Pack your bags…

REPOST:

Greg Palast, Author of Armed Madhouse, on How Rove May Have Already Stolen the 2008 Election
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 4:06pm. Interviews
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it. That’s one of the main new things. Plus a special chapter on New Orleans and my bust down there.
– Greg Palast
* * *
You might say, since the 2000 election, BuzzFlash and Greg Palast have shared many a foxhole in the fight for democracy. He’s a workaholic, like we are — and he doesn’t flinch one iota in investigating the powers that be.
One of the things that makes Palast such an incredible asset is that he is in the I.F. Stone tradition of his doing thorough research. As much as he’s built up a Sam Spade sleuthing persona, it is grounded in his ability to shift through large piles of documents and data that most modern reporters would just look at and cry, "No way, I’ve got to meet someone for a daquiri."
Mainstream jounalism in D.C. is built on the "easy story," as in the one that is handed to you by the Executive Branch. Actually, Palast doesn’t work in D.C. much at all. He is out traveling around the country — and world — doing actual investigations into what is really going on.

i’m sitting in laguardia, waiting for my flight back to chicago.

i’m
so tired, but it’s the good kind of tired. i was at The Last HOPE all
weekend…which really isn’t the final HOPE at all; i’m boundlessly
excited for The Next HOPE in summer 2010. it was my first hacker con
ever, and it was amazing.

a blow-by-blow of the con would be a
little nonsensical, and probably very boring everyone who is reading
this. either you weren’t there and you therefore don’t care about the
minutiae, or you were there and you lived through all of it with
me…and my words will be a pretty poor substitute for your own
memories. thus, i won’t subject you to one.

still…the phone losers
talk on saturday night was a blast. i spend way too much time on the
web posting on the PLA forums, and in IRC chatting in #phonelosers,
that it was great fun meeting some of the people from there in real
life. that was my favourite part of the con…the people. i loved
meeting these people and being able to put faces and personalities to
what had been words and avatars and handles for so many months, and i
loved meeting more people through them, or by just running into them.
yes, i also attended several very interesting and very educational
talks on phone phreaking, computer hacking, and other wonderfully geeky
topics, but that wasn’t the main excitement for me.

i had no
idea what to expect, since i had never been to anything like that
before. but, it was wonderful, and i fully expect to be attending many
more hacker cons in the future.

March 4th. Here’s what happened today in history:

1275: Chinese astronomers observe a total eclipse of the sun.

1789: The constitution goes into effect.

1791: Vermont becomes a state.

1837: Chicago becomes incorporated as a city.

1970: French submarine Eurydice explodes.

2005: The car of released Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena is fired on by US soldiers in Iraq, causing the death of an Italian Secret Service Agent and injuring two passengers.

2008: Brett Farvre retires.