Mind Vomit by the ikss ~ a journal
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Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2004are we really safer?
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�Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead�
-Lucille Ball
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
REGISTER TO VOTE
"The time is always right to do what is right"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The "seven social sins": Knowledge without character,
Science without humanity,
Wealth without work,
Commerce without morality,
Politics without principles,
Pleasure without conscience,
Worship without self-sacrifice."
--Gandhi
"We have not inherited the world from our forfathers -
We have borrowed it from our children."
--Kashmiri, proverb
~~~
A note from John Kerry:
George Bush and Dick Cheney have lost millions of jobs, made our health care crisis worse, and turned record budget surpluses into record deficits. They misled America into war, failed to plan for the peace, and are running up a $200 billion bill at the expense of America's middle class taxpayers.
And now they are acting like they are doing us a favor by standing for re-election. They even have the gall to tell the American people how risky it would be if we turned them out of office.
The biggest risk to America's future is four more years of Bush-Cheney's incompetence, misinformation, and ill intent.
Don't let Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party run away from their record. Send a "Don't yield an inch" contribution to support all our Democratic candidates right now:
https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html
*
And from yours truly:
I don�t care what side of the political fence you sit on. I don�t care if you recognize that our two-party system is seriously flawed and in need of a complete overhaul. I don�t care if you think Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to having to answer to special interest groups. I don�t care if you think John Kerry looks like a puppet from Crank Yankers.
This is an important time in our history. You are obligated to take part in it. You may not �see a point� in voting, as John�s son said to him this past weekend. If you don�t, you are wrong.
This administration is doing all it can to make sure a whole lot of people in this country are denied their right to vote. They are also doing all they can to institute paperless voting machines which can easily be tampered with by college students and upon which votes can not be traced even if they are altered. First of all, don�t let them do either of those things! Second of all, in the event their efforts actually work, your vote will be all that much more important!
Sure, the process is flawed. Don�t let that intimidate you into not caring. The minute you let that happen is the minute �they� have won.
We can work on overhauling the entire political process at a later date. Right now, what matters most is that you vote. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have died, first to gain our right to vote, then to defend it. You have an obligation to them to practice that right. Further, you have an obligation to yourself to have a say in what happens to this country and in your world.
*
Someone called in to Al Franken�s show on AirAmerica yesterday and said something that makes so much sense (and I wish I�d thought to put it the same way). He was saying he couldn�t believe anyone would still be voting for Bush/Cheney, after so many hundreds of lies have been exposed and when you can not point to one single positive thing they have done in the three years they�ve been in office (unless you count reading to school kids during a time of massive crisis as a positive, of course). He was saying he didn�t understand people who still thought that the motives of Bush/Cheney could not ever be suspect � surely these people must realize that the leaders of dozens of countries, world over and for centuries, have been motivated by their own personal greed and lust for power; not by the needs of the people they are supposed to serve. What makes people think Bush/Cheney are any different, when all evidence points to this as fact? Because they�re American?
Frankly, I don�t get it either.
The one drum that Bush/Cheney keep beating is that we are �safer� with them in office. Certainly, they can�t talk about their achievements with the economy, because there have been none. Certainly they can�t talk about the great strides they�ve made on environmental issues because they�ve ruined any strides we�ve made in the last thirty years, at the risk of our very lives and the lives of our children. They can�t tout the many more Americans who now have access to affordable healthcare; they can�t talk about how many more kids are being educated properly when they didn't even fund their own "No Child Left Behind" proposal (a flawed proposal to begin with); they can�t claim that they are supporting crisis areas in other nations with humanitarian aid; they can�t talk about how they�ve expanded and supported civil rights for all.
I have written about this many times before, but I am going to do so again.
We are not safer, folks. Not in the slightest. It has been suggested many times that Al Qaeda is stronger now than it was before 9/11; bolstered by the tremendous ill-will we have fostered worldwide in the last three years.
To make matters worse our so-called �Homeland Security� is agonizingly under-funded. Our Border Patrol isn�t able to hire any new people, even if it wanted to, and they estimate that for every person they catch trying to enter this country illegally, six people slip by under the radar. I didn�t make that up � I heard a representative of the Border Patrol talking about it on the news last night, in response to some more bullshit hype coming out of Dick Cheney�s mouth.
