United Nations, Sep 30 (Prensa Latina) UN human rights specialists rejected on Friday the recently approved US law that worsens how suspected terrorists may be interrogated and declared it a stimulus to prisoner maltreatment.

Manfred Nowak, UN torture investigator, issued a declaration in NY today that this legislation ignores UN human rights mechanisms, which have certified that the US interrogation methods and prolonged detentions are violations of international law.

The UN Human Rights Committee against Torture has denounced the US methods applied to interrogate prisoners and has publicized its concern about arbitrary detentions.

Nowak maintained that President Bush got most of what he wanted from the new legislation to continue CIA secret detentions and aggressive interrogations of suspects, and said the new law, approved yesterday by the Senate, will protect these brutalities.

"The new legislation does not take our substantial criticisms under consideration and is not a sign that the US government and Congress will comply with our recommendations,” stressed the Austrian attorney.

Inserted from <http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7BADFC2F0A-AFC9-4239-92E7-F7648225EF83%7D)&language=EN

Look what this is already dong to our standing in world opinion.

Report Documents Impact of Bush-Nominated Appeals Court Judges

Federal appeals court judges nominated by President Bush are threatening and undermining Americans' rights and liberties, and working to reduce congressional authority to protect those rights and liberties, according to a legal analysis published today by People For the American Way Foundation.

"President Bush has fallen far short in keeping his promise to appoint judges who will interpret the law, not make it," said People For the American Way Foundation President Ralph G. Neas. "Judges nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate are undermining Americans' rights, liberties, and legal protections."

The report, Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears, covers cases decided between September 1, 2004 and May 31, 2006. It provides a significant update to preliminary analyses of Bush-nominated judges that PFAWF published in 2004. The new report documents that troubling trends identified in earlier reviews have continued as more Bush appointees gain more experience and tenure on the appellate courts - more and more opinions seek, sometimes successfully, to cut back broadly on Americans' rights under our Constitution and laws.

"The cumulative impact of the Bush administration's ideological approach to judicial nominations is beginning to be felt," said People For the American Way Foundation Vice President and Legal Director Elliot M. Mincberg. "What we're seeing is unfortunately exactly what the Federalist Society and White House hoped for when they promoted one ultraconservative ideologue after another to the appeals courts."

For example, Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears reports that two controversial Bush appellate judges - Michael McConnell on the Tenth Circuit and Lavenski Smith on the Eighth Circuit - cast deciding votes in rulings that significantly restricted individuals' rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, including one decision that struck down a Department of Labor regulation protecting workers.

In addition, Bush-nominated appellate judges wrote or joined opinions that:

* tried to rewrite legal protection for employees against sexual harassment under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, explicitly contradicting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and several previous court decisions Lutkewitte v. Gonzales, D.C. Cir. (Judge Brown)

* attempted to significantly weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by requiring proof of discriminatory intent in voting cases, a requirement that another judge explained was flatly inconsistent with Congress' language and intent Johnson v. Governor of Fla., 11th Cir. (Judge Pryor)

* cast the deciding vote that the First Amendment did not apply at all to a restrictive municipal "English only" mandate Moldonado v. City of Altus, 10th Cir. (Judge Hartz)

* cast the deciding vote to limit the ability of health clinics to challenge anti-abortion laws Nova Health Systems v. Gandy, 10th Cir. (Judge Tymkovich)

* tried to rule that taxpayers could not sue to obtain restitution of government funds illegally transferred to private universities in violation of the Establishment Clause Laskowski v. Spellings, 7th Cir. (Judge Sykes)

* cast the deciding vote effectively authorizing partisan challengers who targeted African-American precincts to challenge voters, creating what the dissenting judge called a "threat of suppression, intimidation or chaos sown by partisan political operatives." Summit County Democratic Cent. & Exec. Comm. v. Blackwell, 6th Cir. (Judge Rogers)

* tried to prevent terminally ill patients from seeking to obtain access to drugs partly approved by the FDA when no other government approved treatment options are available Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Von Eschenbach, D.C. Cir. (Judge Griffith)

