RED LAVENDER INSURGENT

DEFENSE OF NAMBLA: REPLY TO LYDIA HOWELL

2011-04-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

Duncan:
I spent all morning looking for the article on NAMBLA and it turned up on the 19th page of my SENT file. Even though I told Lydia Howell I was only getting my thoughts together for a possible future publication, I went ahead and published it on the Green Party of Minnesota discussion list. I thought I had put in either my Web page or blog but I was unable to locate it there.

I hope you get this article. As you can see in the addenda at the end, aol has placed a block on my email address so the I could not send email to aol addresses. They told me the block depends oon the number of complaints they receive so I guess a large number of complainants found my political views objectionable. I notice you have an aol address so I hope this doesn't keep this article from reaching you.

I'm sorry that I was unable to answer your question about whether the bounds of discussion allowed in our community had shrunk in the last thirty years. But the main thing I have noticed in the Minneapolis GLBTI communities is that there has been virtually no political discussion in its publications in recent years, not that the bounds of allowable discussion had shrunk. There may be an even broader range of siscussion on the Internet and facebook since it is harder to exclude unpopular groups from these media.

Robert Halfhill

AUGUST 13, 2006

On August 8, 2006, Lydia Howell posted David Thorstad's
article, "Marriage, Marketing, Tailending: The U.S. Left and Same Sex
Marriage," stating that "I adamantly oppose the aims of NAMBLA but, I

do think Thorstad raises some interesting critiques and points that
are food for thought."
I do not know what Lydia Howell thinks the aims of NAMBLA (North
American Man-Boy Love Association) are. However, NAMBLA only
supports CONSENSUAL sexual relations between people of any age, no
matter how old or how young and no matter how wide the difference in
age between the consensual partners is. NAMBLA does not support rape
and tales about NAMBLA owning a Lear Jet to fly children from any
area of the country to its members are not true.
D.J. West in his HOMOSEXUALITY pointed out that the sublime
discussions of love by Socrates in Plato's SYMPOSIUM were about
what "we would call perversion." For those Gays who condemn NAMBLA
and sex with people under whatever is the magic age of consent in the
particular jurisdiction in question, that is also precisely what
Socrates was expounding on in the SYMPOSIUM. Although not all Gays
are attracted to males under the arbitrary age of consent, those Gays
who dismiss sex with underage persons as criminal are saying that
Socrates, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Walt Whitman
should have been put in jail!
Wainwright Churchill in HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR AMONG MALES pointed
out that Western Culture is one of the most erotophobic cultures
known. Conservatives view sex as evil. But even liberals and
radicals, although they claim they view sex as good, also conceive
sex as good but also dangerous, just as electricity is good but can
also kill you if your are not careful, and also view sex as good only
if it can be justified by marriage or love. Very few people believe
that sex can be enjoyed for its own sake. Recreational sex is good
in itself and needs no additional justification, although it is even
better if it is conjoined with love.
We need to ask ourselves why people get so upset over CONSENSUAL
sex between an adult and a child and assume that somehow the child
has been damaged. If the sex is consensual and enjoyed by both
partners, then, once we have got beyond the erotophobia of our
culture, is is obvious that no harm has been done but, in fact, only
good if both partners enjoyed the encounter. Research has shown that
no harm is done to the child if the people around him or her to not
get so upset. I remember reading in popular magazine articles
about child rearing in the 1950 that the child was unlikely to be
irrevocably damaged by a sexual encounter with an adult if the adults
around the child did not indicate that they now believed he or she
was irreparable damaged or, even worse, that they now thought he or
she was "bad."
I have thought that I should write something for the various Green
discussion lists about my views on this subject but, so far, the
occasion to do so has not come up. I am writing this to you off
list in order to organize my thoughts for a response to your post on
list. The nearest I have come to writing about this on list was to
forward a post about the hysteria and witch hunts around the country
about child adult sex to the Minnesota and 5th district Green
discussion lists. Even this provoked an email from Mark Snyder
asking why I had posted the article and adding, gratuitously, that
the posts must always be in the context of respect for others. I do
not know what his remark about respect for others had to do with
anything since my forwarding the post was not even in reply to anyone
else. I replied, saying that the hysteria and witch hunting over
child adult sex was likely to have a negative effect on GLBTI'S. He
replied, saying that I should post an explanation of the relevance of
my post but, in the press of other work, I never got around to it.
And this witch hunt about child adult sex has had a negative
effect on many people, not just GLBTI'S. The California scandal over
the Little Rascals day care center, operated by Peggy MacMartin-
Buckley, one of her children, and her grandson, Raymond Buckley,
continued for a decade and cost millions of dollars in legal expenses
before it was established that the state had no case and the case was
dismissed. By that time, Peggy MacMartin-Buckley and Raymond Buckley
has been in prison for years and Peggy MacMartin-Buckley had been
assaulted by other inmates who knocked out all her teeth. Peggy
MacMartin-Buckley tried to sue the state but the judge dismissed her
suit, saying that as long as state officials had acted in good faith,
they were immune from suit. That may be the way the law IS but it is
not the way it SHOULD BE. The law should provide that if a person
has been imprisoned for years unjustly, there should be a law
providing them with enough monetary compensation to make them wealthy
for the rest of their life.
But there are some additional comments Thorstad made in his attack
on the demand for same sex marriage and equal marital rights for Gays
and Lesbians that require a reply. He attacks the demand for same
sex marriage as an attempt by Gays and Lesbians to assimilate to
heterosexuals and achieve middle class respectability and says it
only became popular after the numbers of Gays and Lesbians who poured
out of the closet in response to Anita Bryant's Save Our Children
campaign made it safe for more conservative Gays and Lesbians to come
out. He claims that the recent decisions against same sex marriage
in five state courts "may have sounded the death knell for this issue
in the United States, even if it did not drive a stake through its
heart."
It no more "sounded the death knell" than the Hardwick
decision "sounded the death knell" for the fight against sodomy
laws. And no more than the Hawaii Supreme Court's deliberately
delaying its final decision until the voters had time to amend their
state constitution to allow marital discrimination against Gays and
Lesbians "sounded the death knell" for same sex marriage in the
1990's. It no more sounded "the death knell" than Plessey v.
Fergerson sounded "the death knell" for the fight against separate
but equal in the 1890's. And it cannot "sound the death knell" as
the United States becomes more and more unique among the advanced
industrial democracies in not guaranteeing the right of same sex
marriage with the nearest counter example being in Canada, right over
our northern border.
Thorstad also denounced hate crimes legislation as a manifestation
of identity politics and as "thought crimes legislation." Hate
crimes legislation is not thought crimes legislation. Intent
or "thoughts" have long been legitimate considerations in the law.
An example is intent being considered in distinguishing between
first, second and third degree murder and distinguishing those from
first and second degree manslaughter. Intent is necessary in
determining which of these five crimes have been committed and
therefore, the severity of the sentence imposed.
Furthermore, a hate crime against a member of a particular
minority group heightens fear among other members of that group than
a generic crime against a member of the general public can heighten
fear among members of the general population.
Also, hate crimes against a member of a minority increase the
probability of crimes, i.e. acts, against other members of that
group. Prosecutors are likely to assign a higher probability to
prosecuting crimes that have a higher sentence. And the successful
prosecution of a hate crime can undercut the general impression that
people have carte blanche to attack members of unpopular minorities
and therefore lower the probability of further crimes, I.E. ACTS,
against that unpopular minority.
Thorstad argues that "there is no such thing as'gay people' --
only homosexual acts -- that this was an abstract concept that erased
fluidity and ambiguity and discovery, that diverted attention from
decriminalizing consensual sexual acts that everyone had the
potential to engage in, regardless of their sexual identity, and that
turned freedom from sexual oppression into a question of mere
identity politics."
Thorstad is defending the position popular in much
contemporary "modern thought," that Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals,
Transgender and Intersexed People have no existence as objectively
existing groups and are mere "socially constructed" categories which
are not even present in most cultures.
It is true that the less GLBTI's are singled out and persecuted in
some societies, the less Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgender
People and Intersexed People are less likely to think of themselves
as
distinct groups and if there were a society that lacked any such
singling out, Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals in that society might not
think of themselves as separate groups at all, that society's view
being only that some people liked only sex with the opposite sex,
other people liked only sex with their own sex, and that others liked
both.
However, even in that hypothetical society, it would still be an
objective fact about people that they desired sex with the same,
opposite or both genders. And if that hypothetical society did not
consider it important whether a person identified as being the same
as or the opposite of their bodily gender, maybe Transgender Persons
would not think of themselves as separate groups but it would still
be an objective fact about them whether they identified as the same
or opposite of their bodily gender. And if that hypothetical society
did not consider it important whether people were born with ambiguous
and not distinct male or female genitalia, maybe Intersexed People
would not think of themselves as a distinct group either, the general
impression in that society being only that some people were born with
distinct male or female genitalia and that some were born with
ambiguous genitalia. However, it would still be an objective fact
about Intersexed People in that hypothetical society that their
genitalia were not definitely either male or female.
Jonathan Katz abandoned his earlier view in GAY AMERICAN HISTORY
that Gayness and Lesbianism were objective traits for the view that
Gays and Lesbians were "socially constructed" categories with no
objective existence in his later GAY AND LESBIAN ALMANAC. He went
from, for instance, the true statement that the early puritans
thought in terms of specific people who committed the specific crimes
of engaging in sex with members of their own gender, sex with
children, sex with animals, etc and not in terms of groups such as
homosexuals, pedophiles and pederasts, zoophiliacs, etc to the false
statement that the puritans apparently had an undifferentiated sexual
attraction to both sexes, adults and children, animals, etc. An
example that will make this clear is skin color. It means different
things in other societies and is categorized differently than it is
in contemporary
American society. It has even been categorized differently at
earlier times in American society. In the early twentieth century,
Finns were not considered white. I suppose if there were a society
that had gotten beyond racial prejudice, different skin colors might
not mean any more than different hair colors do today. But the
actual color of the skin remains the same, no matter how it is
categorized in different societies. An analogous error to the error
Katz made in the case of sexual orientation would be as if he said
with respect to our hypothetical society that had gotten beyond
racial prejudice that the people in that society apparently had skins
of an indeterminate color instead of skins that were white, black,
brown, yellow or red!
This modern attempt to consider Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals,
Transgender People and Intersexed People as mere "socially
constructed" categories instead of separate peoples with a proud
history erases our proud history and ties in with the wimpy tendency
of "modern," middle class, thought to avoid taking a definite
position on anything. It also ties in with the tendency that
Thorstad
decries of less proud and militant Gays and Lesbians to want to blend
in and assimilate with the heterosexual majority. After all, as so
many post Stonewall Gays and Lesbians are fond of saying, "I'm just a
human being."!!!! To paraphrase Jesse Jackson, we were born Gay or
Lesbian among the heterosexuals, not heterosexual in Gay or Lesbian!!!
Thorstad argues that identity politics and considering GLBTI's
to be actual real groups instead of socially constructed categories
relegates "gay liberation to a nearly weightless interest group."
However, 10% of the population can in no sense be considered "nearly
weightless." Thorstad says supporting equal rights for "gay
people"
is "something any liberal capitalist could support," ignoring the
fact that capitalism has certainly dug in its heels against even
tolerating GLBTI'S, let along granting us equal rights. Thorstad
says identity politics has degenerated into the reductio ad absurdum
of an "alphabet soup" of acronyms, "GLBT, LGBT, GLBTQIA,
etc." I too
considered it absurd to go beyond GLBT until I realized that people
born with indeterminate genitalia are an objectively existing group
and conceded that ONE more group had to be added. However, I
consider
it absurd to divide the groups into subgroups, such as Transgender
People into Tsub 1, Tsub2, etc. And Q for Questioning People is
unnecessary since all the questioning people will fit into one or the
other five categories. And I forget what A stands for. It seems as
if people have gotten caught up in a contest to prove how politically
correct they are by thinking up a new category to add.
However, Gays and Lesbians are separate communities in that many,
though not all, Gays and Lesbians have the majority of their social
network among others Gays or Lesbians. The old bromide "speak for
yourself" is irrelevant here since the statement is based on my
observation of other Gays and Lesbians. And Bisexuals are subject to
bigotry from both the heterosexual and Gay and Lesbian communities,
so they will qualify as a separate group also. And whether people
identify as the same gender as their bodily gender or whether they
were botn with indeterminate genitalia are objectively true facts
about them so Transgender and Intersexed People will also qualify as
separate groups. The majority heterosexual society until recently
thought of us as all one group and lumped us all together so we
tended to
think of ourselves as one group also. But we are not one community
but a coalition of five separate communities, each with its own
distinctive set of overlapping, through similar, oppressions and each
with a distinct need for our own separate organizations as well as a
need to act in coalition with one another.
Thorstad argues that " in all the ink spilled over gay marriage,
other forms of marriage are not even countenanced, such as polygamy
or between men and boys, as in the Siwa Oasis." He says "The State
should get out of the marriage business. Society should extend
recognition to all kinds of civil union arrangements between
consenting individuals, whether man and woman, , man and man, woman
and woman, man and boy, grandparent and grandchild, communal
arrangements, and so on. Marriage should be relegated to the purely
private and religious domain. Every citizen should be treated
equally before the state and be guaranteed the same rights and
privileges, without regard to conjugal or marital status. Separate
church and state!"
Thorstad dismisses the demand for Gay marriage as part of " the
gay assimilationist agenda" -- incidentally, Thorstad's consistent
refusal to capitalize Gay demonstrates the extent to which HE has
been sucked into the Gay assimilationist agenda -- and states
that "Oddly, left groups that uncritically support gay marriage are
silent about the way marriage is treated in Cuba." He quotes Vilma
Espin, birth name Mariela Castro, Raul Castro's daughter and Fidel
Castro's niece, who when asked if Cuban Gays are going to demand a
right to marriage, "pointed to Cuba's casual approach to marriage and
its no-fault divorce." "Marriage is not as important in Cuba as in
other more Catholic countries," she said. "Here consensual pairing
is more important. What matters is love." Thorstad concluded: "So
far, Cuban Gays have not demanded marriage. If they use their head,
they won't."
First, the fact that I want to affirm any relationship I succeed
in
establishing in a ceremony before the community does not mean I want
to ape straights or assimilate to them.
Second is is disingenious and avoiding the issue for Vilma Espin
to assert that marriage is not as important in Cuba as in other
Catholic countries as long as Cuba still legally recognizes opposite
sex but not same sex marriage.
And third, while Thorstad is right in arguing that the concept of
marriage should be expanded to include man-boy relationships (as well
as women-girl relationships -- Linda Frankel was one of the few woman
members of NAMBLA), one husband and multiple wives and one wife and
multiple husbands, and group marriage or polyamory, and that the
concept of civil marriage or consensual contracts should be firmly
delineated from the concept of religious marriage which will be the
sole business of the particular religions involved, it is
unnecessary to replace the words "civil marriage" with "civil
contracts" once all that has been achieved. Civil marriage has
always had the meaning of a variety of marriage. My parents were
married in a civil ceremony before a Justice of the Peace in 1939 and
they, I and everybody else always considered them as MARRIED in the
usual sense, even if it was performed by a Justice of the Peace
instead of a minister, priest or rabbi. So a terminological change
is definitely not needed. But if that change is made, I want Gays
and Lesbians to win the right to civil marriage in the generally
accepted sense BEFORE we start calling it something else. Otherwise
it will look like the heterosexual majority has gotten away with
saying: "We don't want to admit Gays and Lesbians to MARRIAGE, which
only a man and a woman are good enough for. So we will abolish
marriage so we will only have to give them the inferior substitute of
consensual pairings and civil contracts. The only way we can stop
marriage from being sullied by Gays and Lesbians is to abolish it for
everybody!"
This seems to me very similar to the tactic of some public schools
in Utah which decided that if recognizing other student extra
cirricular clubs meant that they would be legally required to
recognize Gay Straight Alliances, then they just wouldn't recognize
ANY student extra cirricular clubs.
Finally, Thorstad concludes: "In the 1970's, much of the
left seemed to discover that the proletariat was unlikely to play the
historic and revolutionary role assigned to it by orthodox Marxism.
Leftists began to look around for 'new mass vanguards' and 'new
social movements' such as students, women, gays, third world
peoples. None of the groups have proven viable alternatives to the
proletariat that, in the West at least, shows no sign of acquiring a
revolutionary consciousness, or even of acting in its own self-
interest. And none have proven more easily coopted by the capitalist
system than homosexuals. This is the meaning of the marriage
campaign."
However, the remark about "homosexuals" being the most easily
coopted is probably just a case of Thorstad assuming that the grass
is always greener on the other side of the fence. And it wasn't just
the left looking for new vanguard
groups. The growth and expanding influence of the GLBTI, the
Women's, etc movements forced the left to recognize them. All of
these groups will once more play a revolutionary role when the
political climate shifts back to the left.
And I hope that Thorstad still recognizes that as capitalism goes
deeper into crisis, it will be forced to attack the gains of the
workers, which will force the proletariat to act in its own self
interest, acquire a revolutionary consciousness and act once more in
a revolutionary manner.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
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TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11 (FOURTH REVISION, 12/12/10)

2011-02-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 12, 2010
TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11 (FOURTH REVISION, 12/12/10)
By Robert Halfhill
There are many unanswered questions about the official conspiracy theory that an Islamic terrorist organization, headquartered in Afghanistan, sent 19 men with box cutters to infiltrate the United states to hijack four planes and wreak appalling destruction by crashing them into buildings. The first question about the official story is that since the World Trade Center had already been attacked by terrorists once before in 1993, and it remained the one place where a successful terrorist act would make the greatest impression, why was there no attempt to guard the WTC or prepare defenses? I remember thinking in 1993 that the
terrorists had to only be successful once while we had to be successful every time.

Second, the U.S. government received at least eleven warnings from foreign intelligence services about Al Qaida's plan for a big attack on the United States before they struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, why were no counter measures prepared?

Third, the Minneapolis FBI tried to obtain approval from the FISA Court to look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after he was arrested for being in the country illegally. But as Minneapolis FBI agent Coleen Rowley testified to a Senate hearing, the National FBI Office even rewrote the Minneapolis Office's request to FISA so it failed to be approved. The Minneapolis-St. Paul STAR TRIBUNE later wrote about how it became a running joke in the Minneapolis FBI Office about the National Office being on the side of the terrorists. And still later, the STAR TRIBUNE reported that plans for the attack on the World Trade Center were found on Moussaoui's computer.

Fourth, the Phoenix FBI Office had noticed the large number of Middle Eastern men enrolling for flight training. Someone from the Phoenix Office pointed out to the National Office that a plane could be used as a weapon.

Fifth, there is the mind boggling incompetence of both the civilian air traffic control systems and the military North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The civilian air traffic control system's radar can detect a plane going off course immediately, as soon as it deviates from its flight plan, and the protocol calls for it to notify NORAD within ten minutes. Boston Air Traffic Control detected American Airlines Flight 11 going off course as soon as it deviated from its flight plan at 8:14 A.M. on September 11, 2001. But it did not notify several other air traffic control centers until 8:25 A.M., eleven minutes later. And it did not notify NORAD until 8:40 A.M. The two F-15 Eagles that were eventually scrambled from Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which was 153 miles northwest of the World Trade Center and which had a top speed of over 1875 miles per hour, could have reached the WTC in seven minutes with more than enough time to intercept AA 11 if the F-15's had been in the air soon after 8:14 A.M or even 8:25 A.M. However, AA 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 A.M.

If NORAD had been informed and had the F-15's in the air soon after AA 11 was detected going off course at 8:14 A.M., there would have been far more than enough time to intercept it. At 8:41:32 A.M., there was a suspicious radio transmission from United Airlines Flight 175 which sounded something like "everyone stay in your seats." Boston Air Traffic Control informed NORAD that UA 175 had been hijacked at 8:43 and there would have been more than enough time for the two F-15"s, which were air borne by 8:52 A.M. to intercept UA 175 before it hit the South Tower at 9:02:54 A.M. That is there would have been more than enough time if the two F-15's had not been flying at only 23.9% of their top speed!

AA 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M. At their top speed, the two F-15's could have intercepted AA 77 twenty-four minutes before it hit the Pentagon.At 9:55 A.M., United Airlines Flight 93 went of course near Cleveland and began a 135 degree turn over Ohio and Northern Kentucky. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:06:05 A.M.
If a police officer pursuing fleeing criminals drove her or his squad car at only 23.9 percent of the car's top speed, the most probable conclusion would be that the officer intended to let the criminals escape. Human stupidity can account for a lot and even mount to civil or even criminal negligence. But when there is a series of one incredible, mind boggling stupidity after another, there has to be a malign intent to bring about the
opposite of what officials are supposedly trying to achieve, in this case to ensure that the hijackers succeed. But there's more!

Six, why did the government officials ship most of the steel from the World Trade Center out of the country, even though it is a felony to remove evidence from a crime scene. In the October 6, 2005 issue of NEW CIVIL ENGINEER, Dave Parker writes in "WTC Investigators Resist Call For Collapse Visualization" that nearly all the WTC steel was shipped out to Asia and melted down for recycling.

Seven, Why did the Bush Administration fight against having public hearings on 9/11 for nearly 18 months although public hearings on Pearl Harbor were held within weeks after the event? 9/11 hearings were not held until the relatives of those killed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exerted enough lobbying pressure to force the hearings to be held, and even then, only one-tenth of the questions they submitted were
answered.

And eight, why did the government not even allow the visitors to the site of the World Trade Center to take photographs of the ruins and why did the government confiscate photos and videos of the attack on the Pentagon? Could both seven and eight be part of an attempt to hide evidence of government complicity?

In his editorial, "Selling out the Investigation," in the January, 2002 FIRE ENGINEERING, William Manning wrote that "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) ... is a half baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." Manning also criticized the investigation in another editorial, "The Twisted Brush of 9/11 Politics" in the September, 2004 FIRE ENGINEERING.

Robert Berhinig, P.E. states in "Protecting the Foundation of Fire-Safety," in the July/August, 2002 IAEI (International Association of Electrical Inspectors, the definitive magazine for electrical inspectors) that "the FEMA report states further that until the attack on the WTC, no protected steel framed buildings had been known to collapse as a result of a fire." Yet on 9/11, after steel framed buildings had been around for over a hundred years, since the late 1800's, three protected steel framed buildings, WTC 1, 2, and 7, had collapsed, supposedly because of fire.

Three of the experts who testified before the House Committee On Science May 1, 2002 Hearing On the Collapse of the World Trade Center said the there had NEVER BEFORE been a collapse of a protected, steel framed building because of fire. Dr. W. Gene Corley, American Society of Civil Engineers and Chair of the Building Performance Assesment Team reviewing the WTC disaster said on page 76 of the hearing record that "prior to these events, no protected steel frame structure, the most common form of large
commercial construction in the United States, has ever experienced a fire-induced collapse." Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology said on page 103, "The Twin Towers and WTC 7 are the only known cases of total structural collapse where fire played a significant role." So we have here an admission by a spokesperson for NIST that allegedly accounted for the collapses that fire had never before brought about such a collapse of a protected, steel framed building. And Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute said on page 133, "Up until 9/11, we never had a collapse of a protected steel building." On page 163 he said, "This was the
first time we had the collapse of a protected steel structure." Dr. Bement said on page 169, "... there have been instances where buildings have had major fires that have burned to completion without the buildings collapsing." And on page 172, Dr. Barnett said of the partial collapse of WTC 5, "But building 5 was a normal building and it had a fire and it had a major collapse. This has never happened before."

The August 25, 2007 issue of SCIENCE NEWS had an article about the collapse of the World Trade Center on pages 122 - 24 entitled FIRE INSIDE: STRUCTURAL DESIGN WITH FIRE SAFETY IN MIND by Carolyn Berry. The paragraph in the first column on page 124 is particularly significant in evaluating the NIST computer simulation of the collapse of WTC 7:"The NIST simulation, like all models of building failures to date, couldn't follow the 9/11 collapses through to the end. No computer is yet powerful
enough to follow the chaotic sequence of events that ensues when components break apart and a building falls, but this is where research is headed."In other words, the much vaunted NIST simulation which purported to dispose of the arguments of we conspiracy theorists didn't actually demonstrate how fire caused the buildings to collapse; they just waved their hands when the computing power currently
available had took them as far as it could and said: "This is far enough; the
buildings collapsed somewhere about here." Of course we all know we have accounted for how the buildings probably collapsed once we have gone this far. It HAS to be the probable explanation because the only alternative explanation is those NUTTY, WACKO CONSPIRACY THEORIES! We know a priori that that CAN'T be true!

I might as well add the statement in the same SCIENCE NEWS article of Allen Hay, chief fire safety officer of the New York City Fire Department, about WTC 7. "We just expected it to burn out -- we didn't expect it to fall down." "It's the only building I know in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire."

The enclosed article from the COLUMBIA ENCYLOPEDIA makes it clear that the only way to demolish buildings so that they collapse onto their footprint, or the area they were standing on, is by controlled demolition, or imploding buuildings with explosives.

COLUMBIA ENCYLOPEDIA
Next Page How Building Implosions Work
by Tom Harris
Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks article:

You can demolish a stone wall with a sledgehammer, and it's fairly easy to level a five-story building using excavators and wrecking balls. But when you need to bring down a massive structure, say a 20-story skyscraper, you have to haul out the big guns. Explosive demolition is the preferred method for safely and efficiently demolishing larger structures. When a building is surrounded by other buildings, it may be necessary to "implode" the building, that is, make it collapse down into its footprint.In other words, planting explosives within a building at carefully preselected locations is the ONLY way to bring down a building on to its footprint. Conversely, if a building falls on to its footprint, we can be certain that explosives were planted within it.

But terrorist from Afghanistan would not be able to sneak past building security and preplant explosives at carefully preselected locations. Even a domestic terrorist group would not be able to do this. Only the U.S. government or rogue elements within it would be able to pull this off, a task made especially easy since the FBI and CIA both had their offices in Building 7 of the World Trade Center. The similarity of the destruction of World Trade Center 7 to controlled demolition was pointed out by Dan Rather when he said on the September 11, 2001 CBS News: "it's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down."

Many of the firefighters, whose testimony is recorded in the oral histories that were made available to the public after an Appeals Court order reported on hearing and seeing the explosions that would occur in controlled demolitions. Assistant New York Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory said: "I thought that when I looked in the direction of the Trade Center before it came down, before Number Two came down, that I saw low-level flashes. In my conversation with Lieutenant Evangelista, never mentioning this to him, he
questioned me and asked if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building, and I agreed with him ... I saw a flash-flash-flash, and then it looked like the building came down. ... No, the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building, how they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw."

Chemist Kevin Ryan said in "Environmental Anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for Energetic Materials," in the March, 2009 The Environmentalist: "The characteristics of these un-extinguishable fires have not been adequately explained as the results of a normal structure fire, even one accelerated by jet fuel.
Conversely, such fires are better explained given the presence of chemical energetic materials, which provide their own fuel and oxidant and are not deterred by water, dust, and chemical suppressants." The necessity of preserving the evidence of thermites is emphasized in the 2001 Edition of the National Fire Protection Association NFPA 921 Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. "Thermite mixtures also produce esceedingly hot fires. Such accelerants generally leave residues that may be visually or chemically identifiable. ... As a result, the entire fire scene should be considered physical evidence and should be protected and preserved." But, as we have seen, the majority of the remains of the World Trade Center were shipped out to be melted down in Asia as soon as possible.

But I want to return to the repeated Congressional testimony that a protected, steel framed building has NEVER BEFORE collapsed because of fire. And never afterwards either. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we have a purported fact about the behavior of protected, steel framed buildings in fire that dare not be true again!

There are many other suspicious anomalies about 9/11. Only a few are, nine, all three World Trade Center buildings collapsed at nearly free fall speed,i.e. almost as fast as it would take an object dropped from one of the WTC building's roof to reach the ground. The resistance of the massive steel columns and concrete would have slowed the fall considerably if it had been a matter of the floors pancaking and falling on the floors below.

And ten, fire would have unlikely to have been equally intense at every point in the buildings so that every point failed simultaneously and they fell onto the surface area they stood on, i.e. on to their footprint.

Eleventh, fire has never caused the girders in protected steel framed buildings to become ductile or loose sufficient strength to result in a building collapse. The 17th edition, published in 1992, of the National Fire Protection Association's Fire Protection Handbook says that structural steel does not even begin to soften until it reaches a temperature of 425 degrees centigrade, or 837 degrees fahrenheit and doesn't loose half its strength until 650 degrees centigrade, or 1202 degrees fahrenheit. W. I. Edgar and C. Musse in their 2001 article "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation," in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, (53/12:8-11) state that even with its strength halved, the steel in the World Trade Center could still support two or three times the stresses imposed by a 650 degrees centigrade or 1202 degrees fahrenheit fire.

But even though fire cannot melt steel, pools of molten steel remained at the bottom of the wreckage for 100 days. Although molten metal at ground zero was a constant feature of media accounts in the days following 9/11, there have since been widespread denials of the presence of molten metal in the ruins of the
World Trade Center. Or if the presence of molten metal is admitted, it is claimed that the metal was molten aluminium from the planes, although the press accounts at the time specifically said it was molten steel and pictures of the WTC ruins show the metal as bright red, characteristic of molten steel, whereas molten
aluminium has a silvery color. Some have even proclaimed that the TV pictures of ground zero were taken in different wave lengths of light to explain away why the molten aluminium looked like molten steel. However since the television pictures we normally see all show objects as being the same color we normally see them, i.e trees are shown as green and people did not have purple complexions, it is difficult to understand why the
video photos of the World Trade Center alone were photographed at a different wave length than the wave length normally used by TV cameras. This seems particularly difficult since all the other objects we see in photos of ground zero have the same colors we normally see such objects as having. The extent to which ad hoc hypotheses are resorted to to explain away pictures of molten steel is mind boggling! And when what was widely reported in the press and accepted as true is denied a few months later by seemingly intelligent people as well as by self professed experts, it reminds us of George Orwell's 1984 in which once the official news accounts changed, people would forget the previous news accounts!
So it is instructive to consider an official report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has otherwise consistently claimed there was no evidence for molten metal at ground zero, in which they cite numerous first hand reports of molten steel in the ruins of the World Trade Center while resorting to irrelevancy after irrelevancy and ad hominem after ad hominem in an attempt to discredit these first hand reports. The NIST report is in ordinary type while my interpolated comments are in capital letters for ease of distinguishing fron the text of the NIST report.

Molten Metal
Workers Reported Molten Metal in Ground Zero Rubble Reports of molten metal in the foundations of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers are frequently noted in literature of proponents of theories that the buildings were destroyed through controlled demolition. The most widely publicized report is one by American Free Press reporter Christopher Bollyn citing principals of two of the companies contracted to clean up Ground Zero. The president of Tully Construction of Flushing, NY, said he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at Ground Zero. Bollyn also cites Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition Inc.(CDI) of Phoenix, MD, as having seen molten steel in the bottoms of elevator shafts "three, four, and five weeks" after the attack. Although reports of molten steel are consistent with the persistent heat at Ground Zero in the months following the attack, we find the American Free Press report suspect for two reasons. First, Tully Construction was one of four companies awarded contracts by New York City's Department of Design and Construction to dispose of the rubble at Ground Zero, and CDI was subcontracted by Tully and was instrumental in devising a plan to recycle the steel. The involvement of Steve Tully and Mark Loizeaux in the destruction of the evidence of the unprecedented collapses would seem to disqualify them as objective
reporters of evidence.

