Politics in the Zeros
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California bans Diebold voting machines in four counties, calls for criminal investigation

The state’s top elections official called for a criminal investigation of Diebold Election Systems Inc. as he banned use of the company’s newest model touchscreen voting machine, citing concerns about its security and reliability.

Friday’s ban will force up to 2 million voters in four counties, including San Diego, to use paper ballots in November, marking their choices in ovals read by optical scanners.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley asked the attorney general’s office to investigate allegations of fraud, saying Diebold had lied to state officials.

I’m listening to the California Secretary of State at the press conference as I type this. He is seriously pissed and is point-blank accusing Diebold of deliberately breaking the law in numerous ways.

This may well be the death knell for touchscreen voting. Good. Until such systems are genuinely verifiable, they should not be used. You’re damn right I don’t trust unverifiable voting systems created by companies with strong ties to conservative Republican causes!

US report: Terrorism at 35-year low

The number of terrorist attacks worldwide has dropped to its lowest level since 1969, according to a US State Department report.

A 35 year low? Lord have mercy, and here the TV media is scaring us silly with unending reports of commies, whoops, terrorists under every bed. Hmm, why is this? Reading White House press releases as news certainly is less taxing than all that tedious investigative journalism or am I too cynical?

Why oh why do they hate us. The saga continues.
US troops accused of torturing Iraqis

Those ungrateful wretches…
Iraqi Council members demand full sovereignty.

U.S., Iraq generals reach tentative deal, uh huh…
The “deal” is - are you ready - a former general under Saddam will invade Falluja, uh, “handle security” for the US, who promises to leave town. However the bombings are continuing unabated. A clear pattern is emerging. US military pretends to talk peace as they continue the war.

But it’s not working out, is it? Support for war is down sharply.

Nader coming on strong

An editorial from from FortWayne.com

Supporters of John Kerry are kidding themselves if they think Ralph Nader won�t hurt their candidate. The latest Gallup Poll, taken April 5-8, gives him 4 percent. A Newsweek poll of 18- to 29-year-olds found 12 percent backing Nader, “at the expense of John Kerry.” And Democrats have to be worried about a survey in New Hampshire last month that found Nader with 8 percent.

Maybe Democrats should figure out why Nader is attracting votes, then do the same because Kerry appears dead in the water while Nader is gaining strength.

But they should worry more as they look at Iraq. The war there is not going well. Kerry�s position on the war is not much different from the president�s. Nader, by contrast, is fervently anti-war: “I have been against this war from the beginning.”

In early April, Gallup found that 28 percent of those surveyed wanted all U.S. troops out of Iraq, compared with 16 percent in January. If the war deteriorates, the sentiment for pulling out can only rise, and Nader (that is, Bush) will be the beneficiary. He�s the only anti-war game in town.

I disagree. Kerry could easily be the beneficiary. All he has to do is oppose the war. 

The people who want him to quit don�t know Ralph Nader. I have known him for a quarter-century. He is not like other politicians. While I disagree with him on practically every issue, I admire his seriousness, his vigor and his perseverance. This is his life. This is his movement, and it might be his moment. He is not stepping aside for anyone. Good for him.

Green Party nominating convention. Bad moon rising.

It’s looking like there will be a nasty floor fight in the upcoming Green Party (GP) nominating convention between the anyone-but-Nader forces and those who want to either endorse Nader or run him as a candidate.

It’ll be a vicious pie fight too, with lasting damage within the party because of it. Democratic pundits like Eric Alterman will gleefully rub the GP’s face in it too, oh yes they will. And of course a surging Nader run will siphon votes away from the GP by the hundreds of thousands.

I expect a nonentity like David Cobb will get the nomination and then, oh, one half of one percent of the national vote, upon which the GP may well go into a serious, prolonged, maybe terminal slump.

Yeah, I do think it’s that bad. Hope I’m wrong. This is not the time for inward focus and internal battles. This is the time to unite against the war and all that it represents.

A possible conversation between senators in DC

“Hey, isn’t Negroponte linked to death squads in Honduras that murdered and tortured dissidents, insurgents, and anyone opposed to the rulers?”

“Yeah, so what’s your point?”

“Um, maybe he might want to do the same in Iraq…”

“Oh heck, that Honduras thing is ancient history, besides we need someone robust and manly in Iraq to clean up the mess Bush has made.”

“How will making more of a mess clean up the mess that’s already there?”

“Hey, what are you, some kind of dangerous radical like John Kerry, threatening our national security with his opposition to the war?”

“Kerry favors the war. He agrees with Bush completely on it. And he’s running to the right of Bush on Israel.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot… So, what questions will you ask Bush and Cheney when they testify today?”

