[Am-info] Who killed the DOJ suit against Microsoft? Remember?

[Hans Reiser]

I think that the Iraqi people would have been grateful and would have 
loved us for the removal of Sadaam, if we had only:

1) held elections 3 weeks after the invasion, and yes, if we had wanted 
to, and had been willing to accept not getting our agents elected as 
winners, we could have done it.

2) we had treated them with respect.


Gene Gaines wrote:

>   Apologies to those on the list not in the U.S., but this U.S.
>   presidential election is unusual in that it has the potential
>   of having a substantial effect on the world.
>
>   Is this off-topic? I do not think so. If the then-new Bush
>   administration had not intervened in the lawsuit brought by
>   the U.S. Department of Justice against Microsoft, we would be
>   in a different position today.
>
>   I propose that between now and the Nov. 2 election, we permit
>   each person on this list to send no more than three political
>   statements to the list, including responses to the statements
>   made by others.
>   
>   I greatly value the opinions of every person on this list. I
>   would welcome hearing the views of others on this list,
>   whether we agree or not.
>
>   Trading insults is not useful. Trading views and information
>   is. Listen to me and I will listen respectfully to you.
>
>   And all should vote.
>
>
>
>Below is my first personal statement.
>
>About me. I am an Independent voter, but I have strong feelings
>about this election. Perhaps because I am in Washington DC and
>spend time on Capitol Hill, I observe some things close-in
>that might not be seen by others. Things I know to be true
>because I see them first-hand -- not but because I am told them
>by others, or am fed them in overly simplistic sound bytes.
>
>I plan to vote against Bush (for Kerry) in 2004.  John Kerry
>is an honest, responsible, thinking man who will make a good
>president.
>
>The statement below best summarizes my thoughts about the
>national election, set out in a well-documented, rational
>address given last week in Washington DC. I do not care about
>the reaction of the audience or the number of flags flying in
>the background; I care about whether the views are based on
>facts, and those facts can be verified.
>
>Do not read it unless you welcome my view. I look forward to
>hearing the views of others.
>
>Note. It is important we respect each other. Example. For
>several years recently, I was the president of our Homeowners
>Association. During this time, I spent many hours of my time,
>mired in mud and in water sometimes 2.5 feet deep, cleaning
>drains around the house of one of our homeowners whose house had
>been built with a drain defect. I did this because he travels
>much of the time and he needed the help. He is an executive with
>Microsoft, but I can respect the man and his personal life
>separate from my views of his company. Same applies to politics!
>
>Gene Gaines
>gene.gaines@gainesgroup.com
>Sterling, Virginia
>
>
>
>Transcript: The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush
>
>Remarks as delivered by former Vice President Al Gore
>Gaston Hall at Georgetown University
>Monday, October 18, 2004
>
>   Text at:  www.algore04.com
>   Video at: www.c-span.org/Search/basic.asp?BasicQueryText=gore&SortBy=date
>
>Thank you. I really appreciate that enthusiastic and warm
>welcome. And I want to thank Eli Pariser for his generous
>introduction, also even more for the tremendous energy that he
>and his colleagues at MoveOn.org have brought to the democratic
>process in America. I'm really a big fan of Eli and all of those
>who work with him at Move On. And I want to say a special word
>of thanks to Gerard Alolod who is the Lecture Fund chair, and I
>wish to thank Georgetown University for the courtesy of allowing
>me to speak here, and president John DeGioia. Allow me also to
>express my condolences to the family of the student who had an
>accidental death on Friday, and condolences to the student body.
>
>This is a great, great university. I have spoken here before,
>and it is always an honor, particularly to come to this
>magnificent hall. So, again, thank you very much. So I come, as
>I have said at other occasions, as a recovering politician. I'm
>on about step nine, and an enthusiastic welcome like that always
>presents the danger of a relapse, so I'm on my guard. I came
>here because I have made a series of speeches about the policies
>of the Bush-Cheney administration with regard to Iraq, the war
>on terror, civil liberties, the global environment, and other
>issues, a series that began more than two years ago with a
>speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, prior to the
>president's decision to invade Iraq.
>
>During this series of speeches, I have tried hard to understand
>what it is that gives so many Americans an uneasy feeling that
>something very basic has gone wrong in our democracy. There are
>many people in both political parties who worry that there is
>something deeply troubling about President Bush's relationship
>to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about
>new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the
>problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the
>country.
