EFF Christmas carol

The only xxxmas carol I feel like singing. Remember, because of Bush and his publically acceptable psychopaths, they are trying to step on every right you have. See this link at the EFF for more information on how the fight to restore the constitution has progressed in 2008, with a strong focus on internet usage.

Remember, it is wrong for our government to spy, snoop, and treat you like you're guilty till proven innocent. What you do is your own business. This country belongs to us, not Bush, not private security companies, not paid mouthpieces, not commercial media, not churches & creepy religious interests.

The BushCo Legacy

I think we're realizing what it was all about now.

BushCo National Security incompetency

Philip Shenon's new book The Commission : The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation fingers Condoleeza Rice in the Bush administration's national security failure of 7 1/2 years ago. This excerpt from Shenon's book published in The Sydney Morning Herald shows the U.S. intellegence apparatus doing its best to warn the Administration about Bin Laden's crazies and just how dangerous they were. The book paints Rice as almost a highly-paid do-nothing, choosing to ignore intelligence and focus instead on promoting the administration, focus on what appears to be PR, game-playing, a big show. As the book follows the 9/11 commission one Richard Clarke emerges as a true soldier, intent on protecting the country. Clarke was at the time the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director. He'd been demoted by the time of the attacks. From the excerpt:

Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

More:

Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

Shenon's book seems to offer a thru-the lens glimpse into a shameful and tragic chapter of U.S. history: the bumbling incompetence of an administration created by the most hated and destructive U.S. president of all time.

Amazon.com's reference to Shenon's book is here.


This guy is a hell of a journalist. It should be hilarious to hear what Limbaugh and the other highly-paid fart-generators say about him.

About the author, quoting Amazon:

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter with The New York Times, based in Washington. He was the lead reporter on the investigation of the September 11 commission and has held several of the most important assignments of the Washington Bureau, including chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, Congressional correspondent and Justice Department Correspondent. He was one of two Times reporters embedded with American grounds troops during the invasion of Iraq and worked in pre-war Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran for Times foreign staff.

BushCo environmental destruction continues

It seems like anything destructive you hear about, whether it's environmental, social, diplomatic, economic, infrastructure-related, or civil liberties-related, you can just say, "Thanks Bush." Moronic industrialization of old-growth forest and the consequent destruction of salmon habit in the Pacific Northwest is detailed in this story in the AZ Daily Star. Because the Star's links only last a week or two, I'll quote a bit of the story here:

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The Bush administration's plans to dismantle more than a decade of protections for northern spotted owls and salmon to sharply increase logging in old growth forests is seriously flawed and not adequately supported by science, the federal agency in charge of saving salmon concludes.
In a Jan. 11 letter obtained by The Associated Press, NOAA Fisheries told the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that its Western Oregon Plan Revision — known as The Whopper after its acronym — has no coherent or cohesive conservation strategy for salmon and steelhead, and relies on assumptions and models not supported by published scientific studies.

Once again you can see the typical BushCo hallmarks of doing business. First, an aggressive disregard of scientific evidence. You can see this at work all through the Bush Presidency anywhere you look, whether it's support for fundamentalist bullcrap like Creationism, or policies regarding reproductive and women's health. Second, time after time, the people Bush puts in charge of environmental and Interior Department responsibilities are usually on the payroll of companies that profit from environmental destruction. Look no further for a motive. This is just plain illegal, but of course the law means nothing to BushCo.

For example, in this story, by veteran Star reporter Dan Sorenson, which details the Federal Government's unraveling of policies related to the survival of endangered wildlife, in this case the Jaguar, some hack by the name of Elizabeth Slown glibly defends lack of support for the jaguars that have managed to survive, while the reporter presents some weak evidence that the abandonment of reintroduction plans is actually related to Homeland Security plans for the so-called border wall, which Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano described in her Tucson state of the state speech as "nothing but an ivitation to go get a ladder or dig a tunnel."

"What we said is that … doing a recovery plan for the jaguar doesn't advance conservation for the jaguar," Slown said.
"We'd rather put our efforts into on-the-ground efforts: participating in the Jaguar Conservation Team led by (the state of) Arizona, continuing to fund research we do throughout Central America," she said.
"The jaguar is still under (the protection of) the ESA; it doesn't affect that at all," Slown said, referring to the Endangered Species Act.
"Instead of a 200-some-page recovery plan," Slown said, "let's help the countries where the jaguar can survive and help the Jaguar Conservation Team."

