Whats in a name?

"Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling incompetence, please say "Premier" rather than "Diebold," because Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems."

You know, I fear how history will view us Americans at the start of this century.

We are not a caring people. We are not a forgiving people. We are not a law abiding people.

I'm just saying, it does not look good.

The Dark Side

"Amid revelations about faulty prewar intelligence and a scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history." Evil

How the Iraq Resistance Unmasks the American State and the Promise of Zapatismo

"America's Emotional and Moral MalaiseThe explanation of Bush’s hold on the United States developed in The Business of Emotions over the past few years, can be summarized thus:

1. Without authentic emotions, the vital connection between thinking and feeling is lost and the ability to act, morally and politically, for oneself and for others, is compromised.

Authentic emotions in the United States are being commercialized out of existence.

Americans are alienated from their feelings by the emotional labour they perform at work, in what is now a predominantly service economy.

Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.

This is hardly a problem unique to the United States, but the commercialization of emotions is most developed there.

Other countries at least have the counterweight of some historical ballast to keep them in check. The United States, rooted in the topsoil of history, built among the graveyards of the civilization it supplanted, has no such corrective.

The more commercialized the emotions, the weaker the resistance to depravity."

via wood s lot yet again.

"Heckuva job, Brownie."

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe." via wood s lot