Viva America Latina!

From the NY Times:

ONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct. 31 - Tabaré Vázquez, a Socialist doctor running as the candidate of an opposition coalition that includes former guerrillas, narrowly triumphed Sunday in the presidential election, bringing the left to power for the first time in this South American country.

The victory by the coalition, known as the Progressive-Encounter-Broad-FrontNew-Majority, whose largest faction consists of Tupamaro guerrillas turned politicians, strengthens a trend throughout the continent. As in the last presidential votes in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina, the candidate most opposed to American-supported free-market policies has defeated backers of those policies.

(emphasis added)

The people of Latin America have realized that "globalization" norteamericano style means poverty and repression. They know this from over half a century of World Bank, IMF, and WTO policies designed to bankrupt their economies and impoverish the workers. It looks more and more like the Free Trade Area of the Americas, FTAA (or ALCA en Espanol) may be a dead letter. That will be very good for the people of South America, but it will also be a huge benefit for the large majority of US citizens who get most of their income from wages (or used to). The best way to really win in the race to the bottom is to drop out. If our two-sided single party won't bring common sense and fairness to trade, hopefully the world will force it on us.

I saw the movie "The Corporation" last Monday. One of the best parts for me was its coverage of the story of Cochabamba Bolivia's recapturing of its municipal water system, which the globalizers had managed to put into the hands of Bechtel. Hopefully the Zapatistas in Mexico achieve success as well in turning that country's government into an agent for the people and not for gringo corporations like Coca Cola and General Electric. (They've got a ways to go, since President Vicente Fox is a former Coca Cola exec, and Mexico is the only country on the planet to consume more Coca Cola per capita than the US.)

Only in Texas!

Is that the Junior Klan getting ready to do the halftime show at the Lions-Cowboys game in Dallas?

Bring back Janet Jackson.

Peak Oil! Peak Oil! Peak Oil!

Back in June, I went to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in Wisconsin. One of the most memorable and enlightening parts of that fair for me was the talk given by Richard Heinberg on the subject of peak oil. I ordered the DVD of that talk, and just got it yesterday. I spent the last hour watching it, and I think it is something every American should see. If you're local, I'll be glad to share my copy with you--otherwise, please order one from the MREA Marketplace for $10. You can also read Heinberg's book The Party's Over for a more thorough discussion of peak oil. Here's one of my previous posts on peak oil. You might want to know about it BEFORE it ruins your life!

Friendly Militias

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense who in a slightly more honorable world would be in the unemployment line, and in a more honorable world than that would be in prison for the lies he told about Iraqi WMD's, and under a world ruled by a harsh yet just God would have been struck down by lightning long ago, has come up with yet another brilliant scheme: funding a "global anti-terrorist network of friendly militias." Congress, having learned from its previous mistake of being fooled by Wolfowitz, has eagerly agreed to be fooled once again, approving the scheme to the tune of $25 million (I know, Halliburton has swindled us out of more than that in the time it has taken you to read this post, but it still seems like a lot of money to me!). WIIIAI explains the cons and cons of this scheme:

At best, millions in bribes will be put in the hands of unsavory thugs, such as the Afghan warlords who sold their opponents to the CIA to be spirited away to Guantanamo, and the next generation of Chalabis. At worst, the money will build up forces that will destabilize nations, commit atrocities, or otherwise come back to bite us in the ass, like the aid given to mujahaddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

They lied. They continue to lie. They ALWAYS lie.

Cyndy links to this video reminding us of "flip-flops" of the Bushies on the subject of weapons of mass destruction. To think that there are people out there, including my own sister, who still support this idiot lying bastard makes me want to scream. That my sister's two sons, my nephews (one of whom reads this blog regularly and generally agees with me!), will probably lose their public-school teaching jobs in the next few years because of Bush's policies, or that some of their students, many of whom she knows personally, will probably be drafted, or that her newborn granddaughter's opportunities in life will be seriously restricted, all because of Bush's policies and actions, doesn't seem to faze her. Of course, much of the problem lies with John Kerry, who supported many of Bush's worst policies, and could easily have been included in the above-linked video. ("Why is Saddam Hussein pursuing weapons that most nations have agreed to limit or give up? Why is Saddam Hussein guilty of breaking his own cease-fire agreement with the international community? Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try, and responsible nations that have them attempt to limit their potential for disaster?" -- John Kerry, speech in the Senate, October 9, 2002.) My sister, if she hears anything at all, hears only arguments from Kerry suggesting that he could pull off the crime of the century better than Bush has. And she clearly sees it as an either/or situation. For some bizarre reason probably eminating from Rush Limbaugh, she believed that Bush was a decent, intelligent man. I'm not sure she still really believes that, but she sees the issue as only Bush v. Kerry, and Kerry hasn't done anything to convince her that he's a better option. I currently think he is, although not in any way that will avoid most of the catastrophes that Bush has led us into (with lots of Democratic support). Not liking Kerry is easy and very understandable. Still, supporting the worst president in history, who is actually running on a platform consisting of his worst failures (9/11, the war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind), is utterly incomprehensible. Kerry is only a likely failure; Bush is a proven one. Not voting for Kerry is excusable (and I might still vote for Cobb or Nader myself, although I'm helping with GOTV efforts in poor neighborhoods to soothe my angst if I do); voting for Bush isn't. There's an old joke: "Which is worse, ignorance or apathy?" To which the answer is "I don't know, and I don't care." That's the answer you're giving to the children of this country and the people of the world if you vote for Bush.

(I'm really no good at arguing with my sister; I'm sort of hoping my nephew will be able to use these arguments and give it a try! You go, Paul!!!)

Eight Marines Killed in Iraq

FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- Eight U.S. Marines were killed and nine wounded Saturday in al Anbar province west of Baghdad, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said.

The casualties came amid heavy air and artillery assaults in the province, where the restive city of Falluja is located.

A Marines spokesman said those casualties were outside Falluja in a single incident. No further details were immediately available.

