ONE MILLION NAMES ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST

From Barry Stienhardt at Huffington Post:

"Terrorist" Watch List Hits One Million Names

The "terrorist" watch list now has more than one million names. Do you feel safer now?

Since February we've been tracking the size of our government's list of ostensible terrorist suspects, which according to the government's own report (pdf) has been rising at a rate of 20,000 per month.

Today I appeared in a press conference at the National Press Club here in Washington to mark this latest threshold in the history of our government's so-called "War on Terror." With me were Caroline Fredrickson, head of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, and two watch list victims: Jim Robinson, a former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division at the Justice Department, who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance; and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been repeatedly detained, shackled, separated from his family, and interrogated at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for his business.

The first thing we have to do is reduce the size of this list. There cannot possibly be one million terrorists poised to attack us. If there were our cities would be ablaze. The president - if not this president, then the next one -- needs to order the Terrorist Screening Center (the entity that maintains the list) to take everyone off this list except those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist activities or ties. And they should be ordered to do it quickly -- within three months.

There's just no excuse for a terrorist watch list with one million names on it. And the million names dramatically understates the number of Americans actually affected by this hopelessly bloated folly. With common names like Robert Johnson on the list, exponentially more Americans are caught up in a Kafkaesque web of suspicion.

Think about it -- when the government announced it was setting up this list, did anyone picture such a thing? Might as well just put the whole population on the list and save on administrative expenses.

The second primary thing that needs to be done is for checks and balances to be imposed on this watch list system. If the government is going to use watch lists, there needs to be in place the same kinds of due process protections that American citizens expect any other time the government interferes with the rights and privileges that other members of society enjoy (such as the right to travel by air).

Congress needs to put into law -- you can't trust bureaucracies to stick with "guidelines" or other weaker protections -- basic protections such as:

• a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based;


• tight criteria for adding names to the lists;


• rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists;


• and most of all, the right to a meaningful, participatory process by which we can challenge our inclusion on a watch list in an adversarial proceeding before a neutral arbiter.

Today we also announced the creation of an online form where victims of the watch list can report their experiences to us. We will collect those stories and use them in a variety of ways to advance our advocacy. We only share or use each story according to the permission that the submitter gives us, and stories can be submitted anonymously.

In some ways, this million-person watch list is the perfect symbol for an administration whose strategy in fighting terrorism has always revolved around making everyone a suspect -- from data mining to ID cards to see-through body scanners. It is an approach based around trying to pick a one-in-a-billion terrorist out of the population, rather than doing the only thing that has ever really worked to stop attacks: following up competently on known terrorists and known leads and working outward from there to go directly to the terrorists.

I've gotta print up some of these stickers!

From http://gods4suckers.net/

Oh, Christ, Just Fuck Me

10 July 2008 by Bob

Senate Accepts Retroactive Immunity for Telecoms

The Senate voted 68-29 on Wednesday to broaden the authority of the executive branch by approving changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (H.R.6304) was passed by the House on June 20. Earlier Wednesday, the Senate struck down three amendments that would have delayed, weakened or revoked a controversial provision in the bill to grant unconditional, retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted the White House in its warrantless wiretapping program. [...] The amendment brought forward by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) would have stripped the retroactive immunity provision altogether. The Bingaman amendment failed 42-56, the Specter amendment failed 37-61 and the Dodd-Feingold amendment failed 32-66; While Senators Dodd and Feingold considered a filibuster of the final legislation after their amendments failed, they lacked the necessary votes to stop the vote from taking place. “Mr. President, I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program,” Feingold stated Wednesday on the Senate floor. “And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new president, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation.”

So, everyone, go and call your senators and tell them JUST HOW FUCKING STUPID THEY ARE if they voted “yes” for this bullshit.

There goes the neighborhood. Welcome to Soviet Amerikkka, people…

And so it Goes! Fucking Criminals each and everylast one!

And fucking Congress does not have a set of balls between the entire group of them. Put this no-good scumbag fuck who has destroyed this country with a scorched earth politic in the fucking jail in the basement of Congress!!!! THAT"S WHY IT"S FUCKING THERE YOU BUNCH OF FUCKING SPINELESS PIECES OF SHIT!
Ah, Fuck it, who cares anymore. They will walk away with literally billions of your and my money, and continue making it happily ever after.... Whats the fucking use.
From http://www.crooksandliars.com/

You knew it was going to happen. For all his big talk about being happy to talk to the House Judiciary Committee looking into the conviction and incarceration of Don Siegelman, when push came to shove, you had to know that Karl Rove would never, ever freely respond to the HJC subpoena. CQPolitics:

Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, cited executive privilege as the reason that the former White House adviser would not appear before the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee on July 10.[..]

“Mr. Rove will respectfully decline to appear before the Subcommittee on July 10 on the grounds that Executive Privilege confers upon him immunity from process to respond to a subpoena directed to this subject,” Luskin wrote.

Luskin renewed an offer that would have Rove submit to an off-the-record, untranscribed interview or answer written questions about the Siegelman case, but not the broader issue of the politicization of the Justice Department.

Not even man enough to stand up for his actions. Hear that, Karl? Not even man enough. Dan Abrams brings NYU Law School Professor Michael Waldman and former HJC counsel Julian Epstein to discuss the latest in Bush League (In)Justice:

Abrams: Okay, Michael, let me start with you: it is clear, Karl Rove is not coming. I mean, the House Judiciary Committee can say as much as they want, we’re still hoping, we’re still encouraging him to come, we’re still insisting that he come, he’s not coming. So what do they do now?

