undergroundclips

GOP Attacking an Independent Judiciary

Senator John Cornyn attacks our Independent Judiciary live on C-Span.

What gives with the GOP? Why are they threatening Judges with "courthouse violence" because Judges are "unaccountable to the public"?

I thought people who made threats to our democracy were considered terrorists.  But now people who believe they represent the Republican Party are making just such threatening remarks live on TV. First it was Trent Lott telling us that "the time will come"  for the judges who ruled according to law in the  Terri Schiavo case, that they will have "to answer for their behavior." Who exactly are they going to have to answer to? The radical right? The NRA? for following the law?

Now, as a New York Times Editorial on April 6, 2005 reports, Senator Cornyn argued that the courthouse violence we have seen is a result of an "unaccountable judiciary:"  he explained away the recent murder of a judge by arguing the following: "we seem to have run into a spate of courthouse violence recently in the news, whether the perception in some quarters in some occasions where judges are making political decisions, yet are unaccountable to the public, that it  it builds up and builds up and builds up until some people engage in violence."

The Atlanta judge who was murdered in his courtroom, the Chicago Judge's mother and husband executed by an obviously mentally ill man, how can a Sentator, let alone one on the Senate Judiciary Committee, possibly argue that these crimes have anything to do with an unaccountable judiciary?   

Have a look at Senator Cornyn making a thinly veiled threat of courthouse violence to Judges who don't represent the views of a strikingly radical but powerful minority within the Republican Party.

Where is the Justice Dept. when you need them?  Oh yeah, I forgot, the head of the Justice Dept. is part of the same radical minority.....it has to make you wonder.

Social Insecurity on the Daily Show

Daily Show on Social Insecurity

In their typically brilliant and sardonic way, The Daily Show has placed the Social Security debate in its full and proper context. George Bush is shown to be moving his sights away from Iraq and toward domestic issues.

The plundering of Iraq after the invasion clearly presages what will happen to our fine nation once the neoconservative cum radical Bush acolytes get through with us...

Samantha Bee's report is also available here at the Daily Show's website: http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/

Homeland Insecurity

Homeland Insecurity:

On Undergroundfilm.org, Filmmakers Jigar Mehta and Jeff Plunkett have a documentary on the militarization of our capitol.  They are students at the Graduate School of Journalism (they don't say, but I presume UC Berkeley).  The shots of the surface to air missles on a roof has to make you wonder what's happened to us.  This is only the beginning....

Beware of Bush

Beware of Bush (quicktime)

Have a look at this anti-bush TV ad from the
New Democratic Network it fits my mood exactly today.

One thing about all the money spent on ads in this campaign, half of them will be useful for the next few years anyway, while ads against Kerry are dead, the one's against Bush still stand....as Kerry was saying, the vote for Bush was a vote for 'more of the same.'

New Videos on On Lisa Reins Radar

Lisa Rein has outdone herself and posted a number of important videos, here are just four of them:

Video of "Election 2000: The Stolen Presidency"

BBC Documentary On The Shrub Administration's Jessica Lynch Rescue Lies

60 Minutes Explains How Electronic Voting Machines Are Inherently Insecure

Bill Moyers On The 911 Commission Report

Voter Scandal in Florida from BBC

New Florida Vote Scandal Feared (realone)

Leave it to a foreign news agency like the BBC to create the best report on the growing evidence of a serious voter scandal in Florida. This is a must see.

In case the text is no longer available, I've archived it here.

Check out "Republican Dirty Tricks" by Max Blumentthal, AlterNet about Republican operative Nathan Sproul, whose company is under investigation for allegedly destroying voter registration forms by Democrats.

Ed Gillespie would like you to believe that one crack head can do as much damage as one of his operatives who across the nation are wiping out tens of thousands of democratic votes.

Gillespie and McAuliffe: Voter Supression vs Opportunity

Gillespie and McAuliffe: Voter Supression vs Opportunity

In this Meet the Press segment [transcript], the differences between the parties with respect to voters rights becomes absolutely clear: according to their Chairman, Republicans are for putting in place as many obstacles as possible for voters, whereas Democrats are for giving as many people as possible the opportunity to legally vote.

