Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Clinton vs. Bush Poll Results & Is it Time for Al Gore to Run & Win Again?

host · 05-14-2006, 11:04 AM

scout and willravel, stop "dicking around" with distractions, like 3rd parties, 2nd amendment rights, or "oooohhhh!!!" he or she is tooooo liberal or toooo conservative !! In the present climate, those concerns are parochial....they are luxuries that we can no longer afford. There just isn't time....anymore.

We need restoration of checks and balances, now! We need trade and budget deficit management, a sane foreign policy, and military spending that isn't sucked dry by the Wilkes, Wades, Cunninghams, Foggos, and Jerry Lewises. We need the K Street Project/Abramoff- lobbyists paying to write the legislation that congress then rubber stamps, GONE.....now!

We need open government, and the end to rampant partisan cronyism in appointments to high positions, NOW!

FEMA has been destroyed by crony appointments, the CIA is a gutted shell with no leadership or veteran management....republican hacks replaced them when they resigned or were force out. The NSA is badly damaged, and DHS is an effing joke:

Quote:

http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticle...TopStoriesMore
The DHS chief's coattails extend to the administration's highest levels

By Jason McLure
Legal Times
January 23, 2006

.....On Jan. 4, President George W. Bush granted a recess appointment to Julie Myers, making the 36-year-old former Chertoff chief of staff the head of Homeland Security’s 15,000-employee Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

........Myers fit the bill. Nominated to become head of the federal government’s second-largest investigative agency, Myers had virtually no experience in immigration policy and a thin record of management of any sort. (Myers was unavailable for an interview. A spokesman for her office issued a statement saying, “She has great respect for Michael Chertoff and is extremely proud of her work with him.”)..........

........If Myers’ credentials aren’t impeccable, her connections certainly are. She is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Upon taking the helm at the DHS, Chertoff tapped her then-fiance (now husband), John Wood, who was once an aide to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, to be his chief of staff.

Read the rest of the article, most of the other lawyers Chertoff has hired, come from his former lawfirm, Latham & Watkins....here's one:

Quote:

• Philip Perry: The career of the son-in-law of Vice President Dick Cheney has in many ways mirrored Chertoff’s over the past decade. Also a former partner at Latham & Watkins, he worked on the Whitewater investigation with Chertoff and joined the DOJ after Bush’s election in 2000. After stints at the Office of Management and Budget and back at Latham, Perry joined Chertoff at the DHS last year as the department’s general counsel.

Sorry guys....by the time an opposition candidate comes along that is "just right".....middle-o-the-road, NRA member, third party....we won't have a recognizable country left to live in!

This isn't about democrats vs. republicans. It is about QUICKLY electing people who can WIN! In 2006, and in 2008! At first, they have to be democrats because one house of congress has to shift to democrats next january. But....they can't be democrats like this:

Quote:

http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/...d=161556&rfi=6
Lieberman highlights small contributions, but benefited most from bundles, big checks, and stepped-up PAC giving
By Don Michak, Journal Inquirer
05/09/2006

Executives at ChoicePoint Inc. - which bought the company whose list Florida officials used to prevent thousands from voting in the 2000 presidential election - were among the biggest contributors to U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's re-election campaign from January to March, records show.

Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000 who often quips that he actually was elected despite the bitterly disputed Florida results, reported to the Federal Election Commission that over a two-week period in March he collected a total of $11,700 from 14 ChoicePoint officials, only one of whom resides in Connecticut.

Lieberman is the ranking Democrat on the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

ChoicePoint is a giant data collection company that began by selling credit data to the insurance industry and now is among the private companies that "increasingly occupy a place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts," according to the Washington Post.

The suburban Atlanta company in January agreed to pay a record $10 million fine and an additional $5 million to consumers to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations after a security breach of its computer databases led to at least 800 cases of identity theft.

It also is at the center of a continuing controversy in Congress over privacy rights and federal "data mining."

We are waking up to a new crisis now. It is the new Corporatism, AKA Fascism:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051100539.html
By Barton Gellman and Arshad Mohammed
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 12, 2006; Page A01

The new report, by contrast, described a far broader form of surveillance, focused primarily on domestic phone-call records. Some of its elements have been disclosed before. The Los Angeles Times reported in December that AT&T provided the NSA with a "direct hookup" into a company database, code-named Daytona, that has been recording the telephone numbers and duration of every call placed on the AT&T network since 2001. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T over that and other alleged violations of privacy law, said the call database spans 312 terabytes, a quantity that would fill more than 400,000 computer compact discs....

These bastards proudly display this on their own website:

Quote:

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=7
......... <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22269-2005Jan19_4.html">Reprinted with permission from washingtonpost.com</a> and The Washington Post.

It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives.

As its dossier grew, so did the number of ChoicePoint's government and corporate clients, jumping from 1,000 to more than 50,000 today. Company stock once worth about $500 million ballooned to $4.1 billion.

Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence."

"We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying analytics," said company vice president James A. Zimbardi.

<h3>ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws.</h3>

ChoicePoint renewed and expanded a contract with the Justice Department in the fall of 2001. Since then, the company and one of its leading competitors, LexisNexis Group, have also signed contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online, according to newly released documents. .........

Guys...this is what we have to begin to stop, on election day, this November, if it isn't too late already....you can only help by voting for democrats who aren't bought by the corporatist complex....that has to be your only criteria, if you ever want to vote in a multi party election, again...it is that bad, IMO!

Quote:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=502&row=0
Friday, May 12, 2006
by Greg Palast

I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52998-2004May24.html">Ken Langone</a> -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.

I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.

It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.

But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.

And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.