Florida Recount Funded by Enron/Halliburton
The Bush Family’s Made Men
According to IRS documents, the Bush campaign took in $13.8 million, most in large contributions. Listed among those large contributors were Bush and Cheney’s two most reliable genies - Enron and Halliburton.
While the Gore/Lieberman campaign filed its IRS disclosures of their Florida recount expenditures months ago, the Bush’s recount fund filed the required forms at the very last moment allowed by law. July 15 was the final day of an IRS amnesty program for groups that hadn’t already complied with the law.
Enron was the allowed to meet with Cheney six times during the California energy crisis, but one of the state’s senator could not.
July 31st, 2002
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It has been a bad year for forest fire fighters, and a bad year for investors. Fires have broken out in near record numbers, and Colorado had the largest fire in its history. The Dow Jones has been racked by scandal after corporate scandal, and has lost almost 7% of its value since the beginning of the year. The two situations are of course unrelated, but they are connected. The root causes of each are very dangerous substances.
People like to say that fire is neutral, that it ’s effect depends upon how you use it. That is not entirely true. Once a fire has started, it has animation, it will seek out and consume fuel for as long as it is able. Fire, in its native state, is bad. We tend to think of fire - when we think of it at all - favorably. That is only because we have chained fire, bent it to serve our good. Notice, however, that we are careful to chain it, to never allow it access to fuel on its own, to wall it off. Every city has a cadre of brave men and women whose job it is to contain fire when it gets out of control.
Greed is very much like fire. People say it is good. It is not. In its native form, it is as rapacious as fire. Instead of twigs and tinder, it devours ethics, pensions, investors, savings, and even, eventually, if left unchecked, economies. Greed can be made to work for our good, but only when we beat it and chain it. Only when it channeled and constrained, only when it is walled off from its fuel, can we direct it towards useful goals. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that. In the name of “efficiency” and “competition” and “deregulation” we have unchained our greed, let it loose among the dry fuel of our savings and 401k plans. Worse, we have under-funded and denigrated the people we rely on to protect us from our out of control greed. Unbelievably, some still insist that there is no danger, that greed can only do goods, that we should step back and allow it to burn through what it would. We should no more do that than allow the fires in Colorado to burn Denver. This is not a needed clearing of the underbrush, this is an inferno attacking the very underpinnings- transparency, trust, fairness - of our economic system. It is far past time that we correct our mistakes, and get our greed under our control again.
July 31st, 2002
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Eschaton
Atrios has a great piece from Olbermann up:
Then, my network starts covering this story 28 hours out of every 24, and six days after the story breaks more people watch my show than watch my old show Sportscenter. And while I’m having the dry heaves in the bathroom because my moral sensor is going off but I can’t even hear it, I’m so seduced by these ratings that I go along with them when they say do this not just one hour a night, but two, thus bringing my own skills and talents to bear on the process by which the snowball runs faster and faster down the hill.
Check it out.
July 31st, 2002
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The New Republic Online: Bench Press
That many of the president’s nominees will be conservative is not reason enough to oppose them. That he might be trying to pack the courts with judges for whom opposition to abortion overrides intellectual honesty and judicial restraint is.
Defeating Owen will not be easy. After scuttling Charles Pickering’s nomination to the Fifth Circuit in March, it’s not clear Senate Democrats have the stomach for another knock-down, drag-out judicial-confirmation fight. But that’s a political calculation. Democrats should feel no guilt for going after Owen on her abortion record. It is, after all, the reason she’s appearing before them in the first place.
I don’t agree with the idea that ideology should not matter, if the judge wasn’t picked solely because of ideology. The President is not entitled to appoint whoever he please - he must receive the consent of the Senate. The Senate is obligated to reject judges that it deems inappropriate, for whatever reason. Ideology is a valid reason, because a judge’s ideology will help determine how he or she decides cases. If the Senate disagrees strongly enough with the nominee’s ideology, then he or she should be rejected. This is one of the checks and balances that ensure we have a strong, vibrant government not beholden to anyone one ideology.
This does not mean that the Senate can dictate who should be appointed. It does mean that the president and Senate must work together to nominate and confirm judges that both sides can live with. That is how democracy works - by compromise and consensus.
