Vacation
Today, I start my vacation. I would feel better if my cat, Chairman Meow, didn't insist that I get up at 6:30 so she can chase her feather on a stick (aptly named "Capitalism", so I can say, "Get Capitalism, Chairman! Geddit!"). I'm doing a roadtrip to a few cities, and I won't be back until sunday.

In the meantime, I have asked Matt to keep the site updated and post some entries to the blog. Matt is a much too busy college student right now, but i'm sure he'll do the best he can. I didn't have anyone else to ask, because everyone else is pretty busy, too.

I promise to come back with pictures. Hee hee hee..

The specter of nuclear war draws closer
The Independent in London has an article that, if it doesn't scare you, then I'm not sure if I would consider you to be human: Nuclear war risk grows as states race to acquire bomb. This article is about the Prepartory Committee (PrepCom) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), currently in its second of three meetings before the NPT convenes a Review Conference in 2005. Representatives from 187 nations are attenting the current meetings.

Due to recent actions by the United States and North Korea, the NPT is in jepardy. North Korea has defected from the NPT, and the US has lacked commitment to the treaty because we have threatened to use nuclear weapons in combat recently. More importantly, we have threatened to us nuclear weapons against nations that are not likewise armed with nukes. UN Security Council (not like we listen to them anymore) Resolution 924 bans the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed states, which was a proposition made in the NPT in 1978.

Let's hop on the train of logic here: if the US launches pre-emptive strikes against other nations, and then threatens to use nuclear weapons against its enemies, some of whom might not have nuclear weapons, then don't you think these nations wuld want to defend themselves? And furthermore, we know that Israel, a nation which will not sign the NPT or admit to having nukes, HAS nukes. Israel will NOT let UN weaons inspectors into their country (gee, didn't we goto WAR with Iraq over this?) But here's what the US representative said recently at the PrepCom meetings: "[Iran has] an alarming, clandestine programme [to get hold of nuclear technology]. Iran is going down the same path of denial and deception that handicapped international inspections in North Korea and Iraq."

News to fucko: if Israel has nukes and nobody is doing a thing about it, and the US has named Iran as part of the same "Axis of Evil" that Iraq and North Korea are part of, DON'T YOU THINK THAT'S A GOOD REASON FOR THEM TO WANT NUCLEAR WEAPONS?!@ Argh! God fucking damnit! Let's just blame Iran for everything! Nope, our foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes and letting Israel do whatever the fuck they want, let's just not think about that!

If Iran wants nuclear weapons, then it's our fault. Ditto for North Korea. If the US is serious about nuclear disarmament, then we would do the right thing and disarm first. But no, we never will. We would rather risk the future of the world then stand down from our tough guy posture and cowboy antics.

Baseball never fails to amuse me..
More great stuff about violence and baseball from ESPN. They have a story where they pick the greatest manager meltdowns, and former Yankees skipper Billy Martin was highlighted:

Billy Martin punches out marshmallow salesman
Martin fought with umpires, George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, pitchers (Dave Boswell and Ed Whitson), two traveling secretaries, at least one cab driver, two bouncers at a topless bar, a sportswriter and one fan outside Tiger Stadium. But his biggest meltdown came in 1979 when he punched out a marshmallow salesman named Joseph Cooper, which led to his getting fired as Yankee manager.

Agence France-Presse is reporting that the rally where US troops opened fire was a pro-Saddam rally. Interesting, this is the only news organizations I have heard this from. I have listened to the radio reports about it and the protesters are blaming the troops, troops are blaming the protesters, and one wonders if we will ever know what really happened.

I just got a mass emailing from the ACLU corcerning two issues that they are asking people to take action on. I think they are both worthy causes, so I'm posting the email in its entirety:

1) Support proper solutions to national security issues!

Congress will soon be voting on legislation that would significantly infringe on privacy rights without making us any safer from terrorism.
The Congressional investigation by the House and Senate intelligence committees into the September 11 attacks uncovered a number of serious, structural breakdowns in the intelligence community.

But instead of taking action to address the real failures in the national intelligence services, several Members of Congress have proposed legislation that would give the government new, unprecedented spying powers and significantly infringe on the privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Congress needs to address the real national security issues -- not
adopt false solutions that violate Constitutional rights.

