Monday, January 28, 2008

Ger Bernie Ward back on the Air

Contact information to get Bernie ward back on the air

ABC Network Information
Write us:
444 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Call us: 212-735-1700
Fax us: 212-735-1799


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/27/BALBUMNOA.DTL



Radio waves: Bernie Ward, the self-described "Lion of the Left" who lost his late-night slot at KGO radio last month after being indicted by the feds on child pornography charges, has sent out an SOS to his supporters urging them to fax and call the station's New York corporate ownership to demand that he be returned to the airwaves.

"This is an 'all hands on deck' call," Ward wrote in an e-mail circulated last week. "I need you to help convince the corporate bosses that our San Francisco/West Coast community really wants me back on the air and deserves the factual information I can provide."

Ward tells his fans that KGO station manager Mickey Luckoff wants to put him back on the air but that the suits in New York are resisting. Luckoff did not return calls seeking comment.

"They need to hear that the feds don't always win, that I'm innocent until proven guilty, and that it's imperative for me to be back on the air now as the primaries are at a crucial stage, and my voice is something you miss and want to hear," Ward wrote.

The feds have charged Ward, 56, with two counts of possessing and distributing child pornography using the Internet. The former Roman Catholic priest insists he is innocent, saying he simply downloaded a handful of images as part of a book he was researching on right-wing hypocrisy.

"Can you do it? Will you do it?" Ward implores. "Will you light up their phones and fill up their faxes and voice mails? This is the last shot we have to get me back on the air, and I need your help."

Well, someone is listening.

"We have gotten a 4-inch stack of faxes, and yesterday we were getting three calls a minute," an assistant to Citadel Broadcasting Co.'s chief operating officer told us Friday. "To tell the truth, it's quite annoying."

No word yet on whether they'll budge.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Hang in there Bernie!

Ok, I like many was in shock for a long time over this whole Bernie Ward indictment. I mean come on, Bernie has help shape my political views for the past 20 years and a lot of who I am today reflects on a lot of what Bernie taught me. Not only about politics, but about being a person and a father. With that being said, I refuse to bail on Bernie so quickly. If it comes out, without a doubt, that Bernie accesses and distributes child porn, for anything other than real research, then I will be the first to condemn him and move on. However, it just doesn’t fit. Bernie has always said to be skeptical of the government and that’s what I intend to do in regards to this case. They need to prove it and I also need to hear from Bernie before I throw him under the us

Anyone who comes across this post and feels like they need to express themselves, please post here. Put the word out to all Bernie listeners that they have a place to talk. That has been the hardest part, not being able to talk this out with the group I have enjoyed listening and talking to (via Bernie’s show) for so long.

and to Bernie Ward, hang in there. We all needed a little time to take all this in. Unfortunately you had to spend the holidays feeling left behind by all your listeners. We are here for you now and will continue to be until someone can prove to us bad intentions.

Hang in there

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Alternative Minium Tax

I am going to see if Bernie will discuss the AMT topic on his show:


Here is a letter I sent to Harry Ried.
November 27, 2007

Dear Senator
I’m writing you tonight to express my extreme concern about potentially having to pay AMT. I just completed my 2007 estimated tax return, which I believe to be 98% accurate at this time. My calculations found with the current AMT exemption of ~45K, my husband and I would be required to a pay an alternative minimum tax bill in April of over $ 3,500.00

The thought of incurring this extra unexpected expenditure made me sick to my stomach. My husband and I are hard working, financially responsible individuals. We live in California and 5 years ago upon purchasing our home ignored others advice about taking out a “high risk” loan allowing us to move into a larger home. Instead, we took the responsible route and bought a small, very old home in a city that has a fairly high poverty and crime rate. I tell you this fact to highlight how this tax will impact a family that works hard to ensure we live within our means you’ll be able to imagine the larger impact to those Californians who are barely making it.

The impact of this tax to our family and spending would be huge. First, we’d not only owe the 3,500 but we’d also have to pay a penalty to the IRS of an unknown amount. As we don’t have that kind of cash lying around in the drawer, or the bank, we’ll have to pay it with credit causing us to minimally have a $300.00/month bill throughout all of 2008. Next, we’d have to adjust our withholdings for 2008 by $300.00/month.

