Mojowire for 10.25
PART I

MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master



J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire... I’m Mojo...

S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, October 25, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...

J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:

S. First this morning, Sy Hersh, who has been quiet of late -- almost too quiet -- unleashed a massive butt kicking on the administration’s treatment of intelligence data, and how it was abused to get our nation into war in Iraq and damaged our campaign against terrorism at the same time.

J. But there is good news in the war, though. No, not that South Asian distraction, the Bush Administration’s real war; the one against the nation’s poor. Their strategy is working, according to a recent report that shows more Americans falling into poverty and median incomes nose diving.

S. Next we take a look at the national energy policy with the help of The American Prospect. In spite of 9/11 “changing everything,” the plan looks like just another GOP giveaway to big oil, in a vain attempt to drill, dig and pollute our way out of our current energy conundrum.

J. With this week’s horror forecast, Dr. S9 asks the arcane question: why is the President deliberately allowing the Chinese army to get total control of Global Crossing? Story is there are some disgruntled Americans who are angered that their higher bid was rejected, and they're raising a stink...and it's a pretty weird stink.

S. And those liberal, hippy scientists are at it again, trying to scare everyone with lurid tales of a coming global catastrophe. I mean, so what that this most recent September was the warmest on record anywhere and that glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Don’t you know there’s a war on?

J. And then with this week’s Presidential roundup, we take a look at the DNC’s most recent visit with the Oracle of Bill of Clinton. He pronounces party infighting and liberalism as “not good.” Then Kerry is having a problem selling his new found respect for peace, and Sen. Eyore is now really grasping at straws, saying he would make John McCain Sec. of State if elected. Great. Eyore in the White House and Tigger down at Foggy Bottom...what could *possibly* go wrong...

S.... So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...




J. This intercepted by the SooperSnooper UltraLowFrequency Mojohaus Listening Station at Ice Station Echo deep beneath the Arctic: “By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.”

So a proven threat to the security of the Nation was pushed to the background while we diverted precious resources to beat up someone who never landed a successful punch against the United States. This administration has allowed Al Qaeda to regroup and reform, which they have undoubtedly done since the decision to go to Iraq.

And all that jabbering from the Administration about going to the UN and leaving all options open was utter garbage. The President decided to go to Iraq, at least 6 months before his dad’s pals outed the administration in August on the nations Op/Ed pages. They possessed rigged intelligence, offered up by crooks and thieves pimped by dubious sources like Ahmad Chalabi, and spiced up by secret cabals within the Pentagram errr...Pentagon and the White House.

You know, all the Duct Tape and plastic sheeting in the world isn't going to help this administration if a revamped Al Qaeda takes another crack at the Motherland...

“inside the military, ‘stovepiping’ is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of command-checked at levels and sent from one level to another-and bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what you're going to do with it. Stovepiping allows them to cheat the process. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results.”

The Hersh story confirms our worst fears about this administration. This practice of Stovepiping, ignoring the process and views of the experts and using political hacks to decipher complex information and twisting it to support their established opinions, is how this administration conducts themselves not only Iraq, but the War against Al Queda, the economy, the environment, all their policy decisions.

Remember, this is from an administration where the President doesn’t even glance at a daily newspaper, but relies on underlings to “synopsize” the day’s news for him, because he wants the “unvarnished truth.” This is an administration that has turned intellectual laziness and disengagement into a kind of zen thing that they are getting way too much mileage out of.

S. This story is a crucial piece in understanding how dangerous these people really are. They embroil us in Iraq because they refuse to listen to contradictory information, no matter how well sourced or grounded.

They bankrupt the government and put the American economy on the brink of a devastating financial crisis, even putting Social Security and Medicare at risk, no matter what their economic advisors or the Treasury Secretary tells them. They ignore the threat of global warming because it would displease their corporate contributors. Scared? You should be.

This problem is compound by President's admission to Fox News that he never cracks open a newspaper or reads anything his aides don't prepare for him.

So if they are ignoring evidence that might call their views into question, is it any wonder that mendacity and deceit just congeal out of thin air every time he opens his mouth. This is Hubris on a scale that even shocks us. This is bad enough at any time in history, but the in face of the real national security threats facing the country, Al Qaeda, North Korea, a nuclear Iran, and the threat of world wide economic melt down, it's downright scary.

I'm talking the "Ring" Scary, like a fuzzy scaly chick climbing out of a well while you are watching The O’Reilly Factor and going postal on you.

Jesus!..How many times do we have to say it..There are no WMDs...The administration is lame and mendacious...They lied to us and themselves...They have risked American lives for minimal return on the National Security dollar.

They only know one thing, making their money while they are in office, and making sure that the right contributors get paid, while average Americans like us get to suck hard vacuum. This is not a government, this is an organized crime gang, a low-rent, intellectually-crippled version of the Corleone family, that got over in one of the most massive election frauds of all time.

They suck and have no game. They should be run. Not just out of the building, but out of the country and possibly off the planet to an icy asteroid in the OOrt cloud where they can ponder the vastness of space and scare each other during the eternal night with stories of Saddamzilla and his radioactive fire breath and the alien saucers he use to control Rodan and Monster Zero...


J. So what is it really with this administration and the poor? What is the deal here? Is it the guilty hatred of the conqueror for the conquered? Do they fear some sort of Dickensonian visit from the ghosts of starving children and homeless wokrers? Are they really the central casting villains that they are trying to convince us they are, like the evil childnapping slaver from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?

Well, there may not be real answers for these questions, but the effects of the Bush Administration’s policies are very real. To wit: the Census bureau reported recently that another 1.7 million of your neighbors, friends, family and other assorted fellow Americans sank beneath the waves for the third time and drowned into poverty last year.

That brings the grand total of Americans in poverty to 34.6 million. Just suck down that one for a moment. More than 12 percent of Americans live in poverty. That means they can’t afford rent, food, clothes, medicines and all those other luxiries that Dick Cheney takes for granted.

And those people will be in good company soon... the median income in the United States edged down by more than 1 percent last year to $42,409. Yeah, and once the rest of the world starts calling in their markers on the U.S. dollar and we continue to sell our country to oil rich despots, see how much that $42,000 will buy you.

The best part about this is the answer from our Nation’s Tool-In-Chief, White House flack Scotty McClellan: “The president acted. He led, and he acted, and we passed those tax cuts to get more money back into people's pockets so they can spend it on a good or a service. The economy is growing. And as the economy picks up even more steam, the economists will tell you then that creates an environment for job creation.”

That’s right, think about that for just a moment. Forget the horrible untruth of the whole “we put money back in the pockets” thing. Even better is the “just ask the economists, they’ll tell you...” bit.

Well, no Scotty, they won’t. Why? Because when the President’s Council of Economic Advisors were trying to motivate Bush and his speechwriters to get off the bong long enough to listen to a little reason, they were summarily evicted from their digs in the Old Executive Office Building and exiled off into a basement in an old disused Housing and Urban Development suboffice down in Alexandria, Virginia somewhere where the White House wouldn’t have to listen to their continual carping buzzkill about “large structural deficits.”

No, the speechwriters in the West Wing assured everyone that they remember their macroeconomics class in High School, and as long as everyone just stays high all the time, the numbers really do work out, or at least workout long enough for your pot-addled attention span to make it to the next “Joe Millionaire” episode...

S. Now some people in the rough-trade wing of the economics department are asking: How can this be? We have a growing economy. Gross Domestic products are up, up, up! The stock market is cruising towards 10k again! There is a massive pool of new capital to fuel the next round of business mergers and acquisitions!

Well, hold on there, Diamond Jim... That, in fact, *is* the problem. It would appear that our glorious Maximum Leader will be the first glorious Maximum Leader since Maximum Leader Herbert Hoover to preside over net job loss on his watch. And of course, you all remember the era Hoover presided over...

Steny Hoyer, the terrible and ancient Senator from Maryland hit it right on the head: “Americans have listened for three years to President Bush's lofty promises of economic prosperity and ‘robust growth,’ while he dismissed the three million jobs lost under his watch as a ‘short-term problem,’ But increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity is not a problem easily dismissed. The policies pushed by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have been breathtaking only in their failure to improve the lives of average Americans.”

It is becoming apparent to even the most rock-brained, FOXNews addled, ditto-head that the current good news in economic statistics is only good news to a certain portion of the population, and they are beginning to suspect they are *not* a part of that demographic.

For instance, we were told the great news a couple of weeks ago that in spite of Daimler-Benz announcing plans to close plants and layoff thousands of American workers, it was all good, because WalMart was planning to open dozens of new stores across the country, and hire people.

And as for a new round of mergers and acquisitions? Hooray! More American workers shipped off to the Island of Redundant Toys... But that’s okay, there’s always room for one more at Sam’s Place...

So let me get this straight. We are going to trade $25 an hour auto-manufacturing jobs with great health benefits and retirement packages for minimum-wage parttime WalMart jobs that have no benefits whatsoever, much less a union to help the workers fight for their rights.

