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Friday, November 12, 2004 One more reason imposed democracy doesn't quite work Iraq's media regulator warned news organizations Thursday to stick to the government line on the U.S.-led offensive in Fallouja or face legal action... ...The commission, set up by the former U.S. governor of Iraq, was intended to be independent of the government and to encourage investment in the media and deter state meddling after decades of strict control under President Saddam Hussein. -clip- It also asked media to "set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear." "We hope you comply … otherwise we regret we will be forced to take all the legal measures to guarantee higher national interests," the statement said. It did not elaborate. Story. posted by chris at 1:09 PM   American "danger" gets peace prize Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev honoured the singer once known as Cat Stevens with a peace prize on Wednesday, praising him for charity work and for standing by his convictions despite personal hardships. Yusuf Islam was awarded the Man for Peace award in Rome at the opening of a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates. He last made headlines in September, when he turned up on Washington's no-fly list for having suspected ties to terrorists - a claim he has strongly denied. Story. (thanks, Scott) posted by chris at 9:41 AM   ------------------ Thursday, November 11, 2004 Make your voice heard Working for Change has set up an easy way you can email your Congresspeople on the issue of electronic voting machines. 1. The first one calls for an independent investigation by the Government Accountabilty Office on the efficacy of e-voting machines: All in all, more than 30,000 complaints have been gathered from across the country, and the Internet is heating up with rumors and innuendo that the results of the election were somehow tampered with. In the midst of such turmoil, it's crucial that an independent authoritative investigation be undertaken to sort this all out. Fortunately, a handful of representatives are working hard to get to the bottom of the situation and have urged the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to immediately investigate these charges. It's crucial that Congress continues to pressure the GAO so that these problems can be investigated and reported on to the American people to ensure that Americans' faith in the election process is maintained and strengthened. Contact your Congressperson here. 2. The second one urges Congress to make meaningful election reform a priority in the November special session of Congress: There are a few steps that should be taken immediately to reform our election systems, such as barring election officials from working on any partisan campaigns (a la Katherine Harris), establishing laws and strict penalties against voter suppression and intimidation; and ensuring accurate voting roll purges, free of racial or party bias. Standardizing our election system across the entire nation will strengthen our democracy and will help to increase confidence in our elections. If we act now without the glare of an impending election, future elections can be free of the flaws of 2004. Contact your Congresspeople here. Both issues are important to our democracy. Please sign them and pass them along (easy to do by clicking the little envelope symbol below this post). posted by chris at 7:06 PM   Bush's plan for social security Fresh from re-election, President Bush is dusting off an ambitious proposal to overhaul Social Security, a controversial idea that had been shelved because of politics and the administration's focus on tax cuts and terrorism. Bush envisions a framework that would partially privatize Social Security with personal investment accounts, similar to 401(k) plans, that would be voluntary for younger workers. American workers currently pay 6.2 percent of their taxable income into Social Security, and employers match that amount. A starting point for an overhaul is a plan proposed by a presidential commission in 2001 that would divert 2 percent into private accounts. The remaining 4.2 percent — and the taxes employers pay — would go into the system, helping fund benefits for current retirees. That leaves an estimated shortfall of about $2 trillion to continue funding benefits for current retirees. -clip- Bush has not said how the $2 trillion transition costs would be funded, nor did his commission. Record deficits, Bush's desire to make his five rounds of tax cuts permanent and the rising cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan are major obstacles. Story. posted by chris at 1:09 PM   ------------------ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 Ashcroft's replacement - more of the same President Bush named White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general on Wednesday, picking the administration's most prominent Hispanic for a highly visible post in the war on terror. -clip- Gonzales publicly defended the administration's policy — essentially repudiated by the Supreme Court and now being fought out in the lower courts — of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts. He also wrote a controversial February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. That position drew fire from human rights groups, which said it helped led to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Story. posted by chris at 11:59 AM   EPA suspends pesticide study The Environmental Protection Agency has suspended a controversial study aimed at exploring how infants and toddlers absorb pesticides and other household chemicals, officials said yesterday. Several rank-and-file EPA scientists had questioned the ethics of the two-year experiment, which would have given the families of 60 children in Duval County, Fla., $970 each as well as a camcorder and children's clothing in exchange for having the children participate. The critics said low-income Floridians might continue to use pesticides -- which have been linked to neurological damage in children -- in their homes to qualify for the project. More. posted by chris at 11:54 AM   Ashcroft resigns, crime now non-existant U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, a lightning rod of criticism by civil liberties groups for his anti-terror policies after the Sept. 11 attacks and who once even ordered the robing of two partially nude statues in his department, resigned on Tuesday. "The demands of justice are