RH - WHEN THE FEMA REPORT SAYS STEVE TULLY AND MARK LOIZEAUX WERE INVOLVED "IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EVIDENCE," IT IGNORES THE FACT THAT IT SAID IN THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING SENTENCE THAT TULLY WAS HIRED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE. (TULLY HIRED LOIZEAUX AS A SUBCONTRACTOR.) ALTHOUGH NEW YORK HIRING THEM TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE CASTS SUSPICION ON THE NEW YORK CITY GOVERNMENT, AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR ALLOWING NEW YORK TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE, HOW COULD THIS BE USED TO DISCREDIT TULLY AND LOIZEAUX WHEN THE VERY GOVERNMENT OF WHICH FEMA IS A PART ALLOWED A SUBORDINATE GOVERNMENT, THAT OF NEW YORK CITY, TO HIRE THEM TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE?

SECONDLY, WE HAVE AN ADMISSION BY FEMA THAT THE EVIDENCE WAS DISPOSED OF AND THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG IN DISPOSING THE EVIDENCE.

THIRD, THE ONLY WAY THEY HAVE OF DISCREDITING TULLY AND LOIZEAUX'S FIRST HAND REPORT IS NOT TO PRODUCE EVIDENCE THAT THEIR REPORT WAS MISTAKEN BUT TO RESORT TO AN AD HOMINEM. EVEN IF THEY HAD DISPOSED OF THE EVIDENCE WITHOUT BEING HIRED BY NEW YORK, THAT IS NO REASON TO ASSUME THEY WERE NOT TELLING THE TRUTH IN THEIR FIRST HAND REPORT. INSTEAD OF TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER PREVIOUS WRONG BEHAVIOR INFLUENCES THE TRUTH OF
FACTUAL TESTIMONY, OR WHETHER ALLEGATIONS THAT THEY MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE, FALSIFIED THEIR FACTUAL TESTIMONY AND THUS INVALIDATED THEIR ARGUMENTS, WHY NOT JUST CUT TO THE CHASE AND CONCENTRATE ON THE CREDIBILITY OF THE FACTUAL TESTIMONY OR THE VALIDITY OF THE ARGUMENTS?

Interestingly, CDI was also hired to bury the rubble of the Murrah Building in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. That Loizeaux stood trial on charges of illegal campaign contributions casts further doubt on his credibility. 1

R.H. - WHAT IS THE RELEVANCE OF LOIZEAUX'S COMPANY, CDI, BEING HIRED TO DISPOSE OF THE RUBBLE OF THE MURRAH BUILDING IN OKLAHOMA CITY TO WHETHER HIS TESTIMONY ABOUT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER WAS TRUTHFUL? POINTING OUT LOIZEAUX'S STANDING TRIAL ON CHARGES OF ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS IS ANOTHER AD HOMINEM. THE FEMA REPORT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHETHER HE WAS CONVICTED, BUT EVEN IF HE HAD BEEN, IT WOULD NOT PROVE HE WAS NOT BEING TRUTHFUL IN HIS TESTIMONY ABOUT MOLTEN STEEL AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. FEMA'S STOOPING TO THESE SHODDY AD HOMINEM TACTICS, A FALLACY THAT WAS DISCUSSED IN THE ELEMENTARY LOGIC COURSE I TOOK AS A COLLEGE SOPHOMORE, RAISES ADDITIONAL SUSPICIONS ABOUT FEMA'S REPORT. WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE IF THEY HAVE TO RESORT TO SUCH DESPICABLE AD HOMINEMS?

A second reason to doubt this molten steel report is the fact that it has been used by Bollyn and others to support the dubious theory that the collapses were caused by bombs in the Towers' basements.

R.H. - YOU DO NOT ASSUME THE THEORY IS WRONG, I.E.. "DUBIOUS," AND THEN ARGUE
THAT THE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE THEREFORE FALSE. YOU FIRST HAVE TO PRODUCE INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE THAT THE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE FALSE. THE TRUTH OF A THEORY IS DETERMINED BY THE TRUTH OF THE FACTUAL STATEMENTS CITED AS EVIDENCE FOR IT; YOU CAN'T USE THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE THEORY IS TRUE OR FALSE TO DEDUCE THE TRUTH OR FALSITY OF THE STATEMENTS OF FACT CITED AS PART OF THE EVIDENCE FOR IT.

Corroborating Reports
There are reports of molten steel beyond those cited by American Free Press. Most of these have come to light as a result of a research paper by Professor Steven E Jones, which has stimulated interest in the subject of molten steel at Ground Zero. *
A report by Waste Age describes New York Sanitation Department workers moving
"everything from molten steel beams to human remains." 2
A report on the Government Computer News website quotes Greg Fuchek, vice president of sales for LinksPoint Inc. as stating: In the first few weeks, sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel 3
A Messenger-Inquirer report recounts the experiences of Bronx firefighter "Toolie" O'Toole, who stated that some of the beams lifted from deep within the catacombs of Ground Zero by cranes were "dripping from the molten steel." 4
A transcription of an audio interview of Ground Zero chaplain Herb Trimpe contains the following passage: When I was there, of course, the remnants of the towers were still standing. It looked like an enormous junkyard. A scrap metal yard, very similar to that. Except this was still burning. There was still fire. On the cold days, even in January, there was a noticeable difference between the temperature in the middle of the site than there was when you walked two blocks over on Broadway. You could actually feel the heat.
It took me a long time to realize it and I found myself actually one day wanting to get back. Why? Because I felt more comfortable. I realized it was actually warmer on site.
The fires burned, up to 2,000 degrees, underground for quite awhile before they actually got down to those areas and they cooled off. I talked to many contractors and they said they actually saw molten metal trapped, beams had just totally had been melted because of the heat. So this was the kind of heat that was going on when those airplanes hit the upper floors. It was just demolishing heat.

A report in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine about recovery work in late October quotes Alison Geyh, Ph.D., as stating: Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel. 6

A publication by the National Environmental Health Association quotes Ron Burger, a public health advisor at the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who arrived at Ground Zero on the evening of September 12th. Burger stated: Feeling the heat, seeing the molten steel, the layers upon layers of ash, like lava, it reminded me of Mt. St. Helen’s and the thousands who fled that
disaster. 7

An article in The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah describing a speaking appearance by Leslie Robertson(structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center) contains this passage: As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running. 8

A member of the New York Air National Guard's 109th Air Wing was at Ground Zero from September 22 to October 6. He kept a journal on which an article containing the following passage is based. Smoke constantly poured from the peaks. One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers' remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots. 9
The book American Ground, which contains detailed descriptions of conditions at Ground Zero, contains this passage: ... or, in the early days, the streams of molten metal that leaked from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole. 10

A review of of the documentary Collateral Damage in the New York Post describes firemen at Ground Zero recalling "heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten steel." 11

This construction photograph shows the foundation of South Tower in the foreground, with the foundation of the North Tower in the left background. The foundations were seven stories deep.

R.H. - HERE WE HAVE 11 INDEPENDENT REPORTS CITED BY FEMA OF MOLTEN STEEL IN THE RUINS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, EVEN IF THE AD HOMINEMS FEMA RESORTED TO IN AN ATTEMPT TO DISCREDIT TULLY AND LOIZEAUX'S TESTIMONY WERE VALID ARGUMENTS, THIS WOULD DO NOTHING TO DISCREDIT THESE ELEVEN INDEPENDENT TESTIMONIES ABOUT MOLTEN STEEL AT GROUND ZERO.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Most of the press reports compiled here were gathered by other researchers, including Matthew Everett, the author of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and 9/11: A Scandal Beyond What Has Been Seen Before; David Ray Griffin; and the author of posts such as this on georgewashington.blogspot.com.

R.H. - AGAIN IT IS AN AD HOMINEM TO ASSUME THAT SINCE THESE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE CITED BY PEOPLE THAT THE FEMA REPORT CLAIMS TO BE DISCREDIBLE, IT PROVES THE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE NOT CREDIBLE, EVEN IF FEMA HAD PROVED THAT THE CITERS ARE DISCREDIBLE, WHICH IT HAS NOT. I HAVE PREVIOUSLY EXPLAINED WHY YOU CANNOT ASSUME A THEORY IS FALSE AND USE THAT ASSUMED FALSITY TO ASSUME THE FACTUAL REPORTS CITED AS PART OF THE THEORY'S EVIDENCE ARE FALSE AND THAT THE ARGUMENTS CITED TO SUPPORT THE THEORY ARE INVALID.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. Fire Power: It Took Three Lawyers to Stop the Destruction of CDI Inc., The Daily Record, 10/7/00
2. D-Day: NY Sanitation Workers' Challenge of a Lifetime, WasteAge.com, 4/1/02 [cached]
3. Handheld app eased recovery tasks, GCN.com, 9/11/02 [cached]
4. Recovery worker reflects on months spent at Ground Zero, Messenger-Inquirer.com, 6/29/02 [cached]
5. The Chaplain's Tale, RecordOnline.com, [cached]
6. Mobilizing Public Health, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, [cached]
7. The scene at Ground Zero, NEHA.org, [cached]
8. WTC a Structural Success, SEAU News, , page 3
9. Ground Zero, 12/01 [cached]
10. American Ground, , page 32
11. Unflinching Look Among the Ruins, NYPost.com, 3/3/04
page last modified: 2006-12-28
END OF NIST REPORT

And twelve, although an ordinary building collapse would produce chunks of broken concrete, the steel, concrete and asbestos in the three World Trade Center buildings was mostly converted to a fine dust which flowed out from the WTC through the streets of Manhattan in the manner of the pyroclastic flows produced from volcanoes.

And thirteen, although the buildings were not even observed to move at all when the planes crashed into them, nearby geological observatories detected seismic tremblors as if there had been massive explosions at ground level when the buildings collapsed. And while WTC 7 had not
even been struck by a plane, all the phenomena previously mentioned accompanied its collapse also.

And fourteen, while the Environmental Protection Agency said that the air around the World Trade Center was safe to breathe after 9/11, we now know that our government lied yet again because of all the deaths from asbestosis and other respiratory diseases among both the humans and dogs who were involved in the WTC cleanup.

And fifteen, while it is standard procedure for the secret service to hustle the President away from the scene immediately whenever there is a hint of danger, George Bush remained in the Florida elementary school reading "The Pet Goat" for nearly half an hour, even though there was supposedly no assurance that there would not be an attempt to crash a plane into the school.

And although the Bush Administration attempted to ship all the steel from the World Trade Center to China and Korea, even though it is a felony to remove the evidence from a crime scene until the criminal investigation has been completed, some of the steel girders were saved by 9/11 investigators. And the massive amounts of metal in the dust which surged out from the WTC collapse provided additional metal for investigators to study. Brigham Young University Professor of Physics, Steven E. Jones obtained some of the metal containing dust after he had published his first paper about 9/11 online in November, 2005. Janette Mackinlay had returned to her apartment on the fourth floor of 113 Cedar Street, which was about 100 meters, or 328 feet, away from the South Tower, about a week after her apartment had been flooded with dust, to clean up. She had saved some of the dust in a plastic bag and mailed some of it to Jones after he published his first paper online. Later, he traveled to MacKinlay's new residence in California and obtained a second sample of WTC dust in the presence of other scientists. (Latest reports are that MacKinlay is now gravely ill because of even this brief exposure to ground zero dust, although the government had claimed that the air was safe to breathe by the workers working on the site of 9/11 who had far more exposure to the toxic dust than Mackinlay had had in her brief clean ups of her apartment.) [I learned that Janette Mackinlay has died after I finished this article.]

In his subsequent online paper, "Revisiting 9/11, 2001 -- Applying the Scientific Method," Professor Jones reported that the dust contained clear traces of thermate. Thermate is an incendiary used to melt and cut steel in controlled building demolitions. It is a well mixed powder of iron, aluminum and sulfur. The sulfur lowers the melting point of iron, or steel, and cuts right through it. Sometimes other metallic powders are mixed in to fine tune the characteristics of the incendiary. Doctor Jones found all of these substances in the dust.
And recently, Jones and others reported in their artcle "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" in the January, 2009 issue of The Open Chemical Physics Journal that they have found nanoscopic particles of unignited thermate in the World Trade Center dust. Ordinary thermate is only an incendiary which burns at a temparature hot enough to burn through steel girders. Nano is a prefix meaning billionths of a meter and the smaller size of the nano particles of iron oxide (rust), aluminum, and sulfur enable nanothermate to burn so much faster that it is an explosive as well as an incendiary. Grain millers are familiar with an analogous process when grain, which will burn when exposed to fire, becomes an explosive when it is ground into a fine dust. Even a random spark can set off a catastrophic explosion when enough of it builds up in the air inside a grain mill.

David Heller, who has degrees in physics and engineering, makes many of the same points Dr. Jones made in Heller's article, "TAKING A CLOSE LOOK; HARD SCIENCE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER," in the June 18, 2007 GARLIC AND GRASS. After he states that the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings was a controlled demolition brought about by pre-planted thermate explosives, he states that it would seem impossible for Al Qaida to preplant the explosives, especially since WTC 7 housed the offices of the FBI, CIA, and OEM(Office of Emergency Management). But he says that recently he learned that President George Bush's brother, Marvin Bush, is a part owner of the company that provided security for not only the World Trade Center buildings but also both United and American Airlines, the two airlines whose planes were hijacked on 9/11. He also pointed out that the owner of the World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein, had received a $3.55 billion insurance settlement after 9/11 and was suing for an additional $3.55 billion on the grounds that the airplane crashes into the Twin Towers constituted two separate incidents.

However, regardless of Silverstein's motives, it is unlikely that he could have played a major role in planting the explosives in the building containing the offices of the FBI, CIA and OEM. Only the United States government could have carried that off and Silverstein, at most, could have played no more than a subsidiary role.

The final step in a criminal investigation is asking who had the motive to do the crime. Whose poll numbers shot up into the stratosphere after 9/11 and who gained the popular support to enable him to the invade Afghanistan and Iraq, abolish habaeus corpus and, at least, seize the de jure power to lock anyone up for life without a trial or even telling them why they were being imprisoned? Only the neo cons and the Bush
Administration, although Bush may be only a front man and Dick Cheney the real power behind the throne. It was the neo con Project for a New American Century who proposed that the U.S. seize the lands where the world's dwindling supply of oil is located and who were quoted in NEWSWEEK as saying that the American people may need a new Pearl Harbor to wake them up.

But if enough people realize in time just how bad our government is, we can counter them
before it is too late.

http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com/ (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.comaolaccessibility@aol.com, or call
1-888-212-5537.
http://redlavenderinsurgent.blogspot.com/

OBAMA'S FAILURE TO KEEP HIS PROMISES PROVES YET AGAIN THE NECESSITY OF A THIRD PARTY

2011-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

OBAMA'S FAILURE TO KEEP HIS PROMISES PROVES YET AGAIN THE NECESSITY OF A THIRD PARTY
By Robert Halfhill
There has been a lot of discussion among liberals and people further to the left about
how the Republicans swept back into a majority in both houses of Congress after only two
years of the Obama Administration and Democratic Party control. Actually, this happened
before with the Clinton Administration.
With both Obama and Clinton, the Democrats came back to power with a lot of hope and
promise and, within two years, lost control of Congress after having disappointed their
base after not delivering on most of their promises. Their disappointed supporters were
too discouraged to make the effort to vote during the off year elections and simply
stayed home on election day. Analyses of the votes after both elections showed that the
Democrats lost not because of more people voting against them but because of the number
of their past supporters who didn't vote for them.
Clinton promised to admit the Haitian boat people fleeing Haiti to the United States but
instead detained the refugees in camps outside the United States. That subset of the
boat people who had AIDS were also detained. Some of the refugees with AIDS had only
three t-cells left and would die unless a medical parole allowed them entry into the
United States and access to U.S. medical care. Clinton's denying them refugee status
meant he would be as guilty of their murder as he would be if her personally had pulled
the trigger and shot them. Finally, some of the Haitian boat people were allowed into
the United States.
Clinton also promised to issue an executive order to repeal the ban on Gays and Lesbians
serving in the military. Instead, he gave us Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which lead to a
steady increase of Gays and Lesbians expelled from the military in each successive year
of the Clinton Administration. The military brass apparently decided that any indication
of being Gay or Lesbian, even unfounded rumor or an anonymous accusation, constituted
"telling", stepped up their investigations, and in each successive year,
expelled an ever greater number of Gays and Lesbians.
Even though there are provisions in International patent law allowing governments to take
over the manufacture of medical drugs if that is the only way their citizens can obtain
access, Vice President Al Gore, who would be the Democrat's liberal standard bearer in
the 1992 elections, served as the hit man for Clinton in bring U.S. pressure on poorer
third world countries, such as South Africa and India, to intimidate them into stopping
the manufacture of their own AIDS medicines. Never mind the millions and tens of
millions of third worlders who would die because they could not afford the expensive AIDS
drugs; the patent prerogatives of wealthy 1st world drug corporations much be preserved!
Obama promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Instead, he has delayed withdrawal
from Iraq well beyond the date he originally promised and escalated the war in
Afghanistan -- and in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Obama also promised a government health plan. This was compromised down to a government
option to compete with private health plans. But even this disappeared in the final
bill. The final version however provides private health insurance companies with many
new captive customers who are legally required to buy health insurance. I asked two
women acquaintances whether this new health care bill was any improvement and both said
yes. One woman told me that the new plan would pay for her preventive mammograms and the
other, a DFL office holder, said it was an improvement over what we had. So whether the
good of the larger number of people who will have access to medical care will outweigh
the harm of the larger number of captive customers who may be legally required to pay an
increasingly inflated price is a matter still to be determined.
Obama also promised to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense Of Marriage Act, but
to date, neither promise has been enacted into law, even though the Democrats had a
supposed filibuster proof majority in the Senate.
These events, as well as the record of how past Democratic Administrations failed to
carry out their promises, provide the evidence for what, at first glance, is a new
argument against those who advocate voting for Democrats on the grounds that Democrats
are the lesser evil. And that argument is: Even if you were right in arguing that
Democrats are the lesser evil to Republicans, and even if you elect them, they will
alienate their supporters by not fulfilling their promises and thus loose control of
Congress before they have a chance to do anything. So the tactic of voting for
Democrats, even if your others assertions were true, is still futile.
I can already hear the chorus of counter arguments. "You can't say that the
Democrats won't carry out their promises just because they haven't in the past. Human
behavior is not as regular and determined as that of objects in physics or astronomy.
Someday in the future, they may have learned their lesson and actually carry out their
promises!"
We can make short work of that argument if we merely remind ourselves that the just
completed off year elections are estimated to end up costing about a half billion dollars
and the last Presidential election of 2008 is estimated to have cost about a billion
dollars. The wealthy special interests who have such enormous amounts of money are not
just contributing to political campaigns as a hobby or for their health. They expect
something in return from the candidates they contribute to and any elected official who
is too naive to realize that will soon find out when they don't receive any large
contributions for their reelection campaign!
This is why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will fulfill the campaign promises
that will deliver any substantive improvements to the majority of people. They cannot,
if they want to receive the contributions they need to stay in politics. Unlike under
feudalism or slavery, the capitalist ruling class does not have a formal legal
designation as a ruling aristocracy. They maintain their power as a ruling class because
they are the only ones who have the large sums needed by politicians who want to get
elected to the government. (There are other mechanisms, such as their owning the major
media, etc.) And the ruling class in this country has quite cleverly set up two ruling
class parties; one, the allegedly lesser evil Democrats to serve as the good cop, while
the allegedly greater evil Republicans fulfill the role of bad cop. While the Democrats
could not maintain their image as the lesser evil or good cop unless they were slightly
less evil than the Republicans on some issues, they will never be substantively less evil
on any issues that can endanger the hegemony of their ruling class contributors, or on
any issues that will result in any substantive improvement in the lives of the majority
of people. And while in one sense, the Democrats are the lesser evil, in their good
cop/bad cop charade, they are both equally necessary for the survival of a bad system,
and in that sense, equally evil.
This is why the new argument from the last two Presidential elections against the lesser
evil tactic is only seemingly a new argument. There were people who figured out before
any of were born why the Democrats would inevitably renege on their promises because of
the source of their funding.
The modern history of America reminds me of the situation during the pre-Empire Roman
Republic. Through the history of the Republic, the plebeians fought for more and more
rights against the patricians. By the time of the Empire, the plebeians had won their
struggle for equal legal rights. But this was only in formal legal terms. By the time
of the Empire, most of the rural freeholders had been dispossessed by large landed
estates and had fallen into slavery or become part of the large urban proletariat in
Rome. Most of the population were poorer and had a lower quality of life than they had
under the Republic. And the Republic was a Republic in name only, although there was a
Roman Senate up until the fall of the Empire. But in reality, the government was an
Empire with the Emperors as absolute monarchs.
Will the history of the American Republic be similar, with an expansion of rights for
African Americans and other non whites, Women, GLBTI's (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and
Transgender and Intersexed Persons), and other groups while economic inequality, which is
now greater than it was during the Gilded Age just prior to the Depression, continues to
increase and our Republic become a Republic in name only under post 9/11 repression.
There is an alternative that has a chance of succeeding, at least an alternative that has
a greater chance of success than continuing to support the Democrats as the lesser evil,
which is sure to fail. There are far, far more people who are not members of the ruling
class than those who are, people who have to work for a living instead of the bulk of
their income coming from investments. If these over three hundred million people break
free of the siren song of the two party duopoly and make many small contributions of the
money, time and effort needed to build a viable third party that can fight the system,
there is a good chance of success because we are the overwhelming majority! Meanwhile,
those of us who are now in the minority that realizes the necessity of breaking from the
two party duopoly can keep plugging away at the task of building that third party now
until we convince a majority.
That is the only alternative. There is no get rich quick road to freedom!

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HOW BUSH STOLE THE 2004 ELECTION

2011-02-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

HOW BUSH STOLE THE 2004 ELECTION
After Bush stole the 2000 Presidential election and the Supreme Court appointed him President, this December, 2004 article from the AMERICAN FREE PRESS exposes the many opportunities for fraud and vote theft in Bush's second stolen Presidential election in 2004.

(A note of explanation: I have extensive prior posts on my blog, RedLavenderInsurgent. After RedLavenderInsurgent disappeared, I started posting on RedLavenderInsurgent2. But then I got RedLavenderInsurgent restored and could continue posting on it for a few months. But now, I can't post on RedLavenderInsurgent so I have started posting on RedLavenderInsurgent2. But the problem is that anyone who stumbles on RedLavenderInsurgent has no way of knowing about the subsequent posts on RedLavenderInsurgent2 while readers of RedLavenderInsurgent2 have no way of knowing about the extensive past posts on RedLavenderInsurgent. A least the readers of RedLavenderInsurgent2 can read this explanatory note and Know about one but there is no way for readers of one to know about two until I can get this mailto:%60~!@#$%^&*()_+-= problem cleared up by the company that hosts this blog!)

PICO SEARCH:
Updated December 12, 2004

Private Company Still ‘Controls’ Election Outcome
Secretive company administers almost every last aspect of ‘democratic’ election process
By Christopher Bollyn
CHICAGO, Illinois—The morning after Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and the vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised the nation that the Democrats would make sure that every vote counts, and that every vote is counted. Later in the day, Kerry and Edwards, however, conceded defeat before some 170,000 to 250,000 provisional ballots from Ohio, which could have changed the outcome of the election, had been counted.

But how were the votes actually counted across the nation on Nov. 2? On Election Day, voters in Cook County, Ill., were among the 60 million Americans who voted with machines made by Election Systems & Software, a secretive company based in Omaha. ES&S, as it is known, calls itself “the world’s largest and most experienced provider of total election management solutions.” According to the company’s own figures, 42 percent of all registered voters in the United States voted on ES&S equipment on Election Day. ES&S sells its “end-to-end election management suite of solutions” to replace traditional voting methods and election officials with what it calls “‘one-stop-shop,’ full service election coordination from start to finish.”

What this means on Election Day is that ES&S, a private company, manages everything about the voting, from voter registration, the printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, the counting and tabulation of the votes and the final reporting of the results—for 60 million Americans in 47 states. Four years after first revealing the flaws inherent in the insecure ES&S electronic voting machines used in Cook County, American Free Press went to the county clerk’s office to observe how ES&S manages the counting of the votes for America’s third largest city, Chicago, and the suburban area around it.

Scott Burnham, spokesman for the county clerk, had informed me that the vote count is open to the public and that press credentials would not be required. Shortly after arriving, I ran into Burnham and David Orr, the county clerk, in the hallway. Although I had arrived just shortly before the polls closed at 7 p.m., I was the only member of the public or the press around except for a couple of Associated Press (AP) reporters in the far corner of the room. They were busy setting up their laptop to the ES&S computer in the backroom, which provided them with “direct feed” of the results. I was surprised to see so few people attending such an important event. In France, scores of citizens watch the vote count in each polling station. While the results were coming in, the AP reporter read a novel while her laptop did the communicating.

PLEASE LEAVE
When I went to talk to the AP reporter, Burnham quickly appeared and told me to leave. “You should talk to AP,” he said.
“She is AP,”I replied.
“She just works for AP,” he said.

Clearly the subject of AP having direct data feed from the mainframe computer was something Burnham did not want me to discuss.
Dane Placko, a local reporter for the Fox News network, told AFP that “Fox gets direct feed.”

Any actual counting of the votes by citizens is very rare in the United States except for a few counties in Montana and other states where paper ballots are still hand-counted. In most counties the ballots are treated as input data to be processed through computer systems controlled by private companies like ES&S.
In Cook County the ballot is inevitably a cluttered punch card with nearly 100 votes. After voting for the president and vice president, a senator and a congressman, the voter has to wade through pages of choices to vote for some 80 local officials from the sanitation board to the state’s general assembly. Every voter had to vote on nearly 80 judges.

LONG & COMPLICATED
Rather than holding separate elections for national and local officials, as is done in most countries, the Cook County ballot is extremely long and complicated. Officials who support electronic voting systems give the complexity of the ballot as the main reason why voting machines are necessary—because it would take too much time to count the votes manually.

After calling and personally visiting ES&S headquarters in Omaha and Chicago, I can say it is a highly secretive company. In August, I visited ES&S company headquarters on John Galt Blvd. in Omaha.
Although the company says it is the largest voting machine company in the United States, they were unable to provide any information about their company or their products. The ownership of the company is a closely guarded secret.

I asked to meet with Todd Urosevich, one of the two brothers that founded the company. Bob and Todd Urosevich started ES&S as a company called Data Mark in the early 1980s. Today, Bob Urosevich heads Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, a competitor of ES&S and the second largest U.S. manufacturer of electronic voting machines. Together, the computerized ballot scanners and touch-screen voting machines systems made by ES&S and Diebold recorded some 80 percent of all votes cast in the recent U.S. presidential election.

As ES&S had no media relations person available, and Todd Urosevich was not willing to be interviewed, the company’s chief financial officer Tom O’Brien finally appeared. Clearly displeased with my visit and questions, O’Brien refused to provide any information about the company.

MORE NAUSEOUS
Although I was ill on Election Day, I knew I had to go to the county clerk’s office to observe “counting” of the vote. It is, after all, the only “counting” open to the public. What I saw in Chicago, however, only made me more nauseous. The only “vote count” the press or public can observe in Chicago is what is projected on screens. The opening screen read: ES&S Automatic Election Returns, Release 35, Under License to the City of Chicago, Serial No. 0004, Copyright 1987. Carl Zimmerman, technical supervisor for the clerk’s office, said that the computer that ran the system was in the back—“in the ES&S room,” he said.

At 7 p.m., Jonathan Lin, a worker on the county clerk’s computer staff, came out and turned on the monitors on the 6th floor, where the City of Chicago votes were tallied and displayed. Behind him was Rick Thurman, an ES&S technician, checking the first results. Thurman seemed surprised when I asked him if he worked for ES&S. He said that the company had about six engineers running the computer in the back room. He then checked himself, saying he had said too much.

Later I asked Lin who was actually operating the computer that was generating the results being shown on the monitors. “ES&S is running the mainframe for all of this,” Lin said, pointing to the television displays.
In the press room in the back I noticed stacks of boxes containing “Votamatic” voting machines and “prepunched” ballots printed by ES&S of Addison, Texas, for the different precincts in Cook County. In the rear hallway behind the pressroom was the ES&S room. Only ES&S personnel were allowed into the room.
When I poked around in the hallway and peeked into the ES&S room, an armed marshal and ES&S employee quickly appeared. In no condition for a confrontation, I made myself scarce.

I met a couple reporters from CLTV, a local cable channel of WGN. One of the reporters asked about my interest in the Chicago tallies. I said I was interested to see how a private company runs the elections in Chicago. Seemingly unaware of how ES&S operates elections in Cook County, I explained the basics. “I’ve observed elections across Europe,” I added, “from France and Germany to Serbia and Holland. Everywhere in Europe, voting is done on paper ballots that are counted by the citizens, except Holland.”
Obviously uncomfortable with this discussion, the reporter responded: “I’m glad I’m not in Serbia. I don’t mind if a machine counts the votes.”

Not Copyrighted. Readers can reprint and are free to redistribute - as long as full credit is given to American Free Press - 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100 Washington, D.C. 20003

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SOCIETIES WORSE OFF 'WHEN THEY HAVE GOD ON THEIR SIDE'

2011-02-02T20:11:00.000-08:00

Subject : SOCIETIES WORSE OFF 'WHEN THEY HAVE GOD ON THEIR SIDE'.

Date : Sun, Sep 26, 2010 02:22 AM

THE TIMESTHE SUNDAY TIMESTIMES+ The TimesThe Sunday TimesArchive ArticlePlease enjoy
this article from The Times & The Sunday Times archives. For full access to our content,
please subscribe here MY PROFILE From The Times September 27, 2005
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'By Ruth Gledhill, Religion
Correspondent RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high
murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published
today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society. It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution.
Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is
socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many
Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.” Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the
International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy. The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said. “The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. “The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is
therefore refuted.”

HOW BUSH STOLE THE 2004 ELECTION

2011-02-02T20:06:00.000-08:00

After Bush stole the 2000 Presidential election and the Supreme Court appointed him President, this December, 2004 article from the AMERICAN FREE PRESS exposes the many opportunities for fraud and vote theft in Bush's second stolen Presidential election in 2004.

(A note of explanation: I have extensive prior posts on my blog, RedLavenderInsurgent. After RedLavenderInsurgent disappeared, I started posting on RedLavenderInsurgent2. But then I got RedLavenderInsurgent restored and could continue posting on it for a few months. But now, I can't post on RedLavenderInsurgent so I have started posting on RedLavenderInsurgent2. But the problem is that anyone who stumbles on RedLavenderInsurgent has no way of knowing about the subsequent posts on RedLavenderInsurgent2 while readers of RedLavenderInsurgent2 have no way of knowing about the extensive past posts on RedLavenderInsurgent. A least the readers of RedLavenderInsurgent2 can read this explanatory note and Know about one but there is no way for readers of one to know about two until I can get this mailto:%60~!@#$%^&*()_+-= problem cleared up by the company that hosts this blog!)

PICO SEARCH:
Updated December 12, 2004

Private Company Still ‘Controls’ Election Outcome
Secretive company administers almost every last aspect of ‘democratic’ election process
By Christopher Bollyn
CHICAGO, Illinois—The morning after Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and the vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised the nation that the Democrats would make sure that every vote counts, and that every vote is counted. Later in the day, Kerry and Edwards, however, conceded defeat before some 170,000 to 250,000 provisional ballots from Ohio, which could have changed the outcome of the election, had been counted.

But how were the votes actually counted across the nation on Nov. 2? On Election Day, voters in Cook County, Ill., were among the 60 million Americans who voted with machines made by Election Systems & Software, a secretive company based in Omaha. ES&S, as it is known, calls itself “the world’s largest and most experienced provider of total election management solutions.” According to the company’s own figures, 42 percent of all registered voters in the United States voted on ES&S equipment on Election Day. ES&S sells its “end-to-end election management suite of solutions” to replace traditional voting methods and election officials with what it calls “‘one-stop-shop,’ full service election coordination from start to finish.”

