Protecting us from... Spitzer?

Now, I don't want to come off as defending any of the actions of a Mr. Mark Spitzer, but this story in Newsweek really sent a shiver down my spine...

Some background first: I was still working on the "Hill" when the so-called "Patriot Act" was passed through Congress without the slightest bit of debate or oversight (with the huge exception of the good senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold who will always be my hero for said act), and knew even then from the language and lack of significant sunset provisions that it was going to be a catastrophic loss for civil liberties in this country.

I've heard the arguments about "Oh we're just trying to give Police and intelligence the same tools they have to fight organized crime", I call bullshit on you right there... Go back and research how the RICO act was passed originally. The same type of scare tactics and fear-mongering that was needed to pass RICO, was running rampant through the US right after 9/11, thus we were perfectly tuned sheep ready to have the Patriot act shoved down our throats (for our own protection of course).

Now than, one of the fine lines in the Patriot Act (or "provision") gives the Treasury Dept authority to demand more and more financial records from banks regarding their customers:

Congress wanted to help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs—Suspicious Activity Reports—to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn't comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers—on a scale of zero to 100—based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder.

Again, this is vitally important information to prevent Terrorists from getting lower interest rates than good ole patriotic Americans on credit cards I'm sure, but it gets even better.

The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in 2001 to 1.23
million last year. The data, stored in an IRS computer in Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide. "Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it," says Peter Djinis, a former top Treasury lawyer. "The vast majority of SARs filed today involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime." Federal Prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for potential leads.

So essentially what we're seeing here is law-enforcement admitting that this new regulation in place has absolutely nothing to do with catching actual terrorists. It was a new rule put in place to make things easier to to catch another type of criminal altogether.

This is the most egregious form of lawmaking that anyone could possibly participate in, and in my opinion makes every lawmaker that voted for this bill unqualified to represent any Americans interest, much less the constitutional ideals they should strive for.

Oh, but here's the funny part...

Last summer New York's North Fork Bank, where Spitzer had an account, filed a
SAR about unusual money transfers he had made, say law-enforcement and industry sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the probe. One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that Spitzer wasn't flagged because of his public position. Instead, the governor called attention to himself by asking the bank to transfer money in someone else's name. (A North Fork spokesperson says the bank does not discuss its customers.) The SAR was not itself evidence that Spitzer had committed a crime. But it made the Feds curious enough to follow the money.

Spitzer was actually busted by the Patriot act while trying to wire money for prostitution... I can't even think of words to describe how damn funny that is.

Truth is always far stranger then fiction.

Thursday Throw Down

Yep, it's early in the morning and I've been at work for an hour and a half already, it's time for Thursday Throw Down!

I know a lot of folks don't like the ACLU, but what you can no longer say is that they're paranoid. CityCat and I have talked about this for months now, and it looks like I may have been the one who was right. Big Brother is apparently out there and the Hate Hour is close at hand.


McCain apparently is going to slither his way next to any Christian leader, no matter how deplorable they are, as long as they bring votes.


In what has to be shocking news to all, and something that will get ZERO air time on Faux Noise, the Pentagon and the White House are doing all they can to squash the Pentagon report that concludes that Sadaam Hussein had ZERO connections to A.Q. I wonder if folks in the military are not just lying down anymore for this administration, perhaps they see a light at the end of the tunnel as well.


You can head on over and vote for the music to be played at Nationals Park this year after certain events. My only question is how do they not include Chocolate City by Parliament Funkadelic?

Crap...

Just going over the hit count from Google Analytics today and noticed that we've actually gotten a hit or two from Iran...

For the record, I have no idea where Salman Rushdie is, I have nothing by the utmost respect for President Ahmadinejad (maybe not so much the whole destruction of Israel and all though, hope you can understand our differences there), and certainly do know and respect what a fatwa is and really can't afford to have one of those right now.

So, in closing, I just want to say I hope our fan, or fans in Iran have a good sense of humor and have no idea where Vermont is. Thank you, salaam and please enjoy the last 2 weeks of Ramadan...

Update: The hits are coming from a city called Yazd. Never heard of it, but Welcome aboard Iran!

Hey Hackers, do this!

Since we enjoy helping people learn how to really screw us over, a new video created by the Idaho National Laboratory illustrates just how damaging an attack a hacker could do to the nation's infrastructure.

In this image from video released by the Department of Homeland Security, smoke pours from an expensive electrical turbine during a March 4, 2007, demonstration by the Idaho National Laboratory, which was simulating a hacker attack against the U.S. electrical grid. (AP Photo/Dept. of Homeland Security)

I had to include that bit of info I felt to really get an idea of what it is that is happening in this video.

