Happy Labor Day

"The most helpful man in any community is not the man who dispenses the most charity. On the contrary, he is the one who makes any kind of charity or aid unnecessary. he is, if I may say so, the man who gives the most people self-respecting gainful employment."
- Vollie Tripp -

"Working people in the United States are being screwed. Not only are we losing high-paying manufacturing jobs, but our benefits are second-rate when compared to those of white- and blue-collar working people in other industrialized democracies. Take vacations, for example. Typically, American workers get two weeks paid vacation a year, provided they have worked at a company for a specified time. The typical vacation time in countries of the European Union is four weeks per year, that's the legal minimum. Think of that statistic next time flag-waving yahoos start chanting, 'We're Number One!'"
- Marty Jezer: Steamed for Labor Day -

"One of this administration's first actions was to repeal the ergonomic regulations that prevent repetitive stress. Two years later, the administration solved the entire problem with characteristic brilliance: It revoked the provision requiring employers to report such injuries! This was almost as good as the time that the administration solved global warming by simply editing it out of an environmental report."
- Molly Ivins -

"In the past year, 700,000 people were added to the list of unemployed. The number of people out of work for half a year or more is up 28%. Thanks to 'Welfare to Work' (and Bill Clinton), July of 2003 saw 43.8% of the unemployed lose their state support even though they still could not find a job. Jobs have simply evaporated."
- Michael Moore -

    "In celebration of the working person's holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration's plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime.
    "I'm sure you already knew that -- if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of the Federal Register.
    "According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place it's little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay -- for a 'benefit' of $1.53 billion. I put 'benefit' in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush's Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers' pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change.
    "Nevertheless, workers getting their pay snipped shouldn't complain, because they will all be receiving promotions. These employees will be re-classified as managers exempt from the law. The change is promoted by the National Council of Chain Restaurants. You've met these 'managers' - they're the ones in the beanies and aprons whose management decisions are, 'Hold the lettuce on that.'"
- Greg Palast: The Grinch that Stole Labor Day -

7,300,000 Americans hold more than one job.

What a Coinkydink

Two wildfires sprang up in view of the spot where President Bush planned to promote his plan to thin forests for wildfire prevention, and they both appeared just as his plans emerged. There were rumors of mysterious black helicopters clattering over the forest shortly before the fires were spotted the afternoon of Aug. 19, two days before the president's visit, because there really were black helicopters clattering over the forest.

"Typically the Secret Service does all kinds of aerial surveillance before the president comes in," said Don Ferguson, an information officer for what have become known as the B&B complex fires. "They pretty much know the location of every tree." 

No lightning that might have sparked fires had struck the area for at least 11 days before the twin blazes were sighted, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland. 
- The Oregonian -

No Connection

We invaded Afghanistan and now Russia has a big heroin problem. We invaded Iraq and now Baghdad has a big heroin problem.

Gallery of the Week

Here's an interesting concept. Jim Gasperini has taken the two images from a 3D camera and put them in animated gifs that go back and forth between the two images, creating amazing looking pseudo-3D images.

Free Music of the Week

The Capital Steps sing Goodbye, Uday Qusay, with apologies to the Rolling Stones.

Randy Newman sings the Star Spangled Banner, with apologies to everybody.

The Chipmunks sing Remember Sept. 12, with apologies to nobody.

Petition of the Week

This September at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, Mexico, the U.S. Trade Representative will attempt to expand the WTO's power over Communications and Audiovisual Services  including film, radio, television, video, and music production, as well as media distribution services such as satellite, cable and broadcast. This is part of a quiet pattern of closed-door negotiations that could spell disaster for vibrant media systems worldwide. Tell them you think it's a bad idea.

Fake Headlines of the Week

Necrophilia: Raising the Dead to Find a Man Who Will Both Agree With Me and Go Out With Me 
by Ann Coulter
- Amazon.com -

2002 crime rate lowest in 30 years
"Not as much worth stealing," explains recession-weary thief.
- National Lampoon -

Disgusted Man Realizes He Used To Masturbate To Anna Nicole Smith
George Loonit felt suicidal last week when he realized that the bloated, drug-addled celebrity on the Anna Nicole Smith Show was in fact the same woman that he used to masturbate to, nearly a decade earlier.
- The Fake News -

God Calls For Retirement of Pat Robertson
VATICAN CITY - Amid a blaze of lights, God called for Pat Robertson's retirement at a press conference early Friday.

