"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society."   Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in a 1945 opinion.  In direct defiance of this wisdom, the Bush regime is engaged in a war on the press- at least the portion of the press it doesn't like.   (more)

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires a court order."  Shrub, 4/20/04.  In 2002, he signed an executive order that authorizes the NSA to wiretap people within the United States with no judicial review.  (more below)

"We do not do torture." -  Shrub

"It's all over Iraq. the worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like... burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs."  - Retired army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, reported the torture, got frustrated by the regime's stonewalling of his reports and when public with what he knew.

"Today, we have a President and administration that has out-Nixoned Nixon in every negative way, with none of the Nixon  administration's redeeming attention to detail in domestic and foreign policy." - Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski

By far, our own government is a bigger threat to our freedom than any possible menace posed by Al-Qaida.-     T.J Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor

"Authorities are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse.  It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things." - former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad on the torture and other human-rights abuses in Iraq

"The Patriot Act has gone too far. Secret renditions should be stopped. Torture must be outlawed. Our military should not spy on our own people. The Senate has spoken: Let us secure our country, but not by destroying our liberties." - US Senator Robert Byrd  (more)

 "The most corrupt Congress in the history of the country." - Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.  - Pascal

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.  - Schopenhauer

As millions of christians across the country celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, their leaders wage war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and elsewhere; crushes the hungry, homeless, elderly, imprisoned and refugee; and maintains the world's ultimate terrorist threat - its nuclear arsenal.  So much for "peace on earth".

The US house voted overwhelmingly to reject calls for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.  Each and everyone of the chickenhawks who voted for this should immediately be sent to fight their own war.   (more)

A bill by congressmen Richard Pombo and Jim Gibbons  (both ripublicans, naturally....)  wants to open millions of acres of public lands to mining corporations and other greed-heads and charge them peanuts for the privlidge of raping our public lands.  Six Western governors have signed a letter calling the proposal  "ill-conceived" with "sinister intent"  and that it would yield a "paltry" $32 million annually, while sacrificing $2 billion worth of royalties.  Death Valley National Park mining engineer, Mel Essington said, "They could put in a bingo parlor, gambling
casinos, a McDonald's.   A portion of the park extends into Nevada.  They could have a legal right to a brothel out there."  Like the casino bribery scandal,  look for ripublicans to take bribes the owners of the Bunny Ranch and their lobbiests to prevent competing brothels from opening on once public lands.   (more and yet more)

Yet more evidence has finally surfaced that Bush and his minions lied about linkage between Iraq, Al Qaeda and 9/11.  The independent National Journal reports that a mere 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."   Of course, only a day after 9/11, he was ordering Richard Clark, his then terrorism chief, to finger Iraq with the attack.

Another report by Dana Priest again provides glaring evidence of the evil the Bush regime is doing.   Khaled Masri, a German citizen, was kidnapped by the regime and whisked to one of its gulags for inhumane treatment.   This was because his name sounded terrorist to the regime's goons.  After 5 months of this treatment, he was released without papers on a dark rural road in Albania with the hopes no one in German would believe his story.   To help ensure this, the regime sent a top diplomat to bet the German govt. to keep quite.  Alas, they did...  Also documented are other innocent folks that the goons have kidnapped and mistreated.  Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, was kidnapped by a  CIA goon squad and rendered to Egypt for torture- including being burned with cigarettes, given electric shocks and beatings.  After six months of this, the regime flew him for more abuse at their Gitmo gulag.  Surprisingly, he was released- after almost 4 years in secret captivity  without being charged with anything.  Many folks were kidnapped based on what the CIA goons had been told by other "suspects" they interrogated (probably using torture...).   Of course that has led to many, many innocent folks being kidnapped and tortured.  One prime example- from an intellegence official no less- is the totally innocent college professor whose crime was having given another kidnapped suspect a bad grade.  This just adds more proof that Bush and his regime are criminals.

