Homeland Security's Data Vacuum Cleaner In Action
An Investigation by the Identity Project
I. ATS, APIS, Secure Flight: Different Bottles, Same Water
A. The Bottles
For years, DHS ran a secret travel surveillance program called the Automated Targeting System. This data mining program came to light earlier this year when DHS announced plans to openly monitor the international comings and goings of Americans with a legal version of the scheme called the Automated Passenger Information System, or APIS.
APIS, which is now fully operational, places requirements for government-issued travel credentials on all Americans as well as individualized, explicit, prior, per-flight permission to travel ("clearance") by DHS on every American citizen wishing to leave or enter the United States. In conducting APIS, DHS pulls in huge amounts of data on every passenger.
Secure Flight will put these same requirements on all Americans for domestic travel. Under Secure Flight, an American wishing to fly within the United States will need permission from DHS for each segment of his travels.
B. The Water
The main source of information DHS uses to determine whether to grant an American permission to travel by air comes from their flight reservation, or PNR. The PNR contains a wealth of deeply personal information, as this report will soon show. For DHS to argue that the APIS foreign travel surveillance program and the Secure Flight domestic travel surveillance program are separate and distinct is a fiction, if not an outright falsehood. They are but two bottling plants drawing water from the same spring.
II. The Identity Project Investigation...... LINK FOR REST

Hola Todas....

Just a short little note to tell everyone that I am in Spain for the fall semester. Once I am settled in Almeria I will try to update my blog with stories of class, my day, thesis research and any other information that seems interesting. I arrived on Wed and stayed in Madrid for two nights. Although I am heading to Almeria, I was put with the Salamanca group and thus have been forced into hanging out with a group of people that I will only know for a limited amount of time. And one thing that I dislike is touring around tourist sights with a bunch of english speaking people. The toures have generally been great but the sur amount of people in the groups makes me uncomfertable.
The day of arrival I just made myself stay up until about 10pm before passing out from pure jet lag...
Thursday we visited the Prado and the Royal Palace. Because of stupied people who can not turn off there flashes on there cameras both places have stopped allowing pictures. THis seems a bit extreme and thus I took the oppurtuniuty to take pictures regardlss....although I had to senak them in and caugh when my shutter closed and opened. Although the Prado was beutifal, the tour was limited in not only what they were showing us but in the amount of time given to interrpurt the paintings to get a better understanding of the paintings. Vasquez, Goya and Ribiera were basically the only painting we saw....my favorite are Goyas darker paintings. Mosy of my op undercover pictures did not turn out to well but a few made it into the photo album.
After the Prado we walked towards the Royal Palace with an hour break for lunch inbetween. I made the mistake of ordering tripe marinated soup............which I did the last time here except this trip I am even less of a meat eater. Thus I dipped my bread in it a few times left and went and got an apple and water from a chinese run grocery store. The royal palace was not that impressive besides a few rooms and again I attempted to take a few pictures inside.....all of which did not turn out. Once that was over with I walked back to the hotel by myself with a short stop for internet, tapaps and beer.....in that order.
Thursday night I watched the Real Madrid soccer game (they won 2-0), had a beer, then went back to the room and drank some beer with my temp room mate until 2am before crashing out.
Friday (Today) we headed to "The Valley of the Fallen". This is a park that was built by Franco to be a memorial for the soilders under Franco that dies in the 1930s Civil War against the republic sipporters. The inglesia that is built into the mountain and the cross that sits apon the ssame moutain are huge massses of rock that seem unlikely built by human hand. However, Franco had plenty of prisoners at his disposal and they would work 24/7 (to death) to complete this place. Franco is burried there as well. There was a church ceremony going on when we got there and I def got the opes dei felling from the place???? Amassing yes, but the stroy behind it makes it that less important for me!!!!
After that we visited the old winter palace of the royal family in San Lorenzo. Beutifal, no pictures and one of the best guides I have ever had. He was a maestro and used Spanglish to make the tour that more fun and interesting.
Now im in Toledo. I went into town with a group of the Salamanca students but like I said....me and groups do not do to well!!! Like I said I will be glad to be in ALmeria.
PEACE LOVE NO MORE WAR
TY