You know, this is how revolutions start... Memo to the President: Continually throwing your feces at all the people who voted for you in the first place, in the vain hope that the dread of Iraqi Flying Saucer Technology, will keep them from noticing that they are standing on a breadline in a cardboard city, is, perhaps, not the wisest political play in the book.

It didn’t work for Maximum Leader Hoover, and trust us, you are not even close to being in that intellectual ball park...


J. So, is there any really any surprise anywhere that the current national energy plan crafted by the White House and snaking its way through Congress ensures our continued reliance on fossil fuels imported from some of the most criminally violent regimes on earth?

I mean, seriously, in an administration absolutely awash in oil-barons, can anyone muster even a shred of shock that their energy plan would be a continuation of the same old policies, in spite of the fact that “9/11 changed everything...” or so they say.

Well, the truth is that for this administration’s outlook on energy, 9/11 didn’t change a damn thing. The American Prospect gave a pretty good rundown recently on where our current energy policy stands.

“As it stands now, the conference committee, headed by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Billy Tauzin of (R-La.), is cooking up much the same legislation as Vice President Dick Cheney did in his pre-9-11 secret tryst with energy lobbyists. They may remove the unpopular drilling in the Alaskan wilderness from the bill (though in recent days Alaska's Republican delegation has threatened to vote "no" unless it remains in).

“But the core of the legislation -- $18 billion in tax breaks to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries -- remains unchanged. The operating assumption, to the extent there is anything more than corporate greed behind the bill, is that the United States can drill, dig and pollute its way to energy independence.”

We are getting the big lie: just do whatever the Petroleum industry says, and no one gets hurt. Forget the fact that two-thirds of our domestic oil usage goes to internal combustion engines and that 60 percent of our supply is imported.

The fact remains that no matter what sort of goat-blood voodoo we enact in terms of economic planning, there simply is not enough oil in the freeking ground to meet our bulemic over-indulgent SUV fixation.

And that augers for an even worse national security situation than Al Qaeda sleeper cells haunting the bars of your favorite Appleby’s on a Monday night watching football. Forget someone flying a 747 into the Sears Tower... if you want to see an international economic crisis that will stop the world on a dime, wait until someone gets the bright idea of driving a massive truck bomb into the Al Abqaiq oil field in Saudi Arabia.

It was just recently that former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed out the dearth of the Emperor’s oily clothes, noting that most of the world’s largest producing oil fields have now peaked, and that we would already be in a supply jam if not for the increased production of Norway and the Russian Federation.

But it’s only putting the eventual day of reckoning off, and not putting it off very far into the future.

S. This is not a matter of ideology, this is not a matter of fuzzing thinking hippies or gun-toting racists...it is science, we are running out of the product, and we need to be preparing for that day.

The company or government that gets out ahead of the next big energy technology, solving some of the issues surrounding photo-voltaic efficiency or large-scale capacitor storage will be gazillionaires, they will simply rule the world.

Sure, we can go on and on about meeting our energy needs by solar, clean, carbon-sequestration coal, hydrothermic, hydrogen fuel cell, biomass ethanol and wind sources, to name a few, and those who are so inclined will dismiss the talk as the raving of aging hippies leaning on their pitchforks, shooting the breeze around the old compost heap.

Surprise... these sources already account for 20 percent of global energy production and growing by 30 percent per year. Everywhere, that is but in the world’s leading industrialized power. When it comes to renewable, efficient and clean energy (don’t worry, we’ll get to Global Warming in a few minutes) it is the United States that is stuck in 19th Century.

And that, ultimately, may be the real threat posed by the energy rip-off now being enacted in Washington. The Europeans are the technological leaders in wind power. The Japanese have seized the lead in photovoltaics. The Brazilians have mandated that new vehicles burn up to 85 percent ethanol.

Chris Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, put it succinctly at a forum last week on Capitol Hill: “The danger we face today," he said, “is that if we don't develop a strong domestic market in these technologies, we will not have the companies and we will not have the jobs that will flow from the revolution taking place around the globe.”

But no, not us...what we get is a President giving away the treasury to their oil drilling pals, more American kids coming home in boxes for attempting to protect our access to a shrinking supply of a destructive commodity all because a gang of bible thumping weirdos proclaimed that they read in their Bible Code version of the Old Testament that the Earth will be cleansed by the firey wrathful fist of the angry pre-atomic space god Jehovah-1 before Bush’s second term is up anyway...so, what the hell, smoke’em if ya got’em...

SEE PART II

MojoWire for 10/25/03
PART II


And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…

J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…


S9 Greetings once again from the big, deep black, fellow space adventurers-- this rotation, we would like to give a big shout out to Qi Faren and his entire team at the China National Space Administration who worked on the Shenzhou V spacecraft. Way to go! And, since most of you folks are under forty years old, we here on the Mojohaus Lovesatellite are looking forward to watching your further accomplishments unfold for decades to come. Mad props to you for that
wizard demonstration of lift capacity. Now let's see you guys get an EVA and docking capability. Know that we *are* rooting for you.

After that whole business with the Wen Ho Lee scandal and the Lockheed Martin ballistic missile technology transfer flap, we wouldn't blame you if you decided to give up completely on trying to cooperate with the Americans on space technology. But take heart, comrades-- not every American wants to keep China mired in its medieval past. And you've certainly got some important friends in the highest offices of the United States government.

Have you heard about the sweetheart deal the Chinese army is potentially going to get greenlighted by the White House to bring Global Crossing out of bankruptcy? This should renew your faith in the Communist Party.

It's like this. Global Crossing is an American company that spent billions of dollars over the last decade laying millions of miles of optical fiber all over the ocean floors of the entire world. They
literally crossed the globe, building out high capacity long-distance telecommunications links.

Then they went bankrupt in late 2001. It was an implosion only exceeded in size by the craterings of Enron and Worldcom. The accounting "irregularities" that preceded the crash of Global Crossing were typical of the excesses that we have now come to associate with the telecom industry of the late nineties and early oughts.

About a month ago, the President allowed the sale of Global Crossing, Ltd. to a company called Singapore Technologies Telemedia, which is owned outright by an arm of the government of Singapore. This was the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United
States, which must approve any deals that allow foreign state-owned companies to invest in the U.S.

This all must sound pretty routine, except there is a story making the rounds that should raise a few eyebrows all around the Pacific rim. I'm speaking of the strange claims of a Texan by the name of Karl W. B. Schwartz, who is making a very weird stink about how the bankruptcy of Global Crossing may be the work of a conspiracy to deliver the strategically critical infrastructure assets of the company into the control of the People's Liberation Army.

Karl says that Li Ka-shing, who is apparently a Chinese equivalent of Richard Perle, has been trying to buy Global Crossing for years, and that the process of bankrupting it and selling it for pennies on the dollar to an arm of the Singapore government has been shepherded every step of the way by the President's gang of looters and thugs in the vast American government bureaucracies that regulate the markets for infrastructure projects on the scale large enough that only governments can pay for them.

The story is not a wild tale of partisan blowhards trying to pull the blocks out from under the President because he's a member of the opposition party. Mr. Schwartz is a true blue Republican, and he's also making a big stink out of the fact that the Clinton administration sold Magnequench, Inc. to your friends in the Chinese Triad. Magnequench is the only company on earth that makes the rare earth magnets used in a lot of high tech devices, including-- and Karl *loves* to make this point-- American smart bombs. Magnequench just finished moving their production facilities from Valparaiso, Indiana to Tanjian, China.

Ross Perot wasn't kidding about that Giant Sucking Sound, and Karl's story might have enough legs that we're following it closely here on the Satellite of Love. With Global Crossing in the hands of a company owned by a government entirely within the sphere of Chinese influence, it might not be far-fetched at all to expect all that dark fiber on the ocean floor, which GX so carefully laid before it went bankrupt, might soon be under the control Li Ka-shing and his buddies in the PLA.

This would be very good for the Communists in China. You see, Global Crossing transoceanic cables already carry over 90% of all intercontinental Internet traffic, and they own the termination points in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. This is infrastructure that the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense all rely on for their communications needs. If you were the Chinese army, wouldn't *you* want to own a piece of that pie? It could come in useful in the event of unforeseeable unpleasantry.

ST Telemedia can already sell a 25% stake in Global Crossing to the PLA, and there's nothing anybody can say about it. Given a little time, and the correct strategic realignment of resources, I'm sure a deal could be worked out for the rest of it to change hands in the future.

After all, the Chinese government is currently the largest holder of U.S. Treasury debt in the world. They're holding over $250 billion in U.S. federal debt. They can get practically any concession they want just by showing up an hour late to the next Treasury auction.

See... it pays to have friends in high places.


Remember *that* when there's a Chinese taikonaut wandering around on the lunar surface, and the Americans are still wondering why they can't book a supersonic flight on the Concorde anymore.


J. Well, we told you we’d get to global warming in a few minutes, so here we are. So while the President’s “scientific” advisors -- and by scientific advisors, we mean junior speechwriters from the American Enterprise Institute -- are busy taking the whiteout to the latest in state of the art climate research that suggest that not only is global warming a real phenomena but is also anthropogenic (that’s man-made for all you students waking up with hangovers)...

