Several Democratic lawmakers have been calling for Ashcroft to remove himself from the case for months, arguing that the former Republican senator from Missouri has a conflict of interest because of his close ties to senior White House aides. FBI agents have questioned top figures in the administration, including senior advisor Karl Rove.

...But perhaps the single most impressive feat accomplished thus far by local grassroots campaign supporters belongs to those stumping for Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Within 36 hours of the candidate's announcement of a visit to the University of Michigan campus between campaign stops in Houston and Iowa earlier this month, Kucinich supporters pulled together more than 200 people through e-mails and phone calls.

The crowd swelled beyond the confines of the room reserved in the Michigan League, prompting an outdoor speech.

"It's a lot of work, but all worthwhile when it's someone you believe in," said Mares Herchert, of Hartland, who forwarded dozens of e-mail announcements on the event through a network of names she found through the candidate's Internet site.

Herchert also pledged to insert appeals for supporting Kucinich in her annual holiday cards. "You can't get much more grassroots than that," she said.

"For years, as a Colorado River guide I told people how the Grand Canyon was formed over the evolutionary time scale of millions of years. Then I met the Lord. Now, I have 'a different view of the Canyon, which, according to the Biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than about a few thousand years old.'"

I like Dennis Kucinich even though he looks rather peculiar. This is not a beauty pagent and everything he says is quite correct. He hasn't missed one issue that he's turned to that he hasn't been, in my view at least, right about.

People won't take him seriously because he's the wrong height, and um, the hair is deplorable. It's the only negative thing I can say about him, but then, he can get a crewcut perhaps, on inauguration day.

If they'd take him seriously, people might listen to the issues. If they'd listen to the issues, things might start to change, but they won't. They can't. Same people who own the political system own the media.

"In the tradition of Lenny Bruce, it's about f---ing time," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

A study in the latest Journal of the National Cancer Institute describes an altered adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene that can be found in precancerous and cancerous esophageal tissue and in the bloodstream. With such a blood test, doctors could more accurately determine a cancer's stage, observe the effectiveness of various therapies, and screen for the cancer's return after treatment.
When Meltzer and his team examined cancer tissue DNA from patients diagnosed with two types of esophageal cancer, they found the methylated APC gene in 92 percent of the 52 patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma, and in half of the 32 patients with squamous cell cancer of the esophagus.

The CEO and chairman of the Clergy Leadership Network, Reverend Albert M. Pennybacker, explained, "The Christian Right has been very articulate, but they have been exclusive and very judgmental of anyone who doesn't agree with them. People may want to label us the Christian Left. But what we really are about is mainstream issues and truth, and if that makes us 'left,' then that shines even more light on the need for a shift in our society."

Goard allowed Florida Republican Party workers to modify absentee ballot requests in her office in the weeks leading up to the election.

The GOP workers added voter-ID numbers to about 2,000 requests initially rejected by Goard's office. Jacobs, a Democrat, asked the courts to throw out the nearly 16,000 absentee ballots cast by Seminole County voters.

Had Jacobs won, then-Vice President Al Gore would have defeated George W. Bush for the presidency.

Ms. Granholm and her senior environmental and economic advisors unexpectedly shut out a feisty citizens group and aided the world’s largest food company in a two-year-old David and Goliath legal struggle that affects all of Michigan. The issue: The security of the state’s treasure trove of fresh water.

MESILLA, N.M. - Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said Tuesday the United States needs the United Nations to develop a constitution for Iraq and warned that America cannot be the only nation calling the shots to rebuild the country.

Key Dates: Secrecy and the Bush Administration

Inauguration Day (1/20/01) Administration freezes Clinton-era regulations, without allowing for public comment.

10/12/01 Attorney General John Ashcroft, reversing Clinton policy, encourages agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act requests if a "sound legal basis" exists.

10/26/01 President Bush signs U.S.A. Patriot Act, expanding law enforcement powers and government surveillance.

2/22/02 Congress's General Accounting Office sues Vice President Dick Cheney for refusing to disclose records of his energy task force; the GAO eventually loses its case. A separate private case is pending.

