War is Peace

Richard Cohen has a good editorial in the Washington Post today. Bush, Safely in Denial

Constant anxiety is safety, so says our fearless leader Prances in Flightsuit.

Boston is agog about the ridiculous "safety" precautions being taken for the Democratic Convention. They are shutting down the main drag through Boston, Route 93, in the afternoons and evenings, for 20 miles north and south of the city. So people were told to take the T. (T is our abbreviation for the public transportation agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, shortened to MBTA, but like all things Boston, shortened even further to "T".) But now you can't take anything larger than a purse the size of a sandwich on the T. What if your job requires you to carry something larger than that, like tools? Tough nuggies. And you can't take a bike on the T, unless it is one of those hugely expensive ones that breaks down into component parts. A regular bike that someone might really own, not allowed.

I'm not sure if this is just an over-reaction to the Tom Ridge terrorism warnings, or just the small town version of security. I've found that the further you are from New York City (where most of the death & destruction of 9/11 actually happened) the more stringent the security precautions. I've spent a lot of time in NYC since 9/11. New Yorkers understand that everyone is not a threat. At Madison Square Garden, for example, you can bring a backpack. You have to open it up for inspection, but once they get to know you the inspection is pretty cursory. & why shouldn't it be? A 47 year old lawyer? I'm a threat to America? Of course not. But in Boston, and Baltimore, and Fort Wayne Indiana, backpacks are not allowed in sporting events. (Because the 9/11 terrorists used backpacks, right? No, they used briefcases. They don't allow backpacks because that means you are a 60s liberal, the most dangerous of all Americans. You might be bringing in dangerous ideas, like free speech, dissent, tolerance, equality, right? So backpacks are banned all over America. Get it?)

War is peace, and Oceania is always at war with Eurasia.

blogspot is broken

Gee, it only took 4 days for my last post to publish. It's hard to be topical with that kind of time frame. I feel like US News & World Report.

Whee-hoooo!

John Edwards for Veep!

Re-defeat Bush

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 today. On a whim, headed out to the suburban 16 screen theatre for the 4:30 showing.

Was surprised to find the theatre 3/4 full, for the matinee. I guess I am in Massachusetts, and it is a holiday weekend. Had to wedge myself in next to a large man wearing aftershave.

It was great to see all that I know to be true strung together for the mainstream audience. All the corporate media has been hiding from us. I tried not to annoy the poor man next to me as I answered Moore's rhetorical questions throughout the film. Managed not to say "Commander Codpiece" out loud when they showed the money shot of Bush in his ridiculous Mission Accomplished flight gear.

I did get choked up during the non-Moore narrated parts of the film -- the sounds of the planes hitting the World Trade Towers, the interview with the 9/11 widow, and the wrenching footage of the mother of the boy killed in Iraq.

There was one moment that made me gasp, during the final quarter of the film, and I will have to see it one more time because the fact has eluded me. It was another one of those Michael Moore rhetorical questions, and I was surprised and shocked by the answer.

So, if you haven't seen the film yet, stop reading now, because here's the final line:

[Commander Codpiece, leaning earnestly over the lectern]

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on....[long pause]....shame on you. Fool me....[longer pause]....you can't get fooled again."

—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

We won't get fooled again.

Job Growth Not There

Job growth last month was less than 50% of what economists expected. NYTimes, WashingtonPost.

Maybe this is why Bush isn't getting any bounce from his economic rebound????

Blogger fatigue

Now I understand why my favorite bloggers take time off occasionally.

I'll try not to do it too often.

Kerry in a Landslide

From ABC's "The Note", today, June 29, 2004:

8. Nearly every political reporter in America is having the same experience — they keep finding Republicans who say they will never vote again for President Bush (over the the war and the deficit, usually) but they have a heck of a time finding anyone who voted for Gore in 2000 who are now certain that they will vote for Bush (and Gore apparently won the popular vote).

I'm BAAAAAAAAAAACK

Just returned home from an unscheduled trip to visit a recuperating relative.

Now I am recovering from a new sports blow -- England's extra-time loss to the dreaded Frogs at Euro20004. England Suffer France Agony

It was torture to watch it all unravel so quickly at the end.

Crazy Barthez with that great save on Beckham's PK was the start.

