The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 10/24/2005

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

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

 

Cost of the War in Iraq

Remember these faces

Track your congresscritters here!

Media Contacts

More Media Contacts (email)

Right-Wing Media Contacts

Resist the Regime!
General Strike: Nov.2


Free stuff can be found here

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

Welcome to my Rutgers classmates.

It's beginning to look like they're trying to pin all this stuff on Rove, Libby and Cheney. I can't really predict, obviously. Who can? This is not Ken Starr's leaky investigation (where, at the time, he argued that a sitting president could be indicted.) But, judging by the stories in the news like "Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy" and "Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics" and "Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney" and "Prelude to a leak" and "Dick Cheney's Covert Action" and Tuesday's NYT stunner "Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report" it sure seems like they're letting Cheney, and by extension, Libby, look like the bad guys. (Cheney might have another indictment to deal with besides Plamegate.)

I can hope that Fitzgerald will go farther than just indictments of the most felonious in the administration and examine the crux of the issue: the forged Niger documents. Just who had a hand in that, I wonder.

But I'm not getting too excited. Not only is there a chance that a lessor indictment would do little harm to them, we also know what happened the last time a Bush was in the White House and was threatened with serious legal consequences. Yeah. You betchya. Can you say "pardon"?

Sad thought. But that's probably what will happen.

Good blog coverage of the various aspects of Plamegate can be found at the following:

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo

Raw Story

Billmon

What Really Happened

AntiWar.com

Refresh and refresh often!


Fitzmas Website of the Week: Office of Special Council

Art of the Week: Sculpture of 4 dimensions


Activist Website of the Week:
Mr. Floatie for for Mayor!

Download of the Week: Open Office 2.0

Blog Catch of the Week: Against perjury before being for it


Underreported of the week

Don't like the map of ANWR? Just get rid of all traces of it and draw a new one that's more to your liking.

Excerpt: The missing map did not seem to include in the coastal plain tens of thousands of acres of Native Alaskans' lands. On the new map, those lands were included, arguably making it easier to open them to energy development.

They get an 'A' for craftiness for this one.


Feels like Viet Nam

I can't believe that there's even an idea of expanding the war still out there.

Excerpt: As I suspected six months ago, U.S. military and Bush administration civilian officials confirmed last week that U.S. forces have invaded Syria and engaged in combat with Syrian forces.


All your land belongs to us

Well, at least the Senate is trying to undo the damage of the higher court with regards to eminent domain.

Excerpt: Reacting to a Supreme Court ruling, the Senate on Wednesday moved to bar some federal funds from projects where people's homes are seized for private development.

On that point alone, that the Senate will have to spend time cleaning up bad decisions made with someone like Miers on the court, she shouldn't be confirmed. But her fibbing to the judiciary committee doesn't help her either.

Excerpt: President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, provided erroneous and incomplete information to the Senate Judiciary Committee about her membership on a Board of Directors for a real estate investment company, RAW STORY has learned.

Perhaps if they had just let her write a mash note to GW....

Or maybe she did and that's why GW is withholding her paperwork.

Excerpt:Bush Says He Won't Release Miers Records That Threaten President-Attorney Confidentiality


I don't care that there's a mud season.

I'm moving to Vermont.

Excerpt: Sponsored by the Second Vermont Republic, the convention, which will begin at 9 am and conclude at 5 pm, is open to the public and free of charge. This historic event will be the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861.


He only fristed himself.

Unless the Media is completely complacent (and I'm not saying they aren't) Frist's chance at a 2008 nomination is gone.

Excerpt; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (search) paid $72,012 from his own pocket to his 2000 re-election campaign fund in August, two months after he was notified that trustees had sold millions of dollars of his stock in HCA Inc., the hospital chain founded by his father and brother.


Media & Stuff

I love to watch how the media starts fluffing us up for whatever it is the administration's future plans are. I mean, it sort of reminds me of what fighter pilots do. When they're flying in group formation, the guys in the front will "plow the field" by taking out enemy planes so the guys in the back can get at the intended target. The media, in this case, is planting memes so that when the US decides to attack someone (in this case Venezuela), we basically have all the bits of information in our heads to justify the action on some level. For instance, why would Chavez feel like this?

Excerpt: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez believes the United States is planning to invade his country and has evidence to prove it, he said in an interview with British radio broadcast Thursday.

Why would he believe something like that?

Well, it's not like the US hasn't tried it before, right? And they are sitting on a lot of "our" oil.

As I mentioned last week, two articles in the Moonie Owned Washington Times, one on Venezuela looking for nuclear material and another on how Venezuelans are preparing for war, clearly are prepping the faithful (who are the only people who read the Washington Times I think.) for some sort of conflict with Venezuela.

There have been multiple stories in the past few months about Venezuela, about how the US is mulling over sanctioning Venezuela and how Chevez revoked US drug agents' immunity (mostly because that's how the US is spying on Venezuela) and don't even get me started on Pat Robertson's call to have Chavez assassinated. Jeebus.

