A-Changin' Times (ACT)
Born in the aftermath of 9/11, ACT has become as political as the times.
Now a blog for alternative news, views and rants offered with a twist, a song and a smile. Fair and balanced.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize [sic] with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
 — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Copyright 1963
(1991 Special Rider)

"A-Changin' Times: taking the best from the past to make the most of the present and to create a better future."

"What marching through the streets was to the Sixties, walking through the halls of Congress is now."

 — Marianne Williamson

You're visiting a website that incorporates a blogging feature, not "just" a blog.

Blog entries follow, most recent entries at the top

Thursday, August 28, 2003

	:: DUG853		8/28/2003 08:08:00 AM

Analysts Doubt U.S. Claim on Iraqi Drones
By Dafna Linzer and John J. Lumpkin
Associated Press Writers


Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in Baghdad came to one conclusion:

Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons.


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Wednesday, August 27, 2003

	:: DUG853		8/27/2003 07:44:00 PM

Uncle Sam, Hatred And Hypocrisy
Why Do People Hate America?
By Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies Icon Books, $21 (pb)


REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY

If you have ever wondered why the United States ("America") is hated around the world, then maybe you did come down in the last shower.

This question has been asked more frequently and publically since the terrorist attacks on New York's twin towers in September, 2001. Many writers have been asking it. Gore Vidal has addressed this question; so too have Richard Neville and John Pilger. Everyone basically comes to the same conclusion as to why Uncle Sam is no longer the ant's pants.

While these works analyse what the US government does offshore, they don't tackle the question of how it thinks. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies' book, Why Do People Hate America?, does.

Sardar and Davies try to expose the logic of US expansionism as it is embraced and rationalised within US cultural discourse.

The authors' arguments are a little forced sometimes, but as an attempt to comprehend the ideology of the most powerful nation-state that has ever existed on Earth.

Why Do People Hate America? has a lot to offer the novice objector.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2003

	:: DUG853		8/26/2003 10:36:00 PM

Your Vote Matters

Register to vote, update your address, or change your party registration in a few easy steps.

Click Here

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	:: DUG853		8/26/2003 08:25:00 AM

Meanwhile, back in the Homeland . . . .


Lock up the dangerous ones, help the rest
By Dennis Wilken

In one of those reports I like to call a light-on-our-society matter, the Associated Press and The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that about one in 37 U.S. adults was incarcerated at the end of 2001, or had been imprisoned sometime in their adult past.

That frightening, maddening and saddening statistic came from a report released by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics this month. These numbers do not count those who have done jail time for DUI or shoplifting, or misdemeanor domestic violence, the three crimes a reporter sees most often while covering courts in Kitsap County.

The 5.6 million people in the U.S. who have had "prison experience," either current or in their past, according to the Justice Department, did hard time in either state or federal prisons. If those jailed for spousal violence and driving high or drunk were added in, the percentage of Americans who have done behind-bars-time might reach one in every five adults.

Last month, the Bureau of Justice reported that 2.1 million Americans were in federal, state or local custody at the end of 2002. Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current or former inmates in the U.S. rose by almost 4 million people.
Now, I've covered enough violent crime to have moved from anti-death penalty to pro-death penalty in some cases.
I think murderers, rapists, child molesters and armed robbers should go to prison and stay in prison. But we don't have 2.1 million armed robbers, raypos, chimos, and killers in our prisons.

According to the Justice Department, almost 50 percent of the people now locked up are incarcerated in connection with some type of drug offense. [Emphasis added.] We have non-violent marijuana growers, crack cocaine users, and meth heads cluttering up our prisons, when what many of them need is treatment, not punishment.

If you use violence in the course of selling your drugs, you should be in jail. But if all you are doing is supplying a demand, well, isn't that capitalism?

I don't do hard drugs. I don't smoke pot. I haven't snorted anything other than nasal spray for my sinuses in 30 years.
I drink red wine with dinner and a beer or two on a hot summer night once in awhile. I don't drink and drive.

It's not about me or mine.

I am still against imprisoning sick people and weak people unless they resort to violence. Lock up the violent and the violently crazy and help the rest.

In a country where one in three people is now overweight and one in five is obese, why are we only locking up drug users? The cost to a society of unhealthy, obese people is staggering. But we aren’t locking them up. Junkies are no different than the chronically obese. They are sick, not evil.

We are a society that is failing the weak among us. For a Christian country, we act very un-Christ-like concerning our drug abusers. And how about all the alcoholics driving around drunk? Why are they less guilty than drug users?
Help the junkie the way we now try and help the alcoholic. Let’s quit punishing the non-violent drug offenders in our midst. Quit singling them out while ignoring drunks and gluttons.

