|
| Of course, the question in all of this is "why now"? Interestingly, around the same time a ban on smoking was being discussed in many countries, other information was coming to light that tells a very different story about nicotine and the most effective and accessible way of infusing it into the brain: smoking. |
|
|
So what is it about smoking, and nicotine in particular, that
prevents or lessens the effects of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
Diseases among others? The answer, it seems it to be found in
nicotine's capacity to mimic the effects of a molecule found
naturally in the body.
But before we delve into nicotine's chemical properties and effects, we turn to an article that may seem at first to be a bit out of place given our present line of investigation: |
UFO sightings soar, researchers puzzled Paul Turenne,
Winnipeg Sun
February 21, 2005
Either aliens are visiting Manitoban airspace more frequently, or the smoking ban has forced people to spend more time staring at the sky. Whatever the reason, a report released yesterday by Ufology Research of Manitoba states that there were 112 UFO sightings in Manitoba last year, which more than doubles the previous record for sightings and is more than four times as many as in 2003. In fact, the 882 sightings across the country last year also constituted a record, but UFO researchers are baffled as to why.
"It is puzzling. We know things are up all over Canada. In fact several provinces saw all-time records last year," said Chris Rutkowski, the research co-ordinator for Ufology Research of Manitoba, a group of about a dozen people who compile UFO sighting statistics for all of Canada.
"We're way past X-Files now and there aren't a lot of UFO-type movies out there so we can't blame media," said Rutkowski. "It could be something as simple or obvious as there are more objects in the sky to be seen."
| Comment: Certainly the
author of the above article did NOT intentionally associate the
anti-smoking laws with aliens, but it just may be that there IS
an association!
Consider first of all the fact that the "anti-smoking" campaign began in the United States, the same United States that thinks it is okay to lie about Weapons of Mass destruction in order to justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the same United States that will not support the Kyoto Protocol to halt Global Warming that may kill billions of people. Has anyone ever wondered if the illnesses that are blamed on smoking might very well be caused by the pollution and toxins in our air, water, and food, and are blamed on smoking so as to maintain the commercial viability of the real causes, while at the same time, creating a nation of law-breakers so that the government can cash in on the guilt as Ayn Rand suggested? But still, we think that there is MORE to the relationship between anti-smoking campaigns and alleged "aliens" - something sinister. The reader may wish to read our page on Diet and Health Related Questions as well as the Wave series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk from which the following has been extracted: Now, nicotine is a most interesting drug. Nicotine mimics one of the body's most significant neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. This is the neurotransmitter most often associated with cognition in the cerebral cortex. Acetylcholine is the primary carrier of thought and memory in the brain. It is essential to have appropriate levels of acetylcholine to have new memories or recall old memories.Editor's note: In all of the above we would like to stress in the strongest terms that standard manufactured cigarettes often contain up to 200 additional chemicals other than the tobacco and paper and that these chemicals may well be harmful to your health. We therefore strongly suggest that efforts should be made by the individual to find pure tobacco and paper. In promoting smoking, we do so with the caveat that we are not suggesting that everyone should smoke or that everyone benefits from smoking. Our stance is that people who may benefit from smoking should be allowed the freedom to discover any potential benefits for themselves. This freedom however is severly curtailed by government and media propaganda and brainwashing by way of blanket 'black and white' assertions about the dire effects of smoking, assertions which, as the evidence above suggests, are incorrect. "Elections" and Polls Was the 2004 Election Stolen? BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Rolling Stone Magazine Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2) But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10) The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11) Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.'' But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15) ''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.'' Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.'' I. The Exit Polls The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16) Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20) But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21) ''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.'' In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27) On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29) As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32) But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33) According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls) Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling. In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35) Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37) Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.'' What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39) ''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.'' The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40) Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.'' II. The Partisan Official No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42) But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46) Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51) ''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.'' The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54) ''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.'' When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56) There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state. According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots. III. The Strike Force In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62) To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67) There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent. By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74) [Click here to read the rest of the article] Comment on this Article Only 25% in Poll Approve of the Congress By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER NY Times September 21, 2006 With barely seven weeks until the midterm elections, Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of the Republican-controlled Congress, with substantial majorities saying that they disapprove of the job it is doing and that its members do not deserve re-election, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The disdain for Congress is as intense as it has been since 1994, when Republicans captured 52 seats to end 40 years of Democratic control of the House and retook the Senate as well. It underlines the challenge the Republican Party faces in trying to hold on to power in the face of a surge in anti-incumbent sentiment. By broad margins, respondents said that members of Congress were too tied to special interests and that they did not understand the needs and problems of average Americans. Two-thirds said Congress had accomplished less than it typically did in a two-year session; most said they could not name a single major piece of legislation that cleared this Congress. Just 25 percent said they approved of the way Congress was doing its job. Overall discontent with Congress or Washington does not necessarily signify how people will vote when they see the familiar name of their member of Congress on the ballot, however. Democrats face substantial institutional obstacles in trying to repeat what Republicans accomplished in 1994, including a Republican financial advantage and the fact that far fewer seats are in play. Thus, while 61 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job, just 29 percent said they disapproved of the way their own “representative is handling his or her job.” The New York Times/CBS News poll began last Friday, four days after the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and two weeks after the White House began its offensive on security issues. A USA Today-Gallup Poll published Tuesday reported that Mr. Bush’s job approval rating had jumped to 44 percent from 39 percent. The questioning in that poll went through Sunday; The Times and CBS completed questioning Tuesday night. Presidential addresses often produce shifts in public opinion that tend to be transitory. The nationwide poll was conducted by telephone Friday through Tuesday. It included 1,131 adults, of whom 1,007 said they were registered to vote, and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. As part of the Republican effort to gain advantage on the war in Iraq, Republicans have accused Democrats who want to set a timetable for leaving Iraq of wanting to “cut and run.” But 52 percent of respondents said they would not think the United States had lost the war if it withdrew its troops from Iraq today. The poll also found indications that voters were unusually intrigued by this midterm election: 43 percent said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting. However, with turnout promising to be a critical factor in many of the closer Senate and House races, there was no sign that either party had an edge in terms of voter enthusiasm. Evidence of the antipathy toward Congress in particular — and Washington in general — was abundant: 71 percent said they did not trust the government to do what is right. “If they had new blood, then the people that influence them — the lobbyists — would maybe not be so influential,” said Norma Scranton, a Republican from Thedford, Neb., in a follow-up interview after the poll. “They don’t have our interest at heart because they’re influenced by these lobbyists. If they were new, maybe they would try to please their constituents a little better.” Lois Thurber, a Republican from Axtell, Neb., said in a follow-up interview: “There’s so much bickering, so much disagreement — they just can’t get together on certain issues. “They’re kind of more worried about themselves than they are about the country.” Incumbents and challengers nationwide are trying to accommodate this sour mood. Democrats are presenting themselves as a fresh start — “Isn’t it time for a change?” asked an advertisement by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee directed against Senator Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri. And Republican incumbents are seeking to distance themselves from fellow Republicans in Washington. “I’ve gone against the president and the Republican leadership when I think they are wrong,” Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican locked in a tough re-election battle, said in a television advertisement broadcast this week. The Republicans continue to be seen as the better party to deal with terrorism, but by nowhere near the margin they once enjoyed: it is now 42 percent to 37 percent. When asked which party took the threat of terrorism more seriously, 69 percent said they both did; 22 percent named Republicans, compared with 6 percent who said Democrats. Voters said Democrats were more likely to tell the truth than Republicans when discussing the war in Iraq and about the actual threat of terrorism. And 59 percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was hiding something when he talked about how things were going in Iraq; an additional 25 percent said he was mostly lying when talking about the war. Not that Democrats should draw any solace from that: 71 percent of respondents said Democrats in Congress were hiding something when they talked about how well things were going in Iraq, while 13 percent said they were mostly lying. Robert Allen, a Democrat from Ventura, Calif., said: “We’re in a stalemate right now. They’re not getting hardly anything done.” He added, “It’s time to elect a whole new bunch so they can do something.” But for all the clear dissatisfaction with the 109th Congress, 39 percent of respondents said their own representative deserved re-election, compared with 48 percent who said it was time for someone new. What is more, it seems highly unlikely Democrats will experience a sweep similar to the one Republicans experienced in 1994. Most analysts judge only about 40 House seats to be in play at the moment, compared with over 100 seats in play at this point 12 years ago, in large part because redistricting has created more safe seats for both parties. The poll also found that President Bush had not improved his own or his party's standing through his intense campaign of speeches and events surrounding the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The speeches were at the heart of a Republican strategy to thrust national security to the forefront in the fall elections. Mr. Bush's job approval rating was 37 percent in the poll, virtually unchanged from the last Times/CBS News poll, in August. On the issue that has been a bulwark for Mr. Bush, 54 percent said they approved of the way he was managing the effort to combat terrorists, again unchanged from last month, though up from this spring. Republicans continued to hold a slight edge over Democrats on which party was better at dealing with terrorism, though that edge did not grow since last month despite Mr. Bush's flurry of speeches on national security, including one from the Oval Office on the night of Sept. 11. But the Times/CBS News poll found a slight increase in the percentage of Americans who said they approved of the way Mr. Bush had handled the war in Iraq, to 36 percent from 30 percent. The results also suggest that after bottoming out this spring, Mr. Bush's approval ratings on the economy and foreign policy have returned to their levels of about a year ago, both at 37 percent. The number of people who called terrorism the most important issue facing the country doubled to 14 percent, from 7 percent in July; 22 percent named the war in Iraq as their top concern, little changed from July. Across the board, the poll found marked disenchantment with Congress, highlighting the opportunity Democrats see to make the argument for a change in leadership and to make the election a national referendum on the performance of a Republican-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush's tenure. In one striking finding, 77 percent of respondents - including 65 percent of Republicans - said most members of Congress had not done a good enough job to deserve re-election and that it was time to give a new people a chance. That is the highest number of voters saying it is "time for new people" since the fall of 1994. "You get some people in there, and they're in there forever," said Jan Weaver, of Aberdeen, S.D., who described herself as a Republican voter, in a follow-up interview. "They're so out of touch with reality." In the poll, 50 percent said they would support a Democrat in the fall Congressional elections, compared with 35 percent who said they would support a Republican. But the poll found that Democrats continued to struggle to offer a strong case for turning government control over to them; only 38 percent said the Democrats had a clear plan for how they would run the country, compared with 45 percent who said the Republicans had offered a clear plan. Comment on this Article Will The Next Election Be Hacked? - Fresh disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an industry insider - prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Rolling Stone The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County. Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election." Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly. Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox's office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta's Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm's CEO, Walden O'Dell, checking Diebold's stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement. Hood wondered why Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in. "The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn't hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox's predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company. The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment," Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. "It was pretty much an impossible task," Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if "the vendor had control over the entire environment." That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia's entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it." Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done." Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level." According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others. The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes - where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. "There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results," Hood says. "Your program says, 'I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.' Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it's done." It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent. Diebold insists that the patch was installed "with the approval and oversight of the state." But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state's office submitted a "punch list" to Bob Urosevich of "issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address." One of the items referenced was" Application/Implication of '0808' Patch." The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system "be recertified at national and state level" as well as "verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system." In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold's use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until "these punch list items will be corrected and completed." Diebold's response has not been made public - but its machines remain in place for Georgia's election this fall. Hood says it was "common knowledge" within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system." The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies. Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's counties. The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes. Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. "There is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source." Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida, however, the "faulty memory card" was all but forgotten. Instead of sharing culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their political clout to present their product as the solution. In October 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors. But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, Diebold not only failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these issues," he writes in one e-mail, "but were rebuffed by the argument that the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone outside the established chain of custody." In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state officials worked to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing with Diebold lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact," he recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential catastrophe." During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore. "What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get hold of all the technology - for manipulation - if they knew the inner workings of just one machine." Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of machines were down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system," says Hood, who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading, machines freezing up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes." Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. "The machines are gone," one janitor told Hood - picked up, apparently, by the vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was major chaos because there were so many cards missing," Hood says. Even before the 2004 election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would undermine the integrity of the vote. "The system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent," Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. "It must be re-created from scratch." Two months later, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team - a division of the Department of Homeland Security - issued a little-noticed "cyber-security bulletin." The alert dealt specifically with a database that Diebold uses in tabulating votes. "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account," the alert warned, citing the same kind of weakness identified by the RABA scientists. The security flaw, it added, could allow "a malicious user [to] modify votes." Such warnings, however, didn't stop states across the country from installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In Ohio, jammed and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In heavily Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed "Kerry" and watched "Bush" light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Similar "vote hopping" was reported by voters in other states. The widespread glitches didn't deter Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell - who also chaired Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio - from cutting a deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive bidding process. Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast their ballots on Diebold machines - in a pivotal election in which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for governor. Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most discrepancies - Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade - were also the most heavily Democratic. Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find any flaw in the results. "You can't break it - I've tried," he told The Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties." Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an election programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state's office after the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in order to 'pull off' an election," Singer wrote, "was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry." The company denies the charge, but in an e-mail this month, Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election officials to pressure the secretary of state to accept "a software change at such a last minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid certification." Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S. In primaries held in Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes had to be recounted after error messages prevented workers from completing their tabulations. In April, with early voting in local elections only a week away, officials across the state were still waiting to receive the programming from ES&S needed to test the machines for accuracy. Calling the situation "completely unacceptable and disturbing," Texas director of elections Ann McGeehan authorized local officials to create "emergency paper ballots" as a backup. "We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor," McGeehan added. In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities and malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded that a host of weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology "could damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by allowing unauthorized modifications." Some electronic systems used passwords that were "easily guessed" or employed identical passwords for numerous systems. Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of custody, and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick. Unsecured memory cards could enable individuals to "vote multiple times, change vote totals and produce false election reports." An even more comprehensive report released in June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law, echoed the GAO's findings. The report - conducted by a task force of computer scientists and security experts from the government, universities and the private sector - was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since 2000, the report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections." While no instances of hacking have yet been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely used machines - the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt software that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election. And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the polls. On September 12th, in Maryland's first all-electronic election, voters were turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines. By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and delivered to every precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast ballots. It seems insane that such clear threats to our election system have not stopped the proliferation of touch-screen technology. In 2004, twenty-three percent of Americans cast their votes on electronic ballots - an increase of twelve percent over 2000. This year, more than one-third of the nation's 8,000 voting jurisdictions are expected to use electronic voting technology for the first time. The heartening news is, citizens are starting to fight back. Voting-rights activists with the Brad Blog and Black Box Voting are getting the word out. Voter Action, a nonprofit group, has helped file lawsuits in Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico to stop the proliferation of touch-screen systems. In California, voters filed suit last March to challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system - a move that has already prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they won't use the machines in November. It's not surprising that the widespread problems with electronic voting machines have sparked such outrage and mistrust among voters. Last November, comedian Bill Maher stood in a Las Vegas casino and looked out over thousands of slot machines. "They never make a mistake," he remarked to me. "Can't we get a voting machine that can't be fixed?" Indeed, there is a remarkably simple solution: equip every touch-screen machine to provide paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted in the event of malfunction or tampering. "The paper is the insurance against the cheating machine," says Rubin, the computer expert. In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine. But twenty-seven states now require a paper trail, and others are considering similar requirements. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting." Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight. You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests. >>This article is from the October 5th, 2006 issue of "Rolling Stone" magazine. >>Post your thoughts about the threats to fair voting, in the National Affairs blog. Plus, read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" -- his report on Republican methods for keeping more than 350,000 Ohio voters from casting ballots or having their votes counted. Comment on this Article Don't Worry, Democrats Won't Impeach Bush, Democrat Says Susan Jones Senior Editor CNSNews.com Democrats and liberal advocacy groups have been talking about impeaching President George W. Bush for months. But when Republicans say the president indeed may be impeached if Democrats regain control of Congress, they're just trying to scare people, a Democratic operative says. In an op-ed column in Thursday's Detroit Free Press, Robert Weiner, a former press secretary to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), accused Republicans of "trying to create hysteria about the likelihood of impeaching President Bush." According to Weiner, "Impeachment is not on Conyers' current agenda. It is only a red herring on the Republican agenda." (In a Democratic House, Conyers would be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and thus a key player in deciding to impeach, or bring charges against, the president.) Weiner (who also worked for the Clinton White House) says Conyers "has told me directly: 'I'm not going to conduct an impeachment. That would take all of our time. I would not want to bring an impeachment investigation because that would drain time and energy from the work that needs to be done, and it would take away the country's attention from issues that need to be addressed.'" Weiner said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who would become speaker of a Democrat-controlled House, said last May that "Democrats are not about impeachment. Democrats are about bringing the country together." (You don't decide to impeach, Pelosi said at the time, until the facts and "investigations" lead you there. She left the question open.) The Republican National Committee insists that the real Democratic agenda is impeachment -- spurred by hatred for George W. Bush as well as payback for what happened to Bill Clinton. A number of Democrat/liberal websites, groups and individuals certainly do want Bush impeached on a variety of grounds -- including the invasion of Iraq, the NSA wiretapping program, and alleged abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Various cities and towns have passed impeachment resolutions, urging Congress to act against the president. A number of Democratic politicians, Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer among them, have mused about impeaching Bush. And groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union also have pressed the impeachment issue. Based on the sentiment of liberal grassroots groups, Conyers -- if he becomes Judiciary Committee chairman in a Democratic House -- would find himself under tremendous pressure to bring charges against the president in a time of war, as CNSNews.com has noted (see reports below). Comment on this Article Oprah blocks bid to make her President By Andrew Buncombe in Washington 22 September 2006 Could the first lady of daytime TV become the first citizen of the United States? One fan of Oprah Winfrey certainly believes she could and is behind a burgeoning campaign to persuade her to make a run for the nation's highest office. The problem for Patrick Crowe and his "Oprah for President" campaign is that Ms Winfrey - at least so far - seems less than enthusiastic about swapping the interviewer's couch for the Oval Office. This week it was revealed that lawyers for Ms Winfrey have sent a "cease and desist" letter to Mr Crowe demanding that he stop using the name Oprah in his campaign and stop reprinting copyrighted photographs of her in his book, Oprah For President: Run, Oprah, Run. Mr Crowe, 69, a former teacher from Kansas City, Missouri, is convinced that Ms Winfrey has the qualities to make a perfect president. "I believe that if she ran she would change the face and heart of American politics. It would never be the same again," he enthused. "She has serious compassion, she can build teams, she can lead. She has done things, she has accomplished things. She is a doer. Just look at what she has done for [the victims of] Hurricane Katrina. Just look what she has done for books: one recommendation from her and a couple of days later that book is top of the New York Times best-seller list. She is a person of influence." Mr Crowe, who has largely supported Democratic party candidates, believes that once there is a sufficient groundswell of support Ms Winfrey, 52, could be persuaded to change her mind. "In this country we call if drafting a candidate," he said. Mr Crowe says he has spent more than $60,000 (£32,000) of his own money on his campaign. And as unlikely as his suggestion may sound, there may be something more to his idea than pure fantasy. A poll which was carried out earlier this year for Fox News found that 24 per cent of the public believed Ms Winfrey would "make a good president". She compared favourably to Arnold Schwarzenegger on 11 per cent, Senator Ted Kennedy on 23 per cent and the real estate mogul Donald Trump on 11 per cent. Yesterday there was no comment from Ms Winfrey's Chicago-based company, Harpo, whose lawyers sent the letter to Mr Crowe. The letter warned: "Ms Winfrey has not granted you the right to use her name for commercial purposes, including to sell [your] book via the website and via a [freephone] number". It said that using the celebrity's name "falsely implies that Harpo or Ms Winfrey sponsor or endorse the website, the campaign website or the book, when in fact there is no such endorsement or affiliation". Comment on this Article Our World Can't Wait by Stephen Zook 22 Sept 06 The first reaction I had when I was told that the "world can't wait" was "sure, it can." I certainly can. My papers will still be due, my professors will still lecture, and my alarm clock will still jar me from sleep whether or not George Bush is in office. My world can wait another two years. But, this world is not mine alone. There are other people, people whose worlds cannot wait. People who cannot afford to just go on telling themselves that it won't happen to them. Because it is happening to their families, their hometowns. Its happening to them. They are being, quite literally, dragged off in the dead of night. They are being tried without evidence. They are being forgotten by the people who claim to be protectors of freedom. They are being forgotten by us. And we cannot forget them now. There is an element of every human atrocity that people don't hear about a lot. This element doesn't bleed or cry in the streets. It doesn't make propaganda speeches while it blows up cities and lives. And far too often, it never even makes a noise. It is the "unattached" third parties. It is the people who watch the news and read the papers. The element is us. And all the while, we tell ourselves that we can't change anything. We are deceiving ourselves. We, the disconnected masses, are the crucial element in changing anything. The victims of atrocities cannot change anything. The perpetrators certainly aren't going to change anything. But we can. It was not the massacre of Colorado mining families that brought reform. It was the public outcry that rose from the "disconnected masses" who were appalled that brought change. And it was not the students who endured beatings and jail who ended segregation. Again, it was the outraged public that put pressure on those in power to bring change. And it will not be the victims of unlawful interrogation, torture and bombs that will stop the atrocious actions of our government. It will be the people, the disconnected masses, the bystanders. It will be us. If we sit in our cafes and coffee shops and don't make any noise, we repeat the same sad mistakes that we have been repeating. We will wake up one day and realize "Hey, that was pretty nasty, huh?" And so we will make some apologies, and maybe a movie. Let's make some noise on October 5th instead. Because our world can not wait. I am a student at Temple University. Comment on this Article Poll: Only 7 percent of Israelis want Olmert as PM Ynet (well known as a propaganda rag) 21 Sept 06 Despite polls which show Israelis don't see him as right person to lead Israel, PM tells Yedioth Ahronoth he is most suitable; 'I cannot see one person more experienced in managing operation as big as second Lebanon war,' he says In a special Yedioth Ahronoth interview ahead of the Jewish New Year, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated, "I am the most suitable for leadership." Looking at the political and military establishment, Olmert said he could not see one person more experienced than him in managing an operation as big as second Lebanon war. In the interview, the prime minister defended the decisions he made during the war and refuted the claims that he was not experienced enough to make them. "I did not feel I had to deal with the type of decisions for which I lack something in order to deal with them," he said. "I look at the entire Israeli public system and at the entire military establishment. Has anyone there managed a war with three divisions? Who? ((Former IDF Chief of Staff and former Defense Minister) Shaul Mofaz? (Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe) Boogie Yaalon? (IDF Chief of Staff) Dan Halutz? (Deputy IDF Chief of Staff) Moshe Kaplinsky? (Outgoing Northern Command Chief) Udi Adam? "Which one of them managed such a large-scale war that I could say - this is the person I want to rely on? The last person with experience one could rely on was Ariel Sharon," the prime minister stated, more than one month after a ceasefire in Lebanon was declared. Olmert was also asked about Minister Shaul Mofaz's claims that in a meeting with the prime minister ahead of the operation in Lebanon, he asked Olmert how he would look soldiers' mothers in the eyes and Olmert answered: "Good question." The prime minister denied the claims and said that he had never heard such things from Mofaz. The harsh remarks made by former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon regarding the death of soldiers for a corrupt spin and a "photo opportunity" were defined by Olmert as "bitterness and vindictiveness." As for the prisoner swap deal to release kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, Olmert did not rule out the possibility that Israel would also release prisoners "with blood on their hands," as long as this is done opposite Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The prime minister praised the Saudi king, who is responsible for the Arab peace initiative which is on the agenda once again. Only Peretz gets less support However, if one would like to believe the public opinion polls published in the newspapers ahead of Rosh Hashana, Olmert has good reasons to be concerned: The public, it appears, does not see him as the most suitable person anymore. A poll conducted by Yedioth Ahronoth and the Dahaf Institute headed by Dr. Mina Tzemach, 27 percent of the public believe that Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu is the most suitable person to head the government. He is followed by Israel Our Home Chairman Avigdor Lieberman with 15 percent, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni with 14 percent, and Vice Premier Shimon Peres with 12 percent of support. Olmert is only at the fifth place, with only 7 percent of the public supporting him as the right person to lead them. Mofaz gets 5 percent and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak is supported by 3 percent of the public. Defense Minister Amir Peretz is at the bottom of the list with 1 percent of the public's support. The survey findings are based on the responses of 499 people out of a representative sample of the adult population in Israel, and they will be published in full by Yedioth Ahronoth on Friday. The maximal sampling error is 4.5 percent Comment on this Article Playing Politics Crowd dwindles in Hungary as fears of anti-government riots subside AFP Anti-government protests outside the Hungarian parliament in Budapest started to fizzle out, reducing the likelihood of a fourth night of rioting. The peaceful crowd, composed of mostly extreme right-wing protestors, had swelled to 7,000 people on Thursday evening, but then people started to go home, leaving only a few hundred in the early hours of Friday, an AFP correspondent on the scene said. Many of the demonstrators said they were tired and had to work in the morning. The protestors were demanding the resignation of socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, who sparked an outcry after it was revealed he lied to the country about the dire state of the economy in order to win re-election in April. The previous three nights the crowds in front of parliament had swelled to more than 10,000, a relatively small number in this city of two million but significant because of the charged political atmosphere that has sparked riots. Three nights of clashes between police and violent protestors have left more than 250 injured and some 200 detained. The building of the public television station was sacked by rampaging protestors on Monday. Due to security fears the main opposition Fidesz party of conservative leader Viktor Orban, who is calling upon Gyurcsany to resign, announced it was canceling a planned rally for Saturday where up to 200,000 were expected to attend. The cancellation came after police were reportedly worried about their ability to control the big crowd. Gyurcsany welcomed the decision by the opposition party Fidesz to change course and call off their demonstration, after the conservatives in the past days said they would go ahead with the rally despite the security fears. "I am very happy. They made the only correct decision," Gyurcsany said. But Fidesz stressed that the protest had only been postponed and that it would now take place after the municipal elections on October 1. The rally had been planned as a finale to the local election campaign before the current Gyurcsany scandal erupted, and it had since taken on another dimension. The decision to postpone was made "in the interest of the security of well-intentioned people," top Fidesz official Laszlo Kover told a press conference. Also Thursday, there were reports of a number of bomb hoaxes, including at three television stations, a railway station, and the education ministry. In an attempt to address the unrest, Gyurcsany called for multi-party talks on Thursday, but Fidesz refused to attend. "Fidesz considers Ferenc Gyurcsany as persona non grata in Hungarian politics. In the current state of affairs, he is himself the problem," Fidesz spokesman Peter Szijjarto told MTI news agency. More than 10,000 people gathered Wednesday evening in front of parliament in Budapest in the most peaceful protest since clashes with police began Monday. A strong police presence ended the country's worst street riots since the fall of communism in 1989. In a sign that the police's use of overwhelming force was starting to take effect, no officers were injured overnight Wednesday, compared with more than 100 hurt in scuffles in previous nights, spokeswoman Eva Taffener