Wednesday, October 6, 2004

4 Good Reasons FEATURED ARTICLES - The Curse of Dick Cheney, Rolling Stone - NRDC Releases New TV Ad Featuring Robert Redford, NRDC - From Baghdad: A Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-Mail to Friends, By Farnaz Fassihi. - I, Moazzam Begg, Demand to Be Freed From Guantanamo   By Moazzam Begg, - BOTTOM LINE - Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush, by Frank Rich, NY Times QUOTE OF THE DAY Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people. Mr Vice President, there is no connection between the attacks of 11 September and Saddam Hussein. The 9/11 Commission has said it. Your own secretary of state has said it. - - Senator John Edwards (From last night's debate) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - October 8th 1979 -- Over 1,000 arrested at Seabrook, New Hampshire, site of construction for a nuclear power plant, in an occupation organized by Clamshell Alliance. 1989 -- The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled leader, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nearly 40-year non-violent campaign to end China's domination of Tibet. RHINO HERE: Last night's VP debate showed that John Edwards has the both the smarts & the guts to stand up to the attempted bitch slapping by dick cheney. Edwards repeatedly called the VP to task for the lies & ineptitude which characterize the bush 2 administration's handling of both foreign policy & domestic issues. For those who might think the big dick is as indestructo as a teflon covered & oil slicked titanium droid, learn a bit of cheney history from the following article: The Curse of Dick Cheney The veep's career has been marred by one disaster after another By T.D. ALLMAN, Rolling Stone, 8/25/04 Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick Cheney to a post in his administration. Curse In my ongoing late night efforts to provide as many reasons to vote against bush & for Kerry/Edwards, today The Rhino offers 4 good reasons to vote against george bush; our environment in crisis, the worsening situation in Iraq, the illegal & inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo & the shrub gangs pandering to the Christian fundamentalists. NRDC Releases New TV Ad Featuring Robert Redford Budget bills now awaiting action in Congress could be critical to saving our Natural Heritage The White House is unleashing some of America's most destructive industries on our nation's last and best wild places. Here's what the Bush Administration will be putting on the auction block unless we stop this onslaught: - NATIONAL FORESTS - 58 million acres of our last wild forests, including Alaska's Tongass rainforest, will be opened to bulldozers, chainsaws and drilling rigs. - WESTERN WILDLANDS - Greater Yellowstone, Utah's Redrock Canyons, New Mexico's Otero Mesa and other treasured landscapes will be invaded by drilling rigs, truck traffic, pipelines and compressor stations. - ARCTIC WILDLIFE - The Western Arctic Reserve (formally known as NPR-A) will be sacrificed to oil and gas companies without any permanent protection for its world-renowned populations of polar bears, caribou, wolves and millions of migratory birds. Congress will vote soon on budget bills to fund these destructive attacks on the public lands we hold in trust for all future generations. Other natural treasures may be threatened by backroom deals, called riders, that may be added to the budget bills at the last minute.  The NRDC Action Fund is sounding the alarm and mobilizing millions of Americans against this giveaway of our public lands to corporate special interests. Tell your Senators and Representative to reject President Bush's assault on our natural heritage! And beginning this week, millions of Americans will start hearing the truth --  if you'll help NRDC run a hard-hitting television ad made by Robert Redford for the NRDC Action Fund. You can view the Redford ad and help get it on the air by going to: http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/redfordtvad/donate.asp From Baghdad: A Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-Mail to Friends By Farnaz Fassihi. CommonDreams.org, 30 September 2004 Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference. Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.  It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began... MORE: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/uploads/fassihifarnaz350.jpg I, Moazzam Begg, Demand to Be Freed From Guantanamo By Moazzam Begg, Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2004 Moazzam Begg, 36, arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, is one of four British citizens held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This uncensored letter addressed to U.S. officials, dated July 12, 2004, was made public by his attorneys. The Pentagon would not comment on the letter but said that "all the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo are within the standards accepted internationally." I, Moazzam Begg, citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, attributed the number 00558 (camp Echo), have felt it necessary to augment … my grievances and intentions. After over 2 1/2 years in the custody of the U.S. military without charge, and by extension, without jurisdiction, I have yet to be afforded basic rights normally granted under the constitution of the U.S.A., and international law. I therefore demand, unconditionally and irrevocably, that I be released immediately and returned to my family and domicile in the U.K., together with all possessions, including all items and monies confiscated by U.S./Pakistani "agents" from my residence in Pakistan on 31st January 2002. In the likely event that these demands are outrightly rejected or unnecessarily procrastinated, I demand the following rights under U.S. law: 1. A thorough and peremptory explanation of all statutory rights available within U.S. legislature, particularly with respect to foreign nationals. 2. Any and all charges/allegations be presented unambiguously and written. 3. Full access to international phone calls in order to communicate with family and lawyers. 4. Full access to legal representatives of my own choice and appointment. MORE AT:  http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1004-23.htm 8:12:36 AM    comment

Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush "SEND THIS ARTICLE TO A REPUBLICAN!" Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush by Frank Rich, NY Times, October 3, 2004 ...The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own. It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base." The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism." READ IT ALL AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/arts/03rich.html?oref=login&;ex97825244&ei=1&en b Rhino's Blog is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. Feedback & requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. (rhino@kifaru.com) Search the Rhino's Blog Archives, The Daily Rhino Photo, and lots of links at  (http://www.rhinosblog.info) Rhino's Other Web Sites: http://www.dreamcatchers.org  (Indigenous Assistance & Intercultural Dialog) http://www.kifaru.com  (Native American Relations Video Documentaries) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 7:18:53 AM    comment

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