Lost In Translation: Ahmadinejad And The Media By Ali Quli Qarai09/28/07 "ICH" -- -
First I want to make some remarks about that now world-famous statement of President Ahmadinejad at Columbia: “We do not have homosexuals in Iran of the kind you have in your country.” The American media conveniently ignored the second, and crucial, part of his sentence as something redundant.Obviously he was not saying, We don’t have any homosexuals whatsoever in Iran—something nobody in the world would believe, not even in Iran. And by implication, he was not telling his audience, I am a plain liar! —something which his audience at Columbia and the American media construed him to be saying.What he was saying is that homosexuality in the US and homosexuality in Iran are issues which are as far apart from one another as two cultural universes possibly can be. They are so dissimilar that any attempt to relate them and bring them under a common caption would be misleading. “Homosexuality is not an issue in Iran as it is in present-day American society.” This was, apparently what was saying in polite terms.Homosexuality in the US is a omnipresent social and political issue which crops up in almost every discourse and debate pertaining to American society and politics. So much so that I think it was a major issue, if not the deciding factor, in the last two presidential elections which paved Bush’s way to the White House and saddled the Democrats with defeat, because a large so-called conservative section of the American public (the red states) felt wary of the pro-gay liberalism of the Democratic Party. LINK

See No Evil
The Teflon Alliance with Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

Two recent offhand comments, both widely publicized, have seriously undermined whatever progress might have been made in exposing the fact that the Iraq war was initiated at least in large part to guarantee Israel's safety and regional dominance in the Middle East.
In late August, Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was secretary of state, told Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service that, when Israel first got wind of U.S. planning for a war against Iraq, a wide range of Israelis, including political and intelligence officials, began warning against such a war. "Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy," Wilkerson said. Israeli warnings against an attack on Iraq were "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the administration during early 2002, according to Wilkerson.

This story garnered a fair amount of publicity and in at least one instance was used by a radio talk show host to shut off discussion of the John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt book on the influence of the Israel lobby, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Just a few days after the Wilkerson story came out and also only days after release of the Mearsheimer-Walt book, a caller to the Thom Hartmann radio program commended the book, urged Hartmann and his guest at the time, Senator Bernie Sanders, to read it, and asked Sanders to address the issue of Israel's and the lobby's support for the Iraq war. Hartmann shut the caller off with a comment that "we don't hype books on this program" (after having just allowed another caller to hype another book). Sanders then proceeded to denounce "conspiracy theories" such as the notion that Israel had anything to do with the war, and Hartmann finished off with a remark that, "besides," a report just came out --obviously meaning the Wilkerson story -- that demonstrates there was no Israeli link to the war. LINK

Massive Surveillance Net Keeps Track of Americans' Travel -- Even the Size of Hotel Beds

Raw Story

The Bush Administration has been collecting detailed records on the travel habits of Americans headed overseas, whether you fly, drive or take cruises abroad -- not simply your method of transit but the personal items you carry with you and the people you stay with, according to documents and statements obtained by the Washington Post.

They even keep sometimes keep track of what books you read. For as long as 15 years.

In a terrifying front-page article Saturday, the Post outlines the latest in US government surveillance.

According to officials, the records are intended "to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country." LINK

(I have not read this book yet but this article does a great job of summing it up...I look forward to reading it and I think everyone should)
Surviving Democracy
Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" By Stephen Lendman
Her newest book just out is "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" that explodes the myth of "free market" democracy. It shows how neoliberal Washington Consensus fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. Wars are waged, social services cut, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering she calls "disaster capitalism" with torture along for the ride to reinforce the message - no "New World Order" alternatives are tolerated.
"Free market" triumphalism is everywhere - from Canada to Brazil, China to Bulgaria, Russia to South Africa, Vietnam to Iraq. In all cases, the results are the same. People are sacrificed for profits and Margaret Thatcher's dictum applies - "there is no alternative."
"The Shock Doctrine" is a powerful tour de force, four years of on-the-ground research in the making and well worth the wait. In an age of corporatism partnered with corrupted political elites, it's must reading by an author now firmly established as a major intellectual figure on the left and champion of social justice. Naomi Klein is all that and more. Even for those familiar with her topics, the book is stunning, revealing, unforgetable and essential to know. This review will cover a healthy sample of what's in store for readers in the full equisitely written text. It's in seven parts with a concluding section. Each will be discussed below starting with a brief introduction. LINK

