Whatta ya think about this Snarlin Arlen?

In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The “evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed,” concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

The researchers’ re-analysis involved new statistical calculations and a modern chemical analysis of bullets from the same batch Oswald is purported to have used. They reached no conclusion about whether more than one gunman was involved, but urged that authorities conduct a new and complete forensic re-analysis of the five bullet fragments left from the assassination 44 years ago.

More at MSNBC

Crossposted from Global Research:

The US government and Washington elites are aggressively ramping up their “war on terrorism” rhetoric and propaganda, stoking fear and paranoia in order to bolster their war agenda, and reinvigorate the mass public perception of new and growing “homegrown terrorism” threats to the US homeland.

The next phase of America’s war abroad (under the management of a post-Bush neocon/neoliberal consensus), and the deepening militarization of the US homeland towards a full police state, are well underway.

Who or what was behind the Fort Dix Six?

On May 8, 2007, six foreign-born Muslims were arrested during an attempt to purchase assault weapons, and accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix (New Jersey), as well as an assault on a Pennsylvania Navy installation.

While evidence regarding this case continues to unfold, what is clear is that the FBI and US intelligence had been infiltrated and monitored over an extensive period, as early as January 2006. An unnamed “shadowy informer“, likely an intelligence asset, is the key figure behind this operation and the arrest.

An objective analysis of the Fort Dix incident leads to questions about US military-intelligence involvement, and the use of the incident as a pretext:

“There is no doubt that the actions of the US military around the world are provoking a level of disgust and anger that could well produce misguided terrorist attacks within the US itself. Nonetheless, the various terrorist A-plots- exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur.”

In each of these cases, the supposed conspiracy has been heavily publicized in a transparent bid to justify the ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to create a climate of fear in order to suppress democratic rights in the US itself.

“The exposure of the latest alleged plot has coincided with an unprecedented political crisis for the administration. With the president’s standing in the polls falling to record lows and US military casualties in Iraq increasing as the quagmire in the occupied country deepens, the political motive for unveiling another supposed terrorist threat from within is abundantly clear.”

The Fort Dix suspects allegedly came to the attention of authorities after one of them was fingered by a Circuit City store manager while requesting to dub a terrorism training videotape from VHS to DVD. This bungling is reminiscent of the actions of the so-called 9/11 hijackers (all of them guided US intelligence assets), and suggests low-level and amateurish “patsies”, guided and set up by larger forces.

This foiled “spectacular” terror plot comes shortly after the bizarre Virginia Tech massacre (which, perhaps coincidentally, bears striking similarities to other “manchurian candidate” incidents such as the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley) successfully sparked fear across the country, and ignited new calls from citizens to “make our children safe”.

The clear political beneficiary of both the Fort Dix and V Tech episodes are the same: Homeland Security.

Read more »

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani reported a whopping $16.1 million in earned income over the past 16 months, most of it in speaking fees, according to financial documents filed Wednesday.

Democratic hopeful John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, reported $29.5 million in assets, including millions in a hedge fund Edwards worked for part-time. Edwards’ biggest single source of earned income was his $479,512 salary from the fund - the Fortress Investment Group - for consulting work last year.

Giuliani’s report is the first detailed glimpse of his vast holding and income since his term as mayor of New York ended. Since then, Giuliani parlayed his image as an in-charge mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks into lucrative speaking fees and business enterprises.

Giuliani reported $13 million to $45 million in assets, including his share in Giuliani & Co., a partnership that provides an array of consulting services. He also listed income from dividends and interest on many of those investments of at least $411,332 and as much as $3.3 million.

The reports were part of a flurry released Wednesday by the Federal Election Commission. The deadline for filing was Tuesday, though several candidates received 45-day extensions, including Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans Mitt Romney, John McCain and Tommy Thompson. Republican Jim Gilmore asked for and received a 30-day grace period.

Sen. Barack Obama’s report showed a surge of interest in his writings as he drew closer to a presidential bid, earning more than a half-million dollars in 2006 in royalties for one book and an advance for another.

The Illinois Democrat received $572,490 for the books - his best’selling memoir, “Dreams of My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” an account of his political journey.

Giuliani’s biggest single source of income between January 2006 and February 2007 came from speaking engagements around the world. He grossed $11.4 million in speeches, which includes fees retained by the Washington Speakers Bureau. He typically charged $100,000 per speaking engagement and as much as $200,000 on occasion.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writers

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli aircraft launched missiles at Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least five people, after Hamas fired rocket barrages into Israel in an apparent attempt to draw Israel into increasingly violent Palestinian infighting.

Hamas gunmen fatally shot six guards from the rival Fatah movement and mistakenly ambushed a jeep carrying their own fighters, killing five. In all, 16 Palestinians were killed in Palestinian infighting Wednesday - the bloodiest day since violence broke out in the Gaza Strip four days ago.

The streets of central Gaza City echoed with gunfire and were empty except for gunmen in black ski masks. Terrified residents stayed home from school and work, huddling in dark homes after electricity to some neighborhoods was cut off by a downed power line.

At nightfall, Hamas announced its intention to begin observing a unilateral cease-fire, and President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah also called on the warring parties to hold their fire. However, similar truces the two previous evenings did not hold.

In four days of fighting, 41 people have been killed and dozens more have been injured - not including the dead from the Israeli airstrikes. Most of the dead have been from Fatah. The violence threatened to bring down the Palestinians’ two-month-old unity government - and brought the Palestinians dangerously close to all-out civil war.

Despite Israel’s vow to stay out of the fray, its missile strikes added another layer of complexity to Gaza’s mayhem, and raised the specter of a large’scale Israeli invasion.

“What is happening in Gaza endangers not only the unity government, but the Palestinian social fabric, the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian strategy as a whole,” said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Abbas was expected to meet with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Gaza on Thursday to discuss the situation, Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo said. One option was declaring a state of emergency, he said. Abbas also spoke by phone with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Syria on Wednesday, and the two agreed to work to end the violence.

Hamas officials said the organization’s men launched eight rockets at Israel, following a barrage of around 20 rockets Tuesday. That salvo at the Israeli town of Sderot, just outside Gaza, wounded five Israelis, one seriously, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

From THE ARMY TIMES

Troops don-t need bigger pay raises, White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill.

The Bush administration had asked for a 3 percent military raise for Jan. 1, 2008, enough to match last year’s average pay increase in the private sector. The House Armed Services Committee recommends a 3.5 percent pay increase for 2008, and increases in 2009 through 2012 that also are 0.5 percentage point greater than private’sector pay raises.

The slightly bigger military raises are intended to reduce the gap between military and civilian pay that stands at about 3.9 percent today. Under the bill, HR 1585, the pay gap would be reduced to 1.4 percent after the Jan. 1, 2012, pay increase.

Bush budget officials said the administration “strongly opposes” both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases “unnecessary.”

“When combined with the overall military benefit package, the president’s proposal provides a good quality of life for service members and their families,” the policy statement says. “While we agree military pay must be kept competitive, the 3 percent raise, equal to the increase in the Employment Cost Index, will do that.”

The House of Representatives plans on passing the bill tomorrow. The Senate Armed Services Committee has announced it will start writing its version of the bill next week.

Two items in the House defense bill could lead to a veto, the policy statement warns. One is a change in the National Security Personnel system that would back away from the pay-for-performance initiative pushed by the Bush administration and reverse some of the flexibility provided in current law. The second issue that could prompt a veto are Buy America provisions in the bill that White House officials said “would impose unrealistically arduous requirements.”

read more at THE ARMY TIMES

“Governors could order federal facilities to lower their flags to honor fallen military troops under legislation passed by the House Tuesday.”

Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat whose northern Michigan district has lost close to 20 people in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he sponsored the bill after unsuccessfully trying to persuade President Bush to issue an executive order on the issue.

The bill passed 408-4 and now goes to the Senate, where Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., have introduced parallel legislation.

The measure would amend federal law with regard to the flying of the national flag at half’staff to allow a governor to require that federal facilities in the state lower their flags when a member of the armed forces from that state dies while on active duty.

cross posted at THINK PROGRESS

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

(Via Politics TV.) I had thought this story about the White House pressuring a sick man to approve their domestic spying program was bad enough when reading about it. That’s not to mention the “You mean even Ashcroft wouldn’t sign off on this?” angle. However, listening to NPR last night and hearing Comey’s voice, I started getting furious. Here’s the video.

Glenn Greenwald has two good pieces on this, “Gonzales’ yearlong effort to block Comey’s testimony” (5/15/07) and “Comey’s testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal” (5/16/07). Hilzoy has a good examination of some of the key testimony in “When Christ Told Us To Visit The Sick In Their Sickrooms, This Is Not What He Meant.”

