Island Dave's View

Anyone wanting information on NC-3 Democratic candidate Roger Eaton should check these sources:

The official campaign site

Project Vote Smart profile, including NPAT responses

Statement to the Pitt County Democratic Party from Roger's campaign

Campaign manager Larry Spell's LTE in the Daily Reflector

New Bern Sun Journal article

Roger Eaton for Congress Meetups in the New Bern area.

If anyone can help out on Tuesday for the primary, please contact Roger's campaign through the official site.

From poster Gryn at Daily Kos:

Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh
by Gryn
Wed Jul 14th, 2004 at 23:33:32 EDT

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

This is a summary of Hersh speaking at the ACLU 2004 America At A Crossroads conference according to EdCone.com (via Oliver Willis). I verified by watching the video myself (it starts at 1:07, the "worse stuff" part starts at 1:30).
There's more bad stuff in here, read Ed Cone's summary.

I'll try transcribing some of the more important bits.

[my transcription from 1:31 - 1:32]

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]

The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.

It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?

Chilling.

Outfoxed producer Robert Greenwald is about to be on Air America Radio (11:30 AM on the East Coast). Listen online here.

Anyone who is getting excited about Sunday's Outfoxed House Parties should check out these links to get an idea of what will be presented:

You can watch the movie trailer and clips from the film at the official site.

NYTimes article about producer Robert Greenwald and the making of Outfoxed.

Here is an NPR interview with Greenwald.

Media Matters for America got ahold of 33 internal Fox documents.

Salon's take on the movie. (Click on the free one-day pass and view an ad to read full article.)

For those attending Island Dave's "Outfoxed" House Party who are new to my blog, welcome to Island Dave's View! I look forward to meeting all of you on Sunday! Take a moment to check out my daily digest blog at Current Events Monitor

There is no doubt that contingency plans should be in place in the event of serious disruptions to the stability and integrity of an election. However, the specific threat from "terrorists" is a deliberate ruse by Rethugs to maintain the fear level in the nation. As Kossack Dump Terry McAuliffe points out, there are numerous events which are far more likely to occur, affecting an election.

What bothers me is the focus on terrorists; it smells like yet another Administration scare tactic. For what it's worth, I can think of a number of events that could seriously disrupt an election, at least in parts of the country: a serious earthquake or hurricane, a power blackout like the one last August, an outbreak of SARS or the flu. All of these would be more disruptive to the election than, say, the Madrid train bombing, tragic as it was.

Rethugs believe that a fearful citizenry will surely back an incumbent as a means of survival. Of course, come November, they'll realize they were wrong when Kerry-Edwards steamrolls a scandel-clouded Bush-Cheney campaign.

Over at Daily Kos, fellow Kossack bellatrys offers a segment of narration from a film not widely known, but which should be seen by all in lieu of our current situation. This snippet from The Handmaiden's Tale certainly echoes loudly with respect to both the 2000 election and the imminent one this year.

"You had to take those pieces of paper with you when you went shopping, though by the time I was nine or ten most people used plastic cards. Not for groceries though, that came later. It seems so primitive, totemistic even, like cowry shells. I must have used that kind of money myself, a little, before everything went on the Compubank.
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on...

Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen. Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons, they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful. They said that new elections would be held, but that it would take some time to prepare for them. The thing to do, they said, was to carry on as usual..."
--The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1985