Follow the money

Looks like the Democrats will have some money to counter the Republican cash from Haliburton, Bechtel et al.
George Soros has also contributed heavily to campaigns to legalize marijuana in Nevada and other states and has contributed billions to democracy projects in the former soviet bloc, Asia and Africa. He is becoming my favorite James Bond villian millionaire - those people so rich they could be villians in Bond movies (think Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and thier ilk)Billionaire Soros
takes on Bush. Ousting president ‘central
focus of my life,’ he says

What do the Montreal Canadiens have that the Toronto Maple Leafs don't?
.......







wait for it!











Colour photos of their last stanley cup victory!

Sign #321 that the apocalypse is imminent
Yes, just in time for the budding facist on your all-amerikan khristmas listthe talking Ann Coulter doll

This article is an older one from Salon.com - by posting it I am probably violating copywrite, but I hope it will entice a few people to subscribe to this excellent web magazine.




Grounded
A federal agency confirms that it maintains an air-travel blacklist of 1,000 people. Peace activists and civil libertarians fear they're on it.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Dave Lindorff



Nov. 15, 2002 | Barbara Olshansky was at a Newark International Airport departure gate last May when an airline agent at the counter checking her boarding pass called airport security. Olshansky was subjected to a close search and then, though she was in view of other travelers, was ordered to pull her pants down. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have created a new era in airport security, but even so, she was embarrassed and annoyed.

Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention the next time she flew. And the next time. And the next time. On one flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.

"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months, rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."



But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration has acknowledged for the first time that the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances. And in an interview with Salon, the official suggested that Olshansky and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.

"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is composed of names that are provided to us by various government organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS ... We don't ask how they decide who to list. Each agency decides on its own who is a 'threat to aviation.'"

The agency has no guidelines to determine who gets on the list, Steigman says, and no procedures for getting off the list if someone is wrongfully on it.

Meanwhile, airport security personnel, citing lists that are provided by the agency and that appear to be on airline ticketing and check-in computers, seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups.


Virgine Lawinger, a nun in Milwaukee and an activist with Peace Action, a well-known grassroots advocacy group, was stopped from boarding a flight last spring to Washington, where she and 20 young students were planning to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S. military aid to the Colombian government. "We were all prevented from boarding, and some of us were taken to another room and questioned by airport security personnel and local sheriff's deputies," says Lawinger.

In that incident, an airline employee with Midwest Air and a local sheriff's deputy who had been called in during the incident to help airport security personnel detain and question the group, told some of them that their names were "on a list," and that they were being kept off their plane on instructions from the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. Lawinger has filed a freedom-of-information request with the Transportation Security Administration seeking to learn if she is on a "threat to aviation" list.


Last month, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, two journalists with a San Francisco-based antiwar magazine called War Times were stopped at the check-in counter of ATA Airlines, where an airline clerk told them that her computer showed they were on "the FBI No Fly list." The airline called the FBI, and local police held them for a while before telling them there had been a mistake and that they were free to go. The two made their plane, but not before the counter attendant placed a large S for "search" on their baggage, assuring that they got more close scrutiny at the boarding gate.


Art dealer Doug Stuber, who ran Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was barred last month from getting on a flight to Hamburg, Germany, where he was going on business, after he got engaged in a loud, though friendly, discussion with two other passengers in a security line. During the course of the debate, he shouted that "George Bush is as dumb as a rock," an unfortunate comment that provoked the Raleigh-Durham Airport security staff to call the local Secret Service bureau, which sent out two agents to interrogate Stuber.

"They took me into a room and questioned me all about my politics," Stuber recalls. "They were very up on Green Party politics, too." They fingerprinted him and took a digital eye scan. Particularly ominous, he says, was a loose-leaf binder held by the Secret Service agents. "It was open, and while they were questioning me, I discreetly looked at it," he says. "It had a long list of organizations, and I was able to recognize the Green Party, Greenpeace, EarthFirst and Amnesty International." Stuber was eventually released, but because he missed his flight, he had to pay almost $2,000 more for a full-fare ticket to Hamburg so that he would not miss his business engagement. In the end, however, after trying several airports in the North Carolina area, he found he was barred from boarding any flights, and had to turn in his ticket and cancel his business trip.

