"Death To America!" -- Soon to be enriched with nukes?
Ah, Iran's wonderful parliament is at it again , they unanimously passed an outline of a bill that would require the government to resume uranium enrichment, capped off by several of their more exciteable members shouting a familiar rallying cry for our death.
Of course, this may be their version of Big Stick diplomacy, realizing that they need to do this in order to be taken seriously. There are negotiations ongoing, after all, and this could largely be their way of getting the best possible set of concessions in their negotiations with the European states. The next stage is November 25th, at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Europeans are already offering to simply supply the Iranians with enriched nuclear fuel (for power plants) if the Iranians will agree to not build more enrichment facilities of their own. It could simply be the art of the deal, spiced dramatically by some of the true,...
Posts
Happy Halloween from the universe!
Especially for today, here's a pic of the Ghost Head Nebula ! ...and some related, astronomical and historical info on Halloween .
It's time for me to make some last minute prep for the kids in costumes. We're having beautiful weather here today - it would be beautiful weather for late August, with short sleeves and sandals being wholly appropriate. Have fun!
While I'm thinking of it...
Some items I'd somehow neglected to re-post links to here after seeing them on Tony Collett 's site:
First, a former Republican senator's explanation of why he is "frightened to death" of a second Bush term .
Second, a look at the state of civil liberties in the US after the Bush administration has had the time since 9/11/01 to work on it.
Finally, while you're over there, take the time to follow the thoughtful process by which he worked to help convince his wife, that voting for Bush would not be the right thing to do. Just go to Tony's site and check the postings on October 28th. In the mix are comments from stalwart supporter Tammy and fellow blogger Mark Gibson .
A non-partisan investigation? Thanks to Mr. Washington for a pass-along on a local story. (I'd have gotten it up hours ago, but Blogger wasn't allowing me in.) In what may be a sign of desperation from the GOP a judge on Friday ordered the unsealing of court records in a 1994 lawsuit by Teresa Heinz Kerry and her sons in the airplane crash that killed her first husband, U.S. Sen. H. John Heinz III , further, the judge ruled that nearly all documents related to the case should be made public by Monday. What the point of this is supposed to be -- evil lawyer shenanigans they want to try to use against the hopefully future First Lady, perhaps? -- I don't know, thought it smacks of a desperate attempt to find anything to distract potential voters from the facts of this not merely bungled but dangerously misdirected administration. Fortunately, the state supreme court has granted a stay of the lower court's decision, pending a review.
It's important to note that Philad...
Pour It On!
A recent AP story lists a handful of the current items dogging the Bush administration - and, by extension, their campaign. Among them:
The neglected, 350 - 380 tons of explosives missing from the al Qaqaa site - and the lies from administration stooges including Condoleza Rice, who was among those giving out the message that the explosives might not have been there when US forces came into the region, this despite both corroboration from the Pentagon and a Minneapolis news station's video from a week after the invasion having been public knowledge for at least most of the day. Then there was a little inadvertent twist of the knife as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Bush supporter, said the troops in Iraq, not Bush, bore the responsibility for searching for the explosives. This despite the fact that the explosives were logged and locked down while the UN weapons inspectors were able to do their job. Good job, Rudy. Blame it on the troops instea...
The Fall of America
Okay, so it's a somewhat dated piece concerning the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but since Grant Schreiber doesn't generally publish on the web, the folks at the Underground Literary Alliance selected this piece to highlight yesterday and it isn't as if we should be forgetting what happened (and may well be happening with some of the other hidden "detainees" around the globe at this moment) I wanted to pass along a link to The Fall of America .
Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq
Mickey Herskowitz, highly respected author of some 30 books and the original ghost writer of the planned autobiography of George W. Bush (which was completely re-written by Bush propagandist Karen Hughes as A Charge To Keep ), has revealed many fascinating and telling details of his approximately 20 conversations with the then governor of Texas . It's a fascinating piece, and well worth the time to read. Admissions of not completing his national guard service but, instead, of being "excused." The plan to start a war in order to gain the political capital his father held briefly with respect to the war to liberate Kuwait and then to use that power to push all other agendas through. That Bush himself described his businesses as "floundering" -- just the type of detail that Bush handlers insisted be stricken and rewritten to conform to their projection of him a...
