I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
Fuck Bush!
Merry Christmas from the big mikan (tokyo).
and Fuck Rummy too.
Hi Hubris Sonic.
Fuck Bush with a rusty chainsaw
are you referring to the dartmouth story -- haven't heard that. could you provide details. laura rozen posted she had spoken to the prof who had confirmed it, but not yet the student.
ohio gozaimasu!
kos has the mao story.
it's a hoax
I wish Bush was a hoax
Reality bites sometimes
I'm taking my nephew to WalMart today to buy him a BB gun, hope these nitwit ladies aren't anywhere near. Not to worry, up here in northern Michigan they'd be ridden out of town on a rail.
"Code Pink, a leftist women's outfit that's a fixture at antiwar rallies, is taking a break from protesting real conflict in Iraq to campaign against so-called "war toys." As the Pink website warns: "Every holiday season manufactures prey on our children with pro-war propaganda disguised as innocent toys. Don't let your child be a victim of G.I. Joe!"
Mele Kalikimaka
My phone company's in bed with these bastards.
never mind -- just saw the kos link. what a little fucktard.
I trust since you all hate christmas so much,
your blogging will be at normal pace tommorrow
OT - but what's with Kevin Drum's pointless anti-union post from overnight? Is he under contract to make at least one non-left post per day, and so just throws one out without putting any thought into it?
Drum was being pissy because WaMo tried to do a piece on Kos and totally fucked it and he and his boys had to have crow ala mode.
I'd like to note (in a rare "informative" blogwhore) that the nation-wide monitoring of mosques and muslim residences for radiation was plainly violative of the 4th Amendment. Even Scalia thinks so.
I work for a major Telecom company & have heard mention of this "backdoor" mechanism in hallway conversations. Aparently, the Feds either require it or somehow pressure us into putting it in there. I don't know any details though.
.
It was actually a few lefty librarian bloggers who smelt something funny on the Mao story as well.
Is he under contract to make at least one non-left post per day,
Just to remind the print media that he's still out there.
Can we as American citizens sue George Bush (and Gonzalez I guess..) over the domestic data-mining? Pehaps a massive class action suit. We could get the ACLU to sue BushCo on behalf of us all (or 49% or us or a few hundred thousand or whatever). The harm would be the violaton of the right to privacy established in Griswald and affirmed in Roe and codified into the FISA law and laws against unreasonable search and seizure (these laws against warrentless searches come from the the 4th amendment I'm being told). The remedy would be they would have to tell what Americans they have a file on and if any of those files were a result of warrently searches or taps, they would have to pay and destroy the file.
Since they're data mining everybody, we all have standing. The harm or this monitoring of American without cause would be easy to show..,,
What do you think? Certainly 40 million or so suing Bush for a violation of their constitutional rights would be a helluva news story.
and Paula Jones gives us the right to sue a sitting president right?
Heh. Well, that covers that. lol
New Space Program
I think someone ought to initiate a deep space probe up George Bush's ass in search of intelligence.
Our superlative leftie talk show host, Bernie Ward in SF, called this one when he first heard about the warrantless searches. He said that he wouldn't be surprised if the TIA program that had supposedly been "scrapped," simply went underground and all of our correspondence was now being monitored for key words.
I fell for the little red book story too and posted it in a comment earlier this week.
What an idiot I am to believe what I read on the Internets!!!!!
I should of listened to Bush when he said civil liberties are safe.
I just wrote the following to the New Bedford (MA) "Standard-Times."
--
Since I wrote in response to the original article about the UMass Dartmouth student who supposedly got a visit from the feds over Mao's "Little Red Book," it's only right that I acknowledge the follow-up.
Which is that it develops that the student at UMass Dartmouth who told the story made it up. Okay, then he made it up. And those of us who believed the tale have some small amount of egg on our faces. In our defense, it must be noted that in significant part that belief was based on the fact that the story could be sourced to specific individuals known to the reporter; this was not some vague "Didja hear about (fill in the blank)?" rumor floating around the internet.
In spite of all that, I expect we’ll hear a lot of sneering and gloating from the right wing about this, about the "paranoid lefty conspiracy wackos" and all that. But before the whistling and foot-stomping go too far, consider three things:
1 - Mao's book, despite being the part everyone grabbed onto, was never the issue by itself; it was, the student claimed, that plus the fact that he had spent a fair amount of time outside the US that prompted the supposed visit. In fact, I saw one comment on a blog that noted that in some places, Maoism is a renewed force among insurgent groups so if the student's time abroad was in those areas, the agents' visit might make sense. Which meant that the biggest objection to the story, the one that asked "well, are the feds checking out all those other people who looked at that book?" was unpersuasive, indeed irrelevant.
2 - Who uncovered the hoax? Not some right-wing self-proclaimed "truth squad" or another, ready to slay the dragon of the evil liberal media, but the professors and the reporter, the same ones who brought the story out. They pursued it and got to the truth of it.
3 - Most importantly, consider the context. The misnamed "Patriot" Act empowers the feds to secretly examine the library records of anyone they choose. We have become used to the idea of our Social Security numbers being demanded for just about anything we do in this country.
We had just learned that the Bush team had been illegally monitoring domestic communications and that they had been keeping tabs on peace protestors, gay rights activists, and student groups as "national security risks."
Since the story first came out, we have learned that the domestic spying was far more extensive than Bush admitted and is undertaken with the active support of telecommunications companies. We've come to know that one judge was so disturbed by the White House's flouting of the law that he quit the FISA court.
We've become aware that federal agents have been monitoring private sites - overwhelmingly Muslim ones - to check for supposed radiation, "in numerous cases" trespassing on private property without search warrants or court orders.
[continued]
[continued]
We've been reminded that assaults on our privacy with their resulting chilling of dissent are not limited to the federal government, as Ohio enacts a law that criminalizes the refusal to provide your name, address, and birthdate on demand to any member of the police and the NYPD has been discovered infiltrating and spying on peaceful protests - and in at least one case even staging a phony arrest of an undercover cop in order to provoke a confrontation with protestors. That in turn just added to what we already knew about aggressive suppression of dissent, a suppression that sometimes turns violent, as it did at the FTAA meeting in Miami in November 2003.
So tell me: Is there anyone beyond the terminally dense, busily declaring "well, they just wouldn't do that," anyone outside the ranks of the fanatic robots who would screech their belief in Bush if he said the sky was green, anyone else who can honestly say the story was not at least plausible?
And having admitted that, what does it say about an administration that has developed policies and pursued behaviors that would make it seem so?
--
If anyone cares, a posted version of that, with appropriate links, can be found here under the title "UMass Revisited."
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