July 31st, 2002
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Independent News
Apperently, not as violent as some governments would have you believe:
Italian police planted two Molotov cocktails in a school where anti-globalisation pro-testers were sleeping to justify a brutal crackdown during last year’s G8 summit in Genoa.
A policeman has confessed that he planted the explosives following a year of acrimony over the handling of security at the summit where a protester was shot dead by the police.
“I brought the Molotov cocktail to the Diaz school. I obeyed the order of one of my superiors,” the 25-year-old unnamed officer told prosecutors investigating the summit.
July 31st, 2002
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12-4-01
Coulter was asked why she condemns the terrorists so strongly, but not those who kill abortion doctors. She said that the latter have been extremely frustrated by the fact that they can%u2019t vote on this issue, thanks to Roe vs. Wade, and that they worked within the system for twenty years without success before turning to murder. She said that those individuals believe they had been left with no other routes for dissent in the face of an ongoing atrocity. Coulter further suggested that although she would not take it upon herself to take extreme actions on the abortion issue, she will not condemn those who do.
First, let us make no mistake about it - bombing abortion clinics is terrorism. it is an act of violence against civilians designed to illicit a fear of continuing a given policy.
Second, it is nice that Ann has laid out just when the murder of innocents is appropriate: when they disagree with Ann. We should thank her for clearing that up for us.
Finally, Ann must think that it would be okay for, say, Columbian peasant to use terrorism as a tool in their fight for labor rights, because, after all, they have tried to work within the system, only to have corporate and right-wing sponsored para-military groups harass them and kill their leaders. Apparently, Ann thinks it would be okay for them to say, bomb the headquarters of Coca-Cola.
Oh, wait, I am sorry, I forgot. Ann doesn’t approve government regulations interfering with the free enterprise system (i.e. the right of corporations to harm whoever they please, free of shame or regulation), that means those people would be bad.
See how much easier this is with the Ann Coulter Guide to Acceptable Terrorism?
July 31st, 2002
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Yahoo! News - Democrats: Bush May Roll Back Part of Reform Law
In a statement that lays out how the administration will interpret certain provisions in the bill, Bush said the protection for whistle-blowers applies only to those who provide information to congressional committees conducting investigations, but not necessarily individual lawmakers.
“An individual member of Congress does not conduct an investigation,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.
Question, please: how is an investigation supposed to get started if people are afraid to speak up?
Answer: It is not.
All this does is help shield corporations from scrutiny. People will not come forward until the situation is absolutely dire, and perhaps not even then, if they have to worry about how they are going to feed their families the day after.
Bush has just struck another brave blow in his battle against accountability for anyone making over $5.50 an hour.
July 31st, 2002
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Independent News
The United Nations went into abrupt reverse yesterday and said it no longer intended to release a report compiled by a team of UN officials who visited the site where a US warplane attacked a wedding party in Afghanistan on 1 July.
The change of tack by the UN was apparently the result of pressure from within its own hierarchy, particularly in Afghanistan itself, and from the US not to release the report that allegedly contradicts claims made by the US about the circumstances of the attack.
The controversy first erupted on Monday when it emerged that a first draft of the report written by the UN fact-finding team featured a number of potentially embarrassing allegations. They included the charge that the US had underreported the numbers of people who had died and US soldiers had removed evidence from the site, suggesting a cover-up.
If this is true, it is yet another horrible mistake. The whole world we knows made a terrible mistake. Lying about that mistake is not going to help. We should be apologizing, conducting an investigation to determine what went wrong and how it can be prevented - and doing so publicly, to help convince the world that we are doing our best to minimize casualties - , and doing what ever we can to help those affected rebuild their lives.
Instead, it now appears that we have buried a report critical of our actions. By doing so, we lend credence to the earlier leaked report, we provide ammunition for those who say we don’t care how many Muslims we kill, and we further enrage those we have already harmed, and those who care about them.
In short, we look like arrogant, uncaring bastards flaying about wildly, unconcerned with who we crush in the process. That is not the way to convince the Muslim world that we are fighting only the terrorists.
July 31st, 2002
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