November 14, 2006

THE THINKING SPOT

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice 1928 Source: Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)

AIN'T LIFE GREAT!!!

Rep. McDermott Says Make Murtha Majority Leader Because “The President’s Worst Nightmare Is To Have To Sit At Breakfast With Jack Murtha”…
http://tinyurl.com/yk2zvx

ALERT

The Dangerous Lame Duck --- There are a lot of bad bills that the Republicans may try to ram through, but here's the worst of the worst - a bill to legalize the President's warrantless wiretapping program.
http://tinyurl.com/yb6ex8

Free Press: New Report Catches More TV Stations Airing Fake News
http://tinyurl.com/y9lbvv

WAR

Another Day in Bush's NeverLand of Self-Delusion, With Real Death the Result: 20 Iraqis killed; 150 abducted in Baghdad. Bush is the Only Person Who Could Make the Iraqis Yearn for the Days of Saddam.....
http://tinyurl.com/yjfwx5

Mission Impossible: The Iraq Study Group
http://tinyurl.com/ydtapq

Don't Look for Much From the "Bipartisan" Iraq Study Group: Ray McGovern
http://tinyurl.com/ymxs9c

Iraqi I.E.D.s track back to the US? --- It can now be reported that Zapata Engineering has hired these Israeli Mossad-types into Iraq for the purposes of alleged counter-insurgency. --- The improvised explosive devices killing our kids and keeping Iraq in chaos use old surplus ordnance. It is confirmed that Zapata Engineering (mentioned in this story) here on Oahu has a $500 million contract with the US government ... to dispose of surplus and outdated ordnance.
http://tinyurl.com/yz2uf6

Blair wants shunned nations to help solve Iraq fiasco Tony Blair has urged George Bush to make a dramatic U-turn by drawing Iran and Syria into efforts to bring stability to Iraq and forge a long-term peace in the wider Middle East.
http://tinyurl.com/yn5nxk

British Prime Minister Tony Blair made an open plea on Monday to United States President George Bush to recognise that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies at the core of any hopes for wider peace in the Middle East, including Iraq.
http://tinyurl.com/ybvvhd

Plutonium Traces Found In Iran...IAEA Asks For Explaination...
http://tinyurl.com/ycogyz

THE WHITE HOUSE

Bush trip inflames House - Agung had barely finished his speech when a number of lawmakers started to raise their hands to deliver fiery statements objecting to Bush's visit.
http://tinyurl.com/ycxals

Bush's only big ally on warming shifts stand - Australia’s leader said Tuesday he wants to consider an international carbon trading system to fight global warming, signaling a shift toward a part of the Kyoto agreement that he has steadfastly refused to ratify.
http://tinyurl.com/ya7vtq

Junior Eats Shit, Calls Poppy For Help... Again --- Bush's entire life has been an ongoing saga of either using Poppy's influence to avoid trouble or using Poppy to bail him out after eating shit.
http://tinyurl.com/ynzuam

What is the connection? Bush and Pakistan, "What me Worry?": "Every case, Afghan security officials say, is similar to that of Mr. Shah, who repeated his story in a rare jailhouse interview with a reporter in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The trail of organizing, financing and recruiting the bombers who have carried out a rising number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan traces back to Pakistan, they say."
http://tinyurl.com/ym4gl8

Mother Tells All About White House Sex Slave Ring And Son's Kidnapping --- If you recall, the stories of 15-year-old callboys wandering through the White House in the middle of the night was linked to the "Franklin Cover-Up" case exposed by Nebraska State Sen. John DeCamp. In that case, a Republican operative named Larry King was involved with procuring boys and girls from Boys Town in Nebraska and elsewhere and entrapping them in a child sex-slave and espionage ring. King, with an annual salary of under 20K, was throwing sex parties for the powerful in a $5,000-a-month condo in Washingotn, DC; apparently taping the proceedings for blackmail purposes....One of the victims of this ring was one Paul Bonacci, who testified in court proceedings that he helped kidnap Johnny Gosch into this ring in 1982. It was apparently at 2:29 AM, Sunday, Feb. 20 that the question was first asked -- is "Jeff Gannon" really Johnny Gosch?...By the end of the day, Hunter S. Thompson was reported dead.
http://tinyurl.com/ycb8og

