Have you heard the term "he who pays the piper call the tune?" Television, newspapers, magazines are all funded by advertisers. If they don't like what you are saying then they withdraw their money.

And yet today you have nearly infinite choice of where you find information. And you don't need to care that Johnson and Johnson or Nike pulls their advertising from any specific source. The people at Moveon or Al Jazeera seem to do just fine without sponsorship from Ford.

Also, the govenment is careful about what it feeds to the press ... There is a very cosy "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" relationship between most journalists and government.

And yet, people still line up to beg the gov't to interfere in their lives. Notice the problem there?

If that is the case then it will all come out in the court case when Michael Moore sues his critics.

I personally would be thrilled if Moore sued, but I think the chance of that is next to nothing. He won't do it, because he would actually have to defend the statements he made--not that he doesn't have the right to say them, but that their legitimacy would be questioned in excruciating detail. Much like the calling oil execs to the Hill to "testify" that's all just more rhetoric.

I agree, but sometimes it is easier to brand someone a nutcase or a fruitloop than listen to what they are saying. Some truths can be very uncomfortable.

And it Moore's case, they mostly aren't even truths at all.

Does it mean that you are unpatriotic because you don't support the war in Iraq?

Nope. Both Moore and Coulter are utterly entitled to their own opinions. However, just as Moore follows people around, annoying them and sticking cameras in their faces, and crabbing because they often won't give him an interview, he wasn't accomodating when someone else followed him around, annoyed him and stuck a camera in his face, and wouldn't give that guy an interview either. Odd that it's OK for Moore to do it to others, but when someone else subjects Moore to the exact same treatment, he does what he maligns others for doing.

Think for a moment who controls the media and who's interest it serves. If you want to express an alternative viewpoint you may have to take extreme measures to do so.

So who really controls the media?

It would be O.K. to present a alternative
viewpoint if it wasn't full of innuendo and unsubstantiated claims.
The extreme in considered nut cases and fruit loops.

Extreme measures can be emotional Terrorism.

Sound like Fox News and all the media outlets owned by R. Murdoch...

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From this message, your saying Bush is a genius.

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

From this message, your saying Bush is a genius.

I don't think so...

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Plan would split teeming court in two
This time, effort over 9th Circuit gaining momentum

By Dana Wilkie
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

November 14, 2005

WASHINGTON - Back in the 1940s, it was the train schedules that caused folks to gripe about the big headache of assembling the judges of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from their far-flung states.

Sixty-five years ago, as today, there was talk of splitting the vast 9th Circuit into two courts, which might make judges' travel easier and their caseloads lighter.

But for the first time in a long while, the idea has gained momentum as House Republicans attempt to push through a plan that would split California and the other Western states in the 9th Circuit.

Backers say the plan would make the court more speedy and efficient, and perhaps less inclined to produce rulings that are often overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The move is dismissed by opponents as a Republican ruse to break up a court that has the reputation of being the nation's most liberal circuit.

"There are some very powerful people who are pushing this," said Arthur Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and a leading expert on the 9th Circuit. "And they are doing it in a way that makes it more difficult for opponents to fight it."

Many bills over the past decades failed to make it through Congress. This year, GOP House leaders have included a court-splitting plan in a $54 billion spending-cut package, making it harder for Democrats to vote against it without opposing the entire budget bill.

"It is a lose-lose proposition, one with clear financial costs to the administration of justice and with human costs to those with cases before the court," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. She argues that under the split, the 9th Circuit would keep 72 percent of the caseload, but only 60 percent of the judges.

Republicans complain that the court is stacked with liberals.

They say that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned more 9th Circuit rulings than any other circuit, including its controversial 2002 declaration that the Pledge of Allegiance - with its phrase "under God" - was unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

The 9th Circuit has 28 judgeships. The next busiest court, the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit, has 17.

The 9th Circuit covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. It handles nearly 16,000 cases a year - about triple the average for other circuits.

It represents 58 million people - almost 27 million more than the next most populous circuit, the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit. Experts agree it takes a case longer to get before 9th Circuit judges than in any other circuit's.

"The 9th Circuit dwarfs any of the other circuits - in size, in number of cases, in population," said Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican and House Judiciary Committee chairman who wrote one of seven court-splitting proposals in Congress this year. "It's become bloated and inefficient."

Diarmuid O'Scannlain, one of the few 9th Circuit judges who endorses a split, notes that the court's jurisdiction spans the Rocky Mountains to the rain forests of Kauai and the U.S.-Mexico border to the Arctic Ocean.

"The sheer magnitude of our court and its responsibilities negatively affects all aspects of our business, including our . . . consistency, our clarity and even our collegiality," O'Scannlain said during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The plan calls for a new 12th Circuit that would include Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. The 9th Circuit would include California, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Congressional Budget Office said it would cost $71 million during the next five years to add new judges to the 9th and 12th circuits, and that each new judge would add about $560,000 in administrative costs each year.