After all, the Bush Administration doesn't make mistakes...
Despite Bush administration spokesman Dan Senor going on CNN to state "there's a very high probability that those weapons weren'teven there before the war" this is in contradiction not only to Pentagon confirmation that the 380 tons of high explosives had been confirmed as being at the al Qaqaa site in March of 2003 , but is also shown to be utter fantasy via a videotape news report made in Iraq on April 18, 2003 by a Minneapolis area news team that was being given a tour by members of the 101st Airborne Division of bunker after bunker of material labelled as explosives that were present, just as the IAEA had reported.
I really cannot pound this point home enough times:
Iraq under the supervision of UN weapons inspectors = controlled & locked down munitions and facilities for the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq under the control of US-led coaliti...
A planned "failure" of diplomacy?
Court martial proceedings in the UK yesterday included the revelation that secret plans for the war in Iraq, including the date for the invasion, were passed to British Army chiefs by US defense planners five months before the invasion was launched . The papers and testimony, if confirmed as genuine, indicate that the decision had been made to invade long before such diplomatic measures as were underway were halted.
I suspect that over here in the states this will make little difference to the hardliners in the Bush camp, and probably little more to those who have been hoodwinked into believing lies such as the Iraq/al Qaida link, or that the U.N. weapons inspection program was a failure, despite it being well and repeatedly publicized that there was no Iraq/al Qaida link and the weapons inspection program (along with sanctions) had resulted in the complete dismantling of Iraq's WMD programs and the tagging and control of related ...
Pre-Election Florida Ballot Hijinks
Two bits sent to me by Tammy (thanks!) which I couldn't reach Blogger to update early this morning and forgot about until now:
The BBC has reported on a "caging list" containing 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida , which may be used as a challenge list to provide one more hurdle for each of the prospective voters to jump in order to vote on election day.
Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic Broward County, as many as 58,000 ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and 8 could be "missing." Hopefully the news focus will find them suddenly reappear in the system and in people's mailboxes.
I keep hoping all of the advance suspicion and scrutiny will result in excellent use of the election polling places next Tuesday, and that things will go much more smoothly because so many people are watching, and watc...
Rediscovered Wood
(No, it's not a Viagra joke)
A long lost film from the, well, in his own fashion acclaimed filmmaker, Ed Wood - best known for Plan 9 From Outer Space - has been found. It's titled Necromania from 1971 and is a porn film of a young couple's sexual enlightenment by a coven of witches.
"Necromania" -- the last film Wood directed -- was filmed over two or three days with a budget of no more than $7,000 and the only copies went missing soon after it was made. The movie tells the story of Danny and Shirley, a young couple who visit the mysterious Madame Heles for help with their flagging sex life. The lessons they are taught involve skulls, spells and sex in a coffin.
Hey, it's even worse than we thought.
As mentioned here last Tuesday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had reported that entire facilities of equipment which the IAEA had under seal during their highly successful inspection and monitoring program in Iraq, but which US/coalition and then interim Iraqi government officials refused them continued access to, had subsequently disappeared . These were mostly pieces of "dual use" equipment which could be used in setting up uranium/plutonium enrichment programs or otherwise be used in developing nuclear weapons. Well, this morning I awoke to the news that in addition to this equipment, some 350 metric tons of high explosives are also missing . The IAEA had held back this additional information in order to give US & Iraqi forces some time to possibly locate the materials, but are reporting this formally to the U.N. Security Council today.
