The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 2/21/2005

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

...'cause I'm angry and my friends are sick of listening to me...

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Gannongate heats up! (That makes how many "gates" for this administration??) But I don't want to miss the important angle of this story 'cause it's not the sex. OK. Well, the sex makes it A LOT of fun. (I mean,it's not like there hasn't been homosexual scandals in DC before.) But it's really not about the sex. The moral of the story, boys and girls, is this:

There's someone high up in the administration, someone who can tell the secret service what to do and what not to do, and who has more than once put the president's life in jeopardy, ostensibly to further their own agenda--whatever that agenda might be. (And it's not the Media's problem, like this Guardian article stipulates.)

Let me explain: Gannon/Guckert. This guy obviously had a checkered past, was not a real journalist, didn't work for a real news outlet and hadn't worked for that for very long, and used an alias to get a press pass that real reporters had to jump through multiple hoops for. Not only that, it seems that he was privy to stuff regular journalists weren't AND used that information in a propagandist way. This guy could have been anybody with any agenda. The secret service would never know that because somebody told them "this guy gets a pass" and the secret service obeyed them. (Or worse, "whomever" just got a press pass for him without even telling the SS who the press pass was for and the SS didn't even question it.)

Now, the secret service's job is to protect the president of the United States. That's basically their only job. They're supposed to make the environment as safe as possible and if the environment is not safe, they're supposed to leap into action.

Who can bypass the secret service's mandate? Who wields that kind of power in the White House? Not the president. The president defers to their judgment (and Cheney's obviously), if we are to believe the 9/11 narrative that said that he wanted to come back to DC but the SS said "no" so he didn't. Cheney? But why would he bother with the press? That, to me, doesn't seem like his sphere of concern. So who else?

Well....

The only one I can think of is Karl Rove. This man's name has been bandied about as the culprit in every major "gate" during this administration's tenure. He's just so slippery (or scary) that there's never been any evidence to be found. And the fact that Bruce Eberle (of GOPUSA) has something to with Gannon AND Rove only makes the connection more plausible. (Also, there are all sorts of rumors about him and McClellan being gay and Rove is very powerful.)

Let's think back to 9/11. Michael Rivero over at whatreallyhappened.com came up with an excellent observation: On 9/11, when it was obvious that we were under attack, Bush continued to sit there and read a children's book about goats. Now remember, we were under attack. Supposedly, we didn't know how many planes there were or what their targets were. And Bush's schedule had been announced some time in advance. Anyone with press creds (which, evidently, are not as difficult to acquire as we once thought)or any interest in knowing where he would be, would know where he would be...including any terrorists with access to an airplane. Now, Rivero's astute observation (and others) was that in lieu of all of these unknowns, why did the SS not leap into action to protect him and move him to an alternate location?

The only answer is that they were told by somebody that the president wasn't in danger and to stand down. And who could've done/known that? Cheney of course (that would certainly be within his evil purview), but like I said, Cheney probably wouldn't bother with the press/Gannon/Guckert thing, so there's somebody else who wields that kind of power and might've told them to stand down and that would be Rove, (possibly via Cheney, but Rove nonetheless).

And why would Rove want Bush sitting there on 9/11 reading about a pet goat? Because for Rove, the manufacturing of the image of a calm, cool, and collected President under pressure was the narrative he had decided upon. Rove's framing of the president post-9/11 was of a president in control. How would it have looked if the SS had swooped the president out of the room? It just wouldn't fit the narrative. (Though, somebody must've said to Rove "Dude. You have to at least give the ILLUSION that we're trying to protect the president" and so the lies about threats to Air Force One and the trip to Nebraska ensued.) <sarcasm> Of course, I'm assuming certain people in our government knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen...which, we all know is impossible. </sarcasm>

Eh, I could be wrong.

Oh, and I had the talking-heads Sunday morning shows on in the background and, maybe I missed something, but not ONE of them even mentioned Gannongate! Not ONE! Man! I loathe our main-stream media. (No wonder they're so threatened by the blogs.)

Job Site of the Week: Sustainable Business Jobs

Junk Site of the Week: Ebaum's world

Video of the Week: Reid on the filibuster

Funny Video of the Week: Maher on Gannongate

Crop Circle of the Week: Hello Kitty

Time Waster of the Week: Image Puzzle (I can't get beyond 5)

T-shirt of the week: Slayer washroom

Utility Site of the Week: Tiny URL

Useful Media Site of the Week: Local Media Blaster

Sex Scandal Name of the Week: Ruud

Programming Note: Next week, I will be in term-paper hell. But I'm going to try something new. This time, instead of not updating, I'm handing the blog over to the Sailor. He'll update the page for 2/28. He makes me laugh, so I suspect he'll do the same for you. (No pressure there, huh?)

