ThinkingBlue: THE SIX O'CLOCK NIGHTLY PSYCHOTIC NEWS HOUR

There is so much solemn news out there in this ever shrinking (due to technology) world of ours. Events that could be classified as sad and many even psychotic... with no meaning, to one devoted to common sense. Picking an article from the WORLD WIDE WEB arena, to place on one's blog is no easy task. Overload of dreadful information, so much in fact, that we all feel like we are in (or for those of us who think,wished we were in) a mutual PADDED CELL! For instance, the Average American Family Incomes have Declined, since the Republican take over of our government, allowing rampant Corporate Greed to go unchecked. Resulting in more swelling of the ranks of poverty. HUH?

WHERE'S THE TELEPHONE, I NEED TO MAKE A CALL TO THE FUNNY FARM!

Click the above picture for an amazing look at poverty in America from an outside source.
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Another dire subject is how Partially Hydrogenated Oils which may be slowly killing us all, not to mention creating an epidemic of obesity and it is virtually allowed in EVERYTHING WE BUY AND DINE UPON! (Consuming partially hydrogenated oils is like inhaling cigarette smoke. They will kill you -- slowly, over time, but as surely as you breathe. And in the meantime, they will make you fat! ) HUH?

And if that isn't enough to scare the BEJESUS out of you... we have been badgered since the beginning of modern times on whether EATING OR NOT EATING FATS will kill you or make you healthy...! HUH? Read THE BIG FAT LIE.

Oh and how about the ongoing debate about...

Genetically Engineered Food (FAQS):

GE Food is an expensive technology that the farmers of the developing nations would not be able to afford easily.

Patenting laws go against the poor
around the world and allow biotech companies to benefit from
patenting indigenous knowledge often without consent.
This is a very young and untested
technology and may not be the answer just yet.
Crop uniformity, which the biotech firms are promoting, will reduce genetic diversity making them more vulnerable to disease and pests.
(This furthers the need for pesticides (often created by the same companies creating and promotinggenetically engineered crops). HUH?

Just to name a few misgivings of this technology.

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Another schizoid topic is how the anti-choice people are even more embolden by the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court and are out there "tooth and nail" trying to whittle away at a woman's right to make decisions over her own body.

Hunt's bill would ban abortions
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Tuesday it would consider reinstating a federal ban on what opponents call partial-birth abortion, pulling the contentious issue back to the high court on conservative Justice Samuel Alito's first day. HUH?

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One of the saddest and really out of this world, bazaar news topics of today, (Which I won't go near at this time) is the insane THREAT OF CIVIL WAR in Iraq, a threat so many warned Bush about from the GET-GO, before he and his neocons ordered A PREEMPTIVE AND UNNESSACARY WAR THERE IN IRAQ!!! This threat, BUSH just scoffed off as meaningless and just the same old cowardly trite from the peace-mongers (WHICH IS MOST OF THE WORLD). HUH? Arianna Huffington: Civil War in Iraq: Murtha Told Us So and Day four of Iraq's civil war - violence escalates
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The list of toxic subjects go on and on like a continuing repeated nightmare. But I've narrowed it down to an article about the vulnerability of our ports and the absolutely cockamamie conservative pick of an Arab company to oversee its safety. Being a foreign company isn't so absurd, ... But a business located in the United Arab Emirates, a nation with ties to 9/11? HUH?
Dubai Ports World (DPW), a ports operator owned by the United Arab EMIRATES (UAE) GOVERNMENT?HUH?HUH?HUH?HUH?HUH?
Lawmakers from both parties are questioning the sale as a possible risk to national security

TALK BOUT THE FOX GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE!

Please read the articles below FOR A HAIR-RAISING EXPERIENCE. (Afterwards, you can make that call to the FUNNY FARM!)
thinkingblue
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White House Has Ties to Dubai Firm
By Michael McAuliff The New York Daily News Tuesday 21 February 2006

Washington - The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

The ties raised more concerns about the decision to give port control to a company owned by a nation linked to the 9/11 hijackers.

"The more you look at this deal, the more the deal is called into question," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said the deal was rubber-stamped in advance - even before DP World formally agreed to buy London's P&O port company.

Besides operations in New York and Jersey, Dubai would also run port facilities in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baltimore and Miami.

The political fallout over the deal only grows.

"It's particularly troubling that the United States would turn over its port security not only to a foreign company, but a state-owned one," said western New York's Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. Reynolds is responsible for helping Republicans keep their majority in the House.

Snow's Treasury Department runs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which includes 11 other agencies.

"It always raises flags" when administration officials have ties to a firm, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-S.I.) said, but insisted that stopping the deal was more important.

