The Bill Moyers show this week (June 22-29, 2014) featured an interview with Chuck Lewis who has written a book titled 935 Lies.... Here is Transcript etc of the show.
Found at the link for the transcript was a link to a database of the lies that led to the Iraq War. Search the database of liars by clicking on their photos:
For regular readers of Salon Online Magazine in those days and related comments in the now gone Table Talk Forum, the lies were obvious long before the war. Our congress critters refused to look at the evidence and source of the lies. Something in the area of 5000 US and other soldiers died, tens of thousands were injured, many will carry the emotional and psychiatric scars of that war for the rest of their lives.
As was powerfully indicated in the Moyers Show, the future of our system as a real democracy depends on determining truth and falsity in government propaganda. That requires determined digging and prodding journalists who need our support when even a "liberal" President Obama goes after whistle blowers and truth tellers with the kind of bureacratic vengeance not even seen by the morally rotten Bush, Jr. Administration.
And, we still need explanations from our own Senator Tim Johnson on why he suckered for the lies or went along with them when he had been provided ample evidence that the Bush War Card was a nearly complete and total fraud. We have let all of our congress critters in those days get off without an explanation for their incompetence or willing intelligence failure in the runup to the Iraq war.
And, in recent news is a bunch of partisan crap about how the IRS scrutinized right wing money-making schemes and propaganda devices when they went after tax exemptions. Several hundred e-mails apparently disappeared when hard drives failed BEFORE the GOP demand which produced something like 70,000 e-mails despite the computer crashes. In the Moyers show, is a note that the Bush-Cheney administration used corporate e-mail to avoid scrutiny inevitable with government e-mail systems and that 10,000,000 of those e-mails related to the Iraq war and presumably to the money-making schemes of the industrial war machine were destroyed.
*** Stay tuned...and never trust without proof and always verify--- Doug Wiken
I watched Frontline tonight on SDPB-TV2. It was part 1 of their two-part program "United States of Secrets". That program should make any real liberal or real conservative mad as hell. There is video of Bush lying through his teeth, Gen. Hayden lying through his fat lips, and VP Cheney sneaking around like a skunk under a bush sneaking secret documents around to safe in the VP's sttorneys office.
Then there is Obama as a campaigner talking about open government and sunshine, etc. and then voting for a bill to make the illegal operations pushed by Bush and Cheney legal and then as President going after leakers. It is no wonder Snowden left the country to let us know how we are being lied to and our constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of speech being invaded. And apparently all for nothing since it has been impossible to show that all this snoopervision of US citizens has prevented a single terrorist act or even led to any signficant information...as well as information that was completely wrong.
Also in the Frontline story is the story of both Bush and Obama going after a guy they want to testify falsely against others claiming they were in a conspiracy with him to leak top secret information. They raid his house and take his computer and every shread of printed or digital information. Then they charge him with the equivalent of high treason for having "Top Secret" documents in his possession. Obama said leakers would be hit with a ton of bricks.
Only problem, when a knowledgeable reporter got a look at the documents he realized all the information was already released in the public domain. Then they looked at the "Top Secret" documents and noticed the line indicating they were public information blotted out and "Top Secret, etc" stamped on the line below. After being hassled for months and spending all his life savings on attorneys, he ended up with not a conviction for espionage, treason, or whatever, but a $25 fine for the misdemeanor of "misusing a government computer". Incidentally, I am not typing this on a government computer.
Watching this you will be reminded of the adage, "Sleep with dogs, and you will wake up with fleas". Then you will realize that almost the whole Washington bureacracy, Congress, President Obama, and with a few exceptions, the press are all covered with fleas. Don't get too close to Sen. Johnson or Thune, you may start to involuntarily itch and scratch.
Check the links below, and if you haven't seen this buy the $24 DVD or take the time to watch the streaming video online. Another Frontline program coming up on corporate spying on us and aiding and abetting government spying on all of us. Don't miss it. Also, Bill Moyers will have Glen Greenwald on this weekend.