What this means on Election Day is that ES&S, a private company, manages everything about the voting, from voter registration, the printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, the counting and tabulation of the votes and the final reporting of the results—for 60 million Americans in 47 states. Four years after first revealing the flaws inherent in the insecure ES&S electronic voting machines used in Cook County, American Free Press went to the county clerk’s office to observe how ES&S manages the counting of the votes for America’s third largest city, Chicago, and the suburban area around it.

Scott Burnham, spokesman for the county clerk, had informed me that the vote count is open to the public and that press credentials would not be required. Shortly after arriving, I ran into Burnham and David Orr, the county clerk, in the hallway. Although I had arrived just shortly before the polls closed at 7 p.m., I was the only member of the public or the press around except for a couple of Associated Press (AP) reporters in the far corner of the room. They were busy setting up their laptop to the ES&S computer in the backroom, which provided them with “direct feed” of the results. I was surprised to see so few people attending such an important event. In France, scores of citizens watch the vote count in each polling station. While the results were coming in, the AP reporter read a novel while her laptop did the communicating.

PLEASE LEAVE
When I went to talk to the AP reporter, Burnham quickly appeared and told me to leave. “You should talk to AP,” he said.
“She is AP,”I replied.
“She just works for AP,” he said.

Clearly the subject of AP having direct data feed from the mainframe computer was something Burnham did not want me to discuss.
Dane Placko, a local reporter for the Fox News network, told AFP that “Fox gets direct feed.”

Any actual counting of the votes by citizens is very rare in the United States except for a few counties in Montana and other states where paper ballots are still hand-counted. In most counties the ballots are treated as input data to be processed through computer systems controlled by private companies like ES&S.
In Cook County the ballot is inevitably a cluttered punch card with nearly 100 votes. After voting for the president and vice president, a senator and a congressman, the voter has to wade through pages of choices to vote for some 80 local officials from the sanitation board to the state’s general assembly. Every voter had to vote on nearly 80 judges.

LONG & COMPLICATED
Rather than holding separate elections for national and local officials, as is done in most countries, the Cook County ballot is extremely long and complicated. Officials who support electronic voting systems give the complexity of the ballot as the main reason why voting machines are necessary—because it would take too much time to count the votes manually.

After calling and personally visiting ES&S headquarters in Omaha and Chicago, I can say it is a highly secretive company. In August, I visited ES&S company headquarters on John Galt Blvd. in Omaha.
Although the company says it is the largest voting machine company in the United States, they were unable to provide any information about their company or their products. The ownership of the company is a closely guarded secret.

I asked to meet with Todd Urosevich, one of the two brothers that founded the company. Bob and Todd Urosevich started ES&S as a company called Data Mark in the early 1980s. Today, Bob Urosevich heads Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, a competitor of ES&S and the second largest U.S. manufacturer of electronic voting machines. Together, the computerized ballot scanners and touch-screen voting machines systems made by ES&S and Diebold recorded some 80 percent of all votes cast in the recent U.S. presidential election.

As ES&S had no media relations person available, and Todd Urosevich was not willing to be interviewed, the company’s chief financial officer Tom O’Brien finally appeared. Clearly displeased with my visit and questions, O’Brien refused to provide any information about the company.

MORE NAUSEOUS
Although I was ill on Election Day, I knew I had to go to the county clerk’s office to observe “counting” of the vote. It is, after all, the only “counting” open to the public. What I saw in Chicago, however, only made me more nauseous. The only “vote count” the press or public can observe in Chicago is what is projected on screens. The opening screen read: ES&S Automatic Election Returns, Release 35, Under License to the City of Chicago, Serial No. 0004, Copyright 1987. Carl Zimmerman, technical supervisor for the clerk’s office, said that the computer that ran the system was in the back—“in the ES&S room,” he said.

At 7 p.m., Jonathan Lin, a worker on the county clerk’s computer staff, came out and turned on the monitors on the 6th floor, where the City of Chicago votes were tallied and displayed. Behind him was Rick Thurman, an ES&S technician, checking the first results. Thurman seemed surprised when I asked him if he worked for ES&S. He said that the company had about six engineers running the computer in the back room. He then checked himself, saying he had said too much.

Later I asked Lin who was actually operating the computer that was generating the results being shown on the monitors. “ES&S is running the mainframe for all of this,” Lin said, pointing to the television displays.
In the press room in the back I noticed stacks of boxes containing “Votamatic” voting machines and “prepunched” ballots printed by ES&S of Addison, Texas, for the different precincts in Cook County. In the rear hallway behind the pressroom was the ES&S room. Only ES&S personnel were allowed into the room.
When I poked around in the hallway and peeked into the ES&S room, an armed marshal and ES&S employee quickly appeared. In no condition for a confrontation, I made myself scarce.

I met a couple reporters from CLTV, a local cable channel of WGN. One of the reporters asked about my interest in the Chicago tallies. I said I was interested to see how a private company runs the elections in Chicago. Seemingly unaware of how ES&S operates elections in Cook County, I explained the basics. “I’ve observed elections across Europe,” I added, “from France and Germany to Serbia and Holland. Everywhere in Europe, voting is done on paper ballots that are counted by the citizens, except Holland.”
Obviously uncomfortable with this discussion, the reporter responded: “I’m glad I’m not in Serbia. I don’t mind if a machine counts the votes.”

Not Copyrighted. Readers can reprint and are free to redistribute - as long as full credit is given to American Free Press - 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100 Washington, D.C. 20003

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2011-01-31T16:43:00.000-08:00

Please visit our new location:
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DESPICABLE TO WHIP UP BIGOTRY OVER MOSQUE

2010-09-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

The people who started the furor over the "Mosque" (actually an Islamic cultural center with a Mosque inside it) are either incredibly stupid or so morally despicable that they don't care whether they spark off mob action and a witchhunt against the Muslim minority in this country. The majority of Muslims still don't support, in fact deplore, the terroristic actions of the 19 Al Qaida members who allegedly crashed planes into buildings on 9/11. (It is unclear how the U.S. government was able to identify the hijackers within hours of 9/11 and a number of the alleged hijackers have since turned up alive.) But leaving all that aside, there were 19 alleged hijackers, Osama bin Laden, and a few other Al Qaida leaders who knew about the planned action in advance and helped organize it. That adds up to 25 to 50 people. It is a no brainer that you cannot conclude that all of the estimated one billion to one and a half billion Muslims in the world are responsible for the actions of 25 to 50.

Some who would inflict authoritarian restrictions on all Muslims, and even a few Uncle Tom Muslims, argue that because of the crisis brought about by 9/11, the Muslim community should understand the need for heightened security measures and restrictions on them. We should only need to remind ourselves of the numbers involved to reject that argument. Consider -- if an individual security officer, or an entire government agency, is watching out for terrorists, is singling out a person solely because he or she is a Muslim really the best stategy for success when the probability of catching a terrorist is only 25 to 50 divided by one to one and a half billion?

The actual number of Muslims supporting Al Qaida is probably in the thousands or tens of thousands. (The numbers are likely to become considerably larger if demogogues of the ilk of Palin and Gingrich continue to whip up anti Muslim bigotry!) So the probability of an individual Muslim being a terrorist is still only ten thousand divided by a billion, or one in one hundred thousand -- a target that is hardly the most productive for law enforcement or security attention.

And since the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of religion to its citizens, Americans are prohibited by the constitution that they profess to hallow from singling out a particular religion for heightened discrimination because of something done by one one hundred thousandth of their members.

When those who are opposing the Mosque near Ground Zero are told all this, many retreat one step back and protest that while Muslims have the right to build a Mosque near Ground Zero, one should not necessarily do something merely because they have a right to do so, and that Muslims should be "sensitive" to the feelings of those victimized by 9/11. Excuse me! As we have seen, the majority of Muslims are no more responsible for or guilty of 9/11 than the rest of us. Hence they have no special obligation to be extra "sensitive" to the feelings of the victims of 9/11. And the most rational course for the victims of 9/11 is to find out who is actually responsible for what they suffered from 9/11 before directing their retaliation against them and not strike out blindly against any target that bears the most superficial resemblance to the perpetrators of 9/11. If they want to strike out against those who did 9/11 to them, they had best find out who actually did it to them before striking out.

And demagogues such as Palin and Gingrich are either incredibly stupid or so morally despicable that there are literally no words to convey the depth of their despicability for playing with fire when they whip up anti Muslim bigotry over the location of a Mosque!

al Qaida

HOW WILL YOU FEEL IF 9/11 TRUTH TURNS OUT TO ACTUALLY BE TRUE?

2009-12-04T00:26:00.000-08:00

HOW WILL YOU FEEL IF 9/11 TRUTH TURNS OUT TO ACTUALLY BE TRUE?
By Robert Halfhill

The documented evidence simply does not support the arguments of Peter Robson, Mary
Katherine Ham, and Ben Cohen against the 9/11 Truth movement's charge that 9/11 was an
inside job.

To get Ham's cheapest ad hominem argument out of the way at the very beginning, that the
9/11 truthers are "disrespectful" and "soiling the memories of those
lost," she assumes what she needs to prove. If the 9/11 victims really had been
killed by their own government in a false flag attack designed to set off a wave of super
patriotic hysteria and win public support for the Bush-Cheney administration's invasion
of the oil fields of the Middle East and suppression of civil liberties and dissent at
home, it would not be "disrespectful" or "soiling the memories" of
the 3000 people murdered on 9/11 to expose and bring their actual murderers to justice.

Ham alleged that jet fuel from the hijacked planes striking the World Trade Center Towers
"ignited everything inside the buildings." However, those of us who saw the TV
coverage on 9/11 remember that the thick black smoke was pouring from only a few floors
of the buildings.

But more importantly, Ham claims that jet fuel burns at 2,190 degrees Fahrenheit.
However, jet fuel is just kerosene and WIKIPEDIA states that kerosene burns in the open
air at 287.5 degrees Centigrade, which is 549.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The open air burning
temperature is what is relevant to the burning temperature of kerosene spilled on the
floors of the World Trade Center. She may have confused the open air burning temperature
with the temperature at which kerosene burns in a jet engine after compressed air has
been forced into the ignition chamber. Humans have known for thousands of years that we
can smelt metals by using bellows to force compressed air into the chamber where a
hydrocarbon fire is enclosed.

Ham claimed that steel weakens as low as 400 degrees. However, the 17th edition of the
FIRE PROTECTION HANDBOOK, published by the National Fire Protection Association in 1992,
states that steel only begins to weaken at 837 degrees Fahrenheit.(1) This is
considerably higher than the 400 degrees Fahrenheit at which Ham claims to be the
temperature at which steel begins to weaken. The HANDBOOK states that steel loses half
its strength at 650 degrees Centigrade or 1202 degrees Fahrenheit. This again is above
the 980 Fahrenheit at which Ham alleged steel has only ten percent of its strength.(1)
And even more important, W.T. Edgar and C. Muse state in "Why Did the World Trade
Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation" that the World Trade Center
was designed with a considerable margin or error and that even with its strength halved,
the steel could still support two or three times the stresses imposed by a 650 degrees
Centigrade, or a 1202 degrees Fahrenheit, fire. (2)

Ben Cohen charges that the 9/11 Truth movement drained so much energy from the movements
trying to expose Bush and Cheney's other crimes, such as lying to get us involved in the
war against Iraq, that if it were not for us, Bush would have been impeached and Cheney
would be in jail by now. I participated in both the 9/11 Truth movement and the antiwar
movement and I can testify that the anti Iraq war movement had for more participants and
was far less blacked out by the press than the 9/11 Truth movement. Neither was
satisfied by their treatment by the press but the press's treatment of the 9/11 Truth
movement was far worse since our blackout by the media was and is near total. In short,
the 9/11 Truth movement is too small and too ignored by the media to drain any
significant amount of energy, people, and press coverage from either the anti Iraq war
movement or the movements against Bush-Cheney's other crimes.

Cohen also tries to argue that no one could have predicted what would happen to the World
Trade Center because -- apparently never before had a plane so big flown into a building
so big. But the melting point of steel or the temperature at which steel loses half its
strength does not change because of the size of the building that it is a part of. If
that were true, architects would never dare to design larger buildings.

Other than flinging emotionally charged words around, such as asserting that any
alternative to the official account of 9/11 is "absurd," Cohen has nothing more
to contribute to the discussion about 9/11. And this last assertion of Cohen is not even
a contribution at all since it is not even an argument at all.

Then Peter Robson asserts that "there is something inherently racist about the 9/11
Truth myths" since we "argue, perhaps unconsciously. that the 3000 largely
white people who died on September 11 are more important than the million, largely brown
people...who died as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Notice that Mr. Robson offers no
evidence that we think, either consciously or unconsciously, that the 3000 largely white
people are more important than the million largely brown people. He simply assumes it
without proof!

This is a prevalent cheap tactic among both liberals and people further to the left.
Charges of racism serve the same function as charges of being a witch during the Middle
Ages or charges of being a communist during the McCarthy witch hunt in the United States
during the 1950's. What better way to discredit someone than to accuse them of being the
very thing which was the most detested at the time the charges were made!

Robson's argument is like saying that if I condemn the actions of Adolf Hitler, that must
mean I have no objection to the actions of Pol Pot. It is possible, as I do, to condemn
both.

I do not need Mr. Robson to remind me that Iraqi lives are just as important as American
lives. In fact decades before Robson and I interacted on the internet, and before he was
even born for all know, I recognized that the number of people who lost their lives in
the Vietnam War was 3,000.000, not 58,000, since each Vietnamese life has as much value
as each American life.

Lastly, I must comment on Peter Robson setting himself up as a censor when he said that
"I won't allow this list to be used as a forum for such damaging theories."
Why not let your readers decide for themselves whether 9/11 "theories" are
damaging. Whenever you, or anyone else, sets themself up as a censor, they are saying,
"I am intelligent enough to see what is wrong with this material, but my readers are
not intelligent enough to see what is wrong with it. So I in my greater intelligence
will protect them from being exposed to it."

I will cite the arguments of John Stuart Mill in ON LIBERTY in the same spirit as you
cite the arguments of Mary Katherine Ham. You considered Ham's arguments on 9/11 to be
valuable even though you point out that she is a conservative. In the same spirit,
although Mill was an apologist for European colonialism and imperialism, I consider his
arguments against censorship and for freedom of speech to be valid.

Mill had many arguments but the most important is that the way to ensure that our
opinions on a given subject have the highest probability of being true is to know and
understand all the opinions on a given subject and to understand all the arguments for
each opinion as the arguments would be expounded by a sincere adherent of each opinion.
Resorting to the equivalent of a College of Jesuits to inform you about the opinions of
people in groups other than your own, and "why they are wrong," won't do, since
people educating you about opinions they don't agree with often trivialize the opinions,
presenting superficial features while totally misunderstanding the essentials.

Only after you have this thorough understanding of all the alternative positions on a
given question will you have the greatest probability of your own position on the
particular question being true. And if you shield your readers from even knowing the
arguments of the 9/11 Truth movement, how will they have any assurance that their views
on this subject have any likelihood of being true.

And finally and most importantly, if Bush-Cheney and the neo cons actually did murder
3000 of their own citizens, and I have given reasons why I think they did, then by
censoring 9/11 Truth, you will be serving as a gatekeeper, protecting the actual
murderers of 9/11 from exposure for as long as possible. Are you absolutely certain you
have the right position on 9/11? Have you studied and considered all the evidence and
arguments? How will you feel if the charges of the 9/11 Truth movement turn out to
actually be true?

1. Cote, A.E., editor, Fire Protection Handbook, 17th edition, Quincy, Maine: National
Fire Protection Association, 1992
2. Edgar, W.T. and Musse, C., (2001). "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse?
Science, Engineering, and Speculation," Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and
Materials Society, 53/12:8-11, (2001)

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HEAVY HANDED OPPOSITION TO 9/11 TRUTH FROM MODERATOR OF GREENlEFT

2009-08-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Since I posted my letter to the STAR TRIBUNE, which has not been printed, on why 9/11 was an inside job on various Green discussion lists, I have encountered heavy handed opposition from Peter Robson, moderator of the Green Left discussion list. (GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com) In order to elucidate the issues in this discussion, I have reposted my letter, followed by Mr. Robson's admonition, and my reply.
Robert Halfhill

Robert Halfhill
2700 Park Avenue, Apt 1401
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55407-1038
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

August 9, 2009

Star Tribune
Letters Editor
425 Portland Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55488

Three recent Star Tribune articles -- the July 29th article in which Congressman Collin Peterson is quoted as saying "Twenty-five percent of my people believe the the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the Twin Towers down," and the two articles in the August 5th Star Tribune about Jesse Ventura maintaining that
"the 9/11 terrorist attacks were hatched by conspirators unknown to the general public," and columnist Michael Smerconish's complaints about the "9/11 was an inside job" crowd -- are examples of how the truth about 9/11 keeps breaking through the media blackout.
I first realized that the government must have deliberately let the hijackers reach their targets when I remembered that the civilian air traffic control system's radar can detect immediately when a plane deviates from its assigned course and that the protocol
mandates that the civilian air traffic controllers inform the military within ten minutes of detecting a hijacking. Apologists for the government have argued that our air defenses are set up to detect an attack from outside U.S. airspace, not from the inside. However this is proven to be untrue by the fact that the military has always been able to intercept domestic hijackings within minutes.
My puzzlement upon seeing pictures of the wreckage from the World Trade Centers mostly piled up on the ground where the buildings stood rather than being scattered all over the surrounding terrain was alleviated when I recalled reading about the controlled demolition of buildings in downtown Minneapolis to bring them down on their footprints. In fact this is the only way to implode buildings instantaneously without damaging their surroundings.
All three of the experts who testified at the May 1, 2002 hearing of the House Committee On Science about the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings said that fire had never before caused a steel framed building to collapse. Yet on 9/11 we had three such collapses, including WTC 7 which had not even been struck by a plane.
Steel, even if unprotected by insulation, does not melt until it reaches a temperature of 2750 degrees Fahrenheit and does not even begin to lose its strength until it reaches 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. Hydrocarbon fires do not reach either temperature unless augmented by extra air or oxygen inside a blast furnace.
The August 25, 2007 issue of SCIENCE NEWS quotes Allen Hay, chief fire safety officer of the New York Fire Department, as saying about WTC 7, "We just expected it to burn out -- we didn't expect it to fall down." "It's the only building I know in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire."
Al Qaida would not have been able to implant the explosives for controlled demolition inside the World Trade Center buildings -- only elements of the U.S. government would have been able to do that. It is significant that the Project For A New American Century
stated that the American people might need a new Pearl Harbor to wake them up. We need only ask ourselves who benefited from the crime on 9/11.Whose poll numbers shot up into the stratosphere after 9/11 and who gained the popular support to enable him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, abolish habaeus corpus, and take, at least, the de jure power to lock anyone up for life without a trial without even telling them why they were being imprisoned? Only the Bush/Cheney Administration and the neo cons in government from the Project For A New American Century.

Robert Halfhill

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15b. Re: THEORY THAT TWO PLANE IMPACTS AND FIRE COLLAPSED THREE WTC BUILD
Posted by: "Peter Robson" campbell.robson@gmail.com rebel.hobbit
Sun Aug 9, 2009 5:41 am (PDT)

MODERATOR'S NOTE:

9/11 Truthers should find another venue please.

I have warned people before about this, but I will again.

Engineers of various stripes have given examples of how the twin Towerscould collapse through the EXTREME HEAT caused by two jet airline impacts.

It's frankly a distraction from politics, where, if you looked hard enough, you could see that the US state created the terrorist organisation that did the damage and the same US state directly killed many, many times as many people before and after for far less.

This is a list for politics not conspiracy.

Thank you

Peter R

REPLY BY ROBERT HALFHILL

IF IT WERE TRUE, WOULD IT BE A CONSPIRACY THEORY?
Mr. Robson:
If it were true, which it is, that the U.S. government murdered 3000 of it own citizens on 9/11, would it be a distraction from politics to try to expose it? Was Watergate a conspiracy theory that was a distraction from politics? Watergate incidentally refutes the traditional Marxist view that it is useless to focus on charges about government conspiracies and that we should focus instead on the injustices inherent in the social system that the government props up, the capitalist system, and particular unjust actions, such as the Vietnam or Iraq War, since you can never prove charges about governmental conspiracies. The illegal actions of the Nixon Administration during Watergate WERE proven and the exposure led to a sea change in the naivety of a large part of the American citizenry about their government. Again, was Watergate a conspiracy theory and a distraction from politics? A conspiracy is just two or more people conferring together to carry out illegal or unethical actions. Contrary to the typical liberal dismissal of "irresponsible conspiracy theories," conspiracy theories are either true or false, probable or improbable, but not irresponsible. It is just as much a category mistake to call theories about conspiracies around 9/11 irresponsible or responsible as it would be to waste time debating whether the theory of evolution is responsible or irresponsible instead of true or false.
Is it an "irresponsible conspiracy theory" and a "distraction from politics" for historians to discuss Hitler's responsibility for the Reichstag Fire to justify his assuming emergency powers and instituting his dictatorship? Is it a conspiracy theory to discuss his arranging to have men dressed as Poles attack German border posts to create support for his invading Poland?
When a defected, former Russian KBG official was poisoned with polonium, there were articles in the press stating that he planned to reveal that the Russian government blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and killed its own citizens in order to blame it on the Chechens and justify the reconquest of Chechnya. False flag attacks are a typical tactic of governments to get their citizens to support foreign wars and invasions. Are you saying the U.S. government is too good and honest to resort to such tactics?
The architect who designed the World Trade Center designed the buildings to withstand the impact of a 747. And you have still not explained how a jet fuel fire can melt steel girders when steel does not melt unless it reaches 2750 degrees Fahrenheit and hydrocarbon fires cannot even reach the 1600 degrees needed to make steel soft and ductile. And if you have ever forgotten to use a potholder and grasped the metal handle of a hot skillet on the stove, you will understand that EVEN IF part of the frame work of the World Trade Center had been exposed to a temperature over 2750 degrees, the heat would have been conducted away by the rest of the steel frame before any melting could occur. As the three experts who testified at the May 1, 2002 hearing of the House Committee On Science -- Dr. W. Gene Corley, American Society of Civil Engineers and Chair of the Building Performance Assessmant Team reviewing the WTC disaster; Dr. Arden L Bement, Jr., Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute -- said there had NEVER BEFORE been a collapse of a protected, steel framed building because of fire. And Allen Hey, chief fire safety official of the New York City Fire Department was quoted as saying about WTC 7 in the August 25, 2007 SCIENCE NEWS, no steel framed building had ever fallen down solely because of fire prior to 9/11. But on 9/11 we had three of them. Your contention that fire even with the jet plane impact, which the buildings were designed to withstand, was responsible for the collapse requires that the laws of physics be suspended.
And opposed to the few architects you cited, there are the more than 750 architects who signed the statement of Architects For 9/11 Truth.
Robert Halfhill

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REPLY BY PETER ROBSON TO
IF IT WERE TRUE, WOULD IT BE A DISTRACTION FROM POLITICTS?

Robert,

This will be the final piece of correspondence on the list that I will allow on this issue.

Please feel free to continue the discussion with me off list if you like.

You are correct that conspiracies are either true or false. The 9/11 Truth movement's version of events at the WTC falls into the latter category.

The following is a response from Mary Katherine Ham (yes a conservative, but correct on this one, nonetheless):

"Myth No. 2: The “official story” concludes that fires set off by the jet fuel and initial explosions of the aircraft entering the World Trade Center towers caused the steel structure to weaken and eventually fail. But “no large, steel-frame, fire-protected building had ever collapsed before due solely to fire,” is how the book “Debunking 9/11 Myths”restates the idea. Theorists conclude it must have been controlled demolition that led to collapse.

Fact: Each plane was carrying thousands of pounds of jet fuel, which burns at 2,190 degrees Fahrenheit, a great deal lower than the temperature required to melt steel (2,750).

Experts and investigations conclude that steel didn’t have to melt to cause collapse. Instead, the planes entering the buildings at 750 feet per second caused significant damage. They were banked at an angle that took out multiple floors upon impact and likely stripped the fireproofing from the core load-bearing structures on those floors. Jet fuel then ignited everything inside the buildings.

Steel weakens at as low as 400 degrees. At 980, it’s at only 10 percent strength, according to industry experts. As the core steel columns weakened, load-bearing was transferred to the building’s shell. As the fires continued to burn, multiple floors weakened, sagged, and pulled on the outside
structure causing total collapse.

The jet fuel followed the path of least resistance, incidentally, which means some of it flowed down the elevator shafts from the top of the building, causing explosions and fireballs on lower floors, which conspiracy theorists sometimes cite as evidence of bombs."

The full post is here http://townhall.com/columnists/MaryKatharineHam/2007/09/11/top_5_911_truther_myt\hs_you_should_be_prepared_to_debunk
>

Secondly I'm going to post something by Ben Cohen on why he thinks (and I agree with him) that this conpsiracy theory is damaging:

"The 9/11 truth movement was enormously helpful to the Bush Administration as it provided a giant distraction from the colossal crimes they committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If their energies had been directed in a positive way, there's a good chance Bush would have been impeached and Dick Cheney thrown in jail. Alas, the 9/11 truth movement dedicated its time to proving the U.S government tried to kill thousands of its own people in exchange for gold/political power. "

Full post here: <
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-cohen/my-argument-with-the-911_b_245788.html
>

I won't allow this list to be the forum for such damaging theories.

Take it up personally with me but take it off
this list.

Peter Robson

Mon Aug 10, 2009 11:11 am

Peter Robson
rebel.hobbit
Offline
Send Email

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GRATUITOUS SLANDER OF 9/11 TRUTH MOVERMENT BY PETER ROBSON THROWN INTO A MODERATOR'S REPLY TO A DIFFERENT POSTER

As for the 9/11 truth poster: I believe there is something inherently racist about the 9/11 Truth myths. They argure, perhaps unconsciously, that the 3000 largely white people who died on Septmber 11 are more important than the million, largely brown people (half of which were children) who died as a result of the invasion of Iraq. The same can be said of the similar
number who died in Afghanistan.

This is the dead-to-rights war crime that Bush and his cronies can be done for. But instead 9/11 Truthers focus on a lame conspiracist version of
events. I won't tolerate it. The poster can stay, but i will delete any posts of this nature in the future.

That's my explanation.

Peter R

glw moderator

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OUTLINE OF A REPLY TO PETER ROBSON IN A LEETER TO SHITLEY JOHNSON

The debate with Peter Robson continues. He included two other posts with this which I will send.

Again I learned many interesting facts. In addition to learning that we are dishonoring the 9/11 victims -- If they were murdered, which they were, would it be dishonoring them to expose the fact that they were murdered and attempt to bring their killers to justice? -- and that steel softens and loses most of its strengh at 400 degees --he didn't say whether the degrees were fahrenheit or centrigrade, but if he meant fahrenheit, I wonder why the coal stove my parents used for heating in Kentucky during the 1940's and 50's didn't deform since the coal fire inside was hotter than 400 degrees? --and most demoralizing of all, I learned that the 9/11 truth movement distacted from the fight against Bush because of his other crimes and that if it weren't for us, Bush would have been impeached and Cheney jailed. But the one thing that stopped me from committing hari kari in utter shame was that I rembered that the movements against Bush/Cheney's other crimes, such as the Iraq War, which I also participated in, were blacked out far less and received far more press coverage than 9/11 truth. In short, the 9/11 Truth movement was minuscule in relation to the Anti War movement and did not have anywhere near the power to divert significant amounts of energy from the Anti War or other movements,

I hope I remembered to click Reply All instead of Reply in sending this to you. But if I did not, I recommend you send this to the rest of the people on the 9/11 list and urge them to sign up for the GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com list and start giving Mr. Robson hell until he throws you off the list.
Robert Halfhill
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH BY ROBERT HALFHILL

Since jet fuel is just kerosene, I looked up the temperature at which kerosene burns in open air on WIKIPEDIA. It burns at 549.5 degrees Fahrenheit or 287.5 degrees Centigrade. This is considerably less than the 2,190 degrees Fahrenheit claimed by Mr. Robson. He hay be thinking of the temperature at which kerosene burns in a jet engine in which compressed air is forced into the combustion chamber of the jet engine. The temperature at which kerosene burns in air is relevant when we are considering the burning temperature os kerosene spilled on the floors of the World Trade Center. In fact, the clouds of dark black smoke, which indicated the presence of many uncombusted carbon particles, which indicates the fire was oxygen starved and was burning at a lower temperature than it would have burned in the open air...Since WIKIPEDIA is considered unsuited for scholarly research because of all the people with agendas loging in to rewrite posts, it would be better for me to get to the Library and consult the BRITANNICA.

549.5 degrees Fahrenheit is still above the 400 degrees Fahrenheit at which Robson claims steel begins to soften. However, http://scienceblogs.com/insolence2008/02/the_troof_hurts.php says, "Even high temperture steel loses 50% of its strength at 600 degrees Centigrade," which is 1112 degrees Fahrenheit. This is not necessarity contradictory to Robson's claim that steel BEGINS to lose its strength at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. However since the architech of the World Trade Center designed in a lot of reduncy so the building could withstand 747 impacts, etc, it is unlikely that that an oxygen starved fire burning at LESS than 549.5 degrees Fahrenheit would have been sufficient to cause the WTC to fall down, EVEN IT the steel framewood had not conduced the heat away almost as fast as it was produced. And even heat sufficient to buckle the steel girders would not have caused the three WTC buildings to implode inward and fall ontheir foot prints, let alone pulvarize the massive amounts of concrete into a fine dust.

It would be advisable for me toe check a more objective reference, such as the BRITANNICA for the temperatures at which steel loses its strength, since the science blog is an anti 9/11 Truth site. This is indicated by its calling it 9/11 Troof, whiich is a cheap way used by opponents of 9/11 Truth to mock our movement.

As for Robson charging that 9/11 Truthers are racists, he simply assumes without investigating that 9/11 Truthers think the lives of the 3,000 mostly white people killed on 9/11 are more important than the lives of the one million Iraqis killed in the war the Bush Administration used 9/11 to justify. I do not need Mr. Robson to remind me that Iraqi lives are just as important as American lives. In fact, decaades before Robson and I interacted over the Internet, and before he was even born for all I know, I recognized that the number of people who lost their lives in the American invasion of Vietnam was 3,000,000 and not 58,000, since each Vietnames life has as much value as each American kife.