The endorsement neither candidate wanted

And thank Allah that neither one got it. I've struggled a few times trying to explain my feelings about how to treat the opinions of people who are not respected. Most recently, I complained about the Kerry campaign jumping on the story about the Iranian leadership endorsing Bush. That particular gaffe looks particularly foolish now that the new Osama tape has come out. If OBL had specifically said that Kerry should be elected, whatever the reason, the Bushies would have been all over it, and could have cited the Kerryistas' reaction to the Iran endorsement as justification. If you don't respect terrorists, their opinion shouldn't count one way or the other to you. You act according to your own morals or interests or whatever, without regard to what they say or what you think they want. If "letting the terrorists win" is the best course of action, by all means let them win! The Spanish knew this back in March, voting out their sleazebag government despite the idiotic charges of "letting the terrorists win." You're not doing it to let them win; you're doing it because it's the best course of action. In an honest political system with integrity, all candidates would reject the opinions of those they don't respect not as wrong, necessarily, but irrelevant. Unfortunately, we are light-years away from an honest political system with integrity, and Osama might have derailed the Kerry express with an endorsement. Don't be surprised if Karl Rove stays up late tonight concocting a Zarqawi endorsement for Kerry.

Anyway, I think both Juan Cole and WIIIAI do a better job of reviewing Osama's latest video (due out on DVD in time for Christmas) than I would, so I'll refer you to them.

Harvest Moon

Cyndy points out that Robert Parry, author of the book I reviewed last night, has a Dark Side of Rev. Moon page on his web site.

Bad news, bad news, whatcha gonna do?

I'm scared to think what Rove's October/November surprise might be, now that the media is even doing bad-news metastories, like this one from AP and today's Krugman column. The thing to remember here is that very little of the bad "news" this week is, or should be, news. Al Qaqaa was clearly looted after April 9, 2003, and before June 2003. The administration knew this all along. The report of 100,000 civilian deaths since the war began is new, but those people have been dying all along, not just this week. Osama got away 2 1/2 years ago. The fact that more money would be needed to keep Cheney's "remarkable success" going was obvious, even if not reported until this week. Halliburton has been an ongoing scandal since well before the war. Enlarging the time frame to a month instead of a week, it should have been obvious to everyone a year or more ago that Iraq had no serious WMD's or programs, but that only became common wisdom with the Duelfer report earlier this month. Attempts to disenfranchise voters and steal votes through electronic voting machines have been going on for years, but they've only made the front pages recently.

So far, the October Surprise this year has been the media finally doing their job reporting on the disaster that is the Bush administration, after three years and nine months of neglect or worse. As I've said before, it seems as though the wealthy people who really run the world have decided that the Bush presidency is just too dangerous to continue. And that is why John Kerry will be elected president on Tuesday. Karl Rove may still be planning his own surprise, and it might be awful. Then again, Karl may well have gotten a call from his controller telling him to back off if he ever hopes to get that seat on the board of the Carlyle Group.

Wait a minute...

It just occurred to me, looking over my previous post, what it means when David Kay says this: "Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the US has in its entire inventory." Just today, I've learned that the al Qaqaa cache was only 0.06 percent of the total munitions in Iraq, or about 1/1600. Earlier this week, we learned that the explosives missing from al Qaqaa are enough to blow up some 8000 federal buildings, or one million jetliners. So that means, roughly, that Iraq had enough conventional munitions to blow up some 12 million federal buildings, or 1.6 billion airliners. And Kay just told us that the US has 50% more than that! (Not to mention, we've got nukes too.)

That's all Cheney'd up.

Friday Pumpkin Blogging

This is the world.


This is the world on Bush. Any questions?

(Editor's note: The sequel to this photo, taken after Kerry had smashed the pumpkin on the sidewalk and captioned "This is the world on Bush," was confiscated by the FBI using one of the many secret provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Photo from WIIIAI.)

[Update] Thanks to WIIIAI and the magic of Google, the missing photo was recovered!

(Alternate photo caption for first photo: Senator John Kerry held up a large pumpkin today. He then challenged President Bush: "President Bush doesn't think I have what it takes to be commander-in-chief. But does the President have what it takes to do this?" Kerry then proceeded to eat the entire pumpkin.)

Fallujacide to Get Much Worse

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. forces are gearing up for a major operation against the insurgent stronghold Fallujah, a U.S. general said Friday, as hundreds of British troops reached a base near Baghdad to free American forces to join the assault.

"We're gearing up to do an operation and when we're told to go we'll go," Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said at a camp near Fallujah. "When we do go, we'll whack them."

Because that's what liberation's all about, right, General?

BTW, the blog Whatever It Is, I'm Against It has been reminding us that Fallujah has been in our bomb sights for a long time (see the previous posts here). WIIIAI's most recent post quotes Ramsey Clark's eye-opening book about the first Bush war against Iraq, The Fire This Time:

"In mid-February [1991], missiles accounted for at least 200 reported civilian deaths and 500 more injured in the town of Falluja. ...These deaths were the result of two separate attacks, allegedly on bridges. ... However, witnesses disagree, calling the bomb placement intentional." The bridge was 1 1/2 km. from the bridge. "The other attack destroyed a row of modern concrete five- and six-story apartment houses near another bridge, as well as several other houses nearby. As Middle East Watch described it, 'All buildings for 400 meters on both sides of the street, houses and market, were flattened.'"

Bush Kay-oed Again

Josh Marshall has the transcript of CNN's Aaron Brown's interview with David Kay, which seems to pretty conclusively "explode" the administration's meager excuse for the al Qaqaa "bombshell." In addition, Kay reinforces the point from the post below in saying that al Qaqaa was just the tip of the iceberg.

Kay: That was one of the most well-documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented. Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the US has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

So while Karl Rove tries to find a way to blame that on Kerry, and Rudy Giuliani tries to blame it on the troops, I've got to ask, "Are we just seeing the tip of the quagmire?"

8000 Oklahoma Cities just small potatoes

According to the Washington Post, Kerry's concern over the missing 377 tons of high explosives from al Qaqaa have "struck some defense experts as exaggerated," given that there are some 250,000 more tons of explosives in the country whose whereabouts are unknown.

"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

Okay. I feel better, don't you? Why worry about enough explosives to blow up one million airliners being unaccounted for, when there is 1600 times as much actually out there? Why should I worry about U.S. citizen Jose Padilla being jailed for over two years without rights of any kind, when there are so many other people being held illegally? Why cry over that one poor Iraqi boy who lost both arms and his entire family in the "shock and awe" bombings at the start of the war, when tens of thousands of other Iraqis have been killed or maimed? Why feel sorry for my friend who lost his job when millions of other Americans are losing theirs? Why complain about the Patriot Act's provision allowing the FBI to inspect my library records, when it takes away so many other rights as well?

