released today by the Defense Department.

The computerized records, which the Pentagon said earlier this month had been destroyed in an effort to save microfilm, provide no new information about whether Bush, 58, completed Guard service during those months.

The time period has been raised as an issue by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who questioned Bush's military service during the Vietnam War.

"The president fulfilled his military obligation, and was proud to do so, which was why he was honorably discharged," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said. "The fundamental concept of National Guard service is that the service can be completed over time."

The DNC said on its Web site that Bush's military records show a six-month-gap in Bush's service between May and October 1972. Bush transferred to the Alabama Guard from the Texas National Guard to work on the Senate campaign of Republican Winton Blount, a family friend, during those months.

Bush's presidential rival, Democrat John Kerry, served in the Navy and volunteered for combat in Vietnam, earning a Silver Star and Bronze Star for valor and three Purple Hearts for injuries. "There are few differences as stark as the choices John Kerry and George W. Bush made during Vietnam," the DNC's Web site says.

Kerry, 60, a four-term Massachusetts senator, began a march to next week's Democratic National Convention in Boston with a call in Colorado today for national service as "an important step to building a stronger America."

DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera said in a statement that the timing of the release of Bush's pay records is "highly questionable" on a Friday afternoon "as reporters converge on Boston."

The Pentagon said the mistake was due to an incorrect records access number and Bush's records were discovered this month with the help of a manager at the facility where they were kept. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Not destroyed after all ...

07.24.04 (8:34 am) [edit]

The Real Show ...

07.24.04 (8:25 am) [edit]

[b]The Real Show

by Bill Moyers [/b]

First, a confession: I haven't seen Michael Moore's "[i]Fahrenheit 9/11." [/i]It's not that I haven't wanted to; it's just that I have not been able to tear myself away from the real show-the political theatre playing out in full sight right before our eyes. Who needs a movie when you have the news?

Michael Moore's weird alright, but not as weird as Michael Powell, our cartel-loving chairman of the Federal Communications Commission whose idea of the press seems to be channeling William Randolph Hearst.

Michael Moore's outrageous, but not as outrageous as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay conspiring to let the ban on killer assault weapons expire. Bush says he doesn't like all that loaded hardware lying around, but it's up to the House of Representatives to vote. The aptly named Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, on the other hand, says-wink, wink-he can't let a vote happen because Bush hasn't asked him to. After you, Alphonse; after you, Gaston - and will the last man out please turn on the lights?

Michael Moore has a keen eye for the absurd; I know that from his earlier wickedly funny films. But we don't need a seeing-eye absurdist to understand how wacky it is for Ralph Nader to get on the ballot in different states with the help of a conservative outfit that's a front group for all those corporate interests Nader has spent his life trying to cut down to size. Imagine: 43,000 Michigan Republicans suddenly seized by the vision of "Nader the Savior," putting their names on a petition urging him to run for President. "Save us, Ralph; save us!" Politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is a ménage a trois, as John Kerry might say, that would shame the Marquis de Sade.

No, I don't need to shell out $9 for a movie when I can watch the Democrats in Boston next week piously pretending to be taking seriously a homily on values from Al Sharpton, or when I have C-span to watch Congress in action (or not).

In fact, there was to be a Congressional hearing this week into the safety of anti-depressant medicine. It seems some pharmaceutical companies are suspected of keeping secret the bad news about their products. The hearing was abruptly cancelled when word spread that the committee chairman is under consideration for a big-paying job representing-are you ready for this? - the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

You think I'm kidding. But believe me; I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to. Unfortunately, I don't have to.

[b]Bill Moyers is the host of the weekly public affairs series NOW with Bill Moyers, which airs Friday nights on PBS[/b]. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

The Real Show ...

07.24.04 (8:23 am) [edit]

The Real Show ...

07.24.04 (8:21 am) [edit]

The Real Show ...

07.24.04 (8:19 am) [edit]

The Real Show ...

07.24.04 (8:17 am) [edit]

Bush/Cheney & GOPpers are terrified of Michael Moore's great film 'Fahrenheit 9/11'!!!

07.23.04 (10:16 am) [edit]

[b]'Fahrenheit 9/11' making GOP nervous[/b]

Republicans initially dismissed "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a cinematic screed that would play mostly to inveterate Bush bashers. Four weeks and $94 million later, the film is still pulling in moviegoers at 2,000 theaters around the country, making Republicans nervous as it settles into the American mainstream.

"I'm not sure if it moves voters," GOP consultant Scott Reed said, "but if it moves 3 or 4 percent it's been a success."

Two senior Republicans closely tied to the White House said the movie from director Michael Moore is seen as a political headache because it has reached beyond the Democratic base. Independents and GOP-leaning voters are likely to be found sitting beside those set to revel in its depiction of a clueless president with questionable ties to the oil industry.