>
>One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart
>enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact
>from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his
>personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he
>relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I
>disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those
>cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while
>I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it's
>an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as
>it is for me, and for most of you, I'm convinced that most of
>the president's frequent departures from fact based analysis
>have much more to do with right-wing political and economic
>ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to
>be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so
>strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even
>debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the
>source of this troubling inflexibility.
>
>Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country
>stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the
>infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts
>the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and
>above the interests of the American people. It is love of power
>for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.
>
>The surprising current dominance of American politics by right-
>wing politicians whose core beliefs are usually wildly at odds
>with the opinions of the majority of Americans is a dominance
>that has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of
>interest groups that have little in common with each other
>besides a desire for power that can be devoted to the
>achievement of a narrow agenda.
>
>The two most important blocks in this coalition are, first, what
>I would call the economic royalists, those corporate leaders and
>high net worth families with vast fortunes at their disposal who
>are primarily interested in an economic agenda that will
>eliminate as much of their own taxation as possible, and an
>agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and any competition
>they might face from smaller, newer firms in the marketplace.
>They provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the
>now extensive network of foundations, think tanks, political
>action committees, media companies, and front groups capable of
>simulating grassroots activism.
>
>The second of the two pillars of this coalition are social
>conservatives, many of whom want to roll back most of the
>progressive social changes of the 20th Century, including many
>women's rights, social integration, the social safety net, the
>government social programs of the progressive era, the New Deal,
>the Great Society, and their coalition includes a number of
>powerful interest groups like the National Rifle Association,
>the anti-abortion coalition, and other groups that have agreed
>to support each other's agendas in order to obtain their own.
>You could call it the 300 musketeers, one for all and all for
>one. And, indeed, those who raise more than $100,000 are called
>not musketeers, but pioneers.
>
>Now, Bush's seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by
>people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the
>strength of his conviction when, in fact, it is this very
>inflexibility based on a willful refusal to even consider
>alternative opinions or conflicting evidence that poses the most
>serious danger to our country.
>
>By the same token, the simplicity of many of his pronouncements,
>which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has
>penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly
>the opposite because they usually mark his refusal to even
>consider complexity. And that's a particularly difficult problem
>in a world where the challenges America faces are often quite
>complex and require rigorous sustained disciplined analysis.
>
>The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an
>astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and
>political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral
>authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and
>genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he
>convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that
>actually hurt their families and their communities.
>
>Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language
>of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in
>American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American
>people, and give as much of it as possible to the already
>wealthy and privileged. And these wealthy and privileged look at
>his agenda and they say, as Dick Cheney said to former Secretary
>of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, "this is our due."
>
>The central elements of President Bush's political as opposed to
>religious belief system are actually plain to see. First, the
>public interest is a dangerous myth according to Bush's ideology
>-- a fiction created by those hated liberals who use the notion
>of public interest as an excuse to take away from the wealthy
>and powerful what they do believe is their due. Therefore,
>government in this system of beliefs, government of, by, and for
>the people is bad -- except when government can help members of
>his coalition. Laws and regulations are also therefore bad,
>again except when they can be used to help members of his
>coalition. Therefore, also, whenever laws must be enforced and
>regulations administered, it is important in their view to
>assign those responsibilities to individuals who can be depended
>upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion that there is
>such a thing as the public interest, those who will instead
>reliably serve the narrow and specific interests of industries
>and interest groups.
>
>This is the reason, for example, that President Bush put the
>former chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of vetting all of
>the Bush appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
>Enron had already helped the Bush team with such favors as
>ferrying their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt
>the counting of legally cast ballots. They flew on the Enron
>plane. And then, after members of the Federal Energy Regulatory
>Commission were appointed with Mr. Lay's personal review and
>approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric rate payers of
>California and other states without the inconvenience of federal
>regulators protecting citizens against their criminal behavior.
>
>Or, to take another example, this explains why all -- virtually
>all -- of the important EPA positions have been carefully filled
>with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in
>their respective industries in order to make sure that those
>polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of
>the law against excessive pollution.
>
>In Bush's ideology there is an interweaving of the agendas of
>large corporations that support them and his own ostensibly
>public agenda for the government that he leads. Their
>preferences become his policies, and his politics become their
>business.
