St Patricks Four

These are the four protesters who went into a recuiting office and poured their own blood on the floor to protest the Iraq war. They have all been sent to jail for 4-6 months and had to foot the about $1000 bill to clean the blood. They new it was jail was a posibility and did it anyway in order to make their point which is why they are stronger people than I.

Burn the Liars

Truthout.com
Im lacking in the linguistic skills to properly convay how pissed this makes me. You have an investigation into illegal lobbying that reaches deep into capital hill. Abramoff has pleaded guilty and says he will name names so whats the Republican way of dealing with a problem that could implicate many top level congressmen? Nominate the fucking prosecutor to be a federal judge automaticly taking them off the Abramoff case. The problem is a few Dems like my boy Chuck Shummer from NY will bitch about this and the republicans and Fox will blast them for bringing politics into a matter that is clearly just a nomination of a qualified canidate. The republicans will scream and shout real quick and the vast majority of Dems will hid in the corner not being able to stand because they were born without spines.
If this nomination had nothing to do with the investigation they why did it not take place before or after, why did they not say hey we were going to tell you this just yet but your going to be a judge so dont take this case. They claim Mr. Hillman was up for nomination a year ago, so why would they wait untill he in the start of the investigation of a lifetime?
I suppose it going to get tough for Bush to find many compitent lawyers to nominate who Aren't in the middle of a high level investigation of the government soon. We still have that CIA leak, remeber that where someone in the white house commited Treason by intentionally leaking the name of an undercover agent causing at least one operative to get killed. Remeber that yeah we haven't finished that yet. Hell the Fucking 9/11 commision still has a pile of unaswered questions. Then theres Delay scandals and Abramoff that we were talking about. Then theres the big one that hasn't happened yet and thats looking into the lies that took us into Iraq. We're also going to need an international war crimes tribunal when the wars over. Oh then theres the investigation about the Torture prisons and flights and everything else connected to the torture.
So maybe Bush does have a good reason for pulling a prosecutor off of a high level case investigation, every good prosecutor is working a high level investigation into our corupt government.
I named this post burn the liars and it got away from the level of anger I originaly felt. I just edited a great part out because I dont feel like having the FBI come and drag me out of my office kicking a screaming cause when the FBI comes for me im not going quietly, I want people to know that it was men in black suits with no expresions that made me disapear.
But trust me the suff I took out was good at least if was if you think flame thrower make good toys.

major change

In the last post I mentioned massive sweeping change is better than constant little fixes. Ill put this into terms of something else that im interested in. Rules in racing. Every race series has rules to keep the cars fairly even and to keep the costs from spiralling out of control, also there are rules to slow the cars down when people feel that the cars are getting to fast for their own safety. Ill focus mostly on the slowing the cars rules because I think they'll fit my analogy the best. If you do the typical campaign reforms then this slows down the money momentarily. This is like the rule changes they do every year to keep the cars from being much faster than the previous year. These are minor changes they dont make the car slower so much as they limit how much quicker they'll be than the year before. Then everynow and then the cars just start getting rediculous and these minor changes just arent enough to keep things from getting out of control. This is when you change a major rule on them. A good example would be in the mid 80s when F1 cars were making 900 hp with 1.5 liter turbo motors, well they wanted to slow them so rather than some minor change they made them go to 3 liter NA V10's. this was a whole new ball game and so it took a long time before the NA motors became the 19,000 rpm 950hp beasts that they are today, at which time they are talking of going to 2.6L V8's to slow them again.
So my point is you need to make major changes from time to time to knock them back a bit, the companies will find another way to start funneling money into politicians and then we will do a series of band-aid fixes to slow the escalation of money and then we'll make big changes again. it could also be compared to an arms race but I like race cars not military so I chose mine. Its a battle between the will of those in the companies/at the race teams vs the rules. change the rules and the companies/teams will find away around them to get their results but it takes some time.

My one change

Here is my answer to the question of what would I change about our system if I were given the power, but I'm hoping to hear yours.

42, just kidding

I would remove all private money from campaigns. I don't mean banning soft money or even putting caps on it I mean NO money goes into a campaign. If you want to run for office you go out and get signatures of people in your district and if you get enough then your on the ballot. Once your on the ballot you are given a specific amount of air time and press coverage all paid for by the government. In this way having rich friends does not help you. It also means that with no legal way for companies to buy your influence the elected officials might actually need to listen to their constiuents instead of their investors. I will admit that there will be problems with this system the first one that I can think of is that now pretty much anyone can run, which is good, but how do we keep the ballot from having a thousand people running for president? I'm sure we could work it out maybe a non-partisan primary where you need at least 10% of the vote to make it into the main race. Thats something that we can work on. Personally I believe that the corporate interests have far greater control over our government than they deserve and that this would be the simplest way to eliminate the majority of that control. Masive sweeping change like this is the best way I can think of to close all the loopholes. Every revolution starts with a single act of defiance.