Tim Russert starts off this segment with a report from the NY Times: "In the name of fraud prevention, the Republicans plan to use 3,600 challengers in Ohio, a pivotal state where the race is dead even and there has been a big surge in first-time registrations for Democratic voters. ...One of the gravest dangers is that partisan teams will challenge many, if not all, voters in selected precincts, with the goal of slowing voting to a standstill. ... If the challengers can add 10 minutes per voter, waiting times may become so long that thousands of voters will simply give up. "

Among the charges Gillespie makes on the segment:

[Gillespie]: "The fact is, and what Terry is saying here, that if non-U.S. citizens vote, if somebody votes two, three, four times, if somebody who is 15 years old goes in and votes, that those people have to have their votes counted. We don't have to have their votes counted."

[McAulliffe]: "I just want to be clear. Ed said something which is just absolutely outrageous. We want to make sure that only the people who are allowed to vote legally have the right to vote should be able to vote. No shenanigans."

In their arguments they both bring up instances of voter fraud, but the factual difference is between $500,000 being paid to organized republican operatives, and a couple of hundred dollars by the NAACP to a person who in turn offered to pay someone in crack cocaine. [Ohio Voter Fraud] McAulliffe refers to Nathan Sproul's firm, Sproul & Associates and who is the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and the state's Christian Coalition. He has worked for a number of Arizona politicians. [see the Arizona Republic article on this] Quite a gap here.

Addendum: Wed, Oct.27, 2004: Florida County says Absentee Ballots missing Interestingly, the AP reports writes that Broward is of course the district which "in 2000, Broward gave Democrat Al Gore his biggest margin among Florida counties. He received 67 percent of the vote there, while losing the state to George W. Bush by just 537 votes."

Al Gore on the "Failed Bush Presidency"

Gore's 10/18/2004 speech at Georgetown
from C-SPAN (requires realone player)

Gore's recent speech at Georgetown University is well worth a listen. At 15:40 Gore uses the same Dick Cheney quote that I mentioned in a previous post which I think best sums up Cheney and the current administration: "This is our due..." from Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind's recent book: The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neil. This is one of Gore's most well reasoned speeches.

If anyone has a transcript or link to it of this speech, please send it on.

Nightline Falsifies Swift Boat Veterans for 'Truth'

Nightline goes to Vietnam and takes on Swift Boat Veterans for 'Truth' quicktime

(Note: If you want an mp4 to download right-click here.)

This is a must see for people who had any doubts about John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veteran's for 'Truth.' On the show O'Neil comes off as a political hack and bozo. For more on John O'Neil, check out this on the Daily KOS

Nightline actually goes to Vietnam and the exact village where the incident occured that resulted in Kerry's Silver Medal. The facts support Kerry. O'Neill avoids as best he can discussing the facts from Nightline's investigation which pretty clearly put him and his group in disrepute.

The ABC News article about the Nightline episode What Happened in Kerry's Vietnam Battles? tells us the following:

"According to the military citation, Kerry was awarded the medal for his actions during an intense firefight on Feb. 28, 1969, during which he shot and killed a Viet Cong fighter who was armed with a rocket launcher. Members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group have charged that the Viet Cong fighter was a teenager who was alone, who was not part of a numerically superior force, and who was already wounded and running away when Kerry shot him."

" "Nightline" traveled to Vietnam and found a number of witnesses who have never been heard from before, and who have no particular ax to grind for or against Kerry. Only one of them, in fact, even knew who Kerry is. The witnesses, all Vietnamese, are still living in the same villages where the fighting took place more than 35 years ago. A "Nightline" producer visited them and recorded their accounts of that day. The accounts were subsequently translated by a team of ABC News translators. "

The odd thing is that this particular article spends more time being 'fair' to O'Neil than to the facts that Nightline discovered. But O'Neil still gets a relatively fair hearing on the ABC news site despite being utterly discredited on Nightline,...check it out for yourself.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ought to be called the Swift Bozo Veterans for Lies, Distortions and Falsehoods. If you think I'm exaggerating take a look at their site. You can find them on any search engine. They and the sites they link to show nothing but contempt for intelligent, thoughtful discourse. Here's John O'Neill's statement in response to his Nightline interview.

Paul O'Neil on the Bush Whitehouse

Paul O'Neil Speaks out.
Or: The Manifest Destiny Theory of Wealth and Power.

How is the Whitehouse actually run by George W. Bush?

60 Minutes' interview of Paul O'Neil from January 9th, 2004, provides us with probably the only revealing inside portrait of the Bush Administration and how it has been run. He is the only person to leave the administration in the last 4 years to speak out.

