It's morning somewhere

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other top government officials will have to answer questions under oath in a lawsuit that accuses them of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrants held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn after 9/11.

The officials had sought to have the lawsuit dismissed without testimony, arguing in part that they had governmental immunity from its claims, that the court lacked jurisdiction because they live outside New York State, and that the Sept. 11 attacks created "special factors" outweighing the plaintiffs' right to sue for damages for constitutional violations....

...Another angry chicken, of course, is coming home in the form of devastating storms and a grossly incompetent administration to deal with them. Bush is not entirely responsible for Hurricanes Katrina or Rita, of course, but he is partially responsible for them by his willful ignorance of the global warming issue. And he is more than a little responsible for the carnage and damage done, because of his budget-slashing on preventative structural projects, because of his deployment of needed-at-home Guard forces to Iraq, because of his staffing of the government with completely incompetent crony hacks, and because of his and their astonishingly lame performance in responding to a known crisis. Where I come from, a president who remains on vacation during possibly the worst natural disaster to hit this country, praises his FEMA chief for doing a "heckuva job" when the guy doesn't know what any American with a TV set has known for 24 hours about New Orleans, and then later fires him for poor performance, is a president who should be impeached for those reasons alone...

...But, of course, the biggest cross for Bush to bear is the one he built for himself, and thus the most richly deserved. In Iraq, simply put, there are no good options. None for America, that is, but even fewer for George W. Bush.

...The refugees trade tales of heroism and generosity, along with reports of the bad and the ugly. That's human nature, but there's nothing forgivable about organized government corruption.

I'm sorry, there are no exceptions: The first commandment of governing is Thou Shalt Not Steal the People's Money. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 on the mantra that he would rid the nation of Waste, Fraud and Abuse. He proceeded to raise the national deficit by $2 trillion with tax cuts and spending on the military in the face of a collapsing Soviet Union. This led to the peppy military procurement scandals of the late'80s and early'90s — the $435 hammer and the $640 toilet seat.

When Newt Gingrich and Co. took power in 1994, they promised many "reforms" and spent millions of dollars on hearings and investigations — the endless prosecution of Henry Cisneros may actually be a stronger case in point than the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Despite these splendid efforts, they never could find the Waste, Fraud and Abuse they claimed were the hallmarks of government. But this Bush administration has given us Waste, Fraud and Abuse galore....

WASHINGTON (AP) - Legislation that would end the longtime ban on energy development along most of the country's coasts and open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling advanced Wednesday in the House.

Opponents said Republican leaders were exploiting the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to pass pro-industry measures that they failed to get included in an energy bill signed into law only two months ago.

It is a "leave no oil company behind" wish list that will damage the environment and do nothing to ease high gasoline or winter heating costs, said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography...
...Americans have thousands of media outlets to choose from. But they still have to visit a porn site to see what this war has done to the bodies of the dead and the souls of the living. One of the pictures on Wilson's site depicts a woman whose right leg has been torn off by a land mine, and a medical worker is holding the mangled stump up to the camera. The woman's vagina is visible under the hem of her skirt. The caption for this picture reads: "Nice puss -– bad foot."...

Cindy Sheehan Arrested in Washington!
From the latest I’ve heard, Usama bin Laden has not yet been arrested. Nor has anyone been arrested in the Valerie Plame or Muhammed Naeem Noor Khan leaks…
Posted Sep 26, 2005 11:39 AM PST
Category: DICTATORSHIP

Or the AIPAC spy scandal.
But Cindy? Time to teach THAT bitch a lesson! How DARE she refuse to see the death of her son as the highest possible honor the Bush administration can bestow upon her!

The internationally renowned correspodent for The Independent - the great British journalist Robert Fisk - has been banned from entering the United States. Fisk has been covering war zones for decades, but is above all known for his incisive reporting from the Middle East for more than 20 years. His critical coverage of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and the continuing occupation that has followed it, has repeatedly exposed U.S. and British government disinformation campaigns. He also has exposed how the bulk of the press reports from Iraq have been "hotel journalism" - a phrase Fisk coined...