After that I would work on creating a system of un-biased media, then Ill sart a snowball fight in hell while pigs soar efortlessly across the sky...

If you could change one thing....

If you were given the power to change one thing about our political system what would it be? What single thing could be done, if given the power, would do the most good for this nation? This is a simple question that I put out for anyone to respond to.

Anti-Flag

Ill start by saying im a punk rock fan, I dont wear the clothes or the hair but I love the music and the ideology. I like it because of bands like Nofx and Anti-Flag who can range between very silly happy songs to very powerful political songs. Anti-Flag is not too shockingly a very political band with songs like Die for your Govenrment, and Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) they even have a song whose name Im not sure of that is all about how we need to work together and protest because songs aren't enough anymore. Oh if we're talking about political punk you can't not mention the Dead Kennedy's but they broke up quite some time ago. The lead singer was Jello Biafra who was nominated by the NY green party to run for President, he because he felt he was better off helping Ralph Nader than running against him.
If your angry about the people running our country I think its worth giving Anti-Flag a listen if you like punk you'll propably like it, If you only know punk as the crap on the radio then theres a good chance youll like it, if you have no idea what punk music is and just assumed you wouldnt like it because people with mohawks frighten you then give it a try. Punk music is just simple fast rock with a healthy dose of angst thrown in. here is the official website followed by their myspace site, which has some free tunes I think.
http://www.anti-flag.com/
http://www.myspace.com/antiflag
enjoy

couple more things bout the "I"

23% of republicans think this may be an impeachable offense. How your base lookin?
This is all from
http://www.democrats.com/bush-impeachment-poll-2

Impeachment Supported by Majorities of Many Groups
Responses to the Zogby poll varied by political party affiliation: 66% of Democrats favored impeachment, as did 59% of Independents, and even 23% of Republicans. By ideology, impeachment was supported by Progressives (90%), Libertarians (71%), Liberals (65%), and Moderates (58%), but not by Conservatives (33%) or Very Conservatives (28%).
Responses also varied by age, sex, race, and religion. 74% of those 18-29 favored impeachment, 47% of those 31-49, 49% of those 50-64, and 40% of those over 65. 55% of women favored impeachment, compared to 49% of men. Among African Americans, 75% favored impeachment, as did 56% of Hispanics and 47% of whites. Majorities of Catholics, Jews, and Others favored impeachment, while 44% of Protestants and 38% of Born Again Christians did so.
Majorities favored impeachment in every region: the East (54%), South (53%) and West (52%), and Central states (50%). In large cities, 56% support impeachment; in small cities, 58%; in suburbs, 46%; in rural areas, 46%.
Support for Clinton Impeachment Was Much Lower
In August and September of 1998, 16 major polls asked about impeaching President Clinton (http://democrats.com/clinton-impeachment-polls). Only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal. Even so, the impeachment debate dominated the news for months, and the Republican Congress impeached Clinton despite overwhelming public opposition.

The Big "I" with a little bit o' peachment

Kentucky news

So according to Zogby 52% of Americans thing that the president should be impeached if he illegally wire tapped American citizens. We based on Bushes own theory 52% is well into the spectrum of a Mandate. Now that we have this Mandate we need to follow through, of course there is the problem in that what the American people want doesn’t mean shit in this country. You would need some sort of system where the leaders have to listen to the people to have that sort of control, like a democracy or something and obviously were not about to got about changing our entire system just because of the eight hundred thousand scandals going on. Its funny, all presidents seem to run into scandals of some sort but when most have problems they try to hide them by doing something good or starting a war. Then bush comes along and says, hey I gots me a new plan, we’ll completely blindside em’, no one will see this one commin’. There’s the massive scandal about the stolen 2000 election, then there was the constant problems of him always being on vacation then there was the greatest security failure in our nations history then we went to war then he lied and made up “intelligence� and went into another war oh yeah we did piss off the rest of the world in between those two wars then there’s Delay and Abramoff and a million other smaller scandals then there was torture scandals and now the wire tapping see he had a whole new theory that no one had the balls to try before. Instead of trying to fix mistakes or even cover up scandals he would first say that the illegal things were to protect us and then create an even bigger scandal so that we would forget about the last one. Its really quite creative. And no matter what its all to help protect us from the “terrorists� of course were trying like hell not to catch terrorist #1 because that might put a damper on things. Hell terrorist #1 even sends us videos to let us know that he’s still kickin.’ Then again he’s just one man, bush doesn’t need to spend much time on him. How much can one man really do? Its not like Osama has a history of being able to create massive destruction with very limited resources. I mean its not like one world super power trained him in guerrilla tactics in order to fend off the other superpower. Of course if he turns around and attacks those who trained him he’s a terrorist instead of a freedom fighter. But that’s another issue and an old one at that, we have new scandals to worry about and not investigate.

