Monday, November 03, 2003
I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ...To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant, into a latter-day Arab hero. ...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.- Bush, Sr., in A World Transformed
Resolve vs Correcting a Mistake: The Bush people are on message, that we must show resolve and stick with the policy. The media then follow, with headlines such as the NY Times, “Will Resolve Falter?” This is a particularly odious following of the Administration’s framing of the news. Instead, we would hope, ‘Time to Admit Misjudgments?” would be the appropriate question.
There’s also much talk of not “running,” but clearly the timetable is being rapidly speeded up so that our troops are less likely to be in future helicopters.
Wall Street “irregularities”
This has been an outrageous betrayal of the public trust by that agency; The regulators who were supposed to have been watching this industry were asleep at the switch. And I'm going to pull that switch.- Eliot Spitzer, NY Attorney General re the Security Exchange Commission
Spitzer's doing his part. And, Deborah Solomon and Susanne Craig noted in their Wall Street Journal piece,
The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a confidential report, blasted the New York Stock Exchange for failing to police its elite floor-trading firms and for ignoring blatant violations in which investors were shortchanged by millions of dollars in trades involving more than two billion shares over the past three years.
The 40-page report, dated Oct. 10 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, is a severe rebuke of both the floor-trading firms, known as "specialists," and the self-regulatory structure that monitors the Big Board floor. It paints a picture of a floor-trading system riddled with abuses, with firms routinely placing their own trades ahead of those by customers -- and an in-house regulator either ill-equipped or too worried about increasing its workload to care. And it concludes that when the NYSE does act on investor abuses, the exchange often does little more than admonish the specialists in a letter or slap them on the wrist with a light fine….
The findings are likely to bolster those who argue that the NYSE's regulatory arm should be taken out from under the exchange's control.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10678146664412100-search,00.html?collection=wsjie%2F30day&vql_string=Deborah+Solomon+%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29
Commentary from William Pfaff. The International Herald Tribune’s fixture is usually to the point. This one is no exception.
...what actually has happened during the past nine months is something Americans have yet to grasp, and that others have yet to say out loud: People outside the United States have stopped believing the American story.
They don't think terrorism is an Evil force the United States is going to defeat. They say instead that terrorism is a way people wage war when they don't have F-16's or armored divisions.
They say that Chechens, Moros, Taliban, Colombian insurgents, Palestinian bombers and Iraqi enemies of the U.S. occupation do not really make up a single global phenomenon that the world must mobilize to defeat.
They say that, actually, they had never really believed the American story in the first place. They had listened to it because Washington said it, and they respected Washington. Now they don't. http://warincontext.org/2003_10_26_archive.html
Still another voice re “no WMD”
Former deputy prime minister and media fixture Tariq Aziz is the latest to be quoted as saying that WMD didn’t exist. So, we have another voice for ‘bad intentions’, but no threat. From Steve Coll in the Washington Post
Aziz, who surrendered to U.S. authorities on April 24, has also said Iraq did not possess stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons on the eve of the war, an assertion that echoes the previously reported statements of other detained Iraqi leaders and scientists. Yet Hussein personally ordered several secret programs to build or buy long-range missiles in defiance of international sanctions,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55022-2003Nov2.html
Wolfowitz, the nice guy.
Pleasant report of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz having a pointed exchange with a student at Georgetown University forum.
What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the project for New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]
Wolfowitz: …It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies.
When in doubt, attack their patriotism!
Support our Troops: The latest from the Administration
Might as well go to the source. Army Times reports that the Administration is targeting family benefits. Karen Jowers reports that
Commissaries and the Defense Department’s stateside schools are in the crosshairs of Pentagon budget cutters, and military advocates, families and even base commanders are up in arms.
Defense officials notified the services in mid-October that they intend to close 19 commissaries and may close 19 more, mostly in remote areas.
At the same time, the Pentagon is finishing a study to determine whether to close or transfer control of the 58 schools it operates on 14 military installations in the continental United States.
The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.
The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions...
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-2335705.php
Pakistanis supporting al-Qaida?
