AlterNet: On Censure, Democrats Wait for Godot: "Feingold's resolution is a clear call for accountability; something the Democrats are willing to do only superficially.

...

Several Democrats, including leaders on intelligence issues such as Senators Carl Levin and Diane Feinstein, say they need an investigation on the first part before they can decide on the second part. Yet as First Amendment attorney Glenn Greenwald has emphasized, there is virtually no disagreement about the facts in the censure resolution. The Bush Administration has admitted it spied on Americans without warrants. In fact, it is now working with Congress to try to legalize more warrantless spying."

(Via AlterNet.)

"Saddam chose to deny inspectors" | Salon.com : "Slowly but inexorably, as more and more information emerges, the conventional wisdom about the events leading to war in Iraq is shifting. The American public has joined the rest of the civilized world in questioning the arguments and motives of the war makers. Commentators who have habitually fashioned excuses for the White House seem to find that task increasingly burdensome and humiliating. The old lies no longer have much traction.

Yet even now, President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war's origins -- perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it.

...

For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com | News Wires: "In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Researchers emphasized that their work can't address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com | News Wires: "The air over Antarctica is warming even faster than in other parts of the world, according to an analysis of 30 years of weather balloon data.

While surface warming has been reported in parts of Antarctica, this is the first report of broad-scale climate change across the whole continent, the British Antarctic Survey says in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

...

The research team led by John Turner reported that they could not provide a definite cause for the warming, but added that the observed increases are what would be expected as a result of warming caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat from the sun in the atmosphere."

(Via Salon.)

AlterNet: Our Fake Immigration Crisis: "The current debate on Capitol Hill is the result of the latest in a long history of scare tactics. But as millions protest nationwide, has the ploy backfired?

There is no immigration crisis -- other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes. So it has always been throughout the history of this country when anti-immigrant hysteria periodically reigns during low ebbs in our national sense of security and vision."

(Via AlterNet.)

Think Progress » ThinkFast: March 29, 2006: "‘How do you say revolving door in Japanese?’ Former Senator Howard Baker (R-TN), the U.S. Ambassador to Japan until last year, has already registered as a lobbyist for Toshiba Corporation.

Halliburton actually did ‘a worse job under its second Iraq oil contract than it did under the original no-bid contract,’ repeatedly overcharging the government and exhibiting ‘profound systemic problems.’

30 out of more than 180,000 millionaires were audited by the IRS last year. Poor taxpayers were almost twice as likely to be audited as the wealthy."

(Via Think Progress.)

AlterNet: Silent Civil Rights Groups: "The great irony in the gargantuan march of hundreds of thousands in Los Angeles and other cities for immigrant rights is that the old civil rights groups have been virtually mute on the explosively growing movement. There are no position papers, statements or press releases on the Web sites of the NAACP, Urban League or SCLC on immigration reform, and nothing on the marches.

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) hasn't done much better. It has issued mostly perfunctory, tepid and cautious statements opposing the draconian provisions of the House bill that passed last December. The Sensenbrenner bill calls for a wall on the Southern border, a massive beef-up in border security and tough sanctions on employers who hire undocumented immigrants. The Senate Judiciary Committee will wrestle with the bill this week."

(Via AlterNet.)

BBC NEWS | Americas | Lobbyist Abramoff gets 70 months: "Disgraced former US lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been jailed for nearly six years for conspiracy and fraud.

Abramoff - who had close links to top Republicans - had pleaded guilty to the charges, which relate to the purchase of a fleet of casino boats in 2000.

In a separate case, he has admitted to tax evasion, defrauding his clients and conspiring to bribe public officials.

An ongoing federal inquiry is said to be focusing on his dealings with up to 20 politicians in Congress."

(Via BBC News.)

Baghdad Burning: "E. was sitting at the other end of the living room, taking apart a radio he later wouldn’t be able to put back together. I called him over with the words, ‘Come here and read this- I’m sure I misunderstood…’ He stood in front of the television and watched the words about corpses and Americans and puppets scroll by and when the news item I was watching for appeared, I jumped up and pointed. E. and I read it in silence and E. looked as confused as I was feeling.

The line said:

وزارة الدفاع تدعو المواطنين الى عدم الانصياع لاوامر دوريات الجيش والشرطة الليلية اذا لم تكن برفقة قوات التحالف العاملة في تلك المنطقة

The translation:

‘The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.’

That’s how messed up the country is at this point."

(Via Baghdad Burning.)

American Indians Cite Voter Intimidation: "American Indian Charon Asetoyer says that when she went to vote a few years ago, a white man gave her the finger and asked her in vulgar terms what she was doing there.

She says she told him she had a right to vote, and she went back to her car to wait for him to leave. Only when he sped away did she walk inside.

'It's outright racism,' said Asetoyer, who lives on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation in impoverished Charles Mix County, where Indians are about one-third of the population.

While the federal Voting Rights Act has brought them a long way from the days when some states required that they be 'civilized' to cast ballots, many Indians around the country say they still face intimidation, restrictive voting requirements and long distances to reach polling places."

...

"They cite, for example, South Dakota's new voter identification law, which requires photo identification at the polls, a problem for many on the reservations who do not have IDs. The law permits those without identification to sign an affidavit, but opponents argue there is confusion about what is allowed. The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged other voter ID statutes seen as burdensome to Indians in Albuquerque, N.M., and Minnesota."

(Via Salon.)

CNN.com - Immigration protests continue in California - Mar 27, 2006: "Tens of thousands of students walked out of school in California and other states Monday, waving flags and chanting slogans in a second week of protests against legislation to crack down on illegal immigrants.

In Washington, 100 demonstrators wore handcuffs at the Capitol to protest a bill that would make it a felony to be in this country illegally and would make it crime to dispense aid to the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants.

Immigrant supporters also object to legislation that would also impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and would build fences along part of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Full story)

More than 500,000 people gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, and tens of thousands rallied in Phoenix and Milwaukee last week."

(Via CNN.)

American Civil Liberties Union: "The ACLU said that its report, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, is an attempt to step back from the daily march of stories about new surveillance programs and technologies and survey the bigger picture.  The report argues that even as surveillance capacity grows like a ?monster? in our midst, the legal ?chains? needed to restrain that monster are being weakened.  The report cites not only new technology but also erosions in protections against government spying, the increasing amount of tracking being carried out by the private sector, and the growing intersection between the two."

(Via AlterNet.)

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Keeping Tabs on the Peaceniks: "More evidence that the U.S. government is justifying surveillance of political dissidence under the guise of monitoring 'terrorism' has recently come to light. Early this March an FBI agent's presentation at the University of Texas law school listed Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, the Communist Party of Texas and 'Anarchists' as groups on the FBI's 'Terrorist Watch List' for central Texas."

Just to make it explicit, this means two things:

• The FBI's back to its old tricks again, harassing normal Americans that want a better America. Remember the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The FBI doesn't know about 10 real terrorist groups in Texas. Despite it being really likely that there are at least that many in a state that large.

(Via AlterNet.)