I can't really tell what the Post's slant is on this article. While at first reading it could be seen as anti-Kerry, accusing him of another one of those "ex-agg-er-AY-shuns," a more thorough reading would be that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. While the invasion of Iraq didn't prevent the world's most dangerous "weapons of mass destruction" from ending up in the hands of terrorists (because there were no such weapons there), it seems to have greatly facilitated the wide dispersal of the world's most dangerous "conventional" weapons. These are now likely in the hands of not only people we would have considered "terrorists" before the invasion, but thousands more who now see the US as the enemy. And no matter how much Rudy Giuliani tries to blame the troops for this monstrous Cheney-up, the blame clearly belongs to the idiot-in-chief. Worst president ever.

BTW, Giuliani apparently isn't backing down:

"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?" he said on NBC's "Today" show.

That rankled Eleanor Kjellman of Henniker, an Air Force veteran whose son Kurt is an Army reservist in the Mideast.

"That was such a demoralizing, destructive statement for Rudolph Giuliani to make. Once again they (the troops) are scapegoats for the administration's failures," she said at a Democratic protest before a planned appearance by Giuliani in Bedford.

As Kjellman was speaking out, Giuliani was at a GOP event in Gilford. There, he said that in blaming Bush for the missing explosives, Kerry himself was implicitly blaming the troops.

Well, the wingnuts have been trying for two years to equate supporting the troops with supporting the pResident. Now Giuliani is equating blaming the pResident with blaming the troops, clearly a vile and despicable thing for Kerry to do, when he should know that the honorable thing to do is to criticize the troops directly, like Rudy. What a despicable excuse for a human being Giuliani is.

A Charge to Make

Ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz was hired by the G.W. Bush campaign to write aWol's campaign autobiography, "A Charge to Keep." When he turned in the manuscript to Karen Hughes, she complained that it was full of stuff that wasn't true. Herskowitz said he got it all from Bush himself. So they fired Herskowitz, and Hughes rewrote the book in pure BS. Well, Herskowitz has decided to let the world know what candidate Bush told him in 1999. I've already seen other blogs and e-mails focusing on the part where Bush says he was already planning to invade Iraq in 1999, but that hardly seems to be news to me (nor does it really differentiate him from his current opponent). But I think that the real eye-openers are what aWol had to say about wars and success as a president. From the article:

"My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade--if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically.

Frankly, I think this indicts our political system and the ignorant populace far more than it indicts Bush. He's not a particularly bright man, nor does he learn easily. But it seems that he understood this lesson completely.

Template Change

I decided to try a different Blogger template. I'm not sure I like the restricted text width, but I definitely prefer my blockquotes looking like blockquotes, so you can tell the difference between when I'm quoting and when I'm ranting. The "Previous Posts" feature seems nice, too.

Bad Moon Rising

Connect the dots: Nazi Klaus Barbie, Bolivia's Cocaine Coup, weird sex rituals, George H.W. Bush. Okay, a few more hints: The Washington Times, Korea, mass weddings, Capitol Hill coronations, the title of this post. Now, if you worked for the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, you'd come up with the same answer you always did: Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, you probably guessed, correctly, that the dots are connected by the extremely strange person named Sun Myung Moon.

I just finished reading this book:


The book traces the various Republican scandals of the past 32 years and their intricate relationships with the two George Bushes. The book is full of interesting stuff, including a section on the Bush 2000 campaign's elaborate preparations for attacking the electoral college, since their polls were indicating that they might win the popular vote over Al Gore, but lose in the electoral college (in fact, they lost in both). But the most fascinating sections to me were the parts about Reverend Moon. Since you really should read the whole book, I won't give you large selections that will really inform you, but selected sentences and paragraphs to entice you. Fortunately, there is an article online which has much of the stuff I'm leaving out. As for the stuff I'm putting in:

Sun Myung Moon may have the distinction of being the most unusual person ever to wield substantial influence in the capital of the United States.

Known for crowning himself at lavish ceremonies and ranting for hours in Korean about the proper use of sex organs, Moon demonstrated how almost anyone can secure something akin to respectability in Washington if he's willing to spend enough money. In Moon's case, the ticket to influence in Washington was purchased at the price of hundreds of millions of dollars.

-- p 77

According to Pak's book, Moon taught that Jesus was intended to save mankind by having sex with six already-married women who would then have sex with other men who would pass on the purification to other women until, eventually, all mankind would have pure blood. [or HIV--ed]

Pak contended that Moon took on this personal duty as the second Messiah and began having sex with the "six Marys."

-- p. 78

"Here's a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy," said Steve Hassan, a former church leader.

-- p. 84

In 1989, published reports disclosed that Moon had declared that one of his sons, Heung Jin Moon who died in a car crash in 1983, had come back to life in the body of a church member from Zimbabwe. The muscular African--known inside the church as the "black Heung Jin"--then compelled church leaders to stand before him and engage in humiliating self-criticism, sometimes making them sing songs.

During one of these rituals in December 1988, the Zimbabwean severely beat longtime Moon lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, who was then publisher of the Washington Times. Pak reportedly suffered brain damage and impaired speech from the assault, which church sources told me had been sanctioned by Moon after Pak had fallen out of favor.

-- p. 240

"History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him," Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. "That is Father's tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population."

Yep. That's the guy who has supported the Bush family for years, the guy who was crowned humanity’s “savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent” in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on March 23 of this year.

How's your Korean?

CARE shuts down Iraq operations

(CNN) -- The relief agency CARE International has shut down all operations in Iraq and urged insurgents to release its director in Bagdhad, Margaret Hassan, who was kidnapped more than a week ago.

Freedom on the march. Right out of Iraq.

Michigan Voter Information

Michigan voters! You can verify that you are registered and see a sample ballot at publius.org. Print out the ballot, research the candidates and proposals, and take your sample ballot to the polls with you on Tuesday.

BTW, I haven't looked into the details on Michigan Proposal 1 yet. As I understand it, a "yes" vote means that future legislation extending legalized gambling in the state would have to be approved by voter referendum instead of by the legislature. Sort of a referendum on referenda, I guess. I'm not sure that referenda are necessarily preferable to the old representative form of government (and I think a lot of Californians would say that they aren't). But I do think that state-run lotteries are an abomination. Also, I'm so cynical now that I tend to get very nervous about anything that Republicans and Democrats agree on--like wars, Patriot Acts, NAFTA, and so on. So when I saw the ad with Governor Granholm and the Republican Speaker of the House together telling me to vote "no" on 1, my gut reaction was to vote "yes."

