Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

In December, Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) promised to return the approximately $150,000 he received from Abramoff, his clients, and his associates:

This is an important step that all public officials should take in order to renew the faith of Montanans, and all Americans, in their government. We can and must set a higher ethical standard.

Burns also added that he “instructed [his] staff to work with the
Montana Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council to identify an appropriate
Native American charitable entity to which the contributions received
directly from Mr. Abramoff and his associates may be donated.”

But instead of working with the Council or returning the money to its original donors, Burns sent $111,000 directly to the Montana Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council, whose lobbyist, Stan Ullman, is a former Burns staffer.

Round and round Abramoff

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by Kathryn Casa

Parents cannot remove their children’s names from a Pentagon database that includes highly personal information used to attract military recruits, the Vermont Guardian has learned.

The Pentagon has spent more than $70.5 million on market research, national advertising, website development, and management of the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) database — a storehouse of questionable legality that includes the names and personal details of more than 30 million U.S. children and young people between the ages of 16 and 23.

The database is separate from information collected from schools that receive federal education money. The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to report the names, addresses, and phone numbers of secondary school students to recruiters, but the law also specifies that parents or guardians may write a letter to the school asking that their children’s names not be released.

However, many parents have reported being surprised that their children are contacted anyway, according to a San Francisco-based coalition called Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).

“We hear from a lot of parents who have often felt quite isolated about it all and haven’t been aware that this is happening all over the country,” said the group’s spokeswoman, Felicity Crush.

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Army Orders Soldiers to Shed Dragon Skin or Lose SGLI Death Benefits

By Nathaniel R. Helms

Two deploying soldiers and a concerned mother reported Friday afternoon that the U.S. Army appears to be  singling out soldiers who have purchased Pinnacle’s Dragon Skin Body Armor for special treatment. The soldiers, who are currently staging for combat operations from a secret location, reported that their commander told them if they were wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin and were killed their beneficiaries might not receive the death benefits from their $400,000 SGLI life insurance policies. The soldiers were ordered to leave their privately purchased body armor at home or face the possibility of both losing their life insurance benefit and facing disciplinary action.

The soldiers asked for anonymity because they are concerned they will face retaliation for going public with the Army’s apparently new directive. At the sources’ requests DefenseWatch has also agreed not to reveal the unit at which the incident occured for operational security reasons.  

On Saturday morning a soldier affected by the order reported to DefenseWatch that the directive specified that “all” commercially available body armor was prohibited. The soldier said the order came down Friday morning from Headquarters, United States Special Operations Command (HQ, USSOCOM), located at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. It arrived unexpectedly while his unit was preparing to deploy on combat operations. The soldier said the order was deeply disturbiing to many of the men who had used their own money to purchase Dragon Skin because it will affect both their mobility and ballistic protection.

“We have to be able to move. It (Dragon Skin) is heavy, but it is made so we have mobility and the best ballistic protection out there. This is crazy. And they are threatening us with our benefits if we don’t comply.” he said.

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Clinton slams Bush, White House in Harlem

NEW YORK (AP)

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By Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

No matter what you think of George W. Bush, he is staking out his claim as
a bona fide Horseman of the Apocalypse.

With his Hand of Hell in Iraq already yielding countless dead, $200 billion
wasted and a global war again Islam well on its way to Armageddon, Bush has
definitively established his ability to wreck unparalleled disaster on a global
scale with zero positive outcome.

By drowning New Orleans and turning its alleged rebuilding plan into a sinkhole
of corruption and disarray, he has shown he can lay waste to an entire American
city.

And now he is visiting disease and death on tens of millions of our elderly
and ill with a botched Medicare/Medicaid drug plan that has plunged the nation’s
pharmacies into total chaos while driving the states even closer to bankruptcy.
As you read this, millions of Americans are without medications that may be
life-sustaining because of what Bush has done to “improve” their pharmaceutical
plan.

One can only shudder at what might come next.

There have, of course, been lesser catastrophes, or ones whose long-term devastation
is primarily political.

Bush’s No Child Left Behind program has utterly poisoned our national educational
system and gutted state budgets.

Bush’s economic programs have taken a national surplus and turned it into a
gargantuan debt, almost incalculable in its devastating implications for our
future.

Bush’s “War on Terror” has in fact been a war on civil rights and
liberties, stripping the US of its basic democracy while leaving us more vulnerable
than ever to terror attacks on nuclear plants, chemical facilities, our ports
and air lanes.

Bush’s “Homeland Security” agency is by all accounts a fetid swamp
of corruption, mismanagement and ineptitude.