both rewarding and depleting," Ashcroft said in a handwritten resignation letter to Bush dated Nov. 2, the day the president was re-elected. "I take great personal satisfaction in the record which has been developed. The safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." Wow. And it only took him four years. Thanks, Johnny! We can all rest easy now that Americans are free of crime and terror. UPDATE: Looks like Ashcroft isn't the only one who's vanquished terrorism. posted by chris at 10:09 AM   ------------------ Tuesday, November 09, 2004 The President is not a tribunal Even though he really, really wants to be: The first military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday after a federal judge here ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law — dealing a blow to the legal process set up by the Bush administration to handle accused terrorists. -clip- Robertson ruled that the Bush administration had not followed a lawful procedure in declaring Hamdan an "enemy combatant" who was not entitled to protections and privileges under the Geneva Convention. The "combatant status review tribunals" — used by the Pentagon to decide whether to hold detainees — are not a "competent" court to make such a determination, Robertson said. And the military commission process, which prosecutes detainees using secret evidence and unnamed witnesses, "could not be countenanced in any American court," the judge ruled. "The government has asserted a position starkly different from the positions and behavior of the United States in previous conflicts, one that can only weaken the United States' own ability to demand application of the Geneva Conventions to Americans captured during armed conflicts abroad," wrote Robertson, who served as a lieutenant in the Navy between 1959 and 1964 and was appointed a judge in 1994 by President Clinton. posted by chris at 5:15 PM   Making the world safer, part 16 American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday. A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said. More. posted by chris at 1:06 PM   Fun with maps This site has taken the election results and made new maps of the US voting results based on population size. And then they get crazy with the purple. posted by chris at 11:54 AM   Payback The corporate wish-list is announced and Santa just got re-elected! Lobbyists for the nation's leading business groups have been toasting the success of what they describe as an unprecedented effort this year to help elect President Bush and Republican congressional candidates. Now they plan to collect on that investment... ...Business was generally pleased with the first four years under Bush, but Tuesday's victory now brings within grasp some of the things it was unable to secure in his first term. The list, according to interviews with lobbyists and trade associations, includes making tax cuts for capital gains and dividends permanent, limiting liability lawsuits, changing bankruptcy laws and opening previously restricted land in Alaska and elsewhere for energy exploration. Business groups also count on more narrow shifts, such as changing health insurance rules in a way that benefits some of the GOP's most ardent allies, easing corporate government reform measures at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and making specific adjustments to the tax code. See also this. (via Bob.) posted by chris at 11:43 AM   Always look on the bright side of life Rising global temperatures will melt areas of the Arctic this century, making them more accessible for oil and natural gas drilling, a report prepared by the United States and seven other nations said on Monday. It predicts that over the next 100 years, global warming could increase Arctic annual average temperatures 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over land and by up to 13 degrees over water. Warmer temperatures could raise global sea levels by as much as 3 feet. Such a change would threaten coastal cities, change growing patterns for vegetation and destroy habitats for some wildlife, but an energy-starved world would have new areas for oil and gas exploration, according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. Sure, it'll threaten coastal cities, but hey, think about all that oil and gas! Their optimism is simply stunning. (via August.) UPDATE: Tbogg shows us how Dick Cheney reads these sorts of things. posted by chris at 11:16 AM   ------------------ Monday, November 08, 2004 And so it begins, part II The assault against Falluja began here Sunday night as American Special Forces and Iraqi troops burst into Falluja General Hospital and seized it within an hour. At 10 p.m., Iraqi troops clambered off seven-ton trucks, sprinting with American Special Forces soldiers around the side of the main building of the hospital, considered a refuge for insurgents and a center of propaganda against allied forces, entering the complex to bewildered looks from patients and employees. We're attacking hospitals now. As Jeanne notes: ...The hospital is "considered a refuge for insurgents and a center of propaganda against allied forces." Propaganda. Reports of civilian casualties caused a pullout in April. Clearly the military's first priority was to stop those reports. Not the casualties. The reports. posted by chris at 5:19 PM   And so it begins... The Texas Board of Education approved new health textbooks for the state's high school and middle school students Friday after the publishers agreed to change the wording to depict marriage as the union of a man and a woman. GRANTSBURG, Wis. - The city's school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed. Texas education officials on Friday approved health textbooks for high school students that extol the virtues of sexual abstinence but only make passing mention of contraceptives, which critics say violates state regulations and endangers the health of teens. Arizona voters resoundingly endorsed a ballot initiative requiring immigrants to show proof of citizenship when seeking government benefits - potentially barring all foreigners from the public schools and health programmes. And this is just the beginning, folks... posted by chris at 1:53 PM   Fines for dealing with terrorists decrease since 9/11 What?!? Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of federal records shows. The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records. posted by chris at 1:24 PM   ------------------

    

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