If you're looking for the textbook The Little, Brown Reader, click here.
is a free service provided by Lance Brown, Candidate for President in 2008. You can visit his campaign site and weblog here.
About Lance Brown
The Campaign "Elevator Pitch"
The Longer Pitch: The Future of America is Freedom
10 Easy Ways to Help the Campaign
Join the On-The-Road Support Network
Lance In The Media
Contact Lance
 |
Easy online actions for advancing the cause of freedom.
PNAC.info
An effort to investigate, analyze, and expose the Project for a New American Century, and its plan for a "unipolar" world.
CampusLP.org
Free web sites for campus libertarian clubs!
The Little Brown Reader
A rolling catalog of articles and web sites of significance that Lance is reading.
The Nevada County Libertarian Party
"Your Local Party of Principle" (Chairman)
The Nevada County Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Dedicated to Creating a Civil Liberties Safe Zone in Nevada County, California. (Co-founder)
The Free School on the Internet
A developing effort to create a superior online K-12 school, with free attendance.
StopCarnivore.org
Stop the FBI Spy Tool Carnivore Now!"
GreenLiberty.org
Where Green values meet Libertarian principles.
Pictures of The Bill of Rights
Tips for Promoting a Campus Event
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
My (many) e-zine and list subscriptions
The History of Drug Prohibition in the U. S.
The Bill of Rights -- Full Text
Support freedom in our lifetime:
"I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it."
A Little Worried About America
Boston Public: The Case Against Schools
The USA-PATRIOT Axe
The Nader 2004 "threat", and those poor, pitiful Democrats
Book Recommendation: Healing Our World
Taboos, skews, and contradictions
North Korea's Sensible Delusions
Lance on Regulation
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In IraqCBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq August 29, 2003 Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq. ... Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway. ... Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not. Read It Rating: 8 Fire consumes R.V.Excerpts: The fire began at around 5 p.m. and was under control in less than 20 minutes, according to Mount Shasta Fire District Chief Clyde Davis. However, the vehicle was fully involved very quickly, and only a few personal effects could be salvaged. The fire also spread beyond the vehicle, burning a small amount of vegetation. Davis said the preliminary investigation revealed the fire was caused when the driver "pushed the vehicle really hard up the grade," which loaded up the engine's filters with oil, causing the smog pump to explode and spread oil over the engine. "There are quite a few motorhome fires in this area because of the steep grades the vehicles have to come up," Davis said. "People try to get more out of their vehicles than they can give." Read It Rating: 4.5 Write a Story, Go to JailWhenever I read a story like this, I always think of the Stephen King novella Rage. Wired News: Write a Story, Go to Jail Brian Robertson was just months away from graduation at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, last year when he found the beginnings of what he thought was a short story on a school computer. He copied the file to another computer, added some paragraphs to the initial text and then promptly got arrested. Robertson, who was 18 when he wrote the story, was charged with a felony count of planning to cause serious bodily harm or death. The story he wrote, titled "Evacuation Orders," (PDF) described preparations for an armed invasion of his school that included directions to unnamed fellow commandos to kill the senior class principal and then plant plastic explosives around the campus. After searching Robertson's car and his parents' home, authorities found no weapons, traces of explosive material or any other evidence that the teen was planning to attack his school. But authorities said the story Robertson wrote was sufficient to charge him under an Oklahoma state statute, which was passed in the wake of school shootings across the country in the last few years. Read It Rating: 9 Family: Police beating killed manFamily: Police beating killed man The family of a man who died after a struggle with arresting officers is accusing the Marin County Sheriff's Department of beating the man to death. San Rafael police and the sheriff's department are conducting investigations into the mysterious death of Cary James Grime, who called 911 asking for help early Sunday and ended up being forced to the ground by two officers and arrested on suspicion of public intoxication. ... Lavie said Grime was was completely subdued and screaming, "Help, they're going to kill me," and 'They're breaking my arm." She said she watched as the officers roughed him up, then pulled him into the patrol car by his cuffed wrists. "I don't care if he was drunk or what he was being arrested for, what they were doing wasn't right," she said. "I think its disgusting." Pittman said, however, that Grime was still resisting when he was taken to the Marin County Jail booking area. As deputies attempted to take off his handcuffs, Grime suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing, Pittman said. Read It Rating: 8 California's reasonable recallBoston Globe / Op-ed / California's reasonable recall By Jeff Jacoby, 8/24/2003 Excerpts: Whether all these add up to a compelling case to recall him is a serious question for serious voters, and the campaign deserves more serious coverage than it has gotten. Yes, there are some ludicrous publicity hounds on the ballot, and yes, there is a decidedly only-in-California aura to the candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that doesn't detract from the gravity of California's condition or the legitimacy of the recall as a vehicle for repairing it. One of the world's largest and most important political entities is in the midst of a leadership crisis. It is irresponsible and cynical for the press to be treating it as a circus. The pundits' dyspeptic disapproval of California's recall procedure is meritless. Why should Californians be condemned for making use of a provision that has been in their constitution since 1911? They have not exactly been promiscuous with it: This will be the first statewide recall election in California history. ... For all the talk of "democracy run amok," voters in states that have the recall use their power sparingly. Like the ability to pass or repeal laws via the ballot box -- initiative and referendum -- the recall is a restraint on the power of arrogant politicians and entrenched special interests. In a government based on checks and balances and the sovereignty of the people, it is prudent to have a constitutional tool for removing officeholders who are so abusive or incompetent that it would be unwise to leave them in power until the next election. A train wreck? A coup? Far from it. California's recall campaign is simply an exercise in democratic accountability. Whatever the outcome on Oct. 7, the cause of self-government will advance. Read It Rating: 9 California can't be won without a winning mantraI like this suggested mantra: "A true leader is someone who knows where his followers are going." California can't be won without a winning mantra Excerpt: Here is my advice to the other 134 hopefuls who are trying to overtake him: A message is good, but a mantra is better. Find a phrase that resonates with voters and stick with it. This can be tricky, especially for office seekers who have little or no experience in public speaking, or writing declarative sentences. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting stumped on the stump. So I have compiled a list of sample slogans that are inspiring, noncommittal, and somewhat confusing. In other words, they should help any political novice step up to the podium and sound like a pro: • "Standing still means we are not moving forward." • "Progress is a transformative undertaking." Read It Rating: 4.5 |
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
Bush's men tried to gag me, claims Gen Clark
Telegraph | News | Bush's men tried to gag me, claims Gen Clark
General Wesley Clark, the former Nato commander in Bosnia, and a probable presidential contender, has accused White House officials of trying to get him sacked as a CNN military analyst because they feared he would criticise the Iraq war....
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Democrats line up Gen Wesley Clark as their best hope
I said earlier that Clark would be a better choice than Dean for Democrats. (I can't link to it right now because the LBR archives don't seem to be cooperating). I'll stick with that assertion.
