disturbing the comfortable

Tuesday, I'm out of here for another week of trying to remember that governmental stupidities, cruelties, and generalized bullshit existed before I was born and will continue to exist long after I am gone. It's in the nature of the beast. Governments lie; it's what they do best.

The universe was also here long before I came along, and even though it sometimes seems questionable, it will be here after I'm gone. The difference between the government and the universe is this: governments seem to have an inherent attraction to evil, while the universe just is the way it is. A couple of days ago I saw an article about narcotics treatment programs up in British Columbia that were experimenting with psychedelic drugs because of their staggering ability to shake up personal belief systems. My own experience was that psychedelics also gave me an over-powering sense of the benevolence of Creation: everything was, really, OK. That was an experience I still treasure. I just don't take psychedelics anymore, though, so it's somewhat more difficult to get that feeling. And, yeah, in these scary times I sometimes forget that the universe is a pretty good place—especially our living breathing Mother Earth, who's always ready to comfort me...all I have to do is make the effort.

So, next week I'm off to Ceremony for a week. It's a sort of ceremony for the mis-begotten. What happens is that it is a place for me to remember the good things. It's the closest thing yet, non-chemically-inducd, for me to remember the essential benevolence of Creation. All I have to do is ask, and that benevolence is there, front and center. It's asking for the help of the Spirits, really.

Monday will be my last, quickie-wickie post until the following week. Will I miss doing this? Yeah, probably for about five minutes. The rest of the time I'll be getting purified and recharged. And, boy, do I need it!

You, readers, will have the following mantra: Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Well, the Junta is willing to try everything when it comes down to the next election. And that there are plenty of news broadcasters willing to suck up to the government in order to maybe land some posh job writing propaganda.

I just came across this a bit from CNN (thanks to RawStory for the lead):

‘Might Some Argue That Lamont…Is The al Qaeda Candidate?’

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/11/headline-news-lamont/

Today on CNN Headline News, anchor Chuck Roberts discussed the impact of the foiled British terror plot with Hotline senior editor John Mercurio. Roberts asked Mercurio, “How does this factor into the Lieberman/Lamont contest? And might some argue, as some have, that Lamont is the al Qaeda candidate?”

Bend, Oregon, is a town of hustlers: realtors, land-sharks, go-getters, high achievers, all the cultural heros of our Neo Guilded Age. We’re not the only town in the grip of these people: Aspen, Carmel, Anacortes, Bozeman, Sandpoint—dozens and dozens of towns in the American west have been seized by entrepeneurs and their ilk. Sometimes they improve things; but once they’ve done that, they keep going. Being a go-getter is like being a heroin addict: more more more is always the modus operandi.

So, some hotshots decided that Bend should become the center of some sort of film industry. I don’t quite know if they dream of an Orlando-in-the-desert or what, but they’ve made their pitch. Too bad they overlooked the very simply fact that the free-lance film industry, and a lot of mainstream productions as well, simply leave the country for Canada where costs are much lower. But these guys will figure out how to profit from their sales pitch.


Central Oregon urged to recruit show business productions
8/5/2006, 2:20 p.m. PT
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-16/115481335767220.xml&storylist=orlocal
BEND, Ore. (AP) — Central Oregon should think of itself as a place where television executives and movie moguls want to produce shows, Oregon video promoters say.

Former Hollywood television producer Steve Oster and Eugene production studio owner Scott Chambers briefed a group of political leaders, economic development agents and publishers in Bend last week.

They said Oregon is increasingly viewed as a destination for the creative class, people who might leave Southern California or New York, and Oregon has both financial incentives in place and production facilities in prospect.

All three of those factors — people, incentives and facilities — have to come together before a viable film industry will take root here, Oster said.

"It's a chicken and egg thing," Oster said.

Oster is head of the Oregon Film and Video Office, a state agency that tries to attract and coordinate film work in the state.

The state needs to attract more work before trained film people will relocate here in great numbers - there currently are three feature films being shot in various locations around the state, but the frequency of projects is still "feast or famine," Oster noted.

"We are shooting for sustainability," he said.

Before film producers will shoot here in steady numbers, though, they need people. The state can currently crew about two to 2 1/2 feature films at a time, with a few hundred people required for each, Oster said. That's not enough to keep the work coming steadily, particularly if a long-running television series with lots of shoots is thrown into the mix.

Oregon's Production Investment Fund can offer individual filmmakers up to $250,000 per film in the form of a 10 percent reimbursement for in-state costs, Oster said, and its Greenlight Oregon labor rebate offers a 6.2 percent kickback on labor costs.

___

Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Here and there, little leaks appear in the carefully-built dike that keeps contrarian information and ideas from appearing in public. Guest editorials, letters to the editor—those are about the only ways non-approved ideas make it into the public eye. What kind of an idea? One that says the undeclared war against terror is one of force against ideas themselves...

Here’s one from the the Seattle P-I, all in all not a bad paper. Wish we had as good a paper around here...

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/280844_waronterror11.html

U.S. wages war on a concept

Friday, August 11, 2006

ROBERT SPRACKLAND
GUEST COLUMNIST

On Sept. 11, 2001, religious fanatics hijacked four commercial jets and crashed them in the most egregious acts of war against the United States' mainland since the British burned Washington, D.C., in 1814. No perpetrator was an Iraqi, but the White House had decided Iraq was a locus of anti-American terrorism. While journalists dutifully presented each administration justification against Saddam Hussein, the lynchpin of condemnation became the effervescent weapons of mass destruction.

The administration has drawn lines between nations that are "with us, or with the terrorists." An Axis of Evil was defined, in which one nation was invaded and cast into a civil war, while two others hastened to develop nuclear weapons capabilities. Afghanistan was occupied, Iran joined the Axis and all hell broke out in the Middle East as Israel slammed at Hezbollah. And still there are claims that all is still hopeful on the roadmap to peace.

How can there be any progress in a war in which there are no contiguous elements? The U.S. is not waging war against Iraq, or Baathists, or even Muslims. It is not fighting a place or entity but a concept -- "terrorism." What enemy can be more of a phantom, impossible to kill or contain, than an idea? That is why dictators so enjoy a good book burning -- books contain ideas.

The government, when queried about when troops will come home and the war will end, repetitively answers "we will stay the course until we defeat terrorists." Yet the methods employed to attack terrorists provides precisely the feeding ground to produce their replacements. Worse, the largely artificial lines of nationhood drawn in the sands of the Middle East quickly blow away in the hot winds of fanatical Islam. Terrorists do not wear a national uniform, but come dressed as civilians.

Wars against ideas never achieve victory. China may have overthrown its 2,200-year tradition of emperors, but it is still an empire led by a hereditary aristocracy; the United States failed miserably in its wars against drugs, poverty and alcohol, but admitted defeat only when it repealed Prohibition. And although the Third Reich is a memory, Nazism is still among us. Were the goal of World War II to destroy the Nazis, it would still be fought today.

So I ask the president: How will we know when we have defeated terrorism? If it is outlawed by all the Middle Eastern nations, it will still exist, as do slavery and drug dealers. What will it take to recall U.S. troops, admit that this is a foe that armies are not meant to fight, and that the idea of fighting "terrorism" is as poor an idea as any that led to the debacle ongoing in the Middle East?

Regarding troops, Tennyson eloquently wrote: "Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do & die." Those of us at home must hold government accountable and demand to know why. It may not be the most important way to support the troops, but after three years of war it certainly seems we should get answers. Question one is "How do you defeat a phantom menace?"

Robert Sprackland lives in Seattle.

© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The administration-junta clearly believes it doesn’t have any responsibility toward a give-and-take between citizens and government. And the news media, gelded as they are, goes along with the program. Ultimately, the government is in control of the news; that's why there's so much antagonism and discounting of the bloggers who refuse to play along.



