This is just a heads up that the latest masterpiece from our fearless leader will be showing this week in San Francisco at the Red Vic - 1727 Haight St.

Tuesday - 7:00, 9:30 Wed - 2:00, 7:00, 9:30

This is from the August 22, 2003 program of
NOW With Bill Moyers.

I've provided a "complete" version and a version in two smaller parts (in case you're on a slow connection).

Caroline Hawley From Iraq - Complete (Small - 20 MB)

Caroline Hawley From Iraq - Part 1 of 2 (Small - 10 MB)

Caroline Hawley From Iraq - Part 2 of 2 (Small - 10 MB)

Here's
Ben Affleck on Tech TV talking about filesharing. (Windows Media File - .asf)

(Thanks, Jason.)

There's a an interview from OUI magazine in 1977 that has seen the light of day recently on the smoking gun.

I caught the last half of an interview on KTVU Channel 2 News in San Francisco with Smoking Gun reporter Andrew Goldberg about republishing the Arnie OUI interview.

I thought you might find it interesting.

This is from around 7:00 am on August 29, 2003.


KTVU - Andrew Golberg, Smoking Gun Reporter (Small - 4 MB)

Lisa's voting NO on the recall and for Cruz Bustamante.

This totally rocks dude:

Victory Act Summer Tour

MIT Everyware
Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.
By David Diamond for Wired News.
(via Boingboing.)

When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program - dubbed OpenCourseWare - would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required...

And MIT will learn a few things, too, just as it did during OpenCourseWare's first year. One lesson of the beta test revolved around access, which in some parts of the world is costly and slow. A second issue: lack of assistance to Web-based students. Even the most brilliant university course can falter without the kind of intensive teaching support provided at a school like MIT. Then there are the nagging intellectual property headaches. How, for example, do you police Third World scam artists from hawking MIT degrees as if they were Calvin Klein knockoffs?

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit_pr.html

MIT Everyware

Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.

By David Diamond

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."

In a huge brick house that Evan Hoff shares with three other guys in Nashville, the 20-year-old brings up the MIT Web site and connects to the same material Lam is studying halfway around the world. "This is the lecture on data abstraction," Hoff explains. "I went over this in community college, but that class only took it so far. This teaches you about the three different specification conditions, the things you put in documentation to let future programmers know how to use it. In community college we covered only two of them."

When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program - dubbed OpenCourseWare - would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required.

"It's a profoundly simple idea that was not intuitive," recalls Anne Margulies, the former Harvard assistant provost and executive director of information systems who was hired to be OpenCourseWare's executive director. "At the time, the world was clamping down on information, limiting it to those who could pay for it." Soon foundation money was gushing in to support the initiative. MIT earned the distinction as the only university forward-thinking enough to open-source itself. To test the concept, the university posted 50 courses last year.

Peter Lau
Lam Vi Quoc
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Smart and upbeat, Lam, 22, is the first member of his family to attend college. He is the youngest of six children of Chinese-Vietnamese parents who are retired from the business they ran making cartons. A student in the information technology department of Vietnam's Natural Sciences University, in Ho Chi Minh City, he received a $500 scholarship to buy his computer and a $100 scholarship toward his studies. Lam, who spends six days a week at school, was introduced to Laboratory in Software Engineering - aka 6.170 - when one of his professors downloaded the course materials onto the university's server and made it required reading. As leader of his software lab team, Lam helped create a program that allowed city residents to find bus routes by destination. After graduation, he hopes to continue his studies in either Singapore or England, but to do so, he'll need another scholarship - something he says is unlikely unless he is one of three students chosen to be a graduate assistant at his own university. If that doesn't happen, he'll shoot for an IT job in Vietnam. "Maybe if I work for three years," Lam says, "I will be able to have my own house and a car."

In September, as students arrive on the Cambridge campus for the start of school, MIT will officially launch OpenCourseWare with 500 courses, offerings like Nuclear Engineering Course 22.312: Engineering of Nuclear Reactors, and Political Science 17.251: Congress and the American Political System. (Like everything else at MIT, classes are typically referred to by number.) The school expects to add the remaining 1,500 courses over the next three years. If the pilot program is any indication, students from Nepal to Nebraska will be diving into the material.

And MIT will learn a few things, too, just as it did during OpenCourseWare's first year. One lesson of the beta test revolved around access, which in some parts of the world is costly and slow. A second issue: lack of assistance to Web-based students. Even the most brilliant university course can falter without the kind of intensive teaching support provided at a school like MIT. Then there are the nagging intellectual property headaches. How, for example, do you police Third World scam artists from hawking MIT degrees as if they were Calvin Klein knockoffs?

Like many other universities, MIT had ambitions for making money in the distance-learning business. It called in a consultant to scope out the terrain, and in 2000, Booz Allen Hamilton reported that MIT had missed the wave. That's when a group of faculty members and administrators - Hal Abelson, Steven Lerman, Toby Woll and Dick Yue - hit upon the idea of posting all courses online, free and available to all. MIT President Charles Vest signed on, but persuading the faculty was difficult. Some professors complained the program would burden them with extra work. Others worried that unpolished lectures would reflect poorly on the institution. Faculty authors were concerned that they would be giving away intellectual property and thus hurt sales of their textbooks. "This was probably the most widely discussed decision at MIT," recalls Abelson. By making the project voluntary for professors, most objections melted away.

The idea quickly attracted outside funding. The William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations ponied up a total of $11 million for the first two-year phase. (MIT kicked in another $1 million.) Those organizations are likely to continue supporting the initiative, which is expected to require an additional $20 million or so before the rest of the courses are posted by the end of 2006. The money will underwrite everything from helping faculty develop and digitize their materials to designing Web sites and hosting servers.

In some academic circles, MIT was viewed as making a masterful PR move. If so, the scheme worked brilliantly, because most of the world applauded; when I explained OpenCourseWare to a Turkish journalist, his immediate response was, "They should give the Nobel Prize to whoever came up with that idea."

One of the most popular offerings turned out to be Laboratory in Software Engineering, aka 6.170, a tough requirement for electrical engineering and computer science majors. Lam Vi Quoc, a fourth-year student at Vietnam's Natural Sciences University, relied on 6.170 lectures to supplement a software lab he was taking, and Evan Hoff, a software developer in Nashville, followed the course to improve his coding skills. In Karachi, Pakistan, a group of 100 students and professionals met weekly to study 6.170. In Kansas City, five members of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association gathered monthly to take the course. In Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, Priya Durshini Thaunoo used 6.170 to prepare for a master's degree program at the University of Mauritius. Saman Zarandioon, an Iranian refugee living in Vienna, studied it to continue an education that was stalled by the Iranian government. And software developer Rahul Thadani in Birmingham, Alabama, took it to sharpen his skills.

These and countless others called up a Web site, ocw.mit.edu, that is well organized and easy to navigate. The 6.170 home page, which displays a photo of a computer lab, contains key details about the course, including a syllabus. The left-hand side of the screen has links to various course elements - from quiz reviews to online resources. By clicking on lecture notes, for example, students access a chronological list indicating each lecture number, date, and topic; they can quickly link to each lecture's PDF file. (Some courses offer video lectures.) Assignments are presented in HTML and include links to online resources, such as software tools and supplemental texts. The final project in 6.170 requires students to design, document, build, and test a program that plays Gizmoball, a version of pinball, and the site provides links to tips, FAQs, and tools - everything needed to complete the project.

Extensive though it is, the site is built around lessons from a previous term - material that already might be slightly out of date. But that's a small part of why OpenCourseWare can't come close to replicating the resources available to Irene Lee, an MIT student who took 6.170 on campus last spring. Most nights, Lee logged on to a PC in the computer lab and worked through problem sets. Even at 3 am, she had ready access to help via Zephyr, MIT's internal messaging system. "If I have a question or a problem I don't understand, I can send an instant message to a teaching assistant or a lab assistant," Lee tells me. "I can usually get an answer right away." Each of the 10 teaching assistants for 6.170 was available several hours per week. In addition, at least one of the six lab assistants was on call to sit down with students or respond to IMs. And then there was the give-and-take of interacting live with a professor - a boon not just to students but also to faculty. Michael Ernst, who taught Lee's 6.170 class, says, "When I'm in a lecture, I look around to see people's faces. I can see when they're nodding off and change my approach, even if there are 200 people in the room."

MIT administrators and professors are quick to note that the Web is no substitute for the experience of learning in a top-tier academic setting. "OpenCourseWare is a snapshot of the way a particular subject in a particular discipline was taught at one period in time at MIT," says project director Margulies. "It isn't an MIT education."

Nick Ruechel
Evan Hoff
Nashville, Tennessee
Hoff, a 20-year-old software developer and college dropout, is the son of a former DEC computer repairman. He divided his childhood between his father's double-wide trailer in the Missouri countryside and his grandmother's house in the Kansas City suburbs. Soft-edged and bantam-weight, Hoff has been programming since he was 13. He signed on with Aegis Commerce while he was still attending a small Christian high school. (With just four members in his graduating class, it "was more like home schooling," he says.) Last year, shortly before moving from Missouri to Nashville, Hoff took 6.170 on his own, studying into the night in his apartment. Now he has a list of clients in the Christian music business. MIT's 6.170, he says, has "allowed me to write simpler code, less code, and be more efficient and more productive with my time." He recently wrote a program that synchronizes Aegis products with Peachtree Accounting software. (And if you go to the Web site of Christian rock band Mercy Me - www.mercymelive.com - you can find the function he created that enables visitors to locate any radio station in the country that plays the group's music and conveniently request one of its songs.) Hoff hasn't decided whether he'll move to Aegis' Philadelphia-area headquarters or stay in Nashville and go full throttle into consulting. Either way, he says, he'll enroll part-time in college. "I definitely want to get my bachelor's degree. That's my goal.".

OpenCourseWare's pilot run was wildly successful, drawing visitors from 210 countries and territories. In addition to students, the material appeals to countless educators at other universities. Zhivko Nedev, a computer science professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, turns to 6.170 material to help him prepare lectures for his programming course. "It is the best thing I have ever seen in computer science," he says. Ludmila Matiash, at the Kyiv Mohyla Business School in Ukraine, draws on OpenCourseWare to design educational and training programs. Kathy Mann, manager of the biology lab at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, uses Biology 7.012: Introduction to Biology to teach students how to create lab reports and record information from science experiments. "It's really well done," she says. "Why reinvent the wheel?" The Fulbright Economic Teaching Program at the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City makes its own content available online to any interested learners - and indicates on its site that it is taking a cue from OpenCourseWare. "Part of our stated mission is to be more than just a project at MIT," says Margulies, "to evolve into a movement, to help other universities develop a model."

All this success has bred a few problems. For starters: profiteering. I show Margulies an email from Thailand. "A group of us here are considering opening a University devoted solely to 'e-learning courses from MIT!'" writes the sender, who says he hopes to offer "Bachelor of Science degrees in MIT Studies."

"He can't do that!" she shrieks.

Soon, the budding entrepreneur is sent a stern reply stating the guidelines: People are free to use, modify, translate, and distribute OpenCourseWare as long as they don't try to make a buck from it.

The promise of the first year only underscores the hurdles still to clear, some of which are beyond MIT's control. A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization forum last year considered OpenCourseWare's potential impact in the developing world and concluded that much of the planet isn't sufficiently wired to benefit from the program. MIT dishes out its content via more than 200 servers in Akamai's global network. This takes the burden off the university's infrastructure and eases bottlenecks, but the big remaining obstacle is the last mile into people's homes. In places like Vietnam, university systems mirror MIT's servers, making the material available via internal networks. In Lam's case, he downloaded lecture notes from his school's server onto a CD. An entrepreneur in Ghana is also burning content to CDs, which he sells, without profit, to educators.

MIT is working hard on other ways to extend OpenCourseWare's reach. In January, Universia, a Madrid-based consortium of universities, approached MIT about translating the material into Spanish and Portuguese. MIT signed a deal to authorize and vet the translations, and the first 25 courses will be available this month. The university has received similar requests from the Middle East, Ukraine, and Mongolia, but it won't forge any more official partnerships until it sees how the Universia deal goes.

Ultimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses. Margulies says MIT is eager to find third parties to create tools that would enable learners or educators to easily organize and manage discussion groups using OpenCourseWare content. "We'd like to see self-managed OpenCourseWare communities," says Margulies. "Our vision is to have this open source software on the site, as well as information that helps people build a learning community, whether it's in Namibia, Thailand, wherever."

For a firsthand look at OpenCourseWare's power, you need only travel the back roads of western Kentucky to Murray State University, which bills itself as "Kentucky's Public Ivy University." That's where I met James Humes, a likable, articulate 25-year-old who has flunked out of various colleges three times. After a stint teaching in Shanghai, Humes enrolled at Murray State, where, he says, "people start to get nervous if you talk about evolution."

Now Humes is getting a 4.0. He's more motivated, sure. But he also has a secret weapon.

We enter his two-room duplex and sit down in front of his computer. "My friend's dad turned me on to OpenCourseWare," he says. "At first I didn't want to use it. It looked too advanced." But then he had a physics professor who couldn't spark his interest. So Humes checked out Physics 8.02: Electricity and Magnetism. "This MIT guy giving the video lecture was incredible," he says. "It's like you want to hear the next word. It's such a rich experience that I would get done with one lecture and find myself clicking on the next one immediately."

To demonstrate, Humes brings up a video presentation in which a disheveled and highly animated professor, Walter Lewin, is demonstrating how an EKG test works. "First of all, he's a great speaker. He does demonstrations. We never had that. Our class was all tedious derivations. Every day he impressed the heck out of me. He relates it all to things you know. Look at these kids laughing. They give him a standing ovation at the end of each lecture! We never had a moment of levity in our class."

Humes was so stoked by the physics class that he also reviewed the OpenCourseWare version of calculus and has since moved on to linear algebra. Now he prepares for exams at Murray State by practicing with OpenCourseWare quizzes covering the same material. "I do fine and feel great, and then when I take my test the problems are easier," he says. "There's a lot of satisfaction that comes from being able to understand the MIT classes."

"Check this out," he says, clicking to an early lecture in linear algebra. Soon he is transfixed by the famous mathematician Gilbert Strang. He finally turns to me, displaying the most amazing grin - that of someone who's just discovered the joys of learning.

It's a Nobel Prize-worthy grin.

Top 10 OpenCourseWare Nations*
Rank Nation Hits
1. Canada 3,886,197
2. Germany 3,576,071
3. Brazil 3,170,362
4. South Korea 3,254,259
5. France 3,012,102
6. Japan 3,095,913
7. United Kingdom 3,099,713
8. China 2,563,446
9. India 2,512,267
10. Australia 1,372,052
* Outside the U.S.

Includes nearly 600,000 hits from mainland China, where the government denied access to OpenCourseWare until February 2003, and nearly 2 million hits from Hong Kong.
Top 10 OpenCourseWare Classes
1. Philosophy 24.00: Problems of Philosophy
2. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.170: Laboratory in Software Engineering
3. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.071: Introduction to Electronics
4. Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences 12.409: Hands-On Astronomy: Observing Stars and Planets
5. Mathematics 18.06: Linear Algebra
6. Mathematics 18.013A: Calculus with Applications
7. Nuclear Engineering 22.00J: Introduction to Modeling and Simulation
8. Physics 8.02: Electricity and Magnetism
9. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.281J: Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods
10. Management 15.810: Introduction to Marketing
Source: MIT. Ranked by hits per page and based on a two-month period ending June 30, 2003.

Contributing writer David Diamond (ddiamond@well.com) interviewed Linus Torvalds in Wired 11.07.

2004 Deficit Could Near $500B
By the Associated Press.

The federal government is heading toward a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 and will rack up red ink of almost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The estimate may even break the half-trillion dollar mark, a newspaper reports.

Congressional aides with access to the CBO report said it also confirms earlier estimates that the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 will be $401 billion, well above the previous record of $290.4 billion set in 1992.

The 2004-2013 deficit estimate of $1.397 trillion by the nonpartisan office reverses previous predictions that the federal budget, battered by economic recession and rising defense and security costs, would edge back into the black over the coming decade.

According to The New York Times, the CBO will actually provide two estimates. One ignores the cost of the military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are running at a combined $4.9 billion a month.

Another assumes that war costs this year will continue at the same amount for the next 10 years.

Both assumptions are considered somewhat unrealistic. The method assuming a 10-year war cost could push the deficit over $500 billion.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/politics/main570166.shtml

2004 Deficit Could Near $500B

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2003

"Even with growth we still have deep deficits getting even deeper."
Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C.

The budget impact of the war in Iraq is uncertain, because it is not clear how many troops will remain there as time goes on, or how long they will stay. (Photo: AP)

As higher deficits are projected, Congress is considering adding a costly prescription drug benefit to Medicare. (Photo: CBS)

DEBT & TAXES
# The federal debt is the total amount from IOUs accumulated by the federal government over time. The deficit is the annual gap between spending and revenues.

# The current federal debt is $6.6 trillion.

# About $2.8 trillion is owed by the Treasury to the Social Security or Medicare trust funds. The public holds the rest.

# About 40 percent of the privately held federal debt is held by foreigners.

# The projected federal deficit for this year exceeds the total government budgets of France, Canada and Russia.

CBS

(CBS/AP) The federal government is heading toward a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 and will rack up red ink of almost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The estimate may even break the half-trillion dollar mark, a newspaper reports.

Congressional aides with access to the CBO report said it also confirms earlier estimates that the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 will be $401 billion, well above the previous record of $290.4 billion set in 1992.

The 2004-2013 deficit estimate of $1.397 trillion by the nonpartisan office reverses previous predictions that the federal budget, battered by economic recession and rising defense and security costs, would edge back into the black over the coming decade.

According to The New York Times, the CBO will actually provide two estimates. One ignores the cost of the military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are running at a combined $4.9 billion a month.

Another assumes that war costs this year will continue at the same amount for the next 10 years.

Both assumptions are considered somewhat unrealistic. The method assuming a 10-year war cost could push the deficit over $500 billion.

Besides defense costs, Democrats were quick to cite the Bush administration's tax cuts for the government's financial problems.

In its last budget estimates in March, the CBO predicted that the deficit would be $246 billion this year, but would move gradually back toward the black and result in an accumulated surplus of $891 billion in the 2004-2013 period. But the latest figures, reflecting the rising costs of the military campaign in Iraq, are certain to be more pessimistic.

Even before the report was released, congressional Democrats on Monday argued that the CBO numbers underestimate the coming deficits because the office generally does not anticipate future changes in spending policy.

The Bush administration's drive to pass new tax cuts and make existing tax breaks permanent, coupled with efforts to give seniors a Medicare prescription drug benefit and meet sharply rising defense costs, will eliminate the possibility for a return to surpluses in the next decade, they said.

"It is clear that these estimates will provide yet more evidence of the nation's fiscal deterioration under the irresponsible tax cut and spending policies of the Bush administration," said Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

The Budget Committee Democrats said their analysis shows that the deficit will hit $495 billion in 2004, and will never go below $300 billion in the 2004-2013 period, reaching a total over the decade of $3.7 trillion.

If money from the Social Security surpluses now being used to pay for other federal programs is not factored in, the decade-long deficit will be $6.3 trillion, they said.

Sean Spicer, spokesman for House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, disputed the Democratic conclusions, saying Republicans do have a blueprint for getting the budget back in balance. He said the keys were promoting a strong economic recovery and controlling federal spending and "we're trying to do both."

The Bush administration has blamed the swift reversal from budget surpluses to perennial deficits to the faltering economy, the Sept. 11 attacks and the sharp rise in defense and homeland security costs. The White House says the fiscal situation will improve as the economy, bolstered by the Bush tax cuts, becomes more robust.

But Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, contended that budget projections already assume strong growth of more than 3 percent a year over the next few years. "Even with growth we still have deep deficits getting even deeper," he said.

The CBO numbers, he said, do not take into account the $1.2 trillion that will be lost if tax cuts scheduled to expire over the next decade are made permanent, and another $878 billion in new tax cuts over the decade being sought by the White House.

Last month, the White House's own Office of Management and Budget estimated an even higher deficit for this year — $455 billion — and a lower one for next — $475 billion — compared to the CBO figures.

This fiscal year's deficit has already exceeded the old record of $290.4 billion set in 1992 when President Bush's father was president.

Republicans argue that the economy is much larger today than it was then, so the budget shortfall has less of an impact and is not a record when measured as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.

Many economists look more at the percentage of GDP than raw dollars in assessing the impact of federal budget deficits on the economy.

But even at its current size, the deficit could damage the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned as much last month.

"There is no question that if you run substantial and excessive deficits over time you are draining savings from the private sector," Greenspan told the House Financial Services Committee.

At long last! I'll be putting up presentations from the Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons? conference at the rate of about one every other day for the next two weeks or so.

This conference changed the way I think about a lot of things, not just spectrum, but I must admit that I didn't fully grasp cognitive radio beforehand. They really took the time to explain everything to us and then gave us a chance to dig our teeth in a bit as the weekend progressed by engaging in some discussions and, at the very end, a moot court where the issues were debated.

This conference was a bit of a death march** in the sense that it started at 8am and went until 8 or 9pm (or 10 or 11) easily both nights. (Oh wait, that was Joi Ito's party that went late on Sunday :-) (**And I mean that in a good way -- I didn't realize how exhausted I was till the end -- it was very exciting while it was taking place. It was just a lot of information crammed into two days.)

Anyway I recorded the whole darn thing. Even the speakers who presented over dinner -- as you'll be well aware of from the silverware noises in the background. I had to record everything because it's all so important.

So here it is. If you haven't been able to wrap your head around open spectrum and cognitive radio yet, this conference will bring you up to speed immediately. Particulary the first half-day of presentations -- an array of backgrounders from the top experts in the field. It's not so hard to understand when these guys explain it to you step by step.

For each of the presentations, I will be creating a single, huge file (the "1a, 2a, etc." numbered files) and four smaller files for easier downloading (labeled 1, 2, etc. as the day progresses).

If I haven't explained this before, the reason I make all of these slides is to enable people to use them in presentations they are putting together themselves for their own classes and collegues, should they wish to do so. (I'm trying to save teachers the time of trying to capture stills from the video.)

Enjoy!

David Reed - Sat AM - Part 1 of 4 (Small - 32 MB)

David Reed - Sat AM - Part 2 of 4 (Small - 24 MB)

David Reed - Sat AM - Part 3 of 4 (Small - 38 MB)

David Reed - Sat AM - Part 4 of 4 (Small - 35 MB)

David Reed - Sat AM - Complete (Small - 127 MB)

Left to right (above), Ren Bucholz (EFF), Cory Doctorow (EFF), Matthew Haughey (Metafilter), Aaron Swartz (Creative Commons)

Our heroes!

Texas State Senators in Exile Fear Arrest
By the Associated Press - In the NY Times.

Texas Senate Democrats who stymied Republican redistricting plans by fleeing to New Mexico may not be returning home any time soon, despite running down the clock on the special legislative session.

The 30-day limit on the latest session expired Tuesday and Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry said he was prepared to call yet another special session to get the issue resolved, though he would not say when.

If they re-enter Texas, the 11 Senate Democrats now in Albuquerque said they feared being arrested and hauled back to the capitol should Perry call another session. Senate rules allow for the arrest of members who intentionally thwart a quorum.

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said she and the 10 other Democrats are prepared to stay away another 30 days, the maximum length of a special session.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Laredo declined to rule on a related matter, the Democratic senators' federal lawsuit alleging that the GOP had violated their constitutional rights and the Voting Rights Act...

Republicans, who control the Texas House and Senate, have been trying to redraw the state's political lines to increase the number of Republicans in Congress.

Democrats have a 17-15 majority in the Texas delegation and have said the current map should not be changed. They argue that proposals before the GOP-dominated Legislature this year would have hurt minority representation.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Texas-Redistricting.html

Texas State Senators in Exile Fear Arrest
The Associated Press

Wednesday 27 August 2003

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Texas Senate Democrats who stymied Republican redistricting plans by fleeing to New Mexico may not be returning home any time soon, despite running down the clock on the special legislative session.

The 30-day limit on the latest session expired Tuesday and Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry said he was prepared to call yet another special session to get the issue resolved, though he would not say when.

If they re-enter Texas, the 11 Senate Democrats now in Albuquerque said they feared being arrested and hauled back to the capitol should Perry call another session. Senate rules allow for the arrest of members who intentionally thwart a quorum.

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said she and the 10 other Democrats are prepared to stay away another 30 days, the maximum length of a special session.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Laredo declined to rule on a related matter, the Democratic senators' federal lawsuit alleging that the GOP had violated their constitutional rights and the Voting Rights Act.

At a hearing, U.S. District Judge George Kazen said he would refer the case a three-judge federal panel. He said he doesn't think the Voting Rights Act applies in the case, but said the issues raised by the 11 senators have enough merit to let the larger panel consider them.

Some of the senators had planned to attend the Laredo hearing but decided late Tuesday not to cross the state line amid mounting rumors that Republicans might try to get them arrested, said Harold Cook, a consultant for the Democrats.

``They haven't come this far to be lured into a trap,'' he said.

Perry didn't discount Democrats' concerns about being arrested in Texas. ``I guess that is a legitimate concern, I suppose. If they don't want to be here working then I don't think the lieutenant governor has any other options.''

Republicans, who control the Texas House and Senate, have been trying to redraw the state's political lines to increase the number of Republicans in Congress.

Democrats have a 17-15 majority in the Texas delegation and have said the current map should not be changed. They argue that proposals before the GOP-dominated Legislature this year would have hurt minority representation.

Democrats and one Republican thwarted the plan in the first special session, but Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst tried to push it through in the second session by dropping a rule that requires two-thirds of senators to agree to consider a bill.

With no blocking power, Democrats fled the state July 28 to avoid a vote and later sued, claiming Republicans violated their rights by dropping the rule. The 11 Democratic senators said the two-thirds rule is vital in ensuring racial, ethnic, or political minorities bargaining power.

Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate, sent a warning Tuesday to self-exiled Democrats, who along with House Democrats have defeated redistricting three times this year.

``Let me pass on a very clear message to our 11 colleagues out in Albuquerque. The mood in the Senate is changing. We're tired. We're tired of sitting here and waiting,'' Dewhurst said.

Three of the Democrats watched from Albuquerque on the Internet as the Legislature adjourned. ``It really is sad to see the Texas Legislature so divided and at the same time, we felt validated because we accomplished what we set out to do,'' said Sen. Judith Zaffirini.

Just realized I never linked to this glossary from my blog yet. I'm gearing up for teaching at University of San Francisco this semester and realized I hadn't linked to it or updated it for quite some time.

I'm also looking for other great glossaries to add to this category, so please, send them along.

I also need a lot more "semantic web" terms in this puppy too -- so send them along so we can argue about them :-)

XML, P2P and Semantic Web-related Terms

An Unpatriotic Act
A NY Times Editorial

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a charm offensive on behalf of the USA Patriot Act. He is traveling the country to rally support for the law, which many people, both liberals and conservatives, consider a dangerous assault on civil liberties. Mr. Ashcroft's efforts to promote the law are misguided. He should abandon the roadshow and spend more time in Washington working with those who want to reform the law.

When the Patriot Act raced through Congress after Sept. 11, critics warned that it was an unprecedented expansion of the government's right to spy on ordinary Americans. The more people have learned about the law, the greater the calls have been for overhauling it. One section that has produced particular outrage is the authorization of "sneak and peek" searches, in which the government secretly searches people's homes and delays telling them about the search. The House last month voted 309 to 118 for a Republican-sponsored measure to block the use of federal funds for such searches...

One member of Congress, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, has charged that Mr. Ashcroft's lobbying campaign, in which United States attorneys have been asked to participate, may violate the law prohibiting members of the executive branch from engaging in grass-roots lobbying for or against Congressional legislation. Legal or not, the campaign seeks to shore up a deeply flawed piece of legislation. The Patriot Act is the Bush administration's attempt to make the country safe on the cheap. Rather than do the hard work of coming up with effective port security and air cargo checks, and other programs targeted at actual threats, the administration has taken aim at civil liberties.

The administration is clearly worried, as opposition to the excesses of the Patriot Act grows across the country and the political spectrum. Instead of spin-doctoring the problem, Mr. Ashcroft should work with the law's critics to develop a law that respects Americans' fundamental rights.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/opinion/25MON1.html


An Unpatriotic Act
The New York Times | Editorial

Monday 25 August 2003

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a charm offensive on behalf of the USA Patriot Act. He is traveling the country to rally support for the law, which many people, both liberals and conservatives, consider a dangerous assault on civil liberties. Mr. Ashcroft's efforts to promote the law are misguided. He should abandon the roadshow and spend more time in Washington working with those who want to reform the law.

When the Patriot Act raced through Congress after Sept. 11, critics warned that it was an unprecedented expansion of the government's right to spy on ordinary Americans. The more people have learned about the law, the greater the calls have been for overhauling it. One section that has produced particular outrage is the authorization of "sneak and peek" searches, in which the government secretly searches people's homes and delays telling them about the search. The House last month voted 309 to 118 for a Republican-sponsored measure to block the use of federal funds for such searches.

Congressional opponents of the act, on both sides of the aisle, are pushing for other changes. A Senate bill, sponsored by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, addresses many of the law's most troubling aspects. One provision would make it harder for the government to gain access to sensitive data, including medical and library records, and records concerning the purchase or rental of books, music or videos.

Another change would narrow the definition of "terrorism," so the law's expanded enforcement tools could not be used against domestic political protesters, such as environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, with no link to international terrorism. The bill would also require the government to be more specific about the targets of wiretaps obtained under the law, and would restrict the kind of information that could be collected on Internet and e-mail use.

One member of Congress, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, has charged that Mr. Ashcroft's lobbying campaign, in which United States attorneys have been asked to participate, may violate the law prohibiting members of the executive branch from engaging in grass-roots lobbying for or against Congressional legislation. Legal or not, the campaign seeks to shore up a deeply flawed piece of legislation. The Patriot Act is the Bush administration's attempt to make the country safe on the cheap. Rather than do the hard work of coming up with effective port security and air cargo checks, and other programs targeted at actual threats, the administration has taken aim at civil liberties.

The administration is clearly worried, as opposition to the excesses of the Patriot Act grows across the country and the political spectrum. Instead of spin-doctoring the problem, Mr. Ashcroft should work with the law's critics to develop a law that respects Americans' fundamental rights.

It's Official - Saddam Was Not an Imminent Threat
By Clare Short (Yes the Clare Short who resigned as British international development secretary in May)

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.

The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world's leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists - and presumably others - to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.

The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report - from such an eminent source - to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report ... and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source...

I agree completely with Jonathan Powell's conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix's inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq's WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.

Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac's view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell's conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq's reconstruction.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1028068,00.html

It's Official - Saddam Was Not an Imminent Threat
By Clare Short
The Guardian

Saturday 23 August 2003

Hutton's remit was narrow - yet he has exposed the truth about the Iraq war

After eight days of the Hutton inquiry and enormous quantities of media coverage, it is worth pausing to try to take stock. Many of us have said that, deliberately or otherwise, Alastair Campbell's decision to go to war with the BBC had the potential to distract attention from the most important questions arising from the Iraq crisis - whether the nation was deceived on the road to war, and where responsibility lies for the continuing chaos and loss of life in Iraq.

Lord Hutton has been charged with inquiring into the narrower question of the circumstances that led to the death of Dr David Kelly and will report on this very important question. But his inquiry is revealing important information that casts light on the bigger question of how we got to war.

There is an unfortunate tendency among some commentators to seek to narrow the issue to a blame game between the BBC and 10 Downing Street. This has led to comment to the effect that Dr Kelly was the unfortunate victim of a battle between two mighty institutions, accompanied by a campaign of vilification against Andrew Gilligan and the Today programme. It is important to remain constantly aware of the vested interests at play: the Murdoch empire and other rightwing media operations would like to weaken and break the BBC so that British broadcasting might be reduced to the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves. It is extremely unfortunate that a Labour government has been willing to drive forward this campaign against the BBC.

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.

The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world's leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists - and presumably others - to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.

The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report - from such an eminent source - to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report ... and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source.

As a result of the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two defence intelligence officials wrote to their boss to put on record their disquiet at the exaggeration in the dossier. Moreover, one official asked his boss for advice as to whether he should approach the foreign affairs select committee after the foreign secretary had said that he was not aware of any unhappiness among intelligence officials about the claims made in the dossier.

We know through emails revealed by Hutton that Tony Blair's chief of staff made clear that the dossier was likely to convince those who were prepared to be convinced, but that the document "does nothing to demonstrate he [Saddam Hussein] has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the west. We will need to be clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions. The international community has to enforce those resolutions if the UN is to be taken seriously."

I agree completely with Jonathan Powell's conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix's inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq's WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.

Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac's view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell's conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq's reconstruction. In this scenario the armed forces would have concentrated on keeping order; the UN humanitarian system would have fixed the water and electricity systems; Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Kofi Annan's special representative, would have helped the Iraqis to install an interim government and begin a process of constitutional change, as the UN has done in Afghanistan; and the World Bank and IMF would have advised the Iraqi interim authority on transparent economic reform, rather than a process of handover to US companies.

Following the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, there is a danger that those who favour chaos in Iraq will make further gains, at great cost to the people of Iraq and coalition forces. The answer remains a stronger UN mandate and internationalisation of the reconstruction effort. The worry is that the US will not have the humility to ask for help, and the chaos and suffering will continue.

In the meantime, Lord Hutton will draw his conclusions about the tragic death of Dr Kelly. My own tentative conclusion is that Downing Street thought they could use him in their battle with the BBC, and that the power of the state was misused in a battle to protect the political interests of the government.

-------

Clare Short resigned as British international development secretary in May.

GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe
The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants.
By the Associated Press.

Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said...

Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan.

The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO...

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/politics/main570137.shtml

GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2003

Dick Cheney (Photo: AP)

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants.

(AP) Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said.

The GAO unsuccessfully sued the vice president last year to release information.

The Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the GAO's report before it was released and chose not to comment. The vice president's office declined to look at it, the GAO said.

The National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed by President Bush in January 2001 to develop a national energy policy.

