Liberals in academia?

Radical Reference: volunteer librarians helping activists

UN General Assembly Revolt?

How To Take Back A Stolen Election

Activists Crawl Through Web to Untangle US Secrecy

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves" --Brendan Behan

"A German writer whom I love and whom I've translated, Erich Kastne, gives advice, in one of his poems, to a would-be suicide. He tries to give this man various reasons for not blowing his brains out. The man remains unconvinced, so Kastner says, in essence, "All right, the world is full of idiots and they're in control of everything. You fool, stay alive to annoy them!" And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation. If I can't convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them..." --John Simon

Confessions of a Mutual Fund Insider

The Invasion of Iraq: Dollar vs Euro
The War To Save The U.S. Dollar

"The US mass media “reports”, the style, content and especially the language, echo their Nazi predecessors of 70 years ago to an uncanny degree. Coincidence? Of course!"

Nazi vs American propaganda

Making PBS "fair and balanced"

A Democratic candidate for Ohio Chief Justice recieved 257,000 more votes than Kerry

"Statistically, Kerry, as the Democratic presidential candidate, should have more votes than Connally. In a presidential election, most voters have the priority of casting a vote for president and the votes for president are almost always much higher than those of candidates farther down the ticket... Many voters simply don’t vote for Supreme Court justices. It is highly improbable that Connally’s vote totals would be so much higher than Kerry’s"

Re-Vote, Not Recount, in Ohio

I'm Not a Leftist, But I Play One on TV

"In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and also senior producer on the "Donahue" show, the most-watched program on the channel. In the last months of the program, before it was terminated on the eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management that every time we booked an antiwar guest, we had to book 2 pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to book 3 on the right. At one meeting, a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told that she would need to book 3 right-wingers for balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86 right-wingers we would have needed for balance...

NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the "Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial and GE's plastics division.

Fox News is owned by the right-wing Rupert Murdoch (and News Corporation), and does Murdoch's ideological bidding.

ABC is owned by Disney. You'll remember that CEO Michael Eisner said that Disney wouldn't distribute "Fahrenheit 911" because Disney "didn't want to be in the middle of a politically-oriented film during an election year." Eisner's comment was allowed to pass only because so few people realize that Disney is one of the biggest purveyors of political opinion this election year and every recent election year -- almost all of it right-wing political opinion. Each day in major radio markets nationwide, Disney radio stations serve up hour after hour of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, etc. etc.

CBS News, owned by Viacom, got taken in by forged documents -- and then censored accurate reporting critical of Bush, apparently at the behest of Viacom's CEO, Sumner Redstone. Six weeks before the election Redstone endorsed Bush on behalf of Viacom: "From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on."

The Media and the Election

"If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."

argumentum ad temperatiam

Democrats Commit Suicide

"The Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch tells the story of an ambassador's visit to the Hermitage in Leningrad: 'He wanted to see the art known to be hidden in the Hermitage and not shown to the public. Works of the old Russian avant-garde. The museum functionary -- a woman who is a connoisseur -- showed him this and that. His last wish: The Black Square of Malevich. Why that? Because it exists, said the ambassador, and it's here, in the Hermitage.... And the two of them stood, thrilled, before Malevich. Why don't you go and hang it right next to the paintings of soial realism in which the Soviet people recognize themselves at work for society, and people would see -- Malevich is baloney! The woman listened. Seriously, though, said the ambassador, you don't have to hide Malevich in the cellar; nobody would look at it. The woman laughed: You're wrong, she said. People wouldn't understand the point of a black square, but they would see that something else exists beside the society and the state.'" --Joyce Carol Oates

Blair impeachment proceedings start next Wednesday

"If I were president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United states in a few days. Permanently.

I would first apologize—very publicly and very sincerely—to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.

Then I would announce to every corner of the world that America's global military interventions have come to an end.

I would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but—oddly enough—a foreign country.

Then I would reduce the military budget by at least 90 percent and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings, invasions, and sanctions. There would be more than enough money. One year's military budget in the United States is equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's one year.

That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated." --William Blum

Doubting the kidnappings and executions

Another Noam Chomsky blog

Anti-Bush protest in Chile

Not What You Think claims the US is in Iraq because of Israel, not oil
While Iraq and the hidden euro-dollar wars argues that it is about the oil after all, through which the US influences the rest of the world and keeps the dollar strong

How I Stole Your Election by George W. Bush

Fallujah in Pictures

"What's the difference between Aunt Jemima and Condoleeza Rice?

One is a 2 dimensional fictional character, used to sell a product, a play on stereotypes in order to allow the consumer to feel safer because their "black mammy" would never lead them astray...

And the other is Aunt Jemima."

Wow

Carnegie Military University: How the Pentagon Funds Universities to Contribute to War

Before a recount can be started in Ohio the vote must be certified, but it looks like the Ohio Secretary of State (coincidentally a zealous Bush campaigner and notorious minority vote suppressor) is dragging his feet on certifying the vote:

"Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of President Bush’s 2004 Ohio Campaign Committee had told the press recently that certification of the vote would not take place until around December 6th, leaving only a week for the recount before the Ohio members of the Electoral College convened on December 13th.