Increasingly, Bush Escapes the Media Pack
Press Cuts Converge With Closed Events

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101834_pf.html

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 12, 2006; A01

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- On one of the scariest days yet in the five-year battle with terrorists, President Bush prepared to make a speech to reassure the American people. But the White House press corps was 1,000 miles away in Texas.

Bush had left his ranch vacation and jetted north for a scheduled closed-door fundraiser. No press plane accompanied him. And so when news broke that Britain had broken up a major terrorist plot, the only ones there to convey the president's reaction were a handful of local reporters and a few pool journalists who ride in the back of Air Force One.

The idea that Bush could travel across the country without a full contingent of reporters, especially in the middle of a war, highlights a major cultural shift in the presidency and the news media. In the four decades since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, presidents traditionally have taken journalists with them wherever they traveled on the theory that when it comes to the most powerful leader on the planet, anything can happen at any time.

But increasingly in recent months, Bush has left town without a chartered press plane, often to receptions where he talks to donors chipping in hundreds of thousands of dollars with no cameras or tapes to record his words for the public. Barred from such events, most news organizations will not pay to travel with him. And so a White House policy inclined to secrecy has combined with escalating costs for the strapped news media to let Bush fly under the radar in a way his predecessors could not.

Another piece of the puzzle is put in place. The exposure of the Brit-based “plot” to blow up airliners and kill hundreds of thousands of oh-so-brave-but-innocent-American-Christian lives, is seen by our junta as an opportunity to increase it’s spying powers and to get off the hook for torturing prisoners.

The question is, of course, will people fall for this and not complain when FBI agents are watching their every move, reading each and every email…? Yeah, the people will probably fall for it. You tell the lie over and over and over and people believe it.


August 12, 2006
The Political Effects
Bush Aides Foresee Gains on Eavesdropping and Guantánamo
By JIM RUTENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/12/washington/12bush.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 11 — White House officials said Friday that the fallout from the discovery of the British bombing plot could help the administration advance its agenda in Congress. The officials cited in particular battles over supervising the program of eavesdropping without warrants and how to try detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Taking the White House’s lead, Republicans throughout the country used the arrests of terror suspects in Britain to go on the offensive against Democrats for the second day in a row. They accused Democrats of failing to understand the nature of the terrorist threat facing the nation. ***

Back in the 1960s, there was a great deal of experimental work being done with psychedelic drugs; at first, of course, it was thought the compounds mimicked psychosis. This was disproved: but researchers realized that psychedelics combined with intense insight therapy offered a great deal of potential for life-changing experienes.

Unfortunately, the research basically came to an end with an outbreak of anti-drug hysteria. Yet many of us to who ventured into space with psychedelics found joy and a sense of OK-ness with the drugs. I know my own adventures didn’t harm me and I still have some memories of utter amazement at the cohesion and benevolence of mystical experiences.

Now, up in Canada, a country rather immune to the drug-scares that periodically sweep through America, researchers are trying the use of psycho-active drugs in getting addicts and alcoholics to lead clean and sober lives. Some people will go through the roof when they hear this, but it should be remembered that Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was willing to try LSD. It did not, repeat: did not, cause him to relapse.

Psychedelics could help addicts, say B.C. drug officials
Last Updated: Thursday, August 10, 2006 | 2:59 PM PT
CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/08/10/bc-drugs.html

Some of Vancouver's top drug policy officials say the city should consider treating drug and alcohol addicts with psychedelic drugs to help them turn their lives around.

Zarina Mulla, the social planner for the City of Vancouver's drug policy program, says hallucinogens such as peyote and ayahuasca could offer addicts "profound benefits."

"There have been profound, lasting and positive behavioural and lifestyle changes in the clients who were given that sacrament," she told CBC News.

"I say this as a treatment so it is under very ritualistic and therapeutic conditions. It helps people understand who they are and leads to a process of self examination and recovery."

She co-authored a report last year saying the use of peyote and ayahuasca could be "beneficial," and is recommending that the city spend some money to look into the idea.

The idea already has the support of other drug addiction experts, including David Marsh, the head of addiction medicine at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

"My feeling is that people with substance abuse disorders should have the same treatment as people with cancer or heart disease. If there is a natural compound that shows some promise, it should be rigorously evaluated and if proven effective it should be offered."

The city report was released following a report by the Health Officers Council of British Columbia that also suggested that medical use of psychedelic drugs could be useful.

B.C. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall also thinks that used properly, the psychedelic drugs could help addicts change their lives.

"Anything that fundamentally alters their perception of themselves may potentially have a therapeutic use as an adjunct," said Kendall.

So far, there are no plans to set up a clinical trial in Vancouver.

Be all you can be in the Army. Somehow this reminds me of an old AA joke about what happens when you take a drunken horsethief and get him sober: you get a sober horsethief. When we hear about "our troops" doing some unpleasant things in Iraq, remember, they can do unpleasant things right here at home. Be all you can be...but at least change the goddam license plates on the get-away car.


Friday, August 11, 2006 - 12:00 AM

3 Rangers charged in Tacoma bank heist

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003190695&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=rangers11m&date=20060811
By David Bowermaster
Seattle Times staff reporter

The robbers apparently knew what they were doing.

As one kept track of the time, counting down the minutes, the others brandished automatic weapons to rob the tellers. All wore masks and what appeared to be body armor under their clothing.

When they were done — in under 2 ½ minutes — the men had made off with $54,000 from a Tacoma branch of Bank of America on Monday.

Viewing surveillance video of the robbery, an FBI agent would later note it was an "extremely well organized and executed robbery that was carried out with military-style precision and planning."

On Thursday, three members of the Army's elite Rangers unit at Fort Lewis were charged in federal court in connection with the robbery.

The suspects, Alex Blum, Luke Sommer and Chad Palmer, each hold the rank of private first class and are attached to "C" Company, 2nd battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, according to charging papers.

A Fort Lewis spokeswoman declined comment. "This is covered under civilian law enforcement and right now it's an FBI issue," she said.

Blum was arrested Wednesday in Colorado and appeared in court there Thursday, said Michael Dion, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Tacoma who is prosecuting the case.

He was arrested after a witness near the bank reported seeing the robbers arrive and depart in a silver Audi A4 sedan. The witness wrote down the license-plate number. The car is registered in Colorado to Blum and his father, according to charging papers. Palmer was arrested Thursday in Virginia and is to make a court appearance there today, Dion said.

Sommer remains at large. According to the charging papers, Capt. Clinton Fuller, commander of "C" Company, told FBI investigators that Sommer is on leave and traveling in British Columbia.

Two other individuals are alleged to have taken part in the robbery.

Fuller gave all 192 soldiers in "C" Company two weeks off beginning at noon on Monday, according to charging papers. The bank was robbed just a few hours later.

The robbers brandished semi-automatic weapons and rifles that appeared to be AK-47s, said Monte Shaide, the FBI agent leading the investigation.

Searches of the soldiers' rooms at Fort Lewis turned up money bands with Bank of America markings, cash and government-issued body armor, according to charging papers. Two AK-47s, eight loaded AK-47 magazines and $10,000 in cash were found in Sommer's room.

David Bowermaster: 206-464-2724 or dbowermaster@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Lily Tomlin once said the problem with being cynical was that it was too hard to keep up. I think I’ll rephrase that: the problem with being paranoid is that there are too many greedheads running the show.

Here’s a good piece by Greg Palast on what’s happening with BP’s pipeline. The link is at the end of the post.

Greg Palast: 'The brilliantly profitable timing of the Alaska Oil Pipeline shutdown'
Date: Wednesday, August 09 @ 10:18:35 EDT
Topic: Corporate America

British Petroleum's "smart pig"

Greg Palast

Is the Alaska Pipeline corroded? You bet it is. Has been for more than a decade. Did British Petroleum shut the pipe yesterday to turn a quick buck on its negligence, to profit off the disaster it created? Just ask the "smart pig."

Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."



This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Now let's talk timing. BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

Indeed, it's pretty darn hard for BP to claim it is surprised to find corrosion this week when Lawn issued a damning report on corrosion right after a leak and spill were discovered on March 2 of this year.