News that the Bush regime has kidnapped their citizens, tortured and otherwise abused them, "rendered" them to allied nations for torture, operated gulags on thier soil, and used their  airports to aid their criminal endevours has casued quite a flap- but only in Europe...   Already there are serious criminal investigations, legislative inquries and demands that the Bush regime tell the truth (for a change...)   Most notably, Italy has issued arrest warrants for over 20 CIA goons for kidnapping an Egyptian cleric there in 2003.  The EU's top justice official said that any member nation which permitted Bush regime gulags within its borders would be stripped of their voting rights.  That's a start.  Better yet, try their leaders as war criminals.

Condi Rice took her lying road show to Europe where she repeated the lie that the regime doesn't torture its prisioners.  Knowing she was going to hammered about this and regime other war crimes,  current and  former CIA officers report that the regime scrambled to get all the
suspects it holds off European soil before she arrived.  Many were whisked to a new regime gulag  in the North African desert.  (more)

The regime finally gave up and said they would stop objecting to Sen. McCains anit-torture measure.  It requires prisioner treatment to be in accords with an Army field manual.  The rest of the story:  The NY Times reported the regime's pentagon flunkies approved a 10-page secret addendum to the Army field manual which allows many forms of torture and inhumane treatment.

A federal district court has ruled that Dover PA's school board policy mandating that students studying 9th grade biology be made aware of the so-called theory of “intelligent design” is unconstitutional since it endorses religion by teaching the bullshit as science.  It further found that some alledgely christian school board members had “time and again lie[d] to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy".

Human Rights Watch reports that the regime operated a secret prison in Afghanistan where detainees were subjected to torture and other mistreatment.  The prisioners were were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a  time and slapped or punched during  interrogations.  (more)

The GAO has further documented that the Bush regime's Corps of Engineers is failing to protect wetlands and other important waters.   Although thehey are required under the Clean Water Act to protect these waters, they are permitting their destruction without explaining why it is not following the law, recording the acreage being destroyed or evaluating the natural functions that are lost.  The regime flunkies in the Corps have told their peons in the field to stop protecting these resources unless they first get permission from them first.    In another report, the GAO found that the Corps is very seldom requiring developers intent on raping wetlands to document the proposed rapes and whatever meager protective measures they include.  Worse yet,  the Corps rarely inspects the finished project to verify the developers live up to whatever measures they said they would implement.     (the GAO report)

The regime's is changing the "management" plans for our Natl. Parks.  Commments will be taken up to 2/18/06.  Read the proposal and comment here.  For good background on their plans to rape the parks, The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees has posted detailed information at their website- http://www.npsretirees.org/.

 Investigators in a widening corruption probe of the regime's Iraq "reconstruction" contracts arrested an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel for taking bribes in exchange for awarding lucrative Iraq "reconstruction" contracts to a private contractor and for outright stealing $100,000.   Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said billions in funds can't be accounted for.  More than 50 other cases of graft and theft by regime officals are being investigated.  In Nov, the owner of several companies in Iraq- and who had been been convicted of fraud in 1996- was arrested for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to regime officals to get plum contracts worth millions.  One receiptant of the bribes was also arrested.  (more)  And how has the "reconstruction" the Bush regime has promised gone?  It, like their response to Katerina has been a disaster.  Oil production is less that before their attack and the average home in Baghdad gets only three hours of electricity a day.

Another ripublican greedhead bites the dust.  Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting a cornucopia of bribes (including two antique commodes and a Rolls Royce) from defense contractors for steering work their way.  The corporations should also be convicted of bribery.

Not content with bribing domestic media members to mouth their propaganda, the regime has exported the approach to Iraq.  Members of the Iraq media are being paid to publish propaganda written by regime troops in Iraq as "news".  The propaganda program is headed an organization in the regime's Dept. of Offense which is named the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element.  It is also aided and abetted via a multimillion dollar contract with the K Street PR/spin firm, the Lincoln Group.   The Lincoln Group has also been bribing a newpaper controlled by the ever evil Ahmad Chalabi to print the propaganda.   They are just one of three contractors the regime has employed with up to $300 million in taxpayer money to spout their lies, BS and propaganda.  The regime also bought an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and used them to covertly spout their propaganda as unbiased "news".  Yes, the regime is sure bring democracy to Iraq- their Orwellian form of it...  (more)

The regime is now killing kids in Pakistan according to a 12/4/05 report  which says a regime drone launched missle killed two sleeping kids.

