Good intelligent debate now online. Howard Dean vrs Ralph Nader.

[ worth a listen... some good bits here... -k]

Nader VRS DEAN

] Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the
] committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had
] chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear
] weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.
]
]
] "As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and
] largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he
] said.

Yep, so much for those WMD's. So now that we've got close to 900 dead and over 5000 wounded to protect the world from something that never existed, can we please get the hell out of the goddamn desert?

Yahoo! News - Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq

] But the chairman of the new federal Election Assistance
] Commission complained Thursday that he was rebuffed when
] he wrote to Ridge seeking to discuss election security
] issues, including how to handle rescheduling the election
] if it were to be disrupted by an attack.

Oh yeah... This inspires confidence. "Hey, you're going to get attacked!" "What can you tell me?" "Sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you. You're the one who's going to be attacked."
WTF?

Yahoo! News - Ridge Warns of Election Terror Plot

] But the Rev. Richard Land, who deals with ethics and
] religious liberty issues for the Southern Baptist
] Convention, a key Bush constituency, said he was
] "appalled."
]
] "First of all, I would not want my church directories
] being used that way," he told Reuters in an interview,
] predicting failure for the Bush plan.

[ Good. SO he's alienated the fiscal conservatives, worked hard to alienate the military and their families, and now he's gonna work on pissing off large segments of the religious base? Sounds like a winning combination to me. Granted, these people are probably pretty solidly red overall, but every vote counts and all that... a few percent change could make the difference. -k]

Bush Seeks to Mobilize Religious Conservatives

] One friend I know describes working in the media as
] shoveling coal for Satan. That's about right. A worker in
] a tampon factory has dignity: He just uses his sweat to
] make a product, a useful product at that, and doesn't lie
] to himself about what he does. In this business we make
] commodities for sale and, for the benefit of our
] consciences and our egos, we call them ideas and truth.
] And then we go on the lecture circuit. But in 99 cases
] out of 100, the public has more to learn about humanity
] from the guy who makes tampons.
]
] I'm off on this tangent because I'm enraged by the
] numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary, "nuanced"
] criticism of Moore this week by the learned priests of
] our business. (And no, I'm not overlooking this
] newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible
] to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the
] facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he
] wouldn't be necessary if even one percent of the rest of
] us had any balls at all.
]
] If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush
] press conference last year and shouted, "Bullshit!" it
] might have made a difference.

[ Awesome. Taibbi lays down some smack on lazy journalism, pulling no punches. Hear hear. -k]

NYPress: SHOVELING COAL FOR SATAN: Christopher Hitchens collects check from Microsoft, calls Moore a coward.

To whom it may concern,
I was reading your paper "Is Open Source Software a threat to Future Intellectual Property Rights," and was quite shocked to find the following error. In the paper you claim:

"As unlikely as this might seem to the skeptic, the National Security Agency (NSA), that coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence information, made the folly of developing GPL-licensed code to improve the Linux operating system. After reading the terms of the Linux GPL, the NSA realized they needed to post this enhancement to the Internet in source code form for the world to see."

First of all there no such thing as the "Linux GPL." There is the GNU GPL, which many distributions of Linux are published under. This seems a rather large mistake for a PAC specializing in IP to make. Furthermore, the claim that the GPL in some way requires you to post publicly any modifications to GPL-code is completely false. In fact, a specific section of the Frequently Asked Questions of the GPL addresses this issue. From the GNU GPL FAQ: (available at:http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html)

"The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL. Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you."

How could you make such a a blatant mistake? How do you conduct research at your organization? Even a cursory glance at the license would have shown this. Do you have such little faith in our Government agencies to imagine that they wouldn't have a horde of lawyers examine a license before using it? And yet, you, a organization who claims to protect my property rights didn't a) already know this, or b) do the trivial amount of research to learn it?

I utterly offended by your complete lack of fundamental research in this paper. To make the baseless claim that the GPL or Linux are some kind of evil things that have weakened National Security and manipulated our government is completely absurd. I am extremely interested how this gross mistake was missed by your editors and fact-finders, and made it into publication. I eagerly await your reply.

[ Damn. Right on, brother... -k]

Email to mail@yourpropertyrights.org

The 155-mm shells containing sarin gas that exploded in Iraq May 17 were manufactured before 1991, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. That was a pre-Gulf War shell, a different category than the weapons being sought by the Iraq Survey Group, Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, the joint staff deputy director for operations, told a Pentagon news briefing.

...

For what it's worth in the debate over the shells.

Sarin Shells Made Before 1991 War

] "The government ought to make a greater effort to give a
] fair and balanced representation of political viewpoints
] on its airwaves to soldiers, sailors and airmen around
] the world listening," says Tom Athans, executive director
] of Democracy Radio, a nonprofit group in Washington that
] promotes political diversity on the airwaves. "It's
] important for the U.S. military, when using tax dollars,
] to not provide just one political perspective without
] giving consideration to opposing points of view."
]
] After the Florida recount in 2000, when overseas military
] ballots were an important element in Bush's narrow
] victory, the influence of what amounts to propaganda
] beamed daily to U.S. troops must be considered a domestic
] political factor of no small consequence. "There's no
] question when one-side programming like American Forces
] Network is presented to troops, it's going to impact
] their voting behavior," says Athans.

I thought it was bad enough letting Fox and Clear Channel buy up as many stations as they could afford. From this article it clearly sounds like those heading up the Armed Forces Networks are taking sides and forcing their views on the troops and their families.

Gee, wasn't there a movie made about this?

Rush Limbaugh's forced conscripts

"The (NY) Times and Iraq

Published: May 26, 2004

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past
time we turned the same light on ourselves.

[ Props to intellectual honesty. -k]

Duped or just Bushwhacked?

] "We were dealing with reels of film, not politics," said
] jury president Quentin Tarantino. "We all agreed that
] 'Fahrenheit 9/11' was the best film."

[ There are a lot of things that make a film good, and I don't think it's quite accurate to claim politics don't enter into it. The content of the film *has* to be one of the major factors. If you're only looking for mechanincs and cinematography, you're not doing much good.
That being said, I think most of us will be waiting a while to judge for ourselves. I'm anxious to see it, but I'm very surprised to see it win this... it seems impossible that politics on the world stage played no part. -k]

Jury defends award to Moore