Security at our nuclear facilities is practically nonexistent and seriously flawed, but there is no funding to make it stronger. Same thing with our ports. My friend Jen works for Homeland Security at the Port of Los Angeles. According not only to her, but to other officials speaking on the record to the media, only one out of seven ships entering our ports is even checked out. They simply do not have the resources to do more than that.
To make matters worse, The Bush Administration has �actively blocked an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initiative to impose security measures for extremely hazardous chemicals stored at power plants across the country.�
The Bush administration also ignored evidence pointing to the fact that Al Qaeda was going to attack us, using planes as missiles. From the git-go, this administration were much more interested in what was going on in Iraq � a country that yes, would probably have been a threat some day, but a country which was not an immediate threat at the time. I paraphrase Richard Clarke when I say that it is remarkable that Bush is using Sept. 11 and his reaction to it as the main reason we should all vote for him again, when he ignored the intelligence showing clearly that it was going to happen! Had he done his job correctly in the first place, we may very well have been able to keep Sept. 11 from happening at all � and we�re supposed to have confidence in him enough to vote him in to a second term? Again � read the 9/11 Commission Report. I�m not pulling this out of my ass, people. Or out of Al Franken�s.
Thanks to Dubya not extending the Assault Weapons Ban this week, we will now have more guns on the street � guns that can fire off thousands of rounds per minute. Was that bill an answer to our nation�s gun problems? Of course not � but it was a start. There is absolutely no need for assault weapons to be on the street and I don�t care about our �Right to Bear Arms�. Our forefathers lived in a different time � when hunting was essential for your very living and when you might have to actually defend yourself against the native population who might just come a�knockin� when you didn�t want them to. I feel somewhat certain that their intent was not for a guy to be able to walk in to a McDonalds with a fucking Uzi on his arm, so long as he has a license for it.
Knowing all of this does not make me feel safer today than I did four years ago.
So if you�re buying in to the Bush/Cheney line of �We are a safer nation now than we were before 9/11�, please explain to me how it is you come to this conclusion. If you are voting for Bush/Cheney for some other reason � please explain it to me. I can almost always see two sides to an issue (it's a Libra thing) � I can not see your side now.
Another thing Bush/Cheney are fond of talking about these days is what a �flip-flopper� John Kerry is. That he at first voted to support an armed conflict in Iraq; then was going to vote for even more money to go toward that war, before he changed his mind and decided not to.
Sure he did. Like so many on the Senate floor, John Kerry voted to support armed conflict in Iraq initially, because that was before most people knew what a liar George W. Bush is. He voted in support of armed conflict before he knew that what we were being told about Weapons of Mass Destruction was all a huge smokescreen. He also voted in support of armed conflict back when George W. Bush was saying (again I paraphrase) that we have to show support militarily in order to �keep the peace.� Contrary to what he said at the time, Bush didn't really try to "keep the peace" for very long. John Kerry said very clearly at the time of the vote that he was voting support for a military option only after UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to do their job thoroughly and only as a last-ditch option. Of course, the inspectors were allowed no such thing, but we didn't know until after the vote.
Further, when it came time to vote for or against an additional 80-some-odd million dollars to go to the War in Iraq, John Kerry did not flip-flop. He voted against it because by that time we all knew this war was being fought not for the reasons we were all initially told. By that time, we knew that hundreds of our soldiers and thousands of Iraqis were being killed while Bush was giving tax cuts to his rich buddies - and yet asking us to give even more money to support his immoral and illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
What he would have voted for was an alternate bill being talked about on Capital Hill at the time. That bill put very specific restrictions on why additional funds would be approved and how they would be implemented. But that�s not the one that came up for a vote, so John Kerry voted �Nay.� He didn�t vote �Nay� because he doesn�t support our troops � he voted that way because he doesn�t support pouring billions of dollars in to a war with no vision and no apparent end. He voted that way specifically because he does support our troops � he doesn�t want thousands of them killed needlessly and for no good reason. He knows first-hand the folly of an ill-conceived and ill-planned war and he is pissed that we�ve gotten ourselves in to another one.
