Friday, October 24, 2003
Of all the people in the world who understand Texas, it's probably Australians. (sic)
We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people. (Huh?)
-Bush, on his Asia trip
More on that trip:
According to the British and Australian press, it was a ragged trip; Bush upset several nations when he termed Australia 'the sheriff' of Asia. Last I checked, there isn’t supposed to be a hierarchy in southeast Asia, and certainly designating the only anglo-saxon state- though with one heck of a Bush loyalist for prime minister- is bound to unsettle.
The protests were impressive, numbering in the thousands, and there was a scrum inside parliament.
The day might have started as a high-security event staged with US military precision, but nothing could stop it in the end from degenerating into a classic Aussie wing-ding.
John Howard was eventually forced to throw himself, like a human shield, between his honoured visitor, George Bush, and marauding Greens senators as they tried to accost the US President. www.theage.com.au/
More from this site and from www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Rumsfeld Memo: So the Defense Secretary comments that the terror "war" is not going so well, that there is no long-range planning to deal with terrorists. Rumsfeld cites "mixed results" against al-Qaeda, "reasonable progress" tracking down top Iraqis and "somewhat slower progress" in apprehending Taliban leaders. "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
That sounds like admitting failure, no? Yet, the airwaves were full of commentators who noted that they were pleased that Rumsfeld was more honest in this communique than in his usual up-beat public pronouncements. Few and far between are comments that his public comments were misleading, that he should resign as a result of the misleading statements and/or the policy failure.
Still more politicizing… of a poll: Zogby International (zogby.com)in Iraq had conducted the poll, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published their interpretation of the findings. AEI’s and the Administration’s"spin" created a faulty impression of the poll’s results.
Cheney has claimed that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US... hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say "none of the above."
That’s "winning hands down"?
Election Fraud: Back to 2000
I’ve stayed away from this problem area, only because there are so many issues, not because of its relative importance. To get a glimpse of what we’re dealing with or not dealing with, take a look at this report on that most irregular night in Florida, back some 150 weeks. This report comes from Alastair Thompson, award winning New Zealand investigative journalist, at http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.html
Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." -(Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000 ; Page A22)
First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being lopped off the Gore total...
And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong...
What has not been discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that the events that occurred between around midnight and 4am might have been the result not of mistakes but of organised voting fraud.
Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken Clark's memos confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the lines they suggest it is the most likely possibility.
Consider this:
How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night – was really the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts.
Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida?
Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle.
Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a recount.
And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
Venezuela: Plotting?
We know the USA’s history- of fomenting, equipping, facilitating coups in Latin America. So, is it happening anew? An AP report (Christopher Toothaker) reports on the latest denial of our interfering in Venezuela.
Washington's ambassador to Venezuela denied Thursday the CIA was working with Venezuelan dissidents to overthrow President Hugo Chavez as the his allies have alleged. US. Ambassador Charles Shapiro met with the ruling party lawmakers who made the allegations and disputed charges that the Central Intelligence Agency planned to overthrow the government.
"I am sure the charge is not true," he said.
On Wednesday, pro-Chavez lawmaker Nicolas Maduro showed a videotape he claimed was evidence the CIA financing and training dissident military officers and police in espionage and "terrorist" tactics to topple Chavez.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the video showed a private security company, not CIA agents. It also said the U.S. government did not participate in the event.
Played at a news conference at Congress, the video showed three unidentified men speaking in Spanish about making contacts with an unspecified embassy. They discussed "blending in" and changing cars to avoid detection.
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: More reports on Taliban strength
AP/Yahoo.com, etc report major military engagements in southern Afghanistan, which seems to be in response to reports that the Taliban were planning to bring 2,500 guerillas from Pakistan. One sign: a report in the Far Eastern Economic Review quoted intelligence sources as saying that Taliban had bought more than 1,000 motorcycles to be utilized in upcoming activities.
Report on U.S. Environmental Policy
The Guardian (GB) ran a long investigative report by Matthew Engel on "how America is ravaging the planet." The report focused initially on destruction to Carolina’s Outer Banks and then ‘moved on’…
The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069883,00.html
Good News, Bad News Poll
According to a poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 61% of college students approve of the President's job performance, about ten points higher than the general public. The good news is that 87 percent (including 70 percent of Republicans) say "members of the Bush Administration" have been "hiding some things" or "mostly not telling the truth" about the situation in Iraq.
Business News: Same Old…
Today’s NY Times reports (Edmund L. Andrews) that even though Bush had announced that there would be no more tax cuts in the coming year, the House Republicans have fashioned another round.
House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.
According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.
It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade.
The intended beneficiaries are companies that manufacture products in the United States and small businesses. But the definition of manufacturing includes movies, software, oil and gas refining and engineering services. That means the beneficiaries would also include Time Warner, Disney, Microsoft and giant engineering companies like Bechtel and Fluor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/business/24TAX.html?pagewanted=print&position
And, in a gem in Wednesday’s Times, Neela Banerjee wrote of Halliburton’s price gouging.
The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.
Separately, a report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan public policy research arm, warned that the Corps of Engineers might be paying too much to import fuel.
