The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 7/12/2004

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

Mirror (in case geocities is wacky or, in case of trouble in New York, check it for messages): http://129.79.148.33/vidiotcontact/

Kerry picked Edwards! Yay!(Good profile of Edwards from 2001 here.) Whatever you think of the Kerry, you have to give him kudos for choosing Edwards. I haven't heard one dem or liberal poo-poo it. (Even the Bilderbergs approve!) That says something. Let's just hope he continues to make good decisions when he's president. Even Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, is plus (She's a former Floridian). But of course, the Rovians went into attack mode. They say that Edwards has no experience, and that Cheney does (Gee, and look at where that got us.) They say that Edwards was Kerry's second choice (Uh, not really. McCain was only asked if he wanted to be considered. More importantly, Cheney was Bush's second choice when McCain said no in 2000) Edwards is a rich, trial lawyer (uh, obviously he was a really GOOD trial lawyer and he fought against big business. I LIKE that. Competant AND fighting the right fight.)

Besides, he's cute as a button and he really wows a crowd. I'm so looking forward to that Edwards/Cheney debate in Cleveland. Edwards: The Anti-Cheney.

And lest we forget how important this election is, it's the judiciary, stupid.

But the Bushies are really using the Fear Factor:

The Feds are on high-alert

We've had yet another politically-timed warning from Herr Ashcroft

They're planning on how to cancel an election in the event of a terrorist attack.(wink wink nudge nudge)(read what Meteor Blades over at Kos has to say)

The Bushies have told Pakistan to have Osama by the time of the DNC in Boston.

And hey, maybe they'll even start a war right before the election with, oh, I dunno, Korea?

Bush, the worst president ever.

Oh, and has anyone ever sat down and actually WATCHED C-span? I mean really? Well, I did. I don't know why but I found myself sitting there watching the congress bicker about how the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act vote went down. John Adams was right, two or more useless men ARE a Congress!

Reading Assignment of the Week: Excellent article on Corporate Greed.

Another Reading Assignment of the week: How the media puts words in people's mouths.

(I'm assigning reading because nobody reads anymore, or so I've read. For those of you who know how I put this page together, this week, the database says "258".)

Gift Idea of the week: 8643 T-shirt

Embarrassing video of the week: Powell does the village people (The irony does not escape me.)

Photo of the week: Movie Marquis for Truth

Site of the Week: Bush is not a chimp (because that would be an insult to chimps.)

Monty Python is coming to broadway!

What the Vidiot will be watching on TV: Farscape 4-hour miniseries: Starts October 17!! (How the hell are they going to reconstitute Crichton and Aeryn Sun after they were zapped into a pile of crystals as he was finally putting a ring on her finger??) and Josh Whedon's movie, "Serenity" (based on his series "Firefly") is due out in April of next year.

And now, on with the show...

That's about all I can say about this.

Excerpt: The United States has secretly moved out more than 1.7 tonnes of enriched uranium and other radioactive materials from Iraq.

Uh. Excuse me, George? But the UN didn't say you could do that.

Excerpt: United Nations nuclear officials were in apparent disagreement with Washington over U.S. claims that it had the proper authority to transfer highly radioactive material from Iraq last month.

Digging the Saddam trial stuff. Though, every time I hear that he gassed his own people, I have to shake my head. I've read, in so many different places, that he in fact didn't gas his own people.

Excerpt: The IRANIANS gassed Halabja. The US knew it. Bush senior knew it and that's why, in 1988, the US gave Iraq poison gas to defend itself with.

Here's a government memo from 1998, sent to Sandy Berger, that discussed it.

Excerpt: In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing a great many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack, even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.

But I digress.

The worst part about watching the Saddam trial here in the US is knowing it was censored for us. There was this whole thing about how the journalists were told to turn the sound off because the judge had requested it, when in reality he hadn't. (link fixed)

Excerpt: A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

And what was censored, well, for instance, this was:

Excerpt:
Judge: I represent the Iraqi people ... You have the right to examine witnesses and documents
Saddam: Everyone here knows this is a theatre carried out by Bush the criminal to win the election

(Just try to find that line in the MSNBC version.)

And I'll betchya they'll censor the hell out of the trial if the CIA is called in his defense.

Excerpt: Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.

Don't take my word for it, here's what Christine Amanpour had to say about the censorship.

Excerpt: The result, she said, was that Mr. Hussein came off as an angrier, more self-possessed dictator than she had witnessed in person. "The reality clashed with the video," she said. "It’s only a partial reflection of the reality because it was only one perspective and one shot.

Excerpt: Norwegian authorities reacted with shock and disgust Tuesday to a documentary on German TV that American soldiers allegedly have been holding children in prisons in Iraq, and abusing them as well. The Norwegians joined the Red Cross and Amnesty International in calling for an immediate end to the abuse, and release of the underage prisoners, some of whom are as young as 12 years

Hey. The media actually accomplished something! They went after Jeb's voter purge list in Florida and won!