A Secret Service agent at the agency's Washington headquarters confirmed that his agency had been called in to question Stuber. "We're not normally a part of the airport security operation," Agent Mark Connelly told Salon. "That's the FBI's job. But when one of our protection subjects gets threatened, we check it out." Asked about the list of organizations observed by Stuber, the Secret Service source speculated that those organizations might be on a list of organizations that the service, which is assigned the task of protecting the president, might need to monitor as part of its security responsibility.

Additional evidence suggests that Olshansky, Stuber and other left-leaning activists are also seen as a threat to aviation, though perhaps of a different grade. A top official for the Eagle Forum, an old-line conservative group led by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, said several of the group's members have been delayed at security checkpoints for so long that they missed their flights. According to Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization, an American member of the Falun Gong Chinese religious group was barred from getting back on a plane that had stopped in Iceland, reportedly based on information supplied to Icelandic customs by U.S. authorities. The person was reportedly permitted to fly onward on a later flight.

Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says his group has documented over 80 cases -- involving 200 people -- in which fliers with Arabic names have been delayed at the airport, or barred altogether from flying. Some, he says, appear to involve people who have no political involvement at all, and he speculated that they suffered the misfortune of having the same name as someone "on the list" for legitimate security reasons.

Until Steigman's confirmation of the no-fly list, the government had never admitted its existence. While FBI spokesman Paul Bresson confirmed existence of the list, officials at the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service declined to comment and referred inquiries back to the TSA. Details of how it was assembled and how it is being used by the government, airports and airlines are largely kept secret.

A security officer at United Airlines, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the airlines receive no-fly lists from the Transportation Security Administration but declined further comment, saying it was a security matter. A USAir spokeswoman, however, declined to comment, saying that the airline's security relationship with the federal transit agency was a security matter and that discussing it could "jeopardize passenger safety."

Steigman declined to say who was on the no-fly list, but he conceded that people like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon, Adams and Olshansky were not "threats to aviation," because they were being allowed to fly after being interrogated and searched. But then, in a Byzantine twist, he raised the possibility that the security agency might have more than one list. "I checked with our security people," he said, "and they said there is no [second] list," he said. "Of course, that could mean one of two things: Either there is no second list, or there is a list and they're not going to talk about it for security reasons."

In fact, most of those who have been stopped from boarding flights (like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon and Adams) were able to fly later. Obviously, if the TSA thought someone was a genuine "threat to aviation" -- like those on the 1,000-name no-fly list, they would simply be barred from flying. So does the agency have more than one list perhaps -- one for people who are totally barred from flying and another for people who are simply harassed and delayed?

Asked why the TSA would be barring a 74-year-old nun from flying, Steigman said: "I don't know. You could get on the list if you were arrested for a federal felony."

Sister Lawinger says she was arrested only once, back in the 1980s, for sitting down and refusing to leave the district office of a local congressman. And even then, she says, she was never officially charged or fined. But another person who was in the Peace Action delegation that day, Judith Williams, says she was arrested and spent three days in jail for a protest at the White House back in 1991. In that protest, Williams and other Catholic peace activists had scaled the White House perimeter fence and scattered baby dolls around the lawn to protest the bombing of Iraq. She says that the charge from that incident was a misdemeanor, an infraction that would not seem enough to establish her as a threat to aviation.

Inevitably, such questions about how one gets on a federal transit list creates questions about how to get off it. It is a classic -- and unnerving -- Catch-22: Because the Transportation Security Administration says it compiles the list from names provided by other agencies, it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their names, but for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency put someone on the list.

Bresson, the FBI spokesperson, would not explain the criteria for classifying someone as a threat to aviation, but suggests that fliers who believe they're on the list improperly should "report to airport security and they should be able to contact the TSA or us and get it cleared up." He concedes that might mean missed flights or other inconveniences. His explanation: "Airline security has gotten very complicated."