Sorerson:

There will be no recovery plan, at least not one with teeth, for the rarest of the wild animals native to Arizona — the largest and rarest cat species of North America — the jaguar.
The Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group that has pushed for an official plan to set goals and spell out and enforce efforts to save the big cats, portrays the move as a concession to the Bush administration's border-fence project.

A reporter on the job as long as Sorensen no doubt did some background on the spokepeople quoted in the story, and no doubt the Star's editors didn't include that, and you can bet that Slown works for some company somewhere that has a stake in the dismantling of environmental law.

The overall point is here, if we're going to take a giant chainsaw and clear all the forests and deserts so that mining companies, logging companies and private security companies can have an easy go at running up profits, and if we dismantle the law in the process, then we destroy not only our fellow animals that live on our planet, but we also destroy our planet, and destroy the resources we need. BushCo policy, if it continues, will lead to a planet without wood, fish, januars, deserts, mountians or forests, and not only will we suffer in ways we cannot even imagine, but the resulting economic destruction will make things much worse than are now. You can't make a buck off a scorched, denuded, dying Earth, Republicans! You can't feed your children if you destroy this place in the name of short-term profits, and you can't give your children clean air to breathe if you kill all the trees.

Center for Biological Diversity sues to reclaim wilderness

In an effort to start undoing Bush Administration environmental damage the Center for Biological Diversity announced its intention to file suit against the federal government over protected endangered species habitat in 28 states. The amount of land involved is stupendous, 8.7 million acres. The suit describes the typical Administration practices we've all read about. For example, quoting from this article in the Seattle Times:

In the case of the marbled murrelet, the organization contends the government manipulated a scientific review to make it look like the bird didn't need further federal protection. The government also illegally shrank the amount of critical habitat for the Western snowy plover by exaggerating the economic costs involved in the protections, said [a CDC spokesperson].

The outcome of this type of policy is that land that normally would be preserved gets destroyed when industrial and corporate interests move in. In formulating this type of policy, it's quite clear who BushCo represents in the U.S., clear who BushCo is working for.

It's important to note that the more we allow destruction of wilderness, the more the earth looses its ability to keep us alive. Without an environment free of toxins, without fresh air, without wildlands, we all die. BushCo has been absolutely criminal in its lies, policies and disregard for scientific data in this area, and there has been very little talk of consequences or solutions.

National day of celebration

People should be out rejoicing in the streets over the Gonzales resignation. We should be declaring mass parties, with banners with the names of Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, DeLay, Rove, and Gonzales inside circles with the big red slash.

Read the paper lately and it's like, "oh well there were some questions about Gonzales' integrity, competence and honesty." And "well old Rove, well, he's just going to go fishin' now, with his wife and his dog..." Well what a fucking couple of good-old-boys now, why, those good old boys, they just done had enough now haven't they. The fuck. They are running scared, like all those BushCo crooks, once people start finding out what BushCo has been upto.

Let us all hope that exactly what BushCo has done can be brought to light. And let's hope that damage to the constitution, the law, the environment, the economy, the infrastructure, international relations, and the way in which the federal government spends our tax money may be repaired, and the sooner the better.

Karl Rove resigns

Looks like he just gave his 2 weeks' notice.

Add him to the list of failed BushCo NeoC*n thugs.

Hooray. He was one of the worst, one of the men responsible for the tragedy foisted upon the United States and the rest of the world.

Details here at Reuters Canada.

I'm putting a sweet old family picture with this post as kind of a "unicorn chaser," since the image of Karl Rove is a sickening reminder of BushCo offenses.

more on the Gonzales scandal

"There are no rules"
Alberto Gonzales, July 2007

"The attorney general took an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Instead, he tells the half-truth, the partial truth, and everything but the truth. And he does it not once, and not twice, but over and over and over again."
Senator Charles Schumer, July 2007

ASTOUNDING stuff is trickling into public view in the Gonzales scandal. My point here is that we are seeing less and less tolerance in Congress for BushCo's lying, cheating, stealing ways, and that damage caused by Bush, Cheney, Rove and company is coming to light, stirring citizenry and congress, Demos and Reps alike, to call for punishment, adherence to the law, the public's right to know the actions of those who are supposed to represent us in government. BushCo has become its own ugly little entity and no longer serves the People of the U.S. The Gonzales scandal illustrates business as usual at BushCo- secrecy, lying, disregard for the constitution and law, attempts to discredit and obfuscate, contempt for the Bill of Rights and the very people the President is supposed to represent.

