Open Thread

Til John gets back from Batman... Read the rest of this post...

Bush and the theocrats REALLY want your porn

Came across this tidbit via Think Progress. After a fun week with Mary Carey, the Bush administration is planning a big porn crackdown, we learn via Tony Perkins:

I just met with Attorney General Gonzales and right now he is launching a major effort to prosecute the porn industry. He intends to smash these criminal enterprises on the Internet and elsewhere with a special new obscenity strike force. That is the only way to handle hardcore pornographers!

Bush and people like Perkins are OBSESSED with sex. Just obsessed with it. I wonder if Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich and Karl Rove are going to be on the "obscenity strike force"?

However one feels about porn, most of it comes right in to the home now (I hear). So, the Bush/theocrats team are going to start invading the privacy of your home through your computer. Scary, huh? This is going to really affect a lot of those red state white guys....Bush wants your porn, fellas. And, he is going to start prosecuting.

The theocrats are all about taking away privacy rights: a woman's right to choose, contraception, sodomy, porn. It's all about sex. Their sex obsession is just out of control...and it affects all of our privacy on so many levels. Read the rest of this post...

Justice Ohio GOP Style

There's a scapegoat in the brewing scandal in Ohio again, per the Toledo Blade. A staffer for Governor Bob Taft has been DEMOTED:

The investment scandal at the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation escalated yesterday as Gov. Bob Taft purged one of his high-ranking employees for keeping him out of the loop about a $215 million loss in the months leading to the presidential election.

Yes, the Governor's office has found someone to punish for the loss of $215 million. And, here's what he got:

Mr. Samuel, who in July, 2003, joined the governor’s office as an executive assistant for business and industry after working eight years for the bureau, is being demoted to a post in the taxation department. He’ll work on tax amnesty programs, with his salary trimmed from $80,000 to $76,000, Mr. Rickel said.

In Ohio, you're involved with the folks who lose $215 million in state money, you have your pay docked $4,000. Man, those Republicans are tough on each other.

Major GOP fundraiser/Bush Pioneer Tom Noe only "lost" $12 million from the rare-coin debacle. That will probably garner someone a promotion. Read the rest of this post...

Note to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show

Lost your producer's email address. Someone in the comments suggested that you really ought to do this as one of your kids reciting the pundits. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Going to see Batman tonight. Any reviews? (No spoilers, please :-) Read the rest of this post...

BP being sued by Colombian farmers for $15M

Who would ever guess that BP or any other oil company, is not living up to their "corporate social responsibility" to help poor locals who are impacted by Big Oil? Whether we are talking about Nigeria or Colombia the story is always pretty much the same and poor locals, who may or may not know how to read are forced to sign away their rights while Big Oil forces their drilling or pipeline on the local population. Despite all of the touchy-feely advertisements that the industry marketing types crank out, the stories are always the same.

In this case, local farmers are upset that the oil pipeline in Colombia has had a negative impact on their lives and when they have objected, they have been intimidated by the military and para-military forces operating in the region. Lawyers have been killed and names have been added to hit lists. Was BP directly responsible? No, but that's not the point. BP has talked a lot about corporate responsibility but as long as their pipelines are operating, they don't give a damn about the local population and the intimidation by local thugs.

It always makes me laugh that these companies are run by people from the "right background" (in the case of BP, "Lord" Browne) but yet they seem so clueless about what is going on in the real world, or are they? The corporate responsibility policies seem as outdated as his posh title and make me wonder what century are we living in. Read the rest of this post...

Amazing AP story on DSM today. We're entering the realm of impeachable offenses, here

Master, it's alive!

AP doing some impressive reporting today on the Downing Street Memos.

Seriously, read this report, it's long and detailed and THAT GOOD. We're talking impeachable offenses here, and the Brits' own Deep Throats are starting to talk.

When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.

President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.

In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.

"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."....

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic.

Read the rest of this post...

What she said

Margaret just posted the following comment in a post below. It was too good to leave hidden:

"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror."

This is from Bush's Radio address today. I can't get over the hubris of this guy. Well yeah! Iraq has become a central front for terrorism. Why? Because and ONLY because Bush decided that irregardless of facts and world opinion, he was going to involve this country in a preemptive and totally bogus war. Now his justification seems to have become that Iraq is currently full of jihadists. THEY ARE THERE BECAUSE YOU PUT THEM THERE ASSHOLE!

Read the rest of this post...

Where's the GOP apology?

Where is the apology for 24% of GOP Senators - one in four! - not being willing to take a stand against lynching? Where's the apology for lying to the American people about Terri Schiavo's condition, and then lying again this week when Frist totally denied saying exactly what he said, on camera - that Terri Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state? Where's the apology to Michael Schiavo for making his life hell, all based on a lie and the desire to suck up the radical right hate groups? And where's the apology to the American people for lying to us in order to trick us into supporting a now-disastrous war in Iraq?

