The United Workers is a human rights organization based in Maryland of low-wage workers working to create the political conditions for poverty’s end. This weekend the cleaners at Camden Yards and other day laborers organized an all-night vigil in front of the Orioles owner’s offices in downtown Baltimore. Workers also held a prayer breakfast and marched with supporters to draw attention to poverty’s wrongs and to how the publicly owned Camden Yards exploits low-wages workers for Peter Angelos’s private interests. Workers aired out Angelos's dirty laundry of profiting from poverty and using Camden Yards for his private gain at great cost to the community. Shirts we dirtied with poverty's ills and carried on a clothes line throughout the vigil and march.

Staff, volunteers and the Leadership Committee of the UWA at a recent rally for immigration with dignity in Washington, DC.

Human rights, as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights vision statements are by their nature, "universal."  This is important.  Things universal can transcend traditional barriers, such as barriers between races, between language groups and between national and religious divisions.  But human rights are not the UWA's only organizing framework.  The UWA is also, at our core, an organization led by the poor themselves.  While all are welcome to work with the UWA, priority is placed on developing leaders from the ranks of the poor. And this requires class identity.  

This summer we are planning a series of Freedom from Poverty events and programs as we continue our campaign to organize the day laborers who clean Camden Yards after Orioles games there.  The summer, Summer of Justice, follows last year's Summer of Honor and the Summer of Hope the year before.

Baltimore is a city engulfed with poverty.  There are entire neighborhoods almost totally abandoned.  Rows of houses are boarded up, emtpy, some falling apart.  Parts of the city are in ruins.  Tens of thousands of the city's residents are paid below minimum wage.  Thousands more are homeless, without medical care and working two or three jobs just to survive.

Read more: UnitedWorkersAssociation.org

The White House set out a strategy after the indictment of top administration Scooter Libby in the fall.  Part of that strategy was to create a reset switch that would be in place and activated by the State of the Union Address.  August, September and October were very bad months for the administration, to say the least.  In the news vacuum created by Bush's August vacation a new spokesperson against the war was realized in a mother whose son had died in war.  From stories of a vacationing President too busy relaxing to give a shit about a mourning mother outside his ranch, the White House was hit even harder when Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast while the President did nothing.

Cross posted at EconoCulture's blog: Political Porn

Cheney started today's speech by saying that he didn't say that "debate" is reprehensible, or that war critics are dishonest.  He even claimed to like debate, and to accept its value even in times of war.  Cheney even claimed to value reexamining the reasons that Bush sent America into war in the first place.

Okay.  It's over.  No, really. It is.  George Bush's Neoconservative Revolution is dead.  It started with Cindy Sheehan's off-message camp in front of Bush's ranch.  Bored Washington reporters stuck in Crawford had nothing else to report, so they made Cindy's camp into a media circus.  Then, in a stroke of shitty luck, Katrina hit.  Bush's advisors were out of town: Shopping in New York, getting married in Greece, buying a new house - doing those sorts of things.  And so Bush was on his own, to show his true cold-bolded colors.  

Cheney's speech last night is an excellent example of the Rovian Rules at work.  The attack on Democrats for charging that Bush lied about going to Iraq was perfect in almost all ways, except at the highest level.  Bush is clearly desperate, as his White House is now attacking Democrats on specific issues and charges, and not just by attacking individual persons.

DICK: The suggestion that's been made by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.

Rovian Rule (violated): Attack the person, not the issue.

Why this rule matters: The debate is about the person, are they or aren't they (fill in the blank).  If the issue is attacked, the debate becomes (in this case) did Bush lie?

I don't care that he spoke on foreign soil.  But partisan conservatives will, as will many ordinary Americans.  And regardless if I or others don't care about protocol, Clinton's remarks as given on foreign soil will matter to many Americans.  That means that Clinton's actions be examined in the context of where he spoke.  He will be called a traitor.  He will be asked to apologize.  He will be used as a symbol to bolster the claim that Americans opposed to the war are actually Americans opposed to America.  And that requires that we not only respond to what Clinton said, but also to where and when he said it.

