HAMMERNEWS- Michael Hammerschlag

Current Political Commentary by journalist Michael Hammerschlag; Thoughts on foreign policy, Republican outrages, liberal strategies, science by 8 year correspondent in Russia/Ukraine over 22 years and longtime commentator; Website: http://HAMMERNEWS.com

Monday, June 12, 2006

KOS SLAMS CHAFEE-Interview, ABRAMOFF TIED TO MOB HIT, WHO KILLED ELECTRIC CAR?, ELECTION STOLEN-RFK, JPL GUY-TITAN LANDING, WHY NEW OMEN


CALIFORNIA ENERGY RIPOFF WASN'T JUST CRIME, BUT TERRORISM- new
6 power companies, led by Enron, by manipulating power production, raised rates up to 90 fold; CAL paid in one day what it had been paying in 3 months; Used this vast scam to punish Gore voting state (+12%) and depose Dem governor; secret Cheney Energy Task Force likely plotted Iraq war - Bartcop, Buzzflash

(
DAILY) KOS Speaks- Markos Moulitsas Slams
Chafee- Interview

Providence, RI REALAUDIO - 9 min WINDOWS MEDIA
Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of Daily Kos, the most popular liberal blog web site, came to Providence May 22. The famous blogger, who looks like John Cryer, was promoting his book, Crashing the Gate (about how to effect progressive change with the Internet), with coauthor Jerome Armstrong, who hosts MY DD and helped set up Howard Dean's Internet operation that was emulated by Kerry and others. I saw him at Trinity Brew House, along with almost every top Dem political campaign assistant for the various RI campaigns. Daily Kos Site costs $4000 a month to maintain, about $50K a year to handle 1/2-1 million hits a day, though ad income may defray that.

He slammed Senator Lincoln Chafee on his enabling of the Republican agenda, "They want to destroy everything we stand for. NARAL, NOW, League of Conservation Voters, and Sierra Club pretend that Lincoln Chafee isn't the corrosive influence he is on their interests. He confirms every single one of George Bush's judges, and the ones that he didn't vote to confirm, like Sam Alito, he voted for cloture, so the vote that would matter, he voted the wrong way. He's enabling the judges who are going to make war on progressivism for the next 30 to 50 years on the federal bench.* There is no such thing, in today's landscape, as a moderate Republican, who may be an alright guy. His good votes have all been meaningless, and the one that could have mattered, he voted the wrong way." MORE

ABRAMOFF PAL TIED TO MOB MURDER
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - A man who purchased SunCruz Casinos with lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2000 has told authorities he knows who killed the casino's founder the following year, according to a report published Friday.

Adam Kidan told authorities in a 2 1/2-hour interview last month that John Gurino, who was later killed by a business partner, shot SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis in 2001, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. The paper did not say how it obtained the taped interview.

Of course he knows who killed him, since he was probably responsible. After Florida forced Boulis to sell because suddenly non-citizens couldn't own a cruise ship line, Abramoff and Kidan "bought" the line by forging a $23 million wire transfer on a closed account and using borrowed "flash" funds- they invested nothing. When an enraged Boulis confronted Kidan about the $147 million fraud, there was a fight.. and a few weeks later he was dead, shot in his car in a mob hit. The MSM has been startling silent about the fact that this giant pal of Bush and every top Republican, not just stole hundreds of millions, but killed people who protested. MORE

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR
Check out the NOW tragic tale of auto companies' contempt at regulation by crushing and destroying almost all electric cars (GM EV1 was beautiful) when they finally beat CA 100% non-polluting regulation in 2002. Another
long story has the semi-scam of biofuel alcohol co- from corn supposedly only 13% less polluting than gasoline because of the oil and coal used in producing, fertilizing, harvesting, and distilling it... and how ADM is getting huge payoffs- another crummy technology that is pushed to payoff the corporation rather than fix the problem.

This week, NOW talks to director Chris Paine about his upcoming documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The film looks at the hopeful birth and untimely death of the electric car, an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving salvation to some, but a profit barrier to others.In a film that has all the elements of a murder mystery, Paine points the finger at car companies, the oil industry, bad ad campaigns, consumer wariness, and a lack of commitment from the U.S. government."[The film] is about why the only kind of cars that we can drive run on oil. And for a while there was a terrific alternative, a pure electric car," Paine said.

2004 Election Stolen?- RFK Rolling Stone SALON dubious CRITIQUE

Kennedy overreached but Manjoo seems prof. debunker- My LETTER to SALON

I broke the first comprehensive story on the media mistakes in the 2000 election ("WHOOPS"- How the Networks Got it Wrong- PROBLEM POLLING POLICY - Intellectual Capital- 11/25/00 MediaChannel 12/26/00 http://members.surfbest.net/mikehammer/whoops.htm ), an account of the most blatant fraud of 2000 Florida (SAMPLE BALLOT DECEPTIVE, DIFFERENT- Dems denied hand count in Duval Co.), and huge story on the Congressional Investigation (NETWORK NEWS HEADS IN THE DOCK - Tauzin Hearings Confused by Red Herrings, Election Woes) and there is absolutely no question that Al Gore won Florida by 20,000-40,000 votes had the 10-15 cases of illegal and unethical Republican tampering been reversed. But, it is very dangerous to project definitive allegations of fraud and supposed proper results on the basis of polls, exit or any other. Polls can be spectacularly wrong, as they were sometimes in 2000, and obviously in 2004. Yet the instant Stalinistic “correction” of Mitofsky’s poll numbers was deeply creepy and troubling. It could have been an embarrassed pollster trying to correct gross error (but way too fast) or something much much more insidious- the widespread media tendency to manicure the facts to avoid embarrassing or exposing Bush’s illegitimacy (like the invisible 2000 Inauguration protests, except on CSPAN).

