Advertisement

Save the polar bear from extinction

At this moment, the polar bear's Arctic habitat is literally melting away beneath it due to global warming. If we don't intervene now, these majestic bears may not survive beyond the next few decades.

Please go to Polar Bear Action and send a message urging Interior Secretary Gale Norton to protect polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Global warming has already taken a serious toll on the large expanses of summer sea ice that polar bears depend on for survival. Since 1979, more than 20 percent of the polar ice cap has disappeared. Yet the Bush administration refuses to lift a finger to help the polar bear.

Leading scientists now warn that if current rates of global warming continue, the polar bear could face extinction by the end of this century.

To head off this unthinkable tragedy, NRDC is launching a campaign of intense public and courtroom pressure to compel the administration to act. We have just put the Interior Secretary on notice that we will be taking her agency to federal court on behalf of the polar bear.

Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage. Click here for GAO Report

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004

Katrina and the new global terrorism

Future historians will remember the George W. Bush administration for allowing two colossal catastrophes on U.S. soil: the 9/11 terrorist attack and the Katrina hurricane invasion. In both cases, Bush the Younger ignored mounds of evidence pointing to each impending disaster.

In December 2002, Bush announced that his administration planned to study the issue of climate change for five more years rather than be forced into any action regulating fossil fuel emissions. The question of global warming was put on the back burner.

Even if Bush refused on principle to read those boring policy papers he might have accidentally stumbled on the fact that New Orleans was in peril from leafing through the pages of Rolling Stone, glancing at the pictures and reading a paragraph or two.

The February 20, 2003 issue of Rolling Stone had a graphic of the U.S. Capitol under water, and citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said “New Orleans, which has an average elevation of eight feet below sea level could become the next Atlantis.”

When Divas collide

Would you pay $49.95 to watch women wrestling in mud? I did last week, and it was well worth the expense. I get the New York Times Online, and until a couple of weeks ago, all the features were free. Then, as some of you have no doubt discovered, the NYT's columnists started to have only their opening sentences on free display. To get the full columns of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and the others you have to pony up $49.95 for a 14-day free trial, and then a year's subscription to Times Select.

I held off until Saturday, when the Times nailed the sale with Dowd's column title, "Woman of Mass Destruction," and her ominous opening sentence, "I've always liked Judy Miller."

Miller has been the sport of a million stories, and there was nothing much by way of startling revelations in what Dowd wrote, but in operatic terms it was as though Maria Callas had suddenly rushed onto the stage and slugged Elizabeth Schwartzkopf.

Burma U.S. military

BANGKOK, Thailand -- America wants to install "a puppet government" in Burma and seize an island in the Andaman Sea and a mountain near China so the Pentagon can build military bases and attack Asia, according to Burma's official media.

"If the [U.S.] power has a naval base on our Coco Kyun Island, it can launch a blitzkrieg against the eastern or the western hemisphere," the military regime's official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.

Burma, mainland Southeast Asia's biggest country, is also known as Myanmar and has been ruled by its military since 1962.

"If the big nation [America] can deploy troops and missiles in the north of Myanmar, it can target and attack any specified country in and around the region," it said.

The Coco Islands are two dots just north of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, off southern Burma where the Bay of Bengal mingles with the Andaman Sea, at about the same latitude as Thailand's capital, Bangkok.

Did you erase your own vote?

In 2004, New Mexico once again led the nation in Presidential undervote rate. Undervotes are ballots cast without a vote for President, and New Mexico had 21, 084 of them – 2.78% of the total ballots cast last November or one out of every 36 voters. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron seems surprisingly untroubled by undervotes, commenting after the election that she doesn't "spend a lot of time on undervote issues, I'm just speculating that some voters are just not concerned with the presidential race." [1]

I never found this very convincing. However, the recent testimony from the head of Automated Election Services (AES), the company that provides election services to most of the counties in New Mexico, may offer a more persuasive explanation.

The analysis [2] of the certified results of the New Mexico election that I undertook with Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org revealed that more than 80% of New Mexico’s undervotes were recorded (or, more accurately, not recorded) on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with the main culprits being the Sequoia Advantage and the Danaher Shouptronic - both “push button” electronic machines.

Diane Wilson, magnificent unreasonableness

AUSTIN, Texas -- I am writing about the most extraordinary book by the most extraordinary woman, and I would have interviewed her at length, except she's going to be arrested if she ever sets foot back in our home state.

That's pretty much the way life goes these days for Diane Wilson, who used to be just a regular old shrimper and mother of five kids, until she accidentally became an activist. Then, all hell broke loose. The results are described in "An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas."

I believe the book will become a classic, not just of the environmental movement, but of American lit, as well. It is the rare, clear, moving voice of a working-class woman goaded into action against the greatest massed forces in the world today: globalized corporate greed backed by government power.

Media at a huge crossroads, 25 years after Reagan’s triumph

By a twist of political fate, the Oct. 28 deadline for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to take action on the Plamegate matter is exactly 25 years after the only debate of the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. How the major media outlets choose to handle the current explosive scandal in the months ahead will have enormous impacts on the trajectory of American politics.

A quarter of a century ago, conservative Republicans captured the White House. Today, a more extreme incarnation of the GOP’s right wing has a firm grip on the executive branch. None of it would have been possible without a largely deferential press corps.

Among other things, Reagan’s victory over Carter was a media triumph of style in the service of far-right agendas. When their only debate occurred on Oct. 28, 1980, a week before the election, Carter looked rigid and defensive while Reagan seemed at ease, making impact with zingers like “There you go again.” More than ever, one-liners dazzled the press corps.

For the next eight years, a “Teflon presidency” had the news media

Iraq is not Vietnam. But...

Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.

Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries -- while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge -- are far from identical.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.

War after war, decade after decade, the U.S. news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.

From the U.S. media’s fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the U.S. news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.

We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with

Attack plans

http://mattbors.com

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS