Although the 10th Circuit Court has called the policy unconstitutional, from now on all websites with 'explicit' (lascivious' is OK) content will have to keep records about the individual portrayed. Even if the image is originally from another source. These records must be very extensive.
Because of that, personals websites will no longer be able to post explicit images of members. Gay.com has already removed all adult images from their site.
This is supposed to protect children (I guess) but instead will have the effect of closing MANY sites that do not have records of the original models. EVERY image must be accompanied by such records.
As one adult-oriented website put it (SFW) "We are not deviants. We have no interest in the sexual exploitation of children. That's what record companies are for."
The head American Commander in the Persian Gulf today told congress:
"I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago." As to the overall strength of the insurgency, Abizaid said it was "about the same" as six months ago. - AP
Then in today's White House Press Briefing: spokesperson Scott McClellan tried to spin this to somehow not coflict with the Vice President's delusional "last throes" comment. I love this reporter, who ever she/he is.
Q Does the President agree with the Vice President that the Iraqi insurgents are in their last throes?
MR. McCLELLAN: He agrees with -- I think you should put his comments in context, because the President agrees that there is significant progress being made by the Iraqi people on the political front. And that's what the Vice President was talking about in his remarks.
[snip]
...you have to look at the context of the Vice President's comments.
Q I did, I looked.
MR. McCLELLAN: And you don't point them out. What did he talk about?
Q He said there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago.
[snip]
MR. McCLELLAN: It doesn't appear that you've looked at the context of his comments, and I would encourage you to do that. And I just addressed this question when you asked it.
Q I was there in this -- when he said, "in the throes of," --
MR. McCLELLAN: You were in the interview?
Q He did not mean political, he meant the whole situation in Iraq.
MR. McCLELLAN: You were in the interview? I think you should look --
Q You can't change his meaning. You guys are trying to step back now, and I don't blame you.
"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers" -Karl Rove, June 22 2005 (video)
How dare he say that as I sat terrified in my New York apartment and watched the twin towers crumble, my thoughts were "let's give therapy to these people... these poor people are just misunderstood."
No, Karl, you are totally fucking wrong. How dare you play petty politics with the tragedy of 9/11? And isn't it convenient that you are raking up the mud at the point when your brainchild administration's poll numbers are in the toilet?
My first thought was for my friends who live and work in Manhattan, and my second thought (and I'm not proud of this, though it's certainly understandable) was "nuke 'em."
Rove's statement is simply gross, and right now I want to kick him in the head. What he suggested said out loud at a ballroom event held only a few miles from ground zero is reprehensible, despicable and totally characteristic of the entire Bush administration. While I worried about my friends, Rove's eyes lit up with the dollar signs of new-found political capital.
The one thing New York has had since Sept. 11 is unity...To inject politics into this and to defame a large number of people [is outrageous] It's not what New York and America is all about.
If Rove does not retract with a full apology, he must step down in disgrace. If he does not retract with a full apology, he is standing beside remarks that purposefully demonize, defame, and injure those who disagree with him. Moreover, he would be saying that his remarks do characterize "what America is all about." Maybe in his fantasies.
UPDATE: Took a breather. While Rove must be made to pay, this must not distract from the grater issue at hand: the Democrats are winning, and the NeoCons are using barbed language to disguise this fact as everyday partisanship. I think it's clear, as Nancy Pelosi so nicely put it, that "The President is on the ropes." Why else would Rove (who is a genius--an evil genius) take one for the team like this? It's a trap!
W: Make America More Vulnerable to Radiological Attack
Today, Bush pushed for the construction of new nuclear power plants on US soil. With the track record of current US nuclear facilities (see below), this is like planning to leave a basket full of grenades at a daycare center and walking away. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl both happened without the help of terrorists--just imagine the horror that an intentional attack could bring! New Democrat Language: Bush is planning to make the US more vulnerable to domestic radiological attacks.
Considering the fact that a nuclear plant houses more than a thousand times the radiation as released in an atomic bomb blast,the magnitude of a single attack could reach beyond 100,000 deaths and the immediate loss of tens of billions of dollars.