...so while they’re busy attempting to get you believe in Creationism and the eternal natural gas tank inside the Earth, those commies at the National Oceanagraphic and Atmospheric Adminisistation and their red fellow travellers at NASA have informed us that not only was September 2003 the warmest September in recorded history, only after Septembers in 1997 and 1998, but that South American glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields are melting with increasing speed and creating climate change throughout the Southern Hemisphere.

Now before you reflexively irate Sean Hannity devoteés get your “liberals are all about the sky is falling” freak on, let’s refresh ourselves on a bit of relevant science, shall we?

To begin with, the phrase “global warming” is really more of a media phrase than a scientific one. The Earth is continually either cooling or warming, on a number of differnt time scales. The actual phenomena it describes is a warming of the cooler “low” temperatures in the natural daily cycle of cooling and heating. This results in a more efficient heat capture by the Earth’s surface, which translates into overall more radical heating spells and cooling spells.

So when the internationally recognized and peer-reviewed journal Science reports that “Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern Argentina and Chile has doubled in recent years, caused by higher temperatures, lower snowfall and a more rapid breaking of icebergs,” they are pointing to more weather disruptions that are caused by the heat/water exchange that takes place when you start warming up large bodies of water under any conditions.

This leaves us with this conclusion that while the physical evidence mounts that the Earth is in a medium term warming period, the political leaders of the United States are ignoring the basics of organic chemistry and certainly won’t let it deter them from squeezing every last drop of oil from the Earth.

That’s right commie, don’t you know there’s a war on? We need to show the enemy we mean business, even if we have to make the entire planet completely uninhabitable for humanity. We will be victorious in our glorious battle against the double-plus-un-goodness of our dastardly opponents...

Fine, enough with the dispassionate sarcasm. The problem is that with the adminsitration’s continual belief that the climatolgists and geographers are a bunch of devil worshippers who need to come to Jesus, because there weren’t no mention of global warming in the Bible (by the way, Bible prophecy does mention global warming...a saw buck to the listener who can give us the reference), they are seriously messing with the economic health of the country.

S. If the United States does not take up its rightful place as a global leader in the prevention of carbon pollution, which is a big part of the issue with trapping heat in the atmosphere, then we are signing our economy up for massive hits from increased weather related disasters.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the North American continent is basically a giant weather laboratory, which often places the United States squarely in the cross-hairs of some of the most violent, bi-polar, Crispin Glover on Xtacy at the Viper Room behavior that the planet can muster.

From massive super cells and the tornadoes they spawn to city eating Hurricanes, to crop- destroying frosts and crop-denying droughts to floods that wipe out huge swaths of human habitation, the global warming phenomena promises one thing... it will get stronger, bigger and more frequent as the planet eats itself in a fit of pique that all the Zoloft in the galaxy could not correct.

Which might be one thing, but in terms of economic damage, how will the United States cope with billions of dollars more per year in lost crops, buildings, lives? It’s not like the current administration is doing much to plan for a good economy even under the best of circumstances.

Consider for a moment what happens when we have a massive surplus of moist air over the Central United States in the early spring, because it had nowhere to go, because a slight heating of the atmosphere in the late winer placed more moisture in the air than it could exchange suddenly with the normal northern movement of that particular semi-permanent air mass at that time of the year?

I want you to picture a Mississippi River that is about 30 miles wide starting in Minnesota and runs like that until it completely eats most of the large midwestern cities in its path, before it finally sinks all of Louisiana...

Think that’s far fetched? Think that’s the raving of those “Earth Changes” pseudo Native-American prophecy freaks...you should probably know that that model is only one of several scenarios being spit out by NOAA computers given only slightly more provocation than is currently existing.

But don’t worry, we won’t have to worry about that soon. If those guys from NOAA won’t come correct for the Bush Administration, well, we’ll find some office space for them out in the cornfield, where we sent the President’s Council on Economic Advisors...


J. First this week on the Presidential roundup, the DNC made its annual pilgrimage to the oracle of Bill Clinton. And after proferring the necessary sacrifices, the Oracle did speak and bestowed the wisdom of the gods upon the supplicants.

Unfortunately, it was complete bollocks...

The rambling Oracle has apparently decided that even out of real political power, he is still a Democratic Leadership Council owned-and-operated enterprise. Thus these divine little sop-soms of political thinking.

“We can’t beat the Republicans by being too liberal.” Too liberal? Hell Bill, I’d settle for being just a little bit liberal. How about that? How about we at least acknowledge that the real power base of the Democratic party is progressives.

That’s right Bill, the same progressives you sold down the river for things like the DMCA, several Consititutionally questionable Crime Omnibus Bills and the pardon of our favorite party scumbag Mark Richards... yeah...thought we forgot about him?

Then there was this: “Democrats need to not criticize one another.” This was clearly aimed at Gov. Howard Dean. Dean is the one who came out early and started to question what the hell Democrats were doing voting for a blank check for the Bush Administration’s new mercantile empire.

Clinton’s remarks were clearly directed towards anyone in the party who would try to take the mantle of “true Democrat” for themsleves without the party’s elite bestowing it upon them in an elaborate ceremony at the midnight full moon in front of the Lincoln Memorial...

The point being, the party elite get to say who the real Democrats are, not the candidates, much less the voters. Thanks Bill, we’ll keep that in mind. In the meantime, could you please just fade into obscurity, like a good ex-President please?

Next, John Kerry is apparently having having some difficulty in selling his new-found respect for cooperative threat reduction and criticism for the war in Iraq.

Bad news Senator, on this level, you break it, you bought it. The point is, you voted for this mess, and any attempt to spin your way out of it like the deadly silver ninja will get knocked out of the park like a cheap, slow hanging curve in front of a coked up Barry Bonds looking for his 748th homerun.

Look John, if you wanted to support the war, fine, then make your case, if not then you are going to get tagged as a morally soft, spineless politician. And that is a shame, because your own veteran’s record is pretty strong. This is the sort of thing you should be emphasizing.

S. Tell you what, John, we will give this one to you for free: Senator, how can you justify your voting for the war in Iraq? Well, it comes down to the United States having a responsibility to clean up a mess created by previous Republican administrations, and working against violent tyrants that terrorize their own people. Saving Iraq from Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.

Of course there are problems with this whole line of reasoning, if you take it far, but give it to your communications people and they will iron out the wrinkles. Next time, you get a bill...

Finally on the round up this morning, we take a quick look at Joe Lieberman’s latest desperate cry for attention, namely that if elected he would make Sen. John McCain of Arizona the Secretary of State.

As we noted in the headlines, this would just be the perfect continuation of the Pooh metaphor for Lieberman’s campaign. We would have President Eyore depending on Tigger for his foreign policy.

That’s great, what could conceivably be wrong with that.

Well, we can tell you what: Even though we like Tigger for his unfiltered political Id bubbling to the surface 24-7, I am not sure he is the guy I want traveling the world, placing foreign leaders in headlocks and challenging other foreign ministers to games of Russian Roullette.

And it is our belief anyway that this whole statement simply is another desperate plea for attention from Eyore, as well as a signal that he is finally getting ready to change his party affiliation.

It’s a little like coming out of the closet. Don’t worry, Joe, we all knew already anyway. Sure your parents might have some trouble with it for a while, but sooner or later, they will come to love you, no matter what kind of donors you bring home for the holidays.

J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Energy efficiency and independence means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “They stole it, my precious, thieveses, nasty little liberalses”



S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.

And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.

J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...

Mojowire #29 for 10.18
PART I

MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master



J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire Vol. 29... I’m Mojo...

S. And I’m Sean

J. And we have a special live, in studio guest this morning, directly from the Mojohaus Spy Sattellite of Love in geosynchronous orbit high above Bagdad by the Bay, it’s the Wire’s very own Dr. Strychnine...

S9. Good morning Wireheads, it’s great to be here planetside this morning although the air is not as rich as I’ve grown accustomed to, so I might have to catch my breath a bit -- it’s Saturday, October 18, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...

J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:

S. First this morning, we break down the bad news regarding the California recall and take a quick look at the tasks that await “The Governator” as he begins to learn that it is a lot easier to criticize than to govern.

S9. Next, we take a look at the morale of our troops overseas and match the administration’s pro-patria cheerleading for our boys in blue against the reality of their deeds, and as you can guess, it is not a pretty picture.

J. Then we examine the adminsitration’s latest brain-fizzle, as they tried to bypass the national media and take their case for the war directly to the home town newsrooms. Problem, the home town newsrooms have even less patience for a gang of lying thugs than the beltway gang.

S. This one we had to get from the “we couldn’t make this stuff up” file. Sailor Mongering... We are willing to bet that the Darkling Eclectica’s own maritime attorney doesn’t know what this is, well stay tuned and you soon will and learn why it is a weapon being used by the Department of Justice to beat up on Greenpeace.

S9. Then with this week’s Presidential Roundup, we take a look at the Democratic field for their latest antics and missteps and read the bones with regards to the future of the Maximum Leader’s job security.

J.... So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...




J. So in case you have been under a rock for the last couple of weeks, we have a new governor coming into power in Sacramento next month. Are you ready for the wonder, the terror, the splendor of Conan, the Govenator? Are you ready for Sygian Black Lotus in every pot?