Waldman: Well, it’s really quite remarkable, as you say, you can just say no to a lawful subpoena from Congress. Congress has a bunch of tools they can use. They can, of course, throw him in jail. There’s a jail in the basement of the Capitol. That’s probably the extreme remedy. There’s all kinds of other things. They can cut off funding, they can hold up nominations, they can bring a lawsuit as has been the case in the Miers…the Harriet Miers contempt case. But what Congress has to have when it looks in its toolbox is not any of these tools but some backbone. Congress is a co-equal branch of government and it needs to stand up for its rights in this.

Backbone in Congress? What’s that? I’ll believe it when I see the perp walk.

Gee, The things you find out when doing a little RESEARCH!

Lifted from the website http://gods4suckers.net/
Below is a letter to the editor from author Paul M. Howey published in the opinion page of our local newspaper this past week.
Few know the story of how the Pledge of Allegiance came to be. The “Pledge” was written as an advertising ploy to sell flags, and was written by a “Baptist socialist”. Taking these things into consideration, and the fact that we may be the only nation to pledge allegiance to a flag, should the pledge be replaced or gotten rid of entirely?

Independence Day–a perfect time for some independent thinking. On this all-American day of apple pie, parades and fireworks, what better time to question why we pledge “allegiance” to a flag.

We say the Pledge of Allegiance a lot, mechanically mouthing the words without truly understanding them or their history. Are we deluding ourselves into believing this somehow renders us more patriotic?

At the risk of sounding like Cliff from “Cheers,” here are some little-known facts, Norm.

Conservatives are up in arms about presidential candidates wearing flag pins. I’ll bet precious few of them, however, are aware the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a left-winger, a socialist even, and that corporate profits were the sole motivating factor behind it.

Francis Bellamy penned the Pledge in 1892. Bellamy was a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and an extreme nationalist whose sermons (”Jesus the Socialist,” for one) eventually got him booted from the church.

He then landed a job with Youth’s Companion, a magazine that also happened to be in the business of selling American flags. The magazine’s owners decided they needed to boost flag sales. They came up with a marketing gimmick.

They engineered a deal with the National Education Association to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing in the New World. By agreement, all the schools in the country were to have flag ceremonies, and naturally they would all need to have flags. To cement the deal, they had Bellamy write the following pledge that youngsters all over the country would be required to say:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

“One nation indivisible” was a phrase Bellamy used to drive home the fact that states had no inherent right of secession. The Civil War was still fresh on the minds of Americans, and the Northerners wanted to be sure the Southerners understood the new rules.

Socialist that he was, Francis had wanted to include “equality for all” in his Pledge, but he knew the states’ superintendents of education–who generally did not support equality for women or for African-Americans — would object. That could hurt flag sales (the Pledge was, after all, just an advertising ploy meant to peddle more flags), and so he dropped the idea.

The last change to the Pledge came in 1954. In response to the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era, the words “under God” were added, supposedly to show that we rejected the godless precepts of Communism. Otherwise patriotic atheists and agnostics were not consulted.

Sadly, the Pledge of Allegiance was but an ad campaign created to bolster a corporation’s bottom line. Perhaps worse, it was worded to be politically expedient rather than politically correct.

We’re about the only nation to “pledge allegiance” to a flag, and we do it without even understanding why we do so. Perhaps it’s time to consider retiring this anachronistic practice, or at least finding a meaningful replacement.

Paul M. Howey is an author and photographer, and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

ENOUGH SAID, I THINK.

Secretary Rice: I'm "Proud" We Invaded Iraq

Lifted from www.Huffingtonpost.com

Yes, That's Right. Let's not give any of those freeloading bastards any Healthcare!

In Controversy Over Medicare Pay Cuts, Conservatives Side With Insurance Industry

Last week, the White House and its allies in the Senate, voted down a proposal that would have made “cuts to the private Medicare Advantage program” in order to finance the deferment of a 10.6% physician fee cut for doctors who treat Medicare patients.

Oncology association ‘horrified’ by Specter’s vote against Medicare bill.

Earlier this week, Politico reported that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) switched his vote and opposed an increase in Medicare payments to doctors, after he made a deal with the White House. Officials promised Specter, who has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, “an administrative fix to increase Medicare reimbursements for oncologists.” Yet at least one medical association, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, is “horrified” by Specter’s actions and assured Hill staff yesterday that it did not lobby him for the deal.

FUCKHEADS!

SAME SHIT DIFFERENT ASSHOLE

Feds Use “Terrorist Liaison Officers” in Colorado

By: Nicole Belle @ 2:00 PM - PDT

Mike mentioned this in his Round Up, but it definitely merits its own post. Denver Post:

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for “suspicious activity” - and are reporting their findings into secret government databases.

It’s a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs’ mission, and their focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

“Suspicious activity” is broadly defined in TLO training as behavior that could lead to terrorism: taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document.

All this is anathema to opponents of domestic surveillance.

Yet U.S. intelligence and homeland security officials say they support the widening use of TLOs - state-run under federal agreements - as part of a necessary integrated network for preventing attacks.

“We’re simply providing information on crime-related issues or suspicious circumstances,” said Denver police Lt. Tony Lopez, commander of Denver’s intelligence unit and one of 181 individual TLOs deployed across Colorado.

“We don’t snoop into private citizens’ lives. We aren’t living in a communist state.”

No, just sliding more and more inexorably into a fascist state.