Add the greiving parents of another victim of the regime's Iraq quagmire to the growing list of families speaking-out.  The parents of marine Auggie Shroeder say their son's life was wasted in Iraq want the US out of Iraq.  They say that before their son was killed in the quagmire, he said the war was not worth it and that,  "His complaint was about having to go back repeatedly into the same towns, to sweep the same insurgents, or other insurgents, out of these same towns without being able to hold them, secure them. It just was not working, and that's what he wanted to get across."  (more)

A British paper, the Daily Mirror, has reported that Bush had told Blair in April 2004 that he was planning yet another crime-  bombing the al-Jazeera offices in Qatar.  The Blair regime has invoked the rarely used Official Secrets Act to prevent further leakage of the info.  Many of regime supporter scoffed at the report, however, it is very likely true since the Bush regime has previously bombed al-Jazeera's offices in Afghanistan and in Baghdad.  Rummy has also defended the targeting of radio stations.  (more)

As if push for Patriot Act redux isn't enough, a secret Dept. of Offense database obtained by NBC News shows that military intelligence and local law enforcement agencies are spying on the constitutionally protected activities of anti-war and enviromental activists using the guise of the war on terror.

Resistance to the regime's recruitment of cannon fodder for their wars is growing.  Students, teachers and peace activists are being rallied for a National Day of Counter-Recruitment by the Campus Anti-War Network (CAN)   A Rutgers organizer says, "A military that is an unequal employer and that funnels people into an immoral war should not be able to recruit on campus"  Methinks the regime should first recruit amoung it's supporters.  All who voted for Bush- especially in 2004, long after his lies about the need to attack Iraq were plainly obvious- should immediately sign-up as cannon fodder in the war they supported with their vote for the lying idiot.  If they are unfit, make them send their sons and daughters to die to "protect their freedom".    The Bush twins should be the first to volunteer as cannon fodder/IED magnets to show they support their daddy's stupid Iraq attack/quagmire. (more)

The massive US effort will leave behind this legacy: Iraqis will actually have, on average, fewer hours per day of electricity in their homes than they did before Bush attacked the country in March 2003.  Oil production also lags pre-attack levels.

A top Florida election official and computer experts say computer hackers could easily change  election results from electronic voting machines.  They also noted that Diebold software had failed repeated security tests. A computer security expert said he was "shocked" at how easy it was to get into the machines and make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked for a user name and password,  but didn't require it. That meant it had not just a "front door, but a back door as big as a garage".  From there, he typed just five lines of computer code and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another. The expet said,  "I am positive an eighth grader could do this."  (more)   Calf. has also ordered ES&S to fix their electronic voting machines and warns that Diebold's machines are flawed.  (more)

Ripublician senator Ted "Bridges to Nowhere" Stevens can't get legislation through the senate to rape ANWR on it's own merits so he attached it to a "must pass" Dept. of Offense funding bill.  How typical...

A poll shows that more than 3/4 of Americans believe that global warming is happening and is at least partially caused by human activity, and that 60 per cent see it as a "crisis" or a "major problem".  The more surprising thing is that the poll was by a regime ally- right-wing  Fox news.  In spite of this, the Bush regime refuses to do anything about global warming.  Their idiotic position is that efforts should be voluntary.  Sure, just like when Bush was governor and pushed this BS.  Pollution in Texas soared.  Some of the damage already done:

• New research has found that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years.
• This year is expected to be the warmest ever recorded; 1998 was the hottest so far, but the past three years currently occupy the next three places.
• The level of the world's seas and oceans is rising twice as fast as in the past, as their waters expand in rising temperatures and glaciers melt.  The people of the Carteret Islands in the South Pacific, have started to leave as their homes succumb to rising seas.
• Hurricane Epsilon - the 14th of the year - is forming in the Atlantic, even though the worst recorded hurricane season by far has formally ended.
• Greenland glaciers have suddenly started racing towards the sea and melting. Much the same is beginning to happen to glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
• Areas such as the western USA, which depend on mountain snows for their water supplies, are running short as less snow falls - and what does fall melts earlier.
• Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are bleaching out and dying as sea temperatures rise and scientists fear that the whole reef may perish by 2050.