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of ... British Petroleum.

BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall.

Enron Corporation was infamous for deliberately timing repairs to maximize profit. Would BP also manipulate the market in such a crude manner? Some US prosecutors think they did so in the US propane market. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) just six weeks ago charged the company with approving an Enron-style scheme to crank up the price of propane sold in poor rural communities in the US. One former BP exec has pleaded guilty.

Lord Browne, the imperious CEO of BP, has apologized for that scam, for the Alaska spill, for this week's shutdown and for the deaths in 2005 of 15 workers at the company's mortally sloppy refinery operation at Texas City, Texas.

I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium.

Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volume's worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, m'Lord Browne preens himself with his corporation's environmental record. We know BP cares about nature because they have lots of photos of solar panels in their annual reports -- and they've painted every one of their gas stations green.

The green paint-job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But the good Lord, Mr. Browne, knows it stands for the color of the Yankee dollar.

BP claims the profitable timing of its Alaska pipe shutdown can be explained because they've only now run a "smart pig" through the pipes to locate the corrosion. The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though they had not done so for 14 years. The fact that, in the middle of an oil crisis, they've run it through now, forcing the shutdown, reminds me, when I consider Lord Browne's closeness to George Bush, that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

Greg Palast, an energy economist and investigative reporter, is the author of "Exxon Valdez: A Well-Designed Disaster." His reports can be seen on BBC Television's Newsnight, Democracy Now! and in Harper's Magazine.

Beginning noon today, at www.GregPalast.com, read, "Trillion Dollar Babies: Big Oil's War Bonus" from Palast's recently-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=27238

And, speaking of terror, both the NY Times and the Washington Post carried stories today about Israel wanting the US to ship “cluster munitions” so they can zap Hezbollah rocket-launching sites. More than they already have, yeah. In Laos they were “cluster bombs” and they’re still blowing the shit out of people. They don’t all go off at once, you see, being of good American craftmanship; some are dud-ish and go off later when somebody disturbs them.

Cluster bombs and cluster munitions are as wicked as land-mines and just as indiscriminate. Since Hezbollah likes to launch rockets from populated places, innocent people are going to get zapped and maimed and even more fucked-over than they’ve been getting by Israel. You know, when you live in a neighborhood run by gangsters, when the shooting starts all you can do is hope you don't get shot; it isn't just a matter of supporting anybody—it's a matter of survival.

It should be obvious to anybody—but it won’t be to those who love war and gore and think that Ay-rabs deserve everything that hurts them—that Israel is behaving in an exceedingly ugly manner. Israel would drop blankets infected with smallpox on their enemies, if most everyone wasn’t innoculated against it. Their behavior toward the Palestinians and Lebanese is as vile as anything the euro-Americans did to the Indians. I have nothing but disgust for Israel’s behavior.

The current terror "threat" is just a little too convenient for the beleaguered Cheny-Bush Junta. They knew about the plot before the election, but chose to release it when their Democratic Poodle, Leiberman, went down to defeat. It's another rabbit pulled out of the hat, I believe. Here's an excerpt from Anwaar Hussain's post (read the whole thing!):

SomethingisRottenintheStateofDenmark http://malakandsky.blogspot.com/2006/08/london-plot.html

By Anwaar Hussain

A huge ‘terror plot’ has just been uncovered in London. “This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale” say the London Metropolitan police. Britain's terror alert, accordingly, has been ratcheted up to its highest-ever level with security services, military and police now on “severe specific” alert.

Not to be left behind, even though the list of unanswered questions, irregularities, and discrepancies continues to grow with each passing hour, the obedient Western media jumped at the occasion ensuring a spate of spectacular cover stories and anti-Muslim tirade.

As usual, though the facts are still coming in, the media is dutifully following the open-ended cues provided by the US and British governments, and reproducing the handed-down script without a pause for the facts to emerge fully. With an indecent haste, government enforcers have already slapped ridiculous restrictions on travelers, with mother's having to taste baby milk before they board planes and all hand luggage, including liquid drinks, being banned.

If there indeed was such a plot, then by its uncovering innocent lives surely have been saved and just in time too. If not, then let us thank God for that and hasten to analyze the event from a slightly closer quarter as it has happened a little too conveniently for certain personages of rather dubious repute and vile agenda.

The following is long. If you don’t want to read it, OK, but it’s important...especially if the future of nature is a concern.

The Klamath River, like the Rogue River, the Columbia, Frasier, Sacramento, and countless other rivers once were filled with millions of salmon. They aren’t any more. The salmon survive only with a great deal of life-support. It isn’t just commercial fishing that threatens their existence: it’s logging, farming, pollution, dams, and all the other benefits of modern American society. The people who depended on the salmon—for thousands of years—are as endangered as the fish themselves. It’s time to make some major changes in the way we regard the situation. It’s time to yank out the big crippling dams. Maybe we won’t be able to run our air conditioners 24/7, but we went without for quite a while, and we can do it again.

The Klamath River Dispute

by Colin Miller
http://progressive.stanford.edu/2006.06_klamath_river.html

The Klamath River story of Northwestern California and Southern Oregon
is as tragic as it is convoluted, and the legal battles and controversy
surrounding it are as dirty and as overheated as the river itself.

Fishing rights' clash with aggressive farmers, and the conflict on the
Klamath has created a strange bedfellows alliance between commercial
fishermen and Native Americans. The two groups, normally opposed on
political grounds, have come together with environmentalists and
environmental justice groups in lawsuits filed against the U.S.
government for failing to adhere to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and
save the few remaining salmon. Each year, the populations of threatened
Chinook and endangered Coho salmon coming up the Klamath have dropped.

The conflict came to a dramatic head during a drought in 2001, when the
Bureau of Reclamation (the federal irrigation division responsible for
monitoring the water levels on the Klamath) opened the dam floodgates to
provide cool water for two species of suckerfish in Klamath Lake and for
the salmon that would be coming up for the fall runs. The farmers of
Southern Oregon were apoplectic at losing 75% of "their" water.
Incensed, the farmers filed a lawsuit and engaged in massive protests,
drawing the national spotlight in the months running up to Oregon
Republican Senator Gordon Smith's re-election campaign. Within months,
the water was turned back on for the farmers, despite the wealth of
scientific evidence documenting the salmons' tenuous position in a dying
ecosystem.

By September of the following year, the catastrophic dimension of the
government's decision to allow irrigation was revealed. The 2002 salmon
harvest was tragically small. Approximately 80,000 salmon lay gasping
for breath on the banks of the Klamath, unable to reach their spawning
grounds alive. Since then, each year's salmon run has gone lower,
suffering from disease and high heat, pushing the "endangered" salmon
species near extinction and the "threatened" species closer to an
"endangered" listing. If Congressman Richard Pombo of California has his
way, the Endangered Species Act may yet be reformed and crippled to the
extent that the listings as they stand hold even less water, so to
speak, than they already do.

The impact on commercial fishermen of the North Coast, and indeed, for
salmon fishermen from Seattle to San Francisco, has been grave. Because
it is impossible to determine the origins of ocean-going salmon (which
always return to their birthplaces to spawn) the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated an extremely low allowable wild
salmon harvest, limited by the endangered salmon runs of the Klamath. As
hard as it has been for these fishermen, Indians of the Klamath have
been, and will continue to be hit the hardest, because of the
subsistence nature of the tribal fishery.

The Karuk people were once one of the wealthiest indigenous groups in
all of California. Today, the 4,000-member Karuk Nation is the
second-largest tribe in the state and one of the poorest. About 90% of
Karuk families in Siskiyou County live in extreme poverty. Historically,
the Karuk customarily ate more than 450 pounds of fish per person per
year, an average of 1.2 pounds per day, comprising 50% of their total
diet. Last year, the Karuk caught just 100 fish ?five pounds of fish per
person per year. Not only does this number mock the idea of
"subsistence" fishing, it doesn't even provide for their ceremonial
rites. Last year, the Karuk people bought Alaskan salmon.