Clinton was answering questions at a forum in Dubai.  When asked about the war, Clinton said that it "was a big mistake."  He said that Saddam being out of power is good, but that the US made mistakes.  Clinton spoke mostly of logistical failures, such as that the US did not plan for what to do after toppling Saddam.

"Along with annual assessment and closing the achievement gap by 2014, reporting data to show every child's achievement is one of what I call the "bright line" principles of No Child Left Behind," Secretary Spellings said. "On the road to achievement, we must continue to be guided by these principles. We must continue to have high expectations for every child. We must measure progress towards these standards. And we must hold ourselves accountable for reaching our goals."

cross posted: Political Porn

Gonzales: As we know, the strength of the American economy is dependent on the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of our citizens. At the heart of that spirit is the dedicated protection of intellectual property - and the innovations, jobs, and productivity that flow from it. source: Department of Justice

"Turns out, we were wrong," Hadley told "Late Edition" on CNN. "But I think the point that needs to be emphasized ... allegations now that the president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people, are flat wrong." source

About what were Hadley and the rest of the Bush administration wrong?  The answer is: Just about everything that they claim led us to war.  So let's (once again) grant the administration the benefit of the doubt, and pretend for a moment that they were simply wrong, and not lying, about the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Before I catalogue what the administration got wrong, it's important to remember how the intelligence was used: To launch a preemptive strike based on the (supposed) belief of an imminent threat.  

[DeLay] also blamed Democrats [for the budget woes], complaining that they haven't offered any suggestions on how to cut spending. He said they created a congressional budget process that makes it difficult to cut spending.

"We've been operating off a Congress designed by Democrats," he said. source

Now the White House is blaming Democrats for the White House's use of false intelligence on the nonexistent WMDs in Iraq. It seems just a bit desperate to try to pin blame on the out-of-power Democrats for the recent fuck-ups of the in-power Republicans.

Next the White House will be saying:

If only the Democrats had stopped us from fucking up, we wouldn't be in this damn mess.  Why didn't they steal the election, seize power, leak the names of CIA agents and lie to the nation in order to take us down?  For their failure to stop us from failing, we should ban Democrats from taking any elected offices, so that they won't fail to stop us any longer.

Reuters reported today on the use of napalm-type weapons by US forces in Iraq.  While the US military denies using white phosphorus shells against civilians in Fallujah, the use of MK 77 firebombs was confirmed.  MK 77 is like napalm in every regard except chemical make-up.  That is to say that MK 77 functions in the same way as napalm, but using different ingredients to get the job done.  It's essentially a new and improved kind of napalm.

The US military has denied that it used white phosphorus against civilians. It confirmed, however, that US forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs, which a documentary on Italian state-run broadcaster RAI compared to napalm, against military targets in Iraq in March and April 2003.

I was listening to conservative radio earlier today.  The topic: How far should the US go with its war prisoners?  It was a radio call-in show about torture.  People called in with suggestions for drugging prisoners, for torturing them, for doing whatever.  It was totally disgusting, and some callers actually voiced that view (military folks were the most upset).

And now there is more news about use of chemical weapons by the US in Fallujah.

All news in the US should stop and focus this story.  Bloggers should write of nothing else.  Not Plamegate, not Alito, not the gains for Dems in the elections matter more than this news.  

I bombardamenti con l'uso di fosforo bianco (a bombind using white source

Here are quotes over the years on Cheney, his role in the White House and his secretative, power-grabbing and ruthless way of doing things.  

The NY Times today:

The indictment provides a rare glimpse inside a vice presidential operation that, under Mr. Cheney, has been extraordinary both for its power and its secrecy..

It doesn't matter who Bush actually nominates. Bush could nominate Thurgood Marshall from the dead and the Dems should proceed as planned.  "Marshall's a radical right-winger.  The president is cowing to special interests of extremists.  We won't stand for a radical conservative like Marshall."