“As if it matters! Their testimony is in private session, it can’t be taped or transcribed, and they aren’t under oath. A pointless exercise, if you ask me!”

“Hey, can you believe those news reports saying we Senators are useless and gutless”

June 5. International day of emergency protests

Los Angeles March and Rally
Sat. June 5, 12 noon
Assemble at Olympic and Broadway
March to downtown federal building

Bring the Troops Home Now
All foreign troops OUT of Iraq

National mobilization

Great moments in eBay history

From the ever-vigilant Miss Monica:

“Guy sells ex-wife’s wedding dress on ebay — he’s wearing it — gets nearly 4k”

Insurgents in Iraq show signs of acting as a network

They appear to be carrying out coordinated raids and finding ways to recruit new fighters.

Blair slapped upside head by own establishment

From the august Financial Times, no less…

In possibly the most stinging rebuke ever to a British government by its foreign policy establishment, 52 former ambassadors and international officials have written to Tony Blair telling him he is damaging UK (and western) interests by backing George W. Bush’s misguided policies in the Middle East.

Former diplomats’ attack on Blair is off the Richter scale, says Cook.

The bombings of Falluja and Najaf have started

U.S. warplanes hit insurgents in Fallujah

Dozens die as US planes strafe Najaf

The balance of power is wobbling

Al-Qa’eda gunmen attack Syrian capital

Suspected al-Qa’eda gunmen launched co-ordinated attacks on a diplomatic district of Damascus last night, sparking a fierce battle with security forces on the streets of the Syrian capital.

This is direct blowback from the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq. al-Qa’eda or whoever did it sure weren’t attacking in Syria, a secular nation, before the war, were they? But thanks to dimbulb Dubya and his bloodthirsty band of loony neocons, why heck, al Qa’eda probably had to add a third shift to manage all the new recruits who want to fight the US and then demolish any local secular governments.

It was just days ago that someone blew up that Saudi police station, in, I believe, the first direct attack against Saudi, not US targets.  

The current US bombardment of Falluja and Najaf will only serve to create more such attacks - attacks aimed at upsetting the balance of power throughout the Middle East with consequences directly counter to what the Bushies, in their naïveté, believed would happen. In imperialist delusion, they thought they would rule it all. The end result will be quite different.

Leslie Feinberg in L.A.

Sat May 1, 7 pm
International Action Center
422 S Western Ave, Rm 114 (between 4th and 5th St)
Light dinner. $10 suggested.
 
Leslie Feinberg, renowned author of Stone Butch Blues, Transgender Warrior, and Trans Liberation, will speak in LA this Saturday on the struggle for same sex marriage rights, the brutal U.S. war against Iraq and related issues.

She has been an activist/organizer for LGBT liberation, anti-war and social justice issues for more than three decades. I’ve heard her speak before and she is remarkable. Don’t miss this.

Blowback

UN Building burns after Damascus explosions

The United Nations building was on fire and a terrorist group started shooting following three explosions in a western Damascus neighborhood.

Falluja and Najaf. Much worse is yet to come.

It’s a given the US military will attack Falluja and Najaf, and no doubt will do so in a mind-numbingly brutal and self-defeating way. Self-defeating? Yes. The attacks will fail, the resistance will grow exponentially in size and ferocity, and the world will become a vastly more dangerous place.

They thought it would be easy to grab Iraq, that their plans to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq while simultaneously grabbing the oil, would be a non-event with the joyful natives greeting them by tossing rose petals in their paths. Instead, their mad visions of imperialistic power and unquestioned American dominance worldwide are, quite literally, blowing up in their faces.

Remember when US deaths in Iraq were a rare event? Now there are multiple deaths every day. What does our military do? Change tactics? Revise their plans? Well of course not. Instead they huff and puff, and swagger about boasting how they are the roughest, toughest military in the world and how those Muslimoids are about to get themselves a serious case of ass-whomp. They’ve been saying this for months. Every time they Git Tough, the resistance escalates, and the US military position becomes more precarious. All of which would be a quite comical display of macho ineptness were the consequences of their lunacy not so serious.

As always, “don’t mourn, organize.” And now IS the time to organize.

Anyone who believes that April has been the cruelest month of this Iraq war - 111 Americans killed with the total dead now at 718, hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed - should gird themselves for the reality that the worst, the very worst, the unimaginably awful, is still yet to come.

Do the math.

American forces attack Falluja, and become ensconced in a brutal street-to-street fight within the confines of that maze-like city. 300,000 civilians will be caught in the crossfire, and the resulting carnage will enflame the Iraqi people to a degree not yet seen. American forces will absorb brutal casualties. If the U.S. decides to avoid troop casualties by bombing Falluja in a repeat of Shock and Awe, the loss of civilian life will be beyond severe.

