I'm listening

to Stacy Taylor this morning, and he's filling in for Randi Rhodes later today.

At Three PM here, noon in LA, Phoenix and Three PM in New York.

Not my point. Point is that a caller had been to the Burt Bacharach Summer Pops show last night and he played some very mild protest song about the Bush Administration. Burt is 79 years old and I would love to be able to personally apologize to him. You see, the caller said that Burt was booed when he played his mild protest song. He said he's never been booed for playing that song before.

Guess Burt doesn't realize how many defense contractor employees live in San Diego, does he?

update: here are the lyrics to

Who Are These People?
Lyrics by Burt Bacharach and Tonio K.

Who are these people that keep telling us lies
And how did these people get control of our lives
And who’ll stop the violence cause it’s out of control?
Make em stop


Who are these people that destroy everything
And sell off the future for whatever it brings
And what kind of leaders can’t admit when they’re wrong?
Make em stop


This stupid mess we’re in just keeps getting worse
So many people dying needlessly
Looks like the liars may inherit the earth
Even pretending to pray
And getting away with it


Who are these people that keep telling us lies
And how did these people get control of our lives
And who’ll stop the violence cause it’s out of control?
We’ve got to make them stop


Who are these people that keep telling us lies
And how did these people get control of our lives
and who’ll stop the violence cause it’s out of control?
Make em stop


See things really have to change
Before it’s too late


This song was worth booing to these idiots? Once again, the RepugnantThuglicans in San Diego make me ill.




Karl Rove quit today , so I'm never going to get to see this.

Bummer.

Religion sucks 1

I get hits at least once every couple of weeks wherein the search term uesd is "religion sucks." Since this blog doesn't get much traffic unless skippy sends some my way, that says something to me.

It's not hard for me to find articles that prove that point to ME, anyway.

Here's an example:

Malaysia's convert marriage ilegal

Hmmmm, Sunday might be a good day for that, and this might be a regular feature here.

Oy, here we go again

with the pathetic local newz reports:

County to push absentee ballots in wake of electronic voting ban

San Diego County officials said voters would see paper ballots in February's presidential primaries. They also said no decisions had been made to challenge Bowen's decision or to break out of the county's 2003 agreement to spend $31 million on the again-decertified Diebold machines.


Tiny bubbles that are our votes that are counted on hackable Diebold optical scanners.

No reminders in the article of who Deborah Seiler and Michael Vu were before they came to San Diego.


Note: in all fairness, Gig Conaughton of the North County Times has reported on these two, and their possible conflicts of interest before. Kudos to Gig.

And Kudos to the people who wrote letters to the editor in Sacramento:

Letters: Electronic voting, prisons, environment, etc.

Don't blame her for e-vote mess
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, August 11, 2007Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B6

My question is, how much longer are do we have to put up with these electronic charades they call elections?

We the people know WTF is going on.

Gee, I wonder why the US has no more allies?

Well maybe if we didn't kill our allies with cancer from DU exposure during wars for oil company greed, then we would have more of them.

Heh.

Alrighty then.

Federal reserve does a fancy dance

NEW YORK — Wall Street closed out a difficult week with a mixed finish Friday after the Federal Reserve injected billions of dollars into the banking system to calm markets torn by worries about evaporating credit.







Oh whoops, my bad, here's the article

John Hiatt & Sonny Landreth "Circle Back"

John Prine --- Flag Decal

Yesterday I posted this:

Nope, more genius reporting in the San Diego newz wurld:

Today Media Matters confirms my diagnosis nationwide.

Numerous outlets publish misleading atacks on decision to limit electronic voting.
Thu, Aug 9, 2007 5:54pm ET

Summary: While reporting on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision to decertify the state's electronic voting machines in light of a study that found the systems are vulnerable to security breaches, numerous media outlets attacked the study's "unrealistic" methodology or uncritically reported criticism of the study's premise, without noting the researchers' explanation for their methods.

Alrighty then.

Who says the Grey Lady isn't good for laugh?

This is the best laugh I've had all day----
Bridge Hero Gets Offer: Paid Tuition
New York Times
August 7, 2007

Among the dozens of wrenching accounts to come out of the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, the actions of 20-year-old Jeremy Hernandez were a bright spot: Trapped in a tipping school bus with 50 children, he kicked open the back door and began helping them one by one to safety.

Within a day, news outlets across the country were repeating the story of the school bus, along with a sad footnote — that Mr. Hernandez had recently been forced to drop out of an automotive repair program because he could not afford the $15,000 tuition.

