The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 9/6/2004

(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/

(Early posting today. Not covering Labor Day news...not that there will much more than Clinton's surgery. )

The RNC: I watched so you didn't have to.

It was probably the hardest thing I ever did. One vile half truth after another. (And that podium! Yikes!) When that one stocky guy said that it took real bravery for the shrub to go to Iraq for Thanksgiving, I was yelling at the TV "But it was a decorative turkey you big fat idiot! And he had to be convinced to go in the first place!" McCain must've said the word "war" like a gazillion times. Mr. "Ghouliani".(Not the mayor most people think he was) Good rousing speech, really. Some good lies in it too. But all I could think was "Ewww. He married his cousin." Other notables were of course, Herr Gropenator, the alcoholic Bush twins, who tittered and giggled throughout (Mr. Rove was not pleased.), Zell Miller who I'm convinced was either planted by the DNC or has completely lost his mind (challenging Chris Matthews to a dual??!!) and Dick Cheney. Now, Cheney I just can't take seriously.When I see him, I hear this and when he speaks, I hear this. (There were plenty of half-truths in his speech too.)(Download the text of this speech and see how Cheney just might be the man behind 9/11's curtain) Then there's Bush. His speech was good though lame on facts. (At one point, they cut-away to Karen Hughes and she was moving her lips. Made me laugh.) Oh, and that soldier he mentioned in his speech? A conservative operative. Nice.

Overall though, I think the RNC did what it set out to do: accentuate the fear, frame Kerry as incompetent, and completely ignore domestic issues. Though, from a viewing perspective, it just didn't seem as organic as the DNC. The DNC message grew and matured over four nights, like a nice loaf of rising bread. The RNC just sort of hammered away at theirs, for which, sadly, I have no clever metaphor. Besides, our signage was way more clever than their signage.

I also found it "funny" (not funny haha) that the bounce that was reported was like 11 points. But that was only one, poorly created poll. Most of them had the same bounce as Kerry's bounce. I really feel like they're setting us up for the theft of another election, don't you? I mean, keep the poll numbers up, make people think it's a close race and when they steal it for Bush, it won't seem so implausible.

As for my protesting activities this week, I managed to stay out of jail, or, as it was known here "Gitmo on the Hudson." I spent most of my time at the Progressive Tourist Bureau at The Tank on 42nd Street where I actually SAW my blogging heroes! I saw Atrios and Kos! (I was quite thrilled really.) I did do "The Line" which I thought was just THE BEST political theater ever. And I went to the live reading of the Constitution at Cooper Union. I got all goose-bumpy and not because I was looking at Richard Gere in the flesh. No. It was for what the damn thing says in it. Those guys really had some foresight. As I was leaving, I saw that they had an original print of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on display, under glass of course. Nearly made me weep.

{sigh} I'm such a geek.

It was an interesting time to be here in NYC. I'm glad I didn't flee, though I'm thoroughly disappointed that I didn't see any delegates. They were kept far, far away from us regular folk.

Website List of the Week: Who's watching the watchers?

Computer of the Week: The new iMac

Worse defeat ever: Yankees 0 - Cleveland 22! (that's my OTHER home town!)

Saddest Trek Story Ever: Scotty is bowing out.

Most Interesting, Non-political Read of the Week: Scientific Method Man 

Website of the Week: BushTax.com

Reference Site of the Week: Kerry on the Issues

As you already know, Clinton will have heart bypass surgery. Fortunately, it's not the horrific thing it used to be. He should be fine. Best comment I read about it though it this.

Excerpt: Before long, Bill will be going on the Late Show and swapping bypass stories with Dave. Let's all visualize that moment!

And contrary to early reports.

Excerpt: Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them.

The repugs didn't boo Clinton.

Excerpt: This comes from a reporter on the scene whose judgment and honesty I completely trust ...They didn't boo. More accurately, the overwhelming number of people didn't boo (I heard maybe one or two, and even those died with "hospitalized.") AP got it wrong.

What I think happened was Bush started saying "We just got word that Pres. Clinton" <pause> and in that pause is where the repugs --trained to boo at the mere mention of either of the Clintons-- started to boo, but when they heard the rest of the sentence, they stopped. But how telling is it we were all so able to believe that they would do such a thing?

This election may be decided by the Supreme Court AGAIN.

