HONORING A FALLEN INDY MEDIA COLLEAGUE

NEW YORK (AP) - Undeterred by violence, journalist Bradley Roland Will felt compelled to document what he called human rights abuses around the globe, so he headed to the volatile city of Oaxaca in Mexico.

As the situation turned increasingly dangerous, Will decided to stay. Despite his fears, he wanted people to know what was happening in Oaxaca.

The 36-year-old videographer from New York was killed Friday in the Mexican city where protesters have barricaded streets and occupied government buildings for five months in a bid to oust the governor.

Brad Presente!

TURNOUT THESIS VALIDATED
MEXICO CRISIS DEEPENS
FEARS OF IRAN CONFRONTATION

This is the season of trick or treat. With that in mind, what do you think next week’s election will bring?

HOW ABOUT THAT!

Last Friday, I led this blog with the suggestion that the key to the mid-term elections will be TURN-OUT. Most of the coverage usually focuses on who votes, not who doesn’t, and that’s without considering the dirty tricks being used in advertising and at the polls to suppress voting. (Only 38% usually turn out for mid term elections). Guess what the NY Times led its election reporting on Sunday with:

“DEMOCRATS PUSH TO COUNTER GOP IN TURNOUT RACE …. DISADVANAGE IS FEARED.” That’s the very problem I was spotlighting three days before the Timesmeisters got to it. The Times calls Karl Rove’s get out the vote operation “sophisticated.”

The LA Times goes further, reporting:

“GOP at a loss? Karl Rove has an 11th-hour plan”

The top strategist is in rare form for the midterm endgame as he taps government resources to boost candidates in need.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rove29oct29,0,440699.story?coll=la-home-headlines

THIS MAY BE ROVE”S “LEGACY TEST”
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W9RT02484301F1484F27F335A7EA80

Robert Kuttner critiques what the GOP does:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1028-20.htm

HI HO SILVER, AWAY (PLEASE)

Time Magazine labels Bush “The Lone Ranger.” (No mention of Tonto) and says: “with just nine days left before voters head to the polls, many GOP candidates are running down the campaign trail without stopping for the president.”

Money, that old ‘root of all evil” is at the root of the campaign as the Washington Polls reports:

“As Elections Near, Dueling With Dollars “
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W9RT02484C7C91484F27F335D4F3C0

Now we all know that politics is a cesspool so you have to assume that the election will be affected by it as we already see in distorted spots and superficial reporting:

VIDEO: Charge: Tom Feeney tried to pay him to rig election vote counts_ http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=2094

ON A RACE IN PA
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/28/19638/753

ALTERNET’S DON HAZEN: HOW TO STOP THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS FROM BEING STOLEN

Progressive Democrats are saying “we need to get people to the polls in large numbers, win big, and protect the vote counting to make sure that the congressional elections are not stolen on November 7th.”

http://www.alternet.org/rights/43645/

RALPH NADER BOOSTS BILL MOYERS FOR PRESIDENT
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1028-24.htm

ECO DISASTER LOOMS

AP: David M. Walker sure talks like he’s running for office. “This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids,” the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin’s historic Driskill Hotel. “We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed…”

‘From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America’s political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.

‘What they don’t talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.”

I report on Walker’s predictions in my film IN DEBT WE TRUST (indebtwetrust.com)

THE CRISIS IN OAXACA IN MEXICO

Nancy Davies writes:

“President Vicente Fox, through his Secretary of Internal Affairs Carlos Abascal, has authorized the entry of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP in its Spanish initials) into Oaxaca, in direct response to the events of October 27 in Oaxaca. Following a declaration by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) to launch an all-out work stoppage and boycott to force the hand of governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (known as “URO”), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) supporters, both police and private individuals, assaulted the population in several different areas of the city on Friday. The result, according to the Radio Universidad, was four dead, thirty wounded. The dead have now been identified as Emilio Alonso Fabián, Bradley Will and Eudocia Olivera Díaz. The fourth reported death, of Esteban Zurita LÃpez, is at the center of accusations by both sides of the conflict, with each blaming the other.