List of stuff that's been all over the news this week:

1. The entire top tier of the U.S. Justice Dept. was going to quit over the BushCo domestic spying program. That means ASHCROFT, yes, even Ashcroft was was so pissed about Bush's disregard for the law & Constitution that he was going to resign from his job as fucking ATTORNEY GENERAL, along with the head of the FBI Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General James Comey. This was in 2004. Link to Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's 5/15/07 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

2. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are now trying to charge Gonzales with perjury, via a special council. Gonzales keeps saying- under oath- there was no internal dispute over the domestic spying program. Mueller and Comey, in their testimony, have been frank about how the people who ran the Justice Dept. at the time believed the domestic spying was illegal and were about to resign over it.

3. Karl Rove has been subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is part of the committee's 7-month-old proceedings regarding the BushCo purge of U.S. Attorneys.

4. It's coming out that the Attorneys were fired in states where the Administration believed the Attorneys would oppose Republican attempts to discredit Democrats and draw attention away from election fraud through phony "voter fraud" scandals.

5. In the media they are now referring to Gonzales as "Gonzo."

Link to DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE's New York Times article, which sums up the week's developments in the Gonzales scandal, and provides the adminstration's masterfully persuasive counter arguments, which arguments I'd like to quote:

“confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum where the greatest care must be used not to compromise sensitive intelligence operations.”
“The disagreement that occurred in March 2004 concerned the legal basis for intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified,”

It's worth noting that these strong-sounding arguments are handily deflated by sworn testimony of people who were there when this went down.

"Voter fraud" linked to U.S. Attorney firings

On an NPR edition of All Things Considered today I heard a story where for the first time it was mentioned that the Congressional response to the U.S. Attorney firings is now focused on Gonzalez' attempt to fire U.S. Attorneys who may have opposed BushCo's so-called voter fraud diversions.

The story, which story I cannot find on NPR's website, clearly stated that U.S. Attorneys were fired in states were Gonzalez & Co. thought said Attorneys might oppose election-timed investigations into said "voter fraud."

Paraphrasing the the NPR story, I'm quoting this story on ahn.com regarding a 52 page memorandum written by Michigan congressman John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee:

The memorandum also says the congressional probe has turned up evidence that some of the U.S. attorneys were fired because of their handling of vote fraud allegations, public corruption cases or other cases that could affect elections.

...I am hoping this point makes it to the Arizona Daily Star tomorrow, and I am wondering if it will...

"Voter fraud" was a slimeball Republican tactic to divert attention from, and pacify objection to, election fraud.

Election fraud as, for example, illustrated in Florida, involving voting machines and the poorly covered up trail of bullshit involving voting machines, voter intimidation, and many other similar efforts, which helped put our current president in office.

The link between the U.S. Attorney firings and BushCo's "create-a-scandal-that-conveniently-discredits-Democrats-at-election- time" machinations illustrates BushCo's tendency to cheat, lie & discredit, and has come to light through congressional attempts to shed light on the actions of Bush's old friend, Alberto Gonzales.

BushCo hiring grads from Pat Robertson's "Christian" law school

Regent University School of Law, Pat Robertson's attempt to change the world through intertwining "Christian values" and the Law, has had 150 of its graduates hired by the Bush administration since 2001. The attorney who recently resigned as part of the Gonzales scandal, Monica Goodling, who looks like a cast-member from the Lawrence Welk show circa 1973, was a Regent grad. Goodling had graduated from the "law school" 2 years earlier and had been part of BushCo's effort to dump U.S Attorneys who were doing too good of a job. Goodling was involved in importing Karl Rove's pal Timothy Griffin to fuck things up in Arkansas.

Way to go BushCo. The attempts to pack the U.S. Circuit courts with rightwing zealots for judges, label all other judges "activist judges," subvert the law in a million other ways, promote creationism, destroy habeus corpus, the Bill of Rights, and so on, is now joined by a transparent and gutless attempt to give legal muscle to fucking morons who can't separate church from state, who are apparently unaware of the tyrannical actions taken throughout century after century in the name of religion, and are stupid enough to go to a school founded they King of Dorks, Pat Robertson.