There have been previous assertions and reports, most notably by Seymour Hersh, that the Pakistanis have protected bin Laden, were allowed to escape with the al-Qaida leader when they were potentially entrapped last December in the Tora Bora mountains. Now comes this report from India’s ndtv.com.
Three Pakistani armymen were captured inside Afghan territory during a raid on an Al-Qaida hideout in the Kandahar region, the main stronghold of the former Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Afghan officials later handed them over to the Pakistan embassy in Kabul. Although the Afghan government says the men have been released as a goodwill gesture, it is bound to cause a lot of embarrassment to Pakistan. http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template=Alqaida&slug=Pak+soldiers+nabbed+in+Al+Qaida+hideout&id=44480&callid=1
Voting Problems: HR 2239; Does your Representative support it?
To try to rectify some of the problems from the 2000 election, many states are seeking to replace their older equipment with new electronic voting computers. From all reports, the technology is not yet adequate to the task. Machines are still prone to errors, companies (Diebold) that control most of the machines have close ties to the Bush Administration, etc. According to verifiedvoting.org, we have the following problems,
Americans will use voting computers with secret software that has not been sufficiently scrutinized, just as they have in past elections.
They will have to trust computers to record and count their votes correctly – computers that are not advanced enough to ensure the security and accuracy that could justify their trust.
If something odd occurs, manual recounts of the original ballots will be impossible, because the only record of the votes will be in electronic form, which will, of course, match the questionable tally.
A solution, many are noting, is Representative Rush Holt’s proposed bill introduced into the House. The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 2239) would mandate the necessary safeguards for U.S. elections in every state. The bill, currently in the Committee on House Administration, would require all states to use election equipment that provides a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.
This means that voters could check a paper ballot or paper record of the ballot for accuracy before casting the vote --without having to trust the voting machine. Voter verification of ballots is crucial, because only the voter can check whether the ballot is accurate.
A paper audit trail makes it possible to reconstruct the election results from the original voter-verified records, without having to trust the election equipment. In other words, it is possible to do a meaningful recount if an election is in dispute. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
-R
Resolve vs Correcting a Mistake: The Bush people are on message, that we must show resolve and stick with the policy. The media then follow, with headlines such as the NY Times, “Will Resolve Falter?” This is a particularly odious following of the Administration’s framing of the news. Instead, we would hope, ‘Time to Admit Misjudgments?” would be the appropriate question.
There’s also much talk of not “running,” but clearly the timetable is being rapidly speeded up so that our troops are less likely to be in future helicopters.
Wall Street “irregularities”
This has been an outrageous betrayal of the public trust by that agency; The regulators who were supposed to have been watching this industry were asleep at the switch. And I'm going to pull that switch.- Eliot Spitzer, NY Attorney General re the Security Exchange Commission
Spitzer's doing his part. And, Deborah Solomon and Susanne Craig noted in their Wall Street Journal piece,
The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a confidential report, blasted the New York Stock Exchange for failing to police its elite floor-trading firms and for ignoring blatant violations in which investors were shortchanged by millions of dollars in trades involving more than two billion shares over the past three years.
The 40-page report, dated Oct. 10 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, is a severe rebuke of both the floor-trading firms, known as "specialists," and the self-regulatory structure that monitors the Big Board floor. It paints a picture of a floor-trading system riddled with abuses, with firms routinely placing their own trades ahead of those by customers -- and an in-house regulator either ill-equipped or too worried about increasing its workload to care. And it concludes that when the NYSE does act on investor abuses, the exchange often does little more than admonish the specialists in a letter or slap them on the wrist with a light fine….
The findings are likely to bolster those who argue that the NYSE's regulatory arm should be taken out from under the exchange's control.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10678146664412100-search,00.html?collection=wsjie%2F30day&vql_string=Deborah+Solomon+%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29
Commentary from William Pfaff. The International Herald Tribune’s fixture is usually to the point. This one is no exception.
...what actually has happened during the past nine months is something Americans have yet to grasp, and that others have yet to say out loud: People outside the United States have stopped believing the American story.
