July 25 commentary: "For links to the articles I read on the air, guest websites, archived shows, my commentaries, and the text of Mark Stanneart’s latest commentary, visit: www.rabblerousing.org."

First item: JEFF KOSSEFF writing in The Oregonian .
WASHINGTON -- Oregonians called Peter DeFazio's office, worried there was a conspiracy buried in the classified portion of a White House plan for operating the government after a terrorist attack.
As a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee, DeFazio, D-Ore., is permitted to enter a secure "bubbleroom" in the Capitol and examine classified material. So he asked the White House to see the secret documents. On Wednesday, DeFazio got his answer: DENIED.
  "I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack," DeFazio says.
Homeland Security Committee staffers told his office that the White House initially approved his request, but it was later quashed. DeFazio doesn't know who did it or why.
"We're talking about the continuity of the government of the United States of America," DeFazio says. "I would think that would be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Security Committee."
Bush administration spokesman Trey Bohn declined to say why DeFazio was denied access: "We do not comment through the press on the process that this access entails. It is important to keep in mind that much of the information related to the continuity of government is highly sensitive."
Norm Ornstein, a legal scholar who studies government continuity at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he "cannot think of one good reason" to deny access to a member of Congress who serves on the Homeland Security Committee. "I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual, knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House," Ornstein said.
"Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right," DeFazio said.
Next item: for those with friends or relatives contemplating joining the military, this item might interest you. Its yet another example of how our govt treats our veterans, as opposed to how military recruiters tell their cannon fodder, excuse me, potential recruits. By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press Writer SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- An appeals court chastised the Department of Veterans Affairs on Thursday and ordered the agency to pay retroactive benefits to Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and contracted a form of leukemia.
"The performance of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has contributed substantially to our sense of national shame," the opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals read.
"We would hope that this litigation will now end, that our government will now respect the legal obligations it undertook in the consent decree some 16 years ago, that obstructionist bureaucratic opposition will now cease, and that our veterans will finally receive the benefits to which they are morally and legally entitled," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the court's opinion.
what the article does not mention is how many viet nam vets have died in the 16 year period the govt has withheld payments to military vets. Yes boys and girls, join the military, and if you survive endless tours of duty in the oil wars, and become a veteran, rest assured, your govt will take care of you. With friends like the us govt, who needs enemies?

Next item: for this weeks sillitness out of our nations capital, we now give you sen russ Feingold: dateline wash dc: Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold said Sunday he wants Congress to censure President Bush for his management of the Iraq war and his "assault" against the Constitution. Feingold, a prominent war critic, said he soon plans to offer two censure resolutions - measures that would amount to a formal condemnation of the Republican president. "This is an opportunity for people to say, let's at least reflect on the record that something terrible has happened here," wow, strong words there. Feingold, D-Wis. Continues "This administration has weakened America in a way that is frightful. Wowee zowee, russ, stronger words still. Feingold is truly upset. My comment on this riveting news story. Only a liberal democrat could come up with something as wishy washy as a resolution for censure. Hold out your wrist geo, we are going to give you such a slappy poo. feingolds erstwhile leader, Senate Majority Leader Harry, take no prisoners Reid,., said Feingold's proposals "showed the nation's frustration". But he would not go along with them and said the Senate needs to focus on finishing spending bills on defense and homeland security. Way to go harry. His leadership consists in dithering along over how much money he will give Give king geo to waste on his oil wars and the ongoing farce that is homeland insecurity. Are the democrats really trying to blow the next election or does it just seem that way?