Many bits and pieces are out there, floating in the ether. The stories come in clusters, in waves. In January, Rice said that Chavez was 'Very Deeply Troubling' and the Venezuelan ambassador started saying the US was going to attack. In March, Bush orders policy to ‘contain’ Chávez. Meanwhile, the Venezuelans detected US battleships near it's coast. In May, a think tank called for regime change in Venezuela and Bloomberg news reported a story that said the Chavez was looking for nuclear power with Iran's help. At the same time, Venezuela announced it had found more oil reserves. And so on and so forth. With each wave giving out a little more information than the last. Until, finally, when the invasion/coup/assassination finally happens, the public is complacent/prepared.

Honestly, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy nut and say the media is softening us up, blah blah blah. But I can't remember seeing any articles that made Chavez look like someone we WOULDN'T want to attack. Not saying such an article hasn't been written, but considering how much time I spend on the internet, you'd think I'd have stumbled onto at least a few.

So where are the stories in our media that discusses the good that Chavez is doing? Land reform, his sane take on Latin American debt, his popularity, (Frankly, he seems like the anti-Bush) I'm not saying the man is a saint. Whenever anybody decides to redistribute wealth, there are winners and there are losers. But jeeze, at least he's trying?

And you'd think that would be an interesting story to cover. How one country's leader is trying to share the wealth of that country with the majority of it's population. It's an alternative to our laissez faire system here in the US.

I thought journalists were supposed to tell both sides of a story, no?

So we are left with whatever blogs we can find on the net, most of which I SUSPECT are anti Chavez, only because the pro-chavez people are, as a rule, quite poor and unable to have their own blogs.

Venezuela Today

Paspalum Fasciculatum

Reason over might

Vcrisis

The Devil's Excrement

Venezuelan Politics

A dream for Venezuelans

Aleksander Boyd

 

Comments?


News of the Weird

Not really a weird story, but kind of interesting.

Excerpt: It was a plane crash back in 1942 that wasn't discovered until 1947. Now, hikers made a frozen discovery in connection with a World War II plane crash. Hikers found the frozen body of an airman while scaling Mount Mendel Glacier in the Kings Canyon National Park. Now, the military is working to find out who this airman is and whether he was ever reported missing.

Next time someone jokes that cops would ticket the dead if they could, tell them it not a joke.

Excerpt: Australian authorities have apologised to the family of an elderly man who was given a parking ticket while he lay dead in his car in a suburban shopping centre.

Magyver Gorilla!

Excerpt: A young gorilla in a Congo sanctuary is smashing palm nuts between two rocks to extract oil, surprising and intriguing scientists who say they have much to learn about what gorillas can do — and about what it says about evolution.

Interesting Gedanken experiment regarding alien invasions.

Excerpt: The unrestrained territorial drive that served biological evolution so well for millions of years becomes a severe liability for a species once it acquires powers more than sufficient for its self-destruction. The Milky Way may well contain civilizations more advanced than ours, but they must have passed through a filter of natural selection that eliminates, by war or other self-inflicted environmental catastrophes, those civilizations driven by aggressive expansion. That is, the acquisition of powerful technology ultimately selects for wisdom.

Squirrels on crack

Excerpt:Crack squirrels are a recognised phenomena in the US.
They are known to live in parks frequented by addicts in New York and Washington DC.

Well, that at least explains why I saw a squirrel with pipe burns on his mouth.

Previous rants


What do we do about all of this crap? I have no idea. Part of me wants to start teach-ins  at my local pub. Just go to the bar, rant and rave and inform the idiots who still think Brian Williams is telling them the truth. I sincerely believe that if we protected the voting rights of the underprivileged that any Democrat could SWEEP any election. I don't think Democrats are the answer. But they are at least a start.  

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.

{back}

 

 

Who am I?:

I am a biker chick who lives in NYC. This blog is about current events and my left-leaning, acerbic spin on those events. Nobody pays me anything to do this. Nobody tells me what to write. I will NEVER tout anything for anybody's money! EVER!


Use this instead of Google:

Clusty.com

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

buzzflash.com
unknownnews.net
rawstory.com


Here are some excellent blogs:

Bartcop
Daily Kos
Atrios
Tacitus
Josh Marshall
Two Glasses
Brad DeLong
The Wonkette
Urban Survival
Greg Palast
Mark Crispin Miller


Link exchange:

Ilia Dreams Blog
Iraq War Blog
BushVote.com
Dommecile.com
Funny Farm

media-bias exposed:

dailyhowler.com


these are good 'left-wing' journalism sites:

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


a little more to the left:

wsws.org
indymedia.org


different:

whatreallyhappened.com
almartinraw.com

more different :

surfingtheapocalypse.com


really different:

goroadachi.com/etemenanki/

 

and for godsakes, stay away
from FOX,  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 (and whose companies are diversified in industries that support the war machine) so all of the news is all the same CRAP.