The task force submitted its final report in May 2001. Congress is now considering the energy-related legislative proposals.

The GAO said the task force's report was the "product of a centralized, topdown, short-term, and labor-intensive process that involved the efforts of several hundred federal employees government wide."

In the few months between the start of the energy task force and its presentation of the final report, the vice president, some Cabinet-level and other senior administration officials and support staff controlled most of the report's development, according to the GAO.

They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said.

Two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Graham of Florida, on Tuesday criticized the administration for failing to release the energy task force documents and called on Cheney to produce the records.

"As gas prices reach historic levels and the nation's energy infrastructure is pushed beyond its limits, the Bush administration has decided their energy policy will be of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests," Kerry said in a statement.

Said Graham: "If the Bush-Cheney team has nothing to hide, then why are they hiding documents? There can be only one answer — they don't want the American people to know just how much influence the big oil companies have over U.S. energy policy."

Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan.

The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO.

Some Democratic congressmen requested information in the spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with in creating the Bush administration's energy plan.

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

Ed Note: I'm going to start including a few guest entries in my blog from a couple of friends of mine in an attempt to expand my blog's content a bit to cover other important issues without my having to do too much extra work! I hope you will find them interesting. The first is an entry from Bobby Lilly about a frightening situation where teens are actually being prosecuted for raping each other while engaging in consensual sex.--lr

Thanks Lisa,

I've always wanted a forum like this but haven't had the time to set up my own blog so I'm thrilled to be here. I do want to warn your readers though that, while the provided link to the FFE speakers network gives them a lot of information about who I am and my concerns, it still shows me as the chairperson of Californians Against Censorhip Together even though Cal-Act no longer exists. It was an interesting ride for more than a decade though ;-) and for all too many years my life revolved around my political work

Now days, things are different. I've got an internet job working on-line from my office at home and I finally have the time to try to master the world of digital photography and be the artist I've always dreamed of becoming. These days I have to confess to being a Photoshop-aholic and I am just another activist working with a variety of groups on a variety of issues but not the political junky I once was.

For years, I focused on the importance of sexual speech and still consider myself a sex positive feminist even though those terms may be out of fashion these days. But both sexual speech AND sex itself still need someone defend it from prudery and speak the truth about it. There is still a crying need for sexual sanity in the US today.

A friend passed on the following story which I think deserves much more publicity and, hopefully, a demonstration of outrage from all of us to the paper which had this article, if not in larger venues as well:

Take a look at: Teens have right to have sex, lawyer argues
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim for the Journal Sentinel.

While it may seem ridiculous for any prosecutor to charge teens with rape for engaging in consensual sexuality, it is both a travesty of justice and a tragedy of the first order that this nation's legal system has been so co-opted (or should I say corrupted) by an anti-sexual mentality/morality that children were charged with RAPE for innocent sexual exploration.

I can only hope that situations like this will raise an alarm that finally wakens the American people from their passive acquiescence to the nightmare of our legal system being hijacked by extremists on both the left and the right for their own political agendas. This should outrage us all.

The prosecutor deserves to be booted out of her position for her callous treatment of two 'troubled' (i.e., rebellious) teens. I can't believe she dared to tell the press, "The reason I charged this case was because of their attitude," Kornblum says. "I believe they had to be brought before an authority." "Not to punish the children," she said, "but to help them through various court-ordered services."

Yah, sure that's WHY she charged them with RAPE!!!...she should be ashamed of herself. Prudery, whether on behalf of the sex-negative left or the anti-sex religious right, runs rampant in this country these days and has harmed too many of us in too many ways to list here. It has to end.

So, why don't you take the five minutes it will take to write a letter to the on-line edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel right now at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/submit.asp and DO something about it.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/aug03/163688.asp

Teens have right to have sex, lawyer argues
By JAMAAL ABDUL-ALIM
jabdul-alim@journalsentinel.com
Last Updated: Aug. 20, 2003

When an Oak Creek woman found her 14-year-old daughter nude in the woman's bed with a 14-year-old boy, the teens didn't strike her as being overly concerned.

"They both freely admitted that their intention was to 'have sex,' " records quote the woman as saying. They "were confrontational and remorseless."

The teens even "challenged" the woman to call police. So she did.

Now, the couple's would-be sexual encounter in October has both of them facing serious criminal charges.

Their case takes a course through the intersection of morals and law, a bustling crossroads at a time when sexuality has become a greater focus of youth culture. While authorities say their prosecution is meant to help, not punish, the teens, a lawyer for one of them contends 14-year-olds have a right to privacy that allows them to consent to sex with each other, and has challenged the constitutionality of the law.

The boy is being held in secure detention on a charge of attempted second-degree sexual assault, a felony that carries a possible juvenile prison term.

The girl pleaded guilty to fourth degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor, but is charged with violating her probation; a warrant has been issued for her arrest.

Neither is being named because of their ages.

Don Linke, the boy's attorney, argues that children's privacy rights include the right to make "important decisions."

"One of those types of decisions is whether to engage in sexual relations," says Linke, who will argue his position today at Milwaukee County Children's Court. If Circuit Judge Tom Donegan rules against Linke, the case could go to trial.

But prosecutors say children have no right to have sex.

"Sex between kids is not legal," said Assistant District Attorney Lori Kornblum, who is prosecuting the case.

According to the law, "Whoever has sexual contact or sexual intercourse with a person who has not attained the age of 16 is guilty of a Class C felony." There is no mention of consent.

Linke suggests the statute is intended to prevent older teenagers or adults from abusing or exploiting younger, more vulnerable children, not to prohibit consensual sex among teenagers.

Kornblum said that while many instances of consensual sex among minors get handled informally, she felt compelled to bring charges in this case.

"The reason I charged this case was because of their attitude," Kornblum says. "I believe they had to be brought before an authority."

Not to punish the children, she said, but to help them through various court-ordered services.

Linke says there are other ways for the court to intervene without the children having to be found delinquent, such as filing a petition for protection or services.

Beyond the teenagers' sexual activity lurk a host of other problems.

Court records reveal that both come from troubled backgrounds and struggle with the same issues, such as attention deficit disorder and parental abandonment.

Prosecutors did try to cut the teens some slack.

The boy - originally charged in October - secured a "deferred prosecution agreement" in March. All he had to do was stay out of trouble until Aug. 6 and the charge would have been dismissed. But not long after the agreement, his father reported that the boy "refuses to follow rules." That prompted prosecutors to reissue the charge.

The girl - who was not given deferred prosecution because all parties involved agreed she needed services - was placed on probation, and ordered into Wraparound, a monitoring and treatment program designed to help emotionally disturbed youths at home instead of at costlier institutions.

But after she repeatedly spent the night out without permission, a warrant was issued for her arrest Aug. 5.

It could not be determined Wednesday if she had yet been arrested.

This is from the August 23, 2003 program of "Bay Area People" on KTVU Channel 2 in San Francisco.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jason Schultz explains why the RIAA's Subpoena process raises several red flags in the areas of privacy and due process in terms of one's rights being violated before it's been proven that they've even broken the law).

Jason also explains the EFF's How Not To Get Sued and Subpoena Database Query Tool websites and how consumers can use them to protect themselves against this travesty of justice.

Jason Schultz On The RIAA Subpoenas (Small - 19 MB)

This is from the August 20, 2003 program.

CA Recall Update (Smart - 6 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 20, 2003 program.

Rob Lowe As Arnie's Political Advisor (Small - 6 MB)

Lisa's voting NO on the recall and YES on Cruz Bustamante.

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

MoveOn.org has sent out a great round up of resources and articles about the situation in Liberia.

You might want to check them out.

MoveOn Bulletin
Monday, August 18, 2003
Noah T. Winer, Editor
noah.winer@moveon.org

Subscribe online at:
http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking here:
http://moveon.org/s?i=1592-1870203-c.VI9Ipjdg0TqrC.AxBbIQ

------------------------------

GRASSROOTS INTERVIEW WITH LUIS MORENO-OCAMPO
There has been a delay in getting the responses of the International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor, Mr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to the interview questions you posed. We'll send his complete responses as soon as we receive them.

------------------------------

EDITORS' NOTE
With so much crucial work to be done for 2004, we've decided to shift the content and frequency of the MoveOn Bulletin. Instead of covering every major domestic and international issue, we'll focus in on issues relevant to our campaigns. We'll use the Bulletin to set the context of those campaigns. That means you'll receive the Bulletin less often, but it will be more focused and relevant for your informed participation. Thanks for your continued help with these important issues.

------------------------------

CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. One Link
3. History of Liberia
4. Human Rights
5. Taylor Steps Down
6. Intervention and Peacekeeping
7. Hot Off the Press
8. Credits
9. About the Bulletin

------------------------------

INTRODUCTION
This bulletin's focus is the historical context necessary to understand the dangerous situation in Liberia. Unrestrained fighting between government and rebel forces created a grave humanitarian crisis. In the capital of Monrovia, people are unable to access food, civilians are recruited to fight against their will, and the collateral damage (war-speak for murdered civilians) is in the hundreds of thousands.

The conflict in Liberia does not lend itself to simple moral judgment. Surely we would hope for an end to the military conflict and a start to peaceful self-determination, but neither the government nor the rebels are certain to bring this about. While both speak of democracy, their atrocious abuse of human rights tells observers their ambition is power and political control.

While the fighting has subsided, peace remains far away.

------------------------------

ONE LINK
This Q&A on peacekeeping intervention from the BBC explains why there's fighting in Liberia and describes the regional context of the crisis.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2975834.stm

------------------------------

HISTORY OF LIBERIA
The Guardian presents an excellent presentation of Liberian history. Requires free Macromedia Flash Player.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,988886,00.html

Black Entertainment Television has a more detailed timeline.
http://www.bet.com/articles/0,,p389gb6914-7717,00.html

The Village Voice describes the relationship between the U.S. and Liberia, which was founded by freed African-American slaves. This article also asks whether President George W. Bush's involvement may be intended to court African-American voters in 2004.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0328/mondo1.php

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HUMAN RIGHTS
A Human Rights Watch publication on abuses by the Liberian government and the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). Testimonies describe summary killings, torture and abuse of civilians, rape, and abduction into forced labor and fighting. This report recommends continuing the UN Security Council's arms embargo on both government and rebel forces.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/liberia/liberia0402.htm

MSNBC on the use of child soldiers in the conflict between the government and the rebels. The article estimates that 50 to 60% of the soldiers "are under 18.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/945577.asp?0sl=-11

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TAYLOR STEPS DOWN
Last Monday, President Charles Taylor resigned as president under pressure from rebels, the United States, and neighboring countries. He fled to Nigeria, where he was promised protection. Taylor's vice president, Moses Blah, will act as interim president until October.
http://www.moveon.org/r?462

This past June, Taylor was indicted as a war criminal by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a precursor to the International Criminal Court. Here, Human Rights Watch argues Nigeria must turn him over for trial in cooperation with international law.
http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/08/liberia081103.htm

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INTERVENTION AND PEACEKEEPING
The international peacekeeping force intervening in Liberia is composed primarily of troops from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). PBS's Online NewsHour describes the creation, accomplishments, and mission of ECOWAS.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/liberia/ecowas-background.html

Mother Jones has an excellent summary of arguments for and against U.S. intervention. These arguments were made before President Taylor resigned, but they confront interesting questions about whether it's desirable for the U.S. to play the role of world policeman.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/30/we_487_02.html#one

Related to its objections to the International Criminal Court, the United States insisted on immunity for peacekeepers entering Liberia.
http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/08/liberia080103.htm

On Thursday, 200 U.S. Marines joined ECOWAS peacekeepers to secure Monrovia. Rebel forces withdrew from the capital, allowing the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid to begin.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3149255.stm

The Los Angeles Times yesterday reported that in July the Pentagon quashed a report by its own specialists calling for urgent action in Liberia. Defense officials have said the move was "definitely strange" and "inconsistent with our operational procedures." Last week's intervention comes five weeks after the report.
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-intervene17aug17,1,3823806.story

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HOT OFF THE PRESS
Today, a peace deal was signed between the government and the two rebel groups. The deal, negotiated by ECOWAS, will set up a transitional government in October with elections to follow in two years. Transitional leaders will be announced as soon as Tuesday.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3158647.stm

------------------------------

CREDITS
Research team:
Leah Appet, Lita Epstein, Kate Kressmann-Kehoe, and Sarah Parady.

Editing team:
David Taub Bancroft, Melinda Coyle, Nancy Evans, Eileen Gillan, Alfred Karl Weber, and Rita Weinstein.

------------------------------

ABOUT THE MOVEON BULLETIN AND MOVEON.ORG
The MoveOn Bulletin is a free weekly collection of links, which represent a broad range of views on important political issues. These links aren't meant to represent the position of MoveOn.org. The full text of the MoveOn Bulletin is online at http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/; you can subscribe to it at that address.

MoveOn.org is an issue-oriented, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that gives people a voice in shaping the laws that affect their lives. MoveOn.org engages people in the civic process, using the Internet to democratically determine a non-partisan agenda, raising public awareness of pressing issues, and coordinating grassroots advocacy campaigns to encourage sound public policies. You can help decide the direction of MoveOn.org by participating in the discussion forum at:
http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=223

This is from the August 21, 2003 program.

Daily Show On New Shrub/Rummy/Powell dolls (Small - 3 MB)

Shrub "inaction figure" with Cool Ranch grip.

Rummy Doll with "action scowl"

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is of interest to "noncommercial licensees who have not elected to accept rates and terms negotiated earlier this year under the Small Webcaster Settlement Act" regarding "rates and terms for the use of sound recordings in eligible nonsubscription transmissions made by noncommercial licensees, and for the making of related ephemeral recordings..."

The complete email follows.

COPYRIGHT OFFICE REQUESTS COMMENTS ON PROPOSED RULEMAKING
(68 FR 50493)

The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is
requesting comment on proposed regulations that set rates
and terms for the use of sound recordings in eligible
nonsubscription transmissions made by noncommercial
licensees, and for the making of related ephemeral
recordings. The rates and terms are for the 2003 and 2004
statutory licensing period and apply only to noncommercial
licensees who have not elected to accept rates and terms
negotiated earlier this year under the Small Webcaster
Settlement Act. Any party who objects to the proposed rates
and terms set forth must file a written objection with the
Copyright Office and an accompanying Notice of Intent to
Participate. The content of the written challenge should
describe the party's interest in the proceeding, the
proposed rule the party finds objectionable, and the reasons
for the challenge. Only a party with a significant interest
in these rates and terms and who is prepared to participate
in a CARP (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel) proceeding
has standing to object. If no comments are received, the
regulations shall become final pon publication of a final
rule and shall cover the period from January 1, 2003, to
December 31, 2004. Comments are due no later than September
22, 2003.

To view the Federal Register article, go to

Federal Register Notice (HTML)
(http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2003/68fr50493.html)

Federal Register Notice (PDF)
(http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2003/68fr50493.pdf)

Here's the full text of the announcement I received:

U.S. Copyright Office
NewsNet
August 21, 2003
Issue 206

**********************************************************
For additional information, visit the Copyright Office
homepage at
Copyright Website

**********************************************************
CONTENTS

* News *

Federal Register

Copyright Office Requests Comments on Proposed
Rulemaking (68 FR 50493)

* Calendar *

* To Subscribe/Unsubscribe to NewsNet *

**********************************************************
* NEWS *

-----------Federal Register------------------

COPYRIGHT OFFICE REQUESTS COMMENTS ON PROPOSED RULEMAKING
(68 FR 50493)

The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is
requesting comment on proposed regulations that set rates
and terms for the use of sound recordings in eligible
nonsubscription transmissions made by noncommercial
licensees, and for the making of related ephemeral
recordings. The rates and terms are for the 2003 and 2004
statutory licensing period and apply only to noncommercial
licensees who have not elected to accept rates and terms
negotiated earlier this year under the Small Webcaster
Settlement Act. Any party who objects to the proposed rates
and terms set forth must file a written objection with the
Copyright Office and an accompanying Notice of Intent to
Participate. The content of the written challenge should
describe the party's interest in the proceeding, the
proposed rule the party finds objectionable, and the reasons
for the challenge. Only a party with a significant interest
in these rates and terms and who is prepared to participate
in a CARP (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel) proceeding
has standing to object. If no comments are received, the
regulations shall become final pon publication of a final
rule and shall cover the period from January 1, 2003, to
December 31, 2004. Comments are due no later than September
22, 2003.

To view the Federal Register article, go to
Federal
Register Notice

Federal
Register Notice

**********************************************************
* CALENDAR *

September 12: Due date for comments and Notices of Intention
to Participate in 2001 cable statutory license fee
distribution (68 FR 48415)

September 22: Due date for comments on proposed rulemaking
on rates and terms for the use of sound recordings in
eligible nonsubscription transmissions made by noncommercial
licensees, and for the making of related ephemeral
recordings for 2003 and 2004 statutory licensing period (68
FR 50493)

So the Dems in Texas had to "vote with their feet" again and go running in order to block a Republican-backed redistricting measure that would recount the districts in such a way that the Republicans would end up with more seats. (For more information on this, read the letter from Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis that I just posted from MoveOn.

This clip has Stephen Colbert interviewing Senator Rodney Ellis and Senator Leticia Van De Putte, two of the "runaways."

This piece was edited by Einar Westerlund and produced by Jim Margolis.

Runaway For The Border (Small - 10 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

MoveOn has provided a great collection of information and links about what's going on over in Texas. So far, they've raised over $400,000 dollars for an ad campaign aimed at getting the word out about what's really going on.

What is actually going on over in Texas? (you might ask). Well, here's a letter from State Senator Rodney Ellis that will explain the situation a little better. I've also included the "background" he mentions at the top of the "more" section -- and the entire MoveOn.org email underneath it.

Dear friends,

I am writing to you from a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
where I and 10 of my colleagues in the Texas Senate have been forced
to reside for the past 20 days. If we return to our homes, families,
friends, and constituents, the Governor of Texas will have us
arrested.

I know, it sounds more like a banana republic than the dignified
democracy on which we have long prided ourselves. We are effectively
exiled from the state due to our unalterable opposition to a
Republican effort -- pushed by Tom Delay and Karl Rove, and led by
Texas Governor Rick Perry -- that would rewrite the map of Texas
Congressional districts in order to elect at least 5 more Republicans
to Congress.

You may not have heard much about the current breakdown in Texas
politics. The Republican power play in California has obscured the
Republican power play in Texas that has forced my colleagues and me to
leave the state.

Recognizing that public pressure is the only thing that can break the
current stalemate, our friends at MoveOn have offered to support our
efforts by sharing this email with you. In it, you will find:

-Background information on how the situation in Texas developed;
-Analysis of what's at stake for Democrats and the democratic process;

The Republican redistricting effort shatters the tradition of
performing redistricting only once a decade immediately after the
Census -- making redistricting a perpetual partisan process. It
elevates partisan politics above minority voting rights, in
contravention of the federal Voting Rights Act. It intends to decimate
the Democratic party in Texas, and lock in a Republican majority in
the U.S. House of Representatives. And Republican efforts to force a
vote on this issue by changing the rules of legislative procedure
threaten to undermine the rule of law in Texas.

We do not take lightly our decision to leave the state. It was the
only means left to us under the rules of procedure in Texas to block
this injustice. We are fighting for our principles and beliefs, and we
can win this fight with your support.

Sincerely,

Rodney Ellis
Texas State Senator (Houston)
August 18, 2003

The complete MoveOn.org email is underneath this "background" section.

Here's the background information that Rodney Ellis refers to:

Background:

During the 2001 session of the Texas Legislature, the legislature was
unable to pass a Congressional redistricting plan as it is required to
do following the decennial Census. A three judge federal panel was
forced to draw the plan. Neither Governor Rick Perry or then Attorney
General John Cornyn, both Republicans, objected to the plan, which was
reviewed and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The 2002 Congressional elections, the first held under the new
redistricting plan, resulted in a Congressional delegation from Texas
consisting of 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans. However, five of the 17
Democrats prevailed only because they were able to win the support of
Republican and independent voters. All statewide Republican candidates
carried these five districts. Most experts agree that the current plan
has 20 strong or leaning Republican districts and 12 Democratic
districts.

Meanwhile, the 2001 redistricting of Texas legislative seats (which
was enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislative Redistricting
Board, after the legislature again gridlocked in its efforts) resulted
in wide Republican majorities in both the Texas House and Texas
Senate. Now Tom Delay has made it his priority to force the
Republican-controlled Legislature to enact a new redistricting plan to
increase the number of Republican-leaning Congressional districts.
Republicans believe they can manipulate the districts to elect as many
as 22 Republicans out of the 32 member Texas Congressional delegation.
They achieve this by packing minority voters into as few districts as
possible and breaking apart rural districts so that the impact of
independent voters will be reduced and suburban Republican voters will
dominate.

During the regular session of the Texas Legislature, Democratic
members of the Texas House of Representatives exercised an
unprecedented parliamentary move to prevent the House from passing Tom
Delay's redistricting plan. While Democrats are in the minority of the
House of Representatives, the state constitution requires that at
least 2/3 of the House be present for the House to pass a bill.
Because it was clear that the Republicans would entertain no debate
and brook no compromise in their effort to rewrite the rules by which
members of Congress are elected, the Democrats were forced to break
the quorum to prevent the bill from passing. Because the Republican
Speaker of the House and Governor called on state law enforcement
officials to physically compel the Democrats to return, the lawmakers
removed themselves to a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma -- outside
the reach of state troops(1). In there effort to apprehend the
Democrats, Tom Delay officially sought the help of the Department of
Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and the Department
of Justice.

The House Democrats (nicknamed the "Killer D's", based on an earlier
episode in Texas history in which a group of Democratic state senators
called the "Killer Bees" broke the quorum in the Senate over a
similarly political stalemate) succeeded in stopping Delay's
redistricting plan during the regular session, returning to Texas
after the legislative deadline had expired for the House to pass
legislation. However, because the Texas Legislature meets in regular
session only every two years, the state constitution gives the
Governor the power to call a 30-day special legislative session at any
time between regular sessions. Despite statewide protests from Texas
citizens who oppose Tom Delay's redistricting plan, the Governor has
called two special sessions(2) already this summer to attempt to force
the legislature to enact a new plan.

The first called session expired in a deadlock, as 12 of 31 Texas
Senators(3) opposed the plan. Under Senate rules and tradition, a 2/3
vote is required to consider any bill on the floor of the Senate,
giving 11 Senators the power to block a vote(4). The Republican
Governor and Lieutenant Governor then determined they would do away
with the 2/3 rule, and called another special session, forcing 11
Democratic Senators to break the quorum and leave the state.(5) These
Senators have spent the past 22 days in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Governor has indicated he will continue calling special sessions
until the Republican redistricting plan is enacted, despite the fact
that the Republican-controlled Texas Supreme Court recently rejected
the Governor's writ of mandamus filing to compel the Senators to
return to the Senate. Meanwhile, eleven Democratic state senators are
exiled from their state, unable to be with their families, friends,
and constituents, for fear of being arrested as part of a partisan
power play by Republicans. In the most recent indignity, Republican
Senators voted to fine the absent Democrats up to $5,000 per day, and
to revoke parking and other privileges for their staffs as long as the
Senators are away.

What's at stake:

At stake, on the surface, is whether Tom Delay will succeed in
exploiting Republican control of the Texas Legislature to add to the
Republican majority in the United States Congress. But deeper issues
are also at stake.

1. If the Republicans succeed in redrawing the Texas Congressional
lines to guarantee the election of five to seven more Republicans, it
will ensure that Republicans hold the majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives for the entire decade and will likely result in Tom
Delay becoming Speaker of the House.(6)

2. The Republican advantage would be gained by removing many African
American and Hispanic voters from their current Congressional
districts and "packing" them into a few districts that already have
Democratic majorities. The voting power of these minority voters would
be dramatically diluted by the Republican plan, in contravention of
the federal Voting Rights Act. If the Republicans succeed, over 1.4
million African American and Hispanic voters will be harmed. It would
be the largest disenfranchisement of minority voters since the Voting
Rights Act was passed.

3. Redistricting exists for the purpose of reapportioning voters among
political districts to account for population shifts. The purpose of
this reapportionment is to ensure a roughly equal number of voters in
each district, to preserve the principle of "one man, one vote."(7)
For this reason, redistricting has always been conducted immediately
following the U.S. Census' decennial population reports. Tom Delay now
proposes a new redistricting plan two years after the Census report
simply because Republicans gained control over the Texas Legislature
in 2002 and now have the power to enact a much more Republican-
friendly plan than the one drawn by the federal courts two years ago.
This is an unprecedented approach to redistricting, one that
subordinates its original purpose of ensuring the principle of "one
man, one vote" to the purpose of perpetual partisan politics.
Redistricting, in this model, would never be a settled matter, and
districts would constantly be in flux depending on the balance of
political power in the Legislature.

4. The Texas Legislature has traditionally been defined by a spirit of
bipartisanship and cooperation. This issue has polarized the
legislature in a way that threatens to destroy that tradition. The
Republicans have effectively exiled their Democratic counterparts in a
power play that makes our state look more like a banana republic than
a dignified democracy. The arbitrary decision to discard the 2/3 rule
in the Senate sets a precedent that undermines that body's tradition
of consensus and cooperation. The deployment of state law enforcement
officials to apprehend boycotting legislators erodes the separation of
powers between the executive and legislative branches of government,
and diminishes legislators' ability to represent their constituents as
they see fit. The unilateral Republican effort to penalize Democratic
Senators and their staffs

What is needed:

The Democratic Senators currently in Albuquerque have two critical
needs. The first is to generate increased public awareness of the
situation. By all reason, every day the Senators are out of the state
this story should get bigger. Instead, news media have gradually lost
interest in the story. The California recall has dominated the
attention of the national media, and the Texas media has largely lost
interest in the story -- out of sight, out of mind. Without public
attention to this story, the Republicans have all the leverage -- if
it does not cost them politically, it costs them nothing(8) to
continue calling special sessions until the Texas 11 are forced to
come home.

The second critical need is funding. The cost of hotels, meeting
rooms, staff support, and public relations efforts is mounting. In
addition, the Senators must defend themselves legally against
Republican efforts to compel their return, while also filing legal
claims against the Republican power play. The Senators are actively
raising money for the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus Fund to offset
these costs and prepare themselves for a stay of indefinite duration
in Albuquerque.

Notes:

1. A recent Department of Justice investigation chronicled Republican
state officials' illegal attempts to use federal resources --
including anti-terrorism resources from the Department of Homeland
Security -- to compel the Democratic lawmakers' return. See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51520-2003Aug12.html
for a news report on the Justice Department investigation, or
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/03-08a/final.pdf for a copy of the
complete Justice Department report.

2. At a cost to taxpayers of over $1.5 million per session.

3. House Republicans passed a redistricting bill in the special
session despite an outpouring of public opposition in hearings across
the state. All 12 Democratic state senators opposed the plan, along
with Republican state senator (and former Lieutenant Governor) Bill
Ratliff.

4. The "2/3 rule" requires the Senate to reach broader consensus on
difficult issues than a simple majority vote. It is a combination of
official Senate rules and tradition. The rules of the Senate require a
2/3 vote to suspend the "regular order of business" to consider a bill
that is not the first bill on the Senate calendar. By tradition, the
Senate has always placed a "blocker bill" at the top of the Senate
calendar, so that every bill requires a suspension of the regular
order of business to be considered. The process requires compromise
and consensus to achieve a 2/3 majority on each bill. One Texas
insider has said that the 2/3 rule is "what separates us from
animals."

5. In fact, the Governor and Lt. Governor attempted to "surprise" the
Senators by calling the second special one day early and "trap" them
in the Senate Chamber. The Senators were able to escape the Capitol
with literally minutes to spare.

6. Republican party activist Grover Norquist, head of the Washington
D.C.-based Americans for Tax Reform, was quoted as follows in the
August 17 Fort Worth Star Telegram: "Republicans will hold the House
for the next decade through 2012 if Texas redistrictsIt depresses the
hell out of the Democrats and makes it doubly impossible to take the
House and probably depresses their fund raisingAnything that helps
strengthen the Republican leadership helps DeLay become speaker
someday if he wants it."

7. Established in the landmark case Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962)

8. Notwithstanding the millions of dollars it is costing taxpayers.

Here is the full text of the email from MoveOn that was sent out to me:

In one day MoveOn members have contributed more than $400,000 for our
"Defend Democracy" campaign. We've been overwhelmed by the response.
The 11 Texas legislators who are right now risking everything for us
and for democracy are deeply grateful to receive this support.

Let's raise a $1,000,000 to make this our biggest campaign ever.
Let's take this campaign to national media outlets, and go deep with
Texas media. Let's take it to California. Let's connect the dots.
George Bush and Karl Rove have been counting on getting away with
these underhanded tactics -- on bullying their opposition into
submission, on playing every dirty trick in the book. With your help,
we can make it cost them dearly. If you can, please make a
contribution today:

http://moveon.org/texasads

We've added a progress graph to our contribution page so that you can
see how close we are towards our goal. Click above to see our
progress.

Our democracy has survived 227 years for one simple reason: when
confronted by extremism, Americans have always united in defense of
freedom. The redistricting fight in Texas is a piece of a larger
attack on democracy nationwide -- Impeachment; the 2000 election;
intimidation on Capital Hill; the California recall; and now
congressional redistricting at the whim of the Majority in Congress.

Texas is a first step. Next week, we will ask for your help to defeat
the California recall -- specifically, to recruit friends and family
in California who are angry about the recall and want to do something
about it. We can stop this attack on Democracy if we once again stand
united. We'll stop it in Texas, California, Washington DC and wherever
it occurs.

Sincerely,

--Carrie, Eli, Joan, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
The MoveOn Team
August 21st, 2003

Once again, here is the letter from State Senator Rodney Ellis and
background information on the events in Texas.
___________________

Dear friends,

I am writing to you from a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
where I and 10 of my colleagues in the Texas Senate have been forced
to reside for the past 20 days. If we return to our homes, families,
friends, and constituents, the Governor of Texas will have us
arrested.

I know, it sounds more like a banana republic than the dignified
democracy on which we have long prided ourselves. We are effectively
exiled from the state due to our unalterable opposition to a
Republican effort -- pushed by Tom Delay and Karl Rove, and led by
Texas Governor Rick Perry -- that would rewrite the map of Texas
Congressional districts in order to elect at least 5 more Republicans
to Congress.

You may not have heard much about the current breakdown in Texas
politics. The Republican power play in California has obscured the
Republican power play in Texas that has forced my colleagues and me to
leave the state.

Recognizing that public pressure is the only thing that can break the
current stalemate, our friends at MoveOn have offered to support our
efforts by sharing this email with you. In it, you will find:

-Background information on how the situation in Texas developed;
-Analysis of what's at stake for Democrats and the democratic process;

The Republican redistricting effort shatters the tradition of
performing redistricting only once a decade immediately after the
Census -- making redistricting a perpetual partisan process. It
elevates partisan politics above minority voting rights, in
contravention of the federal Voting Rights Act. It intends to decimate
the Democratic party in Texas, and lock in a Republican majority in
the U.S. House of Representatives. And Republican efforts to force a
vote on this issue by changing the rules of legislative procedure
threaten to undermine the rule of law in Texas.

We do not take lightly our decision to leave the state. It was the
only means left to us under the rules of procedure in Texas to block
this injustice. We are fighting for our principles and beliefs, and we
can win this fight with your support.

Sincerely,

Rodney Ellis
Texas State Senator (Houston)
August 18, 2003
___________________

Background:

During the 2001 session of the Texas Legislature, the legislature was
unable to pass a Congressional redistricting plan as it is required to
do following the decennial Census. A three judge federal panel was
forced to draw the plan. Neither Governor Rick Perry or then Attorney
General John Cornyn, both Republicans, objected to the plan, which was
reviewed and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The 2002 Congressional elections, the first held under the new
redistricting plan, resulted in a Congressional delegation from Texas
consisting of 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans. However, five of the 17
Democrats prevailed only because they were able to win the support of
Republican and independent voters. All statewide Republican candidates
carried these five districts. Most experts agree that the current plan
has 20 strong or leaning Republican districts and 12 Democratic
districts.

Meanwhile, the 2001 redistricting of Texas legislative seats (which
was enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislative Redistricting
Board, after the legislature again gridlocked in its efforts) resulted
in wide Republican majorities in both the Texas House and Texas
Senate. Now Tom Delay has made it his priority to force the
Republican-controlled Legislature to enact a new redistricting plan to
increase the number of Republican-leaning Congressional districts.
Republicans believe they can manipulate the districts to elect as many
as 22 Republicans out of the 32 member Texas Congressional delegation.
They achieve this by packing minority voters into as few districts as
possible and breaking apart rural districts so that the impact of
independent voters will be reduced and suburban Republican voters will
dominate.

During the regular session of the Texas Legislature, Democratic
members of the Texas House of Representatives exercised an
unprecedented parliamentary move to prevent the House from passing Tom
Delay's redistricting plan. While Democrats are in the minority of the
House of Representatives, the state constitution requires that at
least 2/3 of the House be present for the House to pass a bill.
Because it was clear that the Republicans would entertain no debate
and brook no compromise in their effort to rewrite the rules by which
members of Congress are elected, the Democrats were forced to break
the quorum to prevent the bill from passing. Because the Republican
Speaker of the House and Governor called on state law enforcement
officials to physically compel the Democrats to return, the lawmakers
removed themselves to a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma -- outside
the reach of state troops(1). In there effort to apprehend the
Democrats, Tom Delay officially sought the help of the Department of
Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and the Department
of Justice.

The House Democrats (nicknamed the "Killer D's", based on an earlier
episode in Texas history in which a group of Democratic state senators
called the "Killer Bees" broke the quorum in the Senate over a
similarly political stalemate) succeeded in stopping Delay's
redistricting plan during the regular session, returning to Texas
after the legislative deadline had expired for the House to pass
legislation. However, because the Texas Legislature meets in regular
session only every two years, the state constitution gives the
Governor the power to call a 30-day special legislative session at any
time between regular sessions. Despite statewide protests from Texas
citizens who oppose Tom Delay's redistricting plan, the Governor has
called two special sessions(2) already this summer to attempt to force
the legislature to enact a new plan.