Honestly, I was kind of surprised that these systems are so interdependent on networked communications. Being in IT myself, I guess I should know these things, but systems involving turbines and allowing said communication systems to send commands to these machines that would essentially tell them to tear themselves apart seems a bit surprising to me.

I guess old-school viruses kind of did the same thing though, convincing hardware to overheat while telling it to do too many things at once, burning out the phosphorous in the monitor, etc etc, so this shouldn't be too surprising... Still fascinating though.

Ten Steps To Facism

If you watch the Naomi Wolf video below you know that this is the topic of her new book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot where she goes in depth about how eerily close this country is to completing those steps. Today we shall discuss these ten steps and without having read the book yet determine how close we really are.

The Ten Steps are the following:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create a gulag.
3. Develop a thug caste.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens' groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Declare all dissent to be treason.
10. Suspend the rule of law.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and/or external enemy usually as the result of some actual event. Well, that is well documented as having been done with our "war on terror" after 9/11. Since September 11th this administration has done nothing but fear mongering under the guise of combating this great and terrible foe.
2. Create secret prisons where folks are tortured is well documented as well since the CIA and others are already doing this across the globe on a fairly large scale. Sadly they never seem to get anywhere with it since the big names are still out there at large, so my question is what good does it do?
3. Create your own private army that is only controlled by one group and not the entire government. Blackwater was created in this exact image. It is nothing more then a mercenary army at the beckon call of whatever their corporate and administration masters would have them do.
4. Set up a system to spy on your citizens, not matter if it is against the law or not. We saw this in 1984 and we saw this during the Nazi regime, where children ratted out their families to honor their country. We haven't gone that far, and won't have to since technology has made that useless.
5. Harass citizens group, wasn't that done this week with the assault upon MoveOn.org? That would very much consist of a citizens group that is being harassed, and don't forget groups like those who are routinely arrested for protesting the war, being spied upon, and or infiltrated by the police to be spied upon in the name of national security.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release, basically arresting folks on a whim and releasing them when they feel like it. They have begun this with folks from Afghanistan, excuse "terrorists", and legally all they have to do is declare you a enemy combatant and you have no rights anymore. No right to counsel, no right to a speedy trial, nothing.
7. Targeting key individuals likely means they type of assassinations that Hitler and the like took a part in to eliminate the biggest threats to their power. Thankfully there has not been any of this, least as far as we know. I would like to think the majority of America would revolt as soon as that happened, but so many believe in this war on terror and any lies TV tells them who knows.
8. Controlling the press, maybe Hitler's best talent was how to target the propaganda. It could be argued that this administration does control the press, they already have their own propaganda network. There are so many other networks that don't have the balls to actually stand up to them that in essence save for a select few this government DOES control the media. Hell, it is the center of Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS.
9. Declaring all dissenting points of views treason is happening as well. Perhaps not from those with power to actually prosecute treason, but look at politicians and media folks whenever someone doesn't agree with them. The person becomes unpatriotic, they're committing treason, and lord knows what else. The punishment for treason may not have begun, but the calling of such has.
10. Suspend the rule of law, declare marshal law, things of that nature is the final step. Think of it like Emperor Palpatine, they suspend law to give him power during a crisis and then keeps it until death. This may be what this country is moving to and it scares the shit out of me. I wouldn't be surprised one bit if some attack happens in late October early November if Dubya suspended the election and was granted a temporary status as President until the situation was resolved, which it would never be in his mind, and he would never leave office.

By my determination we have solidly completely six out of ten of the steps fully. Assassinations of opponents, marshal law, detaining of citizens and punishing treason have not been completed fully. There is no reason that our great country should be this close to being the biggest fascist state the world has ever seen. It shouldn't matter which party you are, you should love democracy no matter what kind of bad guy is out there. The Nazis and Soviets were far more of a threat to America then any terrorists are, yet we did not lose as much during those years as we have in the last five.

Cops goin Scarface on yo ass!

As an option now in sunny Miami, where politics is governed by how much you can prove you hate Fidel Castro, Police officers are now given the option to tote around assault weapons (just in case)!

I like making rules and regulations for those "Just in Case" kind of situations, since those could NEVER possibly go awry right?

The one thing I find a bit disturbing about this though is just how easily these type of changes seem to be coming out across the law enforcement spectrum.

Years ago, law enforcement specialists like SWAT teams were the only officers to carry assault weapons, but now even small town police agencies are expanding access to the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M-16 rifle.

Now, call me an anal constitutionalist (I like that word), but doesn't this fit into military assistance or involvement in domestic law enforcement? And isn't that very much illegal? I don't think you can just write this off as cops getting bigger guns anymore, when they're better armed then most foreign standing armies...