Ok I just found this and I need to include it.
Cron.com
I’ve never heard of this site before but they oddly seem to have the exact opposite polling numbers than Zogby who I’ve heard of many times. Ok so an older poll seems to say that 49% of Americans think its ok to spy on Americans and the more recent one says that 52% think the president should be impeached if he broke the law with the spying. What I'm trying to find is the actual poll info from Zogby so I can see the questions, exact wording is very critical when polling or research. Seriously we’ll spend hours going over the most minor of wording to make sure that people are answering the question we’re trying to ask. I really wish I could find the poll itself instead of the Christian science monitor or the Democrats.com’s interpretation of the poll. If I find it ill post it.
Ok well its not straight from Zogby but it at least shows the wording
The poll found that 52% agreed with the statement:
"If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment."
43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 2.9% margin of error.
That’s from.
Democrats.com

Testing Pesticides

Common Dreams
Testing pesticides, good idea.
Testing pesticides on children and pregnant women, Bad idea.
I dont need an ethics board to figure that one out. Ill admit I onlt had time to skim over this article but that seemed to be the gist of it. It id sound like it was at least rare and they are changing the rules but its still pretty sick.

National Sanctity of Life Day

Damnit All!!!
This is one of those few times where I really wish I had TV maybe I wouldnt have missed this one.
Das White House
I coulda had some fun with this. Its not exactly what they were talking about but its close enough so I would have tried to order this shirt in time for the big national holiday.
T-shirt Hell
So anyway heres a holiday I can really get behind, on this one day out of the year Ill go out of my way not to kill anyone. Of course this doesnt apply to the Iraqi's cause... well im not sure why. It probably should. Did Bush ever even realize there was a sick irony to declaring a National Sanctity of Life day while we were at war? did he ever think to say that to honnor this holiday I just pulled out of my ass we promise not to bomb anyone, we will try not to kill a single innocent civilian all day long. Now that would be impressive, not killing an inocent person for an entire day, eh... it'll never fly.Maybe we could do it Ramadan (i may be thinking of the wrong holiday) style and just say no slaughtering innocents untill sundown? would that be an ok comprimise?
OH wait I forgot this is a Bush plan so he only means protect life untill your born, after that he couldnt care less if you starve to death or are forced into prostitution before your a teen, of course then theres the stories of the forced prostitution in saipan where the girls were forced to have abortions if they became pregnant. Where would that fall into this whole mix? I know of at least a couple of republicans came back saying they thought it was a great little island. If you dont know about saipan, well google it I dont have time to write about that right now.
Well Happy belated dont kill anyone today Day!!!

Go Steelers

My sis lives in Pitt and that town is crazy about the Steelers so I may have to head down there to partake in the revelries. I'd say more but what's the point, Go Steelers