Telegraph | News | Democrats line up Gen Wesley Clark as their best hope of winning against Bush
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 24/08/2003)
In this era of the War on Terrorism, senior Democrats have decided that the best - possibly the only - way to beat George W Bush in the 2004 presidential elections is to put up a soldier against him.
A retired general, Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of Nato during its successful campaign in Kosovo, is widely expected to announce his candidacy for the White House in the next few days, backed by powerful members of the United States Congress.
In an open field, where none of the nine current Democrat candidates has established a clear lead, a late entry by Gen Clark would have an electrifying effect. The Vietnam veteran has never stood for elected office. Since his retirement, however, he has become a familiar face on CNN television, frequently criticising President Bush's policies on Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
Federal Court Restricts Global Deployment of Navy Sonar
NRDC Press Release: Federal Court Restricts Global Deployment of Navy Sonar
Conservation Groups Say Ruling Protects Whales and Other Marine Life From Injury and Death
SAN FRANCISCO (August 26, 2003) -- A federal judge ruled today that the Navy's plan to deploy a new high-intensity sonar system violates numerous federal environmental laws and could endanger whales, porpoises and fish. In a 73-page opinion, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte barred the Navy's planned around-the-world deployment and ordered the Navy to reduce the system's potential harm to marine mammals and fish by negotiating limits on its use with conservation groups who had sued over its deployment.
The sonar system, known as Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active sonar (or LFA), relies on extremely loud, low-frequency sound to detect submarines at great distances. According to the Navy's own studies, LFA generates sounds up to 140 decibels even more than 300 miles away from the sonar source. Many scientists believe that blasting such intense sounds over large expanses of the ocean could harm entire populations of whales, porpoises and fish. During testing off the California coast, noise from a single LFA system was detected across the breadth of the North Pacific Ocean.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 28, 2003
Homeschooling in the UK
This is a good article about homeschooling -- in this case, in small-town United Kingdom. It sounds like the British government is much more mellow about the issue in terms of mandatory elements and regulations about schooling. The article appears to be saying that there basically are none.
Excerpt:
It may sound impossible and scary, but anyone can educate their children at home.
There is no law that says that you must send your children to school. Neither do you have to follow the National Curriculum. You don't have to follow a curriculum at all for that matter.
You can put your children into school and then take them out again. You can even put them in during mornings only or on a three-day-a-week basis, should your chosen school agree to a mix and match arrangement.
According to a recent study at Durham University, home educated children fare much better than the average school child in academic terms, and generally socialise well.
Which will surprise many parents who believe making friends in the playground is a big part of childhood interaction.
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 27, 2003
Monsanto, Stop Bullying Tiny Dairy Over Growth Hormones
My brief spiel in favor of this action is posted at E-Actions for Freedom.
Monsanto, Stop Bullying Tiny Dairy Over Growth Hormones
by Working Assets
In a move of Goliath-attacking-David proportions, Monsanto, the multi-national agrichemical company, is suing a small, family-owned milk producer in Maine because they advertise that their farmers pledge not to use artificial growth hormones (also known as rBST) on the cows that produce their milk.
...
Lawsuits such as these are shameless attempts to use the financial clout of a multi-billion-dollar monopolist to intimidate a tiny family-owned business. Consumers want the information being provided to them, and Monsanto should get out of the way.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 89%
August 26, 2003
Petition to Howard Dean on clarifying Israel position
I don't think I'm going to sign this, primarily because of the sentence that begins with "Dr. Dean, we respect and fully support your agenda to...", but if you're a Dean supporter or Democrat enthusiast, I recommend signing this. The Israel-Palestine playing field is already tilted more than enough.
To: Dr. Howard Dean
As members of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, The Green Party, Progressives, Independents, and other parties interested in your candidacy, we would like to express our deep reservations regarding your stated positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on speeches and interviews given last year and early this year, you spoke often of the Israeli victims of terror, yet you failed to acknowledge the three-fold number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, or the Israeli military's incursion and illegal occupation of large portions of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These incendiary actions by the Israeli military have fueled much of the animosity in the region, and they must be acknowledged in any fair assessment of the situation....
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 50%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Jack Hickey
Voter Information for John J. "Jack" Hickey. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Ned Roscoe
Voter Information for Ned Roscoe. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 2%
August 25, 2003
Weintraub: State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
sacbee.com (Opinion): State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 5, 2003
The California Constitution says that the Legislature "shall not, in any manner, create any debt or debts" greater than $300,000, unless such an obligation is for a "single object or work" and is approved by a vote of the people. The only exception is in case of war, "to repel invasion or suppress insurrection."
The pending recall election aimed at Gov. Gray Davis might be considered an insurrection, I suppose. But I don't think that such a threat is the kind of exception the framers had in mind when they prohibited the Legislature from using borrowed money to pay for the ordinary, ongoing expenses of state government.
Yet the budget passed last week and signed Saturday by Davis is built upon a $10.7 billion bond measure to finance the state's accumulated budget deficit. These bonds, to be repaid over five years, are in an amount far greater than $300,000. They will not be used for a "single object or work," such as building a school or buying parkland. And they will not be submitted to a vote of the people.
How then, can the bonds possibly be legal? Some people, not surprisingly, think they are not....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R1
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 75%
Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
Newsday.com - Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
By Patricia Hurtado
STAFF WRITER
August 22, 2003, 9:29 PM EDT
In a scathing opinion, a Manhattan federal judge denied a request by Fox News to block sales of a book by liberal humorist Al Franken that satirizes the network's motto, "Fair and Balanced."
"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Fox's lawyers Friday. "This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit, both factually and legally."
Lawyers for the network filed suit earlier this month seeking a preliminary injunction against the sale of the book, which hit stores Thursday. They argued that the title of Franken's book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," infringed on the network's trademarked motto and could mislead some into believing that the book was endorsed by Fox.
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 20%
August 24, 2003
City can't ban Walmart RV parking
It's not often one hears about something cool that Walmart does, but once I started looking into the RV lifestyle, I soon found out that Walmart has a company-wide policy of allowing RVers to spend a night in a store parking lot for free. It seems that Walmart founder Sam Walton was a big RVer, and the policy was his doing. Very cool.
Apparently some in Whitehorse, Yukon, don't see it as I do.
Particularly this whiner:
After the councillors spoke about Preston’s report, RV park owner Chuck MacKenzie stood up and said now that he sees where council is going on this issue, he wants a refund for 16 years’ worth of city taxes and business licences because the city is not doing its job right.
“I would like a cheque Monday morning,” he said before sitting.
City can’t curtail RV parking, lawyer says
by Jason Small
A Whitehorse Star Archive story originally published August 20, 2003
If the city wants to prevent RVs from camping in Wal-Mart’s parking lot without the store’s permission, it will have to get the territorial government to change a law.