Then England turtled for the rest of the second half -- impossible against the French who are loaded with offensive talent. And the final blow, Sven-Goren puts in EMILE HESKEY, of all substitutes, for Wayne Rooney who at 18 didn't need a rest, and certainly didn't need to be taken out for the useless Mr. Heskey. Wham-o, Heskey fouls, Zidane strikes with the perfect free kick, England panics, Steven Gerrard makes the sloppy pass back to James, James fouls Henry and and Zidane puts them away from the penalty mark. Sad.

More tomorrow.

Stanley Cup spotted in Florida

It's so wrong, the Stanley Cup now belongs to a team from a state where it is 85 degrees at the start of Game 7.

A place where all season long you could walk up to the box office & buy a ticket.

I'll get over it.

Iginla should win the Hart and the Conn Smythe

Tired from staying up late to watch the Calgary Flames gut out a 3-2 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning in OT last night. New York Times, NHL.com, the Boston Globe, Calgary Sun. Jerome Iginla was immense. I wonder if he could hear me? I was sitting in front of the TV shouting "You're the Captain! This is your game! You must produce!" on his every shift. And he didn't let me down. (Maybe he heard me?) That last shift was amazing. I couldn't believe he was still on the ice. A long shift after over 70 minutes of hockey, helmet knocked off, checked again and again, Iginla kept getting up and forcing the play until he took the shot that was so hard Khabibulin gave up the rebound that Saprykin knocked in the for the winning goal. (Whew! What a sentence!)

Go Canada!

Treason

Capital Hill Blue is reporting that Prances in Flightsuit has hired a lawyer because witnesses have told the grand jury investigating the Plame case that he KNEW her name was going to be leaked. LINK

Helen Thomas is right: He's the worst President in the history of the country.

Polygraph Express

I'd pay to see Wolfowitz & Feith getting their polygraphs today. LINK

The whole Iran-sent-a-cable-using-the-code-Chalabi-gave-them story doesn't make sense to me though. Why would they burn such a valuable source of information? If Chalabi has been slipping them US secrets for years, why when he gave them the big one would they throw it away? Why would they suddenly question the value of his information now if he's been telling tales on us for years?

I wonder if this is Karl Rove's exit strategy from the neocon mess. Just a convenient way to dump Feith or Wolfowitz and say, hey, I know we had bad intelligence on this Iraq thing, but that's done with! We've sacrificed the bad guy! Now move on and vote for Shrub.

I used to be such a trusting person.

The Game is Fixed

20 of the 73 companies approved to sell those bogus drug cards by the government have been convicted of, charged with or are being investigated for defrauding the government.

Guess why those 20 still got contracts? First two guesses don't count. You're right, they gave big bucks to the Bushies. As a matter of fact, those 20 companies gave 60% of the money Bush raised from drug card companies. 60% of the over five million dollars those companies gave to Bush since 2000 came from those dirty 20 companies.

You gots to pay to play. Read all about it in this American Progress article. LINK

Torture Works!

What to make of today's Justice Department press conference detailing Jose Padilla's supposed intent to blow up apartment buildings and hotels in the United States? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Justice is terrified of losing Padilla's appeal before the Supreme Court, especially after the Deputy Solicitor General arguing before the Supremes claimed the U.S doesn't torture prisoners -- just hours before the Abu Ghraib pictures were released? LINK

The Abu Ghraib revelations also clashed with remarks Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement made to the court during oral argument in the Padilla case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg posed a scenario for Clement's response: "Suppose the executive says mild torture, we think, will help get this information," she said. "It's not a soldier who does something against the code of military justice, but it's an executive command. Some systems do that to get information."

"Well, our executive doesn't," Clement, the administration's second-ranking Supreme Court advocate, replied. "Where the government is on a war footing . . . you have to trust the executive to make the kind of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that."

In today's Padilla case press conference, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said the majority of the information in the Justice Department's case against Padilla came from interrogation of Padilla and other prisoners, and they've been dying to tell us about it:

Comey said his announcement followed an intensive government effort to declassify information gained from the interrogation of Padilla and others.

LINK

Translation: The new rules of interrogation worked with Padilla. He told us how bad he was. So you see? Torture works! Torture good! Quit complaining about that quaint old Geneva Conventions and get off our backs!

Can't wait to hear Padilla's lawyers press conference.

Ding, Dong, Witchcroft is Gone?

Time magazine reports in this week's issue that John Ashcroft may indeed be headed out of town even if Bush (gasp) does win re-election. The article also speculates that Ashcroft's former #2 at Justice, Larry Thompson, would be named to replace him. I don't know much about Thompson, other than that he is an African-American Republican, which is much like being a Log Cabin Republican, kind of mysterious to me.