Notorious wingnut-right boilerplate poster at Mt. Blogmore prior to destruction by corporate bean counters, and Woster and Rasmussen, Art Oakes died recently in the Black Hills. He struggled for two years against pancreatic cancer.
Oakes was like a cuckoo clock that clanged at least once a day. He dumped the same rehash of the same irrelevancy into Mt. Blogmore over and over again even after the tripe had been shredded for lack of facts or abundance of illogic a dozen times.
But, Art Oakes had the integrity to put his own name on his posts which was something many wingnuts refuse to do. May he rest in peace....and never post anything again. Condolences to his wife and family who loved him and to the editors of the Rapid City Journal and Mt. Blogmore who apparently loved his ideological mythology.
Below is a copy of a letter to the editor from Diane (Lykkens) Bruns that was published in the Sunday Argus Leader April 20. 2014. Diane gave me permission to use it here at Dakota Today. I thought the letter should make people think about law enforcement and judicial behavior in South Dakota. It seems like a rather remarkably calm and sensible statement considering what law enforcement and courts did to abuse and persecute her and her family.
Scriptures say, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32
The truth will not bring back Pam or Cheryl to the Jackson or Miller families and we, the Lykken family, are and have been saddened by their loss and not knowing what happened. We NEVER were a part of their disappearance as we have maintained and people now realize. We do feel that leads were NOT followed up on and disappointed as to how the investigation was handled by law enforcement in 1971 and in 2004 until now.
The truth will not make up for almost 10 years of persecution of our family in the name of “justice,” especially when the courts say it is legal. Our mom, Esther Lykken, turned 94 on April 5. On Aug. 24, 2004, more than 20 vehicles with officers, guns drawn, surrounded the farm, to secure the “crime scene.” Esther, accused of being the mother of murderers, an accomplice, a liar, destroying evidence, was kicked out of her home along with a brother and family and a sister-in-law. Under questioning with no lawyers present on our part, because we all were telling the truth; in order to support their version, we heard that our deceased father and brother were a part of the crime as well.
Lies were told to each of us separately hoping we would verify the theories they had created. Kerwyn was taken in for hours of questioning and a lie detector test. We were kicked off the farm for five days, but reporters roamed it along with South Dakota’s version of CSI, paid for by Homeland Security money, known as the Cold Case Unit of retired DCI agents and state of the art equipment using the electricity to run it from the farm and later paid for by our mother.
Remember, this was and still is the United States of America, and there was NO EVIDENCE of any crime that had ever been committed.
The truth is not innuendo, but innuendo has been rampant in both law enforcement and media. The purse, the rusted pieces of metal, bones, the license plate, the 10 boxes of evidence that the state is now willing to give back to our family but had been held because of potential evidence — even though charges were dropped against our brother David in 2008 — the tape-recorded confession, the reliable snitch, the location of our place to the gravel pit, the connection of how our family knew the Millers and Jacksons, the lies being fed to the Miller and Jackson families about evidence to turn them against us to alleviate their pain. Law enforcement, media and our attorneys general, Larry Long and Marty Jackley, made an art of “hating someone because they may be guilty and if they aren’t, we are going to make sure it looks like it” mentality.
The truth is our brother, David, is in the penitentiary for a crime he committed in 1990. The truth is our family loves him, but we are not and were not raised to be criminals. The truth is hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were spent, maybe even millions, to prove the cold case theory, “make the puzzle fit the piece,” and the piece was David and he had to be found guilty.
The truth is this happened to us: Name and photos in the newspapers, on televisions, YouTube, Facebook; every holiday was affected for years because of new evidence or more digging or another theory, neighbors questioned, grand juries convened, testimony, court houses, the Lykken name being throw like manure from the back of a spreader in spring.
But the most important truth of all is we were raised to love our Lord and Savior, to love each other and live our lives so that others will see the real truth.
