I think I had an actual sighting of one the other day during a little episode on an exit ramp of Central Expressway in Dallas. Didn't know they actually existed. Couldn't believe my own eyes.
Standing in the January wind at a traffic-clogged intersection was the by-now-standard crippled-up black guy with the cardboard sign saying something like "I have no family, I have no friends, but I have God."
Well, that ain't news. Those street-corner guys haven't had any friends besides God since the first Reagan administration, unless you want to count Bill Clinton.
No, the newsworthy thing, in the man-bites-dog sense, is that a fashionably-dressed Park Cities woman in an expensive car did, amazingly, this: She waved the homeless guy over and gave him the big deli sandwich she'd just purchased for herself at nearby trendy Central Market: Just freely forked it over, right there in front of God and Highland Park.
Wow. I'd been hearing about these mythical creatures for four years now, but here one was, in the flesh:
A Compassionate Conservative. ... See the rest of Brad Bailey's report.
ABC anchor Peter Jennings in the New Hampshire presidential debate absolved George W. Bush of responsibility for failing to show up for his National Guard service and right-wing pundits righteously declared that the AWOL/deserter charge had been debunked, but facts are stubborn things.
Jennings was peeved because Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore called Bush a "deserter" at a rally for retired Gen. Wesley Clark. Jennings asked Clark to denounce Moore for uttering "a reckless charge not supported by the facts." (Clark declined to denounce Moore, saying he didn't know the facts.) But Bob Somerby of dailyhowler.com noted that Jennings doesn't seem to know "the facts" either. "As near as we can tell from a Nexis search, Jennings has never reported on the charge that the young George Bush skipped a large chunk of his National Guard service. The Boston Globe reported the charge in a detailed report on May 23, 2000. [TPP also ran a report by Marty Heldt, "George W. Bush's missing year," in the 11/1/00 issue.] And from that day to this, ABC's World News Tonight doesn't seem to have mentioned the allegation, let alone laid out 'the facts.' That's right &emdash; according to Nexis, Peter Jennings has never discussed Bush's 'missing year' on World News Tonight."
See "Spinning Bush at War, Part 2," on how the press buried the story of Bush missing a year of his Air National Guard service before the 2000 election, and now plays down continued unanswered questions about Bush's absence without leave from military service (some say desertion) during a time of war.
See the original Boston Globe story from May 23, 2000, that has eluded so many other news media.
See Timetable of Bush's service and service avoidance.
See 5/24/00 CNN report on Bush's dismissal of the Boston Globe report, where Bush denied he skipped a year of service.
6/26/00 Dallas Morning News report that records of Bush's Alabama military service were missing.
9/27/00 George W. Bush's Missing Year, by Martin Feldt, at TomPaine.com, reprinted in the Nov. 1, 2000 Progressive Populist.
10/21/00 More Questions Than Ever, by David Case. After George Magazine contradicted reports that Bush never finished his Air National Guard service, TomPaine.com checked the record and found Bush not only got special treatment in the 1960s, but his military record also may have received "special handling" after questions about his service were raised.
The Smoking Jet, a report on Bush's military record by Robert A. Rogers (ret. 1st Lt. Mission Pilot)
Documents gathered by Martin Feldt relating to Bush's service in the National Guard.
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A former prosecutor in the Nuremburg war crimes trials says yes. See "War Crimes and Misdemeanors."
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California becomes the first state to require e-votes to leave a paper trail.
Also see See Machine Politics for Wired.com reports on the controversy over the use of electronic voting machines.
See VerifiedVoting.org, a campaign initiated by David Dill, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, to demand a voter-verifiable audit trail.
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Was the 2002 Georgia election, where Republicans defied pre-election polling to upset the Democratic governor and senator, a dry run for the theft of the 2004 election?
See the London Independent's report. Then see a Wired.com report that Diebold Election Systems installed unauthorized software "patches" on Georgia election machines.
A report by Johns Hopkins University computer scientists warning that Diebold electronic voting machines could be hacked into and election results tampered with lends further credence to alarms raised by Progressive Populist correspondents over the past year. The Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute study of voting machine software found so many flaws that any teenager with a modicum of computer savvy could manipulate the system and change the outcome of an election.
Although the study only covered Diebold, which has 55,000 electronic voting machines installed in the USA, the same complaints are heard about other brands. Even systems that claim multiple backups are subject to hacking that is virtually undetectable if there is no paper trail, experts say.
Diebold said the scientists got ahold of outdated software, which was inadvertently placed on a public website, but the researchers said comments and copyright notices convinced them it was legitimate. Avi Rubin, director of the Information Security Institute, told Reuters the Diebold software was so full of errors that it would have to be rewritten completely. Even then, he said, computers and voting should not mix. "I am against electronic voting because I think voting is too important and computers are too difficult to secure."
Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has introduced HR 2239, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, to require a voter-verified paper record for use in manual recounts as of the November 2004 general election. It also requires "surprise" recounts comparing the paper ballots and computer-reported returns in at least 0.5% of jurisdictions.
For more on voting security concerns see www.populist.com/voting.html.
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Sen. Ted Kennedy speaks On the Administration's Failure to Provide a Realistic, Specific Plan to Bring Stability to Iraq, on the floor of the Senate, Oct. 16, 2003
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Check out The Meatrix,
an animated cartoon about factory farming and its effect on meat production.
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The Memory Hole presents the video of George W. Bush continuing to read to an elementary school class for five minutes after being told that a second airliner had hit the second World Trade Center tower and that America was under attack.
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The tangled web that wove the invasion of Iraq. Quotes from Bush administration officials (with sources and links) before, during and after the invasion claiming war was necessary because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Of course now those weapons are nowhere to be found -- or suspected of being in Syria or Iraq ...
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For scuttlebutt on the Bush Family, see Bush Family Values.
If you can't get enough news about Enron, see The Daily Enron.
And for a Texas Democrat's take on the Enron political scandal, see EnronownstheGOP.com.
For an analysis of claims and factual errors made by George Bush during his campaign for president, see TexasTruth.com.
For more information, see our Global Trade page."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture had to back off on proposed rules to degrade organic food standards and outlaw eco-labels, but the battle is far from over.
For more information, see the Pure Food Campaign site and the Save Organic Standards project. Sample letters are available at "SOS Legislation."
Opponents of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments are celebrating that it apparently has been stopped, at least for the time being.
Check the Global Economy News and the Public Citizen Global Trade Watch for recent information on Fast Track and other trade matters.
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