Click here for an incredible online video documentary about the American Meat industry from chickens and turkeys, to pork and cattle. It is narrated by Alec Baldwin, and will surely blow your mind and make you reconsider your eating habits.

Click here for the Reuters article by Andrea Shalal-Esa published in the Washington Post.

The U.S. Air Force is asking the Pentagon's leadership for a staggering $50 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2007 -- an amount equal to nearly half its annual budget, defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said on Tuesday.

. . .

"This amount of money is so much bigger than the Air Force would normally request ... it hints at a basic breakdown in the process for planning and funding war costs," said Thompson

So in other words, it looks like the budget on the books has plenty of extra hidden costs in the years ahead. But don't worry, we can just raise the debt ceiling(click for google search), which is currently 8.2 trillion dollars.

Click here for Representative Ron Paul's view in 2003 on government debt. (Note: Ron Paul is that rare Republican with actual integrity who is worth listening to.)

Of course, the budget would not be taxed had we not ventured off on these foreign escapades, instead of coordinating a world collective of police agencies to ferret out the terrorist cells and networks. So far this has been the most effective method to date, rather than invading countries, writing the constitutions, and building permanent bases in those countries.

Okay, let's just play the devil's advocate. Taking out Saddam was a good thing. Why are we building fourteen permanent bases in what is supposed to be a sovereign nation? Did France build military bases in the United States when they helped the American colonists defeat Great Britain in 1779-1783 ? The new government has been established, why are American soldiers responsible for the history of the Iraqi nation? The Iraqi people want us to go, and we are wasting American lives that are better spending in other parts of the world.

The day of reckoning is near. Why do I hear a distant snowball coming?

Why do the computer voting glitches always favor the Republicans? God damn it ... Why?

[SOURCE : KFDM Channel 6]

There's a video to watch at the link above too. Click here to watch.

Early voting runs through Friday, November 3rd. KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly. Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.

Some of those voters including Lamar University professor, Dr. Bruce Drury, believe the problem is a programming error. Saturday, KFDM spoke to another voter who says it's not just happening with straight ticket voting, he says it's happening on individual races as well, Jerry Stopher told us when he voted for a Democrat, the Republican's name was highlighted.

Stopher said, "There's something in these machines, in this equipment, that's showing Republican votes when you vote for Democrats, and I know Ms. Guidry's a nice lady, and she's working hard, but her theory that my fingernail was somehow over the Republican button is just unrealistic, my fingernail was not. The equipment is not working properly as far as I can tell

[SOURCE: Miami Herald , 28 October 2006]

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

...

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

Not one story about someone trying to vote Republican but the machine persistantly chooses the Democratic candidate instead. Not one single story in 2004 and now 2006. All of the stories of voting "irregularities" favor the Republicans.

Computers fail randomly. How is this 100% favorability rate possible without some intended design?

Yes, they are stealing the votes. They pay the news media millions and billions to spin the reason why they win and to get all of us to focus on non- issues, when the actual reason they are winning comes from the multiplicity of the Republican's anti-democratic tactics.

This isn't political. I would detest the Democratic party was equal excoriation if they were also anti-democratic, but it is not the Democratic party which has become infested with neo-con fascist nazi's.

They have to cheat because they know they will lose if they fight fair. They have to fund lie manufacturing and pay for liars to act like lawyers because the truth will defeat them everytime. They can't stand an honest discussion of ideas and thoughts, because they don't care what anyone thinks and are not interested in talking. They know better than you, so get outta the way.

Then when they fuck up everything that they do, when they turn their back on every belief they ever espoused, then it is god damn pride that they spray like arrogance to vehemently insist upon their unblemished wisdom and integrity.

From M. Kane Jeeves [SOURCE ] -- always a good read.

Rummy was in full fang mode because, the day before, hot on the heels of Bush banishing the terms “stay the course,” “time-tables,” and, presumably, “cut and run” (replacing them with “shifting our tactics” and “constant readjustment,” “the Iraqis meeting benchmarks” and “severing and sauntering”), Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki smacked-down the U.S., stating: “I affirm that this government represents the will of the people and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it.”

Then he said the new Bush plan was prompted by American electoral politics: “I am sure that this is not the official policy of the U.S. government, but it is a result of the election race going on and we are not much concerned with it.”