3/19/02 White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card directs federal agencies to protect sensitive security information.

11/25/02 Bush signs Homeland Security Act. Its provisions restrict public access to information filed by companies about "critical infrastructure," among other matters.

01/3/03 Administration asks, in papers filed before the Supreme Court, for significant narrowing of the Freedom of Information Act.

3/25/03 Bush issues standards on classified material, favoring secrecy and reversing provisions on openness.

Consumption simply is, and through myth and ritual it affirms and acts out (in a heightened and intensified sense) the truth of the cosmic (Economic) order that is already revealed in everyday life. And this truth is that the way things are is the way they ought to be; and the way things are in postmodern culture when things truly are, is the way things are when persons consume. Thus, like every other entity in culture, individuals serve the Economy; and when they serve rightly, they prosper. Why? Because of the sacred order and process of the Economy itself.

[...] To recap my argument: religion in postmodern society is that collection of culturally embedded phenomena that mediate individual and collective relationships with the sacred power of the Economy through acquisition-consumption-disposal. It is not enough to simply acquire and consume objects and images. One must do both and one must also dispose of the objects and images for the sacred to be experienced. The entire process must be completed, for only then (in the cyclical manner that is elemental to cosmological systems) can the process begin again. The quicker the process is completed and then begun again, the greater is one’s experience of the sacred, and hence the greater one’s power in the socio-religious system.

[...] During holy-day cycles, tertiary myths are widely communicated and fervently reaffirmed; one needs only consider the increased number and size of newspaper inserts on weekends before holidays, TV holiday commercials, and the greater number of ads in the holiday issues of magazines. Additionally, holy-day advertisements (tertiary myths) are acutely focused on the sacred concerns of specific holidays. In these myths we discover sacred narratives about objects appropriate or simply available for ritual acquisition during specific holy days: lawn and garden tools for Memorial Day, summer foods and beverages for The Fourth, jewelry for Valentine’s Day, fall apparel for Labor Day, you-name-it at Christmas, and who-knows-what for America’s newest holiday – Patriot Day, to be celebrated on September 11. To the degree that Patriot Day becomes a genuine postmodern holy day, it will generate its own tertiary myths and Americans will respond with rituals of acquisition, for this is what happens on holy days in American culture.

Christmas is, of course, the most vivid illustration of the postmodern sacralization of holidays and the greatest holy-day cycle of postmodern culture. Christmas is, however, only the most dramatic and dynamic example of neo-cosmological religiosity. It is thus different from other holy days, not so much in essence or substance as in degree and size. During Christmas and other holyday cycles, pilgrimages to shrines and temples (stores and shopping malls) are more frequent. Persons may review the tertiary myths more closely and become more focused in their performance of sacred rituals of acquisition; fulfilling their dharma as consumers, reaffirming their primordial relationship with the Economy’s sacred power.

Dennis Kucinich, will make a quick campaign stop in El Paso today.

Kucinich will attend a fund-raising dinner at 5:30 p.m. at Cafe Mayapan and then will go to a private fund-raiser.

Tuesday, Kucinich will visit Mesilla and Las Cruces. He will appear at a rally on the Mesilla Plaza at 10 a.m. and at a noon luncheon at the Mountain View Co-Op Market.

Dennis Kucinich, in an interview with Salon and LinkTV shows why he's the only real liberal in the Democratic race, and brilliantly deconstructs arguments he is 'unelectable'. I'm just more and more impressed with him. I think he'd have a superb relationship with other world leaders as President, and having that kind of collaboration and cooperation, instead of the Bush bullying and unilateralism and confrontation, could make all the difference in the world. Even if 2004 is not his year, watch this guy -- he's not going away and could well turn out to be the best President of the 21st century.

As need increased, the level of resources available to help meet that need at emergency food assistance facilities decreased in 52 percent of the cities, increased in 35 percent, and remained the same in 13 percent. Just over half the cities surveyed said they are not able to provide an adequate quantity of food to those in need. And nearly two-thirds of the cities reported they had to decrease the quantity of food provided and/or the number of times people can come to get food assistance. An average of 16 percent of the demand for emergency food assistance is estimated to have gone unmet in the survey cities.