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TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11

2009-06-26T02:04:00.001-07:00

TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11 (THIRD REVISION,6/24/09)
By Robert Halfhill

There are many unanswered questions about the official conspiracy theory that an
Islamic terrorist organization, headquartered in Afghanistan, sent 19 men with box
cutters to infiltrate the United states to hijack four planes and wreak appalling
destruction by crashing them into buildings.
The first question about the official story is that since the World Trade Center had
already been attacked by terrorists once before in 1993, and it remained the one place
where a successful terrorist act would make the greatest impression, why was there no
attempt to guard the WTC or prepare defenses? I remember thinking in 1993 that the
terrorists had to only be successful once while we had to be successful every time.
Second, the U.S. government received at least eleven warnings from foreign
intelligence services about Al Qaida's plan for a big attack on the United States before
they struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, why were no counter measures
prepared?
Third, the Minneapolis FBI tried to obtain approval from the FISA Court to look at
Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after he was arrested for being in the country illegally.
But as Minneapolis FBI agent Coleen Rowley testified to a Senate hearing, the National
FBI Office even rewrote the Minneapolis Office's request to FISA so it failed to be
approved.
Fourth, the Phoenix FBI Office had noticed the large number of Middle Eastern men
enrolling for flight training. Someone from the Phoenix Office pointed out to the
National Office that a plane could be used as a weapon.
Fifth, there is the mind boggling incompetence of both the civilian air traffic
control systems and the military North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The
civilian air traffic control system's radar can detect a plane going off course
immediately, as soon as it deviates from its flight plan. Boston Air Traffic Control
detected American Airlines Flight 11 going off course as soon as it deviated from its
flight plan at 8:14 A.M. on September 11, 2001. But it did not notify several other air
traffic control centers until 8:25 A.M., eleven minutes later. And it did not notify
NORAD until 8:40 A.M. The two F-15 Eagles that were eventually scrambled from Otis Air
National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which was 153 miles northwest of the
World Trade Center and which had a top speed of over 1875 miles per hour, could have
reached the WTC in seven minutes with more than enough time to intercept AA 11 if the
F-15's had been in the air soon after 8:14 A.M or even 8:25 A.M. However, 11 hit the
North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 A.M. If NORAD had been informed and had
the F-15's in the air soon after AA 11 was detected going off course at 8:14 A.M., there
would have been far more than enough time to intercept it.
At 8:41:32 A.M., there was a suspicious radio transmission from United Airlines Flight
175 which sounded something like "everyone stay in your seats." Boston Air
Traffic Control informed NORAD that UA 175 had been hijacked at 8:43 and there would have
been more than enough time for the two F-15"s, which were air borne by 8:52 A.M. to
intercept UA 175 before it hit the South Tower at 9:02:54 A.M. That is there would have
been more than enough time if the two F-15's had not been flying at only 23.9% of their
top speed!
AA 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M. At their top speed, the two F-15's could have
intercepted AA 77 twenty-four minutes before it hit the Pentagon.
At 9:55 A.M., United Airlines Flight 93 went of course near Cleveland and began a 135
degree turn over Ohio and Northern Kentucky. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania
at 10:06:05 A.M.
If the police officer pursuing fleeing criminals drove her or his squad car at only
23.9 percent of the car's top speed, the most probable conclusion would be that the
officer intended to let the criminals escape. Human stupidity can account for a lot and
even mount to civil or even criminal negligence. But when there is a series of one
incredible, mind boggling stupidity after another, there has to be a malign intent to
bring about the opposite of what officials are supposedly trying to achieve, in this case
to ensure that the hijackers succeed. But there's more!
Six, why did the government officials ship most of the steel from the World Trade
Center out of the country, even though it is a felony to remove evidence from a crime
scene. In the October 6, 2005 issue of NEW CIVIL ENGINEER, Dave Parker writes in
"WTC Investigators Resist Call For Collapse Visualization" that nearly all the
WTC steel was shipped out to Asia and melted down for recycling.
Seven, Why did the Bush Administration fight against having public hearings on 9/11
for nearly 18 months although public hearings on Pearl Harbor were held within weeks
after the event? 9/11 hearings were not held until the relatives of those killed at the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon exerted enough lobbying pressure to force the
hearings to be held, and even then, only one-tenth of the questions they submitted were
answered. And eight, why did the government not even allow the visitors to the site of
the World Trade Center to even take photographs of the ruins and why did the government
confiscate photos and videos of the attack on the Pentagon? Could both seven and eight
be part of an attempt to hide evidence of government complicity?
In his editorial, "Selling out the Investigation," in the January, 2002 FIRE
ENGINEERING, William Manning wrote that "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe
that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
... is a half baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces
whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure."
Manning also criticized the investigation in another editorial, "The Twisted Brush
of 9/11 Politics" in the September, 2004 FIRE ENGINEERING.
Robert Berhinig, P.E. states in "Protecting the Foundation of Fire-Safety,"
in the July/August, 2002 IAEI (International Association of Electrical Inspectors, the
definitive magazine for electrical inspectors) that "the FEMA report states further
that until the attack on the WTC, no protected steel framed buildings had been known to
collapse as a result of a fire." Yet on 9/11, after steel framed buildings had been
around for over a hundred years, since the late 1800's, three protected steel framed
buildings, WTC 1, 2, and 7, had collapsed, supposedly because of fire.
Three of the experts who testified before the House Committee On Science May 1, 2002
Hearing On the Collapse of the World Trade Center said the there had NEVER BEFORE been a
collapse of a protected, steel framed building because of fire. Dr. W. Gene Corley,
American Society of Civil Engineers and Chair of the Building Performance Assesment Team
reviewing the WTC disaster said on page 76 of the hearing record that "prior to
these events, no protected steel frame structure, the most common form of large
commercial construction in the United States, has ever experienced a fire-induced
collapse." Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology said on page 103, "The Twin Towers and WTC 7 are the only
known cases of total structural collapse where fire played a significant role." So
we have here an admission by a spokesperson for NIST that allegedly accounted for the
collapses that fire had never before brought about such a collapse of a protected, steel
framed building. And Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Safety Studies at the
Worcester Polytechnic Institute said on page 133, "Up until 9/11, we never had a
collapse of a protected steel building." On page 163 he said, "This was the
first time we had the collapse of a protected steel structure." Dr. Bement said on
page 169, "... there have been instances where buildings have had major fires that
have burned to completion without the buildings collapsing." And on page 172, Dr.
Barnett said of the partial collapse of WTC 5, "But building 5 was a normal building
and it had a fire and it had a major collapse. This has never happened before."
The August 25, 2007 issue of SCIENCE NEWS had an article about the
collapse of the World Trade Center on pages 122 - 24 entitled FIRE INSIDE: STRUCTURAL
DESIGN WITH FIRE SAFETY IN MIND by Carolyn Berry. The paragraph in the first column on
page 124 is particularly significant in evaluating the NIST computer simulation of the
collapse of WTC 7:"The NIST simulation, like all models of building failures to
date, couldn't follow the 9/11 collapses through to the end. No computer is yet powerful
enough to follow the chaotic sequence of events that ensues when components break apart
and a building falls, but this is where research is headed."
In other words, the much vaunted NIST simulation which purported to dispose of the
arguments of we conspiracy theorists didn't actually demonstrate how fire caused the
buildings to collapse; they just waved their hands when the computing power currently
available had took them as far as it could and said: "This is far enough; the
buildings collapsed somewhere about here." Of course we all know we have accounted
for how the buildings probably collapsed once we have gone this far. It HAS to be the
probable explanation because the only alternative explanation is those NUTTY, WACKO
CONSPIRACY THEORIES! We know a priori that that CAN'T be true!
I might as well add the statement in the same SCIENCE NEWS article of Allen Hay, chief
fire safety officer of the New York City Fire Department, about WTC 7. "We just
expected it to burn out -- we didn't expect it to fall down." "It's the only
building I know in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire."
But I want to return to the repeated Congressional testimony that a protected, steel
framed building have NEVER BEFORE collapsed because of fire. And never afterwards
either. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we have a purported fact about the behavior of
protected, steel framed buildings in fire that dare not be true again!
There are many other suspicious anomalies about 9/11. Only a few are, nine, all three
World Trade Center buildings collapsed at nearly free fall speed,i.e. almost as fast as
it would take an object dropped from one of the WTC building's roof to reach the ground.
The resistance of the massive steel columns and concrete would have slowed the fall
considerably if it had been a matter of the floors pancaking and falling on the floors
below. And ten, fire would have unlikely to have been equally intense at every point in
the buildings so that every point failed simultaneously and they fell onto the surface
area they stood on, i.e. on to their footprint. Eleventh, although fire had never caused
the girders in protected steel framed buildings to become ductile or loose sufficient
strength to result in a building collapse, pools of molten steel remained at the bottom
of the wreckage for 100 days.
Although molten metal at ground zero was a constant feature of media accounts in the
days following 9/11, there have since been widespread denials of the presence of molten
metal in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Or if the presence of molten metal is
admitted, it is claimed that the metal was molten aluminium from the planes, although the
press accounts at the time specifically said it was molten steel and pictures of the WTC
ruins show the metal as bright red, characteristic of molten steel, whereas molten
aluminium has a silvery color. Some have even proclaimed that the TV pictures of ground
zero were taken in different wave lengths of light to explain away why the molten
aluminium looked like molten steel. However since the television pictures we normally see
all show objects as being the same color we normally see them, it is difficult to
understand why the video photos of the World Trade Center alone were photographed at a
different wavelength than the wave length normally used by TV cameras. This seems
particularly difficult since all the other objects we see in photos of ground zero have
the same colors we normally see such objects as having. The extent to which ad hoc
hypotheses are resorted to to explain away pictures of molten steel is mind boggling!
And when what was widely reported in the press and accepted as true is denied a few
months later by seemingly intelligent people as well as by self professed experts, it
reminds us of George Orwell's 1984 in which once the official news accounts changed,
people would forget the previous news accounts!
So it is instructive to consider an official report of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology in which they cite numerous first hand reports of molten steel
in the ruins of the World Trade Center while resorting to irrelevancy after irrelevancy
and ad hominem after ad hominem in an attempt to discredit these first hand reports. The
NIST report is in ordinary type while my interpolated comments are in capital letters for
ease of distinguishing fron the text of the NIST report.
Molten Metal
Workers Reported Molten Metal in Ground Zero Rubble Reports of molten metal in the
foundations of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers are frequently noted in
literature of proponents of theories that the buildings were destroyed through controlled
demolition. The most widely publicized report is one by American Free Press reporter
Christopher Bollyn citing principals of two of the companies contracted to clean up
Ground Zero. The president of Tully Construction of Flushing, NY, said he saw pools of
"literally molten steel" at Ground Zero. Bollyn also cites Mark Loizeaux,
president of Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, MD, as having seen molten steel
in the bottoms of elevator shafts "three, four, and five weeks" after the
attack.
Although reports of molten steel are consistent with the persistent heat at Ground
Zero in the months following the attack, we find the American Free Press report suspect
for two reasons. First, Tully Construction was one of four companies awarded contracts by
New York City's Department of Design and Construction to dispose of the rubble at Ground
Zero, and CDI was subcontracted by Tully and was instrumental in devising a plan to
recycle the steel. The involvement of Steve Tully and Mark Loizeaux in the destruction of
the evidence of the unprecedented collapses would seem to disqualify them as objective
reporters of evidence.
RH - WHEN THE FEMA REPORT SAYS STEVE TULLY AND MARK LOIZEAUX WERE INVOLVED "IN
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EVIDENCE," IT IGNORES THE FACT THAT IT SAID IN THE
IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING SENTENCE THAT TULLY WAS HIRED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK TO DISPOSE OF
THE EVIDENCE. (TULLY HIRED LOIZEAUX AS A SUBCONTRACTOR.) ALTHOUGH NEW YORK HIRING THEM
TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE CASTS SUSPICION ON THE NEW YORK CITY GOVERNMENT, AND THE
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR ALLOWING NEW YORK TO DISPOSE OF THE EVIDENCE, HOW COULD THIS BE
USED TO DISCREDIT TULLY AND LOIZEAUX WHEN THE VERY GOVERNMENT OF WHICH FEMA IS A PART
ALLOWED A SUBORDINATE GOVERNMENT, THAT OF NEW YORK CITY, TO HIRE THEM TO DISPOSE OF THE
EVIDENCE?
SECONDLY, WE HAVE AN ADMISSION BY FEMA THAT THE EVIDENCE WAS DISPOSED OF AND THAT
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG IN DISPOSING THE EVIDENCE.
THIRD, THE ONLY WAY THEY HAVE OF DISCREDITING TULLY AND LOIZEAUX'S FIRST HAND REPORT
IS NOT TO PRODUCE EVIDENCE THAT THEIR REPORT WAS MISTAKEN BUT TO RESORT TO AN AD HOMINEM.
EVEN IF THEY HAD DISPOSED OF THE EVIDENCE WITHOUT BEING HIRED BY NEW YORK, THAT IS NO
REASON TO ASSUME THEY WERE NOT TELLING THE TRUTH IN THEIR FIRST HAND REPORT.
INSTEAD OF TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER PREVIOUS WRONG BEHAVIOR INFLUENCES THE TRUTH OF
FACTUAL TESTIMONY, OR WHETHER ALLEGATIONS THAT THEY MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE, FALSIFIED THEIR
FACTUAL TESTIMONY AND THUS INVALIDATED THEIR ARGUMENTS, WHY NOT JUST CUT TO THE CHASE AND

CONCENTRATE ON THE CREDIBILITY OF THE FACTUAL TESTIMONY OR THE VALIDITY OF THE ARGUMENTS?
Interestingly, CDI was also hired to bury the rubble of the Murrah Building in the
wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. That Loizeaux stood trial on charges of illegal
campaign contributions casts further doubt on his credibility. 1
R.H. - WHAT IS THE RELEVANCE OF LOIZEAUX'S COMPANY, CDI, BEING HIRED TO DISPOSE OF THE
RUBBLE OF THE MURRAH BUILDING IN OKLAHOMA CITY TO WHETHER HIS TESTIMONY ABOUT THE WORLD
TRADE CENTER WAS TRUTHFUL?
POINTING OUT LOIZEAUX'S STANDING TRIAL ON CHARGES OF ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS IS
ANOTHER AD HOMINEM. THE FEMA REPORT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHETHER HE WAS CONVICTED, BUT EVEN
IF HE HAD BEEN, IT WOULD NOT PROVE HE WAS NOT BEING TRUTHFUL IN HIS TESTIMONY ABOUT
MOLTEN STEEL AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER.
FEMA'S STOOPING TO THESE SHODDY AD HOMINEM TACTICS, A FALLACY THAT WAS DISCUSSED IN
THE ELEMENTARY LOGIC COURSE I TOOK AS A COLLEGE SOPHOMORE, RAISES ADDITIONAL SUSPICIONS
ABOUT FEMA'S REPORT. WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE IF THEY HAVE TO RESORT TO SUCH
DESPICABLE AD HOMINEMS?
A second reason to doubt this molten steel report is the fact that it has been used by
Bollyn and others to support the dubious theory that the collapses were caused by bombs
in the Towers' basements.
R.H. - YOU DO NOT ASSUME THE THEORY IS WRONG, I.E.. "DUBIOUS," AND THEN
ARGUE THAT THE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE THEREFORE FALSE. YOU FIRST HAVE TO PRODUCE
INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE THAT THE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE FALSE. THE TRUTH OF A THEORY IS
DETERMINED BY THE TRUTH OF THE FACTUAL STATEMENTS CITED AS EVIDENCE FOR IT; YOU CAN'T USE
THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE THEORY IS TRUE OR FALSE TO DEDUCE THE TRUTH OR FALSITY OF THE
STATEMENTS OF FACT CITED AS PART OF THE EVIDENCE FOR IT.
Corroborating Reports
There are reports of molten steel beyond those cited by American Free Press. Most of
these have come to light as a result of a research paper by Professor Steven E Jones,
which has stimulated interest in the subject of molten steel at Ground Zero. *
A report by Waste Age describes New York Sanitation Department workers moving
"everything from molten steel beams to human remains." 2
A report on the Government Computer News website quotes Greg Fuchek, vice president of
sales for LinksPoint Inc. as stating: In the first few weeks, sometimes when a worker
would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten
steel 3
A Messenger-Inquirer report recounts the experiences of Bronx firefighter
"Toolie" O'Toole, who stated that some of the beams lifted from deep within the
catacombs of Ground Zero by cranes were "dripping from the molten steel." 4
A transcription of an audio interview of Ground Zero chaplain Herb Trimpe contains the
following passage: When I was there, of course, the remnants of the towers were still
standing. It looked like an enormous junkyard. A scrap metal yard, very similar to that.
Except this was still burning. There was still fire. On the cold days, even in January,
there was a noticeable difference between the temperature in the middle of the site than
there was when you walked two blocks over on Broadway. You could actually feel the heat.
It took me a long time to realize it and I found myself actually one day wanting to
get back. Why? Because I felt more comfortable. I realized it was actually warmer on
site. The fires burned, up to 2,000 degrees, underground for quite awhile before they
actually got down to those areas and they cooled off.
I talked to many contractors and they said they actually saw molten metal trapped,
beams had just totally had been melted because of the heat. So this was the kind of heat
that was going on when those airplanes hit the upper floors. It was just demolishing
heat.
A report in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine about recovery work in late
October quotes Alison Geyh, Ph.D., as stating: Fires are still actively burning and the
smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten
steel. 6
A publication by the National Environmental Health Association quotes Ron Burger, a
public health advisor at the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, who arrived at Ground Zero on the evening of September
12th. Burger stated: Feeling the heat, seeing the molten steel, the layers upon layers of
ash, like lava, it reminded me of Mt. St. Helen’s and the thousands who fled that
disaster. 7
An article in The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah
describing an speaking appearance by Leslie Robertson (structural engineer responsible
for the design of the World Trade Center) contains this passage: As of 21 days after the
attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running. 8
A member of the New York Air National Guard's 109th Air Wing was at Ground Zero from
September 22 to October 6. He kept a journal on which an article containing the following
passage is based. Smoke constantly poured from the peaks. One fireman told us that there
was still molten steel at the heart of the towers' remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool
the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots.
9
The book American Ground, which contains detailed descriptions of conditions at Ground
Zero, contains this passage: ... or, in the early days, the streams of molten metal that
leaked from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole. 10
A review of of the documentary Collateral Damage in the New York Post describes
firemen at Ground Zero recalling "heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten
steel." 11
This construction photograph shows the foundation of South Tower in the foreground,
with the foundation of the North Tower in the left background. The foundations were seven
stories deep.
R.H. - HERE WE HAVE 11 INDEPENDENT REPORTS CITED BY FEMA OF MOLTEN STEEL IN THE RUINS
OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, EVEN IF THE AD HOMINEMS FEMA RESORTED TO IN AN ATTEMPT TO
DISCREDIT TULLY AND LOIZEAUX'S TESTIMONY WERE VALID ARGUMENTS, THIS WOULD DO NOTHING TO
DISCREDIT THESE ELEVEN INDEPENDENT TESTIMONIES ABOUT MOLTEN STEEL AT GROUND ZERO.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Most of the press reports compiled here were gathered by other researchers, including
Matthew Everett, the author of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and 9/11: A Scandal Beyond What Has
Been Seen Before; David Ray Griffin; and the author of posts such as this on
georgewashington.blogspot.com.
R.H. - AGAIN IT IS AN AD HOMINEM TO ASSUME THAT SINCE THESE FACTUAL REPORTS ARE CITED
BY PEOPLE THAT THE FEMA REPORT CLAIMS TO BE DISCREDIBLE, IT PROVES THE FACTUAL REPORTS
ARE NOT CREDIBLE, EVEN IF FEMA HAD PROVED THAT THE CITERS ARE DISCREDIBLE, WHICH IT HAS
NOT.
I HAVE PREVIOUSLY EXPLAINED WHY YOU CANNOT ASSUME A THEORY IS FALSE AND USE THAT
ASSUMED FALSITY TO ASSUME THE FACTUAL REPORTS CITED AS PART OF THE THEORY'S EVIDENCE ARE
FALSE AND THAT THE ARGUMENTS CITED TO SUPPORT THE THEORY ARE INVALID.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. Fire Power: It Took Three Lawyers to Stop the Destruction of CDI Inc., The Daily
Record, 10/7/00
2. D-Day: NY Sanitation Workers' Challenge of a Lifetime, WasteAge.com, 4/1/02 [cached]
3. Handheld app eased recovery tasks, GCN.com, 9/11/02 [cached]
4. Recovery worker reflects on months spent at Ground Zero, Messenger-Inquirer.com,
6/29/02 [cached]
5. The Chaplain's Tale, RecordOnline.com, [cached]
6. Mobilizing Public Health, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, [cached]
7. The scene at Ground Zero, NEHA.org, [cached]
8. WTC a Structural Success, SEAU News, , page 3
9. Ground Zero, 12/01 [cached]
10. American Ground, , page 32
11. Unflinching Look Among the Ruins, NYPost.com, 3/3/04

page last modified: 2006-12-28
END OF NIST REPORT

And twelve, although an ordinary building collapse would produce chunks of broken
concrete, the steel, concrete and asbestos in the three World Trade Center buildings was
mostly converted to a fine dust which flowed out from the WTC through the streets of
Manhattan in the manner of the pyroclastic flows produced from volcanoes. And thirteen,
although the buildings were not even observed to move at all when the planes crashed into
them, nearby geological observatories detected seismic tremblors as if there had been
massive explosions at ground level when the buildings collapsed. And while WTC 7 had not
even been struck by a plane, all the phenomena previously mentioned accompanied its
collapse also. And fourteen, while the Environmental Protection Agency said that the air
around the World Trade Center was safe to breathe after 9/11, we now know that our
government lied yet again because of all the deaths from asbestosis and other respiratory
diseases among both the humans and dogs who were involved in the WTC cleanup. And
fifteen, while it is standard procedure for the secret service to hustle the President
away from the scene immediately whenever there is a hint of danger, George Bush remained
in the Florida elementary school reading "The Pet Goat" for nearly half an
hour, even though there was supposedly no assurance that there would not be an attempt to
crash a plane into the school.
And although the Bush Administration attempted to ship all the steel from the World
Trade Center to China and Korea, some of the steel girders were saved by 9/11
investigators. And the massive amounts of metal in the dust which surged out from the
WTC collapse provided additional metal for investigators to study. Brigham Young
University Professor of Physics, Steven E. Jones obtained some of the metal containing
dust after he had published his first paper about 9/11 online in November, 2005.
Janette Mackinlay had returned to her apartment on the fourth floor of 113 Cedar Street,
which was about 100 meters, or 328 feet, away from the South Tower, about a week after
her apartment had been flooded with dust, to clean up. She had saved some of the dust in
a plastic bag and mailed some of it to Jones after he published his first paper online.
Later, he traveled to MacKinlay's new residence in California and obtained a second
sample of WTC dust in the presence of other scientists.
In his subsequent online paper, "Revisiting 9/11, 2001 -- Applying the Scientific

Method," Professor Jones reported that the dust contained clear traces of thermate.
Thermate is an explosive used to melt and cut steel in controlled building demolitions.
It is a well mixed powder of iron, aluminum and sulfur. The sulfur lowers the melting
point of iron, or steel, and cuts right through it. Sometimes other metallic powders are
mixed in to fine tune the characteristics of the explosives. Doctor Jones found all of
these substances in the dust.
And recently, Jones and others have found microscopic particles of unignited thermate
in the World Trade Center dust.
David Heller, who has degrees in physics and engineering, makes many of the same
points Dr. Jones made in Heller's article, "TAKING A CLOSE LOOK; HARD SCIENCE AND
THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER," in the June 18, 2007 GARLIC AND GRASS.
After he states that the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings was a
controlled demolition brought about by pre-planted thermate explosives, he states that it
would seem impossible for Al Qaida to preplant the explosives, especially since WTC 7
housed the offices of the FBI, CIA, and OEM(Office of Emergency Management). But he says
that recently he learned that President George Bush's brother, Marvin Bush, is a part
owner of the company that provides security for not only the World Trade Center
buildings but also both United and American Airlines, the two airlines whose planes were
hijacked on 9/11. He also pointed out that the owner of the World Trade Center, Larry
Silverstein, had received a $3.55 billion insurance settlement after 9/11 and was suing
for an additional $3.55 billion on the grounds that the airplane crashes into the Twin
Towers constituted two separate incidents.
However, regardless of Silverstein's motives, it is unlikely that he could have played
a major role in planting the explosives in the building containing the offices of the
FBI, CIA and OEM. Only the United States government could have carried that off and
Silverstein, at most, could have played no more than a subsidiary role.
The final step in a criminal investigation is asking who had the motive to do the
crime. Whose poll numbers shot up into the stratosphere after 9/11 and who gained the
popular support to enable the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, abolish habaeus corpus
and, at least, the de jure power to lock anyone up for life without a trial or even
telling them why they were being imprisoned? Only the neo cons and the Bush
Administration, although Bush may be only a front man and Dick Cheney the real power
behind the throne. It was the neo con Project for a New American Century who proposed
that the U.S. seize the lands where the world's dwindling supply of oil is located and
who were quoted in NEWSWEEK as saying that the American people may need a new Pearl
Harbor to wake them up.
But if enough people realize in time just how bad our government is, we can counter
them before it is too late.

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TWO PARTY DUOPOLY

2009-06-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

This article was originally a comment on an article by Cindy Sheehan on OpEdNews in which she discusses her "late life epiphany" that both the Republicans and Democrats are part of the same war party and discusses the Democrats recent vote for appropriations to fund the U.S. wars in Iraq, afghanistan, and Pakietan.

.
TWO PARTY DUOPOLY
By Robert Halfhill

It was predicted that the last presidential campaign was going to cost a billion dollars. Without spending hundreds of millions, a candidate cannot let the majority of voters know that he or she even exists. And the only way to get that kind of money is to go to those that have that kind of money. And the people who have that kind of money are not just contributing to political candidates as a hobby. They are unlikely to fund any candidate who won't legislate to promote their interests. Since both the Democrats and the Republicans are funded by the same wealthy interest groups, it is not surprising that there is so little difference between the two parties

Thus it was the majority of Democrats who voted for the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, meaning that the act would have passed even is all those big, bad Republicans had been magically removed from Congress. Taft Hartley outlawed secondary boycotts so, it there was a strike at a particular plant, the workers in other unions could no longer support the strike by refusing to make deliveries to that plant. The outlawing of secondary boycotts is a major reason for American labor's decline from representing over a third of the American workforce in the 1940's to its present anemic state of representing only a few percent of American workers.

Although the introduction of U.S. troops in Vietnam began under Eisenhower with several hundred American troops serving as "advisers" to the forces of the Diem regime, Kennedy, who many liberals considered so promising, increased U.S. forces to several thousand, which Johnson escalated to the point of having 500,000 troops in Vietnam. It was as if the ruling class assigned to the two parties the task of carrying out an imperialist invasion of Vietnam and the two parties handed off the task of escalating the invasion to each other through their successive administrations. It seemed that way, that it was as if, because it was.

Bill Clinton promised to end the ban on Gays and Lesbians in the military and admit the Haitian boat people as refugees into the United States. Instead, he gave us Don't Ask, Don"t Tell, which resulted in even more Gays and Lesbians being thrown out of the military. ACT UP had to picket Clinton's every public appearance for months before he let some of the Haitians who were dying of AIDS into the United States on medical parole. Clinton did keep one of his promises however; he ended wellfare as we know it. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Dole or Bush, Sr. didn't beat Clinton. If either of them had won the presidency, THEY WOULD HAVE ENDED WELLFARE AS WE KNOW IT!!!

Barack Obama is turning out to be as big a disappointment as Kennedy-Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. He has yet to end the ban on Gays and Lesbians in the military, legalize medicinal uses of marijuana and ramp back the war on drugs. The war on drugs was given to us by both the Democrats and Republicans and has led to two millions Americans being currently in prison, not to mention those who are on probation or parole. Enough Democrats may vote with the Republicans to keep publically funded health insurance from passing Congress, leaving us with the same failed health care system we currently have. And the Obama Administration just gor over a hundred million dollars through Congress for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

However, the ruling class in this country have quite cleverly arranged to have two ruling class parties, one, the Democrats, slightly -- only SLIGHTLY -- less evil than the Republicans. But this slight difference enables the advocates of voting for the Democrats as the lesser evil, even after you have pointed out all the evil we have received from the Democrats, to argue that things would be much worse under the Republicans. This fear of how much worse things would be under the Republicans, causes all the liberals who are desperately clinging to the Democrats with there lesser evil strategy, to hysterically attack you once you point out the flaws in their stategy, terrified of the doom they imagine befalling them if you cause enough people to abandon their lesser evil stategy and cause the sky to fall. And since both the Democrats and Republicans are financed by the ruling class, it is no accident that the organizations who advocate supporting one of these parties, even if only lesser evil support, have the larger email lists, etc.

It is time for us all to stop and reflect. The difference in evil between the Republicans and Democrats is no where near great enough to justify all the time, effort, and money liberals have expended on electing Democrats. Remember how the Kennedy Administration, which liberals compared with Camelot, ended in the disaster of Vietnam. Remember all the hopes liberal had for the Clinton Administration and how that turned out. Now Obama seems on the way to disappointing us again, and, if we invest the same hopes in whatever Democratic administration follows Obama, we will be likewise disappointed and no nearer to our goals. And we will continue to be disappointed by the Democrats until we stop letting the Democrats frighten us with the big, bad, Republican wolf if we don't vote for them, bite the bullet, and begin the hard work of building a viable third party alternative.

Robert Halfhill

by rhalfhill (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 326 comments [3 hidden, 0 flagged]) on Saturday, Jun 20, 2009 at 1:51:15 PM

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THE FUTILITY OF SUPPORTING THE LESSER EVIL

2009-06-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

This article started out as a comment about an article by Michael Collins on OpEdNews predicting the demise of the Republican Party. Since the comment ended up as an analysis of how the ruling class, or the class of those with money, maintain their control of this society, how they have kept the electorate bouncing back and forth between their two parties, the futility of supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil, and how the Green Party caved in to the pressure to support the lesser evil in 2004, I decided it deserves publication as a stand alone post.
Robert Halfhill

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GREATER AND LESSER EVIL TOO SLIGHT TO JUSTIFY ALL THE EFFORT EXPENDED ON ELECTING THE LESSER EVIL
BY ROBERT HALFHILL

What is so discouraging to so many of us is that the majority of the public shows no sign of being able to remember, when the Republicans have been so bad that they have swung in desperation and disgust to the Democrats, how just one or two presidential terms ago, the disappointing performance of the Democrats had caused the majority of them to swing to the Republicans.

Clinton had been so disappointing that many of us finally were willing to consider supporting a third party and vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. At one point it looked like Nader would even receive 10% of the vote. The Democrats were able to cut that back to between 4 and 5% percent with their last minute barrage of hysterical predictions that we were going to "throw our vote away" and "elect Bush." After Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court, the Democrats deluged us with hysterical accusations that we "had got Bush elected." Most people seem to have forgotten that Bush had not received the majority of the popular vote and it turned out that he had not even won the majority of the electoral vote when the long predicted media recount of the ballots was released. The media distorted the results of their recount by headlining "Bush wins," but, on closer examination, it turned out that under every scenario in which the ballots have been recounted under uniform standards, Gore had won. How is this as an example of how ruling elites determine how the press distorts the news?

Five Neanderthal buffoons in the robes of Supreme Court Injustices ordering us to stop counting votes and appointing Bush was actually no different than five military generals conducting a coup and appointing Bush.

And since in Florida, the Republicans had outsourced the task of purging the voter rolls of felons to private companies, and the low bidding companies were naturally the ones who cut corners by only compiling lists of those who had been CHARGED with felonies, without checking further to see if they had also been CONVICTED, the Democratic Party apologists cannot even retreat to their backup charge that the Nader voters were only one of the reasons, though not the only reason, for Gore's defeat. Given how the Republicans systematically disenfranchised voters from groups likely to vote Democratic, the Democrats cannot even say Nader voters were a contributing factor to Gore's loss to Bush, since the record makes it clear that if the Republicans had needed more votes to win, they would have simply stolen them.

But since the press had convinced most people that Bush had won, the majority believed the hysterical charge that those of who voted for Nader had elected Bush. Even enough Greens had caved under the pressure by 2004 to cause the Green Party to reject Nader in favor of "safe states" candidate David Cobb. "Safe states" means you only make a serious attempt to campaign in states where the polls predict the Democrats are sure to win, a covert form of lesser evilism since you don't make a serious attempt to campaign in states where there is a danger the Democrats will lose to the Republicans.

But to return to my main theme, those who advocate voting for the Democrats as the lesser evil were able to convince most people that Nader supporters had "elected Bush." The electorate had become even more disgusted with Bush by 2004 and it had first seemed that the Democrats had won by a comfortable margin. But over the post midnight hours of the night, the press reported that the vote had swung back to Bush. It has been extensively documented by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and others how a surplus of voting machines in Ohio had been allocated to Republican leaning, predominantly white, suburban precincts, which left inner city, predominantly Black, Democratic leaning precincts with an acute shortage. The new electronic voting machines left no auditable paper trail of ballots, so no real recount could be conducted. The FREE PRESS later verified that the electronic vote count had been sent through a computer in Tennessee to alter the tally to produce a Republican win. Nevertheless the press managed to convince most people that Bush had won.

