Bush Promises Saddam the Outward Appearance of a Fair Trial Before His Conviction
The United States will work with the people of Iraq to ensure the trial of Saddam Hussein stands international scrutiny, President George W Bush says. The deposed Iraqi leader will get the justice he denied to millions, Mr Bush told a news conference in Washington.
Mr Bush said it was for Iraqis to decide whether Saddam Hussein should face the death penalty. e ex-leader has reportedly given no direct intelligence to interrogators since being captured at the weekend. (BBC News)
Me and Liberace
      This Christmas at school we are doing a secular play which I guess means no baby Jesus and no Santa Clause either cause last year our principal invited the local actors from The Passion to act out the scene from Easter, but I live in a town where not everyone really is into that so this year we are doing A Christmas Carol. The principal said that he wanted something that was more safe. Whatever that means.
      We all had to try out and I didnt want to but Liberace didnt really care he just kind of stood around and looked at his shoes and then at his watch cause recess is always his favorite time of the day, well, that and lunch. He always brings in quiche, which is gross cause if I want to eat pie, I dont want cheese or eggs or broccoli in it. Yech. Anyway, so he gets picked as the Ghost of Christmas Future which is a good role for him cause he doesnt have to do anything but look around and point at stuff. And whom was I cast as? A tree. Yep. I get to be a tree and stand and do nothing the entire play. I cant really complain cause I always get really nervous and mess up my lines anyway but the tree is the most unspeaking role you can have. I dont know if my Mrs. Darling has any faith in me after really messing up the lines from last year.
      My mom likes to make some of the costumes for the plays and she is really good at it too. And the ones that are too hard to make she gets from her friend who works at the performing art center in town. They have all kinds of neat costumes there but they all smell like mothballs and my grandmas attic. If you want to dress up and mess around, the old building where they have the art center would be fun. But Im not aloud to. Not until Im in Junior High. That is sooo dumb.
      Liberace insists on making his own costume and we all role our eyes because we know it is going to be something really silly. Liberace is just like that though, he gets this idea in his head and he sticks to it. Like the time he made a dollhouse out of sticks and rocks for my sisters birthday, that was a lot of work and really nice of him too but it looked kind of like a big raccoon house. Now this year he wants to make his own cloak and be all scary, he wants to wear lots of make up too, to have more of an effect. My mom takes me and him to Jo-Ann Fabrics and then to Ben Franklins and we pick out some material for his costume. Of course his takes way longer cause him and my mom are all excited about how he is going to make it look. He finds this role of Shibori Silk and just about goes crazy over it but they dont have it in black, just yellow. He didnt care, he wanted it. So the lady at the counter cut him a few yards of it and he paid for it with his credit card. Man is he goofy sometimes.
      So the costume turned out pretty nice and my mom helped him make it. My costume was a tree from the performing art center that this guy named Gary made. My mom knows him and he brought it over to the junior high in the back of his pick up. His pick up is cool, it is blue and you can turn the engine on without a key, Liberace showed my how, I think its called high-wiring. All I do is stand behind the tree and make sure that I am in the right position during the right times of the play. I cant have it in the middle of Ebenezers living room but I can have it outside when they are walking around. I dont even get to make bird noises or anything and I was practicing all week too. Bummer.
      The first night of the play goes pretty well and Liberace looks really nice in his navy silk cloak and I do a pretty good job standing behind the tree and moving it around at the right times. I dont mess it up once. But Dougie Boyd messes up his lines as little Tiny Tim and everyone laughs at the wrong time, when it was suppose to be sad and not funny. He got really red and looked like he was going to cry but he didnt. Except for that part of the play everything else went really well and we were invited to the rest of the elementary schools in our district. I thought that was really cool.
      There are six schools in our area, Grover Elementary, Edison Hall, Deerspring, McKinley Elementary, Kennedy Elementary and ours, John Adams Elementary School. We have a little tiny stage that we use for plays and when it is down the gym doubles as the cafeteria and all the classes are centered around that little gym. It gets really noisy sometimes and you cant hear the teachers even talking on gym days.