These actions will effectively reduce our discretionary income by over $ 600.00/month or $ 7,200.00/year. I say more because the increased tax bill will cause both my husband and I to effectively negate any raises we receive in 2008 by increasing our 401(k) withholdings. Thus, we will have no additional income this year to help with the inflation and the huge increases we’ve been observing in gas, food, and clothing price.

If you actual take the time to read this letter and truly care, you WILL work with Congress to insure that my and the other millions of families do not fall victim to this tax. We as a family and we as a country can not afford this unexpected and sudden increase. Please remember that although this tax will hit my family and our spending hard, we are lucky in that we are not already in financial trouble with regards to our home. Millions of others I’m sad to say will not, and this tax will be the straw that breaks their and maybe the economies back.

Please act quickly to save my family and our country!!!

Best Regards,




PS:
For anyone wanted to hear Bernie you can listen live from 10-1 PT or listen to the acrhives at the following location:

http://www.kgoam810.com//Article.asp?id=503007

Monday, May 15, 2006

Verizon's response to my complaint email regarding NSA

Dear M. Morrison,

Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. My name is Wendy, and I will be handling your request today.

This message is in response to your email dated May 11, 2006. You inquired about the NSA article. I understand this is important to you. I will be happy to assist you.

We appreciate that the USA Today article and other reports about the possibility that the NSA is able to analyze local call data records is causing concern. Please be assured that Verizon places the highest value on protecting the privacy of our customers.

Anything to do with the NSA is of course highly classified, so we can not comment on whether or not the news article causing concern is even accurate. But we can say that, to the extent that we cooperate with government authorities, we are confident that we are complying with all applicable statutes. We appreciate the continuing opportunity to provide you with service.

It has been my goal to resolve your reason for contacting us. I hope I have succeeded in meeting that goal. If you have additional questions or if we may be of assistance to you in the future, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.

Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
Wendy
Verizon eCenter

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Cheney's "Quailgate" Leaves Unanswered Questions




Retrieve Feb 15th, 2006 from: http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3096
By Jim Motavalli with Erin Coughlin

Many unanswered questions remain about Cheney's hunting adventure, which seems to have been conducted mere steps away from the comfort of luxury SUVs. Were these quail on the Armstrong Ranch wild or pen-raised captives, which are reportedly much easier to hit? Pen-raised birds, according to some veteran Texas quail hunters, are essentially "sitting ducks" that don't have enough native sense to fly to cover when flushed. They fly off in all directions instead of maintaining discipline and seeking group shelter.

The Armstrong Ranch denies that it uses pen-raised quail, but some observers have taken note of Cheney's light 28-gauge shotgun, which would more likely have been effective for domesticated fowl. It's considered a good choice for "small framed" and young shooters because it doesn't recoil much, but it's hardly the type of weapon the macho Cheney would seem to favor.

In any case, Cheney is no stranger to canned hunts. In December of 2003, he went (via Humvee) to a pheasant shooting party in Pennsylvania at the Rolling Rock Club. Gamekeepers there released some 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets, and Cheney's party, which included former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) as well as several influential Republican fundraisers, shot 417 of them. Cheney himself got at least 70. Apparently that wasn't enough slaughter, because after lunch the group went after pen-raised mallard ducks.

Cornyn had the audacity to claim later that the birds had a sporting chance, though he conceded that the hunt was so easy that at times it seemed "kind of like how Tyson's and Pilgrim's Pride and other people do it. I must tell you that people don't necessarily hunt the same way in Texas that they hunt in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, but it was enjoyable."

In 2004, Cheney got into trouble for going duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Louisiana while he had business before the court. It's not hard to see why the Vice President might favor guaranteed canned hunts because the shooting in Louisiana was poor. "The duck hunting was lousy," Scalia remarked. "Our host [owner of an oil services company] said that in 35 years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen so few ducks." But it ended well. "I did come back with a few ducks, which tasted swell," Scalia added.

Outdoor writer Ted Williams estimates there are approximately 3,000 canned hunting operators in the U.S., many of which offer the "sport" of releasing birds right in the path of waiting shotguns. This kind of hunting is banned (for at least one species) in California, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and, yes, Texas, where the practice nonetheless amounts to big business. In a typical operation, the animals are fed at specific times and locations, and learn to anticipate the sounds of approaching humans. So they're more likely to move toward the hunters than away from them.

