Author: Buck Banks

The Defense Department has issued its homeland defense plan for the next 10 years, and it looks like we can expect another decade of police-state activities where the gubmint will trample on personal freedoms with impunity.

Here’s a sample of the rhetoric of the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”:

Directed by the Strategic Planning Guidance (March 2004), this Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support focuses on achieving the Defense Department’s paramount goal: securing the United States from direct attack. The Strategy is rooted in the following:

• Respect for America’s constitutional principles;
• Adherence to Presidential and Secretary of Defense guidance;
• Recognition of terrorist and state-based threats to the United States; and
• Commitment to continue transformation of US military capabilities.

[…]

Today is the Dalai Lama’s 70th birthday. Send a peaceful thought into the cosmos.

Newsweek’s Periscope column this week considers what George W. Bush’s autobiography will be like. And who will write it. In the wake of “A Charge to Keep,” a slim tome written by Bush’s former communications chief Karen Hughes and rushed to press in time for the 2000 election, expectations are generally low.

But I disagree. There would seem to be plenty of opportunities for Bush to rise to the occasion and produce a work (or have someone produce it) that would explore his place in history and establish his legacy as U.S. president. Of course, as the Newsweek column notes, Bush neither keeps a journal like his father or records his thoughts like Bill Clinton, and he writes thank-you notes with a black Sharpie pen, so any autobio from his camp is likely to be a work of fiction.

With that in mind, here are a few speculative titles I suggest for a George W. Bush (auto)biography:
• Myth and Metaphor in The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• An Encyclopedia of Lies I Told Leading Up to the Invasion of Iraq (Vol. 1)
• Cheney Made Me Do It
• How Condi Got Her Groove Back
• Me ‘n’ Jesus — Just a Couple of Good Old Boys with an Agenda
• Pennies from Heaven — An Investment Guide for Political Capital
• The Kids are All Right, or How I Packed the Supreme Court with Wingnuts
• Dustbowl Dreams: Environmental Policies to Make the Whole World Look Like South Texas
• Serving as the Leader of the Free World and Commander and Chief of the Most Powerful Army on Earth with Your Finger on the Nucular Button for Dummies

Update: Keep those suggestions coming in. Here are a few more:
• Staying the Course: It’s Not About Principle, It’s About Lack of Ideas
• I’ve Never, Even Been Wrong: Being George Bush
• My Life, by George W. Bush and Karl Rove
• Winning the War on Terror Using the War on Logic
• How to Raise Perfect Daughters Even When Their Mother is a Manslaughterer

From Comments: Love this one:
• George W Bush: Nepotism Gone Wrong.

If you have a title to suggest for President Bush’s autobiography, send it to News Desk at Pensito Review Dot Com.

Oakland-based Redefining Progress and the Earthday Networtk have created an on-line quiz that might get you thinking about your lifestyle. Only 15 questions long, and requiring no registration, the quiz measures how much of the surface of the planet is required to sustain your existence.

In the United States, that average is 24 acres. Compare that with the fact that there are only 4.5 acres per person on the planet and you get some idea of how out of whack our consumer culture is.

Take the quiz here.

July 4, 2005, marked the 39th anniversary of the signing into law of the Freedom of Information Act, a resource for public disclosure of government documents that has become essential to keeping the process of governance at least somewhat transparent. Though first proposed by the Democratic Party in 1956, it took a decade before the FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson — one day before it would have expired in a “pocket veto” if he had not signed it.

Since then, the FOIA has been instrumental in bringing to light hundreds of thousands of documents and aiding investigations from Watergate in the 1970s to prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Cuba, today.

The FOIA has spawned “sunshine law” statutes in all 50 U.S. states, and similar access laws in other nations. Only Sweden’s freedom of information law is older than ours.

According to Interpress News Service, the law is continuing to evolve through current legislation.

Efforts to strengthen FOIA are continuing, today by an unlikely partnership of one of the U.S. Senate’s most liberal members and one of its most conservative.

The odd couple is Senator John Cornyn, a conservative Republican from Texas and Senator Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat from Maine. Amid growing complaints about delays and difficulties in obtaining information from federal agencies, the pair has put together two bills.

One would create a commission to identify ways to reduce delays in processing FOIA requests. A second would establish a way for people to track their Freedom of Information Act requests on the Internet and would establish an ombudsman to mediate disputes between agencies and requesters.

It is interesting to note that with the current administration’s tight-fisted approach to information, the number of FOIA filings has increased dramatically as U.S. citizens seek to find out what our government ius up to. A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that during George Bush’s administration, FOIA requests increased 71% from 2002 to 2004, with a 68% rise in requests processed during that period, and a 14% rise in the backlog.

While the report found that 92% of 2004 requests resulted in ”responsive records” being provided in full, it noted that many of those seeking information still must sue the government to get it.

Here is a text analysis of President Bush’s speech delivered at Fort Bragg June 28, 2005.

• The speech contained 1996 words, 928 of them different words.
• The compexity factor (lexical density) was 46.3%; readability on the Gunning-Fog Index, where 6 is easy and 20 is hard, was 8.6. On another readability scale where 100 is easy and 20 is hard, and the optimal range is 60-70, the speech scored 46.
• There were 228 sentences averaging 16.04 words; the longest sentence was 48 words: I said that America’s mission in iraq is to defeat an enemy and give strength to a friend, a free representative government that is an ally in the war on terror and a beacon of hope in a part of the world that is desperate for reform.