      In the same day we go to Grover Elementary and Edison Hall and we do really well, those schools have a nice stage and a big yard for recess and all kinds of cool swings and stuff. They have padding under all the stuff out their so if you fall off the slide you dont fall right onto your head. Our school doesnt really have that. They feed us lunch at Edison Hall and then let us go home early. It was a really cool day. The next day we go to Deerspring and McKinley Elementary and their schools are way tinier than ours. They dont even have a library at all there. They have to walk downtown to the public library to use the computers and read books. The library is really far from where the school is too. Some of the kids there I knew from church and others from soccer so it was pretty sweet. The play went ok there and we had lunch. It was pizza day and they make this sauce you can get for an extra 20 cents and put it on the pizza. Its really spicey and make my mouth water so I get two chocolate milks. The pizza is so greasy that my fried Steve takes his napkins and soaks it up before he eats it, his dad says its full of collateral.
      On Friday we got to Kennedy Elementary and the school is way nice, way nicer than any school I have ever been to or ever seen before and even Liberace thinks its nice. You can tell cause every time he sees something that looks really nice or expensive he gets this look in his eyes. All the kids there were dressed way better than they do at our school and almost all the other schools too. They had an elevator in it and the walls were clean and there were lights in all the fixtures and the playground was huge! I kinda felt weird there like all the kids were looking at me funny and I got nervous. Some of the other kids did too, like Tommy Jones, he threw up and Mike James wouldnt come out of the bathroom. So we did our play with out them.
      I fell over and knocked the tree down and Liberace tripped over his own yellow silk cloak and the kids laughed at him and Dougie messed up his lines and again and Mary Wentworth started crying and the play kind of just ended at the end and we were all bummed out. We were all nervous and not sure why or what was going on.
      When I got home I told mom all about how the kids at Kennedy where weird and their school was better than ours and why was that and why were we all nervous. She said the kids parents had more money than we did and paid higher property taxes so they got better schools then we had. So what if their parents make more money than us and have nicer houses and stuff, why should they have better schools than everyone else? I looked over a Liberace and he was just spinning in circles over and over and last time he did that on the big chair at Sherwin-Williams he puked in the back of my moms Escort. My mom said that the funding for the schools is based on the property value of the homes in the area, so the kids with nicer property paid more in take taxes so they had a nicer school. She said it was based on an old Jim Crowe law from when they used to segregate everyone.
      What does that mean? I ask her, segregate means to divide people up based on what they look like. Like fat and skinny people? Or tall and short? No she says. Not like that but like black and white and yellow and red and all that . She said the minorities were segregated into communities separate from other folks that are white and they made less money and by making the schools funding based on property value the people with the least money had the least nicest yards and stuff and didnt have good schools. She said it perpetuated the system. Or something. I said that was dumb. She said yeah. And Liberace threw up.
Me and Liberace
My senior year in high school was when I finally turned 18 and I registered to vote. Me and Liberace where really excited cause we could both go down to the polling station together. It was a really cool time to be able to vote with the presidential race in full swing being an election year and all. What an amazing time to be a first time voter. I got to watch to the entire process of the different politicians and governors and people declaring their candidacy, the debates between the candidates and their parties, the ups and downs, the primaries and then the final party picks.
After the parties picked their final choice, me and Liberace would sit at my grandmas and watch the debates between the two parties. It was really cool to be able to watch the entire process from beginning to end and then get to vote on it for the first time. What I didnt understand though was why were there only two candidates on TV all the time, what about the other third party candidates that where out there? Like the Libertarians, the Greens, the Independents. Where were those guys? I asked Liberace but he didnt know, he just shook his head and kept flipping through his Vogue magazine.
Liberace, you suppose with only two parties on TV that we are getting a fair chance to see what is going on? I asked.