"Cheney has a real history of questionable hunting behavior," says Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS). "He is apparently obsessed with hunting and is a regular patron of canned hunts. We don't like to see the Vice President of the U.S. providing pretty explicit endorsement of this practice, because canned hunting violates all the rhetoric that hunters use to justify themselves. Hunting is supposed to involve a fair chase with the animal having an opportunity to evade the hunter. But this eliminates the possibility of failure."

Some of the canned hunting ranches offer the chance to shoot endangered species, which typically consist of zoo-bred animals that outgrew their cuteness and were sold in exotic animal auctions. At the Renegade Ranch in Michigan, one price list charged $350 to shoot a Corsican ram, $450 for a Russian boar, $750 for a blackbuck antelope and $5,500 for a trophy elk. Among the zoos participating in such programs, according to a Humane Society of the U.S. investigation, are Buffalo Zoological Gardens, Busch Gardens in Florida, Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, the Houston Zoo, the Kansas City Zoo and even the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

The Connecticut-based Friends of Animals has filed a lawsuit aimed at keeping three species of endangered antelope out of the canned-hunt trade. "This is a lazy person's idea of hunting," says Priscilla Feral, the group's president. "They drive right up to the animal."

The first George Bush celebrated his 1988 election victory with a canned quail hunt at the Lazy F Ranch near Beeville, Texas. And he apparently didn't "get it" any more than Cheney does. "These aren't animals, these are wild quail," he reportedly responded to criticism. President Clinton also hunted in shooting preserves during his Presidency. In 1993, he shot a captive-bred mallard at a Maryland preserve owned by a lobbyist who ran DUCPAC, a pro-hunting political action committee that gave out $35,000 in campaign contributions.

In addition to asking Cheney to explain the nearly 24-hour gap between the hunting accident and public notification, reporters are wondering how the Vice President could have broken a cardinal hunting rule. According to Time, "An eyewitness account reported by the Associated Press suggests that Cheney may have, in the heat of the moment, violated the number one rule of hunting by failing to keep track of his hunting buddies at all times….For the shooter, hunting safety dictates that focusing on the target should never be more important than keeping in mind what's behind it."

Vice President Cheney, adept at shifting the blame for Iraq and disastrous energy policies, also chose to blame the victim in the hunting incident. Whittington, a 78-year-old lawyer and Republican Party functionary, apparently failed to announce himself when he came up behind "Deadeye Dick."

Columnist Molly Ivins summed up this Bush administration's tendency to avoid any and all responsibility for the messes it creates: "I was offended by the never-our-fault White House spin team," she wrote. "Cheney adviser Mary Matalin said of her boss, 'He was not careless or incautious (and did not) violate any of the (rules). He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do.' Of course he did, Ms. Matalin, he shot Harry Whittington.

"Which brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Bush administration, which claims to be creating 'the responsibility society.' It's hard to think of a crowd less likely to take responsibility for anything they have done or not done than this bunch. They're certainly good at preaching responsibility to others—and blaming other people for everything that goes wrong on their watch," wrote Ivins.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

PNAC still moving forward

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

The Pentagon’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review, the fancy name for the Defense Department’s “big think” strategy that is supposed to come out every four years, has to be seen as the Bush administration’s ultimate Plan for Empire. It lays out a Thirty Years' War-type battle plan for an expanding U.S. military presence worldwide, to fight a war against an enemy which is, at most, a few hundred strong.

Officially, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld calls it “The Long War,” a propaganda term designed to echo “the Cold War,” and the Pentagon intends to brainwash Americans into supporting a generation-long struggle that will lay the groundwork for an American hegemony in the 21st century. It is, indeed, the Project for a New American Century.

According to The New York Times, alongside the QDR, the Pentagon has developed its own (classified) counterterrorism strategy. It is this mission, designed to combat an enemy that the Bush administration describes as equal in magnitude to the threat posed by German Nazism or Soviet communism, which is driving both the QDR and the huge expansion of the budget for the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community over the next few years. The QDR is the neoconservatives’ mythical World War IV, in line-item form.

Of course, it ignores the fact that the blunt instrument of the U.S. military is precisely the wrong tool to use against radical right Islamist forces. As the war in Iraq has proved to everyone but the most hard-core neoconservative, ham-handed U.S. military attacks in Muslim countries create more terrorists than they kill. The Times , in reporting the Pentagon’s counterterrorism plan, quotes a Defense Department official involved in writing it who points out:

...the American military’s effort to aid tsunami victims in southeast Asia and to assist victims of Pakistan’s earthquake did more to counter terrorist ideology than any attack mission.