Bush Will Keep Rove Until The End: “He Knows Too Much”...
http://tinyurl.com/yzuo6p

POLITICS

Secret of Cold War Spy Messages Revealed - The invisible ink formula used by East German secret police to pass messages during the Cold War has remained classified, until now.
http://tinyurl.com/uzkue

Sen. Elizabeth Dole On Why GOP Lost: “It Was Just Too Massive To Overcome”...
http://tinyurl.com/yb7q4n

Next RNC Chair Sen. Martinez Promotes Anti-Gay Issues But Has Top Gay Staffers...
http://tinyurl.com/ykfq82

SCANDAL

"The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman" -- "The Whistleblower will shock everyone, whether they follow the news or not."
http://tinyurl.com/yecod8

LEGAL ITEMS

The courts are starting to accept that the war against Iraq is a crime - There is no prospect that the British prime minister could be put on trial for war crimes in this country (although, as the international lawyer Philippe Sands points out, there is a chance that he could be arrested and tried elsewhere). Even so, the government appears to find these legal processes profoundly threatening.
http://tinyurl.com/yl9mtm

ABC: Abramoff was set to implicate Rove, Dems
http://tinyurl.com/yd3q8l

CIA acknowledges existence of presidential order authorizing it to detain, interrogate terror suspects overseas. In response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, the CIA has finally acknowledged the existence of a presidential order authorizing the agency to detain and interrogate terror suspects overseas.
http://tinyurl.com/ykh5ch

Civil Rights Groups File Suit Against Rumsfeld For “Personally” Ordering And Condoning Torture...
http://tinyurl.com/ynbkju

ELECTION ITEMS

EXit polls show that the so-called 'God gap' between Dems and the GOP was cut in half in the 2006 elections. So much for Republicans being the party of God
http://tinyurl.com/yhy9yb

DNC: GOP Continues Trickery at the Voting Booth
http://tinyurl.com/yzjb2l

Eight House races remain unresolved. Don't let them steal the vote
http://tinyurl.com/ygqwaj

Court battle begins during Fla recount
http://tinyurl.com/ymrouw

Ohio's 2006 vote count now includes a higher percentage of uncounted ballots than in 2004, and a statistically impossible swing to the Republicans The percentage of uncounted votes in the allegedly "fraud free" 2006 Ohio election is actually higher than the fraud-ridden 2004 election, when the presidency was stolen here. A flawed voting process that allowed voters to be illegally turned away throughout the morning on Election Day may have cost the Dems at least two Congressional seats and a state auditor's seat.
http://tinyurl.com/y2hysn

ECONOMY

Qwest execs dump stock, score $43m
http://tinyurl.com/ykkqod

Home Buyers Back Out Of Deals in Record Numbers---Now is not the time to close the deal, many buyers are deciding,
http://tinyurl.com/yjs978

Bush’s Chernobyl economy; hard times are on the way. All of the traditional supports for the dollar have been removed by a shrinking economy, a massive $800 billion account deficit, dramatic increases in the money supply, and the reckless manipulation of interest rates.
http://tinyurl.com/yj6dyw

911

Rudolph Giuliani Got Warning WTC Towers Were Going To Collapse --- As Rudy heads into the 2008 Presidential race, this question needs to be asked of him at every public opportunity, "Who warned Rudy that the WTC towers were going to fall, and how could they know, given that no steel-framed building had ever collapsed for fire before 9-11?"
http://tinyurl.com/yzw3b7

CONGRESS

Dems and moderate Republicans try to oust the current Speaker of the House in the Texas Legislature
http://tinyurl.com/5soo

Murtha vs. Hoyer, the latest.
http://tinyurl.com/yhfsfs

Pelosi, Kleiner Perkins Push for Overhaul of Sarbanes-Oxley Law --- For Silicon Valley venture capitalists eager to weaken the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate- governance law, it may pay to have friends in high places.The speaker's rostrum of the U.S. House of Representatives, for instance.She in turn has already identified revising the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law as a top priority
http://tinyurl.com/yzl58j