The explanation for Obama and the Democrats win in 2008 by contributors to OEN has been that the electorate had swung so markedly to the Democrats in the last month or so of the election that the Republicans did not steal enough votes and that the Democrats would have won by an even greater margin if it had not been for the Republican theft. I am not certain about this explanation since, if you are sending the election tally through a computer in the middle, you can alter the results by whatever amount you need to win in the final hours, or even seconds, before the final tally. A more plausible explanation to me is that whatever interest group that could influence the press to falsely report that Bush has won the majority of the electoral votes in 2000, and to falsely report despite all the evidence to the contrary that Bush had won in 2004, had decided that they simply didn't dare to pull off another election theft in 2008, given the mounting disgust with the Republicans.

And you can clearly find the evidence that there is a class that rules this society if you stop to consider that a candidate cannot even obtain enough media coverage to even let the majority of voters know that he or she even exists unless she or he has hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase media coverage. The only way you can raise that large an amount of money is to go to those that have that large an amount of money. And they are not likely to contribute to candidates who do not support the same policies that they support. They are not just contributing to political candidates as a hobby, In that sense there is a ruling class, although not in the sense of some secret group that meets at Bohemian Grove or Skull and Bones.

The result of all this history is that Obama and the Democrats now have the presidency and the majority of Congress and, afters nearly six months in power, they are disappointing us in all the ways that Michael Collins outlined. But this is not the first time the Democrats have disappointed us, nor is it the first time one of the two major parties have seemed on the verge of extinction. I remember that the Republicans seems headed for extinction after their and Nixon's disgrace in Watergate and the ensuing Democratic sweep of Congress. But after the disappointing performance of Jimmy Carter, it was as if Watergate had been erased from the minds of the majority of the electorate and, a scant six years after Watergate, the voters swung back to Reagan and the Republicans, who gave us the deregulation that contributed to what could still become the Second Great Depression. After another twelve years of Reagan and Bush, Sr., the electorate swung back to the Democrats and Clinton, who "ended welfare as we know it." What a short time ago would have been considered the ultimate reactionary measure by Democrats and liberals and a major step in dismantling the New Deal was given to us by a Democratic president.

And it was the majority of Democrats who voted for the Taft Hartley Act in the years immediately following World War II and, by outlawing secondary boycotts, took away one of labor's major gains from the New Deal. With secondary boycotts, not only could striking employees refuse to provide their labor to the struck enterprise but workers in other unions could refuse to make deliveries to the struck facility. It is primarily Taft Hartley that led to labors decline from representing over a third of the American work force in the later 1940's to its present anemic position of representing only a few percent of American workers. And the majority of Democrats voted for it. So it would still have passed even if all those big bad Republicans had been magically removed from Congress.

And as for Kennedy and Johnson, I still remember a Democratic Party activist in 1968 telling about how he had told a Goldwater supporter -- "You vote for Goldwater and in a few months, we'll be in Vietnam!" A few months later, he ran into the Goldwater supporter again who told him, "You know you were right. I did vote for Goldwater and we are in Vietnam!"

However, despite this long record of evil from the Democrats, it would be a mistake to say that there is NO difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The ruling class has to keep the lesser evil LESSER in order to bait the trap enough to draw the majority of voters into supporting it. On some individual issues, the Democrats may even turn out to be the GREATER evil. But OVERALL, when all issues are considered, the Democrats have to be slightly the lesser evil for the trap to keep working at all.

But on the other hand, the mistake that advocates of continuing to support the Democrats as the lesser evil make when they hysterically predict how much worse things will be if we "throw away our vote" and let the greater evil Republicans win is that the difference in evil if not great enough to justify all the time, energy and money liberals spend on getting Democrats elected. Surely the disappointing record of the Democrats over the last 65 years since World War II should be enough to convince us that if we waste another six decades on electing Democrats, we will not be significantly further towards achieving a just society at the end of those decades. If we ever want to achieve anything significant, our only recourse is to ignore the slight improvements blandished by the lesser evils and the hysterical, overwrought predictions of how much worse things will be if we "throw away our vote" and elect the greater evil, bite the bullet, and devote the energy we have been wasting on getting Democrats elected to building a third party. Think of what could be achieved if we devoted all the time, energy, and money liberals have expended on electing Democrats to building a genuine, progressive alternative. It is hard to see how we could do worse than what has been gained from the Democrats.

What the examples of the Federalists and Whigs do prove however is that one of the major parties can go extinct and be replaced by another. However the examples of the Federalists and Whigs have been cases one of the ruling class greater evil parties becoming extinct and being replaced by another. Whether the Republicans are due to become extinct yet is difficult to say since they seemed just as close to extinction after Watergate but yet survived,

Another discouraging fact is the non reaction of the American people after the Supreme Court coup and installation of an illegal government for the first time in our history in 2001. By contrast, the Serbian people took to the streets en masse after Milosevic tried to steal the election. But unlike the Serbians, Americans have never lived under an open military dictatorship whereas the Serbians have lived under both Nazism during World War II and over forty years of Stalinism after the second World War. They thus knew what unpleasantness could result from letting a government get out from under Democratic control. I hope the majority of Americans can wake up without having to endure a Nazi or Stalinist -- or a Christian Taliban -- dictatorship. And similarly, one reason there has not been a revolution in this country since the one against the British is that, no matter how impoverished and unpleasant living conditions have been for many people in this country, they have never up to now become as bad as in other countries. I hope the majority of the American people can wake up before they have to endure mass starvation and penury.

I referred earlier to the fact that a candidate could not even inform people that he or even existed without hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase media coverage. The development of the Internet provides the potential that small parties and ordinary people can get enough media exposure to have a chance to be heard amidst the media colossi. The Internet leads to another problem however since it opens up space for hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people to be heard. Since no one can attend to more than a few of these many posts, the potential still remains for the result to be a few privileged sources on which most people depend for their information. However, the Internet does open up the possibility that an ordinary poster can seamlessly make the progression from a few to many people who attend to him or her without having to get over the discontinuity of having to purchase a major newspaper or television station in order to jump from having a small scale to a mass audience. The Internet thus has the potential of leading to the same mass democratization that the introduction of the printing press led to. This gives some reason to hope that we can one day attain a society without a ruling class in which all people can live comfortably.

Robert Halfhill

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OUR ACTIONS CAUSED BUT WE ARE STILL DOING WHAT WE WANT TO DO

2009-06-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

OUR ACTIONS CAUSED BUT WE ARE STILL DOING WHAT WE WANT TO DO
BY ROBERT HALFHILL

Try this thought experiment. If our desires were merely physical processes in the brain and the outcome of what we decided to do was merely the outcomes of what these conflicting desires, i.e physical processes, impelled us to do, as determined and mathematically calculable as the sum of forces moving an object in different directions results in the object moving in a certain direction, then we would still think we were acting according to what we decided to do and would think we were acting on free will.

If our actions were completely random, i.e. if the results of our conflicting desires were random and could not be predicted from the desires we had, we would still think we were acting freely or had free will, though with no way to predict what we would do next, we would be worried about what we might do.

Whether the outcome of our conflicting desires were causally determined and predictable, or non causally determined and random, or somewhere in between with our actions being partly caused and partly random, we would still think we were doing what we freely decided to do. And we would still think we were doing what we freely desired whether these desires were merely physical processes in our brain or something non material.

When people are confronted with the idea that our actions are causally determined and predictable, they think it is like being confined to move down a narrow track in a certain direction and that they could not deviate no matter what they wanted or desired. Since their experience is obviously not like this, they reject the contention that their will is not free as an offense to common sense and contrary to direct experience. But of course, if what they wanted to do was the result of previous causes, their desires could not be other than what they were and it would still seem like they were acting freely, by free will.

In fact, there is no difference in our experience between a world in which our actions are causally determined and a world in which they are "free," and since there is no difference, I conclude that this free will is a meaningless concept. Though I started out this argument by saying IF our actions WERE determined, this was merely a way to get readers to see that everything would seem the same even then. Our actions ARE determined by previous causes, we eat because there is a physical process in our brains which IS the desire for food or hunger, and this physical process was brought about by a physical process in our stomachs and the rest of our bodies, which... Causal determination does not mean we can't do what we want to do so there is no reason to concern ourselves further. And if there is someway in which quantum indeterminancy on the microscopic level of electons and other particles introduces a degree of non causality and randomness in the actions of our bodies on the macroscopic level, it still seems like we are acting freely, in fact there is no way to see how things would seem any different if we WERE not acting freely. Hence there is no meaning to this cincept of not acting freely and we need not worry about it even though our actions ARE causally determined with perhaps a little indeterminancy because of quantum uncertainty.

I also want to deal with the concept that our having a self means that there must be something immaterial. I am aware of being aware of sensations, desires, emotions, thoughts, ect and I am aware of being aware of these things. I can infer that other people have this same awareness through their behavior. But there is no reason to conclude that this awareness or consciousness must be nonmaterial. The existence of a self is another idea that got thrown into this mishmash but, after disentangling the confusion, there is no proof left for anything nonmaterial.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com RobertHalfhill@gmail.com

IT NEITHER PICKS YOUR POCKET NOT BREAKS YOUR LEG!

2009-06-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

IT NEITHER PICKS YOUR POCKET NOR BREAKS YOUR LEG!

To highlight the issue of same sex marriage, it might be best to quote Mary Liz
Holberg, the arthor of the House companion bill to then State Senator Michelle
Bachmann's bill to put a state constitutional amendment to limit marriage to a man and a woman on the ballot. On April 6, 2006, as the House was preparing to vote to not require a referendum of Hennepin County voters on the bill to impose an 0.05% stadium tax on Hennepin County, Holberg said as the House was preparing to enable all Minnesota to enjoy having a new stadium while legislating that only Hennepin County residents pay for it: "You may have the votes to pass this (Hennepin County only tax) but that won't make it right."
Similarly, from 1607 to 1865, the majority of the inhabitants of this country had the power but not the right to impose slavery on African Americans. But that didn't make it right. They had the power during segregation, and still do to to some extent, to deny African Americans equal rights. But that didn't. and doesn't make it right. The majority of Americans had the power to inter Japanese Americans in camps during World War II. But that didn't make it right. The Majority of Germans had the power to exterminate the majority of European Jews from 1933 through 1945, But that didn't make it right.
So too the majority of Minnesota citizens may have the power to keep the Legislature from passing a same sex marriage bill this year. BUT THAT WON'T MAKE IT RIGHT!
Another issue that must be highlighted is that the behavior that is legally sanctioned is best limited to behavior that harms other people. We have laws against murder, rape, assault and robbery because, if someone murders, rapes, assaults or robs you, you are
harmed. But two people of the same sex can have erotic relations and it effects you in no way. Even if the idea of erotic relations with a member of the same sex repulses or disgusts you, the solution is simply for you to not have erotic relations with a member of your own sex. To quote Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg.
This standard of harm to others MUST be the standard for the criminal law or else
society is confronted with a situation in which the different religious and ideological groups can only come to blows in a fight to seize control of the state in order to force their views on everyone else. And this limit on the law includes both outlawing the behavior of a group we dislike and passing discrimatory laws against them, such as denying them the right to get married.
And lastly, one has to wonder about and look askance at a religious group that
continually lobbies against a group whose behavior does not hurt them in any way. WHY CAN'T THEY LEAVE THE REST OF US ALONE?
Robert Halfhill
2700 Park Avenue, Apt 1401
Mpls, MN, 55407

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"CONFESSIONS: OF "WITCHES" TO INQUISITION PROVES TORTURE DOESN'T WORK

2009-06-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

Robert Halfhill
2700 Park Avenue, Apt 1401
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55407-1038
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno

May 22, 2009

Star Tribune
425 Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55488-0002

Those who are arguing that torture obtained vital information and "saved American
lives" need only consider the truthfulness of the "confessions" obtained by the Medieval Inquisition. We all know that the accused witches "confessions" to flying through the air and having erotic encounters with the Devil were false and given only to stop the torture. The "confessions" given under "enhanced interrogation at Guantanomo are equally useless and are not even admissible in court to prosecute the alleged terrorists.
The United States prosecuted the Japanese interrogators who water boarded captured American soldiers during World War II as war criminals. Whether water boarding is a war crime has already been settled under American law so it onlyremains to prosecute those federal officials who approved it. This includes George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And since it has now come out that prominent Democrats, such as Nancy (Impeachment off the table) Pelosi knew along with the Republicans about these war crimes, surely it is well past time for Americans to transfer their allegiance to a fresh start with a new third party.

Robert Halfhill

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DOES ANYONE STILL BELIEVE THAT SUPPORTING THE DEMOCRATS AS THE LESSER EVIL IS A VIABLE STRATEGY

2008-02-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

Date : Tue, Feb 05, 2008 06:49 PM
DOES ANYONE STILL BELIEVE THAT SUPPORTING THE DEMOCRATS AS THE LESSER EVIL IS A VIABLE
STRATEGY?
BY ROBERT HALFHILL

I can't understand why the majority of progressives continue to believe that supporting the democratic Party will do much good. For example, impeachment is the most important issue facing us, given that Bush was never elected, having been APPOINTED by the Supreme Court in 2000 and STEALING the election of 2004. Bush and Cheney are behind the loss of our civil liberties de jure, although not yet de facto, taking the power to declare anyone an enemy combattant and secretly imprisoning them without the right of habaeus corpus or a
fair trial, or even any trial at all. He has introduced torture. He has pushed through legislation allowing him to spy on our emails and phone calls, been malfesant with respect to his duties as Commander In Chief by fabricating the intelligence, i.e. lying, to get us into the disaster of the Iraq invasion, and, when Joseph Wilson objected, committed treason by outing Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. The list goes on.

The issue on that list which renders all other issues minuscule by comparison is 9/11. If you look at pictures of the World Trade Center after 9/11, the majority of the buildings mass is piled up on the surface area that the buildings stood on instead of being scattered all over the surounding area. Only controlled demolition with thermate explosives to melt and cut through the supporting steel girders can bring a building down like this. Yet not only did the twin towers collapse on their footprints but World Trade Center 7, which was not even struck by an airplane, collapsed on its footprint. Numerous experts on fire behavior have testified that never before or since 9/11 has a protected steel framed building collapsed solely because of fire. The steel girders were cut at the precise angle that girders are cut in controlled demolitions. The buildings fell at almost free fall speed, which could not have happened if the upper floors had had to crash through the lower floors on their way to the ground. The buildings falling would have only broken the concrets composing them into chunks and the fall would not have released enough energy to reduce the concret and other material in the buildings to powder; only the energy released by thermate explosives could do that. And Peofessor Steven Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, analysed samples of the dust from the World Trade Centers and found traces of thermate!

The hijackers flew the hijacked the four planes all over the northeastern United States, in the world's most well defended airspace, before three of them crashed into their targets. Only the U.S. government could have managed to sneak explosives into the buildings, especially since several government intelligence agencies had their offices in the same buildings. But still, many have argued that even the U.S. government could not have planted the explosives without being detected. Even if we could not explain HOW they did this, we are still left with the overwhelming evidence that they DID. But when we learn that Jeb Bush's company was in charge of security for both the World Trade Center and both American Airlines and United Airlines, the two companies whose planes were hijacked on 9/11, that some floors of the World Trade Center were vacant in the period before 9/11, that WTC tenants heard banging sounds and objects being moved around on the vacant floors, that a fine dusts entered their offices from the vacant floors, and that the janitor at the World Trade Center, William Rodriquez, heard loud noises from the vacant floors one night when he was alone in the building, and even heard these sounds when he entered one of the vacant floors to investigate before he was frightened away, then it is much easier to understand how the 9/11 conspitators were able to wire WTC 1, 2, and 7 with explosives without being detected.

The conspirators motive is also obvious when we realize that 9/11 catapulted Bush from very low in the polls to their upper reaches and that it provoked a right wing reaction in the United States that enabled Bush-Cheney and the neo cons to embark on course of suppressing civil liberties and wars of conquest.

Yet Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table even before she assumed her post as Speaker of the House. John Conyers, in spite of the massive tome he produced on the theft of the 2004 elections, refuses to hold hearings or do anything else about it, and has even
had Cindy Shehan and others who protested by sitting in at his office arrested. His telling you that impeachment is not off the table is meaningless if he refuses to do anything about it. Impeachment is the most crucial issue we are facing since it is necessary to stop our country's slide into dictatorship. The electorate, many of whom
were hoping for impeachment, put the Democrats back in control of Congress in 2006. On this one crucial issue alone, if the Democrats won't call impeachment hearings, WAS THERE ANY BENEFIT FROM ALL THE TIME, MONEY AND EFFORT SPENT ON ELECTING THEM?

The Iraq war is the next most crucial issue. And I am not impressed by the Democrats plea that they must have 60 votes before they can override Bush's veto in order to end the Iraq War. Each time a bill to appropriate further money for the war is introduced, it requires 50% plus one of the votes to pass. The Democrats could end the invasion of Iraq by simply voting against further money for the war, leaving Bush and Cheney with no alternative but to pull the troops out.

Single payer is the ONLY way of containing our rising and exhorbitant health care costs but Hiliary Clinton tells us the majority won't accept it. If single payer is the only way of containing health care costs, then the only rational alternative is to keep campaigning for it until the majority is convinced to support it.

So I ask all those who campaigned for the Democratic Party. Was it worth all your time, effort and money if the Democrats won't do anything about impeachment, the Iraq war, and single payer health care? Rob Kall, owner and moderator of OpEdNews, has argued that a third party can never win enough seats to pass their legislation under our present electoral system. But even under our present electoral system, there have been cases where a third party has displaced one of the two major parties. The Whig Party went into the dustbin of history when a new third party, the Republican Party, was founded in 1856 and went on to displace the Whig Party.

I know you will argue that building a third party will take so much time as to be useless as a near term solution. But the evidence is in that your chances of success are zero by supporting the Democratic Party. So though it may take several electoral cycles, a strategy that has a chance of working in the long term is preferable to a strategy that has zero chances of success. You may argue that our present problems are so accute that we don't have time to build a third party. But you won't accomplish anything on these accute issues anyway with a strategy that has zero chances of working. I am sure you can find some legslation, out of all the legislation Congress has passed since the 2006 elections, where the Democrats have been preferable to the Republicans. But if, even after electing them, the Democrats refuse to do anything about impeachment, ending the Iraq war, and single payer, your efforts have been wasted and the results don't justify the time, effort and money you have put into them. So your only alternative to a strategy whose chances of succeeding are zero, it to buckle down to the effort of building a third party.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

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hOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE HEARING CONFIRMS THAT NO PROTECTED STEEL FRAMED BUILDING HAD EVER COLLAPSED FROM FROM FIRE ALONE

2008-02-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

FRAMED BUILDING HAD Since I published my article, TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11, on the Atheists For Human Rights meetup, I have become involved in a running debate with someone with the user name of Tom of Darwin. One of my replies to him is published below. It provided additional support to the points I made in TOO MANY ...

Tom:
Flight AA77, which struck the Pentagon, made a 170 degree turn while simultaneously descending 7000 feet to send up flying only a few feet above the lawn as it flew into the Pentagon. Not only would a pilot with only a few hours of training on a simulator have been unable to perform this maneuver but even military top gun pilots say they would be unable to perform this maneuver. In fact, skilled pilots have said no civilian aircraft would have been able to do this.
Two of the experts who testified before the House Committee On Science May 1, 2002 Hearing On the Collapse of the World Trade Center, experts whose testimony I read in the document you sent me, said the there had NEVER BEFORE been a collapse of a protected,
steel framed building because of fire. Dr. W. Gene Corley, American Society of Civil Engineers and Chair of the Building Performance Assesment Team reviewing the WTC disaster said on page 76 of the hearing record that "prior to these events, no protected steel frame structure, the most common form of large commercial construction in the United States, has ever experienced a fire-induced collapse." Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology said on page 103, "The Twin Towers and WTC 7 are the only known cases of total structural collapse where fire played a significant role." So we have here an admission by a spokesperson for NIST that allegedly accounted for the collapses that fire had never before brought about such a collapse of a protected, steel framed building. And Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute said of page 133, "Up until 9/11, we never had a collapse of a protected steel building." On page 163 he said, "This was the first time we had the collapse of a protected steel structure." Dr. Bement said on page 169, "...there have been instances where buildings have had major fires that have burned to completion without the buildings collapsing." And on page 172, Dr. Barnett said of the partial collapse of WTC 5, "But building 5 was a normal building and it had a fire and it had a major collapse. This has never happened before."
I subscribe to SCIENCE NEWS and the August 25, 2007 had an article about the collapse of the World Trade Center on pages 122 - 24 entitled FIRE INSIDE: STRUCTURAL DESIGN WITH FIRE SAFETY IN MIND by Carolyn Berry. The paragraph in the first column on page 124 is
particularly significant in evaluating the NIST computer simulation of the collapse of WTC 7:"The NIST simulation, like all models of building failures to date, couldn't follow the 9/11 collapses through to the end. No computer is yet powerful enough to follow the chaotic sequence of events that ensues when components break apart and a
building falls, but this is where research is headed."
In other words, the much vaunted NIST simulation which purported to dispose of the arguments of we conspiracy theorists didn't actually demonstrate how fire caused the
buildings to collapse; they just waved their hands when the computingpower currently available had took them as far as it could and said: "This is far enough; the buildings collapsed somewhere about here." Of course we all know we have accounted for how the buildings probably collapsed once we have gone this far. It HAS to be the probable explanation because the only alternative explanation is those NUTTY, WACKO CONSPIRACY THEORIES! We know a priori that that CAN'T be true!
I might as well add the statement of Allen Hay, chief fire safety officer of the New York City Fire Department, about WTC 7. "We just expected it to burn out -- we didn't expect it to fall down." "It's the only building I know in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire."
But I want to return to the repeated Congressional testimony that a protected, steel framed building have NEVER BEFORE collapsed because of fire. And never afterwards either. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we have a purported fact about the behavior of protected,
steel framed buildings in fire that dare not be true again!
You say that 9/11 was the first time a protected, steel framed building had had an airplane crash into it and knock the asbestos insulation off its steel girders. Actually smaller planes have struck skyscrapers. It happened to the Empire State Building in 1929
and 1942. But this may well be the first time a 757 has crashed into a skyscraper.
However protected, steel framed buildings have caught fire in earthquakes (I remember seeing a movie about the Los Angeles earthquake of 1906 watching high rise buildings burn.) and
earthquakes can shake asbestos insulation loose better than a 757 can. The effect of a 757 on a building is minuscule compared to the effect of an earthquake. But we know that if the buildings weren't toppled by the earthquakes, the fires never caused them to collapse. We know this because of the repeated and reiterated testimony before the Congressional Committee that NO protected, steel framed building prior to 9/11 had EVER collapsed solely because of fire. Once again, NIST has given us an assertion about the behavior of steel framed buildings in fire that dare not ever be true again!
I have not yet had the time to check all the claims in the extensive material you emailed me. But as for the claim that the molten metal at the bottom of the wreckage of the World Trade Center could have been molten aluminum, molten aluminum has a silvery
color. The molten metal that spilled down the sides of the World Trade Center had a bright yellow color, indicative of molten steel at a much higher temperature. Some portions of it glowed white hot because of an even higher temperature.
You are no doubt aware of the pressure the Bush Administration put on officials to report the results they wanted to hear. Generals in Iraq kept being replaced until they not only reported that they could be successful but sucessful with the number of troops the Bush Administration allocated. The Bush Admistration kept demanding intelligence that there were weapons of mass desruction in Iraq until they got it. So it is not surprising that those federal employees in NIST produced the results Bush wanted. Nist is part of the Department of Commerce whose head is a member of Bush's cabinet. Philip Zelikow, who ran the 9/11 Commission hearings was a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and as such part of Bush's inner circle. So when you juxtapose the enormous number of experts cited in the NIST report against the few I cite, you are not citing a vast number of independent experts but a vast number of federal employees whose livelihood depended on remaining in the good graces of an administration known for not demanding the facts but the assertions of facts they wanted.
Finally, a number of people have rejected the controlled demolition theory of 9/11 on the grounds that there is no way they could have planted all the explosives without being caught. But the crucial consideration is that there is no way the World Trade Center
buildings could have collapsed on their footprint without being brought down by a controlled demolition. That is the only way of bringing buildings down without either demolishing it brick by brick and girder by girder or knocking them all over their surroundings. Since we know the buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions, our task is to figure out how they planted the explosives without being caught instead of arguing that they couldn't have brought the building down by controlled demolition because they couldn't have preplanted the explosives without being caught.
An analogy might be a person in the 1940's who believed it was impossible to make an atomic bomb. If that person had been in Hiroshima on July 6, 1945, they would have known it was possible to construct an atomic bomb even if they still didn't know how to do it
themself.
Robert Halfhill

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YOU WILL HAVE BROUGHT THE CONSEQUENCES ON YOURSELF IF YOU ALLOW THE DRUG WAR TO CONTINUE

2007-10-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

I sent the following letter to the STAR TRIBUNE.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

Robert Halfhill
125 Oak Grove, Apt 41
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

October 10, 2007

Star Tribune
Letters
425 Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55488

The consequences of the war on drugs are becoming clearer and clearing according to the 10/10/07 STAR TRIBUNE and if the people of Minnesota allow the government to continue it, they will have to pay the taxes to build another 1000 inmate prison every two years until 2030 and pay for the support of 23,319 prisoners. And you will continue to suffer these consequences until you realize that the drugs other people use in no way harms you. If you don't want to use drugs, then don't use them yourself. This is particularly clear with marijuana which has many medical uses according to the Institute of Medicine and other medical authorities. You are currently paying for the imprisonment of nearly one-fourth of this year's inmates and you do not have the prison space to lock up the murderers, rapists and armed robbers we need to be protected from.
You do not deserve the consequences of the back breaking taxes needed to build eleven 1000 inmate prisons and the crime wave you will suffer because you don't have the prison space to keep the real criminals locked up long enough. But if you don't end the drug war, you will have brought it on yourself.

Sincerely,
Robert Halfhill

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POLICE ASSAULT ON AL HIXON

2007-10-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

I emailed this letter to the STAR TRIBUNE on Thursday, October 4, 2007.

The jury quite properly held the city of Golden Valley liable for $778,000 in
damages for the police assault on Al Hixon. But several addional points need to be made.
First, there are several hundred thousand Blacks living in this metro area so the
police need to understand that, if they receive a report of a Black person committing a
crime, the next Black person they come across is very, very unlikely to be the criminal
they are looking for. Those of us who are white never have to fear that, if the police
receive a report of a white person committing a crime, the police will pile onto us if we
are the next white person they encounter. All local, state and federal governments that
employ police need to explain this simple fact that even a child can understand to the
police they employ and make it clear that violating this understanding means they will be
fired.
While the police may use whatever force is necessary to subdue a criminal resisting
arrest, there is absolutely no need to shoot pepper spray up the nostrils and into the
lungs of somone already on the ground and being handcuffed. This is torture, not
legitimate use of force by the police. It is also assault and a felony. The policeman
who shot the pepper spray into Al Hixon's lungs should not only be barred from ever being
a policeman again but he should also be prosecuted for the felony of assault.
Robert Halfhill
125 Oak Grove, Apt 41
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308
Phone: 612-870-9026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

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DON'T JUST LEAVE THE DEMOCRATS;BUILD A NEW PARTY

2007-09-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

I posted this comment on the Minnesota Green Party discussion list after David Lindorff's article in COUNTERPUNCH on resigning from the Democratic was posted on the GP discussion list.
Robert Halfhill

Perhaps this would be a good time to contribute my comment in response to another
article on resigning from the Democratic Party that David Lindorff published on OpEdNews.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

rhalfhill
DON'T JUST LEAVE; BUILD A THIRD PARTY

For those of you who are arguing that we don't have time to pressure the Democratic
Party into changing its stripes, unless you change your thinking, it will NEVER be the
time and you will still be arguing we don't have time in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020...

In 2004, many antiwar voters supported John Kerry as the lesser evil candidate, a
lesser evil candidate who said he would have been for going into Iraq EVEN IF he had known
that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and that he would send more troops
"if the generals asked for them." It should be a nobrainer that you cannot
oppose the war on Iraq by supporting a candidate who says he would have been for invading
even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction there and that he would
send more troops "if the generals asked for them." Since lesser evil support of
Kerry was totally futile, no harm would have resulted from spending your time on another
totally futile tactic.

But actually, by leaving the Democratic Party, you would have opened up the alternative
of spending your time on building an independent third party, even if that tactic did not
produce results in time for the election.

In fact by throwing their energies into campaigning for Kerry, antiwar voters actually
hurt their cause. You probably remember the massive antiwar demonstrations of 2002 and
early 2003. There were estimates that, worldwide, fifteen million people came out in to
the streets to oppose the war. But in late 2003 and 2004, those mass demonstrations
vanished because people had dropped what they were doing to campaign for Kerry. The
antiwar movement still hasn't recovered the strength it had in 2002.

In 2004, in spite of his good positions on many issue, Kucinich adhered to party
discipline and supported the Democratic endorsed candidates, including Kerry. Unless
Kucinich leaves that rotten party, supporting him is also a waste of time for opponents of
the war on Iraq.

According to historian Mark Lause, people have been going into the Democratic Party to
reform it since 1871 and it has never worked. Don't you think it is time to try some
other tactic?

Edward Maynick pointed out an even deeper reason why going into the Democratic Party to
reform it can never work. Even if, after failing to take over the Democratic Party for
136 years, you somehow managed to get a majority of delegates in the Democratic Party and
elected new party officers, those who are funding the Democratic party are not going to
spend money on a party that doesn't support their interests. They will either transfer
their support to the Republicans or, since the ruling class in this country has benefited
from having two partys to keep the voters going back and forth from one to the other,
transfer their support to building another ruling class party so they can maintain their
duopoly. A minority of voters may still keep voting Democratic out of habit, but, once
those multi millions of ruling class dollars are pulled out and the ruling class media
start publicizing their new party, you'd be surprised how quickly even most of those
habitual Democratic votes vanish before the next election.

So David Lindorff, I would recomend that you go even further and not only resign from
the Democratic Party but spend your time tryng to build an independent third party. If
the Green Party nominates Ralph Nader in 2008, I would recomend that you devote your
efforts to building the Green Party. But if the Green Party gives in to the pressure from
hysterical liberals accusing them of electing the Republicans as they did in 2004, and
runs another safe states, covert lesser evil candidate who does not make a serious attempt
to campaign in states where he or she is afraid of throwing the election to the
Republicans, as the GP did in 2004, then it will still be necessary to build A third
party, even if it is not the Greens.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

by rhalfhill (1 articles, 63 comments) on Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 4:34:47 PM

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REPLY TO MARIE CASTLE

2007-08-17T03:16:00.000-07:00

8/17/07
After I posted TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11 in the ATHEIST FOR Human Rights meetup, I received an emailed reply from Marie Castle. I published this reply on one of the 9/11 Truth group's meetups.

