Sunday, December 18, 2005
NSA's surveillance of US citizens raises questions
Why did he bother overturning a number of laws and parts of the Constitution? Brief annual reports of the activities of the secret court show that from 1979 through 2004 it granted 18,761 warrants and rejected five.
Untrustworthy Bigger Brother
Los Angeles Times Editorial : Last week may come to be seen as a tipping point in the public's attitude, one that will cause the administration to reverse its encroachment on rights in the name of security. The report of the NSA's unsupervised eavesdropping program helped defeat an extension of certain controversial provisions of the Patriot Act in the Senate on Friday.
Now even sympathetic lawmakers can be expected to view the Patriot Act more skeptically. The revelations about the NSA raise two fundamental questions about the administration's rationale for increased powers: If it's already spying on its own citizens, then why does it need the Patriot Act? Alternatively, if it's already spying on its own citizens, how can it be trusted with the Patriot Act? This administration has yet to fully acknowledge that with greater powers must come greater accountability.
As for the Defense Department's counterterrorism database, the Pentagon was forced on Thursday to acknowledge that it hadn't followed its own guidelines requiring the deletion of information on American citizens who clearly don't pose a security risk. Imagine that: a domestic military intelligence program that failed to abide by its own safeguards.
Given this administration's history, none of these developments is especially surprising. But the latest revelations may serve as a timely reminder of why the American constitutional system requires the judiciary — the third branch of government — to review the actions of the executive branch when necessary to protect the people's liberty.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
New World Foundation advocates rebuilding a more Democratic Party from the grassroots
AlterNet: The Left's New Majority
This is the America of Latinos, African-Americans, religious progressives, union members, young people, and single women. Combined, these mostly progressive groups of the left constitute an actual and significant national majority. If the Democratic Party taps into this energy, it could help create the next social and political momentum in the United States and even win presidential elections. But typically, Democratic leadership does not work closely with these groups, their natural constituencies. This relationship has yet to become a reality.
Every single American city with a population of over 500,000 voted for John Kerry in 2004. And more than half of all cities with over 50,000 inhabitants did the same. The American public rejected Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, just as they rejected the vicious manipulation of the Terri Schiavo case in 2005.
.... Another post-2004 election trend has been to say that Democrats need to "frame" their issues better and develop "values", as though moral and social values were something to be learned from the right.
Perhaps the most important thing to know about framing is that progressives, and especially Democrats, have been "framed" by the right as a political fringe without values, driven by self-interest, without regard for ordinary Americans.
The right has successfully taken its own description and projected it upon us. Unless we free ourselves from the frame they have put us in, we are cut off from our own traditions and from the people whose activism continues to drive an agenda based on concern for the democratic distribution of American prosperity.
What self-defeating pandering, when a national figure like Hillary Clinton says we have to "introduce values into the abortion debate." As if the abortion debate was ever anything but a values conflict! To retreat from such an obvious recognition is the expression of a form of defensive paralysis that has plagued Democratic Party leaders for years.
.... In December 2004, I explained on openDemocracy how the Democratic Party is not a party in the traditional sense. It has virtually no local presence or connection to people in most states. During elections, campaign workers are typically flown in and out instead of deploying local activists who can remain engaged from election to election. Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, has begun to address this by appointing local party operatives.
What has been achieved by the politically engaged all over the country is very powerful and ought to be compelling to national leaders and funders. A couple of examples will convey a sense of what is described in more detail in "Building the New Majority":
in Florida, on the same day George W Bush was elected, a coalition of small businesses, community organisations, churches and labour unions named Floridians for All, were to thank for the fact that 71 percent of voters came out in favour of raising the minimum wage by $1 to $6.15 (£3.44) per hour.
In Mississippi, a group called Southern Echo has been making its mark over the past thirteen years by organising largely disenfranchised African-Americans in the rural Delta counties. More than twenty of its leaders have been elected as school-board members, county supervisors and mayors. Recently, Southern Echo has overturned a Republican governor's decision to slash the education budget, and even got more funds allocated for crippled public schools.