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez on Tuesday gave Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich a third-party boost, endorsing his run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Gonzalez, president of the Board of Supervisors and one of the most prominent elected member of the nation's Green Party, said Kucinich represents the best of the Democratic Party.

"He's unapologetic about his politics and the progressive nature of what he represents," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said the Democrats have fielded several candidates better than President George Bush and that Kucinich "stands out as the real deal."

Kucinich, appearing with Gonzalez at the Studio Z community space in SoMa, said Gonzalez's endorsement validates him as a "green Democrat."

He said Gonzalez's support will help him carry the Bay Area and he hopes to work with Gonzalez as the next president.

Gonzalez said his endorsement is implicitly a statement that the Green Party should not be fielding a candidate as long as there is a choice who represents its views.

"At some point, we have to be willing to cross party lines and endorse the best candidate in the field," Gonzalez said.

The Justice Department's inspector general announced today that investigators had found hundreds of prison videotapes that were not turned over by federal prison officials during an earlier investigation and that the tapes confirm reports of serious physical and verbal abuse of immigrants detained after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.


Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that "some officers slammed and bounced detainees against the wall, twisted their arms and hands in painful ways, stepped on their leg restraint chains and punished them by keeping them restrained for long periods of time," according to a report released today. [ read more ]

The IRS, through the small office of "Director of Practice," claims the authority to wield carte blanche authority over all the other powers of government -- the authority to monitor, surveil, and eavesdrop on political dissenters, the authority to pry into the private financial records of banks, businesses, and taxpayers, the authority to conduct secret investigations under a criminal grand jury, and the authority to censure political dissenters by branding on them a badge of infamy and stripping them of governmentally-protected licenses. In short, under the guise of a "practice" investigation, the IRS claims the right to wield all intrusive and invasive powers of government available.

He informed some of his relatives of his intentions to betray Saddam and "contacted the Americans through one relative he trusted," the newspaper said.

They agreed on a plan by which Muslit had "to drug the Iraqi president...to guarantee his capture alive, without giving him an opportunity to resist or to escape from the trap that was laid out for him," the report said. The officer "succeeded in drugging Saddam in his hideout,"

(CBS) For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.

"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," said Thomas Kean.

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame. [ read the story ]

U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was sanctioned by a federal judge on Tuesday for twice violating a court-imposed gag order in the Detroit terror trial.

But Ashcroft, the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement officer, will not face criminal charges of contempt of court. He apologized for what he said were inadvertent comments.

"Two serious transgressions committed in this case are simply one too many for the court to abide with no response," U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen wrote in an 83-page opinion. "More than a warning is necessary here."

Rosen criticized comments Ashcroft made at two press conferences -- the first on Oct. 31, 2001, and the second on April 17 -- in which Ashcroft praised a government witness during the trial of four Arab immigrants in Detroit.

Rosen chose to issue a public admonishment, a sanction that falls short of rebuking Ashcroft with a formal reprimand. [ more, if you can stomach it ]

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16th. In a stunning victory for medical marijuana, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of patients Angel Raich and Diane Monson to possess and cultivate marijuana for their own personal medical use in accordance with Prop. 215.

In a 2-1 ruling, Justices Pregerson and Paez held that the federal government lacked power under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution to interfere with the plaintiffs' possession and cultivation of marijuana for personal use. The court ordered a preliminary injunction barring the government from arresting Raich or Monson for violating the Controlled Substances Act.

"This is an enormous victory for medical marijuana patients," declared California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer, one of the original authors of Prop. 215, "It essentially makes Prop. 215 federal law in California" (The decision should also apply to the other states in the Ninth Circuit with medical marijuana laws, namely Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Nevada and Hawaii).

The decision did not address the broader question of the federal government's authority over marijuana distribution and commerce within California, an issue that is the subject of a second, pending appeal by the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana and the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative. This marks the first case in which the Controlled Substances
Act has been held unconstitutional. The court's decision was based entirely on the Commerce Clause and did not address other issues raised by the plaintiffs, such as states' rights or the fundamental right of patients to relief from pain and suffering under the 5th and 9th amendments.

Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.

..."We have a real problem with drugs in our schools,'' she said, "and they're using our narcotics officers to entrap me for selling a vibrator.''

"The National Council of Churches USA welcomes the news that Saddam Hussein has been captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. As demonstrated by the displays of celebration in the streets of Baghdad, the arrest of this dictator should bring to an end the fear that has gripped Iraqis throughout his long reign, a fear that has lingered throughout these last several months of U.S. occupation. It is our hope now for the Iraqi people that freedom will flourish in their country.

As the next days and weeks unfold, we remind the U.S. government that the world will be watching to see how we treat our adversaries after they are in our custody. This presents a teachable moment in western ideals and democracy. We therefore urge the US government not to give in to the temptation of vengeance or expediency, but to facilitate the prosecution of Hussein in a manner consistent with the highest accepted international standards of justice.

As for the court process itself, no trial is possible based on evidence to date of weapons of mass destruction, or of a link between Hussein and the terrorism of 9/11-- two reasons many Americans believe we went to war in the first place. Prosecution should instead focus on the abundant evidence of heinous crimes he committed against his own people. For this, the Iraqis themselves must play a prominent role in what should be a public trial."

When I was a little boy in Albany, N.Y., I delivered newspapers. Whenever there was a big story, like the day Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped, the newspapers rushed into print with an extra edition to tell everyone about it.

There was no television then.

Newspaper boys went out in the street with bundles of papers, yelling,

"Extra, extra, extra!" I felt sorry for newspaper editors this morning. The papers were on the street before they knew Saddam Hussein had been captured.

Not a word about it in the paper.

Like most Americans, I first heard the news when I turned on the radio this morning. I went to my television set and sure enough, there was Dan Rather, a fireman in the television news business, yelling "Extra, extra, extra!"

I had a hundred thoughts about Saddam Hussein while I was eating breakfast.

What was his mother like?

I hope we don't kill him.

I hope we don't let him kill himself.

He's a great source of information and such an egotistical bastard that he'll enjoy telling us everything.

If you made a list of the 10 most evil men of all time - there has never been a woman so evil - Saddam Hussein would be on the list.

My history isn't good enough to name all the old ones like Genghis Khan, Nero, Caligula, Attila the Hun, but we all know the modern bad guys: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Qaddafi, Khomeini, Marcos.

We congratulate ourselves all the time on our democracy here in America and for not having had a dictator. I don't know whether we've been lucky or smart. It could happen.

The people who follow an evil leader don't have to be evil themselves. They can be dumb, uninformed, disinterested in the world, or just too absorbed with their personal problems to care about their government. It's been amazing, really, that this great democracy of ours has lasted so long.

A dictator doesn't usually just come in and take over. He moves in little by little. That's why every country, even so free and democratic a one as ours, with a nice guy as president, has to watch out.

It's why some Americans - me for example - are nervous about something like the recently enacted Patriot Act. We're even nervous about saying we're nervous, for fear of sounding un-American.

Anyway, we've all been looking for the perfect Christmas present, and now we've got it: The capture of Saddam Hussein. It's the best gift we could possibly get, and we thank the men who gave it to us.

Written By Andy Rooney © MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Of all the candidates, only Dennis Kucinich has the courage to call for a "single payer" (government-run) health-care system, the kind used successfully by every other industrialized nation in the world.

And this, in my opinion, brings to mind the greatest problem the Democrats face: letting the Republicans define them.

The Fox News spinners, like those on MSNBC, giggle at a candidate like Kucinich and dismiss him as a representative of the lunatic fringe.

But I ask you, how crazy is it to try to drag America into the 21st century when it comes to health care? (To say nothing of the 20th! Germany has had universal health care for more than 100 years.)

And how crazy would it be to finally, finally, relieve employers of the responsibility of providing health care for their employees? Right now, the payment of health-care costs is perhaps the biggest sticking point between unions and employers.