Looking for loathe in all the wrong places Tipped by a recent post by Handsome I quickly found a link to a piece in the St . Petersburg Times concerning an outraged mob being led onto private property to destroy a Halloween display they thought was a racially-based hate crime . Apparently "Bob", a Halloween dummy with Frankenstein's head and the hands of a werewolf who had been hung by an improvised gallows looked sufficiently like a Black man to members of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement that their local leader, Omali Yeshitela, decided they couldn't wait for the police to contact the homeowner at work, opened the fence and proceeded to tear the display down and the dummy apart. While in the end it appears that everyone is satisfied, I have to join H. in finding the vandalism to be a hate crime in and of itself , arising from a misunderstanding over a Halloween decoration by people with short tempers and, apparently, little to no...
"If you were high, you'd be a Republican by now."
In a move in which the GOP is as much a victim as anyone, apparently some unscrupulous people convinced students at nearby Montgomery County Community College that they were signing a petition to legalize marijuana, when they were in fact registering them as Republicans . The best guess is that some group was being paid to sign up Republican voters and the people finding recruits didn't care how they did it. (The link and the header line were both courtesy of Mr. Washington, sent to me last week.)
I'm still hoping to hear that the majority of those so registered will band together publicly as "Republicans for Kerry."
Slide into darkness? Although the piece veers wildly and personally off-course into opinions on policy issues, the core supposition that President Bush has been demonstrating what one physician refers to as presenile dementia. (Thanks to Mr. Washington for passing this along late last week.) Perhaps a Kerry victory and a renewed stem cell research program will yield results that will help the poor guy before he slips completely... well, maybe it is too late already.
How are up to three quarters of Bush supporters like mushrooms?
Apparently they've been kept in the dark and fed shit. (Pardon my Freedom.) According to a mid-October poll , a strong percentage of self-described Bush supporters believe that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, had ongoing programs to produce more, and was supporting al Qaida. They also believe that the Bush administration supports many international treaties it is instead on record as opposing, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, land mine treaty and, most unbelievable of all, the Kyoto Protocol.
“One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these (erroneous) beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them,” noted Steven Kull, PIPA’s director. “Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree.” So, perhaps that Bush-supporting relative or co-worker is simply misinformed. Could it hurt to bring these issues up and maybe, just maybe,...
The horror of certainty (or: "Bush's faith, our blood")
As I'm sure you all have, I've been catching the story over the past couple days on Pat Robertson's recollections that Dubya told him there would be no U.S. casualties in the Iraq invasion . The official response from the White House is that Robertson either misheard or misremembered. After all, it would be as silly for the President to say that as, well, him to say that Osama bin Laden's location didn't concern him much, and that he didn't think about him often. He'd have to be a moron to say that , eh?
Back to the original story, here's a chunk from the first of the two links above:
"I emphatically stated that, 'I believe 'the blessing of heaven is upon him,' and I am persuaded that he will win this election and prevail on the war against terror in order to keep America safe from her avowed enemies," Robertson said. In his CNN interview, the religious l...
Sinclair Backs off... sort of.
Claiming that it never intended to air the documentary in its entirety anyway, the Sinclair Broadcasting Group announced yesterday that it will only be showing excerpts from "Stolen Honor" as part of a special called "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media."
Well, look at that. All of the writing to the company and, especially, the sponsors managed to do something to deflect this.
Little Things, Hitting Each Other
I was generally pleased with Matt Stone & Trey Parker’s latest big screen venture, Team America: World Police . The previews had me increasingly worried that it was a good concept lost as the creators became goofy over working for too many hours with puppets, and had come to primarily rely upon the running gag of violent puppets to be funny enough to carry the film. While there is plenty of that it was a genuinely funny movie – or at least funny in their particular idiom. That is to say, if you found South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny, then this movie will probably work for you. We and the audience we saw it with were kept laughing through most of it.
Much as their weekly tv show makes use of crude animation as part of its appeal, the awkwardness of marionette movement becomes central to many of the gags, including comedically undercutting dramatic scenes.
As with their South Park movie this one has some musical numbers, and en...
Protect the President from dangerous radicals!