Furthermore in an act that surly must be illegal, BushCo placed a Dean from Regent in charge of hiring at the U.S. Government's Executive branch. The hiring of the 150 moronic followers of Pat Roberton's insane and prejudiced social views began immediately after. According the Globe article we can thank the psychopathic John Ashcroft, who put a curtain up so nobody could see the breasts on a statue representing Justice, for the lowering the hiring standards at the DOJ:

"John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.

Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools."

Naturally, Ashcroft is now a professor at Regent University School of Law.

Details are here in the Boston Globe's story by Charlie Savage.

And yes I read about it here in the venerable and great Raw Story.

U.S. attorney firings, Gonzales & Rove

Even the Republicans are fed up with BushCo's attempt to replace U.S. attorneys with compliant BushCo substitutes such as Karl Rove's friend Tim Griffin. The Huffington Post reports here that two additional Republican Congresspeople, Gordon Smith and Dana Rohrabacker of Oregon and California, respectively, have publicly stated it's time for Attorney General Gonzales to call it quits. Senator John Sununu was the first republican to speak up on the obvious transgressions in this matter.

To top it off, 2 years ago Karl Rove and Gonzales were involved in a plan to replace all 93 U.S. Attorneys. Emails cited by ABC news show Rove and Gonzales involved in the sneaky plan long ago, which eventually led to the firing of 8 U.S. attorneys, and a lot of inconsistent rhetoric and explanations from BushCo.

New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged. The e-mails also show how Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse while he was still White House counsel — weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general.

The e-mails put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio and raise questions about Gonzales' explanations of the matter.

The fact the people found out about this and are outraged is BushCo's second-worst nightmare. The truth is that this type of transgression is business as usual for the Bush administration. We see evidence of it week after week after week, they just say, "well we're responsible for that, and mistakes were made..." blah blah blah, and get away scott-free. But it seems like once people find out about it, the wheels start rolling, and the idea of justice starts to come about, like what do you do with people at the very top of a government, a democracy, who break the law again and again, and who do great harm to us and our beloved country, and the government which serves us and makes the U.S. a free country, great, wonderful and awesome. You just can't say "shame on you" and let it go and just accept the harm done.

Bushco and torture

'Prisoners of war' vs. 'Unlawful combatants.'
Philip Zimbardo is the kind of guy who would be targeted by right-wing moron and highly-paid propaganda expert Horowitz. The Stanford psychology professor, who has some serious credentials, in his last lecture before retirement, and not doubt not for the fist time, blamed BushCo higher-ups, rather than U.S. Military personnel, for the style of torture and abuse we've heard about over the last couple years.

Zimbardo — who spent months interviewing [Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, the highest-ranking officer implicated in the scandal] and his friends and relatives, and poring over his work history and personal background — argued that his sentence should be lessened.

Based on academic research, Zimbardo said, very few people could resist the situational pressures of Abu Ghraib — particularly Army reservists, themselves subject to hazing and abuse by active duty soldiers.

"There's only one rung lower than reservists, and that's the detainees," Zimbardo said while flashing dozens of "trophy photos" of Iraqi prisoners in naked piles, being menaced by snarling German shepherds, covered in blood, or with their eyes missing.

Zimbardo, an unusual icon of both academia and pop culture also starred in the 2002 Discovery Channel reality show "The Human Zoo" and the PBS series "Discovering Psychology."

On Wednesday, he displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually — then switched to an eerily similar digital photo

The SF Chron article is here.

The Cheneyspere & Fitzgerald

Dog bless Raw Story for keeping a stiff upper lip in the darkest of times. In this story by Brian Beutler Raw Story claims prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is stalking Vice President Cheney, like a wolf in search of a fat arrogant bullfrog. With all due regards to the office of the Vice President, Cheney's blithe participation in the information war surrounding the Plame scandal has seemed like a Very Bad Thing from the start.

Molly Ivins

Here is a lady who would kick your ass, who was living proof the pen is mightier than the sword, who would walk in there and say what's what on a daily basis. And she was from Texas, living proof that Texas is not an outpost of moron, shit-for-brains fuckwads.