The Police State Is Right Here, Right Now
By Carolyn Baker
In April, 2007 I was pleasantly surprised to find Naomi Wolf's article, "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps" posted in several places online. I have been a fan of Wolf for many years, greatly appreciating her works and especially her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth. I had been looking for a list-or more specifically, an encyclopedia of the losses of civil liberties in the United States that might clarify for my history students the extent to which America has become a fascist empire. Wolf's "10 Easy Steps" was perfect, but her just-published book, The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot, from which the 10 easy steps was compiled, offers an even fuller picture-a succinct and engaging explanation of how our civil liberties have been hijacked in the past decade. It is the most poignant, powerful, genuinely patriotic piece of literature I have encountered since Thomas Paine's Common Sense. No wonder then, that the book's cover greatly resembles that 46-page tract by Paine written in 1775-as well it should.
One of the most frightening realities of teaching college history is that most students rarely have a clue what fascism is. They know about Hitler and the extermination of Jews, but they see little connection with Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s and the current political milieu in the United States. Overwhelmingly, they cannot define fascism, nor can they define socialism or democracy. After all, they were pre-occupied during grammar school with becoming standardized human beings by way of taking standardized "No Child's Behind Left" tests, five hours a day, four days a week. So why would they know the definitions of fascism, socialism or democracy? LINK

Hessians Redux: Blackwater, U.S. and England
By Dr. Sam Hamod 09/20/07 "ICH" --- -
It's strange that most of our American brethren have forgotten the Hessians, the mercenaries the British hired to fight against us in the Revolutionary War. You may recall that George Washington and his small band of patriots, men who were fighting for their country, crossed the Delaware River during the icy winter season in small boats and caught the Hessians unaware in Trenton and defeated them and broke the spirit of the British regulars who had depended on the famed Hessian mercenaries to finish off General Washington and his troops.
These Hessians were mercenaries, fighting for money, not for any moral cause; the Blackwater "security" people are mercenaries and who come from all over the world, South Africa, the Congo, Chile, Nicaragua and other places. Though Blackwater is an "American firm," its mercenaries are not all Americans, though some are. But, they, like the Hessians, are there for money, to do the bidding of those who wish to occupy a land against the will of the natives of that land—in our case, we were fighting for our independence, in the case of the Iraqis they are fighting for their country. We label them "terrorists" for fighting for their families, their homes and their religion—but we label Blackwater, "security forces"! Ah, what euphemisms, wrongful labeling and upside down semantics can do for you. LINK

Greenspan and the Economy of Greed
As the Empire Slips
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's memoir has put him in the news these last few days. He has upset Republicans with his comments on various presidents, with George W. Bush getting the brickbats and Clinton the praise, and by saying that Bush's invasion of Iraq was about oil, not weapons of mass destruction.
Opponents of Bush's wars welcomed Greenspan's statement, as it strips the moral pretext away from Bush's aggression, leaving naked greed unmasked.
It is certainly the case that Iraq was not invaded because of WMD, which the Bush administration knew did not exist. But the oil pretext is also phony. The US could have purchased a lot of oil for the trillion dollars that the Iraq invasion has already cost in out-of-pocket expenses and already incurred future expenses.
Moreover, Bush's invasion of Iraq, by worsening the US deficit and causing additional US reliance on foreign loans, has undermined the US dollar's role as reserve currency, thus threatening America's ability to pay for its imports. Greenspan himself said that the US dollar "doesn't have all that much of an advantage" and could be replaced by the Euro as the reserve currency. By the end of last year, Greenspan said, foreign central banks already held 25 percent of their reserves in Euros and 9 percent in other foreign currencies. The dollar's role has shrunk to 66 percent. LINK

Justice Forgotten
Whatever Happened to Palestine?
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
A group of anti-war leaders held a conference call at the end of August under the sponsorship of Michael Lerner's Network of Spiritual Progressives to do some long-term strategic planning for the anti-war movement. The discussants included leaders of the country's best known peace groups -- United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, Pax Christi, the Department of Peace, and others -- as well as Lerner himself and Democratic Congressmen Lynn Woolsey and Jim Moran. They talked about Iraq, of course, but of virtually nothing else. There was a bit about "peace and justice" in general, one passing mention of trying to stop an attack on Iran, and a whole lot of talk about avoiding action on all issues, including even Iraq, until Woolsey and a couple of progressive colleagues try their hands at manipulating weak-kneed congressional Democrats into "showing some backbone" on a withdrawal from Iraq. This must be a new concept in opposing war: do nothing.
You would think there was nothing else wrong in the world. There was no talk of the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan (which is assumed even by the anti-war movement to be a "good" war, despite the excessive number of innocent civilians -- never remembered -- who have been killed there). There was nothing about safeguarding Lebanon from frequent Israeli attack and nothing, of course, about supporting Palestinian human and national rights or opposing Israel's gross violation of these rights. There was nothing, in short, about any of the massive injustices perpetrated around the world by the United States, primarily as part of the so-called war on terror, and ignored by the anti-war/peace movement. This is a peace movement but apparently not a justice movement. LINK