The first called session expired in a deadlock, as 12 of 31 Texas
Senators(3) opposed the plan. Under Senate rules and tradition, a 2/3
vote is required to consider any bill on the floor of the Senate,
giving 11 Senators the power to block a vote(4). The Republican
Governor and Lieutenant Governor then determined they would do away
with the 2/3 rule, and called another special session, forcing 11
Democratic Senators to break the quorum and leave the state.(5) These
Senators have spent the past 22 days in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Governor has indicated he will continue calling special sessions
until the Republican redistricting plan is enacted, despite the fact
that the Republican-controlled Texas Supreme Court recently rejected
the Governor's writ of mandamus filing to compel the Senators to
return to the Senate. Meanwhile, eleven Democratic state senators are
exiled from their state, unable to be with their families, friends,
and constituents, for fear of being arrested as part of a partisan
power play by Republicans. In the most recent indignity, Republican
Senators voted to fine the absent Democrats up to $5,000 per day, and
to revoke parking and other privileges for their staffs as long as the
Senators are away.

What's at stake:

At stake, on the surface, is whether Tom Delay will succeed in
exploiting Republican control of the Texas Legislature to add to the
Republican majority in the United States Congress. But deeper issues
are also at stake.

1. If the Republicans succeed in redrawing the Texas Congressional
lines to guarantee the election of five to seven more Republicans, it
will ensure that Republicans hold the majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives for the entire decade and will likely result in Tom
Delay becoming Speaker of the House.(6)

2. The Republican advantage would be gained by removing many African
American and Hispanic voters from their current Congressional
districts and "packing" them into a few districts that already have
Democratic majorities. The voting power of these minority voters would
be dramatically diluted by the Republican plan, in contravention of
the federal Voting Rights Act. If the Republicans succeed, over 1.4
million African American and Hispanic voters will be harmed. It would
be the largest disenfranchisement of minority voters since the Voting
Rights Act was passed.

3. Redistricting exists for the purpose of reapportioning voters among
political districts to account for population shifts. The purpose of
this reapportionment is to ensure a roughly equal number of voters in
each district, to preserve the principle of "one man, one vote."(7)
For this reason, redistricting has always been conducted immediately
following the U.S. Census' decennial population reports. Tom Delay now
proposes a new redistricting plan two years after the Census report
simply because Republicans gained control over the Texas Legislature
in 2002 and now have the power to enact a much more Republican-
friendly plan than the one drawn by the federal courts two years ago.
This is an unprecedented approach to redistricting, one that
subordinates its original purpose of ensuring the principle of "one
man, one vote" to the purpose of perpetual partisan politics.
Redistricting, in this model, would never be a settled matter, and
districts would constantly be in flux depending on the balance of
political power in the Legislature.

4. The Texas Legislature has traditionally been defined by a spirit of
bipartisanship and cooperation. This issue has polarized the
legislature in a way that threatens to destroy that tradition. The
Republicans have effectively exiled their Democratic counterparts in a
power play that makes our state look more like a banana republic than
a dignified democracy. The arbitrary decision to discard the 2/3 rule
in the Senate sets a precedent that undermines that body's tradition
of consensus and cooperation. The deployment of state law enforcement
officials to apprehend boycotting legislators erodes the separation of
powers between the executive and legislative branches of government,
and diminishes legislators' ability to represent their constituents as
they see fit. The unilateral Republican effort to penalize Democratic
Senators and their staffs

What is needed:

The Democratic Senators currently in Albuquerque have two critical
needs. The first is to generate increased public awareness of the
situation. By all reason, every day the Senators are out of the state
this story should get bigger. Instead, news media have gradually lost
interest in the story. The California recall has dominated the
attention of the national media, and the Texas media has largely lost
interest in the story -- out of sight, out of mind. Without public
attention to this story, the Republicans have all the leverage -- if
it does not cost them politically, it costs them nothing(8) to
continue calling special sessions until the Texas 11 are forced to
come home.

The second critical need is funding. The cost of hotels, meeting
rooms, staff support, and public relations efforts is mounting. In
addition, the Senators must defend themselves legally against
Republican efforts to compel their return, while also filing legal
claims against the Republican power play. The Senators are actively
raising money for the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus Fund to offset
these costs and prepare themselves for a stay of indefinite duration
in Albuquerque.

Notes:

1. A recent Department of Justice investigation chronicled Republican
state officials' illegal attempts to use federal resources --
including anti-terrorism resources from the Department of Homeland
Security -- to compel the Democratic lawmakers' return. See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51520-2003Aug12.html
for a news report on the Justice Department investigation, or
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/03-08a/final.pdf for a copy of the
complete Justice Department report.
2. At a cost to taxpayers of over $1.5 million per session.
3. House Republicans passed a redistricting bill in the special
session despite an outpouring of public opposition in hearings across
the state. All 12 Democratic state senators opposed the plan, along
with Republican state senator (and former Lieutenant Governor) Bill
Ratliff.
4. The "2/3 rule" requires the Senate to reach broader consensus on
difficult issues than a simple majority vote. It is a combination of
official Senate rules and tradition. The rules of the Senate require a
2/3 vote to suspend the "regular order of business" to consider a bill
that is not the first bill on the Senate calendar. By tradition, the
Senate has always placed a "blocker bill" at the top of the Senate
calendar, so that every bill requires a suspension of the regular
order of business to be considered. The process requires compromise
and consensus to achieve a 2/3 majority on each bill. One Texas
insider has said that the 2/3 rule is "what separates us from
animals."
5. In fact, the Governor and Lt. Governor attempted to "surprise" the
Senators by calling the second special one day early and "trap" them
in the Senate Chamber. The Senators were able to escape the Capitol
with literally minutes to spare.
6. Republican party activist Grover Norquist, head of the Washington
D.C.-based Americans for Tax Reform, was quoted as follows in the
August 17 Fort Worth Star Telegram: "Republicans will hold the House
for the next decade through 2012 if Texas redistrictsIt depresses the
hell out of the Democrats and makes it doubly impossible to take the
House and probably depresses their fund raisingAnything that helps
strengthen the Republican leadership helps DeLay become speaker
someday if he wants it."
7. Established in the landmark case Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962)
8. Notwithstanding the millions of dollars it is costing taxpayers.

This is from the August 21, 2003 program.

This is the mellowest I've ever seen Kucinich! He came across very well, I think.

Check it out and decide for yourself.

Dennis Kucinich On The Daily Show (Small - 13 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 21, 2003 program.

Ashcroft's Victory Act Tour (Small - 4 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from early February 2003 sometime. (Sorry I can't be more exact!)

I forgot to link to this before, but with Arianna running for Governor in the CA Recall, it seemed relevant to make this available to you.

Arianna Huffington On The Daily Show - Part 1 of 3 (Lres - 26 MB)

Arianna Huffington On The Daily Show - Part 2 of 3 (Lres - 29 MB)

Arianna Huffington On The Daily Show - Part 3 of 3 (Lres - 26 MB)

Lisa is voting NO on the recall and YES on Cruz Bustamante.

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Laura Splan is one of the Illegal Art artists I've been working with making my movie.

Of course, not all the art she creates is illegal. She's got an opening tomorrow night with another artists, Philip Ross.

Hope to see you there.

Artists Presentations - Philip Ross & Laura Splan
Tuesday, August 26, 7:30 pm - Gallery opens at 7 pm

SF Camerawork
@ New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street (between 8th and 9th Streets)
San Francisco, CA 94103

Local artists Philip Ross and Laura Splan both make work inspired by life and life science. Whether it's human or non-human life, growth or decomposition, ecosystems or HMO's, each artist works in a variety of media to present provocative work unveiling traits of the world around us. Artist Philip Ross uses living organisms and life support technologies as the inspiration and the means by which he makes his work. This process has yielded a series of highly manipulated living organisms and a number of sculptural structures specifically designed to support, confine and protect them. Laura Splan's work explores how our surroundings and experiences mediate our perceptions of the human body. Believing that interaction with objects can leave a mark on our psyche via their form and function, Splan examines the dynamics of these interactions through visual metaphors, visceral materials, and images that challenge our perceptions of beauty and horror. The artist frequently uses medical science and technology as a point of departure to question categories of what is natural, what is normal, and what is desirable.

Gallery & Bookstore opens at 7 pm
$6/$4 members, students, and seniors

http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html

This is just a funny intro bit from August 21, 2003 where Jon addresses the fact that the clip from the night before was a bit...well...obscene. (In a good way.)

Daily Show Aug 21 Intro (Small - 2 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

File swapper fights RIAA subpoena
By John Borland for CNET News.com

An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy.
The legal motion, filed in Washington, D.C., federal court by a "Jane Doe" Internet service subscriber, is the first from an individual whose personal information has been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in recent months...

The motion was filed by a pair of Sacramento, Calif., attorneys, who said the RIAA had gone too far in its effort to protect its online copyrights.

"This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent," said Glenn Peterson, one of the attorneys, in a statement. "The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods--good old fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush."

The "Jane Doe" motion comes as the first individual legal response to the RIAA's effort to sue large numbers of file swappers. It follows similar legal challenges from several ISPs and colleges, including Pacific Bell Internet Services, an SBC Communications subsidiary...

Critics of the unconventional subpoena process have noted that individuals whose information has been sought in other subpoena processes, such as potential libel cases, are given the legal opportunity to challenge the request for their personal information, however.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1025_3-5066754.html

File swapper fights RIAA subpoena
John Borland, Staff Writer, CNET News.com

An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy.
The legal motion, filed in Washington, D.C., federal court by a "Jane Doe" Internet service subscriber, is the first from an individual whose personal information has been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in recent months.

The RIAA has used court orders to try to identify more than 1,000 computer users it alleges have been offering copyrighted songs on file-trading networks. It plans to use the information gained to file copyright lawsuits against the individuals.

The motion was filed by a pair of Sacramento, Calif., attorneys, who said the RIAA had gone too far in its effort to protect its online copyrights.

"This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent," said Glenn Peterson, one of the attorneys, in a statement. "The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods--good old fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush."

The "Jane Doe" motion comes as the first individual legal response to the RIAA's effort to sue large numbers of file swappers. It follows similar legal challenges from several ISPs and colleges, including Pacific Bell Internet Services, an SBC Communications subsidiary.

A Massachusetts federal court has already ruled that some of the group's subpoenas, submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College, had not followed the correct legal process and were therefore invalid. That court left open the possibility that the RIAA could simply refile those subpoenas properly, however.

An RIAA spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday's legal action. Previously, attorneys for the group have noted that the subpoenas are aimed at the ISPs that hold subscriber information, not subscribers themselves, and therefore individuals had little or no legal standing to challenge them.

Critics of the unconventional subpoena process have noted that individuals whose information has been sought in other subpoena processes, such as potential libel cases, are given the legal opportunity to challenge the request for their personal information, however.

In Courtroom, Laughter at Fox and a Victory for Al Franken
By Susan Saulny for the NY Times.

"I never really had any doubt," he said in a telephone interview, calling the ruling "a victory for satirists everywhere, even the bad ones. In addition to thanking my own lawyers, I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life."

The Fox court papers had referred to Mr. Franken, a former "Saturday Night Live" writer and performer and an unabashed liberal, as a "parasite" who appeared shrill, unstable and "increasingly unfunny."...

If anything, the lawsuit only benefited Mr. Franken. His book had been scheduled for release in September, but the publicity caused the publisher to print an extra 50,000 copies, for a total of 435,000, and to roll the book out on Thursday.

After the ruling yesterday, it moved to the No. 1 spot on the best-seller list at amazon. com...

One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, "Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies' over Mr. O'Reilly's face would believe Mr. O'Reilly is endorsing this book?"

The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, "To me, it's quite ambiguous as to what the message is here."

She continued, "It does not say `parody' or `satire.' "

Ms. Hanswirth said Fox's "signature slogan" was also blurred, because people who were not associated with the network, which owns the Fox News Channel, also appear on the cover with Mr. O'Reilly.

Judge Chin said, "The president and the vice president are also on the cover. Is someone going to consider that they are affiliated with Fox?"

The courtroom broke into laughter again.

Ms. Hanswirth replied, "It's more blurring, your honor."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/23/nyregion/23FRAN.html?ex=1062651741&ei=1&en=aaceb455e7843f58

In Courtroom, Laughter at Fox and a Victory for Al Franken
By SUSAN SAULNY

A federal judge in Manhattan told Fox News yesterday that it had to learn how to take a joke. Then he rejected the network's request for an injunction to block the satirist Al Franken from using the words "fair and balanced" on the cover of his book, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

Calling the motion "wholly without merit, both factually and legally," the judge, Denny Chin of United States District Court, said that a person would have to be "completely dense" not to realize the cover was a joke, and that trademark protection for the phrase "Fair and Balanced" was unrealistic because the words are so commonly used.

Lawyers for Mr. Franken and his publisher, Penguin Group (USA), called the ruling a victory for the First Amendment. Mr. Franken was not in court.

"I never really had any doubt," he said in a telephone interview, calling the ruling "a victory for satirists everywhere, even the bad ones. In addition to thanking my own lawyers, I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life."

The Fox court papers had referred to Mr. Franken, a former "Saturday Night Live" writer and performer and an unabashed liberal, as a "parasite" who appeared shrill, unstable and "increasingly unfunny."

The network could appeal the decision. "We are considering our options," said Paul Schur, a Fox spokesman. "We don't care if it's Al Franken, Al Lewis or Weird Al Yankovic. We're here to protect our trademark and our talent."

If anything, the lawsuit only benefited Mr. Franken. His book had been scheduled for release in September, but the publicity caused the publisher to print an extra 50,000 copies, for a total of 435,000, and to roll the book out on Thursday.

After the ruling yesterday, it moved to the No. 1 spot on the best-seller list at amazon. com.

The network filed for the injunction on Aug. 11. Fox News Network trademarked the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in 1998 to describe its news coverage, and network lawyers claimed that Mr. Franken's use of the phrase in his book would "blur and tarnish" it.

Fox also objected to the use of a picture of Bill O'Reilly, one of its prominent news personalities, on the cover, claiming that it could be mistaken as an endorsement of the book.

But these arguments were met by laughter in the crowded courtroom, as Fox tried to defend its signature slogan. Part of the network's burden was to prove that Mr. Franken's use of the phrase "fair and balanced" would lead to consumer confusion.

One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, "Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies' over Mr. O'Reilly's face would believe Mr. O'Reilly is endorsing this book?"

The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, "To me, it's quite ambiguous as to what the message is here."

She continued, "It does not say `parody' or `satire.' "

Ms. Hanswirth said Fox's "signature slogan" was also blurred, because people who were not associated with the network, which owns the Fox News Channel, also appear on the cover with Mr. O'Reilly.

Judge Chin said, "The president and the vice president are also on the cover. Is someone going to consider that they are affiliated with Fox?"

The courtroom broke into laughter again.

Ms. Hanswirth replied, "It's more blurring, your honor."

After more discussion about what was and what was not satire, and about the definition of "parody," Judge Chin decided that Mr. Franken's work was of "artistic value."

"Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment," he said. "The keystone to parody is imitation. In using the mark, Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox."

He said Mr. Franken's work was "fair criticism."

Judge Chin said the case was an easy one, and chided Fox for bringing its complaint to court. The judge said, "Of course, it is ironic that a media company that should be fighting for the First Amendment is trying to undermine it."

Doug Byers sez:

I'm a photographer living in Portland Oregon. As you may know we had a large demonstration against George Bush's fundraising visit to Portland today. Thousands of people flooded the streets to send a message to our president of strong protest on many political and social fronts.

The show of force by the Portland Police was VERY SCARY INDEED !! The storm troopers have landed !!

Here is a link to additional images.
(http://www.byersphotography.com/bushprotest1)

This is from the August 20, 2003 program.

Will Shortz On The Daily Show (Small - 11 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

The Daily Show's Mo Rocca has really outdone himself this time!

This has got to be one of the funniest bits I've ever seen.

Apparently, there's a new syphilis outbreak, and the Dept. of Health hired an advertising company to run some focus groups and find out the best way to deal with the problem.

The result: The Healthy Penis. A squeaky clean fallice with a big smile to help people understand about healthy genital hygiene. San Francisco residents responded very positively to The Healthy Penis.

Everything seemed great, until it was time for The Healthy Penis to bring the campaign down to Los Angeles. Citizens there, such as Ron Jeremy, objected to a healthy penis being used as a symbol for syphilis. As an alternative, organizations in L.A. created "Phil the Sore" to start a negative campaign using scare tactics to educate the public about syphilis, (rather than having a healthy genital representative's positive tips and information).

This film was produced by Jim Margolis and Edited by Einar Westerlund.

This is from the August 20, 2003 program.

The Daily Show - Sore Loser (Small - 10 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Daily Show - Messopotamia Part 2 (Small - 3 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 19, 2003 program.

Daily Show - Messopotamia Part 1 (Small - 7 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This makes about as much sense as any other part of this recall, I suppose.

How transparent of Taco Hell. But now that I've thought about it, rather brilliant.

Who says you can't buy votes anyway? That's exactly what they're doing.

Even I have become a pawn in their little game bringing this to you now.

Who Says You Can't Buy Votes

At participating locations for a limited time. This promotion is solely sponsored by Taco Bell Corp., and is not affiliated with nor has it been endorsed by any other entity. © 2003 Taco Bell Corp.

*Product results will be indexed to pre-promotion levels to insure fairness to all candidates. We’ve assigned one Taco Bell® product to the Governor and one to the leading candidate of the opposing party, along with one product for all other candidates: †IRIS ADAM, BROOKE ADAMS, ALEX-ST. JAMES, DOUGLAS ANDERSON, ANGELYNE, MOHAMMAD ARIF, BADI BADIOZAMANI, VIK S. BAJWA, JOHN W. BEARD, ED BEYER, VIP BHOLA, CHERYL BLY-CHESTER, AUDIE BOCK, JOEL BRITTON, ART BROWN, JOHN CHRISTOPHER BURTON, CRUZ M. BUSTAMANTE,

Here is the full text of what was text on the page. Most are gifs -- which I have saved if this site ever gets taken down, so just let me know.

http://www.tacobell.com/2003recall/

At participating locations for a limited time. This promotion is solely sponsored by Taco Bell Corp., and is not affiliated with nor has it been endorsed by any other entity. © 2003 Taco Bell Corp.

*Product results will be indexed to pre-promotion levels to insure fairness to all candidates. We’ve assigned one Taco Bell® product to the Governor and one to the leading candidate of the opposing party, along with one product for all other candidates: †IRIS ADAM, BROOKE ADAMS, ALEX-ST. JAMES, DOUGLAS ANDERSON, ANGELYNE, MOHAMMAD ARIF, BADI BADIOZAMANI, VIK S. BAJWA, JOHN W. BEARD, ED BEYER, VIP BHOLA, CHERYL BLY-CHESTER, AUDIE BOCK, JOEL BRITTON, ART BROWN, JOHN CHRISTOPHER BURTON, CRUZ M. BUSTAMANTE, PETER MIGUEL CAMEJO, TODD CARSON, WILLIAM ”BILL” S. CHAMBERS, MICHAEL CHELI, D. (LOGAN DARROW) CLEMENTS, GARY COLEMAN, MARY “MARY CAREY” COOK, ROBERT CULLENBINE, SCOTT DAVIS, ROBERT “BUTCH” DOLE, BOB LYNN EDWARDS, WARREN FARRELL, DAN FEINSTEIN, LARRY FLYNT, LORRAINE (ABNER ZURD) FONTANES, GENE FORTE, DIANA FOSS, RONALD J. FRIEDMAN, LEO GALLAGHER, GEROLD LEE GORMAN, RICH GOSSE, JAMES H. GREEN, JACK LOYD GRISHAM, GARRETT GRUENER, JOE GUZZARDI, IVAN A. HALL, KEN HAMIDI, SARA ANN HANLON, C. STEPHEN HENDERSON, RALPH A. HERNANDEZ, JOHN J. ”JACK” HICKEY, JIM HOFFMANN, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, S. ISSA, MICHAEL JACKSON, TREK THUNDER KELLY, EDWARD “ED” KENNEDY, D.E. KESSINGER, KELLY P. KIMBALL, STEPHEN L. KNAPP, ERIC KOREVAAR, JERRY KUNZMAN, DICK LANE, GARY LEONARD, TODD RICHARD LEWIS, CALVIN Y. LOUIE, FRANK A. MACALUSO, JR., PAUL “CHIP” MAILANDER, ROBERT C. MANNHEIM, BRUCE MARGOLIN, PAUL MARIANO, GINO MARTORANA, MIKE P. MCCARTHY, BOB MCCLAIN, TOM MCCLINTOCK, DENNIS DUGGAN MCMAHON, MIKE MCNEILLY, SCOTT A. MEDNICK, CARL A. MEHR, JONATHAN MILLER, DARRYL L. MOBLEY, JEFFREY L. MOCK, JOHN “JACK” MORTENSEN, DORENE MUSILLI, PAUL NAVE, ROBERT C. NEWMAN II, LEONARD PADILLA, RONALD JASON PALMIERI, GREGORY J. PAWLIK, HEATHER PETERS, CHARLES “CHUCK” PINEDA JR., BILL PRADY, DARIN PRICE, BRYAN QUINN, JEFF RAINFORTH, DANIEL C. ”DANNY” RAMIREZ, CHRISTOPHER RANKEN, REVA RENEE RENZ, DANIEL W. RICHARDS, KEVIN RICHTER, KURT E. “TACHIKAZE” RIGHTMYER, DAVID LAUGHING HORSE ROBINSON, NED ROSCOE, SHARON RUSHFORD, GEORGY RUSSELL, JAMIE ROSEMARY SAFFORD, DAVID RONALD SAMS, DARRIN H. SCHEIDLE, MIKE SCHMIER, GEORGE B. SCHWARTZMAN, RICHARD J. SIMMONS, BILL SIMON, B.E. SMITH, RANDALL D. SPRAGUE, CHRISTOPHER SPROUL, LAWRENCE STEVEN STRAUSS, TIM SYLVESTER, A. LAVAR TAYLOR, DIANE BEALL TEMPLIN, PATRICIA G. TILLEY, BRIAN TRACY, WILLIAM TSANGARES, PETER V. UEBERROTH, MARC VALDEZ, JAMES M. VANDEVENTER JR., PAUL W. VANN, BILL VAUGHN, VAN VO, CHUCK WALKER, MAURICE WALKER, NATHAN WHITECLOUD WALTON, DANIEL WATTS, C.T. WEBER, JIM WEIR, LINGEL H. WINTERS, MICHAEL J. WOZNIAK, JON W. ZELLHOEFER

This from the August 18, 2003 program.

Jim Hightower is the author of a new book:
Thieves In High Places.

Jim Hightower On Texas Democrats Voting With Their Feet (Excerpt)
(Small - 4 MB)

Jim Hightower On The Daily Show - Complete (Small - 13 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

There's an introduction in the beginning by Jon Stewart with a clip of Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman saying "have you ever seen the United States take the blame for anything?"

According to Stewart, the US tried to blame Canada for the Blackout at first -- before it was discovered that it was a problem with the US side of the grid after all.

Samantha Bee -- Canadian Beacon (Small - 11 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Flash mobbers hit Brazil again
On Ananova.com

A Brazilian flash mob has hit the busiest road in Sao Paulo.

Around 100 people gathered in Avenida Paulista and pointed remote controls at a giant screen, as if they were trying to change channels.

After exactly three minutes they put the controls away and walked off as if nothing had happened, Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper reports.

The first Brazilian flash mob happened last week when a crowd converged on a Sao Paulo street corner, removed one shoe each and beat it on the pavement several times.

The flash mob phenomenon, in which crowds organised by email and websites perform pointless stunts, started in the US and has spread around the world.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_810594.html?menu=news.quirkies

ananova.com

Flash mobbers hit Brazil again

A Brazilian flash mob has hit the busiest road in Sao Paulo.

Around 100 people gathered in Avenida Paulista and pointed remote controls at a giant screen, as if they were trying to change channels.

After exactly three minutes they put the controls away and walked off as if nothing had happened, Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper reports.

The first Brazilian flash mob happened last week when a crowd converged on a Sao Paulo street corner, removed one shoe each and beat it on the pavement several times.

The flash mob phenomenon, in which crowds organised by email and websites perform pointless stunts, started in the US and has spread around the world.

I sure hope he's not our next Governor, but his story is a pretty interesting one.

Schwarzenegger's Next Goal on Dogged, Ambitious Path
By Bernard Weinraub And Charlie Leduff for the NY Times.

Thirty-five years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unknown Austrian bodybuilder who spoke only a few words of English, had little money and no acting experience, came to the United States and soon made a prediction: He would become a movie star, make millions of dollars, marry a glamorous wife and wield political power...

By all accounts, Mr. Schwarzenegger's drive to succeed was not merely an immigrant's classic up-by-the-bootstraps obsession. It was a calculated effort to turn himself into an invulnerable and powerful (physical and otherwise) figure. He was also a far cry from the skinny Austrian boy whose father, Gustav, a policeman and a one-time member of the Nazi Party, intimidated and sometimes beat him, favoring his other son, Menhard, according to published accounts of Mr. Schwarzenegger's life. (Mr. Schwarzenegger did not attend the funeral of his father in 1972, or that of his brother, who died in a car crash in 1971.)...

But the scrutiny of Mr. Schwarzenegger has only begun. So far he has not clarified his positions on most public issues, including offshore oil drilling, the state's budget crisis and immigration.

On abortion, however, he has said that he is for women's right to choose. On business, he has said he would bring more of it to the state to generate more revenue. And as for his economic view, Mr. Schwarzenegger was quoted in The Sacramento Bee as saying, "I still believe in lower taxes - and the power of the free market."...

The Los Angeles Times, in a recent investigation of his finances, estimated that his fortune far exceeded $200 million. This included real estate investments and a significant ownership in Dimensional Fund Advisors, a mutual fund company in Santa Monica that manages about $40 billion.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has climbed a social as well as political ladder. He used his early fame to get acquainted with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When "Pumping Iron," was released, Mr. Schwarzenegger told the film's publicity agent, Bobby Zarem, that the one person he wanted to meet was Mrs. Onassis. Mr. Zarem spoke to a friend who worked for Mrs. Onassis. A luncheon meeting was arranged at Elaine's in New York to introduce the relatively unknown Mr. Schwarzenegger to Mrs. Onassis, Andy Warhol and others. A photograph of Mr. Schwarzenegger talking to Mrs. Onassis was widely distributed, and his celebrity grew...

Mr. Butler, who still keeps in touch with Mr. Schwarzenegger, put it another way. "Arnold is one of the most political people I've ever met," Mr. Butler said. "Everything he does is political. He has an uncanny ability to go to a meeting, get into an elevator, sit down with people in a restaurant, and immediately assess their strengths and weakness. He manipulates."...

Mr. Schwarzenegger's campaign team for the run for governor consists of Mr. Wilson, a Republican whose support for rigid measures to combat illegal immigration contrasted with his moderate approach to abortion and other social issues, and some senior members of his old Sacramento crew, including Bob White, his longtime strategist.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has drawn other powerful and well-know figures to his cause. Warren Buffett, the billionaire financier and a friend of Mr. Schwarzenegger, came aboard as a financial consultant, and George P. Shultz, secretary of state under President Reagan and friend of Mr. Wilson from the Hoover Institute, is helping the campaign...

Mr. Schwarzenegger did not vote in the last two presidential elections, according to election records. And over the last 20 years he has given more money to Democrats than Republicans, albeit all of the Democrats are Kennedys...

Some Republican conservatives have held back in supporting Mr. Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy. On social policies, at least, Mr. Schwarzenegger seems to hold views that conflict with hard-cover conservatives in the party. His outlook can best be summed up in an interview he gave to The Sunday Telegraph magazine in November 1999 in which he admonished his party members to alter their approach.

The Republican Party, Mr. Schwarzenegger said, "is going to lose until you become a party of inclusion." He went on to say, "that you love the foreigner that comes in with no money, as much as a gay person, as a lesbian person, as anyone else - someone who is uneducated, someone who's from the inner-city."

Lisa's voting NO on the Recall and YES on Cruz Bustamante.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/national/17ARNO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=


Schwarzenegger's Next Goal on Dogged, Ambitious Path
By Bernard Weinraub And Charlie Leduff
The New York Times

Sunday 17 August 2003

LOS ANGELES - Thirty-five years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unknown Austrian bodybuilder who spoke only a few words of English, had little money and no acting experience, came to the United States and soon made a prediction: He would become a movie star, make millions of dollars, marry a glamorous wife and wield political power.

As far-fetched as some of his aspirations might have seemed to some, all of Mr. Schwarzenegger's predictions have come true - except the last.

In stepping into the bizarre race to recall California's governor, Mr. Schwarzenegger, the 56-year-old former Mr. Universe, is seeking to fulfill what he called his "master plan" as he once sat talking with bodybuilder friends at an International House of Pancakes in Santa Monica.

By all accounts, Mr. Schwarzenegger's drive to succeed was not merely an immigrant's classic up-by-the-bootstraps obsession. It was a calculated effort to turn himself into an invulnerable and powerful (physical and otherwise) figure. He was also a far cry from the skinny Austrian boy whose father, Gustav, a policeman and a one-time member of the Nazi Party, intimidated and sometimes beat him, favoring his other son, Menhard, according to published accounts of Mr. Schwarzenegger's life. (Mr. Schwarzenegger did not attend the funeral of his father in 1972, or that of his brother, who died in a car crash in 1971.)

"What fascinated Arnold was money and power, and what money and power bestow on an individual," said George Butler, producer and director of "Pumping Iron," the 1976 documentary that became Mr. Schwarzenegger's first successful film.

"The past meant nothing to Arnold because it was over," Mr. Butler said. "He never looked over his shoulder. This is a man of bottomless ambition. It's always been there. Nothing's happened in the last few days that hasn't happened before. He sees himself as almost mystically sent to America."

Mr. Schwarzenegger has long-professed an interest in politics but his run for governor is coming as his movie career is ebbing. From 1982, with the release of "Conan the Barbarian," to 1991, when "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," was distributed, Mr. Schwarzenegger was one of the world's top stars.

But "Last Action Hero," 1992, was a costly flop that began a career slide for Mr. Schwarzenegger. As he grew older, Mr. Schwarzenegger performed in a series of comedies: "Twins" was successful but "Junior" and "Jingle All the Way" were not. More recently, his action films - "Collateral Damage," "The 6th Day" and "End of Days" - were box office disappointments. His current film, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," has taken in more than $145 million at the box office, but its high costs may not make it very profitable in the United States.

His insatiable appetite for success and his impeccable sense of timing have led him to this moment, says his best friend and former workout partner, Franco Columbu. "He knows how to leave the stage on top," Mr. Columbu said. "He's looking to invent something new."

As a public figure, Mr. Schwarzenegger has a recognizable name that gives him an enormous advantage over most of the 134 other candidates who have been certified to run in the Oct. 7 recall election to replace Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat.

But the scrutiny of Mr. Schwarzenegger has only begun. So far he has not clarified his positions on most public issues, including offshore oil drilling, the state's budget crisis and immigration.

On abortion, however, he has said that he is for women's right to choose. On business, he has said he would bring more of it to the state to generate more revenue. And as for his economic view, Mr. Schwarzenegger was quoted in The Sacramento Bee as saying, "I still believe in lower taxes - and the power of the free market."

Mr. Schwarzenegger is also facing nagging questions about his personal life as well as on the details of his finances.

A detailed profile in 2001 in Premiere Magazine accused Mr. Schwarzenegger of being a habitual womanizer, behaving crudely and cheating on his wife, Maria Shriver. Mr. Schwarzenegger dismissed the assertions as "trash."

The Los Angeles Times, in a recent investigation of his finances, estimated that his fortune far exceeded $200 million. This included real estate investments and a significant ownership in Dimensional Fund Advisors, a mutual fund company in Santa Monica that manages about $40 billion.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has climbed a social as well as political ladder. He used his early fame to get acquainted with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When "Pumping Iron," was released, Mr. Schwarzenegger told the film's publicity agent, Bobby Zarem, that the one person he wanted to meet was Mrs. Onassis. Mr. Zarem spoke to a friend who worked for Mrs. Onassis. A luncheon meeting was arranged at Elaine's in New York to introduce the relatively unknown Mr. Schwarzenegger to Mrs. Onassis, Andy Warhol and others. A photograph of Mr. Schwarzenegger talking to Mrs. Onassis was widely distributed, and his celebrity grew.

"He took seriously his ability to charm and coax people and do exactly what he wanted," Mr. Zarem said. "He knew 25 years ago where he was going."

Mr. Butler, who still keeps in touch with Mr. Schwarzenegger, put it another way. "Arnold is one of the most political people I've ever met," Mr. Butler said. "Everything he does is political. He has an uncanny ability to go to a meeting, get into an elevator, sit down with people in a restaurant, and immediately assess their strengths and weakness. He manipulates."

Stress and Fantasy Growing Up

Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger was born on July 30, 1947, in Thal, Austria, near Graz, and grew up there. His mother was a homemaker.

Wendy Leigh, author of an unauthorized biography of the actor, wrote this year in an Australian newspaper that the elder Mr. Schwarzenegger had a "brutal temper" and "gloried in pitting his two sons against each other." Arnold usually came out the loser in these boxing and running matches. Mr. Schwarzenegger has said that he was raised "under great discipline."

As a boy, Mr. Schwarzenegger found escape in the movie house and became a fan of Reg Park, a body builder who starred in B Hercules movies. Mr. Schwarzenegger would model his life after Mr. Park's. In his 1977 biography, "Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder," Mr. Schwarzenegger said that Mr. Park became his fantasy "father figure."

Mr. Schwarzenegger said his parents ridiculed him and called his dreams of building his body and becoming a movie star a lazy and nonsensical pursuit. "It was a very uptight feeling at home," Mr. Schwarzenegger said in "Pumping Iron." "I always felt I belonged in America."