Many critics of the security agency's methods accept the need for heightened air security, but remain troubled by the more Kafka-esque traits of the system. Waters, at the Eagle Forum, worries that the government has offered no explanation for how a "threat to aviation" is determined. "Maybe the people being stopped are already being profiled," she says. "If they're profiling people, what kind of things are they looking for? Whether you fit in in your neighborhood?"

"I agree that the government should be keeping known 'threats to aviation' off of planes," Ibish says. "I certainly don't want those people on my plane! But there has to be a procedure for appealing this, and there isn't. There are no safeguards and there is no recourse."

Meanwhile, nobody in the federal government has explained why so many law-abiding but mostly left-leaning political activists and antiwar activists are being harassed at check-in time at airports. "This all raises serious concerns about whether the government has made a decision to target Americans based on their political beliefs," says Katie Corrigan, an ACLU official. The ACLU has set up a No Fly List Complaint Form on its Web site.

One particular concern about the government's threat to aviation list and any other possible lists of people to be subjected to extra security investigation at airports is that names are being made available to private companies -- the airlines and airport authorities -- charged with alerting security personnel. Unlike most other law-enforcement watch lists, these lists are not being closely held within the national security or law-enforcement files and computers, but are apparently being widely dispersed.

"It's bad enough when the federal government has lists like this with no guidelines on how they're compiled or how to use them," says Olshansky at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But when these lists are then given to the private sector, there are even less controls over how they are used or misused." Noting that airlines have "a free hand" to decide whether someone can board a plane or not, she says the result is a "tremendous chilling of the First Amendment right to travel and speak freely."

But Olshansky, alarmed by her own experience and the number of others reporting apparent political harassment, is fighting back. She says now that the government has confirmed the existence of a blacklist, her center is planning a First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government. CCR has already signed up Lawinger, Stuber, and several others from Milwaukee's Peace Action group.

"The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."
President* George W. Bush
Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003

The best democracy money can buy
I'm reading this guy's book right now on the theft of the 2000 election among other things. It is excellent and a must read for anyone who wonders how the world really works.

As the rockets were crashing into the rooms on the floors below him, was Paul Wolfowitz recalling Dubya's challenge to the Iraqi resistance to 'Bring it on" or was he simply hoping he remembered to bring some dry shorts?rocket attack

here's a couple of good pieces from Salon about right wing arrogance in the Excited States

stupid phone tricks

and dissent? what dissent?

No its not a new Japanese punk band - learn more about the newest craze from Germany :Porno Karaoke

100 great books
The Guardian and the Observer (two big English newspapers) have combined to present a list of the 100 greatest novels.

here are the top ten
1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.


6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron

For those too lazy to follow the link, some other notables you might be interested in:

14. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

21. Moby Dick by Hermman Melville

24. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol

31. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

61. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

66. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

68. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

How do Kirk Hammett and Joe Perry come ahead of Neil Young?

Rolling Stone's 100 greatest guitarists
for those too lazy to use the link here's the top 20 plus one:
1. Jimi Hendrix (naturally....)
2 Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band
3 B.B. King
4 Eric Clapton
5 Robert Johnson
6 Chuck Berry
7 Stevie Ray Vaughan
8 Ry Cooder
9 Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin
10 Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones
11Kirk Hammett of Metallica
12 Kurt Cobain of Nirvana
13 Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead
14 Jeff Beck
15 Carlos Santana
16 Johnny Ramone of the Ramones
17 Jack White of the White Stripes
18 John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
19 Richard Thompson
20 James Burton
21 George Harrison

Clearly there are some problems with the list that are the result of it being a Rolling Stone list - a lot of emphasis on guys who are very new and hip (Jack White is #17 and Buddy Guy is #30? Don't make me laugh) or are known more for the notoriety or influential nature of their group than thier actual chops/solos/skill (Johnny Ramone? Kurt Cobain?) though it is nice to see the real king of Rock and Roll at number 6.

Esti mundus Furi abundus (the universe is unfolding as it should)

Habs bounce back from opening loss to Sens, destroy Make-believes 4-0



a change in management can make all the difference

Once again proving the yanks have no sense of humor, obvious Mr. Waters need to have a few toke and chill the hell out...