Recruiters, they're just telemarketers

I constantly hear about the problems between protesters and recruiters and recruiters hassling kids and issues like this. So for all the kids out there who are getting pressured by recruiters and aren’t sure what to do Ill give you a little guidance from someone who had to deal with this a few years back when they weren’t so pushy. First off this is assuming that you don’t want to join the military. If you are interested then I would suggest shopping around. If you want to join just so you can kill people and not go to jail then I would suggest the marines. If you want to join but you don’t want to get shot then try the Air Force, although I think they have the highest standards. If you just want the government to pay for your education and your broke then I would suggest looking into grants and scholarships, there’s a lot of money out there if you really look. But if it comes down to it and you need a job and an education and the military is the only option left then at least look around, get the most money/training you can. Remember recruiters are salesmen nothing more they are selling a product, so haggle the best deal you can out of each branch and then set them against each other. Divide and conquer, get them in a bidding war, pretend your making a deal with the devil for your soul, at least get the most for it that you can. Even the typical stunted imagination of today’s youth get pretend enough for that analogy. The people I know who did this both ended up in the Navy which seems to offer the most money, they’re fairly safe but then again they live on a boat, and even an aircraft carrier is pretty small once you look at the bunks, trust me. So back to my advice. First tell them about any medical conditions which my make you exempt. For me it was asthma, they heard that and quickly they started asking if it was still a problem and if a doctor would say it was still a problem, so obviously it was still a problem and I was able to get back to stealing music on Napster, I told you this was a few years ago, back when Napster was new, before I got kicked off by Metalica, fuck you Lars. Any way, Now we get to the main piece of advice I have for the youth who are being harassed by recruiters, LIE. Yup that’s it that’s my big advice. Fuck every person I know who’s joined up has told me that the recruiters lied to them in one way or another, sometimes minor things sometimes some pretty critical shit they lied about. So the old golden rule comes into effect treat them they way there going to treat you, lie tell them anything you can think of to get rid of them. Try the asthma thing, they might check your medical records in which case your fucked on trying to lie about anything medical. If you don’t care then tell them your gay. I would tell you to say you’re a drug addict but honestly that doesn’t stop them anymore. I know two people who should have failed their drug tests, both of them had their recruiters buy them that stuff that’s supposed to clear out your system so you can pass, both people had their recruiters buy them that shit enroute to the drug test. (ok of minor note here, enroute is a real word right? Word is telling me its not) Just remember kids recruiters are just telemarketing salesmen you don’t owe them shit. If your not planning on joining then you need to convince them not just that you don’t want to but that you can’t. This way they wont keep bugging you. If that’s not working then at least be extremely hostile towards them till they are convinced it’s not worth it to even try. You can try calling the cops on them, see if you can press harassment charges against them, if you can pull that off then I would be seriously impressed. But short of that stick with lying and just generally making it extremely clear that your not joining the military. Last time, they are telemarketers, we all enjoy talking shit to telemarketers and there is no reason to think that you owe these bald fucks any more respect than any other telemarketer. You have no obligation to them and many recruiters got that job because they didn’t want combat and they get better pay than a grunt. Call them out on it if you’ve really got balls or your on the phone, ask why they became recruiters, say that you want that job because then you can be a rifle dropper too. Ok now I’m just trying to think of ways to piss off recruiters, now before you take that part of the advice remember they still have a lot of training on how to inflict pain and are often angry people so I wouldn’t necessarily try these things if they encounter you in person. I would give them a false phone number though if they bugged me for one. Wow now I almost wish I was 18 again, I think I would memerize the number for the gay bar in town and give that to recruiters. Ok I’ve rambled enough on this one. Fuck recruiters.

P4P summit

Well Friday I went to the first annual Pipeline 4 Progress summit. I just wrote about how I’m a sucker for a great title and I’m sorry but this one doesn’t do it for me. Ok I should get all of the bad things out now, ok yeah the title could use some work and that’s pretty much it. I got a new understanding of what young people means, I was a little surprised by how many young people have gray hair but hey the number doesn’t matter so long as your young at heart. Oh god is that ever an overused line, forgive my cheesiness. So a few of the highlights, I got to speak with the new mayor of Elmira, that’s where I live in case you missed that. I’m shockingly impressed. I may have seen the light as to why people always say to think globally and act locally. I’ve talked with congressmen before and its not really a conversation so much as to people talking at each other, usually one at a time, but what one says really has no bearing on how the other person responds, you might as well have a debate with a waterfall you have about the same influence. This guy on the other hand was very personable and very open to suggestions. I don’t think that he is the world greatest person or any thing, what makes it more influential is that he’s a very normal fairly intelligent person. He’s just a guy that got sick of what he saw around him and decided to try to make a difference. That’s always a powerful message. So anyway I think I like the local politics because these folks are newer to the game and so they haven't sold out there souls yet. So any way we have a new mayor and I think he’s going to be a good one. He even set up his own website which I will be joining before the sunsets on this day. Here’s his site and Ill add it to the links.
http://www.johntonello.com/

Ok enough about the new mayor. There was also a lot of talk about how ridiculously cheap housing is around here. There were claims about second lowest east of the Mississippi, now I’m not sure about all that but housing is damn cheap around here. So there are more than a few folks around who think we should try to get artists into the area, loft apartments downtown, things like that to encourage the creative class to move to Elmira.
I want to make a connection with the new mayor of Elmira and see if he can help me a little to get to work on the campaign for Eric Massa. I would like to work on that campaign and having even a foot in the door always helps, maybe the new mayor can be my in. It could also be beneficial to Elmira and its mayor to have a person from here working on the campaign of a representative. Just a few thoughts, anyone from the area I hope you were at the Summit and if not then sign up early for the next event because this is not a one time deal. We will be back there is strength and energy in this group. P4P.