The Bush administration continues to spend us into the ground with war, homeland insecurity, and callous tax relief for the wealthy. It is eroding America's ability to function democratically and equitably. If conditions don't improve anger will continue to rise.
As Bush's former national-security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, told the New Yorker, the "bad guys" are always the ones who rise to the top of a chaotic society, because they are always better organised. He was talking about the Egyptian elections, but I think the same holds true in America.
There could be a major shift toward progressive thinking in American politics over the next ten years. But it won't happen unless national leadership is either displaced by or starts to connect with the good guys who know how to organize, and are doing so locally as a matter of urgency.
Pentagon mislead Congress about dangers of anthrax vaccination
The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who'd taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed. No one knows how many, or how few, of the 20,765 hospitalizations are directly attributable to the vaccine.
Col. John Grabenstein, director of the military's vaccine agency, said no one from the military intentionally misled Congress or the public. He said the 20,765 hospitalizations merely followed vaccinations in time, without documented proof of a cause-and-effect relationship.
Friday, December 16, 2005
We White Honkeys are the Mutants Y'all
Scientists find a single small DNA change that accounts for White Skin
The work raises a raft of new questions -- not least of which is why white skin caught on so thoroughly in northern climes once it arose. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates.
The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races.
Several sociologists and others said they feared that such revelations might wrongly overshadow the prevailing finding of genetics over the past 10 years: that the number of DNA differences between races is tiny compared with the range of genetic diversity found within any single racial group.
Late Night Political Jokes collected by Daniel Kurtzman
'President Bush spoke today about the elections in Iraq. Bush admitted the elections won't be perfect. Well, luckily for him, they're not perfect over here, too. That's how he got elected.' --Jay Leno
'Over in Iraq after you vote they paint your finger purple so you can't vote again. It's a flawless system. It works perfectly unless, of course, someone has paint remover.' --Jay Leno"
"During an interview yesterday, President Bush said 'You can call me anything you want, but don't call me a racist.' Brian Williams responded: 'Whatever you want, Dumbass.'" --Conan O'Brien
"In a recent interview, President Bush said, this is a quote, 'I know a lot of people who are glad that we're in Iraq.' When asked who, the president said the leaders of North Korea and Iran." --Conan O'Brien
"Fox News' Bill O'Reilly has been at the forefront in defending Christmas, even though, until recently, Fox's own online store invited viewers to buy an 'O'Reilly Factor' holiday ornament for their holiday tree. In the war on Christmas, that's known as friendly fire. ... Legend has it every time you say 'Happy Holidays,' an angel gets AIDS." --Jon Stewart
I'll add that Stephen Colbert tonight declared war on those who declared war on "Happy Holiday." It seems that holidays is a contraction of Holy Days. He said Focus on the Family and Bill O'Reilly and the others are trying to take the holly out of Christmas and just leave it as the culmination of an orgy secular consumer spending.
"Say what you will about George Bush, but at least his interns are only licking the envelopes." --David Letterman, on Bush sending out 1.4 million Christmas cards
"Heating bills this winter are the highest they've been in five years, but President Bush has a plan to combat rising bills. It's called global warming." --Jay Leno
"While speaking in North Carolina this week, President Bush said, the economy is strong, and the best is yet to come. Adding: Also, the war's going great, we don't torture people, I'm 11 feet tall, and if you don't believe me, you can ask my unicorn." --Tina Fey
"Christmas and the New Year are actually two holidays. So there is a plural, which in the English language, necessitates the use of 's.' I suppose you could say 'Merry Christmas' and 'Happy New Year,' but you probably have sh*t to do." --Jon Stewart, on Bill O'Reilly's objection to "Happy Holidays"
"In a speech yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld criticized the media for casting the war in Iraq in a negative light. Yeah, he said they should focus on the light-hearted and fun aspects of the war." --Conan O'Brien
"Howard Dean said that we can't win in Iraq. And if anybody knows about not winning. it's the Democrats." --Jay Leno
"A new study suggests that middle-aged adults who go on periodic drinking binges may face a heightened risk of dementia later on in life. The study is entitled, 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.'" --Tina Fey
ADDED BIG BONUS - JIB_JAB 2005 in Review
It's Official - Congress does not have access to the Intel data the Administration does
According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, the administration's and GOP congressmen statements, amplified in the conservative MSM, are untrue.