PM's jokes on marijuana outrage U.S.
Canada 'ashamed' of Chrétien, drug czar says

Sheldon Alberts and Janice Tibbetts
The Ottawa Citizen


Friday, October 10, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The White House's drug czar lashed out yesterday at Prime Minister Jean Chrétien for relaxing marijuana laws and said Canadians are "ashamed" over the prime minister's recent jokes about smoking marijuana when he retires.

John Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy Office, said Mr. Chrétien was being irresponsible when he said last week that he might try marijuana when he leaves office next February.

Canadians "are concerned about the behaviour of their prime minister, joking that he is going to use marijuana in his retirement," Mr. Walters said to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"They're ashamed."

Canada is "the one place in the hemisphere where things are going the wrong (way) rapidly," Mr. Walters added. "It's the only country in this hemisphere that's become a major drug producer instead of reducing their drug production."

Justice Minister Martin Cauchon, who is shepherding the federal government's marijuana legislation through the House of Commons, responded that Mr. Walters should "look in his own backyard" before criticizing Mr. Chrétien.

"There are over 10 states that have in place what we call alternative penalties, so you know, if it is not correct to move in that direction, maybe he should spend some time talking to his own states," Mr. Cauchon said.

Mr. Walters' criticisms of Mr. Chrétien came following an effort by the prime minister to make light of his government's controversial decriminalization legislation.

During an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press, Mr. Chrétien said he had never tried marijuana, but might once decriminalization legislation is approved by Parliament.

"I don't know what is marijuana. Perhaps I will try it when it will no longer be criminal," he said. "I will have money for my fine and a joint in the other hand."

Jim Munson, Mr. Chrétien's director of communications, declined to comment on Mr. Walters' claim that Canadians are ashamed of their leader.

"I am not going to get into those kind of comments. I mean, they have their point of view and we have our point of view," Mr. Munson said.

The prime minister, while joking about his own lack of personal experience with marijuana, also spoke about the need to crack down on growers and dealers of marijuana, Mr. Munson said.

The bill was handed yesterday to a special parliamentary committee, instead of the busy Commons justice committee, which would not be able to hold public hearings on the controversial legislation until after Christmas.

Randy White, a Canadian Alliance MP on the special committee, said that members do not intend to rush the bill. The Americans will be among the witnesses who will be invited to the hearings.

© Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen

Highway 61 rerevisted by Tim Cahill

You can tell Le Petit Gar from Shawinagin is ready to retire and clearly doesn't give a shit what the press says. You have to love that.

Chretien jokes about trying pot once it's decriminalized, ready to pay fine

Canadian Press


Saturday, October 04, 2003



WINNIPEG (CP) - It's an unlikely retirement scenario for Prime Minister Jean Chretien: he's at his lakeside cottage, sipping tea with his wife Aline - and smoking a big fat joint.

The 69-year-old prime minister has never smoked marijuana, he says, but he joked in an interview this week he might be willing to give it a try once it's decriminalized. Chretien made the joke in an Ottawa interview with the Winnipeg Free Press published in Friday's paper.

Chretien was asked how it felt to have bills for decriminalizing marijuana and legalizing same-sex marriages as the exclamation points to his lengthy political career.

"I don't know what is marijuana," Chretien replied.

"Perhaps I will try it when it will no longer be criminal. I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand."

On a more serious note, he defended his government's marijuana bill, which he is trying to pass this fall in what is expected to be his last parliamentary session.

He said replacing criminal sentences with simple fines is a more realistic way of punishing marijuana users.

"The decriminalization of marijuana is making normal what is the practice," Chretien said.

"It is still illegal, but do you think Canadians want their kids, 18 years old or 17, who smoke marijuana once and get caught by the police, to have a criminal record for the rest of their life?

"What has happened is so illogical that they are not prosecuted anymore. So let's make the law adjust to the realities. It is still illegal, but they will pay a fine. It is in synch with the times.

On same-sex marriage, Chretien said he thinks it is better to err on the side of giving more rights than taking away rights. But he didn't want to talk about whether that view has caused him problems as a Catholic.