Excerpt:President Bush on Friday signed a bill that he says will curtail multimillion-dollar class action lawsuits against companies and help end "the lawsuit culture in our country."

Excerpt:A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted Friday to let doctors prescribe Cox-2 painkillers, including Celebrex and Vioxx, but recommended stronger warnings about the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Except; Ahmed Chalabi is likely to emerge as Iraq's leader, as originally envisioned by the US, Dan Senor, the former spokesman for the US occupation government in Iraq, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

Excerpt: Negroponte, 65, was at the United Nations when he was tapped to take on the delicate job of transforming the U.S. presence in Iraq from that of an occupier to that of an adviser. Bush chose him for the job last April and he went to Baghdad hours after the handover of sovereignty to Iraq's interim government.

Excerpt; After all, during the Reagan years, when he was ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte was involved in what was arguably an illegal covert quid pro quo connected to the Iran/contra scandal, and he refused to acknowledge significant human rights abuses committed by the pro-US military in Honduras. But each time Negroponte's appointment came before the Senate, he won easy confirmation. Now that he's been tapped to lead the effort to reorganize and reform an intelligence community that screwed up 9/11 and the WMD-in-Iraq assignment, Negroponte will likely sail through the confirmation process once again.

Excerpt:A week after the most recent Gallup Poll for CNN and the USA Today claimed that Bush’s approval rating shot up to 57%, using a sample that had a 9 percentage point advantage for the GOP over Democrats (37% GOP, 28% Democrats), Gallup came out with its own poll last Friday. This poll, not done for CNN or USAT, and not bull-horned through the media and seemingly lost in the late Friday news dump, shows that Bush’s approval rating plummeted in one week to 49%, with his disapproval rating now up to 48%.

Excerpt: Speaking with one voice, President Bush's top intelligence and military officials said Wednesday that terrorists are regrouping for possible new strikes against the United States.

Excerpt: Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint Inc., a firm that maintains databases of background information on virtually every U.S. citizen, MSNBC.com has learned.

Excerpt: The US Pentagon has failed to make public all the human cost of its war against Iraq, especially regarding soldiers with mental disorders, according to an article in Wednesday's El Diario/La Prensa.

Excerpt: U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals are not counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005.

Excerpt: Conservation organizations challenged the Bush administration's decision to log Giant Sequoia National Monument in federal court in January of 2005. The groups also encouraged the administration and the court to look to neighboring Sequoia National Park for a better way to manage the rare forest.

Excerpt: The chairman of a Senate committee that oversees environmental issues has directed two national organizations that oppose President Bush's major clean-air initiative to turn over their financial and tax records to the Senate.

Excerpt: Forget to buy chocolates for your valentine? Now you can say you're in step with lawmakers shunning the treat because of child slavery on West African cocoa farms.

Excerpt:When Heather and Logan Ward's son entered public kindergarten this fall, they were shocked to discover that pupils were taken from class to a nearby church for weekly Bible lessons.

Excerpt: On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail.  --  Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq....

Excerpt: The Bush administration, condemning the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, is suggesting that Syria is to blame and moving to get a new condemnation of Syria's domination of Lebanon at the UN Security Council.

Excerpt:Iran and Syria say they are to form a common front to face challenges and threats from overseas.

Excerpt: The last time Dr. Floyd Baker served in the U.S. Army, Harry S. Truman was president, Dinah Shore's "Buttons and Bows" topped the music charts, "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" won an Oscar and the bikini made its debut on American beaches.

Excerpt: A rare form of plague has killed at least 61 people at a diamond mine in the remote wilds of northeast Congo, and authorities fear hundreds more who fled into the forests to escape the contagion are infected and dying, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Excerpt; State health officials say they are looking into the deaths of three soldiers who developed flu-like symptoms after returning from overseas deployments.

Excerpt; Officials say a Special Forces captain died of a bacterial infection last week after he returned to Fort Bragg from a pre-deployment site survey overseas.

Excerpt: The vicious avian flu that has killed dozens of people in Vietnam, Thailand, and elsewhere in the region "has caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of animals in nearly a dozen Asian countries" in the past two years and could kill millions of people if it becomes capable of spreading efficiently among humans, Michael Specter reports in "Nature's Bioterrorist" (p.50), in the February 28, 2005, issue of The New Yorker.

Excerpt:That's no moon, it's a space station. Actually it's Saturn's satellite Mimas, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star - the planet-destroying space station in the film Star Wars.

Excerpt: A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

Excerpt; My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Excerpt:A new finding in India: Extraterrestrial UFOs have the capabilities to disable all nuke missiles in the world including that of India’s, Pakistan’s and China’s

Previous rants

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.)

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