Complete 9/11 Timeline

They let it happen.
But they also made it happen through decades of insane foreign policy. Detailed knowledge of information on the 9/11 timeline site makes it completely clear the Bush Administration knew what was coming on 9/11 and did absolutely nothing to stop it.

But what infuriates me even more than that, with all this information available, is how many Americans believe we are actually fighting a war against terrorism or that Israel is under attack by Arab terrorists and must defend itself or that those A-Rabs have been killing each other for hundreds of years because they are violent, tribal, incorrigible thugs (compared, I suppose, to civilized peace loving Christian Westerners-Bleech!) and so on.

What could terminal satyriasis sufferer Bill O'Reilly possibly say if CNN actually reported information available on 9/11 time line or guerrilla news network or even Daily Kos? What could anyone say if that information were widely available through mainstream sources?

Bush and his flying monkeys would be in prison.

It frightens and depresses me that most Americans appear completely unable to think critically but that many of the average people who bother to think view CNN as liberal media, or at least as reliable, and Fox as "conservative" and so we continue on 6 years after the fact with little if any discussion of real threats, like our corporate run government which is the biggest threat America faces.

I watched about 90 minutes total of Christiane Amanpour's 6 hour special on religious extremism and felt extremely frustrated by all the missed opportunities and mischaracterizations. Amanpour is the best of what CNN offers, but the best of CNN just isn't good enough and the worst of it - like Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs - is downright crap

I wonder what the twentieth century would have been like if Hitler had had media such as ours at his disposal?
24 hours a day of lies, sensationalism and speculation passed off as independent, unbiased journalism...

There's all that verifiable information, right there on the Internet, though that may not last many more years, yet there is no mechanism for it getting to millions and millions of people who are casual consumers of news. And that is what most people are - casual consumers of news.

The media conglomerates need to broken up. It is not possible for democracy to exist inside this media system.

Time for Women to Take Over

I have a theory that women, especially mothers, have several advantages over men in the small-business world.

¶They are better listeners.

¶Consequently, they pick up details and nuances men often miss.

¶They are more active networkers.

¶They are better motivators.

¶Having to juggle home and workplace duties, they are better multi-taskers.

¶They are more patient, and thus better able to stick to long-term strategies.

¶They are more tenacious. Men can be pretty dogged, but not a single one, to my knowledge, has had to endure childbirth.

I searched the Internet for evidence for this thesis and found none. The book titles I came across, like “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” by Lois P. Frankel, seemed to contradict it. It’s a familiar tune: women leaders need to drop that nurturing nonsense and kick butt the way men do.

Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps men ought to imitate the opposite sex. The tide is turning in women’s favor, after all. They now account for 57 percent of college students. They are rising up the ranks in corporate America and invading formerly male sanctuaries like engineering and even construction. Most profoundly, they are changing the entrepreneurial landscape, with the number of businesses they own increasing at twice the overall rate for the last two decades, to 10.4 million today, or 40 percent of the total, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research (www.cfwbr.org/).

Greed Driven Cheats Who Run Phone Companies Want a Piece of Lucrative Cable TV Market in Illinois

The measure hammered out by state lawmakers and the attorney general's office would try to make it easier for telephone giants AT&T and Verizon to compete with cable kings Comcast Corp. and Insight Communications for consumers' phone, Internet and cable needs.

It cleared the House 113-0 two weeks ago and awaits expected approval in the Senate.

That's a long way from just a few weeks ago, when opposition from city mayors, public access channels and powerful cable companies seemed to have doomed the idea.

But protections included in the negotiations prompted opponents to drop their opposition, although Verizon criticizes the proposal as making it more difficult to enter Illinois' market. Even the cable companies are officially neutral on the measure and say they're willing to see if it works.

"It obviously didn't please everybody," said Gary Mack, spokesman for the Illinois Cable Television and Communications Association. "There are elements of it that nobody's completely happy with."

The new measure eases concerns about the loss of public access channels, known as PEGs, by protecting funding and potentially creating channels in places that don't have them now.

PEG advocates say that's a vast improvement over what's happened elsewhere.

"In a number of states, PEG access is dead," said Barbara Popovic of Keep Us Connected, a coalition of cities, nonprofit groups and public access channels. "This really does give PEG access a new hope."

Communities still will get their franchise fees. They'll also have the final say over permits for cable equipment and some enforcement power if service is flawed. Mayors throughout the state had warned that stripping them of franchising power could jeopardize customer service and cause a revenue shortfall in local government.