"If you are a naive, uncommitted voter and wander into a theater, you aren't going to come away with a good impression of the president," Republican operative Joe Gaylord said. "It's a problem only if a lot of people see it."

Based on a record-breaking gross of $94 million through last weekend, theaters already have sold an estimated 12 million tickets to "Fahrenheit 9/11." A Gallup survey conducted July 8-11 said 8 percent of American adults had seen the film at that time, but that 18 percent still planned to see it at a theater and another 30 percent plan to see it on video.

More than a third of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of independents told Gallup they had seen or expected to see the film at theaters or on video.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" opened in June mainly in locally owned arts theaters that specialize in obscure films and tiny audiences. Drawn in part by the buzz surrounding the film, people packed the theaters and formed long lines for tickets. Within a week, it was appearing in chain-owned theaters along with "Spider-Man 2," "The Notebook" and other big summer attractions.

When he sat down to watch the film at the Varsity Theater in Des Moines last weekend, Rob Sheesley didn't harbor anti-Bush feelings. Two hours later, he left with conflicted emotions.

"You want to respect the president," Sheesley said. "It raised a lot of questions."

Bush's leadership in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had impressed retired teacher Lavone Mann, another Des Moines moviegoer. After watching the film, Mann wanted to know more about its claims.

"I guess that I think it makes me want to pursue how much of it is accurate and not just get carried away with one film," she said. "I don't hear Bush and (Vice President Dick) Cheney saying that this is incorrect."

Retired college professor Dennis O'Brien, a Bush voter in 2000 and a movie buff who has seen other Moore films, said "Fahrenheit 9/11" hasn't changed his view of Bush but may well serve a larger purpose by sparking debate.

"Moore forces you to think about the role of oil in the politics of American life," O'Brien said. "This goes back a long way."

In GOP-strong Columbia, S.C., watching the movie last week at the Columbiana Grande tipped 26-year-old David Wood's support more to the left.

"I don't consider myself a Republican or a Democrat. I just vote for whoever is right for the job," the University of South Carolina student said. "I think most people don't bother to really research, and all they need is something popular to sway them."

Others at the screening in Columbia were put off by what they saw as the film's biased approach to examining Bush and the reasons he took the country to war. For Scott Campbell, 19, the movie reinforced his apathy toward politics.

"We didn't even stay to see the whole thing," Campbell said. "It was one-sided."

Former Iowa Republican Chairman Michael Mahaffey said the movie's impact could be dulled over time. "It's July," he said. "Conventional wisdom will change completely every four or five weeks."

Still, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is likely to gain an even wider audience when it's released on home video in the weeks before Election Day. The Gallup survey found that nearly half of the Republicans and independents who expect to see the film said they were likely to view it on video.

"In all honesty, in a very close election, who knows what will sway the public?" Mahaffey said. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Over 900 And Counting ...

07.23.04 (7:57 am) [edit]

[u][b]900 And Counting ...[/b][/u] - http://winstonsmith.tblog.com...

"[i]The security situation [in Iraq] is calamitous. ... This, however, is the tip of the iceberg. ... The story of Abu Ghraib http://www.tblog.com/template... and Guantánamo Bay is a disgrace[/i]. ..." - [b]Iraq is not Improving, it's a Disaster [/b]- http://www.commondreams.org/v...

[b]"We the People" are engulfed in a disastrous and failed nightmare in Iraq [i]"thanks [sic]" [/i]to the blood-thirsty Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta[/i]. Iraq is teetering on the edge of a catastrophic civil war http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?... and the corrupt Bush regime is already laying their illegal and immoral neo-fascist "ground-work" for an insane neo-con regime change in [b][i]Iran[/i][/b] http://www.sundayherald.com/4... [Iran is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq (Iran is 636,293 square miles / Iraq is 168,753 square miles) with a population nearly 3 times that of Iraq (Iran has a population of approx. 68 million people / Iraq has a population of approx. 25 million people)]!!!

We must[i] stop this insanity [/i]and [i]rid ourselves [/i]of the ruthless and reckless Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i] who are miserable failures ...[/b]

The fact that four Americans were killed in Iraq on Tuesday found itself mentioned in the 19th paragraph on an inside page of the [i]New York Times [/i]today, meaning that not only did those two marines and two soldiers die for nothing, but their deaths won’t even contribute much to the rising American disgust over Bush’s Iraq misadventure. More U.S. soldiers died yesterday, and the pace is continuing. An [i]AP[/i] story puts it thusly http://www.boston.com/dailyne...:.shtml :

... "[i]American soldiers in Iraq have been dying at a rate of two a day since Iraqis regained political control on June 28 a drop from the deadliest months of violence before the handover but still about the same rate overall as in the 16 months since the U.S. invasion.

The U.S. military death toll now has reached 900, and the number of American soldiers injured is approaching 6,000[/i]." ...

