Here are two disturbing pieces from DemocracyNow.org: The Co-Author of a Medical Study is estimating that 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The study was conducted by American and Iraqi researchers and published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. This link goes to an…
Mark Foley is a political whore, like most of his elected peers in Washington, DC. Yes, this post is yet another plea for radical campaign finance reform.
Our country appears to be going down the tubes and for the most part it is not because of perverts like Mark Foley are trying to seduce young boys. The reason we are really in trouble is because hundreds of elected officials (Mark Foley among them) are perverting our Constitution by acquiescing in our corrupt (though technically legal) election system.
How often do you hear a politician discussing an issue in a way that makes intuitive sense to you and seems straightforward? Not very often, in my experience. Almost all political conversations emanating from DC are contorted by money. That is why very little political dialogue makes sense to those who are not closely monitoring the flow of contributions. The result is that we the citizens are getting is a steady stream of legislation geared toward helping big contributors (mostly big companies) at the expense of individual citizens.
Today, Salon.com featured an article about Mark Foley, a known sex pervert. Foley has also been busy perverting our electoral system (as have most other elected federal officials) by taking big money from corporate interests and working hard to reward those contributors. Since Foley himself happened to be in the news already, Salon.com made him today’s poster boy in an article demonstrating that political/financial quid pro quo is alive and well.
The Salon.com story …
Check out this Huffpo post by Robert Scheer. He is right to warn that we shouldn't allow ourselves to be distracted with sex scandals when there are much more important issues deserving of our attention: The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy…
If the past few weeks have proven anything at all they have proven to us that no news is not good news. In the absence of a steady stream of vigorous reporting to convince us that things are actually going well, we should never assume that things are okay.
We now have evidence that Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were advised of an imminent Al Qaeda attack in July, 2001, but that they did nothing to protect us.
We now have evidence that an alleged stalwart protector of children, Mark Foley, is actually a brash and despicable Internet predator. We know also that several high-ranking Republicans covered up the conduct of Mark Foley for months instead of protecting the teenage boys on the receiving end of Foley’s horny advances.
We now know from the recent NIE report directed to the President that the war in Iraq is inflaming the Middle East and that producing a new generation of Islamic radicals. This contradicts the constant and ludicrous assertions by the President that attacking Iraq would make Americans safer from acts of terrorism. In other words, the President’s claim that he was protecting us by attacking Iraq was utterly false and it should have been vigorously questioned by the press for years.
All of this recently revealed information makes me ask “what else don’t we know?”
Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters. Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:
If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here. Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed. You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.
Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …