The Liberal Majority and How To Win With It

The Liberal Majority and How To Win With It
By Ian Welsh Friday Sep 18, 2009 5:00pm One constant theme which needs dealing with is the idea that the country is more conservative than liberal and that centrists are needed to hold off horrible conservative things from happening.

More than that, this is an argument for oligarchy. What I see is that the majority of people, in poll after poll, want single payer. A huge majority want the public option, yet odds are decent you won’t even get that.

When people talk of left-center coalitions the center part include a large number of Senators (like Diane Feinstein) who won’t do what the majority of their constituents want them to do. At this point centrist = captured by monied interests.

Odds are if Obama wanted single payer, the House could pass it. It’d be close, but they could get it done. The House is the more representative body of the two bodies, the Senate is deliberately retrograde.

When I look at the US what I see is a banana republic, because it doesn’t act like a democracy. I see people who think that the Senate, or even the House, actually does what the American people want. Again and again, Congress does things that the majority disagree with. In 2006 the Dems were elected to end the war in Iraq, for example, and refused to do so (though again, the House at least went through the motion, the Senate didn’t even make an effort). Oh, Congress will sometimes do what the majority want—when that’s what it was going to do anyway.

The plan to fix this is simple enough and always has been.

Obama was a right wing democrat and this was clear early. This was clear even in the primaries and certainly into the election. Once he was chosen as the nominee the best idea was to not to work for him or give him money, because he could win or lose without netroots or progressive support (it was a drop in the bucket compared to what he was getting elsewhere and was not decisive for him), and to instead take that time and money and spend it on electing progressive members of Congress, where that amount of money and volunteers could be decisive.

People who hold progressive and liberal policy views are a much larger proportion of the population than the right wing crazies are, they are in fact a majority of the population, though you’d never know it from listening to the gnashing of teeth of some folks.

If the right wing crazies could capture the Republican party, liberals and progressives, who already make up the largest block in the House, and who massively outnumber Blue Dogs, can certainly do the same to the Democratic party.

If, of course, they stop telling themselves self-excusing lies about how the country doesn’t agree with them on basic issues like healthcare, when, in fact, the country does. Americans may not call themselves liberals, but when you look at their actual policy positions they are more liberal on most (not all, but most) issues than they are conservative. That’s a gap in self-perception it should be possible to jump.

It takes real work for the centrists and right wing to keep Liberals and Progressives down. Notice that almost all of Obama’s whipping is towards the left, towards progressives, not to the right. The right wing of the Democratic party is more or less doing what he wants (forget the rhetoric, again, look at who he and Rahm whip), it’s the left wing he’s scared of, because if they got their act together they could stop him from passing anything. The Blue Dogs in the House do not currently have a veto, the Progressives, if they want to use it, do. And that’s why they get the back side of Obama and Rahm’s hand so often.

The left is the most dangerous force in American politics today. The entire resources of the lobbying industry and of centrist Democratic interests are required to keep it in check, not just during legislative season, but during elections, when the DCCC and the DSCC do their very best to make sure that progressives don’t win primaries, and when they do, that they’re starved of resources.

So time to spine up. If you’re a left wing Democrat, you belong to the scariest force in American politics. The crazy right will have some good cycles yet to come, mainly due to Democratic establishment incompetence and preference for mushy middle candidates but demographics are against them. Don’t write Republicans off yet, but they are failing. You—the left—is the rising force, and everyone in the center and the right, is doing everything they can to keep you down.

Don’t let them, and don’t believe lies about how you’re some tiny minority whom the American people don’t agree with.


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America, I Love You. Americans, On the Other Hand…

America, I Love You. Americans, On the Other Hand…
By Evan Handler
Actor, author, screenwriter, and journalist
I have found the last week to be one of the most politically dispiriting of my adulthood. After President Obama’s address to the nation on health care, I posted an opinion piece on Huffington Post which garnered well over 600 comments, as well as dozens of emails sent directly my way. The piece was in support of strong health care reform legislation, including a “public option,” and used my own history of overcoming acute myeloid leukemia, as well as my wife’s Italian family’s health care experiences in that country, as reference points. Most responses were of the “Thank you for saying what I’ve felt” variety, and it’s always gratifying to be told I’ve said something important, or made someone else feel heard.

The strong minority current won’t surprise anyone who’s followed the health care debate, or most any political discussion, over the past couple of years. A vocal minority has let me know, over and over again, that they don’t want the government taking any more of their money; that they want to be able to decide how to spend and invest their own money; that they don’t want to have to pay for anything for anyone else; and — the big time, firecracker, most-consistent comment of all — they don’t want any Americans to have government-subsidized health care insurance if one single, goddamn, fucking, disgusting illegal immigrant might be able to get their hands on it, too.

Okay. I get it. And here’s my response to both groups.

First, to those opposed to any European-styled government subsidized health insurance option: I found every one of your arguments to be small-minded, selfish, fear-driven, ill-informed, self-serving, and — most crucially — detrimental to the long-term interests of the United States of America. As I indicated in my last piece, the oft-stated logic of “government out of my life” is a fantasy existence you’ve never experienced, and that you’d whimper in fear over were you ever subjected to it for an instant. Make a list of the industries you’re aware of: medical, chemical, automobile, steel, housing, whatever. Each and every one of them would crush you with glee without government regulations if it added to their profits by one one-millionth of a percentage point. They’d sell the juice they squeezed out of you as a refreshment drink, if they could get away with it. As corrupt and inefficient as your government is (and it clearly is), it’s the only thing keeping you alive moment to moment. Reform it, by all means. Keep it honest. Throw out the bums who aren’t protecting you adequately enough. But, end its involvement in your life? Scale it back? You’re kidding yourself. That’s a joke. Take one look back at history (please, just one look!), and see how workers, and children, and consumers are now protected where they were once injured and exploited. That’s called “progress,” and we’re hoping to add a little more.

To those who insisted, “I don’t use public transportation, my local taxes pay for my town’s sidewalks, I don’t use this, I don’t use that,” yours are idiotic arguments. The concrete under your feet, the steel used in elevators, the earthquake and flood resistant building codes, the dams that don’t break and drown you, the cars that (hopefully) don’t fall apart as you’re driving them, the airplanes that don’t (usually) land on your head — every single thing that keeps you safe every day of your life is provided to you by a government standard or regulation. Argue with me about it all day long; go ahead and take offense at my use of the word “idiotic.” None of it changes the fact that you wouldn’t survive a week if you were really in it on your own, and that your resistance to recognizing it is a much bigger problem than 11 million people who entered this country illegally. You, in your refusal to acknowledge your interdependence with everyone else, are a bigger problem than they are.

As to those immigrants, and the rage I’ve seen inspired by them, just give me a break. You’re all immigrants. Every one of you. Every one of your pink, overstuffed, jiggly “American” asses is stuffed full of tortillas, or pancetta, or paella, or schnitzel, or knockwurst, or moussaka, or Dublin Coddle, or whatever the fuck your ancestors ate before they crawled their way over here. And, when they got here, someone hated them just as much as you’re hating whoever’s newest here now, and fought against their having anything you now enjoy.

If it’s only the illegal entry that’s an issue for you, let me ask you this: If you lived in Country A, where you and your family were starving, and you knew you could get a job in Country B, are you telling me you wouldn’t sneak across a border to feed them? Of course you would. And, if the people of Country B kind of, sort of allowed it, and benefited tremendously from your willingness to harvest their crops, or work on their assembly lines, or vacuum their offices, or clean their children’s school toilets for pennies, it would be pretty shitty treatment, indeed, to turn you away from an emergency room if you got got sick, like I’ve heard recommended in terms of the undocumented residents of the United States.

As to those undocumented residents, get ready to have your blood really boil. They’re not going anywhere. No one is going to round them up and send them home, other than in token gestures to calm you down, and no amount of mistreatment is going to force them to run home in any meaningful numbers. What needs to happen, and what will happen, is that they be put on track to gain legal residency status, so that they will pay taxes, and be rightfully protected from all the evils I’ve outlined above, just like the rest of us human beings living here. The reason it needs to happen and will happen is that it’s the more cost efficient thing to do. It’s cheaper than keeping them here as a marginalized population, with all the costs included in that, and it’s cheaper than the impossible process of gathering, prosecuting,and sending them away. Really, when will enough be enough? Don’t you realize, can’t you realize, that all the change you’re fighting against — just like the protections that are now taken for granted, but that someone fought against once-upon-a-time — will happen, eventually, whether you like it or not?

That last bit is the only thing that comforts me right now. No matter how hard the nitwits (and the clever ones who manipulate them) fight, eventually everything they despise will come to pass. Gays will get married and enjoy equal protection. There will be some form of government-subsidized health care coverage for all. And the vast majority of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants currently here will be granted some degree of permanent residency status. These things will all happen, even if it’s thirty more years until they do, because they need to. They are the most correct solutions. (Don’t tell me, “There’s no right or wrong. We just happen to disagree.” Nonsense. I don’t accept it. There is right, and there is wrong, and those against strengthening protections for those least able to protect themselves are wrong.) The joke is that, by fighting, and delaying, those who think it’s just “unfair,” or that providing rights or protections for others will “cost too much,” or who want “the government out of my pocket,” will make the final tab so much higher than if the reforms were implemented now. The costs of exclusion are astronomical, from ER care for those with no coverage, to cultural warfare and political campaigning, and eventual (lost) lawsuits by those who’ve been trampled upon.

My prediction is that, finally, one day, with fewer fireworks than anyone could now expect, with more of a groan of exhaustion than much celebration, enough of the opposition will have seen enough carnage to come to their senses, or have discovered they can love the gay children they’ve given birth to (imagine that!), or had a catastrophic illness themselves, and the right laws will come into play, and the country will change. But what will we have gained from the long delay?

As to those who agree with some, or much, of what I say, you’d better get off your asses right now. I mean right now. The greedy and the foolish are ruling the day, even after they lost an election (and even though they hold no majorities, either in government or in population). Because they’re working harder. They’re yelling louder. Their hatred is out hustling your good will by a mile. How many of them showed up in Washington, fifty-thousand, or 1.5 million? It doesn’t matter. Because no bigger demonstration existed to demand government-subsidized health insurance be available to those who want it. Were there facts shouted at the town hall meetings, or lies? It doesn’t matter. Because there was no larger force, to sing “I Ain’t A-Scared of Your Lies, ‘Cause I Want My Health Care,” to the tune of the old civil rights song “I Ain’t A-Scared of Your Jail, ‘Cause I Want My Freedom.” That would have made the evening news. Because it would have taken a spectacle, and used it as a jumping point to create a bigger, more powerful, one. Because it would have framed the effort for what it is, a struggle for what should be a civil right. And, at least for one small day, a news cycle would have been won, instead of lost.

Oh, the mail I’ll get now. The comments will scream that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because one or two of my facts might not be perfectly correct, or phrased. People will take offense, and say I’ve lowered the level of dialogue with my language. But there is no dialogue. One glance at the comments section to my last post, or at my emails this week, and you can see. Dialogue is over. There is no convincing those who will not listen to reason.

It’s funny to remember and compare such a small incident, but it applies. When I still lived in New York, I owned a small apartment in a co-op building. There was a security guard who patrolled the block at night, and he was paid by voluntary contributions from those who chose to give. Ten dollars a months was the requested amount. Ten dollars a month, from people who owned Manhattan real estate, in order to make the block a bit safer, and a bit cleaner. But payments to the guard’s salary were dwindling, so a survey was done, and it became clear that while 50% of the people on the block were contributing, our building had a participation rate of only 30%. At a board meeting, some of my neighbors said, “I don’t go out at night. Why should I have to pay for a security guard when I don’t go out at night?”

“Well, would you rather have to step over broken glass and used condoms during the day, when you do go out?” I asked. “Would you rather have noise and music from groups that gather at night, or hear screams from people being robbed, or worse?” It didn’t matter. They weren’t moved.

So we did what the law allowed us to do. We took a vote, and we made the ten dollars a month a mandatory part of the building’s monthly maintenance charges. We went from 30% participation, to 100%. In other words, we stopped trying to reason with them, or make them understand, or agree. We used our majority, and we rammed it down their throats. It’s time now to do the same. This is a war we’re in. Not a shooting war (and I condemn anyone who takes up arms on either side of it, like some have already done at supposed “Town Hall Meetings”). It’s an ideological war. And the longer it takes to recognize and acknowledge that fact, the longer it will take for our society to throw off the outsized influence of those who are willing to wage one from the other side.

So, if you feel inspired, if the words of the last post meant something to you, do something. Don’t write to me on Facebook, or merely pass the article on there (though I thank you for doing so this past week). Call Senators and Congressmen/women. Flood their phone lines. Send them emails. Shout out to them from the street. Carry signs. Gather. Organize. Call ten friends, or a hundred, or fifty-thousand, or a million-and-a-half, and go to Washington. Scream and shout. Wage war. Insist.

We were once a nation of such potential. A nation built on the pride of its self-proclaimed superiority. We’ve been embarrassing ourselves in front of the world since shortly after 9/11, 2001. In spite of a change of leadership, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Shame on the citizens who are trying to obstruct, and shame on the politicians who pandered to them this past week.

The words on the Statue of Liberty, liberators of concentration camps, inventors and innovators throughout the twentieth century. And what’s the United States’ most recent contribution? Collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and eleven million brown, yellow, and red-skinned people who’ll be denied the privilege of paying money to purchase health care insurance. Hooray for the red, white, and blue.

Evan Handler’s latest book is “It’s Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive.”

EvanHandler.com


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What Makes People Want to Play Rock Band and Guitar Hero?

What Makes People Want to Play Rock Band and Guitar Hero?
By Gary Marcus
Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and Professor of Psychology at NYU

In some ways, Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem like the stupidest games on earth. Colored discs scroll down a TV screen, and eager participants mash colored buttons in time with what they see. You press a red button when you see a red disc, a blue button when you see a blue disc, and hold your fire when you see nothing. Rinse, lather, and repeat; that’s about all there is to it. Since the sequence and timing are provided by the game software, you don’t really even need to know the songs. There’s no need to strategize ahead (as in chess); no need for big muscles (as in basketball), and no need to bluff past one’s opponent (as in poker). Few games demand less of the player; I suspect monkeys could be trained to play, and know for a fact that robots can cruise through Guitar Hero on Expert.