Excerpt: I mentioned last week that Colorado (9 electoral votes) will have an amendment on the ballot that would change the state's electoral vote award from winner-take-all to proportional. What I didn't mention is that the amendment, if passed, specifies that it will take effect in the current election! Think about it! If the electoral vote difference is within 9 votes, and if the Colorado amendment passes, there is going to be a legal challenge like no other.

Would this administration hide a 9/11 connection with Saudi Arabia? You betchya'.

Excerpt: Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.

Is Bush drinking again?

Excerpt: Bush's return to drinking is apparently common knowledge in DC, though it seems unlikely anyone will talk on the record.

Well, whatever. Kerry better start to fight back and fight nasty. Like Bill Maher said on his show on Friday, "It's time for Kerry to take up a new sport and that sport is called Mud Slinging."

I don't know about you, but I think that this whole thing of a paternalistic president is patronizing.

Excerpt: White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said yesterday that President Bush views America as a ''10-year-old child" in need of the sort of protection provided by a parent.

Again, the New Yorker proves to me that my subscription is worth it (thank you Aunt Anita!) This article talks about what Bush really wants to do with the tax code. It's long but well worth the read.

Excerpt: To conservative Republicans who understand his coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.

And yet another great article on Salon about GW's missing year.

Excerpt: "The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."

Here's a couple of laws the RNC may have broken this week. First, it's illegal for military personnel to participate in parisian politics

Excerpt: But the Republican Party itself is claiming that the active duty personnel are not spectators but delegates.  What's going on here?  Why are the Republicans encouraging our soldiers to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and its stated rules of political engagement?  And why for goodness sakes, aren't these rules being enforced?  Hey MSNBC.com, can we put a reporter or two on this story please? Other news organizations are free to jump in as well.

And the Presidential Seal is not supposed to be used for partisan politics.

Excerpt: (a) Whoever knowingly displays any ... likeness of the great seal of the United States, ... in, or in connection with, any ... public meeting, ... telecast, or other production, or on any building, monument, ... for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Isn't all crime and expression of hate? So why do we need a special law for it?

Excerpt: The Defense bill with the 'hate crime' attachment passed the senate 65 to 33, and will now be going to the house.

Well, congratulations. If you read my blog, you were aware of all of these stories, but one.

Excerpt: Sonoma State University's student run media research group Project Censored announces the release of its annual publication, Censored 2005, a compilation of the year's 25 most significant news stories that were overlooked or under-reported by the country's major national news media, as well as chapters on the grass roots media democracy, media ownership maps, real news about US involvement in Palestine, Haiti, Iraq, and more

The only one I don 't remember covering here was the Ashcroft trying to get rid of the Alien Torts Claim Act (ATCA). I'll get right on that.

See, now NYC going all wireless would be kinda' cool

Excerpt:New York City is on the verge of going fully wireless, according to a deal being finalised this month between authorities and a group of six technology companies.

If we were sure it wouldn't give us all brain cancer.

Excerpt: Two recent studies on the effect of electromagnetic fields on animals found that low-level magnetic fields caused damage to the DNA in rat brain cells while exposure of rats to extreme electromagnetic fields caused the animals to produce toxic amounts of ozone.

The award goes to Dennis Hastert.

Excerpt; Hastert dismissed the protesters as "anarchists." "They really don't understand democracy and they really don't understand freedom," said Hastert, who was presented with a bell-shaped trophy by the International Association of Firefighters.

And this isn't ironic, but maybe it should be.

Excerpt: Chief executives at U.S. companies that shipped jobs overseas won a 46 percent pay hike last year, more than five times the average CEO raise, while ordinary workers' paychecks barely budged, a study showed on Tuesday.

These people should be smacked. Seriously. Mocking a veteran's purple hearts is horrific.

Excerpt: Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

And by the way, those medals on GW's chest? Fakes. Lies. Phonies.

Excerpt: A closer examination of a photograph included in President George W. Bush’s Air Force records, released by the White House earlier this year, shows then-Second Lieutenant Bush wearing an Air Force Outstanding Unit Award which he never earned.

What does China know that our government isn't telling us?

Excerpt: EVIDENCE is mounting that China is buying more oil than it consumes, raising fears that oil hoarding may be supporting the current high price of crude.

This was already known info, but it bears repeating: Bush is an asshole.