Does that mean that the Pentagon will recommend a multinational Marshall Plan-style effort to provide economic security, housing and health care for the impoverished in Asia, the Middle East and Africa? Hardly—although such a program wouldn’t cost more than the $1 trillion Iraq-Afghanistan war effort, and would unquestionably do far more to calm passions, soothe anti-Americanism and dry up Al Qaeda’s recruitment pool. No, the Pentagon is proposing a vast, multi-year campaign of wars, commando raids, air strikes, military bases, naval expansion, covert actions and other military operations whose sum can only be seen as an imperial expansion of the U.S. presence around the globe.

According to the Los Angeles Times , a core element of the Long War is an increase in the size and strength of the elite U.S. military forces, including “secret Delta Force operatives skilled in counterterrorism,” Army Special Forces battalions, Navy SEAL teams, “the creation of a new SOF [Special Operations Forces] squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles to ‘locate and target enemy capabilities’ in countries where access is difficult,” “civil affairs and psychological operations units,” and “a 2,600-strong Special Operations force for training foreign militaries, conducting reconnaissance and carrying out strikes.”

These forces, says the Los Angeles Times , “will have the capacity to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously.” The QDR says: “The long war against terrorist networks extends far beyond the borders of Afghanistan and Iraq and includes many operations characterized by irregular warfare.” It outlines expanded U.S. military operations in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Horn of Africa; in the trans-Sahara region and Niger to “combat emerging terrorist extremist threats”; the “Plan Colombia” anti-drug counterinsurgency; etc. And it concludes: “Long-duration, complex operations involving the U.S. military … will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries around the world, relying on a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches.”

The QDR, says the Pentagon, is specifically designed as a 20-year battle plan. It is generational in scope. “The Defense Department unveiled the Quadrennial Defense Review today, charting the way ahead for the next 20 years as it confronts current and future challenges and continues its transformation for the 21st century,” according to the official unveiling:

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our nation has fought a global war against violent extremists who use terrorism as their weapon of choice, and who seek to destroy our free way of life. Our enemies seek weapons of mass destruction and, if they are successful, will likely attempt to use them in their conflict with free people everywhere. Currently, the struggle is centered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we will need to be prepared and arranged to successfully defend our nation and its interests around the globe for years to come.

So once again, President Bush is trying to scare us about the threat of terrorists with WMD, just as he did before the war in Iraq, even though not a single terrorist in history has ever come close to possessing WMD and even though the Bush administration has not documented a single instance of a serious effort by terrorists to acquire weaponized chemical or biological agents—never mind a nuclear device.

A hapless Ryan Henry, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for policy, sounded befuddled as he tried to rationalize the Long War. It was, he said, “fuzzy”:

U.S. forces in all probability will be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they're not currently engaged. But I can tell you with no resolution at all where that might be, when that might be or how that might be. Things get very fuzzy past the five-year point.

Fuzzy.

And the fuzzy math used to calculate how much all this will cost sees the Pentagon’s bloated budget soaring toward half a trillion dollars per year, not counting perhaps a $100 billion surcharge for the ongoing fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the Bush budget slashes non-defense spending, Pentagon spending—already huge after successive post-9/11 increases—will rise another 7 percent to $439 billion, not including Iraq, and not including a ballooning budget for the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a shocking misallocation of resources, one that makes a mockery of the fact that the Cold War is long over and that the world is mostly at peace. At peace, that is, except for wars of America’s own making.


http:\\tompaine.com

Friday, February 03, 2006

Libby Trial to Start after Midterms, Hmmm, go figure!


Hmmm, go figure! The judge wanted to start the trial of Lewis Libby in September but low and behold, one of Libby's laywers just happens to be tied up.

How convenient

By Toni Locy

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – A federal judge on today set former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial date in the CIA leak case for January 2007, two months after the midterm congressional elections.

The trial for Libby, who faces perjury and obstruction of justice charges, will begin with jury selection Jan. 8, said U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. Walton said he had hoped to start the trial in September but one of Libby's lawyers had a scheduling conflict that made an earlier date impractical.

Walton said he does not like "to have a case linger" but had no choice because Libby attorney Ted Wells will be tied up for 10 weeks in another case.