...Something's going on in this country, and the Democrats had better pick up on it. Books by Moore, Al Franken and other outspoken liberal writers are selling big. There is a hunger for reform, for the return of decency to our nation's politics and policies.

The Democrats can provide that. But to do so they have to return to their Democratic roots. More important, they have to stop letting the Republicans define them. Good Democrats are good people who are good for our country. Wishy-washy, lukewarm Democrats aren't good for anything.

Drugs provided a marvellously adaptable and popular subject matter for authors - as sexy, sensational or sordid as they wanted. It has been a more mixed story for literary drug users. Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn't handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is hosting an important Hill briefing ( The Politics of Pain Management )on Tuesday, and they need your help in encouraging your Congressmen to attend. So give your rep a call on Monday morning if you can.

Call the D.C. offices. The main switchboard is 202.224.3121. They will patch you through to your members.

It sounds like a great briefing, including 5 groups taking part in the Coalition Against Prosecutorial Abuse (CAPA): [ more details ]

A retired teacher has broken her silence to reveal she's the love child of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond and his family's black maid.

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

The plan is to ditch the greenback in one way or another and an alternative proposal is to trade international oil in a basket of currencies other than the US$.

...Arab nations are mindful of the fact that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's decision to convert his country's international trading to the Euro may have accelerated the US/UK invasion of Iraq but they are somewhat strengthened by China's plans backed by similar Russian plans to join the Euro as the US currency continues its freefall.

Gore was a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, the moderate Democrats who moved the party to the center. In 2000, he ran as a “people against the powerful” populist. Now he’s endorsing Dean and joining the liberal wing of the party to oppose the Clinton centrists.

...Clinton, for all his moral failings, talked comfortably about religion, and Jimmy Carter was a born-again Christian. Dean is puzzled why minimum-wage workers who have no health benefits would vote Republican. The answer he’d rather not hear is they care more about God, gays and guns than health care. “Our challenge is to raise the cultural armies in our America while not waking the sleeping giant in their America,” Rove tells Bush in Greenberg’s fictional account. Dean’s challenge if he becomes the nominee is to elevate the debate, and to make this election about real issues and contrasts, and not about which guy you’d rather sit next to in a church pew. [ read it all ]

The day after Dennis Kucinich took ABC debate moderator Ted Koppel to task for avoiding questions that would be useful to voters in favor of questions about endorsements, money, and polls, ABC pulled its fulltime "embedded" reporter from the Kucinich campaign.

As Big Left Outside says:
Whether you are Republican, Democrat, or Independent... whether you like Dennis Kucinich or hate him or don't care... something much larger is at stake here... and ABC should not be allowed to use our airwaves to pick and choose which candidates are in the race. ( read the comments too )

The White House contacted the CEO of AdvancePCS – a pharmacy benefit management company – while it was writing key parts of the Medicare "drug discount card" bill, despite the fact that the company would make millions from the bill, and the President himself was an original investor in the company. The CEO, David Halbert, had previously "helped clean up a deal with Harken Energy that had prompted an SEC investigation of George W. Bush," was a big funder of Bush's gubernatorial campaigns, and had given Bush the investment opportunity in AdvancePCS, which made the President up to $1 million.

RHINO HERE:
Some may know that The Rhino was a founding member & 13 year resident of the spiritual/activist community in Tennessee known as "The Farm". That community was the subject of many news pieces, including a few articles in the 70's in The Nashville Tennesean written by a young reporter named Al Gore. He was more than just another reporter to us, he became a friend. When he ran for Congress, we campaigned for him. He later assisted in efforts to legalize & promote natural childbirth & midwifery.

Al was an honest left leaning Southerner with a soft spot for beatniks. Fast forward a bunch of years & the man has changed in many ways. Hey, so has The Rhino. But maintaining idealism (& sanity) while breathing for years inside The Beltway is a very difficult practice. So when I meet a man like Dennis Kucinich, hear him speak as he did in Tuesday night's New Hampshire debate, naturally I have to support him however I can. I'd love to have him as leader of "the Free World".