Pakistan Heading Towards Total Anarchy
by Muhammad Khurshid

Again, Pakistan has reportedly been trying to sign a deal with Taliban and terrorists in Waziristan tribal region. According to reports, the local Taliban and the political administration in South Waziristan finalized an agreement for the release of more than 250 soldiers held hostage since last month.
According to the agreement, the Taliban will release the abducted soldiers in phases, a private TV channel reported. Efforts for the safe release of the abducted soldiers have been underway for the last two weeks.
In return, the army will leave the area and the Frontier Constabulary (FC) will take responsibility for security. The administration will also release the local Taliban who were arrested. Sources present during the talks with the local Taliban said that the abducted soldiers were kept in different locations, so they will be released phase wise starting on Monday. Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Major General Waheed Arshad told the TV channel that he has no information about the truce made between the political administration and the local Taliban.
In another development the retired generals have warned full-scale civil war in the country if the present campaign against the terrorists has not been stopped immediately.
According to a newspaper comment, SOME retired army generals have warned the government that continuing the current policies will push Pakistan into a state of civil war, creating no less serious situation than in Afghanistan and Iraq. The observation coming on the heels of the recent suicide strike on an army mess in Terblea-Ghazi is not without a rationale LINK

Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade.
According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.
Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.
In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.
Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence. LINK

Why U.S. Food Aid Benefits Big Business and Not Starving People
By Megan Tady, In These Times
How current policies favor giant shipping companies and agribusinesses over the starving populations they are supposed to serve.
Critics charge that current U.S. food aid policies are inefficient and possibly harmful.
Last month, in a move that shocked observers, CARE, one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations, rejected $45 million in U.S. food aid, shining a spotlight on a practice the group says may hurt starving populations more than help them.
Complaining that U.S. food aid policy is inefficient, unsustainable and perhaps even detrimental to combating food insecurity, CARE belives "enough is enough," according to Bob Bell, director for CARE's Food Resource Coordination Team. The decision comes at a time when other humanitarian and food advocacy organizations are calling on members of Congress to rewrite food aid policy that puts starving populations first when they authorize this month's 2007 Farm Bill. LINK

American Economy: R.I.P.

By Paul Craig Roberts

09/10/07 "ICH' -- -- The US economy continues its slow death before our eyes, but economists, policymakers, and most of the public are blind to the tottering fabled land of opportunity.

In August jobs in goods-producing industries declined by 64,000. The US economy lost 4,000 jobs overall. The private sector created a mere 24,000 jobs, all of which could be attributed to the 24,100 new jobs for waitresses and bartenders, and the government sector lost 28,000 jobs.

In the 21st century the US economy has ceased to create jobs in export industries and in industries that compete with imports. US job growth has been confined to domestic services, principally to food services and drinking places (waitresses and bartenders), private education and health services (ambulatory health care and hospital orderlies), and construction (which now has tanked). The lack of job growth in higher productivity, higher paid occupations associated with the American middle and upper middle classes will eventually kill the US consumer market. LINK

Why Has Congress Failed Americans?

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

The Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution surely did not foresee the day when, of the federal government’s three branches, the public would have the least confidence in Congress. In fact, the public has a little less confidence in Congress than it has in HMOs. At 14 percent, the fraction of Americans with a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress is the lowest in Gallup's history of this measure -- and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested in this year's Confidence in Institutions survey. The Supreme Court received 34 percent confidence and the awful presidency of George W. Bush received 25 percent – nothing to be proud of.

The 2006 congressional elections show that switching power between the two major political parties is an act of utter futility. We have a bipartisan failure of Congress to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities and serve the public. In the end, Democrats may have a different style, but like Republicans are also corrupt, arrogant, and incompetent. Things have gotten so bad institutionally and culturally that we cannot vote our way out of a dysfunctional and destructive Congress as long as the two-party duopoly maintains its grip on our political system. LINK

Will the US Really Bomb Iran?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"They're about taking out the entire Iranian military."
This particular spine-chiller comes from Alexis Debat, excitingly identified as "director of terrorism and national security" at the Nixon Center. According to Debat, the big takeout is what the U.S. Air Force has in store, as opposed to mere "pinprick strikes" against the infamous nuclear facilities.
Predicting imminent war on Iran has been one of the top two items in Cassandra's repertoire for a couple of years now, rivaled only by global warming as a sure-fire way to sell newspapers and boost website hits.
Debat was re-roasting that well-scorched chestnut, the "Shock and Awe" strategy, whereby-back in March of 2003-the U.S. Air Force proposed to reduce Iraq's entire military to smoldering ruins. In the event, "Shock and Awe" was a resounding failure, like all such pledges by Air Force commanders to destroy the enemy's military since the birth of aerial bombardments nearly a century ago. Such failures have never stopped the US Air Force from trying once again, and there are no doubt vivid attack plans now circulating the government.
LINK