said. Gyurcsany's popularity slumped even before the protests erupted, after he introduced harsh economic reforms that include tax increases in order to rein in a skyrocketing deficit, the highest in the European Union at more than 10 percent of gross domestic product. Gyurcsany had promised tax cuts and higher social spending during the election campaign. Comment on this Article Hungarian PM unapologetic, says 'I did not lie' Hungary's Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, in an interview, said he did not lie but only exaggerated for dramatic effect in a taped conversation that sparked unrest in Hungary and a clamor for his resignation. "It's important to emphasize that I did not lie," he told The Washington Post referring to a conversation in which he revealed he had misled the country about the dire state of the economy in order to win re-election in April. "It's like you are arguing with your girlfriend, after four years of living together, saying to her, 'My darling, don't you understand? Our life is nothing! We screwed up our life!' "It doesn't mean your four years were nothing. It doesn't mean that you don't like her. It means that you would like to change and improve your relations," Gyurcsany told the newspaper. Hungarian public radio on Sunday broadcast a closed-door discussion between Gyurcsany and his party's deputies last May in which he said the government had accomplished nothing but "rubbish" and "lied all along" in its first term in office. The comments sparked three nights of demonstrations and rioting that have left more than 250 injured and some 200 detained. Protesters are demanding the socialist prime minister's resignation. Gyurcsany, 44, was already losing popularity before the unrest because he passed harsh economic reforms to rein in a skyrocketing deficit -- the highest in the European Union -- despite campaign promises of tax cuts and higher social spending. The Washington Post said the prime minister did not apologize, express any embarassment or regret over the incident, and repeated that he would not resign, during his interview Thursday in his office in Budapest. Instead, he boasted that he was one of the few Hungarian politicians who dared to speak frankly about the country's economic hardships. "It just shows one thing: This guy would like to change, and he's the first to admit it," he said referring to himself. "You cannot say that there's been anyone else in the Hungarian elite in the last 60 years who was brave enough to pass reform." Comment on this Article Japan's Abe seeks White House style administration AFP Japan's hawkish next prime minister Shinzo Abe has unveiled plans to centralize power and turn his office into a sort of White House, as a poll shows public doubts about his clout. Abe, 52, will replace Junichiro Koizumi on Tuesday and become Japan's youngest prime minister. Abe plans to spend the weekend at a retreat near Mount Fuji to decide his cabinet lineup. In a break with the past, the prime minister's office said it will appoint senior ministry officials to a policy team working directly under Abe that will take up issues of its choosing. The move will sideline unelected bureaucrats, who have traditionally wielded heavy influence in Japanese politics. "Some politicians see this is a step toward top-down policy-making, likening it to the White House staff in the United States," Yu Kameoka, the spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office, told AFP. Abe has earlier said he plans to restructure the premier's office along the lines of the US National Security Council to quicken responses in a crisis and better coordinate with Washington, Tokyo's main ally. Abe rose to prominence as a hardliner on communist neighbor North Korea. He will be the first prime minister to be born after World War II and has called for Japan to shake off some legacies of its defeat. He has pledged to revise the US-imposed pacifist constitution. Koizumi, who is Japan's longest-serving premier in three decades, has already boosted the role of the prime minister, handpicking telegenic ministers rather than picking candidates based on the basis of party politics. Koizumi, a committed free-market reformist, also set up his own council of economic advisers, which held its last meeting Friday. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Jinen Nagase, the government spokesman, expected "many capable people would apply" to join the policy team in Abe's office. "This is aimed at strengthening the prime minister's leadership in policy making," Nagase told a news conference. The first poll published since Abe won a ruling party vote Wednesday to become prime minister showed that most Japanese voters support Abe but have doubts about whether the young leader can succeed. Some 57 percent of voters approved of Abe's rise to the premiership, said a survey of 1,062 people by the Asahi Shimbun. But only 29 percent believe that Abe will be a strong leader, compared with 53 percent who question his leadership skills. Other voters have yet to decide, according to the poll by the liberal newspaper, which has sparred with Abe. Abe has said he favors "consensus" politics, a gentle rebuke to Koizumi, who appealed directly to the public and famously vowed to destroy his own Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled through cozy ties with special interests. However, an overwhelming 70 percent of voters doubt that the party, which has led Japan almost continuously since 1955, will change under Abe, with only 17 percent believing it will improve under his leadership. Abe will announce his cabinet Tuesday. He met Friday with the caucus of the upper house of parliament and promised that at least two lawmakers from the chamber will get cabinet berths, news reports said. Comment on this Article Indonesian executions spark violent protests Reuters PALU, Indonesia (Reuters) - Thousands protested over the execution of three Christians in Indonesia on Friday, torching an official's house and setting prisoners free in the hometown of one of the executed men. The three militants were executed by a police firing squad early on Friday in Central Sulawesi province, despite appeals from Pope Benedict and rights groups. Fabianus Tibo, Marianus Riwu and Dominggus Silva were sentenced to death in 2001, after being found guilty of leading a mob in an attack that killed more than 200 people at an Islamic boarding school during Muslim-Christian clashes in the province. The three men had originally been scheduled to die in August but the executions were postponed after the Pope's appeal and demonstrations by thousands of Indonesians. Security was tight in Palu, capital of Central Sulawesi province, where violence between large Christian and Muslim populations has left thousands dead in recent years. "According to valid information I received they were shot in a sitting position with their hands tied. Two were blindfolded while Marianus Riwu refused to be blindfolded," the convicts' Catholic priest, Jimmy Tumbelaka, told Reuters. The bodies of Tibo and Riwu were flown to their hometown while Silva, from Atambua in West Timor, was buried in Palu, 1,650 km (1,030 miles) northeast of Jakarta. Silva's death triggered protests by thousands of Christians in Atambua. A local Red Cross official, Elli Mali, said the demonstrators broke into a jail and freed about 200 prisoners. "The mob numbers in thousands. I ran into some of the prisoners and they said, 'I'm free!,"' Mali told Reuters. The protesters threw rocks and burned the local prosecutors' house, Indonesian media and police said. Julito Borges, a policeman in Atambua, told Reuters two policemen were injured but the crowd had begun to disperse. In Palu, Bishop Joseph Suwatan, whose diocese oversees North and Central Sulawesi, urged the faithful in Palu to remain calm. EU'S CONCERN But in the Poso area of Central Sulawesi, where many Christian-Muslim clashes have occurred in recent years, including the incident for which the men were prosecuted, hundreds of protesters rallied against the executions and burned tyres on the street, said Minarta, Poso's deputy police chief. The protesters threw rocks at anti-riot policemen, injuring an officer, Minarta told Reuters in the early afternoon. "The protesters are dispersing now," he added. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla told reporters: "We are concerned that the public misunderstood. The ... case is not a religious or ethnic issue but simply a legal one." Human rights groups and other death penalty opponents had urged Indonesia not to proceed with the executions. The European Union presidency issued a statement saying it had "learned with disappointment that despite numerous expressions of concern by the EU to the Indonesian authorities," Indonesia had carried out the executions. It noted the EU considers the death penalty "cruel and inhuman punishment." Muslim-Christian clashes rocked Central Sulawesi from late 1998 to 2001, killing an estimated 2,000 before a peace accord took effect. There has been sporadic violence since. Around 85 percent of Indonesia's 220 million people follow Islam, but some areas in eastern Indonesia have roughly equal proportions of Muslims and Christians. Three Islamic militants are on death row for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people. A lawyer representing the militants told reporters there could be efforts to speed up the punishment against his clients because of the executions in Central Sulawesi. "We are alert because the strategy now is going after (convicted Bali bomber) Amrozi and company," said lawyer M. Mahendradatta. (Additional reporting in JAKARTA by Ahmad Pathoni, Diyan Jari, Telly Nathalia, and Achmad Sukarsono and by BRUSSELS bureau) Comment on this Article Norway taped plot to blow up U.S. embassy Reuters OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian prosecutors unveiled on Friday evidence against four men detained on suspicion of plotting to blow up the U.S. and Israeli embassies and of participating in a shooting at the Oslo synagogue last weekend. Prosecutor Unni Fries told a court the Norwegian secret services had bugged the car of the main suspect and recorded conversations between the men planning the attacks. "They spoke in detail about how to attack the synagogue and the U.S. and Israeli embassies," Fries said, asking the court to detain all four suspects for four weeks without visitors or other contact with the outside world. Early on Sunday morning at least 10 shots fired from an automatic weapon hit Oslo's only synagogue. No one was hurt in the shooting, the most serious in a string of attacks in recent months on the Nordic country's small Jewish community. Police have identified the detainees only as men between the ages of 20 and 30. Defense lawyers, who said their clients were innocent, said one suspect was of Turkish origin, two had Pakistani backgrounds and one was a native Norwegian. Fries said the main suspect had "expressed extreme Islamist views" and was briefly detained during this summer's World Cup by German police, who found drawings of rockets in his car. During a trip to Britain in June he was reported to have told his girlfriend over the telephone that he "felt that he had to act," Fries said. She did not say whether prosecutors were linking the suspects with any extremist organization. The U.S. embassy said in a statement that it was watching developments closely and would cooperate fully with Norwegian authorities. "We are deeply concerned about the emerging information on these planned terrorist attacks," ambassador Ben Whitney said. "This situation reflects the importance of having the necessary legal tools to prevent terrorism." The four men could face jail terms of up to 12 years if convicted of conspiring to carry out acts of terror. Comment on this Article Dutch diplomat under fire for calling Delhi a 'dump' A top Dutch diplomat in New Delhi has come under fire from the Indian foreign ministry after he reportedly labelled the capital as "miserable" and a "garbage dump", a report says. Arnold Parzer, agriculture counsellor at the Royal Netherlands Embassy, also reportedly told the Dutch daily Het Financieele Dagblad that New Delhi residents were a "darn nuisance", the Hindustan Times reported. "Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong; everyone interferes with everyone else; the people are a darn nuisance; the climate is hell; the city is a garbage dump," Parzer reportedly told the daily. "New Delhi is the most miserable place I have ever lived in," the diplomat was quoted as saying. The Hindustan Times said India's foreign ministry had summoned Dutch ambassador Eric Neihe, who in turn had "taken the officer to task". The Dutch embassy declined to confirm if New Delhi had expressed its displeasure over the incident, after the Indian embassy in The Hague sent New Delhi a translation of the comments. "The statement does not reflect the opinion of the Netherlands government," said embassy press officer J.H. Schutte. Comment on this Article Dutch ministers step down over damning Schiphol fire report AFP Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner and Housing Minister Sybilla Dekker resigned after an independent report blasted their departments for negligence in a deadly fire at a detention centre in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport last year. The ministers announced their resignation in a short declaration to parliament after a report released earlier Thursday concluded that their ministries were partly to blame for the deadly outcome of the blaze in the detention centre that left 11 illegal immigrants dead in October 2005. "Ministerial responsibility means that in the eyes of the victims I represent the departments whose actions are said to have contributed to their suffering... It is for me to show that this is not without consequences," Donner said. In its report, the independent Dutch Safety Board said that "there would have been fewer or no victims if fire safety had gotten the attention of the authorities involved". "The (justice ministry) is the primary responsible party... They are responsible for the safety of their employees and the people that are detained," said the board, chaired by Pieter van Vollenhoven, brother-in-law to Queen Beatrix. It added that the housing ministry, which oversaw the detention centre's construction, had also failed because the site did not comply with the government's own fire safety rules. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said the safety board's conclusions were "harsh and crystal clear". "I have great respect for the decision the ministers took," he added. The resignations are largely symbolic as political commentators said it would have little effect on the current centre-right government, which faces a legislative election on November 22. Donner and Dekker, who will not be replaced as the election is so close, said that had they not stepped down, the parliamentary debate on the Schiphol fire report would probably focus only on whether or not they would resign. A date for the parliamentary debate will be set after the government issues an official response to the report, which Balkenende said would come as soon as possible. Donner, Dekker and Balkenende all recognised that the resignations would not ease the hurt and the suffering of the survivors and the families of the victims. "We cannot and should not forget that their life is forever marked by this fire," the prime minister said. In October last year nine men and two women -- from Bulgaria, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Libya, Romania, Surinam, Turkey and Ukraine -- died trapped in their cells when fire broke out in a wing of the prefabricated detention centre designed to hold some 400 people. Fifteen people were injured. A total of 298 inmates were being held in the jail, which is located on the grounds of Schiphol airport, at the time. All the people who perished that night were considered to be illegal immigrants awaiting deportation from the Netherlands. The fire was set off by a stray cigarette butt, the report said without commenting on whether it was accidental or intentional. The public prosecutor's office suspects a Libyan detainee, identified in the Dutch press as Achmeon d Al-Jeballi, started the fire deliberately. Comment on this Article Middle East Madness I love everyone, says smiling Ahmadinejad Friday September 22, 2006 The Guardian  It is unconventional for New York press conferences to begin with a recital of
the Qur'an, but then the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran is anything
but conventional. "I thank God the Almighty for giving me an opportunity
to meet with my friends once again," he said at the start of yesterday's
address, having recited several verses.In an hour of questioning from the media, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talked about Iran's nuclear programme, his attitude to Israel and his views on America. Smiling broadly, he invoked the prophet Moses, said he loved everyone around including Jews and apologised to New York for the traffic problems caused by this week's UN general assembly. As the annual assembly approaches the end of its first week, Mr Ahmadinejad appears to be stealing the show. He has appeared on CBS and CNN television, had a bilateral meeting with Romano Prodi, Italy's prime minister, and addressed the august thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations. If the White House was hoping he would come to New York, deliver his 15-minute speech to the assembly on Tuesday and then quietly go, they hoped wrong. Iran's president began the substantial part of the press conference by adopting George Bush's technique. On Tuesday Mr Bush spoke to the people of Iran, ignoring the delegation from Tehran in the assembly chamber. Mr Ahmadinejad spoke to the people of America, saying he regretted that he had not had the chance to meet and talk to them directly. He was quick to point out the failings of the US administration towards its own people. "My country offered help to the victims of Katrina," he said, "when we saw bodies floating in the water and the homeless." Asked about political prisoners in Iran, he replied: "There are 219 million people in the US and 68 million people in Iran. There are 3 million prisoners in the US and 130,000 in Iran. The percentage is much higher." At the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday night, Mr Ahmadinejad proved to be a formidable interlocutor for some of America's most experienced minds on international affairs. He ended the session by asking whether the thinktank's members were speaking for the Bush administration. The decision to invite him to speak to the institution caused some of its members to refuse to attend. With Iran's nuclear programme dominating the backstage diplomacy at the UN this week, Mr Ahmadinejad consistently denied that Tehran was involved in developing the bomb. "The bottom line is we don't need the bomb. Some people think you can deal with problems through the bomb, and they are wrong," he said. He accused America of being hostile towards his country for 27 years and said Washington's stance was hypocritical, "coming from the country which has an immense stockpile of nuclear bombs and even today is developing a new, more frightening, generation of bombs". Only once did he raise his voice a little. "We will stand up when we are oppressed and when people try and impose their will on us. We will never permit that, never permit that," he said. He spoke of his belief in "love and peace" and dismissed the portrayal of him in the west, even slipping into the third person. "Even if Ahmadinejad, even if I were a person who would keep my silence, do you think injustice would go unnoticed?" he asked. He offered conciliatory words for Israel. "We love everybody around the world: Jews, Christians, Muslims ..." Minutes later he qualified his words: "Zionists are not Jews. Zionists are Zionists," he said. Comment on this Article Iran warns of 'lightning' response to any attack AFP 22 Sept 06 Iran has warned Western powers the armed forces would hit back "like lightning" against any attack as it crowed over its military prowess and showed off firepower at a major army parade. Thousands of members of the armed forces and the whole panoply of Iran's ballistic missile arsenal were on display at the parade, including the Shahab-3, a weapon whose range includes arch-enemy Israel. "We want peace but we warn the expansionists not to think of an aggression against Iran as we can defend the fatherland and Islam," Vice President Parviz Davoodi warned. "Our lions are so powerful that they can strike the enemy like lightning and destroy him," he added. The comments of Davoodi -- standing in for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has yet to return from a visit to the United Nations in New York -- come at a time of mounting tension over Tehran's contested nuclear programme. The United States has never ruled out using force to make Iran comply over its atomic drive that Washington charges is aimed at making nuclear weapons. Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for civilian energy purposes only. Iran has also never been shy of warning it would retaliate if the Islamic republic was attacked and the parade included its longest-range missile, the Shahab-3, which has the range to hit Israel and US installations in the Middle East. "Are you not proud to see the Shahab-3, a missile with a range of 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles)?" boomed the commentator over the loudpeakers as two green Shahab-3s were driven past the parade ground on the back of a truck. The missile was up until last year believed to have a range of 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) but Iran has worked on extending its range. However the missiles appeared to lack the anti-Israeli and anti-US slogans that were daubed on the weapon at last year's event and caused European diplomats present to stage a walk-out in protest. A succession of other missiles were also on display, including the short-range Fajr and the medium-range Nazeat, Shahab-1, Shahab-2 and Zelzal. Thousands of soldiers clutching their rifles marched past Davoodi and other dignitaries to the sound of martial music in an event that has become Iran's most significant annual display of its military might. The parade, which marks the anniversary of the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, took place just opposite the mausoleum built for Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the outskirts of Tehran. "Our armed forces have no need for their power to be based on atomic weapons, this power is based on our convictions," said Davoodi, restating Tehran's denial of US allegations it is seeking nuclear weapons. While Iran remains at loggerheads with the West over its nuclear programme, it has been engaged in talks with the European Union to find a solution and in New York Ahmadinejad said that discussions were on the "right path". Davoodi also played up the importance of major war games that Iran has staged in the past month which have seen it claim the development of new missiles and warplanes. "In the recent manoeuvres the armed forces showed their power, notably in the areas that were once the monopoly of the great powers," said Davoodi. "We will resist until the end," proclaimed a slogan on the main grandstand erected for the parade, which coincided with a march to Beirut by supporters of Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah to mark its resistance against Israel. Among the thousands of armed forces personnel marching past the main grandstand were ethnic minority members of Iran's Basij militia in their national dress, including Kurds, Baluch, and for the first time Arabs. Comment on this Article 'Egypt will pursue nuclear energy' AP 22 Sept 06 President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday called for Egypt to pursue nuclear energy, as the US ambassador said Washington would be willing to help its Mideast ally develop a peaceful program. Mubarak echoed a call made earlier this week by his son, Gamal, who many believe is being groomed to succeed his father. The proposal surprised some, who saw it as a jab at the United States, which is locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. "We must increase our exploitation of new energy sources, including the peaceful uses of nuclear energy," President Mubarak said in a televised speech at the closing session of a three-day conference of his ruling National Democratic Party. "I call for a serious debate (in Egypt), taking into consideration what nuclear tecnology can provide by way of clean, inexpensive energy sources," he said. He said Egypt was "not starting from zero. We have knowledge of this technology, enabling us to move forward with it." US Ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, said the United States had no problem with an Egyptian nuclear program and is ready to supply technology to help. "There is no comparison between Iran and Egypt in this field. Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but using nuclear power for peaceful means is a totally different matter," he told the Egyptian TV station El-Mehwar. "If Egypt, after detailed study on this subject, decides that nuclear power is a positive thing and important for Egypt, we can cooperate in this field. Why not?" he said. The 42-year-old Gamal Mubarak made the nuclear proposal during a speech on Tuesday at a conference of the ruling National Democratic Party, where he is the deputy secretary general. Egypt has conducted nuclear experiments on a very small scale for the past four decades, but they have not included the key process of uranium enrichment, according to the UN's nuclear watchdog. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a 2005 report that the program did not appear to be aimed at developing weapons. Comment on this Article Eighth allegation of sexual assault filed against Israel's president Katsav By Roni Singer-Heruti Haaretz Correspondent 21 Sept 06 An eighth allegation has been filed against President Moshe Katsav accusing him of sexual assault, it was revealed on Wednesday. Channel 2 broadcast the testimony of one of the complainants, who has accused Katsav of assaulting her while she worked for him during his tenure as a cabinet minister a few years ago. She said the President sexually harassed her repeatedly and tried to touch her inappropriately. Her complaint, the second to have been filed, is one of the central allegations being considered by the investigative team into the matter. Her testimony was revealed some two-and-a-half months ago in Haaretz, along with the testimonies of four other complainants. Katsav's attorney Zion Amir called the second complainant's testimony "a shocking story bordering on fantasy." "The evidence that we have in our hands completely disproves this woman's testimony," he said, adding, "she was fired from her job and swore to seek revenge." The team investigating President Moshe Katsav for alleged rape and other charges presented its intermim findings to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz on Tuesday. Investigators believe the material collected so far contains enough evidence for at least three charges in the affair. Based on the evidence it appears highly likely that at the end of the investigation, the team will recommend indicting Katsav, apparently on three charges. While the evidence is strong regarding the charges of sexual harassment, in the other matters, improper conduct in the granting of pardons and wiretapping of President's Residence employees, more evidence is needed. But police sources said there is some evidence on which to base these charges. Most of the investigation, which started about two months ago, has been completed, and sources close to the investigation said the probe could end within a few weeks after which a decision could be made on an indictment. Contrary to rumors over the past few days, it was not decided in the meeting to hold a confrontation between the former staff member known as A., who claimed Katsav raped her, and the president. Investigators said it would be enough for Katsav to take a polygraph test to prove his version of events. At the end of Tuesday's meeting attended by State Prosecutor Eran Shendar, his assistant Shuki Lamberger, other senior Justice Ministry officials, and the head of the police investigation, Brigadier General Yoav Segelovitch, Mazuz instructed the investigators to requestion a number of individuals. Katsav