Sen. Bob Graham had also said this December 1.
The National Journal reported last week that the CIA told Bush during his daily briefing 10 days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that there was no link to Iraq, a finding that was repeated later in a longer CIA report.
Graham said that information was never passed to the Senate intelligence committee.
He said the administration also withheld from the Senate warnings from German intelligence that an Iraqi defector, code-named Curveball, was untrustworthy. Curveball was the source for administration allegations that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made before the U.N. Security Council that Saddam had built mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq. U.S. forces never found such labs in Iraq.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
GOP worries about 'Sam's Club Republicans' in the emerging suburbs
Public Opinion Watch in addition to some other polling data brings us a conservative analyst worrying that right now they are getting votes from people who don't agree with their agenda. The GOP in the last elections are "an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement."
Wouldn't it seem to be a good idea to peel those voters off of the GOP ticket by explicitly running on that platform?
Breaking - Optical scan voting machines easily hacked with simple device leaving no trace
New tests cast severe doubts about vote machines
Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.
After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.
''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors association.
Thompson told The Herald he was ''shocked'' at how easy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked for a user name and password, but didn't require it, he said. That meant it had not just a ''front door, but a back door as big as a garage,'' Thompson said.
From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer code -- and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.
''I am positive an eighth grader could do this,'' Thompson said.
Over the past few months, computer expert Harri Hursti tried to manipulate election results with the memory card inserted into each Diebold voting machine. The card records votes during an election, then at the end of the day is taken to a central location where results are totaled.
Hursti figured out how to hack into the memory card by using an agricultural scanning device easily available on the Internet, said BlackBox founder Bev Harris.
He learned how to hide votes, make losers out of winners and leave no trace, she said.
Sancho said he tried to discuss the problems with Diebold, but met with resistance. On Monday, he did one final test with Hursti at the Leon County supervisor's office, Hursti hacked the memory card to spit out seven ''yes'' votes on an issue and one ''no'' vote.
Then, six ''no'' votes and two ''yes'' votes were cast into the machine the same way voters would. Those results didn't show up in the final tally -- just the ones hacked into the card.
"These were sold as safe systems. They passed tests as safe systems," Sancho said. "But even in the so-called safe system, if you don't follow the paper ballots, there is a way to rig the election. Except it's not a bunch of guys stuffing ballots in a precinct. It's possibly one person acting in secret changing thousands of votes in a second."
"Presidential Perogative" to declare DeLay innocent
Worse than "Scotty doesn't know" usual excuses.
Listen to brief song clip or buy for a dime - Scotty doesn't know.
Bush turned against Rove and went with a "limited hangout"
Capitol Hill Blue: The White House's bitter debate over admitting a mistake
Bush’s speech, delivered Wednesday, went through more than a dozen drafts before settling on the language the President would use:
“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush said in the final draft. “As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.”
But, in typical Bush style, the President remained committed to the war.
“Saddam was a threat — and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," Bush said.
The debate over admitting the use of false intelligence marked the second straight defeat for Rove in determining the President’s course is trying to resell his Iraq war to a skeptical American public. He argued against the current strategy used by Bush to admit some setbacks, saying “a real leader doesn’t act that way.”
Bush Refuses to Influence DeLay Trial, Then Declares DeLay's Innocence
So much for that “can’t comment on an on-going investigation.”
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Pentagon spying on American Anti-War Groups
A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.
“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”
....“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again.”
Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database.
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.
Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.
Wacky video Wednesday - Tonight the Year in Weird on MSNBC
Keith Olbermann is Jon Stewart with a real, or almost real, news show.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Ed Wood's 'Necromania' on DVD
"Necromania" (1971) is one of the "lost" smut films produced during the 1960s and 70s by Edward D. Wood, Jr., the infamous film auteur reponsible for such cult classics as "Glen or Glenda?" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space".
