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[However, Kennedy adjusted the numbers to account for undecided black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and said the runoff election currently stands in Blanco's favor. With that adjustment, Blanco would get 53 percent of the vote, compared to Jindal's 47 percent]
Republican Primary Trial Heat (among Republican voters): Cecil Underwood 30% Robin Capehart 8% Sarah Minear 8% Dan Moore 3% Monty Warner 3% Doug McKinney 2% Other 3% Undecided 43%
Democratic Primary Trial Heat (among Democratic voters): Joe Manchin 46% Darrell McGraw 11% John Perdue 5% Jim Humphreys 4% Lloyd Jackson 3% Jim Lees 3% Spike Maynard 2% Robin Davis 2% Other 1% Undecided 25%
US authorities have unofficially told their Japanese counterparts that North Korea already possesses several small nuclear warheads for ballistic missiles, a news report said today.
It is the first confirmation that Pyongyang has nuclear missiles that can immediately strike Japan, the Sankei Shimbun said, citing sources related to Japan and the United States.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials have publicly confirmed that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons.
Until now, however, they have not been clear about what stage of development North Korea was at. Washington has told Tokyo that the number of nuclear warheads that North Korea has is "not just one or two," It was not clear how the United States obtained the information, nor whether those weapons were developed or purchased by North Korea, the Sankei said. - Article
If we think back not so long ago to the rhetoric that deceivingly led to the illegal invasion of Iraq, you will see exceptional similarities between then and now.
Hyping the existence of nuclear weapons in North Korea (A charge that the Administration held as 'doubtful' back when N. Korea first claimed they had working nukes) aids the Administration's agenda in at least three ways:
1) Fear levels rocket both here and in Southeast Asia...pointing specifically to Japan. Ultra-hawks in Japan have already joined the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Cheney-Perle Chorus to jack up the arms race and facilitate the re-proliferation of various WMD. As we all know by now, a fear-driven citizenry is one that follows sheepishly a leader who presents war and unilateralism as the do-all solution to international policy.
2) Spooking the Japanese is the perfect way to develop an imminently necessary "coalition" member for future Asian invasions given that Blair, Aznar and Howard are all taking it on the chin and will be lucky if they are not removed from office.
3) Particularly after a failed test on the $200 billion Missile Defense System, a little motivation will be welcomed by the Administration. a Nuclear missile threat from N. Korea is the perfect medicine for any pesky opponents to the missile defense shield.
As far as the Administration is concerned, they couldn't care less if nuclear weapons are a viable option for the North Koreans. They don't care if containment would be a working alternative. And they don't care if they are called on their lies. They will press forward with every point on their agenda. For hardline wingers there couldn't be a better scenario. For the other six billion of us, there couldn't be one worse.
It has now become clear that President Bush lied to the American people in order to promote a war. That war continues and has already led to the death of thousands of Iraqi civilians, hundreds of U.S. soldiers and countless Iraqi soldiers. In truth, Bush's lies are more than just lies. They are high crimes and the President should now be subject to impeachment.
There are those who say that the President's current popularity or the Republican majority in the House and Senate preclude the possibility of his impeachment. Perhaps they are underestimating the moral integrity of our Republican congressmen. In fact, some of them have already publicly stated their opinions on this subject. They did so in February of 1999 when they served as Impeachment Trial Managers for the Senate Impeachment Trial of former President Clinton. Let's look at what they had to say then:
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Illinois),
"There is a visibility factor in the president's public acts, and those which betray a trust or reveal contempt for the law are hard to sweep under the rug...They reverberate, they ricochet all over the land and provide the worst possible example for our young people."
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)
"The truth is still the truth, and a lie is still a lie, and the rule of law should apply to everyone, no matter what excuses are made by the president's defenders...We have done so because of our devotion to the rule of law and our fear that if the president does not suffer the legal and constitutional consequences of his actions, the impact of allowing the president to stand above the law will be felt for generations to come...laws not enforced are open invitations for more serious and more criminal behavior."
Steve Chabot (R-Ohio)
"It would be wrong for you to tell America's children that some lies are all right. It would be wrong to show the rest of the world that some of our laws don't really matter."