Diane Lykken Bruns, 63, lives in South Dakota. She is a sister of David Lykken, who was falsely accused in the disappearance and death of two Beresford teens in 1971. Source: Argus Leader April 20, 2014 Diane Bruns Letter to Editor
Maybe it is time South Dakota puts together a "blue-ribbon" committee of researchers, historians, law professors, lawyers, and a number of "joe six-packs" with a fine sense of outrage.
***Stay tuned and reread your old civics books and see how that meshes with current behavior of law and courts.--- Doug Wiken
For part of yesterday, Dakota Today, and TypePad management page were unavailable. The TypePad Status page indicated a DNS attack on Typepad. Denial of Service generates a lot of rear-end pain.
I would much prefer our big brother government would go after the Techno-Terrorists who vandalize web sites instead of trying to store every phone message of every citizen for whatever mindless reason; or, for going to the armpits of the world with religious and political fanaticism related to thousand year old wars, etc.
And while speaking of the thousands of square feet of government buildings devoted to storing telephone messages from here and the rest of the world, perhaps a bit of those billions of storage bytes could be devoted to real-time recording of commercial plane flight data so that after crashes, survivors and rescuers or salvagers don't have to first find a pinging device in the bottom of the ocean in order to know about that crash or prevent similar crashes in the future. (Sorry about that aproximately 75-word sentence). Or perhaps a floating radio transmitter could be popped out of a plane if it lands with a thud on land or sea.
Of course, that might reduce the time CNN would be able to devote to the plane crash. As of yet, the only real news in that story is : 1. Plane Disappeared, 2. Plane is found. Everything between 1 &2 is speculation and often conflicting irrelevant speculation.
Enough of this.
*** Stay tuned and tell your congress critter to go after the Techno-Terrorists--- Doug Wiken
A few weeks ago, I listened to SDPB-Radio Midday. I don't remember who was interviewed, but he made several general and specific points relevant to the horribly botched law enforcement investigations of the disappearance of the two girls 43 years ago who have now been found in a creek and identities confirmed. See KELO site for multipile stories on the case. Lykken and Law, etc. KELO story 1, KELO Story 2,KELO Story 3. KELO Story 4. Note: not in chronological order unfortunately.
In the last days, SD newspapers have followed SD AG Jackley's press release with some followup. Info is available. Please note the "ETC" in title above.
But, here I will attempt to tie the 43 years of multiple law enforcement bungling to the SDPB-Radio Program. I think link below leads to that interview. Since it is not a transcript and I don't now have time to listen again (and no speakers on computer), you can take a look yourself:
If my memory of the program is correct the guy interviewed when asked what were primary factors leading to conviction of innocents, he mentioned law enforcement "theories" of where investigation should lead. The problem he noted is that once law enforcement starts trying to prove their theory rather than actually test it, they and prosecutors tend to ignore evidence that contradicts their theories even when the new or later evidence suggests they have the wrong person in their investigative meat grinder. Couple that with delays in evaluating and testing forensic evidence, and "justice" can go haywire with a lot of unfortunate consequences for a lot of innocent people and likely as well, truly guilty people also never getting any scrutiny.
With all the experience in evaluating wrongful convictions, it would seem law enforcment, courts, and legislators should be examining investigative failures to determine is systematic failures might continue even with plenty of evident reasons to correct the systems.
But, if you look at your daily papers or KELO, you will find that law enforcement and courts have both worked together on at least two misleading worthless theories. Number 1 was the idea that these two girls took off for California in search of hippiedom or some such, so no real investigation early after the disappearance. Then there was the failure to question other students going to the party in the car in front of the girls who said the girls headlights disappeared about a mile behind them and the girls never showed up at the party in the gravel pit.
Then years later law enforcement gets the theory that David Lykken must have somehow killed the girls and buried their car somewhere. This is the faulty "guilt theory" that drove law enforcement to hastle the Lykken family and dig their farm up. Apparently law enforcement people are still justifying that "theory"-driven goose chase today even after the girl's car and their bodies have been found in nearby Brule Crick.