Another damaging trend documented in the report is judges preventing, or advocating in dissent to prevent, individual Americans from having their day in court and presenting their claims to a jury. In a number of cases, Bush judges have been specifically criticized by their colleagues for improperly applying the summary judgment standard and denying plaintiffs their day in court despite the existence of important evidence supporting their claims, or for other reasons have tried to throw such cases out of court. Bush-nominated appeals court judges have written or joined opinions that have sought to:

* prevent a female worker from attempting to prove that significant salary disparities between her and male employees violated the Equal Pay Act Ambrose v. Summit Polymers, Inc., 6th Cir. (Judge Sutton)

* deny the family of a murdered 8-year old girl the opportunity to try to prove in court that local officials had helped put her in danger Bright v. Westmoreland County, 3d Cir. (Judge Smith)

* stop an African-American man from pursuing a claim that his constitutional rights had been violated by state troopers engaged in racial profiling Gibson v. Superintendent, 3d Cir. (Judge Van Antwerpen)

* overturn a lower court decision that a female sheriff department employee who had been sexually harassed by the sheriff (who, among other things, called her vagina a "snapper" and stroked "his mustache while telling [her] he was ‘clearing off her seat'") could pursue a claim that she had effectively been forced to resign Wright v. Rolette County, 8th Cir. (Judge Melloy)

* prevent an African-American employee fired from a Wal-Mart store, who had been called a "lawn jockey" by his supervisor, from trying to prove he had suffered illegal racial discrimination and harassment Canady v. Wal-Mart Stores. Inc., 8th Cir. (Judge Riley)

* stop a Wal-Mart employee at another store from even presenting to a jury her claim that she had been fired because of illegal pregnancy-based employment discrimination Quick v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 8th Cir. (Judge Riley)

Inserted from <http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/releases/025>

(APN) ATLANTA – Top Diebold corporation officials ordered workers to install secret files to Georgia’s electronic voting machines shortly before the 2002 Elections, at least two whistleblowers are now asserting, Atlanta Progressive News has learned.

Former Diebold official Chris Hood told his story concerning the secret “patch” to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Kennedy’s second article on electronic voting in this week’s Rolling Stone Magazine.

Hood’s claims corroborate a second whistleblower who spoke with Black Box Voting and Wired News in 2003.

Whistleblower Accounts

“With the primaries looming, [Chief of Diebold’s Election Division] Urosevich was personally distributing a ‘patch,’ a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program,” Rolling Stone Magazine reported.

"We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood told Rolling Stone. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

"It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told Rolling Stone.

"We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level,” Hood told Rolling Stone.

The “patch” was applied to about 5,000 polling places in Fulton and DeKalb Counties in 2002, Rolling Stone reported.

Hood did not immediately return a text message from Atlanta Progressive News and his voicemail was not operational.

The second whistleblower, Rob Behler, was contracted to work with Diebold in the lead up to the 2002 Elections.

Two patches were applied in June and July 2002 respectively while Behler worked in the Diebold warehouse; another patch was applied in August 2002 after Behler left the warehouse, Wired News reported.

“Behler said Diebold programmers posted patches to a file-transfer-protocol site for him and his colleagues to apply to the machines,” Wired News reported.

Diebold officials first denied any patches were applied in an interview with Salon in 2003, according to Wired News.

"We have analyzed that situation and have no indication of that happening at all," Joseph Richardson, Diebold spokesperson, is reported to have told Salon at the time.

This story later changed.

Activists Speak Out

Elections integrity activists are outraged by the relevations, although they say the apparent secretive nature of “the patch” has only confirmed the things they already suspected and feared.

“The fact that they were doing any patch of any kind is very disturbing,” Garland Favorito of VoterGA, an organization that is suing the State of Georgia over the meaningless nature of elections here, told Atlanta Progressive News.

“It raises the distinct possibility the machines might have counted [in a] different [manner] on Election Night than when certified,” Favorito said.

“It corroborates two of our key points of the suit. One, machines can count differently on Election Night than when certified. So, the only way is to verify on Election Night. Two, it’s another example of how people have been removed from the counting of the votes,” Favorito said.