"Next item: The gv unions web site publishes comments sent in regarding their stories and the comments are often highly entertaining. trina kliest, the gv unions pot bust reporter is taking some heat for her continually reporting local law enforcement speculation as facts. last week featured 2 stories on separate busts of 2 rather sizable commercial pot gardens. Here are 3 representative comments:; AGAIN?!? SAME OLD RED HERRING, Three days in a row: "Cartels increasingly have been planting marijuana in remote areas of California, guarded by Mexican nationals who sometimes have been forced into the work at gunpoint. Traffickers then use profits from pot sales to finance large methamphetamine laboratories in Mexico and the United States, many in Southern California." PROVE IT! Just saying it doesn't make it true. Where are the photos of the bust? None, ever. Trying to align pot with bad old Mexicans has been used since Harry Anslinger and Hearst started the lies to scare Americans, over 70 years now. No evidence has EVER been produced suggesting this: "For more than a year, local authorities have been concerned about Mexican drug cartels moving marijuana operations into Nevada County." For crying out loud, they don't need to come up here to grow pot, they have super-sized greenhouses in Mexico. The Union is just trying to continue to blame meth problems on pot smokers. Give it up or prove it! here is another Trina continues to make gross generalizations regarding the intended trafficking of these now-defunct plantations. I demand more information regarding this link between large-scale marijuana plantations in Nevada County and the manufacture of meth-amphetamine. Just because Trina keeps writing it doesn't make it believable, and just because the plants were tended by Mexican Nationals doesn't make them part of a cartel.
and: we are going with the whole -if you repeat a lie long enough and often enough the people will eventually take it as fact. (Remember the weapons of mass destruction Saddam had?)
A while back a web poster even went to the Department of Justice website looking for the marijuana/meth connection and they had no info at that time. We need to accept that this reporter reports as "facts" STATEMENTS made that have no facts to back them up.
my opinion, for what its worth: these are very large scale grow operations. They seem to be tended not by locals but by Mexican nationals. So it seems to me that these probably are foreigners engaged in very lucrative commercial pot growing operations. And im very pleased that law enforcement seems to be focusing on large commercial operations. But that’s where the facts end and local law enforcement speculation begins. This continuing attempt to tie in pot selling to methamphetine in our county is sadly off base, and simply reduces the credibility of any utterances by law enforcement. and the union and its reporters would do us all a service by clearly differentiating between facts and speculation. The union reporters continuingly parroting law enforcement speculation and reporting it as solid as stone truth only serves to tarnish the reputation and credibility of law enforcement. This may help sell newspapers but it is just plain sloppy journalism.

More local silliness: according to the union, the nev city council is roaring into action to placate business owners. Well whom else do we expect them to serve? Seems homeless folks are messing with our yuppie lifestyles again. The charges are that the trail located between the Stonehouse Restaurant and Red Castle Inn attracts transients, some of whom allegedly harass customers, abuse drugs, sleep on the trail and start fires. Notice that these heineous crimes only effect people using that trail. Anyone else is blissfully ignorant of these activities. So the councils solution? Close the trail at nite-not just to the homeless-to everyone. prohibit walking, standing, and sitting during the nighttime hours. Viola. Not only no miscreants, no upstaneding citizens to possibly be inconvienced, and business goes on. It gets better. The council is also proposing banning smoking in parks. The excuse is to protect we the upstanding citizens from 2^nd hand smoke and having to wade thru cigarette butts. Now im not a nicotine addict, and I really hate breathing 2^nd hand smoke, but I cant recall ever being outdoors and being bothered or even aware of 2^nd hand smoke. Indoors, absolutely, but out in nature never. Maybe im just overly sensitive but I cant help but suspect this is more aimed at giving law enforcement an excuse to go after those fiends who have the gall to smoke their medicine in public.

I enjoyed one readers comment on this article. Quoting one of the councilpersons: You've Got to Start Somewhere" Isn't that a direct quote from Hitler? For what was once a very open and tolerant town, Nevada City seems to be rushing towards enforced conformity. Fortunately for the dissenters, the chief has indicated that they can't enforce laws in Nevada City, so nothing will change, and the ordinance will just get lost in the city's so called filing system.

Next item: well, for once I caught a hoax before broadcasting it rather than after. This one concerns a caution that freezing plastic bottles will release dioxins into whatever is in the bottle. The 'news' about freezing bottles releasing dioxins was a hoax, dispelled here by Johns Hopkins researcher:

http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/articles/halden_dioxins.html

 However, heating plastics DOES release phthalates, that are sometimes added to plastics to make them flexible and less brittle. Phthalates are environmental contaminants that can exhibit hormone-like behavior by acting as endocrine disruptors in humans and animals. If you heat up plastics, you could increase the leaching of phthalates from the containers into water and food. So the part about being careful with plastics in microwaves is still a good idea. It furthers that covering food with saran wrap before microwaving is also a very unhealthy idea.