There are also signs that the insurgency in Iraq is on the verge of turning the quagmire into something much worse. One on hand, U.S. forces and their partners in the ersatz Iraqi quisling army are finding themselves personnel non grata in city after city in Iraq, not just in Falljuah. To demonstrate American might, it now appears as if U.S. forces are about to launch an all-out assault on Samarra, north of Baghdad, in a raid that could make the Alamo look like a picnic. First, the [i]Knight Ridder[/i] story this week http://www.realcities.com/mld... :

... "[i]After more than a year of fighting, U.S. troops have stopped patrolling large swaths of Iraq's restive Anbar province, according to the top American military intelligence officer in the area.

Most U.S. Army officers interviewed this week said the patrols in and around the province's capital, Ramadi—home to many Iraqi military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein—have stopped largely because the soldiers and commanders there were tired of being shot at by insurgents who've refused to back down under heavy American military pressure.

While American officials in Ramadi wouldn't provide exact figures for the change in numbers of patrols, there's obviously been a significant drop.

After losing dozens of men to a "voiceless, faceless mass of people" with no clear leadership or political aim other than killing American soldiers, the U.S. military has had to re-evaluate the situation, said Army Maj. Thomas Neemeyer, the head American intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, the main military force in the Ramadi area and from there to Fallujah.

"They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either," he said. "It creates a form of stalemate."

In the wreckage of the security situation, Neemeyer said, U.S. officials have all but given up on plans to install a democratic government in the city, and are hoping instead that Islamic extremists and other insurgent groups don't overrun the province in the same way that they've seized the region's most infamous town, Fallujah.

"Since Ramadi is the seat of the governate, we worry that if they could unsettle the government center here they could destabilize the al Anbar province," said Capt. Joe Jasper, a spokesman for the 1st Brigade.

The apparent failure of a long line of Army and Marine units to bring peace to the province, which makes up about 40 percent of Iraq's landmass, will be a major challenge for Iraq's new government and could prove to be a tipping point for the nation as a whole. Increasingly, Iraq is a place in which cities or part of cities have been taken over by insurgents and radicals.

To show how operations in Anbar have changed, Jasper sketched a map on a piece of paper.

Pointing to a neighborhood outside the town of Habbaniyah, between Fallujah and Ramadi, he said, "We've lost a lot of Marines there and we don't ever go in anymore. If they want it that bad, they can have it."

Looking up at a map on the wall, Neemeyer flicked his laser pointer across a large piece of land between Ramadi and Fallujah. "We don't go into that area anymore," he said. "Why go there when all that happens is we get hit?"

Many of those interviewed in Ramadi recently said they'd welcome a Fallujah-like rule by insurgents[/i]." ...

If they want it that bad, they can have it? They want the whole country that bad. Can they have that, too? According to the[i] Washington Post[/i], http://www.washingtonpost.com... they can’t have Samarra, at least—but we’ll see:

... "[i]Tens of thousands of people have fled Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, in recent weeks, expecting a showdown between U.S. troops and heavily armed groups within the city, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.

Samarra is now controlled by a volatile mix of tribes and gangs, some split along religious lines, and supporters of ousted president Saddam Hussein, according to interviews with numerous Samarra residents who have fled to Baghdad. On July 8, some of those groups launched an attack in which a car bombing was followed by a fierce volley of mortar fire. Five U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi National Guardsman were killed and 40 people were injured.

U.S. military planners complained in private that Fallujah was a bad deal, allowing the city to become a rallying point and stronghold for guerrilla forces.

"It's the lily pad theory. Fallujah exports itself to Samarra, which exports itself to the next place," said Lt. Col. James Stackmo, an intelligence officer for the division, headquartered in Tikrit. "In Samarra, there's probably 100 to 300 fighters who are holding the town hostage. We're not going to allow a militia in Samarra. We're not going to do it."

The U.S. military will try to mount a joint operation with Iraqi security forces, officials said. Under the plan, U.S. forces would likely seize Samarra in a powerful assault, then have Iraqi National Guard or police officers patrol the city[/i]." ...

In fact, cities all over Iraq are totally outside the control of either the U.S. forces or the government of Iraqistan. Not only Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, but other population centers in central Iraq are virtually self-contained city-states. The Kurds run their little enclave all by themselves. Parts of Baghdad are no-go zones for Americans. And in the south, fascist Shiite militia and armed gangs controlled by Iranian-backed mullahs and the likes of Ayatollah Sistani run things without any help from Baghdad.

[b][i]Nice going[/i], George.[/b]

[b]Sources:[/b]

Iran, Again: The Crisis Builds, http://www.tblog.com/template...

Iran End Game???, http://www.tblog.com/template...

Bob Dreyfuss, [i]The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com

Over 900 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq, Remembered!

07.23.04 (7:54 am) [edit]