While dam removal is fundamental to the pursuit of both justice and
sustainability, it resolves only one facet of a complex problem.
Incompatible extractive land-uses continue to cause disproportionately
negative impacts on the health and survival of both salmon and Klamath
Basin tribes. The Klamath Water Users Association, representing mostly
farming interests, contends that dams are actually serving to protect
salmons' health and the overall ecological well-being of the Klamath
River Basin, by allowing sediment, pesticides, and herbicides to
"settle" in reservoirs, rather than flowing freely into the river. These
claims could not be more misguided.

A combination of 55 agro-industrial chemicals used on farms upstream,
made more toxic to fish in their synergistic effects, combined with
extremely high water temperatures due to dams, are still finding their
way into the river in lethal quantities.

The tribes first sued PacifiCorp for a $1 billion in a Court of Federal
Claims, but their case was dismissed because the 1864 treaty
guaranteeing Klamath Basin Indians the "exclusive right of taking fish
in the streams and lakes" predates the existence of the company or its
dams! Failing that, in late 2002, they sought representation under
Earthjustice lawyer Kristine Boyles, together with a large group of
high-profile environmental groups to sue the Federal government for
failing to protect the endangered Coho salmon, and the threatened
Chinook salmon and bull trout. As expected, the Federal court threw the
case out, but Earthjustice appealed.

In October 2005, the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court unexpectedly
overturned the Federal government's plan to "protect" Coho salmon by
providing status quo amounts of irrigation water to farmers for the next
decade. Unfortunately, the appeal derives the strength of its argument
entirely from its argument that the Bush Administration's plan for the
Klamath would violate the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Were the ESA to
be weakened, the Ninth Circuit decision could be repealed, bringing the
tribes to the next nationally-fought legislative battle. This battle
would be waged not just by indigenous advocacy and Environmental Justice
groups, but by mainstream environmentalists as well.

California Republican Congressman Richard Pombo has sponsored House
Resolution 3824, which the House subsequently approved. Should HR 3824
pass in the Senate, it would undermine the Endangered Species Act,
removing every restrictive provision and altering the system by forcing
taxpayers to reimburse would-be habitat-destroyers if they voluntarily
decided to protect endangered wildlife.

This bill would prove devastating to the future of the dwindling Klamath
River salmon population, which was once teeming with life. The future of
the Klamath River depends on prudent policy including dam removal and
meaningful agriculture reform. The Klamath River salmon run's alarmingly
small population is a warning of the river's poor health. The Klamath
has fueled culture, subsistence, and industry for millennia. It is up to
both the federal government and the people to determine that the day for
justice has finally come. Then, the salmon may finally return to their
ancestral home.


Feds declare fishery disaster
Salmon cutback - Congress is now clear to secure direct aid for affected fishermen and coastal businesses
Friday, August 11, 2006
PETER SLEETH
The Oregonian

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/115526317640670.xml&coll=7

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez announced a long-awaited disaster declaration for salmon trollers in Oregon and California on Thursday -- a step that came with no money but increased chances for a congressional cash infusion.

The federal declaration marks only the second time that a formal commercial fishery failure declaration has come while the fishing season was still under way.

Gutierrez said it already was abundantly clear the salmon fleet and its coastal communities were suffering as a result of a broad fishing closure to protect weak salmon runs returning to the Klamath River.

When Congress reconvenes in September, it now can move forward with the Bush administration's backing to seek millions of dollars in direct aid to fishermen and coastal businesses hit by the 85 percent reduction in the length of the fishing season. Gutierrez blamed five years of drought for critical conditions in the Klamath, a river that originates in Oregon and spills into the Pacific Ocean in California.

"This is very good news," said U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore. "What this does is put the ball in the court of Congress to come up with the money."

No one would speculate how much money could come from a gridlocked Congress, but the most credible estimates of need put the number at $30 million or more in Oregon and California. At least three bills seeking money for the fleet have failed to move through Congress.

Fishermen, who have received little in the way of assistance despite promises of help, greeted the news warily.

"It's a step in the right direction for us," said Kevin Bastien, a salmon troller from Newport who pilots the 40-foot fishing boat Gal. "Right now I'm tuna fishing to get by. It's going to be a tough year."

Trollers from central California to northern Oregon are being forced to drastically reduce their catch along a 700-mile stretch of coast so that fishery managers can protect dwindling runs of Klamath River salmon. Because the fish can be found in the ocean north and south of the mouth of the river in Northern California, fishery experts have reduced all fishing to minimize the catch. Despite record-high prices, the value of the landings is expected to be 16 percent of the five-year average.

When Hunter Thompson ended his writing career by over-indulgence in Wild Turkey and a gun, it was an open question who would pick up the flag of hard-edged, cynical, and honest political commentary. It seemed we had lost something brave and stout.

Matt Taibbi, it turned out, was the person to pick up that flag and carry it on. And he's just the person to go after Hillary.

Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is an ambitious, non-party politician. They are considered Democrats. The truth is, they are simply politicians who are eager for the prestige and power of office. Bill had his turn: now it’s Hillary’s. She’ll say just about anything that might get her votes, but she’ll do nothing unusual, rock no boats, make no structural changes. Her ambition was as responsible for the Clinton "Welfare Reform" as Bill's. Her plan for health care sounded nice, but collapsed once the insurance companies made it clear they weren't going to donate to them. Right now, going after Rumsfeld's sorry ass is popular, so she's after it, too.She wants to be The First Woman President, period.

URL at end of post

Matt Taibbi: 'Don't let Hillary's Dems cash in on Iraq'
Date: Friday, August 11 @ 09:34:41 EDT
Topic: The Democrats

Hillary Clinton's carefully scripted display of canned anger at Donald Rumsfeld was for his screwing up the 'execution' of the Iraq war, not because he thought invading Iraq was a good idea.

"Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively ... I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past."
--Richard Nixon, 1968

"We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders -- and frankly the record of incompetence in executing -- you are presiding over a failed policy."
--Hillary Clinton, addressing Donald Rumsfeld, August 2006

Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she's deserved all of it.

It never should have happened this way. Hillary's real destiny was to destroy American progressivism forever, taking the Democratic Party down with her, but an unlikely alliance of unwitting male conspirators screwed things up along the way by making her into the first great martyr of the mass-media age.



First among these were Rush Limbaugh and the other rightist media clowns of his ilk, who burned up the airwaves for over a decade, furiously miscasting Hillary as a kind of pompous, castrating Trojan Horse of liberalism and socialism. They sold Hillary as the Satan of the conservative's unwritten political Bible -- an icy, polysyllabic creature from the north bent on installing costly, intrusive and, frankly, lesbian government programming in place of the God-fearing Southern male as the ultimate authority in the American home.

These morons cranked out a virtual Mt. Everest of hysterical Hillary merchandise (Buy a "Stop Hillary!" Political Infant Creeper for just $12.99!) and sold her relentlessly in the media as a kind of evil socialist asteroid hurtling inexorably toward earth ("Hillary Endorses World Government!" "Hillary Linked to Marxist-Terrorist Network!"). The whole thing was so childish and overdone that even I felt sorry for her for about five minutes once.

The other conspirator, of course, was Bill Clinton himself. By screwing everything that moved, and especially by publicly engaging with the irritatingly wide-eyed and much younger Monica Lewinsky in the kind of weird and interesting sex most older career women only experience in fading memories or at exorbitant per-hour rates in Third-World vacation locales, Bill turned his wife into the ultimate martyr for modern feminism.

Hillary was educated, driven and accomplished, a superwoman who brilliantly matched wits with CEOs and senators on live national television, and what did it get her? A one-way trip to the sexual scrap-heap, followed by a late middle age lived out as an unsmiling pro-military curmudgeon with a fast-rusting vagina endlessly haunting the Sunday morning news magazine shows, with nothing left to look forward to but the questionable rewards of power and ambition, and a thicker neck every year ... Hillary's life story, in other words, spoke to the deepest fears of the modern liberated woman, who by the turn of the century was beginning to have serious doubts about what was waiting for her at the end of the rainbow.

