Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
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a middle-aged George Washington
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Friday, 17 November 2006 at 0h 17m 13s | True sight of the people | “A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches
pass
over, their
spells dissolve and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles.”
-—Thomas Jefferson, on the
Alien & Sedition Act,
June 4, 1798.
| Wednesday, 15 November 2006 at 3h 20m 56s | My take on the Time cover | Here is my spoof of the recent pitiful Time magazine cover that
I
discussed in one
yesterday's posts.
| Tuesday, 14 November 2006 at 0h 36m 8s | Leonardo puts his money to use | Click
here to
visit Leonardo di Caprio's website where he posts 2 online movies. One about
Global Warming and one about the earth's water supplies.
Wow.
| Tuesday, 14 November 2006 at 1h 7m 21s | The tale of two covers and 12 years |
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Which cover of Time occurred in 2006 ?
Which cover in 1994 ?
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The current meme of the 2006 election by the corporate media has been to equate
the Democratic onslaught with the rise of true conservatism. This makes no
sense, but then the corporate media is the manipulated vocal box of absentee
owners and the financial classes who want to salvage as much of the discredited
agenda as possible while denying the dismise of conservative governing policy.
Not one Democratic office holder lost one seat in every election last Tuesday,
both state and federal. The majority of governors (28 to 24) are now
Democratic. Democrats either won or keep their seat. Republicans either held
their seat or lost.
Or, as Maureen Dowd aptly said in a recent column:
"Republicans were oddly oblivious to the fact that they had turned into an
unappetizing tableau of bloated, corrupt, dissembling, feckless white hacks
who were leaving kids unprotected. DeLay and Bob Ney sneaking out of Congress
with dollar bills flying out of their pockets. Hastert playing Cardinal
Bernard Law, shielding Mark Foley. Rummy, cocky and obtuse as he presided over
an imploding Iraq, while failing to give soldiers the armor, support and
strategy they needed to come home safely. Cheney, vowing bullheadedly to move
full speed ahead on Iraq no matter what the voters decided. W. frantically
yelling about how Democrats would let the terrorists win, when his lame-brained
policies had spawned more terrorists."
In other words, they started believing in their own spin. Every dirty trick
they tried turned against them this election cycle. Voter turnout increased by
10% (from 45% to 55%) with the increase being predominantly younger voters.
The turnout of younger voters increased by 25%. According to Thom Hartmann (and the
exit poll data he cites) every federal election was within 1% of the exit poll
data except in Montana and Virginia, where they were off by 4% or more -- which
means the obvious. However, Thom believes (and I do too) that the increased
voter turnout made it too difficult for the Republicans to steal the election
this time, even though both Montana and Virginia were extremely close.
Exit polls are never wrong by more than 1% unless there is deliberate
malfeasance and tampering. Ignorant persons and political jackals will try to
think otherwise, but exit polls are never wrong by more than 1% unless there is
deliberate malfeasance and tampering. For the last 30 years, in Germany, exit
polls determine the election winners -- unless the victory is within 1%. After
2 weeks all of the paper ballots are counted, AND THE ELECTION RESULTS ARE
NEVER MORE THAN 0.5% OFF. Exit polls are accurate because people are stating
something they just did, rather than something they say they will do in the
future. Exit polls only came into discredit since 1998 when they started to
differ from the tally results of electronic voting machines.
Which again, means the obvious. Throw away the touch screen voting machines.
Use ballots and electronic scanners so there is a paper trail. Then enforce
exit polling and ballot sampling techniques ( examining a small sample ) to
ensure the reliability of the scanners and central tabulators.
How come the media isn't educating the public correctly on this issue? Well,
do you really think the corporate media has an interest in an informed,
educated voting population?
According to the exit polls, the top five issues this election cycle were :
- Corruption
- Iraq
- Education
- Health Care
- Economy
Yea, I know, what are they talking about?
Ezra Klein demolishes the conservative victory hypothesis in a recent article
in the American Prospect online edition. Click here.
I like this picture better ...
So here you have Time magazine -- which is but one small branch of the
monolithic
enterprise Time Warner Inc. -- equating the 2006 Democratic sweep as
two large equal sized circles overlapping a little in the middle. Whereas in
1994, the Elephant takes up to 65% of the paper squashing a small donkey
underneath its front foot, with the title "GOP Stampede" at the top.
Here are the two election victories in both years.
1994 : Republicans gained 52 House, 8 Senate, and 10 gubernatorial seats
2006 : Democrats gained 33 House, 6 Senate, and 6 gubernatorial seats
Obviously the 1994 take-over by the Rethuglicans was a brutal stampede -- a
perfect example of what happens when the voters choices are Republican and
Republican-lite : no one votes but Republican voters. Yet how come the
editors of Time choose to represent a Democratic sweep as abstract geometrical
concepts and nuanced vocabulary terms like "center" ? Why are they NOW
suddenly so concerned about partisanship when they were partisan biased for the
last decade? They could have done a story about the "new Democrats" with 6 to
11 of the freshmen Democrats that beat Republicans in Congress.
Ah, but what better way to hide the faces of the new Democrats than behind a
color blue and the Republicans underneath the color red. It's two circles not
a Donkey and an Elephant. The percentages of the circle colors is
even wrong. The percentages of Republican(red) to Democrat(blue) to
Independent(purple) is 33% to 38% to 29% -- the purple section should be
much larger !
