Go over to Digby's and watch a video of just how quickly and easily you can be tortured by the police these days.
Remember when watching. No one is required to sign a traffic ticket and the law requires a warning that you will be tased if you are about too.
Read the whole thing and you'll get a sense of just how degraded are our civil liberties these days.
Here's something interesting. Ever want to conduct your own poll? Now you can.YouPolls is a place for users to create polls about the topics of their choice, and gauge public opinion about the issues, as they frame them. It's also a place where people can discover content across a wide variety of subjects, share them with friends, and discuss them with others who share the same interests.
I may have to try this out.
Read a suggestion online that sounds good.
A member over at Democratic Underground suggested we make donations to the Kucinich campaign on December 15th. I asked what the significance of that date was. Shows how much I know. It is the date the Bill of Rights took effect in 1791. As the person says:I don't think it matters whether you can donate $100 or $10, the important thing is that folks donate. Even if Dennis is not your first choice, isn't it worth a donation to his campaign simply to open up the debate for the American people? Right now, the media and their corporate sponsored big money candidates are running everything. I say lets turn the tables on the media and let them know America can no longer be railroaded by their manipulation of information.
I completely agree. Enough is enough.
Here's a brief excerpt of a new book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan:
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," writes McClellan. "So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."
But his press performances weren't based on the facts, McClellan continues.
"There was one problem. It was not true," he writes. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."
McClellan conducted a number of often-heated press events centering on Plame. In one September 2003 briefing, he expressly denied Rove's involvement in the matter.
I think this should be filed in the Colin Powell file of former officials who seriously hurt the country by knowingly prostituting themselves for Bush and then cashing in later.
Omar Khadr is a young Canadian citizen currently imprisoned at Guantanamo and facing a military trial for war crimes he allegedly committed in Afghanistan at the age of 15.
In July 2002, US special forces in eastern Afghanistan got a tip that al Qaeda forces were holed up nearby. After hours of fighting, the soldiers entered the bombed-out compound but were met by a grenade thrown over the wall that killed one man. They then found Omar Khadr lying in the rubble, badly hurt and begging them -- in perfect English -- to kill him.
The United States has charged Omar with murder, on the grounds that there was no one else left alive in the compound who could have thrown the grenade, and he now faces a possible sentence of life in prison. The only concession made for his youth was not to ask for the death penalty.
In the interest of balance, here's some real news on the situation in Iraq. This is one day:
'MOSUL - One policeman was killed and two wounded in a drive-by shooting at a police checkpoint in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .
BAIJI - A parked car bomb wounded five people, including two children, when it exploded near the house of a policeman in the oil refinery city of Baiji, 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.Maybe it's just a glass half full or half empty thing .... unless you live in Iraq.
NEAR BAQUBA - Gunmen attacked a police station, killing three policemen in a village north of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - An unspecified number [it is said to be 30-40] of foreign security guards [working for the Dubai-based Almco company] were arrested by Iraqi security forces after a shooting in central Baghdad's Karrada district, security spokesman Brigadier-General Qassim Moussawi said. A convoy of four four-wheel drives was passing through a square on the edge of Karrada when a woman crossing the road was shot. The guards were arrested at a nearby checkpoint [none was American] . . .
BAGHDAD - Three bodies were found in different areas of Baghdad on Monday, police said.
BAGHDAD - A car bomb wounded five people in the Bayaa district of southwestern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb wounded two people on Palestine Street in northeastern Baghdad, police said. . .
BAGHDAD - One person was killed and seven were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a small bus in Baladiyat district in eastern Baghdad, police said.
SUWAYRA - Police retrieved the bodies of two men bearing signs of torture from the Tigris river on Sunday in the town of Suwayra, south of Baghdad, police said. . .
BASRA - Six members of the same family were killed when a Katyusha rocket hit their house in the oil hub of Basra, 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said. Three of the dead were children. '
A comment from Abu Adarvark via Rising Hegemon:I attended a talk today by Stephen Biddle, a first-rate military strategist who has been working with General Petraeus, about military progress in Iraq...Overall, he presented a rosier portrait than I would have, based on his recent ten day visit to Iraq, but he's a serious guy so I take him seriously - though I noticed that he concentrated almost exclusively on the local level progress and hardly mentioned Maliki or the national political level at all. Without getting in to his arguments or my reservations, I just wanted to lay out Biddle's best case scenario as he presented it: if everything goes right and if the US continues to "hit the lottery" with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years. And that's the best case scenario of one of the current strategy's smartest supporters.
Atrios has got this just right:
10 months from now we will still be in Iraq, the war will not be "won," whatever the hell that means, US troops will still be getting killed on a regular basis. And that's the optimistic view.
The idea that Iraq will be a popular success story then is about as absurd as thinking that political advice from conservatives and Republican operatives is given in good faith.
The only hope for Republicans in 2008 is that they can make Iraq a bipartisan disaster, something the Villagers in general are desperate to make happen.
.... at least according to the American media, but there's still a war going on with a lot of people dying, including Americans:
Bombs killed 17 persons in Iraq on Sunday, including 3 US troops. The three US soldiers were killed Sunday in Baquba in a suicide bombing attack.