I think at this point we can dispense with the ridiculous fiction that the Bush administration somehow didn’t know what it was doing or possesses any innocence whatsoever. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they knew going through the proper process would stymie them, so they used every trick they could and abused their power to try to get what they wanted. They’ve blocked investigations, prevented oversight and lied to Congress and the American people to try to get away with this. It’s a familiar pattern. Still, the conduct described in this testimony isn’t just illegal, it’s inhuman. The Bushies aren’t just bad public officials, they’re bad people. We still haven’t obtained the full details of the abuses leading to war (we have the broad strokes), but there’s ample evidence that the Bush administration are indeed worse than the Nixon crew and they’ve committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Democrats have an obligation not only to manage the country in this moral and managerial vacuum, they have a prosecutorial duty to continue to dig, and build an iron-clad case for impeachment. If nothing else, using the government to achieve something positive and just would make a nice change of pace, don’t you think?

Update: No surprise, Dan Froomkin’s column today, “High Drama - and High Crimes?” is also superb.

Comedians, artists and certainly political cartoonists tend to possess an anti-authoritarian, skeptical, irreverent streak. This makes the staunchly conservative cartoonist an especially odd bird.

Which cartoonists dare to criticize their own party? Who seems to literally illustrate GOP talking points? Who are their favorite targets? Who mocks liberals - and who seems to truly hate them? Who’s funny? Who’s independently minded and who’s a hack? Read, and decide, for yourself!

In this installment, covering two weeks (4/30/07 - 5/13/07), conservative cartoonists ranged all over the map in terms of subject matter. Iraq experienced a, err, surge in popularity again. George Tenet received some ridicule. Meanwhile, conservatives also noted the impending resignation of a Brit they loved and celebrated - the French?!?
Read more »

Joe LIEberman: To remain competitive, American companies need access to highly educated individuals.
His answer? Bring in foreigners who are highly educated. Ok, a couple things. Bill Gates recently testified at a congressional hearing that he’d like there to be no limits on H-1B visas because he has a hard time finding qualified IT professionals. I think this is total bullshit. What he has trouble finding is IT Professionals who will work for nothing. Being very close to the IT industry, I KNOW there are plenty of highly qualified individuals, but they won’t work for peanuts. And Leiberman’s statement is totally ridiculous. Why not fix the problem by educating Americans? If he feels there’s a lack of “highly educated” Americans, then why not find out WHY. And fix that problem. This shit makes me crazy…….. So according to Bush, Mexicans are coming to do the jobs Americans won’t do….. and now they are saying they want foreigners to come in to do the jobs Americans, according to them, can’t do. Big business wins again…….

A new U.S. Senate proposal would allow limitless H-1B visas and green cards for foreigners with master’s degrees or higher in any field from an American university–or anyone with such credentials in the science, technology, engineering or math fields from abroad.

Like other competing proposals in Congress right now, the “Skilled Worker Immigration and Fairness Act,” introduced on Tuesday by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), also proposes raising the existing annual cap on the controversial H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000 for fiscal year 2007. That number could climb by 20 percent in each subsequent year, to as high as 180,000, if the previous year’s quota was exhausted.

Right now, there’s also a 20,000 visa cushion beyond the existing H-1B quota for foreigners who have received advanced degrees in the United States. The new Senate bill would remove that 20,000 visa limit. It would also broaden the exemption from the H-1B limit beyond just those with advanced degrees to include foreigners with “medical specialty certification based on post-doctoral training and experience in the United States.” A broad House of Representatives immigration bill known as the Strive Act contains a similar approach.

“To remain competitive, American companies need access to highly educated individuals,” Lieberman said in a statement. “But today’s system makes it difficult for innovative employers to recruit and retain highly educated talent, which puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage globally.”

Read more at Znet

Oh what a shock.

The Department of Homeland Security is breaking privacy laws by failing to tell the public all the ways it uses personal information to target passengers boarding flights entering or leaving the United States, according to a draft government report.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report to be released tomorrow, says DHS’s Customs and Border Protection agency has never publicly disclosed all the sources of data such as name, credit card number and travel history that it uses to detect passengers who may pose a security risk.

“CBP’s current disclosures do not fully inform the public about all of its systems for prescreening aviation passenger information, nor do they explain how CBP combines data in the prescreening process, as required by law,” the report says. “As a result, passengers are not assured that their privacy is protected during the international prescreening process.”