One of my cousins down there has expressed some concern about this current view of Texas, for which we can thank not Molly, but somebody named George....

Quoting from an Ivins column of July 2005 about the ACLU:

“We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU exists to protect every citizen’s rights as defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist? … We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals.”

BushCo replacing U.S. Attorneys

Getting fired for doing a good job is exactly what happened to a high up Washington state U.S. Attorney. Jon McKay was damn near famous for his job performance. He was highly thought of by judges and everyone else. He was ordered to quit 2 months ago by the Bush Administration. McKay was in line to become a federal circuit court judge but apparently was not a BushCo automatic right wing zealot drone. It's well know BushCo has been packing federal circuit courts across the nation with right wing radicals, and diverting attention by growing a huge crop of rhetorical bullshit about "activist judges" (= any judge who does not tow the tyrannical BushCo party line).

McKay's firing is detailed, to some extent, in this story by AP writer Gene Johnson here in the Seattle Post Intelligencer. The story is deeper, though, as U.S. Attorneys of similar stature across the nation are being dumped by BushCo under a secretive provision slipped into the renewal of the Patriot Act 2 years ago. A notable example is that of Carol Lam, the San Diego U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting the spectacularly corrupt Republican House Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Hm, go figure. How'd that happen?

This article in Salon.com by Joe Conason details the other firings.

The House of Representatives has taken notice of this typical BushCo boodoggle thought. The chairwoman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Linda Sanchez, is beginning hearings on BushCo's attempt to end Congress' role in appointment of federal Attorneys.

"No presidential administration - now or in the future - should be allowed to dismantle the important constitutional set of checks and balances to achieve a political agenda."

Go Representative Sanchez!

Also, according the same Raw Story article by Mike Sheehan quoted above, a bill is under consideration that would nullify the slimy Patriot Act provision that allowed BushCo to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate oversight.

New FBI internet snooping on massive scale

1/31/07 UPDATE: DOJ replies to author of article in this news.com post. They say they follow the law, and the sources quoted in McCullagh's story are incorrect. Let's hope so, because the idea of massive government surveillance is a disgusting one and it's really time the law was shown some respect in this country. Journalism is all about verifying your sources and statements. Given the Bush Administration track record on telling the truth, it's pretty hard to believe anything they say these days tho.

Do you like living in a free society?

Hey wow, Big Brother has been watching over your shoulder as you email, web surf, conduct e-commerce, even, potentially, as you tap away at your keyboard at your job.

Wow, and all this time I thought our government was there to represent and serve us.

ZDNet's Declan McCullagh has published this article detailing the new "vacuum cleaner" approach the FBI has adopted to surveiling U.S. internet traffic, and by proxy, those millions and millions of U.S. citizens who use the internet.

Writin' your Momma? In touch w/ your partner, maybe writing a sexy letter to her or him while he or she is out of town? Chatting w/ co-workers, blowing off steam about the boss, joking with friends, seducing lovers? Reading up on anything, anything at all? Reading up on BushCo? Hmm. Looking at Pr0n?? Hmm?? Buying new shoes, looking at videos on uTube, visiting the iTunes store? Doing anything? The FBI is "recording" internet traffic at ISP's across the nation. Warrants barely enter into it- it is as if they were routinely recording any community's telephone and mail traffic for no reason at all.

Who allowed this? Take a guess. We sure didn't allow this. I don't remember a vote on it.

Why should the government be allowed to snoop at random? Is this because we have a massively unpopular president and administration who fear the very people they are supposed to represent?

Is this our government or not? Just whose government is this?

Is the FBI in charge of protecting us against large scale crime, or are they jailkeepers now?

Or now maybe our lovely government can become judge, jury and executioner?

Don't let's forget that people who work for the government are public servants, they work for us, and they are human beings. We pay their salaries, AND we don't have to put up with them, or anyone, looking into our business every time we cut a fart, step out for breath of fresh air, or walk down the road, or in this case, walk down what used to be referred to as the information superhighway.

In case you think snooping is OK, or that BushCo is not really a threat to freedom, or that your rights don't matter, now might be a good time to read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Especially a good time to read George Orwell's 1984. Or maybe read a book on this history of Argentina, because I think that is where we're headed unless we quit feeling helpless in face of BushCo transgressions.

