My Brief Article is below. I spend most of my time looking at local News, but yesterday I happened to notice that Iraq voted on their constitution, the results were disputed and there was a 10 day recount which cast the results into doubt. Sunni Leaders said things like "The people were shocked to find out that their vote is worthless because of the major fraud that takes place in Iraq," and called the election a "farce". Sunnis are the main force behind the insurgency, and the group who was in power untill the US invasion. In the last election in January they boycotted the vote because they didn't trust the system, this time they voted overwelmingly against the constitution and it passed anyway. leaving them with the impression that their vote doesen't matter (kind of like us in America, but they're not desensitized and jaded yet so it realy pisses them off and makes them want to overthrow the government by force).



Iraq Constitution is a sign of Civil War, not Democracy


The problem is this: the Sunni Arabs (who are the major force behind the insurgency) actually voted this time… and it didn’t work. Despite all of our promises about democracy and freedom, they tried doing it Our Way, and it backfired. If you can’t trust democracy to achieve change, what do you have left? Violence.

Sunnis fear they are being excluded, and left on land that has no oil and no wealth. The new constitution paves the way for a semi-autonomous Kurdish Region in the north and a Shiite region in the south, both of which have large supplies of oil. The Sunnis are becoming an impoverished and desperate minority in the country. This is not a good formula for peace.

Unfortunately the US doesn’t care. As long as the two tribes that do have all the oil are our buddies we make out just fine. We can give them weapons to repress the desperate minority and they can give us oil. It’s a win-win situation, unless you’re concerned about justice. Don’t believe me? Our government isn’t as modern as we might hope, they see the world in terms of survival of the fittest. This is all very practical geopolitical, ‘realist’, state centered strategy.

News Excerpts Below


Reuters - Iraq voters approve constitution
10-25-2005

By Claudia Parsons and Andrew Quinn

“BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi voters ratified a new U.S.-backed constitution despite bitter opposition in Sunni Arab areas where insurgents are battling to topple the Baghdad government, results showed on Tuesday.

Iraq's Electoral Commission, giving final results from the October 15 referendum, said 79 percent of voters backed the constitution against 21 percent opposed in a poll split largely along Iraq's sectarian and ethnic lines.

Several Shi'ite and Kurdish regions voted between 95 and 99 percent "Yes"; in rebellious, Sunni Anbar 97 percent said "No".

Prominent Sunni Arab leaders rejected the referendum as a fraud, warning it could fuel militant violence and discourage Sunnis from participating in future elections.”


AP - Iraq's Constitution Ratified by Voters
10-25-2005

By MARIAM FAM, Associated Press Writer

“The strong negative vote by Sunni Arabs, however, raised questions whether the charter would succeed in luring Sunnis away from the insurgency. Many Sunni Arabs fear the constitution will create virtually autonomous and oil-rich mini-states of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, leaving Sunnis isolated in poor central and western regions with a weak central government in Baghdad.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni Arab member of the committee that drafted the constitution, called the referendum "a farce" and accused the Shiite and Kurdish-dominated government of stealing ballot boxes to reduce the percentage of "no" votes in several provinces.

"The people were shocked to find out that their vote is worthless because of the major fraud that takes place in Iraq," he said on Al-Arabiya television.
Much will depend on whether Sunni Arabs vote in large numbers in the Dec. 15 elections. A Sunni boycott of the Jan. 30 balloting enabled Shiites and Kurds to dominate parliament and take the lead role in drafting the constitution.”

the casino in Buffalo... there's a lot to the issue, but one thing about it is really offending me right now... NOBODY ASKED US! The governor woke up one morning and said "I know how I'm going to close the gap in our budget, I'm take a piece of Buffalo and give it away to a sovereign nation. They can take the land right off of the tax rolls and make $150 million off of it each year from a casino." And he didn't even ask the State government, nor the Erie County or Buffalo government. And he sure as hell didn't use a referendum to ask us, the people who live here. I'm offended, in fact it really pisses me off.

Especially since Buffalo is not doing bad right now, there's actually a lot of old architectural gems being renovated and turned into mixed use apartments and commercial buildings. And new buildings are even starting to fill in the parking lots. The nice areas of the city are actually growing, as more people are moving into the downtown neighborhoods. Main St is improving from the theatre district past the medical campus and all the way up to the Artspace lofts project near Summer St. There's also the interesting Health Now building right behind City Hall and all kinds of stuff is happening. All we need is for the government not to screw up real bad. You can read about it at Buffalo Rising's City page . Now is not the time to be giving pieces of downtown real estate away to a sovereign nation.