Corporations will no longer have to inform the public of the amount of toxic chemicals they release if a proposal by the regime's EPA goes into affect.   This is yet another plum for ever-greedy corporations.   (more)

The McWane corporation has been convicted for the third time this year for its enviromental crimes.  This time its been slapped with a $5 million fine, forced to do a community service project valued at $2.7 million and several executives were sentenced to house arrest and probation.  McWane is a notorious polluter and has also been sanctioned repeatly by OSHA for its horrid worker safety and health conditions.

Sign an Earth Justice petition opposing the Bush regimes' revoking of the Roadless Area  Conservation Rule and replace it with a state petition process.   Under the regime's approach, the 58.5 million acres of National Forest Roadless Areas will be opened to loggers and developers and other rapists.  The roadless rule was established after more than 600 public meetings and more than 1.6 million comments.  More than 95 percent of  those comments supported the rule.  Despite this, the regime is going to open these areas under the guise of states rights.

An AP article says an,  "analysis of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's voting record shows a pattern of supporting bills that benefit HCA."  Well DUH!   Who in their right mind would expect a rich ripublican to put the public's welfare above his own greedy interest?   Frist is also pushing for giving big the big drug corporations billions under the guise of preparing for an avian flu outbreak.   One of the many regime figures who'll benefit is Rummy.  He's a major stock holder and former CEO of Gilead Sciences Inc., the sole patent owner of Tamiflu.

Bill Frist's AIDS charity paid nearly a half-million dollars in consulting fees to members of his political inner circle according to tax returns (filed nine months late...) providing the first financial accounting of the alledged nonprofit organization.  (more)

The  EU Justice Commissioner threatened  sanctions against any EU nation which hosted Bush regime gulags.  The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly has announced a probe of the gulags.  Meanwhile the Guardian is reporting that more than 300 CIA flights have landed at European airports.   Germany and nearly a dozen other European countries have launched their own investigations into the flights.

Alledged christian  and Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed failed for two years to register as a lobbyist in Texas although he received $4.2 million from crooked lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon to lobby Texas officials and mobize Texas religious zealots to shut down two Texas tribal casinos which threatened their clients' casinos.   These two are charged with defrauding their tribal clients of some $80 million and Scanlon recently plead guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials.  He's being forced to refund the tribes $19 million and cooperate with investigators.  One can only hope that Reed gets slapped with an indictment for christmas.  Reed also did their bidding in Louisiana by stoking religious zealots against casinos which would have competed with the ones run by Abramoff and Scanlon's clients.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separtion of Church and State debated christian zealot Jerry Falwel on  Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" recently on the zealots' latest screed that a war against christmas is being waged.  As a result, he received 66 nasty e-mails, including two death threats- e.g.,  "Hope you die soon. Merry Christmas.".   What fine christians....

Echoing the words of Falwell and Pat Robertson, a Sharia judge said last years tsunami "was because of the sins of the people of Aceh."

A report by 13 members of the House Homeland Security Committee says the regime's Homeland Security Department is failing to protect the homeland.  Some of its notable failures:

• Failure to compile a single, comprehensive list prioritizing protections for the nation's most critical and potentially vulnerable buildings, transportation systems and other infrastructure.
• Failure to install monitors at borders and every international seaport and airport to screen for radiation material entering the country.
• Failure to install surveillance cameras at all high-risk chemical plants.
• Failure to create one effective network to share quickly security-related intelligence and alerts with state, local and private industry officials.
• Failure to track international visitors through a computerized system that takes their fingerprints and photographs as they enter and exit the country.

Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July in re: the Plame outing by the regime, "When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."   How ironic.  This once great reporter helped turn a third-rate burglary by Nixon "plumbers" into a saga which resulted in Nixon fleeing the White House in disgrace cannot recognize the importance of the regime's outing of a CIA agent.  Now, instead of investigating those in power, he's writting fawning books about them.   He's swapped being a real journalist for access.   He's also tried to hid is own role in Plame-gate.   A glowing example of this is his fawning book "Plan of Attack".  Although it was published 6 months after the regime's role in the Plame outing became clear, it contains nothing on the story.  It also contained very little on the regime's lies about the need to attack Iraq.