Yet the two games together have grossed over three billion dollars, and received extensive coverage in highbrow outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly.

What is the appeal of a game that demands so little of the human mind? Part of it of course lies with the music; the latest Rock Band comes complete with Beatles music, and for people like me, who grew up listening to music, no body of music is more compelling. (For people with rather different tastes, there’s Guitar Hero: Metallica and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, with Steely Dan allegedly on its way, although Jimmy Page swears there will never be a Guitar Hero: Led Zeppelin).

Still, at $60, the game costs as much as 4 or 5 albums, and the game takes more work to play. Why mash buttons on a video game controller, when you could put Sgt. Pepper on your CD player, or learn to play a real guitar? If an alien scientist came to observe humanity, they’d find a lot of things puzzling, but few would be as puzzling as Guitar Hero.

* * *
Some games, of course, could be seen as practice for the real world; Monopoly could be viewed as preparation for a career in real estate, chess for the art of war. Many evolutionary psychologists believe that play evolved as way to ease children into their ultimate adult responsibilities; chasing your friends in a game of tag prepares you for the bison hunt on which your life will later depend.

Whether you buy that theory or not, the plastic “guitars” in Guitar Hero have little to do with real guitars; there are no strings, and no frets, there’s no soundhole, and no jack to hook up to an amplifier, either; except for a bit of clattering, the plastic pseudo-instrument makes no sound at all. And there’s no room for genuine creativity, as there would be with a real instrument. A real apprentice guitarist must spend hours and hours practicing scales and chords, and learning about the relation between melody and harmony; an aficionado of Guitar Hero skips straight to the songs, and may well never learn the difference between a major scale and a minor.

Economists would be puzzled, too. It generally costs the same amount or even less (once you factor out the costs of the plastic guitars) to buy the songs on iTunes as to get them in a package for your Xbox, and if you buy them on iTunes, you can play them over and over, wherever you want, in the car, or in the gym, and not just when you stand in front of your television set. You also aren’t stuck suffering through the abominable mid-80’s Hair Metal, in order to “unlock” the next song that you actually like.

What gives? If it’s not practice for a career in music, and it’s not efficient or rational from an economist’s perspective, what is it that drives people to play these games?

* * *
It’s a lust for power.

Not, mind you, of the sort that allows one to rule the world, but the sort that allows one to control one’s own world.

Dozens of studies over the years have shown that human beings are happier when they believe themselves to be in control. In one famous set of studies, participants were asked to solve simple arithmetic problems while sitting in a room in which sudden blasts of noise occurred at random intervals. One group of subjects had no choice but to listen, the others had a panic button they would be allowed to press if the noise became too much. Though few participants actually pressed the button, the mere feeling of control made the entire experience considerably more bearable. In another famous study, dogs were put in an environment in which nothing that they did correlated with their situation; so-called “learned helplessness” — essentially a form of depression — was the result.

Alas, although humans are very fond of being in control, we aren’t always so good at telling whether we actually have it. As Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has argued in The Illusion of Conscious Will, Oujia boards were designed to trick people into thinking they didn’t have control when they really did. Guitar Hero is designed to do the opposite.

Inferring control is really an exercise in inferring causality; we want to know whether A causes B, but sometimes all we know is that when A happens, B happens too. In technical jargon, we infer causality from temporal contingency.

Games like Guitar Hero set up one of the most potent illusions of temporal contingency I’ve ever seen: if the player presses the button at the right time, the computer plays back a recording of a particular note (or set of notes) played by a professional musician. The music itself is potent and rewarding — Keith Richards really knows how to bend a note — but the real secret to the game is what happens is that fact if you miss the button, you don’t hear the note.

The brain whirs away, and notices the contingency. When I push the button, I hear Keith Richards; when I fail to push the button (or press the wrong button, or press it late), I don’t hear Keith Richards. Therefore, I am Keith Richards!

* * *
It’s not simply that you hear the songs (which bring pleasure) but that the game skillfully induces the illusion that you yourself are generating the songs. You aren’t paying $60 to hear the songs; you’re paying $60 to trick your brain into thinking that you are making them. Your conscious mind may know better — and realize that it’s all just a ruse — but your unconscious mind is completely and happily fooled.

Is that worth $60? If you want to feel like Keith Richards, the answer is surely yes.


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Katrina’s Lessons Are as Important as 9/11’s

Katrina’s Lessons Are as Important as 9/11’s

By Casey Gane-McCalla

Assistant Editor for BlackPlanet.com’s NewsOne

Last Friday was the 8th anniversary of 9/11. The previous week was the 4th anniversary of Katrina. While the media covered a lot of the 9/11 memorials, concerts and memories, it seemed as if the legacy of Katrina got very little attention. Both events have had a great impact on our country, but it seems as if politicians and pundits only learned something from 9/11.
I’d like to think that the lessons of 9/11 would be: Be extremely cautious about domestic terrorists, don’t train militant religious fanatics to fight your enemies, because they might come back to bite us and treat all threats against our country seriously.

While people in the media talk about the lessons of 9/11 very often, it is rare to hear pundits and politicians talk about the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. While 9/11 left 2,998 people dead or missing, Hurricane Katrina left 2,536 people dead or missing and displaced over one million people.

But 9/11 changed several ways the government operates in terms of foreign and domestic polices, while Katrina changed very little. After 9/11, we invaded two countries, started the patriot act and changed airline travel as we know it.

Katrina has caused no significant changes in US policy. What the world saw after Katrina, was a natural disaster inflamed by poverty, segregation and racism. While the government may not have been able to stop the hurricane, the U.S. could have definitely prevented the racism and poverty that made Hurricane Katrina way worse than it should have been.

Hurricane Katrina was an embarrassment to the United States. Despite its great wealth, the U.S. could not take care of its own. After Katrina, George Bush’s approval rating was 45%, half of the 90% it reached after September 11th.

Hubert Humphrey once said, “A nation is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. Congress should not ignore the plight of our nation’s poorest and sickest beneficiaries any longer.”

The judgment on George Bush from his reaction to Katrina both domestically and internationally is part of his legacy forever. Still, it seems as if the lessons of Katrina have been lost on the Republican party.

The Republicans obviously have not learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, as they continue to disregard poor, disenfranchised people, which is reflected in their opposition to health care.

Diseases, like hurricanes, affect everybody. Yet, as in Katrina, the rich seem to be protected against them, while the poor and minority populations are vulnerable and often left with no help to protect themselves against them.

If the next Katrina comes as a virus (like Swine Flu), once again the rest of the world will see how America treats its poorest and sickest beneficiaries. That is why we need health care for every citizen. If America has learned anything from the lessons of Katrina, it is that America must protect all of its citizens, regardless of economic or racial backgrounds.

Katrina was a reminder of the poor people who are rarely on TV and not seen or heard. These people are Americans, not third world refugees. They are entitled to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness given to us in the Declaration of Independence. Just like the government is responsible for trying to help its citizens from disaster, it should be responsible for taking care of its citizens from diseases and health risks.

Protecting our citizens and keeping our country safe is no just about bombing countries that we think our threats. Not all threats come from Islamic extremists. Hunger, poverty, crime, natural disasters and diseases also threaten the safety of our country and citizens. If we can spend billions of dollars to invade other countries to keep our country safer, we should sacrifice to make the country safer for all of our citizens from natural disasters and diseases.

