As Mary O’Grady reported in the Wall Street Journal, the conduct of today’s presidential and Congressional elections is a tribute to the fortitude of the leadership in standing up to the United States and the anti-US front led by Hugo Chavez.
Preliminary official results showed Porfirio Lobo, of the opposition National Party, with 56% support with more than 60% of the tally sheets counted. Ruling party candidate Elvin Santos conceded defeat to Lobo. Election officials said more than 60% of registered voters cast ballots Sunday.
Neither Zelaya nor Marcheletti were candidates. The fact of the elections without Zelaya is the crowning achievement of Honduran democracy.
Text messages sent in the hours before and during 9-11 are now becoming available for public examination.
It will take time, but a number of individuals are working through them (remember what the Iranians did with CIA's singular shredded messages) and we anticipate findings within a few months. We've also suggest a quick tag cloud cross-references to time and location.
Reddit Discussion
For the text files themselves, click on Wikileaks logo. For the Reddit discussion click on the Frog.
An e-mail hack that exposed thousands of private e-mails and documents about global warming from a University of East Anglia climate change research center indicates a shifting paradigm for e-mail as a means of “private” communication, and a continuation of political “hacktivism” to further political agendas, experts say.
Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ, the Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men’s Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, National Geographic, Hustler, Penthouse, Maxim, FHM and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah, where he writes more poetry than is publishable or readable. In 2002, he was selected as a Livingston Awards finalist for his Salon.com coverage of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In 2004, he published a book of poetry about September 11, which Norman Mailer declared “the best book I never got. Can you re-send?” A 2006 article in New York Press, “The Dogs of Gowanus,” has recently been optioned for a feature film.
1) Time Magazine recently ran a profile on the 2nd Maine Militia, which is headed up by the wonderful novelist (and all-around sweet-hearted lady) Carolyn Chute (check out her most recent book, The School on Heart’s Content Road). Choice line from one of the 2nd Mainers at their annual meeting: “Fuck America. What have they done for us lately? Let’s cut the United States loose and let it drift downstream.” Indeed.
2) For those of you dosing on the swine flu vaccine, see “Swine Fools” in CounterPunch.
3) CounterPunch also found the space to publish my profile of ex-CIA operative Bob Baer, the veteran Middle East case officer and author whose books became the basis of the film Syriana. See “Unlearning the CIA”. A sample:
By remarkable coincidence, Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue: An American Life just came out, jumped to the top of my ‘waiting to read” stack, and includes the phrase “Commonsense Conservative” is featured in that book. Combine it with Richard Branson's “Gaia Capitalism” and you have the makings of something special.
This book is short (123 pages), easy to read, and an inspiring patriotic labor of love, a gift to all of us who care deeply for American the Beautiful and are confused and/or angry about all that has been done “in our name” by the festering cesspool of Washington-based politicians and senior bureaucrats who live to claim budget share (inputs) rather than deliver public service (outputs).
The author provides the single best, most complete, and most sensible demarche against EARMARKS that I have ever seen. Included are eight illustrations and I will list them here because they capture the essence of this book's common sense:
Robotic systems can’t replace a pilot’s gut instinct
BY COL. JAMES JINNETTE, USAF
Unmanned combat systems have fundamental limitations that can make their technology a war-losing proposition. These limitations involve network vulnerabilities, release consent judgment and, most importantly, creative capacity during air combat and close air support (CAS) missions. Although futurists might assume these problems away with grand ideas of technologies yet to be developed, during the next few decades these limitations will remain critical constraints on our ability to provide airpower in the joint fight.
AIR FORCE COL. JAMES JINNETTE is director of the Air Force Element at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a recent Army War College graduate. Prior to his current posting, Jinnette was an F-15E squadron commander. He has completed three close air support deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Phi Beta Iota: David Pozen, JD Yale 2007, has provided advance access to the complete draft on his paper forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and we are both appreciative of this offering, and impressed–deeply impressed–by this seminal work. At a time when the U.S. “security clearance” system is so totally hosed up (and 70,000 clearances behind) that we might do better with with “spin the bottle,” the author is highlighting the reality that most of the secrecy we buy with $75 billion a year in taxpayer funds is not really that important–not only have others, such as Rodney McDaniel, made it clear that 809% to 90% of all “official” secrecy is about turf protection and budget share rather than national security, but it is administrative secrecy rather than “deep secrecy” that is leveraged by a very few with their own informal system for assigning trust, generally at the expense of the larger mass of uninformed individual who are treated as “collateral damage” that is of little consequence. The download options are at the top of the linked page