Excerpt: President Bush's campaign won't say for sure whether he will agree to the three debates proposed by the independent Commission on Presidential Debates, or if a Republican strategist was right this week when he said the Bush campaign would agree to only two debates.

He always does this. Hems and haws like he doesn't want to debate, gets people to think he's all ascared and then debates. And the expectations are so low that though he doesn't win the debate technically, he wins it in the public's mind.

Oh, and he fails the CEO test.

Excerpt: Bush's basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses.

That whole Russian school thing was just awful.

Excerpt:THE full horror of the Russian school atrocity began to emerge yesterday as traumatised children told horrific tales of stabbed babies and brutal rapes. It has also emerged that scores of the 323 who died - including many children - had been shot in the back.

Between that and the airplane crashes, who the hell did Putin piss off? (And I can't believe it's the Chechens. Most of the kids and parents were Chechen. So, why would Chechen extremists torture their own? Like THAT would garner them any support with their own people.) Maybe it has to do with Putin's fucking around with Lukos.

Excerpt: In the case of Russia, Rifat says recent Chechen terrorist attacks on two airliners and a school were designed to punish and undermine Vladimir Putin for his interference with Rothschild oil giant Yukos.

The pentagon spy story is swirling around. On who's lap will it land, I wonder?

Excerpt: Larry Franklin, the Pentagon analyst suspected of passing classified material about Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never hidden his unequivocal support of Israel. Colleagues from the Near East and South Asia desk at the Defense Department said yesterday that his sympathy for Israel was overt and public - he didn't refrain from praising Israel and he held aggressive views about several Arab governments, primarily the ayatollahs' regime in Iran and Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq.

But rumor has it this thing leads to a whole can of warms and when I say can, I'm not saying a campbell's soup can. Oh no. I'm talking a J Lo's butt-sized can.

Excerpt: They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.

And Chalabi is part of the investigation.

Excerpt: FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether several Pentagon officials leaked classified information to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a law enforcement official and other people familiar with the case.

Maybe that's why they tried to off Chalabi this week, huh?

Excerpt: Gunmen opened fire Wednesday on a convoy carrying former Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi in an apparent assassination attempt that wounded two of his bodyguards, Chalabi's spokesman said.

And Ashcroft is stalling the investigation, as per his usual.

Excerpt: The neoconservative New York Sun is reporting that Attorney General John Ashcroft halted arrests in the Israeli spy case last Friday.

But what do you expect from a guy redacts stuff, not just out of security, but because he doesn't like what it says?

Excerpt: Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.

Uh, it's kind of funny that a bunch of braniacs are sitting around devising a new calendarthat's basically like the old pagan calendar that was used for centuries before the church got a hold of it.

Excerpt: If the concept of throwing the Gregorian Calendar out to replace it with the World Thirteen Moon 28-day Calendar of Peace isn’t ludicrous enough, calendar challengers say they are basing their reform on "common sense".

How drunk do you have to be to have this happen.

Excerpt:A drunken driver hit a telephone pole support wire that decapitated his passenger, then drove 20 kilometres home and slept in his bloody clothes, leaving the headless body in his truck, police said.

What the hell is this?

Excerpt: A source highly placed, informed me and yielded me images of a specific zone of the Portuguese coast that is "to be searched" by the North American military satellites.

Is ET checking in, finally?

Excerpt: AMATEUR radio hams are usually excited by the faint buzz of a distant shortwave station, but a group of scientists believe they have received a message from extra-terrestrials.

I LOVE this lizard shit!

Excerpt: David calls the few "ruling elite" at the top of the pyramid REPTILIANS! David sounds sometimes reluctant to talk about the Reptilians and for good reason; most people would think he is nuts and talking like this could negate and cause people to not take his other writing seriously. David's theory is that possibly several thousand years ago "non- humans" came to this planet and mated with the beings on planet Earth. Because of their superior knowledge, they were able to expand their "rule" and control this planet to this day. They maintained their special bloodline for these thousands of years through intermarrying amongst themselves. David says they can"shape-shift" to be able to look like human beings and at the same time they can look like Reptilians when they're privately out of the view of the public. David explains that this group of Reptilians supposedly set up all the organized religions, monarchies, school systems, science, all the media and everything else they needed to control the MASSES OF HUMANITY over thousands of years.

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
rawstory.com

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.