A Passing Bit of Paranoia
Just a thought:

What if the NSA-spy thing was leaked by the WH on purpose? Here's the reasoning (or lack thereof :)):

The admin would greatly benefit from a terror attack perpetrated within the US right now. Not only would it likely grant them the sort of congressional unity and cooperation they took advantage of after 9/11, but it would throw up a big smokescreen in front of all the nefarious goings-on in which so many of them have been caught red-handed. Problem is, they can't allow an attack to happen (or engineer one), since protecting the US has been their whole shtick, as well as their excuse for everything from civil rights abuses to the war. Howevah, if they were to be legally thwarted by Congress and the public on the spying thing, any attack (engineered or otherwise) which might occur could then be blamed on the bleeding heart civil libertarians, who refused to let them protect us at the expense of a few little civil rights infractions. :S

Okay, I said it was paranoid. Doesn't mean it can't be true. ;)

Current Mood: pessimistic

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Maybe It's Just Me ....
Here I am, pissed off again. Dubya praises our "booming" economy, paints a rosey picture, and most of the news media I've seen/heard/read has been running off copies of it. Sheepshit. Every day I hear of new layoffs, most of the people I know are having a harder and harder time making ends meet, and the poverty figures have gone up every single time I've checked. But our economy is mahvelous. WTF?

Sure, I can see how they're manipulating some of the data, and I can pretty much guess at the rest. But are people really fucking stupid enough to believe any of it? Mike said a while back that he'd heard the civilians being hired in Iraq are being lumped in with US employment figures. I haven't had a chance to try and track down anything in print, but it does make me wonder: Are the Iraqi army and police personnel also part of our employment figures? Are we paying them? It's the only explanation I can see for why our unemployment figures are holding in the face of so many corporate layoffs and outsourcing. Where else are all these "new jobs" that are being created?

New home sales perked up last month. Wow. Could it be that the homes built for hurricane victims by Habitat for Humanity and other charitable orgs were responsible for that perk up? Duh.

The whole thing just makes me wanna puke.

Current Mood: angry

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I Have No Words ....
http://www.papersplease.org/davis/facts.html

Commuting By Bus In Denver? Papers, Please.
DEB DAVIS LIKES to commute to work by public bus. She uses the time to read, crochet or pay bills. It's her quiet time. What with the high price of gas, she saves money, too: a week's worth of gas money gets her a month's worth of bus rides.

The bus she rides crosses the property of the Denver Federal Center, a collection of government offices such as the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and part of the National Archives. The Denver Federal Center is not a high security area: it's not Area 51 or NORAD.

On her first day commuting to work by bus, the bus stopped at the gates of the Denver Federal Center. A security guard got on and demanded that all of the passengers on this public bus produce ID. She was surprised by the demand of the man in uniform, but she complied: it would have meant a walk of several miles if she hadn't. Her ID was not taken and compared to any "no-ride" list. The guard barely glanced at it.

When she got home, what had happened on the bus began to bother her. 'This is not a police state or communist Russia', she thought. From her 8th grade Civics class she knew there is no law requiring her, as an American citizen, to carry ID or any papers, much less show them to anyone on a public bus.

She decided she would no longer show her ID on the bus.

The Compliance Test
On Monday, September 26th 2005, Deb Davis headed off to work on the route 100 bus. When the bus got to the gates of the Denver Federal Center, a guard got on and asked her if she had an ID. She answered in the affirmative. He asked if he could see it. She said no.

When the guard asked why she wouldn't show her ID, Deb told him that she didn't have to do so. The guard then ordered her off the bus. Deb refused, stating she was riding a public bus and just trying to get to work.

The guard then went to call his supervisor, and returned shortly with a federal policeman. The federal cop then demanded her ID. Deb politely explained once again that she would not show her ID, and she was simply commuting to work. He left, returning shortly thereafter with a second policeman in tow.

The Second Compliance Test
This second cop asked the same question and got the same answer: no showing of ID, no getting off the bus.

The cop was also annoyed with the fact that she was on the phone with a friend and didn't feel like hanging up, even when he 'ordered' her to do so.

The second cop said everyone had to show ID any time they were asked by the police, adding that if she were in a Wal-Mart and was asked by the police for ID, that she would have to show it there, too.

She explained that she didn't have to show him or any other policeman my ID on a public bus or in a Wal-Mart. She told him she was simply trying to go to work.

The Arrest
Suddenly, the second policeman shouted "Grab her!" and he grabbed the cell phone from her and threw it to the back of the bus. With each of the policemen wrenching one of her arms behind her back, she was jerked out of her seat, the contents of her purse and book bag flying everywhere. The cops shoved her out of the bus, handcuffed her, threw her into the back seat of a police cruiser, and drove her to a police station inside the confines of the Denver Federal Center.

