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SATIRE: 'Osama in October': Leaked White House Transcript (9)

Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Ridge, Schwarzenegger, Rove

PRESIDENT BUSH: Alright, everybody, on your knees. We've been beat up enough these past few months. It's time to get right with the Big Guy.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Yes, George, I quite agree. It's long overdue.

ALL: Shuffling. Silence.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Dear Lord, we know you are testing us, and that we shall not be found wanting. It is not for nothing that you elected me President. I have allowed the September 11 attacks to occur, as you asked through Reverend Robertson, to put this nation on notice that it can no longer live in sin. We have launched our crusade against the Islamics. We have smited the Saddamites. We are warming the planet with Holy Fire, as revealed in Revelations. This is a time of illusion for those who would do us harm, or attempt to take power from your true servants We all know that I am your Divine messenger, sent to get things right. So please, dear Lord, help us as always, continue to kick liberal butt.

ALL: Amen.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Alright, so lets get down to it. This Kerry guy is pretty tall, isn't he.

A candidate

AUSTIN, Texas -- So the Democrats have a candidate at last, and he is about bent over double with gravitas. I think that means he doesn't a have humorous bone in his body. It's a good thing there's at least one serious person in this race -- the Bushies are getting sillier and sillier.  

            Just when you thought no one could top Rod Paige calling the teacher's union "a terrorist organization," along comes Veep Cheney with this gem, "If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two-to-three years, the kind of tax increases both Kerry and Edwards are talking about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had."  

            Uh, in the first place, Kerry and Edwards are not talking about tax increases at all, but about repealing part of Bush's tax cuts -- so we would have had no tax cuts, not tax increases. And in the second place, if losing 2.3 million jobs is "job growth," Dick Cheney is a laugh riot.

The uproar over Nader

Here's how a lifelong, very radical organizer put it to me the week after Nader announced he was entering the race.

            "I have never voted for a Democrat for president, and I don't intend to start now, but I want to beat Bush -- I want to beat Bush more than I have ever wanted to beat any Republican.

            "I support Nader's run, wholeheartedly, but at the same time I think that punishing Bush should be the main point of this election.

            "Vote now to punish Bush; four years hence, vote to punish Kerry. And so on. But I am not sure where that leaves me. Can a vote for Nader be a vote to punish Bush, or does it just split the vote against Bush? That can be argued, as Nader did in his declaratory speech.

Keep Davis-Besse nuclear plant closed!

As you may know, FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio has been shutdown for over two years because a football-sized hole was discovered by workers during routine maintenance.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is deciding any day now whether or not to allow FirstEnergy to restart Davis-Besse, perhaps the nation's most poorly managed, and therefore most dangerous, nuclear reactor.

We need Ohio's leaders to stand up for the health and safety of all Ohioans by opposing attempts to restart Davis-Besse.

Please take a moment to ask Governor Taft and his Director of Public Safety to speak out against restarting Davis-Besse. Then, ask your friends and family to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser: pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=595&id4=OHFreep

BACKGROUND

Don't hit the hornets' nest

 AUSTIN, Texas -- Anyone see any reason to think Haiti will be better off without Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Just another little gift from the Bush foreign policy team, straight out of the whacko-right playbook.

            Jesse Helms always did think Aristide was another Fidel, not being able to distinguish between a Catholic and a communist. We know the main armed opposition group is a bunch of thugs and that they have been joined by old Duvalierists, including members of the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous torturers.

            The Bush administration wanted this to happen -- it held up $500 million worth of humanitarian aid from the United States, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and International Monetary Fund. Without U.S. or multilateral help, the country spiraled downward.

            So here we are, reduced to hoping for the best again.

            David Corn of The Nation magazine developed a wonderful metaphor for this experience. It goes like this: Two kids are playing, and one says, "I'm gonna take this stick and whack that hornets' nest."

Mel Gibson and the Killing of the Christ

At a time when the Republican White House stands in full breech of Jefferson's guarantee of religious freedom (implemented by the now defunct separation of church and state), Mel Gibson's portrayal of "The Passion of Christ" is a reminder of millennial issues in the world of western Christendom. By and large, these issues were successfully dealt with two centuries ago by America's "founding fathers."

We must keep in mind that American Democracy actually has two remarkably different sets of "founding fathers." There were the Revolutionary liberals who rallied around Paine's "Common Sense" and Jefferson's Declaration of human rights (as America's ideological base). Opposed were the religious conservatives (made up largely of pro-British Tories) who had very little interest in any of this new ideology, being more interested in efforts to circumvent a revolution.

THANK YOU Bob Fitrakis - 'Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy'

We caught Bob Fitrakis' 2/25/04 article, "Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", thru Truthout.org      

THANK YOU, THANK YOU and did we say . THANK YOU! Please continue to shine a light on the dangers of paperless voting machines.  My husband and I are very concerned and scared about the integrity of our voting system. We have never missed walking into our polling place to vote in an election since we were each old enough to vote.  However, if paperless voting machines are put into use, we will not trust the process and our answer is Absentee Ballot.  Over 500 American soldiers have died in Iraq for Democracy and the assurance of a Fair Election.  Shouldn't we Americans also be assured a Fair Election?

A new electronic voting scheme

Dear Bob Fitrakis:

I read your interesting article on Diebold and electronic voting in the 2/24 Columbus Free Press

There's another, more reliable, and cheaper way of doing electronic voting, and it could use existing machines; no need to purchase new ones from Diebold.

There are more than 270,000 ATMs in the U.S.; it would not be difficult to write voting programs for them, and to issue ATM 'voting' cards to registered voters.

A voting system using ATMs would be a LOT less expensive than the $5 to $8 billion projected for using new voting equipment throughout the US, and be more secure than all existing and many proposed voting systems. Such a system could be a very interesting source of revenue for an ATM manufacturer like NCR.

ATMs have very accurate methods for dealing with depositor's (and the bank's) money; this same accuracy could be adapted to vote counting. Banks already have a secure and fraud-resistant system for sending ATM data to central computers.

How might an ATM voting system work ? Prior to election day registered

USS Des Moines

I am trying to locate former crew members of the heavy cruiser USS DES MOINES. Our annual reunion is held in rural MERCER, PA each August. This year it is on the 6th through the 8th. They can contact me at (321) 632-6347 or via email at: tmmax@hotmail.com. Thank You!

Tom MacFarlane
Cocoa, Florida

50 Years of Nuclear Testing Fallibility. Bravo?

March 1 st , 2004 marks the 50 th anniversary of the 1954 US "Bravo" hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands that unexpectedly turned out to be the largest US nuclear test ever exploded. "Bravo" gouged a crater about a mile wide in the reef of Bikini Atoll. Within seconds of the blast, the fireball was nearly three miles in diameter. On Rongerik, an island 135 miles east of the blast, the illumination from "Bravo" was visible for almost one minute. Physicist Marshall Rosenbluth, located on a ship about 30 miles away, stated that the fireball "just kept rising and rising, and spreading.it looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like on the surface.and the air started getting filled with this gray stuff, which I guess was somewhat radioactive coral."

      Human Fallibility

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