"Stop lying about my record, George Bush"

Who of a certain age (me among them) could forget Dan Ackroyd's imitation of the furious Bob Dole debating George H.W. Bush with these immortal words: "Stop lying about my record, George Bush!"

Will Bob step in (aided by his use of male-performance-enchancing drugs, one hopes) to help out John Kerry as Little Bush does the same?

Today's Washington Post article:
From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity
Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks

As in, Little Bush, lying about John Kerry's record.

Will any Republican have the guts to call him on it? McCain spoke up when they attacked Kerry's patriotism, but I hear an eerie silence from the other side of the aisle now....

A Woman Scorned

Right after I finally get to see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, I can't wait to read this book.

"A new book on the Bush dynasty is set for release just six weeks before November's knife-edge presidential election. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley will have an initial print run of 500,000, and the main source is believed to be Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil, President George W Bush's wayward brother."

Now we all remember Neil Bush as the scoundrel who absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Silverado Savings & Loan in the 1980s, LINK and "in 1988 Silverado went belly up, leaving U.S. taxpayers holding the bag for $1.3 billion in debts." LINK

Another astute economic mind in the Bush family.

But the really fun part of the Kitty Kelley book should be over Neil Bush's family values, which included LINK sex with prostitutes in Thailand (who just showed up at his door mysteriously) and telling his wife of 22 years that he wanted a divorce -- via email. LINK

Should be fun.

Unpatriotic Act, Part 2

Ok, I've delved a little deeper. The declaration of John Doe makes clear that it is a small company as he is the sole employee. (While names were blacked out, gender was not!)

The final paragraph of his declaration is quite interesting. It is numbered 30 and says (I gave the blacked out parts letters so we can speculate on their contents):

"I find ironic that _____a______ I freely engaged in political debate on the government's use of the Patriot Act._______b________ I know much more about how the Patriot Act works. _______________________________________c_______________________________________________________________

What could be in those blanks??

Here are some ideas:
a. prior to this lawsuit
b. Now that I have been sued
c. I can no longer have any discussions about the Patriot Act, even though I am now one of the most well-educated persons on the subject in the United States of America.

a. as a government employee
b. Now as a private citizen
c. ???

More tomorrow. I'm hitting the wall.

The Unpatriotic Act

I've started wading through the ACLU's recently released papers in the case against an internet service provider by Ashcroft's Justice Department. Here's the article that got me started on it. The ACLU has gotten the judge to allow them to release some of the legal papers, but the identify of the company targeted by the Justice Department can only be referred to as "John Doe."

I'm playing one of those lawyer games, trying to figure out the name of the company by looking at how long the blacked-out portions of the legal papers are. My first thought was, I wonder if it is one of the blogger sites? After looking at the papers I'm not so sure. The organization's name is (I think) abbreviated after the first few pages, to some acronym that can't be more than three letters. AOL? MSN? But the article about the case refers to John Doe as a company run by an individual who is frustrated by the gag order. The abbreviation could even be "Doe", I suppose.

A few weeks ago there was an article about a computer program, developed by a graduate student, that figured out some of the blacked-out words in the August 6th PDB (that famous non-warning, "Bin Ladin Determined to Attack In United States).

I hope someone applies this program to the ACLU papers so we can find out which ISP the Justice Department is targeting.

I hate John Witchcroft. Atrios says he's toast, on his way out the door before the elections. Will that mean the statue of Justice can take off her blue robe and show her breasts again?

More importantly, who would get the job after Witchcroft? Gonzales, the White House Counsel, who thinks the Geneva Conventions are "quaint"? If they're going to follow with someone in the Ashcroft mode, maybe they'll try to appoint Senator Imhofe of Oklahoma -- the idiot who is "outraged about the outrage".

Oh, who replaces Witchcroft doesn't really matter, does it. Kerry in a landslide. Like father, like son: One term. I believe.

6/1/04 update: Here's an interesting article LINK on vastlyimportant.com about the "Dublin Project" and how it works to identify blocked out text.

Remember Karen Silkwood?

Depleted uranium will be the Agent Orange of Iraq:

News > May 18, 2004
Depleted Morality

The first signs of uranium sickness surface in troops returning from Iraq

By Frida Berrigan

Sergeant Mark Callihan (right) and Staff Sergeant Sean Bach inventory 25mm depleted uranium rounds at their base in Tikrit, Iraq.