“I’m not surprised people are playing tricks. As far as the patch, I say ‘time out’ for that,” Donzella James, who is contesting her purported loss in the Democratic Primary in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District to US Rep. David Scott (D-GA), told Atlanta Progressive News.

“I’m definitely going to look into it. I’m glad there’s a credible person–Kennedy–who has brought this information forward,” James said.

An outspoken advocate for a voter verified paper trail since her days in the Georgia State Senate, James said she is getting ready to run again in 2008 whatever the outcome of her lawsuit.

“It immediately shows Diebold has not been telling the truth, has been covering up facts, in state after state, year after year..... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0091.html>

This clearly illustrates the need for machines with a verifiable paper trail.

Just as it is hard to fully comprehend the grief of a beloved friend or relative killed needlessly in an accident, it is excruciatingly painful to try to come to terms with the pernicious betrayal of our Constitution and liberty that occurred in the Senate on Thursday, September 28.

In the past week alone, we have seen factual evidence that belies the need for the power play/pre-election attack on our Constitution. In fact, these developments indicate that giving Bush even more unprecedented power is not only unconscionable; it puts the national security of the United States of America in peril:

Bush’s newly "revamped" top 16 intelligence agencies reached the conclusion that the Iraq War had become a primary cause in the growth of terrorists and the increased threat of terrorism to the United States. Bush called the report of his own top intelligent agencies "naïve." Meanwhile, a second U.N. report came to the same conclusion as the American spy agencies. The U.N. also reported that more Iraqis may now be being tortured under U.S. occupation than were tortured under Saddam Hussein.

And there is a second National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report just on Iraq that the Bush Administration will not release until after the election. So it clearly must be even more harsh in its assessment of the Iraq War than the White House "selective conclusions" Executive Summary of the first NIE, which was revealed by the New York Times.

On September 25, retired American generals provided testimony that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration threatened to fire any member of the Pentagon brass that provided a plan for keeping the peace in Iraq after the invasion. They testified that Rumsfeld, who has no combat experienced, has made peremptory, uninformed and arrogant decisions that have resulted in the needless deaths of American Gis and Iraqis.

Bob Woodward, for many years the loyal Royal Court reporter of the Bush Administration, now has been stricken with a case of reality. In his latest book, he apparently reports, according to "60 Minutes," "that the Bush administration has not told the truth regarding the level of violence, especially against U.S. troops, in Iraq. He also reveals key intelligence that predicts the insurgency will grow worse next year."

According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. "It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," says Woodward.

The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. "The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better,'" he tells Wallace. "Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know," says Woodward.

"The insurgents know what they are doing. They know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? The American public," Woodward tells Wallace.

Woodward’s view is confirmed by the National Intelligence Estimate and a report that this summer set a record for Iraqi civilian deaths in recent years.

What’s more, a poll in Iraq reported in the Washington Post indicates 60% of Iraqis support attacks on American GIs.  We repeat, while Bush is saying we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis believe killing American soldiers is justifiable! The population we are supposedly liberating and bestowing democracy on in Iraq supports the deadly assaults on our military.

For 59% of Americans, Iraq is already in a civil war. And the "confidence in Iraq policies" dropped to 20% in the U.S.

And, according to the Washington Post, "A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers."

In addition, "Almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents."

Meanwhile, the Bush vaunted efforts to train the Iraqi police and army are being proven a sham. An Iraqi police academy that was built as a war profiteering gift to some American firm is a total failure, symbolic of the Bush Administration’s fiasco in Iraq:

"A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found. The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed ‘the rain forest.’"

We are losing the war in Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban, who is being given safe harbor by our "major ally," Pakistan. And the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan aren’t even cooperating with each other.

We could go on and on. This is just the tip of the iceberg – all from just the last week.

So how do the White House and the Congressional Republicans respond?

They give the man responsible for this tremendous loss of life, for wasted expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars, for lies upon lies, for fighting an ineffective battle against terrorism that has resulted in an increase in terrorists and a rise in the terrorist threat to America…They respond by giving this man the right to suspend habeas corpus, declare who is an enemy combatant, and the right to torture at will -- and they absolve him of the crimes in violation of American law, the Constitution and the Geneva Convention that he has committed up to now.