Simultaneously, American forces attack Najaf, a holy city central to the spiritual lives of millions of Shi’ites around the world. An explosion of rage will engulf the Middle East. Iran, which has something resembling a real army, could very well drive across the border to engage American forces that are already stretched. This war, already a ridiculous mess, will become an unmitigated catastrophe.

Attacks halt rebuilding of Iraq.
GE and Siemens have bailed, thus the electrical grid will not be rebuilt in time for the coming extreme summer heat, which will make the natives very cranky indeed. You’d get cranky too if it was 115 and no electricity. 

Geneva convention ‘breached’, agencies warn.
Oh that pesky thing.

Veterans for Peace, Arlington West Project
Veterans set this up every Sunday at the Santa Monica Pier, one homemade cross for every soldier killed in Iraq. They will continue doing so until the war is over.

Photo by Kevin McKeown

Over one million march in DC for women’s rights!

This was the biggest march ever in the United States. That’s right, the biggest ever.

They were pro-choice, anti-Bush, and made sure the country (and politicians) heard their message, which was - We vote, and we will be voting in huge numbers in November.

Protesters crowded the National Mall on Sunday to show support for abortion rights and opposition to Bush administration policies on women’s health issues in one of the biggest demonstrations in U.S. history.

There was no official crowd count, but organizers claimed more than one million people participated.

Pink- and purple-shirted protesters raised signs reading “Fight the Radical Right,” “Keep Abortion Legal” and “U.S. Out Of My Uterus” and covered the Mall from the foot of Capitol Hill to the base of the Washington Monument.

“Vote That Smirk Out of Office,” was a characteristically political placard targeting Bush, but Dorothy Smith, 76, of Eldridge, Missouri, carried an emblem she made herself — a wire coat hanger draped with a sign reading “Never Again.”

The organizers for this deserve huge kudos, the crowd size and enthuasism surpassed all expectation.

SHUs. A living tomb.

California, quite possibly, has the most brutal prisons in the nation. This is deliberate, and part of the massive prison industrial complex in the California gulags, er, penal system. The worst are the Orwellian-named Special Housing Units (SHUs), where inmates are kept 22 hours a day in 6×9 foot cells with deliberate sensory deprivation and little, if any, human contact permitted. You can be put into a SHU if a guard says you might be a gang member or if he says you were talking to one. There is no appeal. You stay there until you are paroled, rat someone out, or die.

The Midnight Special, a leftie bookstore in Santa Monica, had an art opening today of drawings done by inmates in currently in SHUs. I bought one, a quite beautiful drawing of a quetzal and two hummingbirds done by Jack L. Morris. Jack has been in a SHU and in virtual solitary confinement for nineteen years. They don’t let SHU inmates have colored pencils, so the color in their drawings comes from them rubbing the color off photos and text in magazines, then laboriously transforming it into paint.

What is gained by not letting Jack have colored pencils? What is gained by keeping anyone in solitary for that long? This is not rehabilitation, this is not even punishment, instead this is torture. If a US soldier were to be captured by the insurgents in Iraq and held under such conditions, the Bushies would be screaming ‘human rights violations’, yet such barbarities happen routinely in supposedly enlightened California.

In 1995 a Federal Court found conditions at Pelican Bay to be unconstitutional. Amnesty International has said conditions in SHUs and SuperMax violate international standards for humane treatment of prisoners. Yet nothing has changed.

Luis Rodriguez spoke, then read poetry written by inmates as well as some of his own. He was a gang member in the 70’s, now is a respected poet and author. He helped start Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural (”Where art and minds meet - for a change”) in LA, works with gang kids, and is perhaps best known for his book, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., which he wrote in an attempt to steer his son away from the gang life.

Y’see, for many there, including Rodriguez, this is deeply personal. He has friends and family in prisons, including his son, who is doing 28 to life in Illinois. Two women, sisters of men in SHUs, read poetry their brothers have written. Yeah yeah we need to git tough on crime and stomp the evildoers, but when you see a grown woman almost unable to read the poetry because she so misses her brother who has been in one of these living tombs for 25 years - well, there just has to be a better way. Because what SHUs are can only be called torture.

The event was taped, and maybe the tapes will be allowed into the SHUs. All the speakers made a point of saying how, while family and friends may be in SHUs, they are not forgotten and are still family. And that no one should be treated like that.

It appears there will be an initiative on the ballot in November in California making the grotesque Three Strikes Law applicable only to “serious and violent” crimes. Right now, 4,100 3rd Strikers are serving 25 to life sentences for nonviolent crimes - yet more evidence of vindictive madness in an out of control penal system.

Prison Activist Resource Center

Families to Amend California Three Strikes

Death Penalty Focus