It is time to heed the lessons of Katrina. We are one country and all of our citizens are important, rich and poor, black and white. When a government gives an every man for himself attitude towards disease and natural disasters, it reflects badly on our country. It is the duty of our country to protect its citizens not only against terrorist attacks, but also against natural disasters and diseases as well. That’s why we need to make sure every one of our citizens has the right to health care.


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Lions and Tigers and… Nazis?

Lions and Tigers and… Nazis?
Filed by: Sara Whitman
September 13, 2009 11:30 AM
The first few times I heard the right wing call Obama a “Nazi,” I ignored it. Thought it was random. After all these years, I should know not a single thing comes from the right that hasn’t been vetted, considered and framed.

Nazi? I’m not sure I even understand how they got there or who they are trying to rally. I mean, the skinheads aren’t going to go run and side with Obama as the supreme Nazi. I just saw a photo of Nancy Pelosi branded as a Nazi- pretty sure they aren’t going to go rally behind her, either.

The Nazis were not communist- rather anti- communist. They called themselves socialists, but in truth, they were fascists. State controlled, dictatorship that allowed no critique of any kind of the government.

I didn’t see anyone going to jail for screaming “lie!” the other night. Or marching in the streets, or writing articles, or telling seniors they will be subjected to death panels.

Again, the Nazi image rears it’s ugly head. Why? I’m not sure who they are trying to rally. Extreme right folks tend to think the holocaust didn’t happen. Or that having an extreme nationalism, eugenics and separation of races isn’t a bad idea. They kinda like that stuff.

Is this an attempt for the right wing to reestablish itself with the soccer moms of America? People who do think the Nazi’s were evil but also can’t stand someone standing up and believing social justice is a good thing? That the embracing of the far far right has left them powerless and they are coming back to the mushy middle, dredging up fears, and selling their snake oil policies to them?

Long live the health care companies! As if that will help under and uninsured. But fight against the Nazis? Well, that’s noble, isn’t it?

Several people have said to me lately, we have to keep a keen eye out for what is going on. All this progress will certainly be followed by a backlash.

And the right does nothing without a careful plan.

Lions and Tigers and Nazis… time to ask the question why.


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Run A Free BitTorrent Tracker On Google!

by Ernesto on September 10, 2009
With both the Pirate Bay and OpenBitTorrent trackers down at the moment, many people are unable to download torrents unless they enable DHT. Luckily there are a few backup trackers that people can use, and thanks to Google’s free App Engine, everyone can setup a tracker of their own in a few minutes.

In their defense, operators of BitTorrent sites often argue that they do nothing more than Google does. They offer a search platform for people to find content on the web, specifically torrent files. To a certain extent they are right, Google can be used to find torrent files in several ways.

For example, the mother of all search engines has a special search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet.

Google’s custom search also allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine, and Google’s App Engine enables users to start a free torrent search engine for free by using Google’s servers.

It is quite clear that there are several ways to find torrents through Google. However, just finding torrents is not enough. In order to download content through BitTorrent successfully, one also needs a working tracker in order to locate those all-important peers. Luckily Google can help here too.

By using Google’s App Engine, everyone can run a tracker without having to invest a single dime in hardware or bandwidth. The only problem is making the tracker compatible with the App Engine, but thanks to the newly released Atrack software it is a piece of cake to set one up.

The Atrack Bittorrent tracker is designed to run on Google App Engine and its main goals are a minimal memory use, speed, low bandwidth usage and efficient CPU use. On top of this the tracker wont store any data at all, making it as secure as possible for its users.

“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,” the Atrack team writes.

So now everyone can set up a standalone BitTorrent tracker at no cost aside from the the time it takes to set things up. The Atrack software is released into the public domain, and a test tracker is up and running on Google’s App Engine.


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With One Simple Sentence, ABC News Confirms The Death of Beltway Journalism

With One Simple Sentence, ABC News Confirms The Death of Beltway Journalism
from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by Eric Boehlert

It’s from an online report about the Obama school “controversy,” and it’s written by Dan Harris. In his piece, Harris notes that conservatives pre-emptively blasted Obama’s stay-in-school speech even though conservatives had no idea what was going to be in the speech. Harris notes that the speech itself “turned out to be little more than a pep talk on the importance of staying in school.”

Later in the piece as he tries to put the “controversy” in context, Harris uncorks this era-defining gem [emphasis added]:

While the media loves a good fight — even when the charges are unfounded — there may be more to conservatives’ complaints that play into larger concerns about the president on health care reform.
Behold the wonder. Pretty much sums up the state of affairs, right? “The media loves a good fight–even when the charges are unfounded.”

And do I even have to mention that the media’s new-found love of unfounded fights is an Obama era special. Or can somebody point me towards the manufactured, unfounded “controversies” hatched during the Bush years that the press treated as big news. (As I’ve noted, when conservatives–and overwhelming white–activists get mad, it’s news. When liberals do it, it’s annoying.)

If that weren’t bad enough, there were other depressing nuggets from Harris’ woeful report. First, he quoted three partisan Obama critics in the story, yet somehow managed to avoid a single Democrat or Obama supporter for his report.

And second, then there was this:

While Obama may have run a successful presidential campaign, critics say the White House has been unprepared for the ferocity of the Republican opposition.
“You have to be aware of the opposition that is going to arise and have a plan to deal with it,” [former Gov. Mitt Romney spokesman Kevin] Madden said.

Did you get that? According to a partisan Republican, the Obama WH was to blame for the school “controversy,” because it should have seen the firestorm coming. It should have known that by having the President of the United States address school children and urge them to excel and stay in school, that Republicans and wingnuts would accuse him of trying to “indoctrinate” kids with a “socialist” agenda.

I mean really, how did the WH not see that one coming, right?

So to summarize: ABC News confirms that it will chase any right-wing “fight” even if it’s baseless; even if it’s “unfounded.” In reporting those fights, ABC News will purposefully exclude Democrat voices from the story. And ABC News, while acknowledging a fight is “unfounded,” will allow partisan Republicans to blame the White House for the “controversy.”

R.I.P., indeed.

Crossposted at County Fair, a Media Matters blog.

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/EricBoehlert


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Breaking Three Years of Silence: Alex Jones Interviews Charlie Sheen

Breaking Three Years of Silence: Alex Jones Interviews Charlie Sheen

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

In the audio clip below, aired today on the Alex Jones Show, Charlie Sheen, popular actor and winner of the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series, tells Alex Jones why he wrote “20 Minutes with the President,” an open letter to president Barack Obama calling for a new investigation into the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“Enough stonewalling,” Sheen told Jones, “enough media manipulation, enough media-mantra speak. The families deserve better, America deserves better.”

Charlie said he cannot sit idly by and hope that a new investigation will “fall out of the heavens and into our Congress.” We must demand Obama deliver “honest promises,” Sheen explained. We must demand a new investigation.

Alex mentioned John Farmer, a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, who revealed earlier this year that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11. Other members have said that the Pentagon and the government were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack. Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released this month (see Paul Joseph Watson, 9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11).

Charlie said the call for a new investigation will not be silenced by the corporate media. “This message will not be silence anymore by the media-fueled mantras insisting on how they feel and deciding for them [the American people and most importantly the victim family members] for eight long years what can thought, what can be said, what can be asked..”