Liberace just shook his head sideways, he never knew. He just knew that the guy for the Republicans always had a bad time picking the right tie out and the guy for the Democrats was always standing too stiff. I think Liberace was right.
Me and Liberace went to the library and I looked up how the debate system works cause I thought that it was odd. I found out that there was this group of women called The League of Women Voters or something like that and for a while they used to run the public debates. It was more transparent and more open when they were running it. Third parties used to always get in, like John Anderson in the 80s and Ross Perot in 92. But the democrats and the republicans didnt like that and they started the CPD, the Commission on Public Debates. The CPD was owned by huge corporations who put there money together and then decided the policy of the debates, who televised it, where it was held and who did or didnt get in, even if you had a ticket and the debates was held on public property.
Liberace, isnt that kind of fishy? I asked him. He just kind of looked at me. Then he nodded yes. I dont think he really knew.
Then I found out you have to have 15% of the electorate to even be considered to debate under the CPD rules. The funny thing is that you only have to have 5% to get federal matching funds to run for president.
Isnt THAT fishy? I asked Liberace. But when I looked up, he wasnt even there. I looked down the hall and saw him in my grandmas bathroom plucking his eyebrows. Oh Liberace, you are so crazy, I said.
So how do you get 15% of the vote, well you have to get on TV cause that is the way almost 90% of Americans get their news. And how do you get on TV? You have to make big news to get on TV so people know who you are and recognize your name. So what do you do to get big news? You have to be covered by the papers, but if the papers dont cover you, you dont make the news on the papers and then the TVs dont pick that up and they dont show you. And when they do the polling (all done by big corporations) nobody knows who you are and you dont get 15% of the electorate. So no debate and everyone loses. Even me.
Liberace, how come big huge corporations control how we get to vote? Doesnt that seem silly? They dont get to vote but they control the entire process. I dont think that its fair.
He was eating a bowling of Captain Crunch and just nodded his head. Sometimes when he is eating cereal, I make him laugh until milk comes out of his nose. I think its funny.
A lot of people my age dont vote because of just this reason and they think their vote doesnt count. I think they may be right. I love watching how the government works but I dont think its fair anymore, there seems like too much money and power is compromising the rights of the people.
What do you think Liberace? I ask him and then make a gorilla face at him until milk shoots out of his nose.
Hack the Vote
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser,the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail. Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven’t caused problems. “How do you know?” he asks.
The High Cost Of Wal-Mart’s Cheap Goods
“Wal-Mart’s ‘everyday low prices’ are the result of an unprecedented retail operation that staggers the imagination and beggars description,” scareduck writes. “In 2002, it moved some US$244.5 billion dollars of merchandise, which, if it were a country, would rank it 31st in GDP, ‘ahead of Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and Austria.’ Ruthless at cutting costs, it drives its suppliers to find ever-cheaper prices for the basic goods it stocks in its stores. This breeds a Darwinian swimming-with-the-sharks relationship with its suppliers, illustrated in this Fast Company article by now bankrupt Vlasic, then the leading pickle processor in the country. Vlasic worked out an agreement to sell a gallon jar of pickles, their lowest-margin product, to Wal-Mart at such a price that it could be profitably sold at retail, throughout the country, at US$2.97 per jar. It was an immediate and resounding success; Vlasic was inhaling whole fields of cucumbers to keep up. But this success came at a cost: sales of bulk pickles were clearly hurting more profitable lines of business (cut spears and dill chips basically anything requiring processing), eroding Vlasic’s margins even as volume rocketed skyward. Vlasic begged for relief, but Wal-Mart would not relent: the gallon jar at US$2.97 was now the new bar for doing business with the giant. Finally, Wal-Mart did back down, effectively doubling the price, but only just before Vlasic filed for bankruptcy (though in fairness, the gallon jar of pickles ‘wasn’t a critical factor’).