"My grandfather had been refused holy communion because he was a Liberal organizer," he said. "For us, my mentality, my religion belongs to me and I will deal personally with that. I am a public person in a very diverse society, and I don't think I can impose every limit of my morality on others, because I don't want others to impose their morality on me."

Oh to be back home and listening to the cbc blues series

With the western world supposedly beseiged by snarling, foaming at the mouth, fanged, three-eyed terrorists intent on eating our children it nice to see the attorney general of the Excited States is spending his limited resources well.
the next step will be arresting reggae singers for singing about weed

well I almost had a bit of a dust up at the office last night. For a branch of the world's largest newspaper our editors seem to have a funny idea of what constitutes journalism.
A couple of examples:
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/index-e.htm
I think most of us will have heard of the 5 Ws (Who what where when why) Well where I work "who" is usually a well guarded secret, even when the name is in the public domain. The above story has two main actors in it, one who is on trial for accessory to murder after the fact(destruction of evidence). His name is therefore a matter of public record, but the oiks at the parent paper won't use it because they think it might identify the other main actor in the story - a police lt. who has been accused of accepting a bribe. Said Lt. was interviewed and testified at the trial and his name is also therefor a matter of public record, but we don't run it because he might not like it.
example two shows us how accurate stats can be used to twist the truth
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/index-e.htm
this one concerns the number of foreigners arrested in the first half of the year. The police say the number is up by 20 percent from last year to just over 9,000 and that about 240 of those were arrested for "murder and other violent crimes". Sounds like a massive crime wave committed by those pernicious foreign devils doesn't it? Spot the logical/statistical fallacy yet?
9,000 arrests out of how many? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?

five minutes of web cruising later we find out that in 2002 2,735,612 crimes were reported to police, including 1,340 murders and that in all, 542,115 arrests were made
Current year stat are not yet readily available in english, but would have been included in the report the DY story was based on. When I mentioned this I was told that because it wasn't in the original japanese story, we could not add it to our story.
The next day I checked the other two main english language dailies and found out that while we at the Daily Anonymous didn't have the essential background info to put the crime stats in context, our rivals did.

The international Herald-Tribune/Asahi:
"Crimes allegedly committed by foreigners accounted for only 1.39 percent of all criminal cases in the half-year."

The Japan Times:
"Crime allegedly committed by foreigners, a popular media scapegoat, accounted for a scant 1.39 percent of all cases in the half-year period. The total number of arrests and papers sent to prosecutors, including those involving Japanese, reached 1.34 million in the first six months of this year."

It is the classic propagandists big lie. "Our country is in peril, the communists have receive triple the number of votes in this latest election compared to last election." says the red baiter, not telling us that last time they got 20 of 200,000 votes cast and this time they got 60 out of 300,000 votes cast.

The problem is when I complain about these things, the editors look at me like I've grown an extra head. "We Japanese don't like to use too many names, we like to keep thing anonymous" said one editor (good of her to speak for the entire population of 128 million) and of course as all Japanese know (and as we keep telling them) "Foreigners are responsible for most of the crime in Japan"


Now obviously if both rival papers had the information it was readily available, probably contained in the same report from the NPA. Therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that the writer for the Yomiuri Shimbun intentionally left out the information.
Could there be an agenda at work here?
You bet your (insert off-colour colloquial expression here) there is.
A quick search of our database turned up a half dozen similar stories, all with the same information missing. It also turned up four editorials that followed the stories, calling for measures to be taken to halt the rising flood of criminal foreigners.

conclusion: I work for facists here at Partoftheproblem, Inc.

Is the ministry of truth taking job applications?

this article does not exactly inspire faith in the democratic process

www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...ageid=968256289824&col=968342212737
rather it calls to mind Frank Zappa's "Dumb all over"
http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/lyrics/You_Are_What_You_Is.html#Dumb

seem to having a little trouble with the new comment function due to reblogger being offline at the moment but I will try to sort things out in the near future.

Meanwhile consider the benefits of thisme hearties, ahrrrr! and this too ye scaborus sea-dogs