UNDERNEWS Sam Smith August 9, 1999 The Progressive Review 1739 Conn. Ave. NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 Fax: 202-234-6222 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] INDEX: http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINE NEWS: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.com DONATIONS AND ORDER FORM: http://prorev.com/order3.htm UNSUBSCRIBE: Reply with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. For a free subscription to our e-mail updates send your postal address with zip code. Copyright 1999, The Progressive Review. Matter not independently copyrighted may be reprinted provided TPR is paid your normal reprint fees, if any, and is given proper credit. Because of its quantity, TPR's mail is not always answered, but it is always read. The editor is cheered or remorseful as appropriate and posts some of the more interesting messages at http://prorev.com/letters.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- WE ARE NOT MAKING THIS UP ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT GAZETTE: Federal Emergency Management Agency officials will help develop a national program to combat school violence in the aftermath of shootings at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro and other schools around the country, an agency official said Friday. "We didn't have school violence before," said Kay Goss, associate director of the agency and a native of Northwest Arkansas who was appointed to her post six years ago. "But the definition of emergencies in school has to be changed to include school violence." "So many times we've heard afterward someone say, "I heard he was going to blow up the school, but I didn't think he would.' We have to catch violence in the early end of the cycle," she said. .... Along with Goss, Buddy Young, the agency's southern regional director in Denton, Texas; Cliff Brown, Goss' assistant; and Jan Paschal, northeast regional representative of the U.S. Department of Education, spoke during Friday's seminar, which urged area officials to develop comprehensive emergency programs for area schools. THE UNDERNEWS: FEMA has a long history dating back to the Reagan years of granting, or attempting to grant, itself plenary powers of one sort or another. One of its more notorious schemes involved a junta to provide "continuity in government" following a national disaster .... Buddy Young was Clinton's muscle at the Arkansas state house who, unlike some other state troopers, remained loyal to WJC and was rewarded with the FEMA plum. He's not the sort of person one expects in high federal office. More about all this can be found by searching TPR's web site for "FEMA" and "Buddy" STUPID POLITICIAN TRICKS WIRED: A proposed congressional bill that bans Internet discussions of the use of unapproved drugs and links to such sites has not just normally mellow potheads but also journalist groups in a huff .... About a dozen senators have signed on to support the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, but its primary leaders are Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and longtime Internet regulatory enthusiast, and Orrin Hatch, the arch-conservative Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary committee. If the measure becomes law, it will create a new federal felony -- punishable by a fine and three years in prison -- that covers Web pages that link to sites with information about where to buy "drug paraphernalia." .... Even editors of news organizations that publish articles about drug culture and link to related sites will be subject to arrest and prosecution. ANOTHER BILL from the ever-tedious Hatch, cosponsored regrettably by the normally sane Patrick Leahy, would prohibit the registering of a web domain with the sole intent of selling it to someone later. Proving once again that the free market belongs to those who got there first, the legislation would outlaw a practice known as cybersquatting. One response: the owner of two domains using Hatch's name has offered to sell them to the senator for $45,000. The bill is now before the Senate. DRUG BUSTS REUTERS: A federal judge has given the longest possible prison sentence to a Vietnam veteran who had claimed that his ``medical'' marijuana crop was legal under California state law. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell sentenced 52-year-old B.E. Smith to 27 months in federal prison, the first such sentence since California voters passed the ``Compassionate Use Act'' legalizing medical uses of marijuana in 1996. THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY Wages of Sin Department The American Bar Association featured Clintonista felon Webster Hubbell at its national convention. Hubbell, you may recall, was a lawyer sent to jail for overbilling his clients. The ABA also invited W.J. Clinton to speak. The invitation was announced the same week that a federal court judge imposed a $90,000 fine on Clinton for having given "false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process." The judge took the action, "not only to redress the misconduct of the President in this case, but to deter others who might themselves consider emulating the President of the United States by engaging in misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial system." Clinton is also under consideration for disbarment in Arkansas. VINCE FOSTER Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who wrote some of the best earlier material on the Clinton scandals, has returned to the topic in an article about HRC and Vince Foster in the Telegraph of London. Among his points: -- The cover-up of Foster's death was not initially Kenneth Starr's doing but the FBI. "Once this had occurred there was no going back. The FBI and the Justice Department were institutionally committed. It would have taken a granite prosecutor to crack this open. Mr. Starr was not a man who was going to tangle with the FBI." --"Mr. Starr's lead prosecutor in the case, Miquel Rodriguez, the man who conducted the witness cross-examinations, suspected that Foster's death was staged to look like a suicide. As he tried to probe, FBI agents began to obstruct him Planted stories appeared in the press .... Mr. Starr looked the other way. Rodriguez discovered that the FBI had doctored the key surviving Polaroid taken of Foster's head and neck. By sleuth, he obtained the original, which I have examined. It shows a black stippled neck wound, half way between the chin and the ear, exuding blood. It looks like a small caliber gunshot fired at short range, probably a .22 handgun pressed into the neck. In the FBI's doctored photo, the wound has disappeared." -- "Why does it matter? Because the FBI engaged in flagrant evidence tampering, and because it invalidates the official story that Foster put a revolver in his mouth and blew his brains out." -- Evans-Pritchard suggests that the death of Foster was related to that a few months later of Jerry Parks, the private investigator hired by Foster to do surveillance on WJC. When Parks heard about the Foster death, he said, "I'm a dead man." And soon was. The full story is well worth reading. TELEGRAPH STORY http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000157475629455&rtmo=pQsUshSe&atmo=99999999 &pg=/et/99/8/7/whil107.html CLINTON SCANDALS WASHINGTON TIMES: A former White House official invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 28 times Thursday in refusing to testify during a rancorous