That has changed. On Saturday, Mr. Hernandez learned that Dunwoody College of Technology had offered him a full scholarship toward a degree in applied science. He has also received offers of help from dozens of strangers across the country, said Molly Schwartz, communications director for Pillsbury United Communities, which employed him as a gym coordinator for one of its summer programs.

You're right, that's not funny, that is really a great thing. So where's the humor?


...When President Bush’s staff contacted him to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,’ ” she said.

It is impossible to prevent voting machine hacking

August 7, 2007 at 16:50:28
by Woody Smith Page 1 of 1 page(s)
OpEdNews

...When I tell you the following you can take as the genuine truth: There is NO POSSIBLE WAY UNDER THE SUN to "fix" voting machines to ensure their accuracy or their immunity from penetration from a party seeking personal gain. They are ALL, regardless of what "generation" they are, past, present or future, utterly unfixable in this context, whether or not they contain paper trails, and whether they're used merely to mark ballots or cast votes or are used to tabulate votes cast by other means (as with optical scanners). Every computer ever built is vulnerable to attack, and there is no possible way to render any computer genuinely invulnerable. ...

Nope, more genius reporting in the San Diego newz wurld:

Decision comes after ban on touch-screen machines.
By Craig Gustafson
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 7, 2007
The county is planning an aggressive push to get as many voters as possible to cast absentee ballots instead of heading to their local polling place for the Feb. 5 presidential primary.

We use optical scanners to count the absentee votes in San Diego, Diebold optical scanners.

SD Electronic Voting Systems To Be Extensively Modified
POSTED: 11:45 am PDT August 4, 2007
UPDATED: 12:05 pm PDT August 4, 2007
...A review of the Diebold equipment showed it was vulnerable to malicious attack that could change the vote tallies, among other deficiencies.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. is headquartered in Allen, Texas. One of its product lines is equipment that scans paper ballots, circumventing some of the concerns that have been expressed about touch-screen systems...

The concerns were circumvented by whom, the pathetic excuse that passes for news reporting in this county?

US navy barred from using sonar

From correspondents in Los Angeles
August 07, 2007 09:32am
THE US navy was today barred from using an ear-splitting sonar in upcoming wargames off the California coast alleged to be harmful to whales and other marine life.


alleged to be harmful to whales and other marine life. ?

Alleged?

Arrrrrgggggghhhh!


Good job, Captains of Industry.

Mmmm,m pr'haps I shouldn't be so hasty to blame Navy sonar for the demise of the whales, it could be a number of Navy pollutants, or it might be sound bombing . You know, for oil exploration.

Alrighty then.

Drugs, oil, wars

Most of Europe's heroin poppies are grown in Afghanistan.

Another record poppy crop in Afghanistan
By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 4, 12:27 PM ET

A while back this post of mine on Dyncorp got quite a few hits from people who might have been looking for employment, but one that I wondered about was from Columbia. I don't get a lot of hits from Columbia.
A lot of our "black tar" heroin and cocaine begins it's journey here to the US as happy little poppies and coca in Columbia. We don't like that. We spray. There's oil in Columbia also.

Hmmmmm, remember this book?

And, yeah, what happened to this dude?

Yeah,this looks like an interesting book to me:

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

I'm reading this one now:


Opium Wars by William Travis Hanes, Frank Sanello


Oh well, at least the Dyncorp guys can afford heroin. The soldiers can't, but they're buying it anyway. Umm, so what happens when the marines bring their sorry overdeployed, drug addicted asses back to San Diego? Did they clean up downtown for nothing? I wonder if this is next? If so, Southern California is going to explode, and these fuckers will be right in there, and to top it off they will have a shitload more NAFTA refugees to recruit from.

Cagle nails it

I don't know what Cagle calls it, but I would title it: Media focus on politics.

Never mind the latest US military Whoops, my bad, let's focus on the Clenis and his wife's cleavage

Oakland Post editor is victim of targeted killing possibly linked to his work

Hmmmm. That freedom of the press ranking ain't looking any better for the US when this stuff happens.

update: Police: Calif. handyman admits to shooting veteran journalist investigating Black Muslim group
By Michelle Locke
ASSOCIATED PRESS2:46 p.m. August 6, 2007

Israel's Jewish Problem in Tehran

So why hasn't Iran started by wiping its own Jews off the map?
by Jonathan Cook
August 4, 2007


...There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?...
...Despite the absence of any threat to Iran's Jews, the Israeli media recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma'ariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, "a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave." According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones...



