News of the Month

February 14, 2004

They’re building snow forts in hell this month – Al Gore finally said something about the Presidential campaigns. Nearly four years after he won the Presidential election, but had it stolen from him, he’s finally coming out with some meaningful remarks on our Commander-in-Thief. In a speech to MoveOn.org last month, he said:

“While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward – so weak that he seldom if ever says ‘No’ to them on anything – no matter what the public interest might mandate.”

Has he begun to recover his ethics – or did his payoff just run out?

Speaking of ethics, we’ve known for a long time that the neo-con men surrounding our Commander-in-Thief haven’t the slightest idea what the word “ethics” means; but now we find yet one more piece of evidence that neither does any other Republican in government, either. Listen to this story by Charlie Savage, from the Boston Globe of January 22, entitled “Infiltration of files seen as extensive: Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats”:

“Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

“From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

“The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November. With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers – including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

“Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs. Citing ‘internal Senate sources,’ Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.”

Novak, you may remember, was the so-called “journalist” who publicly committed what the first President Bush called treason by revealing in his column the identity of a secret CIA operative, endangering her life and the lives of everyone who had ever worked for her, just to spite her husband. It seems his honesty about those fictitious “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was just too much for Karl Rove to bear. Ethics and patriotism – two concepts that are utterly foreign to the ruling CheneyBushCorp junta.

And, on the topic of ethics, let’s get an inside look at what passes for ethics inside Tom Delay’s twisted mind. This is an article by U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It’s kind of long, but you need to hear it all to realize the depths of slime to which the Republican Party’s rulers are willing to sink to gain that little bit more power.

“Never before has the House of Representatives operated in such secrecy:
At 2:54 a.m. on a Friday in March, the House cut veterans benefits by three votes.
At 2:39 a.m. on a Friday in April, the House slashed education and health care by five votes.
At 1:56 a.m. on a Friday in May, the House passed the Leave No Millionaire Behind tax-cut bill by a handful of votes.
At 2:33 a.m. on a Friday in June, the House passed the Medicare privatization and prescription drug bill by one vote.
At 12:57 a.m. on a Friday in July, the House eviscerated Head Start by one vote.

“And then, after returning from summer recess, at 12:12 a.m. on a Friday in October, the House voted $87 billion for Iraq.

“Always in the middle of the night. Always after the press had passed their deadlines. Always after the American people had turned off the news and gone to bed.

“What did the public see? At best, Americans read a small story with a brief explanation of the bill and the vote count in Saturday's papers. But what did the public miss? They didn't see the House votes, which normally take no more than 20 minutes, dragging on for as long as an hour as members of the Republican leadership trolled for enough votes to cobble together a majority.

“They didn't see GOP leaders stalking the floor for whoever was not in line. They didn't see Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay coerce enough Republican members into switching their votes to produce the desired result.

“In other words, they didn't see the subversion of democracy.

“And late (in December), they did it again. The most sweeping changes to Medicare in its 38-year history were forced through the House at 5:55 on a Saturday morning. The debate started at midnight. The roll call began at 3:00 a.m. Most of us voted within the typical 20 minutes. Normally, the speaker would have gaveled the vote closed. But not this time; the Republican-driven bill was losing.

“By 4 a.m., the bill had been defeated 216-218, with only one member, Democrat David Wu, not voting. Still, the speaker refused to gavel the vote closed. Then the assault began.

“Hastert, DeLay, Republican Whip Roy Blount, Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, Energy and Commerce Chairman Billy Tauzin – all searched the floor for stray Republicans to bully.

“I watched them surround Cincinnati's Steve Chabot, trying first a carrot, then a stick; but he remained defiant. Next, they aimed at retiring Michigan congressman Nick Smith, whose son is running to succeed him. They promised support if he changed his vote to yes and threatened his son’s future if he refused. He stood his ground.”

Just so we’re clear on this – those actions against Representative Smith by Delay’s evil minions constitute attempted bribery and attempted coercion of a United States Congressman, both of which are felonies. Why do you think nobody’s investigated those crimes? But back to it:

“Many of the two dozen Republicans who voted against the bill had fled the floor. One Republican hid in the Democratic cloakroom.

“By 4:30, the browbeating had moved into the Republican cloakroom, out of sight of C-SPAN cameras and the insomniac public. Republican leaders woke President George W. Bush, and a White House aide passed a cell phone from one recalcitrant member to another in the cloakroom.

“At 5:55, two hours and 55 minutes after the roll call had begun – twice as long as any previous vote in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives – two obscure western Republicans emerged from the cloakroom. They walked, ashen and cowed, down the aisle to the front of the chamber, scrawled their names and district numbers on green cards to change their votes, and surrendered the cards to the clerk.

“The speaker gaveled the vote closed; Medicare privatization had passed.

“You can do a lot in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness.”

Is it any wonder that those of us who are sick of “politics as usual” have abandoned the hopeless morass of the Republicrat Parties and joined the Libertarian Party? And you know as well as I do that the Democrats would be doing the exact same kinds of sh… stuff that the Republicans are, if they were in power right now. The Libertarian Party – hell, any party that offers a viable alternative to politics as usual, the politics of raw greed, naked power, and illegal aggression – is where thinking Americans have to be right now.

