"There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," he said.

"War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."

He said it was no use having an army that did nothing but train.

Just one more "bring 'em on" moment.

You've really got to hand it to these guys. They are consistent. They've been calling for our exit from the UN since before Ronald Reagan. But the "tooth fairy"?

The United Nations is the tooth fairy of American politics: Few adults believe in it, but it's generally regarded as a harmless story to amuse the children. Since 9/11, however, the U.N. has ceased to be harmless, and the Democratic presidential candidates' enthusiasm for it has ceased to be amusing.

The United Nations has emerged at best as irrelevant to the terrorist threat that most concerns us, and at worst as an obstacle to our winning the war on terrorism. It must be reformed. And if it cannot be reformed, the United States should give serious consideration to withdrawal.

The U.N. has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States' ability to defend itself. If these limits ever made sense at all, they do not make sense now.

But allow me to digress. I attributed this to Perle, because Frum probably wrote the article (and the book -- he was a speechwriter for the Chimp), but the ideas all belong to Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle, who is a consultant to Rummy and, let's not forget, a very rich arms broker. No conflict of interest there, is there, Dick?

But there's more:

The trouble is that the U.N. defines aggression in outdated ways. For the U.N., "aggression" means invasion across national borders. Send Nazi shock troops into Poland -- that's aggression. Give sanctuary to thousands of anti-American murderers, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, that's not aggression.

In other words, under U.N. rules, the U.S. is obliged to let terrorists strike first before retaliating -- and might even be prohibited from striking second.

We need new rules recognizing that harboring terrorists is just as much an act of aggression as an invasion and that those who are targeted by terrorists have an inherent right to defend themselves, preemptively if necessary.

Of course, it won't be easy to persuade the U.N. to adopt these changes.

And finally:

In a little more than a decade, our world has been transformed, first by the fall of the Soviet Union and then the events of 9/11. Everything has changed -- except for the U.N. It remains an invention of a vanished era, designed to solve vanished problems.

Listen up, Dick. You too, Dave. Spend a little time brushing up on your composition skills. Otherwise, you just might end up getting published in the LA Times and looking STUPID.

Oil and politics make an intoxicating cocktail ­ addictive, but with deadly consequences. It has always been so.

Just look at the events of the past three decades: the rise of OPEC in the early 1970s and its spectacular initial success in setting global oil prices; the 1973 Arab oil embargo that shook Western economies to the core; last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq, a country that happens to possess the world’s second-largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia. Not to mention the often repeated call by neoconservatives in America to “occupy” Arab oil countries.

Just a few weeks ago: the arrest of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, head of the Yukos energy firm, when he “defied” a Kremlin directive by trying to sell a major stake of his firm to ExxonMobil.

To understand the meaning of the Kremlin’s move against Yukos, it is important to appreciate that ExxonMobil is one of the world’s two largest corporations, along with General Electric, and the biggest of all oil companies. It is therefore a major player in American politics.

The bottom line in all these episodes is the same: Oil is the one strategic commodity of the world that governments, from superpowers to minor states, will never allow to be free of political control.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it? ...

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again across Latin America, in Africa and in Central and Southeast Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media don't just support the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a moral position they have chosen to take; it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media work.

In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the very least, the marginalization--of dissent.

So what is the Standard's problem? It seems that Edwards hasn't named his campaign contributors. Well, wait a minute. All of that is reported quarterly by law. So Edwards waits until then? So does Bush.

But, oh no, it must be those evil trial lawyers sending Edwards money. Well duh? He was one. You might expect them to like his candidacy.

I'll tell you. If this is the best that Bill Kristol's boys can do against Edwards, they should save their typespace. I would have been ashamed to put my name on such a shabby article.

But the Pentagon is standing by the system, which could get its first test Feb. 3 in South Carolina. ...

So far, seven states have signed on to the experimental system: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

Internet voting has been viewed as a possible cure for some of the ills that afflict the mechanics of American democracy. Recently, the technology has seemed to move ahead of any serious consideration of whether it is actually a good idea to allow home computer owners to choose a president in the same way they order bath towels online or send e-mail to their relatives. But now there are grave questions about whether even the technology makes sense.

Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report this week, concluding that the program should be halted. These four are the only members of a 10-member advisory committee to issue a report on the program. Their findings make it clear that the potential for hackers to steal votes or otherwise subvert elections electronically is too high. Congress should suspend the program.

The intentions behind the Pentagon's plan, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, are laudable. Military personnel overseas, and other Americans abroad, face obstacles to registering and voting. The new program would ease the way by allowing them to use any computer hooked up to the Internet. This year, it would be limited to voters abroad who are from one of 50 counties in seven states, but it could eventually be used by all of the estimated six million American voters overseas.