If any readers have strong feelings on Prop 1, I'd love to hear them! Here's the Citizens Research Council of Michigan analysis, and a Google search page. I haven't read this stuff yet.

Ted Rall's Ten Reasons Bush Can't Be Allowed to Win

Sometimes I think cartoonist Ted Rall should stick to writing. While some of his cartoons are spot on, they're usually at least a bit confusing, and I think he'd agree that he's not especially gifted with a pencil. But Ted can write. Here are his ten reasons why Bush must go. Rall has explanations for all ten in the article, but I'm only going to include portions I really like. The case against Bush:

1. He stole the 2000 election.
2. He politicized 9/11.
3. He let the terrorists get away while giving them a payraise.
4. He murdered nearly 100,000 people. ("The world would be safer if Charles Manson, a mere amateur killer by comparison, were released and Bush was sitting in prison.")
5. He bankrupted the treasury.
6. He threw thousands of innocent people into concentration camps.
7. We are more feared than Al Qaeda. ("We are feared, which is why we are hated. Because we are hated, we are in greater danger.")
8. Bush has done nothing to improve the economy.
9. Bush will appoint the next Supreme Court justice.
10. We deserve a president who can speak English and doesn't look like a chimpanzee.

A Safer Place

100,000 excess civilian deaths in Iraq due to war.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations (news - web sites) sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighborhoods.

I have seen the "ten thousand civilian deaths" cited since about June of 2003, as if civilians hadn't been dying by the hundreds since then. I don't know how accurate the 100,000 number is, but I'll bet it's a lot closer to the truth than 10,000.

So I guess Bush's new line will have to be: "There may not have been any WMD's or WMD programs or ties to 9/11 or relationships with al Qaeda, but Iraq is definitely a more dangerous place without Saddam Hussein in power." And his idiot supporters won't even notice the difference, and cheer the moron anyway.

[Update] Juan Cole discusses the report in greater detail.

From Bruce Plante.


From Rex Babin.

Deja vu all over again?

The last time the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, before last night, was 1918. That winter, the worst known influenza epidemic in history hit the world, killing 20 to 40 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans (including probably my grandfather, who died when my father was an infant). Both the world-wide and American tolls from the flu exceeded their relative tolls from the "war to end all wars."

Faith-based Presidency

Thomas Schaller expresses his faith in the pResident. Excerpt:

I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited. I believe the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows it was the fault of a handful of misguided underlings who simply misunderstood a memo signed by the Secretary of Defense which authorized the use of dogs to interrogate prisoners.

Domestically, I believe income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are the solution to budget surpluses or deficits, high or low inflation, stable or unstable interest rates, expanding or shrinking trade deficits, widening or narrowing wealth gaps, increasing or decreasing poverty rates, rising or falling unemployment, prosperity or recession, wartime or peace. I believe record-setting budget deficits, record-setting trade deficits, and a burgeoning national debt are examples of the president's fiscally-conservative economic leadership.

One eclipse photo that wasn't awful

It doesn't nearly match up to what I saw through the binoculars, but it's the best photo I got!

Eclipse eclipsed by Red Sox win

Lunar eclipses happen every few years; Red Sox World Series' wins are a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Memo to Boston cops: Don't kill anybody tonight.

Totally Cosmic!

I've been out watching the lunar eclipse through binoculars. Probably the coolest celestial event I recall seeing. It's really cool that you can still see the moon and its features even in the eclipsed area. It's got this cool reddish glow, and it looks much more three-dimensional than it does when fully lit by the sun. Instead of just a bright disk on the sky, it looks like a marble you could reach out and grab. If you missed the moon going into the earth's shadow, be sure to catch it on the way out. It will be in full shadow until 11:45 pm EDT, and fully emerge from the shadow at 12:54 am.

I pointed the digital camera at it a couple of times; I'll load those later and see if they're worth looking at.

He said it, not me!

"...A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief." -- George W. Bush, today.

Saving Energy

I would have been REALLY proud this year if I had played some role in getting Dennis Kucinich elected president. Instead, he got 3% in the Michigan Democratic caucus, and zero planks, give or take, put into the national Democratic platform. So I guess that I'll have to settle for something a bit more personal--that I've cut my electricity usage by over 50%. The chart below shows my usage over the past two-plus years. Note that my October total (actually for Sept. 21 through Oct. 20) is the lowest on the chart, except for January 2004 (which I think was a correction for misreading my meter in December 2003--probably both months should have been around 400 kw-h). I believe this October total reflects three major factors: 1) My general conservation efforts over the past year--compact fluorescent bulbs, putting "phantom loads" on power strips and shutting them off when not in use, switching for a desktop to a laptop computer; 2) Finding out what my biggest energy hog was during the summer and early fall, the dehumidifier, and running it much less often; and 3) my two solar panels. For most of September and much of October, I was able to power most of my TV watching and stereo playing from my solar-charged batteries. I also used a solarpowered 12-volt DC fan instead of a 120-V AC box fan for air circulation. Adding my second, larger solar panel is probably the main reason for the drop from August and September. The next bill may not be quite as good, since we've had a lot of cloudy weather lately, and I've been running the furnace on occasion. Even though it's a gas furnace, it has an electric fan which uses a lot of watts. Anyway, I guess the chart below and this blog are probably the two things I'm proudest of from 2004 so far.

The making of the terror myth

Read this article! Here's the tease:

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of
catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.

Stupid is as stupid does

The "Sensible Liberal" is at it again. I'm sure that Tom Tomorrow and Busy, Busy, Busy and dozens of other bloggers will be all over Nicholas Kristof's latest apology for the worst president ever, but I'm going to get my shot in before I read theirs! Kristof tries to say that Bush is smart, as follows:

My Times colleague John Tierney wrote a few days ago of a new report suggesting, based on their scores on military intelligence tests taken in the 1960's, that Mr. Bush had an I.Q. in the 95th percentile of the population and that John Kerry's was in the 91st percentile. Yet most liberals have not revised their view that Mr. Bush is a nitwit.