Mr. Schwarzenegger's luck turned when he met Joe Weider, who had built a worldwide fitness empire and was the power behind the International Federation of Body Building, which sponsored contests like Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia. Impressed with Mr. Schwarzenegger's charm and humor, convinced that Mr. Schwarzenegger was the kind of figure who could turn bodybuilding into a mainstream sport, Mr. Weider brought him to America in 1968.

"I knew, and he knew, that he could be great," Mr. Weider said. "We created Arnold. He was special because he was tall, he had willpower, charm and above all he wanted to win."

At 20, Mr. Schwarzenegger became the youngest man to win the Mr. Universe title, the sport's top amateur prize. (He went on to win four more Mr. Universe crowns.) But initially he could not beat Sergio Oliva, for the professional title, Mr. Olympia. He finally dethroned Mr. Oliva in 1969 at a body building competition held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's movie debut in 1970 was inauspicious. It was the now-forgotten "Hercules in New York" or sometimes called "Hercules Goes Bananas." For the movie, he was renamed Arnold Strong, and played opposite the diminutive actor, Arnold Stang.

Early Appeal of Republicans

Television stirred Mr. Schwarzenegger's interest in politics, and in particular, Republicans. Mr. Columbu said that he and Mr. Schwarzenegger began watching television news in the late 1960's and decided that Republicans were far more appealing than Democrats.

The Democrats, Mr. Columbu said, reminded them of the dreary socialism they had left behind in Europe. The Republicans, he said they felt, were about hard work, self-sufficiency and a muscular foreign policy.

"We were mad at Europe," said Mr. Columbu, who was born in Sardinia. "We were coming here because we thought America was better than Europe. We liked Nixon because he told Europe it had to pull its weight. Basically, Europe was old and you couldn't get anywhere there. America was the place."

In the early 1980's Mr. Columbu, now a chiropractor, invited one of his patients, Dana Rohrabacher, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, to have dinner with the action hero.

"When I first met him, he talked about how much he loved America, how much he admired Reagan," said Mr. Rohrabacher, now a congressman from Huntington Beach. "I remember him saying, `Dana, some day I'm going to be governor of California and I'm going to call you.' I knew he was a guy going places."

Mr. Schwarzenegger's film stardom led him to meet top Republicans like Mr. Reagan, Vice President George Bush and Pete Wilson, then a senator from California and eventually the governor. Although he keeps a bust of Mr. Reagan in his office, Mr. Schwarzenegger grew especially close to Mr. Bush, admiring his pragmatism and world view and regular style of speech.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's campaign team for the run for governor consists of Mr. Wilson, a Republican whose support for rigid measures to combat illegal immigration contrasted with his moderate approach to abortion and other social issues, and some senior members of his old Sacramento crew, including Bob White, his longtime strategist.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has drawn other powerful and well-know figures to his cause. Warren Buffett, the billionaire financier and a friend of Mr. Schwarzenegger, came aboard as a financial consultant, and George P. Shultz, secretary of state under President Reagan and friend of Mr. Wilson from the Hoover Institute, is helping the campaign.

Also in the foreground is Mr. Schwarzenegger's wife, who is a network television journalist and a member of the Kennedy family, the paragons of Democratic Party politics. Ms. Shriver is said to provide the counterbalance to the Republican strategists. She was said to be displeased with the round of early television show appearances in which her sleepy-eyed husband kicked off his campaign the morning after announcing his intentions on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno. As a consequence, Team Schwarzenegger was reshuffled.

"She's looking at it as his wife," said Sheri Annis, a former consultant to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I don't think she's Hillary Clinton. She's looking to advance Arnold, not herself."

Mr. Schwarzenegger did not vote in the last two presidential elections, according to election records. And over the last 20 years he has given more money to Democrats than Republicans, albeit all of the Democrats are Kennedys.

Some Republican conservatives have held back in supporting Mr. Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy. On social policies, at least, Mr. Schwarzenegger seems to hold views that conflict with hard-cover conservatives in the party. His outlook can best be summed up in an interview he gave to The Sunday Telegraph magazine in November 1999 in which he admonished his party members to alter their approach.

The Republican Party, Mr. Schwarzenegger said, "is going to lose until you become a party of inclusion." He went on to say, "that you love the foreigner that comes in with no money, as much as a gay person, as a lesbian person, as anyone else - someone who is uneducated, someone who's from the inner-city."

Getting Into Power Clique

Mr. Schwarzenegger's thin political resumé includes a stint as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness under the first President George Bush, and sponsor of last year's successful California ballot initiative Proposition 49, which channeled state money into after-school programs. It also introduced him into the Sacramento power clique.

He is involved in numerous charities, including the Special Olympics and the Inner-City Games.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has, in the past, admitted taking steroids to enhance his body building. In 1997, after Mr. Schwarzenegger had heart valve replacements, his doctor said that the damage was not caused by steroid use, but was rather a congenital defect.

Around 1990, at the time he was nominated by the first President Bush to lead the fitness council, and aware that he might seek a political future, Mr. Schwarzenegger went to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles in an attempt to gauge the political consequences of his father's past. He asked officials at the center to investigate his father's ties to the Nazi Party, during World War II.

"He said that for years his father served in World War II, and he wanted to know exactly what he did," recalled Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Rabbi Hier said investigators found that Mr. Schwarzenegger's father had tried to join the Nazi Party in 1938, and was accepted for membership in 1941. He said that investigators found no evidence that the elder Mr. Schwarzenegger had committed war crimes.

"Arnold said, `What did it mean to be a member of the Nazi Party?' " Rabbi Hier recalled. "I explained, `Look, any son who finds that his father was a member of the Nazi Party is not something to be proud of.' "

Since then, Rabbi Hier said, Mr. Schwarzenegger and his wife have become very supportive of the Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance. He said the couple had been the hosts of numerous fund-raising events at their home and had donated more than $1 million to the center.

"No other star has given that kind of money," Rabbi Hier. "He is a friend not only of the center but the state of Israel."

But Mr. Schwarzenegger and Ms. Shriver surprised their friends by inviting Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general, to their wedding in 1986. At the time, Mr. Waldheim, who was running for president of Austria, was denying accusations that he had concealed knowledge of war crimes committed by his German Army unit in World War II.

Mr. Waldheim did not attend the wedding, but sent the couple an elaborate gift - life-size papier-mâché statues of themselves.

Ms. Leigh wrote in her unauthorized biography of Mr. Schwarzenegger that he startled guests at his wedding with his nuptial toast: "My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy, but I love him and Maria does, too, and so thank you, Kurt."

Mr. Schwarzenegger, who lives with Ms. Shriver and their four children in an estate in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, is plainly confident that he will triumph in politics. Just as he has triumphed in body building and the movies. As he said in "Pumping Iron": "I was always dreaming of very powerful people, dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years."

Arnie and Kenneth Lay and Dick Cheney had meetings together during the California Energy Crisis/Scandal. How interesting.

Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis
By Jason Leopold for Commondreams.org.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0817-07.htm

Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis
By Jason Leopold
CommonDreams.org

Sunday 17 August 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

At the meeting, Davis asked Bush for federal assistance, such as imposing federally mandated price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. But Bush refused saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that’s what caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket. It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said. However, Bush’s response appears to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis. It worked. According to recent polls, a majority of voters grew increasingly frustrated with the way Davis handled the power crisis. Schwarzenegger has used the energy crisis and missteps by Davis to bolster his standing with potential voters. While Davis took a beating in the press (some energy companies ran attack ads against the governor), Lay used his political clout to gather support for deregulation.

A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.

“No,” Cheney said during the Frontline interview. “The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things--an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process.”

A month before the Frontline interview and Bush’s meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chairs Bush’s energy task force, met with Lay to discuss Bush’s National Energy Policy. Lay, whose company was the largest contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign, made some recommendations that would financially benefit his company. Lay gave Cheney a memo that included eight recommendations for the energy policy. Of the eight, seven were included in the final draft. The energy policy was released in late May 2001, after Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken met with Lay and after the meeting between Bush and Davis and Cheney’s Frontline interview.

The policy made only scant references to California's energy crisis, which Enron was accused of igniting, and did not indicate what should be done to provide the state some relief. Cheney said the policy focused on long-term solutions to the country's energy needs, such as opening up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and freeing up transmission lines. That's why California was ignored in the report, Cheney said.

What’s unknown to many of the voters who will decide Davis’s fate on Oct. 7, the day of the recall election, is that while Cheney dismissed Davis’s accusations that power companies were withholding electricity supplies from the state, one company engaged in exactly the type of behavior that Davis described. But Davis would never be told about the manipulative tactics the energy company engaged.

In a confidential settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose chairman was appointed by Bush a year earlier, Tulsa, Okla., based-Williams Companies agreed to refund California $8 million in profits it reaped by deliberately shutting down one of its power plants in the state in the spring of 2000 to drive up the wholesale price of electricity in California.

The evidence, a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between an employee at Williams and an employee at a Southern California power plant operated by Williams, shows how the two conspired to jack up power prices and create an artificial electricity shortage by keeping the power plant out of service for two weeks.

Details of the settlement had been under seal by FERC for more than a year and were released in November after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain the full copy of its report. Similarly, FERC also found that Reliant Energy engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Williams and in February the commission ordered Reliant to pay California a $13.8 million settlement.

Had the evidence been released in 2001 when Davis accused energy companies of fraud it would have helped California’s case and voters may have viewed the governor more positively. But if FERC were to publicly release the details of the Williams settlement it wouldn't have jibed with Bush's energy policy, which was made public instead in May 2001. It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.

But Davis was still causing problems for Lay. California’s power woes had a ripple effect, forcing other states to cancel plans to open up their electricity markets to competition fearing deregulation would lead to widespread blackouts and price gouging. For Enron, a company that generated most of its revenue from buying and selling power and natural gas on the open market, such a move would paralyze the company.

Fearing that Davis would take steps to re-regulate California’s power market that Lay spent years lobbying California lawmakers to open up to competition, Lay recruited Schwarzenegger, Riordan, Milken, and other powerful business leaders like Bruce Karatz, chief executive of home builder Kaufman & Broad; Ray Irani, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum; and Kevin Sharer, chief executive of biotech giant Amgen.

The 90-minute secret meeting Lay convened took place inside a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel. Lay, and other Enron representatives at the meeting, handed out a four-page document to Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken titled “Comprehensive Solution for California,” which called for an end to federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in the California energy crisis and said consumers should pay for the state’s disastrous experiment with deregulation through multibillion rate increases. Another bullet point in the four-page document said “Get deregulation right this time -- California needs a real electricity market, not government takeovers.”

The irony of that statement is that California’s flawed power market design helped Enron earn more than $500 million in one year, a tenfold increase in profits from a previous year and it’s coordinated effort in manipulating the price of electricity in California, which other power companies mimicked, cost the state close to $70 billion and led to the beginning of what is now the state’s $38 billion budget deficit. The power crisis forced dozens of businesses to close down or move to other states, where cheaper electricity was in abundant supply, and greatly reduced the revenue California relied heavily upon.

Lay asked the participants to support his plan and lobby the state Legislature to make it a law. It’s unclear whether Schwarzenegger held a stake in Enron at the time or if he followed through on Lay’s request. His spokesman, Rob Stutzman, hasn’t returned numerous calls for comment about the meeting. For Schwarzenegger and the others who attended the meeting, associating with Enron, particularly Ken Lay, the disgraced chairman of the high-flying energy company, during the peak of California’s power crisis in May 2001 could be compared to meeting with Osama bin Laden after 9-11 to understand why terrorism isn’t necessarily such a heinous act.

A person who attended the meeting at the Peninsula, which this reporter wrote about two years ago, said Lay invited Schwarzenegger and Riordan because the two were being courted in 2001 as GOP gubernatorial candidates. A week before the meeting, Davis signed legislation to create a state power authority that would buy, operate and build power plants in lieu of out-of-state energy companies, such as Enron, that the governor alleged was ripping off the state.

For Enron’s Lay, the timing of the meeting was crucial. His company was just five months away from disintegrating and he was doing everything in his power to keep his company afloat and the profits rolling in.

It wasn’t until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company’s manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company’s role in California’s electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like “Fat Boy” and “Death Star,” that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.

Enron’s top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators who are still trying to get to the bottom of the crisis.

California is still demanding that FERC order the energy companies to refund the state $8.9 billion for overcharging the state for electricity during its yearlong energy crisis. But FERC says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds because the state still owes the energy companies $1.8 billion in unpaid power bills.

Davis, who refused to cave in to the demands of companies like Enron even while Democrats, Republicans and the public criticized him, was right all along. Maybe Californians ought to cut Davis some slack.

-------

Jason Leopold (jasonleopold@hotmail.com) spent two years covering California's energy crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is currently working on a book about the crisis.

RIAA Subpoenas and the Final Failure of the DMCA
By Ed Foster, Section The Gripelog
(via techlawadvisor.com)

The original intent of Congress was to prevent ISPs and other Internet services from having to police their users’ content for copyright infringement, and in theory it seemed a reasonable way to protect copyright holders while not unduly burdening fledgling Internet businesses.

In practice, of course, it’s turned out to be anything but reasonable. DMCA “takedowns” based on flimsy or totally bogus claims of copyright infringement are a daily occurrence. And not just because of the RIAA, since movie studios, game console manufacturers, pornographers and spammers have also learned what a powerful tool the DMCA can be in the hands of those with a little knowledge of the law and no scruples. Small ISPs and web hosting services often find the need to respond to DMCA takedown orders an enormous burden, particularly if they have any sense of responsibility for their users.

All the RIAA has done with its out-of-control legal attack is to take the DMCA takedown process to its logical but absurd conclusion. Now even the biggest broadband suppliers like SBC and Verizon are saying they can’t be saddled with the substantial costs involved in responding to all the subpoenas they’re receiving from RIAA. And, as a recent lawsuit filed by SBC-subsidiary PacBell against the RIAA and several adult entertainment operations makes clear, it's not just the recording industry that can use these subpoena tactics to the detriment of ISPs and their users. After all, copyright holders come in all manner of life forms, including some very low ones.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2003/8/17/193749/599

RIAA Subpoenas and the Final Failure of the DMCA

By Ed Foster, Section The Gripelog
Posted on Sun Aug 17th, 2003 at 07:37:49 PM PDT

I think one point about the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) attempt to sue everyone in sight needs to be emphasized. In filing thousands of subpoenas trying to force ISPs to identify customers who may have pirated music, the RIAA has demonstrated beyond one thing: the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) has absolutely and completely failed in its purpose.

While it’s generally recognized that the DMCA is badly flawed, most of the negative commentary has focused on the law’s ban on circumventing copyright protection systems and the resulting abuses of fair use principles. But there was a second major section (Section. 512) that the DMCA added to the Copyright Act called “Limitations on liability relating to material online.” DMCA defenders have often cited that section as being the section of the law that works, an assertion that has now been proven false by the RIAA.

Section 512 basically says that online service providers will not be held liable for copyright infringement by their users as long as they respond “expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing …” when notified a copyright holder. The original intent of Congress was to prevent ISPs and other Internet services from having to police their users’ content for copyright infringement, and in theory it seemed a reasonable way to protect copyright holders while not unduly burdening fledgling Internet businesses.

In practice, of course, it’s turned out to be anything but reasonable. DMCA “takedowns” based on flimsy or totally bogus claims of copyright infringement are a daily occurrence. And not just because of the RIAA, since movie studios, game console manufacturers, pornographers and spammers have also learned what a powerful tool the DMCA can be in the hands of those with a little knowledge of the law and no scruples. Small ISPs and web hosting services often find the need to respond to DMCA takedown orders an enormous burden, particularly if they have any sense of responsibility for their users.

All the RIAA has done with its out-of-control legal attack is to take the DMCA takedown process to its logical but absurd conclusion. Now even the biggest broadband suppliers like SBC and Verizon are saying they can’t be saddled with the substantial costs involved in responding to all the subpoenas they’re receiving from RIAA. And, as a recent lawsuit filed by SBC-subsidiary PacBell against the RIAA and several adult entertainment operations makes clear, it's not just the recording industry that can use these subpoena tactics to the detriment of ISPs and their users. After all, copyright holders come in all manner of life forms, including some very low ones.

Ultimately, we will probably owe the RIAA a debt of thanks for what it’s done here. DMCA or no DMCA, it’s clear the RIAA legal strategy will itself ultimately fail to thwart peer-to-peer technology. But in forcing ISPs to take sides against them -- not to mention millions of Americans who must worry if they or their children are one of the subpoena targets -- the RIAA is actually helping highlight the DMCA’s failure. Even Congress must soon come to understand had badly its purposes have been perverted by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and those who make use of it.

Utility Officers Gave to Bush
By Mike Allen for the Washington Post.

The top two executives of FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio-based utility that is a focus of investigations into last week's cascading blackouts, are key financial supporters of President Bush, according to campaign records.

H. Peter Burg, chairman and chief executive, was one of three hosts of a $600,000 fundraiser for Bush's reelection campaign in Akron, Ohio, on June 30. Vice President Cheney was the featured speaker.

Anthony J. Alexander, FirstEnergy's president and chief operating officer, was a "Pioneer" for Bush's last campaign, meaning he raised at least $100,000. Alexander also contributed $100,000 to Bush's inaugural committee.

The Energy Department has dispatched teams of investigators to the Midwest and Northeast. Democrats have questioned whether Bush's administration coddled electric companies because of his long personal ties to the energy industry.

FirstEnergy's ties could increase Capitol Hill scrutiny of the White House handling of the blackout aftermath.

Bush's campaign had no comment.

Records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that FirstEnergy executives contributed about $50,000 to Bush's last campaign. Energy and natural resource interests gave the campaign more than $3.6 million, according to the group's figures.

Here is the full text of the entire article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11622-2003Aug18.html

Utility Officers Gave to Bush

Tuesday, August 19, 2003; Page E02

The top two executives of FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio-based utility that is a focus of investigations into last week's cascading blackouts, are key financial supporters of President Bush, according to campaign records.

H. Peter Burg, chairman and chief executive, was one of three hosts of a $600,000 fundraiser for Bush's reelection campaign in Akron, Ohio, on June 30. Vice President Cheney was the featured speaker.

Anthony J. Alexander, FirstEnergy's president and chief operating officer, was a "Pioneer" for Bush's last campaign, meaning he raised at least $100,000. Alexander also contributed $100,000 to Bush's inaugural committee.

The Energy Department has dispatched teams of investigators to the Midwest and Northeast. Democrats have questioned whether Bush's administration coddled electric companies because of his long personal ties to the energy industry. FirstEnergy's ties could increase Capitol Hill scrutiny of the White House handling of the blackout aftermath.

Bush's campaign had no comment.

Records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that FirstEnergy executives contributed about $50,000 to Bush's last campaign. Energy and natural resource interests gave the campaign more than $3.6 million, according to the group's figures.

When Bush was Texas governor, employees of the now-collapsed Enron Corp., the energy-trading company, were his most generous career patrons.

-- Mike Allen

This clip has footage of the Shrub explaining the lesson we were supposed to learn from the blackout: we need to upgrade our power grid! (Of course.)

Funny, a friend of mine was telling me this morning that all the conspiracy theorists were speculating on the Shrub saying this before the week was out, and that Halliburton would probably get the contract. I guess the Stewart heard the same rumours. (Or started them :-)

This is from the August 18, 2003 program.

Daily Show On The Blackout Of 2003 (Small - 3 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Here's Donna Wentworth on Friday, July 4, 2003, telling us what she thought of the conference.

Of course, Donna was sort of a special attendee -- she took incredible notes and posted for them in near-real time all week long.

Her favorite session (when forced to choose) was the Future of Entertainment: Music panel with the EFF's Fred von Lohmann.

Donna Wentworth On ILAW 2003

The Crime and the Cover-Up
By William Rivers Pitt for t r u t h o u t.

The simple fact is that America went to war in Iraq because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and virtually every other public face within this administration vowed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. America went to war because these people vowed that Iraq had direct connections to al Qaeda, and by inference to the attacks of September 11.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said Bush on March 17, 2003.

"We know now that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," said Cheney on August 26, 2002.

"There is no doubt'' that Saddam Hussein ''has chemical weapons stocks,'' said Powell to FOX News on September 8, 2002.

"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," said Bush in his State of the Union address. On September 26, 2002, Don Rumsfeld laid the groundwork for Bush's statement by claiming that America had "bulletproof" evidence of Iraqi involvement with al Qaeda.

These public statements, augmented by hundreds more in the same vein, stoked fears within an already shellshocked American populace that Iraqi nuclear weapons and anthrax would come raining out of the sky at any moment, unless something was done. This same information was delivered in dire tones to Congress, which voted for war on Iraq based almost exclusively on the testimony of CIA Director George Tenet.

None of it was true. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 82 days since "hostilities ceased" on May 1, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 124 days since the shooting in Iraq officially started on March 19, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 230 days since the UNMOVIC weapons inspections began in Iraq in late November of 2002. No proof whatsoever of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda has been established.

Here is the full text of the article, in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/072103A.shtml

The Crime and the Cover-Up
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 21 July 2003

The scandal axiom in Washington states that it is not the crime that destroys you, but the cover-up. Today in Washington you can hear terms like 'Iraqgate' and 'Weaponsgate' bandied about, but such obtuse labels do not provide an explanation for the profound movements that are taking place.

Clearly, there is a scandal brewing over the Iraq war and the Bush administration claims of Iraqi weapons arsenals that led to the shooting. Clearly, there is a cover-up taking place. Yet this instance, the crimes that have led to the cover-up are worse by orders of magnitude than the cover-up itself.

The simple fact is that America went to war in Iraq because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and virtually every other public face within this administration vowed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. America went to war because these people vowed that Iraq had direct connections to al Qaeda, and by inference to the attacks of September 11.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said Bush on March 17, 2003.

"We know now that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," said Cheney on August 26, 2002.

"There is no doubt'' that Saddam Hussein ''has chemical weapons stocks,'' said Powell to FOX News on September 8, 2002.

"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," said Bush in his State of the Union address. On September 26, 2002, Don Rumsfeld laid the groundwork for Bush's statement by claiming that America had "bulletproof" evidence of Iraqi involvement with al Qaeda.

These public statements, augmented by hundreds more in the same vein, stoked fears within an already shellshocked American populace that Iraqi nuclear weapons and anthrax would come raining out of the sky at any moment, unless something was done. This same information was delivered in dire tones to Congress, which voted for war on Iraq based almost exclusively on the testimony of CIA Director George Tenet.

None of it was true. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 82 days since "hostilities ceased" on May 1, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 124 days since the shooting in Iraq officially started on March 19, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 230 days since the UNMOVIC weapons inspections began in Iraq in late November of 2002. No proof whatsoever of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda has been established.

Recently, the scandal over the missing Iraq weapons and the Bush administration claims has focused on whether or not Iraq was trying to procure uranium "yellow cake" from Niger in order to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. The last two weeks have shown decisively that the Bush administration used manufactured evidence, which had been denounced from virtually all corners of the American intelligence community, to justify their war. The administration's explanation for this has changed by the hour - They weren't told by the CIA, and then they were told but Bush and Cheney never heard about it, but it was only sixteen words in one speech, so everybody calm down.

No one is calming down. When the President of the United States terrifies the American people in his constitutionally-mandated State of the Union speech with nuclear threats based upon evidence that was universally known to be shoddily forged garbage, no one should calm down. When he uses that terror to make war on a nation that was no threat to America, no one should calm down. When over 200 American soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians die because of this, no one should calm down. When that grisly body count rises every single day, no one should calm down.

The Niger nuclear forgery scandal is merely an accent in this criminal symphony. It has become all too clear that a small cadre of ultra-conservative hawks within the administration led us to where we are today with absolutely no oversight from the rest of the government. This group managed the run-up to war by creating demonstrably exaggerated interpretations of intelligence reports, and used 'insider data' from people with many good reasons to help lie America into this war.

The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. The OSP was staffed by rank amateurs, civilians whose ideological pedigree suited Rumsfeld and his cabal of hawks. Though this group was on no government payroll and endured no Congressional oversight, their information and interpretations managed to prevail over the data being provided by the State Department and CIA. This group was able to accomplish this incredible feat due to devoted patronage from high-ranking ultra-conservatives within the administration, including Vice-President Cheney.

The highest levels of the OSP were staffed by heavy-hitters like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, and William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Cheney before joining the Pentagon. These two men, along with their civilian advisors, worked according to a strategy that they hoped would recreate Iraq into an Israeli ally, destroy a potential threat to Persian Gulf oil trade, and wrap U.S. allies around Iran. The State Department and CIA saw this plan as being badly flawed and based upon profoundly questionable intelligence. The OSP responded to these criticisms by cutting State and CIA completely out of the loop. By the time the war came, nearly all the data used to justify the action to the American people was coming from the OSP. The American intelligence community had been totally usurped.

When the OSP wanted to change or exaggerate evidence of Iraqi weapons capabilities, they sent Vice President Cheney to CIA headquarters on unprecedented visits where he demanded "forward-leaning" interpretations of the evidence. When Cheney was unable to go to the CIA, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, went in his place.

On three occasions, former congressman Newt Gingrich visited CIA in his capacity as a "consultant" for ultra-conservative hawk Richard Perle and his Defense Policy Board. According to the accounts of these visits, Gingrich browbeat the analysts to toughen up their assessments of the dangers posed by Hussein. He was allowed access to the CIA and the analysts because he was a known emissary of the OSP.

The main OSP source of data on Iraqi weapons, and on the manner in which the Iraqi people would greet their 'liberators,' was Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi was the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group seeking since 1997 the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been hand-picked by Don Rumsfeld to be the leader of Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that he had been convicted in 1992 of 32 counts of bank fraud by a Jordanian court and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison. It apparently never occurred to Rumsfeld and the OSP that Chalabi had a lot of reasons to lie. It seems they were too enamored of the data he was providing, because that data fully justified the course of action they had been set upon since September 11, 2001.

Chalabi was the main source behind claims that Iraq had connections to al Qaeda. Chalabi was the main source behind claims that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi was the main source behind claims that the Iraqi people would rise up and embrace their American invaders. Chalabi's claims on this last matter are the main reason post-war Iraq is in complete chaos, because Rumsfeld assumed the logistics for repairing Iraq would be simple - The joyful Iraqis would do it for him.

According to a story entitled "Planners Faulted in Iraq Chaos" by Knight-Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, published on July 13, Chalabi proved to be a dangerous wild card. Chalabi's association with and influence over the OSP, however, continued unabated:

"The Chalabi scheme was dealt another major blow in February, a month before the war started, when U.S. intelligence agencies monitored him conferring with hard-line Islamic leaders in Tehran, Iran, a State Department official said. About that time, an Iraqi Shiite militia that was based in Iran and known as the Badr Brigade began moving into northern Iraq, setting off alarm bells in Washington. Cheney, once a strong Chalabi backer, ordered the Pentagon to curb its support for the exiles, the official said. Yet Chalabi continued to receive Pentagon assistance, including backing for a 700-man paramilitary unit. The U.S. military flew Chalabi and his men at the height of the war from the safety of northern Iraq to an air base outside the southern city of Nasiriyah in expectation he would soon take power."

Chalabi never took power. Instead, Paul Bremer was installed as the American proconsul in Iraq, ostensibly with orders to bring stability and liberty to the country. This last aspect is the final lie, the most repugnant crime, perpetrated against the civilians of that ravaged nation.

I spoke last week with a woman named Jodie Evans, long-time peace activist and organizer of a group called the International Occupation Watch Center, or IOWC. The purpose of the IOWC is to stand as watchdogs in Iraq over the corporate contracts being doled out, and to view in person what is happening to the Iraqi people. "I think that if you were against the war, then you need to be there," said Evans, "because there is no one in Iraq who is for the Iraqi people, and the people know it. They know it."

Evans had just returned from Baghdad. Upon her arrival to the city, she saw the demonstrable chaos caused by the war, and by the abject failure to repair the country in the aftermath. "It was 120 degrees, it was dusty, the air had a haze that makes everything gray," said Evans. "The buildings you see on the road are bombed out. In some, you can see the fire coming up. In some, you only see the scaffolding of contorted metal. We got across our bridge and turned right onto the street we know so well, the one we've stayed on, and every building was either boarded up or bombed out, including the United Nations DP. It was all bombed in, the windows were black from the fire."

"Immediately after we arrived," said Evans, "we hear that it is not only worse than before the war. It is worse than during the war. People are upset, people are angry. There were lots of stories about how the Americans are doing this on purpose. A month after the '91 war, which was much worse than this one, everything was back and working. Now, the people live in this chaos they can't even imagine. People can't go outside. Women haven't left their homes. Lots of people haven't come back from Syria or Kuwait or wherever they fled to get away from the bombing, because life in Iraq is unlivable. There is 65% unemployment, and even the doctors and nurses and teachers who are going to work don't get paid, so there's no money."

Evans met a number of Americans in Iraq who are part of the 'rebuilding process.' One such person was in the Compound, a guarded palace that is now home to Bremer's office and staff along with a number of other groups. The overall organization is called the Iraqi Assistance Center, or IAC. The man Evans met was a professor of religion and political theory at a religious college in America. He explained that his job was to collect intelligence for Bremer.

"That professor I spoke to, the one doing intelligence for Bremer, I told him that I had spoken to countless Iraqis and all of them felt this chaos was happening on purpose," said Evans. "He basically said this was true, that chaos was good, and out of chaos comes order. So what the Iraqis were saying - that this madness was all on purpose - this intelligence guy didn't discredit. He said, 'If you keep them hungry, they'll do anything for us.'"

"I met the man who was hired to create a new civil government in Baghdad, to bring Baghdad back to order," said Evans. "His name was Gerald Lawson. I asked him what his background was that allowed him to get this job. He said he was in the Atlanta Police for 30 years. I asked how this gave him the ability to create a stable, civil government. He said he was a manager. I asked him what he knew about Iraqis. He knew nothing, and didn't care to know anything. He didn't know their history, their government, didn't speak a word of Arabic and didn't care to learn. This guy doesn't work for the American government, doesn't work for the State Department, and doesn't work for the CPA. He works for a corporation created by ex-Generals. Their job is to create the new Iraqi government structure."

"We met the man whose job is to make sure the hospitals have what they need," said Evans. "He is a veterinarian. We met a British guy who showed up at the Compound gates one day and said he was a volunteer who wanted to help. The next day he was named the head of rubbish control in Baghdad, which is a huge problem there because there is garbage all over the street. I asked him what he had been doing with his time. He said he'd been hanging out at Odai's palace playing with the lions and the cheetahs. I met the guy in charge of designing the airport, where major jumbo jets are supposed to land. He had never designed an airport before."

"Another man I spoke to associated with this process is named Don Munson," said Evans. "His job is civilian affairs policy. He said to me, 'We are replacing one dictatorship with another.' He's there for two years, and he works in the palace on the first floor."

"Remember," said Evans, "that the first thing America did was to fire 80,000 police officers. These guys weren't associated with the Hussein regime. That's like connecting a cop in LA to the Bush administration. All the people I've talked to over there, the ambassadors and others, said they warned Bremer not to do that. The cops knew who the criminals were, and 80,000 cops are gone. So now there are these little mafias that run neighborhoods. With no other work and no way to survive, people are going to become criminals. The borders are wide open - we didn't even get stopped when we came in - so everything is just flowing into Iraq."

"A friend of mine's husband is an ambassador," said Evans. "I asked him if this was normal operating procedure. He said that, basically, no one will work on this Iraq project who has any respect for their work or career, because it is so clearly a farce. He said that later we will go in after these guys have blown it, but right now with Bremer there it is a farce. Even the press is over there are just shaking their heads and asking, can anyone fail so badly? Can anybody make so many mistakes? You can't imagine they can be so dumb."

"One Iraqi woman I spoke to," said Evans, "said she feels like Iraq is a wounded animal, and everyone is coming in to take their piece of flesh."

The cover-up is one thing, the crime is another. The Bush administration, mainly in the form of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, disregarded any and all intelligence which said Iraq was no threat. They supplanted reliable data with a slew of lies and exaggerations that were fed daily to the American people and Congress, and got their war. In the aftermath, nothing is being done for the millions of Iraqi civilians who suffer daily under their newfound 'liberty.'

American soldiers continue to die. Two more, men from the 101st Airborne, were killed early Sunday when their convoy was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. "You have these young American soldiers sitting in turrets," said Jodie Evans, "just sitting ducks for the rage and frustration and vengeance that is coming out."

This is a crime without peer in the annals of American history. The cover-up currently underway must not be allowed to succeed.

When the American government gets hijacked by extremists like the men staffing the Office of Special Plans, when intelligence data stating flatly that Iraq presents no threat to America is disregarded or exaggerated because the truth does not fit ideological desires, when Congress is lied to, when the American people are lied to, when innocent civilians at the sharp end of these lies are left to rot in the dust and the bomb craters on purpose, when American soldiers are shot down in the street because of these lies, no kind of cover-up can be allowed to succeed.

The time has indeed come for a reckoning. Let it begin, and let it begin soon.

Author's Note: The data surrounding this developing story is voluminous, and seems to change every time an administration representative opens his or her mouth. I have collected below the last few stories I have written on this subject in chronological order. Please utilize this data to further your understanding of this matter.

We Used To Impeach Liars (6/3/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/060303A.shtml

The Dog Ate My WMDs (6/13/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/061303A.shtml

Slaughtergate (6/23/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062303A.shtml

Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern (6/26/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml

The Insiders Are Coming Out (7/8/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/070803A.shtml

Mr. Bush, You Are A Liar (7/11/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/071103A.shtml

The Dubious Suicide of George Tenet (7/14/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/071403A.shtml

- - - - -

William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto Press at SilenceIsSedition.com.

This aired on
Larry King Live on August 4, 2003.

I've provided the interview in "complete" and three separate parts.

There's also a rush transcript available.

Howard Dean On Larry King Live - Complete (Small - 54 MB)

Howard Dean On Larry King Live - Part 1 of 3 (Small - 19 MB)
Howard Dean On Larry King Live - Part 2 of 3 (Small - 19 MB)
Howard Dean On Larry King Live - Part 3 of 3 (Small - 16 MB)

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/04/lkl.00.html

CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Interview With Howard Dean; Will U.S. Catch Saddam Hussein?