is not expected to be questioned again. Haaretz has also learned that the detectives on the case are expected to question individuals who have not yet given testimony next week. The team has been instructed to complete the investigation as soon as possible due to Mazuz's decision not to publish an interim report. Mazuz is expected to render a decision in two to three months. Comment on this Article Palestinian PM Won't Recognize Israel Associated Press 22 Sept 06 GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said Friday he will not recognize a government that recognizes Israel - his clearest statement yet on the terms of sharing power with the moderate Fatah movement. Haniyeh spoke a day after moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas indicated that a coalition government of Hamas and Abbas' Fatah would recognize the Jewish state. "I personally will not head any government that recognizes Israel," Haniyeh said in a mosque sermon in Gaza City on Friday, laying out his group's positions. Haniyeh said Hamas is ready to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War, and to honor a long-term truce with Israel. "We support establishing a Palestinian state in the land of 1967 at this stage, but in return for a cease-fire, not recognition," Haniyeh said. At the United Nations on Thursday, Abbas indicated that the planned national unity government between Hamas and his Fatah Party would recognize the Jewish state. But Haniyeh's political adviser, Ahmed Yousef, told The Associated Press on Friday that "there won't be a national unity government if Hamas is asked to recognize Israel." Instead, he reiterated Hamas' offer of a long-term truce. Abbas was still in New York on Friday, and couldn't be immediately reached for comment on Yousef's remarks. A close adviser, Nabil Amr, clarified that the Palestinian president would not ask Hamas to explicitly recognize Israel, but to abide by Palestine Liberation Organization agreements that recognize the Jewish state. "We expect Hamas to agree to this," Amr said. Hamas, which swept Palestinian parliamentary elections in January, currently rules alone. But Abbas, elected separately last year, has been toiling for months to broaden the government in the hope of easing crushing international sanctions imposed on the Hamas-led government to force it to soften its violent anti-Israel ideology. Last week, the two sides announced they would govern together, and strive to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel - an objective that implies recognition of the Jewish state. But coalition talks have faltered because the West and Israel have balked at restoring hundreds of millions of dollars in funding until Hamas clearly states its willingness to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Abbas told a U.N. forum on Thursday that the national unity government would commit to all past agreements between the Palestinians and Israel, including letters exchanged by the two sides in 1993 that call for mutual recognition and the renunciation of violence. Officials from both Fatah and Hamas said privately Friday that it wasn't clear whether Abbas' speech was meant to solicit international support for the planned government, or a new condition to forming a coalition with Hamas. In deciding to form a coalition with Fatah, Hamas had agreed to "respect" past agreements, but didn't commit to them, calling into question Abbas' ability to maneuver in any future peacemaking. Hamas is afraid that committing to past agreements would be tantamount to recognizing Israel, which it is sworn to destroy. Yousef said instead of recognizing Israel, Hamas was prepared to agree to a "long-term truce for five or 10 years, until the occupation withdraws." In the past, Hamas has offered a long-term truce in exchange for an Israeli commitment to withdraw from all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel rejects that demand. Yousef said renouncing violence was a clause of the agreement underlying the planned coalition government. He was unclear on what Hamas would do if coalition talks break down. A spokesman for the Hamas-led government, Ghazi Hamad, said the group would ask Abbas to clarify his remarks after he returns from his trip. Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin reiterated Israel's demand that any Palestinian government yield to the demands the international community has imposed. Comment: Ah, a man of principle... vanishingly rare in today's world. Comment on this Article Let Us Prey Church Accused of Being Anti-War (!) to Fight IRS Demand for Documents By GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press 21 September o6 A liberal church that has been threatened with the loss of its tax- exempt status over an anti-war sermon delivered just days before the 2004 presidential election said Thursday it will fight an IRS order to turn over documents on the matter. "We're going to put it in their court and in a court of law so that we can get an adjudication to some very fundamental issue here that we see as an intolerable infringement of rights," Bob Long, senior warden of All Saints Church, told The Associated Press. He said the church's 26-member vestry voted unanimously to resist IRS demands for documents and an interview with the congregation's rector by the end of the month. The church's action sets up a high-profile confrontation between the church and the IRS, which now must decide whether to ask for a hearing before a judge, who would then decide on the validity of the agency's demands. IRS spokesman Terry Lemons would not comment specifically on the dispute but noted in a statement that the agency could take a church to court. Religious leaders on the right and left have expressed fear that the dispute could make it more difficult for them to speak out on moral issues such as gay marriage and abortion during the midterm election campaign. At a news conference Thursday, church officials were flanked by about 40 representatives of mosques, synagogues and other churches. "We smell intimidation, it smells rotten, and we should not allow any aspect of intimidation to be directed to any member of our great country," said Maher Hathout, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Under federal tax law, church officials can legally discuss politics, but to retain tax-exempt status, they cannot endorse candidates or parties. The dispute at the 3,500-member Episcopal church centers on a sermon titled "If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush," delivered by a guest pastor. Though he did not endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would condemn the Iraq war and Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war. According to the IRS, the only church ever to be stripped of its tax- exempt status for partisan politicking was a church near Binghamton, N.Y., that ran full-page newspaper ads against President Clinton during the 1992 election season. Comment on this Article Jewish rabbi calls for extermination of all Palestinian males IMEMC & Agencies A Jewish rabbi living in the West Bank has called on the Israeli government to use their troops to kill all Palestinian males more than 13 years old in a bid to end Palestinian presence on this earth. Extremist rabbi Yousef Falay, who dwells at the Yitzhar settlement on illegally seized Palestinian land in the northern part of the West Bank, wrote an article in a Zionist magazine under the title "Ways of War", in which he called for the killing of all Palestinian males refusing to flee their country, describing his idea as the practical way to ensure the non-existence of the Palestinian race. "We have to make sure that no Palestinian individual remains under our occupation. If they (Palestinians) escape then it is good; but if anyone of them remains, then he should be exterminated", the fanatic rabbi added in his article. Falay is not the first to have called for such extreme measures. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Kach movement, called for "the transfer of Israel's Arab population to Arab (or other) lands." (As it states on the group's website). Followers of Kahane have been connected to a number of murders of Palestinians, particularly in the Hebron area in the southern West Bank. In the most well-known of such attacks, 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron were gunned down by Baruch Goldstein, a follower of Kahane, in 1994, with Israeli soldiers looking on and allowing the gunman to reload his automatic machine gun and continue killing innocent civilians. In response to that massacre, the Israeli authorities punished the Palestinian victims by taking over the Ibrahimi mosque and turning half of it into a synagogue, where Israeli settlers go to pray each week. And each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, Israeli settlers in Hebron dress up like Baruch Goldstein and parade through the streets of Hebron, firing guns in the air. The Kach movement recognizes the 'transfer' of 750,000 Palestinians that took place in 1948 in order for the state of Israel to be created on their land, but argues on their website that this 'transfer' was incomplete, and that all Palestinians must be sent away, or killed, in order for Israel to remain a 'Jewish state'. Their platform reads, "In a genuinely 'JEWISH State', how can an Arab be an equal when that State has an Independence Day celebrating his defeat. Its flag isn't that of its people. He isn't trusted to serve in the army. His cousin born in Haifa [sic] and fled during the 1948 War of Independence cannot return... yet any Jew who never lived there before is welcomed with open arms. In short, Israel is his enemy's country, not his. So how can an Arab truly be a loyal citizen in a Jewish State? Simply, they cannot, and they must go!" The idea of extermination of Palestinians, or their 'transfer' into other countries, is not only a view held by extremists on the fringes of society. Prominent Israeli politicians have also made calls for a 'transfer', or ethnic cleansing, based on race. Just last week, on September 11, 2006, an Israeli member of Parliament called explicitly for the transfer of Palestinians (whow he referred to as 'Arabs') from the West Bank (which he referred to as 'Judea and Samaria', the biblical name for the region where the majority of Palestinians now live). "We have to expel most Arabs from Judea and Samaria," Eitam said at a memorial service for Lt. Amihai Merhavia, a soldier who was killed in South Lebanon in July. "We can't deal with all these Arabs, and we can't give up the territory, because we've already seen what they do there. Some of them might have to stay under certain conditions, but most of them will have to go." Despite a law that would strip Israeli parliament members of their immunity to prosecution if they are found make explicitly racist statements, no investigation of Eitam has occurred on this matter, and there was no condemnation of his statement by the Israeli government. Comment on this Article An Unholy Alliance: The Marriage of the Political and Religious Right by Donald Archer 22 Sept 06 The partnership of neo-conservatives with Christian conservatives has undermined a founding principle: the separation of church and state. Unwritten tests of religious "correctness" on everything from candidate selection to judicial appointments, from domestic policy to foreign policy, threaten not only our political freedom, but our religious freedom as well. Such "qualifying" tests are unconstitutional. How the wall of separation came to be built---and why it is falling---has taken books to explain. Put simply, it was instituted to protect both religion and democracy. Colonial America had suffered the insularity and intolerance of theocracy---not only in the witch-hunts of Salem, but in the numerous pre-Revolutionary communities that coerced their citizens into religious conformity---against free and individual expression, much as the neo-conservative coalition is doing today. Our government was founded on enlightened ideals and constitutional law, not evangelical faith. While it was generally accepted that a just and moral society depends on spiritually-grounded principles, the problem then, as now, was that many individuals saw their own narrow religious tenets as the only guide---and viewed it the responsibility of government to impose their sectarian dogma on everyone else. Confronted with a plurality of sects---though vastly fewer than today, the authors of the Constitution created a doctrinally neutral, secular government that guaranteed the religious freedom of every citizen by shunning any state-sponsored dogma. They understood that when religion becomes attached to politics---as it had in Europe---religious freedom, as well as political freedom, is destroyed in the process. While deist Thomas Jefferson included the phrase "nature's God" in the extra-legal Declaration of Independence, the legally-binding Constitution avoids any such reference. Contrary to rhetoric from the Right, it is conspicuously, and intentionally, a "Godless" document. And when religion is mentioned---as in Article 6 and the 1st Amendment---it is to curb intolerance, not to promote it. The authors of the Constitution were anti-sectarian, not anti-religious. In their desire for inclusiveness and spiritual integrity, they rejected the premise of a Christian commonwealth. Being students of the Enlightenment, they founded the nation on reason, not Revelation. Ironically, the Baptists---precursors of contemporary fundamentalists---were among the first in favor of the separation. Their argument was that "the Legislature is not a proper tribunal to determine what are the laws of God" and that the duty of civil government is to protect a citizen's property, not his soul. For the last thirty years, the United States has veered toward theocracy. The turmoil of the 1960s left the country in a moral and spiritual vacuum, and Americans compulsively grabbed for the most reassuring ideological life-line. After the Nixon presidency, political strategists concluded that Americans who regularly attended church were the heart of the Republican base. This profoundly changed the focus of the Party---albeit with political, not religious, ends in mind. Political opportunists actively campaigned to draw