Representative John Conyers released a staff report on the regime's lies and misconduct re their Iraq attack.  Part of Conyers' statement on the report:  "In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. There is at least a prima facie case that these actions that federal laws have been violated - from false statements to Congress to retaliating against Administration critics.

James Tobin, a Republican lobbyist from Maine, was found guilty of conspiring to jam New Hampshire Democrats' get-out-the-vote phone lines three years ago.  He faces up to five years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.   His conviction follows that of Charles "Chuck" McGee of Manchester, N.H., the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and Allen Raymond, a political consultant who headed the now-defunct company GOP Marketplace. McGee, "came up with the phone jamming idea [and] served seven months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to jam phone lines." Raymond is scheduled to begin serving a five-month sentence on Dec. 30.

Media Matters for America named MSNBC's Chris Matthews its 2005 "Misinformer of the Year".  In 2005, Matthews called the majority of his fellow Americans "real whack-jobs"; praised a speech by President Bush as "brilliant" even before it was delivered; said that Bush sometimes "glimmers" with "sunny nobility"; and gushed at having his picture taken with the president, adding that Bush "belongs on Mount Rushmore." Matthews made false claims about Democrats, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Iraqi elections, Catholics, and the Iraqi insurgency, and he derided people with sneering insults, calling them "witchy" and "thimble-wit(s)."  (more)

The regime's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq is still shrinking.  In '06, the UK, Italy and South Korea are planning to reduce or withdraw their troops while other nations, such as Ukraine and Bulgaria, that have already started to depart.  (more)

Socialist Evo Morales was elected Bolivian President in landslide victory.  He will be yet another South American leader who is against Bush.  (more)

The Delphi corporation is a great example of what's wrong with the prevailing flavor/perversion of capitalism.  Under the watch of the current executives, it lost $6.3 billion in the last seven quarters.   Although it still has $1.6 billion in cash and a $2 billion line of credit, it wants to cut the average peon's pay from the current $26 an hour to $9.  That's in addtion to forcing them to pay a total of $1 billion a year more for health care, freezing their pension plan, eliminating cost-of-living raises and profit sharing and reducing vacations.  The worse part is that the greedy and incompentent executives are actually going to get rewarded for driving the company into bankrupcy.  They are rewarding themselves even bigger golden parachutes-  $88 million on top of the $145.5 million they already are "entitled" to.  The golden parachutes of each the top 4 execs would increase by over $2 million.

Which large American mammal kills the most humans each year?   After humans- the deer.

The regime has been illegally monitoring radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the D.C. area, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle- including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities according to a US News report.   Investigator have gone onto private property without first obtaining a search warrant or court orders.  Citizens were also threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation.

The latest frankenstein incarnation of the Patriot Act being rammed through congress by the usual suspects extends most of its Orwellian measures.  Some of the things it will continue to allow Bush's minions to do:

• Launch witch-hunts on citizens without any judicial oversight (which they've done more than 30,000 times each year),
• Search private property without notifying the owners.
• Search citizens' library records, medical records, school records, and financial records with essentially no judiciary review.
•  Conduct roving wiretap

A California jury awarded thousands of Wal-Mart employees $207 million because they were illegally denied lunch breaks.  (more)

Inflation adjusted corporate profits have grown over 50% since 2001 but the peons aren't reaping the rewards.  Their pay has only increased by less than 7% and the hourly pay of nonsupervisory workers is now lower now than when the "recovery" began.   Krugmans also cites Census data on family income for 2004, the latest year analysed, which shows  "It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2%, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise".

Say, isn't this the fifth year that Bush has been in power?   This reverse Robin Hood upward transfer of wealth to the greedy rich is aided and abetted by the policies of the Bush regime.  In fact, it is the over-arching goal of the regime.  Just from their never ending tax cuts,  the greedy rich are getting even richer while everyone else is getting poorer.  Even worse, the poorer - and their kids and grandkids- are getting saddled with the monstrous debt the regime has racked up rewarding the greddy rich.   When are american citizens finally going to rise-up against this madness?  Alas, until they finally realize that their improvishment is a neccesary consequence of the ripublicans' and most of the democrats' policy of enriching the folks that really run this once great country- the greedy rich.  In fact, this is the logical consequence of unbridled capitalism.