Seems that the Iraqis were paying $.98 a gallon to Turkey, but Halliburton was charging $1.59. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22hal.html
-R
We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people. (Huh?)
-Bush, on his Asia trip
More on that trip:
According to the British and Australian press, it was a ragged trip; Bush upset several nations when he termed Australia 'the sheriff' of Asia. Last I checked, there isn’t supposed to be a hierarchy in southeast Asia, and certainly designating the only anglo-saxon state- though with one heck of a Bush loyalist for prime minister- is bound to unsettle.
The protests were impressive, numbering in the thousands, and there was a scrum inside parliament.
The day might have started as a high-security event staged with US military precision, but nothing could stop it in the end from degenerating into a classic Aussie wing-ding.
John Howard was eventually forced to throw himself, like a human shield, between his honoured visitor, George Bush, and marauding Greens senators as they tried to accost the US President. www.theage.com.au/
More from this site and from www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Rumsfeld Memo: So the Defense Secretary comments that the terror "war" is not going so well, that there is no long-range planning to deal with terrorists. Rumsfeld cites "mixed results" against al-Qaeda, "reasonable progress" tracking down top Iraqis and "somewhat slower progress" in apprehending Taliban leaders. "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
That sounds like admitting failure, no? Yet, the airwaves were full of commentators who noted that they were pleased that Rumsfeld was more honest in this communique than in his usual up-beat public pronouncements. Few and far between are comments that his public comments were misleading, that he should resign as a result of the misleading statements and/or the policy failure.
Still more politicizing… of a poll: Zogby International (zogby.com)in Iraq had conducted the poll, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published their interpretation of the findings. AEI’s and the Administration’s"spin" created a faulty impression of the poll’s results.
Cheney has claimed that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US... hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say "none of the above."
That’s "winning hands down"?
Election Fraud: Back to 2000
I’ve stayed away from this problem area, only because there are so many issues, not because of its relative importance. To get a glimpse of what we’re dealing with or not dealing with, take a look at this report on that most irregular night in Florida, back some 150 weeks. This report comes from Alastair Thompson, award winning New Zealand investigative journalist, at http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.html
Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." -(Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000 ; Page A22)
First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being lopped off the Gore total...
And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong...
What has not been discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that the events that occurred between around midnight and 4am might have been the result not of mistakes but of organised voting fraud.
Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken Clark's memos confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the lines they suggest it is the most likely possibility.
Consider this:
How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night – was really the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts.
Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida?
Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle.
Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a recount.
And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
Venezuela: Plotting?
We know the USA’s history- of fomenting, equipping, facilitating coups in Latin America. So, is it happening anew? An AP report (Christopher Toothaker) reports on the latest denial of our interfering in Venezuela.
Washington's ambassador to Venezuela denied Thursday the CIA was working with Venezuelan dissidents to overthrow President Hugo Chavez as the his allies have alleged. US. Ambassador Charles Shapiro met with the ruling party lawmakers who made the allegations and disputed charges that the Central Intelligence Agency planned to overthrow the government.
"I am sure the charge is not true," he said.
On Wednesday, pro-Chavez lawmaker Nicolas Maduro showed a videotape he claimed was evidence the CIA financing and training dissident military officers and police in espionage and "terrorist" tactics to topple Chavez.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the video showed a private security company, not CIA agents. It also said the U.S. government did not participate in the event.
Played at a news conference at Congress, the video showed three unidentified men speaking in Spanish about making contacts with an unspecified embassy. They discussed "blending in" and changing cars to avoid detection.
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: More reports on Taliban strength
AP/Yahoo.com, etc report major military engagements in southern Afghanistan, which seems to be in response to reports that the Taliban were planning to bring 2,500 guerillas from Pakistan. One sign: a report in the Far Eastern Economic Review quoted intelligence sources as saying that Taliban had bought more than 1,000 motorcycles to be utilized in upcoming activities.
Report on U.S. Environmental Policy
The Guardian (GB) ran a long investigative report by Matthew Engel on "how America is ravaging the planet." The report focused initially on destruction to Carolina’s Outer Banks and then ‘moved on’…
The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069883,00.html
Good News, Bad News Poll
According to a poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 61% of college students approve of the President's job performance, about ten points higher than the general public. The good news is that 87 percent (including 70 percent of Republicans) say "members of the Bush Administration" have been "hiding some things" or "mostly not telling the truth" about the situation in Iraq.
Business News: Same Old…
Today’s NY Times reports (Edmund L. Andrews) that even though Bush had announced that there would be no more tax cuts in the coming year, the House Republicans have fashioned another round.
House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.
According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.
It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade.
The intended beneficiaries are companies that manufacture products in the United States and small businesses. But the definition of manufacturing includes movies, software, oil and gas refining and engineering services. That means the beneficiaries would also include Time Warner, Disney, Microsoft and giant engineering companies like Bechtel and Fluor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/business/24TAX.html?pagewanted=print&position
And, in a gem in Wednesday’s Times, Neela Banerjee wrote of Halliburton’s price gouging.
The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.
Separately, a report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan public policy research arm, warned that the Corps of Engineers might be paying too much to import fuel.
Seems that the Iraqis were paying $.98 a gallon to Turkey, but Halliburton was charging $1.59. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22hal.html
-R