So I imagine that most Iranian Jews are basically telling the Israelis and American Jews...

Frankenforests: GE Trees Threaten Ecosystem Collapse

Frankenforests: GE Trees Threaten Ecosystem Collapse

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet. Posted August 2, 2007.

Across the U.S. and the world, the timber industry is driving research behind genetically engineered forests. But environmentalists worry that it will open an ecological Pandora's Box.

In China over a million poplar trees have been planted since 2002 to combat deforestation. But the move has not been widely applauded by everyone. The poplars, which are genetically engineered, are China's first foray into the world of transgenic forestry -- or "frankenforests" -- and other countries are not far behind.



The Crash of 1929: Are We on the Verge of a Repeat?
By Scott Thill
AlterNet

Thursday 26 July 2007

...If this is beginning to sound like a game of Monopoly built on fake money, that's because it is. By injecting so many invented shares into the market using naked shorting, hedge funds have not only created an economy in which they can manipulate the stocks of companies smaller than Microsoft and Wal-Mart, but they have also created a market in which there are more shares than actual stocks. And that's about as hyperreal as an economy can get...

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

I want this book.

Clinton Guiliani widen their leads in poll

Oh fuck the mainstream media. I don't believe this shit for one goddamned minute.

Listening to Thom Hartman's quick poll had Kucinich at the top last week.

From the geniuses at the San Diego Union Tribune

By Craig Gustafson
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

July 28, 2007

In one of the broadest tests of electronic balloting to date, computer and election experts had no problem hacking into the same kind of touch-screen voting machines used by San Diego County....



No Fucking Shit, Sherlock.

How long have I been bitching about these voting machines?
The comments are entertaining also. I don't know why I'm still surprised at the idiocy of RepugnantThuglicans.

More voting stuff

California Report Slams E-Voting System Security
Researchers commissioned by California have found security issues in every electronic voting system they tested, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said today.Part 1 of a special five-part series. -->
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Friday, July 27, 2007 4:00 PM PDT

Researchers commissioned by the State of California have found security issues in every electronic voting system they tested, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said Friday.
The report was published Friday as part of a complete review of the state's e-voting systems initiated earlier this year by Bowen's office.

And last night on NOW Greg Palast.

I'm busy

I'm at Anna's in LA. We got seventeen years to catch up on. See ya Monday.

House Panel Votes for Contempt Charges in Firings Case

By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 25, 2007; 2:48 PM

The House Judiciary Committee voted today to issue contempt citations for two of President Bush's most trusted aides, taking its most dramatic step yet towards a constitutional showdown with the White House over the Justice Department's dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

The panel voted 22-17, along party lines, to issue citations to Joshua B. Bolten, White House chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, former White House counsel. Both refused to comply with committee subpoenas after Bush declared that documents and testimony related to the prosecutor firings were protected by executive privilege.

Because we are a nation of LAWS.

Chalmers Johnson from Tomdispatch

The Life and Times of the CIAWall Street Brokers, Ivy League Professors, Soldiers of Fortune, Ad Men, Newsmen, Stunt Men, Second-Story Men, and Con Men on Active Duty for the United States
By Chalmers Johnson

This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).


I waaaaaaant it. I want the book, dammnit.

still reading

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis.

Possibly the most depressing book evah.

The most depressing sentence so far?

p. 132
"International developement agencies encourage destructive transport policies by their preference for financing roads rather than rails, as well as by encouraging the privatization of local transportation."

Next up on the suicide watch reading list? Perkins' latest, of course, The Secret History of the American Empire. I'm actually halfway through "..Slums" and I started "...Empire" a while ago, but put it down for a while. There are some disturbing similarities and some organizations that are mentioned in both books, namely, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank.

refers back to this one

Kings, Queens and dorkwads

Last night I watched about ten minutes of a show on PBS called Queen & Country .

I looked for a web page to see if I could find the exact quote that made me reach for the remote and click the OFF button in disgust, but I couldn't find one. Some smiling, chubby Canadian dude was going on about how much the Americans love the Monarchy and he was so proud that the Canadians actually had a Queen, and the Americans don't.

Huh?

First of all, I didn't even know that the Canadians considered the Queen of England their Queen, and secondly, I wondered if this guy had any clue about why the Revolutionary War in the American Colonies was fought?

(Hint: We need a new revolution to get rid of this dorkwad in the White House who tells us yet again that he thinks he is King George.