Alex noted that even as the whitewash commission conducted its hearings, there were outraged family members in the audience demanding the truth be told. Charlie added that these family members were ignored by the commission and thus deeply offended. The questions they asked “never saw the light of day” and their words never found their way into the final report generated by the commission, itself a fraud as Farmer others have noted. “We know that [the families] have been calling for a new investigation,” Sheen noted.

The government is demanding the public suspend logical thought and dismiss all questions about the investigation’s report, which is a work of fiction, in essence a fairy tale, Charlie argued. The establishment, he said, demands we worship a new form of physics and accept a “new form of reality that is inconsistent with everything we know in each and every cell of our entire being.” The American people are instructed by the government to believe such obvious nonsense and then are systematically demonized for asking questions, he explained.

The official 9/11 story is “an absolute fairy tale,” Charlie declared, “a complete work of fiction, and not even a very good one.”

Sheen hopes “20 Minutes with the President” will get Obama’s attention. “If for some reason this doesn’t make it into his hands and I am never granted 20 minutes with my president, I would urge the American people — I would urge anybody and everybody that has a stake in this, which would be all of us — to continue to apply the pressure, to continue to ask the questions, to continue to demand the truth.”

Charlie Sheen will further expand on his open letter this Friday on the Alex Jones Show.


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Twenty Minutes with the President

Twenty Minutes with the President

Reported by Charlie Sheen
Infowars
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, while he was out promoting his health care reform initiative. I requested 30 minutes given the scope and detail of my inquiry; they said I could have 20. Twenty minutes, 1200 seconds, not a lot of time to question the President about one of the most important events in our nation’s history. The following is a transcript of our remarkable discussion.

————————————————————————————————————————

Charlie Sheen – Good afternoon Mr. President, thank you so much for taking time out of your demanding schedule.

President Barack Obama – My pleasure, the content of your request seemed like something I should carve out a few minutes for.

CS – I should point out that I voted for you, as your promises of hope and change, transparency and accountability, as well as putting government back into the hands of the American people, struck an emotional chord in me that I hadn’t felt in quite some time, perhaps ever.

PBO – And I appreciate that Charlie. Big fan of the show, by the way.

CS – Sir, I can’t imagine when you might find the time to actually watch my show given the measure of what you inherited.

PBO – I have it Tivo’d on Air Force One. Nice break from the traveling press corps. (He glances at his watch) not to be abrupt or to rush you, but you have 19 minutes left.

CS – I’ll take that as an invitation to cut to the chase.

PBO – I’m all ears. Or so I’ve been told.

CS – Sir, in the very near future we will be experiencing our first 9/11 anniversary with you as Commander in Chief.

PBO – Yes. A very solemn day for our Nation. A day of reflection and yet a day of historical consciousness as well.

CS – Very much so sir, very much so indeed…. Now; In researching your position regarding the events of 9/11 and the subsequent investigation that followed, am I correct to understand that you fully support and endorse the findings of the commission report otherwise known as the ‘official story’?

PBO – Do I have any reason not to? Given that most of us are presumably in touch with similar evidence.

CS – I really wish that were the case, sir. Are you aware, Mr. President, of the recent stunning revelations that sixty percent of the 9/11 commissioners have publicly stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11 and that the Pentagon was engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack?

PBO – I am aware of certain “in fighting” during the course of their very thorough and tireless investigative process.

CS – Mr. President, it’s hard to label this type of friction as “in fighting” or make the irresponsible leap to “thorough,” when the evidence I insist you examine regarding 6 of the 10 members are statements of fact.

(At this point one of Obama’s senior aides approaches the President and whispers into his ear. Obama glances quickly at his watch and nods as the aide resumes his post at the doorway, directly behind me.)

PBO – No disrespect Mr. Sheen, but I have to ask; what is it that you seem to be implying with the initial direction of this discussion?

CS – I am not implying anything Mr. President. I am here to present the facts and see what you plan to do with them.

PBO – Let me guess; your ‘facts,’ allegedly supporting these claims are in the folders you brought with you?

CS – Good guess Mr. President.

(I hand the first folder of documents to the President)

CS – Again sir, these are not my opinions or assumptions, this is all a matter of public record, reported through mainstream media, painstakingly fact checked and verified.

(the President glances into the folder I handed him)

CS – You’ll notice sir on page one of the dossier dated August of ‘06 from the Washington Post, the statements of John Farmer, senior council to the 9/11 commission, his quote stating, “I was shocked how different the truth was from the way it was described.”

PBO – (as he glances down at the report, almost inaudible) …. um hmm….

CS – He goes on to further state “The [NORAD Air Defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years….”

(the President continues to view the documents)

CS – On pages two and three, sir, are the statements, as well, from commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, commissioners Bob Kerrey, Timothy Roemer and John Lehman, as well as the statements of commissioner Max Cleland, an ex-Senator from Georgia , who resigned, stating:

“It is a national scandal. This investigation is now compromised. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”

He also described President Bush’s desire to delay the process as not to damage the ‘04 re-election bid. They suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Mr. President, this information alone is unequivocally grounds for a new investigation!

PBO – Mistakes were clearly made but we as a people and as a country need to move forward. It is obviously in our best interest as a democratic society to focus our efforts and our resources on the future of this great nation and our ability to protect the American people and our allies from this type of terrorism in the coming years.

CS – Sir, how can we focus on the future when THE COMMISSION ITSELF is on record stating that they still do not know the truth??

PBO – Even if what you state, might in some capacity, begin to approach an open discussion or balanced debate, I can’t speak for, or about the decisions certain commission members made during an extremely difficult period. Perhaps you should be interviewing them instead of me. Wait, don’t tell me; I was easier to track down than they were?

CS – Not exactly sir, but let’s be honest. You’re the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the buck stops with you. 9/11 has been the pretext for the systematic dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your administration is reading from the same playbook that the Bush administration foisted on America through documented secrecy and deception.

PBO – Mr. Sheen, I’m having a difficult time sitting here and listening to you draw distorted parallels between the Bush/Cheney regime and mine.

CS – Mr. President the parallels are not distorted just because you say they are. Let’s stick to the facts. You promised to abolish the Patriot Act and then voted to re-authorize it. You pledged to end warrantless wire tapping against the American people and now energetically defend it. You decried the practice of rendition and now continue it. You promised over and over again on the campaign trail, that you would end the practice of indefinite detention and instead, you have expanded it to permanent detention of “detainees” without trial. This far exceeds the outrages of the former administration. Call me crazy Mr. President, but is this not your record?

PBO – Mr. Sheen, my staff and I authorized this interview based on your request to discuss 9/11 and deliver some additional information you’re convinced I’d not previously reviewed. Call me crazy, But it appears as though you’ve blindly wandered off topic.

CS – Sir, the examples I just illustrated are a direct result of 9/11.

PBO – And I’m telling you that we must move forward, we must endure through these dangerous and politically challenging years ahead.

CS – Mr. President, we cannot move forward with a bottomless warren of unanswered questions surrounding that day and its aftermath.

PBO – I read the official report. Every word every page. Perhaps you should do the same.