The man who has endangered America, according to his own restructured intelligence agencies and the facts reported in just one week, is allowed to destroy our Constitution and decide, on his own, who will be tortured.

This isn’t just a Rubicon that has been crossed that may mean the death of the American Republic, as we know it. This isn’t just our Reichstag fire.

This is a suicidal act in terms of our national security. It is giving unConstitutional and barbaric powers to a man who has miserably and persistently failed us and lied to this nation at every turn – as born out by the facts. It is a thuggish game of forcing an alternative reality upon America, a noxious, deadly one.

Today, tears would flow down the olive robe of the Statue of Liberty if she were human.

But she is just an inanimate symbol. We are the ones who have to cope with the pain of a democracy destroyed in a political play for power and permanent one-party rule, which is not a Constitutional form of government. That is called a dictatorship.

And the one thing in common with dictators through history, whether Communist or fascist, is their state-sanctioned ability to torture people at will.

Beyond the overwhelming facts this week that Bush has endangered the national security of the United States of America with his failed and costly fanatic ignorance, we are left with this sad fact.

With the law passed on September 28th by Congress, we have become the Republic of torture. We not only have lost our claim to be a civilizing force among nations and abandoned our Constitution, we have appeased the terrorists by doing so.

Because isn’t it Bush who keeps telling us that the "terrorists hate us for our freedoms"? So, to appease those same enemies of America, the White House and the Republicans have abandoned civilized standards of behavior and taken freedoms away.

We are only beginning to grieve for the great beacon of democracy and justice that we lost yesterday.

Inserted from <http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/100>

Final update: Torture is now legal and Bush is now a Dictator, thanks to a 65-34 vote in the Senate. Here are the Senators who crossed party lines:

Democrats in favor (12) - Carper (Del.), Johnson (S.D.), Landrieu (La.), Lautenberg (N.J.), Lieberman (Conn.), Menendez (N.J), Pryor (Ark.), Rockefeller (W. Va.), Salazar (Co.), Stabenow (Mich.), Nelson (Fla.), Nelson (Neb.)

Inserted from <http://www.democrats.com/torture-bill>

The economy is booming for billionaires. It's a bust for many other Americans.

A record 400 Americans are billionaires -- and a record 47 million Americans have no health insurance.

America has 400 billionaires -- and 37 million people below the official poverty line.

The official poverty line for one person was just $9,973 in 2005 (latest data). That wouldn't cover the custom-made men's shoes ($4,128) and Hermes purse ($6,250) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The official poverty line of $15,577 for a three-person family is lower than the cost of the Patek Philippe men's gold watch ($17,600).

The Forbes 400 minimum is up $100 million since 2005, but the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour -- just $10,712 a year -- since 1997. GOP leaders in Congress have been holding a raise for minimum wage workers hostage to more giant tax cuts for wealthy inheritors.

Wealth isn't trickling down. It's flooding up -- from workers to bosses, small investors to big, poorer to richer.

The heirs to Wal-Mart founders Sam and Bud Walton have a combined $82.5 billion -- while the children of Wal-Mart workers swell the ranks of state health insurance programs for the neediest.

In today's corporate America, workers see gutted paychecks and pensions despite rising worker productivity, while CEOs get golden pay, perks, pensions and parachutes. The pay gap between average workers and CEOs has grown nine times wider since the 1970s.

The number of billionaires is a record high, but the share of national income going to wages and salaries is at a record low.

U.S. corporate profits increased 21 percent in the past year, Market Watch reported in March. "Profits have been so high because almost all of the benefits from productivity improvements are flowing to the owners of capital rather than to the workers," said Market Watch.

The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans (minimum net worth $6 million) owned 62 percent of the nation's business assets, 51 percent of stocks and 70 percent of bonds as of 2004, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances -- which excludes the Forbes 400. That's way up from 1989, when the wealthiest 1 percent owned 54 percent of business assets, 41 percent of stocks and 52 percent of bonds.

Our growing economy is not producing a growing middle class, but a richer aristocracy.