More at the Washington Post

The Feingold bill was killed, with the help of the following Democrats:
Bayh, Casey,Dorgan,Landrieu, Lincoln, McCaskill, Webb, Nelson, and Tester

I guess they are hard of hearing. What’s up with Webb? Nelson is my Senator, and oh how I wish another Democrat would run against him next time. He needs to go.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush held assets worth $7.5 million to $20 million last year, but was eclipsed by his vice president’s wealth, financial records released on Tuesday showed.

Bush’s assets included his 1,600-acre ranch in Texas, valued at $1 million to $5 million, where he usually spends his vacations.

He also reported assets of $775,689 from a limited liability company organized in 2003 to produce trees for commercial sales, which were expected in 2007.

Among his holdings were certificates of deposit, Treasury notes, a qualified diversified trust, and $116,000 assets of the GWB Rangers Corp., which is wholly owned by Bush from when he was co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Cheney reported assets valued at $21 million to around $100 million. Cheney gained much of his wealth from his former role heading oil service firm Halliburton Co..

Cheney’s largest holdings included investments in an American Century Investments International Bond Fund and a Vanguard short-term tax-exempt fund. He has 100,000 Halliburton stock options that are unexercised and designated for charity.

The financial disclosure statements only give the value of assets in ranges.

Bush reported gifts totaling $12,364 last year, including three separate sets of fishing equipment.

More at Reuters

I vote ‘hate’.

CNN.com:

Falwell’s legacy: faith, hate or Teletubbies?

(CNN) – “When I have children one day,” Samantha Krieger of Dallas, Texas, wrote to CNN.com, “they will know of the legacy that Dr. Jerry Falwell left.”

But what will that legacy be?

To Krieger, who had personal connections to Falwell — she attended the college he founded; he officiated at her wedding; her husband was his nurse — the evangelist “was a great leader and hero.”

Victoria Kidd of Winchester, Virginia, believes the exact opposite: “The damage he has done to the Christian faith is immeasurable,” she wrote to CNN.com

Others would prefer to think that he has no legacy at all.

“He should be erased from every history book and media story,” wrote Brian Pippinger of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Jerry Falwell was the evangelical minister who founded the Moral Majority, the Christian right political movement, in 1980. He died Tuesday at age 73, and it’s clear from the differing assessments of his legacy that he was a controversial figure.

Matt Foreman, head of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, calls Falwell “a founder and leader of America’s anti-gay industry. His lasting legacy will be the polarization of the American electorate and the rise of Christian evangelicals as a political force in American politics.”

Gene Mims, a trustee of Liberty University, which Falwell founded as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971, says he “pulled us all towards faith.” More narrowly, Mims says that Falwell’s founding of the university will be his specific, lasting legacy. “For the past 10 years, that was his focus.”
[...]

To many critics, this paradox is what makes his legacy so lamentable. “He made it comfortable for churches to get actively involved in politics,” says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “His strategy will be continued by his would-be successors — a focus on hot-button issues like gay marriage (rather than significant moral issues like child poverty and health care), and an eagerness to make outrageous statements to the media, in order to build a religious-political empire.”

Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority — in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”

Susan Friend Harding sees these as his King Lear moments. “He had already lost power by then. It’s sad to think he’ll be remembered for his remark about Teletubbies.”

(In a totally unrelated story, sunshine and rainbows broke out across the U.S. yesterday, sparking smiles and joy.)

Newly declassified data show that as additional American troops began streaming into Iraq in March and April, the number of attacks on civilians and security forces there stayed relatively steady or at most declined slightly, in the clearest indication yet that the troop increase could take months to have a widespread impact on security.

Even the suggestion of a slight decline could be misleading, since the figures are purely a measure of how many attacks have taken place, not the death toll of each one. American commanders have conceded that since the start of the troop increase, which the United States calls a “surge,” attacks in the form of car bombs with their high death tolls have risen.

The attack data are compiled by the Pentagon but were made public in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. It analyzed the effect of the attacks on the struggling American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq, especially the program’s failings in the electricity and oil sectors.

A draft version of the report, obtained by The New York Times last week, indicated that every day during much of the past four years, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil, valued at anywhere from $5 million to $15 million, had been unaccounted for. But the draft report did not contain the attack statistics.

When asked about the new data, Barham Salih, an Iraqi deputy prime minister, said in an interview that the troop increase was having a positive impact in specific neighborhoods in Baghdad, particularly in the Shiite-dominated eastern half of the city. But he said Iraqi intelligence had concluded that Al Qaeda was in effect surging at the same time in Iraq to counteract the American program, damping any immediate gains.

More at the New York Times