REPLY TO MARIE CASTLE OF ATHEISTS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
By Robert Halfhill

All I said in the "off the wall" question I asked Ellison was that
since the families of the 9/11 victims wanted a new investigation
because 9/10ths of their questions were not answered, and the Co-
Chairs of the 9/11 Commission had called for a new investigation,
would he, Ellison, call for a new investigation? The DISSENTING
conspiracy theory I support, as opposed to the OFFICIAL conspiracy
theory that a religious fanatic hiding in a cave in Afghanistan
directed 19 men with box cutters to infiltrate the U.S., hijack some
planes, and crash them into buildings, was not presented until I sent
out my article, TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11. As you
yourself have pointed out, people often ask public officials about a
variety of issues when they appear at public forums, so if that was
the reason the off the wall opponent of dissenting views about 9/11
considered my question off the wall, he was off the wall. I have
never defended, and in fact disagree with, the statement that there
were no terrorists, so I do not see the relevance of bringing that
up. I also disagree with those who say that there were no planes but
missiles instead and with Jim Fetzer's off the wall contention that
the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by powerful lasers
beamed down from space satellites.
I do agree with you that Bush, Cheney and the other neo cons knew
about Al Qaida's planned attack and let them succeed. They let Al
Qaida succeed instead of thwarting them at the last minute because a
thwarted attack would not have produced enough of the shock and awe
that Bush, Cheney and the neo cons needed. (Cheney may be the real
power behind the throne.) But planes hitting and damaging the World
Trade Center would not have produced the absolute super patriotic
hysteria that the neo cons needed.
I originally thought that the claim that explosives were pre
planted to bring about the controlled demolition of the World Trade
Center was a crackpot theory. But them I remembered the dissonance
in the back of my mind when the press reported that most of the mass
of the World Trade Center buildings was piled up on the surface area
the buildings stood on instead of being flung all over their
surroundings. Then I remembered the controlled demolition of
downtown Minneapolis buildings and that controlled demolition was the
only way to collapse buildings on to the surface they stood on.
I too had disagreed with the controlled demolition theory because
I did not see how anyone could sneak enough people into the buildings
to pre plant the explosives. But then I realized that most of the
workers need not even know what they were. doing. The explosives
could be conceaked inside containers of some sort and the workers
could have been told that they were hooking the leads from the
containers into the buildings' electrical systems to upgrade the
electrical systems or, alternatively, to improve the transmission of
email messages among all the computers in the buildings.
And then it turns out that President Bush's brother, Marvin, is
part owner of the company that provided security for not only the
World Trade Center but also for the two airlines whose planes were
hijacked on 9/11.
For these reasons as well as all the other reasons I cited in my
article, I have gone from believing that the neo cons let 9/11 happen
to they made it happen, simply because that is where the evidence
leads. It is not a question of whether I and others "need" to go
from let it happen to made it happen.
And 9/11 is relevent to the purview of an Atheist group simply
because one of the aims of the neo cons in making 9/11 happen is to
enshrine fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity as the state
religion of their new American Empire and make it mandatory for all
to profess.
Robert Halfhill

TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11

2007-07-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11
By Robert Halfhill

I guess those of us who see many unexplained discrepancies with
the official government account of 9/11 owe a debt of thanks to
Katherine Kiersten. Although I am sure it was not her intention, by
launching another attack on Keith Ellison, she inadvertently brought
9/11 back into public discussion, and provided another opportunity to
break through the media blackout on views that dissent from the
official conspiracy theory that an Islamic terrorist organization,
headquartered in Afghanistan, sent 19 men with box cutters to
infiltrate the United states to hijack four plane a wreak appalling
destruction by crashing them into buildings.
The first question about the official story is that since the
World Trade Center had already been attacked by terrorists once
before in 1993 and it remained the one place where a successful
terrorist act would make the greatest impression, why was there no
attempt to guard the WTC or prepare defenses? I remember thinking in
1993 that the terrorists had to only be successful once while we had
to be successful every time.
Second, the U.S. government received at least eleven warnings from
foreign intelligence services about Al Qaida's plan for a big attack
on the United States before they struck the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. Again, why were no counter measures prepared?
Third, the Minneapolis FBI tried to obtain approval from the FISA
Court to look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after he was arrested
for being in the country illegally. But as Minneapolis FBI agent
Coleen Rowley testified to a Senate hearing, the National FBI Office
even rewrote the Minneapolis Office's request to FISA so it failed to
be approved.
Fourth, the Phoenix FBI Office had noticed the large number of
Middle Eastern men enrolling for flight training. Someone from the
Phoenix Office pointed out to the National Office that a plane could
be used as a weapon.
Fifth, there is the mind boggling incompetence of both the
civilian air traffic control system and the military North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The civilian air traffic control
system's radar can detect a plane going off course immediately, as
soon as it deviates from its flight plan. Boston Air Traffic Control
detected American Airlines Flight 11 going off course as soon as it
deviated from its flight plan at 8:14 A.M. on September 11, 2001.
But it did not notify several other air traffic control centers until
8:25 A.M., eleven minutes later. But it did not notify NORAD until
8:40 A.M.The two F-15 Eagles that were eventually scrambled from Otis
Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which was 153
miles northwest of the World Trade Center and which had a top speed
of over 1875 miles per hour, could have reached the WTC in seven
minutes with more than enough time to intercept AA 11 if the F-15's
had been in the air soon after 8:14 A.M or even 8:25 A.M. However,
the F-15's were not in the air until 8:52 A.M., six minutes after AA
11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 A.M. If
NORAD had been informed and had the F-15's in the air soon after AA
11 was detected going off course at 8:14 A.M., there would have been
far more than enough time to intercept it.
At 8:42:32 A.M., there was a suspicious radio transmission from
United Airlines Flight 175 which sounded something like "everyone
stay in your seats." Boston Air Traffic Control informed NORAD that
UA 175 had been hijacked at 8:41:32 and there would have been more
than enough
time for the two F-15"s, which were air borne by 8:52 A.M. to
intercept UA 175 before it hit the South Tower at 9:02:54 A.M. That
is there would have been more than enough time if the two F-15's had
not been flying at only 23.9% of their top speed!
At 8:55 A.M., Barbara Olson called her husband, Solicitor General
Theodore Olson from American Airlines Flight 77 to tell him that the
plane had been hijacked. Since Theodore Olson was a high government
official, we may assume that he informed the government shortly
afterwards. AA 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M. At their top speed,
the two F-15's could have intercepted AA 77 twenty-four minutes
before it hit the Pentagon.
At 9:55 A.M., United Airlines Flight 93 went of course near
Cleveland and began a 135 degree turn over Ohio and Northern
Kentucky. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at10:06:05 A.M.
Human stupidity can account for a lot and even mount to civil or
even criminal negligence. But when there is a series of one
incredible, mind boggling stupidity after another, there has to be a
malign intent to bring about the opposite of what officials are
supposedly trying to achieve, in this case to ensure that the
hijackers succeed. But there's more!
Six, why did the government officials ship most of the steel from
the World Trade Center out of the country, even though it is a felony
to remove evidence from a crime scene. In the October, 1975 issue of
NEW CIVIL ENGINEER, Dave Parker writes in "WTC Investigators Resist
Call For Collapse Visualization" that nearly all the WTC steel was
shipped out to Asia and melted down for recycling.
Seven, Why did the Bush Administration fight against having public
hearings on 9/11 for nearly 18 months although public hearings on
Pearl Harbor were held within weeks after the event? 9/11 hearings
were not held until the relatives of those killed at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon exerted enough lobbying pressure to force the
hearings to be held, and even then, only one-tenth of their questions
were answered.
And eight, why did the government not even allow the visitors to
the site of the World Trade Center to even take photographs of the
ruins and why did the government confiscate photos and videos of the
attack on the Pentagon? Could both seven and eight be part of an
attempt to hide evidence of government complicity?
In his editorial, "Selling out the Investigation," in the January,
2002 FIRE ENGINEERING, William Manning wrote that "Fire Engineering
has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed
by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) ... is a half baked
farce that may already have been
commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it
mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." Manning also criticized
the investigation in another editorial, "The Twisted Brush of 9/11
Politics" in the September, 2004 FIRE ENGINEERING.
Robert Berhinig, P.E. states in "Protecting the Foundation of Fire-
Safety," in the July/August, 2002 IAEI (International Association of
Electrical Inspectors, the definitive magazine for electrical
inspectors) that "the FEMA report states further that until the
attack on the WTC, no protected steel framed buildings had been known
to collapse as a result of a fire." Yet on 9/11, after steel framed
buildings had been around for over a hundred years, since the late
1800's, three protected steel framed buildings, WTC 1, 2, and 7, had
collapsed, supposedly because of fire.
There are many other suspicious anomalies about 9/11. Only a few
are nine, all three World Trade Center buildings collapsed at nearly
free fall speed, i.e. almost as fast as it would take an object
dropped from one of the WTC building's roof to reach the ground. The
resistance of the massive steel columns and concrete would have
slowed the fall considerably if it had been a matter of the floors
pancaking and falling on the floors below. And ten, fire would have
unlikely to have been equally intense at every point in the buildings
so that they fell onto the surface area they stood on, i.e. on to
their footprint. Eleventh, although fire had never caused the
girders in protected steel framed buildings to become ductile or
loose sufficient strength to result in a building collapse, pools of
molten steel remained at the bottom of the wreckage for 100 days.
And twelve, although an ordinary building collapse would produce
chunks of broken concrete, the steel, concrete and asbestos in the
three World Trade Center buildings was mostly converted to a fine
dust which flowed out from the WTC through the streets of Manhattan
in the manner of the pyroclastic
flows produced from volcanoes. And Thirteen, although the buildings
were not even observed to move at all when the planes crashed into
them, nearby geological observatories detected seismic tremblors as
if there had been massive explosions at ground level when the
buildings collapsed. And while WTC 7 had not even been struck by a
plane, all the phenomena previously mentioned accompanied its
collapse also. And fourteen, while the Environmental Protection
Agency said that the air around the World Trade Center was safe to
breath after 9/11, we now know that our government lied yet again
because of all the deaths from asbestosis and other respiratory
diseases among both the humans and dogs who were involved in the WTC
cleanup. And fifteen, while it is standard procedure for the secret
service to hustle the President away from the scene immediately
whenever there is a hint of danger, George Bush remained in the
Florida elementary school reading "My Pet Goat" for nearly a half an
hour, even though there was supposedly no assurance that there would
not be an attempt to crash a plane into the school.
And although the Bush Administration attempted to ship all the
steel from the World Trade Center to China and Korea, some of the
steel girders were saved by 9/11 investigators. And the massive
amounts of metal in the dust which surged out from the WTC collapse
provided additional metal for investigators to study. Brigham Young
University Professor of Physics, Steven E. Jones obtained some of the
metal containing dust after he had published his first paper about
9/11 online in November, 2005. Janette Mackinlay had returned to her
apartment on the fourth floor of 113 Cedar Street, which was about
100 meters, or 328 feet, away from the South Tower, about a week
after her apartment had been flooded with dust to clean up. She had
saved some of the dust in a plastic bag and mailed some of it to
Jones after he published his first paper online. Later, he traveled
to MacKinlay's new residence in California and obtained a second
sample of WTC dust in the presence of other scientists.
In his subsequent online paper, "Revisiting 9/11, 2001 -- Applying
the Scientific Method," Professor Jones reported that the dust
contained clear traces of thermate. Thermate is an explosive used to
melt and cut steel in controlled building demolitions. It is a well
mixed powder of iron, aluminum and sulfur. The sulfur lowers the
melting point of iron, or steel, and cuts right through it.
Sometimes other metallic powders are mixed in to fine tune the
characteristics of the explosives. Doctor Jones found all of these
substances in the dust.
David Heller, who has degrees in physics and engineering, makes
many of the same points Dr. Jones made in Heller's article, "TAKING A
CLOSE LOOK; HARD SCIENCE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER,"
in the June 18, 2007 GARLIC AND GRASS. After he states that the
collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings was a controlled
demolition brought about by pre-planted thermate explosives, it would
seem impossible for Al Qaida to preplant the explosives, especially
since WTC 7 housed the offices of the FBI, CIA, and OEM. But he says
that recently he learned that President George Bush's brother, Marvin
Bush, is a part owner of the company that provides security for the
World Trade Center buildings but also both United and American
Airlines, the two airlines whose planes were hijacked on 9/11. He
also pointed out that the owner of the World Trade Center, Larry
Silverstein, had received a $3.55 billion insurance settlement after
9/11 and was suing for an additional $3.55 billion on the grounds
that the airplane crashes into the Twin Towers constituted two
separate incidents.
However, regardless of Silverstein's motives, it is unlikely that
he could have played a major role in planting the explosives in the
building containing the offices of the FBI, CIA and OEM. Only the
United States government could have carried that off and Silverstein,
at most, could have played no more than a subsidiary role.
The final step in a criminal investigation is asking who had the
motive to do the crime. Whose poll numbers shot up into the
stratosphere after 9/11 and who gained the popular support to enable
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, abolish habaeus corpus and, at
least, the de jure power to lock anyone up for life without a trial
or even telling them why they were being imprisoned? Only the neo
cons and the Bush Administration, although Bush may be only a front
man and Dick Cheney the real power behind the throne. It was the neo
con Project for a New American Century who proposed that the U.S.
seize the lands where the world's dwindling supply of oil is located
and who were quoted in NEWSWEEK as saying that the American people
may need a new Pearl Harbor to wake them up.
But if enough people realize in time just how bad our government
is, we can counter them before it is too late.
Robert Halfhill
125 Oak Grove, Apt 41
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

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COMMENT ON "THE EVIL OF LESSER EVIL VOTING."

2007-06-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

THIS IS A COMMENT ON THE GREEN PARTY OF MINNESOTA DISCUSSION LIST ABOUT A PREVIOUS POST ENTITLED "THE EVILS OF lESSER EVIL VOTING," THE PREVIOUS POST HAD DISCUSSED HOW VOTING FOR THE LESSER EVIL MAKES YOU COMPROMIST AND ABANDON YOUR IDEALS.

I have a vivid example of just how lesser evil voting causes
people to compromise and virtually destroy their ideals. But first,
I must
take up some space to convey just how bad the Democrats were in this
instance and how far this person was willing to go in abandoning
his ideals.
I became aware of this situation when a former resident of a
Minneapolis suburb, who was then an inmate at Parchman State Prison
in
Mississippi, wrote to ACT-UP/Minnesota seeking help. Most of the HIV
positive inmates at Parchman were getting virtually no medical care,
only
a few even receiving AZT and none getting the three drug treatment
and regular viral load monitoring that in 1997 was becoming the
standard of care for HIV/AIDS. The temperatures in Parchman would
typically reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summers, which with
the humidity common in the Gulf states, was equivalent to 115 to 120
degrees. And any medical professional will tell you that high
temperatures can be deadly to anyone who is debilitated for any
reason, whether it be cancer, AIDS or any other debilitating
illness.
HIV positive inmates would die periodically because of the heat. The
prison
plumbing was so bad that when the toilet in one cell was flushed, the
toilet in the adjacent cell would overflow and drip down onto the
bedding of the inmate in the cell below. During the summer inmates
would have to constantly bat flies away from their food in the mess
hall and, given the propensity of flies to fly around and alight at
random, it is a statistical certainty that some of these flies had
been crawling around in the toilet waste before they alighted on the
inmates food.
The two prison "doctors" had what one inmate descibed as "criminal
medical backgrounds," which meant that previous criminal convictions
had made it impossible for the two "doctors" to work in medicine
anywhere but in a prison. Not only were the HIV positive inmates
receiving virtually no medical care for HIV/AIDS, the inmates were
receiving little or no medical care for any other medical condition
as well. One inmate broke his hand while playing ball. A prison
nurse kept telling the "doctor" he needed to look at the inmate's
hand but the "doctor" kept saying there was nothing wrong with his
hand. He was in pain and in danger of losing his hand for eleven
days
before he was finally transferred to the University of Mississippi
Medical Center. Another inmate had injured his back in an automobile
accident and needed a special mattress. The "doctor" told him that
he had "injured his back before coming to prison" and that "it was
his
responsibility to fix it."
Needless to say, these conditions were equivalent to the death
camps of Nazi Germany and the former Yugoslavia for inmates with
HIV/AIDS.
Now to the point. I had voted for a third party in 1996 after
Wellstone had stated that "marriage was for a man and a woman" and
announced his intention to vote for the Defense Of Marriage Act. But
with Bush running against Gore, I was weakening and thinking that
maybe I had better vote for Gore in 2000. It was then that I read in
the November, 1998 POZ magazine that the same ACLU attorney who was
working on the Parchman case, Margaret Winter, was looking forward to
appealing a case about inmates with HIV/AIDS in Alabama prisons to
the Supreme Court when the Clinton/Gore Administration had filed a
brief on Alabama's side, arguing that the consequences of prisoners
contracting AIDS were so grave that prisoners with HIV had to be
segregated from the other inmates. This segregation included HIV
positive inmates not even being allowed to attend chapel services
with other prisoners. Although the Clinton/Gore Administration
argued that this segregation was necessary, only South Carolina,
Alabama and Mississippi segregated HIV positive prisoners. But
Clinton/Gore took the position of the most backward, AIDSphobic,
bigoted parts of the country. POZ
described Alabama prisons as the WORST for HIV positive inmates which
meant, if that is accurate, that the Alabama system that
Clinton/Gore had intervened on the side of, was even WORSE than
Mississippi's.
All this, of course, put a stop to any thoughts on my part of
voting for the Democratic Party and, with an Al Gore rally coming up
in downtown Minneapolis on October 28, 2000, I began preparing a
leaflet to distribute at the the rally. I called up a person who had
been very active in ACT-UP/Minnesota, who had in fact been described
by one AIDS activist as having been "known as Mr. ACT-UP," to ask for
help in financing the leaflet and confronting Al Gore. He replied
that "I don't think Gore needs to be confronted right now" with the
tight race he was in with Bush. In the course of the conversation, I
finally said, "SO YOU THINK THE PARCHMENT INMATES WILL JUST HAVE TO
SUFFER FROM THOSE CONDITIONS UNTIL GORE GETS ELECTED?" He
replied, "YES."
I did distribute the leaflet at the Gore rally which
concluded, "Regardless of which party you support, surely common
decency should compel everyone to hold the Clinton Administration
accountable." At that time, I had already decided to vote for Ralph
Nader but I concluded without an explicit Nader endorsement to make
the message easier for the Democrats to accept.
But as I said in a later version of the leaflet after someone
helped me print more copies, "The most charitable interpretation
possible of their (the DFL'ers) behavior (at the Gore rally) is that
they were too blinded by their partisan desperation to show any of
the common decency this leaflet called for. The Democratic officials
nationally and in Mississippi who allow the conditions at Parchman
State Prison to continue to exist clearly do not have any decency,
common or otherwise."
I concluded with a paragraph about the futility of voting for the
lesser evil. "The Democrats deserve their present desperation
because they have been pulling this lesser evil scam on us at least
since the Roosevelt Administration of 1932. (Added comment by R.H. --
Actually much longer. Green historian Mark Lause has documented how
supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil has been a death trap for
third parties since 1867.) When you vote for the lesser evil, the
greater evil can become even more evil and the lesser evil has room
to become even more evil also. The trend is steadily to the right
and more evil. It is time to end this disfunctional relationship and
stand up to the Democrats greater evil threat. Vote for something
good instead! VOTE FOR RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT!"
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

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MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT -- 33 YEAR OF HOMOPHOBIC RULINGS

2007-05-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT -- 33 YEARS OF HOMOPHOBIC RULINGS!

by Robert Halfhill

It is over three decades past time for the Supreme Injustices on
Minnesota's Supreme Court to realize that the Stonewall Rebellion
happened 35 years ago and that it is way past time for them to start
realizing that they are living in the 21st century, not the 20th and
certainly not the 19th. For while the legal profession would have us
believe that judges are above the political fray and issue objective
rulings based solely on the law, the Minnesota Supreme Court justices
have proven themselves to be a claque of reactionary, venal,
Neanderthal men and women, issuing decisions on the basis of their
homophobic hatreds and biases. Just a few of their homophobic
assaults on our communities are:

On May 18, 1970, Jack Baker and Mike McConnell applied for a
marriage license in Hennepin County. Gerald R. Nelson, Clerk of
Hennepin County District Court, refused to issue the license. The
Minnesota Supreme Court upheld Nelson's denial, the justices
demonstrating that their view of human history was still based on
millennia old myths by declaring that "The institution of marriage as
a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and
rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of
Genesis."

The Minnesota Supreme Bastards removed Hennepin County District
Judge Crane Winton from his judgeship on May 25, 1984 because he
would not promise NEVER to violate Minnesota's sodomy law in the
future, although heterosexual judges who had been brought up on
charges of violating Minnesota's fornication and adultery laws were
allowed to keep their positions. Supposedly liberal justice Rosalie
Wahl raised the issue that two of the hustlers Winton had had sex
with were a few months short of their 18th birthdays. This was not
part of the record when Winton's case reached the Minnesota Supreme
Court and higher courts are supposed to rule solely on the legal
record when cases reach them and not drag in matters that they have
only read about in the news media.

On December 1, 1986 the Hennepin County District Court ruled that
the sodomy statute was unconstitutional because it violated the right
of privacy. On October 2, 1987, the Minnesota Supreme Injustices
overruled the Hennepin County District Court and upheld the sodomy
statute. It was not until July 2, 2001 when Hennepin County District
Judge Delila Pierce granted class action status to her earlier ruling
that the sodomy law was unconstitutional and thereby extended it
statewide. Hennepin County did not appeal Judge Pierce's ruling,
thus making it final when the deadline for an appeal passed on August
31, 2001. If the Minnesota Supreme Court had not been thus bypassed,
the other decisions of the Supreme Buffoons do not warrant much
confidence as to what their ruling would have been if they had not
been bypassed.

On July 31, 1990 when the case of a Marshall, Minnesota landlord
who had refused to rent to an unmarried couple came before the
Minnesota Supreme Court, the Court suddenly went crazy and, in a
berserk rage, turned against twenty years of legal rulings barring
discrimination against unmarried couples. Justice Lawrence Yetka,
speaking for the majority, asked "How can there be a compelling state
interest in promoting fornication when there is a state statute
prohibiting it?" The Minnesota Human Rights Commissioner, Stephen
Cooper and others deplored the Court's ruling on September 6, 1990.
Attorneys for the Minnesota Department of Human Rights asked the
Court to reconsider its decision on September 10, 1990 but the Court
reaffirmed their reactionary ruling on October 8, 1990.

On April 2, 1993, the Minneapolis City Council voted 10/2 to
reimburse City employees for the out of pocket health care expenses
of their domestic partners. On August 27, 1993, the Minneapolis City
Council voted to provide full health benefits to the domestic
partners of City employees. In the Sunday, September 5, 1993 STAR
TRIBUNE, Lou Gelfand calculated in the "If you ran the paper" feature
on page 29A that if all 40 of the City employees who said they would
take advantage of the domestic partners benefits followed through,
the yearly cost of $87,840.00 would be less than 1% of the City's
total cost for benefits for its employees of $11,900,000.00. However
on December 28, 1993, James Lilly of North Minneapolis filed for a
temporary injunction in Hennepin County District Court to prevent the
Domestic Partners Ordinance from taking effect. Lilly was
represented by the right wing Homes School Legal Defense
Association. Judge Deborah Hedlund granted a temporary injunction of
December 30, 1992, preventing the medical benefits for the domestic
partners of City employees from being issued as scheduled at the
beginning of 1994. On June 3, 1994, Hedlund made the injunction
permanent and barred the City from even reimbursing the out of
pocket medical expenses of their employees' domestic partners. The
Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Hedlund's ruling on January 30,
1995, even though Minnesota cities had previously been allowed to act
on matters comparable in importance to providing medical benefits for
the domestic partners of City employees. The Minnesota Supreme Court
refused to even hear Minneapolis' appeal of the Appeals Court ruling
on March 31, 1995.

When Julie Goins' employer, the West Group, told her that she had
to take a five minute walk to another building to use an unisex
bathroom instead of using the women's bathroom in the building when
she worked, Goins, a male to female transsexual, sued under the
Minnesota Human Rights Act. She won in the Minnesota Appeals Court
on November 21, 2000 but the Supreme Homophobes reversed the Appeals
Court on November 29, 2001 and ruled against her on the grounds that
she had refused to tell her employer whether she had completed the
sex reassignment surgery. In other words, the West Group wanted to
know if her genitals had been altered and Goins had refused to answer
their question or submit to a genital inspection. Besides the gross
violation of the right of privacy involved in forcing Ms. Goins to
submit to an inspection of her genitals by company officials as a
condition of continued employment, medical professionals in the field
of sex reassignment surgery all require the reassignee to live as the
opposite sex for a year before their genitals are altered to minimize
the chance of the patient later regretting that they had made the
change when it was too late to alter it. The Minnesota Supreme
Court's decision would make it impossible for transsexuals to follow
their physician's instructions while they were waiting for their
final surgery.

For far too long have the reactionary Supreme Neanderthals been
getting progressively too big for their britches while pretending to
be above the political fray and issuing homophobic decisions. We
need a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Intersexed activist on
that court to begin cutting them down to size and making them realize
that they are hanging on 35 years past the Stonewall Rebellion. In
future elections, the GLBTI communities should run a full slate of
GLBTI activists and contest every seat on that court that is up for
election until we have thrown ALL the homophobes out.

DISBAR AND IMPRISON THIS EVIL, DESPICABLE MAN!

2007-05-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

REMOVE THIS EVIL DESPICABLE MAN

There ought to be a civil rights movement of felons denied their right to vote, with mass sit ins at polling places, etc. I am opposed to the above suggestion of making voting compulsory or denying people their right to vote for the sweeping and multitudinous reasons suggested above. (A previous comment on the OpEdNew article I am commenting on)

But my main comment is about Steven Biskupic, the U.S. Attorney in eastern Wisconsin. He was on the Rove/Gonzalez list of attorneys to be fired but he got off the list by prosecuting innocent citizens.

He prosecuted Georgia Thompson, an employee of the state travel office on trumped up charges of directing a state travel contract to a company that had contributed to the Democratic Governor. When Thompson's appeal reached the appelate court, the court commented on the lack of any evidence supporting Thompson's conviction and ordered her freed from prison that same day. Meanwhile, Thompson had served four months in prison and lost her house.

Citizens of a free society are supposed to be able to go about their business without having to fear that the state will single them out for a show trial and conviction as was done in the former Soviet Union and other dictatorships. Biskupic's false and political prosecution strikes at the very foundation of that right. Georgia Thompson should be given the money to buy an even better house plus punitive damages for the ordeal she has suffered. Steven Biskupic should be removed as the U.S. Attorney, disbarred and sentenced to at least ten years in prison for that trumped up prosecution alone.

But there's more. In accord with the Bush Cheney Administration policy of cutting down the number of veterans who received service connected disability, Biskupic prosecuted a 62 year old Vietnam veteran for fraud after he applied to retroactively move back the time he was eligible for benefits. He had contracted Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after seeing another service member crushed to death in the wheel well of a plane during the 1960's. The VA hearing examiner ruled that he was eligible for benefits from an earlier date. But Biskupic obtained another trumped up conviction and the veteran has now been in jail for over four months, awaiting his transfer to prison

The Republican administration tried to suppress the minority vote by alleging that there was massive voter fraud. Biskupic prosecuted 14 voters for voting before their probation ended, obtained five convictions, and some of those voters are now in prison serving several year terms.

Remove, disbar and prosecut this evil despicable man before he can prosecute and imprison more innocent citizens!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Robert Halfhill

by rhalfhill on Sunday, May 27, 2007 at 9:38:42 PM

BLISSFUL ILLUSION THAT WE ARE LIVING IN A FREE SOCIETY AND ARE THEREFORE SAFE FROM FRAMEUP, UNJUST IMPRISONMENT OR EXECUTION, TORTURE, ETC.

2007-05-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

The actions of Steven Biskupic strike at one of the most fundamental advantages of living in a free society. Citizens of a free society are able to live their lives and go about their business without having to worry that they will be singled out because of some political motives they don't even know about, subjected to a show trial, framed, and imprisoned or executed. Mr. Biskupic has done one of the most despicable actions it is possible to do, pick out an innocent person and frame and imprison her because of political motives.

Although Georgia Thompson may never be able to be made whole because of what has been done to her, the federal government should have to pay MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in damages so that Ms. Thompson can buy an even better house than the one she lost because of her unjust prosecution. And Mr. Biskupic and all the others responsible for this frame up should be prosecuted and imprisoned for a lengthy term

Of course we cannot expect an administration that got itself selected by a judicial coup in 2000 and, according to Robert F. Kennedy's exhaustive research, stole the election of 2004, to limit itself to prosecuting and imprisoning only people guilty of crimes. The different acts of incipient dictatorships are part and parcel of their very nature; they steal elections, assuming they even both to hold them, and imprison and even execute innocent people

Do you think a dictatorship that has stooped to one despicable act to remain in power would shrink from stooping to another despicable act. Americans who go about their lifes in the belief that they are safe from unjust imprisonment and execution, torture, ect are living a blissful illusion because the society they are living in has never been really free and democratic and is sliding down the slope towards nakedly oppressive tyranny. We can still halt and reverse the slide but the hour is very, very late.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

GOVERNMENT COMPLICT IN 9/11; THEY BOTH LET IT HAPPEN AND MADE PART OF IT HAPPEN

2007-05-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

This is a reply to David Dittmann on the Minnesota Green Party discussion list. Dittmann replied to my previous post on 9/11, which is identical to the post following this one on this blog. What Dittmann said in his post should be clear from my reply to it, so it should be unnecessary to sumarize it other than to point out that he misinterpreted my statement that the fires in WTC 1 and 2 were oxygen starved as my saying that the fires burned themselves out.

