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Burma U.S. military

BANGKOK, Thailand -- America wants to install "a puppet government" in Burma and seize an island in the Andaman Sea and a mountain near China so the Pentagon can build military bases and attack Asia, according to Burma's official media.

"If the [U.S.] power has a naval base on our Coco Kyun Island, it can launch a blitzkrieg against the eastern or the western hemisphere," the military regime's official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.

Burma, mainland Southeast Asia's biggest country, is also known as Myanmar and has been ruled by its military since 1962.

"If the big nation [America] can deploy troops and missiles in the north of Myanmar, it can target and attack any specified country in and around the region," it said.

The Coco Islands are two dots just north of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, off southern Burma where the Bay of Bengal mingles with the Andaman Sea, at about the same latitude as Thailand's capital, Bangkok.

Did you erase your own vote?

In 2004, New Mexico once again led the nation in Presidential undervote rate. Undervotes are ballots cast without a vote for President, and New Mexico had 21, 084 of them – 2.78% of the total ballots cast last November or one out of every 36 voters. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron seems surprisingly untroubled by undervotes, commenting after the election that she doesn't "spend a lot of time on undervote issues, I'm just speculating that some voters are just not concerned with the presidential race." [1]

I never found this very convincing. However, the recent testimony from the head of Automated Election Services (AES), the company that provides election services to most of the counties in New Mexico, may offer a more persuasive explanation.

The analysis [2] of the certified results of the New Mexico election that I undertook with Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org revealed that more than 80% of New Mexico’s undervotes were recorded (or, more accurately, not recorded) on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with the main culprits being the Sequoia Advantage and the Danaher Shouptronic - both “push button” electronic machines.

Diane Wilson, magnificent unreasonableness

AUSTIN, Texas -- I am writing about the most extraordinary book by the most extraordinary woman, and I would have interviewed her at length, except she's going to be arrested if she ever sets foot back in our home state.

That's pretty much the way life goes these days for Diane Wilson, who used to be just a regular old shrimper and mother of five kids, until she accidentally became an activist. Then, all hell broke loose. The results are described in "An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas."

I believe the book will become a classic, not just of the environmental movement, but of American lit, as well. It is the rare, clear, moving voice of a working-class woman goaded into action against the greatest massed forces in the world today: globalized corporate greed backed by government power.

Media at a huge crossroads, 25 years after Reagan’s triumph

By a twist of political fate, the Oct. 28 deadline for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to take action on the Plamegate matter is exactly 25 years after the only debate of the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. How the major media outlets choose to handle the current explosive scandal in the months ahead will have enormous impacts on the trajectory of American politics.

A quarter of a century ago, conservative Republicans captured the White House. Today, a more extreme incarnation of the GOP’s right wing has a firm grip on the executive branch. None of it would have been possible without a largely deferential press corps.

Among other things, Reagan’s victory over Carter was a media triumph of style in the service of far-right agendas. When their only debate occurred on Oct. 28, 1980, a week before the election, Carter looked rigid and defensive while Reagan seemed at ease, making impact with zingers like “There you go again.” More than ever, one-liners dazzled the press corps.

For the next eight years, a “Teflon presidency” had the news media

Iraq is not Vietnam. But...

Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.

Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries -- while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge -- are far from identical.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.

War after war, decade after decade, the U.S. news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.

From the U.S. media’s fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the U.S. news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.

We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with

Attack plans

http://mattbors.com

Hard conversations about the big easy

As the New Orleans disaster recedes from the headlines, citizen activists face a choice. We can focus exclusively on other newer issues. Or we can work to make the disaster one of those key turning points with the potential to transform American politics. For this to happen, we need to consciously create new dialogue, reaching well beyond the core converted.

If we think back to the 9/11 attacks, which have shaped American politics ever since, a brief window of critical reflection opened up in their immediate wake. Middle East experts critical of U.S. policies had op-eds in our largest newspapers and appeared on network TV. Ordinary citizens mourned the victims, while asking what would make the attackers so embittered they'd be willing to murder 3,000 innocent people. The next day, when I spoke about possible root causes, with even more frankness than usual, at a community college in the overwhelmingly Republican suburbs just north of Dallas, the response was amazingly receptive.

But by a few weeks later visible public questioning had largely ceased. Most Americans accepted the Bush administration's definition of a war of absolute

Great work and talk radio

Thanks for all the good work guys.

None of this Bush disaster would be possible without the right wing talk radio monopoly. We know Bush and the GOP don't care how many people protest at state or federal capitols. They WILL care if people protest at their local talk radio stations where their propaganda is broadcast.

Right wing radio is the only place the lies can be repeated over and over to a largely captive audience- "to catapult the propaganda", as Bush said. That is the GOP base and that is what makes red states red. Many progressives and sensible people ignore it because it gives headaches and nausea but it permeates this country with boundaries over which people like Dan Rather cannot pass.

Talk radio is where the "immigration crisis" has beeen blown up far enough to pass the real id legislation but more importantly has been used and will be used to knock down any real election reform.

What gets the GOP base to cheerlead their reps and harrass and threaten anyone who questions or threatens their agenda, especially Republicans who might want to cross Bush, is talk radio. As long as the local talk radio

Was the vote on the Iraqi constitution fixed? A rotten foundation is hard to build on

“It wouldn't surprise me if the election was rigged,” said a U.S. Army officer in Mosul who requested anonymity from Time and who worked on security arrangements for the poll with Iraqi security and election officials. “I don't even trust our election process.”

If democracy is supposed to provide legitimacy to government – what does a fraudulent election provide? The U.S. occupation, already suffering a host of problems – false reasons for the invasion, lack of international support, wanning support in the U.S., Abu Gharib prison scandals, the Fallujah attack, the killing of civilians, a strengthening insurgency, lack of support by former generals and foreign service officers, and generals on the ground saying the presence of U.S. troops are increasing the strength of the insurgency – now has a voting scandal on its hands.

Koran Muslims

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's Buddhist prime minister angrily told the Saudi Arabian-based Organization of Islamic Conference to "read the Koran" before criticizing his military crackdown in the south, where more than 1,000 people have died in the worst Islamist insurgency outside Iraq.

"I would like him to read the Koran which stated clearly that all Muslims, regardless where they live, must respect the law of that land," Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Thursday (Oct. 20), in remarks aimed at OIC Secretary-General Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

"This means the Koran wants Muslims to live peacefully with people of other religions," Thaksin said, referring to Islam's sacred text which believers regard as God's revelations.

Thaksin has been struggling to contain the rapidly escalating violence in southern Thailand, where most of this Southeast Asian nation's minority Muslims live.

"All Thai people are tired of the violence and want to see peace. I will do every by all means to end the violence," Thaksin said.

"Such criticisms contained in the Muslim organization's communique is considered most inappropriate."

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