The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 9/27/2004

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

Sadly, we've reached 1,000.

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

Wasn't Kerry awesome last week? First the speech where he pointed out some of the more glaring lies, like Rumsfeld's lie about the training of Iraqi forces. Then the appearance on Letterman with that "Top 10" list? (Quite the ratings boost for Letterman, BTW) Then Regis? Maybe it's Carville. Maybe it's just the fire in his belly. I dunno. But I'm LOVING it. (John at americablog has a great suggestion for him for the debates.)

Meanwhile, the giggling murderer spoke at the UN and gave a speech that was not only full of crapola, but was not appreciated by many in the room. (I don't think they were too crazy about the fact that he was using their Assembly as a campaign prop.) He was followed by Allawi, who I just can't watch, because all I can think of when I see him is that he's a cold blooded murderer. Everything Allawi said parroted Bush. Everywhere he went was scripted by the State Department. He's a Bush stooge. To quote Josh Marshall: "Is President Allawi actually part of the Bush campaign? Or is he registered as a 527?"

If Kerry keeps the fight up like he has been, he may actually win this thing, especially if the Saudis look like they may be on his side.

Gift Idea of the Week: Revenge CD w/ earplugs

Must-Read of the Week: Your Media is Killing You

Cartoon of the Week: Jeff Danziger

Question of the Week: Why are Republicans So Violent?

Best Idea of the Week: Why the WWE is Better Than Debates

Sound Clip of the Week: Bush at his best.

Disgusting Quote of the Week: Rumsfeld

Best summation of Rathergate thus far: Dan Rather vs George Bush on the facts

Grim Prediction of the Week: Another Florida Election, only this time, it's Colorado.

Reading of the Week I WISH I had time for: "What If Bush Wins" by a panel of 16 experts

Satire of the Week: Bill of Rights' authenticity in question

Heartbreaking Flash Graphic of the Week: A look at 1000 who died

Urban Myth of the Week: That map that showed Florida and the various paths of the hurricanes.

Anarchy of the Week: Altering the "Resident Evil" signs.

Programming note: 10/30 Kerry vs. Bush Debate (Subject to cancellation due to the Bush campaign's political maneuvering and overall assholishness.)

More than anything, the war in Iraq, the way we went in, the way we're managing it, takes away all of our credibility and respect. How can anybody still support this bunch of goons?

Excerpt: The first visit by an Amnesty International team to Darfur over the last several days showed that the U.S. human rights record has weakened its case to intervene in a human rights crisis elsewhere.

Think the market likes Republicans more? Guess again.

Excerpt: If this isn't enough to destroy the perception that the economy has performed better under Republicans, then let's include stock market performance under Democrats. The Dow Jones Industrial Average during the 20th century rose an average of 7.3% a year under Republican presidents. Under Democrats, it jumped 10.3%, a whopping 41% gain for investors. During George W. Bush's first three years as president, the stock market declined 4%.

Shouldn't this have been done BEFORE he had the power to make decisions that effected these companies' profit margins?

Excerpt: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sold stakes this summer in at least five companies after they were identified as doing business with the Pentagon, according to his latest financial disclosure form, made available on Wednesday.

Why isn't anyone screaming about this!!!

Sorry. I forgot where I was.

Of course hand-marked ballots are better. But there's no money in it.

Excerpt:Another, demonstrably more reliable technology was already on the rise: optical scan voting, introduced in some parts of the country in the late 1970's. By the 2000 election, optical scanning - which involves marking a paper ballot that is ultimately read and counted by a computer - had overtaken all other voting methods as the most common way to vote in the United States. This year, optical scan systems will be used in more than 45 percent of all counties, according to Election Data Services, a political consulting firm in Washington.

And anyone who didn't suspect something fishy about the FDA and how it approves things really should wake up and stop smelling the prozac.

Excerpt: A Food and Drug Administration medical officer was told by top agency officials to delete material on the risks of antidepressant drugs from records he was submitting to Congress and then to conceal the deletions, according to documents released yesterday at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Ok. First, I read this.

Excerpt: A new superstrain of the flu virus capable of triggering a global pandemic could emerge from east Asia, health officials have warned.

So then, I read this with some interest.

Excerpt: The world's first human-to-human transmission of a lethal strain of bird flu is suspected to have taken place in Thailand

But then I found this.

Excerpt: University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with a killer flu virus grown from tissue exhumed from victims of the 1918 epidemic.

And I thought, what if the bird flu stories are merely cover for the possible release of the 1918 flu virus in an effort to scale back the population, something the NWO has been wanting to do for ages.??

(Don't worry. I don't really believe that all the crap my brain dreams up is actually real.)

This time, it's the gray lady.

Excerpt; A story in the New York Times with a really bad headline has some really good news for the John Kerry campaign. The headline says: "Both Parties See a Big Increase in New Voters."
Yet directly underneath, the story begins: "A sweeping voter registration campaign in heavily Democratic areas has added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that has far exceeded the efforts of Republicans in both states, a review of registration data shows."

Of all the polls out there, this one has to be the dumbest of them all.