But the advantages of the Pentagon's Internet voting system would be far outweighed by the dangers it would pose. The report makes it clear that the possibilities for compromising the secrecy of the ballot, voting multiple times and carrying out vote theft on a large scale would be limited only by the imagination and skill of would-be saboteurs. Viruses could be written that would lodge on voters' computers and change their votes. Internet service providers, or even foreign governments that control network access, could interfere with votes before they reached their destination.

This week's report — which was written by respected scientists, including Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University — is not the first to call Internet voting into question. A March 2001 study conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and financed by the National Science Foundation found that Internet systems like the Pentagon's "pose significant risk to the integrity of the voting process."

There is every reason to believe that if federal elections can be tampered with, they will be, particularly when a single hacker, working alone, might be able to use an online voting system to steal a presidential election. The authors of this week's report concede that there is no way of knowing how likely it is that the Pentagon's voting system would be compromised. What is clear, however, is that until the vulnerabilities they identified are eliminated, the risks are too great.

While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ”a legal person”, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.

What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres.

To carry out this choice bit of war profiteering, Halliburton hooked up with Altanmia Marketing of Kuwait. Altanmia was given exclusive rights to ship Kuwaiti gasoline to Iraq -- "even though it had no prior experience transporting fuel," U.S. Congressional investigators report. So what is the firm's actual expertise? Investments, real estate -- and acting as "representative agents for companies trading in military and nuclear, biological and chemical equipment," The Wall Street Journal reports.

In other words, Halliburton's new partner traffics in the essential elements of WMD -- the very stuff whose spread and sale the United States is ostensibly dedicated to stopping around the world. Ostensibly. But as always with the Bushists, the rhetoric of "security" is a thin rag to cover their unquenchable thirst for state-supported brigandage.

The problem has always been what President Eisenhower loosely called “the military-industrial complex.” That is, if the USA comes to terms with all the rogue states of the world who were aligned with Moscow or Beijing in the Cold War, there would no enemies to guard against or to defeat if they were deemed imminent threats. Public support for defense spending would dry up and the Pentagon would wind up living on crumbs, as it was in the 1930's.

This was not to be however. Bush, Sr. refused all solicitations by the Libyan government. Hart questions why:

I anticipate (sic) obvious questions in response to these facts. Why me? The only plausible explanation is that I had publicly condemned (based largely on my experience on the Church committee, which revealed previous assassination plots) President Reagan's attempt to assassinate Gaddafi by long-range bomber in 1986. Was I singled out? Not really; others had been approached. Do I believe the offer was rejected because the Swiss would demand jurisdiction over the bombers in the 40 feet between airplanes? Not in the least. Was the offer rejected because the intermediary was a Democrat? The first Bush administration will have to respond to that question.

This account suggests, and strongly so, only one thing: We might have brought the Pan Am bombers to justice, and quite possibly have moved Libya out of its renegade status, much sooner than we have. At the very least it calls into serious question the assertion that Libya changed direction as a result of our preemptive invasion of Iraq.

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

Let's look at some potential and actual problems:

• Technical:
  • Viruses can easily corrupt voting computers and servers, possibly rendering them inoperable. If this were not detected and corrected in advance, voters may be denied the opportunity to vote. Even if these could be detected in advance, there is no guarantee that skilled personnel will be available to correct the problem.
  • Viruses can easily corrupt the voting computers and servers in a manner that misrecords or deliberately alters the votes cast. These viruses can also be programmed to delete themselves once voting was completed.
  • Even viruses that do not attack the voting computers and servers themselves can cause the communications lines that carry their messages to become overloaded, thereby denying voters the opportunity to vote.
  • Soldiers stationed in areas subject to power failures could be denied the opportunity to vote by such a failure.
  • Systems such as Carnivour could easily intercept and even change internet votes

• Practical:
  • It is the responsibility of each voting supervisor to verify the eligibility of every person casting a vote to actually be eligible to cast a vote in their district. Military write-in voting offers at least a cursory opportunity for the voting supervisor to just that. The system being implemented by the military will simply forward vote totals to the various districts. Voting supervisors will thus be placed in the position of accepting a mere vote count without any possibility of verifying that individuals are eligible.
  • Voting supervisors will be unable to inspect the voting computers being used to insure that they meet local standards.
  • Paper trails and systems audits will be impossible for voting supervisors.

• Political:
  • Most troublesome is the fact that this system essentially militarizes a portion of our voting system, bring it under direct control of the military. Inspection by elected officials and/or their appointees will be impossible. The military simply should not be a part of our voting process beyond their current role of providing all soldiers the opportunity to vote.
  • This system is being suggested as a "pilot test" of a future national voting system. This would have the potential of bringing the majority of our voting system under military control. Since the military is effectively under the control of the Executive, the Executive could literally order the military to tamper with the vote.

This article also appears at Black Box Notes.

WASHINGTON - A House committee recommended legislation Wednesday that would provide for fast special elections if a terrorist attack killed or incapacitated many House members.