Well, Nick, that's probably because most liberals realize that twenty years of acknowledged heavy drinking and who knows how many years of unacknowledged cocaine use can have a detrimental effect on intelligence.[1] I'd suggest that the military tests were correct--both Bush and Kerry were wealthy and connected enough to get out of having to go to Vietnam, but only Bush was smart enough to take advantage.[2] But you'd have to ignore all of the evidence, especially from the three debates, to conclude that Bush is still smarter than Kerry--or a doorknob, for that matter. I think Forrest Gump summed up Bush the best: "Stupid is as stupid does."[3]

Footnotes: 1. Twenty years in the U.S. Senate is probably also detrimental to intelligence, but not as bad as drinking and drugs. 2. Although people of considerably less intelligence than Kerry, like Dan Quayle and John Ashcroft, got out, as did those who were probably smarter, like Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney. Maybe it was only those of high but not exceptional intelligence like Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain and Max Cleland who got stuck going to Vietnam. 3. And Forrest knew several presidents.

8613 Oklahoma City Bombs

From TAPPED:

[T]he lost material at [al Qaqaa] equals between 2,584 - 8613 OK City-size bombs. That's one hell of a lot of material to be on the street -- enough to fuel a car-bomb and IED-based insurgency for years, if not decades.

If the Army didn't have enough troops to secure this site, why not just call in the Air Force? I guess it might have caused a minor earthquake to bomb al Qaqaa, but wouldn't that have been preferable to 8613 Oklahoma City bombs, or one million Lockerbies, delivered one at a time?

Puppet Cuts String

Allawi Blames Coalition for Massacre. From Fox News:

Iraq's interim prime minister blamed U.S.-led coalition forces Tuesday for "great negligence" in the ambush that killed about 50 American-trained soldiers..."It was a heinous crime where a group of National Guards were targeted," Allawi said. "There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces. It seems there was sort of determination on doing Iraq and Iraqi people harm."

I picked the Fox News report to bolster my claim that Bush is toast since pretty much ALL of the media is now reporting his screwups.

Allawi's comments are currently the lead story on MSNBC. They're also prominent at the NY Times and Washington Post. Only CNN has the story hidden deep within another Iraq story.

Priorities

From yesterday's press GAGgle with presidential spokesliar Scott McClellan:

Q But after Iraqi Freedom, there were those caches all around, wasn't the multinational force -- who was responsible for keeping track --

MR. McCLELLAN: At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn't massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur. It was a priority to get the reconstruction office up and running. It was a priority to secure the various ministries, so that we could get those ministries working on their priorities, whether it was --

Ah, yes. Operation Iraqi Liberation. OIL.

Q Scott, did we just have enough troops in Iraq to guard and protect these kind of caches?

MR. McCLELLAN: See, that's -- now you just hit on what I just said a second ago, that the sites now are really -- my understanding, they're the responsibility of the Iraqi forces.

Brilliant, Scotty. Keeping those 380 tons of high explosives, enough to blow up ONE MILLION airplanes, was the responsibility of the Iraqi army that Americans were in the process of massacring back in April 2003. Blaming the victim is an old Bushie sport--this raises it to new levels.

And General Shinseki could tell those commanders what happens to officers who say they need more troops. I think the Nazi Wehrmacht had a similar policy.

Fallujah has been there a while

The blog Whatever It Is, I'm Against It has been making the very valid point that Fallujah didn't just rise up from the earth to kill and mutilate four contractors back on March 31. Fallujah was the site of one of the earliest reported atrocities of this current Iraq war, back in April, 2003, when US troops who had occupied a school shot up a crowd of Fallujans, killing at least 15 and wounding many more. They shot up a bunch more the next day before withdrawing.

WIIIAI added this update yesterday:

In talking about the historical amnesia over Fallujah, I missed a quote, from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who after the 4 contractors were killed said that it "was not the Americans who cast the first stone...in Fallujah." My own historical amnesia was pointed out to me (by email) by blogger ManicNetPreacher, who noted that in the 1st Gulf War, the market in Fallujah was bombed twice in separate incidents (by the British).

A Safer Place: The Daily Carnage Report

From Juan Cole:

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in western Baghdad, killing 1 US soldier and wounding five other US troops.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as an Estonian patrol passed, killing one soldier and wounding 5 others.

Near the Australian embassy in Baghdad, guerrillas used a car bomb to attack Australian military vehicles. They eounded 3 Australian soldiers lightly, but killed 3 Iraqis and wounded 6 others.

In Mosul, one suicide car bomber detonated his payload at provincial government offices, killing 3 Iraqi government employees and wounding one. Another car bomber targeted an Iraqi military convoy in the city, wounding an Iraqi general, Mu`tazz al-Taqah.

AP says that guerrilla attacks are up 25 percent since the beginning of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Gee, I wonder where all the explosives for all of those bombs came from.

Riverbend Endorses Kerry

From Iraqi blogger Riverbend:

Who am I hoping will win? Definitely Kerry. There’s no question about it. I want Bush out of the White House at all costs. (And yes- who is *in* the White House *is* my business- Americans, you made it my business when you occupied my country last year) I’m too realistic to expect drastic change or anything phenomenal, but I don’t want Bush reelected because his reelection (or shall I call it his ‘reassignment’) will condone the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It will say that this catastrophe in Iraq was worth its price in American and Iraqi lives. His reassignment to the White House will sanction all the bloodshed and terror we’ve been living for the last year and a half.

I’ve heard all the arguments. His supporters are a lot like him- they’ll admit no mistakes. They’ll admit no deceit, no idiocy, no manipulation, no squandering. It’s useless. Republicans who *don’t* support him, but feel obliged to vote for him, write long, apologetic emails that are meant, I assume, to salve their own conscience. They write telling me that he should be ‘reelected’ because he is the only man for the job at this point. True, he made some mistakes and he told a few fibs, they tell me- but he really means well and he intends to fix things and, above all, he has a plan.