How the fuck does it make you feel to have everything do on the internet recorded by the FBI for posterity? Look up "chilling effect" in a legal dictionary. Think of the government recording each of your phone calls, or photocopying each piece of mail you send or receive. Think of the government recording everything you buy. Ask, why?

Is the internet that much of a threat? Is information that much of a threat? Why should it be treated as such? What minds, in all their managerial genius, have come up with this paranoid nonsense? Is there a bit of an intimidation factor going on here?

There are too many of us for them to mind everyone's business, and real FBI agents and real cops, who give a shit about this country, are worried about catching people who are your worst nightmare- those types who murder, torture, break into our homes kidnap families, and worse.

However, not everybody in this country is a suspected criminal. But this is, unfortunately, the approach Bush, Gonzales and all the other clowns responsible for this mindless stormtrooping seem to be adopting. In their actions, they are more and more treating each United States citizen as a criminal suspect, based on nothing, no fucking evidence at all.

It is time for us to put our collective foot down and not tolerate warrantless searches and random snooping. Write your congressperson, tell the whole world what you think about this misuse of public servants and tax dollars. Remember, your life is nobody's business but your own and privacy is a constitutional guarantee. Privacy never needs an excuse, and privacy is a component of a free society.

War protests in DC

Tens of thousands turned out Saturday 1/27 in Washington, D.C. to protest the war. The story is covered here in My Way News by the AP. I have an uncertain feeling about this protest being covered in tomorrow's Arizona Daily Star. We'll see, I guess, but the point is opposition to the Iraq "war" is huge. People have had it with Bush, the invasion, being lied to, and the general stupidity, incompetence, wastefulness, and destructive behavior of the Bush Administration. Something has to change with the fucking moron and his merry band of bloodthirsty criminals. Otherwise we could end up in World War III, and nobody's going to win that one. And for what?

A 74 year old career Air Force pilot named Frank Houde summed it up very well:

"The fact is war doesn't work," he said. "Iraq is not going to work. The war was started for reasons that turned out to be false."

People from all over the country turned out, from all backgrounds and ages and professions. Make your voice heard. Do not be intimidated by imitators of highly-paid right wing mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and the like. It's up to all of us to call for an end to the unnecessary use of the U.S. military and the subsequent waste of life.

Grand Canyon and creationism

It's official, the Bush administration is living in Fairy-Tale Land. Nobody cares much where you worship but people draw the line at myth being passed off by the government as fact. Science, one of our most civilized accomplishments as humans, and of which God, if there is one, would surely be proud of us for, must not be supressed in the public and educational arena. It is science that is going to save us from global warming, industrial pollution, nuclear waste, and rampant mutant bacteria. Trying to force myths and stories down our throats as fact will do nothing but make things worse, and it appears BushCo supports this practice as some kind of diversionary tactic. The BushCo bullshit machine is continuing its policy of spreading lies and insane policy throughout the federal government, in this case at the Grand Canyon.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is publicizing the fact that federal workers at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to state the age of the canyon. Morons appointed by BushCo supporting the right wing Christian agenda also won't allow the canyon bookstore to sell books about geology, while allowing the sale the sale of just one new book, a book stating the Grand Canyon was created in the same flood that Noah got mixed up in. A pamphlet written for Park Service interpretive rangers detailing how to discuss the difference between science and religion was also supressed by BushCo over the past four years.

Now, this is in a U.S. national monument, here, land stewarded by the federal government, and last time I looked our government has a pretty strong policy about separation of church and state.

Apparently that doesn't really matter to BushCo, who, with this action and many, many others like it, is promoting a very false view of reality. I suppose this is because the only people who support Bush and his henchman, besides those who would gleefully dig up the Grand Canyon to mine copper, are fucking gullible morons who believe whatever they're told and who're too subsumed with guilt to distinguish between myths and stories versus reality.

In the TV culture-age marketers tell us that if a lie is hammered home again again and again people will eventually come to believe it and support it. Like the idea that McDonald's serves food, for example, or the idea that sending the best and bravest and brightest folks in the U.S. military to Iraq was somehow necessary.