Well, hold on there a moment, Conan... let’s take a look at some actual numbers from the recall, shall we? In a state that crushed Republican voters in 2000 with an overwhelming turnout of Democrats to the polls, the state’s Democratic faithful barely beat the GOP to the polls by less than a percent.

Overall, the Governator was elected with about an eighth of the vote that Davis got elected with in 2002.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post makes the astute observation that the guy who did the most damage to Davis in the election was Davis himself. As it turned out that when push came to shove in a competitive race, Davis just plain sucked. Remember, Bill Simon, the child-candidate, damn near beat Davis in 2002, and he’s the Republican equivalent of the slow kid with glasses that eats paste.

“Davis, in fact, has long been just about the unhappiest warrior on the American political battlefield. The normal business of politics -- negotiating with legislators, enunciating his principles, building support for his programs -- repelled him. In a sense, his is the tragedy of the staffer, the detail guy, whose ambition pushed him onto center stage, where he was exquisitely uneasy and inept. Only in the closing days of his campaign could Davis finally bring himself to take credit for legislation he had signed: the restrictions on greenhouse gases, the restoration of the eight-hour-day standard for overtime pay, the limits on financial institutions sharing customers' credit reports and, just last Sunday, the extension of health insurance to 1 million working Californians.”

Davis, for those in our international audience, is not Jed Bartlet from the West Wing. This is not a guy whose oratory leaves people looking like they just licked their fingers and stuck them into a high voltage storage capacitor.

S. Now there is clearly a disconnect between the reality of politics in California, and Davis as the embodiment of it. Davis did not create the energy crisis, he did not create the government paradigm that leaves less than 15 percent of the state budget in the hands of the Governor’s office, he didn’t tank the national economy that left the state’s industries reeling.

But he didn’t do a very good job at telling people what needed to be done about it either, and at the end of the day, it looks like that is what a lot of people were looking for, and in the absence of real political solutions, they were willing to take a chance on a bit of Hollywood magic.

So how now, Governator? What comes next?

The Governator came hat in hand to the Maximum Leader of his party to beg a few coppers for the great state of California, Republican to Republican. W. came to stay a night at one of his biggest California fundraiser’s hotel, the historic Mission Inn in Riverside. Fitting that a major player in state Republican politics and friend o’ W., would have an establishment that glorifies the conquest of oppressed indigenous populations by White Christian Europeans. We just report the facts folks, we could not make this up.

Even more fitting that it should set the scene where the new Imperial Governor should meet with the Maximum Leader in a Redneckistan summit.

And the humor started almost immediately. A big reason for the meeting, besides putting the Administration’s federal imprimatur on The Governator’s pending reign, was a chance for Arnold to go hat-in-hand to the prez, given that he is still looking at an $8 billion shortfall and 6.6 percent unemployment right out of the box, and an economy that promises to go even further into the tank without some serious assistance from feds.

S9. The Governator in his first semi-official political action, got run like the village drunk in some early Irish novel. Bush smiled and nodded and said he’d “look into things he could do for California,” stepped out for his photo-op and a few jokes with the crowd and got the hell out of town so fast it made the state party’s head swim.

Clearly, the old standard of honor among theives doesn’t apply when the Federal Government is ready to hold a bake sale to fund the defense of the nation. Sorry Conan, Emperor George has no quatloo’s for a state that ran him by a million votes.

This is important, because a lot of the party faithful held their nose and voted for The Governator because they thought he was a guy who might be able to cut a deal with W, unlike Tom McClintock who would have just urinated on the state line and made menacing superiority displays in the general direction of Washington and members of the Congressional delegation.

It looks like your on your own there Mr. Governator. Yeah, your pals Dana Rohrabacher and David Dreier are suddenly going to stop returning phone calls and you will suddenly find yourself the inhabitant of the crown jewel of the state penal system, the governors office.

By the way, you *do* know that you have to pass nearly anything you want to do through a Democratically elected executive branch and state legislature, don’t you?...

Good luck, have fun stormin’ the castle...


J. So with all the buzz about letters home, how do the troops in Iraq really feel about their jobs, their government and their general place in the world.

Well, let’s make a quick comparison of a little rhetoric vs. reality, shall we?

Rhetoric: “Our whole nation has been reminded that we can never take our military for granted. I will keep our military strong… America counts on the men and women who have stepped forward as volunteers in the cause of freedom. I want to thank you all for your good service. Thank you for the credit and honor you bring to our country every day.”- President George W. Bush, 9/12/03

Reality: By a recorded vote of 213 ayes to 213 noes, the House rejected an amendment to increase the basic rate of pay to all military services by $265 million - the amount needed to provide a $1,500 bonus to each person serving in operations in Iraq or Afghanistan for FY 2004. Remember, $265 million is roughly equal to what many suspect Halliburton is overcharging the U.S. government in Iraq. - House Roll Call Vote #554, 10/17/03

So while we have been unable to reach our correspondents embedded with the troops deep in the Iraqi desert to ascertain the real man/woman/other on ground report on their feelings, we can take a good guess.

I mean, how pathetic is it that a lady in the Mid-West, had to go to her church group to help raise the money to buy her kid a kevlar vest, like he was getting socks at summer camp, because the counselor’s at Camp Rummy were getting a little skimpy on supplies for the boys and girls.

Seriously, these are people from the midwest, this is Bush country, these are the people who populated the big pro-patria rallies, who cried tearfully, keeping a stiff upper lip while our boys were shipped away to the war for mom, apple pie and Judeo-Christian values in the final battle against all that is evil.

How do you think the folks at home reacted when they got the letter that ran: “Hey ma...Things are great, still hanging in there, don’t know when we’ll be home, love, Bubba. P.S. Please run down to the Main Street Army-Navy store and pick up one of those fancy kevlar vests they got on the maniken in the window. Shouldn’t be much more than $1,500. Tell Billy-Joe it’s for me, and he’ll probably knock off 10 percent...”

Can this kind of thing possibly fly out there in vast plains of the great American heartland?

S. Our sources say hell no. From a political perspective, there are a lot of veterans out there who are looking at the administration and thinking of a time in our not too distant past, where 18 and 19-year-old kids are sent overseas and no sooner do they get there, they are cut loose by politicos in power because they could not deliver the silver screen ending the folks at home demanded on an unrealistic schedule.

Not to mention the fact, that in spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the money being spent is not even close to what is needed to do the job and is still billions more than the United States has to spend on anything but debt service at the moment.

Even some Republicans are starting to question Rummy’s commitment to the troops when they have to hear from their own constituencies regarding the lousy job the government is doing in taking care of the soldiers, sailors and marines.

Here is a little bit we intercepted from the Ann Arbor News up in the heart of the heartland, Ann Arbor Mich. “Blaise Blastos, a supply sergeant who quickly replaced his Army fatigues with blue jeans and a white oxford shirt when he got home Saturday, shakes his head when asked to describe the military duties in Iraq. He sums it up in a word: terrible.

"Every day we ask ourselves what we're doing there," he said. "We can't come up with a good answer."

Back in May, he and other reservists helped build two pontoon bridges. Since then, he and about 175 others have had far less to do in their station in Ba'qubah near Baghdad. At most, they work three hours a day, which leaves a lot of free time to commiserate among themselves. Nobody feels proud of what they're doing there, he said.

At first, the Iraqis were happy the Americans were there, but that sentiment has changed to resentment, he said.

Although he voted for George Bush, he says he won't do so again.

"All the reasons for going to war were based on miscalculations, errors and plain untruths," he said. "I can't justify all these people spending a year of their lives based on politicians' untruths." Blastos said he would have felt differently had he served in World War II, where there was a clearly defined goal, threat and outcome.

"Everything's muddled now, nothing is clear-cut," he said, as his chocolate Labrador, LaLa, paced through the house of relatives, a red, white and blue ribbon round his neck.

S9. Blastos said those in active duty don't support the reserve units, which are provided little money for basics. “We get what they don't want, or what's left over,” he said, noting that he has to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to make a phone call home because there's just one phone for 175 people. They were issued two uniforms eight months ago, but nothing since. Some reservists have no boots. His wife mailed him gloves to use when he was sent on a mission to pick up trash on the streets.

Joanna Blastos is also no fan of Bush, who recently extended the service of all the reservists another six to nine months. While her husband should have been coming home for good this month, he'll likely still be there until sometime next spring.

“I try not to watch the news much anymore because it was throwing me into quite a depression, and my blood pressure wasn't too hot for a while there,” she said. “Every day, you wait for that knock on the door.”

This is just one of many stories coming out of Iraq. This is not to say that there are not good things happening there. There is no one who would honestly say that Saddam Hussein is preferrable to the U.S. military.

But for the military guys there, the question is rapidly becoming, how much longer will they be able to answer that question without a moment of pause to think about it.

And it’s a question the NeoCons better start devoting their reputed brain power to. The specialties the National Guard reserves bring to the table is essential to the success of these kinds of missions. The Pentagon has gone to that well many times to cover it’s gigantic behind. A 4 or 5 year stay in Iraq will break the system into little pieces.