(Read the article)

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Securing chemical plants: legislation and obfuscation

By Angie C. Marek

Ed Massuda never would have imagined that the small manufacturing plant tucked into the corner of the industrial park where he works in Baltimore could potentially expose 139,000 people to toxic chemicals. But that’s what the plant, run by Lesaffre Yeast Corp., reported to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 when forced to model what would happen in a “worst case” scenario–an event in which all the chemicals it can store on site are released into the atmosphere. “The only thing I really know about [the plant],” says Massuda, 32, who works at a pharmaceutical company nearby, “is that it makes our office stink.” Massuda says he has never once been told how to evacuate.

That sort of unfamiliarity could be dangerous. More than four years after 9/11, there have been at least modest improvements in airline security, port security, and border security, but critics say there’s been virtually zero progress in protecting the nation’s chemical plants, some of which remain frighteningly vulnerable to terrorist attack. Now, after years of delay, new legislation is inching its way through Congress, but its fate–and ultimate impact–is still very much an open question.

Nationwide, there are some 15,000 facilities–including oil refineries, water-treatment plants, and factories–that use hazardous chemicals to manufacture paints and fertilizers. Over 100 of those plants have reported that a worst-case scenario, like a terrorist attack, could endanger more than 1 million people, according to the Congressional Research Service. “These plants are the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction prepositioned in some of the most congested parts of our country,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

(Read the article)

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The subversion of electoral democracy … takes vast planning and tremendous effort, and a ton of laundered cash. In short, it has to be that movement’s main concern; and I believe that it is Bush/Cheney’s main concern, and that it is the main concern of the regime’s most fervent backers.

* * *

Well, Mark Crispin Miller is one of our favorite renaissance men filled with passion.  Miller may be a professor at NYU, but if you transplanted his passion and stamina into the backbones of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, you wouldn’t have a silent coup taking place now in the United States. In his “J’accuse” book on the 2004 election, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Miller documents how the Republicans likely stole a second presidential election, just in a more subtle and complicated way than they did in 2000. To those who dismiss such claims as “over the top,” BuzzFlash responds, if the Republicans stole the presidency in 2000 by hot wiring the Supreme Court of the United States, why wouldn’t they do it again if they could? They would — and they probably did.

This interview is being posted in two parts.

* * *
BuzzFlash: Your book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), makes a convincing case that Bush/Cheney stole the last election. It’s not mere speculation, but a solid survey of appalling facts, all of them carefully documented. And yet there are a lot of people out there, many of them liberals, who seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that this administration would resort to vast election fraud.

But that view seems ever more absurd, as the Bush Republicans keep making flagrant moves to thwart democracy by rigging the electoral system to their own advantage. For instance, Bush has recently made two astonishing appointments to the Federal Elections Commission. One is Hans von Spakovsky, who helped Bush/Cheney steal the Florida election in 2000. The other is Robert D. Lenhard, the husband of Viveca Novak-the Time reporter who tipped off Karl Rove’s lawyer that Matt Cooper, her colleague at the magazine, knew that Rove had outed Valerie Plame. So Rove went back to testify again to the grand jury, to tell them he had come across an e-mail that reminded him that he did meet with Cooper. So now the husband of this woman has been nominated to the FEC! What are we to make of such gross impropriety? Bill Clinton never could have got away with it.

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FBI Chief Mueller Questioned Legality Of Spy Program…

“It’s Not Our Mess, And We’re Not Going To Clean It Up”…

By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 – In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about “whether the program had a proper legal foundation,” but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a “vital tool” against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved “thousands of lives.”

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

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Gore’s POWERFUL Constitutional Crisis speech

‘America’s Constitution is in Grave Danger’

MP3 audio

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When they surrendered on the original filibuster confrontation without a fight they told us they were “saving our ammunition.” Strike one.

When they waved Roberts through without demanding access to any of his records for the last 20 years they told us they were “keeping our powder dry.” Strike two.

Don’t DARE try to tell us that now rubberstamping the most radical jurist on the appellate bench is yet more “picking our battles.”

A number of senators in the last couple days have made statements to the effect they did not hear anything at Alito’s confirmation hearing that would make them vote against him. Of course not, because he did not actually say ANYTHING!

Alito is on the record stating that he believes in a dictatorial model of the president and that a woman’s private decisions are up for grabs. He lied about his position on the former and categorically refused to repudiate the later. Robert Bork himself stated the other day he believes conclusively that Alito still holds that view. THAT is the evidence to filibuster Alito, not what he might have evaded saying at his hearing.

