Duty to Warn

I attacked the conspiracy nuts last week -- these being the self-styled "Truthers" claiming the WTC and Pentagon attacks were organized by a list of suspects ranging from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the Queen of England.

Yes, the finger of suspicion apparently points to the Queen because one nut faction believes the world is run by the Bilderberg group -- one of those annual get-togethers of businessmen and politicians who assemble from time to time to bore each other with long speeches and drink a great deal. Those who think the Bilderbergers control everything claim that the Queen of England and the British Secret Service are deeply involved in this supervision.

This site normally keeps the “I” to a minimum. In general, the personal occurrences of my life have nothing to do with chronicling and commenting on the entrenched myth of liberal media bias and bringing to light stories that receive little or no attention. But I have lived in New York City for over half my life, and, until today, I couldn't bring myself to write about 9/11. You could say George W. Bush made me do it. In the midst of his ongoing exploitation of this tragedy, from which, in the five years since, his administration has found - through fear mongering, disinformation and McCarthyite attacks - only opportunity to advance its fascist agenda, I humbly present this personal response.

AUSTIN, Texas -- She was so generous with her responses to other people. If you told Ann Richards something really funny, she wouldn't just smile or laugh, she would stop and break up completely. She taught us all so much -- she was a great campfire cook. Her wit was a constant delight. One night on the river on a canoe trip, while we all listened to the next rapid, which sounded like certain death, Ann drawled, "It sounds like every whore in El Paso just flushed her john."

She knew how to deal with teenage egos: Instead of pointing out to a kid who was pouring charcoal lighter on a live fire that he was idiot, Ann said, "Honey, if you keep doing that, the fire is going to climb right back up to that can in your hand and explode and give you horrible injuries, and it will just ruin my entire weekend."

She knew what it was like to have four young children and to be so tired you cried while folding the laundry. She knew and valued Wise Women like Virginia Whitten and Helen Hadley.

Rock Star and long-time environmental activist John Hall just won the Democratic primary in an upstate New York district that hosts what could be the world's most catastrophic nuclear plant. He wants it shut, and may soon be in Congress working to do just that.

Hall was a mainstay of the group Orleans. His name is on such well-known hits as "Dance with Me" and "Still the One." When George W. Bush used "Still the One" at GOP rallies in 2004, Hall made him stop.

Now, Hall may be in place to help stop Indian Point, the reactor complex in the 19th Congressional District north of New York City. Indian Point is now best known as the plant that could have been hit on September 11, 2001. The first jet that flew into the World Trade Center flew directly over the two operating reactors there, and could have done apocalyptic damage had it dived down one minute early.

It's true.  It's weird. It's nuts.  The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, has finally brought charges against … Greg Palast.  I kid you not.  Send your cakes with files to the Air America wing at Guantanamo.

Though not just yet.  Fatherland Security has informed me that television producer Matt Pascarella and I have been charged with unauthorized filming of a "critical national security structure" in Louisiana.  

On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans.  It's been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW's (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere.   One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up" -- except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

I'd actually be fine if ABC aired their Swift Boating mockudrama, The Path to /9/11. They just have to do one little thing:

Every couple minutes they need to interrupt the movie with a black screen that stays around for at least a minute and says, in large readable letters:

TOO BAD THIS FILM HAD TO LIE AGAIN AND AGAIN. THIS IS AS IMPORTANT SUBJECT AS EXISTS. AND THEY TURNED AND TWISTED THE TRUTH, AGAIN AND AGAIN. THEY HAD PEOPLE DOING EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY DID DO.

THEY DID IT FOR THEIR LOVE OF POWER.

THEY DID IT TO KEEP THEIR PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON DC, TAKING ACTIONS THAT MAKE TERRORISM WORSE, AND BREED FEAR AND DESPERATION IN THE WORLD.

THEY DID IT BECAUSE THEY'VE LOST THEIR RESPECT FOR TRUTH.

SORRY WE'RE AIRING A FILM WHOSE LIES EMBODY THESE VALUES.

SINCERELY,

ABC

PS-Next time we'll try to get things right. But no guarantees.

I'd be satisfied with that, so long as it repeated throughout the show.

---

You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts -- the ones who say Bush and Cheney masterminded the attacks -- in the first paragraph of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, "The New Pearl Harbor." "In many respects," Griffin writes, "the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself. . In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes . not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them."

The ballots and computerized voting records from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio constitute one of the most important historical artifacts in our nation's history. They must be preserved as part of the essence of our democratic rights and traditions, and in the patriotic interest of future generations of citizens, teachers, students and scholars. The fact that the state of Florida has preserved its presidential voting records from the election of 2000 adds important weight to the demand that Ohio do the same for 2004.

Since 1848, only five presidential elections have been close enough to have turned on the Electoral College votes of a single state. (In the presidential election of 1960, the true tally of the voting in Illinois has been widely questioned, but that state’s electoral votes were ultimately not decisive in the final outcome).

The presidential elections of 1916 and 1976 were close enough to have been turned by the electoral votes of a single state, but there were no serious challenges to the vote counts of any such state raised in those years.