Utlitmately, this survey focuses our attention on a crucial question. How long before the servicemen and women and their familie will continue to tolerate being lied to, being used, and their sacrficed demaned by Conservative pundits who never stared down the barrel of an enemy screaming that their constant danger is good news. It’s not good news.

The over 2000 dead and wounded in Iraq demands the truth. And this survey demonstrates, our soldiers require it as well. And God knows, they cannot pry the truth out of this adminstration with the jaws of life.


J. However, in the wake of some mixed reviews coming from the troops, the administration decided the best way to deal with potential of bad publicity would be to take a pass on the national media.

Instead, the west wing hive brain decided they would go directly to the small and medium size newsroom across the country to get their message out to the masses. Quote: “We believe local media and regional broadcasters are more interested in letting viewers or readers see or hear what the president has to say,” said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director. “It's less analytical and more reporting.”

Because God forbid anyone in the media actually analyze what the President says. Why on earth would we ever want to take the President’s statements regarding life and death issues and hold them to the harsh light of critical thought? Are we really that rude and uncultured a people?

No, it would just be better for everyone if we just sat there and let the Republican though police beam the President’s cool and soothing words to us from outer space through a haze of xenite gas, making our minds more maleables for the beautiful truth of our Maximum Leader.

The amusing part of the whole deal is that hometown newsrooms proved not to be full of the rubes that the President’s gang were hoping.

S. Martha Kumar, a Towson State University professor in Maryland who has studied White House relations with the media, said recently that trying to get into local news budgets without the filter of the national media is a losing proposition. “I don't know in the long run what it really buys you. The president's problems now are policy problems, not communications problems.”

For example, immediately after getting the President all to themselves for a minute or two the other day, the on WBAL in Baltimore report, mixed Bush's words with reminders of the violence in Iraq and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction: “The president is trying to paint a brighter picture of Iraq despite the deaths of more U.S. soldiers today and another deadly car bombing over the weekend,” the report began.

This is only one front in the battle for the hearts and minds of the enemy on the homefront. We now turn to the subject of chain letters home from troops expressing their love for their Maximum Leader and the task they have been assigned, digging the Iraqi people out from under decades of U.S. backed terror and oppression at the hands of Saddam Hussein.

So now we have terrible tales of soldiers being told to sign letters home describing how wonderful things are in Iraq, and those who don’t sign are apparently having letters sent home for them anyway in their names.

Again, it was those rubes in the small town newsrooms who caught this one. The Olympian in rural Washington received a letter from a kid in the 503rd Airborne Regiment of the 4th ID, telling about all the great stuff going on around Kirkuk.

A day or two later, their editorial department got another letter from another kid in the same unit that was idenitical to the previous missive. But wait it gets better...

Being journalists, they got on the phone with other Gannett papers across the country and soon found out that these propaganda form letters were being received by newsrooms throughout the nation.

S9. There were a few days of people wondering exactly what was going on with this letter writing campaign, as reporters from local and national media started tracking down the soldiers whose names appeared.

A number of them said they not only signed the letters, but agreed with their glowing contents. All well and good... they’re there and we are not. However, there are a disturbing number of soldiers turning up who not only disagree with the missive’s assessment of the situation but claim they never signed, much lessed authorized anyone to send a letter in their name.

Later in the week, some Lt. Col. Who somewhere in Northern Iraq said he took it upon himself to organize a little letter writing party, because his guys were getting tired of seeing how the war was being portrayed back home.

We here at the wire have a little problem with this theory. First off, if those guys are living in holes in Iraq, how are they following the intricacies of day to day news coverage of the war? Furthermore, why are letters being sent to papers where the soldiers no longer live, but the towns where they were recruited from. That would be info that the military Public Affairs Home Town New Service would have.

The problem for the administration is once they were exposed for the congenital liars that they are, that whole jedi mind trick thing ceased working on much of the national press corps, at least those who think and write for a living; we’re not talking so much about television infotainment.

Alexander the Shrub and the SuperFriends are going to have a pretty tough time from here on out getting anyone in the news media to take anything they say at face value. Let’s just hope that starts to translate to the voters about a year from now.

SEE PART II

MojoWire for 10/18/03
PART II


J. It has come to the attention of the vast intelligence network of the Mojowire, of this amazing story. To wit: in a Miami federal court, the attorney general charged the environmental group Greenpeace under an obscure 1872 law originally intended to end the practice of "sailor-mongering," or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships.

Ashcroft plucked the law from obscurity to punish Greenpeace for boarding a vessel near port in Miami.”

No, Wireheads, the transmission was not garbled. The Depatment of Justice, locked in a death struggle with Al Queda, The international drug conspiracy, and the Alien Grays, is actually trying to nuke Greenpeace by conjuring up some obsure law from two centures ago.

When you wonder how a group of crazy fanatics were able to sneak past the vigilence of FBI and DOJ, now it becomes clear. Priorities.....It’s all about Priorities...

Lets just work this isssue bit..shall we?...A couple of Greenpeace hippies get themselves arrested for trespassing to highlight the trade in illegal shipments of rare woods. No one is threatened or hurt, local PD processes in a few hours, and even the importer moves his product to market.....

So why does DOJ scream down from L7 to lay down some law from the days of wooden ships and Blackbeard to prosecute a bunch of enviromentalists? Becausue we’re at war, HIPPIE!

If you thought we were at war wit Al Queda, Hamas, Fatah, Christian Identity or some other proven Assymetric threat, guess again egghead.

This Administration is not at war with those guys..They are at war with their political enemies, real or imagined. the war this administratin is fighting is not with the terrorists or the criminals, it’s with the Democrats, and their constituents, including those fearsome enviromentalists.

S. This war is being fought from the office of Karl Rove, not the Pentagon. It’s all about spin, polls, and working the voters like a bunch of rubes being sold a tonic for a sore throat.

There is a war, and it’s about George Bush and his right wing cronies getting another 4 years at your throat. And every threat they pimp to you has to be viewed through that prism.

For instance, take a look at the actual prosecution of this threat. When this crossed our desk in the Intelligence section, our first thought was “Sailor Mongering?” What they hell are smoking down in Deep 13 these days?

I mean, this was a law that has only been used twice in all recorded U.S. Legal History and even on those occasions the courts had nothing bad things to say about how the law was written and the dubious nature of the policy it was meant to address.

So while we were sitting here scratching our collective brain pans, wondering what species of household mold had gotten into the air ventilation system at Justice and started making people hallucinate, it hit me.

The law is designed to do one thing well. Not punish the actual criminals, but the people the criminals work for. Sailor Mongering laws were meant to punish the owner of the local bar and grill/cathouse on the board walk for sending his cappers out into the harbor to lure these guys off their boats and bring them ashore, and leave the boats relatively unprotected...

The point of the law was to hold a corporate entity reposnsible for this behavior. So what are the consequences for Greenpeace for being held liable under this incredibly twisted reading of the law?

S9. Well, for starters it almost guarantees they will lose their tax-exempt, non-profit status. Next, if convicted, it will, in all likelyhood, require Greenpeace to report all their actions to the Government for the next N-years, like some parolee - agent relationship writ large.

That is the point that the Ashcroft Department of Justice wants to send on behalf of the hacks and thugs in the Political Office of the West Wing. Watch your step and watch how you talk about the Maximum Leader, or you, too, might be on the short list for a federal Grand Jury indictment on some obscure law that probably isn’t even printed anywhere, and had to be inferred from a WestLaw search on relevant case law.

According to the Los Angeles Times on this subject, the administration has pursued a similar zero-tolerance policy in other cases. It has been accused of using so-called "trap-and-arrest" tactics to suppress protests in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of journalists, bystanders and student protesters were arrested en masse without a warning or an opportunity to disperse. They were then left hog-tied in holding areas for as long as 20 hours, with their hands bound to their ankles.

But when it comes to relevant areas of the law, such as 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection and other arcane notions well, it seems that Ashcroft’s untouchables are not to be bothered by trifles.

It is also notable that other organizations have not faced such attacks. For example, in this same judicial district in Florida, the Cuban American group Democracy Movement organized a protest in which members sailed into a government-designated security zone.

Although the members were charged, the organization was not. Similarly, other groups viewed favorably by the administration — such as anti-abortion groups — have not been subject to criminal indictments of their organizations for such protests.

But don’t be fooled. Like we said, there is a war on. The war is on clean water, clean air, your right to speak out, and your right to associate with those dangerous freaks you hoist a pint to every Friday.

Make no mistake, First it’s Greenpeace, and next it’s the beer fueled rap you lay down at the pub. Think of this when you are stading in front of that touch screen or punch card..NO on Facism folks..NO on G2....


J. We have a busy week on the old Presidential roundup, so let’s get right to it. We look at the Howard Dean job creation plan, we get a good laugh at Joe Lieberman getting heckled by Arab-Americans, we read the bones concerning the untimely political death of the Wesley Clark’s campaign manager and consult the oracles surrounding a political panic that seems close to breaking out in the Bush camp.