Ashcroft, currently touring the nation to defend the invasive Patriot Act -- under which the probes were enacted -- called the court's decision "unfortunate."  - Ironic Times -

IN REVERSAL, SCHWARZENEGGER PLEDGES TO HAVE GROUP SEX WITH ENTIRE STATE 
Hopes to Halt Porn Star's Surge in Polls
- The Borowitz Report -

No One Makes It To Burning Man Festival 
GERLACH, NV
The Burning Man festival, a prominent artistic and countercultural event that draws tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert annually, is in danger of cancellation this week because "no one had their shit together enough to even make it," organizers said Tuesday.
- The Onion -

Google Smackdown of the Week

vs.

and the winner is...

"ass" by 15,023,500!

Shockwave of the Week

Your all gay. Yeah, that means you.

 I Feel So Much Safer Now

The federal government will post a record $480 billion deficit next year and accumulate almost $1.4 trillion in new debt over the next decade. (To put that number in perspective, try holding your breath and counting to 1.4 trillion).

A brand new detainment camp is being built at Guantanamo.

Alan Dershowitz has come out in favor of torture.

Speaking of torture, this paper (PDF format) covers the emergence of new sub-lethal, incapacitating and paralyzing technologies and their coming role in the mass production of torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations in time for a Sept. 26 Ohio Republican Party event at his home. His company, which specializes in security and election machinery, is one of three under consideration to supply new, electronic voting machines to replace punch card machines still in use in 71 Ohio counties. In his invitation, O'Dell states his support for the Republican Party and notes he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." 

Forget the Kyoto protocols, the Bush administration has decided to stop regulating all carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

Dubya is pushing legislation that would have sent him to jail.

Calling all Screenwriters

Learn Character Development, Plot Structure, Writing for Film & Television, Script Marketing, Career Strategies, Pitch Craft and more at the largest and most intimate screenwriting conference north of Los Angeles. Hollywood by the Bay is an intensive THREE day forum for screenwriters of all levels. Study and Network with leading screenwriters, producers and literary representatives. Pre Conference sessions, a General Conference session, over 15 ninety minute Specific Topic sessions, individual one-on-ones, Panel Discussions and more at the Hyatt Rickeys, Palo Alto, CA, Sept. 12 - 14. 

Win this writing grant and you get four to six weeks at the Wye Cottage on the south island of New Zealand, outside of Blenheim in the Wairau Valley.
 

Statistics from Hell

The number of Americans murdered in Iraq since May 1: 65. Iraq has 26 million citizens making the average about .5 per day.

The number of Americans murdered in Chicago every day: 2. Chicago has 11 million citizens.

Chicago is 10 times more dangerous than Iraq.

Mr. Conspiracy Says...

Hey, you know all those wackos who claimed that AIDS was created by the United States government? This official 1970 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill (PDF format) from the United States Senate Library approves funding for the development of the AIDS virus. Who's wacko now?

Don't Take My Word For It

"In all the debates over Iraq, we must never forget Iraq."
- George W. Bush: Speech to the American Legion on Aug. 26, 2003 -

"I remember him as a spoiled kid who tried to control the playground and was in trouble often. You wouldn't call him the school bully because he wasn't tough enough for that. He was more of a control freak."
- Alena Lightfoot: How I remember George W. Bush -

"I see a terrible legacy of cruelty reaching new heights and emanating from the inexplicable unwillingness of the American people not to clearly see the true character of events so disastrously unfolding before their eyes. The power of Old Glory waving in the winds of memory, perhaps, keeps so many from seeing so much, from truly believing that those we would venerate and respect could do harm to us - willing, pernicious, lethal harm. And it is precisely this faith in American society - this socially reinforced mythos - that allows rich criminals to get away with what they do, as they hide behind the very trust they exploit."
- John Kaminski: The unbridgeable chasm of doubt: Why faith and government don't mix -

"A legitimate probe of 9/11 - not like the sham that was just perpetrated that didn't address any of the really major questions - would have shed light on the corporate powers that control the media and the White House, and maybe - just maybe - would have taken that large step to show the deluded American populace that we are neither a democracy nor a republic, that we are a corporate-controlled police state whose leaders are savaging their own citizens simply to make more money for themselves and the rich friends who put them in office in the first place."
- John Kaminski: The unbridgeable chasm of doubt: Why faith and government don't mix -