Here's one of the latest ejections with threats of arrest from a Bush rally . What is worse, that the president is considered to be so thin-skinned and vulnerable that three school teachers were run off the fairgrounds, or that their intentionally non-vitriolic t-shirts reading "Protect our civil liberties" were judged to be so inappropriate? (Thanks to Judas Goat Quarterly writer/publisher Grant Schreiber for the link.)
"Stolen Honor" Kerry smear update
As noted last Tuesday , the Sinclair Broadcasting Group is pressing its stations - which reach 25% of the nation - to run an attack piece on Kerry's Viet Nam service and the impact of his public comments on other vets on its stations shortly before the election, calling it a news program. The word from the FCC came through yesterday that they won't block this from running and don't expect the concerns to "amount to a formal complaint that would require an investigation." Yeah, well, it is Michael Powell in charge down there. Ladies and gentlemen, witness and appreciate another aspect of The Fix.
The body of the problem
A piece from the newly-returned Tony Collett on stem cell recearch included a question on adult stem cells, which led me into a long comment on his site. Referenced in Tony's entry is the generally solid article by Patti Davis on stem cell research with a view through the window of Chris Reeve's death -- the article that led Tony to post on the subject. Having quickly written that comment there, I took a few more minutes to refine it and turn it into a post for my site. Minor clarifications needed to be made, and a little more praise given for Davis' article than came through in my first reaction. Moreover, this is an important issue for humanity, and is one of many potentially life and death matters to be considered in the presidential race. President Bush is on record as blocking the use of new lines of embryonic stem cells for research, while John Kerry has pledged to reopen the door on federally funded research if he becomes president. I...
It works so well...
I was pleased to see that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had suspended the sale of those awful World Trade Center commemorative coins alleged to be made partially from silver recovered from the ruins of the WTC collapse. Personally, I found it to be crass profiteering, regardless of its source materials, but anyone who would go for it deserves to be taken - a measure of instant justice. Still, if the people selling these were lying about the materials they deserve to be stopped and fined.
What I found most amusing was a quote from the article, which is in turn a quote from the above mentioned Attorney General:
"It is a shameless attempt to profit from a national tragedy," Spitzer said. "This product has been promoted with claims that are false, misleading or unsubstantiated." Now, is it just me, or isn't this spot-on applicable to the Bush campaign and the marketing of Dubya as the President for a second term?
More of the same...
I feel sorry for the uninformed voter who was watching much of tonight's, final presidential debate, at least if they don't have the time to do fact checks. There were few strong statements made that didn't involve a need for detailed follow-ups. Sometimes it was difficult to keep from being distracted by the frothing bits of mucus at the right corner of and inside Dubya's mouth as he held it open for so long.
Fortunately, as the debate approached the two thirds mark it hopefully became more easily discernable to even the less informed that Kerry was in command of more facts, while Bush kept resorting to wishful thinking both about his own record and what Kerry has actually said on the campaign trail and done as a member of the senate. That everything went so soft for everyone near the end was due to the faith and "strong women" questions -- ones I suppose I can't blame Bob Schieffer for wanting to use to bend matters to a more aff...
To shock the conscience of the court...
Citing a signature-gathering process that was "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court," Commonwealth Court President Judge James Gardner Colins said that fewer than 19,000 of the more than 51,000 signatures that Nader's supporters submitted for entrace to the ballot in Pennsylvania were valid . Amidst the randomly assembled names and addresses were reportedly "Mickey Mouse" and "Fred Flintstone." Consequently, the ballots here in PA will not include Ralph Nader as anything but a write-in candidate come November 2nd. I'd been watching the story both as a Pennsylvania resident and because - as noted late in the piece - many counties opted to send out their absentee ballots early, while Nader's name was still on them. (That said, Tammy - once again - caught the story on the decision before I'd seen it and sent the link my way.) Hopefully the word will get ar...
If anything I'm surprised there'll only be 525...
