Current Events

One-time Republican hero Kevin Phillips dares to speak up against the Walker-Bush oligarchy that rules the American state through oil, intelligence, big money and the power of the Christian right in his new book: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. It should be noted that Phillips is not a Democrat — just a Republican who is unhappy with the current administration.

“Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. To the extent they are Marxists, this vagueness is hardly surprising, since Marx himself never described the world he hoped to create, except with a few glittering but empty generalities.”

Interesting article.

“David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.”
“In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.”

On Monday, Ashcroft tries to claim that none of that matters and that the invasion of Iraq was still justified.
Good try.

WASHINGTON — Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Detroit News, 10/20/2003:
The group’s report uncovers dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.
Bush in State of the Union:
Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.
I guess there’s some speculation that Bush’s team actually wrote the op/ed piece for Hoekstra, which is why the language is the same. Not that either of the statements are actually true, factually speaking.

Turns out that the government is using all kinds of data to build their new CAPPS II passenger screening program, including Census data; a major no-no and violation of privacy issues.
One of my favorite parts of this discussion on the issue is a comment from a commentor further down the page: “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, don’t bring in more hay.” He makes the point that the failure of 9/11 was not that we didn’t have enough data, but that we didn’t have enough people to process the data we had. But they’ve increased the amount of data they collect, without increasing the people to analyze it, and the result is that people are using broad generalizations to track terrorists and gathering up mostly innocent folks in the net as a result.