The high point for median household income -- the income of the household in the middle -- was $47,671 in 1999, adjusted for inflation. In 2005, median household income was $1,345 less at $46,326. In the same period, the Forbes 400 gained more than 100 billionaires.

Government policies are fueling rising inequality. Taxpayers with incomes above $1 million will see their after-tax income grow by about 6 percent this year thanks to tax cuts the nation can't afford.

In an economy where money is flowing up to the very top, even college-educated workers are going backward. Inflation-adjusted median household income was lower in 2005 than 1999 even when the householder had a bachelor's degree, master's degree, professional degree or doctorate.

The problem is much bigger than the rich getting richer, while the poor get poorer. The really rich are getting richer at the expense of most everyone else.

Solutions include restoring the link between rising worker productivity and pay, raising the miserly minimum wage, narrowing the obscene pay gap between workers and CEOs, rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy -- and stop taxing income from work more than income from capital gains.

Inserted from <http://www.democrats.com/node/10159>

Who does the GOP represent?  Doesn't this tell you?

BAGHDAD — Ahmed al-Karbouli, a reporter for Baghdadiya TV in the violent city of Ramadi, did his best to ignore the death threats, right up until six armed men drilled him with bullets after midday prayers.

He was the fourth journalist killed in Iraq in September alone, out of a total of more than 130 since the 2003 invasion, the vast majority of them Iraqis. But these days, men with guns are not Iraqi reporters’ only threat. Men with gavels are, too.

Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in the past year.

Currently, three journalists for a small newspaper in southeastern Iraq are being tried here for articles last year that accused a provincial governor, local judges and police officials of corruption. The journalists are accused of violating Paragraph 226 of the penal code, which makes anyone who “publicly insults” the government or public officials subject to up to seven years in prison. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/world/middleeast/29media.html>

This is the freedom for which Bush is so willing to spend the lives of our magnificent service people.  How long will it be before his cronies in Congress introduce similar laws here?  Never happen, you say?  Wouldn't you have said the same thing about legalized torture?

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html>

This is one more example of how Bush ignores any fact that contradicts his beliefs.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — A bipartisan Congressional report documents hundreds of contacts between White House officials and the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his partners, including at least 10 direct contacts between Mr. Abramoff and Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist. The House Government Reform Committee report, based on e-mail messages and other records subpoenaed from Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying firm, found 485 contacts between Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying team and White House officials from 2001 to 2004, including 82 with Mr. Rove’s office.

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29abramoff.html>

I had no doubt that Bush was in bed with Abramoff.  Did you?

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/opinion/28thu1.html>

Spectre's amendment to strip the provision eliminating habeas corpus protections was just defeated by a vote of 51-48.  As I watch the debate on the bill now on the Senate floor I am dismayed to hear GOP Senators that I used to consider honorable men line up in support, especially Senator McCain.  I guess he was against torture before he was for it. 

In Virginia, a state that few expected to be seriously competitive, Senator George Allen looks newly vulnerable after a series of controversies over charges of racial insensitivity, strategists in both parties say. In Tennessee, another Southern state long considered safely red, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., a Democrat, has run a strong campaign that has kept that state in contention.

Elsewhere, Democratic challengers are either ahead or close in races in five states held by the Republicans: Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, according to political strategists in both parties and the latest polls.

All of these races could shift direction in a matter of days, let alone six weeks, and Republicans are counting on their superior finances and large blocks of television advertising to hold the line. Democrats also have their own vulnerabilities, particularly in New Jersey, where Senator Robert Menendez is in a tight race with his Republican challenger, State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., according to recent polls.

Democrats must win six Republican seats to regain a Senate majority, meaning they would have to win nearly every close race. Even the most optimistic Democrats acknowledge that such a feat would require a big anti-Republican wave, a lot of money and a lot of luck.

Still, a shift in the Senate was always considered a long shot this year. Some analysts now say, however, that there are enough Republican seats facing serious challenges to make it at least plausible.

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/us/politics/28senate.html>

A Democrat majority in both houses of the legislature would clear the way to hold Bush and his minions accountable for their crimes.