Greed- what made this country great economically- and what is causing it's downfall.   The main question now is whether it will end with a bang or a whimper.  Will it be the bang of a economic melt-down and the resulting mayhem or will it be a whimpering slide of another failed empire into decay.   Either way, we are doomed unless the rampant greed is stopped- and stopped quickly.

Despite the outcry, Bush said he has no intention of stopping the illegal spying.

And it's not as if obtaining a court order for spying from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is difficult.  Out of 19,000 requests for orders, only 5 have been rejected since 1978 and there is a provision which permits wire-tapping for 72 hours without an order.

Of course Shrub has lied repeatly about the illegal spying.  In 4/04 he said, "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires a court order." Starting in 2002 and about every 45 days since then, he's signed executives order that authorized the NSA to wiretap people within the United States with no judicial review much less a court order .  Bush also contents that the spying has helped "detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the US and abroad," but refused to provide any specific examples.

And that's not all the Bush regime is spying on.  The ACLU has discovered through a Freedom of Information request that counter-terrorism agents at the FBI have conducted extensive surveillance of such groups as the Vegan Community Project, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and a Catholic Workers group the FBI accuses of having a "semi-communist ideology."  Since when does alledgelly having a "semi-communist ideology" warrant spying?

Alito also wrote a legal analysis for the Reagan regime of a case in which the police shot and killed an unarmed teenager although they didn't know why he was fleeing the scene of a $10 home burglary.  He wrote that the killing could be,  "justified as reasonable" and that because the officer could not know for sure why a suspect was fleeing, the courts should not set a rule forbidding the use of deadly force.  Ironically, the case when to the Supreme court which held in a 6-3 reasonable decision that, "Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so."   (more)

Just where would this idiot draw a line on police shootings?  Maybe if his (if he has a son...) was shot fleeing from fender bender?   Not only should this idiot be prevented from serving on the supreme court- he should be disbarred.

In another case, Alito ruled that a group dedicated to evangelizing children in fundamentalist christianity had a legal right to compel a public elementary school to publicize its meetings by, among other things, having teachers distribute to their classes the group's evangelizing religious materials.

• Infiltrating Public Broadcasting  Although Kenneth Tomlinson is no longer head of the CPB, another political hack of the same rightwing nut  bent was selected to carry on his attacks.
• Manufacturing Fake News  At least 20 federal agencies have produced and distributed scores of bogus "video news releases" out of a $254 million slush fund set up to manufacture what the GAO has called "covert propaganda."
• Bribing Journalists  The regime has has paid pundits praise it.  Most notable was the idiot Armstrong Williams who received $240,000 of  taxpayer money to hype the regime's education policies.  The regime's military has now been outed for paying Iraqi newspapers to publish slanted BS and propaganda as "news".
• Lying about the Iraq War
• Gutting the Freedom of Information Act
• Consolidating Media Control

Crime Without Conviction: The Rise of Deferred and Non Prosecution Agreements by the Corporate Crime Reporter documents the lack of prosecution of corporate criminals by the regime.  Snippets:

It used to be that major corporations caught committing serious crimes would be brought to justice - convicted of a crime and sentenced.  No longer.  Now, under a new policy implemented by the Department of Justice since 2001, major corporations caught committing serious crimes are not convicted of a crime and sentenced.

In fact, no major corporation caught engaging in accounting or securities fraud has been convicted since the Arthur Andersen conviction in June 2003.  Instead, the Justice Department and state prosecutors are offering major corporations - including Adelphia, Computer Associates, KPMG, Merrill Lynch, Monsanto, Sears, Shell, WorldCom/MCI - special deals - known as deferred prosecutions or non prosecution agreements.   Under these agreements, prosecutors agree not to criminally prosecute the corporation to conviction in exchange for cooperation against culpable executives, implementation of corporate monitors, and fines.