“What’s the point of having a recount if it won’t be completed in time? Everyone knows what happened in Florida in 2000 and no one wants to see that happen again,” said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign"

"For 40 years, the Dayton Daily News reports this morning, Shirley Wightman has worked at polling places on election days. Two weeks ago, she says, turnout was high - 611 voters.. in Washington Township, Ohio... Yet when the votes were tallied, 168 of the 611 voters had made no choice for president. Unless these were the famed undecideds we heard so much about in the closing weeks of the campaigns, something went terribly wrong..."

Ohio undervotes

"To be sure, Candidate X is a mass murderer, but it's worth keeping in mind that Candidate Y is a serial jaywalker."

The media and false equivalence

Florida votes questioned by Berkeley study

Antiwar activists targeted in terror probe

New case of Mad Cow Disease in the US

On Media Bias

"It’s the right debating the far right," said Amy Goodman of mainstream American media in an interview on the Tucker Carlson show.

She's also "concerned about a right-wing takeover at PBS,", referring to the recent departure of Bill Moyers and the addition of a show featuring The Wall Street Journal editorial board and also Mr. Carlson’s show.

Here's a transcript of the show itself

"Election officials in one Ohio county found that about 2,600 ballots were double-counted, and two other counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election..."

Ohio Finds Possible Double Votes, Counts

"The so-called 'Personal Representatives' assigned to [the detainees] have no legal background and are not advocates: they are required to pass on any information gleaned from a detainee during their conversations"

These tribunals are a sham

"Secret laws will become commonplace. Already no one is allowed to see the regulation calling for additional screening for airline passengers. The regulation is regarded as sensitive security information. In short Americans can now be obligated to comply with legally binding regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed they are forbidden to know..."

If we fail by 2006 we'll be living under martial law...

"This election is not the first suspicious venture into electronic voting. In Georgia, in November 2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election – the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees, rather than public officials – but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both of these popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing beloved Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-moment 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Then, in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger – who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters – defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the election..."

Was it Hacked?

The Perfect Election Day Crime

Interview with Green Party candidate David Cobb about the election fraud scandal

Greg Palast debates Salon.com on vote fraud

"It was the Germans who began bombing civilian populations rather than military targets... Hitler describes the tactic as "Schrecklichkeit" (frightfulness), the use of terror to break a country's will to resist"

"Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Ghengis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. What weak Western European civilization thinks about me does not matter … Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my “Death's Head Units” with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

On the Moral Implications of Torture and Exemplary Assassination

On filibusters and spineless Democrats

ACLU speaks out against national ID card

The Bush administration has more CEOs working in it than any administration in history... So where does that get us?

If the US can increase the fuel efficiency of its automobiles by one mile per gallon, it would conserve as much oil as there is in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge that Bush has been pushing to drill in. Increasing the fuel efficiency to 7.6 miles per gallon would conserve as much oil as we use from the entire Gulf region...

Instead, the Bush administration has eliminated tax breaks to buyers of the most fuel-efficient hybrids, and increased tax breaks to purchasers of the biggest gas guzzlers... so much so that for some people it's cheaper to buy a Hummer than to buy a $22k fuel-efficient hybrid. It's not so surprising then to hear that when he was a Senator, Bush's Energy Secretary got more money from the automobile industry than any Senator in history...

The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist... The head of the Public Lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional... The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air poluters in America... The head of Superfund (hazardous waste cleanup program) is a woman who's last job was teaching companies how to evade Superfund...

On Condi Rice and other members of the Bush administration

Mass Media in 'Lock Down' Not To Cover Vote Fraud

"If, for example, touchscreen (or DRE - “direct recording electronic”) voting enabled widespread fraud, then the size of the discrepancy between the exit polls and reality should increase as the percentage of votes cast by DRE increases. The charts show no such pattern by any type of voting equipment, so the CalTech/MIT researchers concluded, “there is no evidence that electronic voting machines were used to steal the 2004 election for George Bush.”"

"One problem though... the CalTech/MIT report used the "corrected" exit poll data now available online at CNN.com..."

Analysis of the CalTech/MIT election fraud paper

Wikipedia page on 2004 U.S. Election controversies and irregularities
(the article itself has stirred up controversy on Wikipedia)

Responses to objections to voter fraud

"The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the President's agenda"

The end of the CIA as we know it?
More...

Votes not counted

US soldiers force men fleeing Falluja to return

"He leaves early to avoid traffic — the crush of cars makes him jumpy. On more than one occasion, he has imagined snipers with their sights on him in the streets. Diesel fumes cause flashbacks. He keeps a vial of medication in his pocket and pops a pill when he gets nervous..."

""I'm taking enough drugs to sedate an elephant, and I still wake up dreaming about it," LaBranche said. "I wish I had just freaking died over there.""

Psychiatric fallout from the Iraq war

US press justifies slaughter in Iraq

More from Greg Palast on election fraud

124 indications of fraud in 2004 election

Petition to Congress to investigate 2004 election

Spread the word!

November 9 study of the exit poll and official tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania finds the figures totally incompatible.