Once inside, she was taken down a hall and told to sit in a chair, still handcuffed, while one of the policemen went through her purse, now retrieved from the bus.

The two policemen sat in front of their computers, typing and conferring, trying to figure out what they should charge her with. Eventually, they wrote up several tickets, took her outside and removed the handcuffs, returned her belongings, and pointed her toward the bus stop. She was told that if she ever entered the Denver Federal Center again, she would go to jail.

She hasn't commuted by public bus since that day.
*********************************************************

This woman's son is serving in Iraq.

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Conspiracy Theory, My Ass. :)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lyn-lear/paging-frank-rich-gao-c_b_11483.html

Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman October 26, 2005

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.

According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that "public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines." The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear
that's exactly what happened.

GAO Report

Revised 10/27/05


Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com. Their What Happened in Ohio?, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published in Spring, 2006, by New Press.

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Office Furniture?
http://www.thinkprogress.org/

Cunningham and MZM: The White House Connection
Today, Duke Cunningham pled guilty to receiving over $2 million in bribes from Mitchell Wade and his company, MZM Inc., in exchange for legislative favors. It’s worth noting that MZM also did some unusual business with the White House:

Over the past three years it [MZM Inc.] was also awarded several contracts, worth more than $600,000, by the Executive Office of the President. They include a $140,000 deal for office furniture in 2002 and several for unspecified “intelligence services.”

Why did the White House hire MZM, a “defense and intelligence firm,” to buy office furniture for the White House?

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This is a nightmare. It has to be.
US may use planes as substitute for troops in Iraq

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Monday November 28, 2005
The Guardian


The Bush administration is considering a plan to put America's awesome airpower at the disposal of Iraqi commanders, as a way of reducing the number of US troops on the ground. The plan is causing consternation among commanders in US air force, who say it could lead to increased civilian casualties and lead to airstrikes being used as means of settling old scores.
According to an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh, the possibility of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused unease in the military, with air force commanders objecting to the possibility that Iraqis will eventually be responsible for target selection.

"Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame it on someone else?" a senior military planner told the magazine. "Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of al-Qaida, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?"

With the White House under increasing pressure over its handling of the war in Iraq, senior administration figures are for the first time signalling the possibility of significant troop reductions. In a departure from previous statements the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said last week that the training of Iraqi soldiers had advanced so far that the current number of US troops in the country probably would not be needed much longer.

However, there remains scepticism about the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from the 160,000 US troops in the country. Under the plans reported in the New Yorker, air power will be used to try to fill the gap left by troop reductions. But with the insurgency operating mostly within urban environments, and planes relying on laser-guided bombs directed from the ground to try to avoid collateral damage, there are fears that turning the process over the Iraqis could lead to increased civilian casualties.

"The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot ... The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can't verify. And we're going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?" a former high-level intelligence official said.

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Dave Barry ... On Target Once Again!
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/barryd/

Lesson in futility just a phone call away

Today, I want to CLICK. Excuse me. Okay. Today, I want to talk about CLICK.
Excuse me again. Okay, where were we? Oh, yeah, I was saying that CLICK. Never mind, just ignore it. I was saying that I want to CLICK about this major stride forward in CLICK phone technology called "call waiting," which is such a big CLICKing convenience that I'd like to find the CLICK who invented it and. ...

No, wait, let me just calm down here. Some readers may not even know what I'm talking about. Some readers are probably living in backward, soybean-infested regions that don't even have the incredible convenience of "call waiting." So let me explain how it works: If you're on the phone with Party A, and Party B tries to call you, both you and Party A will hear an interruption noise, which alerts you to press your disconnect button so you can talk to Party B, who, trust me, has absolutely nothing important to tell you, so you say you'll call back and resume talking with Party A for 10 full seconds, until you hear another interruption noise indicating that you have a vitally unimportant call from Party C, and so on down the alphabet until Party A decides to drive over to your house and strangle you.

Doesn't this sound terrific, soybean people? Doesn't it sound modern? To give you a clear picture of what you're missing, let me compare "call waiting" to an everyday domestic situation. Let's say I'm having dinner with my wife and 8-year-old son, and my wife and I are discussing the kind of important issue that normal, mature, married adults discuss at dinner:

ME: It does WHAT when you flush it?

MY WIFE: It makes kind of a banging sound.

ME: A banging sound?

MY WIFE: Yes. And there are these little like electric sparks coming. ...