Yesterday, September 26, the mainstream media was too busy covering the tragically bizarre behavior of a president unhinged from reality to focus on the facts. Bush basically threw a tantrum, claiming that a National Intelligence Estimate by his 16 top intelligence agencies didn’t say what it said.

Then Bush said he would prove that he was right and that he would allow the declassification of selected parts of the NIE finding to prove his point of view was correct.

But even though the report (completed in April, but just disclosed in the New York Times on Sunday) was vetted by the Bush propagandists and only a White House version of an executive summary was released, the report still found that the war in Iraq has led to an increase in terrorists, been a rallying point for jihad, and was increasing the threat of terrorism to the U.S.

In short, the report found that Bush’s war in Iraq has spent billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi lives to INCREASE the number of terrorists and the terrorist threat to our country.

This is incompetence, treason, malfeasance and dereliction of duty all rolled into one. It is beyond belief.

And even more shocking is that "Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Tuesday called on the White House to release a second, previously publicly unknown, national intelligence document that focuses solely on Iraq. Harman insisted there is a draft NIE that has not been revealed to the public. ‘I have learned there is an NIE on Iraq, specifically on Iraq, that has been left in draft form at the National Intelligence Council,’ the California congresswoman said at a news conference."

Yet, the mainstream press continues to treat Bush as credible – and continues to let Rove write a script about "the war on terrorism" that has nothing to do with reality. It as if the billions of dollars spent on "news coverage" by the corporate media is really spent on an ongoing update from the "Wizard of Oz."

What the mainstream media doesn’t report in any sort of front page coverage is that the military, except for the current Bush loyalists at the top, is in virtually open revolt against the Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney/Rice leadership..... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/098>

No surprises here.

By David Morgan

Reuters

Tuesday, September 26, 2006; 1:51 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House-backed legislation on the treatment of terrorism suspects may protect them from torture but gives the United States immunity from legal challenges, human rights groups say.

The U.S. Senate bill laying out procedures for interrogating and trying suspected terrorists that is making its way through Congress this week would effectively protect President George W. Bush and future presidents from judicial oversight, rights advocates said.

"It takes the courts entirely out of the business of making sure the executive branch follows the law," said Christopher Anders, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The bill, which Bush was forced to negotiate with a group of his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate, would bar inmates at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from using habeas corpus petitions to have their imprisonment reviewed by a court.

Habeas corpus -- Latin for "you have the body" -- has been a linchpin of Anglo-American jurisprudence since it was first developed over 300 years ago in Britain.

Rights groups also complained that the measure would retroactively immunize U.S. officials from prosecution under the War Crimes Act of 1996 for interrogations that occurred before Congress enacted legislation banning torture and other abuses late in 2005.

"It's a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card for top officials who ordered the torture and abuse of detainees," Anders said.....

Inserted from <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092600712.html>

Being a small European country with snow is conducive to economic growth. More correlation than causality, no doubt, but the three countries topping the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report are Switzerland, Finland and Sweden--habitual winners all.

Denmark, Singapore, the U.S., Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. round out the top ten. OK, forget the snow, size and location. Soundly run government, being business-friendly and plowing back money into innovation, education and public health are more of what really matter.

Inserted from <http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/09/26/finland-switzerland-denmark-biz_cx_pm_0927competition.html>

The US slipped from #1 to #6, another example of the success of GW's domestic policies.

Click for video

Michael Ware is one of the few journalists on the ground in Baghdad with the street cred to back up their reporting. Here, Ware speaks on the validity of the congressional intelligence report that cites the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a catalyst for terrorism

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Canadian Press

Published: Tuesday, September 26, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Earth's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.

Inserted from <http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=276013db-8b1e-46ba-b387-b867b18ffbca&k=80841>

A picture is worth a thousand words.

This can’t be what President Bush had in mind when he gave a prime-time speech about immigration in May. “An immigration reform bill needs to be comprehensive,” he told the nation, “because all elements of this problem must be addressed together, or none of them will be solved at all.”

That was then. Now we have the Republican-controlled House passing a pre-election lineup of narrow enforcement measures packaged to give voters a false impression of resolve. Mr. Bush has even given up talking a good game on immigration: he says he will sign the Republican legislation as a “first step” toward the real reform he has said he wants but has done depressingly little to achieve.