David, you should Know that arguing that since the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge taught us for the first time that wind can cause a bridge to
collapse, MAYBE there is something else we don't yet know that caused
the World Trade Center buildings to collapse onto their footprints is
a weak argument.
Saying maybe there is something we may not know, without specifying
what it
is, is a weak argument. Is is a generic answer to any argument.
Maybe we don't yet know
that miracles can happen and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are
right in saying God did it!
Furthermore, while the smoke obscurred much of the fall of the
World Trade Centers, most of the fragments from their destruction
ended up resting on the buildings footprints. And in the case of WTC
7,
the building was not obscured by smoke although there were flames
licking from SOME of the windows. If you watch the clip of the BBC
reporter reporting that WTC 7 had collapsed 24 minutes BEFORE it
collapsed, with the still standing WTC 7 visible behind her, it is
not
obscured by smoke. The BBC took the film off their publicly
available archive when this anomaly was reported after their attempt
to "debunk" the 9/11 truth movement. But copies of the film had
already been widely disseminated on 911 truth sites. And if you look
at other publicly available videos of the WCT 7 collapse, the roof
sinks evenly, as does the rest of the building, making the whole
think look like a stage prop attached to a stopper that is being
retracted underground. Have you ever seen buildings collapse or fall
like this?
I should have been a little more precise, however, and said that
the overwhelming majority of the mass of the World Trade Centers were
resting on the buildings' footprints. Videos of the collapse will
show puffs of dust shooting out of the towers and massive girders
being flung out. Some of the girders and other debris even landed on
the roof of the winter garden, three and a half blocks away. But you
see the bulk of the mass of he World Trade Centers piled up where the
buildings stood instead of being strewn all over the surrounding
blocks.
To the extent you can see the World Trade Centers through the
smoke, you can see the puffs of dust jetting out of each floor, just
before that floor joins the collapse. The puffs jetted out of each
floor successively from top to bottom, which is the only way to bring
the building down at free fall speed without the floors blew slowing
down the fall.
Also, if you look at the billowing dust clouds as the World Trade
Centers fall, you can see that they show the same cauliflower shape
as are shown in pyroclastic flows from volcanoes, when a volcanic
eruption ejects a superheated mass of steam and rock dust, which
follows the contours of the ground as it speeds outward. The
superheated air and pulverized rock dust and asbestos in the case of
the World Trade Centers were produced by the thermate explosions,
which were used to cut the steel beams along the same diagonal lines
that show when thermate is used for controlled demolition of
buildings.
Incidentally, subsequent deaths reveal that the federal government
lied when they told the people of New York that the air was safe.)
Unlike the usual procedure of leaving a crime scene intact until
the investigators can complete their investigation, the steel was
immediately trucked to a landfill along with the other debris and the
steel shipped to China to be melted down. However 911 truth
investigators did manage to retrieve some steel fragments and their
analysis showed clear traces of thermate explosives. I guess this
haste to dispose of the evidence explains why tourists were not
allowed to take pictures from the observation platform set up to view
the wreckage. I guess this also explains why little or no attempt
was made to separate out the body fragments for proper burial of the
fireman, policeman and others who perished in the World Trade Centers.
I didn't say the fire was going to burn itself out. I said the
black smoke, which reveals uncombusted soot particles, indicates
oxygen starvation. I will not only maintain that the planes, even
large passenger jets, hitting near the tops of the buildings not only
COULD not have produced large enough holes in buildings a block
square
and over a thousand feet tall to keep the fires from being oxygen
starved, but the presence of black, sooty smoke shows that it DID not.
Neither did I argue that the Bush Administration organized the
hijacking of four planes. Al Qaida did that. The Bush
Administration merely let the planes reach their targets in the same
way the Roosevelt Administration let the Japanese planes reach their
target at Pearl Harbor. The U.S did decipher the coded Japanese
messages about the forthcoming attack. Apologists claim that the
U.S. couldn't warn Pearl Harbor by radio because the Japanese might
decode their message and they couldn't contact the U.S. military base
at Pearl Harbor by cable because the headquarters office was closed
during the weekend so there wouldn't be anyone there to answer the
phones. Does anyone believe that any military worth its salt would
let a forward base be out of contact with central headquarters for
whole weekends? And wouldn't it be worth it to let the Japanese
detect their radio messages if that would have enabled them to warn
the base, forestall the attack and save nearly 3000 lives. Not
unless you had coldly calculated that a forestalled attack would not
have been enough to get the U.S. into World War II.
Whether or not the hijackers had the explosives they bragged
about, they apparently did not go off at the World Trade Centers.
And explosions near the top of the buildings where the planes struck
would not cause the buildings to collapse on their footprints. The
workers hooking up the containers with thermate inside could have
been told they were upgrading the buildings electrical systems or
computer networks. Tenants did report loud sounds from unoccupied
floors of the buildings and construction dust getting into adjoining
floors. The World Trade Centers were in fact owned by a subsidiary
of Cheney's old company, Haliburton. U.S. intelligence did receive
at
least seven warnings about a forthcoming Al Qaida attack. The then
CIA Director had a meeting with Condelezza Rice in her office but was
unable to get through to her about the seriousness of the situation.
The Civil Air Traffic control system can detect immediately when
planes deviate from their assigned flight plans. The protocol calls
for them to inform military air traffic control in five minutes, but
since they were told not to because of the war games scheduled for
September 11, 2001, the military were not informed for twenty
minutes. Even then, the military planes were told to fly out into
the Atlantic and they did not get back to New York until after the
attack. In any event, the military had been told not to attack
without Donald Rumsfeld's approval and, for some reason, that
approval was not forthcoming.
Whether Bush is not intelligent is something I don't know. Bush
seems dumb and he is dyslexic. But dyslexia can exist in highly
intelligent people. I have read in newspapers that Albert Einstein
was dyslexic, but whether or not that is just one of those oft
circulated tales about Einstein, I am unable to say. But in any
event, Rumsfeld and Cheney are intelligent enough to carry it off.
The incompetence of the Bush Administration during Katrina is of
too great a
degree to be explained by just dumbness or incompetence. It seemed
like the federal government was doing everything it could to
consciously sabotage the relief effort. Wal Mart sent a fleet of 500
trucks laden with food and water but the feds turned them away while
thousands were without food and water in the new Orleans Metrodome.
Ships carrying food and water were also turned away. Racist said
that God has done what we were unable to do in "cleaning out" New
Orleans. Well, it wasn't God. It was the Bush Administration. And
when the incompetence extends to the point of turning away trucks and
ships laden with vitally needed food and water, that reveals not
incompetence but a malign hidden agenda.
The Bush Administration needed more than two planes hitting the
World Trade Centers to get the U.S. into war and suppress civil
liberties. They needed the complete destruction of the buildings to
produce the necessary "shock and awe."
False flag operations are a standard method for governments
leading their citizens in the way they want. The Nazis burned down
the Reichstag and blamed it on the Jews. Their was the blowing up of
the Maine in Havana Harbor before the Spanish American War, which led
to the U.S. acquiring its first imperial possessions. The sinking of
the Lusitania got the U.S. into World War I. And after Pearl Harbor
before World War II, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a
pretext for the U.S. escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War.
We can expect another false flag operation before the U.S. invades
Iran.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
http://RedLavenderInsurgent.blogspot.com

ONLY CONTROLLED DEMOLITION CAN COLLAPSE A BUILDING CLEANLY ON ITS FOOTPRINT

2007-05-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

The following post on the Green Party of Minnesota discussion list was set off by the crash and resulting explosion of a tanker truck filled with gasoline on one of the entrance ramps to the Golden Gate Bridge. The fire melted the steel support of the entrance ramp which cause it to collapse.
Since 9/11 truth literature has claimed that fire does not burn at a high enough temperature to melt steel and that the girders of steel framed buildings have NEVER collapsed because of fire, the collapse of the entrance ramp to the Golden Gate Bridge would seem to be a counter example.
I don't yet have a complete answer to this seeming counterexample to the claim that fire cannot melt steel. But I am still focusing on matters I am relatively certain of. And one matter is that the ONLY way to collapse a building quickly on to it footprint without damagine everything nearby is by a controlled demolition, that is by painstakingly calculating where the explosives need to be positioned and the precise times and sequences in which the explosives need to detonate to bring the building down cleanly on its footprint. An earthquake or sufficiently stong wind would bring the building down on everything surrounding it. Motar shells or bombs dropped from above would bring the building down on its surroundings also.
It is possible to demolish buildings piece by piece with a wrecking ball but that could take months, depending on the building's size. The only way to bring buildings down cleanly on their footprints is by painstakingly calculating the prepositioning of explosives and the sequence in which they will detonate.

From : "rhalfhill@juno.com"

To : discuss@mngreens.org

Cc : discuss@mngreens.org

Subject : Re: [discuss] Rosie, 9/11, and the SF overpass

Date : Wed, May 02, 2007 05:02 AM

Just go through the process I went through in reaching the
conclusion that the fall of the World trade Center Towers had to be
caused by a controlled demolition. I didn't realize it was possible
to clear buildings away by taking a few weeks to carefully
preposition explosives and then cause the building to fell cleanly
into its basement, instead of debris from the building falling all
over the surrounding area, until I read about buildings being removed
to make way for newer buildings in the course of urban renewal in
downtown Minneapolis. The only way I had known to remove buildings
previously was to crash wrecking balls into them and spend several
months tearing them down. I remember being surprised that it was
possible to bring buildings down cleanly by controlled demolition.
When did you first learn that it was possible to cause buildings
to collapse into their basements by spending a few weeks preplanting
explosives? Weren't you surprised? I know I was.
So even if fire can melt steel, a fire would not cause the World
Trade Center Towers to fall cleanly into their basements and that is
the way they did fall. A fire would vary in temperature in different
parts of the building and the steel girders would have been exposed
to the fire for different lengths of time since the fire would reach
the girders at different times. The chances are virtually nill that
a fires would cause each structual element to fail at precisely the
moment necessary for the buildings to collapse into their basements
instead of falling all over their surrounding area. Only a
controlled demolition could have caused WCT 1, 2, and 7 to fall as
they did.
If the planes that struck Towers 1 and 2 were filled with
explosives, that would have caused the towers to fall over everything
around them, not collapse into their basements. And World Trade
Center Tower 7 was not even struck by a plane.
As for fire causing steel framed buildings to collapse, I have
seen pictures of burned buildings with their steel frames intact on
various 911 discussion Groups. I asked an architect about this at a
meeting of a local 911 Meetup Group and he answered that not only
could fire not produce a high enough temperature to cause the steel
girders to become ductile enough to buckle but that, since metal is
such a good conducter of heat, the heat of the fire would be
conducted throughout the entire length of the girder too rapidly for
the fire to have much effect on the girder where the fire was located.
I did google the melting point of steel and its melting point was
around 2800 degrees Fahrenheit and I understand that even the hotest
fires don't get higher than 1100 degrees Fahrenheit.
So your architect told you one thing and my architect told me a
different thing. The only way to settle this is to find an
archtecture textbook that says fire has never caused a steel framed
building to collapse or one that says it has.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.com, or call 1-
888-212-5537.

http://RedLavenderInsurgent.blogspot.com

http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.com, or call 1-
888-212-5537.

http://RedLavenderInsurgent.blogspot.com

NEED FOR HATE CRIMES LEGISLATION

2007-04-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

The following is a reply to a Christofascist minister who sent out an "emergency appeal" about the pending vote on federal hate crimes legislation. According to this bigot posturing as a martyr, this legislation would ban hate speech so that "Christians would not even be able to read aloud anti homosexual passages from the BIBLE in their Church services. Oh, the poor martyred dears! The following post clearly states that I have read the Act and it only makes ACTS illegal and not thoughts or utterances.
I came across this despicable clerical bigots "emergency appeal" on the discussion of the twin cities 9/11 Meetup group. The Bush administration deliberately inflicted shock and awe on the American people by allowing the planes that Al Quaida hijacked to reach their targets and preplanting explosives in World Trade Center Towers 1, 2, and 7 to produce a controlled demolition. Building don't collapse straight down into their basements unless explosives have been carefully prepositioned.
9/11 has attracted activists from both the right and the left so, in becoming active in this group, I have encountered some people that are hard to take.

I read the federal hate crimes legislation that the Christofascists are alleging to be so terrible. It required some effort to focus on the meaning of the law amid all the interpolations the Christ Crazies interjected but is should be clear that the Act punishes only acts and not thoughts. (I have interjected some of my own justified hate speech here.)
To give an example, the Christofascists, Islamofascists and Judaeofascists have the legal right to think whatever bigoted thoughts they wish about me and other Gay people. But if someone throws a rock through my window, that is an ACT which is punishable by law. If they attach a note to the rock reading "Get out of town, faggot!", that is objective evidence that the INTENT was to express hate against me and other Gay people. There is really nothing subjective about how intent is determined.
This is not the only case in which the law considers intent. The punishment for first degree murder is greater than for second degree murder. It is first degree murder if the murderer cooly and deliberately planned the murder in advance. It is second degree murder if the murderer committed it in a fit of passion or anger. Here the law specifies a greater penalty for a crime not because of the murderer's beliefs or speech but first, for his ACT, and second, his INTENT in commiting that ACT.
Acts of assault, robbery, rape and murder cause other members of the community to fear they will be victims of those crimes also. When these crimes are motivated by hate against members of a particular group -- and as I have explained, there are objective methods of determining whether the crime was motivated by hate for a particular group-- the fear of being similarly victimized is even greater for members of that particular group than it is for members of the general public. For instance, it caused me more anxiety reading about the murders that occur in this city than I would have if I lived in a city or world where these crimes don't occur. We all worry that we could have been in that particular place at that particular time and, more importantly, whether we will someday be at the wrong place and time. But I experienced greater anxiety a few years ago when someone shot another Gay person in Loring Park and later shot and wounded several more Gays down on the Franklin Avernue River Flats.
Another reason for hate crime laws is that public attorneys all have to priortize the crimes they prosecute. Of course, the most serious crimes, i.e. the crimes with higher penalties, will be the ones the public attorney prosecutes first. In the 1980's, I heard an account on public radio about a Black family who was being harassed after they moved in to a white neighborhood. They couldn't get the County Attorney to do anything about it at first. But after a hate crimes law was passed, which enhanced the seriousness of the crimes, the County Attorney prosecuted. Again, the racist punks who were harassing the Black family were subjected to an enhanced penalty not because they had racist thoughts or even expressed these thoughts in speech. Their INTENT was considered only because it was the motivation for their ACTS.
There are many reasons why it is in the interest of the members of a community to punish hate crimes with a greater penalty. First, as I have said, it creates more fear among members of the community that is the object of such hate. But secondly, such hate crimes, if continued long enough, can provoke hate crimes by members of the minority community against members of the majority community. (Of course, these crimes would also be hate crimes and subject to a greater penalty.) In some situations, this can escalate to armed conflict between different communities. Perhaps if the first hate crimes by Sunnis against Shites or Shites against Sunnis in Bagdad had been punished more severely as hate crimes, the citizens of Bagdad would not now be in such great fear of becoming cictims of hate crimes. (Of course that is only a tiny part of a solution in Bagdad. They would have to have their own government instead of one set up by an invading foreign power and that government would have to be a just government.
That said, now I will indulge myself in a little hate speech. You Christofascists and Christ Crazies have spent 1500 years of the last two millennia burning members of my community at the stake. You have the right to hold whatever bigoted and odious beliefs you want about Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgenders and Intersexed Persons. But you do not have the right to express your bigotry in acts. I don't see why you can't be born as many times as you like and be as disgusted as you like about our sexual practices but then LEAVE US ALONE! Any person who has not suffered brain damage should be able to easily grasp this distincction. But then, most people manage to escape brain damage the first time they are born but being born twice is pushing your luck too far.
And you Christofascists bleat like the southern racists who claimed their "states rights" were being violated when they were no longer allowed to discriminate through segregation. When a psychologist with anti Gay views was no longer allowed to do employment screening for the Minneapolis Police, you Christ Scum bleated as if you were martyrs when you asked, "Can Christians not be employed in any capacity by the City of Minneapolis?" Yes you can! Our belief in freedom of thought and speech precludes us from keeping your kind out. It is only when you ACT on your bigotry while on the job that makes you subject to dismissal. As an analogy, someone with racists views can work for the city of Minneapolis. But if they called Black people the n word when they came to their department for city services, they would and quite properly would be fired!
The only thing I would add is that our Constitution with its first amendment protects us from being tyrannized by the kind of hate speech laws they have in Canada and Europe. Of course, we should all remain on guard to prevent our courts from making the first amendment as much a non entity as they have made the fifth. But I have read the hate crimes legislation attacked on this meetup and it only punishes ACTS. It enhances the penalty when there is hateful INTENT motivating the commission of the ACT, but again, the law also considers intent when it punishes first degree murder more severely than second degree murder.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

PS. The only thing I forgot to deal with was the Christofascist minister's placing great emphasis on his claim that perceived membership in the target group was unspecified, implying that this vagueness allows all sorts of horrible provisions to be slipped through. It is really not hard to understand what perceived group membership, as in Gay or perceived to be Gay means, when you consider a story I read in a book about the Gay world when I was just coming out. A man was waiting at a stop for a streetcar. A group of teenagers pulled up in a car. "Are you queer?" one of the teenagers asked. "Would it make any difference if I were?" the man asked.
That was the last thing he ever said. The teenaged punks beat him to death. He turned out to have been a married heterosexual so he was a victim of murder because he was perceived to be Gay instead of actually being Gay.
This reminds me of another Christofascist minister, Roger Magnuson, who asked during a debate after the Christ Crazies had put an intiative on the ballot in 1978 to repeal St. Paul's Gay Rights Ordinance. "What does manifest mean?" Magnuson kept asking over and over. The Ordinance referred to manifesting traits of group membership but it referered to nothing more sinister than, for example, someone learning you are Gay when they see you going into a Gay bar. By going into the Gay bar, you were manifesting your Gayness but Magnuson kept implying it meant something like commiting sex acts in public or on other people without their consent.

PLIGHT OF HIV+ INMATE IN HINDS COUNTY, MS, JAIL

2007-04-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

I have just emailed the American Civil Liberties Union about the
plight of HIV positive inmates in the Hinds county jail in
Mississippi. The ACLU letter should explain the situation
adequately. I am requesting that people send letters protesting this
situation to the Hinds County Board of Supervisors at:
Hinds County Board of Supervisors
Hinds County Chancery Court Building
316 South President Street
Jackson, Mississippi,39201

The phone number of the Board of Supervisors is 601-698-6794.
The Supervisors are:
District 1 Charles Barbour
District 2 Douglas (Doug) Anderson, President
District 3 Peggy Hobson Calhoun
District 4 Ronnie Chappell, Vice President
District 5 George S. Smith
County Administrator Anthony Brister

On April 11, 2007, I sent you a letter about Karl Tyler, an HIV
positive inmate at Hinds
County Jail in Mississippi. Previously, in the late 1990's to early
2000's, you helped
when I contacted you about the plight of the HIV+ inmates at Parchman
State Prison in
Mississippi. Although Karl Tyler, a former Parchman inmate, told me
things are much
better at Parchman, his March 14th letter indicates that things are
just as bad in
Mississippi's jails.
A few days ago, I received a letter from Karl Tyler with an
affidavit signed by 16
inmates indicating that the situation is much worse. The Medical
Director at the jail,
Ruth Wyatt, "is denying HIV/AIDS inmates immediate access to their
HIV-Medication,
even after we report the Medications we take while being booked in.
We are told to put in
a Sick-Call-Request and charged 5 dollars to try to obtain
medication. We see the doctor
and still don't get medication. And told we will be sent to the
Medical Mall which might
take a month or two. This is a stall tactics by Medical because the
M.D. can prescribe
these Medicines which would only take a couple of days."
The inmates are denied all program participation except anger
management, which Tyler
and the other inmate with hepatitis C are allowed to attend. "As to
this day no
HIV/AIDS offenders has been allowed to take substance abuse
counseling, GED class, work
detail, laundry house keeping, reclassification to trustee status, or
any job or classes.
Mr Tyler also says "We are exposed to mice, spiders, mice feces,
fungus in showers,
cold food, mildew in cell 5155, roof leaking upstairs which runs
downstairs into
cells."
In addition, inmate Stanley Washington sent me a copy of his
Inmate program request
form which says that the inmates' food is allowed to sit for 30
minutes in stroform
containers until it becomes cold. This allows the mice time to eat
through the containers
and make the food unsanitary.
Inmate Willie Jenkins informs me that he has diabetes, high blood
pressure and
seizures. He is unable to get his glucose and blood pressure under
control because of the
food served in the jail.
I had hoped to save time by contacting you by email and that your
requirement that you
be contacted by letter would not apply in this case since I had
already sent you a snail
mail letter about this case on April 11, 2007. However, upon
rereading the inmates'
letters of April 14th, I see that they asked me to send the
affidavits to the ACLU, so I
guess I will have to forward the entire communication to you by snail
mail. I wrote to
them and gave them your address and phone number but the two letters
they have sent me
since I wrote to them on April 11th show no indication that they have
received my letter.
So I don't know if the Hinds County Jail is letting my letters
through to the inmates.
When I contacted you about the Parchman inmates in the 1990's, one
of your officers
explained to me that your organization was not equiped to respond
immediately and it would
take some time for your board to decided whether to take the case.
It took your board
thirteen months to decide. I hope, since this case could be
considered a continuation of
the Parchman case, that it will not take another thirteen months
before you decide to take
this case. Since Karl Tyler has only 28 T-cells, and has hepatitus C
in addition to AIDS,
I am afraid he will not survive if he doesn't receive some help
before thirteen months
have passed. I am also afraid that Willie Jenkins with his untreated
diabetes, high blood
pressure and seizures will not live another thirteen months.
Robert Halfhill
125 Oak Grove, Apt 41
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

Letters of support to Karl Tyler can be sent to:
Karl Tyler #072480
Hinds County Detention Facility-Raymond
1450 County Farm Road
Raymond, Mississippi, 39154

Everyone should understand that whatever their feelings
about "getting tough on crime and criminals," the U.S. Constitution
forbids "cruel and unusual punishment." Cruel and unusual punishment
includes not only the Medieval punishments of burning at the stake,
boiling in oil and death on the stretch rack but also depriving a
prisoner of medical care and allowing him or her to die slowly of
their disease. In addition, the treatment of prisoners with AIDS in
Mississippi reflects extremely backward attitudes and fear of people
with HIV/AIDS, the fear of infection from inmates with AIDs being so
great that they are not even allowed to attend substance abuse
counseling or GED classes. It is important to fight these attitudes
whenever they rear their ugly head.

Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

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LIBERALS ASSUME THAT COMPROMISE IS ALWAYS THE BEST TACTIC

2007-04-09T03:41:00.000-07:00

THIS IS IN RESPONSE TO SOMEONE OF THE MN-POLITICS-NATIONAL DISCUSSION LIST WHO ARGUED WITH RESPECT TO KEITH ELLISON'S VOTE THAT WE HAVE TO COMPROMISE, THAT WE HAVE TO GIVE UP SOME OF WHAT WE WANT IN ORDER TO GET PART OF IT, ETC.

David, what difference does it make whether the bill Keith Ellison
voted for passes or not? Contrary to what you posted, the deadline
is not firm. It contains enough loopholes to drive an escalation
through. The version passed by one of the Congressional houses is
nonbinding. It does not call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from
the Middle East, allowing them to remain in Kuwait, or even in rural
areas of Iraq away from the major population centers, so they can
intervene if the American established Iraqi government shows signs of
being overwhelmed by the insurgency.
While compromise may be the best course in many situations,
liberals and other political tendencies not only assume that
compromise is ALWAYS the best tactic but react by conditioned reflex,
unthinkingly, and respond to any supposed and alleged compromise by
calling for its acceptance, whether the "compromise" is really a
compromise or contains any actual concessions or advantages.
In such as situation, the only tactic for a real antiwar
Congressperson to follow is to vote against any further war funding
period.
Robert Halfhill Loring Park

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ELLISON SOLD OUT ON IRAQ WAR FUNDING

2007-04-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

THIS WAS PART OF THE DISCUSSION ON MN POLITICS NATIONAL ON ELLISON'S VOTE ON FUNDING THE IRAQ WAR. ALTHOUGH I HAVE IDEAS ABOUT THE POLITICAL SITUATION EVERY DAY, I AM FINDING IT DIFFICULT TO FIND ENOUGH TIME TO KEEP UP THIS BLOG EVERY DAY. MEANWHILE I WILL UPDATE READERS WITH MY POSTS ON VARIOUS ONGOING INTERNET DISCUSSIONS.

What Jordan Kushner points out and Mike Fratto does not realize is
that even if the Democratic bill on the Iraq war passes, even over a
Presidential veto, the war could continue with no changes after the
supposed "deadline" has passed. Passing the bill would be a
psychological defeat for Bush but it would make no real difference
for the continuance of the war.
Therefore, the only effective course for an antiwar Congress
member would be to vote against the war funding period. Remember
that while it requires two-thirds of both houses to override a Bush
veto, it take only 50% plus one of either house to cut off further
war funding.
Robert Halfhill Loring Park

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SOCIALISM INVOLVES AN EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY INTO THE ECONOMIC SPHERE, NOT TOTALITARIANISM.

2007-04-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

FOR ABOUT THE LAST SIX MONTHS, I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE LOCAL, TWIN CITIES 9/11 TRUTH GROUP, WHICH ATTEMPTS TO EXPOSE THE GOVERNMENT'S COMPLICITY IN THE EVENTS OF 9/11/01. PEOPLE FROM BOTH THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HAVE BEEN MOVED TO LOOK INTO THE MANY UNEXPLAINED ASPECTS OF 9/11 SO THE GROUP ENCOMPASES A BROAD SPECTRUM OF POLITICAL VIEWS. I WROTE THE FOLLOWING ON APRIL 8, 2007 IN RESPONSE TO AN AN ANTI SOCIALIST POST ON THE LOCAL 9/11 MEETUP GROUP.

When Tim Booth attacks socialism, he neglects to consider that a group of people can own property together. A maaried couple, whether they are a same or oppisite sexed couple, can own their property in common without either partner feeling that they have been forced to give up their time or property to another. Two business partners can also own their business together without either feeling that they have been enslaved by some collective duopoly. And more than two, in fact many, even thousands or more can own property jointly by incorporating.
Once you allow vastly disproportinate concentrations of private wealth, those who possess the wealth will inevitably be able to and thus will use that wealth to influence and even control the government. Look at the funds already raised for the 2008 presidential campaign. The funds raised has already reached 25 million and her secone place challenger has raised 23 million. You can't even run a campaign, in fact you can't even make many of the voters aware that you even exist, without going to those that own that kind of money!
You might try the thought experiment of imagining a feudal system. with the feudal lords owning the great wealth that comes from their large landed estates, but also having the added feature of one person, one vote elections and universal suffrage so that the peasants and other classes could elect the government. The feudal lords would still control the government through their great wealth, since no one could run for office without going to the feudal lords for money. It would be ridiculous to think that either a democracy or a republic could exist under those conditions, but no more ridiculous than to think that either a democracy or a republic can exist under captalism with its vast accumulations of private wealth. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: "We can have Democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few...but we cannot have both."
Time Booth has written and talked at length on the Federal Reserve which he says has resulted in trillions of dollars being owned in private hands. I have pointed out to Tim that if this is true, it was precisely the owners of the great wealth which capitalism made it possible for private individuals to own who used their influence to cause Congress to pass the amendment establishing the Federal Reserve. Tim argued that it was pushed through Congress when most of the Congress had gone home for recess. But this does not matter. It was precisely the owners of the great concentrations of private wealth made possible by capitalism who influenced Congress to pass the Federal Reserve amendment when few were around. Indeed, I would say compelled, since, even then, it was impossible to campaign or even let the voters know you existed without going to these owners of great wealth, hat in hand, to ask for the money needed to campaign.
As I have pointed out, the 9/11 truth movement has attracted people from both the right and the left. I come from the left with a socialist background. Socialism is not what they had in Red China or the Soviet Union where a small caste controls the economy to provide their own wealth and priviledge. Socialism involves an extension of democracy to the economic sphere in that the workers in a given work site would elect their managers instead of those managers being appointed from above to order them around. This democratic selection would be extended to the workers in a given industry or geographhic area electing their managers and this would be continued on up to the national and eventually, planetary legislature. The means of production would be owned by everybody collectively but no one would have reason to feel that they were being forced to give up their time or property to some vaque collective since they would each be one of the owners. Their elected representative, with the constant imput that results from being elected and subject to a recall election if a sufficient number of people petitioned for it, would be able to plan the economy and the allocation of resources rationally, thereby avoiding the cycles of boom and bust and some people living in abject poverty.
Some of the people in the 9/11 truth movement may attribute the threatening and urgent problems of the world to the Illuminat or the Federal Reserve Bankers. I attribute them to a small ruling class, the capitalist class, who are responsible for the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, the abandonment of the poor in New Orleans during Katrina, and 9/11, which was intended to set off the wave of super patriotic hysteria that was intented to facilitate the establishment of the totalitarian dictatorship necessary for carrying out the plans of the Project for a New American Century and the establishment of a new American World Empire.
Robert Halfhill

PROBLEM WITH BELIEVING THINGS ON FAITH

2007-04-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

THIS LETTER WAS SENT TO THE STAR TRIBUNE ON SATURDAY APRIL 7, 2007 IN RESPONSE TO E.J. DIONNE'S COLUMN, THE PROBLEM WITH THE NEO-ATHEISTS. THE THREE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT THE PROOFS FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE HAVE BEEN ADDED TO THIS POST. THEY WOULD HAVE MADE THE LETTER TOO LONG TO HAVE MUCH CHANCE OF BEING PRINTED.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., in his "The Problem With The Neo-Atheists in
Saturday's STAR TRIBUNE states that the problem is our "dogmatic
insistence" that "religion is primarily destructive."
This problem threatens whenever you start believing things on
faith and without proof. For without the aid of reason, you are left
with no means of evaluating your belief and you are as likely to end
up with Nazism, Jim Jones, and the Taliban as something benign and
harmless. Thus it is no wonder the 9/11 has been described as the
ultimate faith based action.
Many contemporary theologians have given up on attempts to prove God's existence. But for those who still believe that the old arguments are valid and that believing in God thus not involve any of the problems that result from believing without proof, a little background is in order.
The old cosmological that there must be a God to explain how the universe came to exist, assumes that everything that exists must have a cause. But this means that God would require a Super God to explain how He or She came to exist, and the Super God would require a Super Super God... and so on ad infinitum with never any explanation of how the whole series came to exist.
The argument from design fails for the same reason since the argument that the universe is so complex and intricate that it must have a designer would mean that anything complex and intricate enough to be the Designer of the universe would require a Super Designer to design Him or Her and the Super Designer would require a Super Super Designer... and so on ad infinitum.
Furthermore, once you have abandoned reason as a tool for
evaluating your beliefs and start believing that some person or
religion has control over whether you spend eternity in agony or
ecstasy, you will do anything to retain their favor. Thus Voltaire
said that "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities." Blais Pascal wrote "Men never do evil so
completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction." And James Weinrich states "We will always have good men
doing good things and evil men doing evil things. But to make good
men do evil things, it takes religion."
It is therefore no accident that it is religion that has fought
tooth and nail against women's reproductive freedom, as well as their
equal rights in general, and equal rights for Gay People. Christian
ministers used to quote the BIBLE to justify slavery.
Robert Halfhill
125 Oak Grove, Apt 41
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308
Phone: 612-870-8026
Email: rhalfhill@juno.com

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GAY MEN AND SMOKING, by Robert Halfhill

2007-02-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

I wrote this email about why Gays smoke in much highr percentages than other groups
for my Lavender Greens discussion group. I think that this is the main reaon for Gay
men's higher smoking rate, although, as far as I know, no one else has proposed this
theory. I agree for the most part with your article in the July 9, 2004 LAVENDER,
although I would assign a much different weight to the importance of the reasons you give
for Gay men's higher smoking rates.
Robert Halfhill
Although some people have asked how the the proposed indoor smoking ban is a GLBTI issue,
other minority groups who have suffered disproportionately from this society's promotion
of cigarette smoking have clealy understood how it is an African American, Hispanic, etc
issue. Since the percentage of Gay men who smoke and thereby suffer the harmful effects is
much higher than it is the general population, it is clearly a GLBTI issue for the same
reason. I would like to propose a reason why Gays have been influenced to take up smoking
at a higher percentage than most other groups by advertising. I am not aware of this
reason being discussed by anyone else. Advertising has typically portrayed amoking as
macho in men. Even after being exposed to a steady drum beat of this advertisin in
childhood and adolescence, most people are not so stupid as to CONSCIOUSLY think that they
can make themselves macho by starting to smoke. But the subliminal impression has been
created in the back of peoples' minds that smoking is macho. Heterosexual men have been
given the subliminal impression through years of steady advertising that "if you
start to smoke, you will be this macho man and have these beautiful women." In Gay
men, the subliminal impression that has been created that "If you start to smoke, you
can be this macho man and have these handsome macho men." So far, these subliminal
effects seem exactly the same. So how is the effect greater on Gay men? Although the
heterosexual adolescent has been given the subliminal impression that he can BE this
handsome, macho man and HAVE these beautiful women by starting to smoke, he is not
sexually attracted to the handsome, macho man he has been given the subliminal impression
that he can BE; being handsome and macho is only a MEANS to obtaining the beautiful
women, which, assuming he is 100% heterosexual, is the only thing he is sexually attracted
to. The Gay adolescent is attracted and excited by BOTH the handsome macho, man hs has
been given the subliminal impression he can BE by smoking but also the handsome, macho man
he has been given the subliminal impression he can HAVE by smoking. As I said, few people
are actually stupid enough to think this consciously. But that is the subliminal
impression in the back of the mind that years of exposure to advertising has created, and
Gay men get a double whammy! In fact, by being both sexually attracted to what he has been
given the subliminal impression that he can BE and HAVE, a cycle of escalating a mutual
reinforcement of the two effects may have been created which more than doubles the effect.
I propose this as the reason why smoking rates among Gay men are equal to what they were
among heterosexual men back in the 1950's, before the Surgeon General's report. I will
leave it to people who belong to the L,B,T,and I portions of the GLBTI communities to
develop this theory for their own cases.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

DESTROYING THE GAINS OF 2000 IN 2004

2007-02-25T15:33:00.000-08:00

DESTROYING THE GAINS OF 2000 IN 2004
(This is a reply to a post by Michael Bonanno on OpEdnews. Bonanno had compared people in the United States supporting John Kerry as the lesser evil to Bush with Germans in 1932 supporting Hindenburg as the lesser evil to Hitler.)

