Politics

Hot damn. Just when I thought that the media was fairly useless, pointless, and completely under the Governmental thumb, along comes something like this transcript from a press breifing with Ari Fleischer:

MR. FLEISCHER: Good afternoon and happy New Year to everybody. The President began his day with an intelligence briefing, followed by an FBI briefing. Then he had a series of policy briefings. And this afternoon, the President will look forward to a Cabinet meeting where the President will discuss with members of his Cabinet his agenda for the year. The President is going to focus on economic growth, making America a more compassionate country, and providing for the security of our nation abroad and on the homefront.

And with that, I’m more than happy to take your questions. Helen.

Q: At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.

MR. FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.

Q: My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and our allies and friends —

Q: They’re not attacking you.

MR. FLEISCHER: — from a country —

Q: Have they laid the glove on you or on the United States, the Iraqis, in 11 years?

MR. FLEISCHER: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression then.

Q: Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I think you know very well that the President’s position is that he wants to avert war, and that the President has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with the purpose of averting war.

Q: Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.

Q: And he thinks they are a threat to us?

MR. FLEISCHER: There is no question that the President thinks that Iraq is a threat to the United States.

Q: The Iraqi people?

MR. FLEISCHER: The Iraqi people are represented by their government. If there was regime change, the Iraqi —

Q: So they will be vulnerable?

MR. FLEISCHER: Actually, the President has made it very clear that he has not dispute with the people of Iraq. That’s why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq —

Q: That’s a decision for them to make, isn’t it? It’s their country.

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don’t think that has been what history has shown.

Q: I think many countries don’t have — people don’t have the decision — including us.

I have no idea who “Helen” is, but I’d dearly love to. She’s got more cojones than most people I know, that’s for sure.

(Via Megnut)

This story will probably be all over the ‘net in a day or two, if it isn’t already, but it’s something that really needs to be read to be believed. A husband and his pregnant wife were attempting to fly out of Portland to go to a friend’s wedding when they were both pulled off for extra “security screening”…

After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, “I’m sorry…it’s…they touched my breasts…and…” That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, “What did you do to her?” Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts — to protect the American citizenry — the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side — no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who’ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. “I felt like a clown,” my wife told me later. “On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That’s when you walked up.”

Of course when I say she “told me later,” it’s because she wasn’t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day — that I was in fact a “menace.”

It’s no longer a “what if” scenario — these things are happening, all over the place, every day. Some are getting reported, many more are not. And as the author of the piece says, it’s probably too late to stop it at this point, though not too late to make our indignation known.

There are plenty of stories like this these days. I don’t know how many I’ve read where the writer describes some breach of civil liberties by employees of the state, then wraps it all up with a dire warning about what we as a nation are becoming, and how if we don’t put an end to it now, then we’re in for heaps of trouble. Well you know what? Nothing’s going to stop the inevitable. There’s no policy change that’s going to save us. There’s no election that’s going to put a halt to the onslaught of tyranny. It’s here already — this country has changed for the worse and will continue to change for the worse. There is now a division between the citizenry and the state. When that state is used as a tool against me, there is no longer any reason why I should owe any allegiance to that state.

Lott said he would survive any challenge to his post as majority leader, and Tuesday he picked up the support of a few GOP senators, including Alaska’s Ted Stevens, who vowed to “defend my friend.” Others who have voiced support for Lott include Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Michael DeWine of Ohio.

The comments from Stevens, the second-most senior Republican senator, were one of the strongest endorsements of Lott since he set off a political firestorm when he praised Thurmond’s unsuccessful presidential bid at a birthday party December 5. Praise of that campaign drew condemnation — from President Bush and others — because Thurmond ran on a segregationist platform.

Stevens said he believes Lott meant the comments as praise for Thurmond as a military man and longtime Senate colleague — not praise for his past segregationist ways. He said Lott’s comments have been blown “out of proportion.”

From CNN.com, “Lott vows to fight for leadership job”

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sen. Stevens’ turn the Senatorial spot over to someone else — though that’s not likely to happen until he dies. Ah, well.

Drug company Eli Lilly is the maker of the drug Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that used to be a common ingredient in childhood vaccines. There is now substantial evidence that due to the mercury content, Thimerosal may be the cause of autism in many, many children, and Eli Lilly has been facing a number of lawsuits from parents looking for some help in caring for their children that were affected by the drug from this company.

Unfortunately, at the last minute, a provision was inserted into the Homeland Security Act that protects Eli Lilly from these lawsuits, moving the suits from state courts to a federal ‘vaccine court’ where damages are capped at $250,000.

And apparently, nobody knows how this piece of legislation got into the bill.

Now there is a $10,000 reward being offered for anyone who can identify who inserted this provision into the Homeland Security Act.

Lots more information on the issue can be found on TomPaine.com’s links to articles, with Counterspin digging into the background a bit.

(Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the heads-up.)