Local lawyer Tim Preston told city council at last night’s meeting that the only way it could prevent people from parking overnight at Wal-Mart without a request by the store to do so would be to ask the territorial government to change the Motor Vehicles Act.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 50%
Conservative backlash (against Ashcroft and "PATRIOT Act")
Baltimore Sun editorial
---------------------------------------------------------
Originally published August 22, 2003
JOHN ASHCROFT must be sweating bullets.
A grass-roots drive to resist the attorney general's broad expansion of police powers in the name of fighting terrorism has picked up so much support in the American heartland it threatens not only repeal of the legislation but political damage to President Bush as well.
Try as he might, Mr. Ashcroft can no longer dismiss opponents of the USA Patriot Act as a small but whiny band of liberals. Some of the nation's top conservative groups as well as a huge majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives -- in other words, the Bush base -- are now leading the drive to eliminate portions of the law that allow secret spying on anyone.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Lawsuit filed against "USA-PATRIOT" Act
Suit challenges constitutionality of anti-terror law
Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Jul. 31, 2003 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union and six Muslim groups Wednesday brought the first constitutional challenge to the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, arguing that the law gives federal agents virtually unchecked authority to spy on Americans.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Ashcroft Criticized for "PATRIOT Act" promo tour
Ashcroft Criticized for Talks on Terror
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — Attorney General John Ashcroft faced sharp criticism today from Democrats and others over his decision to give more than a dozen speeches around the country in defense of anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Ashcroft in a letter that he should either "desist from further speaking engagements" or explain why they do not violate restrictions on political activities by government officials.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 70%
Arnold's Bad Business
Arnold's Bad Business
Is his campaign the new Planet Hollywood?
By Daniel Gross
The most celebrated business venture of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career was his involvement in Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood, you may have forgotten, was the gaudiest avatar of the '90s idiotic theme-restaurant trend, which also spawned the Rainforest Café, the Official All-Star Café, and, most absurdly, the Fashion Café. ("What's on the menu," David Letterman asked. "A stick of gum?") Founded in 1991 by producer Keith Barish (The Fugitive, Sophie's Choice, The Running Man) and restaurant impresario Robert Earl (Hard Rock Café), the profitable Planet Hollywood chain had 34 units when it went splashily public in 1996.
It turns out there's a lot of similarity between the business plan of Planet Hollywood and the business plan of Arnold's gubernatorial campaign.
...
Republicans must hope Schwarzenegger's campaign is more durable than Planet Hollywood. The company raised $196 million in its IPO and plowed the proceeds into expansion. But its celebrity cachet dissipated once outlets opened in London's Gatwick Airport and Edmonton, Alberta. In October 1999 the chain, which peaked at 95 restaurants, filed for Chapter 11. Schwarzenegger severed his ties with the company in 2000. Planet Hollywood exited bankruptcy in 2000 but then earned membership in the Chapter 22 club by going bust again.
So far, the recall campaign has been very much like a meal at Planet Hollywood. There's plenty of ruckus and shouting and fake smiles. A lot of celebrities are hanging around—for no apparent reason. The fare is insipid. And when the experience is over and the bill comes, nausea may follow.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
August 23, 2003
Victory Act melds war on terror with war on drugs
GOP Bill Would Add Anti-Terror Powers (washingtonpost.com)
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2003
As Attorney General John D. Ashcroft begins a barnstorming tour of the country to shore up support for existing anti-terrorism laws, Senate Republicans are discussing legislation that would expand the Justice Department's powers to investigate terrorists and drug criminals.
Recent drafts of the Victory Act, which carry the names of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and four other Senate Republicans, would provide extra penalties for drug dealers alleged to be connected to terrorist groups and would dramatically expand the government's power to seize records and conduct wiretaps in connection with "narcoterrorism" investigations.
The proposal, which totals 56 pages in one July 30 version, also targets alleged "interstate currency couriers" by making it a crime to carry more than $10,000 cash in a vehicle in connection with illegal activity. Prosecutors also would be able to freeze the assets of defendants arrested on money-laundering charges for 30 days, regardless of whether the assets are connected to a crime, according to the draft legislation.
Justice Department officials stress that they have not been involved in creating or revising the Victory Act proposal, but copies of the bill that have circulated on Capitol Hill over the last two months include many provisions sought by Justice prosecutors in the areas of terrorism and drug crimes. Several of the measures are similar to proposals made during the early debate over the USA Patriot Act, the controversial anti-terrorism package approved in October 2001 that Ashcroft is defending during his U.S. tour.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
August 22, 2003
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Woman `thought He Was A Liar'
Thursday, August 21, 2003
By Lee Sensenbrenner The Capital Times
When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident.
She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her.
"My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said.
Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush."
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 40%
Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
t r u t h o u t - Paul Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
By Paul Krugman
New York Times
Friday 22 August 2003
The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids - Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?
Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.
...
...the candidate says he won't touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state's "three strikes" law. In short, he's not leveling with voters: there's no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.
But the candidate says that specifics don't matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?
So here's the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 21, 2003
Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Contra Costa Times | 08/21/2003 | Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Excerpt (emphasis and wisecrack added):
Scott Winfield Davis, a Palo Alto resident running for governor, announced late Tuesday that he was pulling out of the race, just hours after he talked about his campaign and his past with the San Jose Mercury News.
Davis was charged with murder in Atlanta seven years ago, accused of killing his estranged wife's lover and setting his home and Porsche afire. Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney told the Mercury News he still considers Davis "the top suspect."
Not long after the district attorney's statement, Davis announced he was no longer a candidate, citing personal reasons, business commitments and the overwhelming number of candidates.
(Probably a little more the first thing than the second two, I'm thinking.)
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 98%
August 18, 2003
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.
Homeschooling in the UK
This is a good article about homeschooling -- in this case, in small-town United Kingdom. It sounds like the British government is much more mellow about the issue in terms of mandatory elements and regulations about schooling. The article appears to be saying that there basically are none.
Excerpt:
It may sound impossible and scary, but anyone can educate their children at home.
There is no law that says that you must send your children to school. Neither do you have to follow the National Curriculum. You don't have to follow a curriculum at all for that matter.
You can put your children into school and then take them out again. You can even put them in during mornings only or on a three-day-a-week basis, should your chosen school agree to a mix and match arrangement.
According to a recent study at Durham University, home educated children fare much better than the average school child in academic terms, and generally socialise well.
Which will surprise many parents who believe making friends in the playground is a big part of childhood interaction.
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 50%
Monsanto, Stop Bullying Tiny Dairy Over Growth Hormones
My brief spiel in favor of this action is posted at E-Actions for Freedom.
Monsanto, Stop Bullying Tiny Dairy Over Growth Hormones
by Working Assets
In a move of Goliath-attacking-David proportions, Monsanto, the multi-national agrichemical company, is suing a small, family-owned milk producer in Maine because they advertise that their farmers pledge not to use artificial growth hormones (also known as rBST) on the cows that produce their milk.