As we all should be.
If you still are under the misconception that voting for Bush/Cheney is voting for a safer nation, take a read at this:
REPORT SHOWS BUSH NEGLECTING HUNT FOR AL QAEDA
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush promised America he would make the hunt for al Qaeda the number one objective of his administration. "[We] do everything we can to chase [al Qaeda] down and bring them to justice," Bush said. "That's a key priority, obviously, for me and my administration."[1] But according to a new report, the President has dangerously underfunded and understaffed the intelligence unit charged with tracking down al Qaeda's leader.
The New York Times reports "Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks." The bin Laden unit is "stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work."[2]
The revelation comes months after the Associated Press reported the Bush Treasury Department "has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden's" financial infrastructure.[3] It also comes after USA Today reported that the President shifted "resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq" in 2002. Specifically, Bush moved special forces tracking al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Iraq war preparations. He also left the CIA "stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan."[4] That has allowed these terrorists to regroup: according to the senior intelligence officials in July of this year, bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders are now directing a plot "to carry out a large-scale terror attack against the United States" and are overseeing the plan "from their remote hideouts somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."[5]
Sources:
1. "President Calls for Ticket to Independence in Welfare Reform," WhiteHouse.gov, 5/10/02
2. "C.I.A. Unit on bin Laden Is Understaffed, a Senior Official Tells Lawmakers," New York Times, 9/15/04
3. "More Agents Track Castro Than Bin Laden," Common Dreams News Center, 4/29/04
4. "Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions," USA Today, 3/28/04
5. "Officials: Bin Laden guiding plots against U.S.," CNN.com, 7/08/04
Visit www.Misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion.
*
And from BushGreenwatch
Bush Administration Seriously Delinquent on Dam Security
As the Bush administration signaled when it banned tourists and posted guards in the first nervous days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, major dams such as Grand Coulee and Hoover can be instruments of mass destruction if they fail.
Since this grand symbolic gesture, however, the Bush team has dropped the ball on safeguarding thousands of high-hazard dams across the country--dams which are vulnerable to mundane failures due to lack of inspection and regulation, as well as to destruction at the hands of terrorists.
On the one hand, the administration has used the terrorism threat to justify increased secrecy about the consequences of major dam failures, while on the other hand, done far too little to increase dam safety.
As the catastrophic 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania demonstrated, a dam failure can unleash destruction rivaling the collapse of the twin towers at the World Trade Center. The death toll in Johnstown exceeded 2,200.
In a recent court case, the Bush administration successfully invoked national security to block public access to unclassified maps which show the area endangered by failure at Hoover Dam.
"The biggest one with the most danger is Hoover," said Owen Lammers, the director of the Utah-based river advocacy group Living Rivers. "We were asking for inundation maps so people could find out if their homes are in the flood zone. We believe the public has a right to know."
The judge, however, bought the administration's national security claims, which were only raised late in the dispute.
The Bush administration failure on dam security also includes insufficient funding for states, which inspect and regulate 95 percent of the nation's 80,000 dams, and inadequate federal oversight under the Congressionally mandated National Dam Safety Program (NDSP) by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA).
This law requires that FEMA, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, provide Congress with progress reports every two years. The NDSP report due last year has yet to appear.
As of early 2003 (the most recent filing), at least 40 percent of the nation's most hazardous dams-- located above populated areas which would be flooded in a dam failure-- had not prepared the required Emergency Action Plan (EAP). As the FEMA website notes: "With an increased risk of terrorism against our infrastructure, EAP's are even more critical than ever, and provide an additional measure of protection for downstream residents and dam owners." [1]
Meanwhile, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials reports that states have significantly reduced dam inspections because of tight funding. Congress authorized $8.6 billion for NDSP, but the Bush administration requested only $6.2 million. [2]
SOURCES:
[1] FEMA National Dam Safety Program website.
[2] Association of State Dam Safety Officials website.
~~~
Word of the Day for Wednesday September 15, 2004
rivulet RIV-yuh-lut, noun:
A small stream or brook; a streamlet.
last / next
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