OUR SON (interrupting): How come. ...

MY WIFE: Robert, please don't interrupt.

ME: Sparks? MY WIFE: Yes, and they're. ...

OUR SON (interrupting): But I was just gonna ask you. ...

MY WIFE: Wait, Robert!

ME: There are sparks?

MY WIFE: Yes, they're coming from. ...

OUR SON: But this is IMPORTANT!

MY WIFE: ALL RIGHT, Robert. What IS it?

OUR SON: How come my left arm tastes saltier than my right arm?

"Call waiting" is very similar to this. It's kind of like an electronic 8-year-old who is simply incapable of shutting up while you are conversing with somebody else. The differences are that 1.) an 8-year-old does not have the gall to charge you a monthly fee for this service; and 2.) an 8-year-old can interrupt you only if he's in the same room, whereas with the incredible capabilities of "call waiting," your conversations can be interrupted by everybody in the entire world who has access to a telephone. It doesn't even have to be a person. A computer can interrupt you. In fact, through a combination of "call waiting" and "auto-dialing," it is now technically possible for your telephone conversations to be interrupted by a trained chicken.

It's just so darned convenient that I can hardly wait to see what exciting new services the telephone people will come up with next. Maybe they'll offer "call fabricating," wherein your phone becomes bored and rings for no reason; or "call misrepresenting," wherein your callers' voices are electronically altered so that you hear the OPPOSITE of what they actually said.

But what I, personally, would like to see - call me a dreamer - would be some kind of service wherein if you were talking to somebody and a third person tried to call either of you, your call could not be interrupted.

Instead, the third person would hear a special tone - we could call it a "busy signal" - telling him that a conversation was already in progress, so he'll have to try again later. But I doubt we'll ever see this come about.

The concept is far too complex to be grasped by a certain type of telecommunications consumer. I am thinking primarily of the chicken.

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Sullivan County -- Land of the Free and Home of the Sane
From one of our local newspapers:

George is worst natural disaster to hit country

http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/09/19/bethcols.htm

By Beth Quinn
Times Herald-Record

Well, folks, the only thing left up in the air now is whether George Bush is the worst president ever. Herbert Hoover has held the title since 1933.
It's been neck and neck for a while, but I think Bush pulled ahead with his spectacular failure in handling Katrina.
George Bush is a walking catastrophe. Far more than even Katrina, he is one of the worst disasters to ever hit America. His performance these past two weeks seemed a showcase for his utter stupidity and indifference, complete with flood, fire and floating bodies.
It was an epic performance that, more than anything else thus far, has revealed his true, craven self.
And now he wants to lay it on us. Soon we'll be seeing bumper stickers that say, "Buy gasoline or the hurricane will have won."
Somehow, all Americans are now "in this together" and we have to make up for his bumbling incompetence, beginning with picking up the tab for rebuilding the Gulf states.
To paraphrase the words of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, "Holy bullcrap!"
I've got to tell you, I get a lot of e-mails from folks who claim they're offended when I criticize this guy. But now I'm the one who's offended. Really.
I'm offended that Bush has only just now discovered that there are poor, black people in America.
I'm offended by the entire Bush family, who have established a culture of greed in this country and have been unable to disguise their contempt for the poor – an attitude evidenced in all its wild glory by George's mama when she said a week after Katrina hit:
"So many of the people in the (Houston) arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this (she chuckled slightly) is working very well for them."
Oh those greedy poor people who just want to take advantage of living like cattle in an arena.
I'm offended that Bush, upon his return to the White House – finally! – two days after Katrina hit, spent his first few hours back making yet another recess appointment of a federal judge, one whom the Senate had already rejected as too weird.
I'm offended that, when Bush finally realized he should at least pretend some concern for the dead and dying in the Gulf states, he carefully rolled up his sleeves for his photo op as though he were going to be fishing dead bodies out of the water his very own self.
I'm offended that, somehow, Halliburton won again when one of its subsidiaries was automatically granted a $29.8 million government contract to clean up New Orleans. Don't we have a bidding process in this country anymore? Everything has to go to Cheney's cheating company?
I'm offended by Bush's unwillingness to name a bipartisan panel to investigate just what – what! – the hell went wrong in our hurricane response.
I'm offended that those who lost everything in Katrina will be unable to declare bankruptcy because they can't possibly gather up all their drowned and burned paperwork to prove they've got nothing left.
I'm offended that Bush went on television to lay out a $200 billion rebuilding plan without saying a single word about how that might get paid for – just as the No Child Left Behind Act is unfunded; just as the Medicare prescription plan is unfunded; just as his insane war in Iraq is unfunded and raising our deficit to dizzying heights.
I'm offended that Bush has bankrupt our nation of money, goodwill and morality.
I'm offended that no one in Congress has yet called for his impeachment.
Most of all, I'm offended by those Americans who still insist that this sociopath is a swell guy, a terrific leader, a fine thinker. What is wrong with you people?!
And if this column offends you, I don't care. Anyone offended by the truth is living in a bubble world, kind of like the Superdome. And we all know what happens when the roof gets blown off a bubble world.
Reality. Yuck. How offensive.