Aired August 4, 2003 - 21:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Howard Dean, the man everybody is talking about -- on this week's "TIME" and "Newsweek" covers. Will he be the one to take on President Bush?
Then, later, is the United States any closer to finding Saddam Hussein and those weapons of mass destruction? We'll talk postwar Iraq with Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes"; "L.A. Times" chief diplomatic correspondent and Middle East expert Robin Wright; another Democratic presidential hopeful, Florida Senator Bob Graham, former chairman of Senate Select Intelligence Committee; and Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the chairman of the Military Construction Subcommittee.

They're all next on LARRY KING LIVE.

We begin with governor -- the former governor of Vermont Howard Dean. He's with us from Burlington, Vermont. If you saw the weeklies, they're out, he's on the front cover of "Newsweek," called "Howard Dean: Destiny or Disaster?". Front cover of "TIME", "The Dean Factor."

Governor, what do you make of all this?

HOWARD DEAN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, it's an exciting time in Burlington and around the rest of the country. I think it's basically time somebody stood up to this president and I'm glad our party is finally coming away.

KING: Why don't you -- why aren't you called doctor?

DEAN: Oh, some people do call me doctor. I am a doctor. I'm an internist. I practiced up until the day I became governor, almost 12 years ago.

KING: But the title you most often use is governor, right? I mean, you're not referred to as Dr. Dean?

DEAN: Some people do. I don't really care. You know, the old saying, I don't care what you call me as long as you call me on time for dinner. You know, truthfully most people call me Howard around here.

KING: Any cons to all this attention? There were pros, obviously. You forged ahead,. You're leading in some polls. Any downside to this? DEAN: Well, there's always a downside. I have a big target on my back from all the other campaigns on the Democratic side. But the good thing is it gives me a platform on how to talk about how to beat George Bush. And the only way to beat George Bush is to stand up to him.

I think in Washington the game for too long among the Democrats was let's try to be a little bit like him and that's not going to get us elected president and it's not going to get a Democratic president in the White House.

KING: Speaking of the others attacking you, yesterday, on Sunday, Senator Joe Lieberman, another candidate, compared you to George McGovern and described a party led by Dean as a ticket to no where. Today he spoke at the National Press Club. Here's what he had to say and we'll get your comment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOE LIEBERMAN (D-CT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: A candidate who was opposed to the war against Saddam, who has called for the repeal of all of the Bush tax cuts, which would result in an increase in taxes on the middle class, I believe will not offer the kind of leadership America needs to meet the challenges that we face today. And as I said in my prepared remarks, I believe that that kind of candidate could lead the Democratic Party into the political wilderness for a long time to come. Could be really a ticket to no where.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Your reaction?

DEAN: Well, obviously I don't agree.

I think the four candidates from Washington that voted for the war, Senator Lieberman, Senator Kerry, Senator Edwards and Representative Gephardt basically gave the president carte blanche in October to launch a preemptive strike and the evidence wasn't there.

Let's look at what the president said. He told us that he was buying -- that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa. That wasn't true. He told us -- or the vice president that Iraq was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. That wasn't true. The president told us there was a clear link between al Qaeda and Iraq. That wasn't true. The secretary of defense told us he knew exactly where the weapons were, right around Tikrit and Baghdad. That wasn't true. So if I could figure that with my foreign policy team as a governor from Vermont, my question is why should we be led by people who couldn't figure that out and who voted to give the president unilateral authority to attack Iraq?

KING: Are you hurt, though, that a fellow Democrat taking you on like that?

DEAN: Listen, if that's the worst I get in this campaign, I'll be in good shape.

Look, these guys have worked hard. They want to be president. Any one of them would be better than the president they have now. But what our party really has to have is some backbone. We are not going to beat George Bush by voting for things like No Child Left Behind, which is a huge middle class tax increase, property tax increase. We're not going to beat him by doing as Senator Lieberman and others did, voting for some of the president's tax cuts because those tax cuts have really harmed our economy and taken jobs away from Americans; and we're not going to beat the president without casting a critical eye on the statements that he made leading up to the Iraq war, when so many of them have now turned out not to be so.

KING: You're not unhappy that Saddam Hussein is not in power though, are you?

DEAN: No, I think it's great that Saddam Hussein is not in power, but I would have approached it in a very different way. And I think the jury is still out in terms of how much danger to the United States this poses.

Now that we're there, we can't get out. We cannot afford to lose the peace. That's not an option. Now that we're there, we have to find a way to make sure that a chaotic situation doesn't develop or, worse, a fundamentalist regime with Iranian influence doesn't develop. And the first thing we really ought to be doing is bringing NATO and the United Nations in so we can send some of our reserves home.

KING: So if you were president tomorrow, that's what you would be doing?

DEAN: Yes, I would begin the process of going to the United Nations, getting a resolution to bring foreign troops in, preferably including some troops from Arabic-speaking nations and some Muslim troops so that we can make this truly an international occupation. I do believe it's a worthwhile goal to rebuild Iraq into a democracy. I think that's unlikely to happen with this president, given his track record in Afghanistan.

I support the president's invasion of Afghanistan because I thought that was an issue for national security of the United States. But I think what s happened since then has been a very bad harbinger of what the president may do in Iraq.

We're under -- we have probably a fifth of the number of troops that we need to have in Iraq -- excuse me, in Afghanistan. The president is making deals with the warlords, who are certainly not Democratic forces. i think things look bad in Afghanistan. We need the U.N. and NATO to come in and help us there. And the problem is the president has managed to alienate and humiliate all the very countries that we now need to help us maintain the peace both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

KING: How do you react that so many conservative Republicans, some, many on the extreme right, want you to be the candidate? They think you would be the easiest one to beat. DEAN: Well, I welcome that challenge. You know, they all say, Well, he's so liberal. Well, if liberal is balancing budgets, please do call me a liberal. No Republican president has balanced a budget in 34 years in this country. If you want jobs and investment in this country, you're going to have to have a Democrat because the Republicans simply can't handle money.

KING: You actually think, though, out of nowhere, you could win this?

DEAN: I do. I really do.

This is an insurgency candidate, a candidacy. We are way ahead of where I ever thought we were going to be and I really do believe that most Democrats in this country want someone who is going to take on the president directly and is not afraid to do that and doesn't focus every position based on what the polls say and what his focus groups say.

Look, I don't check the polls before I take positions and it has gotten me in trouble before. I also don't always check carefully about when I say what I think. And that's gotten me in some trouble before. But what the American people are going to see, should I get the nomination, is a Democrat who is not afraid to be a Democrat again.

KING: We're going to take a break. When we come back, we'll get to some specific issues with Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential candidate, the former Democratic governor of Vermont. Again, he's on the front cover this week of "Newsweek" and "TIME." Major frontpage story in "The Washington Post" yesterday as well.

Right back with more with the former governor of Vermont right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Our guest is Governor Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. He's also a medical physician. He has been a major scorer on the fund-raising campaign, I'll ask about that in a minute. But he's also been running a television commercial in Austin, Texas. And we want to show you a portion of it. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, COMMERCIAL)

DEAN: I'm Howard Dean. I'm running for president, and I approved this message because I want to change George Bush's reckless foreign policy, stand up for affordable health care and create new jobs.

You know, when you think about it, in the past two and a half years we have lost over 2.5 million jobs. And has anybody really stood up against George Bush and his policies? Don't you think it's time somebody did?

Visit my Web site, join my campaign, because it's time to take our country back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Did you gear that so the president could see it while he's on vacation?

DEAN: We actually didn't do that, air it so the president could see it so he's on vacation. We have an enormous amount of support in Austin, and we think there's a reasonable chance that we can win the Texas primary. And you know, I think it's unlikely we're going to win Texas during the general elections, but we need to play hard in Texas.

One of the things that I thought was a mistake that the Democratic Party did was to lay down in some states, because what happens is we need to excite the base. My whole campaign, the difference between my campaign and all the other guys' from Washington campaign is I believe we need to go to the Democratic base first. We have forgotten who put us in office.

We need to get them energized, and then we need to bring new people into the process. You saw the Web site, DeanForAmerica.com. That Web site has generated over a quarter of a million people who are now supporting us. The fund-raising, you talked about the fund- raising, we raised more money than anybody else in any quarter. We did that because 93,000 people gave us money. Most have never given money to a political campaign, and the average gift was well under $100.

That's how you beat a president who can get as many $2,000 checks as he wants, is to bring three or four million new people into the process, give them a reason to vote, and then you can beat George Bush.

KING: Let's talk about other issues. The president said he wants to codify a law that secures the fact that there will be no gay marriage. Vermont has what, gay union?

DEAN: We have civil unions, which gives equal rights -- doesn't give marriage, but it gives equal rights in terms of insurance, employment rights, inheritance rights, hospital visitation, to every single Vermonter, no matter who they are.

You know, interestingly enough, Dick Cheney took a position in 2000 in the debates that is not very different than mine. He said, this is not a federal issue. I really am inclined to leave this matter to the states, and I think we ought to let states figure out how to give equal rights to everybody in the way that they do it. So I think this is kind of a political issue at the federal level, but the power to decide these things really belongs to the state level.

KING: All right. On your own state level, if it were a referendum, would you vote for gay marriage?

DEAN: If what were -- we don't have a referendum in my state, and we have civil unions, and we deliberate chose civil unions, because we didn't think marriage was necessary in order to give equal rights to all people.

Marriage is a religious institution, the way I see it. And we're not in the business of telling churches who they can and cannot marry. But in terms of civil rights and equal rights under the law for all Americans, that is the state's business, and that's why we started civil unions.

KING: So you would be opposed to a gay marriage?

DEAN: If other states want to do it, that's their business. We didn't choose to do that in our state.

KING: And you personally would oppose it?

DEAN: I don't know, I never thought about that very much, because we didn't do it in our state for that reason. The body politic agreed in our state that it wasn't the thing to do, so we didn't do it.

I'll tell you what I will do, though. If Massachusetts decides that they're going to do gay marriage, I believe there is a federal involvement, and the federal involvement is not to recognize marriage or civil unions but it is to recognize equal rights under the law. So that if a couple enters into a domestic partnership, or a gay marriage in Canada, or a civil union in Vermont, I think those couples are entitled to federal benefits.

KING: What do you think of the recall of Governor Gray Davis in California?

DEAN: I think that the recall of Gray is probably a mistake. I think that -- this is another attempt to overturn an election that was a legitimate election by the right wing. Darrell Issa, congressman from Southern California, very wealthy, very, very conservative, really paid for the recall effort himself, and I think it's better not to upset legal elections. We saw that -- something like that happening in the election in 2000. There were a lot of people who still don't think that was the right thing, and I myself -- I believe we don't really know who won that election. I think it was a shame the United States Supreme Court decided to stop the recount. And I don't think you want in the most populous state in the country another attempt at overthrowing a legal election by the conservative right.

KING: The latest issue of "U.S. News and World Report" says that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, went to the campaigns of all of you and said that if it was mathematically clear that the party had a nominee, he wanted every loser to drop out, and that you refused. Is that true?

DEAN: Well, I am not aware that Terry McAuliffe -- Terry McAuliffe has certainly never had a conversation like that with me. I checked with my campaign, and I never heard of anybody he had that conversation with in my campaign, so I'm not aware that such a conversation ever took place.

I believe, however, that what I'm trying to do in addition to becoming the next president is to build this party back so that we aren't under the thumb of the Rush Limbaughs and the Tom DeLays of the world. I really think that in order to bring new people into the party that I've got to stand up and be proud to be a Democrat the whole way through, be proud of who I am.

KING: Do you have to...

DEAN: But I'm not inclined to drop out, but I never had that conversation with Chairman McAuliffe.

KING: But you're inclined to have your delegates stand up for you in convention?

DEAN: Well, yes, not only do I plan to have my delegates stand up for me in convention, I hope very much there's going to be a majority of them.

KING: How do you account for all this fund-raising?

DEAN: It's average people in my party and independents. You know, I was in a fund-raiser in San Diego at 8:00 in the morning, which is sacrilege in California, and we had Perot people, we had McCain people, we had Green Party people, and we had a huge number of Democrats. There are a lot of independents and Democrats who don't think huge budget deficits are a good thing, who were really upset about the nearly three million private sector jobs that this president has lost, and upset, frankly, about his foreign policy, which appears to be based on things that the president didn't think were necessary to share with the American people.

So I think by standing up and being who you are, people reward you for that. There are going to be some things that people don't agree with me on, but they're going to know where I stand and they're going to know that I'm not going to be afraid to tell them what the facts are.

KING: Any thoughts on the reports that Colin Powell intends to not stay another four years if Bush is reelected?

DEAN: Well, I wouldn't be surprised. I admire Colin Powell a lot, and I read his books, and I think that if the president had listened to Colin Powell we probably wouldn't be in Iraq right now.

I think that, like Christy Whitman before him, the president tends not to listen to voices of moderation. I think Secretary Powell is a voice of moderation. It doesn't surprise me that he might be pretty frustrated with his inability to get much policy headway in the Bush administration.

KING: Would you say, Governor, that you will have to move more towards the center? Is the center where American politics lies?

DEAN: Larry, I am in the center. I balanced budget. The president hasn't done so. I believe that states have the right to make their own gun laws, after enforcing the federal laws vigorously. I believe that we ought to have health insurance for every single American. Harry Truman put that in the Democratic Party platform in 1948. There's nothing that's not centrist about me. I just think that the party and the electorate, the Republican Party and even my own party has simply moved too far to the right.

KING: We'll take a break, come back, take a few calls for Howard Dean. Then our panel will assemble. You're watching LARRY KING LIVE, don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Before we take a call for the governor, your comment, Congressman Dick Gephardt will get his 10th major from Organized Labor. Apparently the United Steel Workers of America about to support him. Any comment?

DEAN: Dick has been long friend of labor. Actually, I think I was their second choice, I was the machinist second choice and that's not a bad place to be. I commend him for that and wish him well.

KING: New York City, as we go to some calls for Governor Howard Dean, hello.

CALLER: Hi. Governor Dean, I have been so impressed by you ever since I saw you on "Meet the Press." And I'm going to my first Dean meeting this week. And my question for you is that many Democrats believe that if not for Ralph Nader staying in the election that we wouldn't have George Bush as a president.

So my question to you is, if you do not get the Democratic nomination, will you still run on the independent ticket?

DEAN: No, I will not.

CALLER: If so, how will that impact the upcoming race?

DEAN: I will not run as independent. I will support the nominee. It is essential that George Bush not be re-elected for the future of this country. It is essential for our economy. It's essential, so we can regain the respect we had around the world. And I will under no circumstances run as a third party and independent. I will back the nominee. I hope I am the nominee because I can bring about half those votes that voted for Ralph Nader back into the party. That's how we are going to win. And I think at this point there is no other evidence that any of the other candidates can do that and I think that's why I'm the most likely to beat George Bush.

KING: Santa Cruz, California, hello.

CALLER: Hi Governor Dean. My question to you is, given your medical background and your view on states rights, in your opinion, what should the federal government do about medical marijuana?

DEAN: I don't think they should throw people in jail in California, but I think do think -- here's what I think. I think the process by which medical marijuana is being legalized is the wrong process. I don't like it when politicians interfere in medicine. It's why I am very pro-choice. Because I don't think that is the government's business. So what I will do as president is, I will acquire the FDA within first 12 months to evaluate marijuana and see if it is, in fact, a decent medicine or not. If it is, for what purposes -- for certain purposes, and I suspect it will be for cancer patients and HIV/AIDS patients. And it should be allowed for that. But I suspect it will not be allowed for things like glaucoma. But we have to do the FDA studies. I think marijuana should be treated like every other drug in the process and there shouldn't be a special process which is based on politics to legalize it.

KING: Wilmington, North Carolina, for governor Howard Dean. Hello.

CALLER: As a real Democrat, and a avid Dean supporter, I was wondering what qualities you would be looking for in a vice presidential running mate and if you would consider one of the well qualified women that we have in public service for the Democratic party?

DEAN: Well, first, A, let me thank you for your help and support, and B, when they say that it is much too early to talk about my running mate. I've got a long way to go and it's nice to be in the position I am right now, but five months before the first primary and caucuses are five an a half months. I do have some ideas. I think the first qualification, and Bill Clinton did this very well, choose somebody who could be president of the United States. That is the thing that you have got to do. Bill Clinton choose Al Gore, who would have be a very good president. Secondly, I'm going to look for somebody with a Washington background. Because the biggest mistake governors make, when they go to Washington, they don't know how to deal with the system.

It is a different world inside Washington than it is everywhere else in the country, which helps me as a candidate because I know that world and it's tougher for the Washington candidates. But to governor you have to get something done. Thirdly, you look at region. The south is a region I am always very interested in as somebody from the north. And finally you take into account the most important constituency groups and women are as important constituency groups, as are African-Americans and Latinos and others. So, all those things go into a mix. We won't work on that for quite some time because I think it would be a little cocky to start picking your vice presidential running mate with -- having won only one primary and that didn't have any delegates and that was the moveon.org primary.

KING: Kingston, Ontario, hello.

CALLER: Yes, hello. Many Democrats voted to go to war, why are they now seeming to back track and withdraw their support to President Bush. And do you agree -- do you not agree with the war any more and trying to win the 2004 elections because no weapons of mass destruction were found? I think...

KING: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut her, but I think we get the gist of the question -- governor. DEAN: I'm not sure the caller understood that I did not support the war and only one of the four or five candidates that you have spoken for tonight. All though, Bob Graham didn't support war and Dennis Kucinich didn't support the war either. But the candidates you have spoken about Lieberman, Senator Kerry, Representative Gephardt and Senator Edwards did all support the war. I didn't support the war because I don't think the president made the case. I supported the president, as I said before, in Afghanistan because I thought that was a matter of national security. I supported the first Gulf War. But you don't send troops to war without explaining clearly and frankly to the American people why they have to go. And what this president said was, mainly, gave -- made a number of assertions that were not factual.

The argument that I make and some people say as Senator Lieberman did if you didn't support the Gulf War you can't be elected president. I actually believe, that if you're a Democrat and did support the Gulf War, it calls into question your judgment in one of the most serious question or actions any president will have to take, which is sending American citizens to die on a foreign land. When you make that decision you ought know the facts. You ought to ask a lot of questions. If I can figure out that the facts weren't accurate, why couldn't they figure that out in Washington? So, I think not supporting the war is an advantage principally because it shows that I am willing to use very, very tough judgment and it stands against the grain of the president of the United States and many Americans and standing up for what I believe in. Just as John F. Kennedy did in during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

KING: We'll see lots more of you governor. Thanks for very much joining us tonight. We expect to have you in debates as well.

DEAN: Thanks.

KING: Governor Howard Dean, coming to us from Burlington, Vermont. The former Democratic governor of the state of Vermont.

When we come back, our panel of Steve Kroft, Robin Wright, Senator Bob Graham, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson will discuss Iraq and other things right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Let's meet our panel. In New York, Steve Kroft, the co- editor and correspondent of CBS News' "60 Minutes." In Washington, Robin Wright, chief diplomatic correspondent of "The Los Angeles Times" and author of "Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam." In Chicago is Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, former chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, member of the National Security Caucus, and a candidate for his party's nomination for the presidency; indeed on Wednesday he is starting a campaign trip through Iowa.

And in Dallas, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, chairman of the Appropriation Subcommittee on Military Construction, member of Veteran Affairs Committee, and vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference. I'm going to ask Steve and Robin to comment first on Governor Dean, and then we'll get into our discussion of Iraq. Senator Graham, of course, is one of his opponents. Senator Hutchison is in the other party.

Steve Kroft, what do you make of this Dean thing?

STEVE KROFT, CBS NEWS: You know, I think that you made a reference to him, somebody saying that he was the George McGovern -- he may also turn out to be the Eugene McCarthy, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate, but certainly one who was able to shift the political debate in the country in 1968 and focus it on the Vietnam War.

He clearly has some support, both in the left wing of the Democratic Party and the right wing of the Republican Party, not -- and in the case of the Republicans, not just because they think he may be a candidate to beat, but because there are many people in the Republican Party who feel the same way about the war. I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens with the vast majority of sort of centrist voters in the next few months ahead.

KING: Robin Wright.

ROBIN WRIGHT, "LOS ANGELES TIMES": Well, how Dean is perceived by the American public may be dependent on event a year from now, in the run-up to conventions before the election. We see two very important events. One is the election in Iraq for government, and then also the election for the first permanent government in Afghanistan. These are the two most ambitious foreign policy items on the Bush agenda, and it's quite likely that they will come to a head. We'll see whether the United States is able in a very short period of time to re-create nations.

And if the administration is successful, then Howard Dean may find that his support is in trouble. If the administration is still facing, you know, regular attacks in Iraq and the warlords are prevailing in Afghanistan, then someone who has taken a position Howard Dean has may have an appeal to the American public.

KING: All right, Senator Graham, we'll get into politics at other times when we're running and we have got them on together, so you can respond to what Governor Dean said. But on the Iraq situation, and you're involved in intelligence, what do you hear about the hunt for Hussein?

SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I would like to just comment a moment on what Robin just said. I think there are two things that are going to shape American opinion about a year from now, but they aren't the two she listed.

I think they are jobs, whether this stagnant economy is moving again, and, second, the condition inside Iraq. Are we still losing an American a day, are we still spending $1 billion every week in that occupied country? As to Saddam Hussein, I know that that is getting a very high priority. We have, of course, already killed his two sons; his daughters have fled the country. I think we will eventually find Saddam Hussein, probably somewhere inside Iraq.

KING: Senator Hutchison, what do you hear?

SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON (R), TEXAS: Well, we think that we are on his trail. We think that the capturing and killing, actually of the sons gave us a lot of information, and we -- our people think we will find him, and that it will be sooner rather than later, and all of us hope so.

But, you know, we've tried before. He certainly has a lot of places to hide in Iraq, and so it's, you know, you don't want to get your hopes up.

KING: Steve, is his capture, would you call it a necessity?

KROFT: I think it's very important. I think it's very important, and I think it was downplayed at the beginning by the administration. And I don't think that -- I think clearly the killing of his two sons has done a lot towards allaying some fears among the Iraqi people that he has the potential to come back into power. But I think as long as Saddam is alive, as long as he has people under his influence, people who he's paid a lot of money to, I think you always run the risk of at least in the minds of the Iraqi people, of the possibility of him returning to power.

KING: Robin?

WRIGHT: Indeed. Three of the four groups that are targeting American troops in Iraq are people who were once loyal to Saddam Hussein, his intelligence, Baath Party members and the Fedayeen, the kind of thugs within the military.

And once Saddam Hussein is captured, that's going to pull the rug out from those who may have been willing to target the United States because they thought Saddam Hussein still stood a chance.

And I think it also will deal a real blow to -- in that so-called Sunni triangle, the area north of Baghdad where so many of the attacks have taken place. This is Saddam Hussein's heartland. This is the area that could be the most trouble for us over the next year, and so getting Saddam Hussein plays out on a lot of other levels, as well.

KING: Senator Graham, what do you make of the search for weapons of mass destruction? Is that a political necessity?

GRAHAM: Well, Larry, where we are now is we have a whole series of searches under way. We are searching for Osama bin Forgotten, we are searching for weapons in Iraq, we're searching for Saddam Hussein. We're even searching for whoever sent those anthrax letters out in the fall of 2001. It's important that in each one of those, we determine who and what was responsible and detain the individual. If we don't, the confidence of the world in the United States, the confidence of the American people in their intelligence, their law enforcement and their president will be severely eroded.

KING: Senator Hutchison?

HUTCHISON: Well, I do think that we will find weapons of mass destruction. We know he has chemical weapons, because he's used them, and I think it's important that we see the evidence of that. I think you have to go back and look at what the president was looking at when he decided to target Saddam Hussein. He had just been through a 9/11, where we were not prepared, where we didn't put all the information we had together to protect our people, and he sees evidence that Saddam Hussein will not let the weapon inspectors do their jobs, and we know he's used these weapons before, and he knows that there is a connection with terrorists.

So the president is saying, am I going to have another 9/11 with the weapon of mass destruction funded by Saddam Hussein, and the answer for the president was no. And I think that has to be looked at in the context of what he knew at the time and what he had seen after 9/11.

KING: We'll take a break and come back with more. We'll also include some of your phone calls. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(EXPLOSIONS)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Memories of the war in Iraq.

Steve Kroft, are you concerned about al Qaeda and American domestic security?

KROFT: Absolutely. And obviously Tom Ridge and the president are too, given the warnings that were issued a few days ago. I think that's going to be an ongoing threat that we're going to have to deal with, probably forever and I don't think that -- I think that there's a good chance that it will come and will come again at the time that we least suspect it.

KING: Robin, is it a certainty? Is something going to happen?

WRIGHT: Well, I think so. I think, though, the pattern of terrorism in the past, the last two decades, in fact, has been that they, as Steve said, of, you know, when no one expects us.

And not necessarily on aircraft. I think that we're -- there's such security now around airports that it's much more difficult and that they'll look for something, perhaps, a little bit more imaginative.

But, I think, you know, while we've been focused so heavily on Saddam Hussein and capturing him lately, the real threat to the United States really is Osama bin Laden and he is a much bigger fish for us to try to catch.

KING: Senator Graham, are the fears warranted?

GRAHAM: Absolutely, and -- but unnecessarily. The reason, Larry, that I voted against the authorization to go to war against Iraq was not because Saddam Hussein was less than an evil person. It was the fact that he wasn't the greatest evil, the greatest threat to the people of the United States. That was al Qaeda and its leadership and Osama bin Laden.

By diverting our attention to Iraq, we allowed al Qaeda to regenerate, regroup and now, again, been cited as a major threat to the people of the United States.

KING: And Senator Hutchison, do you buy the fears?

HUTCHISON: I'm very worried about securing America because we are such a large country and we are free people, and it's very hard, of course, to secure our ports and secure our transportation infrastructure and all of our buildings and our water supply and our food supply. But we are making every effort possible and I think we have closed many loopholes that we had and I do think the aviation security is getting better. It's not where we need it to be yet and I think these current reports that we have that they may be targeting airlines again must be taken seriously.

KING: All right. In another area, Steve, what do you make of all these reports about Colin Powell?

KROFT: Well, it certainly would not surprise me if he left the administration. Not very many secretary of states stick around for two terms.

I've got to believe that this has been a very frustrating experience for him, at least at some levels. And I, you know, I believe that it's entirely possible.

KING: Robin, do your sources tell you that he disagreed with a lot of what the administration was doing, as Governor Dean said?

WRIGHT: Secretaries of state traditionally take a position that reflects America's foreign policy interests and often is in conflict with what the Pentagon wants or believes. That's not new to this administration.

Having said that, however, it is quite clear that there have been some very fierce policy battles over some critical issues involving American troops and going to war against other nations. I think Powell has always, long before 9/11, thought that he would be a one- term secretary of state. The last secretary of state to stay longer than one term was George Schultz in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration.

I think Colin Powell having spent years overseas as a soldier, having been national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both jobs in which he had to travel an inordinate amounts, has made him kind of interested in staying home, being with his family finally. He's a guy who loves to tinker on old cars, particularly Volvos. And this is a time, I think, that he wants, having been out there to look at other sides of life. He is, after all, not a young man any more.

KING: Senator Graham, are you surprised?

GRAHAM: Not surprised. I commend General Powell for the voice of reason and moderation that he has been in this administration. I imagine that he has had a number of disappointments when his advice was not taken.

Larry, I would like to go back a moment, however, to comment that my colleague Senator Hutchison made about the state of our security. Recently, I think last night, in fact, there was a "60 Minutes" segment about the state of our seaports. That is just one example of an area in which our homeland security program has had a lot of rhetoric, a lot of words, but we have not put the resources behind protecting one of our most vulnerable sites, America's seaports.

KING: All right. I got to get a break, but I'll have Senator Hutchison respond to that and her thoughts on Colin Powell. We'll take some calls as well.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Before Senator Hutchison responds, Steve Kroft, you did that piece on the seaports, right?

KROFT: I did, and Senator Graham's absolutely right. There has nothing been done.

I will say that it is a huge problem, and you've got hundreds of thousands, millions of these containers, cargo containers, coming into the country everyday, Lord only knows where from. Not good documentation, you can't search all of them, the search may be 10 percent, physically. Less than that, I believe.

And like the border issue. I mean, some of these problems are so staggering -- how do you deal with the border with Mexico? How do you deal with the border with Canada, where you in -- in many case, you can just walk across a field in Minnesota. You've got supposedly, according to some Canadian officials, 50 al Qaeda operatives that they believe are there.

KING: Senator Hutchison, your response?

HUTCHISON: Well, I think that everyone is saying the same thing. We are very concerned. This is a huge country and we have porous borders and our ports are vulnerable. There's no question about it. And I know Steve did a really strong piece on that just recently. And I think a lot is being done, but are we finished, are we where we need to be, absolutely not.

KING: Spokane, Washington, as we go to some calls. Hello.

CALLER: My question is for Senator Hutchison. Thank you for taking my call. She states Saddam does have these weapons of mass destruction. In her opinion, where are they if he does and why are our boys still dying after the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein, what credibility does President Bush have left after lying about...

KING: That's a lot of questions. Synthesize that Kay.

HUTCHISON: We know he has chemical weapons because he used them on his own people up in the north against the Kurds. And so with that kind of information, we are looking for other evidence, and I think we will find it. But I don't know where. But I do know that it is important that we continue to look for it and find it. I am very concerned about the deaths of our soldiers, that just seem to happen every day or every other day. And I think that is keeping America on edge. But I do think finding Saddam Hussein will make a big difference. We're not getting the cooperation from the people because they are afraid that if they help Americans they will be killed themselves or Saddam Hussein will come back and begin the torture of these people who helped Americans. So, it has been very difficult for our people to get the information that we need to find Saddam Hussein and show the Iraqi people that this man is gone, and they will be able to have a life if they will work with us give themselves a chance at freedom.

KING: Fremont, California, hello.

CALLER: Hi. My question is directed towards Steve. Do you think with the capture of Saddam Hussein it will possibility cease the attacks on the American troops or do you think it could possibly get worse?

KROFT: I think it's one of those things right now that is impossible to know. The biggest problem that we're going to have there, even with Saddam gone is that we are, in effect, occupying a country that we invaded that has very different customs, very different religion, very different language. And just historically that's a very difficult situation for our troops to be in. The longer that we will be, the we will have to try and enforce security measures, laws, being involved in the selection of a new government, it is going to invite people from all different political beliefs to lash out at the presence of the American forces.

KING: Robin Wright, how long we going to be there?

WRIGHT: Well the administration is hoping for elections next year that would turn the civil administration over to Iraqis themselves. And during the interim between now and then there is this 25-member council that's been formed to help the civil administration lead by Jerry Bremer to make the decisions about the day-to-day operation of Iraq. The broader issue, really, is security and how long will American troops be there?

And that's really what's at the heart of the great controversy. I think to address the previous question, one of the issues is that some of these politicians who are reemerging in Iraq are bringing their own little militias with them, there own -- whether they're guards and just a small force or whether there are hundreds of people who have been trained over the years and in some cases even thousands of people trained in the Kurdish areas, in neighboring Iran and elsewhere, That's where you're beginning to see the kind of Lebanonization of the potential, anyway, for the Lebanonization of Iraq and that's a very worrisome phenomenon. Even if you get Saddam Hussein and eliminate some of the forces who have been, some of his loyalists who have been attacking American troops. This conflict, the danger of strike inside the country and for Americans to get involved in it plays out in other ways, as well. And that's very worrisome.

KING: Salt Lake City, hello.

CALLER: MY question is for Senator Graham. I want to know why no one in the Democratic party is questioning the president's personal credibility because of -- first of all his illegal stock trade in Hark and Energy scandal. And second of all the fact that over a year in the national guard his last year, he was AWOL. To me, that doesn't make a military leader.

GRAHAM: I think there are a number of people, Democrats and Republicans and independents who are questioning the credibility of the president who took us to war on what is now proven to be and he should have known or he knew it at the time he spoke the words unreliable. I think the American people are also focusing on the fact that the president did not prepare us for what has happened in a post- war Iraq.

Did you hear the president say it was going to cost $1 billion a week?

Did you hear the president say, we might be losing one American a day.

Did you hear the president say we're going to be there for five years?

No. That's the reality. That was information that was withheld from the American people.

KING: Senator Hutchison, want to respond?

HUTCHISON: Well, first of all, I think the question is going back to a previous campaign. And I think President Bush is going to stand on his record. And I think his record and stepping up to the plate on the war on terrorism is a great one. The American people believe we must fight this war on terrorism to keep freedom for our country. And so I think he will run on his record and I think it will be a good one.

KING: Marina, California, hello.

CALLER: Yes. I would like to ask either Robin or Steve why the media has not had the courage to question the death of the 14-year-old boy when they got Saddam's sons? KING: Does that come up, Steve, we only got 30 seconds.

KROFT: Collateral damage. Unfortunately.

WRIGHT: He was shooting an AK-47 at them.

KING: The boy was?

WRIGHT: Yes. That is why. They didn't mean to kill a 14-year- old, but he was shooting at them and they didn't know he was 14. That's what I saw and heard.

KING: We're out of time. Thanks very much to all of you. We will be calling on you again. Steve Kroft, the co-editor and correspondent of CBS "60-Minutes."

Robin Wright of the "Los Angeles Times."

Senator Bob Graham, a candidate for his parties nomination.

And Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

I'll be back in a couple minutes to tell you about tomorrow night. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING Tomorrow night we'll remember Marilyn Monroe. It will be 41 years ago tomorrow that Marilyn passed away. Remembering Marilyn Monroe with a whole host of folks.

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I'll be putting up the video for this later -- hopefully this week. I'm still backed up through most of the summer on these -- but I am catching up and should have video and transcripts of every show on it's way to you. I'm trying to get a system in place so I can turn these around quicker.

Meet the Press - July 27, 2003

This is from NBC News - Meet the Press on July 27, 2003.