And nearly as co-conspirators in the goose chase, the SD court system decided that the Lykken family had no basis for actual physical damages or apparently pain and suffering from their harrassment by law officers driven by a faulty theory. This reminds me of years ago hearing of the Nixon "No-Knock" door smashing policies going wrong when I was at the U of Rochester about 40 years ago. Law enforcement had smashed the door on a house and dragged a naked couple and their children out into the street. Only later did they realize they had smashed the door on the wrong house at the wrong address. Law enforcement then claimed they had no reason to pay for the door or anything else.
Law enforcement systems that refuse to accept that they can make serious mistakes expensive to innocents have gone on for years with all the worst kind of arrogance and citizen disregard that can reside behind a badge.
Now, Instead of denying any responsibilty for 43 years of "theory"- driven screwups, South Dakota Courts, legislators, and law enforcement should now be seriously studying this and other cases for how law enforcment went so dreadfully wrong and start working on preventing such needless, mindless screwups in the future.
TEA-Party ideologues have their mind set on Obama as an evil threat to liberties and America as we know it. They probably should be more concerned about their neighborhood, local, and state law enforcement systems and get-along go-along- with- prosecutors court systems.
Liberal, Middle of the Road, Conservative, Democrat, Republican, Independent, we all should be demanding that law enforcement and court systems now learn from this case instead of doing everything they can to scratch dirt over it like a cat that has just crapped.
Assume my or your religion opposes corporations being considered the same as God's own children and also I suspect a lot of war is godless. Why should I or anybody else who opposes these policies be required to pay taxes if it is decided that the Hobby Lobby corporation can be exempted from employee health insurance under the Affordable care act because they might get birth control pills and that might offend the religious mythology of the corporate owners?
There are sensible restrictions on all freedoms. Go back to the "No right to scream 'fire" in a crowded theater". No right to impose corporate "religious rights" on anybody else either when that is the equivalent harmfulness as falsely screaming "fire" in a crowded theater.
We have already had enough damage to US democracy from an elitist mythology-based steaming pile of Supreme Court decisions without even one more.
*** Stay tuned even if I haven't looked at a law book for over 50 years-- Doug Wiken
In respect to never underestimating their audiences, President Obama and want-to-be Tzarist dictator Putin are exchanging insults and spitballs blanketed with profound-sounding rhetoric filled with all the actual content of adolescent shitheads screaming insults and epithets across a busy street.
Reality bites. Obama might as well tells us that the Ukraine and Crimea are unfortunately a lot more in the Russian sphere of influence than they are in any rational U.S. sphere of influence. It is also apparent that these areas of the world have such corrupt governments that they are CSFUACTABR; that is, "Countries so fouled up and corrupt they are beyond repair". The US statements coming from Obama are altogether too much like those the US put out before and after the USSR invaded Hungary. We gave the impression to Hungary that we would support a revolt against the USSR, but they learned it was useless U.S. rhetoric.
Putin, on the other hand, is demonstrating only his insecurity by using a military adventure to stir up his population's old Russian empire and blind nationalism to supplement his naked attacks against journalists and others opposed to his governance.
Our US President and congress critters can't find money for education or green energy or efficient high speed transit, but can wave the old cold-war flags and slogans and "patriotically" support dumping $1 Billion into the corrupt economic holes in the Ukraine.
The invasion of the U.S by under-educated, unskilled, superstitious illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America across our unprotected borders is more of a threat to our national interest than is the invasion of Russia into Crimea.
It is apparently much easier and more politically expedient for Putin and Obama to rattle their sabers than to actually solve possibly expensive and/or controversial problems in their own countries. Their pissing contest leaves us all stinking dirty and some of us very disgusted with the self-serving nonsensical cold-war rhetoric and baiting.
