We, the people of the twenty-first century may not have been present when the original Constitutional Congress met; still, we feel the depth of distress our forefathers did. Today, we express as our ancestors had. It is time to submit our own Declaration of Independence. Perchance, this statement of duress is long overdue.
As reported in the New York Times today, a certain, small segment of American global society would like to allow firms to offer foreign securities directly in U.S. markets, without actually having to follow U.S. accounting rules. It appears likely that they will succeed in leaving yet another mess for Pres. Obama to clean up, since that change would work to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans.
Federal officials say they are preparing to propose a series of regulatory changes to enhance American competitiveness overseas, attract foreign investment and give American investors a broader selection of foreign stocks.
But critics say the changes appear to be a last-ditch push by appointees of President Bush to dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron and other large companies — measures that were meant to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices that led to those corporate failures.
Legal experts, some regulators and Democratic lawmakers are concerned that the changes would put American investors at the mercy of overseas regulators who enforce weaker rules and may treat investment losses as a low priority.
The Bush Administration's final rush to loot and pillage as much of America's national heritage as it can before leaving office is proceeding full steam ahead. On the heals of its plans to lift the ban on offshore drilling and its refusal to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on EPA's responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases comes this.
The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.
For nearly two terms in office, Team Bush has been undermining what constitutional conservative scholar Bruce Fein calls the "very architecture of the Constitution." And they've had a pretty good run at it.
Let's see. we've already destroyed the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable search and seizure. Has that stopped terrorism cold? Does Osama Bin Laden quiver in fear because we have crippled the Fifth and Sixth Amendments?
And the First? Have we defanged Islamist extremists by damaging the First Amendment? Are we any safer? Does this strike you as an effective remedy to terrorism?
The words are from the last book of Molly Ivins, cowritten with Lou Dubose. These are Mollys' words, from her introduction, entitled with the words of Ben Franklin: "A REPUBLIC - IF WE CAN KEEP IT."
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Rice said she was "proud" the administration decided to invade Iraq. Believe it or not that's not the only quote from the interview that's worthy of "last throws", "bring it on", or "Mission accomplished" status. She goes on to insult the entire Muslim world with an incredibly ignorant comment. Follow me over the jump for the details.
Let me begin by stating that I am not an attorney. I don't pretend to be an expert on the law. But I am an avid reader with an analytical mind and a detail oriented approach to problem solving.
There are three reasons why I'm posting this diary. The first is that it was simply becoming too long to be considered a comment. The second is that it pertains to a subject that I and many others are very interested in. Lastly, I'm posting it because I believe and hope it will add yet another perspective to the current political dialogue.
For the sake of honoring the right of privacy of the person to whom I was originally responding I will use a fictitious user name when referencing him or her.
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
ALL MEN.
That should have included Brandon Mayfield, but the FBI lied about his fingerprint. For those lies, and more, it cost us $2 milion.
That should have included Steve Hatfield, but Attorney General Ashcroft called him a person of interest. For those words and more, it cost us $4.6 million.
That should have included John Walker Lindh, but we denied his repeated requests for a lawyer, and we stripped him, blindfolded him, bound him, and held him in a shipping container. For that treatment he got 20 years, but it cost us our honesty
That should have included Jose Padila and Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hell, it should have included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
we hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . .
There’s a movement afoot, folks. Insurance companies are itching to jump into America’s nascent surveillance society and their insidious efforts to do so are about to infringe upon one of your last bastions of privacy... your car.
It had to happen. I knew it was coming as far back as the late eighties when I found out that the car companies were installing those blasted black boxes under the hood. That was bad enough. But, this... this is going too far, in my opinion. I’ll be dammed if I want to become some blip on a computer screen monitored by some idiot with a sandwich in one hand and a playboy magazine in the other, paid to keep tabs on my movements from the time I pull out of my driveway to the time I make it back home.
Will it be that bad? I don't know but to me, it’s the equivalent of slappin’ one of those detention bracelets on your ankle axle.
Most of us don't really need any more examples to know how far our media has strayed from it's traditional role of informing the public and acting as the public's watchdog because we've already seen far too many examples of that fact. But for me, A Media Tale of Two Generals is about a subject far too important for me to let it go without comment.
My local Seattle Air America affiliate radio station has been running very serious-sounding ads, ostensibly from the National Crime Prevention Council. Their basic message is "Be afraid—at home, at work, wherever."
Now, the NCPC is an interesting organization that seems to be essentially a trade & lobbying association for companies that stand to profit from fear. They last floated into my awareness as the purveyors of those cute commercials featuring McGruff the Crime Dog® offering kids a guide to coping with strangers, school bullies, and similar threats. But their mission has obviously broadened to target adults and make sure we're good and afraid of scary people who might try to blow us up.
The interesting thing to me was the tag line at the end of the spots, which says (approximately): "Brought to you by the NCPC, the Department of State, and the Advertising Council." Would it be cynical of me to suspect that government and industry are partnering to crank up the terror threat as we head into the election season?
. . . or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Torture
I’m mixing my movie metaphors, I’m afraid. The headline is a reference to Dr. Strangelove, but an article in today’s New York Times is more reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate.
Well, part of it, anyway.
The part where the Chinese commandant brainwashes Americans such as Laurence Harvey (never mind that accent) and Frank Sinatra.
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The chart was made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, but its source was not. It was from a 1957 article by Air Force sociologist Alfred D. Biderman, and the techniques are now all too familiar to us.
Is the "it does not cover criminal prosecutions" meme a smokescreen? The Dog hates to stir this pot some more (there seem to be plenty of Kossacks at the stove on this already) but he has been thinking about Mr. John Dean’s and Keith Olberman’s assertions (which the Dog takes to be correct) that the horrible, terrible, very bad FISA bill immunity for telecoms does in fact not protect them from criminal prosecution. While that is a good thing, how much of a good thing it really is really a subject of debate.
How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil.
The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq’s vast oil reserves. As The Times reported Monday, "At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry."
A prize, yes. But at what cost?
Bob Herbert asks us that question in his column today, entitled ‘Oh Happy Day’ because he tells us that is what one would here sung in the executive suites of oil companies after the deals they just made in Iraq. The question is what achieving the happy day for the oil companies has cost the rest of us.
On NPR's "Fresh Air" today was an interview by Terri Gross with Seymour Hersh regarding his story in the next issue of the New Yorker regarding a big escalation in covert activity by the U.S. in Iran through the issuance of a "presidential finding", strangely enough at about the same time that the Combined Intelligence report on Iran NOT being a threat was issued late last year. (Hersh didn't think this was a coincidence, either.)
The most difficult and horrifying thing to listen to during the interview was the complicity of members of Congress in approving the funds ($400 million) to do this, and their rationale. For more, follow me below the jump for an approximation of transcript highlights (by the way, the interview can be found here).
UPDATE: I know that some of this has been covered before but I want to provide an overview of the entire boondoggle. I do need to apologize to mnemosyne9 however for the similarity to the title of his/her diary. I did not discover it until after having published this one. Mea culpa.
Let's start with some background:
In April 2003, in a move consistent with the hostile approach that the Bush Administration has taken toward public health, the environment and environmental regulation, the US Environmental Protection Agency denied a petition from the International Center for Technology Assessment and a number of other organizations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
As a result, 12 states, three cities and 13 environmental groups filed suit against the EPA to force it to comply with its obligations under the Clean Air Act.