The Daily News has learned that lawmakers also want to know if a detailed 45-day probe should have been conducted instead of one that lasted no more than 25 days.

According to a 1993 congressional measure, the longer review is mandated when the company is owned by a foreign government and the purchase "could result in control of a person engaged in interstate commerce in the U.S. that could affect the national security of the U.S."

Congressional sources said the President has until March 2 to trigger that harder look.

"The most important thing is for someone to explain how this is consistent with our national security," Fossella said.
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It's the Corporation, Stupid By Molly Ivins AlterNet.org
Thursday 23 February 2006
The government is willing to outsource American jobs for the holy grail of free trade. Why is it surprising that national security is ditto? So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?
As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, we'll treat you fairly."
So, what's wrong with that? There's our only president standing up against discrimination and against tarring all Arabs with the same brush and all that good stuff. (The fact that it was Mr. Racial Profiling speaking, the man who has single-handedly created more Arab enemies for this country than anyone else ever dreamed of doing is just one of those ironies we regularly get whacked over the head with.)
OK, here's for starters. We have already been warned that, should we back out of the DP deal, the United Arab Emirates may well take offense and not be so nice about helping us in the War on Terra - maybe even cut back its money, as well as its cooperation. This is a problem specific to the fact that we are dealing with a corporation owned by a country: A corporation only wants to make money, a corporation owned by a country has lots of motives.
Second, this is a corporation, consequently its only interest is in making money. A corporation is like a shark, designed to do two things: kill and eat. Thousands of years of evolution lie behind the shark, where as the corporation has only a few hundred. But it is still perfectly evolved for its purpose. That means a corporation that makes money running port facilities does not have a stake in national security. It's not the corporation's fault any more than it's the shark's.
The president is quite correct that a "Great British" corporation has no more or less interest in helping terrorists than an Arab corporation. It is not the corporation that is supposed to have other interests - it is government. But as Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system."
"Balance" is the arresting word here - keep your eye on "balance." We have an administration that is absolutely wedded to corporate interests, both American and global. It honestly believes that "free trade" is more important than the environment and more important than the people. It has repeatedly demonstrated it is willing to let both go in order to foster free trade.
There is no "balance" in its consideration on these issues, and now it turns out not much in "balancing" national security, either. The people running this country - and that includes most of the leaders of both parties - have proven again and again they are perfectly willing to outsource American jobs, American wage standards, and American health and safety standards all for the sacred, holy grail of free trade. Why would it surprise us that national security is ditto?
I am amused by Chertoff's use of the word "balance." Since the administration has done zip, nada, zilch about port security, it's unclear what he's trying to "balance." In 2002, the Coast Guard estimated it would take $5.4 billion over 10 years to improve port security to the point mandated by the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Last year, Congress appropriated $175 million. The administration had requested $46 million, below 9-11 levels.
As David Sirota points out, the administration has been negotiating a free trade deal with the United Arab Emirates at the same time the port deal was being negotiated. This whole thing is about free trade and the lock big corporations have on our government to further free trade.
Sirota also points out you will see and hear almost no discussion of this fact in the corporate news media. I have no idea whether DP World represents a security threat, but US News & World Report said in December that Dubai was notorious for smuggling, money laundering and drug trafficking in support of terrorists. I suppose the same could be said of New York, but it doesn't sound pleasant.
Dubai is believed to be the transfer port for the spread of nuclear technology by the Abdul Qadeer Khan network. David Sanborn, an executive who ran DP World's European and Latin American operations, was chosen last month by Bush to head the US Maritime Administration, according to the New York Daily News. It'll be interesting to see just how much power the free trade lobby has over the political establishment.
Right now, both Democrats and Republicans are yelling about what appears to be a dippy idea. Let's see what hearing from their contributors brings about.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.
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PS: Well, the above articles will certainly make everyone collectively yell...HUH? But that isn't the worst of it... We are about to visit Oceania in Orwell's 1984 novel once again. With the RECLASSIFYING OF MANY DOCUMENTS THAT WERE DECLASSIFIED YEARS AGO...HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH? HUH?

U.S. Gov’t Reclassifying Historical Records

The New York Times is reporting the country’s intelligence agencies have been secretly reclassifying thousands of historical documents that had been declassified and available to the public. The program began in 1999 and intensified after President Bush took office. Documents that have been re-classified include a 1948 memo on a CIA scheme to float balloons over Soviet-backed countries and drop propaganda leaflets. It appears another document was reclassified in order to hide a mistake made by the CIA 55 years ago. On October 12 1950 the CIA concluded China would not intervene in the Korean War that year. Two weeks later 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. Some historians fear they could now be tried under the Espionage Act because they have copies of files that are no longer declassified.

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February 21, 2006

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State
Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on
China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic
reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program. Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."

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