From the video: "Paul O'Neil was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasure Secretary. At cabinet meetings, [O'Neil] says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think." "

Also in this interview is former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind who wrote the book largely sourced from O'Neil. What he has to say is pretty frightening:

"After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.” "

"This is our due..." that is the essence of Cheney, call it "The Manifest Destiny Theory of Wealth and Power."

Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neil has done pretty well on Amazon. If you 'd like to see who's buying it, click here: Amazon's list of 'Purchase Circles for The Price of Loyalty.'

Here is the link that CBS's website provides for the transcript: Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq? and to their credit they provide some of the interview in postage stamp size. Here is the general site for CBS news video.
See the Wikipedia's definition of Manifest Destiny.

Second Presidential Debate

2nd Presidential Debate. This is a link to the 2nd debate from C-SPAN. You can actually watch it in two styles: conventional and podium watch style the better to watch their reactions in realtime.

Also Archive.org now has the 2nd Presidential Debate in numerous file types and sizes. Archive.org Presidential Debate October, 8 2004.

The candidates were all but shouting past each other and the questions were typically conventional. The reason the questions were so unoriginal is because both candidates have all but brainwashed us through repetition. Have a look at the gopconstrum video below for an example, and if you guessed that Republicans understand propaganda better than the Democrats....you'd be right...wish someone would do one of the Democratic convention for comparison.

CBC's airs an Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney

Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney (at google video) give this a couple of minutes to download, it's worth it.  If you can't wait for the QuickTime progressive download to start, you can right or option click it, download and watch it later.* This is quite a piece on Dick Cheney, as only another country could have done.  In this case it comes from CBC's 'Fifth Estate' Why is it that our own media is so watered down that in the US only 'fake news' programs like the Daily Show are able to supply the kind of strong critiques a democracy needs in order to understand it's own behavior? Why do we need other countries to do this? While the Sunday talk shows at least let their guests dig their own graves right up there in front of us, they still don't have the guts to be less than polite... lest they lose access to those very same guests. Kudos to the Canadian Broadcasting Network! Wish I could get them on my cable system. At least Sinclair isn't running the show here in CA. If you run Bit Torrent, you can also get it from here: Also check out this interesting piece on Dick Cheney at the Project for the Old American Century which looks just like the site it mocks:  "Project for the New American Century" a conservative site. And they have some terrific videos too:  Have a look here at their downloads page. *Some people have had trouble downloading this, it is  H U G E  and it takes a while to load up so that it will play smoothly.  I've twice tried to re-encode it at 320 by 240, but it created too many artifacts to be watchable and took forever. If anyone has an MPEG2 version, please either provide a link or send it to me on a DVD-R at: Undergroundclips.com PO Box 460 669 San Francisco, CA 94146-0669

First Presidential Debate

1st Presidential Debate link on C-SPAN This is the first presidential debate from C-Span. Just in case you want to see Bush in the train wreck again.
The best article I've seen on this was in the Sunday NY Times today by Frank Rich. It takes a former theatre critic to properly analyze politics today. Here he shows how James Baker's attempts to control the theatrics of the debate backfired completely on them. In case the link goes bad, here's a pdf for you.

The Daily News on the First Debate of Sept 30, 2004. Here's a typically brilliant critique of the debate, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. Let's stop calling it 'Fake News," there is nothing fake about it the show's critiques at all.

George Bush on Meet the Press

This important interview is here presented in its entirety and unedited. In response to the Bush administration's stonewalling on getting the commission report out before March 2005, Bush said: "The reason why we gave it time is that we didn't want it to be hurried...." Oh....and here I thought they wanted to avoid getting the commission report out before the election...guess I was wrong :-)

G.W. Bush's Meet the Press Appearance suitable for editing (330mb)

Note the progressive Quicktime file is 330mb, but will load in a few seconds depending on the speed of your connection.

Daily Show On G.W. Bush's Meet The Press Appearance (18MB):
in a blistering critique, Jon Stewart comments on Bush's appearence on Meet the Press. Referring to the growing insurgency against the US military in Iraq and Bush's statement that "I think we are welcomed in Iraq!," John Stewart said: "That's interesting, apparently the rocket propelled grenade is the Iraqi equivalent of Aloha, If there is one lesson to be drawn from Bush's appearence [on Meet the Press], it's that he doesn't have to be forthcoming or honest and he's the first one to tell you why: "I'm a war president!," he added... I guess I should have told you that back in 2000."