...That appeals court ruling freed Bush from the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantee defendants' rights at trials and bar abusive interrogation of military detainees. Lawyers for the prisoner in the case have appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

The more immediate question is whether Roberts, by neither disqualifying himself from the appeals court case nor notifying the prisoner's lawyers of his discussions with an opposing party, violated a federal law of judicial conduct. The law requires federal judges to disqualify themselves from any case in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned.''...

Emergency teams have once again begun evacuating residents of the flood-hit city of New Orleans as a new hurricane heads towards the US coast.
Some 500 buses are moving out people who had returned to city battered by Hurricane Katrina three weeks ago...

About 88,500 Hurricane Katrina refugees are in shelters in 25 states and Washington, D.C., according to the Red Cross and state officials

150 died in one day in Baghdad - and Iraqis, not foreign fighters, are now the insurgency's keenest recruits. Peter Beaumont investigates how this crucial shift has changed the fight...

...KANSAS CITY - A Missouri charity financed terrorism and is connected to a similarly named organization in Sudan, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has concluded.

The findings came Thursday in a 36-page order from U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton in which he threw out a lawsuit filed by the Islamic American Relief Agency-USA, which is based in Columbia. The charity had sought to thaw its assets, which the Department of the Treasury froze last year...

...Akeel acknowledged that IARA-USA occasionally had partnered with the Sudanese charity on individual projects. And he pointed out that the United Nations Children’s Fund contracted with the Sudanese group to rebuild three schools in Iraq. After a U.S. bank declined to process the check because of the terrorism designation, UNICEF backed away from the contract.

Akeel asked why the U.S. government had not also sanctioned UNICEF.

"They had a contract with IARA in Sudan two months after the raid," Akeel said.

The judge, however, did not see a problem...

...Spears, who married Federline in September last year, had been previously reported as saying she planned to have the baby by Caesarean section to avoid the pain of a natural birth...

...The Gallup International Voice of the People 2005 poll questioned more than 50,000 people in 68 states for the BBC World Service survey about power...
...The survey also found that only 13% of people trusted politicians and only 16% thought they should be given more power...

...These guys (and gals) are just cannon fodder as far as the War Party is concerned: having been effectively kidnapped via "stop-loss" programs, they are being forced to "stay the course," while their families are treated like "refugees" in their own country. "Return the favor"? You have to understand that this is not a "favor," in the eyes of the War Party, but a duty. It's all about "sacrifice" – but, somehow, people like Krauthammer and his fellow neocons never get around to doing any of the sacrificing...

The Bush administration is seeking the support of China, Russia and India to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions for its suspected nuclear weapons program. Iran suspended uranium conversion and enrichment activities last year but resumed them last month. Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, warned of serious consequences if the Security Council considers sanctions...

The president also issued a warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom he accused of failing to control the flow of fighters sneaking into Iraq. The United States also has suggested that Syria played a role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafil Hariri last February in Beirut. The U.N. is investigating the assassination.

"The Syrian leader must understand we take his lack of action seriously," Bush said...

...The line of attack was first sounded Friday by the Democratic National Committee's outspoken chairman, Howard Dean, and reinforced Sunday by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the only African American member of the Senate.

Speaking about the black residents of New Orleans, who were the storm's most visible victims, Dean said that Roberts' "entire legal career appears to be about making sure those folks don't have the same rights everybody else does."

"That's probably not the right thing to do," Dean continued, "two weeks after a disaster where certain members of society clearly did not have the same protections that everybody else did because of their circumstances... . I know Judge Roberts loves the law. I'm not sure he loves the American people."...

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him...
...It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith...

Using DNA samples from ethnically diverse populations, they identified a collection of variations in each gene that occurred with unusually high frequency. In fact, the variations were so common they couldn't be accidental mutations, but instead were probably due to natural selection, where genetic changes that are favorable to a species quickly gain a foothold and begin to spread, the researchers report.