Sen. Lieberman to chair Homeland Security Committee
http://tinyurl.com/yl2d5u

Rangel Backs Hoyer for Leader In a Break With Nancy Pelosi
http://tinyurl.com/yh6oj5

Senate to investigate rendition abuses Abuses carried out under the CIA's secret programme of extraordinary rendition are to be investigated by one of the Senate's most powerful committees, it emerged today.
http://tinyurl.com/yzoqkf

Newly Elected Conservative Rep Bachmann: “My No. 1 Goal Is To Not Go To Jail”...
http://tinyurl.com/yc2jt9

Strom Thurmond's Alter Ego is Back! Trent Lott Running for GOP Leadership Post. You Can't Keep a Bigoted Republican Down, Can You?
http://tinyurl.com/ykc4t6

Confirmed: Two-week GOP DeLay replacement loses entire staff
http://tinyurl.com/yet5xn

Senate Dems Choose Leaders...
http://tinyurl.com/ya2vdf

RELIGIOUS ITEMS

Evangelicals: Supporting Israel Is “God's Foreign Policy”...
http://tinyurl.com/yghsdt

Why God Chose George
http://tinyurl.com/yc9tky

From the country's heartland, voters sent messages that altered America's culture wars and dismayed the religious right — defending abortion rights in South Dakota, endorsing stem cell research in Missouri, and, in a national first, rejecting a same-sex marriage ban in Arizona.
http://tinyurl.com/yd62g2

Some Evangelical Christians Reconsider Their Faith in GOP
http://tinyurl.com/ycs4de

ENVIRONMENT

China's Environment Degraded to Dangerous Point: Official
http://tinyurl.com/yb2plc

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Ten spammers create 80% of spam
http://tinyurl.com/yhw93a

INTERNATIONAL

Heroin 'pouring into China'
http://tinyurl.com/ykkqod

Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany; Ahmadinejad is preparing another Holocaust --- Speaking on Army Radio on Tuesday, Netanyahu hinted that Israel possesses the military capabilities necessary for curbing by itself the Iranian nuclear threat, declining to specify what these entail. This will be with our tax dollars and our kids' lives.
http://tinyurl.com/y9zlkb

MILITARY

Torture Suit Star Witness, Fmr. Abu Ghraib Head Janis Karpinski Points to Signed Rumsfeld Memo Listing Harsh Interrogation Techniques --- We go to Berlin to speak with former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who served as the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib. She is the highest-ranking US military officer reprimanded over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal; in May 2005, she was demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel
http://tinyurl.com/ydb2wd

The Military Went to Murtha --- The real issue is that Murtha gets it. His information comes from the military and the top brass who couldn't talk to Rumsfeld. They helped change his mind on the war. He hasn't shut up since.
http://tinyurl.com/yaa847

MEDIA AND JOURNALISM

Comcast backs away from Arab net - Al-Jazeera Intl. has all but conceded defeat in its effort to gain U.S. distribution in time for its worldwide launch Wednesday.
http://tinyurl.com/ydvnok

Is Bill O'Reilly to Blame for the Threats to Letterman and Stewart? And Where the Hell is the FCC?!
http://tinyurl.com/ylrun2

Air America Receives White Powder Package...
http://tinyurl.com/yjjkcy

EDITORIALS - OPINIONS

Judith Miller: Bush Admin. Has Made Us “Less Free And Less Safe”...
http://tinyurl.com/y62jkw

Bring Back Habeas Corpus! Glenn Greenwald: "We simply cannot be a country that vests in the President the power to order people imprisoned for life with no real review of the charges against them."
http://tinyurl.com/ye28c3

HEALTH

Mineral depletion of soils results in higher acrylamide content of foods - A team from Reading University and Rothamsted Research in the U.K. has discovered that wheat grown from sulfur-deprived soils creates flour with high acrylamide production levels.
http://tinyurl.com/wznof

Red Meat Linked To Cancer...
http://tinyurl.com/y6l97k

HUMAN RIGHTS

Crowd cheers as Iran hangs gay man
http://tinyurl.com/yzsewb