All of which theoretically made her an interesting and tragic figure, but as it turned out, Hillary is neither interesting nor tragic. The life story that made her so compelling in the '90s is being subsumed in the 21st century by a larger cyclical drama of American politics, in which she's chosen to play a rank-and-file soldier's role.

We live in a two-party system where both parties are pro-war; when the wars go badly, the system scrambles to find a way to prevent anti-war sentiment from taking the drastic step of mounting a meaningful opposition.

Therefore, from time to time, we have to suffer through the spectacle of some status quo dingbat letting his hair down and performing a tortured impersonation of a peace activist during an election season. He bounds to the podium all hot and bothered and indignant-looking, and he sounds like he's against the war.

Only once you've listened to the tape five or six times do you realize that he's saying that he's actually in favor of the war; he just thinks it should have been prosecuted more effectively.

This was the basic message of Richard Nixon in 1968, and exactly the same message now belongs to Hillary Clinton, who unveiled her new pseudo-anti-war pose during an absurd clash of war collaborators with Donald Rumsfeld on the Senate floor last week.

Pitched as an effort by senators to discover the truth about the "on the ground" situation in Iraq, the series of interrogations of leading administration officials was really a forum for Conventional Wisdom to publicly abandon the war effort.

Generals admitted that Iraq was on the verge of civil war; senators gave gloomy speeches and repositioned themselves for midterm election season. Even a slew of erstwhile media war-cheerleaders, most notably mustachioed Times dipshit Thomas Friedman, used the occasion of the hearings to throw in the towel, universally describing the war as both a lost cause and somebody else's fault (the hilarious Friedman formulation was "Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons ..."). But the headline outcome was Hillary angrily demanding Don Rumsfeld's resignation, apparently for the crime of screwing up a perfectly good war.

Her semantically tortured apostrophic attack against Rumsfeld's "incompetence," in which she railed against the administration's "strategic blunders" but carefully avoided any discussion of the decision to invade, which she and most other Democrats so enthusiastically supported, identified her as the status quo dingbat in this generation's version of the same old story.

So much for being a martyr. Hillary officially stopped being a victim with that stunt, finally completing her self-propelled transformation into just another soulless stuffed suit willing to do anything to keep a job. There are thousands of these types in Washington, huge crowds of faceless drones in glasses and blue suits, each raised on DVD boxed sets of "The West Wing" and each willing to suck off a whole field of racehorses for the right internship or committee appointment. Collectively, they represent the least interesting group of people on the planet Earth, and once-compelling Hillary is their champion now.

The Iraq war has surely produced many landmark moments in the history of American cynicism -- GOP Rep. Bob Ney storming the House cafeteria to crusade against french fries before jetting off to a Scottish golf junket with Jack Abramoff is a particular favorite of mine -- but no one in the whole course of this conflict, not even George Bush, has yet sunk as low as Hillary's Democrats are sinking now. They're making a conscious effort to try to cash in politically on the Iraq catastrophe without making any admission of culpability or responsibility, hoping to limp across the finish line first in the midterm elections with nothing but a semantic absurdity -- for the invasion, against its "execution" -- for a war policy.

To milk the blood of soldiers and innocent civilians for the principle of rank careerism is surely lower even than sacrificing young lives for oil or money, but the Democrats will get away with it, because American voters have always been too afraid to contemplate the reality of their monolithic system of government.

The only kind of change most dissenting voters in this country can contemplate is the rejection of an openly drooling imperialist like Joe Lieberman, whose real crime was not his war stance but his refusal to participate in the kind of craven cover-your-ass posturing the Hillarys and Joe Bidens and John Kerrys have indulged in this election season. Had Lieberman merely pretended to be anti-war once things went wrong in Baghdad, he almost certainly could have counted on the pusillanimity of the American voter to carry him to yet another Connecticut landslide.

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that, in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate, because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grassroots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something. That's the real platform the Democrats are running on this November.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.

Source: AlterNet
http://alternet.org/columnists/story/40185/


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=27261

When Hunter Thompson ended his writing career by over-indulgence in Wild Turkey and a gun, it was an open question who would pick up the flag of hard-edged, cynical, and honest political commentary. It seemed we had lost something brave and stout.

Matt Taibbi, it turned out, was the person to pick up that flag and carry it on. And he's just the person to go after Hillary.

Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is an ambitious, non-party politician. They are considered Democrats. The truth is, they are simply politicians who are eager for the prestige and power of office. Bill had his turn: now it’s Hillary’s. She’ll say just about anything that might get her votes, but she’ll do nothing unusual, rock no boats, make no structural changes. Her ambition was as responsible for the Clinton "Welfare Reform" as Bill's. Her plan for health care sounded nice, but collapsed once the insurance companies made it clear they weren't going to donate to them. Right now, going after Rumsfeld's sorry ass is popular, so she's after it, too.She wants to be The First Woman President, period.

URL at end of post

Matt Taibbi: 'Don't let Hillary's Dems cash in on Iraq'
Date: Friday, August 11 @ 09:34:41 EDT
Topic: The Democrats

Hillary Clinton's carefully scripted display of canned anger at Donald Rumsfeld was for his screwing up the 'execution' of the Iraq war, not because he thought invading Iraq was a good idea.

"Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively ... I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past."
--Richard Nixon, 1968

"We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders -- and frankly the record of incompetence in executing -- you are presiding over a failed policy."
--Hillary Clinton, addressing Donald Rumsfeld, August 2006

Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she's deserved all of it.

It never should have happened this way. Hillary's real destiny was to destroy American progressivism forever, taking the Democratic Party down with her, but an unlikely alliance of unwitting male conspirators screwed things up along the way by making her into the first great martyr of the mass-media age.



First among these were Rush Limbaugh and the other rightist media clowns of his ilk, who burned up the airwaves for over a decade, furiously miscasting Hillary as a kind of pompous, castrating Trojan Horse of liberalism and socialism. They sold Hillary as the Satan of the conservative's unwritten political Bible -- an icy, polysyllabic creature from the north bent on installing costly, intrusive and, frankly, lesbian government programming in place of the God-fearing Southern male as the ultimate authority in the American home.

These morons cranked out a virtual Mt. Everest of hysterical Hillary merchandise (Buy a "Stop Hillary!" Political Infant Creeper for just $12.99!) and sold her relentlessly in the media as a kind of evil socialist asteroid hurtling inexorably toward earth ("Hillary Endorses World Government!" "Hillary Linked to Marxist-Terrorist Network!"). The whole thing was so childish and overdone that even I felt sorry for her for about five minutes once.

The other conspirator, of course, was Bill Clinton himself. By screwing everything that moved, and especially by publicly engaging with the irritatingly wide-eyed and much younger Monica Lewinsky in the kind of weird and interesting sex most older career women only experience in fading memories or at exorbitant per-hour rates in Third-World vacation locales, Bill turned his wife into the ultimate martyr for modern feminism.

Hillary was educated, driven and accomplished, a superwoman who brilliantly matched wits with CEOs and senators on live national television, and what did it get her? A one-way trip to the sexual scrap-heap, followed by a late middle age lived out as an unsmiling pro-military curmudgeon with a fast-rusting vagina endlessly haunting the Sunday morning news magazine shows, with nothing left to look forward to but the questionable rewards of power and ambition, and a thicker neck every year ... Hillary's life story, in other words, spoke to the deepest fears of the modern liberated woman, who by the turn of the century was beginning to have serious doubts about what was waiting for her at the end of the rainbow.

All of which theoretically made her an interesting and tragic figure, but as it turned out, Hillary is neither interesting nor tragic. The life story that made her so compelling in the '90s is being subsumed in the 21st century by a larger cyclical drama of American politics, in which she's chosen to play a rank-and-file soldier's role.