This is our litmus test. If our senators will not protect us from this constitutional outrage, we call for each and every one to be defeated in their next election. We call for candidates to arise in their own primaries if necessary to punish them for their cowardice and their complicity. If putting their own job on the line is not a circumstance “extraordinary” enough for them we don’t know what is.

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By E. J. Dionne Jr.

I underestimated the viciousness of the right wing.

Last November, Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat and a decorated Marine combat veteran, came out for a rapid American withdrawal from Iraq. At the time, I wrote: “It will be difficult for Bush’s acolytes to cast Murtha, who has regularly stood up for the military policies of Republican presidents during his 31 years in Congress, as some kind of extreme partisan or hippie protester.”

No, the conservative hit squad didn’t accuse Murtha of being a hippie. But a crowd that regularly defends President Bush for serving in the Texas Air National Guard instead of going to Vietnam has continued its war on actual Vietnam veterans. An outfit called the Cybercast News Service last week questioned the circumstances surrounding the awarding of two Purple Hearts to Murtha because of wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War.

John Kerry, as well as John McCain — who faced scurrilous attacks on his war record when he was running against Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary — could have warned Murtha: If you’re a Vietnam veteran, don’t you dare get in the way of George W. Bush.

David Thibault, editor in chief of Cybercast, made it very clear to The Post’s Howard Kurtz and Shailagh Murray that Murtha was facing accusations about his 1967 service now because “the congressman has really put himself in the forefront of the antiwar movement.” In other words, if Murtha had just shut up and gone along with Bush, nothing would have been said about his service.

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“The President Of The United States Has Been Breaking The Law Repeatedly And Persistently”

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens – Democrats and Republicans alike – to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped – one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

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by Molly Ivins

Boy, you really can’t take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they’re not screwing up one thing, then they’re screwing up another — busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they have created all by themselves: The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit is such a disaster area, four states took it over in less than a week just to make sure poor people received their drugs.

Some of the press are starting to get the drill. Give us something like the West Virginia coal mine disaster, and instead of standing around emoting like Geraldo Rivera, a few reporters have enough sense to ask the obvious question: What is this mine’s safety record? And when it turns out to be abysmal, a few more reporters have enough sense to ask: Who’s in charge of doing something after a mine gets 205 safety violations in one year? Where’s the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Who runs it? What’s their background — are they professionals or mining industry stooges? Who’s the Michael “Heckuvajob” Brown in this outfit? Why are so many jobs at MSHA just left completely unfilled? How much has MSHA’s budget been cut since 2001 to pay for tax cuts for the rich?

The great irony is that this was supposed to be the CEO administration. Bush was supposed to put people in charge of government who had track records in private industry, who did in fact know how to run a railroad. For just sheer incompetence, this administration sets new records daily. All those years the right wing sat around yammering about government incompetence, and it took this administration to make it true.

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Terry Tillman

I

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The controversial author explains why Bolivia’s new president, Argentina’s anti-IMF rebellion and the NYC transit strike are all harbingers of things to come.

By John Perkins, AlterNet

Most people in the United States know that a transit strike crippled New York City. Fewer are aware that seven South American countries, representing over 80 percent of the continent’s population, recently elected presidents with anti-American sentiments. The former has an immediate effect. The latter will impact our children for decades to come.

In December 2005, Evo Morales buried seven challengers — taking 54 percent of the vote — in what the New York Times referred to as “the most important election since Bolivia’s transition from dictatorship to democracy a generation ago.” His platform appealed to the poor, including farmers whose main source of income, coca plants, caused them to suffer brutal treatment at the hands of U.S. drug agents. Although U.S. politicians and the media have denounced coca because it is used to produce cocaine, the fact is that it is extremely important in the Andes as a legal remedy for altitude sickness, digestive problems and other illnesses.

Evo Morales is the latest in a long list of democratically elected Latin American presidents whose primary appeal is their opposition to U.S., IMF and World Bank policies that favor foreign corporations with reputations for exploiting natural resources and local labor. Bolivia joins the ranks of previously pro-American countries that have recently turned against Washington and Wall Street, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Argentina’s President Kirchner recently announced what has been hailed as an “anti-IMF rebellion.” He paid off nearly $10 billion in IMF debt in order to get out from under a burden that, he said, “caused poverty and pain among the Argentine people.”

Venezuela’s President Chavez has become a popular spokesman for anti-U.S. sentiments around the world.

(Read the article)

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