*** Stay tuned even if your level of political interest never rises above watching sports--- Doug Wiken
I see the Native Sun Times on the rack here and last week the article on the XL pipeline caught my attention and I bought Giago's paper. It was interesting, but probably for the wrong reason. Jeffrey Whalen had an opinion column or article on the Oglala Sioux Tribe Council and their economics.
According to his data, in 2013, the 20 members of the OST Council "paid" themselves $798,000. They also burned through $537,100 dollars for travel. The grand total was over $1,333,100. One of the meetings Whalen discussed was in Spearfish, SD where the council traveled to discuss the $78 million of debt the tribe has. According to Whalen, no other tribal members there, and no members of the council with any accounting knowledge and perhaps only one member with any advanced education.
A few weeks ago, somebody noted in a discussion on the Native Americans needing more days to vote in general elections and more places to do it, that the members of their own boards paid to attend often only showed up at meetings 20% to 40% of the time. Note: this may have referred to some other tribal council.
Now, there are more than a few members of the South Dakota legislature which we might be better off if they failed to show up in Pierre, SD, they are also not getting over $40,000 a year to study and cast votes, nor are they each burning through $40,000 to $66,000 on transportation either. Considering the sad economic situation on SD Reservations, the story on the OST Council exploitation of resources for apparently little benefit to the general Native American population, is genuinely a sad indicator of the hypocrisy evident in the situation.
The article on XL Pipeline dragged out a few more facts and opinions on why it is not a good idea. It is worth reading. I guess I may consider buying the paper again although it is a bit too much like the same genre as a John Birch publication but with a very much different agenda.
I have the January 24, 2014 US Dept. of State CD with the latest slant on the environmental and economic impacts of the XL Pipeline. I need to dig into that stuff again. Republicans have jumped on this issue as if the pipeline would be nearly equivalent to the second coming of Christ. Unlike Christ however, the GOP has taken more than a few dollars from the fossil-fuels industry lobbyists, etc. And, of course, our newspapers and other media have accepted full page ads from Trans Canada and fossil fuels organizations and have recently followed up with glowing editorials attacking President Obama for not immediately approving this foreign-owned environmental obscenity.
So much for the rambling today. Temperature is up, but wind was terrible. At 6:30PM, temperature is back down to 30F, but was over 40 today and the sun warmed the day and the general mood around here.
*** Stay tuned and remember, Fox Noise is not the only source of information-- Doug Wiken
OPINION: Sounds like our wonderful legislators are trying to find new ways to screw farmers and ranchers. Most of us in rural areas are paying an awful lot of agricultural taxes and getting next to nothing in the way of direct services. I understand we all benefit from better education of everybody and some of those educated people might even venture back to the boondocks and be of service to the rest of us. However, in the Winner, SD school district, something like 20% of students come from rural areas, but 80% of the school taxes come from rural land. That suggests to me that perhaps something other than agricultural farm and ranch land should be the target for mulcting more taxes.
If legislators think it is fair to charge more tax per acre (43,560 sq.ft) based on income land produces, perhaps they should be applying income production as a factor in taxing lawyers and doctors and insurance, accountants, barbers, repair shops, et al on a per sq. ft. basis. A parsimonious lawyer working in a 10x10 office with 100 sq ft. may be making a few hundred thousand per year. That kind of space husbandry means that space is worth a lot per square foot if sauce for the agriculturist is the same as sauce for the lawyer. And, farmers and ranchers may also be paying most of the cost of legal libraries and courtroom space.
Too often what comes out of Pierre and the legislature is a palliative rather than a cure or an actual solution. Good heavens, if they actually pushed policies to actually solve problems, what would they pretend to do in the next session?
*** Stay tuned even if a blog can be written in 20 sq ft and return nothing in income---Doug Wiken
Residents of South Dakota. Check your broadband speed with the SD Speedtest. Your test will both let you know how speedy is your ISP and also help get us better service in South Dakota.
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