Of the 9th Circuit judges active in April 2004, 15 opposed a split, four favored it and the others abstained.

Then there is the logistical issue of assembling more than two dozen judges in one city.

Years ago, the complaint was that train schedules made this difficult; today, the complaint is plane schedules.

"I have a case that's been sitting up there for its third year," said Gary Kreep, executive director of the United States Justice Foundation, which supports a split. "We've been involved with other circuits, and I've never seen a case take three years."

The University of Pittsburgh's Hellman said that once the cases are before judges, the 9th Circuit is one of the speediest at making rulings.

He also pointed out that the 9th Circuit allows lawyers to argue orally in almost one-third of cases, while the 5th Circuit allows such arguments in fewer than one-fifth.

"Other (courts) can handle more cases, but they do it by not giving the lawyers a chance to argue," Hellman said.

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me@rescam.org

When blogs bite back

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

So true!

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So true!

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Bush 'lied'? It's time to refute this slander about Iraq war

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

November 15, 2005

Not so long ago, only the extreme left and inveterate Bush haters accused the president of deliberately lying to justify going to war in Iraq. But now, with Bush weakened politically and his adversaries smelling blood, the "Bush lied" mantra is verging toward mainstream among opposition Democrats.

It's long past time, then, for Bush to fight back, and not just because the loose charge of lying is beginning to cut. Bush must answer because his moral authority, political credibility and American honor are all at stake here. So, too, is a momentous question of history: Whether the United States and its principal ally, Britain, went to war against Iraq in bad faith.

The core of the charge that Bush lied is tied to Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's WMDs were a principal justification cited by Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others who supported removing Saddam and his regime by force. As everyone now knows, extensive searches in Iraq after Saddam's fall found no WMDs.

But that hardly proves Bush lied. Rather it shows only that he was, apparently, mistaken. So, also, was a host of others, including the president's most important intelligence and national security advisers. When pressed by Bush before the Iraq war on whether Saddam had WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet famously replied, "It's a slam dunk."

British intelligence was telling Blair the same thing. Indeed, most if not all of the world's major intelligence services - the French and Germans, among them - believed Saddam was concealing WMDs. So did the United Nations Security Council, which is why it kept passing resolutions for a dozen years demanding that Iraq permit unfettered weapons inspections. Repeated U.N. weapons inspection reports through the 1990s noted the huge amounts of chemical weapons components and suspected biological agents that were unaccounted for.

Many of those in Congress who now darkly suggest that Bush somehow lied about Iraq saw much of the same intelligence the White House had, and then voted for the war. More than 100 Democrats in the Senate and House, including the Bush-Cheney ticket's opponents last fall, voted authority for Bush to use force against Saddam.

Did Bush distort or manipulate the intelligence on Iraq that he received? Either might be construed as a form of lying. But the evidence is just the opposite. The bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission reported that it found no evidence of political pressure by the Bush administration or the president to falsify or distort intelligence on Iraq. A similarly independent investigation in Britain exonerated Blair of comparable accusations.

Belatedly, Bush has begun fighting back. In a Veterans Day speech, the president effectively refuted the scurrilous accusation that he lied the country into war. If his critics have any evidence to the contrary, let them produce it. While we're waiting - it could be a long wait - we hope Bush continues to vigorously defend himself and his administration from those trying, as the president said, to rewrite history.

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me@rescam.org

A slick explanation for oil profits

WILLIAM RASPBERRY
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 15, 2005

Oil profits "go up and down," Exxon Mobil chairman Lee Raymond told the Senate the other day, explaining why the oil giants' huge post-Katrina profits were not profiteering.

Thus, the $32.8 billion profits that America's five biggest petroleum corporations reported for the July-September quarter were more like a natural occurrence - that darned "invisible hand"! - than a calculated effort to take advantage of a national emergency. Profits just "go up and down."

But even the facile Raymond couldn't explain why record profits and record gasoline prices just happened to occur at the same time. You know the sequence: Hurricane Katrina ravages the Gulf Coast, and a week later two other things hit: Gasoline prices reach an all-time-high average of $3.06 a gallon and Exxon Mobil became the first U.S company to rack up more than $100 billion in quarterly sales. (It wasn't all Exxon, of course. BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips also did very well.)

Here's how Raymond explains it (and I pick on Raymond only because he says things so clearly): Katrina damaged important refineries, reducing their capacity. That naturally made it more expensive to meet demand, and so they had to raise prices. Chevron chairman David O'Reilly put it more simply: "We had to respond to the market."

But if prices were raised to cover additional costs, whence the record profits?