The GOP wants to keep the pressure on Senator During for an apology for simply stating the truth about Gitmo. Great. Then let's talk apologies. Come Monday, I think we need Apology Week here at AMERICAblog. I'll be posting phone numbers and names of various Senators, and contacts for local letters to the editor and media, for you to go to town on. Read the rest of this post...

Gorgeous Saturday open thread

Joe in DC just called me to let me know he posted his last blog entry right before jumping in the water at a swim thing (via his Blackberry, Treo, or whatever). He thinks that makes him cool. I think it makes him a geek. Read the rest of this post...

Uzbekistan's Slaughter of Its Citizens: US Involved Up To Its Neck

It's not bad enough that Bush pretends he wants to spread freedom around the world but then coddles ugly repressive regimes like Uzbekistan, which boils alive dissidents and is one of the nastiest governments in the world. But offer Bush a military base and he becomes dizzy with delight. So we've provided aid to this horrible government and when it gunned down hundreds of its own people and NATO countries wanted to investigate, Bush blocked it because he's a stand-up guy and we can't have an investigation into terror interfering with the war on terror.

But it turns out we're not just shielding Uzbekistan. According to the New York Times, we've armed and trained the very units that were involved in the massacre of hundreds of innocent Uzbekistan citizens. Mind you, the NYT published our implicit involvement in such a horror on the dead news day of Saturday.

The United States has worked closely with Uzbekistan, a corrupt and autocratic state with a chilling human rights record, in the fight against international terrorism. It has also tried to professionalize the Uzbek military, improve its border security and help secure materials that could be used in nuclear, chemical or biological weapons - areas of engagement that American officials say are of clear national interest.

But such policies can backfire, improving the martial abilities of units that commit crimes against Uzbek citizens, and associating the United States with repression in the eyes of Uzbek people and the Islamic world. Uzbekistan is an overwhelmingly Muslim country with severe restrictions on freedoms of worship and expression.

But actually this massacre is just another success story. Uzbekistan described it as "a counterterrorism operation." Boy, they learn fast.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush Official Removes Science From Gov't Report; Citizens Shrugs

Bush has yet to remove all science from high school science classrooms (Hey, they're working on it). But he's doing an EXCELLENT job of removing any annoying scientific facts from government reports.

The latest travesty. The LA Times reports a Bush official cut out essential scientific warnings on what was supposed to be a scientific study of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands. No bonus points for guessing whether the revised study favored industry over the environment.

The original draft of the environmental analysis warned that the new rules would have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife, but that phrase was removed. The BLM now concludes that the grazing regulations are "beneficial to animals."

Eliminated from the final draft was another conclusion that read: "The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general."

Also removed was language saying how the rules changes could adversely affect endangered species.

"This is a whitewash, they took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees," said Erick Campbell, a former BLM state biologist in Nevada and a 30-year BLM employee who retired this year. Campbell was the author of sections of the report pertaining to impacts on wildlife and threatened and endangered species. "They rewrote everything. It's a crime," he said in an interview this week.

Hey, this isn't unusual or strange. It's just the way they do business. So why should it be more than a blip in the media? Bush's people distorting facts to suit their own purposes? Come on, that's old news. Read the rest of this post...

Saturday Morning Open Thread

"This isn't political talk, this is true," Read the rest of this post...

"This isn't political talk, this is true,"

Hmmmm, you have to wonder when someone says something like that. It's what Bush said yesterday while talking about the Medicare Drug Plan acc. to the Washington Post.

This confirms that everything else Bush says is political talk and isn't true. So, unless he gives this caveat: "This isn't political talk, this is true," he's probably lying. Read the rest of this post...

Gitmo is expanding - KBR/Halliburton wins new contract

Yes, the housing boom continues. So does this mean that Bush has no clue about what is happening with Gitmo is did he just assume once again that the American public is stupid? I'm guessing that he assumes that they're stupid since they bought into his ridiculous plans so many times in the past. It's no surprise though that Dick Cheney knew the real story since Halliburton has the $30 Million contract to upgrade the Caribbean resort, as the GOP likes to think of it.

Funny that I have not yet seen this story in the US MSM but why would we assume they would get the news first on such a story? Go figure. Read the rest of this post...

A computer virus caused the credit card breach?

To follow up on the credit card story below, this is absolutely incredible. Whoever the CTO and board of directors at Card Systems who allowed such a virus to get in and then to get out ought to be sacked on the spot, if they fail to resign. I would expect such shoddy systems in an elementary school network but at a corporate site where they are responsible for credit card data? This type of network protection is so basic and so common, it is shocking that a script was able to pull out data so easily. Thank goodness coporate America always does the right thing without needing to be prodded.

Interesting timing on the story as well...Friday afternoon. Read the rest of this post...

What is a journalist?

Great entry by Harry Schearer at the Huffington Post. Read the rest of this post...