"The War on Terror was never a war in the traditional sense. It is, instead, a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser."
- Naomi Klein: A Deadly Franchise -

"Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it. In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists."
- Brian Eno: Lessons in how to lie about Iraq -

"With her new book Treason, Ann Coulter proves once and for all that a parent having a gay child is something to celebrate compared to having a child who cannot decide whether they are Joe McCarthy or Torquemada in the body of a skeletal blond Christian slut."
- Rack Jite -

"Accordingly, throughout the entire year, a person should always look at himself as equally balanced between merit and sin and the world as equally balanced between merit and sin. If he performs one sin, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of guilt and brings destruction upon himself. On the other hand, if he performs one mitzvah, he tips his balance and that of the entire world to the side of merit and brings deliverance and salvation to himself and others."
- Parashat Shofetim: Laws of Repentance 3:4 -

"Which nuclear armed country is no longer a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Agreement because of their developing small portable nuclear weapons for battlefield use? Which country is no longer interested in the Biological Weapons Treaty while actively researching new biological weapons?  Which country causes the most CO2 while ignoring the Kyoto Protocol? Which country refuses to recognize the International Court of Justice, and UN backing, while unilaterally invading sovereign states?  The answer to all of these, of course, is the U.S.A."
- Xarvon, alien investigator -

    "Take the stomach-turning example of petroleum giant Tosco, which, after donating $70,500 to Gray Davis' 2000 reelection campaign, was allowed to increase the amount of deadly, highly toxic chemicals it dumps into San Francisco Bay.
    "The connection between the donation and the payback couldn't be more obvious -- or more despicable. For 7 years the company, one of California's largest polluters, had tried to get the state water board to relax the pollution limits at its Avon refinery, right here in your own backyard. For 7 years its efforts had failed. Then, on February 17, 2000 -- just one day after the board once again voted down the company's request -- Tosco cut Davis a massive campaign check, 10 times bigger than any previous donation it had given him. Another five figure check followed and, hey, whaddya know, a few months later the water board -- whose members are, not coincidentally, appointed by Davis -- changed its mind and allowed Tosco to boost the amount of deadly Dioxin it could dump into the Bay. In effect, selling out the health of the people of California for an infusion of campaign cash."
- Arianna Huffington -

"Back in April, l989 a [Reverend Billy] Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, 'could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam'. Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the U.S. Commander in Chief that on Nixon's own estimate would have killed a million people."
- Alexander Cockburn: When Billy Graham Planned To Kill One Million People -

"Advocacy groups from across the political spectrum blasted the U.S. government's proposed air passenger screening program on Monday, calling it a 'quantum leap' in surveillance that violates privacy and civil rights." (No word on whether Scott Bakula will be suing them for using the phrase "Quantum Leap.")
- Deborah Charles: Critics Say U.S. Airline Screening Plan Intrusive -

    "This writer, who covered the Afghan struggle against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, sees many of the same elements developing in Iraq: tribal and ethnic divisions, a foreign-supported puppet regime with a useless army, an intractable guerrilla war and a great power with overreaching imperial ambition.
    "Worse for the U.S., Iraq may be emerging - like Afghanistan - as a new, pan-national cause for the Muslim world. Thousands of jihadi volunteers are reportedly slipping into Iraq to battle U.S. troops. They range from youthful idealists to battle-hardened jihadis from other wars and a handful of suicide bombers. Just as the Afghan jihad electrified the Muslim world and helped assuage its feelings of weakness and inferiority, for a new generation Iraq may come to be a passionate struggle against another foreign invader.     "President Bush has conveniently provided anti-American militants and fanatics across the Mideast with an ideal target: the U.S. army in Iraq."
- Eric Margolis: U.S. mired in a mess of its own making -

"The Texan oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty was at the heart of a conspiracy to provide support to Hitler's Germany early in the Second World War, according to newly released intelligence documents. The file links Getty to a shadowy network of financiers who supplied the Nazis with fuel in defiance of a British blockade and accuses him of gathering spies and traitors around him at his fashionable Hotel Pierre in New York."
- Peter Day: Getty helped traitors sell oil to Hitler -