Just pointed out to me is the wonderful Countdown to Election Day: 525 Reasons to Dump Bush . Even if you only have the time to read #s 20 through 22 (the three most recent ones in this countdown), do so before tonight's final presidential debate. [ Thanks to Mr. Washington for the timely link. After listening to Dick Cheney's lies and vitriol during a speech he gave in New Jersey yesterday - knowing that Dubya will be following the same script tonight - it's good to be able to chug down some sanity & truth to neutralize them.]
Think you're registered to vote? Perhaps not.
Word's arisen from Nevada, with word of operations having moved to Oregon, of a group called Voters Outreach of America, aka America Votes. They've set up stations outside of malls, grocery stores and even government buildings and provide voter registration forms for people to fill out and turn back in to them. The twist? At least two former workers who participated in operations in Las Vegas have alleged that the stacks of registration forms have been gone through, and the ones with "Democrat" chosen as party of choice are culled, ripped up and discarded . Similar complaints have come out of Reno, NV.
Please spread the alert, and if you found yourself signing up at some similar operation contact your party of choice or regional election department office for verification that you're registered. I don't know what can be done about it in states (such as mine - Pennsylvania) where the registration pro...
A line on the future
In one of those moves that begins to realize something seen in science fiction for decades, a device has been implanted in the brain of a quadriplegic that allows him limited control over some electronic equipment. Initial work on refining the degree of control is focused on getting the unnamed 25 year old Rhode Island quadriplegic to control a paddle in a game of Pong via the implant; the reported accuracy of the game control is an impressive 70%. Granted FDA approval for the study, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems has authorization to perform four more of these implants this year. Parallel research on sensor arrays that won't require invasive wiring, and work with feedback systems to allow such control to be exercised over prosthetic limbs is ongoing, though the researchers are quick to point out that the current tools are far too blunt and primitive for such things as yet. While I expect that genetic therapies will prove more curative and ...
Help Stop the Smear
Take a look and take the time for action against plans by the "conservative" (I can seldom figure out what it is these groups are attempting to conserve) Sinclair Broadcasting Group to pre-empt other programming to run an anti-Kerry faux documentary titled "Stolen Honor" one week before the election. (The link about enables you to join in a petition move against Sinclair, which will also be delivered to the FCC, along with providing phone numbers of the Sinclair-owned stations, state by state.)
This "Attackumentary" is being pushed by the Sinclair Group, who claim this qualified as "news content" and so doesn't classify as "electioneering communication", which would be federally prohibited within 60 days of the election. This is the same Sinclair Broadcasting Group that had its seven ABC affiliates keep Nightline off the air the night last April when a list of military casualties in Iraq was read, decrying...
Who's International Terrorism's Best Buddy?
Why, it might just be the Bush Administration!
It's no great secret that Bush administration policies have given many potential "insurgents" in Iraq and elsewhere more reasons than ever to join up with militant groups, but now it appears that their ham-handed policies in Iraq may have given the terrorists some of the tools they were looking for. Equipment and materials tagged by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) during the highly successful inspections and monitored weapons dismantling program have seemingly since vanished from Iraq . In some cases it's not just the equipment, but entire facilities .
The IAEA, which the Bush administration kept from returning post-invasion to continue their monitoring operations, has handed in a report to the UN based largely on what's missing from recent satellite images they've been evaluating. The IAEA's requests for information from the US occupati...
Soldiers' letters to Michael Moore
One of the first things my wife said to me this morning was "So, did you hear that Christopher Reeve died?" Having been sleeping, and gotten rid of the Borg implants months ago, I hadn't. About 20 seconds later the line "You'll believe a man can die" popped into my head. Being a Monday, the line's been replaying ever since. Maybe including it in a post will exorcise it. For a more respectful tribute to Reeve, I'll send you over to Mark Gibson .
As for the header line, here are emails Michael Moore's been getting from troops stationed in Iraq.