We live in a two-party system where both parties are pro-war; when the wars go badly, the system scrambles to find a way to prevent anti-war sentiment from taking the drastic step of mounting a meaningful opposition.

Therefore, from time to time, we have to suffer through the spectacle of some status quo dingbat letting his hair down and performing a tortured impersonation of a peace activist during an election season. He bounds to the podium all hot and bothered and indignant-looking, and he sounds like he's against the war.

Only once you've listened to the tape five or six times do you realize that he's saying that he's actually in favor of the war; he just thinks it should have been prosecuted more effectively.

This was the basic message of Richard Nixon in 1968, and exactly the same message now belongs to Hillary Clinton, who unveiled her new pseudo-anti-war pose during an absurd clash of war collaborators with Donald Rumsfeld on the Senate floor last week.

Pitched as an effort by senators to discover the truth about the "on the ground" situation in Iraq, the series of interrogations of leading administration officials was really a forum for Conventional Wisdom to publicly abandon the war effort.

Generals admitted that Iraq was on the verge of civil war; senators gave gloomy speeches and repositioned themselves for midterm election season. Even a slew of erstwhile media war-cheerleaders, most notably mustachioed Times dipshit Thomas Friedman, used the occasion of the hearings to throw in the towel, universally describing the war as both a lost cause and somebody else's fault (the hilarious Friedman formulation was "Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons ..."). But the headline outcome was Hillary angrily demanding Don Rumsfeld's resignation, apparently for the crime of screwing up a perfectly good war.

Her semantically tortured apostrophic attack against Rumsfeld's "incompetence," in which she railed against the administration's "strategic blunders" but carefully avoided any discussion of the decision to invade, which she and most other Democrats so enthusiastically supported, identified her as the status quo dingbat in this generation's version of the same old story.

So much for being a martyr. Hillary officially stopped being a victim with that stunt, finally completing her self-propelled transformation into just another soulless stuffed suit willing to do anything to keep a job. There are thousands of these types in Washington, huge crowds of faceless drones in glasses and blue suits, each raised on DVD boxed sets of "The West Wing" and each willing to suck off a whole field of racehorses for the right internship or committee appointment. Collectively, they represent the least interesting group of people on the planet Earth, and once-compelling Hillary is their champion now.

The Iraq war has surely produced many landmark moments in the history of American cynicism -- GOP Rep. Bob Ney storming the House cafeteria to crusade against french fries before jetting off to a Scottish golf junket with Jack Abramoff is a particular favorite of mine -- but no one in the whole course of this conflict, not even George Bush, has yet sunk as low as Hillary's Democrats are sinking now. They're making a conscious effort to try to cash in politically on the Iraq catastrophe without making any admission of culpability or responsibility, hoping to limp across the finish line first in the midterm elections with nothing but a semantic absurdity -- for the invasion, against its "execution" -- for a war policy.

To milk the blood of soldiers and innocent civilians for the principle of rank careerism is surely lower even than sacrificing young lives for oil or money, but the Democrats will get away with it, because American voters have always been too afraid to contemplate the reality of their monolithic system of government.

The only kind of change most dissenting voters in this country can contemplate is the rejection of an openly drooling imperialist like Joe Lieberman, whose real crime was not his war stance but his refusal to participate in the kind of craven cover-your-ass posturing the Hillarys and Joe Bidens and John Kerrys have indulged in this election season. Had Lieberman merely pretended to be anti-war once things went wrong in Baghdad, he almost certainly could have counted on the pusillanimity of the American voter to carry him to yet another Connecticut landslide.

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that, in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate, because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grassroots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something. That's the real platform the Democrats are running on this November.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.

Source: AlterNet
http://alternet.org/columnists/story/40185/


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=27261

Here’s some more on Lieberman: he’s just as craven as Cheney.

Truthdig

Lieberman Seeks to Exploit Terror News for Political Gain
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20060810_lieberman_terror_news/
Posted on Aug 10, 2006

# Sen. Joe Lieberman seized upon news of the foiled British plane bombers to say that a victory for his Democratic rival Ned Lamont in November would constitute a victory for the terrorists.

N.Y. Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/washington/10cnd-lieberman.html?hp&ex=1155268800&en=cd64531fba998a62&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman seized on the terror arrests in Britain today to attack his Democratic rival, Ned Lamont, saying that Mr. Lamont’s goals for ending the war in Iraq would constitute a “victory” for the extremists who are accused of plotting to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States.



Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

“If you aren’t with us, you are against us.” Dissent equals helping the enemy. The administration really hasn’t toned down their rhetoric, have they? Seems like it’s a little more hysterical tthan it was at the beginning of the “War On Terror.” Why don’t they just come out and say, “if you don’t support the administration you aren’t just unpatriotic, you’re actually working for the enemy”? This is what Cheney’s inferring.

The truth is, it’s Cheney that doesn’t understand what loyalty is.


Cheney: Lieberman Loss ‘Disturbing’ Because al Qaeda Is ‘Betting They Can Break The Will of The American People’

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/10/cheney-ct/

As the Mideast sits on the brink of regional war, Vice President Dick Cheney spent his time yesterday holding a teleconference to discuss the outcome of the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut.

Cheney said that to “purge a man like Joe Lieberman” was “of concern, especially over the issue of Joe’s support with respect to national efforts in the global war on terror.” He explained:

“The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

Is there any doubt that these turdheads know that what they did was wrong? Is wrong, since they’re probably still doing it? It’s pretty much an admission of guilt.

But...if I recall correctly, treaties are the supreme law of the land, and we’ve signed the Geneva treaties. I mean, Congress could theoretically legalize genocide, but it wouldn’t matter: the U.S. could be prosecuted by an international tribunal. Assuming we are “a nation of laws” still, and not a rogue state that will not submit to anything but it’s own will—or, unless, it’s ultimately defeated in war.

August 10, 2006 The Huffington Post


Bush Admin Drafts War Crimes Amendment To "Immunize Past Crimes" Of US Personnel...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/08/10/bush-admin-drafts-war-cri_n_26954.html?view=print
Associated Press

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

The White House, without elaboration, said in a statement that the bill "will apply to any conduct by any U.S. personnel, whether committed before or after the law is enacted"...

..."I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous," said a third attorney, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Fidell said the initiative was "not just protection of political appointees but also CIA personnel who led interrogations."

Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com, LLC

Fear sells. It sells Hummers, assault rifles, home security systems, wars, weapons systems, adrugs, and it hustles up audiences. The purpose of TV programming is simply to collect an audience and then sell that audience to advertisers. Same with newspapers and magazines, anymore. That’s why we have so many stories about children meeting predators over the internet and then being exploited. It really isn’t about reflecting the truth of the story, but it’s about hooking an audience. If ABC does a program on online predators, then CBS will do one so they don’t lose any viewers. And then Bullshit Tonight will do a story, and on and on...

And then, the bubble busts and what we see is that once again, we’ve been hyped.

USA TODAY

Children less likely to encounter online predators
Posted 8/9/2006 8:48 AM ET
By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
Despite the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, a smaller percentage of young people are being sexually solicited online than five years ago.
***
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-08-08-kids-online-survey_x.htm

Jesus! Even the machines have turned against America! This is truly international terrorism!

Wired News

Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71554-0.html
By Quinn Norton|
02:00 AM Aug, 08, 2006

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

The garage is owned by the city; the software, by Robotic Parking of Clearwater, Florida.

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

In the days that followed, both sides dragged each other into court. Robotic accused Hoboken of violating its copyright. "This case is about them using software without a license," said Dennis Clarke, chief operating officer of Robotic Parking, in a telephone interview last week.

At the same time, Hoboken accused Robotic of setting booby traps in the code, causing the garage to malfunction. Then Robotic accused Hoboken of endangering its business by allowing a competitor into the garage.

In the meantime, many of the garage's customers simply couldn't get their cars out.