Next item: after last weeks show I got an interesting call from a viet nam vet. I’ll try to summarize some of his points. He compared viet nam with iraq. He was 19 when sent to viet nam. He and his fellow soldiers couldn’t tell friend from foe. So all viet namese became the enemy. In any dangerous situation, and there were many, he shot first, questioned later. Did many innocent civilians die? Of course they did. It was a simple matter of survival. He predicted that as the iraq war becomes an even greater failure than it presently is, the military will inflate the body count of insurgents killed. The dead wont be insurgents of course. They will be innocent civilians, but the govt and military brass will be desperate to spin anything they can into some sort of hollow victory. He contrasted the conscripted soldiers who fought in viet nam with the volunteer army stuck fighting in iraq and Afghanistan. The soldiers in viet nam came from all segments of American society, except of course the children of the elite who managed to get draft deferments. By constast, in iraq we find mainly the poor, illegal immigrants who, if they survive, will be rewarded with citizenship, and national guardsmen who joined their states national guard as a 2^nd job to supplement their incomes or perhaps to qualify for favorable college loans. National guardsmen aren’t called weekend warriors for nothing. These guys are nothing but cannon fodder, finishing one term of duty only to be sent back for another. In viet nam, the young soldiers, from all segments of American society, often well educated, soon figured out that they had been and continued to be lied to, the war was hopeless, and the orders they were given were often absurd and quite often suicide missions to make their superiors look good. According to my caller, this led to the real reason our govt finally pulled the plug and removed our troops from viet nam. It wasn’t because of protests at home. It was because the troops in viet nam began killing their officers who gave them suicide mission orders. As my caller put it, "im young, im pissed, and I’ve got a gun". Bad combination. The media as it so often does, invented a polite aseptic word for it- fragging, but what fragging really means is murdering your officers, often by tossing a live grenade into their tent as they slept. Whoops, no officer, no more orders to go out and get killed. That, according to my caller, is why the govt pulled out of viet nam. Not because of symbolic protests in collages at home, but by what was in effect Mutiny, and bloody and effective mutiny at that, tho none dared call it by name. This is also the reason that the govt and the pentagon have no interest in reinstituting the draft. They have learned how dangerous a military comprised of ordinary citizens can be. An army of volunteers, especially composed from those of the underclasses and dispossessed, is much easier to control. So one question remains. When will our troops in the middle east, sent back for tour after tour, while their vets benefits are reduced, and they see mercenary soldiers euphemistically called military contractors earn up to 10x what they are getting, wake up, and start fragging their officers? As in viet nam, that might be the only thing that gets our troops out of iraq and Afghanistan. One final macabre thought. Next time you read of a field grade officers death, a lieutenant or captain, on the field of battle, can you now avoid wondering who killed them, the enemy or their own pissed off troops?

Next item: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers strongly indicated Friday he's ready to roll immediately to put Dennis Kucinich's HRes 333 to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney to a vote of the committee. All he wants are three more House members to join the 14 co-sponsors.

If this idea interests you, you can do two things: phone Chairman Conyers at 202-225-5126 and ask him to start the impeachment of Dick Cheney; and phone your own Congressional representative at 202-224-3121 and ask them to immediately call Conyers' office to express their support for impeachment.

To me, this issue is sort of a bell weather. Either conyers lets this go forward, or we can put him into the same waste basket as other democrats. All talk, little action. Another bell weather will be the upcoming vote on funding the proposed 14 permanent military bases in iraq. One if which, according to travus t hipp, is going to be larger than the city of sacramento. In case you missed that, we are maybe possibly considering pulling our troops out of iraq, eventually, but if and when we depart, we will still maintain 14 bases, and one will be larger than the city of sac. Here’s to the independent govt of iraq. Long may you prosper. you can control your dates and kumquats, just as long as we control your oil. so, another opportunity for the democrats to take a stand, or cave into bush once again.

Next item: The earthquake that screamed, "NO NUKES!!!" By Harvey Wasserman Online Journal The recent earthquake in japan also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted that "the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant's builders had underestimated the strength of possible earthquakes in the region." No need to read the rest of the article. You got the point. Nuclear power is not safe. No matter what its proponents claim, Its inherently dangerous. It may be tolerably safe in areas that never have earthquakes, but in any earthquake prone region, building a nuclear power plant is flat out insane.

Humor at end

Next item: Vice-President Dick Cheney, having briefly assumed President Bush’s duties while the President underwent a routine colon procedure last Saturday, told reporters today that he "enjoyed the downtime immensely."

The two hours and fifteen minutes spent doing Bush’s job were "incredibly relaxing," Mr. Cheney said, adding that they were a welcome relief from his exacting Vice-Presidential schedule.

Invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution Saturday morning, Mr. Bush transferred to Mr. Cheney all of his presidential responsibilities, which meant that Mr. Cheney spent Saturday jogging, going to the gym, and hitting a ball for Mr. Bush’s dog to retrieve.

In addition, Mr. Cheney called the nations of East Timor and Luxembourg "evil," stumbling briefly over the pronunciation of Luxembourg.

Finally, as Mr. Bush’s colon procedure was winding down, Mr. Cheney made some remarks about the Japanese economy, mistakenly using the word "devaluation" instead of "deflation," sending the NIKKEI stock market into a tailspin.

All in all, Mr. Cheney said he emerged from his brief tenure as President rested and refreshed, ready to plunge back into his demanding Vice-Presidential workload.

As for the President, Mr. Bush’s doctors pronounced his procedure a success, but said that they were having difficulty determining whether or not the President’s anesthesia had fully worn off.

Mr. Bush’s doctors indicated that when they asked the President the standard post-operative questions – such as, "What is the capital of the United States?" – Mr. Bush got only two out of five correct.

"Before the operation, he got three out of five right," one doctor said.