Well, Raymond had a secondary explanation: Three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline reduced demand and helped to regulate the market. That's why you didn't see those long lines at gas stations. Reducing consumption also reduces reliance on oil imports, and, though he didn't say it, probably reduces hydrocarbon emissions and slows global warming - all good stuff.

In other words, what you thought was profiteering was only Big Oil doing the world a favor.

There is another way of looking at what happened last quarter. Katrina and the flooding that followed amounted to a national tragedy and a national emergency. Companies sometimes benefit from such situations. A bakery that somehow managed to stay open would certainly sell out of bread; and if the owner could bake more bread, he could sell that, too. If the ingredients became more expensive, he would take that into account in setting the price of bread. But if he started charging $8 a loaf just because he could, you wouldn't be in the mood for cheery songs about the beauty of the free market.

There is also another way to respond to national disaster, and lots of individuals, organizations - even entire towns - found it. I mean the response of sacrifice. Americans opened their hearts, their wallets and their homes to Katrina's victims. Where is the record of Big Oil's selfless largesse? As Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told the oil executives: "Your sacrifice appears to be nothing."

Maybe the notion of corporate sacrifice - the very idea of the corporate citizen - is dying, giving way to the bottom line as the only thing worthy of serious attention.

The only thing in Raymond's testimony that sounded even remotely like sacrifice was his reference to reinvested profits. But the profits are reinvested into more exploration and more refining - which is to say, more sales and more profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, the executives were full of dire warnings against legislating anything smacking of price controls, mandatory givebacks or excess-profits taxes. They probably shouldn't worry. There doesn't appear to be much taste for real action in the Senate, and given the Jimmy Carter experiment with taxing excess profits, few want to try that road now.

It's a lot easier to believe the American people have been ripped off than to figure out how to make them whole now.

I just wish the Big Oilers wouldn't stop trying to convince me that the noxious liquid splashing in my face is autumn rain. Listen once again to Raymond:

"Prices for products did increase, of course, but there was no panic and no widespread shortages. Retailers responded to the short-term supply disruption, consumption decreased and imports increased to make up for the shortfall. In a word, markets worked."

For a few of us, anyway.

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me@rescam.org

President must tend to credibility

E.J. DIONNE JR.
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 15, 2005

Mr. President, it won't work this time.

With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans agreeing that George W. Bush "deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq," the president clearly needs to tend to his credibility problems. But his partisan attacks on the administration's critics in a Veterans Day speech last week will only add to his troubles.

Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," Bush declared. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy by daring to indict Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration?

There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-9/11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions that more of them should have raised.

The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.

The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of rushing "pell-mell" into an endorsement of broad war powers for the president. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, protested in September: "We're being asked to go to war, and vote on it in a matter of days. We need an intelligence estimate before we can seriously vote." And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put it plainly: "This will be one of the most important decisions Congress makes in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the frenzy of an election year." But it was.

Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: "While Smith 'reflects' on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains." Note that Smith wasn't being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even to think before going to war.

Marc Racicot, the Republican National Committee chairman, said this about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's opposition to the war resolution: "He has set about to diminish the capacity of this nation to defend itself. That is a legitimate issue." Wellstone, who died in a plane crash a few days before the election, was not intimidated. But other Democrats were.

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Saddam.

By linking the war on terror to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

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me@rescam.org

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You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy by daring to indict Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration?

Please read Fitzgerald's own statements... his investigation is NOT an investigation into pre-war intelligence. There have been investigations into pre-war intelligence and they have all come to the same conclusion: a paucity of human intelligence plus Saddam's behavior led every spook agency on the planet to reach the same (apparently incorrect) conclusion. No matter how much one wants to believe that Bush leaned on the CIA, he has precious little leverage with the spies of Egypt and Russia and France.

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering.

Iraq was not a new issue to Democrats. Those on the intel committees had access to the same intel that the White House had access to, and they reached the same conclusions. Those in Washington would like the electorate to think that the threat was concocted by the Bush White House and pushed thru Congress in record time.

Allow me to repeat the quotes from the previous thread.

"We must stop Saddam from ever again jeopardizing the stability and security of his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction."
Madeline Albright, Feb 1, 1998

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton.
Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, others, Oct. 9, 1998

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Dec. 16, 1998

"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

Kind of blows up the theory that everything happened in the rushed run-up to a midterm election. Now, if the article's author wants to argue that Democrats had considered positions on the Iraq issue and abandonned them after 2002 for short-term political gain during a Presidential election cycle, then there is room for reasonable debate. If Democrats want us to believe that they were against the war in 2002, then they were cowards for not standing up in opposition then. If Democrats meant what they said in 1998 thru 2002, but say the opposite now, then it is they, not Bush, who should be defending themselves against charges of lying.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Point taken, but who acted on this, and who botched the job?

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