Big Houses Are Not Green: America's McMansion Problem
By Stan Cox, AlterNet.
The recent mansion boom produced millions of energy-wasting homes with thousands of square feet that Americans don't need -- not the behavior of a society that's thinking about a sustainable future.
In Los Gatos, Calif., controversy has raged this summer over the city planning commission’s approval of a proposed hillside home that will occupy a whopping 3,600 square feet – and that's just the basement. Atop that walkout basement will be 5,500 more square feet worth of house.
The prospective owner says he’ll build to "green" standards, but at the Aug. 8 meeting where the permit was approved, the city's lone dissenting planning commissioner stated the obvious when he told the owner, "You have a 9,000-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a pool. I don't see that as green."
The just-popped housing bubble has left behind a couple of million families in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. It has also spawned a new generation of big, deluxe, under-occupied houses bulked up on low-interest steroids. LINK

Profit of Doom: Of Vampires, Parasites, and the Demise of Capitalism by Jason Miller
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
-Malcolm X
Striving with the unwavering dedication of true believers and slaves to the grind, those of us who exist within the geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries of the United States are collectively destroying the Earth.
With dutiful efforts, heavily sedated consciences, and sweet obliviousness to the depth of our depravity, we toil away at our chosen or assigned tasks. After all, predatory plutocrats like “Mitt” Romney would be impotent without his minions-the hundreds of millions of wage slaves exercising their “right to work” (for as small a wage as they desire) while obediently manning the bulwarks of a system so putrid that were it possible to feed it to a pig, our porcine friend would wretch his guts out. LINK

Crackpot Realists and Permanent War
by Ann Berg

While economic pundits point fingers at loose lending for the malodor in the housing market that is now filling the noses of financiers, they miss the primary cause: permanent war. Permanent war has caused the nation's institutions – political, social, and economic – to be organized into an impervious structure without which war could not be tolerated or financed.
Although 9/11 pushed the war machine into high gear, political centralization and the structuring of American society around war first gained a foothold during World War II. In 1956, five years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the ascendancy of the military-industrial complex (a phrase that originally included the word congressional), the anti-imperialist C. Wright Mills described the triad of power in his book The Power Elite. Stressing how the military entered the political and economic spheres only temporarily during the First World War, he related how modern warfare and its need for massive industrial capacity – along with support from the technological and scientific communities – propelled the military to new heights of influence. Wrote Mills:
"For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end. … The only seriously accepted plan for 'peace' is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." LINK

Aqua Thieves, Inc.
Whiskey is for Drinking, Water is for Fighting
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
That was Balzac.
Update to Balzac -- behind every great political issue lies a corporate crime.
Take water, for example.
For centuries, water was part of the commonwealth.
Then came the corporations.
And they had to control it.
In the United States, more than 1,000 community water systems have been taken over by corporations.
Then you had people fighting the big corporations, trying to wrest control back.
Think Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
But worldwide, the fight is starting to heat up.
And two activist film maker writers -- Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow -- are now out with a movie -- Thirst -- and a book -- Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water -- documenting the battle. (See thirstthemovie.org)
The movie lays out the fight. LINK

just so you know via Bush:

•I attacked and took over 2 countries.
•I spent the U.S. surplus and bankrupted the US Treasury.•I shattered the record for the biggest annual deficit in history (not easy!).•I set an economic record for the most personal bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.•I set all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the stock market. •In my first year in office I set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history (tough to beat my dad's, but I did). •After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, I presided over the worst security failure in US history. •I set the record for most campaign fund raising trips by any president in US history. •In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs. •I cut unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any other president in US history. •I set the all-time record for most real estate foreclosures in a 12-month period. •I set the record for the fewest press conferences of any president, since the advent of TV. •I presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed. LINK FOR MORE

Former Reagan aide: 'Brownshirt' Bush among top 'mass murderers of all time'
Nick JulianoRaw Story
President Bush's apparent plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran will only add to the civilian death toll as a result of US intervention that has placed the president "high on the list of mass murders of all time," a former aide in President Ronald Reagan's administration known for strident anti-Bush rhetoric said Friday.
"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."
Roberts, who has emerged as a fierce critic of Bush's war policies, accused the president of ignoring habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justifying torture and demonizing critics as anti-American. LINK