That and the snubbing of the Queen by this dude (um, not surprising that a woman would be snubbed in a predominantly Muslim country is it?) was about all I could stand to watch regarding royalty last night.

I must admit though, that this picture is priceless, the Queen sure has dudes number, don't she?



Speaking of PBS, I know where I'll be tonight.

I'll be plopped right in front of the teevee watching NOW (even thought this particular episode looks like it might be sad) and Bill Moyers Journal (because I must see The Yes Men ).

Completely unrelated, unless you consider Machiavellian machinations and the new cold war that has pulled in Britain and Russia :

Kissinger’s Secret Meeting With Putin

Judge throws out Plame's lawsuit
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer1:26 PM PDT, July 19, 2007

...Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and one of the couple's lawyers, said Bates' decision recognized that the Wilsons' claims posed "important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials."

But, she said, the judge dismissed their lawsuit on a threshold legal issue centered on the difficulty of suing a federal official.

"While we are obviously very disappointed by today's decision, we have always expected that this case would ultimately be decided by a higher court." Sloan said. "We disagree with the court's holding and intend to pursue this case vigorously to protect all Americans from vindictive government officials who abuse their power for their own political ends."


Democrats: Miers immunity claim may be illegitimate
By Elana Schor
July 19, 2007

Democrats Move Toward Holding Miers in Contempt
By Emma Schwartz
Posted 7/18/07
...The House could also vote to put Miers in "inherent contempt," which would mean holding her in the congressional jail, though that hasn't happened since the 1930s...

Democrats need to move a little faster, I've had enough, and the middle east is blowing up

You have no idea

How freakin happy I am right now.

I found Anna.

My crazy, sweet, light's up the room, artist friend, who's Grand-Uncle was David Alfaro Siqueiros.

I've missed her. I can't wait to see her .
Her paintings are wonderful.

Interested in her work?

Contact her here: annasiqueiros AT sbcglobal DOT net

reading now

As I imagine the dialogue

"Dad, I wanna be a big baseball guy when I grow up."

"Son, it's not what you were born to do."




"Bbbbbbuuut Daaaaaaaaaaaad."



"Just keep moving son."

"Son.......SON..........Hey Stupid, move your butt!!!!"

Lovely

16 Saudis transferred home from Guantanamo

(AP) - RIYADH, Saudi Arabia-Sixteen Saudis transferred from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay arrived home Monday and were immediately detained by authorities investigating possible terrorist connections, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

A total of 77 Saudis have now been returned from Guantanamo, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki told SPA. He said 53 remain incarcerated at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, a source of tension in U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Washington. Al-Turki's figures correspond to those maintained independently by The Associated Press.

Arabs pile into Darfur to take land 'cleansed' by janjaweed
By Steve Bloomfield, Africa Correspondent Published: 14 July 2007

...Drought in parts of northern Africa has forced nomads to look further afield for fertile land. Although the spread of desert is rapidly reducing the amount of land available for farmers and nomads in Darfur, much of the area cleared by the janjaweed and government forces is fertile...

Egypt faces clean water crisis
By Farid Barsoum in the Nile Delta, Egypt


Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth
By Andrea Thompson, and Ker Than
Republished from Live Science
In the next 200 years humans will face widespread water shortages, famine and disease; whilst Earth’s landscape transforms radically

Last Rites in the Holy Land?
The world's most ancient Christian communities are fleeing their birthplace.
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
July 23, 2007 issue -

Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and the spread of Sunni theofascism - Part 1
By Curtin Winsor

Are Muslims Under Siege?
Sunday, 15, July, 2007 (29, Jumada al-Thani, 1428)
M.J. Akbar, mjakbar@asianage.com
...Do we blame Hinduism or Hindus for the malevolence of those who killed and terrorized Muslims in Gujarat five years ago? We do not, and must not. Is there any reason why Muslims converge so easily into a category?...

Ummmm...

The Gujarat violence broke out in February 2002 when a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu pilgrims and activists, killing nearly 60 Hindus . The incident sparked weeks of reprisals, including arson and murder by Hindu mobs that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

Saudis....

more balls than brains.

Lawmaker: Jail Women Who Wear Burqa
Friday July 13, 2007 4:01 AM

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - A right-wing Dutch lawmaker wants women jailed for wearing the head-to-toe Islamic robe known as a burqa, calling it a ``symbol of oppression.''

Ummmm, I think going to jail for wearing the niquab, or burka is a bit extreme, but I think they are a security hazard. On the other hand, it was a man who killed Theo Van Gogh for insulting Islam.