The jobs argument is bullshit, look at other cities that have tried this, like Atlantic city, Detroit, or Niagara Falls, yes even in Niagara Falls at least two hotels and a restaurant have closed, and they actually have tourists! By contrast 80% of the money that the casino makes in Buffalo is going to come from us, the local economy, and it's not staying here, it's going to the Senecas.

The casino will also be nicely situated at the center of all the bus routes, Downtown, where people who can't afford cars can easily get to. Not so with the Niagara Falls or Salamanca casinos. The poor in Buffalo are going to get poorer. I live in an inexpensive Allentown apartment, most of my neighbors in this building are poor, both white and black, I thought about them. Who would go, would they spend more money than they could afford, and what would they do to try and get that money back? What would happen to our neighborhood because of their poverty? I don't like what I see, really.. more theft, more drugs, more broken car windows and missing stereos, more people outside bothering you for change, or asking you to buy their crap, electronics and fake drugs. It won't be as nice of a neighborhood. This is one of the most pedestrian friendly and architecturally beautiful sections of the city, but people will enjoy it less, and less often, because they will be harassed and confronted by the struggling poor.

It's not good, I mean seriously if you want numbers here's some stuff from Donn Esmonde's recent article :

The casino will make $150 million a year

About 80 percent of the people who will gamble at a Buffalo casino live within 50 miles of Buffalo,

The casino brings about 1,000 jobs (although at a cost of some existing jobs), with those workers taking home about $25 million a year.

The state gets about $30 million of the annual casino profits,
With the City and County splitting about $7 million.

But $25 million in take-home pay and a $7 million local cut doesn't balance the nearly $150 million we'll pay for it.

"The number one casino spinoff business is a gas station," Thompson said. "Maybe a restaurant within walking distance . . . Most people going to the casino won't do a single thing in Buffalo other than gamble."



If you read this whole thing you definitely care enough to call some representatives and say that if a casino is proposed the public should have a say,
tell them to introduce a bill to their legislature so that they have to address the issue and hear from their constituents about it.
Or encourage them to sponsor a referendum for the people to vote on. This process is going way too fast, it needs to be properly deliberated. We are handing over a chunk of our city.
You may have read in my last post that there is a public comment period from now until November 7th, you have to fax (FAX# 202-208-6950) or e-mail (webteam@ios.doi.gov) Gale Norton, the Interior Secretary, she's the one who approves land transfers. I encouraged my representatives to send her a fax as well.

You can find your city reps here:
County reps here:
State reps here:

here is a fantastic article from Buffalo Rising about the casino. Think about it. this is a permanent change to our city. how will it change us? how will it change the downtown urban living and sightseeing environment. Please make a phone call or write a letter, stop this nonsense. you can find contact information in the Buffalo Rising Article.

Downtown Casino: Are We Sheep?
by Figmo

Simply put, putting a casino in Downtown Buffalo is the dumbest and most dangerous idea anyone's had in a while. To give away the center of an area finally in the throes of a residential turnaround to a sovereign nation with no obligation to community development standards and guidelines is stupid. To build a low-budget, third rate casino catering to busloads of sad cases carrying plastic cups filled with loose change in the middle of an area where many developers with vision have taken a chance and sunk significant chunks of capital into high-end residential development-that's the ballgame, folks.

Click for the Rest

I'd like to point out a couple things about the anti-torture amendment to the latest $445,000,000,000 War spending Bill.
The amendment was spearheaded by John McCain. A good guy in my opinion who unlike most of our Washington officials actually SERVED in the military, and he was a war prisoner. Meaning essentially that he understands what life is like in war. he gets his information from experience instead of movies like Bush and most everyone in his cabinet. interesting.
also the wording of the amendment is not as ambiguous as I originally thought. It bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" which as honorable a policy as it is vague. "Cruel" or "degrading" mean a million things to a million people. but McCain and his cosponsors were not looking for a feelgood amendment they actually are looking to set standards at the federal level, and to learn exactly what those standards are the amendment refers you to the "Army Field Manual". standards the army has already agreed upon.

interesting facts.

I got a kick out of this article in the NY Times today.

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Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - Defying the White House, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed Wednesday to regulate the detention, interrogation and treatment of prisoners held by the American military.