Maybe it’s the water down there in Crawford? Or the Kool-Aid. If Lamont is any kind of a leftist beyond, maybe, at the most, a New Deal Democrat, I'd be very surprised. He's another centrist, another social democrat. He's just less—so far—of a suckup to power than Lieberman.

The Administration, I have to admit, is consistent: consistently crazed. The last poll I glanced at says 60% of Americans don’t like the war at all. How Rove translated that into claiming that the Lamont choice isn’t about the war is truly remarkable. Turd Blossom just keeps digesting stuff and turning out pig shit.

I wonder if there's even the slightest hint of cynicism on Snow's part when he has to read crap like this. They're all mad. Unfortunately, they're running the country and they want to run the world.


Boston.com Reuters
W.House: Democrats' extreme left defeated Lieberman

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/08/09/whouse_democrats_extreme_left_defeated_lieberman?mode=PF
August 9, 2006

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The White House accused the Democratic Party on Wednesday of catering to the extreme left after Connecticut voters defeated Sen. Joe Lieberman in a primary election over his support of the Iraq war.

Foreshadowing a debate likely to play itself out in November congressional elections, White House spokesman Tony Snow called the election a defining moment for the Democratic Party.

"I know a lot of people have tried to make this a referendum on the president. I would flip it. I think instead it's a defining moment for the Democratic Party whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party, they're going to come after you," he said.

The former vice presidential candidate lost Tuesday's vote, in which Democrats chose a U.S. Senate candidate for the November election, to Ned Lamont, who had accused Lieberman of being too close to President George W. Bush.

Lamont had cast the race with Lieberman as a referendum on the Iraq war.

But Snow said the vote did not reflect American views on Bush's policies, but rather how the Democratic Party dealt with the Iraq war and other issues of national security.

Lieberman, a three-term senator and vice presidential nominee in 2000, filed petitions on Wednesday to run as an independent against Lamont.

Snow said Bush had no plans to campaign for Lieberman, who has made clear he will still vote on the Democratic side if elected as an independent.
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

In many parts of the American west, Indian records were never kept. The Spanish were, however, inordinate bureaucrats and kept meticulous records of vital statistics at the California missions.

California’s “Mission Indians” suffered terribly during the conquest. They’d had a rather good life until the Spanish came: the coastal Indians had abundant sea-food, acres and acres of acorns, roots, a decent climate, and relatively peaceful times. At the time of the Conquest of California, there were probably about 300,000 of these Indians, between San Diego and the northern reaches of San Francisco Bay. In less than a century, their population was reduced by one-third; by the turn of the Twentieth Century there were probably less than twenty thousand. Disease, disease, and deliberate murder.

But at least the records of the births, marriages, and deaths of the Indians under Spanish control have been kept.


latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-missions8aug08,0,6514584.story?coll=la-home-headlines
From the Los Angeles Times
Huntington Library Database Tells the Stories of 100,000 Mission Indians
The computerized repository is available to the public.
By Larry Gordon
Times Staff Writer

August 8, 2006

Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library in San Marino used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21 Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created a cross-referenced computerized repository that is now open to public access.

The Early California Population Project, its creators hope, will help bring the state's Spanish colonial and Mexican eras from out of the long shadows cast by the 13 English colonies on the East Coast.

"What we are trying to do here is to say these people have a history, and it's not a history that can be caricatured," said the project's general editor, historian Steven W. Hackel. "It's a history that emerges from a deep native past and a deep Spanish past and shows how the two came together for better or worse."

Huntington officials say scholars and amateur genealogists will be able to track, among other things, how many descendants of a Miwok Indian survived into the era of U.S. statehood, how many people died in an earthquake or a measles epidemic, how frequent intermarriage was between Spanish soldiers and Indian women, or how many Indians worked in farming or became skilled artisans.

The database does not offer judgments on the long debates about whether the Franciscans forced Indians into the missions and treated them brutally or whether Father Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system, deserves to be, as he is now, just one step from sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.

However, it does document the Franciscans' obsessions with converting Indians to Catholicism and its bans on polygamy and illegitimacy. And, death by death, it shows an extraordinarily high mortality rate as Indians became exposed to European diseases such as measles, influenza and smallpox.

"People who think the missions were places of cultural genocide and terrible population decline can look at this database, and they'll see that people came into the missions and died soon after," said Hackel, a history professor at Oregon State University. "People who want to see something else in the missions can look here too. It also shows tremendous Indian persistence and attempts to maintain their own communities within the missions."

The public can gain access to the database through an Internet link at http://www.huntington.org . Conducting searches on the site can be complicated at first because of the many choices involved.

The project, which cost $650,000, used records mainly taken from microfilm of the originals. They overwhelmingly concern Indians in the coastal regions from the San Diego to Marin County areas, perhaps as many as half of the Indians within the current state borders. Some Spanish soldiers and Mexican settlers are included through the turbulent times of Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 and California U.S. statehood in 1850.

There are some gaps in the documents as the missions declined, the Franciscans were stripped of their authority and Indians revolted. After the San Diego mission was burned down in an insurrection in 1775, the priests re-created the logs from memory, Hackel said.

Still, the Franciscans remained good record-keepers. They assigned numbers to each baptism and carefully noted parents and godparents, village of origin, ethnic background and trades. As a result, many people can be traced with astonishing specifics through life and, with computer links, their progeny.

For example, a 2-day-old Indian boy, given the name Francisco, was baptized Aug. 11, 1786, at Mission San Diego, the project shows. The information links to his marriage at 18 to a woman named Maria Loreta, also 18 (a spinster by that era's customs) and her death five years later with no children.

Francisco married again the next year to Antonina, who died childless 10 months later. He married a third time, to Thomasa (she was 13 and he was 26) and had a baby girl, Ynes, who died at 6 months. Francisco died April 4, 1817, apparently held in high regard by the Franciscans because he was given a deathbed communion, not just an anointing.

Thomasa married twice more and had 10 more children, two of whom are recorded as dying in infancy.

The causes of deaths in that clan were not given, but other records reveal risks of Western life beyond disease. Some people died from bear and snake attacks and others drowned in wells. The 1812 San Juan Capistrano earthquake killed 39, all buried in the ruins of the mission church.

"It tells us one heck of a lot about the people of California before 1850," said Robert C. Ritchie, the Huntington's director of research. "It has an enormous amount of detail that sits below the big story we know: the dying of so many native people along the coast."

Although surveys of smaller groups of missions were done in the past, none pulled together populations from across what was known as Alta California, scholars say. Plus, no other project on this topic was designed for the average person, not just experts, to navigate.

"The goal is democratic and open access to records that previously were, if not inaccessible, very, very hard to get," said Hackel, whose 2005 book, "Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis," examined Indian-Spanish relations in that period.

The raw records can be difficult to read, interpret and put into context, he added.

The project involved eye-straining work that took the equivalent of between two and four full-time employees since 1999. Their job was to take hundreds of thousands of bits of information from the microfilm of sometimes damaged and illegible mission books and put them into easy-to-read computer formats.

Anne Marie Reid, the inputting team leader, recalled feeling ill sometimes after long days staring at dark microfilm in Spanish and Latin and entering names and dates into computer logs.

But she said she also gained a feeling of fellowship with the Indians and priests as she recognized their names in various references. "You come to know these people," she said recently in her small workroom with consoles and screens.

In all, statistics were gleaned on an estimated 120,000 people, including some with incomplete records and some mentioned just once as a parent. Included are about 101,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages and 71,000 burials at all 21 missions and from the Los Angeles Plaza Church and the Santa Barbara Presidio.

Partly because of the size, the project experienced some delays this summer because of software glitches.

The Huntington has a few original and very valuable mission records, including a page in Serra's very legible hand about three baptisms on Dec. 1, 1783, at Mission San Luis Obispo. Missions and other Catholic archives hold most of the surviving books but usually allow scholars to see only microfilm copies, some made 50 years ago.

