Screaming Points

Painful Polyps of Sadness

The Mighty-Morphin Mark Morford:

"If you answered, "Why, you get even more painful polyps of sadness and disgust on your soul due to the BushCo onslaught," consider yourself among the millions who are right now rather horrified and appalled and who are wondering just what sort of human -- not what sort of politician, mind you, not what sort of power broker, not what sort of failed Texas oilman corporate lackey -- but what sort of human being you have to be to enact such insidious ongoing planet-gouging legislation, smirking and shrugging all the way."

Mother Nature, The Hate Crime / More than 60 world-class scientists agree: BushCo just really, really loathes this planet

===

===

Lovely. Democracy gets in the way, Bush and his handlers will just crush it. Remember this in November:

Haiti's lawyer: US Is Arming Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries, Calls For UN Peacekeepers
By Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill
Democracynow.org

"The US lawyer representing the government of Haiti charged today that the US government is directly involved in a military coup attempt against the country's democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Ira Kurzban, the Miami-based attorney who has served as General Counsel to the Haitian government since 1991, said that the paramilitaries fighting to overthrow Aristide are being backed by Washington.

"I believe that this is a group that is armed by, trained by, and employed by the intelligence services of the United States," Kurzban told the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. "This is clearly a military operation, and it's a military coup." "

Democracy Now! | Haiti's Lawyer: U.S. Is Arming Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries

===

===

I know from my friends that there are many criminally insane people living in Montana who pose as Christians. But now their Governor is getting into the act:

(from the Associated Press):

HELENA - Gov. Judy Martz on Friday defended the placement of Ten Commandments monuments on government property, saying those troubled by such displays "have something going inside of them that would need a little help anyway."

Then -

Dinoboy at DemocraticUnderground.com fills us in with some more info:

She's not running for re-election this year, so she has a looser mouth than usual. She has said some real gems like, "My husband has never beat me, but then again, I never gave him a reason to.

===

===

You know, I'm an atheist, I think religion is one big scam. But one of my favorite things to do with Christian Supremacists is to throw their book back at them.

inspired by a posting by barbaraann at DemocraticUnderground.com:

Here's a chunk of a little thing called Matthew 5:

"Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God."

===

===

Republican-style, Anti-Labor, low-wage neighborhood-killers Wal-Mart
are apparently the biggest users of Georgia's PeachCare, a government program for kids.

They must be telling their employees to use government services instead of paying them a living wage.

"You have a company increasingly shifting the cost of health care to taxpayers," said Shaun O'Brien, assistant director of public policy for the AFL-CIO. Many Wal-Mart employees, the union says, earn wages of $7.50 to $8.50 an hour — not enough to make benefits affordable.

Wal-Mart, with 1.4 million U.S. workers, is the biggest private employer in America; it now employs more than 46,000 workers in Georgia. The company is not unionized."

===

===

UggaBugga nails it, quoting frst the Washington Post:

"From a Washington Post story by Mike Allen from August 7, 2001:
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 6 -- By the time President Bush returns to Washington on Labor Day after the longest presidential vacation in 32 years, he will have spent all or part of 54 days since the inauguration at his parched but beloved ranch. That's almost a quarter of his presidency.

Throw in four days last month at his parents' seaside estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, and 38 full or partial days at the presidential retreat at Camp David, and Bush will have spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route."

then check out the awesome graphic:

bush-time-allocation.gif (GIF Image, 735x647 pixels)

===

commondreams.com on our last hurdle: Diebold

"If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.

Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion."

===

this is delightful, because if everbody believes they've already got Osama, then if they announce it, everyone will say, We knew about that already, so what? And if they don't announce it, everyone says, Why don't you have him?

A Long Time Ago

TEHRAN, Iran - Pentagon (news - web sites) and Pakistani officials on Saturday denied an Iranian state radio report that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) was captured in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan (news - web sites) "a long time ago."

===

from Mark Oberzil:

I am a conservative. I believe in staying solvent and out of debt.

I am a conservative. I believe in keeping my nose out of other people's business, their nations and their bedrooms…

I am a conservative. I don't deal falsely or prematurely with facts.

I am a conservative. I understand the purposes of various institutions. It is the job of government to govern, the job of religion to address spiritual needs, and the job of business to secure profits by producing needed goods and services. I do not confuse these institutions.

I am a conservative. I understand my position in the world and that my opinions are not the only valid ones.

I do not have an exclusive claim on what is right, good or patriotic, and those who disagree with me are not automatically evil traitors.

What's really weird, though, is that I've always thought these things, but now everyone calls me a "liberal"!

===

from Another Day in the Empire

from Another Day In The Empire:

According to Francis Boyle, international law professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Rove and Bush will engineer a Syrian invasion in September if they think the election is lost. "It’s just like what happened in the 2002 congressional campaign," Boyle told Snowshoe Films. "Karl Rove got the Senate back and more votes in the House by going to war against Iraq. And they'll do the same thing this time. I think the most likely target is Syria. They're setting Syria up for an attack. So they'll sit there and wait and see how things turn out and after everyone goes on vacation in August, after Labor Day weekend, if they're going to lose, I think they'll got to war. Chomsky gave a lecture down in Cuba and he said the same thing. He didn't identify Syria, but he said if they conclude it’s the only way they're going to win an election, they'll go to war."

===

===

Posted by ScreamingPoints at February 29, 2004 01:35 AM