Current Mood: good

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An ugly rant about "the other board." Read at your own risk.
Okay, I've pretty much had it. Used to be that the Lib thread on the OB was a place where we, as Liberals, could go and rant, rave, scream when we had to, without having to do much more than defend ourselves against the occasional Con or Neocon lurker who sought to edit us. It used to be a comfortable place, where we could receive support and empathy, have some fun and share occasional moments of rage. No one of us took offense, demanded apologies or made boo-boo faces over what was said, as we all understood that we were Liberals first, and men, women, short, tall, Red, Blue, whatever, second. Hell, some of the worst comments made about people in the Red States were made by those who lived in them, for *they* understood what the thread was all about. But in the past few months, I've seen some of us being harangued into apologizing for everything from not liking certain foods to posting *someone else's* quote about Bush's accented "english." Now it's supposed to be *my* turn in the apology mill for saying that the South was racist in the 50s and 60s. Jesus-H-Fucking-Christ, and no fucking way will I apologize for that. To me, that would be demeaning the memories of all those who fought and died so that African Americans and other black people could attain the right to vote. And if people are uncomfortable with the fact that white Southerners moved to the Republican Party because blacks were registering as Democrats, that's just too fucking bad.

I've tried to be understanding, knowing people have full plates, but mine is overloaded right now, and understanding is beginning to fall by the wayside. For the time being, at least, I'll not be visiting the OB.

Current Mood: pissed off

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Doonesbury
First heard about this on Lou Dobbs' show. Maybe it's just me, but there was something really eerie about hearing Dobbs use the word "turd." LOL!

http://www.southflorida.com/news/sns-ap-doonesbury-language,0,1086820.story

Some Papers Pull, Edit 'Doonesbury' Strip

By DAVID TWIDDY
Associated Press Writer
Posted July 27 2005, 3:45 AM EDT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- It may be President Bush's nickname for key political adviser Karl Rove, but some editors don't think it belongs in their newspapers.

About a dozen papers objected to Tuesday's and Wednesday's "Doonesbury" comic strips, and some either pulled or edited them.

The strips refer to Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, as "Turd Blossom."

Lee Salem, editor at Kansas City-based Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes the strip to 1,400 papers, said the complaints from 10 to 12 newspapers weren't unexpected. As opposed to other times when editors have objected to Doonesbury content, the syndicate did not send out replacement strips.

"Given the coverage of Karl Rove, we thought it was appropriate, especially given the history of the strip," Salem said.

Doonesbury's creator, Garry Trudeau, has infuriated some editors over the years with his language, images and political themes. An e-mail to Trudeau wasn't immediately returned Tuesday.

Salem said that since newspapers don't have to notify the syndicate when they choose to remove a strip, it's impossible to know how many papers ran Tuesday's comic.

In the strip, Bush and an aide are lamenting the problems the administration has had over allegations that Rove leaked the name of a CIA officer to reporters.

Bush says, "Karl's sure been earnin' his nickname lately."

The unnamed aide says, "Boy Genius? I'm not so sure sir ..."

Bush then says, "Hey Turd Blossom! Get in here."

The term is said to be one of several nicknames Bush uses for Rove, one of his closest allies and who is widely credited for Bush's election in 2000 and re-election in 2004. The mainstream U.S. media have rarely mentioned the nickname, but it has gained traction in the international press and on the Internet.

Among those with concerns was the Providence (R.I.) Journal, whose editors removed the offensive word from the strip's final panel.

"I didn't think (taking out the word) hurt it," Executive Editor Joel Rawson said. "I would prefer to run the strip and if we can edit it, that's fine."

Other papers, such as The Kansas City Star, removed the strip entirely, replacing it with an older one.

"We thought it was in bad taste and probably unclear to a lot of people why we would be using the term," said Steve Shirk, the Star's managing editor/news.

One of the newspapers that ran the strips as submitted was the Chicago Tribune, where associate managing editor/Features Geoff Brown said, "The nickname has been reported enough elsewhere that we figured the cartoonist was within his satirical right to use it."

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