Steve Buyer (R- Indiana)
"I have also heard some senators from both sides of the aisle state publicly: I think these offenses rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Now, to state publicly that you believe that high crimes and misdemeanors have occurred but for some reason you have this desire not to remove the president -- that desire, though, does not square with the law, the Constitution, and the Senate's precedents for removing federal judges for similar offenses."
Rep. Lindsey Graham (R - South Carolina, Now Senator)
"The president of the United States sets atop of the legal pyramid. If there's reasonable doubt about his ability to faithfully execute the laws of the land, our future would be better off if that individual is removed. And let me tell you where it all comes down to me. If you can go back and explain to your children and your constituents how you can be truthful and misleading at the same time, good luck."
These, of course, are just a few examples. It is likely that most of those who voted to impeach Clinton are on record as to the high ethical standards they were following. Certainly, they must follow these same standards when considering Bush's egregious lies and the consequences of those lies. It is time to draft the Articles of Impeachment and let those who oppose them state why this case deserves more leniency than was given to former President Clinton. - Article
The Christian Science Monitor has admitted that a set of documents upon which it based its story on were "almost certainly" fake.
Mr Galloway has always strenuously denied that he took any money from the Iraqi regime.
The newspaper said two of the "oldest" documents - dated between 1992 and 1993 - were actually written within the past few months.
[...]
"It is important to set the record straight. We are convinced the documents are bogus. We apologise to Mr Galloway and to our readers."
However the Glasgow MP has refused to accept the apology and is demanding to know who forged the documents.
[...]
[Mr Galloway] said: "This newspaper published on its front page in every country in the world that I had taken $10m from Saddam Hussein.
"That was a grave and serious libel.
"Of course the documents were a forgery and a newspaper of that importance ought to have made the effort, both morally and legally, to establish the authenticity of those documents before they published them."
Mr Galloway also called for the prime minister to investigate the source of the documents.
"As a member of the House of Commons, indeed as a British subject, I have the right to the protection of the British intelligence services from a conspiracy hatched by persons unknown but whose handiwork was conducted in foreign territory co-occupied by Great Britain," he said. - Article
Well, let's see, since Galloway was openly anti-war and a target for those who wanted to cripple the opposition, who could have possibly planted those documents? Duh...maybe the same people who forged the bogus African uranium documents...Bush and Blair.
What did the president know and when did he know it?
The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached. Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you consider the gravity of the charge.
"To put it bluntly," former Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote on the legal Web site FindLaw on June 6, "if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.' " Of course, intelligence data is often open to interpretation, and some political distortion is probably inevitable. Consider, however, just one of the recent revelations about how Iraq weapons intelligence was handled by the Bush administration and you'll start to see a disturbing pattern of cynical mendacity.
Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document, later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery that was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes - which UN inspectors would establish as baseless - would scare Americans much more than talk of mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's MO.
Thus in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president intoned that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." Scary stuff. Problem was, the document was signed by an official who had given up his post a decade earlier, and the CIA had told the White House the story did not check out.
On Friday, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain reported that, according to a senior CIA official, on March 9, 2002, a full 10 months before the speech, the White House was duly informed that an investigation, including an agent travelling to Africa to verify the story, had found no basis for the document. Three senior administration officials told the Knight Ridder reporter that Vice President Dick Cheney and officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the allegation should be included in the case against Hussein.
This is just one example of the administration's manipulation of intelligence in justifying a war that already has killed thousands of people and continues to take the lives of several Americans each week. It is exceedingly odd that the same congressional Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton for dissembling in a sexual scandal find none of this worthy of a full public hearing. To pacify a growing number of critics, they have instead scheduled a secret and limited inquiry.
Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent threat of deployed weapons - "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including "missions targeting the United States." Instead, almost three months after we invaded Iraq, the United States and Britain have yet to find anything of the sort. "Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or biological weapons, or delivery systems," Army Col. John Connell, who heads the hunt for those AWOL weapons in Iraq, said in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find little pieces." We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood. What has not been established is whether the president was in on the lie. If he was, he should be impeached. - Article
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Idiot) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
[..]
The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website. - Article
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