Take Action! Click here to get more information and to send a free fax to your Members of Congress.

http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=12483&c=110

2) Stop the Assault on Reproductive Rights!

Congress continues its assault on reproductive rights. Next week the House of Representatives will vote on the so-called "partial birth abortion" ban, a misguided piece of legislation that has already passed the Senate. Your letters and faxes to Congress have raised awareness about this unconstitutional and dangerous bill -- it is critical that we keep up the pressure.
This bill must be stopped. It bans an array of safe and common abortion procedures and lacks a required exception to protect women's health. It also eliminates doctors' discretion to choose the best medical procedures for their patients.

Take Action! Click here to get more information and send a free fax to your Representative.

http://www.aclu.org/ReproductiveRights/ReproductiveRights.cfm?ID=10780&c=148

The Supreme Court has refused to hear a case where the ACLU won a lower court ruling to prevent Kentucky from displaying the 10 Commandments near the state capitol. The ACLU argued, correctly, that such a display would violate the separation of church and state.

US troops get into a firefight with Iraqi protesters who waant them to vacate a school. 13 Iraqi civilians were killed, including some children under 10. Among the injured were non-protesting Iraqis, with one instance of a couple in their house catching bullets.

I got another blog entry published to the Buzzflash Mailbag. Woo hoo! Search for "Dupont".

Because I am, unfortunately, not lacking in masochistic tendencies, I listened to the Michael Savage show on my commute home tonight. They had on a guest host, Rusty Humphries. When Rusty wasn't enjoying the sound of his voice or putting his audience through 6 minute commercial breaks, he would take callers who agreed with him. One caller voiced his opinion concerning, I imagine, the Santorum situation, and I'll paraphrase what he said: there is a double standard in America where we lynch Republican politicians when they step out of line, however if a Democratic politician steps out of line, nothing bad ever happens to them. He used Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton for his examples, basically saying that Nixon and Agnew did nothing, but Kennedy can drive a car into a river and kill a women and nothing can happen, and Clinton, I quote, "was never impeached." Of course, we ALL know how much of a crook Nixon was, and his vice president, Agnew, had to leave office because he was being investigated for being paid off to give companies contracts while he was Maryland's governor. Anybody who hasn't been living under a rock knows that Clinton WAS impeached, and the further one looks into that situation you find out that the Republicans, trying to knock Clinton out of office, started an investigation into White Water, and $60 million later and after finding nothing to tie Clinton to White Water, they tried him for receiving a blowjob in the Oval Office. Despicable? Yes. Illegal? No. Impeachable? It shouldn't have been. As for Kennedy, it looks like he got off easy, but that event ruined his chances of every running for President, and the voters of Massachusetts keep on reelecting him.

Rusty, being Savage's hand-picked propagandist, agreed with him, and justified this man's moronic view of the world with this moronic rambling, paraphrasing again: the Democrats practice a Marxist method called thesis/antithesis/synthesis, and used the Trent Lott situation as an example. He said that Lott, who "did nothing", was called a racist by the left. adhering to the theory, Lott protested that he wasn't. But since the left kept on calling him a racist, Lott eventually tried to do things to appease them. Hence, the left won.

Rusty next noted that the left has tried to perform this method against Michael Savage through boycotts, etc., but Michael hasn't given in. He also said that Sen. Santorum is guilty of nothing, and that this doesn't happen to Democrats.

Unbelievable, eh? Can you count on two hands how many absolutely lies I heard on the Michael Savage show tonight? This, sadly enough, is the norm for hate/republican AM radio.

So, I decided that I was going to call the show when I got home. I didn't expect to get on the show. What I heard tonight goes beyond Rusty and I simply holding different opinions on a topic, this gets into right and wrong. Rusty is a propagandist who is spreading lies to a nation audience, and somebody has to tell the truth. Nixon and Agnew were kicked out of office BECAUSE they were criminals, likewise, Clinton wasn't a criminal (well, at least not on their level), which is probably why he wasn't kicked out of office. And to say that Clinton did not face the same treatment that Trent Lott got is proof that the host is delusional, or just an absolute liar. Clinton was on the front pages of every paper in the country for over a year for the grand crime of receive a fucking blow job. A BLOW JOB! That's it! He cheated on his wife, and we will never hear the end of it. Like I said: despicable? Yes. Illegal? No. Lott DID make a racist comment, that is a FACT. Nobody denies that Strum Thurmond's 1948 Presidential campaign was run on a racist platform, and to agree with such a platform is to agree with racism. Simple logic. As for Santorum, if anybody doesn't believe that he comments were homophobic and, more importantly, if you as an American are not concerned about the safety of your rights after reading what he had to say, then I just don't know what to say. That last point should be noted for what it is, my opinion, but there's really no questions that Santorum's comments were homophobic.

