I’ve mentioned spam on this blog several times, noting that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in particular have been caught spamming.
Democrats are no less enthusiastic spammers, though, and now Wes Clark has joined the ranks of spammers, having hired Kintera, Inc. to broadcast his campaign messages unsolicited to voters at the recipients’ expense.
The Iraqis have strayed from the script again. This time a prominent Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has been demanding direct elections of the new Iraqi provisional government.
It wasn’t so long ago that Bush, in a display of hypocrisy that should shock me but doesn’t, demanded free elections in Cuba. Bush has called for early elections in Venezuela, elections in occupied Palestine, and elections in Northern Ireland, so why aren’t elections good for democracy in Iraq? The Bush administration claims there are insurmountable technical problems. They also worry about “manipulation” of the election, which I suppose is a code phrase for the majority getting its way. Most likely, Bush has a problem with the likely outcome of elections. An elected legislature might be less likely to follow orders from Washington.
No better can be expected from a man who is unelected himself.
As so many people have been saying, and as I’ve tried to mention early and often, the claim that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction was always a transparent lie. Now David Kay, the guy in charge of finding the nonexistent weapons, has quit his job, which nay-saying peace activists will likely take as an admission that there is nothing to find. I certainly will.
In a dirty-trick scandal that ought to remind everyone of Watergate, Republicans have been caught breaking into the computer system of Senate Democrats. The Boston Globe reports that a Republican staffer discovered a security flaw in the Democrats’ computer network, and used it to read the Democrats’ internal memos and strategy documents from spring 2002 to at least April 2003. The confidential information was leaked to their friends in the conservative media, allegedly including right-wing pundit Robert Novak.
One hopes that such a serious violation of federal law as this will result in an investigation by a Special Prosecutor. But with John Ashcroft in charge I’m not holding my breath.
George Bush wants you to think of him as a visionary space explorer. But his Mars proposal is much more down-to-earth. It’s all about taking his policy of militarizing space to the next level. The prime beneficiaries will be military contractors, not scientists. If you doubt it, consider the fact that NASA will be abandoning the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most productive scientific instruments of all time. As long as NASA is controlled by the U.S. military, its mission will be military, which means it will be all about keeping a river of tax dollars flowing to war profiteers.
Usually the word “monoculture” refers to agriculture done the wrong way, with lots of identical plants living side by side. If a disease comes along that can infect one plant, it can infect them all, and a catastrophic epidemic results. We’ve seen many examples in the past, from Dutch Elm disease to the Irish Potato Famine. The wise farmer encourages diversity, so a disease that affects one plant doesn’t necessarily affect them all.
Slashdot points to an interesting article about monoculture in software. Most computers run Windows, and when a computer virus comes along that can exploit one of the many inherent vulnerabilities of that operating system, the results can bring whole networks to their knees.
It’s yet another argument against allowing monopolies to exist. Monopolies like Microsoft create a technological monoculture, leaving the whole economy vulnerable to an otherwise small flaw in a piece of software.
John Ashcroft ran for the U.S. Senate in 2000, and lost. (to a dead man). Before his defeat he was given a mailing list worth &/036;1.7 million by the Spirit of America political action committee. Turns out he failed to comply with federal election law by concealing the gift from the PAC. The National Voting Rights Institute and Public Citizen have called for a investigation by a special prosecutor.
It should surprise no one to learn that George W. Bush was determined to invade Iraq as soon as he took office.
It’s a bit surprising that a Bush administration insider, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, should be the one to tell us. There was a fine interview with O’Neill on Fresh Air Wednesday, in which O’Neill makes completely clear what Bush and Rumsfeld are hoping to obscure: that Bush had already decided to wage a war of aggression against Iraq, and that his administration’s top foreign policy priority was the search for an excuse to do so.
The White House, true to form, is attacking O’Neill, claiming that he stole classified documents. Bush hopes to keep us thinking about how the secrets got revealed, so we don’t think too carefully about why the secrets existed in the first place.
The American occupation government in Iraq is gradually becoming aware of how badly we are hated by the people whose country we rule. Not surprisingly, one of the grievances the Iraqis have is the large number of Iraqis being held prisoner, with neither POW status nor civilian criminal charges. NPR reports that even the U.S. knows these prisoners are innocent. So what could be better for public relations than a large-scale prisoner release?
In this case, one might ask what could be worse. Relatives were given no information by the occupation government, so they waited outside the prison hoping their family members would be among the 100 people that L. Paul Bremer promised to release. The prisoners weren’t released at the prison, though, they were driven away from it, so the families just had to follow the caravan. Finally the prisoners—60, not 100—were simply put off the trucks in the middle of a major highway. Now the Iraqis, whose loved ones are mostly still imprisoned, are even more ungrateful than they were before.
A report published by the Army War College says the U.S. war against Iraq was unnecessary, and that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the United States. “The United States may be able to defeat al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil,” the report’s author writes.
