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7/18/02 - Sudden Death
So with someone sitting behind me half the time watching what I am doing, now that the Bush administration changes in personnel and employee relations has shuffled down to my own tiny corner of the deck, I can hardly put out regular issues of UncommonSense. Sure, I might occassionally produce some witty little item or graphic and post it here, but if I want to keep my job (and I do), the carefree days of free expression are over. I'll have to find other ways to look busy.
Please continue visiting important sites like Bartcop, Mediawhoresonline, Buzzflash, Bushwatch, etc.. Keep fighting the fight. I'll find new ways to fight it.
Meanwhile, if you've ever wondered who I am, please take a look at my personal website. I've never used Uncommonsense to promote my books, even though this site gets much more attention than my book site. Maybe someday I'll make enough money to support myself strictly through my fiction. If that day ever comes, and there is a need for political debate, Uncommonsense may return. Like Godzilla.
This is Uncommonsense, signing off.
7/17/02
What will it take before there are wide calls for Bush and Cheney to come clean or resign? I mean, Bush tells reporters that they will have to check the director's minutes to get specifics about Harken, then refuses to turn over those minutes. Dick Cheney is in hiding, and no matter what Ari the Liar says, Dick's hands are red. The "lock up" letter story was quickly spun as unimportant, but on closer examination proves a couple of slimy things about our appointed president:
It just gets curiouser and curiouser, don't it?
And in case you missed it last time, here is the story about the Fed's plunge protection team, designed to prevent a stock market plunge. You were wondering how a market could go from almost 500 points down to just 50 down the other day? Look no further than here. I suppose this sounds like a good idea, except that taxpayers could end up holding a bag full of worthless stocks bought up by the Fed in a fruitless effort to prop up a crumbling stock market.
Want to see a Justice Department official tell an outright lie?
"That is why each and every person taken into custody since 9/11 is given the full panoply of rights including the right to go to the press. These are not incognito detainees." - Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh
Appalling, isn't it? Obviously, this guy has graduated from the Rush Limbaugh school of public relations. This is rather like insisting that the sun rises in the west. Thankfully, there was someone around to point out this blatant fabrication. Read the rest of the story here.
An Update on the Pledge issue, from Harper's Weekly Review.
The schoolgirl from California whose atheist father successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance is a Christian and has no qualms about reciting the pledge, her mother told the press. "I was concerned," she said, "that the American public would be led to believe that my daughter is an atheist."
Do you get the feeling there is more to that story than we are being told, like lingering ill will from a bitter custody battle?
7/16/02 - Back in the Day
Now someone is reporting on the mainstream press' failure to report the Harken story during the 2000 election. I wondered why Talk magazine failed so spectacularly. I thought it was the drunk Jenna cover they did. Payback is hell, and that's why the press had their butt cheeks buttered for the CEOs from Texas.
It must be infuriating for people who have made their fortunes over the years almost exclusively through country-club-back-slapping-cigar-chomping-and-tail-oggling insider trading to have their everybody-I-know-does-it-but-then-again-I-only-know-rich-criminals financial transactions exposed despite their best efforts to control access to all information for the sake of national security. Bush dumps Harken stock, Cheney dumps Halliburton, everybody dump-dumps, Old McDonald had nine homes in Aspen, ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.
Does Ted Rall read UncommonSense (or Democratic Underground)? This says much the same thing as the last part of this.
Back in September, when Bush was revving up his war against terraism, the administration kept issuing warnings that it was about to seize terraists' assets from offshore banking havens. Again and again, they made this announcement. At the time, I kept wondering, why are they announcing this? What are they waiting for? Why give the terraists time to shift their money to safer waters? I suspected that what they were really doing was giving Bush cronies time to shift their own illegal accounts from those same banks. I thought, this month long warning is to protect their own people, to give them time to bury their own illegal transactions. They're hiding something.
Finally, in October they announced that they had frozen assets linked to terraism and terraists. You'll recall that it was at about this time that Enron's shit hit the fan.
Coincidence? I don't think so. If you are an investigative journalist or if you know one, this is the story that could break the bank. I don't have the time, means, connections or expertise to investigate it myself. But if you do, why not look into the real reason why the Bush administration issued warnings for almost a month before seizing assets from offshore banks? Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, Smokin Joe are you out there?
7/15/02 - Ye Merrye Olde Tax
Beginning today, Tenneessee implements an increase to its already high sales tax that is so arcane and confusing that it has retailers scrambling to figure it out so that they can reprogram their cash registers. In some cases, they are forced to look at the list of ingredients on specific items to determine if the new tax increase applies. It seems more like some kind of medieval tax system, with a hefty increase to the so-called sin taxes. I should have stocked up on liquor Saturday, but that's ok, I live close enough to Mississippi to do my shopping there. Sorry Tennessee liquor store owners. Without my purchases, you are sure to go under. Unless Tennessee decides to also install gates and customs officers, moats, curtain walls and castle towers at the borders to make sure people aren't trying to smuggle untaxed chocolate covered raisins into the state.
See, I'm not against a fair tax to pay for state and local needs, especially as the Bush administration is heaving more and more responsibility for funding social programs onto the states. What I am against is a tax system that says you charge more tax on a Snickers than a Twix because a Twix contains flour and thus it is food. I'm against ever increasing sin taxes on liquor but not coffee. I'm against calling liquor a sin. As a sinner, I say we've taxed sin enough, it's time for the churches to start paying their way, too. And I am especially against someone who makes a million a year paying the same amount in state taxes for a Snickers as someone who makes $12,000 a year.
To paraphrase Johnny Carson, "Scary, scary stuff." As we run out of oil, it seems that the 'next big thing' in making obscene profits from something pumped from the ground is drinking water. If you can't pay, you die of thirst. So sorry, but people are people and profits are profits and never shall the concerns of the former trump the gathering of the latter. I imagine they will make rain collection illegal or unpatriotic. Time to invest in home desalination equipment.
So what we need to do is start a new comedy sketch based on Jeff Foxworthy's old "You Might Be a Redneck" routine. Like,
If you report serious failures in the visa program that possibly allowed terrorists to enter this country with the government's knowledge, You Might Be a Terraist.
If you think that it is a bad idea for the government to train your Dittohead neighbors to spy on you with all those neat gadgets from Sharper Image, You Might Be a Terraist.
If you think the Democrats is Congress should stop playing footsie and take a stand against the Bush Administration's assault on the Constitution, civil rights, and the balance of governmental powers, You Might Be a Terraist, even if you are a right-wing Reagan-appointed Appeals Court judge.