...
Lawsuits such as these are shameless attempts to use the financial clout of a multi-billion-dollar monopolist to intimidate a tiny family-owned business. Consumers want the information being provided to them, and Monsanto should get out of the way.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 89%
August 26, 2003
Petition to Howard Dean on clarifying Israel position
I don't think I'm going to sign this, primarily because of the sentence that begins with "Dr. Dean, we respect and fully support your agenda to...", but if you're a Dean supporter or Democrat enthusiast, I recommend signing this. The Israel-Palestine playing field is already tilted more than enough.
To: Dr. Howard Dean
As members of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, The Green Party, Progressives, Independents, and other parties interested in your candidacy, we would like to express our deep reservations regarding your stated positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on speeches and interviews given last year and early this year, you spoke often of the Israeli victims of terror, yet you failed to acknowledge the three-fold number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, or the Israeli military's incursion and illegal occupation of large portions of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These incendiary actions by the Israeli military have fueled much of the animosity in the region, and they must be acknowledged in any fair assessment of the situation....
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 50%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Jack Hickey
Voter Information for John J. "Jack" Hickey. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Ned Roscoe
Voter Information for Ned Roscoe. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 2%
August 25, 2003
Weintraub: State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
sacbee.com (Opinion): State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 5, 2003
The California Constitution says that the Legislature "shall not, in any manner, create any debt or debts" greater than $300,000, unless such an obligation is for a "single object or work" and is approved by a vote of the people. The only exception is in case of war, "to repel invasion or suppress insurrection."
The pending recall election aimed at Gov. Gray Davis might be considered an insurrection, I suppose. But I don't think that such a threat is the kind of exception the framers had in mind when they prohibited the Legislature from using borrowed money to pay for the ordinary, ongoing expenses of state government.
Yet the budget passed last week and signed Saturday by Davis is built upon a $10.7 billion bond measure to finance the state's accumulated budget deficit. These bonds, to be repaid over five years, are in an amount far greater than $300,000. They will not be used for a "single object or work," such as building a school or buying parkland. And they will not be submitted to a vote of the people.
How then, can the bonds possibly be legal? Some people, not surprisingly, think they are not....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R1
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 75%
Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
Newsday.com - Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
By Patricia Hurtado
STAFF WRITER
August 22, 2003, 9:29 PM EDT
In a scathing opinion, a Manhattan federal judge denied a request by Fox News to block sales of a book by liberal humorist Al Franken that satirizes the network's motto, "Fair and Balanced."
"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Fox's lawyers Friday. "This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit, both factually and legally."
Lawyers for the network filed suit earlier this month seeking a preliminary injunction against the sale of the book, which hit stores Thursday. They argued that the title of Franken's book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," infringed on the network's trademarked motto and could mislead some into believing that the book was endorsed by Fox.
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 20%
August 24, 2003
City can't ban Walmart RV parking
It's not often one hears about something cool that Walmart does, but once I started looking into the RV lifestyle, I soon found out that Walmart has a company-wide policy of allowing RVers to spend a night in a store parking lot for free. It seems that Walmart founder Sam Walton was a big RVer, and the policy was his doing. Very cool.
Apparently some in Whitehorse, Yukon, don't see it as I do.
Particularly this whiner:
After the councillors spoke about Preston’s report, RV park owner Chuck MacKenzie stood up and said now that he sees where council is going on this issue, he wants a refund for 16 years’ worth of city taxes and business licences because the city is not doing its job right.
“I would like a cheque Monday morning,” he said before sitting.
City can’t curtail RV parking, lawyer says
by Jason Small
A Whitehorse Star Archive story originally published August 20, 2003
If the city wants to prevent RVs from camping in Wal-Mart’s parking lot without the store’s permission, it will have to get the territorial government to change a law.
Local lawyer Tim Preston told city council at last night’s meeting that the only way it could prevent people from parking overnight at Wal-Mart without a request by the store to do so would be to ask the territorial government to change the Motor Vehicles Act.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 50%
Conservative backlash (against Ashcroft and "PATRIOT Act")
Baltimore Sun editorial
---------------------------------------------------------
Originally published August 22, 2003
JOHN ASHCROFT must be sweating bullets.
A grass-roots drive to resist the attorney general's broad expansion of police powers in the name of fighting terrorism has picked up so much support in the American heartland it threatens not only repeal of the legislation but political damage to President Bush as well.
Try as he might, Mr. Ashcroft can no longer dismiss opponents of the USA Patriot Act as a small but whiny band of liberals. Some of the nation's top conservative groups as well as a huge majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives -- in other words, the Bush base -- are now leading the drive to eliminate portions of the law that allow secret spying on anyone.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Lawsuit filed against "USA-PATRIOT" Act
Suit challenges constitutionality of anti-terror law
Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Jul. 31, 2003 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union and six Muslim groups Wednesday brought the first constitutional challenge to the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, arguing that the law gives federal agents virtually unchecked authority to spy on Americans.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Ashcroft Criticized for "PATRIOT Act" promo tour
Ashcroft Criticized for Talks on Terror
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — Attorney General John Ashcroft faced sharp criticism today from Democrats and others over his decision to give more than a dozen speeches around the country in defense of anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Ashcroft in a letter that he should either "desist from further speaking engagements" or explain why they do not violate restrictions on political activities by government officials.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 70%
Arnold's Bad Business
Arnold's Bad Business
Is his campaign the new Planet Hollywood?
By Daniel Gross
The most celebrated business venture of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career was his involvement in Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood, you may have forgotten, was the gaudiest avatar of the '90s idiotic theme-restaurant trend, which also spawned the Rainforest Café, the Official All-Star Café, and, most absurdly, the Fashion Café. ("What's on the menu," David Letterman asked. "A stick of gum?") Founded in 1991 by producer Keith Barish (The Fugitive, Sophie's Choice, The Running Man) and restaurant impresario Robert Earl (Hard Rock Café), the profitable Planet Hollywood chain had 34 units when it went splashily public in 1996.
It turns out there's a lot of similarity between the business plan of Planet Hollywood and the business plan of Arnold's gubernatorial campaign.
...
Republicans must hope Schwarzenegger's campaign is more durable than Planet Hollywood. The company raised $196 million in its IPO and plowed the proceeds into expansion. But its celebrity cachet dissipated once outlets opened in London's Gatwick Airport and Edmonton, Alberta. In October 1999 the chain, which peaked at 95 restaurants, filed for Chapter 11. Schwarzenegger severed his ties with the company in 2000. Planet Hollywood exited bankruptcy in 2000 but then earned membership in the Chapter 22 club by going bust again.
