This is interesting:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/

"The White House is open for questions."

"We invite you to participate in our community-moderated online town hall. Submit your own question about the economy and vote on submissions from others. We also encourage you to include a link to a video of yourself asking your question, but text submissions are all you need. Come back on Thursday to watch the President answer some of the most popular submissions live at WhiteHouse.gov."

Perhaps some of the more literate here can suggest some questions? Not that I expect any of them to be treated seriously, and I expect censorship, but it's worth a try....

I suggest heading over to the Democracy for America blog, Blog for America, and comment on their current entry, What ever happened to......

DFA is a fine organization that is 'mainstream' progressive - it's the outshoot of the Dean campaign - and this is the second time that a topic closely related to 9/11 Truth has appeared on their blog.

I would suggest that people here go over and post some poite follow-up comments. Maybe even better would be to gently start posting interesting diary entries there, remembering to tailor it to a general audience of progressives, and see how much more headway can be made in bring up the issues we find important to this organization and to the community that reads it.

The recent debate on Thom Hartman's show between Kevin Ryan and Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society got me thinking....

He and his kind, when it comes to 9/11, are not the skeptics. We are!

That's fine for "skeptics" to organize and debunk UFOs, Bigfoot, fortune tellers, and so on. But for them to hold the government's mythology as being rational and the 9/11 truth movement being a wacko consipiracy theory to defend is indefensible. I've had conversations with people who refuse to listen to questioning about 9/11 because they think of themselves as "skeptics" - they can't see the irony in that statement!

We are the skeptics here, and we need to start using that term for ourselves. In our websites, literature, lectures, and conversations, we need to use the word skeptic and related words like skeptical, questioning, not believing, not being convinced, doubting, disbelieving, challenging, and inquiry.

Language is very important, because it triggers mental models in the person hearing the words. (Many progressives are probably familiar with George Lakoff's work on "framing" as described in books like Don't Think of an Elephant.)

WIRED magazine, in the new issue, ran a story about conspiracy theories. Naturally they mentioned 9/11 in the way you'd expect a mainstream publication to mention it:

The US Government Was Behind 9/11
Or Jews. Or Jews in the US government. The documentary Loose Change claimed to find major flaws in the official story — like the dearth of plane debris at the site of the Pentagon blast and that jet fule alone could never vaporize a whole 757. Judge for yourself: After Popular Mechanics debunked the theory, the magazine's editors faced off with proponents in a debate, available on YouTube.

Fortunately, they give readers an opportunity to submit new conspiracy theories. So why not submit the theory that we all can probably agree is the wildest - that 19 Arabs took down the world's superpower.

I'm not going to link to the URL to give them this website in their server's referrer logs. Just go to wired.com, click "Read Magazine" in the site menu, then click "THE BEST: CONSPIRACY THEORIES" in the upper sidebar.

Let's give WIRED some really wild theories!

Not *directly* related to 9/11, but it touches on the PNAC "new Pearl Harbor" memorandum. This is a good viral video to spread to people outside of the awareness of 9/11 truth, to prime them that there are forces in our government that have military expansion on their mind, at any cost....

I posted the following article on Rockridge Nation, the community branch of the Rockridge Institute, the think tank for progressive politics. My goal of the article was to highlight the recent paper in The Journal of 9/11 Studies about acceptance of 9/11 truth to a new audience who is interested in this kind of topic, and challenge Rockridge to explore the topic of 9/11 in their work. Obviously the careful introduction is not necessary for readers of this site; I'm just cross-posting it here in case anybody wishes to comment on the issue over on Rockridge Nation.

http://www.rockridgenation.org/questions/analysis-of-cognitive-dissonance-on-the-topic-of-sept-11

With the sixth anniversary of the attacks of the 11th of September coming up tomorrow, I wanted to share an interesting paper I read recently and present a challenge to the Rockridge community and deep-thinkers on staff. It's about the psychological barriers that the concept of 9/11 puts in people's minds and how they react to information that lies outside of their belief systems.

{I wrote this review to appeal to a mainsteam audience and sneak past the gatekeepers. A fresh copy can be found on MyDD -- feel free to rate and add comments. I posted it on Daily Kos as well, a few days ago, with a special paragraph just to diffuse any attempts at censorship. Alas, due to some technical issues, I think it didn't get read much.}

I was able to get an advance copy of Peter Dale Scott's new book The Road to 9/11 from its publisher (University of California Press) so I thought I would share my review of it here. It will be available in your local bookstores this month, perhaps on the 11th itself.

This is interesting. From the Democrats debate last night, Kucinich had some interesting words...

Osama Bin Laden, if he's still alive, ought to be be held to account in an international court of law. And so should any *other* person who's been involved in a violation of international law which has ... resulted in the deaths of many people.

I personally don't think that Kucinich has what it takes to be President, but I'm glad that he is doing his job in Congress!

All of us who are convinced that 9/11 was an inside job have come about this realization from a variety of backgrounds. For some of us, it was a major shift in perspective if we had previously been a supporter of the Bush administration. For others, it may just be a logical extension of the notion that the current administration is made up of thugs. It's that latter group - myself included - that I'm addressing here.

I've been very politically active as a "progressive" since the 2004 election season; I've been involved in a number of groups at the local (in-person) and regional/national ("netroots") level. When I discovered the whole 9/11 truth movement, I was disappointed to notice that the topic of 9/11 is just not discussed among these people -- even though we are all united in hating Bush/Cheney, knowing that we have been lied to in order to get into Iraq, and fighting against this administrations violations of privacy, policies of torture, and so forth.

So how have I - and how can you - integrate 9/11 Truth into these communities?

I was inspired by "V is for Veritas", a recent topic on freewayblogger's site. I made up this design. Kind of subtle. I was hoping to make a T-shirt out of the design, perhaps. Anyhow, view and share if you want.

This is my first post - please be kind!

Since learning about the 9/11 coverup, I've been disgusted that most Democrats aren't willing to talk about 9/11 accountability.

I am a delegate to the California Democratic Party, and will be attending the convention in April in San Diego. So ... I made up this litle flyer (which will fit on half of a legal size paper) that I plan to give out at the convention.

The flyer has several tidbits on it -- it touches on issues like framing (which is a good buzzwords for Dems these days) and pointing out how this liberal issue is not even allowed on Daily Kos - a fact that I'm sure most Dem activists don't even realize. But the main goal is to show that 9/11 is the root of all of that the current administration has gotten away with, and the exposing this is important!

I am looking for feedback on the flyer (attached here as PDF). Thanks!