I'm glad that you point out that supporting the Democrats as the
lesser evil is comparable to the citizens of Germany electing
Hindenburg in 1932 as the lesser evil to Hitler. Ralph Nader was
indeed the progressive alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
But "safe states" David Cobb with his stategy of only making a
serious attempt to campaign in states where there was no chance of
his throwing the election to the Republicans was merely a retread of
the liberal strategy of supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil.
His vice presidential running mate Pat LaMarche, is on record as
saying she wasn't even going to vote for herself unless the polls
predicted Kerry would win 70% of the vote in her state. Those Greens
who cave in under the pressure of the liberals hysterical accusations
that "You got Bush elected!" destroyed much of the progress towards
an independent third party achieved in 2000 and it is still an open
question whether their caving in will lead to the demise of the Green
Party.
Robert Halfhill Green Party member and Nader supporter

by rhalfhill (0 articles, 1 comments) on Thursday, January 4, 2007 at
1:03:52 AM

RELIGIOUS NUTS OF NO USE AGAINST BUSH

2007-02-25T15:02:00.000-08:00

RELIGIOUS NUTS OF NO USE AGAINST BUSH, by Robert Halfhill(This was a comment I made about a post of OpEdnews.)
While I agree with your opposition to Bush, I find your use of religion and BIBLE prophecy appalling. Not only do you believe in the BIBLE, and therefore presumedly God, but you show the same kind of belief in BIBLE prophecy as the rapture cultists you criticize, equating mythological beasts in Revelation with various contemporary persons, organizations, classes, etc.In the first place, you have not a shred of evidence that there is a God beyond the Universe Who created it. The widespread argument that there has to be a God because the Universe has to have a cause and only God can provide that cause fails as a proof because, if everything must have a cause, God would need a Super God to cause Him or Her and the Super God would need a Super, Super God Who would need a Super, Super, Super... No matter how far you regress towards infinity, your have not reached a solution to how the Universe was caused.If your belief in God is based on faith, then if you can believe things on faith, without reason, then why not believe in Naziism, or Al Quaida, or Jim Jones, etc. If you make a "leap of faith," it is a matter of chance where your leap takes you and who knows what evil cult you will land on.I find it appalling that you with a doctorate and an M.D. in psychiatry not only resorts to religion as a rationale for your opposition to Bush but you even resort to the FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGION in the same Bible prophecy that the rapture cultists depend on.

RELIGIOUS NUTS OF NO USE AGAINST BUSH BY ROBERT HALFHILL
(The above post provoked a heated comment to which I replied below.)
Fred F, the soundness of my position on religion does not depend on whether you could or couldn't care less about my views on your religious beliefs. It depends on the validity of the reasons I gave for my position.Incidentally, your statement that you "could care less" is a grammatical error because it shows an error in logic. The only way you COULDN'T care less is if the amount you cared was zero. If you COULD care less, that can only be because the amount of your caring can be lessened, which means that it is greater than zero.But grammatical quibles aside, the critique of your belief in "a higher power" is the same as my critique of a belief in God. You have not a shred of evidence for the existence of this "higher power," and if your belief in this higher power is based on faith instead of reason, you are without any means of evaluating the beliefs you are landing on. You are jumping out at random and you are far more likely to land on something like Nazism, or Al Quaida or Jim Jones that something benign.
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GET OVER A COUP?

2007-02-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

January 26, 2007
Star Tribune
425 Portland Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55488
Although Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said of the Court's
halting the
recount of the Florida vote in 2000, "It's water over the deck -- Get
over it," the equivalent of a military coup is not the sort of thing
that anyone should get over. There is no difference between five
Supreme Court Justices ordering us to stop counting the vote and five
generals carrying out a coup and ordering us to stop counting the
vote. For the first time in U.S. history, an election was ordered
halted and an openly illegal government was installed.
Although the Supreme Court halted the recount on the ground of
egual protection because the different Florida counties had different
standards for counting disputed ballots --"Counting somebody else's
dimpled chad and not counting my dimpled chad is not giving equal
protection of the law," Scalia argued -- the Supreme Court had seen
no reason to intervene on this ground in any election since the
founding of the Republic, even though not only the different counties
but even the different states had different standards for conducting
elections and counting ballots. And in a misleadingly titled headline
"In partial recount, Bush wins, review finds," the November 12, 2001
STAR TRIBUNE reporting on the long promised media recount, informed
us that under four out of six possible methods of conducting the
recount, Gore won. And these four methods of recounting were the
only ones in which there were consistent methods of recounting the
disputed ballots, including the dimpled chads. And this does not
even take account of the fact that Florida outsourced the purging of
its voter rolls of convicted felons to private companies. The low
bidders who won the contract were, of course, the ones who cut
corners by only compiling lists of those who had been CHARGED with
felonies without checking whether they had been CONVICTED. Because
of this, as in the days of whites only voting during segregation,
many Black citizens were systematically disenfranchised.
And in addition to all this, yesterday's STAR TRIBUNE of January
25, 2007 reported that two election officials in Ohio's most populous
county, Cuyahoga, had been convicted of rigging the 2004 election.
Ohio, for instance, was one of the states that allegedly
changed to Bush over the post midnight hours, although the exit polls
had predicted a Kerry win. Exit polls, incidentally, are precisely
the means the United Nations uses to detect whether elections had
been stolen in places like Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The
laws of statistics do not change at the U.S. border. The
American news media cheered on the Serbian people when they took to
the streets when Milosevic tried to steal the Serbian elections. But
the Serbian people, as well as the people in all the other countries
where there were "color" revolutions, have suffered under both
Fascist and Stalinist tyrannies and know from experience how
unpleasant life can be under unelected, illegal governments. Let us
hope that the American people will not have to learn from the same
bitter experience before they realize that they have both the right
and the duty to take back their government.
The STAR TRIBUNE has allowed virtually no mention of the stolen
elections of 2000 and 2004 into your pages. You will probably not
allow this mention in either. But be warned! You and the rest
of the establishment keep on like this and the majority of Americans
will
eventually view their "elections" in the same way the citizens of the
former Soviet Union viewed theirs.
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com

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FUTILITY OF SELF DEFEATING LIBERALISM

2007-02-25T12:33:00.000-08:00

FUTILITY OF SELF DEFEATING LIBERALISM By Robert Halfhill
(The following is a post written on the uhcan-mn discussion list, the dicussion list of an organization whose purpose is to obtain single payer health care, a system of universal health care in which the government pays health care providers out of tax revenues. This is the health care system in place in Canada and every other modern industrial society except the United States. A liberal had written in to say that single payer health care is unrealistic since the "all powerful insurance industry" would oppose it, politicians could not "just wave a magic wand" and bring it about, and quoted Hiliary Clinton's argument that we must "first have consensus" before we propose it. Another more radical poster urged that we tell the Democrats we would not vote for them unless they came through on a nuumber of minimal demands.) Because I have been struggling to keep my head above a tsunami of emails, I very rarely get around to checking up on my uhcan-mn messages. But tonight I have gotten around to it and I feel that I can add some new contributions to this discussion. First, if we can never introduce a proposal for single payer health care because the "all powerful" health insurance industry will fight it, how do you expect to obtain even the slightest improvements in the health care mess? If you are mesmerized under the illusion that your opposition is "all powerful" and can veto anything you propose, then you can never make any progress. It would not be possible to depict more vividly the futile, self defeating mental bind that liberalism is locked in. Single payer WILL be adopted if enough people get fed up with what we have now and DEMAND it. Second, therefore, instead of politicians silencing themselves because "they can not wave a magic wand" and bring single payer about, the kind of politician who is of any use to us will try to argue and convince more people of the need for single payer in the knowledge that the health care mess we have now will eventually enable them to convince enough people. Third, what does Hiliary mean when she says we must first have consensus for single payer and other proposals before we propose them. Let us be fair and assume that she does not mean 100% of the people must be for something before we can come out for it. Still, she is saying the 60%, 70%, 80%, or even 90% of the people must be for something before we can open our mouth and even advocate for it! Any politician who is of any use to use will not wait until 60-90% of people are for something before advocating for it. This is another example of the futile, self defeating nature of liberalism. This is not exactly an example of leadership if you are too timid to support something unless 60-90% of people are already for it. Another example is Ms. Clinton's vacillation on the Iraq War. People voted for the Democrats last year because around 70% of them are now against the war in Iraq and want it ended. They did not vote for the Democrats to elect someone who merely wants to put a cap on the present number of troops so that the present level of deaths and disabling injuries can continue. They did not vote for someone who refuses to even repudiate her original vote to invade Iraq! Finally, the suggestion has been made that we tell the Democrats we will not vote for them unless they make a real fight for single payer, an end to the Iraq War, etc. Why must we content ourselves with not voting at all when we can vote for a third party? The old liberal objection is that a third party cannot win and that we'll be "throwing our vote away." Even if this were true, voting for a third party cannot possibly be as futile as not voting at all. And, more importantly, the only reason a third party cannot win is that most of us won't vote for it. If enough of us vote for it, it CAN and WILL win. In fact, people who have devoted their efforts to fighting for single payer and against the Iraq War, not to mention a host of other issues, are going to have to ask themselves why they are voting for the Democrats if they are not going to do anything to implement what people voted for them to implement? You talk about "throwing your vote away;" voting for Democrats who won't do what you voted for them to achieve is REALLY throwing your vote away! And some have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing that didn't work over and over again while expecting different results. The Nader campaign and the Green Party in 2000 provided the best chance of a critical mass of people breaking out of the two party strait jacket. Unfortunately, the Greens caved in under the pressure of hoards of liberals and Democrats hysterical accusations of "You elected Bush!" and refused to endorse Nader and instead endorsed a "safe states" candidate in 2004 who advocated a covert form of lesser evil support for the Democrats by only making a serious effort to campaign in states where there was no chance he could throw the election to the Republicans. But in spite of their wimping out in 2004, the Green Party still represents the best chance of a critical mass of people breaking out of the two party strait jacket. No other of the many third parties around shows an equal chance off leading people out of the two party duopoly. So I recommend that people who have been wasting their vote on the Democrats vote for the Green Party instead. I am assuming, of course, that the Green Party can be pulled back from its wimp out of 2000 and return to the independent challenge it mounted in 2004. And this is where those of you who have not only been wasting your vote on the Democrats but wasting your time, money and energies by working inside the Democratic Party. Those of us who have been opposing the present dysfunctional misleadership of the Green Party need your help. Instead join the Green Party and expend your efforts there. The tactic of trying to improve things by supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil has led to a steady rightward drift of the political climate in this country so that many people now will be surprised to learn that the President who told Planned Parenthood that as woman ought not to be denied access to family planning because of her economic circumstance was RICHARD NIXON! The news media reported in 2004 that the Democrat's standard bearer, John Kerry, was actually to the right of Richard Nixon. So stop doing over and over again what has led you to THIS. The Green Party still represents the best existing chance of a break from two party futility and if enough of you help and pitch in, the Green Party can be pulled back from its wimp out of 2004 and become a party that will actually do what you vote for it to do. Robert Halfhill
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WHY THE ANTI WAR MOVEMENT SHUT DOWN IN 2003

2007-02-25T11:42:00.000-08:00

This was written in response to article about the antiwar movement
in the Progressive Calendar by Fran Shor and R.M. Mendenhall.
Robert Halfhill http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/8?folder=Sent&msgNum=0000l900:0015kGJ500000_7x&block=1&fromPage=&isMailSearch=no&msgNature=all&msgStatus=all&count=1172431389&rteSupported=1&content=central#
A MAJOR REASON WHY THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT SHUT DOWN IN 2003
Worldwide, there were an estimated fifteen million people in the
streets protesting the Iraq war in 2003. Then suddenly there were no
more mass demonstrations.
Why? Because everybody took time off to campaign for Kerry. The
illusion held by most people was that if we could just get Kerry and
the other Democrats elected, they would end the war. Part of this
illusion also was the belief that the election of Democrats, who were
thought to be against the war, was a more direct and effective way of
stopping the war than "just protesting in the streets."
Yet Kerry was on record as saying that he would have been for
invading Iraq EVEN IF he had known there were no weapons of mass
destruction hidden there and that he would send more troops "if the
generals asked for them." Polls taken at the time revealed that most
of Kerry's supporters believed that he was against the Iraq war. The
illusion that the Democrats were the lesser evil, that the only
viable option was the Democrats and the Republicans, and that
reasonable, pragmatic people would not "elect Bush" "by wasting their
vote" on some ideal third party resulting in people JUST ASSUMING
that Kerry and the Democrats were against the Iraq war without
checking the facts which were otherwise.
It should be a no brainer that you cannot fight against the Iraq
war by supporting a candidate who said he would have been for
invading even if he had known there were no weapons of mass
destruction hidden there and that he would send even more troops "if
the generals asked for them."
The ruling class in this country has very cleverly arranged for
winner take all elections so that political activity tends to be
bipolar, gravitating towards two large parties, and even more
cleverly arranged for one party to be slightly to the left and
marginally less evil than the other party on most issues. The
electorate being confronted by these two political colossi and the
difficulty of any third party holding together long enough to reap
any electoral reward by winning a significant number of
gubernatorial, Congressional and Presidential elections overwhelms
most of the electorate with the illusion that they can only choose
between the lesser of two evils.
Historian Mark Lause, in his history of third parties in this
country, has documented that every third party since 1869 has died
out once it started supporting Democrats as the lesser evil. But to
only go back to the 1940's, the Wagner Labor Relations Act had been
passed by Congress after the depression, the rise of the CIO, etc had
convinced the ruling class that they had better permit some
concessions or reforms or they would loose everything in a
revolution. But in the later 1940's, after the mass movements of the
thirties had died down, Congress passed the Taft
Hartley Act which has been primarily responsible for the steady
decline of the labor movement up to the present. The majority of
Democrats voted for Taft Hartley, so it would have passed even if all
the Republicans had been magically removed from Congress. And in
1992 and
1996, I suppose we can all consider ourselves fortunate that Bush,
Sr. or Dole didn't defeat Clinton. Why if Bush or Dole had won, they
would have ended welfare as we know it! Prior to Clinton, ending
welfare had been considered one of the most reactionary proposals of
the right wing. And the first Gulf War, although started by Bush,
Sr., was continued by Clinton as was the trade embargo on Iraq which
led, according to U.N. estimates, to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi
children.
Further shut downs of antiwar activity will happen as long as the
majority of
anti war activists cling to the illusion that the solution to the
problem is supporting Democrats as the lesser evil. And as the
experience of 2003-7 demon states, once you have shut down a mass
movement, you cannot just bring it back, immediately, on command, as
if you were turning on a faucet or flipping a switch.
Robert Halfhill http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/8?folder=Sent&msgNum=0000l900:0015kGJ500000_7x&block=1&fromPage=&isMailSearch=no&msgNature=all&msgStatus=all&count=1172431389&rteSupported=1&content=central#
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com/ (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/8?folder=Sent&msgNum=0000l900:0015kGJ500000_7x&block=1&fromPage=&isMailSearch=no&msgNature=all&msgStatus=all&count=1172431389&rteSupported=1&content=central#, or call 1-
888-212-5537.
http://redlavenderinsurgent.blogspot.com/

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RED LAVENDER INSURGENT: WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?

2007-02-06T01:42:00.000-08:00

RED LAVENDER INSURGENT: WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?

WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?

2007-02-06T01:23:00.001-08:00

The following post is a comment on an article in OpEd News that bemoaned the fact that people who voted for the Democrats expecting impeachment and an end to the Iraq war did not get what they voted for.

WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?
By Robert Halfhill
Yes, the American people voted for the Democrats hoping they would
impeach Bush and get out of Iraq. Now, the Democratic Senate Majority
Leader, Nancy Pelosi, tells us that "impeachment is off the table."
And despite the power to approve or disapprove any war expenditures,
which has been in the Constitution since it came into effect in 1787
and the first federal government was set up, Congress, which is now
under Democratic control, is agonizing over a sense of Congress
resolution which will not have any effect. Despite all the sound and
fury, with Republicans and conservative Democrats predicting that any
ineffectual and non binding resolution will endanger the troops, and
all the political manevering around amendments and authors of
different resolutions combining their resolutions, the result when
all the tumult and turmoil has passed will be the Iraq War continuing
unimpeded.
If Antiwar and Impeachment activists cannot achieve their goals
through the Democrats, its time you considered voting for a third
party. And stop being brought up short by the argument that voting
for a third party will lead to even more evil since it will cause the
lesser evil Democrats to lose and put the Greater evil Republicans
back in power. The Democrats know that as long as both liberals and
radicals have announced publicly that they are supporting the
Democrats as the lesser evil, the Democrats can safely afford to
become even more evil because liberals and radicals have announced
that they don't have any place else to go. Then the Republicans can
safely afford to move even further to the right and even more evil.
And the Democrats know that they can safely follow the Republicans
even further to the right BECAUSE YOU HAVE ADMITTED THAT YOU DON'T
HAVE ANY PLACE ELSE TO GO.
If you are on a run-a-way train speeding towards the edge of a cliff,
leaving the Republican front car and crowding into the Democratic
rear car is not an effective strategy for survival. And don't say a
third party will not be supported by a majority of the voters
because, if the majority of the voters decide to support a third
party, the third party will have majority support. And that is your
job; you need to be agitating to persuade people concerning the
bankruptcy of the Democratic Party instead of the equivalent of
urging the majority of voters to take refuge in the rear car of a run-
a-way train.
Remember that a third party can prevail even in our winner take all
electoral system. The Republicans were once an upstart third party
before they replaced the Whig Party.
At present, the Green Party represent the best chance of a break with
the two party duopoly, sdspite its disastrous refusal to endors Ralph
Nader in 2004 and its equally disastrous retreat to endorsing safe
states David Cobb and his covert lesser evil support of the Democrats
by only making a serious attempt to campaign in states where there
was no chance he would throw the election to the Republicans. His
running mate, Pat LeMarch came out for a REALLY safe states policy
when she said that she would not even vote for herself unless the
polls predicted that Kerry would win 70% of the vote in her state.
You must be ready for increasingly strident predictions of doom as
you move towards breaking with the Democrats. Already, OpEd has
published another attack on Ralph Nader as the Democrat's
disappointment with respect to impeachment and ending the Iraq war
has led to increased fears that the voters may break with the
Democrats. You can expect more of the same in the same way an
overprotective parent retchets up the stidency and hysteria of his or
her warnings of doom whenever their offspring shows the slightest
sign of self assertion and indpendence.
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com/ (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/8?folder=Sent&msgNum=0000mdW0:0015m2Gj00001S1Q&block=1&msgNature=all&msgStatus=all&count=1170752766&content=central#, or call 1-
888-212-5537.
http://redlavenderinsurgent.blogspot.com/

WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?

2007-02-06T01:23:00.000-08:00

The following post is a comment on an article in OpEd News that bemoaned the fact that people who voted for the Democrats expecting impeachment and an end to the Iraq war did not get what they voted for.

WHEN WILL YOU PEOPLE EVER LEARN?
By Robert Halfhill
Yes, the American people voted for the Democrats hoping they would
impeach Bush and get out of Iraq. Now, the Democratic Senate Majority
Leader, Nancy Pelosi, tells us that "impeachment is off the table."
And despite the power to approve or disapprove any war expenditures,
which has been in the Constitution since it came into effect in 1787
and the first federal government was set up, Congress, which is now
under Democratic control, is agonizing over a sense of Congress
resolution which will not have any effect. Despite all the sound and
fury, with Republicans and conservative Democrats predicting that any
ineffectual and non binding resolution will endanger the troops, and
all the political manevering around amendments and authors of
different resolutions combining their resolutions, the result when
all the tumult and turmoil has passed will be the Iraq War continuing
unimpeded.
If Antiwar and Impeachment activists cannot achieve their goals
through the Democrats, its time you considered voting for a third
party. And stop being brought up short by the argument that voting
for a third party will lead to even more evil since it will cause the
lesser evil Democrats to lose and put the Greater evil Republicans
back in power. The Democrats know that as long as both liberals and
radicals have announced publicly that they are supporting the
Democrats as the lesser evil, the Democrats can safely afford to
become even more evil because liberals and radicals have announced
that they don't have any place else to go. Then the Republicans can
safely afford to move even further to the right and even more evil.
And the Democrats know that they can safely follow the Republicans
even further to the right BECAUSE YOU HAVE ADMITTED THAT YOU DON'T
HAVE ANY PLACE ELSE TO GO.
If you are on a run-a-way train speeding towards the edge of a cliff,
leaving the Republican front car and crowding into the Democratic
rear car is not an effective strategy for survival. And don't say a
third party will not be supported by a majority of the voters
because, if the majority of the voters decide to support a third
party, the third party will have majority support. And that is your
job; you need to be agitating to persuade people concerning the
bankruptcy of the Democratic Party instead of the equivalent of
urging the majority of voters to take refuge in the rear car of a run-
a-way train.
Remember that a third party can prevail even in our winner take all
electoral system. The Republicans were once an upstart third party
before they replaced the Whig Party.
At present, the Green Party represent the best chance of a break with
the two party duopoly, sdspite its disastrous refusal to endors Ralph
Nader in 2004 and its equally disastrous retreat to endorsing safe
states David Cobb and his covert lesser evil support of the Democrats
by only making a serious attempt to campaign in states where there
was no chance he would throw the election to the Republicans. His
running mate, Pat LeMarch came out for a REALLY safe states policy
when she said that she would not even vote for herself unless the
polls predicted that Kerry would win 70% of the vote in her state.
You must be ready for increasingly strident predictions of doom as
you move towards breaking with the Democrats. Already, OpEd has
published another attack on Ralph Nader as the Democrat's
disappointment with respect to impeachment and ending the Iraq war
has led to increased fears that the voters may break with the
Democrats. You can expect more of the same in the same way an
overprotective parent retchets up the stidency and hysteria of his or
her warnings of doom whenever their offspring shows the slightest
sign of self assertion and indpendence.
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.com, or call 1-
888-212-5537.
http://RedLavenderInsurgent.blogspot.com

RED LAVENDER INSURGENT

2007-02-06T01:02:00.000-08:00

RED LAVENDER INSURGENT

DON SAMUELS, NORTH HIGH AND DEAN ZIMMERMANN

2007-02-06T00:19:00.000-08:00

What follows is a post on the Minneapolis Issues List commenting on a post by Tamir Nolley attacking Don Samuels for his statement on burning down North High School. As of my posting this blog, my post has not yet appeared on the Minneapolis Issue List. Most likely, His Excellency, David I (David Bauer) as part of his totalitarian policing of the Issues List has not allowed this post through.
David Bauer, as the Moderator, actually Dictator, of the Minneapolis Issues List, has squelched much of the potential of e-democracy. He suspended this author for two weeks for posting information on the demonstration against George Bush on his appearance this summer at a fundraiser for Michelle Bachmann in Minnetonka because of Bauers orders against posting non Minneapolis issues on the list. By Bauer's arbitrary DICTAT, if Bush had appeared on the Minneapollis side of Emerald Avenue, it would be permissible to post about it on the Minneapolis Issues List. But is Bush were to appear on the other side of Emerald, posting about it would be verboten. Bush's appearance while outside the Minneapolis City limits, was still within the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan area and most of the participants in the demonstration were probably from the two inner cities. In fact, the largest contingent of the demonstraters were undoubtedly from Minneapolis.
But this does not prevent King David I from continuing his choleric threats of suspensions and expulsions thundering down from the Moderator's Throne. Until enough people on the list demand his unseating, his Jehovian threats will no doubt continue.
DON SAMUELS, NORTH HIGH AND DEAN ZIMMERMANN
By Robert Halfhill

I addition to Don Samuels saying "I am an Alfa (sic - should be
alpha) male," "We need to reevaluate out tolerance towards Gay and
Lesbian workers," "The only use for a library book is to block a
bullet or to throw at someone, and "Burn North High School down,"
Tamir Nolley (in a post to the Minneapolis Issues List) forgot to
mention Samuels "admonition" when the City Council
was discussing whether to retain certain provisions protecting the
rights of protesters in the contract for the Republican national
convention in Minneapolis something to the effect of we have to
remember that they control whether the convention comes here.
Perhaps this was just part of his opinions about the dangers of free
speech and the first amendment.
What list members need to remember is that THIS is what we got
after the Democratic Party had the ward boundaries changed in the the
post midnight hours of the night and threw Natalie Johnson Lee into
the same ward as Don Samuels. The ward boundaries did not throw any
incumbent City Council members into the same ward when the STAR
TRIBUNE first published a map of the redrawn ward boundaries. These
were presented as what had been decided for the required
reappointment. But the next day, we learned that the boundaries had
been redrawn.
This was done by the DFL in an attempt to eliminate the upstart
Green Party that had the temerity to win some of THEIR City Council
seats. An in future contests between the Green Party and the DFL,
Minneapolis voters should remember that it was the DFL who saddled
us with THIS instead of Natalie Johnson Lee on the City Council.
It was this same DFL who threw sixth ward Councilmember Dean
Zimmermann into the same ward with another Councilmember. But this
was not enough for the Republican and Democratic government who
arranged a sting so they could show pictures of Dean Zimmermann
accepting cash from a neighborhood developer. The cash was not a
contribution to Zimmermann personally but, instead, a contribution to
the legal expenses of the lawsuit against the redistricting.
Zimmermann had told several friends that he had received the money
for the lawsuit and these friends were prepared to testify at his
trial. However, federal Judge Ann Montgomery, who when she was a
Hennepin County Judge, had acquitted Richard Prof after he threatened
a group of Gay and Lesbian demonstraters, who were protesting a
recent incident of Gay bashing, with a baseball bat and later threw
an egg at them, ruled that the testimony that Dean had told them he
received the money for the lawsuit was inadmissible in the trial
because it was "hearsay." Hearsay, for example, means that you or I
could not testify that someone had committed a murder because we read
about it in a newspaper or someone had told us. Only people with
direct knowledge because of being eyewitnesses or the defendant later
telling them would be allowed to testify. However, if a witness told
someone that he had seen the defendant commit the murder and later
said at the trial that he had not seen the defendant do it, the
person who had earlier been told by the witness that he had seen the
defendant commit the murder could
testify in court about his direct knowledge about what the witness
had committing the murder.
Similarly, Dean's friends should have been allowed to testify
about Dean telling them he had received the money for the lawsuit,
although they would not have been permitted to testify about Dean
receiving the money unless they had been eyewitnesses.
And Judge Montgomery, whose bias is as evident as her ignorance of
the law, sentenced Dean Zimmermann to three years, although other
City Councilmembers, Joe Biernat and Brian Herron, who had actually
taken bribes, had only received a year in prison. And making her
bias more evident for all to see, Judge Montgomery twisted the knife
in for an extra turn by refusing to let Dean serve his sentence in a
Dakota prison where family and friends could more easily visit him,
but instead specified that he serve his sentence in a Colorado prison.
Robert Halfhill Loring Park
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com (SITE NOW BANNED ON AOL)
*Write AOL to complain, here: aolaccessibility@aol.com, or call 1-
888-212-5537.
http://RedLavenderInsurgent.blogspot.com

BEING ANTICAPITALIST

2007-01-28T13:14:00.000-08:00

The following post was submitted to the Green Alliance discussion list. From : "rhalfhill@juno.com" <rhalfhill@juno.com> To : greenallianceus@yahoogroups.com Subject : Re: [greenallianceus] Being Anticapitalist Date : Tue, Aug 02, 2005 03:16 PM Robert Tice throws in our face that there has never been a socialist society in existence. Whet he forgest is that occasionally there IS something new under the sun. Once, during the entire 100,000 years or so that modern humans had existed on earth, NO ONE had EVER achieved heavier than air flight. In 1903, the Wright bothers achieved it for the first time. New things appear in the way human societies are organized too. For over 90% of human history, everyone lived in small, nomadic, hunting and gathering groups. Human societies had no classes. 10,000 years ago, humans started practicing agriculture, although NO ONE HAD EVER done that before. Around about the same time, or shortly afterwards, humans domesticated animals for the first time. Population grew larger and denser and the first class societies developed in spite of the fact that, if Robert Tice had been there, he could have pointed out that there had NEVER been a class society. Although there were democratic societies instead of societies ruled by kings in some of the ancient city states, and some of the rudimentary parliaments that developed in late feudal Europe, there later developed the innovation of localities electing representatives to a national parliament, so that representative government could exist over areas larger than a city state, even though with the exceptions of the Swiss cantons and, perhaps, Holland, these parliaments were still subsidiary to the authority of monarchs. But the inhabitants of what later became the United States launched the almost unprecedented experiment of a society governed by a representative body instead of a monarch. This "democracy" did not have much reality for those without much wealth, since those with great wealth were the ones who really ran things. But even this formal, capitalist democracy was an hitherto unprecedented social innovation. What those of us who are socialists are proposing is yet another social invention, a society in which democracy is extended into the economic foundations of society and made real instead of being a mere legal formality to cover up the fact that it is the people with great wealth who run things. There would no longer be people with massively disproportionate wealth and the workers in any workplace would elect their managers. In fact, the managers will no longer be managers but elected representatives. Since there will no longer be a hidden ruling class ruling behind the scenes, there is a reasonable expectation that this democracy will be deeply rooted enough to not be subject to the pressures that periodically threatened even capitalist democracy during the abolition of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the suppression of dissent during World War I and the McCarthy period after World War II, and the present pressures leading to dictatorial government after 9/11. I can just hear the sneering contempt of Robert Tice and others upon hearing our proposal for a hitherto untried social system that has never existed anytime or anywhere. But evolution has not stopped with the end of the 20th century so we do know that there WILL be new societal as well as technological innovations. And the present capitalist system is headed towards multiple disasters, among which nuclear war and ecological collapse are only a few, so we will HAVE to try something else. Robert Halfhill Minneapolishttp://halfhillblog.blogspot.com
http://halfhillviews.greatnow.com

PRISONS OVERCROWDED WITH DRUG USERS LED TO DRU SJODIN

2006-12-03T00:23:00.000-08:00

This letter was sent to the STAR TRIBUNE but never published.
The Recent outrage over the Dru Sjodin case means the Minnesotans have to face up a clear choice. Do you want to use your finite prison space on imprisoning people who merely offend your moral sensibilities or do you want to use your limited prison space to lock up people who do actual harm and who should be locked up for the protection of the rest of us? A three strikes and you're out law for serious criminal sexual conduct such as rape would have saved the lives of many recent victims of sexual predators since many of the victimizers would have previously had their third strike and have been safely locked away for good. But every time such a proposal is made, we are met with a barrage of objections saying we cannot afford to build the necessary prison space. Yet the January 10, 2003 Star Tribune reported that there were 1,137 drug offenders who comprised 18% of Minnesota's then 7,022 prison inmates. The January 13, 2004 Star Tribune reported Minnesota had 7,500 inmates as of January 9, 2004. At a cost of $80.00 per day to incarcerate a prisoner, the drug offenders were costing the state $33,200,700 per year. If Minnesota repealed its drug laws and released all its drug offenders, we would have had an extra 1,137 prison cells and over thirty-three million dollars to lock up the murderers, rapists, armed robbers, etc who really do hurt the rest of us. Why should I or anyone else care what substances someone else puts in his or her body? To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks our pockets or breaks our legs.
Robert Halfhill125 Oak Grove, Apt 41Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403-4308Phone: 612-870-8026e mail: rhalfhill@juno.com

BEING ANTICAPTALIST

2006-12-03T00:04:00.000-08:00