So far, the recall campaign has been very much like a meal at Planet Hollywood. There's plenty of ruckus and shouting and fake smiles. A lot of celebrities are hanging around—for no apparent reason. The fare is insipid. And when the experience is over and the bill comes, nausea may follow.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
August 23, 2003
Victory Act melds war on terror with war on drugs
GOP Bill Would Add Anti-Terror Powers (washingtonpost.com)
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2003
As Attorney General John D. Ashcroft begins a barnstorming tour of the country to shore up support for existing anti-terrorism laws, Senate Republicans are discussing legislation that would expand the Justice Department's powers to investigate terrorists and drug criminals.
Recent drafts of the Victory Act, which carry the names of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and four other Senate Republicans, would provide extra penalties for drug dealers alleged to be connected to terrorist groups and would dramatically expand the government's power to seize records and conduct wiretaps in connection with "narcoterrorism" investigations.
The proposal, which totals 56 pages in one July 30 version, also targets alleged "interstate currency couriers" by making it a crime to carry more than $10,000 cash in a vehicle in connection with illegal activity. Prosecutors also would be able to freeze the assets of defendants arrested on money-laundering charges for 30 days, regardless of whether the assets are connected to a crime, according to the draft legislation.
Justice Department officials stress that they have not been involved in creating or revising the Victory Act proposal, but copies of the bill that have circulated on Capitol Hill over the last two months include many provisions sought by Justice prosecutors in the areas of terrorism and drug crimes. Several of the measures are similar to proposals made during the early debate over the USA Patriot Act, the controversial anti-terrorism package approved in October 2001 that Ashcroft is defending during his U.S. tour.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
August 22, 2003
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Woman `thought He Was A Liar'
Thursday, August 21, 2003
By Lee Sensenbrenner The Capital Times
When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident.
She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her.
"My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said.
Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush."
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 40%
Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
t r u t h o u t - Paul Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
By Paul Krugman
New York Times
Friday 22 August 2003
The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids - Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?
Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.
...
...the candidate says he won't touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state's "three strikes" law. In short, he's not leveling with voters: there's no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.
But the candidate says that specifics don't matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?
So here's the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 21, 2003
Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Contra Costa Times | 08/21/2003 | Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Excerpt (emphasis and wisecrack added):
Scott Winfield Davis, a Palo Alto resident running for governor, announced late Tuesday that he was pulling out of the race, just hours after he talked about his campaign and his past with the San Jose Mercury News.
Davis was charged with murder in Atlanta seven years ago, accused of killing his estranged wife's lover and setting his home and Porsche afire. Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney told the Mercury News he still considers Davis "the top suspect."
Not long after the district attorney's statement, Davis announced he was no longer a candidate, citing personal reasons, business commitments and the overwhelming number of candidates.
(Probably a little more the first thing than the second two, I'm thinking.)
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 98%
August 18, 2003
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.
Petition to Howard Dean on clarifying Israel position
I don't think I'm going to sign this, primarily because of the sentence that begins with "Dr. Dean, we respect and fully support your agenda to...", but if you're a Dean supporter or Democrat enthusiast, I recommend signing this. The Israel-Palestine playing field is already tilted more than enough.
To: Dr. Howard Dean
As members of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, The Green Party, Progressives, Independents, and other parties interested in your candidacy, we would like to express our deep reservations regarding your stated positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on speeches and interviews given last year and early this year, you spoke often of the Israeli victims of terror, yet you failed to acknowledge the three-fold number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, or the Israeli military's incursion and illegal occupation of large portions of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These incendiary actions by the Israeli military have fueled much of the animosity in the region, and they must be acknowledged in any fair assessment of the situation....
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 50%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Jack Hickey
Voter Information for John J. "Jack" Hickey. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
California Recall SmartVoter Profile: Ned Roscoe
Voter Information for Ned Roscoe. October 7, 2003 Election
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 2%
Weintraub: State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
sacbee.com (Opinion): State deficit bond rests on shaky ground
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 5, 2003
The California Constitution says that the Legislature "shall not, in any manner, create any debt or debts" greater than $300,000, unless such an obligation is for a "single object or work" and is approved by a vote of the people. The only exception is in case of war, "to repel invasion or suppress insurrection."
The pending recall election aimed at Gov. Gray Davis might be considered an insurrection, I suppose. But I don't think that such a threat is the kind of exception the framers had in mind when they prohibited the Legislature from using borrowed money to pay for the ordinary, ongoing expenses of state government.
Yet the budget passed last week and signed Saturday by Davis is built upon a $10.7 billion bond measure to finance the state's accumulated budget deficit. These bonds, to be repaid over five years, are in an amount far greater than $300,000. They will not be used for a "single object or work," such as building a school or buying parkland. And they will not be submitted to a vote of the people.
How then, can the bonds possibly be legal? Some people, not surprisingly, think they are not....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R1
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 75%
Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
Newsday.com - Fox Blocked In Suit Against Al Franken's Book
By Patricia Hurtado
STAFF WRITER
August 22, 2003, 9:29 PM EDT
In a scathing opinion, a Manhattan federal judge denied a request by Fox News to block sales of a book by liberal humorist Al Franken that satirizes the network's motto, "Fair and Balanced."
"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Fox's lawyers Friday. "This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit, both factually and legally."
Lawyers for the network filed suit earlier this month seeking a preliminary injunction against the sale of the book, which hit stores Thursday. They argued that the title of Franken's book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," infringed on the network's trademarked motto and could mislead some into believing that the book was endorsed by Fox.
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 20%
August 24, 2003
City can't ban Walmart RV parking
It's not often one hears about something cool that Walmart does, but once I started looking into the RV lifestyle, I soon found out that Walmart has a company-wide policy of allowing RVers to spend a night in a store parking lot for free. It seems that Walmart founder Sam Walton was a big RVer, and the policy was his doing. Very cool.
Apparently some in Whitehorse, Yukon, don't see it as I do.
Particularly this whiner:
After the councillors spoke about Preston’s report, RV park owner Chuck MacKenzie stood up and said now that he sees where council is going on this issue, he wants a refund for 16 years’ worth of city taxes and business licences because the city is not doing its job right.
“I would like a cheque Monday morning,” he said before sitting.
City can’t curtail RV parking, lawyer says
by Jason Small
A Whitehorse Star Archive story originally published August 20, 2003
If the city wants to prevent RVs from camping in Wal-Mart’s parking lot without the store’s permission, it will have to get the territorial government to change a law.
Local lawyer Tim Preston told city council at last night’s meeting that the only way it could prevent people from parking overnight at Wal-Mart without a request by the store to do so would be to ask the territorial government to change the Motor Vehicles Act.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 50%
Conservative backlash (against Ashcroft and "PATRIOT Act")
Baltimore Sun editorial
---------------------------------------------------------
Originally published August 22, 2003
JOHN ASHCROFT must be sweating bullets.