Among the institutions lending microfilm for the project were the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library, the archdioceses of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Santa Clara University. John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Randall Milliken, a Davis-based anthropologist and mission expert, helped with planning.

The largest financial support for the project came from the National Endowment for the Humanities ($294,000), the California State Library ($163,000) and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation ($110,000).

The Dan Murphy Foundation and the Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation were among other donors.

Anthony Morales, tribal chair and chief of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Band of Mission Indians of San Gabriel, said he thought the project would "really catch the interest of all kinds of people like educators and researchers and just average folks who are interested in their families."

Some people, he said, will search for evidence of brutality in the mission system such as forced conversions and labor, while others will look for a more positive picture, such as "what did happen after my great-great-grandmother got converted and baptized."

Robert Senkewicz, a Santa Clara University historian who is an expert on early California, said the accessibility of the database is its "great virtue."

"It will make genealogists feel like they died and went to heaven," he said.



Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |

I was looking at Glen Greenwald’s blog today and read his “obligatory” post on Lamont and Lieberman <http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/>. I realize, of course, that I’m not quite with it because I haven’t posted anything about the dueling banjos of Connecticut. So:

Connecticut is on the east coast and I’m on the west coast and there isn’t anything I can do about that—assuming that I even wanted to do something about it. I have enough trouble getting through the day without speculating on what will or might happen back there. I don’t like Leiberman: I think he’s patronizing and sanctimonious; pairing him with Al Gore in the last presidential election was about as appealing as a plate of termite and yellowjacket larvae with chicken gravy.

I’ll be interested in how the election comes out, sure, but that’s about it.

And, on the same U.S.-Israel theme as the last post, here’s more evidence of the U.S. and Israel actually working together to blast Hezbollah and, indirectly, Iran. If we can’t actually invade and bomb and blast Iran, we can do everything short of it—and who knows, maybe the Israelis will whack them.

The neo-cons are crazy: as crazy as outhouse rats.

August 4, 2006 The Huffington Post
DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/08/03/bush-approved-secret-prog_n_26483.html?view=print

Bush Approved Secret Program To Help Israel Monitor Syria And Iran...


The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
***

This is a bad sign for the U.S., as well, because we are nearly in lock-step (though “goose-step” comes to mind) with Israel. If their Supreme Court can uphold such a chicken-manure measure, well, so can our’s.

Does anyone remember the technical help the Israelis gave the old South African government? Counter-terrorism, weaponry—it didn't matter that South Africa was black-listed by the democracies: Israel knew their kinship with a heavily segregated regime.

Slowly, slowly, we march backward through time, at least in terms of legalistic thinking. Meanwhile, though, technologic time speeds forward and the gap between our heads and our knowledge grows wider and wider. It ain’t good.


ZNet | Israel/Palestine
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10321&sectionID=107
Israel's Marriage Ban Closes The Gates To Palestinians
by Jonathan Cook ; May 25, 2006

In approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians this week, Israel's Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming.

The judges' decision, in the words of the country's normally restrained Haaretz daily, was "shameful". By a wafer-thin majority, the highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel -- what in legal parlance is termed "family unification" -- did not violate rights enshrined in the country's Basic Laws. And even if it did, the court added, the harm caused to the separated families was outweighed by the benefits of improved "security".

I hope this goes through. There is a long long laundry list of wrongs that need to be corrected, and what happened to the legendary salmon of the Klamath River is criminal—as well as contrary to the law of the land….

I did like the comment from Pacific Power about not being expected to bear the costs. Profits, yes, costs, no. I'm glad PacificCorp doesn't have an ear for irony.


Tribes Call for Removal of Dams That Block Journey of Salmon
By William Yardley
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/printer_080306EA.shtml
Thursday 03 August 2006

Seattle - Indian tribes along the Klamath River rallied in Portland on Wednesday for the removal of four hydroelectric dams that block salmon from spawning in their historic habitat upriver, and they said they intended to pressure the governors of Oregon and California to help push for removing the dams.

The Yurok and Karuk tribes in California and the Klamath tribes of Oregon also said public comments by Bill Fehrman, the new president of PacifiCorp, the power company that owns the dams on the Klamath, reflected new potential for a settlement in one of the most enduring disputes at the nexus of fishing, farming and power supply in the Northwest.

Mr. Fehrman, in a statement released Wednesday, said: "We have heard the tribes' concerns. We are not opposed to dam removal or other settlement opportunities as long as our customers are not harmed and our property rights are respected."

While the tribes cast the statement as signaling a shift, Dave Kvamme, a spokesman for the company, said Mr. Fehrman's statement, in a news release timed to coincide with the rally, was simply his first public comments reflecting a longstanding company policy.

He said that Mr. Fehrman, who became president this year, when PacifiCorp was bought by MidAmerican Holdings Company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has been frequently meeting with tribal leaders and that "he and the tribes have connected on some level."

Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Karuk tribe, which has about 3,400 members, said the tribes intended to put pressure on Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California to find ways to pay for removing the dams, providing power from other sources and restoring fish habitat along the river, which begins in southern Oregon and meets the Pacific Ocean in Northern California.

Mike Carrier, Mr. Kulongoski's natural resources policy director, is to meet with tribal leaders on Thursday. Mr. Carrier said the governor favored positions of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, both of which say PacificCorp must provide some form of passage for salmon above the dams. The National Marine Fisheries Service specifically says dams should be removed to make that happen, Mr. Carrier said.

Removing the dams and restoring the river for fish would be enormously expensive, Mr. Carrier said, and would "really need significant federal support." He said he knew of no reliable estimate of the costs. He said he did not view Mr. Fehrman's comments on Wednesday as a breakthrough, "especially with the caveat of 'as long as our customers are not harmed and our property rights are respected.' In other words, don't ask us to bear the costs."

Our government is being held hostage by a group of utterly ignorant lawyers. Does that sound incongruent? It should.

Alberto Gonzales is a remarkable man. He obviously has no emotional grasp of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. He might be able to quote it forward and backward, but it’s just a relatively meaningless document to him. That Congress confirmed him to his job is to the eternal shame of Congress.

Whenever a potential appointment appears before Congress, the wires that are supposed to be invisible aren't quite invisible. You can just about see the little jolts of current, the minor punishments, being sent down to the politicians just to remind them what they're supposed to be doing.


Guantanamo Detainees May Remain Indefinitely: Gonzalez
Agence France-Presse
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_080306O.shtml
Thursday 03 August 2006

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the US government could "indefinitely" hold foreign 'enemy combatants' at sites like the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We can detain any combatants for the duration of the hostilities," said Gonzales, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"If we choose to try them, that's great. If we don't choose to try them, we can continue to hold them," he said.

Yet neither the Bush administration nor the US military wants "to remain the world's jailers indefinitely," he said.

A Supreme Court ruling last month declared that government of President George W. Bush had overstepped his authority in forming military commissions to try detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

That authority, the court said, belongs to Congress, and the Senate committee is now hearing testimony on how the Guantanamo prisoners should be dealt with.

Gonzales said he was waiting for a green light from Congress to reinstate military tribunals to try war-on-terror prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba.

Gonzales has proposed minor modifications to rules that inmate attorneys have decried as violating the rights of their clients.

The proposed rules would allow hearsay evidence to be introduced, including evidence obtained under duress, unless a military judge considers it unreliable, Gonzales said.

To prevent terrorists from having access to confidential information, judges handling the cases must be able to temporarily exclude defendants from their own trial if deemed necessary for national security.

And if a defendant faces the death penalty, he will face a panel of 12 judges who must rule unanimously for a death sentence to be issued.

Around 450 prisoners are being held in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - some for years - without charges being brought. Human and civil rights lawyers have brought suit on behalf of detainees, many of them picked up as suspected Al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters on Afghanistan's battlefields.

The Washington Post, quoting anonymous Bush administration officials, reported Wednesday that the White House also hopes to allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to the military court's jurisdiction.

Senators did not question Gonzales directly about this, though the attorney general gave assurances that no US citizen would face these courts.