One Nation, Under Vishnu / In the most religiously diverse country in the world, why should God get the only plug? "One nation, under whatever noble and/or beautiful belief system you want, or maybe nothing at all, or maybe a little of this and that, just don't be a freak about it, because this is America and we're nothing if not about religious freedom, even though that may be difficult to believe right now, but just bear with us, indivisible...."

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / 'Enemy combatant' issue rises to fore 'Enemy combatant' issue rises to fore
Bush's aides press for US powers to detain Americans.
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When the Bush Admin first proposed this neogothic nightmare courtscape in the first place, I distinctly remember their reassuring statements directly contradicting the current positions they are heralding. I can't be the only one?!? As evidence that this is taking things a bit far, ask Timothy McVeigh how much it helped him getting a 'standard citizen's trial'? Oh that's right, he's dead. Which isn't to say he didn't deserve it, only to point out that there is NO REASON OTHER THAN BOLD FASCISM to extoll the current measures.

Bush makes another surgical strike on the Constitution Wake up, America! George W. Bush says that we are at war with "people who hate freedom." If so, we'd all better brush up on what we learned about "freedom" back in grade school. Think hard now. This is something more than a pop quiz. Can the US military detain and incarcerate an American citizen on US soil indefinitely without charges? The correct answer, if this is still a "free" country, is a resounding and unequivocal, no. Outside of military bases, the U.S. military has no business arresting anyone on U.S. soil, period. We fought a revolution to expel that kind of arbitrary, autocratic power from our shores. The framers wrote the Constitution, particularly the 5th and 6th Amendments, to prevent such occurrences. Was Chicago under martial law last week? Had law and order broken down? Were the courts closed? No. As such, there is no way around the fact that something deeply offensive to our constitutional system of government happened in Chicago on June 10.

When Conservatives Sue Conservatives I DON'T GIVE GEORGE W. BUSH enough credit. The man's a genius. How else can you explain his clever plan for saving America from terrorists?
Bush defined our problem when, following the Sept. 11 attacks, he said the terrorists attacked us "because we are freedom's home and defender."
So Bush (with ample help from pliant, poll-reading congressional Democrats and an amenable public) set about removing America's freedoms.
How clever. When the the job is finished, when all our freedoms are gone, we'll finally be safe. The bad guys will no longer have reason to hate us.
What a brilliant scheme!

When fear attempts to take a shortcut -- The Washington Times The Constitution, as the fearful constantly remind us, is not a suicide pact. But neither is it a mere handbill, to be tossed away at the slightest inconvenience to the government's lawyers. Cutting corners no doubt makes the job easier for the government, but making the government's job easier is rarely a priority.
Preserving the Constitution, fighting off the nibblers and chippers, even nibblers and chippers with good intentions, was once regarded by conservatives as the first duty of the citizen. It still is. We can imagine what conservatives would think of shortcuts through the Constitution if they had been attempted by a certain president from Arkansas. Fear, legitimate or not, is no better excuse than convenience.

Plutocracy and Politics Kevin Phillips's new book, "Wealth and Democracy," is a 422-page doorstopper, but much of the book's message is contained in one stunning table. That table, in the middle of a chapter titled "Millennial Plutographics," reports the compensation of America's 10 most highly paid C.E.O.'s in 1981, 1988 and 2000.
In 1981 those captains of industry were paid an average of $3.5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. By 1988 the average had soared to $19.3 million, which seemed outrageous. But by 2000 the average annual pay of the top 10 was $154 million. It's true that wages of ordinary workers roughly doubled over the same period, though the bulk of that gain was eaten up by inflation. But earnings of top executives rose 4,300 percent.

Summer of All Fears On the Hill yesterday, Republican lawmakers were using headlines about the dirty-bomb plot to try to hurriedly push through the president's homeland security makeover.
"This is what's at stake," said Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas. "This kind of attack, using chemical, biological, nuclear weapons, radiological weapons, or some other kinds of suicide bombers of the kind we've seen. We must act quickly."
It's bad enough that the terrorists are using fear as a device. Does the Bush administration have to do the same thing?
The Islamic enemy strums on our nerves to hurt our economy and get power. The American president strums on our nerves to help his popularity and retain power.

Earth First activists win case / FBI, cops must pay $4.4 million for actions after car bombing Of the $2.9 million in damages for Bari's estate, $1.3 million is punitive and $1.6 million is compensatory. Bari died of cancer in 1997.
The jury said Cherney should receive $550,000 in punitive damages and $950, 000 in compensatory damages.
An ecstatic Cherney said, "The American public needs to understand that the FBI can't be trusted. Ten jurors got a good, hard look at the FBI and they didn't like what they saw. It's not about the money."
Robert Bloom, an attorney for the activists, said the ruling "shows what the FBI did then, it shows America what the FBI does now."
"This verdict is critical for everyone to understand how law enforcement works in this country," he said. "This jury got a look at a new side of the FBI and saw their secrets. This jury told the truth."

Women dies after having cosmetic surgery A woman who had breast augmentation and liposuction died of complications due to blood clotting following the cosmetic surgery, coroner's officials said.
Maryellen Fluery, 44, of Santa Ana died Monday, three days after she went into her doctor's office for breast enhancements and liposuction. It was ruled a natural death by the coroner, said Jon Fleischman, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner's office.
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I'm not exactly sure that 'natural death' applies here.