Via Jaded Thea, we learn of a web site dedicated to monitoring power production and CO2 emissions. It's an awesome, interactive site where you can see just where electricity is generated and how dirty that generation is. Interestingly, my power producer (Pacific Gas and Electric) is relatively clean.
Too bad they don't have a political map overlay for the power generation. Can you guess where the dirtiest power generation is in the U.S.?
We've really all known this all along. But you can only describe this a grease money:
The Los Angeles Times leads with the Pentagon trying to inject accountability into the way it gives over $1 billion a year in military aid to Pakistan. The U.S. currently reimburses Pakistan automatically, with little or no oversight, for GWOT-related expenses.I'm sure Musharraf has a fat bank account somewhere outside Pakistan. I'm equally sure that Musharraf uses grease money to keep the army on his side.
...
Pakistan currently sends the U.S. embassy invoices for vague expenses like "support … provided to U.S. military operations during January through March related to the global war on terrorism" and receives cash—payments that made up three fourths of all U.S. military aid over the past six years.
From John Mauldin's weekly newsletter, this is the simplest and easiest to understand explanation of exactly why the government's stated inflation numbers are bogus:
"The Boskin/Greenspan argument was that when steak got too expensive, the consumer would substitute hamburger for the steak, and that the inflation measure should reflect the costs tied to buying hamburger versus steak, instead of steak versus steak. Of course, replacing hamburger for steak in the calculations would reduce the inflation rate, but it represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a declining standard of living. Cost of living was being replaced by the cost of survival. The old system told you how much you had to increase your income in order to keep buying steak. The new system promised you hamburger, and then dog food, perhaps, after that.During the Clinton administration, there were all kinds of these types of "algorithms" put in place for measuring inflation. The goal, of course, being to reduce cost of living increases in entitlement programs. The result is that the Fed makes it's monetary decisions based on bogus numbers.
Someone showed up at the end of the Social Security thread to write this:Like who lost Vietnam, the Social Security debate will never die.
So math isn't one of your skills, then? The system goes into the red around 2017 - a decade from now. At that point, money that would otherwise flow towards discretionary programs will start bleeding to Social Security and Medicare. It will get worse over the course of the following 2 decades, until eventually, there won't be any money left for discretionary spending at all.
Essentially this is the prefunding con job. Since FICA revenues will cease to support general expenditures in the near future what we must do is... increase the FICA tax so it continues to support general expenditures. In other words, we need to increase the regressive payroll tax so that we don't need to raise other taxes. And we're doing it to "save" social security.
This is the con, laid out clearly for all to see. This has nothing to do with "saving Social security" and everything to do with increasing the regressivity of the tax code.
Someone had an idea for a lockbox, but the Village Elders decided that was a very silly idea.
At least so far.
That is, Congress is refusing to approving spending on the Iraq war without withdrawal timelines.
At least so far.
Via Josh Marshall:
Wow, that didn't take long. David Broder, in a chat with readers last Friday:The Clenis strikes again!New York: Will you and the media ever apply as much scrutiny to the Giuliani marriages as you have done to the single Clinton marriage?David Broder, in his column today:David S. Broder: I plan to leave both subjects alone.
No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.Now, Broder can write about whatever the hell he wants, as far as this blog is concerned. And the question of how Bill might impact a Hillary Presidency is in some ways a legit one. But what interests me here is the level of outright denial we're seeing at play. The inability of Broder and other pundits not to return to the topic of the Clinton marriage -- as Broder did here despite suggesting a week ago that he wouldn't -- is really almost neurotic at this point, like a bad nervous habit or a facial tic.No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.
It is a difficult question for any of the Democratic rivals to raise. But it lingers, even if unasked.
Guess we "accidentally" killed a whole bunch of our new Sunni allies in Iraq.
That should play well with the Sunni populace.
Eric Alterman gets a letter from a University of Maryland overseas faculty member:
"The reason that I am writing today is to inform you of something rather unsettling. Last weekend, we had a Europe-wide faculty meeting at our headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. At that meeting, we were told that the U of MD military education contracts will be expanding soon to Iraq, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Djibouti, and other locations in the Middle East and Africa. This comes as no surprise.Who knows .... But like the author says, it looks like a good lead for a story.
"What is startling is that the U.S. military has also asked us to prepare a bid for educational programs in IRAN and SYRIA (and, oddly enough, France -- where we have had no presence since NATO was expelled in 1967 -- probably a function of the new conservative government there). We will be bidding on an education contract to these locations at the end of November.
"This is a truly ominous development. The U of MD overseas program follows the military around the world -- thus clearly the contingencies for an occupation of several Middle Eastern countries is not only being contemplated, but actually set up."
Could someone with an expense account from a major media corporation still interested in journalism please look into this?
Gee, no one could have foreseen this:
The Washington Post leads with a dispatch from Iraq and reports that U.S. military officials are frustrated with the Iraqi government, which they see as the biggest obstacle to futher progress in Iraq. The officials contend the government has failed to take advantage of a crucial "window of opportunity" that currently exists because of the decline in violence.Au contrair.