So to begin, our standard disclaimer. Most of us down here at the Mojowire are Howard Dean supporters, so we give him props generally, even though we get on him on occasion for mistakes we see. As far as we are concerned, the rest of the Dems just don’t have what it takes, not even the ones we actually like, like Dennis Kuncinich.

His basic plan is a $100 billion fund that would go to states to help them spur economic development, paid for by closing a roughly equivalent amount of tax loopholes, mainly for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

His overriding concern is essentially to see that the money the government takes in gets directed to those who need it the most. There are those who are troubled by his continual talk of balancing the federal budget and instituting a “pay as you go” federal system.

It seems clear that running a federal deficit in some circumstances is not only unavoidable, but probably even a good thing, as long as they are not thes mountainous structural deficits that the Bush economic brain trust has signed all our great-grandchildren up for.

But that is probably a fine distinction to make in a camapaign speech. But Doc, it is a distinction you are probably going to have to find a way to make soon, lest you at some point are made publicly to contemplate the true meaning of permanently balanced budgets.

S. Next, we look at Sen Eyore’s latest campaign blunder. This one almost starts out like a bad joke: So this Jewish Senator from Connecticut walks into an Arab-American community meeting...

Unfortunately for Joe Lieberman, the punch line was him being nearly heckled out of the room. To his credit, when people in the room started hollering at him regarding his blanket support of Israel.

At first he seemed to blunder in the face of occupation and recent plans to build a wall to keep Palestinians and Israelis separate. His whole take was “sorry, it’s only temporary...you’ll get your land back...sometime...I think...”

He actually managed to pull it out though, by blaming the Bush administration for a lack of commitment to the region and calling on Americans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds to be unified and tolerant of one another.

Too bad, Joe, that doesn’t square with some previous positions you have taken regarding the security of Israel, which is a serious topic. But as we have seen lately, what neither side is doing is getting them the peace or security they need there and an American President is going to have to come to that situation with a completly even temperament to both sides.

Then with Wes Clark’s bid for the White House, the bitter recriminations have started already, just a month into the General’s campaign. He is looking for a new campaign manager after his previous one, Donnie Fowler, quit after claiming that Clark has already sold out.

Apparently the riff goes something like this: General Clark was recruited by a lot of people via the internet and old fashioned grassroots politics. Many of those people are now feeling betrayed because the moment he jumped into the race he became a front runner and immediately brought in people from the old Clinton regime, such as Eli Segal and Dick Sklar who have begun consolidating power in the camapaign.

Those people began to run a campaign like in the old days and made a very terse “thank you for your services, if we need anything else we’ll call,” to the people who got Clark into this thing in the first place.

Those people are less than amused. It remains to be seen if this rift will filter down through the rest of the campaign. Our bet is that it will, if for no other reason was that his popularity out of the gate was due in part to his military background, but more to being an outsider with no ties to the current establishment; the same sort of idea that has been informing the Dean campaign.

And when it turns out that the maverick outsider Democrat, is, in reality, a middle of the road moderate Republican who *did* really support the war in Iraq in spite of his new found religion, then that might be all for the General... but hey, he might make a decent running mate later on...

S9.Finally, this morning, we come to the wailing, weeping and gnashing of teeth that has been taking place in the rarefied air of castle Republinstein high in the Transval, where their blasphemous rites can take place out of the view of mortal man.

Their number one worry is that their brainless paste-eating homonculus in the White House is starting to run out of coattails. And when that happens, their flying monkeys in Congress might start looking at where they can better deals than just down the street at 1600 Penn. Ave.

And that is good news for nobody in the GOP right now. It has put them right off their horrible canabalistic feed.

The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner noted that as the President’s poll numbers threatened to fall below 50 percent, something of a palace coup has erupted within the GOP. He points to indicators such as many Republican hosue and senate members have suddenly balked at a series of “loyalty votes” those votes that are cast in the name of party unity, despite what you or the folks at home might think of it.

For instance, GOP lawmakers have recently told the President what he could do with his plans to privitize air traffic controllers, a bill allowing “comp time” as an alternative to overtime pay, schemes to prevent cheap drugs from Canada, narrowing the scope of the Patriot Act, and others.

The message? Hey doofus, we hafta run for reelection next year, too...

Kuttner writes: “When Bush's popularity ratings were in the stratosphere, Republican legislators contentedly basked in his warmth. The White House political operation could threaten to discipline Republican legislators who defected, refusing favors and even threatening challenges in primaries. Those days are simply gone. Nothing succeeds like success. And nothing fails like failure.”

Complicating matters for Bush is the possibility of a full-blown scandal involving allegations that someone in his White House revealed the identity of a CIA officer out of political spite at the officer's spouse. The ensuing political firestorm, not to mention the Justice Department investigation, could further hurt Bush's standing.

“It's a feeding frenzy. … They've just got to take the punches, make sure everybody is cooperating with the investigation and see where it goes,” said veteran Republican strategist and informal Bush adviser Charles Black. “It's going to be a distraction for a while.”

“They need to get a handle on these things,” said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. “We have a saying around here - don't let your monkeys turn into gorillas.”

So now, Karl Rove, the Himmler-esque mastermind of W’s rise to the top, is now handicapping the race saying it is going to be a tight, tough race in a narrowly divided country. At the same time, the reelection ghouls are spooling up their machine, raising the money and preparing for an all out Get Out The Vote drive.

They are starting to read the writing on the wall...if any of them still want to have a job this time next year, then they better get crankin’ and they better be ready to spend every last dime of $200 million. They know that this is not going to be a cakewalk and they are preparing to do what is necessary to keep the Maximum Leader in office.

Let’s just hope they’ll keep it legal, at least...but given their past behavior, we are not holding our breaths. Remember, regime change begins at home.

J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Analyzing the administration’s rhetoric means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “hey sailor, are these guys bothering you?”



S9. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.

S. And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.

J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...

Mojowire for 10/04 

MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
       Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master

intro with hendrix star spangled banner

J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire... I’m Mojo...

S9. And I’m Strychnine, Sean is in the electro-deluxe, Nitro-enriched, dream pyramid for a little brain care down in the Mojohaus bunker at Deep 13 this week. It’s Saturday, October 04, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...

J. Brought to you by Mojohaus, Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:

S9. First, we lead off with the strange tale of Joe Wilson. You might remember some time back, the Mojowire announced to our legion of loyal listeners when this whole Ambassador Wilson/CIA thing broke that this story was not over by a long shot and that “The Company” has a way of protecting it’s turf. Is this the Agency version of placing a severed horse’s head in the bed of Dick Cheney?

J. Next, we place the Bush rhetoric regarding international weapons proliferation in comparison to the fact that the United States once again leads the world in arms sales to developing nations. So while we are out flexing our big chalooties in Iraq for the CNN cameras, market makers are busy arming the next Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda threat.

S9. California continues to writhe in the final days of the recall death throes. But is there anyone out there who was *honestly* surprised by the L.A. Times story on Thursday describing a happy handed Arnold when it comes to women and Nazis? What may have been surprising to some veteran watchers was the panic his campaign spun into, causing The Govenator to publicly offer an apology, thereby guaranteeing this story stays in play all the way until the polls open on Tuesday.

J. Then we look at the next shot being fired across the bow of the Republic, as Diebold, the company that makes electronic voting machines is now using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a cudgel to silence all criticism of their machines and their potential impact on the Republic once and for all.

S9. David Kay has made his thoughts on the dreaded Iraqi Flying Saucer Technology known and the bottom line is not good for the administration, given their previous statements about the level of threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD legions.

J. ...So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...


A CIA DIRECTOR BLESSED WITH MANY FRIENDS
J. So the basic story runs something like this. A reporter who is closely tied to the current administration either gets or makes a phone call regarding a hit piece he is spooling up regarding a potential embarrassment to the President. He gets info that the wife of the hit-ee is a CIA agent and that he got his job because of that. The reporter/political operative calls the CIA to confirm this. The CIA will say neither nay nor yea, but tells him, perhaps through unofficial backdoor channels that they have no problem with his story.

Fast forward a couple of months. Suddenly, that same CIA is has initiated a blood-hunt for the no-account mangy so and so what outed their agent and if it were in their power, while they are at it, they let it be known that if the reporter ever travels overseas again, he should have people taste his food...

For most of what you need to know about where we're going here is this clip from the lead in Thursday's Washington Post ...

As the White House hunkered down, it got the first taste of criticism from within Bush's own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that Bush "needs to get this behind him" by taking a more active role. "He has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it," the outspoken Hagel said last week on CNBC's "Capital Report."

Hagel is a Republican, even if not much of a loyalist, and he's pointing at what everyone's saying: that the problem centers on the vice president's office. And people are adding a name: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff and close advisor.

A mountain of rumor doesn't amount to a single fact. But two respected ex-CIA officers have now publicly pointed to the vice president's office -- a good sign, I think, that that's what they're hearing from ex-colleagues at CIA. And now a United States Senator of the president's own party has suggested the same. If true, Libby's involvement would mean much more than a rapid escalation in his attorneys' billable hours. Much more.