*Just occurred to me that we have a legal analyst available to us here in Dewey Cheatem and Howe, maybe he can shine some light on this one?

Craigslist, not safe for your average wfmmmmmm encounter anymore.

Well, I guess it was bound to happen eventually.

Yes, the pigs have discovered Craigslist is great at entrapment!

In July raids, the sheriff of Cook County, Ill., rounded up 43 women working on the streets — and 60 who advertised on Craigslist. In Seattle, a covert police ad on Craigslist in November resulted in the arrests of 71 men, including a bank officer, a construction worker and a surgeon.

This just ain't right on so many levels. Not just the entrapment aspect, but damnit, if people wanna go online and use these types of services, isn't it a lot safer that way then sending them to the "bad part of town" to solicit for themselves, or by themselves?

I guess I just don't see the big problem with prostitution anyway though. Its just like the war on vice, er drugs... People want certain things and will go out of their way (ie break laws) to fill those needs. Besides the moral argument against that type of behavior (which gets nowhere with an avowed Libertarian like myself), what is the rationale?

I'm always open to changing my views... Anyone that knows me is probably getting a good chuckle from that one :).

Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture

I know I've talked about this in the past, mainly about how much respect I have for Elizabeth Edwards, but John Edwards right now is without a doubt running the best campaign out of any candidates. Maybe I am being suckered, but he is talking about the issues that I think are most important to this country. It isn't Iraq, it's the wealth divide and the lack of insurance. It's the fact that two years ago today a great portion of the Gulf was destroyed and to this day most of it still has yet to recover from it.

He doesn't believe in gay marriage, but I don't believe he would stop legislation allowing it. He's young (well younger then the rest save for Obama) and has vision of great things for this country and that is what we need right now. We don't need who is most popular, we need who is most competent for the job. We've gone the popularity route the last two elections, beer or no beer that did not work out too well.

I have all the respect in the world for Barack Obama and I do believe one day he very well may be President of the united states, but this is not his election to be the primary candidate. To truly defeat the Republican Menace we need someone like John Edwards. Hate to say it, but what we need is this Southern white male to draw in the votes from Republicans who have lost faith in their party.

I don't believe people like Romney or Rudy can win in the south, they're too Northern. Yeah, some may get fooled by Fred Thompson, but I doubt he'll get the ticket. John Edwards may not be my favorite candidate but he is the person I feel has the best shot of winning this race. Poverty covers all races, not just minorities. Katrina hurt all races, including the majority.

Right now I am not too concerned about who the ideal candidate to push for the legislation I want accomplished. Right now I want a candidate who can win against the Right Wing Smear Machine. We need to take this country away from those who would change it, who would alter it into a police theocracy. This country was built on the premise that ALL men should be free, even if all men weren't free at the time. It does not matter race, religion, sex, or sexuality, all should be treated as equals. All should have say in their own lives and not me lorded over a group of aristocrats who believe their power is divine. We overthrew that kind of superiority once before and we most do so again before it is too late, when our enemy has been Eastasia and has always been Eastasia.

Thank you sir may I have another!

I think this is my favorite article today...

British Airways, Korean Air Fined $300 Million in Price-Fixing Conspiracy Case

Now, part of you might say "Awesome, they caught em! justice will be served!

Yea, not so much...

If you read further into the article....

Korean Air's fines could have been twice as high and British Airways could have faced fines closer to $900 million, but the Justice Department credited the company with cooperating in the case.

Wait wait wait wait... So what you're telling me here, is that because they owned up to raping the folks that paid top dollar for the damn tickets, you are going to lower their fine to YOU, but not actually force them to reimburse the suckers that paid too much???

I'm amazed at how blatantly arrogant the "Guvmint" can be sometimes in going out of their way to assist companies in raping us all... All part of the greater good right?

Thank God we don't have a Lawyer President

Thankfully even though the economy continues its slide (thanks to our greedy bastard loan companies), we still have a President that has an MBA so we should be good right?

Well..

Things are still not looking all that great, as the Feds continue to pump money into the aforementioned "Greedy Bastards" loan companies to keep them afloat.

The latest injections brought the total to 120.5 billion dollars added to money markets in repurchase agreements in the past two weeks.

This really isn't all that different then when the Great Depression collapsed this whole wonderful system we call Capitalism, except this time around we can actually "afford" (I use that term VERY loosely, as we have spent more then we earn for a while now) to pump up the markets ourselves this time, instead of relying on members of Skull and Bones (JP Morgans, Henry Fords, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, etc) to save their wonderful play toy we call America.