But you know something? That confederacy of dunces that we call a government today has the 2004 election locked in. The technology in place, mandated by federal law, to prevent us from knowing whether our votes are counted as we cast them – or even counted at all. “But electronic voting is good for you!” they bleat. Yeah – you don’t even have to bother to vote any more; the electronic voting machines are going to record the vote the way they want to, anyway. Listen to what happened in a special election in Florida a couple of weeks ago, from a report by the Verified Voting Newsletter:

“Broward County, Florida. In a special election for the State House District 91 seat, ES&S electronic voting machines showed a total of 134 undervotes – that is, 134 ballots in which voters did not select a candidate in the single-race election. In this single-race election, all candidates were Republicans. The winner, Ellyn Bogdanoff, received 12 more votes than the runner-up.

“Florida law requires a manual recount of invalid votes when the winning margin is less than one-quarter of one percent, which it is in this case. However, it is impossible for election officials to comply with Florida law because the 134 invalid votes were cast on electronic voting machines, and there is no record of the voters’ original votes.

“Representative (Robert) Wexler (D-FL), an early co-sponsor of H.R.2239 (the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003), has been an outspoken advocate for the bill. Shortly after the election disaster, he issued a press release pointing out that last July he had warned Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood about these very problems.

“Then on January 16, he announced that he has filed a lawsuit against Glenda Hood and Teresa LaPore, charging them with violating their duties to ensure that votes are counted accurately. ‘If the lawsuit is successful, Wexler is hoping to change Florida's election law by requiring that every touch-screen machine in the state be affixed to a printer in order to print out an individual voter-verifiable ballot.’ ”

Is there any hope in all this? Actually, yes – at last count, there were now 102 co-sponsors of H.R.2239, the bill to require that a paper receipt be given to each voter, so the voter can compare it to the votes he or she actually cast. The corresponding bill in the Senate, S.1980, was filed by Bob Graham of Florida, but as of yet has no co-sponsors. If you want to do anything to make sure your vote is counted the way you actually cast it, despite the best efforts of our “leaders” and worst mistakes of the electronic voting-machine makers like Diebold and ES&S, this is your best, and maybe your one and only, chance – call your two senators and your representative, and demand that they support these bills. Even if you don’t believe these companies capable of vote fraud, it has been demonstrated – by doing it – that their technology is wide open to hacking, from anyone.

This next bit of news, from California, is under the heading, “How low can they go?” In a report from the Marijuana Policy Project, we learn:

“After six months of pursuing the case, a California prosecutor suddenly dropped state charges against a middle-aged couple who grew marijuana for their own medicinal use. Then, as soon as the two were deceived into thinking their troubles were over, federal officials – invited by the state prosecutor – swarmed into the courtroom and arrested the couple on federal charges.

“This elaborate ruse was enacted for the sole purpose of getting around California’s medical marijuana law. It is an outrage.

“David Davidson, 52, and Cynthia Blake, 53, grew marijuana on their own property for their own use. They had a doctor’s recommendation to take marijuana for their illnesses. Yet they were arrested, and Tehama County prosecutor Lynn Strom pursued a case against them for six months. Then, in the courtroom, she suddenly dropped the charges.

“Thinking the case was dismissed, the couple’s lawyers were lured into he judge’s chambers. While the lawyers were absent, the feds swarmed into the courtroom and arrested Davidson and Blake on federal charges. The lawyers were deprived of the opportunity to advise their clients of their rights. If convicted, the couple now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.”

Lynn Strom has to be a Republican.

Over in Iowa, the US mis-government has taken yet one more action to strip us of our rights. Ryan Foley, of the Associated Press, writes:

“In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.

“In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum. The group, once targeted for alleged ties to communism in the 1950s, announced … it will ask a federal court to quash the subpoena ….

“ ‘The law is clear that the use of the grand jury to investigate protected political activities or to intimidate protesters exceeds its authority,’ guild President Michael Ayers said ….

…

“Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, said he had not heard of any similar case of a U.S. university being subpoenaed for such records. He said the case brings back fears of the ‘red squads’ of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters.

“According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, ‘all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting,’ and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting.’

“It also asks for campus security records ‘reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting.’

“A source with knowledge of the investigation said a judge had issued a gag order forbidding school officials from discussing the subpoena.”

Have you attended a meeting recently? Did you discuss ways to protest our illegal war in Iraq? Then you, too, might be invited to have a chat with your friendly local Grand Jury.

Finally, how’s our illegal occupation of Iraq going? Well, let’s see – over 550 US service people are dead; over 3,000 US service people have been wounded, and nearly 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have been murdered. Our troops still don’t have protective vests (which is one of the reasons why there are so many killed and wounded), and the frat-rat that’s playing at commander-in-chief continues to bleat that the war was “justified.” Now that the Bush junta’s big rationale for the war has blown up in their faces – publicly – the best he can say is “I expected to find the weapons.” What’s one more lie after the thousands that have already been told about the junta’s reasons for the death, devastation, and deceit they’ve visited on the world?

We all know that the invasion of Iraq was perpetrated under false pretenses, with lie after lie after lie to hide the real reason for the invasion – control of that poor nation’s oil. [No, not “nation” any more – it’s now a US colony.] Now the Army War College, the most important research and education institution in the Army, has issued a report that the war in Iraq was “a strategic error.” Bob Johnson, of the Associated Press, reports:

“The research paper by Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery (Alabama), said the president’s strategy ‘promises much more than it can deliver’ and threatens to spread U.S. military resources too thin. Record also wrote that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not present a threat to the United States and was a distraction from the war on terrorism.

“(The writer of the paper) is the author of six books and is a former legislative assistant for national security affairs to Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Georgia, and former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas.”

As in the song from the days of Vietnam, “And the war drags on.” The first of many wars of conquest, to solidify United States control of the world’s oil supply. Aren’t you proud to be an American right now?