Evildoers In The Hood / Another batch of fresh terrorist warnings from the government, and you without your skepticism Just when you might be beginning to question their maneuvers and motivations and rather sinister levels of secrecy, their lack of discernable results in this war-that's-not-really-a-war because there are no actual results to be had except the ongoing promulgation of, yes, more war.
Too cynical? Too bitter? Don't want to think our government might actually be capable of such deceit and manipulation, of manufacturing rumors and strategically fabricating news stories and making it sound like if you don't blindly endorse every carefully constructed pro-war blurb muttered by Ari Fleischer or Rummy, the terrorists will surely break down your door any minute now and steal all your ice cream and sodomize your cat?

Color Them Fatalistic Mr. Ridge offers five colors to warn against infiltrations. (This being Washington, officials hotly debated including white in the terror pinwheel, but decided against it, perhaps fearing it would look like a white flag.)
I think it would be far more useful, however, if we had a wheel with five colors to warn against incompetence.
Holy heather: At this level, John Ashcroft stays so busy whiting out lines of the Constitution, diluting Justice's civil rights division, lionizing the Second Amendment and robing naked statues that he forgets to give the president a detailed F.B.I. memo describing the time and place of the next terrorist attack.

Yahoo! News - GEORGE W. BUSH, ATTEMPTED MURDERER "We had information," an anonymous Pentagon (news - web sites) official told The New York Times' Thomas Shanker, "that he was planning attacks on American and coalition forces, on the interim government and on [interim president Hamid] Karzai himself."
You and I, faced with such information, might have had Hekmatyar picked up for questioning. We might put him and his pals on trial for conspiracy and, if he were found guilty, thrown in prison. But the guys in the White House aren't like us. They're gangsters. Gangsters are above the law. Gangsters don't bother with judges and juries. They pay off judges; they have their enemies whacked.
And so your illegitimate gangster government, less than a month after it attempted to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Venezuela, sent up one of those unmanned Predator drone planes. Some dude punched a button on an iMac at an undisclosed location in the Virginia suburbs and fired a Hellfire missile at Hekmatyar's car convoy on a road just outside Kabul. "I believe some others were killed in the strike, but the target escaped," an unnamed U.S. official told Reuters. Hekmatyar's spokesman and son-in-law Ghairat Baheer in Islamabad said: "He is in Afghanistan...but there was no attack."

Radio Crow's Radio & TV News A report that Limbaugh had lost his hearing generated press for his program but failed to increase ratings.
Limbaugh dropped the deafness act when investigators began searching for his operation records and logs of hospital stays.
The investigations turned up records of minor plastic surgery and a liposuction procedure. (5/8)

Buzz Flash I know now the media propaganda machine will spin its wheels off and cast aside its integrity for the almighty dollar. Look at the spin today - “It was Clinton’s fault” or how about “What did the Democrats Know?” What a sham! Wasn’t it the REPUBLICANS who held both houses of Congress from 1996 until Jeffords saved America? What the blue blazes were they doing? Let me refresh your memory. They were impeaching Clinton, spending our tax dollars worrying and wondering where Big Dog’s big dog had been. Oh yes, and what about the endless hours of prattle about Gary Condit’s little dog and where it had been? I believe there is an appropriate psychological term for this, but it escapes me right now

Five killed, four kids, on I-80 east of Reno RENO, Nev. (AP) -- A California firefighter suspected of drunken driving was jailed Tuesday after the car he was driving the wrong way on Interstate 80 slammed into a van, killing five people, four of them children.
Eight family members were in the van when the head-on crash occurred around 8:45 p.m. Monday near Wadsworth, about 20 miles east of Reno.
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Thankfully, the man wasn't doing any illegal drugs. One can only imagine the damage he might have done otherwise.

'Smoking gun' Enron memos / 'Death Star,' 'Get Shorty' strategies show how firm manipulated energy to state in attempt to boost profits A state senator who has spent a year investigating the energy crisis called the documents "tremendous" proof that California's power debacle had been caused by companies looking to make money and not by energy shortages.
"The veneer has been broken," said Sen. Joseph Dunn, D-Santa Ana.
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Don't foget all those 'free market' Republicans who were busy trying to slander Gov. Davis during this whole sordid affair. If I had a nickel for every right wing loonie that put the blame of California politics I'd be able to afford the inflated gasoline they're peddling now.

The Oakland Press April 24, 2002
The state Legislature has given police power to search your home without telling you why.
Two new laws, which took effect Monday as part of anti-terror efforts, also shield from public scrutiny the reasons for police searches.

Defense lawyers and civil libertarians are outraged at the laws, which make search warrants and supporting documents such as affidavits non-public records.

The Smoke Machine The Smoke Machine
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative" is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby.

Cold Fusion Rides Again / Science magazine publishes more evidence of tabletop nuclear reactions Cold Fusion Rides Again
Science magazine publishes more evidence of tabletop nuclear reactions

Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate Monday, March 25, 2002

Science magazine dropped a bombshell earlier this month: The prestigious journal published a paper by a team of researchers at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who say they have discovered evidence of what looks like nuclear fusion taking place in a relatively inexpensive tabletop device.

Plan would ease patient privacy rules / Bush wants to allow records to be shared without permission Washington -- The Bush administration has proposed changing some of the federal rules designed to protect the confidentiality of Americans' medical records, including the ability of patients to decide in advance who should be able to use their personal health information.