Excerpt: People who make more than $75,000 a year are far more likely than those who make $25,000 or less to say are "very satisfied" with their lives -- 56 percent of the higher-income group compared with 24 percent of the lower-income group, according to Associated Press polling.

But nothing says ironic like this poll.

Excerpt: MSNBC has just conducted a poll in which it asked people if they thought opinion polls accurately reflected actual opinions. The network informs us that 88 percent of those polled answered "no."

I and a girlfriend at work have decided that though Jon Stewart is not classically gorgeous or sexy, his brain is EXTREMLY well-hung.

Excerpt: As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death — all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity.

It's one thing to pull out of Koyoto, I mean I guess there is an argument to be made that the existence of global warming is questionable. But how the hell can he refuse to back global hunger? It's not like the existence of hungry people is in doubt.

Excerpt: THE United States faced condemnation today after failing to join more than 100 countries as part of a new campaign to raise an extra $50 billion (£28bn) annually in aid to combat global hunger.

Worse than that even (as if that's not bad enough) the stipend for families of wounded vets is about to expire and Bush isn't lifting a finger to make sure Congress does something about it.

Excerpt: The New York Daily News reported yesterday that a key stipend designed to allow the family members of injured service members will stop as of October 1, unless Congress takes immediate action.
The stipend pays $51 per day, plus lodging expenses, for a family member to stay with a severely injured soldier while he or she is recovering in a military medical center. 

But what do you expect from a guy who can't even keep the terrorists' names straight.

Excerpt: President Bush might have been able to say it was simply a slip of the tongue when he confused two terrorists in a campaign speech Monday in New Hampshire. Trouble is, he's made the same misstatement at least 10 times before.

A radio station in Knoxville that was broadcasting a show about Venezuelan politics was raided by the FBI, 30 minutes into that show. War prep: Venezuela?

Excerpt: Jesus Rivas' show, which admittedly has a modest audience, is exactly the kind of grassroots communication that the current US Bush 2 administration does not want between the citizens of the US and Venezuela.   But, in a curious pretext, US FCC authorities acted precipitously on a spurious claim that KFAR 90.9FM was interfering with other frequencies and alleged that the radio station was broadcasting a higher wattage than permitted.

And as the Rathergate controversy has died down, cries (from the freepers) for Rather's head have grown. Meanwhile, Rather's "gaffe" has made CBS so gun shy, it won't run the most pertinent of stories.

Excerpt: In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same “60 Minutes” broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger.

Fight the Freepers. Let CBS know how you feel:

Excerpt:
BY PHONE: 212-975-3247,(212) 975-3691, (202) 457-4385
CBS FAX: 212-975-1998
Also feel free to contact:
Mel Karmazin, President, CBS Corporation
VIACOM/CBS Corporation
1515 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

Email CBS a piece of your mind.

Web feedback form.

Aspartame is evil. Plain and simple. This woman is likely in jail because of it.

Excerpt: Today, a fine innocent woman and widowed mother of three sits in a Virginia prison, sentenced to serve 20 years and 30 years concurrently for poisoning her husband with methanol. As you are about to see, her husband was murdered, but Diane Fleming was not the killer.

If Saddam manages to get himself on the ballot in Iraq and get himself elected, well, wouldn't THAT be ironic?

Excerpt: Saddam's lawyer defends that the ambiguity in Iraq will favor Saddam at the polls. Stefano remarked that a recent Gallup poll indicates that 42 percent of the Iraqi people want their former leader back.

Boy. The Bushies can't kill that guy fast enough.

Excerpt: The trial and possible execution of Saddam Hussein would discourage the die-hard remnants of the old Ba'athist regime and "show Iraq and those beyond Iraq that tyranny will not win", Iyad Allawi, the country's interim Prime Minister, said yesterday.

I didn't read all of this, but it certainly sounded weird. You've heard of the Loch Ness monster. Well, it seems there's a giant worm in the Gobi.

Excerpt: The first time you hear about the Mongolian Death Worm you assume it has to be a joke; it sounds too much like the monster from a B-movie or an especially dire comic book to be true. A five-foot (1.5m) long worm dwelling in the vast and inhospitable expanses of the Gobi Desert, the creature is known to Mongolia’s nomadic tribesmen as the allghoi khorkhoi (sometimes given as allerghoi horhai or olgoj chorchoj) or ‘intestine worm’ for its resemblance to a sort of living cow’s intestine.

Life on Mars is in the news again.

Excerpt: New data showing that patterns of water and methane in Mars' atmosphere overlap may have important implications for the idea that the planet could harbour life.

Reverse speech. Loony, but what if it's true?

Excerpt: Now we have his speech at the Republican National Convention in September 2004 to examine. The first thing to note is the appearance of many reversals in  this speech, which historically is unusual for George Bush who tends to have few reversals. This tells us that he was emotional and passionate as he spoke. This passion is seen as he begins his acceptance speech. He says forwards, “I’m running with a compassionate conservative philosophy, that government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives,” and then says in reverse, “Give the Soul.” This indicates that he is about to bare his heart and soul to us. 

 

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 (retired)
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

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.