Poetic Injustice

Well I got a new site to add check the links. I honestly haven't read much from it but Jason Miller recomended it by writing for it and if its good enough for Jason Miller then its more than likely good enough for me. And lets be honest im a sucker for a great title and this ones an instant classic in my book. So great title and a great author, oh those of you who don't know Jason Miller are really missing out he is a true asset to our political cause, hes simply a great author. I will admit that I was a little giddy when I found out that he put a link to this site from his, maybe hes a sucker for a great title too. I was excited for two reasons on that one. First I have great respect for his writing and so when he gave me a stamp of approval by adding me to his links, i was naturally happy. The second is also big in that its the first, and possibly the only, site that I know of who is linking to me. ok well i have other things to talk about so ill just get this link up for Poetic Injustice and be on my way. I do like that title.

Iraq, the second paragraph is the important one

I was just talking to an old college buddy who is currently serving in Iraq. I obviously wasn’t going to get into the politics of it with a person who has their neck on the line. I have respect for the men and women who are over there. He told me the name of the town he was near and the general location but then laughed as he said that he couldn’t tell me any more specific. Its a little outside of town in the desert, people know that there’s a military base, it’s not inconspicuous the helicopters taking off and landing are a bit of a giveaway. I was going to try to google earth the base but my comp at work is to old and wont run the program, oh well. He’s a mechanic, fixing humvee’s, so he is pretty much away from the combat. He was more concerned about finding the Cannonball bar in Wyoming NY. He had just read the Cannonball Run Book by Brock Yates, which is a great book by the way, as is A Race Against Time, another Yates book. So when he gets back in country we’re going to Wyoming to go to a bar and at some point we need to go see the Dropkick Murphy’s in Boston. That son of a bitch has seen them twice but that’s my problem not his. I asked him a bit about what its like over there but for the most part tried to talk about more upbeat things like other college friends and what we’ll do when he comes back.

There was one really interesting thing he did talk about and that’s his work with the Iraqi Army. He didn’t tell me exactly what he’s doing with them but my assumption is that he is training them on how to work on the Humvee’s. The statement that really stuck was when he said that they’re some funny motherfuckers. Besides the accent and the bad hygiene they are pretty much the same as us. I told him that if you travel a bit you’ll notice that everywhere. We then discussed the hygiene part, I said that I had heard running water was a bit of a problem there and that I must be tough to keep clean without water. He said yeah but the other major part is that there’s no toilet paper. He said its advised not to shake anyone’s left hand as the old rule of right hand for food left hand to wipe has come back into affect. That’s pretty nasty but at the same time if you were in their situation you would probably be wiping your ass with your left hand too, of course you probably forget not to eat with your left hand. But back to the good part of saying that yeah we have different customs and different languages but we all laugh and tell jokes and at the end of the day there’s not much that would make me happier than to hear a joke in a different accent every single day.

I love David Letterman

purely in a platonic sence, but seriously i wish i had watched this one. Letterman tells Bill ORielly that he thinks about 60 percent of what he says is crap.
i love it.
heres a link to media matters they have a feed of the interview.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200601040009
bill goes off on some rant about the war on christmas and what not. but i really stopped caring about when OReilly lies, i just dont care anymore

Nuclear Katrina

Common Dreams
So I'm shocked to hear that our infallible department or homeland security doesn't have a clear concise plan for what to do if someone uses one of the "dirty bombs" were so terrified of. The government loves to blame the peace activists for inciting the terrorist, but I love how we keep telling them where all of our weak points are. Now im not saying to shoot the messenger but maybe some people in the DHS should just watch the news and see what they need to work on.

Ok to be honest that's not what the article is about it is about a nuclear disaster but its not saying that the DHS doesn't have a plan its just that the plan is, unless its really bad we aint doing shit. fuck ya get outta there if you want. In an attack with a radiation level that they estimate that 25% of the people affected would get cancer, DHS has a plan and plans to do nothing, its not a serious enough event to get involved. So apparently being nuked isn't enough to involve the Department of Homeland SECURITY! they really need to change the name of that group because the part about security is very misleading, it would lead you to believe that protecting the lives of Americans was a task that they had a hand in, and clearly that's not their mission.

new favorite bumper sticker

Im never sure if im violating copyrights so I always like to put a link to where I got an image, most people dont get made as long as you give credit where its do, and someone deffinatly derves credit for this one.
http://www.seesharppress.com/index.html

So thats pretty much all there is to it. great bumpersticker. im not sure if id want one but its still a classic.