Now that Al Gore has decided to step out of the ring for the next presidential race, the field looks pretty wide open. A few months ago, or even now, there wouldn’t be much chance of ousting Dubya from office, but who knows where things might stand in a couple years. In the meantime, I don’t really know much about any of the other potential Democratic candidates, so it was nice to see a quick rundown on the current possibilities over on BackupBrain last Sunday. Definitely gives me an idea of who to keep an eye on.

Lieberman: He’ll definitely run. …but there’s not a chance in hell that he could win against Bush in the general. Deplorably, there are too many people in this country that still will not vote for a Jew for president.

Kerry: He’s already running. …my issue with Kerry is part of the problem that Gore has: he’s so cautious, you think that everything coming out of his mouth has been pre-digested, run by a focus group, and vetted six ways from Sunday.

Edwards: Not this time, John. He’s smart, attractive, and he’s from the South, all of which helps a winner. But he’s a first-term senator, and he’s still finding out how things work in Washington.

Gephardt: He’s run for president before. He lost. …under his fabulous leadership, last month Democrats lost the best chance to regain the House for the next decade. He’s on the wrong side of many issues for me.

Daschle: He’s been a crappy Majority Leader. Period. Last week, he let Trent Lott off the hook for his racist comments, for pity’s sake. He can’t see a friggin’ red-meat issue when it slaps him in the face.

Howard Dean: (who?) This guy is already running. …at the moment, he’s the candidate with the best lineup on the issues. He’s a doctor, has, by all accounts, been a pretty good governor, and is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That works for me. …I like this quote: “I have no patience with ideologues. I think they’re fundamentally disturbed.”

Biden, Feingold, Dodd, Wesley Clark: Puh-leeze.

Well, actually, it’s more or less what I said, only better written, and without using pull quotes from other sites for 90% of the content.

OK, the joke’s over. Will someone tell that chowderhead in the White House to stop playing his Fantasy President computer game and get serious? He exhumes John Poindexter, a retired Navy admiral who was such a bumbler and scoundrel that he got fired by the Reagan administration after being convicted of lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal and he puts Poindexter in charge of the Information Awareness Office, which has a legal right to tap electronic information about you, including your prescription records, bank statements, buying patterns, telephone, travel, etc.

While we’re reeling from that, Bush digs up the most gruesome, festering corpse in the catacombs of crooked government, and he puts HENRY KISSINGER in charge of an investigation into the 9/11/01 attacks. This is worse than putting the fox into the henhouse. At least the fox is up front about his intentions. Kissinger is so crooked he can watch himself walking out of the room. If the families of the people lost on 9/11 had any hopes for a fair and just account of what happened, they can forget it.

— Ray Holley, editor for the Healdsburg Tribune, as quoted by Dori Smith

This is why I’m a ‘blogger’, and he’s a newspaper editor.

I don’t have the posts available at the moment to reference (I’m still in the process of resurrecting all my posts from April through August of this year after my webserver crashed), but if you’ve been checking in on me for a bit, you may remember my being up in arms about Operation TIPS. In essence, this was a to be a government-sponsored system for US citizens to snitch on each other, calling on postal workers, utility workers, and anyone who volunteered to “turn in” people they suspected of “suspicious activity”. Ick.

Well, according to Wired news today, one of the upsides to the recently passed ‘Homeland Security Act’ was the nixing of the TIPS program.

A controversial government initiative to recruit Americans to spy on each other in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks was quietly killed with the passage of the Homeland Security Act.

Caught in a hail of criticism, the Justice Department decided not to engage mail or utility workers in the program. Officials then toned down the TIPS website, deleting references to the one million snoops and excising the exhortation to “Volunteer now!”

In July, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), introduced legislation to ban TIPS (Sec. 880). The bill also prevented the Justice Department from using the Homeland Security Act as a launch pad to create a National ID system (Sec. 1514), and to create a Privacy Officer (Sec. 222).

“Mr. Armey was adamant about keeping those provisions in the bill,” said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Armey, who recently retired after 18 years in Congress. “He felt the programs were not consistent with free society.”

Kudos to Mr. Armey for standing up for the freedoms of his constituents — I have to wonder of that was doubly galling for Pres. Bush, as Mr. Armey was representing Bush’s home state! A pity he recently retired, but at least he got some good work in before he stepped down.

On the “lose some” side of the equation, however, we’ve still got the Homeland Security Act itself to cope with, full of goodies like provisions allowing ISPs to turn over customer’s e-mail records without a warrant, and of course, Mr. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System.

Wheeeeeee.

High school students nationwide may be surprised to know that the Pentagon knows their name, address and phone number.

A provision of a new federal education law requires high schools to hand over the information for recruiting purposes, or risk losing federal funds.

— via Boing Boing

Just freaky. I suppose I can kind of understand that school rosters would be a prime source for recruiting people (though I’d prefer that the government at least waited until people were 18, and just stuck to colleges), but threatening to withold funding if they don’t get the rosters? That’s just ridiculous.