** The 'data scandal' - A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained. The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.

Read full story.


** U.S., U.K. Waged War on Iraq Because of Oil, Blair Adviser Says

Bottom line: "I don't think the war would have happened if Iraq didn't have the second-largest oil reserves in the world."


** Another neo-con story, reactionary madness continues - "For seven long years, Bill Kristol agitated for a U.S. coup against Saddam Hussein, and argued that America should remake the world to serve its own interests. Few bothered to listen at the time. So how does he feel now? In his office the other day, he grinned without smirking. That's how most of the hawkish defense intellectuals - better known as neoconservatives - are behaving these days. Although they're sitting pretty in wartime Washington, they're trying not to preen. Kristol refuses to strut his stuff, because he knows how fast the high and mighty can be brought low in this town; after all, he was once Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff. Still, he can't resist contending that Sept. 11 made all the "neocons" look like prophets. [...] The neocons - think-tank warriors and commentators, all of whom cite Ronald Reagan's moral clarity - are hot these days because they emerged from the political wilderness to alter the course of American foreign policy. And Iraq is just the beginning, as Kristol cheerily contended: "President Bush is committed, pretty far down the road. The logic of events says you can't go halfway. You can't liberate Iraq, then quit." The neocons care little about domestic policy; they think globally. They don't believe in peaceful coexistence with hostile, undemocratic states; rather, they want an "unapologetic, idealistic, assertive" America (in Kristol's words) that will foment pro-democratic revolutions around the world, if necessary at the point of a gun."


** The truth about Bush's military record - His missing year.


And from our neighbours...

** The apostropher sent us a 2-part series of American history explained in terms of dialectic dynamics. Have only sped thru it, but looks highly interesting.

The Dao of American Politics Part 1, Part 2.

Also check out the author's site, The Whiskey Bar.


** Wood's lot hosts a collection of links about the May 4 1970 Kent State killings.