Such an attack would probably not result in a Chernobylesque meltdown, but rather a much more devastating release of radiation from the spent fuel rods that sit in relatively-unprotected pools next to the concrete-domed reactor. Said Bob Alvarez, a former senior advisor to the Department of Energy who worked on emergency preparedness:
This is the most consequential vulnerability of nuclear power in the country, and that is not a secret. They could release 5 to 10 times more radioactivity than a nuclear reactor meltdown.
10 Times More Radiation Than a Meltdown? But There's Security, Right? Astoundingly, no. There isn't. Earlier this month, Massachusetts Democratic congressman Edward Markey described his recent investigation of the Seabrook Nuclear facility:
The fence is broken [and has been for months], the security cameras don't work, and some required security analysis hasn't even been performed. It seems the plant motto is 'see no evil, hear no evil, maybe no evil exists.'
Think that's an isolated incident? It's not. There have been over 120 documented incidents of intentional, internal sabotage at US nuclear power plants. As for external threats (i.e., terrorists):
In exercises conducted by the NRC between 1992 and 1998, guards at 27 of 57 nuclear plants failed to keep mock intruders from inflicting simulated damage sufficient to put the nuclear core in jeopardy-this despite the fact that reactor owners got 6 to 12 months' advance notice of the visits, and until recently were allowed to beef up their security staffs to respond to the attacks. (One intruder bypassed the detection system seven times simply by crawling or jumping past a checkpoint.)
Read that again. They were told a year in advance when to be ready--a courtesy I doubt terrorists are likely to extend--and were allowed to hire temps for the mock attack, and they still failed!
So perhaps we should store the spent fuel in a safe place? Unfortunately there isn't one--this stuff stays radioactive for millennia--longer than any man-made structure on the planet has existed. The current idea (and by current, I mean 1978) is to build a storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but to this day construction hasn't even started. And how does the government plan to get this incredibly dangerous material to Nevada? By highway, on trucks. (In 2000, there were 5,275 fatal truck accidents in the US - PDF).
Do you live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor (or within 50 miles of a major highway)? If so, you should already be concerned. If not, you might find yourself with a new nuclear neighbor if Bush's plan for plant construction is successful.
These two cuts alone total 45,000 jobs cuts planned in June. In other words, these two cuts alone are equivalent to over 77% of April's total US job cuts.
I hope nobody else loses their job, or it's going to be a massacre. And there's another week to go in the month!
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night...
Our policy is the correct one....[They do not qualify for Geneva Convention protection but] in spite of that they are still treated with respect and dignity.
Update: Jeff Sessions, R- Ala., "expressed impatience at Democrats who called for more legal rights for detainees. He said the newly constructed facility at Guantanamo was on 'a beautiful site' and 'would make a magnificent resort.'" - MSNBC, hat tip Wonkette
The House voted yesterday to allow us to read library books and buy tomes from bookstores without Big Brother watching. In a surprise turn, many Republicans joined with Democrats to repeal this worrisome section of the Patriot Act.
This is a clear message that the Democrats are on the side of the American People, and that the American People have spoken up with such volume that even lockstep NeoCons broke party ranks.
Perhaps they suddenly remembered the true meaning of "freedom." Not freedom to express hate for others, as is so commonly advocated by this administration, but freedom to learn, to educate ourselves, and to make informed decisions. Hunh, maybe that's exactly what they are afraid of. If Americans started educating themselves instead of just being idiots "dittoheads," they would understand how corrupt this administration has become. In the words of Congressman Bernie Sanders, this is an "administration intent on chipping away at the very civil liberties that define us as a nation."
Of course, it would be important to know if someone being watched as a terror suspect were learning how to build bombs. But our constitution provides for that. As noted in the Fox News coverage of the story:
"If the government suspects someone is looking up how to make atom bombs, go to a court and get a search warrant," said Jerold Nadler, D-N.Y.
That the government would want the right to look at what it's citizens are reading, without their permission, or even any clear record of such investigation is frankly alarming. Under the old Patriot Act, the government did not even have to specify why it was looking into such records; pre-greasing the slippery slope if I've ever seen it.
