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Friday, August 08, 2003 Big surprise The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). The 40-page document, "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration," was compiled by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee's special investigations division. It marks the launch of a new effort by Waxman and others in Congress to highlight simmering anger among scientists and others who believe that President Bush -- much more than his predecessors -- has been spiking science with politics to justify conservative policies in areas such as reproductive rights, embryo research, energy policy and environmental health. "The Administration's political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists," according to the report, posted yesterday at www.politicsandscience.org. "The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups." Science! posted by chris at 3:30 PM   Come Together Labor, environmental and women's organizations, with strong backing from international financier George Soros, have joined forces behind a new political group that plans to spend an unprecedented $75 million to mobilize voters to defeat President Bush in 2004. The organization, Americans Coming Together (ACT), will conduct "a massive get-out-the-vote operation that we think will defeat George W. Bush in 2004," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of EMILY's List, who will become ACT's president. ACT already has commitments for more than $30 million, Malcolm and others said, including $10 million from Soros, $12 million from six other philanthropists, and about $8 million from unions, including the Service Employees International Union. Mo' money. posted by chris at 3:19 PM   ------------------ Thursday, August 07, 2003 The Matrix Just in case you missed it: Police in Florida are creating a counterterrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans. Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event. The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system. And just so there's no mistake, this isn't just an isolated Florida thing. The Federal government wants in. The Justice Department has provided $4 million to expand the Matrix program nationally and will provide the computer network for information sharing among the states, according to documents and interviews. The Department of Homeland Security has pledged $8 million, state officials said. Keanu Reeves not inluded. posted by chris at 1:38 PM   George W. Bush . . . President of the United States/Action Figure Thanks to Tom Tomorrow. Update: More figures have been added to the Halls of Injustice! Collect yours today! posted by chris at 12:57 PM   ------------------ Wednesday, August 06, 2003 The future of the internet? From Congress to Silicon Valley, the nation's largest communication and entertainment conglomerates -- and software firms that want their business -- are seeking to restructure the Internet, to charge people for high-speed uses that are now free and to monitor content in an unprecedented manner. This is not just to see if users are swapping copyrighted CDs or DVDs, but to create digital dossiers for their own marketing purposes. All told, this is the business plan of America's handful of telecom giants -- the phone, cable, satellite, wireless and entertainment companies that now bring high-speed Internet access to most Americans. Their ability to meter Internet use, monitor Internet content and charge according to those metrics is how they are positioning themselves for the evolving Internet revolution. The Internet's early promise as a medium where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged and the public interest can be served is increasingly being relegated to history's dustbin. Today, the part of the Net that is public and accessible is shrinking, while the part of the Net tied to round-the-clock billing is poised to grow exponentially. One front in the corporate high-tech takeover of the Internet can be seen in Congress. On July 21, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing on the "Regulatory Status of Broadband." There, a coalition that included Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Disney and others, told Congress that Internet service providers (ISPs) should be able to impose volume-based fee structures, based on bits transmitted per month. This is part of a behind-the-scenes struggle by the Net's content providers and retailers to cut deals with the ISPs so that each sector will have unimpaired access to consumers and can maximize profits. The industry coalition spoke of "tiered" service, where consumers would be charged according to "gold, silver and bronze" levels of bandwidth use. The days where lawmakers once spoke about eradicating the "Digital Divide" in America has come full circle. Under the scenario presented by the lobbyists, people on fixed incomes would have to accept a stripped-down Internet, full of personally targeted advertising. Other users could get a price break if they receive bundled content -- news, music, games -- from one telecom or media company. Anybody interested in other "non-mainstream" news, software or higher-volume usage, could pay for the privilege. The panel's response was warm, suggesting that the industry should work this out with little federal intrusion. That approach has already been embraced by the industry-friendly Federal Communications Commission. If this comes to pass, the internet as we know it now will be obliterated, replaced, instead, by nothing but internet commerce. The free and open exchange of ideas will all have a price tag. And access to non-mainstream information on the web that is not controlled by corporations will be nearly impossible to come by. That's the doomsday scenario. The other scenario rests in the hands of activists and people like us refusing to let corporations completely control yet another sphere of public life. It lies in undermining their efforts, circumventing them, jamming them, fighting them from all avenues. Here's one place to get you started. posted by chris at 3:13 PM   How many calories in a Big Mac? Based on several stories they've been doing