So, I called the show. When I finally got through, I said that I wanted to talk about what Rusty mention about Marx, Republicans v. Democrats, blah blah.. So the screener asked me what my point was. I said that my point was that Rusty is wrong. Furthermore, he let it pass on the air that Clinton wasn't impeached when everyone knows that he was, and that I had to question Rusty's "journalistic integrity". At this point, I was told to email the host and hung up on.

I imagine that this happens to a lot of people like me, and I'm not surprised. But it just goes to show you how much these hate radio talk show hosts believe in having an open forum where all ideas can be aired, and how they will not hesitate to lie and pull "facts" out of thin air to "prove" their points. They put so much spin on their stories that suddenly the lies become truth.

"Liberal media" my ass. By the way, I did email this to the host.

The Guardian in London has a story that, in a way, is a repply to the article printed in the Telegraph that I commented on yesterday. They say that the Telegraph article proves nothing about a potential link between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. One would assume that the the Telegraph isn't full of shit, which I don't, but even if their article is accurate, the Guardian has this to say in reply:"'We are aware of fleeting contacts [between Baghdad and al-Qaida] in the past, but there were were no long-term official contacts,' a well-placed source told the Guardian yesterday. 'The documents do not take things further forward.'"

Meanwhile, the Telegraph printed the entire contents of the supposed papers they found. While if true, it proves that Iraq was trying to form a relationship wth bin Laden, they do not prove that one exists.

The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal to a case that challenges a South Carolina law that, among other things, allows the medical records of those who have had abortions to be obtained by the state and tells abortion clinics to make members of the clergy available for "counseling". Honestly, can we just blow up the Supreme Court and start over with it?

There's a small oil spill in Massachusetts' Buzzards Bay right now. 325 barrels of oil have leaked, which is over 13,000 gallons of oil, certainly a lot but not enough to go head to head with th grand daddy's of oil spills. You usually need a drunk captain for that, and a company who is willing to let your tax dollars pay for the cleanup. Still, I fact the fact that this isn't going to be considered a "big" oil spill troubling simply becase there have been spills that were worse.

Yep, the US and UK lied about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, making it an excuse to goto war. Big surprise, I know. This article from the Independent in London names names and give you evidence that was not shown the light of day.

It's about friggen time: GlaxoSmithKline Cuts AIDS Drug Price in Developing World

The forums are down right now. This was juuust brought to my attention, so I am starting to troubleshoot now and hopefully I can bring them back up before I goto bed. Fixed.

London's Telegraph says that they have found proof that Saddam had connections to bin Laden. I first read about this when it was posted to Indymedia last night, and a few people on that site found reason to question the legitimacy of this report, particularly with this paragraph from the article I linked:

"Perhaps aware of the sensitivities of the subject matter, Iraqi agents at some point clumsily attempted to mask out all references to bin Laden, using white correcting fluid. The dried fluid was removed to reveal the clearly legible name three times in the documents."

OK, so let me get this straight: Iraqi officials, who knew that there was a chance files like this could be found, USED WHITE OUT to protect the sensitivity of the documents? Wouldn't anybody with a brain simply DESTROY the documents?

This reports reeks of being fraudulent. The "white out" thing gets me, but what I also notice is how nobody even wants to mention that Saddam and Osama might not make the best of buddies, and given the fact that Osama is fundamentalist, he would probably rather see Saddam killed for, among other things, ruling over a secular society, not adhering to proper dress (beard, robes, turbin, etc.), consuming alcohol, not to mention Saddam's deadly repression of other Muslim groups (the Shia to the south, Kurds in the north). Are we expected to believe that Saddam and Osama were golfing buddies?

It's also worth noting that the same person who owns the Telegraph also owns the Jerusalem Post, a paper whose editorial point of view leans to the right.

This is crap. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody completely made up this story.