MR. RUSSERT: John Deutsche, former director of the CIA, testified before Congress on Thursday and said something that was quite striking, and I’ll put it on the board for you and our viewers: “If no weapons of mass destruction or only a residual capability is found, the principle justification enunciated by the U.S. government for launching this war will have proven not to be credible. It is an intelligence failure, in my judgment, of massive proportions. It means that our leaders of the American public based its support for the most serious foreign policy judgments—the decision to go to war—on an incorrect intelligence judgment.”

DR. WOLFOWITZ: Well, it’s interesting. He’s the former director of the C.I.A, and I’m sure if you go and read the intelligence judgments made when he was director, they would be equally emphatic about the existence of those weapons and those programs. President Clinton spoke in 1998 in words that are almost identical to President Bush that he has these weapons and if we don’t do something about it, I guarantee you someday he will use them. I think people should be a little careful about throwing around words like intelligence failure. It’s easy to to go around and play this blame game. I mean, let’s stop and realize that in a country like Iraq—and let me repeat—where children are tortured to make their parents talk, secrets are kept in a way we can’t even imagine. And let’s take some things that aren’t secret at all. We know that for 12 years Saddam Hussein did everything he could to frustrate U.N. inspectors. He sacrificed $100 billion in money that he could have spent on palaces and tanks and all those things that he loved so much in order to frustrate those inspectors. Isn’t that in itself an indicator there was something there? Let’s be patient and let’s figure out—wait until we can find things out.

MR. RUSSERT: But maybe the inspectors’ inspections worked, and if, in fact, we do not find significant amounts of weapons of mass destruction, should we be willing to say our intelligence community missed this and we have to go back and re-examine why?

DR. WOLFOWITZ: Well, we always ought to compare what we thought from our intelligence with what we discover later, and it’s a difficult job to do, especially if every time somebody discovers a discrepancy it is described as a “failure.”...

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PLEASE CREDIT ANY QUOTES OR EXCERPTS FROM THIS NBC TELEVISION PROGRAM TO “NBC NEWS’ MEET THE PRESS.”
NBC News
MEET THE PRESS
Sunday, July 27, 2003
GUESTS: PAUL WOLFOWITZ
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Senator BOB GRAHAM, (D-FL)
Co-Chmn., Joint Inquiry into 9/11 Terrorist
Attacks; Former Chairman, Senate Intelligence Committee
Representative PORTER GOSS, (R-FL)
Co-Chmn., Joint Inquity into 9/11 Terrorist
Attacks; Chairman, House Intelligence Committee
Senator RICHARD SHELBY, (R-AL)
Vice Chmn., Joint Inquity into 9/11 Terrorist
Attacks; Fmr. Vice Chmn., Senate Intelligence Committee
Representative NANCY PELOSI, (D-CA)
Ranking Democrat, Joint Inquity into 9/11
Terrorist Attacks; Minority Leader; Former
Ranking Democrat, House Intelligence Committee
MODERATOR/PANELIST: Tim Russert - NBC News
This is a rush transcript provided for the information and convenience of the press. Accuracy is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, please check with MEET THE PRESS - NBC NEWS (202)885-4598 (Sundays: (202)885-4200)
MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: Uday and Qusai Hussein are dead. But where is their father? And where are the weapons of mass destruction? And how long will the guerrilla war against American troops continue? With us, a major architect of the war in Iraq, the deputy secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. Then, we will never forget September 11, 2001. Could it have been prevented? Could it happen again? With us, the chairman and vice chairman of the congressional joint inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11 that produced this 850-page report, Bob Graham, Porter
Goss, Richard Shelby, and Nancy Pelosi, together, only on MEET THE PRESS.
But, first, he has just returned from a four-day trip to Iraq, the number-two man at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, welcome.
DR. PAUL WOLFOWITZ: Nice to be here, Tim.
MR. RUSSERT: Since Uday and Qusai have been killed, there seems to be an outbreak of more violence against our troops. Fifteen American soldiers killed over the last seven days. Has the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons made Iraq more dangerous for our troops?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Well, first of all, let’s take just a moment to thank our troops for the sacrifices they’re making and the condolences to the families of those who’ve been lost. In fact, what—the battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the global war on terror, and those sacrifices are going to make not just the Middle East more stable, but our country safer for our children and grandchildren. This is very important work they’re doing. And the spirit of the troops out there is fantastic. When Uday and Qusai were killed, we acknowledged there would very likely be a spike in violence, but what we also said was this is going to build the confidence of the Iraqi people to give us
information. In fact, if you see the headline in yesterday’s New York Times, it says: Iraqi Informants’ Tips Grow After Brothers’ Deaths. In the last week alone, we’ve picked up 660 surface-to-air missiles.
That’s a product of the increased intelligence the Iraqi people are providing us.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to May 1. And this was the scene on the USS Lincoln. President Bush arrived on it. And as he is walking to the podium, you see that banner, “Mission Accomplished.” Since that date, 400 U.S. soldiers have been wounded or injured, 107 killed, 48 from hostile fire. Was the president too premature in suggesting that the mission in Iraq has been accomplished?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Look, the mission for those Navy pilots, and it was a magnificent mission, was accomplished, because, as the president said, major combat operations were over. But you know what the president also said, Tim—Why don’t we quote it: “We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re being ordered to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime who will be held to account for their crimes. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time. But it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq.” This is a criminal regime that smothered that country in an unbelievable blanket of fear for 35 years. It’s difficult for Americans to imagine what it’s like to live in a country, not only where they can grab you at night and torture you, but they’ll grab your children and torture them in order to make you talk. It takes time to root out that kind of criminal gangs.
MR. RUSSERT: General Tommy Franks said the other day that he expected Saddam Hussein to be captured within 60 days. Do you concur?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Look, Tom is truly a brilliant general. He has the luxury now of being able to speculate freely. I hope he’s right, but we are going to go after him until we get him, and it’s a mistake to put timetables on these things.
MR. RUSSERT: Military men on the ground said we have his scent and there were reports they came within 24 hours of getting him yesterday. Do you believe we are close to getting Saddam Hussein?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: We’ll only know when we get him, but let me take another minute, Tim, to explain this link between the atrocities of that regime and our ability to get information. We met with the inspector of the police academy in Baghdad, a newly selected leader, training this new police force, and I’m always a little suspicious about whether these people, if they were in the old police, that we could trust them, and it turned out he had been in jail for a year. I said, “Why were you in jail?” He said, “Because I denounced Saddam Hussein.” Well, I was a little surprised at that. I said, “Are you crazy that you denounced Saddam Hussein?” “Well, I said it to my best friend.” You say it to your best friend and you spend a year in jail. That’s the kind of country people have lived in, and it takes time for them to trust us to give us the information but they’re giving us more and more, and I think what happened last week with the deaths of those two miserable creatures is encouraging more people to come forward.
MR. RUSSERT: If we kill or capture Saddam Hussein, are you confident the resistance will then come to an end?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: No, I don’t think you can be confident. Look, it’s a criminal gang of many thousands of rapists, murderers and torturers. There’s no question, though, that getting rid of Saddam Hussein will have more effect than any single thing we can do.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to our commitment to Iraq. Richard Lugar, Republican, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, said this: “Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, criticized the Bush administration’s reconstruction efforts in Iraq as haphazard and called on the president to request supplemental spending legislation committing American taxpayers totens of billions of dollars in aid over the next four years. ... Lugar’s remarks were striking because he
is a respected figure on foreign affairs who staunchly supported the war and generally avoids publicly challenging fellow Republicans in the White House. The Indiana senator said war supporters who originally predicted U.S. troops would be embraced by Iraqi civilians were guilty of ‘naivete.’... The gap between the cash needed to rebuild the country’s economy and revenues from oil, estimated at $14 billion in 2004, could be as high as $16 billion year, Lugar said.”
Is the president prepared to go to the American people and say, “Senator Lugar’s right. We’re going to be there at least four years at a cost of $16 billion. This is a long, difficult, expensive undertaking.”
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Let me quote the president again. He said, “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” and I think that’s a fundamental point to bear in mind is that this is—it’s a big task, it may be an expensive task but it is a very, very important task. And something else to keep in mind, ultimately the resources of Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction. It’s some period of transition—we don’t know how long—before they can really get on their feet. I remember in the hearing before the senator’s committee one senator said to me, “It’s going to cost $5 billion just to get oil production back up to the million-barrel-a-day level.” We reached a million barrels a day a week ago with an investment of just a few hundred million.
MR. RUSSERT: But is Senator Lugar wrong in saying that we should appropriate $16 billion a year for the next four years now?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Tim, I don’t know the exact figure. Ambassador Bremer is trying to come up with a best estimate for the next 12 months. There’s a basic point here maybe about planning that people need to understand. You can’t write a plan for a military situation, and this is basically a military situation. It is like a railroad timetable. There are too many things that you learn as you go, and it may be exactly what Senator Lugar says. It could be more. It could be less. There should be no underestimating the task in front of us but there should also be no underestimating its importance.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Lugar said naivete for those who thought that we would be embraced by the Iraqis. This is what Paul Wolfowitz said in February, and I’ll show you and our viewers: “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.” The fact is, we have just as many troops there now as we did during the war. When General Shinseki...
DR. WOLFOWITZ: I believe that’s what I said. It’s hard to imagine it would take more. Tim...
MR. RUSSERT: You said “hard to imagine.” And when General Shinseki said that it would take the number of troops who were currently in the region, about 200,000, you said it was...
DR. WOLFOWITZ: I’m sorry. He said several hundred thousand.
MR. RUSSERT: And there—and he said...
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Most people understand several hundred thousand, Tim, to mean twice the number we have there.
MR. RUSSERT: No, no, no, no. But this is very important.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: OK.
MR. RUSSERT: Because there were 200,000 troops in the region at that time. General Shinseki said it would take the number of troops we had in the region, several hundred thousand, meaning 200,000 troops. And you said it was wildly off the mark. Based on what we have seen over the last several months, would you not acknowledge today that General Shinseki was right, that it does take just as many troops as it took to win the war as to secure the peace, and, as you acknowledged the other day, that some of your assumptions were wrong and you vastly underestimated the number of troops necessary to secure the peace?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Tim, you’re inserting words like “vastly,” which I never said. We can get into a—we can fill up air time...
MR. RUSSERT: No, that was my word.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: I know that. Let’s be clear. But you said it was my word. Look, I think it’s nonproductive to spend a lot of time arguing about what several hundred thousand means. I said very clearly it was hard to imagine that we would have a number which I thought of as twice what we were planning for winning the war. The difference between 200,000 and 150,000, obviously, is not wildly different. But the important point is, our troops, our commanders will get what they need. They have been asked repeatedly, “Do you need more?” They say, “Right now, at least, we don’t want more. What we want more of, and we’re working to get it, is foreign troops.”
I visited the Polish brigade that’s going to take over a whole province of Iraq. An Italian brigade’s going to take over another whole province. And here’s the most important thing, Tim, which we really need to focus on. It’s time, and I probably should have started sooner, to enlist Iraqis to fight for their country. They are part of the coalition. Many of them are willing to die for their country. It is much more appropriate to have Iraqis out guarding banks and guarding power lines than to have Americans or even Poles or Spaniards, and that’s where we need to go.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the rationale for the war. You gave an interview in Vanity Fair magazine, and the Pentagon released a full transcript of your remarks, which we’re going to use because they are your words. And let me share them with our viewers: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason” for the war in Iraq, if you will. “But... there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is
support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there’s the most disagreement within the bureaucracy.”
If you just analyze your comments—one, weapons of mass destruction. Thus far, we have not found weapons of mass destruction. Two, in terms of support of terrorism, as you acknowledge, there’s broad disagreement within our intelligence community about that and whether there’s any direct link of Saddam to al-Qaeda. And the third, as you said, Saddam’s treatment of his people is not a reason to go to war.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: OK. Tim...
MR. RUSSERT: So if you don’t have weapons of mass destruction and you don’t have a direct link to terrorism, and you do have the third, which the administration has been emphasizing, but you yourself said it’s not a rationale to go to war, what now is the rationale for having gone to war?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: OK. Let me have as much time to answer as you took to ask the question.
MR. RUSSERT: Please.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: It’s important. I appreciate it. And, by the way, you know, you go to war based on your best assessment before the war. You will. Especially in a country like Iraq, you will learn things afterwards that may be different. But, first of all, the fundamental thing I was saying, and I wish people would pay attention to it, is there was no disagreement before the fact whatsoever on weapons of mass destruction. It was unanimous, and, frankly, the Senate and House Armed Services Committee, the
Senate and House Intelligence committees, had access to all the intelligence that people are now debating about.
MR. RUSSERT: But not on nuclear. It was not unanimous on nuclear.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: It was unanimous that there was a program. There was disagreement about how far along it was or how long it would take him to get there. And—OK. That’s point number one.
MR. RUSSERT: Well, this is important because this is what the State Department said. And this is from the National Intelligence Estimate that the White House declassified and released. This is what they said: “The activities we have detected do not...add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR [State Department bureau of intelligence and research] would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.”
DR. WOLFOWITZ: OK, I don’t have the text in front of me, Tim. But everyone, including the State Department—you know, look at those qualifiers, “comprehensive, integrated.” Everyone agreed there was a program of some stage and that it would become comprehensive, integrated, and real the minute he got rid of inspectors. There was no disagreement in the government about that. The nature of terrorism intelligence is intrinsically murky. And while I haven’t had a chance to read the 900-page report that was released last week, my understanding from what has been said about it, is that the basic conclusion there is that we should have connected the dots. We should have seen in this murky picture of terrorism intelligence what was coming to hit us.
Well, if you wait until the terrorism picture is clear, you are going to wait until after something terrible has happened. And we went to war, and I believe we are still fighting terrorists and terrorist supporters in Iraq in a battle that will make this country safer in the future from terrorism. It is—as I said, I think winning the peace in Iraq is now the crucial battle in the war on terrorism. And the sacrifices that our magnificent troops are making is for the children and their grandchildren, for our children and our grandchildren. And it is for our security.
MR. RUSSERT: Porter Goss, who be will our guest in the next segment, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, led a delegation to Iraq and wrote a report. This is what his conclusion came to. “The evidence does not point to the existence of large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.” That’s the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Do you agree with that?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Look, I don’t know how he knows. I flew over Baghdad. It’s a city, I believe, as large as Los Angeles. You look at all those houses and realize that every basement might contain a huge lethal quantity of anthrax.
I don’t know how anyone can know yet. It’s a difficult job. And people are working hard at it. But since we’re quoting things, I mean, as the vice president said, the NIA, and this was a unanimous judgment, “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction program in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. If left unchecked,” he quotes, “the NIA probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade. It has currently chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions.” And, as the vice president said it would be irresponsible for an American leader to ignore that kind of judgment.
MR. RUSSERT: Many people are now asking why the urgency in going to war. If, in fact, we have not found the weapons of mass destruction, could not we have waited a few months with more coercive inspections and have resolved this without a war?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Let me say a couple of things, Tim. People act as though the cost of containing Iraq is trivial. The cost of containing Iraq was enormous. Fifty-five American lives lost, at least, in incidents like the Cole and Khobar Towers, which were part of the containment effort. Billions of dollars of American money spent so...
MR. RUSSERT: Was Iraq linked to those?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Absolutely. Oh, no, not to the—I don’t know who did the attacks. I now that we would not have had Air Force people in Khobar Towers if we weren’t conducting a containment policy.
I know we wouldn’t have had to have the Cole out there doing maritime intercept operations. And worst of all, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwah from 1998 where he calls for killing Americans, the two principal grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and our continuing attacks on Iraq. Twelve years of containment was a terrible price for us. And for the Iraqi people, it was an unbelievable price, Tim.
I visited a village of Marsh Arabs, people have been driven nearly to extinction by 12 years of Saddam’s genocidal policies against them. They would not have survived another three years, much less another 12. We went to that mass grave in Hela. The people who are buried in those mass graves, the people who were executed in this industrial-style execution factory in Abu Ghraib Prison for them, every year was a terrible cost. Every year under sanctions was a terrible cost.
So the question is: What did you gain by waiting? And I think one of the things that would have come by waiting, frankly, is more instability for the key countries in our coalition, including Arab countries that, unfortunately, still prefer not to be named. But we had the coalition we needed when we went to war. There was no knowing if six months later some of those countries would still be with us.
MR. RUSSERT: John Deutsche, former director of the CIA, testified before Congress on Thursday and said something that was quite striking, and I’ll put it on the board for you and our viewers: “If no weapons of mass destruction or only a residual capability is found, the principle justification enunciated by the U.S. government for launching this war will have proven not to be credible. It is an intelligence failure, in my judgment, of massive proportions. It means that our leaders of the American public based its support for the most serious foreign policy judgments—the decision to go to war—on an incorrect intelligence judgment.”
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Well, it’s interesting. He’s the former director of the C.I.A, and I’m sure if you go and read the intelligence judgments made when he was director, they would be equally emphatic about the existence of those weapons and those programs. President Clinton spoke in 1998 in words that are almost identical to President Bush that he has these weapons and if we don’t do something about it, I guarantee you someday he will use them. I think people should be a little careful about throwing around words like intelligence failure. It’s easy to to go around and play this blame game. I mean, let’s stop
and realize that in a country like Iraq—and let me repeat—where children are tortured to make their parents talk, secrets are kept in a way we can’t even imagine. And let’s take some things that aren’t secret at all. We know that for 12 years Saddam Hussein did everything he could to frustrate U.N. inspectors. He sacrificed $100 billion in money that he could have spent on palaces and tanks and all those things that he loved so much in order to frustrate those inspectors. Isn’t that in itself an indicator there was something there? Let’s be patient and let’s figure out—wait until we can find things out.
MR. RUSSERT: But maybe the inspectors’ inspections worked, and if, in fact, we do not find significant amounts of weapons of mass destruction, should we be willing to say our intelligence community missed this and we have to go back and re-examine why?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Well, we always ought to compare what we thought from our intelligence with what we discover later, and it’s a difficult job to do, especially if every time somebody discovers a discrepancy it is described as a “failure.” But let me tell you a story which I think puts this in some perspective. I mentioned visiting the police academy. It’s an impressive operation there where they’re training a new police force, and Senator Lugar, whom you quoted earlier, Senator Biden visited it a couple of weeks ago, and I know they were impressed by this training of the civilian police force. Since their visit but before mine, a woman came forward and described how she had been tortured hideously in a small compound behind the police academy, and I visited that. I was taken there. When I went to the academy, they not only showed me the training, they also showed me this unbelievable torture chamber, the back gate of which leads into Uday’s compound. He used to come in at night to personally torture prisoners. Think about it, Tim. I mean, for weeks, we were using that police academy, we were training people there. Probably someone knew about it. We didn’t discover it until this woman came in and told us her story. There must be thousands of hidden, secret things in that country that we are only just starting to get a grip on.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to Deutsche’s testimony and share this with you: “The next time military intervention is judged necessary to combat the spread weapons of mass destruction, for example, in North Korea, there will be skepticism about the quality of our intelligence.” Is that fair?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: If people keep treating every intelligence uncertainty as an example of failure, I guess we will have a problem. But I mean, stop and think. If in 2001 or in 2000 or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden and we had tried to say it’s because he’s planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, well, you don’t have any proof of that. I think the lesson of September 11th is that you can’t wait until proof after the fact. I mean, it surprises me sometimes that people have forgotten so soon what September 11 I think should have taught us about terrorism, and that’s what this is all about.
MR. RUSSERT: Will we be sending another billion dollars to Afghanistan to shore up our commitment to that country?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: We’ll wait and see, but clearly, what’s going on in Afghanistan is another battlefield in this war on terrorism. It’s very important. Again, the best thing we can do in Iraq is help the Iraqi people help us. The best thing we can do in Afghanistan is help the Afghan people help themselves, which helps us.
MR. RUSSERT: But a tripling of the amount of money in Afghanistan is an indication that things aren’t going as well as we thought.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Sometimes things go well. Sometimes things go better, Tim; sometimes things don’t go as well. Again, the nature of military planning is not to have a timetable. It is to be able to adjust your plan as circumstances change. I think that was what was so brilliant about Tom Franks’ military plan. He called about six or seven major changes in the course of things that produced major results. Ambassador Bremer and General Abizaid are doing the same thing right now, both in Iraq, and, in the case of General Abizaid, in Afghanistan.
MR. RUSSERT: Will our troops be going into Liberia?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: As the president said, we are prepared to assist the United Nations to establish a cease-fire, to evacuate Charles Taylor from Liberia, to bring in regional troops. And that’s the key to this, Tim, is to not have the United States taking on every task in the world but for us to help other people take on their role. And in this case, I think what they call the ECOWAS countries of West Africa are prepared to step up.
MR. RUSSERT: But we will join them on the ground in Liberia, if need be.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: We will help them to get there.
MR. RUSSERT: Before you go, we’re going to talk about the September 11th, 2001, report with our members of Congress. There’s another national commission looking into what happened on September 11, headed by former Republican Governor of New Jersey Tom Kean. And he has said this: “This is a critical time for the Commission. We have worked hard to stay on schedule to complete our work by the end of May 2004...but the coming weeks will determine whether we are able to do our job within the time allotted. ... Time is slipping by. ... Extensive and prompt cooperation from the U.S. government, the Congress, state and local agencies, and private firms is essential. This report offers an
initial evaluation of this cooperation. ... The problems that have arisen so far with the Department of Defense are becoming particularly serious.”
Governor Kean’s saying he can’t get information from NORAD, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from the Defense Department. Will you take steps so that you will cooperate fully with Governor Kean immediately so his commission can do their work?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: We’ve already taken steps to try to accelerate it. But we have no—we want to cooperate fully with the commission.
MR. RUSSERT: And you will?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Absolutely.
MR. RUSSERT: Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, we thank you for your views.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Thank you.
MR. RUSSERT: Coming next: the chairman and vice chairman of the congressional joint inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11, Senator Graham, Congressman Goss, Senator Shelby, Congresswoman Pelosi. They are next, together, only on MEET THE PRESS.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: Four leaders of Congress drew up this joint inquiry into September 11. They are all here next, on MEET THE PRESS, after this station break.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. This is the joint inquiry that Congress has written about what happened on September 11. We are joined by the chairman and co-chairman who helped organize this enormous effort. Let me read from the report, for you and our viewers, and start this way: “A former chief of the unit in the DCI’s Counterterrorist Center formed to focus on [Osama] bin Laden put it succinctly: ‘In my experience between 1996 and 1999, CIA’s Directorate of Operations was the only component of the intelligence community that could be said to have been waging the war that bin Laden declared against the United States in August of 1996. The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic.’”
Senator Graham, one small group of intelligence officers took the threat against our country by Osama seriously?
SEN. BOB GRAHAM, (D-FL): That’s, Tim, why the number one recommendation in our report is to put somebody in charge of the intelligence community. Right now there are about a dozen agencies and they see each other more as competitors than as colleagues to achieve a common purpose. The head of the CIA issued a declaration of war which none of the other agencies in the intelligence community apparently paid any attention to. We paid a price on September the 11th.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby, are we now better organized as a government in terms of intelligence gathering and analysis now than we were before September 11th?
SEN. RICHARD SHELBY, (R-AL): Maybe just a little bit. I think we’re going down the right road. We’ve got a long way to go. I’d say we were about a two then; we might be a three and a half or four.
We’re a long way from 10.
MR. RUSSERT: Chairman Goss, do you agree with that consensus?
REP. PORTER GOSS, (R-FL): I do. I think we’re on the right track. I think that if you read the recommendations of the report, you’ll find a very good road map. It would be my observation, and appropriately, the executive branch has done more on our 19 recommendations than the legislative branch. Our process is a little slower. But we are under way, and our authorization bills in the Senate and the House this year will be dealing with some of the legislative sides. So I would say that every day’s a better day, and I agree generally with Senator Shelby’s assessment.
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman Pelosi, are we better off now in terms of intelligence analysis and gathering than we were before September 11?
REP. NANCY PELOSI, (D-CA): Well, we certainly have seen the shortcomings as the report points out. Our very creative staff, whom I want to commend, they did an excellent job, not only in putting an idea together about how this might have come to be but they showed that information was in the files of the FBI that they were not even communicating among themselves on and certainly not reporting up to the director, and not, of course, not therefore to the CIA or other agencies of government. There’s a long way to go, really.
MR. RUSSERT: Two hijackers living with an FBI informant. That information stays within a small cell within the FBI, if you will. Are the CIA and the FBI now talking to one another?
REP. PELOSI: Well, they’ve improved their communication, but I don’t think it should be left to them. I think the oversight committees of the Congress, working with some of the recommendations that we have, have to weigh in on is. I know that the FBI under Director Mueller made some drastic changes in how they conduct their business. But that’s simply not good enough. Prior to 9/11, the committees were on their way to re-evaluating our entire structure and the community, making judgments about the
community. General Scowcroft did a report which, before it came to us, 9/11 occurred. There was always a recognition that there was a need for improved communication, more humit—many of the recommendations that were there, but before that got to the president’s desk and our desks, 9/11 occurred. The need to restructure the intelligence community was important then, it’s even more important now, and it cannot be internal to the organization. It has to be accountable.
MR. RUSSERT: In May, the director of the FBI—May of 2002—testified that the hijackers lived in social isolation. Your report finds something much different, Senator Graham.
SEN. GRAHAM: Yes, we point out some 14 instances in which hijackers had close contact with people who were or had been in the past under FBI surveillance. As Congresswoman Pelosi just said, a lot of the information that is in this report is information that was in the FBI files which they were unaware and which our staff determined surfaced and put the dots together.
MR. RUSSERT: Why didn’t we know that, and why is it that there are so many al-Qaidas who are able to penetrate our country, and as you told me several weeks ago, you’re convinced there are a large number of al-Qaida still living in this country.
SEN. GRAHAM: The reasons that it has happened, first, the FBI has had a practice of distributing decisions among its various field offices and they don’t talk very well to the central headquarters and they certainly don’t talk very well with each other. I hope that some new reforms of Director Mueller are moving to correct that situation. There is a significant presence of al-Qaida in the United States. There’s disagreement between the intelligence agencies as what the precise number is. But even on the low side, it’s a number capable of carrying out major actions against the people of the United States.
MR. RUSSERT: One of the more controversial parts of your report is a part that, in effect, doesn’t exist. If you turn to page 395 in it, and I’ll show you and our viewers on the screen, it talks about here: “The Joint Inquiry developed information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States...” And you turn the page, and for the next 28 pages, all you see are blank lines. Senator Shelby, shouldn’t the American people know who are the
foreign sources of support for the hijackers?
SEN. SHELBY: Absolutely. They should know and I figure the American people will figure out who’s supporting who and who’s our real ally and who has a transactional relationship with us. I’m not at liberty to get into who it is on this show, but I can tell you on the Banking Committee, which I now chair, we’re getting in and going to investigate who’s financing the terrorist operations, because the key to all of this is the money. Who’s financing? Who’s carrying them through? How are they living? How
are they traveling? How are they getting there? It’s money.
MR. RUSSERT: Based on your work in the Banking Committee, not your work on this joint inquiry, who is doing it?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, I’m not at liberty to say that today. I’m going to let you figure that out. You see the blank pages. They’re classified. I think they’re classified for the wrong reason. I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly two, three days ago. My judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified, become uncensored, so the American people would know.
MR. RUSSERT: Why are they classified for the wrong reason? What’s the wrong reason?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, I think it might be embarrassing to some international relations.
MR. RUSSERT: The front page of The New York Times says: Classified section of September 11 report faults Saudi Arabia. And it seems to be confirmed by the ambassador to the United States from Saudi Arabia, who issued this statement: “In the 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people. It is my belief that the reason the classified section that allegedly deals with foreign governments is absent from the report is most likely because the information
contained in it could not be substantiated. Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”
Chairman Goss, can those 28 pages be substantiated?
REP. GOSS: I believe that the reason the 28 pages are blank—and not to give everybody an opportunity to write their own script, and a lot of that is going on. There are three reasons we classify information. One is protect sources and methods. Another is protect ongoing investigations. And another is to protect what I will call sensitive foreign liaisons. There’s no question that we are concerned about foreign government support. And it is not just one country. It is many countries. Now, these particular pages, I believe, are justified in being held back now, and if you read recommendation 19 of our
recommendations, it specifically says that we request an active investigation. That investigation is under way. We do not want to contaminate that investigation. I believe that these pages will be made available publicly at some point when that investigation is completed. In the meantime, if there’s concern that we are not following the necessary crumbs on the trail to protect ourselves from foreign government activities supporting terrorists, please dismiss those concerns, because we are aware of these things and pursuing them actively.
MR. RUSSERT: We know, Congresswoman Pelosi, that money from the Saudis went to some of the hijackers. It’s been widely reported. Why not share that in your report?
REP. PELOSI: Well, I have a bigger concern about the declassification than just those pages. It took us nine months to do our entire investigation, have our hearings, interview persons of concern. The whole thing took about nine months. It took six and a half months to get the declassified—to get this declassified version out. It was a struggle every step of the way. I think the administration has an obsession with secrecy, that they do not want to reveal information that should be available to the public.
I respectfully disagree with my distinguished chairman. It is true, sources, and method, ongoing investigations, certainly, our national security interests have to call for classification. But to protect that, we do not have to protect reputations. So there are many places in the book that I think more information should become forthcoming. We have to always remember our responsibility to the families of 9/11. They need answers. We need to protect the American people into the future. This secrecy does not serve that purpose.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you something that you wrote in your report on this very subject: “The White House determined, and the DCI and CIA agreed, that the Joint Inquiry could have no access to the [President’s Daily Briefing].”
This was the briefing President Bush was given in August of 2001.
“Ultimately, this bar was extended to the point where CIA personnel were not allowed to be interviewed regarding the simple process by which the PDB is prepared. Although the inquiry was inadvertently given access to fragments of some PDB items early on, this decision limited the inquiry’s ability to determine systematically what Presidents Clinton and Bush, and their senior advisers, were being told by the intelligence community agencies, and when, regarding the nature of the threat to the United States from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.”
And the very day I read that in the report, I read this in The Washington Post: “Cheney laid out a detailed rationale for the war Bush launched on March 20, quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. White House officials have cited the NIE as the basis for prewar pre-war speeches about Iraq. ... As part of an effort to rebut criticism that it had exaggerated the threat, the White House last Friday released eight pages of excerpts from the intelligence report,” which had been classified.
Senator Graham, why would we declassify the National Intelligence Report to buttress arguments about the war in Iraq but keep classified some information that could help us find out what our leaders knew was coming down before September 11?
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, I think one of the fundamental reasons for that is to avoid accountability. We have another major recommendation that we should have a process by which it is determined if there’s been performance below standard, people are sanctioned, and if—their excellent performance is recognized.
None of that has happened since 9/11. Nobody’s lost their job. Nobody has been—had an adverse letter put in their files. All the kinds of things that flow from accountability. One of the ways you avoid accountability is by secrecy. If the people are not allowed to know what happened, if people are not allowed to know what the president knew, then it’s more difficult to hold him or anyone in his administration accountable.
MR. RUSSERT: Is this a selective declassification, Senator Shelby?
SEN. SHELBY: Oh, I think so. I think most declassifications are very, very selective, and done in a tortuous way.
MR. RUSSERT: But is this politically motivated?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, it’s hard to separate politics from declassification of anything at times.
REP. GOSS: I spent most of the last seven months trying to negotiate these items as sort of the remaining of the four of us still on the committee. And I think the biggest problem, frankly, is the culture. We indoctrinate our intelligence people on the need-to-know principle and on compartmentation. Don’t tell anybody unless there is a reason that you have to tell them. And consequently when you measure that up against the jointness and the cooperation and coordination that we all pointed out so properly in this report is missing in this, we’ve got a conflict between the culture of intelligence, and, basically, the efficient operation of fighting the war on terrorism. We have to change things.
MR. RUSSERT: Then why declassify the National Intelligence Estimate?
REP. GOSS: Because I think it helps public understanding. We are going through a big change right now in how we deal with information.
MR. RUSSERT: Wouldn’t declassifying what President Clinton and President Bush knew before September 11 help public understanding?
REP. GOSS: I think that most of the PDB has actually been declassified. If you go to some of the actions of the House committee, and Ms. Pelosi was then the ranking member, we actually had a press conference on that, because one of our task force had actually all the information on that PDB. The only thing we didn’t have was the binder that it came in or the conversation that took place between the president and the people briefing him. But we had the material. Now, the material wasn’t exactly the PDB. But it was the same material.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you agree with that?
REP. PELOSI: No.
MR. RUSSERT: I’m surprised.
REP. PELOSI: With all due respect to my distinguished chairman, when we say it wasn’t quite this and it wasn’t quite that, that’s the heart of the matter. Unless the National Security Council minutes of the counterterrorism working group and other communications between the National Security Council and the intelligence community are made known to the committees, we will never have the answers, and while we may say they had this information, we had information but the fact that it was reported to the
president was an issue that they would not allow us to go forward and talk about. So here’s the thing. As I testified at the 9/11 commission in May, if we’re going to have a real and complete and thorough investigation, if we are going to get the job done for the families and for the country, and protect the American people into the future, the National Security Council records must be available to the committees and to the public. The Congress is responsible. We have oversight responsibilities; we cannot have this gap. It goes—the whole declassification point is a very central one, and the public deserves better.
REP. GOSS: I don’t disagree with that point, that we should have access. But we don’t have access and we have not had access. Our oversight remit does not carry us, either the House or the Senate, into the National Security deliberations and that has been the practice.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq in our remaining moments here. Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said step forward, Mr. President, and tell the country we’re going to be in Iraq for several years, four years at least, $16 billion per year, and tell that to the American people. Chairman Goss, you came back and reported from the House Intelligence Committee that, “large numbers of U.S. troops are likely to remain in Iraq four years.”
REP. GOSS: I believe.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby, should the president tell the American people this is a multiyear expensive commitment?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, that will be up to the president. I believe myself it’s going to be a multiyear commitment. I’ve always thought that. We couldn’t go in and stay a few months and leave. We’ve got to be committed. We’re losing a lot of troops over there day by day in guerrilla warfare. We’ve got to stabilize the place and we’re committed to stabilizing Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: Should we send more troops in to stabilize?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, that would be a decision for the secretary of Defense, our deputy secretary of Defense Wolfowitz ultimately should make.
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Goss, this is what else your report said, and I showed it to Mr. Wolfowitz; I’m going to show it again: “The evidence does not point to the existence of large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.”
REP. GOSS: That’s absolutely true. The evidence does point to a lot of denial and deception to hide and disperse those weapons, and that is what we’ve run into. We underestimated quite seriously and quite badly the denial and deception capability of the Saddam regime. They did a brilliant job of taking things and hiding them. When you start finding weapons of mass destruction plans under rose bushes in scientists’ back yard, you begin to understand a little built the depth of the distances they went to.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president quoted the British as saying that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes. If, in fact, there are not large stockpiles of weapons, was that accurate?
REP. GOSS: I cannot speak for the British intelligence. The British maintain that it was accurate and the president quoted the British report.
MR. RUSSERT: In 1998 when President Clinton launched missiles into Iraq, Congresswoman Pelosi, you said then that there were weapons of mass destruction that existed in Iraq. Are you now questioning that intelligence?
REP. PELOSI: Well, the point is is that there is weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological, in the region. The imminence of the threat, though, to go to war is the question. If the intelligence community was so certain of the fact of this threat and of the existence of these weapons, why didn’t they know anything about the location of them? So it’s not a question of if this region has chemical or biological. It’s a question of the imminence of the threat, and that’s where I think we have—the American people deserve some answers. And certainly on the nuclear issue, the evidence, the intelligence did not
support the claim that the administration was making. I think that we have to take a step back and say
we must stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I commend the president for making that
an important issue. But we can do it with international cooperation, which is exactly what we have to do in Iraq. If we need more troops on the ground in Iraq, we have to have international cooperation to do it. We are not going to change or improve the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan or any of these places unless we have cooperation from countries not selling the kind of technology to those who would be irresponsible and cause terror.
MR. RUSSERT: If that means going to the United Nations for another resolution and asking for the support of the French and Germans, you would do it.
REP. PELOSI: I absolutely think we have to internationalize. Nothing is more important now than the Iraqi situation being settled and managed in a much better way. It’s clear while we had a military plan to go to war, our postwar Iraq planning was either a disaster or nonexistent, and we have to internationalize what is happening there.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Graham, I want to ask you to talk about some comments you made on July 17 in a question-and-answer session. And I’ll read it back and forth so our viewers know exactly what we’re talking about.
Question for Senator Graham: “Question: Senator, if your party were in charge would you let them pursue impeachment?” This is about the intelligence problems confronting the Bush administration.
Answer from Senator Graham: “Well the Republicans set a standard for impeachment with what they did with Bill Clinton, who committed a serious, personal, consensual action. This is case in which someone has committed actions that took America to war, put American men and women’s lives at risk, and they continue to be at risk.”
“Question: So is this more serious?”
“Graham: I think this is clearly more serious. ...My opinion is if the standard that was set by the House of Representatives relative to Bill Clinton is the new standard for impeachment, then this clearly comes within that standard.”
You’re suggesting that, under the standards created by the House for the Clinton impeachment, that the president of the United States, George Bush, could be subject to impeachment for his comments in the State of the Union message about American intelligence, uranium in Africa?
SEN. GRAHAM: The answer is this president is not going to be impeached. The current leadership of the House of Representatives, regardless of what standard they set for Bill Clinton, are not going to apply the same standard to George W. Bush. The good news is that, in November of 2004, the American people will have an opportunity to both impeach and remove.
I would suggest, going back to your previous question, that this issue of secrecy is an endemic one within this administration, and it’s not just secrecy after the fact. It’s not just the secrecy of all these blank pages. It’s secrecy before the fact. This president failed to tell the American people what he knew about the consequences of military victory in Iraq. He understood what the cost was going to be. He understood the casualties. He understood the duration of time. None of that was shared with the American people, and so that we went to war not only on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that we may or may not find, but went to war without the knowledge of what the full consequences would
be.
MR. RUSSERT: But was it a mistake for you to engage in a conversation about impeachment?
SEN. GRAHAM: No. I believe that that’s a legitimate question for the journalists to have asked. It is a legitimate exploration of what is the standard for impeachment now, and then apply that standard against the facts of this president and his administration.
SEN. SHELBY: Well, I totally disagree with Senator Graham. He’s my friend. We work together. But when you reach the threshold of impeachment for stuff like this, I think you’re off base. I think President Bush has shown leadership, courage, and I think he’s on the right road.
MR. RUSSERT: But you heard Mr. Wolfowitz talk about weapons of mass destruction—we haven’t found them—intelligence and direct link of Saddam with al-Qaeda or terrorism. That still is debatable within the intelligence community. And it’s not worth going to war, risking American lives, simply because of Saddam’s treatment of his people. Is the administration now obligated to come forward with a rationale for why they went to war? And do you believe they were properly prepared for winning the
peace?
SEN. SHELBY: Well, I know they were properly prepared for the war. There’s always surprises dealing with the peace. I believe they will stabilize Iraq and we will win the peace. But I believe the cause for war, the case for war, that it was sound policy then; it’s sound policy now.
MR. RUSSERT: We have to leave it there. A lot more to discuss. I hope you’ll all come back in a future program. This is the real issue confronting all of us. Senator Graham, Senator Shelby, Congressman Goss, Congresswoman Pelosi, thank you very much.
We’ll be right back.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: Star your day tomorrow on “Today” with Katie and Matt, then the “NBC Nightly News” with Tom Brokaw. That’s all for today. We’ll be back next week. If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