"If Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore were a self-styled artist who soaked his Ten Commandments monument in urine, he might have been allowed to keep it on display in the courthouse and gotten an NEA grant to boot."
- W. James Antle III -

"When people across the U.S. find out that Al Qaeda is not linked to Saddam but is in fact a creation of the CIA and that the terrorist warnings are fabricated, the legitimacy of the Bush Administration will tumble like a deck of cards. The perceived enemy will no longer be Saddam, it will be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, et al."
- Michel Chossudovsky: Expose the Links between Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration -

"In the end 9-11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one, a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush. The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against 'tinhorn terrorists,' decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next 18 months."
- J. Hoberman: Lights, Camera, Exploitation -

"By definition in the bill, almost any American citizen can arbitrarily be designated a terrorist. Section 101 of this act will give the executive branch the power to declare any American a 'foreign power' and therefore not a citizen. Those designated will be exempt from the protections of the Constitution."
- Tom DeWeese: Total surveillance equals total tyranny -

"The 'Brain Interface Program' is the most lavishly funded of nearly all the DARPA bioengineering efforts (the project has been given $24 million for the next two years). It is aimed at developing ways to 'integrate' soldiers into machines -literally- by wiring them (remotely or directly) to their planes, tanks, or computers. An implantable brain chip is now under development in this sick program, which has already proudly demonstrated how rats can be turned into living robots through the manipulation of stimulus-response signals in the brain via electrodes. The Pentagon hopes to use these pathetic, 'modified' creatures (you should see the photos -makes you want to join People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals!) in mine clearance."
- Cheryl Seal: Frankensteins in the Pentagon - DAPRA's Creepy Bioengineering Program Seeks to Turn Soldiers Into Cyborgs -

"In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging 'like a wet rag' as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device."
- Bill Dash: Horrifying U.S. Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad -

    "I had a feeling the Inquiry into Dr. David Kelly's death would turn out to be interesting ...but the stupidity of my fellow journalists never ceases to amaze. It's apt I was writing about context yesterday, since the context of Dr. David Kelly's remark that if Britain went to war with Iraq he would probably be 'found dead in the woods' appears to have zoomed right over journalists' heads. The question they should be asking that they are not asking is purely contextual in nature: who else was found dead in the woods?
    "Some may remember the 1984 murder of Hilda Murrell. Some may also remember that after the Hilda Murrell case the phrase 'found dead in the woods' became a euphemism, and virtually an idiom, meaning to be done in by British secret services because of what one knew. So when Dr. David Kelly 'jokingly' remarked that he expected to be 'found dead in the woods' one need look no further than the Hilda Murrell case to know the true context of his remark and what he actually meant."
- Joel Biroco -

"[It's] like they're asking you to bend over, put your head in the sand, and put a flag in your ass."
- Janeane Garofalo -

"I would like to be able to love my country, and justice too."
- Albert Camus -

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
- Leo Tolstoy -

"Anyone who has walked down the shady side of a street on a summer's day, found it a bit chilly, and thought to themselves to cross over to the sunny side of the street to enjoy the warmth of the sun has, whether they realize it or not, made a transition from yin to yang. Similarly anyone who has found the sun too intense, too glaring, too sweltering and no longer pleasant to be in and has sought the shade has seen the benefit of a change to yin when yang has become too overbearing."
- The Nature of Yin and Yang -

"There is no fire like greed and no crime like hatred. There is no sorrow like being bound to this world; there is no happiness like freedom."
- Buddha: Dhammapada -

"Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly."
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama -

"Surprise me."
- Bob Hope to his wife when she asked "Where do you want to be buried?" -

Everything Else

Mandatory reading: Ted Rall says it's time to get real in Iraq.

The Earth Liberation Front is sort of a green al-Queda, doing nasty things for all the right reasons.

Can an online magazine succeed in print? 

Flak is giving it a try.

The Holiday Inn is having a towel amnesty day. (They lose 560,000 towels a year.)

The Traffic Cone Preservation Society hopes to allow future generations the opportunity to enjoy these magnificent creatures in their natural habitats.

Wanna turn your computer into a clock? Here's a cool one.

Forget all those stupid card decks, here's a deck of activists who are really doing something.

Which president has told the biggest whoppers? Check out The Mendacity Index.

Working hard? Paying your taxes? Voting in elections? Embracing the American work ethic? Good. Here's A Note of Appreciation from the Rich.