Movie was filmed over two or three days with a budget of no more than $7,000 and the only copies went missing soon after it was made.
(Disclaimer: despite what is presented in "Necromania," there is no established scientific or medical evidence linking necromancy to increased male potency.)
DeLay's Texas redistricting heads to Supremes
provided by Janette - news will be low on this site for the holidays.
Monday, December 12, 2005
USA has secret regulations and laws you are required to obey - that's right, secret
Political Animal found out about it here and seemed to get it confirmed here.
I think there is only one thing to do. I am volunteering my blog if anyone wants to leak any secret laws or regulations. Let's see why they are secret.
Now on Digg. - The Justice Department has stated that it can't identify the secret law that requires one to show ID before boarding a commercial flight to the public, stating that we don't have the authority to actually read the laws (which are supposed ot be a reflection of democratic societal values!). Any of us might be prosecuted under a secret law that we've never heard of.
Tags: Secrets
Rocketboom - very independent video news podcasts
TIVO has just signed a contract with them. At a cost of about $20 an episode, they already reach an audience that some days is roughly comparable in size to that of, say, CNN's late, unlamented "Crossfire" political debate show. (Link from Atrios.)
Some thoughts on local race results
Overall the better candidate in the two most publicized races won and they are both good progressives.
There is quite a bit of sour grapes from Greg over his candidate's loss. I think it is much better to have a candidate win who was openly supported by a gay friendly service union than one with all the ties to privatization and out-sourcing that Jay Aiyer had.
Dos Centavos congratulates Sue but has some reservations over the amount of money SEIU spent and had supported Jay originally.
The other race that was interesting and significant was for the seat for Moreno's unexpired term in the Texas House. This means it is up for grabs again next year and the winner will have to file now for reelection. Ana Hernandez had the advantage of more relevant experience, more endorsements and a better group of corporate supporters. Laura Salinas lost my support when her big backer turned out to be the GOP tort "reformists."
There is now a Democratic majority on Houston City Council which counts as a win and it appears the less conservative of GOP Houston city council candidates won.
Bush has lost New Orleans
Where’s renewing New Orleans? A presidential advisor told me that issue has fallen so far off the radar screen, you can’t find it.
Why does this president seem more interested in rebuilding Iraq than rebuilding America?
Goodbye, New Orleans.
Bush gives Nawlins a quiet kiss of death in budget.
FBI Agents Lament: "Radical Militant Librarians"
"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from Office of Intelligence Policy and Review's failure to let us use the tools given to us"
I find this a little amusing, the FBI fussing about those damn librarians. The FBI wouldn't know the Constitution if a librarian hit them over the head with it.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Blog post of the year nomination
I was reviewing some links and I found a leading contender for blog post of the year. I don't think I even posted the link, it was on a page of links in a folder I labeled "What I've been reading" which I'm pretty sure I never posted. I just converted the folder from favorites to html and then I believe I found it didn't post well in Blogger.
Whiskey Bar: My Back Page - What the Left Needs and why I stopped for awhile. Excerpts:
What happened, roughly, is this: Last summer I got off a boat after a week of intensive Internet detox therapy, and decided there weren't enough good reasons to keep the bar open and more than enough reasons, both personal and professional, to shut it down, at least for a good long while.
I could cite the usual suspects job, family, health, sanity but the real trip wire was coming out of radio silence and finding both the blogosphere and what we had then not yet learned to call the "MSM" immersed to the tops of their pointy little heads in the Swift Boat Veterans for Lies campaign -- last year's version of the vegetative patient story; the patient, in that particular case, being American democracy.