We're in for some pretty dire times if people don't figure out that this cycle of exploitation by corporations is destroying what hope we had of realizing the ideals of Free Markets and the Global Economy... We can't just keep parts of the system we like, and throw out the rest...

Really want to get our resident Historical Genius "Livingamongmorons" to write a bit more about this, as I'm really just a fan of history, not necessarily an expert, but oh man can I pretend! Besides, this is on the "Internets", so it MUST be true!

To quote Colbert "America, you're on notice".

20 Million bucks???

ok ok, I must admit, I'm part of the camp that was not overly shocked by what Mr. Don Imus said on his last fateful program about the Women's basketball team at Rutgers U.

In fact, I was more shocked by the reaction to it. Especially by hypocrites in the wind Rev Sharpton and Prez hopeful Senator Obama, who both gladly accept money from members of the hip-hop community that tend to say much worse things about members of the opposite sex, as well as that loaded "N" word that gets people so worked up (for good reason mind you, when used in certain ways).

But, hypocrisy runs rampant in this media driven Corporate Aristocracy we all live in, so I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised by those cowards actions, or of the sweet book deal Coach Stringer of Rutgers got after her "horrible ordeal".

Was what Imus did right? Well, in the eyes of our nation's founding principles, it was certainly not illegal, but sure, it probably blurred some lines of polite conversation, but that was NOT his job. He's labelled a "Shock Jock" for a reason. He is no Howard Stern when it comes to morality, or just outright shock value, but he may say some things that are not always popular.

Well anyway, today it will be announced (shortly) that Imus has settled his differences with CBS for a cool 20 Million dollars... Why it had to come to this, I'll still never know, but I have to admit that I'm glad the corporate censor machine was not able to silence this guy like it has tried to do other folks that may not share its infinite wisdom (re: Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty, etc).

Hell, I don't even enjoy the guys show (and really don't understand why anyone would), but at least he does some good for the world with his ranch for the sick kids.

And he's no Rush, which is always a bonus...

Pentagon seriously not ever considering Draft, seriously, they mean it.

Feeling the need to get the message out there, the Pentagon today announced that they have no intention of re-instating the draft.

For those of you unaware that the draft has been "kinda" removed, let me catch you up.

• Richard Nixon is no longer President.
• J. Edgar Hoover is no longer head of the FBI.
• George H.W. Bush is no longer head of the CIA (he got a lower paying job actually inside DC).
• We no longer have troops in Vietnam (North or South, they kinda "merged").
• It is NOT cool to wear bell-bottom pants.
• It is now almost impossible to acquire LSD.

Sadly, you did not miss much else, except for the hit "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash in 1982.

I hope this has helped.

All Your Base are Belong to Virginia?

In the wise words of Kanye West, "Virginia doesn't care about any people" (or something like that).

Continuing on their crusade to rape the middle class, the State of Virginia claimed yet another frustrated soul with their oh so constitutional "Pile-on" driving fees.

To those of you that are not familiar with these aforementioned "Pile-on" fees, here's a small snippet from the liberal bastion "The Washington Post":

The fees, which range from $750 to $3,000, were passed by the General Assembly in the spring as part of a package aimed at funding scores of transportation projects. Backers said the fees would both raise money and improve highway safety by targeting the state's worst drivers -- those guilty of severe traffic offenses such as DUI, reckless driving and driving on a suspended license.

Best part about this newest case though? The woman that was fined a $1,050 civil fee on top of a judge-imposed $100 fine and court costs for "reckless driving" for going 57 mph in a 35 zone. Why was she going so fast?

Oh yea, she was GOING INTO LABOR!

Well, to be fair, she thought she was going into labor, but by the sounds of it, if she was the only person available to get her ass to the hospital, I don't think she could (or should for that matter) take any chances.

Thank God we have such diligent cops out there with nothing better to do then pull over Pregnant ladies going through labor pains... Virginia must be the safest state in the union...

Flash: China controls Media directed at own people

In an apparently slow news day, World Tribune reports that:

China’s government controls virtually all media outlets to exercise “mind control” and manipulate public opinion, according to testimony by a former state propagandist at a hearing of the U.S-China Economic Security Review Commission last week.

In related news, Rupert Murdoch coughs, mumbles "amateurs" under his breath and outlines his new plan to offer the Wall Street Journal online for free.

Additionally England has decided that bad news about its military is even MORE bad if it comes from members of it:

They will also be barred from playing multi-player computer games and sending text messages, photographs and audio or video material without permission if they relate to defence matters.

The guidelines say "all such communication must help to maintain and, where possible, enhance the reputation of defence", the paper reported.

Stupid people with their stupid opinions....