I don't know what would be more pathetic... (updated)
...that Bush would need to have someone feeding him information during a televised debate (this is a Salon.com piece, and will task you with a "subscribe or watch an ad" choice in order to read the entire thing) , or that he would do such a lousy job of it even with a Cyrano. Remember, this was during the first debate. While he still failed to pull off a convincing performance in the second one, during the first he was a nearly continuous disaster. Abby - who sent me the first link, but as I was posting while on the run I neglected such niceties as credits - has also sent me this link and this one, too , all on the same subject, but neither requires you to subscribe or watch an ad.
Auctions Postponed (and a few odds and ends)
I've decided to hold off on a block of auctions originally planned for this weekend, starting them next Saturday instead. Still too much prep work ahead of me, and with more pressing matters before me (and two points yet to be resolved concerning the earlier auctions) it makes sense all around for me to wait another week. I'm posting it here since I'd mentioned the auction plans to a large handful of people and this is easier and less intrusive than my sending out an email loop. Geek bits: Yesterday saw some Heroclix LEs arriving via Wizard. These were the two Magneto (in his guise as Xorn) uniques, which look like this.
One of these I've already folded into a trading deal to get me a different LE - a Daniel Ketch (a variant of Ghost Rider who has some dial advantages over the usual ones) - and a unique from the Indy set (Samandahl Rey) I'd been mildly interested in, pics of both shown above, too. (Apologies for the b...
"It's not Batman!"
Marge's attempt to knock Homer off a line of thought came to mind as I noticed that this weekend The Science Channel is showing a TV Science Classics marathon of old science instruction programs. Currently there's a huge block of Watch Mr. Wizard shows under way.
It's some entertaining material, and just about the best mental purgative and restorative handy to revive us after spending roughly 45 minutes listening to Dubya.
A Second Kerry Debate Victory
I'm enjoying aspects of tonight's second presidential debate, hearing the same tired items being raised (predominantly by Bush) while Bush attempts to appear composed and climb out of the hole he put himself during last Thursday's debate. One thing I noticed - did you? - that it seems as if his attempt to control his features saw his blink rate skyrocket. Or, maybe he was doing that before and I was too distracted by the scowling and the uneven contortions that had me wondering a few times last week if he was having a stroke.
A short time ago the Machiavelli of the Bush administration, Karl Rove, implied that the Kerry/Edwards campaign would have some surprises waiting for them before Election Day . Now, this could be simply blowing smoke - whistling in the dark. However, I am among those at least marginally concerned that there will be some big surprise - most likely something the Bush administration will tout as a victory. Whether it...
Putting some of the Vice in the Presidency
First and foremost, tonight’s vice presidential debate – overlaid on last week’s first presidential one – is that any lingering question of why Dick Cheney was paired with G.W. Bush, and why Bush didn’t want to appear before a senate panel without Cheney was put soundly to rest. Generally composed and sharp, however suspect his facts may have been.
Tonight we definitely saw a foreshadowing of this Friday’s presidential debate as Cheney and Edwards moved onto the issues of the economy. They are most assuredly loading the President with key points of rhetoric, and Kerry has to come equipped with at least the most telling facts and figures concerning the Bush administration’s policies on the economy, education and healthcare. Meanwhile, Bush is undoubtedly being schooled as best they can in any seemingly contradictory senatorial votes Kerry may have been party to over the past 30 years, and if they can't find any...
301
Blogger's post counter, which had seemingly been glued in place at "294" for a while, finally tore loose and updated itself. So now I know that this is my 301st post on the site. No more significant than 300 or 302, I suppose, but I wanted to note it.
Those of us up to it watched and/or listened to the first of the presidential debates Thursday night. I was stuck at work until approaching 9, so I caught the opening sections during the drive home and quickly picked it up on tv for the rest. If you were like me you watched it and then immediately either turned off the tv or switched to something else. (I jumped over to Ed Wood , btw., which I don't seem to be able to see to excess.) To stick around longer is to have partisans of one stripe or another pretend to be impartial while telling everyone why one or the other "clearly" won. I'm not going to make the slightest pretense of impartiality as the Bush regime cannot be shooed out of the White Ho...