Now this was only a few weeks after I had concluded, rather rashly, that it would be virtually impossible for the Rove machine to pump its usual tanker load of slime all over John Kerry's war record, based simply on the word of a brigade of Jane Fonda haters led by a Nixon-era retread who has made destroying Kerry his lifelong personal ambition. Surely, I argued, such an absurd ploy wouldn't get beyond the usual right-wing echo chamber pots and would quickly be dumped in the same sewer of right-wing delusions that holds the murdered corpse of Vince Foster.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . oh my yes. It is amusing to recall what a naive idealist I was back then. What I hadn't learned was that the eyes of brain-dead people, like your average MSM journalist, will still track the movement of shiny objects when they are waved in front of their faces. Involuntary reflexes. Lower brain stem activity. The Rovians understood this perfectly well, even if I didn't. So it didn't take them long to organize a full-scale chorus of media vegetables, all making vaguely articulate grunts and other mouth noises about Cambodia, the Christmas of 1968, purple hearts, after-action reports, etc.
And that's when it hit me -- as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I'd been shot in the forehead with a diamond -- that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren't going to persuade them otherwise.
What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn't inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn't very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.
The Boxer
All this, I suppose, is just another way of saying that people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest (li la li). But the implications for me at the time were pretty clear: What the progressive left, not to mention the Democratic Party, needed weren't dogged investigative reporters or eloquent bloggers or wiser candidates, what it needed were more skilled corporate propagandists, more trained information warfare specialists and more cunning, ruthless PR manipulators.
I don't know how to do those things and wouldn't want to do them even if I could. No matter what Horowitz says, agit-prop isn't my line. What I write, I mean, and I say it because I want to communicate something -- to touch people, make them think, make them angry, make them laugh or because I want to express my own thoughts (usually with an attitude).
I don't write to advance a party line or anyone else's ideological agenda. I have my own line and my own agenda, which only partially overlaps with any political party that I'm aware of. I may be a man of the left (albeit with increasingly libertarian . . . let's call it plainly: anti-fascist leanings) but I'm no "movement leftist" (that's a contradiction in terms these days anyway.)
But if the truth does not set any one free, there's not much point raging against the machine not unless you enjoy being enraged all the time. On balance, there didn't seem much point in keeping Whiskey Bar open, given that writing is hard, time-consuming work, and nobody was paying me to blog. (Yes, many readers had given me money to help cover expenses, but after more than 1,500 posts in a year and a half of blogging, I figured most of them had already gotten their money's worth, and then some.) ....
The Salvadoran Option
And who knows? I might have done it -- if some unidentified intelligence officials hadn’t started boasting to reporters about their role in “founding and financing” the Salvadoran death squads of the early 1980s....
Hooked Again
But as I've noted before, blogging is a strange drug. When you're clean, it's not too hard to stay clean. But once you start using the stuff again . . . man, the monkey can get his claws in your back pretty damn fast. So one post led to another, and then another. And, well, pretty soon I was back freebasing.
Much more where that came from.
Perhaps this has a special resonance for me now as I have been reading stories of people in their own (translated) words of why they joined the National Socialist party. Why Hitler Came to Power. This was an underappreciated gem of a sociology study published in 1938 and based on 600 autobiographies of German Nazi activists written in 1934. It doesn't have enough hard cross-tabbed data for a great study but it makes up for it in the real unvarnished voices of people turning away from democracy.
The book made me realize that the current GOP is not the Nazi party. Many of the leaders and activists have just tapped into some of the same powerful techniques. We are not Germany in the 30's, the Republicans aren't pure fascists. I keep telling myself that.
Interesting billmon mentions one of my favorite songs.
In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame,
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains
Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie. Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie, lie lie lie lie lie....
Friday, December 09, 2005
On anniversary of Webb's death SCLM has never admitted its coverup of the Contra-Crack Cocaine connection
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.
The repeated mishandling of the contra-cocaine scandal also was a forewarning of the media’s failure to challenge the case for war with Iraq that George W. Bush sold in late 2002 and early 2003. In the late 1990s, that pattern of journalistic ineptitude deepened as the contra-cocaine case revealed the press corps’ inability to grapple with complex crimes of state.
National journalists came to understand that playing along with the powerful was the best way to protect one’s career, while going against the grain could mean sudden unemployment and a loss of one’s livelihood.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)