The Late Show With David Letterman show that this appeared on was rebroadcast August 12, 2003, so I was able to capture it (along with a couple of other goofy clips from that show).

Top 10 Signs You're In Love With Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean (Small - 6 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 12, 2003 program.

Daily Show On Spy Blimp (Small - 5 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 11, 2003 program.

Broken Dream Index (Small - 2 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 11, 2003 program.

Daily Show Liberia Update (Small - 6 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House
The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights
By Greg Palast.

California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nadar which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of the state's politicians to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when in the first California city to go "lawless," San Diego, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.

Enron circled California and licked its lips. As the number one contributor to the George W. Bush campaigns, it was confident about the future. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. Their motto, "your money or your lights."

Enron and its comrades played the system like a broken ATM machine, yanking out the bills. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on...

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0

Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House
The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York,
Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights
Greg Palast
ZNet

Friday 15 August 2003

I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.

But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.

And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.

The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.

Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.

Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.

But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats.

But Poppy Bush's gift of deregulating of wholesale prices set by the feds only got the power pirates halfway to the plunder of Joe Ratepayer. For the big payday they needed deregulation at the state level. There were only two states, California and Texas, big enough and Republican enough to put the electricity market con into operation.

California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nadar which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of the state's politicians to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when in the first California city to go "lawless," San Diego, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.

Enron circled California and licked its lips. As the number one contributor to the George W. Bush campaigns, it was confident about the future. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. Their motto, "your money or your lights."

Enron and its comrades played the system like a broken ATM machine, yanking out the bills. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on.

And the state did. According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the California state Independent System Operator which directs power deliveries, between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or "economically" withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges.

It took until December 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from the market.

But the light-bulb buccaneers didn't have to wait long to put their hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton's executive order and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant (aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who had economically snipped California's wires knew they could count on Dubya, who as governor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest deregulation deal in America.

Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.

And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.

Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, "Rio Dark."

So too the free-market British buckaroos controlling Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

So where's the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.

Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

See Greg Palast's award-winning reports for BBC Television and the Guardian papers of Britain at www.GregPalast.com. Contact Palast at his New York office: media@gregpalast.com.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Penguin USA) and the worstseller, "Democracy and Regulation," a guide to electricity deregulation published by the United Nations (written with T. MacGregor and J. Oppenheim).

This is from the August 12, 2003 program.

Daily Show On The New EPA Boss (Small - 13 MB)

Here's some other bizarre footage (Small - 3 MB) of the forest fire stock footage (presumably from an EPA reel) that was shown during the credits at the end of this show.

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

A number of close friends of mine have lost a lot of weight on the Atkins Diet. I've learned a number of health tips from them in the process.

This clip from KTVU Channel 2 News in San Francisco seemed to summarize some of the spirit behind this growing movement -- while also highlighting a new chain of franchises -- Castus Low Cal Superstores. One has just opened in San Ramon, California, and KTVU went over there to check it out.

This is from the August 7, 2003 program.

KTVU On Atkins/Low Carb Grocery Store (Small - 12 MB)

My notes and 40+ pictures located below.

Terry Fisher On BMPs - Part 1 of 5 (Small - 39 MB)

Terry Fisher On BMPs - Part 2 of 5 (Small - 40 MB)

Terry Fisher On BMPs - Part 3 of 5 (Small - 36 MB)

Terry Fisher On BMPs - Part 4 of 5 (Small - 26 MB)

Terry Fisher On BMPs - Part 5 of 5 (Small - 41 MB)

More pictures underneath notes below.

Day 4 Tape 1

Terry - Business Method Patents

5:05 - different kinds of patents

5:34 - Examples of extensions to patents

6:31 - purified versions of naturally occurring..

10:07 - Plant Protection Act (1930) - asexually producing plants

10:42 - PVPA (1970) - sexually producing

11:09 - 1980 Chakrabarty

"Anything under the sun made by man is patentable." - Terry Fisher

12:02 - Supreme Court - also covered under utility patents

12:15 - 1954 - Atomic Weapons

12:40 - Software patents

13:30 - How surgical procedures were able to be patented

16:40 - Make doctors immune from prosecution

30:42 - Bounty Quest

33:10 - "Inventive Step" requirement

emergence of...

34:30 - In England

35:01 - France

35:12 - Germany

36:20 - Graham Factors

40:07 - ****verify*** Aggietation for Administrative Reform

42:31 - European Initiatives
Prohibited "methods of doing business" - not allowed unless involving "technical aspect"

44:24 - European BMPs
Queue systems

45:13 - Japanese Initiatives

46:00 - "Business Method Patents are a bad idea and we should not use them at all." - Terry

46:45 - Disadvantages of IPR

48:00 - Mousetrap example

50:25 - perfect price disc

Profit maximizing behavior by a rational monopolist

55:30 - people die because of profits

Day 4 - Tape 2

2:29 - Why Business Method Patents are bad

People innovate in Business anyway

Little, if any demonstrative benefits

Increased transaction costs:
-two examiners etc.
-large dead weight losses
-consumers priced out of the market

6:00 Q and A

8:29 Reward Theory

My pythagorus question here

20:00 - How do you define them? (Business Method Patents)

This is from the August 7, 2003 program on KTVU Channel 2 News in San Francisco.

Jessica Lynch Update (Small - 3 MB)

This is from the August 12, 2003 program.

The Fair and Balanced Daily Show (Small - 6 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Senator to hold hearings on recording industry's piracy crackdown
By Frederic Frommer for the Associated Press.

A Senate panel will hold hearings on the recording industry's crackdown against online music swappers, the chairman said Thursday.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., made the announcement in a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America. He had received information he had requested from the group about the campaign, which Coleman has called excessive...

The association announced plans in June to file several hundred lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing songs on the Internet. Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song...

Coleman said he is concerned the campaign could ensnare innocent people, such as parents and grandparents whose computers are being used to download music by their children and grandchildren. He also said that some downloaders themselves might not know they are breaking the law.

Coleman has admitted that he used to download music from Napster, the file-sharing service that a federal judge shut down for violating music copyrights.

He wrote that as subcommittee chairman, he intends "to assist in the development of remedies that will be reasonable and narrowly tailored to fit the extent of infringement."

...Last month, Coleman asked the industry association to furnish him with a list of its subpoenas; its safeguards against invading privacy and making erroneous subpoenas; its standards for issuing subpoenas; and a description of how it collects evidence of illegal file sharing.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/08/15/hearings/

Senator to hold hearings on recording industry's piracy crackdown

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Frederic Frommer

Aug. 15, 2003 |

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate panel will hold hearings on the recording industry's crackdown against online music swappers, the chairman said Thursday.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., made the announcement in a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America. He had received information he had requested from the group about the campaign, which Coleman has called excessive.

The Senate Governmental Affairs' Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is reviewing the group's responses and declined to make them available Thursday, as did the industry group.

The association announced plans in June to file several hundred lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing songs on the Internet. Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song.

In his letter, Coleman said he would look at not just the scope of that campaign but also the dangers that downloaders face by making their personal information available to others. Coleman said he would review legislation that would expand criminal penalties for downloading music.

The association said in a statement that "hearings are part of any oversight process and we always look forward to having the opportunity to present our position."

Coleman said he is concerned the campaign could ensnare innocent people, such as parents and grandparents whose computers are being used to download music by their children and grandchildren. He also said that some downloaders themselves might not know they are breaking the law.

Coleman has admitted that he used to download music from Napster, the file-sharing service that a federal judge shut down for violating music copyrights.

He wrote that as subcommittee chairman, he intends "to assist in the development of remedies that will be reasonable and narrowly tailored to fit the extent of infringement."

Coleman was on vacation Thursday and unavailable for comment.

Last month, Coleman asked the industry association to furnish him with a list of its subpoenas; its safeguards against invading privacy and making erroneous subpoenas; its standards for issuing subpoenas; and a description of how it collects evidence of illegal file sharing.

Wendy vs. Howard Berman on CNN's Next@CNN, August 9, 2003.

Next@CNN - Criminal Intent - Complete (Small - 21 MB)

Next@CNN - Criminal Intent - Part 1 of 2 (Small - 10 MB)

Next@CNN - Criminal Intent - Part 2 of 2 (Small - 11 MB)

This is from the August 7, 2003 program.

Here's the really, really funny part.

Here's the whole thing:

Rob Couddry On The CA Recall (Small - 8MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Lisa's voting against the recall and for Cruz Bustamante.

This is from the August 6, 2003 program.

Daily Show On Media Covering Itself Covering Kobe's Case (Small - 2 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 7, 2003 program.

Whether or not you're a Tracey Ullman fan, I think you'll agree that this was a hilarious interview. Tracey talks about her recent trip to Italy and its politics and television -- and ends up with a convincing Kim Cattrall impression.

Tracey Ullman On Daily Show (Small - 14 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

From mild mannered student at University of Illinois, to self-proclaimed hacker for dean, Zack Rosen is now headed to Vermont to work on the Dean campaign.

I first met Zack online on his "Hack4Dean" list, when we both realized we were headed for ILAW in Stanford at the end of June. While at ILAW, we were both on a panel about "Blogging and Democracy," where Zack gave a rather detailed explanation of how his Americans for Deans system works.

By the end of the week, Zack had arranged for Howard to blog on Larry's blog while he went on vacation.

In the weeks that past, Zack has gotten even more involved with the Dean campaign, and has decided to take a break from school and move to Vermont to work on the campaign.

I asked Zack to answer a few questions about the work he's been doing and the work he's going to do in Vermont -- and to maybe let myself and other's know how to get more involved in what AmericansForDean has metamorphized into: DeanSpace.

So Zack -- How did the Dean on Lessig's blog arrangement come about?

Well, I can hardly take much credit for that enthralling piece of history, but it sure was fun watching it unfold. Here is what happened....

During my magnificent week at iLaw, I was CC'ed into an ad-hoc mailing-list conversing and brainstorming about the AmericansForDean / DeanSpace project. One night I mentioned in a mail to the list that I had given a mini-speech about it at an iLaw seminar, and that Lawrence seemed to be enthused afterwards. I also mentioned that "everyone wants to get Lessig and Dean together". I of course had no authority to declare this to be so, but in my mind I could not imagine anyone who would not want to get Lessig and Dean together so it seemed justified enough to include in the 3AM list-mail. In any case, shortly there-after, one of the recipients decided to act upon my made-up truism, and invited Lawrence to get together with Dean. Of course nobody really could imagine what this "event" would entail, but after a bit of discussion, Dean's camp and Lessig agreed upon a guest-blogging bonanza much to my delight.

So was that how you connected with Zephyr Teachout? How did you get involved with the "official" folks to the degree where they offered you a job?

Zephyr was one of the members of the ad-hoc mailinglist that made the Lessig-Dean thing happen, so I had been exchanging emails with her for a bit. But, later that week I was interviewed by a Wired News reporter who also interviewed Zephyr as well for the story. That is what put us in direct contact. Since then she started getting involved with the development community and a few weeks later I told her I wanted to work on the project full time rather than go back to school. In another few weeks after sending over a resume and meeting with Zephyr I was offered a job.

So it was you who proactively wanted to go work on the campaign? They didn't lure you away from school?

I think it was a pretty mutual thing, but I offered to move down to Burlington before they offered to pay me.

So what are you going to be working on in Vermont?

While I am not to sure where exactly I will be put to task, I do know there is way more work to be done than I will ever be able to do. I will probably be spending most of my time helping and coordinating with the DeanSpace project, showing campaign offices how use the software, and helping them figure out how to run an open-source meta-mesh web-community powered grassroots Presidentical campaign.

Wow. That's a mouthful. What's an "open-source meta-mesh web-community powered grassroots Presidentical campaign?"

I think the two kludgy words that people will get hung up on in that description of the software the DeanSpace community is building are: "meta-mesh". Open-source means the tools are liscensed under GPL and created by a community that resembles typical open-source development communitities ala sourceforge.net. Web-communities are pretty well understood, and have been around for a while: kuro5shinorg, slashdot.org, yahoo-groups etc.

So what the hell does "meta-mesh" mean? It is intended to describe the magic twist we are building into the web-community software we are assembling. We are making very robost RSS feed content importing and exporting tools into the DeanSpace web community "kits". The idea being that all the different Dean community sites running our code will then have the ability to share and syndicate content and users easily across the network of Dean web-communities. We are attempting to construct a grassroots campaign network from the numerous deployed sites running our code. The goal is to have all content and users on the network wrapped in metadata, so the different sites act as two way filters to the campaign network with communities built around them, rather than as isolated independant communities.

So let's talk more about these community "kits." What will they include?

Well the feature spec hasn't been completly worked out yet, but here is what is to be expected. * News / blog system * Personal blog utility for individual users * Threaded / peer-moderated forum tool * Mailing list integration * Media posting / download utility * Calendar / event system (i.e. meeting wednesday at 9 at Smiths house..) * Project / action ticketing system (i.e. help me make flyers, sign up here...) * Dean Endorser - lets users make endorsements that show up on the page and can be emailed to friends / family * Presence system - shows users who are currently online and allows users to find other users with similiar interests / affiliations.

When will the kits become available?

Don't quite know yet. We have some early code up now you can download on DeanSpace.org, but it is missing quite a bit of functionality. I think a realistic goal would be two more weeks for the first complete 1.0 release, but we will see.

So walk me through the process of downloading and setting up one of these systems. I go to the Deanspace website, and download X and do Y....

One of our members, Alison - alison@bankofknowledge.net - just made a walk through wizard for the setup process.

http://www.bankofknowledge.net/wizard/

It is is pretty early and not very formalized, but it should help neophytes through the install / setup process. Experienced geeks knowledgeable with PHP / mySQL web backends will find the install and setup process a cynch. There is some pretty decent documentation up on DeanSpace.org in the "manual" book as well.

One of our immediate goals is to create comprehensive walkthroughs of the setup process. The manuals / wizard is the beginnings of that.

How can people become more involved with DeanSpace if they are so inclined?

Oh this ones easy. Head over to DeanSpace, make an account, join the mailing lists, read the documentation on the site, and pitch in. The development community is very open. We have bi-weekly IRC meetings and rowdy design debates. Help is very much appreciated; there is absolutely way too much work to get done.

Ed Helms: Using My Religion (Small - 10 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

I'll be posting a lot of these ongoing recall election reports, so I'm just going to start dating them in the title of the blog entry so you can keep them apart.

This is from the August 7, 2003 program.

CA Gov Recall Update - August 7, 2003 (Small - 12 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Lisa's voting against the recall and for Cruz Bustamante.

This is from the August 8, 2003 on KTVU Channel 2 News in San Francisco.

KTVU Recall Update - August 8 (Small - 11 MB)

Lisa's voting against the recall and for Cruz Bustamante.

This is from the August 7, 2003 program on KTVU Channel 2 News in San Francisco.

KTVU Recall Update - August 7 (Small - 27 MB)

Hope I got the dates right on these guys. I'm pretty much in "catch up like a madwoman" mode...It's from August 6, 2003 -- I think :-)

A pair of comedy clips to assist in furthering the aggressive homosexual agenda, courtesy of The Daily Show. (The best news on television.)

GayWatch (Small - 10 MB)

Stephen Colbert On The Recent Gaysplosion! (Small - 9 MB)

This is from the August 7, 2003 program on KTVU Channel 2 in San Francisco.

This article covers last week's Flash Mob in New York City.

KTVU - Flash Mobs In NY (Small - 4 MB)

I missed the first part of this because I just got lucky coming across it when I was clicking through the channels. Looks like I got most of it though.

This was aired on August 4, 2003 on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

Hillary On Jay - Complete (Small - 27 MB)

Hillary On Jay - Part 1 of 2 (Small - 14 MB)

Hillary On Jay - Part 2 of 2 (Small - 14 MB)

This is from August 4, 2003 -- but there'll be lots more where that came from from the Daily Show on the CA Gov Recall from last week.

The Daily Show On The CA Recall Election (Small - 8 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 4, 2003 program.

Dennis Leary On The Daily Show - Complete (Small - 15 MB)

Dennis Leary On The Daily Show - Part 1 of 2 (Small - 9 MB)

Dennis Leary On The Daily Show - Part 2 of 2 (Small - 6 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Here's the entry about the other July 31st Howard Dean event I attended that goes with this one.

This SF Medical Society event was more intimate to say the least. Although the place was packed, our crew had the only video cameras there. It was obvious that Dean felt comfortable in a room full of doctors. There was a nice spread of food and wine and many people were meeting Dean for the first time. Some people had only even heard of him a week or two earlier.

I had a "volunteer" name tag waiting for me (my first!)

It made me feel like I was part of the official campaign. (As it turns out, I was. As "official" as the Dean campaign gets, anyway.)

After his speech, I had a chance to talk to him a bit about his blogging on Larry's blog and Creative Commons. I managed to record it on video, although the angle could have been better. You can see me kind of position myself for my handshake attack and hone in on my target. (Almost missed him!) (Small - 3 MB)

Here's his speech in complete and three-part versions:

Howard Dean At The SF Medical Society - Complete (Small - 71 MB)

Howard Dean At The SF Medical Society - Part 1 of 3 (Small - 29 MB)
Howard Dean At The SF Medical Society - Part 2 of 3 (Small - 21 MB)
Howard Dean At The SF Medical Society - Part 3 of 3 (Small - 22 MB)

Audio - Dean At the SF Medical Society - All (MP3 - 42 MB)

Digital Cutup Lounge has released a new creation using the Orrin Hatch audio that I audio hijacked from the real video feed (requires Real player - may need to launch Real player first and cut and paste URL to launch).

I had made the AIFFs available for just such a purpose!

Orrin vs the Machines [I Want To Ask You A Bunch Of Questions mix]

Hey, well take publicity any way we can get it!

This is from the August 5, 20003 program.

Smells Like Dean Spirit (Small - 12 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the August 5, 2003 program.

Daily Show On The Search For Saddam (Small - 14 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

...with a little help from Florida's 1998 Voter Reform Law.

Here's an awesome video/animation from Eric Blumrich w/music from Grand Theft Auto:

Grand Theft America

Time's ticking away guys, we've got to do something or they're just going to do it again in 2004.

This animation was based on findings in Greg Palast's report:

Theft Of The Presidency.

There's real video of it available too.

(Thanks, Jason)

This is from the July 31, 2003 program.

Cheney Reaction (Small - 9 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Howard Dean came to town last Thursday, and I was able to video two of his speaking events.

The first event in the afternoon was on the environment. Howard warned us that his speech might be a little stiff, and he wasn't kidding. But he did make some good points, including one about the potential of wind power. (Small - 3 MB)

One highlight took place when a cell phone rang and Dean realized it was his own. (Small - 2 MB)

I didn't get a chance to wait around to talk to Howard because I had a 1:45 appointment, but I wasn't worried about it, because I was going to see him speak again at a fundraiser at the San Francisco Medical Society that same evening (which I knew would be a smaller gathering and a better place to say hello).

I'll have the stuff from that up later today.

Here's the complete speech from noon on July 31, 2003, in one part and in three parts:

Howard Dean On The Environment - Complete (Small - 75 MB)

Howard Dean On The Environment - Part 1 of 3 (Small - 23 MB)
Howard Dean On The Environment - Part 2 of 3 (Small - 28 MB)
Howard Dean On The Environment - Part 3 of 3 (Small - 28 MB)

Judge rejects subpoenas in music-use case
By Bipasha Ray for the Associated Press.

A federal judge rejected an attempt by the recording industry to uncover the names of Boston College and MIT students suspected of online music piracy.

U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro said Friday that under federal rules, the subpoenas, which were issued in Washington, cannot be served in Massachusetts.

The two schools filed motions last month asking the judge to quash the subpoenas, which request names and other information for one Massachusetts Institute of Technology student and three BC students who allegedly obtained music using various screen names.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://business.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2003/08/08/judge_rejects_subpoenas_in_music_use_case?mode=PF

Judge rejects subpoenas in music-use case

By BIPASHA RAY, Associated Press Writer, 8/8/2003

BOSTON -- A federal judge rejected an attempt by the recording industry to uncover the names of Boston College and MIT students suspected of online music piracy.

U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro said Friday that under federal rules, the subpoenas, which were issued in Washington, cannot be served in Massachusetts.

The two schools filed motions last month asking the judge to quash the subpoenas, which request names and other information for one Massachusetts Institute of Technology student and three BC students who allegedly obtained music using various screen names.

The Washington-based Recording Industry Association of America issued a statement calling the ruling a "minor procedural issue."

The ruling "does not change an undeniable fact -- when individuals distribute music illegally online, they are not anonymous and service providers must reveal who they are," the RIAA said.

Industry spokesman Jonathan Lamy declined to say whether the RIAA was planning to refile in Boston.

Phone messages seeking comment from BC, MIT and the schools' attorney, Jeffrey Swope, were not immediately returned Friday evening.

The subpoenas are part of the RIAA's nationwide effort to crack down on copyright violators using music sharing software online to distribute songs.

This spring, a federal judge affirmed the constitutionality of a law allowing music companies to force Internet providers to release the names of suspected music pirates upon subpoena from any federal court clerk's office. The ruling has been appealed.

This panel had the EFF's Fred von Lohmann, Charlie Nesson and Leslie L. Vadasz, Director Emeritus, Intel Corporation on it and was hosted by Jonathan Zittrain.

Music Law Panel - Part 1 of 5 (Small - 49 MB)

Music Law Panel - Part 2 of 5 (Small - 50 MB)

Music Law Panel - Part 3 of 5 (Small - 51 MB)

Music Law Panel - Part 4 of 5 (Small - 51 MB)

Music Law Panel - Part 5 of 5 (Small - 65 MB)

Below: Charlie Nesson (left), Leslie L. Vadasz (middle) and the EFF's Fred von Lohmann (right)

Below: Leslie L. Vadasz (left) and the EFF's Fred von Lohmann (right)

Day 3 Tape 7

5:45 - Fred

9:20 CD singles never sold anyway

19:48 Fred - in the rush to save the pirates?

20:49 - Charlie

29:00 Trusted computing - my question

52:45 Report

53:48 Barton

****

Tape 8

8:19 - Interdiction (Charlie)

14:20 - illegal DDOS

Fred!

J.D. Lasica has written a lovely article for the Online Journalism Review.
(Thanks, J.D..)

Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

Video blogging takes root

Like Raven, Lisa Rein of San Francisco has become her own one-woman news crew -- and she expects plenty of company in the years ahead.

During the peace demonstrations in February, Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and shot footage of the marchers and speakers, including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), singer Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper (if more subjective) coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

"At one point, the press started covering the protests as an annoyance, a traffic jam problem," Rein says. "Videotaping the early marches helped spread the word that there were a lot of people who had reservations about our intentions in Iraq."

In recent months, Rein has covered three different conferences. At South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, she videotaped the keynote presentation by Lawrence Lessig. At the Internet Law Conference at Stanford, she interviewed one of the key speakers. Rein also taped highlights of a digital rights conference in Berkeley. She has posted countless hours of video on her Weblog, along with her analysis of events.

"There are just so many interesting things happening in our lives that would make great programming," she says. "The networks aren't interested unless it will attract millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Meanwhile, there are people and events all around us that are meaningful and that people would love to watch."

Rein, 34, also borrows network news segments and public affairs programming for retransmission on her blog. She recently recorded Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on "Meet the Press." She has become so prolific that staffers for presidential candidate Howard Dean notify her when Dean appears on C-SPAN so that she can give the appearance wider currency. She now uploads video to her blog several times a day and says such borrowing is permitted under fair use.

"When NBC News said it would air a story on bloggers, I got e-mails from bloggers saying, 'Hey, grab it and put it up.' Not everyone can watch the news, and not everyone gets cable. My main goal is to capture news as its leaps along the airwaves from reputable sources and archive it on the Web for people to access as needed."

A teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the copyright-licensing center Creative Commons, Rein has a background in technology and freelance writing, laced with an avid interest in public affairs. But she says the tools have become so easy to master that anyone can do it with a little practice.

She captures footage on TiVO -- this can also be accomplished with almost any VCR or other home-taping device -- and transfers the footage first to her DV camcorder and then via firewire to her Mac computer.

"I'm trying to show other people how easy it is to create programming and set up your own TV station on the Web -- without help from anyone in big media," she says.

Others are also getting in on the action. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist who is president of Advance.net, has published a series of video commentaries on his Weblog. At OregonLive.com, a college student created an online video report from the state cheerleading championships. Members of the Independent Media Center create Web video for their alternative news articles.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is turning out thousands of workshop graduates skilled in the art of personal filmmaking. And Steve Mann, a researcher at the Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto, has outfitted students with Webcams on the theory that being an eyewitness to live events qualifies as journalism.

Down the road, the programmers at the Gnu open-software project hope to transform millions of our personal computers into potential personal broadcast receivers and transmitters, using software to turn PCs into radios and digital televisions.

It all adds up to a personal video revolution coming into focus.

Rein sees the day when tens of thousands of Web users have their own Internet TV shows. But for now, she has a more modest goal. Two cable channels, in California and the Midwest, have offered her a slot on public access TV if she can finish three complete shows culled from her raw clips.

"To get your message out to the masses," she says, "it still has to go out over the box and hit them in their living rooms."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1060223904.php

Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

A camera, firewire and the ability to Webcast are all you need. Oh yeah, and don't forget that you have to like sticking a camera and microphone in people's faces.
J.D. Lasica, OJR Senior Editor
Posted: 2003-08-07

By night, Raven -- the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka -- works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday's in Daytona Beach, Fla.

By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality. Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

But let Raven tell it. "I consider a lot of what I do real reporting with no strings attached. When a major event comes to town, I'm there with my camcorder to record everything that goes down while adding some color commentary. On slower days, I still capture the city's day-to-day life."

Daytona Beach is home to a number of well-attended public events each year. In March, Raven covered the Birthplace of Speed, a three-day antique auto festival. During spring break he waded through a quarter-million people thronged along the city’s main street and interviewed college students from around the nation. "I call it the sidewalk commando cam," he says.

He does the same during Bike Week -- Daytona Beach claims to be home to the largest motorcycle gathering in the world -- and Black College Reunion week each spring. In June, he covered the Great Race, an annual race of classic cars that began in Michigan and wound more than 4,000 miles through 15 states, ending in Daytona Beach. Raven was at the finish line, interviewed the winners, and broadcast it on the Web. In mid-July, he gave viewers a tour of the city's Florida International Festival. In October he'll be covering Biketoberfest.

He also covers space shuttle launches, power boat races, fishing and beach activities, performances of live rock bands and more.

"I'm out there interviewing people just like the local Channel 7 news, only I can bring people more complete coverage, and my signal travels a lot farther," Raven says. "Some days it's almost like being a documentary filmmaker. You're showing things to people who can't be here, and that's a community service."

The town fathers weren’t always sure about Raven's intentions. At first they thought he might be connected with Girlsgonewild, a renegade group of video voyeurs who descend on spring break destinations and ask young women to remove their bras or swimsuit tops. The group does a brisk video business.

Raven’s not into that scene. "Everything I shoot is family-oriented -- basically, all G or PG rated." In the past year, he has become such a local fixture that the Ormond Beach Chamber of Commerce (just north of Daytona Beach) added him to its mailing list for media outlets. Local PR people make sure he's in the loop whenever they promote an event.

Daytonabeach-live is Webcast seven days a week, 24 hours a day, barring a technological hiccup. Raven estimates that 40 percent of the programming airs live; the remainder is rebroadcast from earlier tapings. When Raven heads off for his night job, he plops an old-fashioned videotape into the VCR and streams it onto the Web.

How does he pull all this off? On the cheap. Raven and a part-time computer technician, who volunteers his time, run a small production studio out of Raven’s home. Raven uses a Hi8 analog Sony Handycam, which he bought for $200, and hooks it into some used computers.

Typically, a Webcaster pays hundreds of dollars for server costs and a high-bandwidth T1 line. But all Raven has to do is point his camcorder and flip a switch, which sends his signal to an Internet service provider in Utah. The ISP handles the technical heavy lifting, hosting his Webcast on their servers and splitting his feed into 1,500 simultaneous streams. The cost? A grand total of $17 a month.

"None of this is Hollywood quality," he admits, "but it's all original programming."

(For more on citizen reporters and the recent increase in participatory journalism, see this sidebar.)

Despite the low costs, the Webcast has been less than lucrative. "I've done this basically free for the past five years," he says. But in July, he nailed down two paying sponsorships for live local music acts that he helps to produce and Webcast.

He has begun to approach sponsors to see if he can wrangle enough money to let him quit his night job. Already, he has obtained two rooms on the top floor of a beachfront motel -- worth $1,400 a month -- in exchange for mentioning the motel on the Webcast. Those quarters have become the studio of a sister station Raven recently launched, GalaxyUniverseTV. The studio features second-hand computers, stereos, a few worn couches and a tripod on an outside balcony overlooking the beach.