The measure would require expedited elections under "extraordinary circumstances" when the speaker of the House announces that vacancies in the 435-member chamber exceed 100.

The bill stipulates that parties choose candidates within 10 days of that announcement and that state elections be held within 45 days.

The legislation has also been approved by the House Administration Committee and now goes to the full House for consideration.

Pardon me if I smell a rat.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

George Bush doesn't want you to know. And so Health and Human Services didn't tell you.

George Bush didn't want you to know about the quality of asbestos-tainted air at Ground Zero after 9/11. And so the Environmental Protection Agency didn't tell you.

George Bush doesn't want you to know that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer. And so the National Cancer Institute won't tell you that anymore.

George Bush doesn't want you to know that there is no link between education about condom use and increased sexual activity. And so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won't tell you you that anymore.

Here's what George Bush wants you to know.

Some people lie by omission. Some people lie by comission.

George Bush is good at both.

Daschle: "When I was driving around South Dakota this summer, I met a nurse in Sioux Falls who has cancer. She told me that she couldn't afford the $1,500 a month her drugs cost. She told me that she was going to die, that she was a lost cause. But, she said, we must solve this problem; don't turn more people into lost causes."

• Why the Bible Belt supports Bush's big-dollar marriage push: This is just too funny. Avedon quotes extensively from a Newsday article that takes note of the fact that conservative Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics. Avedon's cut is funny enough, but the original will have you rolling.

  As Avedon concludes however, it's not nice to laugh at other people's troubles, but maybe they should stop marrying their cousins?

• Why I'm not a libertarian (Just scroll down from the above link): I'm not a libertarian, but as Avedon points out, it easy for many of us liberals to find common cause with those who are and visa-versa; there is a shared commitment to individual rights. Avedon offers some quite worthwhile comments on her feelings on this, but the bulk of this article is long excepts from a 1997 article by Seth Finkelstein called Libertarianism Makes You Stupid. While I think the article title is a bit overblown (there are some libertarians out there doing seriously good writing), this article is perhaps the best deconstruction of the flaws of libertarianism that I've seen to date. I won't get into its line of argument here, but if you're ever arguing political philosophy with a Libertarian, you'll want to have this article bookmarked. There is a definite reason why Avedon has kept it handy for so long.

• Not from Avedon, but worthwhile in light of the Libertarian article above. Libertarianism is regarded as quite conservative and quite to the right of center. Even its adherents acknowledge that it is well to the right of mainstream conservatism (as opposed to the "New Right", ... which most Libertarians detest, by the way). So how to explain the newly-emerging bond between Liberals and Libertarians? After all, they are almost polar opposites on the scale.

  In fact, it is the scale itself that is the probem. By it's one-dimensional nature, you can only be left of center or right of center, and nuance is excluded. Enter The Political Compass.

  What the political compass does is add a second dimension to one's political orientation. I won't explain that here because the site starts out with a test to place the visitor on this two-dimensional scale, and they don't want the test results to be prejudiced by foreknowledge of what they are trying to measure. That said however, I found it pretty much nailed my view of myself, and though a few personal friends complained about their scores, I found those scores to be pretty much in line with how I viewed their politics.

  Anyways, the test is fun, and you'll be placed among a chart of major political personalities. (For the record, I'm really close to the Dalai Lama.) If you haven't taken this test yet, go ahead, have some fun.

  [Note: If you've taken the test before, they've added a new chart with all of the Presidential hopefuls on it.]

Al-Qaeda has issued a chilling new call to arms to recruits who remain undetected by security agencies. In a terrorist manual published on the internet, Osama bin Laden says: "After Iraq and Afghanistan will come the Crusader invasion of Saudi Arabia. All fighters all over the world must be ready." ...

It is directed at new volunteers who are 'below the radar' of counter-terrorist authorities and who cannot break cover to undergo formal training in terrorist techniques. Like bin Laden, Zawahiri is quoted in the publication, called 'The Base of the Vanguard'. Other writers encourage the use of weapons of mass destruction.

"That's certainly not something Wal-Mart would condone."

We need to get this jerk out of the White House and Ashcroft out of Justice. They simply will not accept responsibility for their inactions.

Max also thinks it is crazy that a few people – maybe even only Paul Wolfowitz – with only a few impoverished thinktanks behind them (AEI, PNAC, the Olin, Bradley and Smith-Richardson Foundations) can create and control American foreign policy. He says neocons have been "relatively influential" only because their arguments are so good, not their connections. That’s probably why Dick Cheney placed so many previously connected thinktank guys in key positions at the Pentagon, within his own office, and in parts of the State Department so as to more easily roll those who weren’t convinced of the wisdom of those good neo-con arguments. ...

Max also denies that neocons are unilateralists, or Manichean simpletons who cherish the idea of noble lies and the stealthy practice of electoral politics by other means. Well, of course they aren’t unilateralist or Manichean–if you are with them, then you are certainly not against them.