Ignoring the real world as usual, Rumsfeld attacked the press for playing up the U.S.-Iraqi dust-up: ” Well, it’s a political season, and everyone’s trying to make a little mischief out of this and make — turn it into a political football and see if we can’t get it on the front page of every newspaper and find a little daylight between what the Iraqis say or someone in the United States says or somebody else in the United States says.

“And I mean, it is not complicated. I’ve explained it two or three times. The president did an excellent job of explaining it yesterday. ”

In terms of these new “benchmarks,” the Iraqis are supposed to “meet?” Rummy declared: “Now, you’re looking for some sort of a guillotine to come flowing down if some date isn’t met. That is not what this is about. This is complicated stuff. It’s difficult. We’re looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.”

thanks to Kevin Drum at the washington monthly.

Here is an article in Le Monde, of which the first 3 paragraphs are translated by me

American Elections: lobbyists, money, and power. AFP/KAREN BLEIER

Having become an integral part of American politics, lobbying is never more active that during elections when their clients want to get elected those candidates most receptive to their demands ("préoccupations"). The term "lobbyist" means attempting to influence the authorities. Lobby -- "large entranceway", in english -- evoking illusions of the longtime standing in the lobby trying to influence and talk to those who can influence events.

The first lobbyists are noted during the 1870 census. They slithered the lobby of teh Willard Hotel, near both the Treasury and the White House, hoping to rub shoulders with the Secretary of the Treasury, even with President Grant, who would drop by to smoke his cigars. Back in 1870, the President command a couple dozen salarys. Today, there are 900 high-level bureaucrats, often whom are merely the mouthpieces for lobbyists.

According to the federal statute, lobbying is a "communication" carried out by an interested party in front of an elected official or a civil servant of the presidency or the 200 federal agencies (public administrations), bearing on the formulation or the modification of a law. The law of 1995 (Lobbying Disclosure Act) defines as lobbyist whoever gains at least 5,000 dollars or spends at least 20,000 dollars for this activity during six months and has established more than one contact. Lobbyist must register themselves and regularly publish their accounts. In March 2005, 21,500 lobbyists were registered with the House of Representatives. The Center for Public Integrity estimates that 22,000 companies used the services of 3,500 lobbying firms and more than 27,000 lobbyists since 1998.

21,500 hired full time agents trying to influence 435 representatives and their staffs, or about 22 per Congressman. Some of the staff members are also past and future lobbyists. Many Congressman cross over to lobbyist after they retire from government.

As for the history of "K Street," you can find out more by clicking here.

Click here for the ABC Corporate memo to ABC affiliated stations requesting that there are 100 advertisers who are not to be aired on "Air America Radio" programs. This is called blacklisting.

When the public airwaves become surrogately owned by private corporations, the advertizers that pay for ads will pull their financial support when they do not like programming. You don't see them pulling ads from liars like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, O'Reilly, and the Fox propaganda channel -- but here they are, requesting that ABC stations not get paid for the Air America programs they put on the air.

This is the anti-democratic nature of corporations, who have a real interest in screening the information that gets through to the public. We need to enforce the Anti-trust laws on these media conglomerates. How many stories in the news media will ever honestly inspect the actions of these corporations? None that the advertizers don't approve, because they don't care to have their monopolistic, immoral, illegal corrupt activities thoroughly explained to the public. This why the news is dominated by celebrity gossip or the civil court- room drama, just like McDonalds' hamburgers are added with phosphates, flavor "enhancers", and other fatty leftovers before they are freeze-dried.

And now these corporate advertizers have gotten so accustomed to this practice over the decades that they send lawyers to regularly staff the production meetings of the big media companies. Editors and executive producers all get promotions based upon understandings of how things work, and they pick journalists and reporters of the same mold. A single phone call from a General Electric CEO got ABC to pull a story on the failure of Nuclear Energy. Two Florida Fox News Reporters got fired when they refused to pull a show about MBT treated cow milk because a Monsanto lawyer wanted the story yanked after many failed attempts to rewrite the story. MSNBC canned its most popular show, Phil Donahue in the months just before March 2003 because the CEO's didn't want a show on the air that might be critical of the President and the war : popularity be damned.