CS – I have sir, and so have thousands of family members of the victims, and guess what; they have the same questions I do and probably a lot more. I didn’t lose a loved one on that horrific day Mr. President and neither did you. But since then I, along with millions of other Americans lost something we held true and dear for most of our lives in this great country of ours; we lost our hope.

PBO – And I’d like to believe that I am here to restore that hope. To restore confidence in your leaders, in the system that the voting public chose through a peaceful transfer of power.

(An odd moment of silence between us. Precious time ticking away).

CS – Mr. President, are you aware of the number of days it took to begin the investigation into JFK’s assassination?

PBO – If memory serves I believe it was two weeks.

CS – Close. Seventeen days to be exact. Are you aware sir, how long it took to begin the investigation into Pearl Harbor?

PBO – I would say again about….two weeks.

CS – Close again sir, eleven days to be exact. Are you aware Mr. President how long it took to begin the investigation into 9/11?

PBO – I know it must have seemed like a very long time for all the grieving families.

CS – It was a very long time Mr. President – four hundred and forty days. Roughly 14 months. Does it bother you Mr. President that it only took FIVE HOURS for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the initial attack to recommend and endorse a full scale offensive against Iraq?

PBO – I am not aware of any such purported claim.

CS – I have the proof Mr. President, along with scores of documents and facts I’d like you to take a look at. Here.

(I hand him another file – much thicker than the first)

PBO – I see you came prepared Charlie.

CS – No other way to show up Mr. President. When in doubt over prepare I always say.

PBO – Now you sound like the First Lady.

CS – That’s quite a compliment sir.

PBO – As you wish. Please continue.

CS – Sir, I’d like to direct your attention to the stack of documents in the folder I just handed you. The first in from the top is entitled “ Operation Northwoods“, a declassified Pentagon plan to stage terror attacks on US soil, to be blamed on Cuba as a pretext for war.

PBO – And I’d like to direct your attention to the fact that the principle draftsman of this improbable blueprint was quickly denied a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman and sent packing to a European NATO garrison. Thank God his otherworldly ambitions never saw the light of day.

CS – I wouldn’t be so certain about that Mr. President.

PBO – I could easily say the same to you Charlie.

(the President checks his watch)

CS – The next document reads “Declassified staged provocations.” Now, Honestly Mr. President I wish I was making this stuff up. I’m certain you are familiar with the USS Maine Incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, which we all now know brought us into WW1, and of course the most famous, the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

PBO – Of course I am familiar with these historical events and I’m aware that there’s a measure of controversy surrounding them. But to be quite frank with you, this is all ancient history.

CS – Mr. President, it has been often said; “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” And I concede to you sir, these events are the past.

PBO – A vastly different world young man, shouldering a radically disparate state of universal affairs.

CS – No argument sir, I’m merely inviting you to acknowledge some credibility to the pattern or the theme. Case in point; the next document in your folder. It was published by the think-tank, Project For a New American Century and it’s entitled “ Rebuilding Americas Defenses“, and was written by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush. To quote from the document sir – (the President interrupts)

PBO – “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

CS – Touche, sir. Your thoughts on this statement Mr. President?

PBO – I would call this a blatant case of misjudgment fueled by an unfortunate milieu of assumption. For some, the uninformed denial of coincidence.

CS – Interesting angle sir. Nevertheless, Vice President Cheney didn’t stop there. In early 2008, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh and MSNBC, both reported that Cheney had proposed to the Pentagon an outrageous plan to have the U.S. Navy create fake Iranian patrol boats, to be manned by Navy Seals, who would then stage an attack on US destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz. This event was to be blamed on Iran and used as a pretext for war. Does any of this information worry you Mr. President? Should we just ignore it, until these realities can be dismissed years from now by our children, as ancient history as well?

PBO – Of course this information worries me, yet it’s not nearly as worrisome as you sitting here today suspiciously implying that 9/11 was somehow allowed to happen or even orchestrated from the inside.

CS – Mr. President I am not suspiciously implying anything. I am merely exposing the documents and asking the questions that nobody in power will even look at or acknowledge. And as I stated earlier, I voted for you, I believed in your message of hope and change. Mr. President I have come to you specifically hoping for a change. A change in the perception that our government has not yet made itself open and accountable to the people. These are your words Mr. President not mine. The lives of thousands were brutally cut short and those left behind to suffer their infinite pain are with me today Mr. President. They are with me in spirit and flesh, and the message we carry will not be silenced anymore by media fueled mantras insisting how they are supposed to feel. Deciding for them, for 8 long years, what can be thought, what can be said, what can be asked.

PBO – And I appreciate your passion, I appreciate your conviction. In spite of your concerns, in spite of what your data might or might not reveal, what you and the families must understand and accept is that we are doing everything we can to protect you.

CS – Mr. President , I realize were very short on time, so please allow me to run down a list of bullet points that might illuminate some reasons why we don’t embrace the warm hug of Federal protection.

PBO – We’ve come this far. Fire away.

CS – Please keep in mind Mr. President everything I’m about to say is documented as fact and part of the public record. The information you are holding in your hands chronicles and verifies each and every point.

PBO – You have five minutes left. The floor is yours. Brief me.

CS – Thank you Mr. President. Okay, first; On the FBI’s most wanted list Osama Bin Laden is not charged with the crimes of 911. When I called the FBI to ask them why this was the case, they replied: “There’s not enough evidence to link Bin Laden to the crime scene,” I later discovered he had never even been indicted by the D.O.J.

CS – Number 2; FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, was dismissed and gagged by the D.O.J. after she revealed that the government had foreknowledge of plans to attack American cities using planes as bombs as early as April 2001. In July of ‘09, Mrs. Edmonds broke the Federal gag order and went public to reveal that Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were all working for and with the C.I.A. up until the day of 9/11.

CS – Number 3; The following is a quote from Mayor Giuliani during an interview on 9/11 with Peter Jennings for ABC News. “I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.”

WHO TOLD HIM THIS??? To this day, the answer to this question remains unanswered, completely ignored and emphatically DENIED by Mayor Giuliani on several public occasions.

CS – Number 4; In April 2004, USA Today reported, “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.” One of the targets was the World Trade Center.

CS – Number 5; On September 12th 2007, CNN’s ‘Anderson Cooper 360′, reported that the mysterious “white plane” spotted and videotaped by multiple media outlets, flying in restricted airspace over the White House shortly before 10am on the morning of 9/11, was in fact the Air Force’s E-4B, a specially modified Boeing 747 with a communications pod behind the cockpit; otherwise known as “The Doomsday Plane”.

Though fully aware of the event, the 9/11 Commission did not deem the appearance of the military plane to be of any interest and did not include it in the final 9/11 Commission report.

CS – Number 6; Three F-16s assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles from Washington, DC, are conducting training exercises in North Carolina 207 miles away as the first plane crashes into the WTC. Even at significantly less than their top speed of 1500 mph, they could still have defended the skies over Washington well before 9am, more than 37 minutes before Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, however, they did not return until after 9:55am.

Andrews AFB had no armed fighters on alert and ready to take off on the morning of 9/11.

CS – Number 7; WTC Building 7. Watch the video of its collapse.

CS – Number 8; Flight 93 is fourth plane to crash on 9/11 at 10:03am. V.P. Cheney only gives shoot down order at 10:10-10:20am and this is not communicated to NORAD until 28 minutes after Flight 93 has crashed.