It’s a year into the occupation and U.S. troops are being killed at a rate of more than four a day. These deaths from roadside bombs, suicide attackers, anti-U.S. militia and mobs of angry civilians make headlines. More quietly, American soldiers also are beginning to suffer injuries from a silent and pernicious weapon material of U.S. origin—depleted uranium (DU).

DU weaponry is fired by U.S. troops from the Abrams battle tank, A-10 Warthog and other systems. It is pyrophoric, burning spontaneously on impact, and extremely dense, making DU munitions ideal for penetrating an enemy’s tank armor or reinforced bunker. It also is the toxic and radioactive byproduct of enriched uranium, the fissile material in nuclear weapons.

When a DU shell hits its target, it burns, losing anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of its mass and dispersing a fine toxic radioactive dust that can be carried long distances by winds or absorbed into the soil and groundwater. The U.S. Army and Air Force have fired 127 tons of DU munitions in Iraq in the last year, says Michael Kilpatrick, the Pentagon’s director of the Deployment Health Support Directorate.

At the beginning of April—the deadliest month of the war and occupation so far—a New York Daily News investigation found that four National Guardsmen have been contaminated by radioactive dust.

The men were part of the 442nd Military Police Company based in Orangeburg, New York, which went to Iraq last summer to guard convoys and prisons and train the new Iraqi police. While the whole company is due back in the United States by the end of April, a number of soldiers were sent home early, suffering from persistent headaches and fatigue, nausea and dizziness, joint pain and excessive urination. They sought medical attention and testing from the Army but were ignored. Nine of the returned soldiers, frustrated with this treatment, sought independent testing and examination from a uranium expert contracted by the New York Daily News. The independent expert’s tests showed four of the soldiers had high levels of depleted uranium in their systems.

Asaf Durakovic, a physician and nuclear medicine expert with the Uranium Medical Research Center based in Washington, examined the GIs and performed the testing. The Daily News quoted him as saying: “These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle. Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposures.”

Second Platoon Sergeant Hector Vega tested positive for DU exposure. He is a 48-year-old retired postal worker from the Bronx and has served in the National Guard for 27 years. After being stationed in Iraq last year, he suffers from insomnia and constant headaches.

Durakovic found that Vega and three of his fellow Guardsmen are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict. These cases raise the specter of much more widespread radiation exposure among coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians than the Pentagon predicted.

Pentagon spokesmen consistently have maintained that depleted uranium is safe for U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. In May 2003, the Associated Press quoted Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the U.S. Army’s V Corps, saying, “There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq.” Sigmon asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.

Yet, according to a 1998 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the inhalation of DU particles can lead to symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, lymphatic problems, bronchial complaints, weight loss and an unsteady gait. These symptoms match those of sick veterans of the Gulf and Balkan wars. In November 1999, NATO sent its commanders the following warning: “Inhalation of insoluble depleted uranium dust particles has been associated with long-term health effects, including cancers and birth defects.” A study that same year found that depleted uranium can stay in the lungs for up to two years. “When the dust is breathed in, it passes through the walls of the lung and into the blood, circulating through the whole body,” wrote Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian epidemiologist. When inhaled, she concluded, DU “represents a serious risk of damaged immune systems and fatal cancers.”

A four-year study released last year by the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found “significantly higher prevalences” of heart and kidney birth defects in the children of Gulf War veterans, though it did not mention DU specifically.

The Pentagon’s professions of DU’s safety also is directly contradicted by the Army’s training manual, which acknowledges the hazards of DU, requiring that anyone who comes within 25 meters of DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection. The manual warns: “Contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption.”

The men of the 442nd Company said they had never heard of depleted uranium and they were not issued dust masks or other protective gear.

Responding to the New York Daily News article, and calls for testing from Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer New York, an army spokeswoman told the Associated Press that “the military would test any soldier that expressed concerns about uranium exposure.” At the request of Representatives Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas) and Robert Filner (D-Calif.), the General Accounting Office (GAO) now is investigating whether the Pentagon has ignored the medical consequences of depleted uranium armaments. Based on the GAO’s findings, Filner and Rodruguez are considering the introduction of legislation to extend service benefits to veterans who develop health conditions that can plausibly be caused by depleted uranium exposure.

These are steps in the right direction. But the men of the 442 and the 131,000 U.S. and 24,000 Coalition soldiers serving in Iraq deserve more. They deserve a ban on Depleted Uranium.