Recall how pitiful the "press" did on the lies of the Iraq war, and the Ohio debacle of 2004 that had to wait until John Conyers independently formed a committee and published a 120 page cursory book on the plethora of suspicious irregularities that needed investigation. -- (Ken Blackwell meet Katherine Harris) -- The Press ignored (and continues to ignore) the way Choicepoint DBA got paid $4 million to provide a sloppy, 90% inaccurate felon list that Katherine Harris used to purge some 60,000 plus black voters from Florida polls that were not felons.

This is how the borderline between filtered news and censorship gets very ambiguous. A big advertiser doesn't like a certain person that is interviewed, or wants to reframe a video spot by clipping out some of the video. Words are editted and changed, not always with the same meaning or implication. The Headline Titles are rarely chosen by the story authors. Even whole details might be removed or altered at the whims of the editors and executive producers for reasons that are not altruistic or honest. The last resort is always to pull the plug, or put the piece in cold storage.

If you've been reading my blog regularly, you've come across my periodic tear down of some bogus reporting or story development. One thing you must remember : there are usually 3 or 4 different versions on the news wire for any big story. A news source is free to pick up the editted version instead of the original story. A lot of Associated Press (AP) and (now that it is owned by Rupert Murdoch) United Press International (UPI) stories are just selectively edited versions of an original story published by some other journalist somewhere else. Thus, unless you seek out the primary source, you might be getting the McDonald's burger instead of the real sirloin steak. Newspapers and local TV news stations are particularly vulnerable to this selective edited story phenomenom, because unless the reporting is local, they usually depend upon outside organizations for their information.

A short list of these advertisers will surprise you :

1. Bank of America
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Federal Express
4. General Electric
5. McDonald's -- Ronald McDonald despises the truth
6. Microsoft -- A fatal system crash might otherwise occur
7. Wal-Mart
8. Hyatt
9. Visa
10. MGM
11. Nestle
12. Frito-Lay
13. NYSE
14. Office Depot
15. Pepsi -- the choice of a brainwashed nation
16. The Discovery Channel
17. the U.S. Navy -- which loves Rush Limbaugh

Some of these are owned by larger holding companies and are not really independent financial entities.

From the DC Examiner, the other paper of record in the Nation's Capital. The story is by ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, an Associated Press reporter.

The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that Houston-based Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root Services routinely marked all information it was giving the government as proprietary, whether it actually was or not. The government promises not to disclose proprietary data so a company's most valuable information is not divulged to its competitors.

By marking all information proprietary - including such normally releasable data as labor rates - the company abused federal regulations, the report says.

In effect, Kellogg, Brown & Root turned the regulations "into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight."

. . .

Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, said that in 13 oversight hearings on the war in Iraq the committee found more than $1 billion in waste, fraud, abuse and what it called "shoddy work" by contractors.

"I'm convinced that this is the biggest waste, fraud and abuse in the history of this country," Dorgan said.

If the Democrats take control of the Senate, he said, they will launch oversight hearings on war matters ranging from faulty intelligence leading up to the war to wrongdoing by contractors.

And today's San Francisco Comical Front Page stories (keep in mind the Sunday paper really comes out Saturday afternoon ... which is another way for corporate headquarters to skim cuts and suck out more profits) :

1. A desperate, critical time in Gaza Strip at close of Ramadan - Matthew Kalman . . . Life is brutally hard in Gaza

2. Dems face a tug-of-war in own tent - Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief of bullshit, trying to sew the seeds of division. Ask yourself this Mr. Sandalow, what's the difference between how many Democrats are voting Republican this year, and how many Republicans are voting Democrat? And on the front page!

3. Forget the mashed peas -- you've come a long way, baby food - Tara Duggan . . .The health issues of organic baby food

4. THE CITY'S COST OF A LIFE REDEEMED - Kevin Fagan, Brant Ward . . . The cost of taking care of homelessness and drug addict health issues

5. Those wrinkles aren't from squinting YouTube, MySpace, computer gaming -- a big chunk of users approach middle age - Joe Garofoli . . . Wow, like oh my god, sooooo much more important then Halliburton corruption!

Don't give me credit. I "borrowed" this from bartcop, a pretty cool site.

"You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," - Rumsfeld at a press conference 27 October 2006.