House committee hearing on campaign finance abuses during the 1996 presidential election. Mark Middleton, an Arkansas lawyer and longtime confidant of President Clinton, steadfastly refused to answer questions by House Government Reform Committee Republicans on whether he conspired with government officials in China or elsewhere to illegally funnel contributions to the Democratic National Committee or the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign. At one point, a frustrated Rep. Bob Barr, Georgia Republican, shouted at Mr. Middleton, asking him if he was "a bag man" for Chinese government interests. The former White House official quietly replied, "I respectfully decline to answer the question." MATT DRUDGE: More than a dozen women associated with various Clinton scandals are set to gather in one hotel room, the Drudge Report has learned. The meeting, which has been planned in secret, is scheduled to take place in Dallas later this month. According to legal sources, the women will travel from all across the country to share "war stories" and to discuss the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit against President Bill Clinton. WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF John Podesta repeatedly ducked Tim Russert's questons as to whether the president accepted Judge Wright's ruling about his contemptuous and deceitful behavior before her. The best he could come up with was this: "He's accepted the responsibility for his actions, for this judgment. He's going to pay the fine and, you know, we could spend all next year talking about this, too, but I think it's better to focus on the work of the American people and the job that the president's doing for the American people to keep this economy strong and to move forward." THE MEDIACRACY CBS On April 3, 1998, Dan Rather said: "Reports continue to surface that this key witness for the prosecution, David Hale, may have been secretly bankrolled by political activists widely regarded as political opponents, people that Clinton supporters call Republican haters from the far right." CBS in 1999 after an independent investigation found nothing prosecutable had happened: No story. Same with others who trumpeted the initial piece including Newsweek, CNN and Geraldo Rivera. Y2K FINANCIAL POST, CANADA: The Boston Globe reported that Warner Brothers cancelled plans for its Y2K disaster flick partly because, as its producer described it, there was a lack of faith in the ability of audiences to discern the difference between fictional and real-world computer disruptions. In the movie, Chris O'Donnell was to play a computer programmer who discovers a Y2K-related bug that could render New York City security systems vulnerable to terrorists. FINANCIAL POST http://www.nationalpost.com/financialpost.asp?s2=columnists&s3=chevreau&f=99 0729/40192.html LAND OF THE FREE WJC has rewritten his executive order on federalism after strong protests from libertarians, state and local officials concerning the initial document. TPR was virtually alone among the progressive media in raising an alarm over this extraordinary document that ran roughshod over at least two constitutional amendments, essentially replacing them in the Bill of Rights with the Rights of Bill. The new order admits what the old one wouldn't: "The people of the States created the national government and delegated to it enumerated governmental powers. All other sovereign powers, save those expressly prohibited the States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States or to the people." "The constitutional relationship among sovereign governments, State and national, is inherent in the very structure of the Constitution and is formalized in and protected by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. "The people of the States are free, subject only to restrictions in the Constitution itself or in constitutionally authorized Acts of Congress, to define the moral, political, and legal character of their lives. "The Framers recognized that the States possess unique authorities, qualities, and abilities to meet the needs of the people and should function as laboratories of democracy. "The nature of our constitutional system encourages a healthy diversity in the public policies adopted by the people of the several States according to their own conditions, needs, and desires. In the search for enlightened public policy, individual States and communities are free to experiment with a variety of approaches to public issues. One-size-fits-all approaches to public policy problems can inhibit the creation of effective solutions to those problems. "Acts of the national government -- whether legislative, executive, or judicial in nature -- that exceed the enumerated powers of that government under the Constitution violate the principle of federalism established by the Framers." CLINTON ON FEDERALISM http://prorev.com/psfed.htm THE GOOD OLD DAYS According to Edward Luttwak In the LA Times "Blood has become the limiting factor on the conduct of war, not arms or ammunition. Recent evidence not only from Somalia, which we evacuated after 20 servicemen were killed, but also from the 1991 Gulf War (when a full-scale U.S. Marine amphibious landing was canceled at the last minute because of a few sea mines), suggests that the United States does not differ from Russia or indeed any other advanced society with 2.2 children per family or less. "When the entire emotional capital of families is invested in one or two children instead of the four or five or six of World War I and World War II families, there are no expendable children whose death in combat is ultimately acceptable. Once willing to accept hundreds of casualties per day as the normal cost of warfare, today's United States will accept very few, if any at all. [Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of those peculiar Washington creatures, the academic who sits in a well protected office telling other people it is their duty to die. At the beginning of the Clinton administration he also wrote a book which the New York Times described as calling "for a mobilization of economic assets in the same way we once mobilized the military to fight wars. Consumer spending must give way to saving and the nurturing of our productive industries. The support of technologically advanced industries must be seen not just in terms of jobs or higher standards of living, but as an instrument of state power." Luttwak wasn't the first to think this way, however; Mussolini beat him to it some decades earlier.] FIELD NOTES TALES FROM THE HELLMOUTH A site for high school students to share tales of peer and administrator abuse in the public school system. http://www.hellmouth.org/ THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW 1739 Connecticut Ave NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 202-234-6222 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] Editor: Sam Smith INDEX : http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS : http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINES: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.htm For a free trial subscription to both our bi-monthly hard copy edition and our regular e-mail updates send e-mail and terrestrial address to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To order "Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual" (WW Norton) direct from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393316270/progressiverevieA/