The top 10 words in frequency (ocurrences in parentheses):

Most frequently used three-word phrases:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks earlier this week may hold unforeseen ramifications for Pensito Review. While aimed primarily at such P-to-P products as Grokster and Napster, it appears the ruling also might impact Penster, Pensito Review’s P-to-P truth-sharing network.

Penster is the backbone of Pensito Review, providing the technological means for PR’s editors and readers to “swap” truths. For eample, Trish uncovers a truth in Florida about that rascal Jeb Bush and posts it on Pensito Review. Visitors to the PR Web site can then access that truth and comment on it, thereby “swapping” their own version of the truth with their peers.

Of course, users of Penster do not pay for the truth they access, which is where Pensito Review runs afoul of the Supremes. In the current political environment created by the Bush Administration, truth has value, and that value must be tightly controlled or the truth will become devalued.

For example, the Downing Street Memo was very valuable to the administration as long as it remained a secret. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the memo’s value has plunged precipitously, according to the administration. By allowing readers to “swap” truths using Penster, Pensito Review is contributing to the devaluation of those truths, since, according to the wingnuts in Washington, the wider truths are disseminated, the less valuable they are. Hence, the admin’s tendency to discount such truths in press briefings.

We here at Pensito Review believe that peer-to-peer truth swapping via the Penster network is protected by the First Amendment.

During the Supreme Court’s debate over the matter, constitutional expert Justice Antonin Scalia maintained that there was no express guarantee of freedom of speech in the Consitution. When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out that the First Amendment to the Constitution did guarantee freedom of speech, Scalia burst out: “Amendment? What amendment? Nobody told me there were amendments to the Consitution! Jeez!”

According to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey completed in April and May, most people in the world continue to have a low, if not downright hostile, opinion of the United States (surprise!). The poll surveyed 17,000 people in 16 countries, and found that the U.S.’s rep is even worse than its president’s approval rating here at home.

In a sign that outsourcing works, however, the study found that the U.S. was most highly regarded in India, where 71% of those polled expressed a positive opinion of the United States, compared with 54% three years ago. That was our highest rating. In the world. A full 62% of Poles think we’re okay, though.

In Europe, we’ve gained a little of the ground lost after Herr Bush started stomping on Iraq, but China actually is viewed more positively by the Europeans than the country that saved their asses in WWII. The former Axis powers of Japan and Germany, and reliable France are all more highly regarded than the United States among European countries. Even (our friends)the British and (our neighbors to the North) the Canadians have a more favorable view of those three nations than they do of America.

Most Muslim countries still hate us, of course, but extreme hostility has faded slightly, with people in some Muslim countries perceiving the U.S. as supporting democracy in the Middle East. U.S. approval ratings are 23% in Turkey and Pakistan, and 21% in Jordan.

Although European publics view China more favorably than the United States, fortunately, they are opposed to the idea of China becoming a military rival to the U.S. Majorities in every European nation — except Turkey believe China’s emergence as a military superpower would be a bad thing. In Turkey and predominantly Muslim countries, where they hate us, a majority think a Chinese challenge to American military power would be a good thing (except for all that nucular fallout — unless it fell on Turkey).

There is widespread support across every country surveyed for some country or group of countries to emerge as a military rival to the U.S. In France, 85% of respondents believe the EU or another country should emerge as a military rival to the U.S. (as long as it’s not France, of course). The United States does not agree, and wants to remain the world’s biggest bully.

When asked about their perceptions of Americans, the rest of the world gets downright personal:

In most Western countries surveyed, majorities associate Americans with the positive characteristics “honest,” “inventive” and “hardworking.” At the same time, substantial numbers also associate Americans with the negative traits “greedy” and “violent.” Canadians, who presumably have the greatest contact with Americans, agree with Europeans on the negatives, but are less likely to view Americans as honest. And Canada is the only Western nation in which a majority (53 percent) regards Americans as rude.

Muslim publics, including Indonesians, are highly critical of Americans in many respects. In particular, they are much more likely than others to view the American people as immoral. Yet people in predominantly Muslim countries also see Americans as hardworking and inventive.

The Chinese are also largely critical of Americans. They are the least likely of these 16 publics to consider Americans hardworking (44 percent) and just over a third (35 percent) see Americans as honest. A majority of Chinese associate Americans with being violent (61 percent) and greedy (57 percent). The one positive trait most Chinese associate with Americans is inventive (70 percent).

By contrast, Indians hold largely positive views of the American people. Clear majorities see Americans as inventive, hardworking and honest (86%, 81% and 58%, respectively). None of the negative traits is linked with Americans by a majority in India.

But hey, we hate ourselves, too: a large percentage of the U.S. public (70 percent) characterizes American people as greedy, and nearly half (49 percent) see their fellow countrymen as violent.

MoveOn.org is currently running a poll to see if its supporters want to back a movement to get U.S. troops out of Iraq — ASAP. The proposed campaign would support the Jones-Abercrombie resolution currently before Congress that would require Herr Bush to put together a plan by the end of 2005 for bringing home all U.S. troops from Iraq, with withdrawal beginning no later than Oct. 1, 2006.

So far, of the 103,015 people who have voted, 83.9 percent want MoveOn to move on with the Jones-Abercrombie resolution. The other 16.1 percent say that MoveOn should concentrate on other issues or should try another route to get U.S. troops home. Vote here.