The report finds that prosecutors have entered into twice as many non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements with major American corporations in the last three years (23 agreements between 2003 to 2005) than they have in the previous eleven years (11 agreements between 1992 to 2002).

The American Dream  doesn't need to go on a diet in the new year. It's been shrinking for years.

We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers -- with an increasingly low-wage workforce, instead of a growing middle class. Even two-paycheck households are struggling to afford a house, college, health care and retirement.

The American Dream is becoming the American Pipe Dream.

"The vast majority of American workers (70 percent) think 'the American Dream' has been or will be harder for them to financially achieve than it was for their parents' generation," according to the Principal Financial Well-Being Index.

We are living the American Dream in reverse.

The hourly wages of average workers are 11 percent lower than they were back in 1973 (adjusted for inflation), despite rising worker productivity. CEO pay, by contrast, has skyrocketed -- up a median 30 percent in 2004 alone, in the Corporate Library survey of 2000 large companies.

Median household income has fallen an unprecedented five years in a row. It would be even lower if not for increased household work hours. Americans work over 200 hours more a year on average than workers in other rich industrialized countries.

America Can't Take It Anymore, Mark Follman's 12/5/05 Salon.com piece on where the regime's torture poliies are taking us.  The lead:

Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any  discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects - conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House - have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

"The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now. How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual - it's complete madness." - Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA, on the regime's policy of torturing its prisioners..  (more)

"I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse."  Robert Baer, ex- CIA officer and expert on Iraq and the rest of the Middle East

"I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners." - Sen. Richard Durbin on being shown photos of the regime's torture.  The photos are even more horrific than the public has seen since they remain classsified.  Durbin also adds,  "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

Don't Let It Bring You Down -  Another great piece by William Rivers Pitt on the regime's Iraq quagmire.  Snippets:

Dick Cheney told us  before the war that, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators"? The vast gulf between our present                reality and Cheney's pre-invasion optimism is wide enough to sail the Sixth Fleet through with room to spare.
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Let's see. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed during this occupation. 70% of the population is unemployed. Long gas lines are the rule of the day. Hospitals don't work. Electricity is intermittent. Potable water is hard to come by. Bombs go off every day, slaying civilians, police and soldiers indiscriminately. Iraqis disappear into torture chambers. Religious factions growl at each other like dogs in a
fighting pit. Even the children throw rocks.

Since January 2001, we have lost faith in the idea that our votes matter, we have lost two towers in New York, we have lost an entire city in Louisiana, we have lost two thousand one hundred and twenty nine soldiers to Iraq, somewhere along the way we lost a whole pile of weapons of mass destruction those soldiers died trying to find, we have lost a substantial portion of our children's future by spending hundreds of billions of dollars so those soldiers could die far from home, we have lost our standing with the international community, and a good portion of the  planet looks long and hard at us, wondering if we have also lost our minds.
. . .
Don't let it bring you down, though. We're staying the course, fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, spreading democracy, rolling with the noble cause, doing the Lord's work and saving Christmas, all at the same time. It's all good.

This Vietnam experience came back to me when I heard that the U.S. military has been planting stories in Iraq newspapers. Having survived training as a U.S. Army journalist, I can report that this military specialty resembles the real thing about as much as Army food resembles food.

In Iraq these days, the U.S. military is reportedly spending millions of dollars planting stories and paying local journalists to write friendly coverage in Arabic newspapers. The Pentagon sublets this propaganda work to a firm called the Lincoln Group, according to the Los Angeles Times, which then places the stories in Iraq media without informing readers that the U.S. government is the actual source. This military  scheme sounds remarkably like the one Karl Rove and other agit-prop specialists have successfully used to plant positive coverage in major media outlets within the Unites States. Nonetheless, the military approach to journalism deserves a special look.
. . .
And so the utensils of the military "journalist" are being again polished in Iraq. A chief trick that bears watching, and we heard it in President George W. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech Wednesday, is the repeated use of limited truth to project an image of unlimited grandeur.

George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
. . .
What these revelations <the regime lies about the need to attack Iraq> also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

    If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

    Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

    No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

    "We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.