Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Foreign Affairs - Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq - Paul R. Pillar
In case you missed it. More evidence of deception and lies. We need to keep pummelling the Bushevics with these testimonies. When the scales fall from their eyes there will be impeachment:
Foreign Affairs - Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
by Paul R. Pillar: "Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
PAUL R. PILLAR is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005."
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Capitol Hill Blue: Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer
Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer:
"According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up."
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Monday, February 20, 2006
TIME.com -- Joe Klein: Cheney's Thousand-Yard Stare
Cheney's Thousand-Yard Stare:
"One valuable metaphor emerged last week. The New York Times described the possible legal charges that could be brought in a hunting accident. 'Mr. Cheney could be charged with negligence, defined as failing to understand the dangers involved and disregarding them, or recklessness, defined as understanding the dangers and disregarding them.' Which is perhaps the neatest summary I've seen of the public debate surrounding the Bush Administration's war in Iraq. Absent further evidence, the Administration seems guilty of negligence—a cavalier insensitivity to the unimaginable calamities that attend the use of lethal force."
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Dick Cheney accidentally goes for the biathlon gold
Dick Cheney accidentally goes for the biathlon gold:
By John Kenney
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Salt Lake Tribune
Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot documentary filmmaker Michael Moore yesterday as Moore was walking out of a Manhattan Denny's.
A spokesperson for the vice president said that it was a ''complete accident'' and that Cheney felt ''horrible.'' The White House released a statement saying that the shooting was ''just bad timing. Vice President Cheney, who is well-versed in firearms safety, was merely sitting in a shrub, wearing camouflage, outside of a Denny's frequented by Mr. Moore.''
The statement went on to say that Cheney had been in the shrub for ''several days.'' Moore is said to have suffered only minor injuries and was released from the hospital.
--
In another bizarre accident, Cheney mistakenly shot every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A White House spokesman said that the vice president feels ''bad, but not that bad.'' An aide to Cheney said that the vice president ''happened to be in the committee chambers, under a chair, when he stood up to put on a pair of chaps, accidentally shooting the committee members, stopping to reload three times.''
Remarkably, the committee members were largely unhurt and are expected to make complete recoveries.
--
The White House was put on the defensive again today when Air Force Two was forced to make an emergency landing 25 miles west of New York City after a loss of cabin pressure because of the accidental shooting of former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Both men have recently come under criticism for their handling of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Cheney was said to be ''laughing, but also deeply concerned'' when he was awakened from a nap after accidentally shooting the men at close range.
Typically, shotguns are not allowed on either Air Force One or Two, but Cheney is, the statement said, ''a seasoned hunter and also planned to accidentally shoot both men.'' Both Brown and Chertoff are expected to make complete recoveries, although it remains unclear as to why Brown was duct-taped to the wing of the plane.
A White House spokesman later added that the vice president had been on his way to New York City to accidentally shoot New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
--
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton miraculously escaped injury today after Cheney accidentally ran up to her motorcade and accidentally shot at her car. The White House said the vice president ''tripped.''
''These things happen,'' a White House spokesman said. ''Guns, while completely safe, are also dangerous.''
A member of the vice president's staff said Cheney apologized to the former first lady and potential presidential candidate in a handwritten note.
''I'm sorry I almost shot you. But know that I will try again and will also be sorry then, too. I like the sound a gun makes and the smell of the gunpowder. 'Flint' is a neat word.''
---
John Kenney has just finished his first novel.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
onegoodmove: In The Park
Pretty funny: Bill Maher on Jay Leno talking about Cheney and the shooting...
The Magic BB Theory
Jesus' General explains how Cheney could fire 30 yards and have the pattern so tightly grouped that nearly all the BBs landed within 18 inches.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Cheney's Chappaquiddick II: The Real Story Emerges | The Huffington Post
RJ Eskow speculates on what really happened on the Armstrong Ranch.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Media Matters Comprehensive Analysis of "Liberal Media" phenom
Media Matters - If It's Sunday, It's Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 - 2005: "The Sunday-morning talk shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC are where the prevailing opinions are aired and tested, policymakers state their cases, and the left and right in American politics debate the pressing issues of the day on equal ground. Both sides have their say and face probing questions. Or so you would think.
In fact, as this study reveals, conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows. Media Matters for America conducted a content analysis of ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and NBC's Meet the Press, classifying each one of the nearly 7,000 guest appearances during President Bill Clinton's second term, President George W. Bush's first term, and the year 2005 as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. The conclusion is clear: Republicans and conservatives have been offered more opportunities to appear on the Sunday shows - in some cases, dramatically so."
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
The Cult of Bush eloquently examined
Unclaimed Territory: Do Bush followers have a political ideology? by Glenn Greenwald:
"Now, in order to be considered a 'liberal,' only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a 'liberal,' regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more 'liberal' one is. Whether one is a 'liberal' -- or, for that matter, a 'conservative' -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush."