Let me assure you Americans- he has NO PLAN. There is no plan for the mess we’re living in- unless he is cunningly using the Chaos Theory as a basis for his Iraq plan. Things in Iraq are a mess and there is the sense that the people in Washington don’t know what they’re doing, and their puppets in Iraq know even less. The name of the game now in Iraq is naked aggression- it hasn’t been about hearts and minds since complete areas began to revolt. His Iraq plan may be summarized with the Iraqi colloquial saying, “A’athreh ib dafra”, which can be roughly translated to ‘a stumble and a kick’. In other words, what will happen, will happen and hopefully- with a stumble and a kick- things will move in the right direction.
...
I guess what I’m trying to say is this: Americans, the name of your country which once stood for ‘freedom and justice’ is tarnished worldwide. Your latest president has proved that the great American image of democracy is just that- an image. You can protest, you can demonstrate, you can vote- but it ends there. The reigns were out of your hands the moment Bush stepped into the White House. You were deceived repetitively and duped into two wars. Your sons and daughters are dying, and killing, in foreign lands. Your embassies are in danger all over the world. ‘America’ has become synonymous with ‘empire’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘warfare’. And why? All because you needed to be diverted away from the fact that your current president is a failure.

Some people associate the decision to go to war as a ‘strength’. How strong do you need to be to commit thousands of your countrymen and women to death on foreign soil? Especially while you and your loved ones sit safely watching at home. How strong do you need to be to give orders to bomb cities to rubble and use the most advanced military technology available against a country with a weak army and crumbling infrastructure? You don’t need to be strong- you need to be mad.

From Kevin Siers.


From J.D. Crowe.


From Bill Schorr.


From Jimmy Margulies.


From Signe Wilkinson.


From Mark Cohen.

Paul Wellstone, two years later

Senator Paul Wellstone's plane crashed two years ago today, killing Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, and five others. I still say they were murdered.



BTW: This was my last post before his plane crashed:

Anti-war vote hasn't hurt Wellstone. This Reuters report says that the Senator's chances for re-election may have improved since he voted against Bush's Iraq war resolution. I'm going to Minnesota next week to volunteer for his campaign, just to make sure. I chewed out another online organization yesterday. A couple of weeks ago I discovered that the supposedly anti-war Council for a Livable World was still collecting donations for several candidates who voted for the Iraq war resolution. And now there's MoveOn. MoveOn.org had conducted a major campaign to call and write members of Congress prior to the war resolution votes on October 10, but now that the votes have been cast, MoveOn is still raising funds for several who voted for war, including Senators Harkin, Carnahan and Johnson. I don't see how we can expect these Republicrats to oppose Bush on other wars, or environmental issues, or Supreme Court nominees, if they fail to vote against an unnecessary, unjustified, and just plain evil war. MoveOn brags about Wellstone's vote, but doesn't mention the votes of Harkin, Carnahan and Johnson. You'd think there would be somebody out there you can trust!

(Emphasis added. I didn't go to Minnesota, instead working on local campaigns and a Congressional race in Indiana.)

Ralph Speaks!

Of the zillion depressing things that have happened this year, few have depressed me as much as the non-stop attacks on Ralph Nader. People who whine endlessly about the latest swiftboat ad for its negative campaigning turn around and call Ralph every name in the book. Supporters of a candidate formerly best known for his principled opposition to the Vietnam who supported and continues to support the ongoing war crime in Iraq have unmercifully attacked Nader for "abandoning his principles." And their candidate, rather than make Ralph a non-factor by stealing a few planks from his platform, instead just dares progressives to vote for Ralph by stealing plank after plank from Bush's platform.

Anyway, Ralph has an answer for his critics. Here's an excerpt:

The liberal intellectual and political leadership has shown itself un-willing to fight for its beliefs, hiding behind the claim that George Bush is such a unique threat that courage, reason, and studied belief all must be abandoned this year. Is Bush really more sinister than Nixon? More frightening than Reagan with his missiles and unworkable missile defense? Think of those times when the missile-loaded US and the USSR were less than an hour from mutually assured destruction. Will the intellectual leaders of the left feel more comfortable with the next GOP nominee in 2008 or 2012? If not, is it too soon for them to prepare for their next surrender? Is there any end-point logic to the "least worst" candidate?
...
Those who have influence over others have a special obligation to consider--and reconsider--their role in terms of the old labor ballad: "Which side are you on?" Are you on the side of the citizens, the workers, the families of America, or the global corporations that have no loyalty to our country? Those who consider themselves on the side of the people, justice and democracy must stop cowering in fear. They need to call the anemic Democratic Party to account for its ten years of losses--local, state and federal --to the worst of the Republicans. If they do not exert open pressure on their Party, progressives can surely expect more of the same.

Frankly, I think that the powers behind the throne have gotten exactly what they wanted. What they wanted wasn't a Bush victory due to Nader "taking" votes from Kerry (sorry, folks, my vote belongs to ME, not Kerry), they wanted to eliminate third-party challenges and the progressive ideas they represent. And they have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations. With a few Repugs offering insignificant support to Nader, they managed to have DEMOCRATS do the dirty work of denigrating Nader for them. I think the story of Nader's recent removal from the Pennsylvania ballot speaks volumes. "Republicans" helped with his petition drive, but their help apparently consisted of filling out hundreds of petition sheets with names like "Mickey Mouse" and "Ralph Nader." The courts ruled that two-thirds of the signatures were bogus, leaving Nader without enough valid signatures to qualify. Whether he could have qualified without the Repug help is unknown, but by the time of the ruling it was too late to get any more. Kerryistas were practically dancing in the streets at the ruling, laughing at Nader and the "Republicans" who helped him.

Now, Nader supporters are probably hard-headed; quixotic, even. But I'll bet that the vast majority of actual supporters out petitioning for him wouldn't dream of forging signatures. I'd guess that some 90% of the bogus signatures came from the "Republicans" who "helped" him. I don't know if these were actually Republicans or what, but whoever they were, I don't think their goal was to get Nader on the ballot. This was done on purpose to guarantee that he wouldn't be on the ballot, and to discredit him besides. Most Kerryistas probably wouldn't stoop this low, but the powers behind the throne would. And they care more about keeping progressive issues out of the election than they do who wins between Bush and Kerry (actually, as I've said before, I believe they're working for Kerry now).

In any case, their strategy has worked like a charm. They've got most "progressives" in this country badmouthing the best-known progressive candidate at every opportunity.

One more thing for Kerryistas to consider: If Kerry gets Wellstoned, there won't be a viable candidate on enough ballots to defeat Bush--Bush would probably get over 60% of the popular vote and all of the electoral votes. You may not have thought of that, but I'll bet Dick and Karl have.