Something like this
| Saturday, 11 November 2006 at 19h 47m 35s | Honoring our veterans of foreign wars |
| Thursday, 9 November 2006 at 2h 19m 8s | Bush's angels |
| Thursday, 9 November 2006 at 19h 35m 58s | The Attempted Scam of Measure L | Out here in liberal-land, the sleepy coastal town of
Pacifica,
California -- 10 miles south of San
Francisco -- got into a fight with an multi-millionaire corporate financier
from South Florida named
R. Donahue Peebles. He bought a piece of property called the Quarry and got a
ballot
measure called "L" to be voted on by the people of Pacifica, California that
would have rezoned the property for up to 355 houses.
Click here to read about the real issues of why Mr. Peebles
bothered to spend a lot of money to get Measure L passed. A lot of people
naively give Mr. Peebles a lot of respectable, non-duplicitous descriptions.
Mr. Peebles threatened to sell out to Walmart if the measure didn't pass. Some
persons now think taxes have to be raised, while believing the costs of new
homes and construction would be offset by generous forecasts of assumed future
revenue.
Click here
for another view that is more realistic.
Click here for the Bay Guardian story.
A flattering article about Mr. Peebles in Inc magazine brings out the
keen eye
of the fine line manipulator at work on a project he re-sold in Florida (eerily
similar to this current project) [SOURCE]
"The owners were asking for $25 million to $30 million, but no one was willing
to pay because it wasn't going to make money unless it got rezoned -- the
building couldn't be taller than 40 feet. The rezoning would take two years. I
found a loophole that would allow us to go up to 200 feet in height and offered
$10 million, contingent on the rezoning.
...
After the Bath Club got rezoned, a brokerage firm offered me $42 million for
the property."
And just follow the money people [SOURCE] :
The current total spending by the Peebles-funded "Yes on L" campaign through
10/21/06 is $1,310,384.78 according to the campaign's official election filing
report (warning: large 3MB Adobe Acrobat PDF file).
That's $415,247.75 just over the last 21 days, or $19,773.70 per day.
Only $3,502.47-- less than 1% of the money spent this period-- went to Pacifica
businesses, and almost all of it was rent for office space. If Measure L is
supposed to be a financial boon to Pacifica businesses, it sure hasn't been so
far.
The Peebles-funded campaign spent $103,455.39 on a firm in San Francisco for
canvassers to go door-to-door here.
This land is a cold, wind driven open space along side a rising mountain that
is boxed in by ocean and one four lane highway. There is no study or plan that
355 houses can be feasibly built, but nevertheless the number is 355.
Now this big Florida land-developer Peebles buys the property a year ago, yet
he offers no development plan? He insists he get Measure L passed so the
number of houses can become 355, because it is quite possible that an official
study would determine a number less than 300.
Keep in mind his own words :"After the Bath Club got rezoned, a brokerage
firm offered me $42 million for the property."
I don't believe this financial minded buisness savvy investor buys anything
without a plan. The plan was to use Measure L as a means to obtain a favorable
re-zoning that could not have occurred by the normal means. Peebles is not
interested in doing the development himself, or else he would have put one
together. Instead he spends more than a million dollars trying to get Measure
L passed so he can use the Measure to inflate the value of the land and resell
it for a profit, maybe to another "brokerage firm."
David Blackman needs to re-join the do nothing minority that he represents.
How much of his campaign funding helped him build those expensive pugnacious
wooden green signs that he placed everywhere ? He also bought a quarter page ad
in the Pacifica Tribute where he talked about the "quarry project" that he "was
involved in" and swore this was only the first step, as if he was an
insider.
The first step to what, David? Tell us what you really know.
Obviously Pacificans see right through you, that's why you got 5th place with
only 14.2% of the 3,000 who bothered to vote yesterday.
| Thursday, 9 November 2006 at 0h 25m 0s | The news media according to Hugh Hewitt |
And it is a wonderful day for new media, especially talk radio. For two years
we have had to defend the Congressional gang that couldn't shoot straight. Now
we get to play offense.
...
As Dean has pointed out, congratulations are in order to the Dems who ran a
skillful campaign that kept the focus on the GOP's scandals and away from the
left's agenda. The GOP couldn't recover from Foley's repulsive conduct, and the
enemy was willing to kill randomly in the run-up to the vote in order to
demoralize an American public.
From Hugh Hewitt, a good-ole boy
television "personality" explaining why he is a media hack. Hewitt defends
corruption and incompetence, and attacks progress and integrity. That is what
he meant when he said "we get to play offense." Notice how smoothly he says
the Democrats "kept the focus on the GOP's scandals and away from the left's
agenda" and sort of blames the Iraqi conflict for being "willing to kill
randomly ... in order to demoralize" the American public.
Are you kidding me? Dragging out that bogeyman called the "Left's agenda" in
order to not talk about the issues, which is, Hubert, what the agenda of the
Democratic party is all about : how to end the corruption you busily defend,
how to stop the incompetence you make excuses for, how to truly put the nations
finances in order instead of talking tough and doing nothing. Most of all, how
to stop putting our troops in the middle of a civil war rather than lying about
it all the time.
There are a lot of persons all over the world who want to kill us. That is not
the reason you invade countries, destroy the infrastructure, rape the budget
with cost-plus contracts without reconstructing anything, and then build dozens
of permanent bases armed by men with guns.
You are demoralizing the American public Mr. Hewitt.
Read the entire article if you want, but Hewitt is full of shit. He's a
dishonest con
artist. That's why the corporate media allows him to speak on televsion on the
time.
| Saturday, 4 November 2006 at 2h 5m 17s | This is unbelievable | [SOURCE -- The New York Times.]
November 3, 2006
Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office
By JAMES GLANZ
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq
have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy
charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected
companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did
not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi
security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush
signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his
reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.
The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal
oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side
of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic
counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and
some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final
legislation.
| Friday, 3 November 2006 at 1h 51m 37s | Grand Opera Pugilists |
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GOTO THE NEXT 10 COLUMNS
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