Excerpt: Florida election officials conceded an enormous mistake Saturday and abandoned the controversial list the state was using to remove convicted felons from the state's voter rolls.

Oy. This is comforting.

Excerpt: SAUDI Arabia's intelligence agencies are so infiltrated by al-Qa'ida sympathisers that the kingdom's counter-terrorist campaign is failing and militant operations are spreading into neighbouring states, senior Arab and Western officials have warned.

Another one of the Bush's "gates" will surely be brushed under the carpet. Turns out the medicare actuary was threatened after all.

Excerpt: An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program's chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged.

How conveenient for him. His records were lost. I guess the dog ate them.

Excerpt:Military records that could help establish President Bush'swhereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

Will it stymie people like The Awol Project ? I hope not.

Excerpt: An examination of the Bush military files within the context of US Statutory Law, Department of Defense regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures of that era lead to a single conclusion:  George W. Bush was considered a deserter by the United States Air Force.

So it was all the fault of the CIA.

Excerpt: The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs and that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had. The committee found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said that he did not know of any such program.

Well, what about that little cabal of neocons that took all the CIA's stuff, removed all the caveats and then fed it to the Shrub?

Excerpt: A special intelligence unit at the Pentagon privately briefed senior officials at the White House on alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda without the knowledge of CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to new information presented at a Senate hearing Tuesday. The disclosure suggests that the controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration's views on Iraq's alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts.

And what sorts of things did they do?

Excerpt: Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA was to produce its postponed assessment, Mr Feith's cell went directly to the White House and gave an alternative briefing to Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and to the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

Oh, right, that'll come out in the next report...due AFTER the election. Nice.

Land of the free? Ummm, not so much.

Excerpt: Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn't be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president. Supporters of Bush's presumed opponent in November's election, Sen. John Kerry, attended a picnic across the street from the capitol at state Democratic Party's headquarters.

That CIA translator, Sibel Edmonds, has been in the news a lot lately.

Excerpt: Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said, she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English.

Unfortunately, Ashcroft has tied the hands of congress and classified some stuff that used to be unclassified. Well, leave it to the Memory Hole to find those documents and post them on their website.

Excerpt: The following three letters were recently declared classified, even though they had been considered unclassified since their creation in summer and fall 2002. They regard Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who charges that the FBI's translation service 1) is incompetent and corrupt and 2) received specific warnings about 9/11 before the attacks.

Heh heh heh! Not so classified anymore, huh Ashcroft?

Jobs are still a problem for George.

Excerpt: Bush and top administration officials tried to make the best of the new job numbers, saying that the nation had added 1.5 million jobs since August. Advisers to Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, quickly retorted that the nation was still more than a million jobs short of where it was when Bush took office.

Heh. So much for talk of a Bush Boom.

Excerpt: If you want a single number that tells the story, it's the percentage of adults who have jobs. When Mr. Bush took office, that number stood at 64.4. By last August it had fallen to 62.2 percent. In June, the number was 62.3. That is, during Mr. Bush's first 30 months, the job situation deteriorated drastically. Last summer it stabilized, and since then it may have improved slightly. But jobs are still very scarce, with little relief in sight.

And with a Chamber of Commerce chief like this, who needs enemies?

Excerpt: U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue is promoting overseas outsourcing of jobs as a way to boost the economy and even increase employment--a stance that rankles jobless white-collar workers, particularly in the flagging technology industry.

That's right folks, up is now, officially, down.

In other economic news, did you know that the Russian oil company Lukos defaulted on huge loan?

Excerpt: "We received a notice for default of one billion dollars," Yukos spokesman Hugo Erikssen told AFP. Another syndicate of Western lenders has also warned that it could call in a loan of 1.6 billion dollars.

You know what they say: default on small loan, bad for the borrower. Default on really big loan, bad for the bank.

Excerpt: Guta Bank, one of Russia's 20 biggest banks, said Tuesday that it is unable to service its clients, according to a notice posted on the doors of several of its Moscow branches, Russian news agencies reported.

And more bank runs in Russia.

Excerpt:Spooked by the closure Tuesday of mid-sized Guta and reports that top-tier Alfa was on the ropes, depositors descended on banks in droves Wednesday, intensifying a trend that has seen an estimated $5 billion, or about 10 percent of all household savings, taken out of the system in the last two months.

(I wonder if this assassination has anything to do with anything?)

Listen, it may be happening in Russia, but it could end up having global implications. Banking is global now.

There's a question as to whether the Saudi's won't increase or production, or can't increase production.

