27 June 2003


Our fearless leader...?

Check out this 5-minute, real-time video at The Memory Hole of President Bush on 9/11 reacting to the news that the second WTC tower has been hit.

Well, actually, the video is quite boring because our nominal "commander-in-chief" does NOTHING but sit there and look like a total dumbass for more than 5 minutes after learning America is under attack.

As Tom Tomorrow aptly points out, at This Modern World, remember where you were when you found out, how you instantly wanted to do something --anything!-- to help those trapped workers who were jumping 100 stories to their deaths to avoid being burned alive.

The average person couldn't do anything but look on in shock and horror. The president of the United States, on the other hand, could have done a lot. At the very least, he could have looked like he was concerned and in command.

Instead, Bush sat there reading to elementary school students in Florida, unwilling to interrupt his pre-arranged photo-op for something as insignificant as 3,000 people suffering horrible deaths and at least two other jetliners hijacked and gone missing.

Bush and his team have been working like crazy to suppress a full accounting of his actions and whereabouts on 9/11. This footage is twice as long as the previous, truncated video that has been given wide coverage.

Here.

26 June 2003


When the EPA says "eat shit," they really mean it....

The farmers outside Augusta, Ga., say the hay had a musty chemical odor and was dark and mottled. But they fed it to the cows. Then the cows started to waste away, growing so thin that their ribs could be counted through their skin, the dairy farmers say. The cows died by the hundreds.

"We just couldn't save them," said Andy McElmurray, whose family has been farming here since 1946. "They wouldn't respond to antibodies. They wouldn't respond to IV fluids. They wouldn't respond to anything. They just ended up dying."
Because they ate hay tainted by sewer sludge, say the farmers.

This NY Times story from Thursday details how the EPA has been pushing the sludge, euphemistically called "biosolids," as fertilizer. Some organic farmers are actually said to prefer it.

And we can't blame Bush totally for this: the practice started in 1992, under Clinton's watch, after Congress (rightfully) banned dumping sewage into the oceans.

In May, the EPA fired award-winning scientist, David Lewis, a 32-year veteran with the agency, after he published an article in the journal Nature raising questions about the policy.

And we call ourselves an "advanced civilization?"

I know! There are proven ways to safely transform human waste into fertilizer. But do you trust the EPA or a for-profit corporation to do it right?

No tears here....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a one-time Democratic segregationist who helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative Republican Party in the South, died Thursday...
After more than 48 years in office, promoting a rabidly homophobic, sexist, and racist agenda.

The segregationist old guard is passing: Lester Maddox, who violated the nascent Civil Rights Act in 1964 by refusing to serve 3 black students in his Atlanta restaurant and later went on the serve one term as Georgia governor, died on Wednesday.

I wish I could say there wasn't an entire new generation of more subtle, but equally diehard racists, to take their places.

NY Times obits here and here.

Who says America has no aristocracy...?

The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period.

The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000.
$174 million! Have you ever tried to think what you'd do with just $1 million? I did once, and came to realize I could probably quit working, send my kid to college and still live on the interest alone, if I invested wisely. Of course, I have more modest tastes than the average jet-setter.

To put all this into dollars and cents, the NY Times articles goes on:
The rate actually paid by the top 400 in 2000 [with average income of $174 million] was about the same as that paid by a single person making $123,000 or a married couple with two children earning $226,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed group whose calculations are respected by a broad spectrum of tax experts.

The group favors higher taxes on the wealthy, and its director, Robert S. McIntyre, said yesterday that the I.R.S. data bolsters that viewpoint. "Regardless of which party these 400 are in, these are the guys Bush wants to help, even though they have so much money they don't know what to do with it," he said. "How Bush feels about the half of the population that doesn't have much money is he got them a tax cut worth an average of $19 each."
And the trickle-downers continue to whine the rich pay too much in taxes, and that's why the economy is stalling.

Complete story here.

It's about time...!

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court struck down a ban on gay sex Thursday, ruling that the law was an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

The 6-3 ruling reverses course from a ruling 17 years ago that states could punish homosexuals for what such laws historically called deviant sex.


Complete story here.

25 June 2003


Destined to fail...

President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's misaptly-named "peace plan" for the Middle East couldn't have been more poorly designed if its stated goal was to fail miserably.

Just the pre-condition alone that the besieged and beleaguered Palestinian security forces disarm the "militants" before negotiations proceed would be laughable, if it weren't so utterly tragic.

Israel has turned the Palestinian territories into wastelands, where the IDF roams at will, strikes at whim and murders whomever it wishes. The Palestinian security forces are little more than lightly-armed observers in a hugely mismatched confrontation between civilians and Israeli soldiers. Israel's military superiority is so absolute: imagine U.S. soldiers asking besieged Iraqi police to disarm and subdue their anti-American, extremist cousins as a condition to sitting down for peace talks.

Imperfect as it was, the latest "ceasefire" has just been literally shot down by an Israeli airstrike on a civilian automobile, said to be carrying Hamas militants.
...A man and a woman, both bystanders, were killed and 15 were injured, including the intended target, a member of the military wing of Hamas.
In another disturbing, related development, 5 Israeli Arabs have been charged with funneling an estimated $10 million to Hamas.

For Americans, a little sketchy on the relevance of this latter bit of news, the accused Arabs are Israeli citizens, residing in Israel; not Palestinians, condemned to stateless misery with little or no hope of escape. It's a little like "privileged" slaves living on the plantation financing the Union invasion of the South.

Ok, the analogy breaks down in many ways. Still, how far does this largely American-financed debacle have to go before it is finally termed a "civil war?"

More importantly, how far until American taxpayers say, in large enough numbers, "Not in my name!"?

Complete story here.