Bush said before the vote that he would veto the measure. I wonder why?
Asked how long [Gitmo detainees] could be held, [Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas L.] Hemingway said: "I think we can hold them as long as the conflict endures."
Leahy questioned the administration's assertion that the prison camp was an essential part of the U.S.-led war on terror. "All of us know this war will not end in our lifetime," Leahy said. - AP
I also can see why this is unacceptable:
A dozen prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to "the battlefield" to fight against the United States, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Wednesday.
"There are several people that we have released that we know have come back and fought against America because they have been recaptured or killed on the battlefield," he said after meetings in Brussels with European Union officials. - Reuters
This was clearly a straightforward, personal issue, in which the Bush administration interfered. For all their talk about "freedom," this administration exerts control over even the most intimate of personal interactions. It's time to tell the NeoCons to stay out of our personal business.
Calling conservative Republicans! Where are you? Please take back your party!
This is bittersweet news. While it points to the fact that people with HIV/AIDS are living longer, it is also a clarion call for better prevention of HIV transmission.
The fact is, in the US alone, 1/4 of those with HIV don't even know they are infected.
As CNN fights to reinvent itself in the face of its worst ratings in years (FOX News is beating the pants off them), they've added a show from CNNI (their international channel) to the regular lineup.
The same poll I mention in my previous post on GM's job cuts shows that Bush is now, officially, an unpopular president. His approval rating is 20 points lower than Clinton's at the time of the impeachment. His approval rating is lower than Nixon's just a month before the one of the largest and most-recognized protests in American history: Operation Dewey Canyon III.
Tell your friends (new language): Bush is unpopular.The majority of Americans think he is doing a bad job. Forget "mandate," and start thinking about how Bush betrayed his followers, and has done even worse than predicted by critics like myself. Bush is unpopular at home, and dangerously so in other countries (who, unlike us, have not forgotten about the Downing Street Memo).
Ironically, the economy is one of the few areas that Bush hasn't taken a pummeling lately. A new Washington Post/ABC News Poll shows that the percentage of people who think the economy is doing well astonishingly increased, from 37% in April to 44% in May. The news from GM is likely to change that, as are the numbers from May's planned job cuts (below).
The weak European economy. As international businesses struggle in Europe, Americans lose their jobs.
Anybody who fails to see that we can no longer "go it alone," fails to realize that the American way of life is inextricably connected to other countries' economies, politics, and the day-to-day life of their citizens.
Bolton says he's just watching out for America's own interests. He doesn't get it. The interests of others are now our interests--whether we want them to be or not.
Watch him explain his view of the UN in this clip from before his nomination (i.e., being honest outside the constraints of a job interview). The best part is near the end when he flips out Khrushchev-style.
He is clearly an unabashed unilateralist, in a time when the US is in great need of its allies. Is this really who we want at the UN, representing us in the global community? (Hint: No.)
[Sgt. Robert] Stout, of Utica, Ohio, was awarded the Purple Heart after a grenade sent pieces of shrapnel into his arm, face and legs while he was operating a machine gun on an armored Humvee last May.
The Daily Delay is urging people to call the Majority and Minority leaders of the Ethics Commitee and urge them to appoint an outside counsel to investigate Tom Delay, aka the most corrupt politician in the District (and that's saying something).
I've pasted the numbers below. Once you've called, leave a comment at Daily Delay to let them know how it went. They already have almost a hundred confirmed calls in the last couple hours.
Ethics Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) WA Office: 509-543-9396 DC Office: 202-225-5816.
Ranking Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) WV Office: 304-232-5390 DC Office: 202-225-4172
Don't worry, they won't want to actually talk to you, they'll just take your name and state.
In 2003 Donald Rumsfeld suggested that "a careful reading of Amnesty International" would be convincing cause to go to war in Iraq. Today, Rumsfeld called the Amnesty indictments of Gitmo "outrageous charges," and went on to say that any organization making such statements clearly has no "claim to objectivity or seriousness."
What I can't take seriously is anyone still in power who claimed in 2002 (of US military action in Iraq):
"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy USA Today
P.S. That photo above is a violation of the Geneva convention... just sayin'
