Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1
An Online Dowser and Filter Of Important Information
CONSERVATIVE CONFUSES BALANCE WITH COMMUNISM: The Pentagon’s American Forces Radio and Television Service is off balance. The taxpayer-funded network airs Rush Limbaugh’s show five days a week to troops abroad, but no corresponding liberal voice. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) added a provision to the Senate defense bill this month to try to rectify that, saying, “Liberals, moderates and independents contribute to funding for American Forces Radio through payment of their taxes, just like conservatives do.” The provision calls “on the defense secretary to ensure that the American Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS) provides ‘balanced’ political programming.” However, it turns out Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) doesn’t want troops to hear balanced commentary. He’s fighting to remove Harkin’s provision, saying this week that Congress acting to provide the troops with balanced commentary “sounds a little like communism to me.”
Note: Limbaugh’s hate filled comments and explosive and racist diatribes are not only heard by the troops but also by the people of the Nations where the troops are stationed.
CONSERVATIVE CONFUSES BALANCE WITH COMMUNISM: The Pentagon’s American Forces Radio and Television Service is off balance. The taxpayer-funded network airs Rush Limbaugh’s show five days a week to troops abroad, but no corresponding liberal voice. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) added a provision to the Senate defense bill this month to try to rectify that, saying, “Liberals, moderates and independents contribute to funding for American Forces Radio through payment of their taxes, just like conservatives do.” The provision calls “on the defense secretary to ensure that the American Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS) provides ‘balanced’ political programming.” However, it turns out Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) doesn’t want troops to hear balanced commentary. He’s fighting to remove Harkin’s provision, saying this week that Congress acting to provide the troops with balanced commentary “sounds a little like communism to me.”
Note: Limbaugh’s hate filled comments and explosive and racist diatribes are not only heard by the troops but also by the people of the Nations where the troops are stationed.
According to federal investigators, “drug companies had repeatedly overcharged public hospitals and clinics for low-income patients, making them pay more than the maximum prices allowed by federal law.” In one month, “the overcharges totaled $41.1 million, raising the cost of prescription drugs to public hospitals and clinics 18 percent.” But despite the violations, “no penalties exist for manufacturers that violate the terms of the [law].” The Bush administration said, although it agrees with the ruling, “it did not want to ask Congress for authority to impose fines and other penalties on drug companies.”
Conservatives have a new inductee to the Hall of Hypocrisy: Ralph Reed. The newest issue of The Nation reports, “When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his ‘family values’ agenda, calling gambling ‘a cancer on the American body politic’ that was ’stealing food from the mouths of children.’” However, a new federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations “has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.”
Christopher Hitchens collects check from Microsoft, calls Moore a coward.
By Matt Taibbi
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental… Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.
by Nat Hentoff
The inside story of the official manual on how to torture without being prosecuted
Liberty Beat: Torture Trail Bush’s lawyers conclude the torture of prisoners is justified in war on terrorism
[The] argument . . . is that the president, as commander in chief, is the law when it comes to the enemy. . . . [He is] unchecked by the courts or any other authority. . . . That’s a very dangerous notion for a free country.
by Richard Goldstein
The attack on Fahrenheit 9/11: Fox lays back while ABC and NBC pile on
n just one weekend, Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more money than any feature-length documentary in history. This despite a campaign against the film by the White House and its surrogates. Everyone expected George Bush’s media shills to go after Moore, but who would have thought Fox News would keep its attack dogs relatively muzzled while ABC and NBC launched remarkably unbalanced attacks.
So far, Fox’s main complaint is that Moore won’t give them an interview. However, he did allow himself to be interrogated by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. During that chat, he addressed his critics’ major points. Take the fact that Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the United States after 9-11 even though all commercial flights were grounded. Moore implies that the president cleared those flights because of family business ties to the Saudis. But Richard Clarke, the former security adviser
An abandoned Brooklyn warehouse heralds the onset of hipster environmentalism
by Amanda Griscom
Catch the aboveground S train in Brooklyn and you’ll whiz through the neighborhood of Crown Heights, an industrial pocket of warehouses and factories that once stored and manufactured everything from artillery to pickle jars. These days, the buildings you pass appear to be abandoned relics in a bleak concrete landscape. But then, just as T.S. Eliot is coming to mind — “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” — you hurtle by a bright green oasis of richly vegetated roofs and a glossy black array of solar panels on a refurbished 1850s warehouse.