Seriously, it really is Weekend at the Naval Observatory. UltraHawk VP Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Mary Matalin dragging the decomposing corpse of the Vice President around the talk shows, using him like that creepy dummy in Magic.

S9. But lets connect ALL the dots here, shall we? The Neo-Con Sith Lords, displeased that the CIA is not penitent enough about 9/11, decides their devotion to accuracy in Iraq WMD intelligence is the final straw, and start working them over, setting up a separate group within the DOD to correct their homework with big red pens, and then the VP himself coming to visit like the Emperor visiting the rebuilt Death Star; "The Vice President is not as forgiving as me, Mr Tenet....We will redouble our efforts!"...

So now it's really on!..The CIA fires a shot across the bow of the White House by calling out the NSA and Condi Rice on Yellowcake, and then drops a big steaming referral on the DOJ to smoke out the scheming Wormtongues at the White House who fingered a CIA operative to punish her husband. "Fear will keep the Local systems in line..Fear of Karl Rove!"...

Folks, this really could be it...although I am sure that Junior isn't awake long enough on workdays to direct his ringwraiths to out Valeire Plame, there is no doubt that Scooter Libby or some sleazy Uruk Hai at the Undisclosed Location was attempting to wreak the vengeance of their terrible master. Fingering the culprit beyond a reasonable doubt will be very difficult, but shinning a crack of the light of the day on the evil inner workings of Cheney's Dul Guldur is likely.

Better wear your cleanest Alchemy robes Dick...It's going to take a whole lot of that old Black Magic to keep this one at bay...

Because, you know, the CIA has always had a way of protecting its own turf, and protecting itself from becoming someone else’s political tool against their will.

Many say that when Deep Throat, the famously named unnamed source for Watergate journalists Woodward and Bernstein, when he, she, it, we, they die, there will be high level CIA credentials found. The CIA was also nominally responsible for pulling the pin on the grenade for Iran-Contra, after the NSC and Ollie North started trying to tell them how to run their show in Central America.

So this could be yet another episode in the long and storied Godfather-like way the CIA disposes of internal political enemies. And this time the opponent wasn’t even Barzini caliber...it was that pimp Tatalia. George Tenet is just a CIA director blessed with many friends.

Again, according to the Post: “The backdrop to this whole scandal is the war that's been going on between the Bush administration and the CIA for two years. Another reporter who's knowledgeable about these issues and not at all averse to this perspective, told me a few days ago that "there are people in this administration who think that the CIA was criminally negligent for 9/11 and that the whole place should be shuttered." That's an accurate portrayal of what a number of those people think.

That war with the CIA centers on the vice president's office. If it turns out that Plame's exposure originated there too, it will inject this legal controversy -- this criminal investigation -- right into that broader policy controversy, the whole issue of the war against the CIA, the questions over politicized intelligence all of it.

The mixing of the two would be explosive because the white light of press scrutiny and the sharp blade of a criminal inquiry would tear open stuff that otherwise never would have seen the light of day.”

SING IT NOW, “WE ARM THE WORLD, WE ARM THE CHILDREN”
J. You know, with all the concern over Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, you would get the singular impression that there was nothing more pressing to the Bush administration than getting these weapons and their potential technologies out of the hands of rogue nations, dictators and just generally unstable states.

But it would be *wrong*

You see, for many in the arms industry, the 1980s never ended. Nope, they still get out that scratchy old Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tape, and continue with business as if our beloved enemy, the Soviet Union had never left.

And in an odd way, it hasn’t. You see, for the seventh year running, the United States has lead the world in small arms proliferation throughout the Developing World, with the Russian Federation second.

Nations that are now just coming into their own, mostly in that now-storied 10/40 belt targeted by Christian Missionaries, are also the main marketing targets for gun merchants. And why not? According to many of the same people, you can’t have God if you don’t have guns, and apparently, the United States is more than happy to be your one stop shop for both.

According to a report released last week by the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of the Library of Congress, Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1995-2002 detailed that The United States was the leader in total worldwide sales in 2002, with about $13.3 billion, or 45.5 percent of global conventional weapons deals, a rise from $12.1 billion in 2001.

Of that, $8.6 billion was to developing nations, or about 48.6 percent of conventional arms deals concluded with developing nations last year, according to the report. Russia was second in sales to the developing world last year, with $5 billion, followed by France with $1 billion.

You see, this is where we at the Mojowire get confuddled... We had been under the impression that weapons proliferations to nominally stable states with matchstick men governments was not a particularly sanguine policy.

In the run up to the Iraqi war, one would have been lead to believe that the United States had a profound moral duty to keep weapons out of the hands of the world’s weirdest people and most violent places. They represented a “unique and urgent” threat to the security of the people of America.

But apparently we were wrong. It would seem that we are in fact market makers when it comes to this sort of thing. I mean, what good would it do industry 10 years from now if there was no new Saddam Hussein right? Arms sales to these countries are long term investments in the financial health of the United States.

S9. This strategy, combined with our intransigence over inspection regimens regarding the International Chemical Weapons Convention over the last several years, might lead one to believe the U.S. actually wants these weapons out there and in play.

It just occurs to us, that if the U.S. was really serious about ceasing the proliferations of conventional weapons, small arms and weapons of mass destruction, we would actually ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, which we haven’t.

And why? Because inspections might damage U.S. trade secrets. Because there are many who claim that allowing a gang of unwashed ferrin’ devils to come poke around our ultra-modern, high-tech, sci-fi chemical plants would damage U.S. competitiveness on the international open market for chemical...you know...stuff...

Guys like ultra-hawk Frank Gaffney have been leading the charge, lobbying the administration to kill the treaty, perhaps even rescind it, saying that the treaty would harm U.S. industrial interests and would do little to actually curb chemical weapons.

Gaffney, who now heads the Center for Security Policy, and who at one time was Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, and now besides running CSP, also scribbles for such erudite and learned journals as WorldNet Daily and the American Spectator online.

Another one of Gaffney’s posse is the previously Mojowired Douglas J. Feith, who now also holds a cherry job in the Pentagon, while helping his himself and his pals line their pockets with Iraqi reconstruction money. Feith penned most of the CSP’s anti-Chemical Warfare treaty doctrine.

But we’re getting a little rambling here, so let’s break down the real tragedy of this. It would appear that while the President smiles for photo ops in hard hats at Ground Zero and in pickle suits on aircraft carriers, decrying the world’s worst villains and their dastardly plots to destroy Americanism, it looks an awful lot like people within the administration and their closest allies are doing their level best to make sure that the developing world’s bullpen of potential bad guys still have access to all the weapons they need.

Because that is where the weapons we ship overseas eventually end up. We know that. Some 18 year old Marine is going to come home in a box, or a bunch of people in South Los Angeles near the port are going to be incinerated, not because Angry-Leftist hippies are trying to stop the President’s noble crusade against evil, but because the President’s own people are bound and determine to arm the world’s most dangerous regimes because, hey, their money still spends!

...And what’s an investment portfolio without long term growth potential, anyway?

RECALL...THE BOSS LEVEL OF THE GAME
J. So who out there is really surprised by last week of the recall campaign. I know, we have before noted that the average Wirehead, besides being supernaturally attractive, also possesses an IQ too high to measure with current technology.

So our guess is no, you have not been all that surprised. I mean who could be surprised that an Austrian body builder and confirmed steroid junkie who worships power for its own sake would ever grope women or glorify Hitler.

Moreover, who didn’t know that this would surface in the last 120 hours of campaigning. Any 11 year old with a PlayStation can tell you that once you defeat all the other monsters you get to the “boss level” where you have to use all your upgrades and powerups to defeat the angry and powerful creature right at the end before you can move on to the next level...I mean, duh...

No, to us, the funniest part has been watching Conan the Governator’s campaign panic and spin out like a roost of headless chickens over this thing. When the Governator’s ready he really needs to step up to the big leagues and get some real help. Normally, the campaign services division of Mojohaus, would be available, but I don’t think we would be able to stop laughing long enough to be any real assistance...

Perhaps it really does demonstrate there was nothing more to Conan the Duplicitator’s campaign other than the played out jam, “Natasha, Moose and Squirrel must die...”

But the issue here from our perspective is the panic. All Conan the Budget Slashinator had to do was spend the next 48 to 72 hours reminding people that the “democrats are desperate, they have no ideas, all they can do is sling this mud and kind of stuff...” But no, the panic set in, and suddenly, Conan the Perambulator has guaranteed that this story stays in play all the way until the polls open on Tuesday.

What was nominally supposed to be his pre-election victory lap around the state, has turned into something of a running gun battle with reporters, hecklers and Democratic operatives dogging his every step. There was even talk of canceling the tour and bunkering it for the next few days while the news media in California worked the toxin out of their systems.

Which, of course, would have been the only thing that could have made matters worse. No, to his credit, he is resisting the overwhelming temptation to dive into the turtle defense, and staying on the road instead.

S9. Good for him, we like to see Conan the Candidator do his Running Man thing. Well, he better run faster, and hope his pals at the RNC have rigged enough of those new Diebold voting machines.