A grass-roots drive to resist the attorney general's broad expansion of police powers in the name of fighting terrorism has picked up so much support in the American heartland it threatens not only repeal of the legislation but political damage to President Bush as well.
Try as he might, Mr. Ashcroft can no longer dismiss opponents of the USA Patriot Act as a small but whiny band of liberals. Some of the nation's top conservative groups as well as a huge majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives -- in other words, the Bush base -- are now leading the drive to eliminate portions of the law that allow secret spying on anyone.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Lawsuit filed against "USA-PATRIOT" Act
Suit challenges constitutionality of anti-terror law
Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Jul. 31, 2003 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union and six Muslim groups Wednesday brought the first constitutional challenge to the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, arguing that the law gives federal agents virtually unchecked authority to spy on Americans.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Ashcroft Criticized for "PATRIOT Act" promo tour
Ashcroft Criticized for Talks on Terror
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — Attorney General John Ashcroft faced sharp criticism today from Democrats and others over his decision to give more than a dozen speeches around the country in defense of anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Ashcroft in a letter that he should either "desist from further speaking engagements" or explain why they do not violate restrictions on political activities by government officials.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 70%
Arnold's Bad Business
Arnold's Bad Business
Is his campaign the new Planet Hollywood?
By Daniel Gross
The most celebrated business venture of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career was his involvement in Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood, you may have forgotten, was the gaudiest avatar of the '90s idiotic theme-restaurant trend, which also spawned the Rainforest Café, the Official All-Star Café, and, most absurdly, the Fashion Café. ("What's on the menu," David Letterman asked. "A stick of gum?") Founded in 1991 by producer Keith Barish (The Fugitive, Sophie's Choice, The Running Man) and restaurant impresario Robert Earl (Hard Rock Café), the profitable Planet Hollywood chain had 34 units when it went splashily public in 1996.
It turns out there's a lot of similarity between the business plan of Planet Hollywood and the business plan of Arnold's gubernatorial campaign.
...
Republicans must hope Schwarzenegger's campaign is more durable than Planet Hollywood. The company raised $196 million in its IPO and plowed the proceeds into expansion. But its celebrity cachet dissipated once outlets opened in London's Gatwick Airport and Edmonton, Alberta. In October 1999 the chain, which peaked at 95 restaurants, filed for Chapter 11. Schwarzenegger severed his ties with the company in 2000. Planet Hollywood exited bankruptcy in 2000 but then earned membership in the Chapter 22 club by going bust again.
So far, the recall campaign has been very much like a meal at Planet Hollywood. There's plenty of ruckus and shouting and fake smiles. A lot of celebrities are hanging around—for no apparent reason. The fare is insipid. And when the experience is over and the bill comes, nausea may follow.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
August 23, 2003
Victory Act melds war on terror with war on drugs
GOP Bill Would Add Anti-Terror Powers (washingtonpost.com)
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2003
As Attorney General John D. Ashcroft begins a barnstorming tour of the country to shore up support for existing anti-terrorism laws, Senate Republicans are discussing legislation that would expand the Justice Department's powers to investigate terrorists and drug criminals.
Recent drafts of the Victory Act, which carry the names of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and four other Senate Republicans, would provide extra penalties for drug dealers alleged to be connected to terrorist groups and would dramatically expand the government's power to seize records and conduct wiretaps in connection with "narcoterrorism" investigations.
The proposal, which totals 56 pages in one July 30 version, also targets alleged "interstate currency couriers" by making it a crime to carry more than $10,000 cash in a vehicle in connection with illegal activity. Prosecutors also would be able to freeze the assets of defendants arrested on money-laundering charges for 30 days, regardless of whether the assets are connected to a crime, according to the draft legislation.
Justice Department officials stress that they have not been involved in creating or revising the Victory Act proposal, but copies of the bill that have circulated on Capitol Hill over the last two months include many provisions sought by Justice prosecutors in the areas of terrorism and drug crimes. Several of the measures are similar to proposals made during the early debate over the USA Patriot Act, the controversial anti-terrorism package approved in October 2001 that Ashcroft is defending during his U.S. tour.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
August 22, 2003
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Woman `thought He Was A Liar'
Thursday, August 21, 2003
By Lee Sensenbrenner The Capital Times
When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident.
She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her.
"My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said.
Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush."
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 40%
Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
t r u t h o u t - Paul Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
By Paul Krugman
New York Times
Friday 22 August 2003
The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids - Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?
Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.
...
...the candidate says he won't touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state's "three strikes" law. In short, he's not leveling with voters: there's no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.
But the candidate says that specifics don't matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?
So here's the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 21, 2003
Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Contra Costa Times | 08/21/2003 | Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Excerpt (emphasis and wisecrack added):
Scott Winfield Davis, a Palo Alto resident running for governor, announced late Tuesday that he was pulling out of the race, just hours after he talked about his campaign and his past with the San Jose Mercury News.
Davis was charged with murder in Atlanta seven years ago, accused of killing his estranged wife's lover and setting his home and Porsche afire. Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney told the Mercury News he still considers Davis "the top suspect."
Not long after the district attorney's statement, Davis announced he was no longer a candidate, citing personal reasons, business commitments and the overwhelming number of candidates.
(Probably a little more the first thing than the second two, I'm thinking.)
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 98%
August 18, 2003
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.
City can't ban Walmart RV parking
It's not often one hears about something cool that Walmart does, but once I started looking into the RV lifestyle, I soon found out that Walmart has a company-wide policy of allowing RVers to spend a night in a store parking lot for free. It seems that Walmart founder Sam Walton was a big RVer, and the policy was his doing. Very cool.
Apparently some in Whitehorse, Yukon, don't see it as I do.
Particularly this whiner:
After the councillors spoke about Preston’s report, RV park owner Chuck MacKenzie stood up and said now that he sees where council is going on this issue, he wants a refund for 16 years’ worth of city taxes and business licences because the city is not doing its job right.
“I would like a cheque Monday morning,” he said before sitting.
City can’t curtail RV parking, lawyer says
by Jason Small
A Whitehorse Star Archive story originally published August 20, 2003
If the city wants to prevent RVs from camping in Wal-Mart’s parking lot without the store’s permission, it will have to get the territorial government to change a law.
Local lawyer Tim Preston told city council at last night’s meeting that the only way it could prevent people from parking overnight at Wal-Mart without a request by the store to do so would be to ask the territorial government to change the Motor Vehicles Act.
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 50%
Conservative backlash (against Ashcroft and "PATRIOT Act")
Baltimore Sun editorial
---------------------------------------------------------
Originally published August 22, 2003
JOHN ASHCROFT must be sweating bullets.
A grass-roots drive to resist the attorney general's broad expansion of police powers in the name of fighting terrorism has picked up so much support in the American heartland it threatens not only repeal of the legislation but political damage to President Bush as well.