>
>Any new taxes in this ideology are of course bad, especially if
>they add anything at all to the already unbearable burden placed
>on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions tot his rule
>of course for new taxes that are paid by lower income Americans,
>which have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the
>burden of paying for government from the wealthy, and then also
>potentially recruiting those presently considered to pay to pay
>taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon.
>
>In the international arena, treaties and international
>agreements are also considered bad, because they can interfere
>with the exercise of power the same way domestic laws can. The
>Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting
>torture were both described by President Bush's White House
>counsel as "quaint," and then effectively discarded as a
>constraint, so that Bush and Rumsfeld could institute policies
>that resulted in the widespread torture of detainees in Iraq,
>Afghanistan, Guantanamo and numerous secret locations elsewhere.
>And even though new information has now confirmed that Donald
>Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific
>extreme measures authorized to be used by interrogators, he has
>still not been held accountable for the most shameful and
>humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory --
>(applause) -- because this president never holds anyone in his
>administration accountable no matter what they do.
>
>Most dangerous of all, this Bush ideology promotes the making of
>policy in secret, based on information that is not available to
>the public and in a process that is insulated from any
>meaningful participation by Congress or the American people.
>When Congress's approval is required under our current
>Constitution, it is to be given without meaningful debate. As
>Bush said to one Republican senator in a meeting described in
>Time magazine -- and I quote from the magazine's account --
>"Look, I want your vote -- I'm not going to debate it with you."
>
>At the urging of the Bush White House, Republican leaders in
>Congress have even taken the unprecedented step of routinely
>barring Democrats from serving on many important conference
>committees, and then allowing lobbyists for special interests to
>actually draft brand- new legislative language introduced in
>conference committees, language that has not been considered or
>voted upon in either the House or the Senate.
>
>It has also become common for President Bush to rely on special
>interests for his basic information about the policies important
>to them. And he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view
>that might emerge from public debate. He has in effect
>outsourced the truth.
>
>Most disturbing of all: his contempt for the rule of reason and
>his early successes in persuading the nation that his
>ideologically based views accurately describe the world have now
>tempted him to the hubristic an genuinely dangerous illusion
>that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with
>clever public relations and propaganda skills; and, where
>specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a
>turnkey operation from the industries most affected.
>
>George Orwell said, and I quote, "The point is that we are all
>capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then
>when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts
>so as to show that we were right." Intellectually it is possible
>to carry on this process for an indefinite time. The only check
>on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against
>solid reality -- usually on a battlefield.
>
>In one of the speeches that I have a year ago last August, I
>proposed that one reason why the normal processes of our
>democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that our nation acquired
>a large number of false impressions about the choices before us
>including for example that -- the false impression that Saddam
>Hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking us on
>September 11th, 2001. According to Time magazine again, 70
>percent thought that in November of 2002. Or, to take another
>example, an impression that there was a tight linkage and close
>partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam
>Hussein, between the terrorist group al Qaeda, which did attack
>us, and Iraq which did not. And the impression that Saddam had a
>massive supply of weapons of mass destruction and that he was on
>the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to
>give nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group, which
>would then use them against American cities. Also the impression
>was widely shared that Iraq would welcome our invading army with
>garlands of flowers. And even though the rest of the world
>opposed the war when it began, they would quickly fall in line
>after we won, and then they'd contribute lots of money and
>soldiers, so there wouldn't be a risk that our taxpayers would
>foot the whole bill. And, in any case, there would be more than
>enough money from Iraqi oil supplies which would flow in
>abundance quickly after the invasion -- we could use that money
>to offset expenses, and the net cost to America would be zero.
>The impression also was widespread was that the size of the
>force required would be relatively small and would not put a
>strain on our military or our reserves, and would not jeopardize
>other commitments we have around the world. Now, of course every
>single one of these impressions was wrong.
>
>And, unfortunately, the consequences have been catastrophic for
>our country. And the plague of false impressions seem to settle
>on other policy debates as well. For example, in considering
>President Bush's gigantic tax cut, many somehow got the
>impression that first the majority of that tax cut would not go
>disproportionately to the wealthy but would go to the middle
>class; second, that it would not lead to large deficits, because
>it would stimulate the economy so much it would pay for itself;
>and, third, not only would there be no job losses, but we would
>have big increases in employment as a result. And of course, as
>everyone knows, here to every one of these impressions was
>completely wrong.