The view from the north

Linda McQuaig of the Toronto Star writes about her concerns that the issue of international law seems to be completely missing from the presidential campaign, except in the sense that each candidate wants to prove that he would break it more aggressively. The whole article is good; I found this part especially telling:

Michael Mandel, a law professor at York University's Osgoode Hall, notes that the Nuremberg Tribunal following World War II ruled that starting a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, because it's the crime from which all the other war-related crimes flow.

Mandel argues that the invasion of Iraq amounts to the supreme international crime.

The Bush administration has tried to claim the high moral ground, stressing that it puts great effort into avoiding civilian casualties in Iraq.

This is nonsense. If it is engaged in a war of aggression, any casualties it creates — deliberate or accidental — are a violation of international law, not to mention a gross injustice. And countless Iraqis have been killed by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington presents its ongoing attacks on insurgents as self-defensive, but Mandel insists that an aggressor has no right to self-defence. "If you break into someone's house and hold them at gunpoint and they try to kill you but you kill them first, they're guilty of nothing and you're guilty of murder."

How Kerry or Bush Might Avoid a Draft

Zeynep at Under the Same Sun suggests that the way they may try to keep Americans out of uniform is the same way they've kept them out of jobs--by getting the impoverished masses of Latin America to do it. According to Zeynep, a US security company is running ads in El Salvador for security guards to work in Iraq at $1700 a month, including life insurance. He and his commenters raise several good points on the subject, and I don't have much to add. But it's cheap, it's immoral, it's piling crime on top of crime--so maybe he's right.

Dollar drops to 8-month low vs. Euro

From CBS Marketwatch:

The dollar tumbled against the euro for a ninth day Monday, hitting eight-month lows against the European currency, as rising oil prices and next week's tightly fought presidential election cloud the outlook for the U.S. economy.
...
The dollar, which fell below 107 yen for the first time in more than six months, traded at 106.6 yen compared with 107.24 yen in late U.S. trading Friday.

The dollar's decline against the yen was in line with the greenback's fall against the euro, said Masatoshi Nishi, a treasury and securities manager at Saitama Resona Bank in Tokyo. "Absent clear support, the dollar could fall further to the 105 yen level quickly," Nishi said.

"There is hardly any good factor to be found for the dollar and the U.S. economy, accelerating the dollar-selling," said Nishi.

In the long term, this might be good for America, providing through currency exchange rates the types of tariffs needed for job creation that the free-traders generally reject. In the short term, it might be good for America since it might be one more nail in Bush's coffin (although probably the only part of it most Americans will notice or understand is the higher gasoline prices).

Al Qaqaa

With the revelation that the huge al Qaqaa stockpile of high explosives in Iraq went unguarded after last year's invasion, and that some 380 tons are missing, it stands to reason that the main supplier of bomb materiel for the insurgents is probably the US military's own incompetence.

Blindfolds for Bush

Good Tom Tomorrow cartoon today. (Requires viewing ad on Salon)

$55.60

From CBS Marketwatch:

Crude-oil futures rose 0.8 percent to record intraday levels Monday after a threatened strike by Norwegian shipowners added to the concerns in the oil market over supplies at a time of high demand.

The benchmark New York contract was last up 43 cents at $55.60 a barrel, topping the intraday record for crude for December delivery at $55.50 bbl on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday.

Bush is still toast

From Bob Herbert in today's NY Times:

Here's George W. Bush's problem. How does a president win re-election when all the news the voters are seeing is bad?

Herbert goes on to cite all sorts of bad news from the headlines: Multiple disasters in Iraq, high oil prices, shortage of flu vaccine, bad economic numbers. And while I agree with Herbert that the bad news will probably sink Bush next week, I don't think that it's really the bad news in itself--it's the fact that it is finally being reported. What generally makes headlines isn't generally what we need to know; it's what the powerful people who control the world want us to know. For three and a half years, they didn't want us to know that George W. Bush was a total screw-up. Now they do. He's toast. Even if (when) he tries to steal the election again, the media, and possibly even the Democrats, won't let it happen as easily as it did in 2000. But I suspect that on November 3 a lot of people will be wondering why the polls showed that this failed incumbent even had a chance.

Once more, with feeling: Corporations are Criminals

K-Mart, being less adept at extorting money from its suppliers and employees than its monstrous cousin Wal-Mart, makes its CEO's rich on the backs of stockholders and taxpayers.

A story from Thursday's Detroit Free Press: $105 million awaits former Kmart CEO

Julian Day, who helped lift Kmart from the scrap heap of American retailing to become a profitable company, will walk away from the Troy retailer with stock options valued at $105 million as of Wednesday, according to his exit package detailed in a government filing.
...
The news was met with a series of groans from some analysts as well as former Kmart employees and shareholders, who lost billions in stock when Kmart emerged from bankruptcy last year and declared old shares worthless.

Kmart has amassed nearly $3 billion in cash from operations and selling stores to other retailers since emerging from bankruptcy last year. It has not said how it intends to spend it.

"This is a company with billions of dollars. How they worked this deal is just unbelievable," said Gordon Heilbrunn, a former shareholder from Madison Heights. "My main concern is all these people got taken." Former Kmart executive Gary Ruffing, now a retail consultant at BBK Ltd. in Southfield, said: "I wish it was me. I lost everything. It certainly seems like a lot of money if you consider it was his job to fix the retail business and there are still double-digit declines in sales."

So surely the state of Michigan will step in on behalf of the stockholders who were screwed so this clown could walk away with a cool hundred mil, right? Of course not. From Saturday's Free Press:

The state has offered Kmart Holding Corp. at least $45 million in incentives to keep its headquarters in Michigan, according to documents obtained by the Free Press under the Freedom of Information Act.

The nation's third-largest discount retailer also has asked officials in Michigan and Georgia to sweeten the pot with a $10-million cash payment, the Free Press has learned from people who requested anonymity. Kmart spokeswoman Caryn Klebba said Friday that the company had no comment on the relocation efforts.

"It's not unusual to push cities to do things. Incentives are expected. As far as a lump of cash on top of that, anything is on the table," said a local real estate expert who requested anonymity. "It is a little extreme, given the budgets of states."

So K-Mart gives a CEO who sold off a bunch of its stores (laying off workers in the process) and screwed its stockholders through bankruptcy $105 million, and then turns around and tries to extort the state for $10 million in cold cash on top of $45 million in incentives. Here's my suggestion: K-Mart takes $55 million out of Day's golden parachute instead of the state incentives, and takes the remaining $50 million and shoves it up its flashing blue light.