The measure ignited a fierce debate among many Senate Republicans and the White House, which threatened to veto a $440 billion military spending bill if the detention amendment was tacked on, saying it would bind the president's hands in wartime. Nonetheless, the measure passed, 90 to 9, with 46 Republicans, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, joining 43 Democrats and one independent in favor.

More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in United States government custody.

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The President wants to veto a bill banning the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" That speaks volumes about this administration. seriously, what kind of America is this guy from?!?!

I'm rather picky when it comes to websites and web-design, being a designer myself I quickly notice holes and flaws in design. Also I am currently taking a class at UB called Interface Design, which looks at websites from the perspective of the user, and it has made me even more critical of sites that are difficult to navigate or understand.

That being said, I really like the New Buffalo Rising site It looks slick, but more importantly you can navigate freely through the content and find what interests you without a problem. They have given the articles categories and subcategories which allow you to find exactly the stuff that interests you, no matter when they were published. and the site is updated often, like 6-12 new articles per day.

I just realy like it I couldn't have come up with a better design myself. check it out

Sheriff Howard is lashing out at WNY Media.net for a negative story they published about him.

The story was about Sheriff Howard of Erie County, and where he is getting his campaign money. He didn’t like these facts being exposed to the public so in response Howard has decided to get revenge on the website and the writer.
The article on WNY Media focuses on a recent fundraiser for the Sheriff that was cosponsored by Delacy Ford. Coincidentally Delacy Ford has been doing business with the Sheriff’s department since at least 1999, with contracts totaling at least $733,917 of taxpayer money.
This is all public information, but I guess the good Sheriff didn’t like this being exposed on WNY Media, which is a popular alternative news website like SpeakupWNY. The Sheriff feels threatened by the story, which is good, it means that WNY Media is doing their Job. The media is supposed to ask tough questions that those in power do not want to answer, they are supposed to bring facts into the light that those in power don’t want people to know. But Sheriff Howard doesn’t like people rocking his boat (or yacht), so he is lashing out against the website and it’s owner. How? He targeted their place of employment. Someone called the website owner’s place of work and said enough mean things to get that person Suspended from their job. Suspended until further notice. We speak truth to power and power reacts by threatening our source of income
We can’t let media be intimidated for doing their job, WNY Media is simply asking tough questions that the public deserves answers to. It’s $733,917 of our tax money that is being played with, we deserve to know what is going on behind the scenes. Attacking the media like this is beyond improper, any lawyers in the house?
I want everyone to be aware of the dirty tricks that are going on with the politicians in this county. Please Read the article.


“The fundraiser was hosted by the wives of Sheriff Howard's political appointees, as well as Smith Boy Marine Sales and Delacy Ford. To say the least, it’s unusual for a company with county contracts to sponsor a fundraiser. Usually they just give money. But when you want to give more money than legally allowed, what do you do in New York State? That's right, hold a fundraiser:”

More….

There was a protest this weekend in DC. there were between 100,000 and 300,000 people there. it was the largest anti-war protest in DC since the war in Iraq began 3 years ago. but if you sneezed you might have missed the news coverage.
our news media is beyond disappointing. I don't even have the energy to go into it now. but I'll give you one example from this latest protest.There was an anti-war protest of up to 300,000 people, and there was a counter "pro-war" protest of around 100 people on the side of that protest. In almost every major American news outlet that I checked, the protest with 100 people was given more prominent coverage then the protest with 300,000 people. I checked Yahoo News at about 9:00 last night, and this was the first news story about the protest I saw, it was talking about the pro-war rally, and only made some abstract refferance to the real protest in about the 8th paragraph. about six lines below that was a story about the real protest.
go to democracy now if you want to hear what the protest was about. the entire monday show is replaying excerpts from speaches at the protest. the show can be downloaded at their website.

[size=l]A Critical Look at the Race for Mayor[/size]
By: David Coffee
September 19, 2005


After hearing the results of last week’s Mayoral Primary, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. In the beginning of the race we had over eight candidates, many of whom were political outsiders who were simply interested in helping improve their beloved community. They entered the race simply because they felt an obligation to do their part to help all of Buffalo. After the primary we lost our inspiring candidates, and we found ourselves immersed in the same old political nonsense, complete with name-calling and devoid of issues. We need to free ourselves from ‘politics as usual’ and the way to do it is to change our voting system so that it more accurately reflects the will of the people.