This anomalous building has just been renovated by Brooklyn sculptor Benton Brown, 31, and his wife, Susan Boyle, 30. Both novices in the fields of construction and engineering prior to this project, Brown and Boyle managed to achieve a mind-boggling feat of ingenuity and perseverance. Over two and a half years, they transformed a 14,000 square-foot derelict brewery and ice-storage house into an apartment building of such style, sustainability, and sophisticated engineering that it establishes the couple as pioneers among a new generation of green builders.
Next month, Brown and Boyle will finally declare their project complete. The building houses six loft units complete with radiant heating, natural ventilation, Energy Star appliances, a rain-water collection system, a high-efficiency condensing boiler, and vast expanses of super-insulated, floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Solar energy provides nearly half of all the building’s electricity.
The project has been so successful that the couple won a $75,000 “Green Cinderella” grant from Keyspan Energy Company to cover one-third of the clean-technology costs, and are on track to get a silver rating from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) — the gold standard in green building ratings. What’s more, they have a waiting list of potential tenants lined up to lease their units, and they expect to entirely recoup their sizable investment in this project within two decades.
(Read the article)
Try that one on the IRS next April!
By Ted Bridis
The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.
“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department’s office for information requests.
Advocates for open government said the government’s assertion that it could not copy data from its computers was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.
“This was a new one on us. We weren’t aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,” Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the Justice Department’s decision.
Fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way!
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIK ECKHOLM
AGHDAD, Iraq, June 29
And you thought Iraq was bad. A new book, “Bush Versus the Environment,” details an assault on our air, water and natural resources that beggars the imagination.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Bombing birds’ nests is actually a boon for bird-watchers, since the ones that survive become rarer, and more exciting to spot. There’s no one more qualified to keep our nation’s forests healthy than a former timber lobbyist. The best person to uphold the Endangered Species Act is the lawyer who once argued before the Supreme Court that the act should be gutted. And pollution from power plants that cuts short the lives of 30,000 Americans a year is nothing to get upset about as long as you pledge your commitment to the best science in the name of “Clear Skies.”
In his new book, “Bush Versus the Environment,” Oregon journalist Robert S. Devine documents a record of environmental neglect and enmity that’s so grim as to be laughable. He uncovers how in the name of “new environmentalism” the Bush crew pursues an agenda that’s so radically pro-industry that even conservative Republicans are reluctant to cop to it publicly, cloaking their new policies in Orwellian happy-speak.
More than a laundry list of green crimes, “Bush Versus the Environment” is an analysis of how these anti-regulation administrators undermine laws they don’t agree with, even if they’re sworn to uphold them. Through a combination of benign neglect — such as underfunding existing programs and settling lawsuits with corporations on absurdly favorable terms — Devine shows that the Bush administration is doing far more to affect the stewardship of our public lands, air and water than even its most explicitly articulated policies suggest.
(Read the article)
One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today
By T. Christian Miller LATimes Staff Writer
WASHINGTON - The top investigator for the Coalition Provisional Authority created to run Iraq released three audits today criticizing the U.S.-led agency’s financial and management controls.
Taken together, the audits are the first official account of long-rumored problems of the CPA’s chaotic and haphazard system of overseeing billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds.
The audits come one day after the disappearance of the CPA, which handed over authority for running Iraq to an Iraqi provisional government Monday.
In the most critical of the reports, CPA Inspector General Stuart Bowen found that the CPA had failed to rein in costs to house government employees in Kuwait under a contract with Halliburton.
Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000, has been a repeated target of political attacks by Democrats who accuse the company of wasteful spending.
But audit officials said that the focus was on CPA failures to adequately control costs under the contract, not on Halliburton’s abuse of the process.
(Read the article)
Speaking at the NATO conference in Turkey yesterday, President Bush said, “15 months after the liberation of Iraq…the world witnessed the arrival of a free and sovereign Iraqi government.”1 The reality, however, is much different.
The same day that U.S. administrator Paul Bremer officially ended the occupation, U.S. prosecutors refused to abide by an Iraqi judge’s order acquitting Iraqi citizen Iyad Akmush Kanum of attempted murder of coalition troops.2 Instead, the prosecutors returned Kanum to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, claiming that “they were not bound by Iraqi law.”
In the days leading up to his departure, Bremer “issued a raft of edicts” in an effort to “exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political authority.”3 Specifically, Bremer empowered a seven-member appointed commission “to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.” Bremer also “appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government” with multi-year terms to “promote his concepts of governance” after the handover.
Iraq remains plagued by violence and “the primary military responsibility for fighting the insurgency remains as much in American hands as it did yesterday.”4 As a result, the New York Times concludes it is “ludicrous for administration officials to suggest that America’s occupation of Iraq has now somehow ended.”
(Read the article)
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