In a further demonstration of BushCo standard operating tactics, the huge uproar over the bookstore policy and the creationist book being passed off as science, and the supression of actual scientific books, was quelled by an empty promise to "review" the moronic fake-science book about a supposed biblical origin of the Grand Canyon. A Freedom of Information Act request by PEER revealed BushCo standard operating procedure: lie, redirect attention, and keep on doing stupid shit. From the press release of 12/28 published on PEER's website:

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Pitiful, eh? Don't let's tolerate this kind crap in the government that represents us.

Weakening organic standards

The USDA has an organic advisory board which is being packed with representatives from large industrial agribusiness concerns. The board is in a position to define what the word "organic" means, as far as what practices are observed to eliminate pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, and other chemicals and poisons from the food we eat. Read about the current state of the board here in the article by Megan Tady of the New Standard.

Presumably, this article also functions as a good indicator of the state of the USDA during the Bush regime. In other words, the USDA functions to represents big business rather than to keep food supplies safe, and agriculture renewable and sustainable.

I don't know why it is but since we've had that psychopathic moron Bush in office, there has been this idea stated over and over again that these huge businesses that control so many things can be trusted with our food supply, our economy, our infrastructure. It was bad enough under Clinton, there was NAFTA, and a lot of creepy pro-megabusiness things going on. But now, given the evidence of so much greed and corruption (Haliburton comes to mind- read up on the scandals surrounding its stake in the Iraq boondoggle), it is particularly unwise and devastating to continue to allow foxes to guard our henhouses.

The Organic Consumers Association is grass roots non-profit that works, among other healty, vital things, to keep the meaning of the word organic from changing into something the mega-corporations can throw around in an attempt at short term gain and smashing competition from smaller farms.

If huge corporations had their way, our entire food supply would be nothing but tasteless poison. You can easily taste the difference between vegetables and meat grown in corporate conditions versus those grown in a truly natural setting. Places like McDonalds have to infuse their food with flavor agents to make it even taste like food. Read Fast Food Nation for a chilling, well researched and packed-with evidence report on routine agribusiness practices. I heard the movie was not that good- but the book showed the journalistic talent of the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Eric Schlosser, who wrote it. I have not spent a dime at McDonald's or the like since, except for the time I saw a movie with a coworker who needed to have coffee and cookies after.

Organic farmers have an eye toward a healthy end product, without the wake of environmental and economic destruction left by mega-agribusiness. Tune in and think. Read up. And think what happens when our food supply consists of frankencrops and animals not even given the dignity due to living things. We parish, that's what. We can't survive eating poison and shit, and that's what the mega-corporations like Con Agra and the like feed us- it's well-documented, and with the money these folks are making (that's right, at the heart of all this nasty stuff is people, not some robot like corporate entity, but people, very very rich people) it is best for them to invest some in changing their ways of doing business so that our one-and-only planet, and our one-and-only community are sustained in a healthy manner.

Jail4Judges & politcal strategy

I call it bull-shit. Want to be nice? Call it "cleverly crafted argumentative rhetoric"

The term "activist judge" just means a judge who does not work to uphold radical right-wing policy- social oppressiveness, throwing more people in jail for no reason, the loss of civil rights, and racist, homophobic, xenophobic or misogynist policy.

Strangely enough the true activist judges are the right wing zealots BushCo has worked to pack the U.S. Circuit Courts with.

This story in the Houston Chronicle talks about a crucial issue in the right wing takeover attempt, what Sandra Day O'Connor refers to as the loss of judicial independence.

There were ballot measures, they all failed thank goodness, that would have done things like send judges to jail or have them fired when they don't what people want- what right wing morons want, actually.

"Such proposals reflect a political strategy," said University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephen B. Burbank. "If voters are persuaded to see judges as representing constituents or policies rather than simply interpreting the law, it will be easier to pass laws limiting their independence," he said.

I like the professor's analysis here. The key word is persuade.

The so-called conservatives, the manipulators among them anyway, the ones with loudest mouths, always come up with worrisome-sounding arguments- hippies, weirdos, gays, liberals, are taking over the world, etc. People who don't go to your church are taking over somehow. Then, as the supposed agent of this vague danger, the "conservatives" conveniently point their finger at whoever's not towing the ultraright party line. It often involves misleading terminology, or a term whose meaning is used in a new, manufactured, purposeful sense, for example liberal, secular humanst, activist judge, etc.