The Buffalo news on Friday described the Brown-Helfer mayoral contest as a battle between “two political heavyweights.” Now I’m not a gambler but I’m willing to bet that nobody in this city would describe their ideal mayor as a ‘political heavyweight’. That says a lot about the trap that we find ourselves in. Our system has lead us down a narrow hallway, and at the end we find two candidates that nobody truly wants. The system is not working, so the responsible thing to do is change the system. I’m not talking about getting a candidate elected, I’m talking about changing the rules that we use to elect our public officials.

There are many ways to translate democratic intent into political representation, and statistically our Winner-take-all plurality system is the worst. Elections like ours use a very simple method to select the winner, the candidate with the most votes wins. This is fine when there are only two candidates, but with three or more there is a possibility that the most favored candidate will lose. A candidate who would normally win in a two-way race might have their votes ‘stolen’ by a third candidate and therefore hand the election to a candidate who doesn’t actually have the support of the majority. This is the dilemma that led Steve Calvanesso to drop out of the primary early. He didn’t want to steal votes from Kevin Gaughan thereby helping Byron Brown win the nomination. If we had used a system of Instant Runoff Voting this problem could have been avoided entirely, voters would have three choices, and they could vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping their least favorite candidate.

It is very possible to deal with this problem. The most efficient and democratic way is through Instant Runoff Voting. It works like this: After the votes are cast, the least favored candidates are eliminated from the ballot until someone achieves a majority of the votes. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference, if their first choice receives the smallest number of votes and is eliminated from the ballot their second choice is used. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. If Brown Gaughan and Calvaneso were competing and Gaughan ended up with the least number of votes he would be eliminated and his voters would use their second choice vote instead. The result would truly express the will of the voters, instead of making them frustrated.

Unlike the Runoff election used in the New York City Democratic primary, Instant Runoff Voting is much less costly or time consuming. The New York City Runoff election requires everyone to come back and vote again if nobody receives a majority in the first round of voting. Instant Runoff voting allows voters to rank their candidates so that they only need to vote once. If a voters first choice is eliminated they will use their second choice instead.

Why does it matter? What difference will it make? In this case, Calvaneso wouldn’t have dropped out. And voters would have been able to choose freely between three candidates without worrying about ‘wasting’ their vote or ‘spoiling’ the election by allowing someone to win with less than 50% of the vote.

We could easily use Instant Runoff Voting in our Democratic primary, or in any City or County election. It doesn’t take a federal or state law to change our system of voting, our community decides how we want to elect our own officials.

Think about it, does our current system elect the candidates that people want? What would happen if voters could record their true preference, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of two evils because they were scared of wasting their vote on a third candidate? And what about the candidates, would more people run? With additional candidates, would we talk about other issues and hear more diverse solutions? And what would happen to Buffalo if we had a vibrant public discourse led by the many candidates in each election? And what if our citizens could vote for any of those eight candidates without fear of their vote not counting, would thousands more people turn out to vote? I’m willing to bet that the change would be dramatic.

It’s not that we don’t have honest, qualified people running for office, the problem is that they are squeezed out of the race before the general public gets a chance to vote for them. Or they show up on the ballot as a third party that nobody acknowledges because we don’t want to waste our vote. We are all tired of the political machines, empty promises, and incompetent public officials, but we can’t seem to overcome them. We have good candidates but our system makes them so hard to elect. The most important thing we can do to get ourselves out of this mess is to change the rules of the system.

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More info on Instant Runoff Voting

In response to (e:Paul)'s request [inlink]paul,3842[/inlink] for pictures from the protest in the square. here they are.
Also I'd like to give a quick update on how terrible things are in Iraq. Not only are more people dying and more terrorist attacks occurring per day, but the whole constitutional process is ripping the country apart. And the sad thing is that America doesn't care. We are simply buddying up with the two oil rich tribes in the country, and getting ready to help them start a war against the Sunni minority. We abandoned the Sunnis and they abandoned the political process. they tried to be involved, I heard many reports throughout the past 2 years of Sunni leaders wanting to sit down with the Americans and talk about how they can be involved and fairly represented politically, but most of the time the Americans didn't even acknowledge their request. Currently the Iraqi congress is going ahead with a theocratic constitution that will legally marginalize the Sunnis and leave them isolated on a territory that has no oil. hmm... is this the way to get to world peace? Remove people from power and thrust them into poverty! because that really is what's happening in Iraq right now.
if you want to know how and why we should get out of Iraq here's some further reading.
Previous post on the 'Iraqi Peace Process'[inlink]dcoffee,5[/inlink]

Recent Article 'Anti-Terror Strategy in Doubt on 911'

Now for the Pictures, I couldn't go but luckilly Molly took some pictures.