A headline news box on GalaxyUniverseTV’s main page offers links to ABCnews.com, MSNBC.com and other news sites. Users can check Daytona Beach weather and jump to live or taped Webcast footage. The site is getting 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a day and, like Daytonabeach-live, gets a fair number of international viewers. Both stations are among the 3,000 live and archived television and radio feeds from around the world listed on Internet portal wwiTV and its North American affiliate, TV4all.

Raven, a Michigan native, began his personal broadcasting odyssey in the late 1990s in Albuquerque, N.M., when he launched Route66live.com, the city's first Internet-only radio station. Two years ago, he gave up radio Webcasting -- which now requires small broadcasters to pay fees to music publishers -- and moved his family to Daytona Beach, fertile territory for a video Webcast.

He hopes to do more hard news in the coming year. One idea involves examining a recent rash of pickpockets who prey on tourists. Raven wants to set up a sting operation, placing "a mark" on the beach and capturing the theft of a wallet with a hidden camera.

"I don’t claim to be Dan Rather," he says, "but I'm free to cover whatever I want. I don't have to get permission from the head office to run something. I think a lot of what we see in the media is compromised. I just wish I had more resources. Then I'd be unstoppable."

Video blogging takes root

Like Raven, Lisa Rein of San Francisco has become her own one-woman news crew -- and she expects plenty of company in the years ahead.

During the peace demonstrations in February, Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and shot footage of the marchers and speakers, including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), singer Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper (if more subjective) coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

"At one point, the press started covering the protests as an annoyance, a traffic jam problem," Rein says. "Videotaping the early marches helped spread the word that there were a lot of people who had reservations about our intentions in Iraq."

In recent months, Rein has covered three different conferences. At South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, she videotaped the keynote presentation by Lawrence Lessig. At the Internet Law Conference at Stanford, she interviewed one of the key speakers. Rein also taped highlights of a digital rights conference in Berkeley. She has posted countless hours of video on her Weblog, along with her analysis of events.

"There are just so many interesting things happening in our lives that would make great programming," she says. "The networks aren't interested unless it will attract millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Meanwhile, there are people and events all around us that are meaningful and that people would love to watch."

Rein, 34, also borrows network news segments and public affairs programming for retransmission on her blog. She recently recorded Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on "Meet the Press." She has become so prolific that staffers for presidential candidate Howard Dean notify her when Dean appears on C-SPAN so that she can give the appearance wider currency. She now uploads video to her blog several times a day and says such borrowing is permitted under fair use.

"When NBC News said it would air a story on bloggers, I got e-mails from bloggers saying, 'Hey, grab it and put it up.' Not everyone can watch the news, and not everyone gets cable. My main goal is to capture news as its leaps along the airwaves from reputable sources and archive it on the Web for people to access as needed."

A teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the copyright-licensing center Creative Commons, Rein has a background in technology and freelance writing, laced with an avid interest in public affairs. But she says the tools have become so easy to master that anyone can do it with a little practice.

She captures footage on TiVO -- this can also be accomplished with almost any VCR or other home-taping device -- and transfers the footage first to her DV camcorder and then via firewire to her Mac computer.

"I'm trying to show other people how easy it is to create programming and set up your own TV station on the Web -- without help from anyone in big media," she says.

Others are also getting in on the action. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist who is president of Advance.net, has published a series of video commentaries on his Weblog. At OregonLive.com, a college student created an online video report from the state cheerleading championships. Members of the Independent Media Center create Web video for their alternative news articles.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is turning out thousands of workshop graduates skilled in the art of personal filmmaking. And Steve Mann, a researcher at the Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto, has outfitted students with Webcams on the theory that being an eyewitness to live events qualifies as journalism.

Down the road, the programmers at the Gnu open-software project hope to transform millions of our personal computers into potential personal broadcast receivers and transmitters, using software to turn PCs into radios and digital televisions.

It all adds up to a personal video revolution coming into focus.

Rein sees the day when tens of thousands of Web users have their own Internet TV shows. But for now, she has a more modest goal. Two cable channels, in California and the Midwest, have offered her a slot on public access TV if she can finish three complete shows culled from her raw clips.

"To get your message out to the masses," she says, "it still has to go out over the box and hit them in their living rooms."

Show: KQED Forum
Title: The Great Download Debate
Time: 10 am
Date: July 30, 2003

Guests include the EFF's Jason Schultz, Mitch Glazier of the RIAA, Alex French, Minority Council on the House Judiciary Committee, and Joseph Menn of the LA Times and author of All The Rave.

I've made it available as a single file or in three parts.

I've made aiffs of everything available in the directory too.

KQED Forum On P2P - Complete (MP3 - 73 MB)

KQED Forum On P2P - Part 1 of 3 (MP3 - 26 MB)

KQED Forum On P2P - Part 2 of 3 (MP3 - 26 MB)

KQED Forum On P2P - Part 3 of 3 (MP3 - 23 MB)

Exact date unknown -- July is all I know...
(sorry! things slip through the cracks!)

Gary Hart On The Daily Show (Small - 20 MB)

Gary was on a commission that all but predicted a 911-type disaster in its Sept 15, 1999 report. Lots of interesting stuff about security and the Shrub's "inept" strategies to date.

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Here's an interview with Reshmi Sarkar of IT for Change about the conference and what she learned there.

Reshmi Sarkar At ILAW 2003 (Small - 7 MB)

This article's pretty freaky. More on this as it develops.

If you've been following this story on my blog the last few months, you might want to start here.

Portland Man Strikes Plea Deal on Terror Charges
By the Associated Press.

Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.

"You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing.

"Yes, your honor," Hawash replied.

Hawash's attorney Steven Houze said his client had decided to cooperate fully with the government, but declined to comment on details of the plea negotiations. Houze said Hawash had faced more than 20 years in prison if convicted on all three counts.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,93944,00.html

Portland Man Strikes Plea Deal on Terror Charges


Wednesday, August 06, 2003

PORTLAND, Ore. — A software engineer pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge of aiding the Taliban (search), agreeing to testify against other suspects in exchange for the dropping of other terrorism charges.

Maher "Mike" Hawash (search), one of the so-called "Portland Seven," will serve at least seven years in federal prison under the deal, which was approved by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (search).

Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.

"You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing.

"Yes, your honor," Hawash replied.

Hawash's attorney Steven Houze said his client had decided to cooperate fully with the government, but declined to comment on details of the plea negotiations. Houze said Hawash had faced more than 20 years in prison if convicted on all three counts.

In March, federal agents seized Hawash, 38, from a parking lot outside Intel Corp., where he worked, and simultaneously searched his home. He was held as a material witness until charges were filed five weeks later. In what supporters called an abuse of civil rights, federal officials did not publicly confirm he was being held during those five weeks.

In a 41-page affidavit, the U.S. Attorney's Office accused Hawash, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent, of growing angry with the United States after the Sept. 11. 2001, attacks, then conspiring with co-defendants to join the fight in Afghanistan against U.S. troops.

Hawash accompanied the group as it tried and failed to enter Afghanistan from western China in late fall 2001, according to court documents. The Taliban was the militant Muslim organization that controlled most of Afghanistan until the American invasion following the terrorist attacks.

Five of the other six suspects in the case -- Jeffrey Battle; Battle's ex-wife, October Lewis; Patrice Lumumba Ford; and brothers Ahmed and Muhammad Bilal -- all have pleaded innocent. The sixth, Habis al Saoub, remains at large. They face various conspiracy, firearms and money laundering charges.

Hawash agrees to plea bargain
By the Associated Press.

Here's another article with more details.

Wow. I am quite shocked, I must say. But I would like to reiterate that the point of this protest has always been the unfairness of holding Mike for five weeks without charging him -- not whether or not he had knowingly or unknowingly taken place in whatever kind of activity he was being charged with, once he was charged.

The point is that holding people for months without charging them isn't cool, and theoretically we don't do that in this country, except that it turns out under a certain material witness statute, we do do that in this country -- and that's kinda scary. That's the point. Just to clarify...

I still get the feeling that he may have taken the deal because he felt it would be the best deal he would get at a jury trial (when it is the best idea to take a plea bargain, because things could also end up even worse at trial). But Steven McGaedy (the "FreeMikeHawash.org" guy), stopped returning my phone calls some time ago (Presumably because things got to heavy with the case.) -- so I took the hint and moved on, and don't really have any kind of inside scoop on this anymore...

Anyway there's an update on that. Okay gotta go. Lots to do today!

Here's the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

August 6, 2003

Hawash agrees to plea bargain
VIDEO

PORTLAND - Maher "Mike" Hawash, one of the so-called "Portland Seven" charged with terrorism related crimes, pleaded guilty Wednesday morning to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban, but will not face other charges in exchange for testimony against other suspects.

Hawash, a 39-year old software engineer who worked for Intel, had initially pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy to wage war against the United States, conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida and conspiracy to contribute services to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

In exchange for testimony, federal prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the U.S. and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism. Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban.

He will serve a minimum of seven years in federal prison under the deal, which was approved by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Hawash agreed to testify in federal court, before grand juries and before any potential military tribunals.

Federal agents grabbed Hawash, 38, from a parking lot outside his work at Intel Corp. in February and simultaneously searched his home. He was held as a material witness, but federal officials would not confirm publicly they held him until charges were filed five weeks later, in what supporters called an abuse of civil rights.

In a 41-page affidavit released in April, the U.S. Attorney's Office accused Hawash, a naturalized U.S. citizen, of growing angry with the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, then conspiring with at least five other Muslim men to join the fight in Afghanistan against U.S. troops.

Hawash accompanied the group as it tried and failed to enter Afghanistan from western China in late fall 2001, according to court documents. The Taliban were a militant Muslim organization that controled most of Afghanistan until the American invasion in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that year.

Kent Robertson, chief of criminal prosecutions at the U.S. Attorney's office in Portland, has declined to say why his office chose to hold Hawash secretly as a material witness before seeking an indictment.

The FBI appears to have begun investigating Hawash after receiving tips from some of his neighbors, according to the affadavit.

Five of the other six suspects in the case - October Lewis, Jeffrey Battle, Patrice Lumumba Ford and brothers Ahmed and Muhammad Bilal - all have pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy to wage war against the United States, conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida and conspiracy to contribute services to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Battle, the Bilals, Ford and Habis al Saoub - who remains at large - also face firearms conspiracy charges while Lewis and Ford were charged with money laundering. Battle, Ford, al Saoub and Ahmed Bilal also face firearms possession charges.

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

This is from the July 29, 2003 program.

Here's Stephen Colbert On Habitat For Humanity's Poverty Theme Park.
(Will the new theme park shut down existing crowd pleasers like the local telephone museum?)

Next, Stephen takes you on a journey through the exciting world of substandard housing!

Oh The Humanity (Small - 12 MB)

(Here's the real Habitat for Humanity)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Jeff Ubois and Sylvia Paull put together a CyberSalon On Spam June 15, 2003 at Berkeley's Hillside Club. Craig and Cindy's presentations and the discussion that follows is of particular interest.

Lou Katz On Spam (Small - 27 MB)

Craig Newmark On Spam (Small - 16 MB)

The EFF's Cindy Cohn On Spam (Small - 16 MB)

Follow up w/Craig and Cindy (Small - 7 MB)

Spam Filter Vendor Talks:

IronPort On Spam (Small - 24 MB)

Enrique Salem, CEO of Brightmail, On Spam (Small - 20 MB)

Pavri Diwariji from MailFrontier, On Spam (Small - 9 MB)

Jordan Ritter of Cloudmark, On Spam (Small - 10 MB)

Doug McLean of Postini, On Spam (Small - 12 MB)

Lou Katz (below)



Craig Newmark (below)



Cindy Cohn, EFF (below)



Craig Newmark, Cindy Cohn (below)

This is an interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson on Meet the Press from July 6, 2003.

Joseph Wilson On The Shrub's Inaccurate WMD Intelligence (Small - 22 MB)

Larry explains this session best in his own words:

"Okay, so. We've talked a little bit this morning about the technology affecting content distribution.

Terry gave you, as is typical with Terry, an extrordinary breadth of knowledge about the law affecting content distribution. And what I want to do today in this afternoon's session is to draw together something about that technology and the story about law and the story about the market to give you some idea of what transformation has occured here. A picture of a change that is hard to see unless you synthesize these three different perspectives of "technology," "law" and "the market."

After Larry talks for awhile, he gives the stage back to Terry to elaborate for a bit on a new possible system for paying artists for file sharing distribution of their works.

Larry/Terry On Technology, Law and The Market - Part 1 of 5 (Small - 53 MB)

Larry/Terry On Technology, Law and The Market - Part 2 of 5 (Small - 36 MB)

Larry/Terry On Technology, Law and The Market - Part 3 of 5 (Small - 35 MB)

Larry/Terry On Technology, Law and The Market - Part 4 of 5 (Small - 29 MB)

Larry/Terry On Technology, Law and The Market - Part 5 of 5 (Small - 33 MB)

Day 3 Tape 5 -- Larry

Before this Disney/Steamboat Bill

16:38 - Statute of Anne

17:55 - Extension of copyright term

21:00 - Changes in scope

26:30 - shift to covering previously unregulated uses

29:00 - How technology

30:30 - E books. Larry's book - "can't read aloud."

33:30 - AIBO Dog

34:00 - How DMCA hurts fair use

38:06 - Norman Lear - all in the family

40:30 - Never before has culture been in the hands of so few

44:30 - Eldred case

47:51 - PDEA

54:00 - CC info

Day 3 Tape 6

Rest of Larry
Terry on alternatives for paying artists

8:50 Responses to public goods problem

tfisher.org - document explaining in more detail

14:30 - alternative compensation system
10-digit ID

15:00 taxation

Stop or I'll sue
Here's why the record industry is now more powerful than police.
By Dave Ralis for phillyBurbs.com

Under the fourth amendment to Constitution, police must show probable cause that a crime has been committed before they can get a judge's permission to search your home for evidence, or subpoena you to appear in court.

But under the federal Digital Millenium Copyright Act, all the RIAA has to do is file paperwork with a court clerk to get a subpoena if it suspects you of downloading a song from the Internet or sharing music in a peer-to-peer network such as Kazaa, WinMX or Grokster.

Anyone found in violation of the act could faces a lawsuit from the RIAA seeking $750 to $150,000 per song, The Associated Press has reported.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/211-08042003-135854.html

Stop or I'll sue
Here's why the record industry is now more powerful than police.
By Dave Ralis
phillyBurbs.com

RIAA TOP BRASS

According to tax records obtained by phillyBurbs.com, there are only two paid officers on the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) payroll. They are:

• Hillary Rosen, CEO and president, who was paid $1,282,599.
• Cary Sherman, general counsel, who was paid $764,184.
• An unspecified number of other RIAA employees were paid a total of $12.7 million.

Rosen was politically active, donating $14,500 to Democratic campaigns and causes. That includes $10,000 in "soft money" she gave to the Democratic National Commmittee.

Sherman gave $22,500, including $10,000 to RIAA's political action committee.

On Thursday, the RIAA announced that Mitch Brainwol, former Chief of Staff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and a previous executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, would succeed Rosen as CEO on Sept. 1.

I used to think music was about freedom. Especially Rock 'n roll.

Not anymore.

Now you can be fined up to $150,000 for sharing a single song with a friend or a stranger. Record companies and politicians have seen to it.

And in a strange twist of fate, the American Civil Liberties Union has joined forces with the largest baby Bell, Verizon, in an effort to prevent the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from gaining more legal power than your local police.

Under the fourth amendment to Constitution, police must show probable cause that a crime has been committed before they can get a judge's permission to search your home for evidence, or subpoena you to appear in court.

But under the federal Digital Millenium Copyright Act, all the RIAA has to do is file paperwork with a court clerk to get a subpoena if it suspects you of downloading a song from the Internet or sharing music in a peer-to-peer network such as Kazaa, WinMX or Grokster.

Anyone found in violation of the act could faces a lawsuit from the RIAA seeking $750 to $150,000 per song, The Associated Press has reported.

On June 26, the association began "gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally offering to 'share' substantial amounts of copyrighted music over peer-to-peer networks," according to a press release on its Web site.

So just what does the RIAA mean by "substantial"?

"We are not putting a number on what substantial is," said Amy Weiss, senior vice president of communications. "If you're sharing one copyrighted file that's one too many.

"... (Music) sales are down 26 percent in recent years, due in large part to piracy," Weiss said. "We've laid off thousands and thousands of people over the years. The industry is suffering. It's time we had to act. Department stores prosecute shoplifters. This is no different than walking into a record store and stealing a CD."

So far, the RIAA has asked for 850 subpoenas in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., including one against a Verizon online user who allegedly downloaded 600 songs in a day and made them available to others via the Internet.

RIAA's subpoena asks Verizon to identify that anonymous user. Verizon countered that it wasn't responsible for what its users did. The ACLU jumped to the phone company's aid, arguing, "there should be judicial process. You should have to allege facts that there's a least some semblance of a case there," said Christopher A. Hansen, an ACLU senior staff counsel active in the case.

"Federal law says anyone who claims a copyright infringement can file and the court clerk is required to issue a subpoena," Hansen said. "No judge ever sees it and you are not notified that they are seeking information nor are you given a chance to contest it. It's a totally mechanical device."

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates found the RIAA was within its rights under the copyright act to seek the subpoena and ordered Verizon to turn over the name. Verizon has complied, but it and the ACLU are appealing Bates' decision. The appeal is expected to be heard in the next three months, Hansen said.

MONEY + LOBBYING = POWER

How did we get to this point?

Think of the RIAA as the nation's largest trade group for record producers and manufacturers. They pay $44 million in dues annually to belong to it, according to tax records.

And because the RIAA's mission is to "work for the benefit of the sound music recording industry," the RIAA has been granted not-for-profit status by the Internal Revenue Service. That means it doesn't have to pay taxes on any of that money.

It also means the association's annual tax return is a matter of public record, and phillyBurbs.com was able to obtain a copy of its most recent filing under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The RIAA's 2001 tax return, which cover its activities from April 1, 2001 to March 31, 2002, shows:

* While the association made $721,000 by handing out gold and platinum albums to top selling recording artists, it made $9.5 million by prosecuting music pirates and recovering lost profits.

All of that $9.5 million was handed over to the record labels affected by the pirates, according to Deborah Moore, the RIAA's controller.

"We're pursuing the rights of the labels, not the artists," Moore said. "They (the artists) are paid based on what their deal with the company is."

* The exact amount it cost the RIAA to recover that money was left blank and Weiss did not respond to questions about it. Moore said federal tax rules did not require that much detail because donations to the RIAA are not tax deductible.

However, the tax return says RIAA paid $2.7 million to IFPI, an international antipiracy group; $1.2 million for "investigative support," $546,000 for "evidence collection/storage," $539,000 for "online monitoring," $61,000 for the "Secure Digital Music Initiative" and $47,000 for "antipiracy projects."

* The association's biggest single expense, by far, was for legal fees - $16.7 million.

* The association also spent $1.7 million for "governmental relations projects," $1.3 million in "federal legislative support," and $480,000 in "state legislative support."

The association also has a separate political action committee (PAC), which doled out more than $630,000 to federal candidates last year, federal election records show. The PAC also pumped another $535,000 of "soft money" into the coffers of the Republican and Democratic parties, up from $392,000 it gave to both parties in 2001.

With all that money came influence over the copyright act and the political will to enforce it.

WHO'S FLYING JOLLY ROGER?

Just as the English used Capt. Henry Morgan to clear the Spanish Main of Buccaneers, the RIAA is using the new law to go after what it calls pirates.

Just who the pirates are is unclear.

According to Weiss, the RIAA is only interested in pursuing "the egregious uploaders first, not downloaders, people who are sharing music."

However, she quickly added, "that doesn't preclude anything in the future. ... This is a very long-term campaign. We're not expect traffic to turn off over night."

It is legal for consumers to copy a CD they already own for use in their car. But once they post its songs on the Internet or make them available for someone else to download, they cross the line, Weiss said. "You're offering up a song for millions of users to take. That's a big difference."

Not even the ACLU has challenged that.

"There's a role for copyright and we understand the RIAA's need to enforce it," Hansen said. "But I certainly have problems with the way that they are trying to uncover internet identities."

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Besides standing on the sidelines and rooting for Verizon to win this legal fight, here are my suggestions on what you can do:

* The Internet has largely supplanted radio as the primary means to listen to new music, in no small part due to the recording industry's continued manipulation of station playlists with an estimated $100 million in annual payola.

Weiss insists that the RIAA is "against pay for play. You shouldn't have to pay to have a song," but declined comment when asked if it had any power to enforce that position with its members.

The practice of paying radio stations to play songs in heavy rotation was supposed to have been killed off in the '50s and '60, but has continued using middlemen. That not only marks a violation of the spirit of the Federal Communications Act (punishable by a fine of at least $10,000 and a prison sentence of up to a year for each instance) but could also be construed as a criminal conspiracy (up to five years in prison) and possibly even racketeering ($25,000 fine and 20 years each instance), given its long-term nature.

I suggest that anyone who even suspects a radio station has been paid off to play some crappy song just to boost record sales, without the DJ spelling out the arrangement, should file a complaint with the FCC immediately. (The FCC wants you to do its job by providing a tape of the broadcast and written proof of payola. But if inundated with similar complaints, the FCC will be forced to act. Just ask Howard Stern.) For the mailing address, click here.

* Challenge the RIAA's not-for-profit (501(c)6) status with the IRS. Anyone who is effected by an institution, in this case anybody who has ever bought a CD, can argue that the association has moved beyond its tax-exempt mission. To find out how, click here.

* Anyone who receives a subpoena or a lawsuit from the RIAA should appeal. Your online identity should be protected from interception and subpoenas just like phone conversations. It should not be fair game for a record company executive to exploit.

RIAA PAC 2002 soft money contributions
Contributor Occupation Date Amount Recipient
ALLMAN, KIMBERLY
WASHINGTON, DC 3/15/2001 $240 Republican National Cmte
ALLMAN, KIMBERLY
WASHINGTON, DC 3/15/2001 $290 Republican National Cmte
FLATOW, JOEL
BURBANK, CA 1/31/2001 $2,015 Republican National Cmte
FLATOW, JOEL
BURBANK, CA 1/31/2001 $2,015 Republican National Cmte
RECODING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 1/25/2001 $5,000 Republican National Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASS'N OF AMER
WASHINGTON, DC 10/17/2002 $25,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASS'N OF AMER I
WASHINGTON, DC 11/4/2002 $400 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASS'N OF AMERI
WASHINGTON, DC 12/28/2001 $20,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASS'N OF AMERIC
WASHINGTON, DC 10/16/2002 $25,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASS'N OF AMERIC
WASHINGTON, DC 1/7/2002 $20,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSN OF AMER
WASHINGTON, DC 11/4/2002 $25,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSN OF AMERICA
WASHINGTON, DC 12/31/2001 $20,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSN OF AMERICA
WASHINGTON, DC 12/31/2001 $20,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOC OF AMERIC
WASHINGTON, DC 6/29/2001 $25,000 2001 President's Dinner Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 8/21/2001 $10,000 Republican National Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 5/11/2001 $10,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 5/9/2002 $5,000 Republican National Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 7/25/2001 $5,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, DC 6/6/2001 $25,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 5/30/2002 $15,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 5/30/2002 $15,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC N/A 10/17/2002 $15,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 7/12/2001 $10,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC INFO REQUESTED 11/5/2002 $10,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC INFO REQUESTED 9/13/2002 $10,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/22/2001 $10,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC N/A 12/31/2001 $10,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC N/A 10/25/2002 $10,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/21/2002 $4,500 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC INFO REQUESTED 8/9/2002 $5,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/13/2002 $5,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/13/2002 $5,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 11/1/2002 $5,000 Democratic National Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC INFO REQUESTED 11/1/2002 $25,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC N/A 5/21/2002 $25,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/13/2002 $20,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 5/30/2002 $20,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC INFO REQUESTED 9/25/2002 $20,000 National Republican Congressional Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC N/A 12/31/2001 $20,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON, DC 6/13/2001 $20,000 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte
ROSEN, HILLARY B
CHEVY CHASE, MD RECORDING INDUSTRY 3/28/2001 $5,000 Democratic National Cmte
ROSEN, HILLARY B MS
CHEVY CHASE, MD RECORDING INDUSTRY AMERICAN ASSOC. 5/16/2002 $5,000 Democratic National Cmte
VALDEZ, DONALDJ MR
MANSFIELD, TX RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOC. OF A 7/12/2002 $297 Republican National Cmte

Source: OpenSecrets.org

Dave Ralis' Pave The Grass column appears on Mondays. You can send him an e-mail at dralis@phillyburbs.com or call him at 215-269-5051. To read his previous columns, click here.

This is from the July 30, 2003 program.

Saudi Royal Family Demands Missing Pages Be Made Public (Small - 4 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the July 31, 2003 program.

Jon Stewart On Gay Marriage (Small - 2 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the July 30, 2003 program.

This sequence has some great footage of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testifying in front of the U.S. Senate Committee On Foreign Relations.

Sen. Joseph Biden (D) plead with Wolfowitz to "give him a break," asking "when are you guys startin' to be honest with us? Come on!" -- after Wolfowitz tells Congress that the military budget he submitted for next year did not include costs for the continued operation in Iraq.

Congress Pleads With Wolfowitz (Small - 4 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

There have been a lot of great news programs about the Daily Show and Jon Stewart lately. I'm going to start archiving them here.

Can't wait for the upcoming Hilary Cinton on August 14th!

Here's one that went up on MSNBC this morning:

Stewart, ‘Daily Show’ at top of their game
Mock-news program’s political satire drawing larger audience, accolades
Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" are up for five Emmy Awards next month, including best achievement in news, along with "60 Minutes" and "Nightline."
by the Associated Press.
(Thanks, Cory.)

He and “The Daily Show” are up for five Emmys next month, and the Television Critics Association gave him two awards last month. The critics even nominated “The Daily Show” for best achievement in news, along with “60 Minutes” and “Nightline.”

On Aug. 14, the nation’s reigning political celebrity, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is Stewart’s guest.

During unfunny times, viewers have responded to Stewart’s ability to make fun. The show’s average nightly audience has nearly doubled from 427,000 in 1999, the year he took over, to 788,000 so far this year.

“Even though terrible things are going on around us, I would hope that wouldn’t mean that the sense of humor is lost,” Stewart said, relaxing in his office after taping a show. “The idea isn’t to make jokes about horrible things. The idea is to find the absurdity in the difficult circumstances around us.”

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/947127.asp?cp1=1

Image: Stewart
Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" are up for five Emmy Awards next month, including best achievement in news, along with "60 Minutes" and "Nightline."

Stewart, ‘Daily Show’ at top of their game

Mock-news program’s political satire drawing larger audience, accolades

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK, Aug. 4 — Jon Stewart could barely contain himself. A congressman had publicly called a colleague a “fruitcake” and, since it happened on a Friday night, Stewart couldn’t joke about it on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” until three days later.

“Even though terrible things are going on around us, I would hope that wouldn’t mean that the sense of humor is lost. The idea isn’t to make jokes about horrible things. The idea is to find the absurdity in the difficult circumstances around us.”
— JON STEWART
“I DO BELIEVE we need to go to a 24-hour fake news channel,” he said. “Fox can’t be the only fake news channel out there!”
Stewart can’t wait to bare the absurdities of the news and the people who cover it, and his sharp humor has made “The Daily Show” a growing force. No one hit the comic mark more consistently during the war in Iraq. As an election year approaches, Stewart’s in top form.
He and “The Daily Show” are up for five Emmys next month, and the Television Critics Association gave him two awards last month. The critics even nominated “The Daily Show” for best achievement in news, along with “60 Minutes” and “Nightline.”
On Aug. 14, the nation’s reigning political celebrity, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is Stewart’s guest.
During unfunny times, viewers have responded to Stewart’s ability to make fun. The show’s average nightly audience has nearly doubled from 427,000 in 1999, the year he took over, to 788,000 so far this year.
“Even though terrible things are going on around us, I would hope that wouldn’t mean that the sense of humor is lost,” Stewart said, relaxing in his office after taping a show. “The idea isn’t to make jokes about horrible things. The idea is to find the absurdity in the difficult circumstances around us.”

Stewart helps keep political satire alive for a young audience that — the experts say — isn’t very attuned to the news.
The show’s fake “debate” about foreign policy, using film clips to show President Bush arguing about nation-building with presidential candidate Bush, was as pointed as a political cartoon.
“He’s really strong at political satire,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, whose first name, naturally, has made him a target of Stewart’s barbs. “I don’t know of anybody who does it better than he does.”
Blitzer said he can tell that Stewart and his staff are news junkies.
“The Daily Show” recognizes that its audience has an astute media awareness, too. Stewart made note last week, for example, that The New York Times used an obituary of comedian Bob Hope written by a reporter, Vincent Canby, who died in 2000.
Stewart also didn’t let the latest odd Dan Rather moment pass by. He played tape of when the CBS anchor, in a deadpan voice, recited lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Road” when former POW Jessica Lynch returned to West Virginia.
“I’m just glad he didn’t keep going,” Stewart said later. “He could have. There’s more choruses. He could have gone into ‘Annie’s Song.’ He could have gone into Jim Croce. He was on a roll.”

NO AX TO GRIND
Stewart’s political humor stands out, in part, because he’s willing to be tough at a time others aren’t. At the same time, he’s less threatening because he has no ideological ax to grind.
“Believe me, the idea of the show is not to be a bold, critical voice that stands out amidst timidity,” he said. “It’s more like, ‘I think we need a fart joke at the end of this because we’re getting too strident.’ Ultimately, everyone here thinks of ourselves in terms of being a comedy show and that’s it.”
He’s seen no evidence that his barbs against the president have drawn blood.
The rigid discipline of the Bush administration is easy to have fun with, he said. At the very least, it’s a big change from Monica Lewinsky jokes.
“When you look back on it now, I wish we were making jokes about that,” he said. “That was a luxurious scandal if there ever was one. Imagine a president right now who’d even have time for extra oral sex.”
“The Daily Show” will begin gearing up this fall for another presidential campaign. Right now, the staff is just happy the GOP convention is in New York, so they can sleep in their own beds.
Stewart’s “Indecision 2000” coverage attracted attention last time. With a larger audience, it’s likely to get even more this time.
The upcoming Clinton appearance is an indication of that. Other than the insatiable need for applause, Stewart can’t quite understand why it’s important for politicians to go on comedy shows. Not that he’s complaining.
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“I can’t imagine anyone lauding Churchill’s legacy as, yes, he rallied England during its darkest hours but, also, tremendous ribald wit,” he said. “Great leadership, as far as I know, doesn’t require that you go toe to toe with pranksters, but for some reason, they feel that it adds to their electability.”
Stewart is signed to stay with Comedy Central through the end of the 2004 elections. His name is always at the top of the list when broadcasters go looking for late-night talent. But unless one of the really big jobs — Jay Leno’s or David Letterman’s — open up unexpectedly, he’s probably better off staying where he is.
“There are things about those jobs that are very appealing,” he said. “There are things about those jobs that are unappealing. I’d probably think more about something else if I wasn’t happy where I was. But I don’t feel an emptiness, an itch. I like doing what I’m doing.”

This is from the July 29, 2003 program.

Daily Show Mess O' Potamia Update (Small - 5 MB)

Of interest was the "Organization of Women's Freedom In Iraq," banner (below).

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Here's an interview with NBC News Anchor Brian Williams - The guy in line to replace Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News after the 2004 Presidential Election Coverage.

Brian and Jon have a pretty interesting discussion about journalists and whether or not they "should" let people know about their own biases.

Brian says that he is a registered Independent and claims that he doesn't even tell his kids or his wife how he votes so that they all have plausible deniability when they say they don't know how he votes. He claims the Washington Post tells their reporters not to vote. I'm not sure how he knows this or how this could be verified, but I certainly wouldn't work for a paper who told me not to vote, and I kind of doubt many of the journalists I read in the Washington Post would either. So I'm not really sure what he actually meant by all of that.

Anyway it's an interesting interview.

Brian Williams On The Daily Show (Small - 15 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the July 30, 2003 program.

The Shrub In Israel (Small - 5 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from July 4, 2003.
July 4 Doonsbury.

Today's going to be all about quantity, hopefully. I'm so backed up.

Here's Lewis Black on the July 30, 2003 program.

Back in Black: July 30, 2003 (Small - 7 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the July 30, 2003 program.

This was also Samantha Bee's first feature segment on the show -- Nice job Samantha!

This one's for Jason, and of course, Dave Nelsons everywhere.

Dave Nelson No Fly List (Small - 10 MB)
A gaggle of Dave Nelsons (below).

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This is from the July 31, 2003 program.

Wow. You really have to see this to believe it.

Daily Show On Shrub's "9th Solo" Press Conference (Small - 15 MB)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

I managed to save the Howard Dean footage! Looks like the rewind is scrooey on my camera -- I can only rewind by pressing play and hitting the rewind to play in scan mode.

This is troublesome indeed. Looks like I'll have to get my camera serviced or something...

Thanks to all who wrote in with Cleaner info to help get me started.

As a reward, I'll be serving up the rest of this week's killer
Daily Show clips -- hopefully all in one evening...

One of the greatest things about writing my blog is that I've learned so much from my readers who have so much more experience doing many of the things that I'm in process of learning now. Way back in the day, it was XML I was learning and getting help from the world at large -- now it's video technologies -- and I could really use some help.

I gotta kinda high tech problem (barely) and a very low tech problem:

1) I finally got a copy of Discreet Cleaner (yeah student discounts!) and now I'm wondering if I can start reducing file sizes quickly without having to learn much (cause I won't really have time to learn anything too intricate in the next week or two). I'm wondering if any of you pros out there can fill me in on the step by step for configuring say, one of my huge ILAW files into a smaller animal.

2) EMERGENCY: My camera crunched part of my Howard Dean tape from last night. I've rewound the tape, but it still won't play. my camera instructs me to remove the tape when I put it in. any ideas?

thanks!