Excerpt:Brent futures were higher in pre-market deals on hints that OPEC may not go ahead with a planned production increase of 500,000 barrels per day from Aug 1, with reports of more sabotage on Iraqi domestic pipelines also supporting prices. At 9.44 am, Brent contracts for August delivery were up 47 cents at 36.39 usd. The Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said Saturday that current oil prices are "good" and that OPEC could consider delaying a scheduled production increase when it meets later this month

And Total shut down production in Nigeria because of a threatened strike.

Excerpt:Energy giant Total's subsidiary has shut down oil and gas production in Nigeria in the face of a threatened strike that raised management fears for the "safety of life and property," a company spokesman said Tuesday.

I guess this means that a barrel of oil will be going for $60 soon. Guess we'll all have to drive hybrids to save cash. Oh, wait, now they have a way to tax you by the mile instead of by how many gallons of gas you buy.

Excerpt; At the panel's request, Oregon State University researchers have developed technology that can distinguish miles driven in Oregon from those driven elsewhere, then allow a mileage tax to be calculated and paid at the pump in place of the state gas tax.

But maybe there is no peak oil. Maybe, like this article says, it's replenishable.

Excerpt: At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.

Even if true, it's obviously not a fast process. In which case, we still have to figure out a way to use less of it.

Tom Delay is lawyering up, baby!

Excerpt: Facing legal challenges in Washington and Austin, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has retained lawyers to defend him in both a Congressional ethics probe and an ongoing investigation into Texas 2002 legislative races.

And now, Enron is being dragged into the mix. Seems DeLay requested money from Enron. Only thing is, it's illegal to use corporate money in Texas. Can you say "smoking gun"?

Excerpt: The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.

But don't get your hopes up.

Excerpt:Four of the five Republicans investigating an ethics complaint against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have received campaign contributions from DeLay's political action committee, records show.

Mars cross-roads?

Excerpt: Below is a section of an image that looks to have a network of crossroads on the surface of Mars. The features look like runs, travel ways or roads that intersect and have what look like road islands at some intersections. Many abruptly stop perpendicular and at angles to other roads. The roads are similar in width and size and the larger image has many more.

A river on Mars?

Excerpt: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA) photos are showing blue river like canyons and valleys on Mars. These blue areas appear to be caused by possibly flowing rivers or colors retained from water that once flowed or perhaps growing algae or bacteria. Blue is also shown inside some craters. On Earth Lapis Lazuli, Blue Viteral, and the dark blue azurite is a hydrated copper carbonate indicating water.

A boy raised by chickens?

Excerpt: One of those looking after Kumar is Elizabeth Clayton, widow of New Zealand mountain climber Roger Buick, who died on Everest in 1998. She says that when she first met Kumar he pecked at his food and would crouch down as if roosting. His fingers turn inward from scratching around in the dirt, he communicates by making a rapid clicking noise with his tongue and he seems detached from much that goes on around him.

 

Previous rant

At the very least, point your CNN-loving friends to my links page. Just getting started in reading alternate news sites gets people thinking. I have one friend who was very happy-go-lucky, thinking ol' Greta was telling the whole truth until I opened up his eyes a bit. Now, he's all depressed. He'll get over it. You gotta' get depressed before you get angry and you gotta' get angry before you can accomplish anything. We're all in mourning. We have to move through the steps. But we gotta' hurry it up.

Read. Inform. Spread the word. Even if it means your friends avoid you for awhile. If they really love you, they'll start to listen.

"POSSE COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385): A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed, arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from Navy ship/aircraft involvement.

(Tom Ridge has practically said he'd do away with this act.)

{back}

These sites are good at culling stories from a multitude of media sites:

buzzflash.com
unknownnews.net

Here are some excellant blogs:

Bartcop
Daily Kos
Atrios
Tacitus
Josh Marshall
DNC: Kicking Ass
Two Glasses
Billmon
Semi-Daily Journal
The Wonkette
Urban Survival

Link exchange:

Ilia Dreams Blog
Iraq War Blog
BushVote.com

These blogs will be covering the primaries and elections:

Salon.com's War Room
The Campaign Desk
FactCheck.org

media-bias exposed:

dailyhowler.com
mediawhoresonline.com

these are good left-wing journalism sites:

onlinejournal.com
thenation.com
inthesetimes.com
tompaine.com
commondreams.org
truthout.com
guerrillanews.com

a little more to the left:

wsws.org
indymedia.org

conspiratorial:

whatreallyhappened.com
almartinraw.com

HIGHLY entertaining:

surfingtheapocalypse.com

really good "Alternate Thinking" site:

goroadachi.com/etemenanki/

and for godsakes, stay away
from FOX NEWS,  MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
It's ALL CRAP!!!
watch the BBC news
or ITN news instead.

if you must succumb to reading a newspaper: 

www.guardian.co.uk 

or any other paper in another fucking country. All of our newspapers are owned by the same idiots that own the TV stations so all of the news is all the same CRAP.