evangelicals and fundamentalists to the Republican Party---for political power, not spiritual integrity. A courtship began between political conservatives and the Christian Right that was consummated with the Bush/Cheney presidency. This unholy alliance has been divisively intolerant, and has embarked on a global crusade of epic proportions. It has used Christian rhetoric to promote political ideology and corporate capitalism. By doing so, it has brought out the worst in politics---and the worst in religion. Politicians who embrace the Religious Right---whether out of opportunism or sincere belief---have let the genie out of the bottle. The foundation of democracy has been undermined: honest debate has been replaced by authoritarian pronouncement, by appealing to emotion rather than reason. Of course "Islamic" terrorism is the result of theocratic thinking, but so too are "Christian" assaults on reproductive and gay rights, references to "axes of evil," and "crusades" in the Middle East---all are of the same mind-set. One of the most pernicious aspects of this political/religious coalition is that it frames each challenge as a battle between good and evil, Christ and Anti-Christ. There is no arguing with one who is convinced that God is on his side---and Satan is on the other. Democracy and religion are both the losers. America, having succumbed to fear and intolerance, is being propelled by the delusion of moral certitude. We have come to identify intractability with integrity, and arrogance with principle. To counter the tyranny of even the best-intentioned, our nation depends on a strong democratic and secular government. Our Founders held that religion is a personal affair between the individual and God---however we may conceive that ultimate source. It is not a matter of national policy. Morals result from spiritual insight, not government mandate. Truth lies not in what we believe, or profess to believe, but in how we behave. A nation that embraces the spirit of all religions---liberty, peace, justice, and charity; free of sectarian trappings, dogma, and prejudice---will not only be a good nation; it will be a democratic one. http://www.DonaldArcher.com Donald Archer is a painter, observer, and commentator living on California's Central Coast. Comment on this Article Who did the Pope quote? Gary Leupp Professor of History at Tufts University 21 Sept 06 Byzantine Greek Emperor Manuel, whom the Pope calls "erudite", had lost his throne to his bother in 1376. How'd he get it back? By calling for help from the Muslim Turks! Back on the throne in 1379, he paid tribute to the Turkish Sultan... His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech September 12 at the University of Regensburg in his German homeland. He discussed "the question of God through the use of reason" and the matter of getting "reason and faith [to] work together in the right way." His basic theme was that there has been a "synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early [Christian] church" and that this relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy and logic has been a very good thing. He warned against those who believe this synthesis is "not binding" upon new converts from non-western traditions; this view, he declared, is "false." The pontiff plainly intended to depict the Roman Catholic Church as supportive of modernity and science in general, and both western and tolerant. The Pope opened his homily by referring affectionately to his years teaching at the University of Bonn (from 1959) during which the university was a "universe of reason." He then segued into a description of some of his recent reading. "I was reminded of all this recently when I readpart of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara [in modern Turkey] - by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Thus he alluded to an encounter between a Byzantine (Christian) emperor and a learned Persian (that is to say, Iranian) Muslim a century after the last major Crusade. (I'm wondering if there really was a Persian involved in a dialogue with Manuel, or if the emperor simply composed a dialogue to express his views.) The emperor, as cited by Benedict, tells the Persian, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." BBC News reports that the Pope said "I quote" twice, stressing that these weren't his own words. The good Emperor Manuel regarded Islam as irrational in its alleged effort to spread itself by force. Manuel declared in response: "Not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature." "Acting reasonably," the pope pointedly explained in his talk, means to act "with logos"-a term taken from Greek philosophy. The Pope did not return to the issue of Islam, but rather devoted his attention to the Church's (reason-filled) Hellenistic heritage. He declared, interestingly, that the Septuagint (translation of the Old Testament into Greek from the third to first centuries BCE) is an "independent textual witness and distinct and important step in the history of revelation." The broad point, again, is that the rational Greek mind and the mind of the Church are one, the pillars of the West. Recall that the Greeks, aside from shaping rational western thought, also shaped our ideas about geography. The Greeks first divided "Europe" from "Asia," and opined that Greeks were unique and superior to the "Asiatics." The Greeks, declared the Father of History, Herodotus, knew that they were "free," whereas the Asiatics (particularly the Persians) were prone to enslavement by nature. This ideological construction derives from a century of conflicts - the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century - but it has been echoed by Orientalists for centuries. Repeated by the Pope, for example, who while still Cardinal Ratzinger told the French newspaper Le Figaro that Turkey should not be admitted into the European Union "on the grounds that it is a Muslim nation" which has "always represented another continent during history, always in contrast with Europe." In beginning his remarks citing that exchange between a Byzantine Greek emperor and this "learned Persian," the pontiff was perhaps conveying a not-so-subtle political message. It may have been a response to the learned letter from Iranian President Ahmadinejad to President Bush. Ending his speech with two references to the need for a (truly reasonable, nonviolent) "dialogue of cultures" Benedict unmistakably alludes to former Iranian President Khatami's campaign for a "dialogue of civilizations." This is the Pope's rejoinder to that plea, presented as the response of the western world (growing out of that remarkable Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman synthesis), to today's Persia - the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having read the speech I just have a few questions of my own for the Vicar of Christ. Did the Byzantine emperors generally act according to "reason" - any more than their Persian, Turkish, or Arab contemporaries? Let's look at this Manuel II character, whom the Pope calls "erudite." Crowned co-emperor by his father, in 1373, he lost his throne to his bother, who seized it in 1376. How'd he get it back? By calling for help from the Muslim Turks! I suppose that was reasonable. Back on the throne in 1379, no doubt acting in accordance with logos, he paid tribute to the Turkish Sultan and actually had to live as a vassal at the Turkish court! But he rebelled in 1391, the very year that while in the "barracks at Ankara" mentioned by the Pope and preparing for war on the Turks, he wrote the above-quoted remark about God's nature. Then what happened? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: "A treaty in 1403 kept peace with the Turks until 1421, when Manuel's son and coemperor John VIII meddled in Turkish affairs. After the Turks besieged Constantinople (1422) and took southern Greece (1423), Manuel signed a humiliating treaty and entered a monastery." Maybe it hadn't been so reasonable that time to meddle with those Muslims. Maybe the Pope could have mentioned this in his speech. Here in 1391 we have an emperor in his war camp, provoking what was to be a disastrous war with Muslims while eruditely disparaging their religion. I'd like to ask the Pope: Was there anything wrong with that? And: And when did the Byzantine Empire ever tolerate a "dialogue of cultures" or apply "reason" to religious issues? Seems to me that the Byzantine emperors, including the Palaeologan line from the thirteenth century, persecuted religious minorities, including Jews, Manichaeans and dissident Christians, during centuries in which the Islamic world showed relative tolerance. I've read the texts of anathemas that virtually everyone in some parts of the Empire was obliged to pronounce publicly in the sixth century: "I renounce Mani, Buddha his teacher," etc. On pain of death, basically. There was no division between church and state. Many Byzantine Jews welcomed the initial Muslim Arab advances, providing relief from Christian persecution. One increasingly expects historical distortion and hypocrisy in the speeches of Bush administration officials. The effort to depict the Terror War as a war on "Islamofascism" shows their desperation. They must be delighted to hear the pope conflate Christianity, the west, and Reason explicitly while implicitly linking Islam, violence, and irrational intolerance. How sweet that His Holiness's erudition should elliptically reference Iran, while the Bush administration prepares to attack it! Breaking new ground for a Roman pontiff, Benedict forayed into the field of Qur'an exegesis in his talk, noting that the Muslim holy book states that "There is no compulsion in religion" (Surah 2: 256). But he notes that the "experts" say that this was composed early on, when "Mohammed was powerless and still under threat." He refers obliquely to "the instructions, composed laterconcerning holy war" implying that these more accurately characterize Islamic teaching. Is he not stating that the real Muslim teachings are those advocating intolerance and violence, and that Christian teachings pose a rational nonviolent alternative? Such an interpretation, aligning the Vatican with the neocon and other Islamophobic camps, could have serious religious and political implications. The Regensberg talk has provoked an outcry, in Pakistan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. By all reports the Bishop of Rome is a very careful and deliberate man, who has just appointed a specialist in the Islamic world to serve as the Vatican's foreign minister. Much thought must have been put into the carefully-worded talk. But what is Rome trying to accomplish? Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu Comment on this Article Moolah and Martians The US housing bubble continues its 'freefall' tailspin John Stepek Moneyweek.com The rate of decline in the US housing market is continuing to surprise the pundits. The number of housing starts - that is, new home construction - fell 6% in August, down almost 20% on last year, the worst annual decline in four years, and a much worse fall than expected. That came hot on the heels of news from the National Association of Home Builders that house builders' confidence is at its lowest since 1991. "This implies an increasingly negative outlook for the consumer sector given the importance of equity withdrawal and the positive wealth effects housing has provided for the consumer in recent years," said James Knightley of ING Financial Markets to the Independent. And unfortunately for the world economy, a negative outlook for the US consumer means that things don't look great for the rest of us either... Soaring US house prices have been the main thing propping up the consumer since the tech boom turned into a bust at the start of the millennium. As Bloomberg says: "Five years of record home sales and price gains supported the US economy through an internet stock plunge, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, bankruptcies at... Enron and... Worldcom, US investions of Afghanistan and Iraq and a surge in oil prices." How has one market managed to bear the weight of all this bad news? Simple. In the past five years, figures from US mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac show that Americans have withdrawn $727.4bn in equity from their homes through "mortgage refinancing" - which is a long-winded way of saying they have "taken on more debt". But that trick only works when the market is rising. And those days are already long gone. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, says: "There's a real problem, not just for the housing sector but for the whole economy. There is a significant possibility of a slowdown so large that it falls into the category of a recession." It strikes us that you don't need to be a Nobel-winning economist to be able to work that out. But still some pundits are trying to put a brave face on what the International Monetary Fund believes is the one of the biggest threats to the global economy today. "Housing is clearly in the midst of a hard landing and the trough seems to be some way off. However, in the absence of a recession, a national house price crash still remains unlikely," Patrick Franke of Commerzbank told the Independent. We must admit, we were of the impression that the housing crash would cause a recession, not the other way about. But in any case, one Mike Morgan, Florida mortgage broker, begs to differ with Mr Franke. "Will there be a hard landing? No. Will there be a crash landing? Absolutely!" Speaking to Whiskey & Gunpowder's Mike Shedlock, he points out that the jobs created by the housing boom are already at risk - and this is at a point when house prices have barely begun to fall. "Loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs created from housing will act like a virus and spread throughout our economy... I spoke with a real estate agent the other day who has not sold a home in three months. His wife works for a title company and was just laid off. He's now sending out applications for a job in his former field of banking." Mr Morgan himself warns that "realistically, if things do not pick up within 90 days, I will close my office and concentrate on my other businesses." The worries over the housing market make it more likely that the Federal Reserve will hold interest rates when it votes on its latest move later today. But as Gerard Baker pointed out in The Times earlier this week, "US inflation, however you measure it, is now running at about 3% per year. That ought to be too high for the Fed's comfort... inflation as a whole now seems broad-based enough and has enough momentum to withstand a bit of downward pressure from global commodites. With short-term interest rates at 5.25%, in real terms monetary policy can hardly be described as tight by any historic standards. It usually takes real rates - a little over 2% now - of 3-4% or more to bear down significantly on price pressure." And on Bloomberg we read that unit labour costs rose 4.9% in the second quarter on last year, and gained 9% in the first quarter. Those are the biggest "back-to-back increases since 2000, and a sign of a classic inflation cycle", according to Allen Sinai of New York-based Decision Economics. Again, Ben Bernanke finds himself between a rock and a hard place. But given the choice between increasing pressure on homeowners on one hand, and risking inflation taking off on the other, we're almost certain he'll choose the latter. That's bad news for the dollar. And meanwhile, it's probably too late for the housing market. US median house price may fall next year for the first time since the Great Depression, Gabriel Stein of Lombard Street Research tells Bloomberg. Last year, the US savings ratio went negative on an annual basis, also for the first time since the Great Depression. We imagine that we will be seeing a lot more problems that haven't happened since the Great Depression in the coming months. Comment on this Article Burst housing bubble a tough sale to sellers By ERIC ANDERSON, Deputy business editor Times Union 19 September 06 SARATOGA SPRINGS -- The housing boom ended more than a year ago, but sellers are having a tough time accepting that fact, says David Lereah, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. The result has been tumbling sales as buyers stay on the sidelines. Lereah was in Saratoga Springs Monday for the annual statewide industry update, talking to Realtors from across New York. The expansion that began in November 1991, when mortgage rates fell into single digits, became a boom following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when trillions of dollars left the stock market looking for a safe haven in real estate, Lereah said. But 17 interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve since June 2004, a pullout from the market by speculative investors, and a loss of confidence by trade-up buyers eventually ended the expansion, he said. This correction is different from any others because it wasn't triggered by a recession, high financing costs or job losses. With unemployment below 5 percent, mortgage rates still below 7 percent and a growing economy, "all you need is a price correction, a price adjustment, to bring the market back," Lereah told the crowd at The Saratoga Hotel & Conference Center on Broadway. He said the Capital Region experienced "a moderate boom" without the extreme price run-ups or overbuilding seen in parts of California and Florida. As a result, "you don't need as much of a price correction," he said. The transition to lower prices is already under way nationwide, Lereah said, and will result in a more balanced market than the one that has been dominated by sellers. The transition in the Capital Region likely would be completed by the end of this year, he added. Sales have tumbled locally even as prices have continued to climb. In July, the median sale price of a single-family home was up 7 percent to $197,250 from year-earlier levels, according to figures from the Greater Capital Association of Realtors Inc. Sales for the month, meanwhile, were down 15 percent from a year ago, the fourth consecutive decline. "We certainly are seeing a slowdown," said James Ader, executive vice president of GCAR, an Albany-based trade group. But "we haven't seen a huge price correction." Lereah predicted prices will drop nationally over the next six months, and that each percentage point drop "will bring thousands and thousands of buyers back into the marketplace." He said the inventory of unsold houses nationally is at an all-time high. Ader described the inventory of unsold houses in the Capital Region as "pretty healthy. "We did have some supply problems during the sellers' market," Ader added. The correction is hitting new construction harder than existing sales, Lereah said, with new-home sales nationally down 16 percent this year, while existing-home sales are off just 8 percent. He predicted new-home sales would be off a further 8 percent next year, while existing home sales would be flat. Eric Anderson can be reached at 454-5323 or by e-mail at eanderson@timesunion.com. Comment on this Article Alien Autopsy Video "Hoax" not a Hoax? SOTT 21 September 06 A bit of film has come to light which may confirm the much disputed "Alien Autopsy" Video as having been real after all. The alien in this short clip seems to be the same one in the allegedly "bogus" Santilli film, the credit for which was claimed recently by an artist in UK. The clip appears to be a pre-autopsy segment shot as the body was brought into what appears to be a military environment with many military personnel running about and looking pretty het up, to say the least. Click the link above to view the clip. The "UFOwatchdog" site claims that this footage "appears near the end of the Ray Santilli produced comedy film about the Alien Autopsy. He tells us: In Ray Santilli's spoof movie about his now infamously hoaxed Alien Autopsy film, there appears at the end of the film a clip showing what some have said to be genuine footage of a military recovery operation at a UFO crash site. At this point, I think it not a stretch to be suspicious when hearing the name Ray Santilli and the word genuine in the same sentence. We here at SOTT still give a high probability to the idea that the Alien Autopsy video was authentic and that a lot of money changed hands, and/or a lot of pressure was brought to bear on various parties to denounce it, claim credit for it, and generally muddy the waters. When will the UFO research community get a clue about the ways and means of COINTELPRO and Psy-Ops? The UFO Watchdog guy shoule know better! For more info, see the SOTT FORUM discussion of the Alien Autopsy. Comment on this Article Last But Not Least Amnesty slams China over rights in Olympics run-up By Lindsay Beck Reuters 21 Sept 06 BEIJING - China's human rights record has deteriorated in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, with thousands of people being executed after unfair trials, Amnesty International said on Thursday. The human rights watchdog sent its latest findings to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and said Chinese authorities would have to act quickly if they were to fulfill their pledges to improve matters. "The serious human rights abuses that continue to be reported every day across the country fly in the face of the promises the Chinese government made when it was bidding for the Olympics," Amnesty's Catherine Baber said in a statement. Beijing's campaign to host the 2008 Olympics was shadowed by criticism of its rights record from international groups and Western capitals. The Beijing committee pledged that by allowing the city to host the Games, the International Olympic Committee would help advance human rights in China. But Amnesty said that was not happening. With less than 700 days to go before the Games, Amnesty said in a report that the Chinese government needed to work fast to make good on its promises to the Olympic movement. China called Amnesty's charges biased and groundless and said the organization had ulterior motives. "China is fulfilling its commitments made during the bid. We are confident we have the capacity to build a successful Games," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news briefing. It was too narrow to understand China's efforts to improve human rights and rule of law only in the context of the Olympics, Qin added. MEDIA CRACKDOWN But Amnesty said the past year had seen a renewed crackdown on journalists and Internet users in China, undermining pledges by Beijing's bid committee to give reporters full freedom. It also said grassroots activists, including those working with residents forcibly evicted from buildings on Olympic construction sites, were harassed and imprisoned. It said reform of China's system of "re-education through labor" -- a kind of imprisonment without trial that Chinese legal reformers say should be scrapped -- might actually be hindered by Beijing's preparations for the event. "The forthcoming Olympic Games may be acting as an incentive for the authorities to retain the system in the name of maintaining public order in Beijing," the report said. Amnesty called on the IOC to use its sway to hasten change before 2008, but the committee said it was not its place to pressure governments. "It is unrealistic to expect the IOC to pressure on such complex matters," its communications director, Giselle Davies, told Reuters. "It is premature to say China has failed to live up to the promises two years before the Games." But Corinna-Barbara Francis, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said the group was not seeing the progress it hoped for. "We have certainly been disappointed given the expectations we had and the promises made by the Chinese authorities," she told Reuters. Comment on this Article Several dead in high-speed train test crash in Germany AFP Several people died when an elevated ultra-modern train crashed into a wagon at high speed during a test run in northwestern Germany. The magnetic levitation Transrapid train had been travelling at around 200 kilometres (124 miles) per hour on a concrete rail built several metres (yards) above the ground in Emsland near the city of Osnabrueck when it hit an engineering wagon. A spokesman for local authorities in the district of Meppen said some passengers had died but he could not give an exact figure. Police said around 20 passengers had been injured. The train was carrying some 30 people when the accident took place at around 9:30 am (0730 GMT). N-24 television reported that 10 injured passengers had been taken to hospital. It showed rescue workers being hoisted up to the train on cranes to try and reach the remaining passengers. Train seats, bags and clothes were scattered on the ground. Ewald Temmen from Emsland police told the NTV news channel that the train had remained on its track but was "badly damaged". He said it was proving difficult to reach victims because the rail was suspended some five metres (16 feet) above the ground. The accident happened on a 31.8-kilometre (19.8-mile) concrete test track. Transrapid spokeswoman Claudia Hohmann told N-24 news channel that she could not confirm reports that the passengers were relatives of employees at the test site. "At the moment we have more questions than answers," she said. A government spokesman said Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee had decided to cut short a visit to China to return to Germany after learning of the accident. The Transrapid train is a joint venture between German engineering giants Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. Comment on this Article French trawler possibly pulled down by Dutch sub: lawyer AFP New evidence suggests a French trawler that sank with its five-man crew off the English coast in 2004 may have been pulled down by a Dutch submarine, a lawyer for the sailors' families said. French news magazine Le Point on Thursday revealed that lab tests had found "unexplained" traces of titanium -- which is used in the paintwork of certain submarines -- on the cables of the Bugaled Breizh. The Dutch submarine Dolfijn is known to have been in the same zone at the time as part of a NATO training exercise, but the ship's commander has insisted his vessel was not responsible. A prosecutor in charge of the case warned not to draw hasty conclusions, saying there were several hypotheses to explain the sinking of the trawler, which was lost off Lizard point in southwest England on January 15, 2004. But Christian Bergot, lawyer for the families, said the titanium find was an important "new step" in the inquiry. Though the sinking was known to have been caused by an underwater collision, an experts report last year said it could have just as easily have been with a rock or underwater wreck as with a submarine. "It seems obvious to me that we need to start again with the Dutch," said Bergot, who claims that the Dutch navy used titanium-based paints. He said the Dolfijn "has still not given its position at the time of the shipwreck and traces of friction were found on its hull a few days after the exercise." But Anne Kayanakis, state prosecutor of the western city of Quimper, was more cautious, warning that titanium paint is not used only by military submarines. "The Dolfijn was out of reach of the incident and its behaviour is not suspect," argued the prosecutor, who said that a combination of "complex circumstances" could be responsible for the sinking. "We have not ruled anything out but we remain prudent," she said. The French judge investigating the accident said in August that he intended to further investigate the position of the Dolfjin at the time. France's defence ministry would not comment beyond reaffirming that no French submarine was in the area at the time. The Dutch defence ministry said on Thursday that it had not yet studied the Le Point allegations but again denied that its submarine had been responsible for the tragedy. "It was not our submarine that caused the shipwreck," ministry spokesman Jaap Hartogh said. "The Dolfijn was sailing to the location (of the accident) and intercepted the SOS. We are sorry for the catastrophe but it is impossible that our submarine was responsible." He added that Paris had not formally approached the Netherlands about any continuation of the inquiry in light of the magazine article. Comment on this Article Remember, we need your help to collect information on what is going on in your part of the world! Send your article suggestions to: sott(at)signs-of-the-times.org |