The latest polls still show Conan and the recall with a double digit leads. But these were polls from last week, before the Los Angeles Times stories came out. In the past 48 hours, it is as certain as sunrise in the east, that the campaign has done internal polling about this issue. But they won’t quote any numbers. They keep hearkening back to the polls earlier in the week.

Where are the new numbers that show Conan the Davisator will bury the Gov. and his Lieutenant Cruz in the entrails of his enemies after this little episode?

And you *know* that we are going to be treated to a veritable surfeit of the best in television advertising production over the next couple of days, as commercials are rushed into production, slammed out in massed reproduction and digitally downloaded to every broadcast outlet on the face of the earth.

We hate to say it Conan...but we told you so. No, we lied, we don’t hate to say it. In fact, we are reveling in our being right...again! We told you many months ago that politics in California is for the big kids and that if you step into this ring, you better be wearing a cup because there would be no director to shout cut just as you are about to get toad cranked only to make another miraculous escape.

It may well turn out that Gray Davis is the real “Predator” and if you do manage to escape to one day sit in the Governor’s office with scraps of skin still attached to your behemoth mass, just remember, that the sequel will begin almost immediately.

Total Recall 2? No, nothing that tawdry... No, it will be Eraser 2... Hope you get that gig doing informercials for home exercise equipment. I know Maria’s face is starting to slack off her skull again and those surgical treatments ain’t gettin’ any cheaper...

IT'S OKAY, I WASN'T PLANNING TO EVER READ ANYTHING IMPORTANT AGAIN ANYWAY
J. It's been almost five years now since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known by its initials DMCA, was signed into law by President Clinton. I remember back in 1998 trying to get journalists to understand why computer professionals were not kidding when they were trying to tell them that the DMCA was the most serious assault on individual free-speech rights in the United States since John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

I'm a card-carrying member of the Associated for Computing Machinery, the ACM, which is a professional society for information scientists and technologists. The ACM has been very outspoken individually and collectively in opposition to the DMCA. It has filed amicus briefs in
several court cases seeking to strike down parts or all of the DMCA as unconstitutional.

Until very recently, it was possible for most journalists to brush off the ACM criticisms of the DMCA as if the ACM were just another industry group trying to keep its own ox from being gored in the legal and regulatory systems of American government.

The DMCA was touted by its supporters as a Get Tough On Software Pirates law, and its critics like the ACM were derided as Chicken Littles when they complained that the law was *way* overly broad and would be used to chill free speech.

Guess what. It's been used to chill free speech.

If you're a journalist, particularly if you're an investigative journalist, then you'll want to know what happened to Bev Harris. She's the woman behind a new book that's about to be published about
electronic voting systems and their vulnerability to wholesale election tampering. Her book is called _Black_Box_Voting_, and we have referenced her activism website by the same name here on Mojowire on several occasions in recent weeks.

Last week, both her websites-- the one owned by the publisher promoting her new book, and the community activism site she owned and operated herself-- were shuttered, and all administrative access to them was denied by their service provider. This was in response to a DMCA "pull-down" demand from one of the companies mentioned in her book, alleging that her site was distributing copyrighted material without authorization.

The material in question? Leaked memoranda, showing intentional malfeasance on the part of software security specialists working for Diebold, the maker of the most widely used electronic voting system in America. They also contained references to events that, if true, would be admissions of knowledge about election frauds.

S9. These memoranda are explosive documents, showing the extent of the corruption and conflict of interest in the electronic voting systems industry. It's quite understandable that Diebold would want to take any and all legal steps available to them to prevent the public from knowing what these memoranda say about them, their employees, and their business practices.

Prior to the passage of the DMCA, a journalist who received such material-- by whatever legal means-- could publish them freely, and only the traditional laws against libel would be of concern. In other words, if the material is basically authentic and true, then the journalist was well within rights to publish it.

Now, it turns out that you can prevent journalists from going live with copies of embarrassing documents by invoking the protections of the DMCA. It doesn't matter whether the documents are authentic and true, or even if they are potentially evidence of a crime. By asserting their copyright over their official memoranda, a corporation, or other government/non-government organization, can effectively silence a muckraking journalist by preventing them from publishing their supporting documentation. And lots of organizations besides Diebold are doing it.

Back in 1998, we in the ACM were telling any journalist who would sit still for us that the DMCA could mean they might have to go to jail for doing their jobs if their work depended on reprinting or redistributing sensitive documents uncovered during an investigation.

Perhaps, in five more years, when our government representatives are no longer elected with voting systems that prevent tampering or provide an audit trail of any kind, and the journalists who are now doing the crucial investigations into how the system works are still fighting in the courts against the DMCA and for the right to publish their documentation, perhaps then it will be clear why the ACM keeps warning us that The Sky Is Falling.

By then, of course, the sky will have completely fallen. It will be too late. You'll look up at where the sky used to be-- where you believed that there would always be a sky, no matter *what* happened in the world-- and nothing will be there except the inky deep black.


YET ANOTHER PILE OF STEAMING LIES FROM THE IRAQI REGIME ABOUT WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
J. We figure President Bush must be getting pretty tired of hearing Iraqi dictators and their sycophant stooges spin horrible lies about how Iraq has completely destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons a long time ago, and how it shuttered all its research and development
programs for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

"We have no weapons! All our programs are finished!" They always tell us this. "You can go anywhere you like. Look anywhere you want. Talk to anybody you need to. We have no weapons! We have no weapons!"

But then, we have to ask, why are there all these accounting irregularities? They can't account for all the stocks of precursors. The scientists keep lying to the inspectors. The inspectors keep getting tips that only lead to dead ends.

It makes you wonder what the Iraqi regime is hiding, doesn't it?

Right now, you're probably wondering what's gotten into the Mojowire. Have they been hanging out at FreeRepublic.com too much? No. We're talking about the Iraq Survey Group, headed by David Kay, which has just spent the last six months going over Paul Bremer's Iraq with a
fine-toothed comb looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

You'll be pleased to know the Kay Report is finally complete, and the short answer is that it basically says the same thing Saddam Hussein's "comprehensive declaration" to the United Nations did back in December-- minus, of course, the parts that the United States and Britain wouldn't release to the rest of the Security Council, because it contained embarrassing details about where Iraq sent its purchase orders for anthrax specimens and precursors for VX nerve gas.

The executive summary of the Kay Report goes like this: 1) we have not yet found stocks of weapons; 2) we have not yet proven the existence of mobile bioweapons laboratories; 3) we have not yet found evidence that Iraq made any significant effort after 1998 at developing nuclear
weapons or producing fissile material; 4) intelligence sourced from defectors was fabricated, and much of it probably originated at the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

In simple terms, the entire case put forward by President Bush to the United Nations for waging a war to prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction and passing them to terrorist organizations has now been shown by our own hand-picked inspectors to have been totally and
inexplicably wrong.

Remember back late last year and early this year, when your friends around the water-cooler would make cracks about Hans Blix like "yeah, that guy couldn't find beer in Ireland," and those crazy peaceniks were taking out ads in the New York Times asking to "Let The Inspections Work?"

Back then, the argument for going to war was very simple: the UNMOVIC inspectors, and the crushing sanctions regime, were not stopping Saddam Hussein from stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and were not preventing him from building more.

He could and *would* one day give them to Al Qaeda, or Hizbollah, or the Earth Liberation Front, so there was no alternative but to send in the 3rd Infantry Division. The intelligence to support this argument was-- well, it was classified-- but it was *indis-freaking-putable* darn it. Only a left-wing, blame-America-first-and-often peacenik-hippie would believe otherwise.

S9. Now, it's six months later. The Iraq Survey Group has been given free run of every single one of Paul Bremer's many, many "guest palaces" and military installations. David Kay and his team of all-American detectives been able to interrogate hundreds of Iraqi scientists-- and yes, *without* the presence of their CIA minders. If the intelligence that made the War in Iraq necessary was *so* indisputable, then how come the Kay Report disputes it?

The President's supporters in the commentariat are quick to point out these days that the White House never claimed that Iraq posed "an imminent threat" to U.S. National Security. But the Bush Doctrine, as laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy, explicitly justifies preventative military operations to counter "manifest threats," even when they are not clearly imminent threats. Notice the spin job?

Even by its *own* controversial standards, the Bush administration's case for War in Iraq has now been undermined by the findings of the Iraq Survey Group. There was no "manifest threat" to U.S. national security posed by Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. There were no weapons. There were no weapons production lines. There was no significant research and development program. There was no manifest threat, much less an imminent one.

But that won't stop the spin doctors from fixing the reporting about the Iraq Survey Group results to make it seem like the Kay Report says precisely the opposite of what it actually says. President Bush says it vindicates Operation Iraqi Freedom. His chorus of loyal courtesans in the echo chamber are even now repeating this lie to insure that it transmogrifies into the gospel truth.

Meanwhile, the White House wants to spend $600 million dollars and nine more months searching Iraq for banned weapons, and nobody is wondering whether David Kay can find beer in Ireland. Well, almost nobody. *We're* starting to have our doubts.


J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Refusing to subsidize religious teaching means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “No questions, I’m not taking any questions from you freekin’ people...”

exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER

S9. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.

And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com. Do it hippies!

J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...