Fueling further suspicion on this front is the fact that three months before the attacks of 9/11, Dick Cheney usurped control of NORAD, and therefore he, and no one else on planet Earth, had the power to call for military sorties on the hijacked airliners on 9/11. He did not exercise that power. Three months after 9/11, he relinquished command of NORAD and returned it to military operation.

CS – Number 9; Scores of main stream news outlets reported that the F.B.I. conducted an investigation of at least FIVE of the 9/11 hijackers being trained at U.S. military flight schools. Those investigations are now sealed and need to be declassified.

CS – Number 10; In 2004, New York firefighters Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi went public to say they had found the black boxes at the World Trade Center, but were told to keep their mouths shut by FBI agents. Nicholas DeMasi said that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate the devices, a story backed up by rescue volunteer Mike Bellone.

As the Philadelphia Daily News reported at the time, “Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero.”

CS – Number 11 – Hundreds of eye witnesses including first responders, fire captains, news reporters, and police, all described multiple explosions in both towers before and during the collapse.

CS – Number 12; An astounding video uncovered from the archives shows BBC News correspondent Jane Standley reporting on the collapse of WTC Building 7 over twenty minutes before it fell at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11. Tapes from earlier BBC broadcasts show news anchors discussing the collapse of WTC 7 a full 26 minutes in advance. The BBC at first claimed that their tapes from 9/11 had been “lost” before admitting that they made the “error” of reporting the collapse of WTC 7 before it happened without adequately explaining how they could have obtained advance knowledge of the event.

In addition, over an hour before the collapse of WTC 7, at 4:10pm, CNN’s Aaron Brown reported that the building “has either collapsed, or is collapsing.”

CS – Number 13; Solicitor General Ted Olson’s claim that his wife Barbara Olsen called him twice from Flight 77, describing hijackers with box cutters, was a central plank of the official 9/11 story.

However, the credibility of the story was completely undermined after Olsen kept changing his story about whether his wife used her cell phone or the airplane phone. The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004. American Airlines confirmed that Flight 77 was a Boeing 757 and that this plane did not have airplane phones on board.

According to the FBI, Barbara Olsen attempted to call her husband only once and the call failed to connect, therefore Olsen must have been lying when he claimed he had spoken to his wife from Flight 77.

CS – Number 14; The size of a Boeing 757 is approximately 125ft in width and yet images of the impact zone at the Pentagon supposedly caused by the crash merely show a hole no more than 16ft in diameter. The engines of the 757 would have punctured a hole bigger than this, never mind the whole plane. Images before the partial collapse of the impact zone show little real impact damage and a sparse debris field completely inconsistent with the crash of a large jetliner, especially when contrasted with other images showing airplane crashes into buildings.

CS – Number 15; What is the meaning behind the following quote attributed to Dick Cheney which came to light during the 9/11 Commission hearings? The passage is taken from testimony given by then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

As the plane was not shot down, in addition to the fact that armed fighter jets were nowhere near the plane and the Pentagon defensive system was not activated, are we to take it that the orders were to let the plane find its target?

CS – Number 16; In May 2003, the Miami Herald reported how the Bush administration was refusing to release a 900-page congressional report on 9/11 because it wanted to “avoid enshrining embarrassing details in the report,” particularly regarding pre-9/11 warnings as well as the fact that the hijackers were trained at U.S. flight schools.

CS – Number 17; Top Pentagon officials cancelled their scheduled flights for September 11th on September 10th. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, following a security warning, cancelled a flight into New York that was scheduled for the morning of 9/11.

CS – Number 18; The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004, and even by that point it was only in the trial phase. Calls from cell phones which formed an integral part of the official government version of events were technologically impossible at the time.

CS – Number 19: On April 29, 2004, President Bush and V.P. Cheney would only meet with the commission under specific clandestine conditions. They insisted on testifying together and not under oath. They also demanded that their testimony be treated as a matter of “state secret.” To date, nothing they spoke of that day exists in the public domain.

CS – And finally Mr. President – Number 20; A few days after the attack, several newspapers as well as the FBI reported that a paper passport had been found in the ruins of the WTC. In August 2004, CNN reported that 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah’s visa was found in the remains of Flight 93 which went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

At least a third of the WTC victim’s bodies were vaporized and many of the victims of the Pentagon incident were burned beyond recognition. And yet visas and paper passports which identify the perpetrators and back up the official version of events miraculously survive explosions and fires that we are told melted steel buildings.

(The Senior aide appears again beside the President whispering in his ear. He then quickly moves off).

PBO – Well Charlie I can’t say this hasn’t been interesting. As I said earlier you’ve showed up today focused and organized. Regardless how I feel about the material you’ve presented, I must commend your dedication and zeal. However, our time here is up.

(the President rises from his chair , I do the same).

CS – Mr. President! One more second!

(The President starts towards the door – I follow him quickly step for step).

CS – Mr. President, I implore you based on the evidence you now possess, to use your Executive Power. Prove to us all Sir, that you do, in fact, care. Create a truly comprehensive and open Congressional investigation of 9/11 and its aftermath. The families deserve the truth, the American people and the rest of the free world deserve the truth. Mr. President –

(He pauses. We shake hands).

CS – Make sure you’re on the right side of history.

(The President breaks the handshake).

PBO – I am on the right side of history. Thank you Charlie, my staff and I will be in touch.

(I watch as he strides gracefully out of the room, the truth I provided him held firmly by his side; in the hand of providence.)

————————————————————————————————————————

A comprehensive bibliography containing all of the evidence presented above can be viewed at http://www.prisonplanet.com/20_minutes_bibliography.html

Get this interview in PDF format here.

Author’s Note: What you have just read didn’t actually happen… yet.

This is an open letter to the President requesting a new investigation.

Charlie Sheen.

Charlie Sheen is going to be on Alex Jones’ syndicated radio show live twice this week. This letter to the President is only the opening salvo in a chain of key events. Read more details here and tune in at 11am CST when Alex will lay out this exciting new development. Sheen first appeared on The Alex Jones Show in March 2006 to air his doubts about the official 9/11 story, an interview that garnered national attention and put the issue of 9/11 truth at the forefront of public debate.

For media requests on this subject email sheen@infowars.com.


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Activist Releases Archive of Suppressed News Videos

Activist Releases Archive of Suppressed News Videos

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
Wednesday, Sept 2, 2009

In a move sure to send shockwaves through the online activist community, Jonathon Elinoff—activist, researcher, and the filmmaker behind the Core of Corruption documentary series—has released a video archive of dozens of network news broadcasts detailing controversial and suppressed news stories.

The archive, compiled over a period of several years, features actual network news coverage of the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government that went into operation on 9/11, the Bohemian Grove and numerous other topics that the nightly news almost never mentions. Many of the videos (if not all) are being released online for the first time.

GOP Wishes Internet Was Never Invented

It makes it way too easy for someone to document their crimes.

An internet agitprop artist publishing the website “Republican Offenders dot com” has produced a list of 272 Republicans charged with criminal activity, 60 of which are pedophiles. Each name is linked to a group heading of the type of crime alleged or convicted. (Among the categories are rape, bribery and “assorted felonies”.)

The list really has to be seen to be appreciated.

