goofballs

It makes me sick, sick, sick to my stomach that weak-kneed Democrats in the United States Congress voted along with the Republican minority to amend the already hopelessly permissive FISA bill. Here is the Washington Post coverage : The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted. Honey, pack our bags, we're moving to Canada. As many have pointed out, and...

I wanted to quickly quote this letter from the comments on a Glenn Greenwald post from earlier this week: I am a Jew who has had the opportunity to live and work in Israel. God, I hope that the people who read Lieberman's garbage do not think it represents the thinking of any but the most minute fringe in Israel. I never met anybody in Israel who believed this sort of junk. Lieberman is a sick, perverted man with no sense of honor or decency. When he says things like this, he speaks neither for the Israeli government nor for the Israeli people. -- Carl from L.A. The letter is in response to a post by Greenwald in which Greenwald dissects the strange bedfellows of AIPAC activist and cheerleader Joe Leiberman (I-CT) and frothing-at-the-mouth Rapture lunatic Reverend Hagee. I commented on this earlier this week in the LJ Atheist Community here: http://community.livejournal.com/atheist/1445891.html . My point being, I know that not all Israelis are evil Zionists, rabid L...

Here is an edifying bit on Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress' now thoroughly shamed (but illogically non-imprisoned) neocon go-to guy for pre-war dirty work. In 1996, the CIA was trying to organize a serious attempt to overthrow Saddam using the INA, headed by a former Saddam hit man, Iyad Allawi who had broken with Saddam and walked in to work for MI-6 in the late 1970s. The Brits eventually brought him to the CIA in 1992. Allawi had assets inside Saddam's military but Chalabi betrayed the coup out of jealousy. The INA was the preferred CIA instrument, its intelligence was being checked out by technical means, and its success would have meant the end of Chalabi's funding. In any case, Chalabi got caught fabricating information and the CIA cut him off. He merely went to the Pentagon and the checks kept coming because his fabricated intelligence on Iraq's WMD was so essential to selling the war, this from a man who had already failed four CIA polygraphs so that...

On this week's Bill Moyers Journal, a montage of young, college aged Republicans show each of them, in lockstep, answering the question of why we are fighting in Iraq with the Party Line of "We Are Fighting Them Over There So We Won't Be Fighting Them Over Here." Nevermind "they" being al Qaeda represents a small minority of the armed insurgents "we" are fighting in Iraq, who is "we" anyway? Well, "we" is not the hawkish youngsters polled by the reporter in the segment: each young adult who had said they favored our continued presence in Iraq, one by one, listed off excuse after excuse as to why they were not serving in Iraq. Only one claimed to have a medical issue, the rest were fit, coiffed, healthy men and women, ages from 19 to 25. Perhaps they were afraid that their hair would get ruffled.

Love it, or change it. Have a great weekend.

Glenn Greenwald's latest post highlights the primae facie abrogation of the independent prosecutorial powers of the judiciary by exerting "Executive Privilege" en masse to the executive branch as a whole, and to the US Justice Department, that branch's largest constituent. This is nothing new, but, continues Greenwald: (4) I confess some difficulty here in becoming particularly outraged over this latest theory. There is nothing new here. As has long been known, this administration believes themselves to reside above and beyond the reach of the law. What else would they need to do in order to make that as clear as can be? They got caught red-handed committing multiple felonies -- by eavesdropping on Americans in precisely the way the law we enacted 30 years ago prohibited -- and they not only admitted it, but vowed to continue to break our laws, and asserted the right to do so. And nothing happened. This latest assertion of power -- to literally block U.S. Attorn...

Why is baking bread, or brewing beer better than systems adminstration? When making bread, you have millions of yeast cells eating sugar and dividing in an orderly fashion. They expel alcohol and carbon dioxide. When system administrating, you have billions of (and sometimes trillions of) resistors blinking on and off in an orderly fashion, but you have dozens of idiotic human beings telling you to do one thing, do another, often completely in contradiction of one another; worse, you have to find a way to secure each of those precious bits in spite of the idiots who are telling you what to do with them. Bread rises. Beer ferments. Dot-coms fuck you in the ass. Over and over and over again.