Republican leaders want you to think they are hard at work overhauling the broken immigration system in the last days before going home. But don’t be fooled by the noise and dust. These are piecemeal rehashes of legislation the House passed last December. They include a 700-mile border fence that would cost more than $2 billion and would not work, and tough-sounding but profoundly undemocratic bills that would allow the indefinite detention of some illegal immigrants seeking asylum, make it easier to deport people without judicial review, and require voters to prove citizenship before participating in federal elections. The latter measure attacks an imaginary problem — voting fraud by illegal immigrants — and would disenfranchise countless Americans who are old and poor.

Among the most poisonous provisions is one that would give state and local police agencies authority to enforce federal immigration laws. Police departments big and small have bristled at the idea, saying they lack the expertise and the resources to enforce immigration law. They say it would cripple crime fighting by severing hard-won relationships with potential victims and witnesses: immigrants who will end up fearing and avoiding them.

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/opinion/26tue1.html>

Let's see...  I guess this fenc will cost me $4.71, personally, and make me the proud owner of 8.7' of it.  It might be more effective for me to pay the money to a mexican national in return for a promise to walk an extra 9' when walking around it.  Smoke and mirrors, friends...... Smoke and mirrors.

By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: September 25, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — Democratic lawmakers, responding to an intelligence report that found that the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat, said the assessment by American spy agencies demonstrated that the Bush administration needed to devise a new strategy for its handling of the war.

Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that while she could not discuss details of the classified National Intelligence Estimate, “Every intelligence analyst I speak to confirms that” the Iraq war had contributed to the increased terrorist threat.

“Even capturing the remaining top Al Qaeda leadership isn’t going to prevent copycat cells, and it isn’t going to change a failed policy in Iraq,” Ms. Harman said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “This administration is trying to change the subject. I don’t think voters are going to buy that.”

In public comments on Sunday, Republican Congressional leaders did not dispute the accuracy of the reports about the intelligence estimate, although they continued to defend the American presence in Iraq.

”I think it’s obvious that the difficulties we’ve experienced in Iraq have certainly emboldened” terrorist groups, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“But I would also argue that these people didn’t need any motivation to attack us on Sept. 11,” he said.

The intelligence estimate, an assessment by America’s 16 intelligence agencies, found that the war in Iraq, rather than stemming the growth of terrorism, had helped fuel its spread across the globe. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/world/middleeast/25terror.html>

McCain has it wrong.  The difficulties have not emboldened terrorists as much as Bush's abandonment of our historical stance as a defender of human rights and criminal violations of the Geneva Conventions has made Iraq a giant recruiting poster for future terrorists.  McCain should be ashamed for trying to cover this up in addition to caving in on human rights abuses.

Congress still has done nothing to protect Americans from a terrorist attack on chemical plants. Republican leaders want to give the impression that that has changed. But voters should not fall for the spin. If the leadership goes through with the strategy it seems to have adopted last week to secure these highly vulnerable targets, national security will be the loser.

The federal government is spending extraordinary amounts of money and time protecting air travel from terrorist attacks. But Congress has not yet passed a law to secure the nation’s chemical plants, even though an attack on just one plant could kill or injure as many as 100,000 people. The sticking point has been the chemical industry, a heavy contributor to political campaigns, which does not want to pay the cost of reasonable safety measures.

The Senate and the House spent many months carefully developing bipartisan chemical plant security bills. Both measures were far too weak, but they would have finally imposed real safety requirements on the chemical industry. The Republican leadership in Congress blocked both bills from moving forward. Instead, whatever gets done about chemical plant security will apparently be decided behind closed doors, and inserted as a rider to a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

It is outrageous that something as important as chemical plant security is being decided in a back-room deal. It is regrettable that Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the chairwoman of the committee that produced the Senate bill, does not carry enough influence with her own party’s leadership to get a strong chemical plant security bill passed. The deal itself, the likely details of which have emerged in recent days, is a near-complete cave-in to industry, and yet more proof that when it comes to a choice between homeland security and the desires of corporate America, the Republican leadership always goes with big business.

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