LA LUCHA CONTINUA

Meanwhile, other reports say The Popular Assembly Movement was not backing down, waiting, calling for strengthening the barricades. But the day, and the night, seem to have passed relatively quietly. And the item below, from La Jornada‘s late news posting reports arrest of two of the assassins.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oaxacastudyactiongroup/
Here’s the item in Spanish:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx:8080/ultimas (at 3:50am Central Standard Time)
http://www.jornada.unam.mx:8080/ultimas/detienen-a-2-presuntos-responsables-de-la-muerte-de-camarografo-de-eu

MORE PRESSURE ON US TROOPS TO LEAVE IRAQ

Under Attack Daily, Occupation Forces in Iraq Have Nowhere to Go Except Home
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/817/re11.htm

DEPLETED URANIUM DEATH TOLL
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=24752

UNDERNEWS: CHENEY SUPPORTS WATER-BOARDING, THEN LIES ABOUT IT

[Sam Smith: We especially like the part where the Post goes to “legal experts” to find out what the English language means. There was a time when reporters thought they knew more about that topic than lawyers]

DAN EGGEN WASHINGTON POST - Vice President Cheney said yesterday that he was not referring to an interrogation technique known as “water-boarding” when he told an interviewer this week that dunking terrorism suspects in water was a “no-brainer.” Cheney told reporters aboard Air Force Two last night that he did not talk about any specific interrogation technique during his interview Tuesday with a conservative radio host.

“I didn’t say anything about water-boarding. . . . He didn’t even use that phrase,” Cheney said on a flight to Washington from South Carolina.

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that the vice president was talking literally about “a dunk in the water,” though neither Snow nor Cheney explained what that meant or whether such a tactic had been used against U.S. detainees. “A dunk in the water is a dunk in the water,” Snow said. . .

Many legal experts said it was reasonable to conclude that Cheney was referring to water-boarding, since it has been a widely debated U.S. interrogation technique that uses water to subject a suspect to the fear of drowning. . .

WP: Iraq’s bloody October a turning point?

October 2006 may be remembered as the month that the U.S. experience in Iraq hit a tipping point, when the violence flared and shook both the military command in Iraq and the political establishment back in Washington.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15462753/

ON THE DEBATE ON IRAQ CIVILLIAN CASUALTIES
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2006/10/genocide-and-denial.htm

BBC: PAKISTAN: 80 Dead In Attack on Madrassa…Iraq Violence soars

IRAN: TENSIONS WILL ESCALATE

Mediachannel Military monitor Joe Dunphy reports:

Saturday’s Iran Daily (10-28-2006) reported that the US and other nations will begin on Monday Persian Gulf operations around a scenario designed to detect and thwart the smuggling of nuclear weapons. The US State Dept. is reported in the Iranian paper as having released the names of some of the countries involved in the exercise –Australia, Bahrain, Great Britain, and France. The active participation of Bahrain is particularly interesting. Bahrain, of course, is a Middle Eastern country. So this can not be seen as a sign of brotherhood by Iran. Observers to the exercise include a number of other Middle East countries. Vietnam-era veterans will quickly recognize the possible parallels to another Gulf of Tonkin declaration, where LBJ rushed Congress into a hasty decision without adequate facts.

On the military front in Iran, there was a change of command in Iran’s Air Force, promoting Brig. Gen. Ahamd Miqani. On the diplomatic front, the German Parliament sent representatives of its subcommittee on disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation to Iran, and they will return to discuss their talks with the IAEA. The upcoming week has the potential to be a real humdinger.

Joe adds:

”An important addition to my previous note on Iran, etc. The addition of Bahrain as an active member of the exercise is interesting for an oil-business reason as well. In the book, “Quest for the Presidency,” by Peter Goldman et. al.(Texas A&M Univ. Press, College Station, Tx, 1994, p. 300) we learn the following: A 1990 article in a Texas newspaper questioned George H.W. Bush’s “motives for mobilizing to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. The article implied that he (Bush 41) was doing it because his eldest son, George W., had business interests in Bahrain in need of protection from a widening war.”

IS MARTIAL LAW NEXT FOR WHEN THE S-IT HITS THE FAN?

Frank Morales thinks so:

”In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does soby revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007″ (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a “public emergency” and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is “martial law.”

Section 1076 of the massive Authorization Act, which grants the Pentagon another $500-plus-billion for its ill-advised adventures, is entitled, “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.” Section 333, “Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law” states that “the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (”refuse” or “fail” in) maintaining public order, “in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

STUDENT PROTESTS PREVAIL: Gallaudet Board Votes Out Jane Fernandes -
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W9RT02484793D1484F27F335DDCB70