on obesity and fast food restaurants, The Washington Post has created a Calorie Counter for several major fast food chain menus. You can select various items and then determine the calorie and fat content of your meal. How fun! For example, a Big Mac, medium fries and a medium Coke will net you a whopping 1,250 calories and 56 grams of fat. Keep in mind that for a 2,000 calorie diet, the recommended fat intake is only 65 grams. So ONE meal at McDonald's gives you almost all the fat grams you need in an ENTIRE DAY, not to mention 63% of your calories! Check out your favorite fast food place here. posted by chris at 11:43 AM   ------------------ Tuesday, August 05, 2003 Executive privilege President Bush signed Executive Order 13303, which states: I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that the threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, obstructs the orderly reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration and maintenance of peace and security in the country, and the development of political, administrative, and economic institutions in Iraq. This situation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat. Which gives him the authority to do this: I hereby order: Section 1. Unless licensed or otherwise authorized pursuant to this order, any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following: (a) the Development Fund for Iraq, and (b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons. While it may look like all the Iraqi oil proceeds will go to the Development Fund for Iraq, this is decidedly not the case. These are two seperate things. What it does is give carte blance to any and all corporations involved in Iraq's newly liberated oil industry. It frees them from pesky things like lawsuits or humanitarian abuse accusations or worries about the effect on the environment. How convenient. More information and analysis here. Thanks to Jason. posted by chris at 4:43 PM   Lily pads and the arc of instability While preparing sharp reductions in forces in Germany, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, military planners are talking about establishing semi-permanent or permanent bases along a giant swathe of global territory -- increasingly referred to as "the arc of instability" -- from the Caribbean Basin through Africa to South and Central Asia and across to North Korea. The latest details, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on June 10, include plans to increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea from Yemen, set up semi-permanent "forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco and possibly Tunisia, and establish smaller facilities in Senegal, Ghana and Mali that could be used to intervene in oil-rich West African countries, particularly Nigeria. Similar bases -- or what some call "lily pads" -- are now being sought or expanded in northern Australia, Thailand (whose prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra will be here for talks this week), Singapore, the Philippines, Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout Central Asia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, Vietnam and Iraq. Amreican soldiers everywhere! posted by chris at 2:04 PM   ------------------ Monday, August 04, 2003 Stolen - the Presidency Working for Change is featuring investigative reporter Greg Palast, who broke the story back in 2000 about the theft of the presidential election by Bush and his Republican cronies. This may seem like old news, but it's not. A lot of the details about this situation are still generally unknown due to the fact that the only news organizations that were actually doing quality reporting on it were from overseas. The American news media didn't want to touch the stuff. But Greg Palast, working for the BBC, dug up all the messy dirt on the election. Working for Change is featuring serialized excerpts from his latest book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy on their website. I highly recommend checking out the exceprts, if not the book itself. Here's a little taste: Here’s how it worked: Mostly, the [CD-ROM] disks contain data on Florida citizens—57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris’s computers, they are named as felons who have no right to vote in Florida. Thomas Cooper is on the list: criminal scum, bad guy, felon, attempted voter. The Harris hit list says Cooper was convicted of a felony on January 30, 2007. 2007? You may suspect something’s wrong with the list. You’d be right. At least 90.2 percent of those on this “scrub” list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, over half—about 54 percent—are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats. There's much, much more and it only gets more insidious. And for those of you who would rather have a video version, check out the remarkable documentary Unprecedented. It'll make you angry, but it's a good kind of angry, cause you can do something about it. posted by chris at 9:34 PM   Powell may leave Bush's team Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration's national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises. Armitage recently told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that he and Powell will leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration, sources familiar with the conversation said. Powell has indicated to associates that a commitment made to his wife, rather than any dismay at the administration's foreign policy, is a key factor in his desire to limit his tenure to one presidential term. Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration. Rice appears to have an edge because of her closeness to the president, though it is unclear whether she would be interested in running the State Department's vast bureaucracy. -clip- The current administration has been characterized by fierce policy disputes, often between Powell and more hawkish members, and a reshuffling likely would significantly change the tenor and character of the foreign policy team. So, then no one would be against all-out agressive force. Great. posted by chris at 1:38 PM   ------------------

    

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