Aggessive Marketing

From Today's Alternative News via Michelle:

A new report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country's food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.

"The US has been imposing patents on life around the world through trade deals. In this case, they invaded the country first, then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable", said Shalini Bhutani, one of the report's authors.

The new law in question [2] heralds the entry into Iraqi law of patents on life forms - this first one affecting plants and seeds. This law fits in neatly into the US vision of Iraqi agriculture in the future - that of an industrial agricultural system dependent on large corporations providing inputs and seeds.

In 2002, FAO estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used saved seed from their own stocks from last year's harvest or purchased from local markets. When the new law - on plant variety protection (PVP) - is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary "PVP-protected" planting material "invented" by transnational agribusiness corporations. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi farmers have made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers' freedoms and a grave threat to food sovereignty in Iraq. In this way, the US has declared a new war against the Iraqi farmer.

This claiming of the world's food crops as proprietary was accomplished by stealth in this country, with Monsanto being the primary burglar and Repugs and Democruds being the accomplices. In Iraq, this theft of people's right to food was an armed robbery.

You've probably seen the definition of chutzpah: A guy who kills his mother and father and then begs for mercy from the court because he's an orphan. Until recently, I thought that probably the prime example of engineering chutzpah was the story of the Chicago River. The Chicago River originally flowed, like most rivers, downhill. In Chicago, that meant that it flowed into Lake Michigan. But the Chicago River was Chicago's main sewer, so by 1890 Chicagoans found that what they'd flushed during the week was washing up on the beaches of Lake Michigan when they wanted to go swimming on the weekend. So did Chicago's engineers develop a state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant, or figure out a way to safely compost the sewage so it could benefit the abundant agriculture of the area? If that's the way you think, you'll never get far as an American engineer! No, the American way was to TURN AROUND THE RIVER, so that it now flows FROM Lake Michigan back to the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers. So when Chicagoans flush, they don't have to see it on their beaches--instead, Peoria gets the pleasure.

So, that was my definition of engineering chutzpah--until I started reading about genetically-modified organisms. With hardly any debate, Monsanto and their ilk have quietly taken over America's farms with GM corn, soybeans, canola, and many other crops. Farmers can't use these crops without paying Monsanto. But these crops tend to spread, and Monsanto actually sues farmers who grow their frankenfoods unintentionally.

There is a red herring in this debate--whether GM foods are safe for human consumption. Even though we never got a chance to approve the experiment, the experiment has been performed, and, by and large, GM crops appear to be relatively safe. (If they weren't, I wouldn't be able to write this nor you able to read this, since GM foods dominate in American markets--almost all processed foods have at least some GM content.) So, candidates like Bush and Kerry will try to downplay concerns about GMO's by saying that they're safe for humans--and they probably are--to eat. Where they aren't safe is in their threat to biodiversity and food security.

Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" corn gives it a distinct advantage over natural corn because the R-R corn can be drenched in (Monsanto's) Roundup weed killer without killing the corn. So R-R corn will have higher yields, since it doesn't have to compete with weeds. And so many farmers will end up growing R-R corn, most intentionally, and other strains of corn will disappear. But eventually Roundup resistant weeds will arise (some of them probably even evolved from the R-R corn itself), as will new types of insects who have a special taste for R-R corn. If the old, natural strains of corn are gone, the nation's entire corn crop may be at risk. Biodiversity provides protection against such devastating crop loss; GM crops destroy that biodiversity.

The related concern is food security--if your right to grow food is owned by a (vile evil scumbag) corporation, then it is always prone to having its price raised or being taken away from you entirely. No one should be able to patent food crops, or biological organisms in general. In case you aren't aware, that last sentence is in direct contradiction of official US government policy which is supported by both major-party candidates.

And attacking a country for which your only remaining excuse is the "march of freedom," when you are taking away the people's right to even hold on to their own food seeds? That's chutzpah.

Screw the Strategy--Just Exit!

We're going to train troops, and we are. We'll have 125,000 trained by the end of December.

-- aWol, from the second debate. Notice that he didn't say that the Iraqi army will have 125,000 troops by December; he only claimed that 125,000 would be trained. Desertion rates are reportedly around 50%, and Iraqi troops are dying by the dozen (something which seems to be a bragging point for Cheney and Rumsfeld). In fact, some 50 Iraqi troops were just found dead--executed--on a remote road in eastern Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The bodies of about 50 Iraqi soldiers were found on a remote road in eastern Iraq, apparently the victims of an ambush as they were heading home on leave, Iraqi authorities said Sunday.

Interior Ministry spokesman Adnan Abdul-Rahman said the victims were believed to have been killed about sundown Saturday on a road about 95 miles east of Baghdad near the Iranian border.

There were conflicting reports on the exact number of dead, whether they were members of the Iraqi army or the Iraqi National Guard and whether they were all killed execution-style.

Iraqi government spokeswoman Maha Malik quoted witnesses as saying insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at about two vehicles carrying the unarmed troops.

Gen. Walid al-Azzawi, commander of the Diyala provincial police, said the bodies were laid out in four rows each, with 12 bodies in each row.

"After inspection, we found out that they were shot after being ordered to lay down on the earth," he said.

The allies aren't going to save our butts in Iraq. Iraqi soldiers under coalition command certainly aren't going to save our butts. There is no exit strategy. Hence my new slogan: "Screw the strategy--just exit!"

How do advertisers sleep at night?

Since I watch most of my TV via TiVo, I fast forward through most commercials. But sometimes I get caught watching one, and I am nearly always aghast at the total depravity of the message.

Today, I see an ad where a youngish mother is driving her kids to the first day of school. She thinks, maybe they don't want to be seen being dropped off by their mom, so she offers to let them out a block away. "No thanks, Mom." So, they pull up in front of the school, and as her kids exit the vehicle, the cool, tough looking kids in front of the school step back and look at her kids in awe. The camera pans back, and you see that Mom drives a Hummer. The kids' message to Mom: "Thanks, Mom, for spending our college money on this monstrosity so we can impress our incredibly shallow classmates for a few seconds while you use up most of the world's remaining resources driving us to school." Hummer's message to the kids at the school: "Respect your betters who arrive in Hummers." Their message to everyone: "Obscene consumption is the only way to go."

What a friggin' sick country.