Try as he might, Mr. Ashcroft can no longer dismiss opponents of the USA Patriot Act as a small but whiny band of liberals. Some of the nation's top conservative groups as well as a huge majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives -- in other words, the Bush base -- are now leading the drive to eliminate portions of the law that allow secret spying on anyone.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Learning Percentage: 15%
Lawsuit filed against "USA-PATRIOT" Act
Suit challenges constitutionality of anti-terror law
Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
Jul. 31, 2003 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union and six Muslim groups Wednesday brought the first constitutional challenge to the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, arguing that the law gives federal agents virtually unchecked authority to spy on Americans.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Ashcroft Criticized for "PATRIOT Act" promo tour
Ashcroft Criticized for Talks on Terror
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — Attorney General John Ashcroft faced sharp criticism today from Democrats and others over his decision to give more than a dozen speeches around the country in defense of anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Ashcroft in a letter that he should either "desist from further speaking engagements" or explain why they do not violate restrictions on political activities by government officials.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 70%
Arnold's Bad Business
Arnold's Bad Business
Is his campaign the new Planet Hollywood?
By Daniel Gross
The most celebrated business venture of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career was his involvement in Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood, you may have forgotten, was the gaudiest avatar of the '90s idiotic theme-restaurant trend, which also spawned the Rainforest Café, the Official All-Star Café, and, most absurdly, the Fashion Café. ("What's on the menu," David Letterman asked. "A stick of gum?") Founded in 1991 by producer Keith Barish (The Fugitive, Sophie's Choice, The Running Man) and restaurant impresario Robert Earl (Hard Rock Café), the profitable Planet Hollywood chain had 34 units when it went splashily public in 1996.
It turns out there's a lot of similarity between the business plan of Planet Hollywood and the business plan of Arnold's gubernatorial campaign.
...
Republicans must hope Schwarzenegger's campaign is more durable than Planet Hollywood. The company raised $196 million in its IPO and plowed the proceeds into expansion. But its celebrity cachet dissipated once outlets opened in London's Gatwick Airport and Edmonton, Alberta. In October 1999 the chain, which peaked at 95 restaurants, filed for Chapter 11. Schwarzenegger severed his ties with the company in 2000. Planet Hollywood exited bankruptcy in 2000 but then earned membership in the Chapter 22 club by going bust again.
So far, the recall campaign has been very much like a meal at Planet Hollywood. There's plenty of ruckus and shouting and fake smiles. A lot of celebrities are hanging around—for no apparent reason. The fare is insipid. And when the experience is over and the bill comes, nausea may follow.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 65%
Victory Act melds war on terror with war on drugs
GOP Bill Would Add Anti-Terror Powers (washingtonpost.com)
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2003
As Attorney General John D. Ashcroft begins a barnstorming tour of the country to shore up support for existing anti-terrorism laws, Senate Republicans are discussing legislation that would expand the Justice Department's powers to investigate terrorists and drug criminals.
Recent drafts of the Victory Act, which carry the names of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and four other Senate Republicans, would provide extra penalties for drug dealers alleged to be connected to terrorist groups and would dramatically expand the government's power to seize records and conduct wiretaps in connection with "narcoterrorism" investigations.
The proposal, which totals 56 pages in one July 30 version, also targets alleged "interstate currency couriers" by making it a crime to carry more than $10,000 cash in a vehicle in connection with illegal activity. Prosecutors also would be able to freeze the assets of defendants arrested on money-laundering charges for 30 days, regardless of whether the assets are connected to a crime, according to the draft legislation.
Justice Department officials stress that they have not been involved in creating or revising the Victory Act proposal, but copies of the bill that have circulated on Capitol Hill over the last two months include many provisions sought by Justice prosecutors in the areas of terrorism and drug crimes. Several of the measures are similar to proposals made during the early debate over the USA Patriot Act, the controversial anti-terrorism package approved in October 2001 that Ashcroft is defending during his U.S. tour.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
August 22, 2003
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Woman `thought He Was A Liar'
Thursday, August 21, 2003
By Lee Sensenbrenner The Capital Times
When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident.
She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her.
"My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said.
Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush."
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 40%
Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
t r u t h o u t - Paul Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
By Paul Krugman
New York Times
Friday 22 August 2003
The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids - Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?
Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.
...
...the candidate says he won't touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state's "three strikes" law. In short, he's not leveling with voters: there's no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.
But the candidate says that specifics don't matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?
So here's the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 21, 2003
Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Contra Costa Times | 08/21/2003 | Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Excerpt (emphasis and wisecrack added):
Scott Winfield Davis, a Palo Alto resident running for governor, announced late Tuesday that he was pulling out of the race, just hours after he talked about his campaign and his past with the San Jose Mercury News.
Davis was charged with murder in Atlanta seven years ago, accused of killing his estranged wife's lover and setting his home and Porsche afire. Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney told the Mercury News he still considers Davis "the top suspect."
Not long after the district attorney's statement, Davis announced he was no longer a candidate, citing personal reasons, business commitments and the overwhelming number of candidates.
(Probably a little more the first thing than the second two, I'm thinking.)
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 98%
August 18, 2003
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Obituary Backs `removal of Bush'
Woman `thought He Was A Liar'
Thursday, August 21, 2003
By Lee Sensenbrenner The Capital Times
When Sally Baron's family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident.
She had moved to Stoughton seven years ago to be closer to her children and was 71 when she died Monday after struggling to recuperate from heart surgery. Her family had come to the question of what might be a fitting tribute to her.
"My uncle asked if there was a cause," her youngest son, Pete Baron, said.
Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush."
Read It Rating: 4
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 40%
Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
t r u t h o u t - Paul Krugman | Conan the Deceiver
By Paul Krugman
New York Times
Friday 22 August 2003
The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn't care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids - Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?
Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn't said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.
...
...the candidate says he won't touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state's "three strikes" law. In short, he's not leveling with voters: there's no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.
But the candidate says that specifics don't matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?
So here's the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 45%
Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Contra Costa Times | 08/21/2003 | Recall candidate withdraws as past murder charges rise
Excerpt (emphasis and wisecrack added):
Scott Winfield Davis, a Palo Alto resident running for governor, announced late Tuesday that he was pulling out of the race, just hours after he talked about his campaign and his past with the San Jose Mercury News.
Davis was charged with murder in Atlanta seven years ago, accused of killing his estranged wife's lover and setting his home and Porsche afire. Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney told the Mercury News he still considers Davis "the top suspect."
Not long after the district attorney's statement, Davis announced he was no longer a candidate, citing personal reasons, business commitments and the overwhelming number of candidates.
(Probably a little more the first thing than the second two, I'm thinking.)
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 98%
August 18, 2003
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.
Arianna's Recall Entrance Speech
Arianna Huffington Announces Her Candidacy for Governor of California
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003
Today I am announcing that I am running for Governor of the great state of California.