We should be pursuing the dangerous psychopaths and pedophiles who litter our streets with their very presence, not those who need a toke, a snort or a shot to see the day through. They need our help and our prayers, not our condemnation.

SOURCE

[Although this uncharitable article oversimplifies a more complicated issue, let's face it--the "drug war" never worked and never will. It's not about helping people. As Lisa says, "It's all about the Benjamins." As *I* say, it's the Benjamins, the power trip and empire. -v]

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Monday, August 25, 2003

	:: DUG853		8/25/2003 07:17:00 PM

Dependent as ever on war and its booty
By Stephen Gowans


A mountain of evidence that the war on Iraq was carried out for entirely specious reasons is hardly daunting to true believers.

They carry on.

"We have lost many brave soldiers in an effort to free the Iraqi people from the tyrant Saddam Hussein, keep the world safe and preserve freedom for everyone," writes Mark Halle, from Manchester, New Hampshire.

But the war that was supposed to be fought to uncover and destroy Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction, has failed, for no weapons have been found.

Which is why Halle, and others, have fallen back on liberation, and keeping the world safe and free, as the reasons for the war on Iraq, even though these were never cited as reasons before the war.

The war, a one-sided assault by the world's most powerful military on a defenseless Third World country, battered by two previous wars and over a decade of crippling sanctions, was a brazen affront to international law, and to the rather humble idea that you don't carry out unprovoked attacks on other countries.

Eight thousand Iraqis have been killed and 20,000 injured, according to an analysis of 300 press reports by the Iraq Body Count Project.

Boosters of the war, when pushed far enough, will almost always play their trump card, pointing to the deaths of 3,000 on Sept 11, 2001, as if this somehow gives the Pentagon and its British juniors licence to jackboot around the world, killing and injuring many more thousands.

To these true believers, the actions of their government come first, the justifications second.

There's always an apparently legitimate excuse for wars of conquest -- no matter how unconvincing.

The need to deprive Saddam of weapons of mass destruction is no longer an excuse.

Not anymore.

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	:: DUG853		8/25/2003 12:06:00 AM

Editor's Note | This story ran in the New York Times in 1944. Draw your own conclusions and compare Henry Wallace's analysis to the situation we find ourselves in today


The Danger of American Fascism
By Henry A. Wallace
The New York Times
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944),
edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

Sunday 09 April 1944

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

What is a fascist?

How many fascists have we?

How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart.

The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press.
These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those.
The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. [Emphasis added.]

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort.
They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

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Sunday, August 24, 2003

	:: DUG853		8/24/2003 09:08:00 PM

Do Republicans really support smaller government?

Note: very well documented, the web page version has a source link for EVERY allegation


GWB's BIG GOVERNMENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Since taking office George W. Bush has increased the national debt by $895.7 billion.

George W. Bush has spent more time campaigning while in office than any of his predecessors.

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	:: DUG853		8/24/2003 01:35:00 PM

Questions for Attorney General John Ashcroft on the USA PATRIOT Act and its effect on the news media
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) Challenges Patroit Act


The RCFP has released a list of questions that journalists should ask about the Patriot Act's application to journalists and newsrooms.

The primary section of the Act that of concern to journalists is Section 215, allowing prosecutors to obtain "any tangible thing" -- not just "business records," as the Department of Justice keeps saying -- for investigations involving foreign intelligence or international terrorism.

A Justice department official acknowledged last year in a letter to Congress that such an order could be applied to a newsroom, but the department will not answer questions about whether or how often it has been.

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	:: DUG853		8/24/2003 12:45:00 PM

"Chemical Ali" Should Get Fair Trial
International Participation is Key to Justice Effort

(New York, August 22, 2003) -Iraqi Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali") should be prosecuted on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said today.

International judges, prosecutors, and investigators should participate in the trial so that it is fair, impartial, and independent.

"The capture of Chemical Ali presents a rare opportunity to bring a measure of justice to the countless victims and their families who suffered under Ba´ath Party rule," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch´s International Justice Program.

"International participation is essential for fair trials that will expose his crimes before independent and impartial courts."

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	:: DUG853		8/24/2003 12:14:00 AM

Lawsuit for Gulf War Veterans Targets WMD Businesses
by Heather Wokusch

A lawsuit on behalf of over 100,000 Gulf War veterans has the Bush administration on edge and businesses running for cover.

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