They don't think terrorism is an Evil force the United States is going to defeat. They say instead that terrorism is a way people wage war when they don't have F-16's or armored divisions.
They say that Chechens, Moros, Taliban, Colombian insurgents, Palestinian bombers and Iraqi enemies of the U.S. occupation do not really make up a single global phenomenon that the world must mobilize to defeat.
They say that, actually, they had never really believed the American story in the first place. They had listened to it because Washington said it, and they respected Washington. Now they don't. http://warincontext.org/2003_10_26_archive.html
Still another voice re “no WMD”
Former deputy prime minister and media fixture Tariq Aziz is the latest to be quoted as saying that WMD didn’t exist. So, we have another voice for ‘bad intentions’, but no threat. From Steve Coll in the Washington Post
Aziz, who surrendered to U.S. authorities on April 24, has also said Iraq did not possess stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons on the eve of the war, an assertion that echoes the previously reported statements of other detained Iraqi leaders and scientists. Yet Hussein personally ordered several secret programs to build or buy long-range missiles in defiance of international sanctions,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55022-2003Nov2.html
Wolfowitz, the nice guy.
Pleasant report of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz having a pointed exchange with a student at Georgetown University forum.
What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the project for New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]
Wolfowitz: …It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies.
When in doubt, attack their patriotism!
Support our Troops: The latest from the Administration
Might as well go to the source. Army Times reports that the Administration is targeting family benefits. Karen Jowers reports that
Commissaries and the Defense Department’s stateside schools are in the crosshairs of Pentagon budget cutters, and military advocates, families and even base commanders are up in arms.
Defense officials notified the services in mid-October that they intend to close 19 commissaries and may close 19 more, mostly in remote areas.
At the same time, the Pentagon is finishing a study to determine whether to close or transfer control of the 58 schools it operates on 14 military installations in the continental United States.
The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.
The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions...
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-2335705.php
Pakistanis supporting al-Qaida?
There have been previous assertions and reports, most notably by Seymour Hersh, that the Pakistanis have protected bin Laden, were allowed to escape with the al-Qaida leader when they were potentially entrapped last December in the Tora Bora mountains. Now comes this report from India’s ndtv.com.
Three Pakistani armymen were captured inside Afghan territory during a raid on an Al-Qaida hideout in the Kandahar region, the main stronghold of the former Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Afghan officials later handed them over to the Pakistan embassy in Kabul. Although the Afghan government says the men have been released as a goodwill gesture, it is bound to cause a lot of embarrassment to Pakistan. http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template=Alqaida&slug=Pak+soldiers+nabbed+in+Al+Qaida+hideout&id=44480&callid=1
Voting Problems: HR 2239; Does your Representative support it?
To try to rectify some of the problems from the 2000 election, many states are seeking to replace their older equipment with new electronic voting computers. From all reports, the technology is not yet adequate to the task. Machines are still prone to errors, companies (Diebold) that control most of the machines have close ties to the Bush Administration, etc. According to verifiedvoting.org, we have the following problems,
Americans will use voting computers with secret software that has not been sufficiently scrutinized, just as they have in past elections.
They will have to trust computers to record and count their votes correctly – computers that are not advanced enough to ensure the security and accuracy that could justify their trust.
If something odd occurs, manual recounts of the original ballots will be impossible, because the only record of the votes will be in electronic form, which will, of course, match the questionable tally.
A solution, many are noting, is Representative Rush Holt’s proposed bill introduced into the House. The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 2239) would mandate the necessary safeguards for U.S. elections in every state. The bill, currently in the Committee on House Administration, would require all states to use election equipment that provides a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.
This means that voters could check a paper ballot or paper record of the ballot for accuracy before casting the vote --without having to trust the voting machine. Voter verification of ballots is crucial, because only the voter can check whether the ballot is accurate.
A paper audit trail makes it possible to reconstruct the election results from the original voter-verified records, without having to trust the election equipment. In other words, it is possible to do a meaningful recount if an election is in dispute. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
-R