Those are 16 words I never imagined I would hear myself say. And they are in no way based on the findings of British intelligence.
I am not -- to say the least -- a conventional candidate. But these are not conventional times. And we will never find a way out of the mess we are in if we continue to elect the same politicians -- backed by the same special interests -- that got us into it.
I have spent a large part of my life writing and speaking out on the need for each of us to become personally involved with our community -- to devote time and attention to building a more just and more compassionate society.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L6
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
Davy Crockett vs. Welfare
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
Thank you, oh mighty War on Drugs, for opening yet another perverse tear in our society's fabric.
There is one good thing about crystal meth: Of all the drugs in the New Prohibition, it's the one which is most obviously reminiscent of the first Prohibition. (Think moonshine.) Maybe something will snap, as people internally compare the images on the evening news with the contraption in "The Swamp" on M*A*S*H, and experience a cognitive dissonance -- preferably, a big collective one.
From the end of the article:
You can help as well by reporting suspected labs to state police.
Try, "You can help as well by demanding a swift and certain end to the foolish 'War on Drugs'."
Illegal drug makers targeting RV's
(Mattawan, August 12, 2003, 6:20 p.m. ) Camping is a favorite summer past time for Cindy Harnish and her family.
But while getting ready for a camp out earlier this summer, Cindy's father discovered a problem with his travel trailer.
"We got up north and the refrigerator, we tried to light it up but it wouldn't light. So he opened it up and it looked like it had been cut."
But what first appeared to be an act of vandalism may actually have been the latest chapter in the war against the drug known as crystal meth.
For years, makers of crystal meth have been stealing anhydrous ammonia from tanks on farm fields and farm co-ops.
...Now, it appears some manufacturers are turning to RV's.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Arizona's Clean Elections law: Trio is in hot water over meaning of political 'party'
Commission orders the Dist. 17 candidates to repay $104,237 they spent on booze, food.
DAVID PITTMAN
Tucson Citizen
Thursday, July 31, 2003
A trio of defeated Phoenix-area legislative candidates spent thousands of dollars on alcohol, food, rental cars and entertainment expenses at trendy Scottsdale nightspots - and used Clean Elections money to do it.
...
Yuri Downing, the son of state Rep. Ted Downing, D-Tucson, said the trio is guilty of only one thing: attempting to run an unorthodox campaign to attract youthful voters.
District 17 includes south Scottsdale and most of Tempe. It takes in all of the Arizona State University campus and most of the students attending the university.
"We are Libertarian candidates, we knew going into the campaign that the odds of us winning were very small," said Yuri Downing. "The only hope we had was to go after the younger demographic, get them registered and to the polls. Those people aren't in church on Sunday morning. So we targeted the places where they do go."
What the three Libertarian candidates did was campaign at sporting events and at campus-area parties and popular watering holes. Yuri Downing said there is nothing wrong with that, accusing the commission of trying to "micro-manage" the trio's campaign.
"Are they saying I didn't run the campaign the way they would have run it?" he asked. "They have no right, either legally or morally, to make that decision."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
California's Hot Ticket
This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.
California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.
"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .
"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."
At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)
Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.
...
The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.
There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.
Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.
It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%
LA Times: Recall is a Circus Without Solutions
Los Angeles Times
Friday 08 August 2003
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in declining Wednesday to run for governor, lamented that the Oct. 7 recall election was becoming "more and more like a carnival every day." And that was before actor Arnold Schwarzenegger ended his slow striptease of refusal, announcing during a late-night entertainment show that he will run for governor after all. The Terminator promised, "I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house." Then, anticlimactically, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante shattered the fragile Democratic unity, offering himself as a candidate to replace a governor he served but never liked.
Carnival? Circus? How about action comics? WHAP! BAM! BIFF! POW! TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA!
Democrat John Garamendi, the state insurance commissioner and a frequent candidate, was in, and Rep. Darryl Issa, who bankrolled the recall petition campaign, was out. The California Supreme Court rejected a series of lawsuits challenging the recall and seeking to delay it. Several cases remain before the federal courts, but each decision moves the election closer to reality.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 8%
The mystery men behind the recall
This has a lot of "dirt" about the characters behind the recall scenes. FWIW.
California Confidential
Who are the mystery men behind the recall push?
By Max Blumenthal
Web Exclusive: 8.13.03
"It's a victory. A total victory!" Howard Kaloogian exclaimed on the right-wing Worldmag.com after hearing that the petition to recall the election of California's embattled Gov. Gray Davis had gained enough signatures to qualify as a ballot question. Kaloogian, a former Republican California legislator, had plenty of reason to cheer. Because while the media have presented Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the wealthy car-alarm magnate, as the man who drove the recall, he's actually been little more than a useful idiot for a stealthy group of GOP operatives who laid the groundwork. Months before the recall was even a blip on the media radar, this consultant cabal began manipulating California's idiosyncratic electoral system, creating a muscular funding mechanism and exploiting it for its members' own ends.
The cabal includes Kaloogian, who was a right-wing backbencher in the state Assembly, Sal Russo, who handled banker Bill Simon's hapless 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and David Gilliard, a veteran GOP strategist with a career steeped in scandal. They're joined by former Enron pollster and Republican tactician Frank Luntz, who devised a strategy for the recall campaign centering around negative character attacks and avoidance of policy discussion. With the surprise announcement of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who boasted on The Tonight Show Aug. 6, "I have plenty of money. Nobody can buy me off." -- the movie star's high-priced uber-consultants George Gorton and Don Sipple have grabbed the baton in the recall race, eager to take it the last mile to the state capitol. Thanks to this handful of men and the millionaires who bankrolled them, what started with a petition and a few phone calls has become an election that may unseat a twice-elected governor and dramatically affect the lives of one in seven Americans.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 70%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Reason: Dean's List
Can the Vermont guv flash mob his way to power?
August 13, 2003
Jeff Taylor
The crowd in Philadelphia got a quick lesson in viral marketing from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who urged his supporters to spam the hell out of their friends.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. ...
At a minimum, Dean's campaign is setting a new standard for integrating the Internet into the overall campaign and is using a number of free or nearly free off-the-shelf components to do it.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Learning Percentage: 25%
Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
Donald Worster: The Heavy Cost of Empire
In Pursuit of Global Supremacy, We Have Polluted Every Part of Our Nation
By DONALD WORSTER
After much denial, Americans are finally beginning to admit that we are indeed an imperial nation. What Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers openly dreamed about two centuries ago has become reality, and the United States has taken Britain's place as the seat of empire, dominating the globe.
What does an empire cost and is that cost worth paying?
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L2.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
The Other Guevara:Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Reason interviews Costa Rica's Libertarian revolutionary
Excerpt:
Perhaps surprisingly, the most successful libertarian party in recent years has arisen in Latin America, where left and right wing variants of statism have been the norm for much of the 20th century.