Howard Dean his own self could not have thought the culture of corruption ran this wide and deep.


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Mainstream Media: Truth That Sells? – Julian Burnside

Australian barrister Julian Burnside outlines content-related constraints on the media industry. He emphasizes the role of profit as a manipulator of content, claiming sports, sex, and political misconduct as the three most lucrative story topics for media sources.

—–

Newspapers, radio, television and now the internet are the means by which countless millions engage with information about the world in which we live.

For much of the time, the principal purpose of the media is to entertain.

However, there are critical moments in our lives when the truth really matters … when disaster strikes, when powers contend, when the decisions that shape our lives are in the balance.

Can the media be trusted at these moments? Are commercial imperatives overwhelming considerations of public interest that once defined the role of democracys fourth estate? – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Julian Burnside QC, is a barrister, writer and President of Liberty Victoria. He has acted pro bono in many human rights cases and is passionate about the arts. He elaborates the law in relation to art censorship and how it is exercised, including the complexities of “intention,” “context,” “reasonableness,” public attitudes, protecting human rights and freedom of expression.

He is President of Liberty Victoria, Chair of fortyfive downstairs and author of Wordwatching – Fieldnotes from an amateur Philologist and Watching Brief – Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice.

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BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Preview: Wendell Potter pt. 1 | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/071… Meet Wendell Potter. Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter, who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate. Check out Potters personal story here and tune in to Bill Moyers Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009 at 9PM on PBS (check local listings http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/abo… ) for his experiences inside the health insurance industry, their work fighting a public option, and the insurance companies close ties to Washington. The entire interview will be available after broadcast at http://www.pbs.org/moyers http://www.pbs.org/moyers.

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Preview: Wendell Potter pt 2 | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.htmlHealth … insurance companies vs. Michael Moore. Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter, who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate. Check out Potters take on the campaign against Michael Moores film Sicko and tune in to Bill Moyers Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009 at 9PM on PBS (check local listings http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/about/airdates.html … for his experiences inside the health insurance industry, their work fighting a public option, and the insurance companies close ties to Washington. The entire interview will be available after broadcast at http://www.pbs.org/moyers

Doctor Who & Scissor Sisters "I Can’t Decide"

Scissor Sisters
“I Can’t Decide” lyrics

It’s not easy having yourself a good time
Greasing up those bets and betters
Watching out they don’t four-letter
Fuck and kiss you both at the same time
Smells-like something I’ve forgotten
Curled up died and now it’s rotten

I’m not a gangster tonight
Don’t want to be a bad guy
I’m just a loner baby
And now you’re gotten in my way

I can’t decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you’ll probably go to heaven
Please don’t hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It’s cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We’re going for a ride

It’s a bitch convincing people to like you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If lies were cats you’d be a litter
Pleasing everyone isn’t like you
Dancing jigs until I’m crippled
Slug ten drinks I won’t get pickled

I’ve got to hand it to you
You’ve played by all the same rules
It takes the truth to fool me
And now you’ve made me angry

I can’t decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you’ll probably go to heaven
Please don’t hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It’s cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We’re going for a ride

Oh I could throw you in the lake
Or feed you poisoned birthday cake
I wont deny I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone
Oh I could bury you alive
But you might crawl out with a knife
And kill me when I’m sleeping
That’s why

I can’t decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you’ll probably go to heaven
Please don’t hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It’s cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We’re going for a ride


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Failure Builds Character – Mythbusters’ Adam Savage

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/30/MythBuster_Adam_Savages_Colossal_Failures

MythBusters co-host Adam Savage describes the life lesson he learned after a job from his early days as a set designer went horribly awry and ruined a friendship.

—–

The 4th annual Maker Faire Bay Area hosts MythBusters co-host Adam Savage. Savage talks about failure – unmitigated, colossal failures he’s experienced during his career.

Following on President Obama’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America,” Maker Faire 2009 was organized around the theme of Re-Make America. Held in the San Francisco Bay Area, Maker Faire celebrates what President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.”

Adam Savage has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what’s in his brain and make it real. He’s built everything from ancient Buddhas to futuristic weapons, from spaceships to dancing vegetables, from fine art sculptures to animated chocolate and just about anything else you can think of.

Since 1993, Adam has concentrated on the special-effects industry, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Galaxy Quest, Terminator 3, A.I. and the Matrix sequels. He’s also designed props and sets for Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Lexus and a host of New York and San Francisco theater companies. Not only has he worked and consulted in the research and development division for toy companies and made several short films, but Adam has also acted in several films and commercials — including a Charmin ad, in which he played Mr. Whipple’s stock boy, and a Billy Joel music video, “Second Wind,” in which he drowns.

Today, in addition to co-hosting Discovery Channel’s MythBusters, Adam teaches advanced model making, most recently in the industrial design department at the San Francisco Academy of Art. Somehow he also finds time to devote to his own art. His sculptures have been showcased in over 40 shows in San Francisco, New York and Charleston, W.Va.

What a Bunch of Whiny Sourpusses!

From The Huffington Post: May 23, 2009 01:04 AM

It has just gotten awful for the Republicans. Tear-shedding gut-wrenching heart-breaking sad.

The party of tough talk and unflappable belief in their version of America — the party willing to send others’ kids to war to prove how tough they are — has just become the most whiny, bitchy, sad little thing you’ve ever seen. Like one of those poodles with a red ribbon and a pedi-pedi and an owner who you just want to hand a sandwich to and beg her to eat, please eat. It’s gotten so bad that Republicans even gave up smashing beer cans against their foreheads to have tea parties for each other.

It’s all the fault of someone else. The group who insists we can do it alone and don’t need any help from anyone else and nobody better question us ’cause we know what we’re doing so you better not speak up or we’ll call you un-American anti-apple pie terrorists socialists godless wimps has, well, fallen victim …

… poor victims of the media who won’t treat them fair and balanced

… poor victims of dweeby little college professors and meek little school teachers who are bent on indoctrinating their kids

… poor victims of sad little dictators like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jung Il who just won’t listen!

… poor victims of the Intertubes & the mean pajama-clad bloggers who won’t leave them alone

… poor victims of the American voters who threw ’em out of power

… poor victims of Nancy Pelosi & Rahm Emanuel & Arlen Specter who keep pullin’ the wool over their eyes
… poor victims of the mean old French who wouldn’t play with them in their Iraq sandbox

… poor victims of the unions who won’t let their executive friends take all the money and run
… poor victims of the gays who are ruining their god-blessed marriages

Geez.

Who wants to follow a Republican Party or conservative movement that sits in a corner, sucking its thumb, and whines about how the world is out to get them and they just can’t do anything about it!?

At least they’ve still got Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich to show us how to be real men. (Or should I say moose-hunting Sarah Palin?)

Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah!

Waaaah!


Donnie Fowler
San Francisco


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Jesse Ventura schools Hasselbeck on waterboarding

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8lccj/jesse_ventura_on_the_view_if_theres_nothing_wrong/

Cops tried it in Texas in 1983, they were arrested, tried and jailed for the practice.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15886834

“Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.”

Jesse Ventura schools Hasselbeck on waterboarding
By David Edwards
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura spoke out against torture and waterboarding while appearing on ABCs The View Monday.

This video is from MSNBCs News Live, broadcast May 18, 2009.