“The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is in the order of one-in-a-million. The odds of all three occurring together are 250 million to one,” the MIT Ph.D calculated. “As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

Rule by Theft

Ohio recount effort initiated by Common Cause and the Alliance for Democracy

"Facticity denotes the conditions according to which one’s possibilities are determined and limited by one’s circumstances, one’s “being-in-the world.” [Heidegger's] interest in scholasticism focuses on categories of living language that have no correspondence with objects in the world, like marks of privation and negation and categories for non-existent entities like “Nothing”... the empty word “being” figures at the heart of questions about the generation of sense in everyday human experience.

At this stage the problem of what [Heidegger] calls “the hermeneutics of facticity” lies in the self-reflexive puzzle according to which facticity must be considered, already, as a kind of hermeneutics. Everyday experience already articulates and interprets its world, so that any attempt to interpret facticity would be an attempt to interpret interpretation..."

Heidegger's Life and Work

Bruce Schneier on electronic voting

Napalm used in Iraq

The head of Ohio's elections commision, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, "also co-chairs the Ohio committee to re-elect George Bush... he publicly spearheaded Republican efforts in the state to reduce the number of his fellow African-Americans whose votes would go to the Democrats

In some cases, the courts over-ruled him, and - much to their credit - most black voters stood up his harassing tactics. But Blackwell never stopped trying...

Who Counts in Ohio?

Edward S Herman's landmark essay, The Banality of Evil, has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable... It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."

Normalizing colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners... No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American...

Fallujah, The Us Elections And 9/11

Milosevic wants Clinton, Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Madeleine Albright, and Wesley Clark to testify

How the Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld

Green & Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount
more...

"In 1998, for no special reason, Orrin Hatch decided that only one senator needed to object to a nomination. This made it easier for Republicans to obstruct Bill Clinton's nominees.

In 2001, when one of their own became president, Hatch suddenly reversed course and decided that it should take two objections after all. That made it harder for Democrats to obstruct George Bush's nominees..."

It gets worse

Building Progressive Media

"'All of the Middle East and indeed the whole world is now extremely suspicious that US Marine forces slaughtered civilians in Fallujah indiscriminately,' Joseph Arrieta wrote at the time. 'Not only that, it appears Marine snipers did a lot of killing. This is not some errant bomb or missile that created "collateral damage," it’s the alleged deliberate, careful sighting of civilian targets with spotters targeting men, women, children and ambulances,' all war crimes.

Now, 'A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest US air raids in the Iraqi city of Falluja,' reports the BBC.

What Sort of Criminal Monsters Bomb Hospitals?

Flickr

More voting weirdness in Ohio

A call to action regarding the election fraud

Votergate 2004: We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW

More on the owners of the voting machine manufacturers

"one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results"

Tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999

John Ashcroft quits!

Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations

Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose?
a DemocracyNow interview with Avi Rubin and Bev Harris

Analysis Of Exit Polls Vs. Supposed Ballot Counts

10,000 vote overcount in Nebraska

EFF on E-Voting

Conflict of interest in voting machine manufacturers

Phil Foster of Sequoia Systems (one of the largest electronic voting machine manufacturers) was indicted for money laundering and bribery in 2001

Tom Eschberger of BRC (now part of another very large electronic voting machine manufacturer, ES&S) was involved in a bribery and kickback case in 2002

Some embarrasing technical details about the electronic voting machines

British trying to impeach Blair over WMD claims that led to war

Citizens for Legitimate Government

Stolen Election 2004

The Numbers Don't Add Up: Nader supporters voting for Bush?

88,408 more votes than voters in Palm Beach county

"When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat."

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

Kerry won by Greg Palast
Interview with Greg Palast (starting at 00:06:00)

Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?

Election judge's experience

official Ohio Secretary of State web site on the 2004 elections

Global monitors find faults [in 2004 US elections]

Voter Suppression Rap Sheet

Discrepancies between electronic voting machine totals

Bug in electronic voting machines "subtracts votes after the absentee tally hit 32,500 -- a ceiling put in place by the software makers"

Exit polling discrepancies
Another take

How exit polling works

The Associated Press reports on electronic voting machine miscounts

North Carolina electronic voting machine tallies 11,283 too many votes for Bush

Voting irregularities in seven Southern states

Running tally of voting machine malfunctions

Florida numbers vs 2000

Voting in 2004 was more problematic than in 2000

Republican Senator and former Senate Ethics Director resigned after revelations that he owned the largest electronic voting machine company ES&S

Much more on voting fraud in 2004 election

Finally Democrats demand a little action

Nader challenges electronic voting machine counts in NH

"This chart makes the trend obvious. In states with paper ballots and audit trails, the exit polls accurately predicted the vote results. In states using electronic machines, the vote results were distorted in favor of Bush."

What really happened

Election results by population

"He didn’t give interviews, or write political essays... But he did want to get a school of students to see what he had seen: that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define itself or defend itself. A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made us into dwarf animals. Made us into herd animals—sick little dwarves, satisfied with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted...

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this..."

The Power of Nightmares

The Economist endorses Kerry

Problems with pebble-bed nuclear reactors