>
>Now, last year I did not accuse the president of intentionally
>deceiving the American people, but rather noted the remarkable
>coincidence that all of his arguments turned out to be based on
>falsehoods. But since that time we have learned from information
>that has become public in a variety of ways that in virtually
>every case the president chose to ignore, and indeed often to
>suppress studies, reports, information, facts, that were
>directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process
>of giving to the American people. In most every case he chose to
>reject information that was prepared for him by objective
>analysts and to rely instead on information that was prepared by
>sources of questionable reliability who had a private interest
>in the policy choice that the president was recommending -- a
>choice that was conflicted with the public interest. For
>example, when the president and his team were confidently
>asserting that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes that had been
>acquired in order to enrich uranium for atomic bombs, numerous
>experts at the Department of Energy and elsewhere in the
>intelligence community were certain that the information being
>presented to our country by the president was completely wrong.
>The true experts on uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, where
>most enrichment has taken place in the U.S., in my home state of
>Tennessee. They told me early on that in their opinion there was
>virtually zero possibility that the tubes in question were for
>the purpose of enrichment. And yet they received a directive at
>Oak Ridge forbidding them from making any public statement that
>disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by
>President Bush.
>
>In another example, we now know that two months before the Iraq
>war began, President Bush received detailed and comprehensive
>secret reports warning him that the likely result of an
>American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for
>Islamic fundamentalism, deep divisions in Iraqi society, high
>levels of violent internal conflict and guerrilla warfare aimed
>at U.S. forces.
>
>And yet in spite of those analyses, President Bush chose to
>suppress those warnings, conceal that information, and instead
>went right on conveying to the American people the absurdly
>Pollyanna-ish view of highly questionable and obviously biased
>sources like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted felon and known
>swindler, who the Bush administration put on its payroll and
>gave a seat adjacent to First Lady Laura Bush at the State of
>the Union address, who they then flew into Baghdad on a military
>jet with a private security force, but then the following year
>decided was actually a spy for Iran who had been hoodwinking the
>president all along with phony facts and false predictions.
>
>There is a growing tension between President Bush's portrait of
>the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on
>the ground. In fact, his entire agenda is collapsing around his
>ankles. Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and
>a growing prospect of a civil war, with the attendant chaos and
>risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state.
>
>America's moral authority in the world has been severely
>damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead
>has virtually disappeared. The latest to announce they are
>beginning to withdraw from the coalition are Poland and Italy.
>Our troops, because they are already bearing more than 90
>percent of the burden borne by non-Iraqis, are stretched thin,
>under-supplied, and placed in intolerable situations without
>adequate equipment or training.
>
>In the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis,
>only 2 percent say they view our troops as liberators. More than
>90 percent of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of what they
>describe as an occupation.
>
>Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently
>Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy
>blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon
>officials have conducted this war.
>
>This war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists
>who use it as their most damning indictment of the United States
>and of U.S. policy. The massive casualties suffered by civilians
>in Iraq and the horrible TV footage of women and children being
>pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes, shown
>routinely and constantly on the Arab television stations
>throughout the Middle East, this has been a propaganda victory
>for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest dreams. And it is tragic,
>and it was avoidable.
>
>Moreover, America's honor and reputation have been severely
>damaged by President Bush's decision to authorize policies and
>legal hair-splitting that resulted in the widespread torture by
>U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and others in
>facilities from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and elsewhere.
>Astonishingly and shamefully, investigators also found that more
>than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were completely
>innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever.
>
>The prestigious Jaffe think tank in Israel released a
>devastating indictment just last week of how this misadventure
>in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on
>terror.
>
>We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen by President
>Bush to be in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately
>following the invasion, that he was repeatedly telling the White
>House that there were insufficient troops on the ground to make
>the policy a success.
>
>And yet at the time Bremer was telling the White House his
>views, President Bush was simultaneously repeating -- repeatedly
>asserting to the American people that he was relying on those
>Americans in Iraq for his opinion -- confident opinion, of
>course -- that we had more than enough troops and no more were
>needed.
>
>We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a
>comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely
>consequences of the invasion accurately predicted the chaos,
>popular resentment and growing likelihood of civil war, and that
>this analysis was presented to the president and that other
>similar analyses were stacked in front of the president's team
>on the desk in the Cabinet Room in the White House, even as the
>president continued to confidently assure America that the
>aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of
>representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful
>Iraqis.
>
>1 of 2
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