I read Kennedy’s piece hopefully, like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver, but thought there were some flaws in his methodology and nothing really new or any smoking gun. I think his contention that Kerry was way ahead in all the exit polls, beyond the margin of error, isn't correct. That said, I believe in his integrity and good faith, and think his rebuttal of Manjoo was persuasive. Manjoo makes some good points, but shows his bias in the extraordinary statement that voters who gave-up were evenly split between Dem and Repub. MORE

MASSACRES INEVITABLE WHEN ATORNEY GENERAL ENDORSES THEM

Massacres are inevitable with AG who says anything short of death or major organ failure isn't torture, only a handful are slapped on the wrist for Abu Ghraib or Afghan prisoner killings, and soldiers blast unknown cars on the "principle" that it might be a terrorist. Almost every time troops riddled a car of innocents, it was a war crime. When you hear one of the Canada deserters say, "Hey, I'm a hero- I did crazy stuff over there... but they wanted me to shoot women and children,", he is talking about these roadside ambushes. One reporter said US soldiers were hiding invisibly by the road while they were shooting up their car. (below)

HIGHWAYMEN SOLDIERS + TRIAL BY FIRE http://hammernews.blogspot.com/2005/08/trial-by-fire-gaza-gazing-admin.html

Why New OMEN when old one was a classic? - My IMDB review from seeing the original world premiere in LA.
Why do the brainless dopes remake even crummy movies like The Poseidon Adventure (3rd try)when there are so many great untold stories?

JPL's Torrence Johnson on TiTAN
landing (realaudio) 4-27-06 Brown U
TITAN LANDING MOVIE
- spectacular high resolution movies of landing on the only Earthlike pressure world in the Solar System- 80-153 meg; Took them 4 months to make this, putting together stills in a seamless movie where Titan expands from a dot to the perilous deceleration and descent through the thick (1.5 Earth) frigid neg 180C clouds to landing in the dark empty basin of a methane sea! Seriously nobody has ever done anything like this in any other landing (Mars, Venus, Moon) and it will knock your socks off.
CLOUD WORLD: MISSION to TITAN- Jan 14 the 11 year $3 billion Cassini mission to Saturn, successfully dropped a landing probe into the most earthlike atmosphere in the Solar System, Titan. Bigger than planets Mercury or Pluto, it has a nitrogen atmosphere 1.5 X Earth’s pressure and 4½X as dense. But it is a bitter –178ºC, leading to speculation of lakes, oceans, and volcanoes of liquid methane- photos seem to show that (inc.); w interview of Huygens scientist ESA, Germany- SCOOP (NZ), MSN-UK



SARAH WEDDINGTON (realaudio) new Winner of Roe vs. Wade case discusses Supreme Court cases and changes, historic struggle on abortion; Former Tx Congresswoman- Brown U., Salomon Hall 4:15 min- WINMEDIA March 14 BIO


After viewing a 15 part ProvJournal series on RI Revolutionary hero Nathanael Greene, the greatest General after Washington, I was inspired to view his homestead in Coventry. To honor the sacrifices of these founding fathers, a chump legislator in Coventry and another proposed a bill that lets State and local police demand internet, phone, and bank records at their whim, worse than anything ever tried by the feds. Time to bring back tarring and feathering.
Bill opens access to Internet records

Critics say the meaures, sought by the state police and currently before the General Assembly, would also give the authorities warrantless access to subscribers local and long-distance phone records as well.

04:03 PM EDT on Monday, June 12, 200 BY BRUCE LANDIS

PROVIDENCE -- The General Assembly is close to giving the police the right to obtain any Rhode Islander's Internet and "local and long-distance telephone connection records," along with credit card and bank information, without a warrant or other court review.

Lawyers familiar with that area of law say the police would be able to get the records of any person's phone calls without a warrant, including who was called, when and for how long.

React to the bill to allow police access to your Internet records without a warrant
The state police deny that, saying they only want warrantless access to Internet-session records and the identity of persons using the Internet. The critics, however, say the measures would give Rhode Island police the same information that some of the nation's biggest telephone companies have been accused of illegally giving to the National Security Agency. The difference, according to Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the state bills would make it legal. Either way, the legislation would dramatically expand the ability of the police to obtain information about private communications without review by a court. The critics say the bill includes no standards the police would need to get the customers' information other than the assertion by a chief of police that the information "is necessary for an investigation."