But alas, we seek to shove on the drift of the United States Government . Compromise will be necessary. For instance, an article in today's Blog by Tom Hayden entitled, "The Anybody-But-Dean Syndrome," presents the possibility that Kucinich supporters in Iowa, bitter towards the anti-war but not progressive enough stances of Howard Dean, could be the sway that lets Dick Gephardt win.

Rhino believes Progressives best realize that while Doctor Dean is no Dennis Kucinich, & while he doesn't stand for as many progressive principles as Dennis, that he is none the less a principled man, who continues to show a kind of toughness that it will take when the vast right wing conspiracy tries to get a hold of him.

The Rhino proposes that if Howard Dean wants the votes of we Kucinich supporters, he should promise that if he becomes President, he'll ask Dennis to come aboard as the 1st Secretary of the U.S. Department of Peace, & give him free reign to follow out his plan, which, if you haven't read it, you should.
Dept. of Peace Legislation at: Department of Peace
More bill info here (search for bill HR1673)
continue reading Rhino's Blog daily

Gus W. Weiss, 72, adviser to four presidents on top secret policy matters, died violently in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2003, but his death was not reported by The Washington Post until December 7, 2003, in the obitiuary section at the bottom of page C12. His home town newspaper, The Nashville Tennessean, was only a week late in reporting his death, but at that late date all they could say was, "The circumstances surrounding his death could not be confirmed last night."

...Weiss...died Nov. 25 of a fall from the Watergate East residential building in the District. The D.C. medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

...'''He was wired into the intelligence community, and there were a lot of mystical secrets we weren't privy to,' said Harris Gilbert, a Nashville attorney who had been friends with Mr. Weiss since childhood. 'He was very interested in diplomatic strategy and was VERY, VERY OPPOSED TO THE IRAQ WAR. It was the first military action he ever opposed, but he believed we shouldn't go to war in the Middle East without knowing what we were getting into.'''

A new drug that delivers a widely used cancer medicine in a novel way significantly improves the medicine's effectiveness while avoiding many of the serious side effects, doctors reported here on Friday.

The new drug, Abraxane, is a form of paclitaxel, the generic name for Taxol, which is used to treat various forms of cancer. In a clinical trial involving 460 women with breast cancer that had spread elsewhere in their bodies, tumors shrank in 33 percent of those who received Abraxane compared with 19 percent of those who received Taxol.

Events surrounding last month's coup in post-Soviet Georgia, read in light of recent State Department documents, suggest that seemingly innocuous NGOs now play a central role in the policy of US-engineered "regime change" set forth in the notorious National Security Strategy of the United States.

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio), who drew as large and active a crowd as many of his rivals, offered frustrated Floridians the clearest alternative to Bush. Kucinich said he would pull troops out of Iraq, create a federal department of peace and dramatically expand the government to cover more health care and education needs.

Kucinich called for a country interested in preserving world peace.

“We need a president who will work with America to stand up with the world community,” he said. Should Kucinich become president, he said he would sign such international treaties as the Chemical Weapons Ban and Kyoto Treaty.

"In 2004, we will vote in such numbers that not even Jeb Bush will be able to fix it," said Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Kucinich and Clark also had a major presence, though it was unclear whether the effort would yield lasting benefits to any of the campaigns

The way CBS chickened out of telecasting their miniseries, The Reagans, you would’ve thought the screenplay had referred to a claim in the wife of Peter Lawford’s biography of her husband that Nancy Reagan gave the best blowjobs in Hollywood. You would’ve figured that it must have revealed the details of her alleged affair with Frank Sinatra–he did it her way–or maybe, who knows, her apocryphal fling with former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates. You would’ve been certain there was footage from that gay orgy in which, according to Larry Flynt, Reagan had participated before he was president. [ continue reading ]

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes along with Jello Biafra and other guests will be playing a Get Out The Vote Benefit Concert for Matt on December 8, 2003 at Slim's 333 11th @ Folsom, South of Market San Francisco. Come out for the cause!

Tish is one of the Bloggers for Matt

Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software -- which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary -- on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it.

... there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.

Republican members of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why.