Sunday, February 12, 2006
The Effectiveness Thing
Paul Krugman:
"We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the Medicare drug program, has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government."
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Cheney Authorized Libby to Disclose Classified Documents
Juan Cole has a good sequence of events outlining the Plamegate scandal. It's not that complicated. Cheney and crew trumped up the intelligence (read:lied) and the Repug political machine attempted to crush all dissent (read:truth).
Guantanamo's Grip
As an American I find this troubling and not in line with American principles. We are no longer the "good guys". An excerpt from the National Journal: Guantanamo's Grip
"Like many of the men who came handcuffed to Cuba, Detainee 032 has never been accused of fighting against America. He fell into U.S custody far away from any battlefield. But today, after four years of interrogations and investigations, he is still an 'enemy combatant,' even though he was never an enemy or a combatant. He is something else: something that might be dangerous or might not. But he's securely in our custody, and raise your hand if you want to be responsible for releasing the man who next flies an airplane into a skyscraper.
In some other world, one where the earth still turned west to east instead of inside out as it did on September 11, 2001, Detainee 032 would be finishing college this year, like his brother, father, and uncle before him. In this world, he's beginning his fifth year in prison, with neither charges nor freedom in sight."
No Bravery
Huffington Post Contagious Festival has some good polictical flash flicks.
Here's the best one: No Bravery
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Connecting the Dots
Part II of an interview with Mark Crispin Miller: author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Lair of the Spirit Bear Preserved
Hartley Bay, British Columbia - In this sodden land of glacier-cut fjords and giant moss-draped cedars, a myth is told by the Gitga'at people to explain the presence of black bears with a rare recessive gene that makes them white as snow.
The Raven deity swooped down on the land at the end of an ice age and decided that one out of every 10 black bears born from that moment on would be bleached as "spirit bears." It was to be a reminder to future generations that the world must be kept pristine.
On Tuesday, an improbable assemblage of officials from the provincial government, coastal Native Canadian nations, logging companies and environmental groups will announce an agreement that they say will accomplish that mission in the home of the spirit bear, an area that is also the world's largest remaining intact temperate coastal rain forest.
Secret Worlds: The Universe Within
View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
Monday, February 06, 2006
About Me
I run a lot. I get outdoors as much as I can. I read and I think. I love intellectual confrontation. I'm a liberal secular humanist atheist who speaks French (and German). I am the opposite of the "Christian Right".
Sibling Web sites
Political Commentary
- Andrew Sullivan
- Truthout.org
- Raw Story
- Juan Cole -- Informed Comment
- Huffington Post
- One Good Move
- Brad Blog: on the Voting Fraud front
- The Belgravia Dispatch
- Think Progress
- Colorado Pols
- Buzzflash.com
- Cryptome.org
Running in Colorado
- Steve Bremner's North American Outdoors
- Incline Club
- C.R.U.D. -- Coloradans Running Ultra-Distances
- Pikes Peak Marathon and more
- Barr Trail Race
Environment
- Grist Mag: Environmental News and Humour
- Waterkeepers: RFK, Jr battles corporate polluters
- National Audubon Society
- Natural Resources Defense Council
- Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project
- The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
- The Canary Coalition
- Leonardo di Caprio has a damn good environmental web site
- Next Billion.net -- Development Through Enterprise -- Focusing on the 4B people at the bottom of the pyramid
- Save the Springs -- To preserve and enhance quality of life in the Pikes Peak region
- Kleercut: Wiping away ancient Forests
Links
- COLORS: a most extraordinary magazine
- Scientific American's Blog
- Election Fraud 2004 (quick page of facts)
- Sudan: the passion of the present
archives
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“There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.”
Robert F. Kennedy (stated in 1968, when Robert was Attorney General, and his brother John had been the President)
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick
“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.” Bertrand Russell
"Just as nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight... and it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness."
-- William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison
"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy."
-- Charles Manson, serial killer and one-time cult leader
"A very popular error-having the courage of one's convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one must be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false."
-- Voltaire
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-- Albert Einstein
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
-- Bob Dylan, 'Masters of War'
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
James Madison, April 20, 1795
"In the end the party would announce that 2 plus 2 made 5, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim, sooner or later, the logic of their position demanded it."
-- George Orwell, in 1984
"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. " --€”Richard Feynman
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
"I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."
--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
"We're all in this alone."
--Lily Tomlin
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
-Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 1911
“The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.�
--Bill Moyers
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
--Hermann Goering
"Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasure, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing." --Jerome K. Jerome
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." -Benjamin Franklin
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." --Aldo Leopold
"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do." --Jose Ortega y Gasset
"The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity...."
"Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism."
-- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831
"Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level." --Henry David Thoreau
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly." --Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Mother Night
"I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels."
--Diogenes of Sinope (c. 408-323 B.C.)
"Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow;
They toil not, neither do they spin;
And yet I say unto you,
that even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these."
Jesus
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