Girls who regularly ate breakfast, particularly one that includes cereal, were slimmer than those who skipped the morning meal, according to a study that tracked nearly 2,400 girls for 10 years.

He declined to give a revised estimate. But he added: "Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000."...
...Ever since the hurricane struck Aug. 29, residents, rescuers and cadaver-sniffing dogs have found bodies floating in the waters, trapped in attics or left lying on broken highways. Some were dropped off at hospital doorsteps or left slumped in wheelchairs out in the open...
...Meanwhile, scores of Louisiana National Guardsmen began arriving home from Iraq. About 800 members of Louisiana's 256th Brigade Combat Team volunteered to join the relief effort, while about 1,500 will return to their civilian jobs, if any of those positions are left...

Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son...
...Gore criticized the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina in a speech Friday in San Francisco, but refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew last Saturday and Sunday...
...In the speech, Gore urged that the Bush administration be held accountable for the government's inadequate relief response, particularly "when the corpses of American citizens are floating in toxic floodwaters five days after a hurricane struck."...

Blue morning, blue day, won’t you see things my way

...It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday...
... And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having "an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security"...

A minister said Wednesday that legislation allowing lawsuits against those who help teens get around Missouri's parental consent law for abortions amounts to "a clergy intimidation bill."...
...Some Democrats advocate access to contraception and education as the best way to reduce abortions...

...For bloggers to ignore this emerging threat is to stand willing to be victims one day of similar actions, which might occur not in a socially repressive, free-market country like China, but in a far closer but equally socially repressive, free-market country.

...Translated into English by the Dui Hua Foundation (which works to document the cases of Chinese political prisoners), the verdict reveals that Yahoo ! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account (huoyan-1989@yahoo.com.cn) and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer...

BEIJING -- Chinese bloggers who use Microsoft's new Web portal to post messages captioned "democracy," "capitalism," "liberty" or "human rights" are greeted with a scolding response.

A bright yellow warning appears: "This message includes forbidden language. Please delete the prohibited expression."

The restrictions were agreed upon by Microsoft and its Chinese partner, the government-linked Shanghai Alliance Investment. But the forbidden words have sparked a debate here and in the online world about how free speech could be threatened when the world's most powerful software company forges an alliance with the largest Communist country.

...Surely you realize by now that either the Bush administration knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or, even scarier, was dumb enough to believe it did have them. On Sept. 11, 2001, we had one enemy – a terrorist organization that calls itself al-Qaida. Instead of limiting our response to taking out that organization, President George Bush declared war on the world...

...In the Iraq War we were everybody's sucker. That crook Ahmad Chalabi played us for a sucker, and the Israelis played us for a sucker. They both got what they wanted – the destruction of Saddam Hussein's government without spending a dollar of their money or a drop of their blood. Instead of Iraqi oil paying for the war, as the neocons had promised, we are paying $61 a barrel for oil. After two years of American occupation, the Iraqi people still don't have (1) security, (2) dependable power, (3) cheap and plentiful gasoline, (4) clean water, (5) a decent sewer system or (6) a viable economy...

NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday...
...White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had funded flood control efforts adequately...

Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Rep. Mel Watt, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced today that when Congress returns next Tuesday, they will introduce legislation to protect the thousands of families and small businesses financially devastated by Hurricane Katrina from being penalized by anti-debtor provisions contained in the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, scheduled to take effect on October 17, 2005. Reps. Conyers, Nadler, and Jackson Lee released the following joint statement:
...
The legislation we plan to introduce will prevent new bankruptcy provisions from having adverse and unintended consequences for the hundreds of thousands now facing financial catastrophe by providing needed flexibility for victims of natural disasters in bankruptcy proceedings...

Hundreds are mourning the loss of their loved ones after the stampede in Kadimiya in Iraq yesterday.

Panicked by rumors of a suicide bomber, hundreds of Shiite pilgrims were killed during a religious procession, which broke into a stampede.

According to reports, more than 800 have died, majority of them women and children.

This is the single biggest loss of life in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.