The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
Well, the 601 page summary of the $10 million 14-month study on the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq is now published. Wow, what a bonanza of information. For our $10 million, we find out that the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn’t find any.
Read more“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security…”.
Read morePope John Paul II has died. I’m not Catholic (nor am I one of the many ?former/recovering? Catholics), and I don’t have particularly strong feelings about this particular pope. But seeing the crowd gathered in St Peters Square has caused me to develop some thoughts on the history of the church and John Paul’s place in it.
Read moreThis is of course Holy Week for Christians around the world. I suppose it should be a time of reflection, and I’ve done some thinking about my feelings. I have to be frank, in face of the egregious distortions amd misuse of Jesus and the Christian message, it becomes more and more difficult to hold on to my “religion.”
Read moreSome weeks ago, I came across a very good blog called Bull Moose. I have found some great insights there. Recently, I took issue with the Moose concerning his position on the Terri Schaivo case. I sent him the following email about an article on his attitude, expressed in this article, that Florida law needed to be changed.
Read moreThe following comment was posted on the DailyKos blog in response to a post about the Terri Schaivo case. I found it to be an excellent summary of circus-like attitude that has developed around this whole situation.
Read moreDuring these past few days I have been following the Terri Schiavo case with interest. I was simply dumbfounded by the President making a big show of rushing back to Washington from his vacation in order to sign Congress? bill to overturn the sanctity of marriage (more on that in a minute).
Read moreIn his State of the Union address, President Bush said, “Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely, or not at all.” But while the White House has consistently underfunded vital national security requirements ? like funds for port security and money for firefighters and cops ? it turns out there’s plenty of money for Tinseltown.
Read moreNew evidence points to the White House’s paranoid penchant for secrecy. In the most recent example, an Internet company last year took the FBI to court after the agency ? hiding behind the Patriot Act ? demanded private information about Internet subscribers. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in September that the law violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.
Read moreLast November, the voters of Florida went to the polls and by an overwhelming majority passed a constitutional amendment raising the state minimum wage by $1, to $6.15 an hour, and indexing it to inflation. Now a cadre of anti-democratic right-wingers in the Florida legislature is working furiously to undermine the voters’ intent.
Read moreWhen Bush’s Social Security road show pulled into Kentucky Thursday, the president suggested that opposition to his privatization plan was based on the notion that some minorities can’t be trusted with their own money.
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