Good thread, Jesse!
And, not TOO off topic:
ppb for a barrel of deceased dinosaurs: $105, which, us bein' record-breakin' lovin' people and all, seems appropriate, all things considered.
Hey, no pain; no gain! Right, guys?
When the panzers are being parked on the lawns for planter boxes, there will be lightbulbs going on above some "patriot" heads.
:o)
Yep, and we can also count on the Democrats doing fuck-all about it. If not doing something to actively facilitate it. But we're still supposed to vote for Hillary in November because...well, just because, damn it!
That fellow in Romania was quite surprised a few years back when the peasants showed up at the front door of the castle with farm implements rudimentary lighting devices. Keep pushing Georgie-boy, but remember the Klingon proverb- revenge is a dish best served cold.
No president could have done all this without a catastrophic failure (EG aiding and abetting) by the legislative and judicial branches.
It's all fascism all the time.
Police state, Constitution gone - it doesn't matter what is written there - it matters how the principles are maintained and supported. All elections are suspect. Everything is surveilled.
The sole thin thread by which this can be stopped is through impeachment - of every person who took the oath to support, protect and defend the Constitution and then broke that oath.
That's treason.
That's it, folks.
I ahve been saying this for a few years now...a storm is comeing, there will be change in our goverment, its now upto the eleites...do they willing step down a notch or two and share power or do we rip it from their cold dead hands...im good with either.
Last year when this AT&T problems came to light, I was urging an acquaintance, a standard issue rapacious capitalist, to start encrypting his sensitive e-mail with PGP because of this surveillance.
He gave the standard "why would they target me? I'm no terrorist" answer. I told him that the surveillance wasn't about terrorists, and reminded him about the kind of businessmen that back the GOP and the DLC (businessmen like him). I then laid out a plausible scenario in which one of those politicians repays a crony with some inside information on a hypothetical business deal that involves my acquaintance and the crony. It's a scenario with lots of plausible deniability, lots of cut outs, and lots of immunity for the telecom, but in it my friend's confidential e-mail laying out negotiation terms ends up in the hands of the other party.
Since he is a standard issue rapacious capitalist, he immediately recognized the competitive disadvantage that would put him in, asked me to teach him how to encrypt, and told his lawyers and accountant that he expected the same when it comes to email. Probably went looking for a pet politician, too, but that's outside my area of expertise. 
It's funny because this stuff is only aimed at ordinary citizens, not at real criminals or terrorists. Organized crime and the terrorist organizations know about this sort of thing and expect that such communications are intercepted. Their important communications are done by courier or face to face, coded, etc. This sort of surveillance is more useful for blackmailing trouble-making citizens into silence.
This sort of surveillance is more useful for blackmailing trouble-making citizens into silence.
cwt | 03.06.08 - 8:50 am
Why doesn't the Congress - Pelosi and Reid in the front - just shut up shop and go home? Stop costing us however much it costs to subsidize one of these parasitic do-nothings and get real jobs at Wendy's or something?
I'm being serious here. It's not like they actually DO anything to act as a check on the rapacity of Bush or Cheney or to assert their actual Constitutional authority.
So, shut the doors of the Capitol, have the Critters go home and get real jobs, and toss the Constitution into the dustbin. "America" is no more.
don't worry, they will start not only enforcign their constitutional authority, but greatly overstepign there limits as soon as a dem is in the white house.
i think that possibly the most disturbing part of this whole expansion of executive power is that it is being vested in the bloody hands of one of the worst administrations ever. their incompetence, impetuousness, their corruption and arrogant displays of willful ignorance (pronounce nuclear anyone?) make them the least deserving recipients of these new powers that i can imagine. i not only lived through nixon, i met that motherfucker a couple of times. bush is worse than him. nixon actually understood the process he was involved with. bush blunders and grabs.
sweet mother of babbling god i hate this man.
Start a ticking time bomb and then write a letter about it? Sounds like a perfectly rational explanation to me.
Almost 70 percent of the intelligence budget is allocated to private contractors. If you think that even a majority of this is for snooping on al Qaeda or even foreign powers you would be wrong. A large portion is doled out to spy on foreign corporations and individuals in those corporations. The amount the foreign operation of the US is in bed with corporations is astounding.
This process has been ongoing for over 60 years and just seems to be getting bigger. It has killed foreign leaders and millions of their people. And the most important thing is that it has not significantly changed no matter who is in office(though the CIA was reigned in a bit after Watergate).
Can you imagine the power that is in corporations hands when they are able to spy on the American people without even the thought of legal consequences? Those political donations suddenly just became that much more important- in fact they might be able the only thing to keep a politician from putting you out of business.
Out of the three people left, Obama has the least payback required to this shadow government, which means they may treat him like a third-world obstacle(you know that means). The next 20 years will tell us whether or not this corporate power will accomplish its supreme ascendancy or will break on the rocky shores of popular dissent.
The Dems had better pick this up and beat McCain over the head with it. But I'm scared they won't. Fucking pussies.
I can see it now. A supposedly hard-hitting ad that says, "John McCain thinks it's all right for the government to snoop through your mail. Is this what John McCain means when he talks about limited government?" And McCain's reply will be, "Barack Clinton believes that al Qaeda should be able to mail whatever the hell they want inside the United States, and we shouldn't be able to inspect it."
And the Dem will apologize and be a great big pussy and agree with McCain and say, "I didn't really mean what I said," and beg forgiveness for hating the American way of life.
Fucking punk-ass Democrats will never, ever grow a spine. Here we are, presented a winning issue on a silver platter, and our candidates are gonna puss out on it. Goddammit!
One really little note as I look into the details of things - this was on 12/20/2006, not 2007.
Just to say, Jesse, you are on a ROLL. You get MY superdelegates.
I just got done visiting the national air & space museum for the second time so I found your pitcher of a mail plane really cool. Thanks Jesee
z -
Thanks for the correction.
I'll get it up in a bit.
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