politics

Chapter Titles in Jim McGreevey’s Book

From “The Late Show With David Letterman,” Top Ten Lists:

10. “The Day I Got Caught Governing Myself”
9. “How to Pretend to Like Girls for 47 Years”
8. “From Schwarzenegger to Pataki: Governors I’d Like to Oil Up”
7. “Another Confession – I Can’t Resist Entenmann’s Pound Cake”
6. “At First I Just Thought I Was Bipartisan”
5. “The New Jersey Budget Crisis – What Would Judy Garland Do?”
4. “A Look at the Governor’s Balls”
3. “Politicians Who Left a Bad Taste in My Mouth”
2. “How to Push Through a Bill – Or a Steve or a Larry…”
1. “Why I Don’t Like Bush”

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How long before I get “disappeared”?

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Today, the Senate approved the president’s new Torture and Unlimited Detention bill, legalizing torture and permanent detention of “enemy combatants” as well as allowing a broad definition of who fits that description, granting the President sweeping new powers. The bill suspends habeas corpus, and allows the President to decide who is an “enemy combatant” and to detain them indefinitely without basic civil rights provided by the constitution.
Give that, and given this scary-ass passage from the end of the declassified NIE Report:

“Anti-U.S. and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests. The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint… We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the Internet to communicate, propagandize, recruit, train and obtain logistical and financial support.”

And given that some on the right have already labeled me a “Liberal extremist” — how long do you think it will be before I disappear to Guantanamo Bay, never to be seen again?
I better contact Amnesty International, and take some cookies to the Homeland Security Guys parked outside my house for weeks.

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Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

So according to our own intelligence agencies, we are not “safer but not safe” as President Bush says. We’re actually much less safe that we were on September 11, 2001. That is, the country in general is less safe. Here in Indiana, we’re still in Indiana. You’re in more danger from Christian terrorists than Islamic ones. Meanwhile:
From the L.A. Times:

Army Warns Rumsfeld It’s Billions Short
The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

And we’re over eight trillion dollars in debt. The estimated population of the United States is 299,573,166 so each citizen’s share of this debt is $28,343.67. Pay up, kids, the Army needs to blow up more people.

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The Hugo Chavez Book Club

When Hugo Chavez spoke to the United Nations on Wednesday, calling George W. Bush “the devil,” he help up a copy of MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to the General Assembly and the American people.

“The people of the United States should read this… instead of watching Superman movies,” Chavez later told reporters. Chavez also said one of his great regrets was not meeting Chomsky before he died. Chomsky is alive and well at 77.

Chomsky’s book has since shot to the top of Amazon’s Bestsellers list from number 20,664.

Prompting the question, what other books does Hugo read?

Hugo Chavez Book Club

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The purser wants you to stop that

New Yorker article on a gay couple who were ordered to stop kissing on an airplane:

Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. “The purser wants you to stop that,” she said.
“I opened my eyes and was, like, ‘Stop what?’ ” Varnier recalled the other day.
“The touching and the kissing,” the stewardess said, before walking away.
Tsikhiseli and Varnier were taken aback. “He would rest his head on my shoulder or the other way around. We’d kiss—not kiss kiss, just mwah,” Tsikhiseli recalled, making a smacking sound.
In the row behind them were Leisner and Jackson. “They were like two lovebirds,” said Leisner, who is a classical guitarist. Frobes-Cross, a Columbia grad student who was sitting across the aisle, had overheard the stewardess’s decree, too. “First thing I catch is ‘You have to stop touching each other,’ ” he said. “And I’m, like, Whoa, that’s really weird.”

After discussing the issue further with the crew, the pilot of the plane told them that they needed to shut up or he would divert the plane. The airline officials also refused to speak to the when the plane landed.
The airline tried to claim that the policy was in place for all couples, but when people called in later to ask, they admitted that straight couples are not prohibited from kissing each other on the plane.
I would so be in trouble for this, because Stephanie and I hold hands and kiss all the time.

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Rosie O’Donnell and Christian Terror Cells in the US

The American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Faith and Action and World Net Daily are all busy bashing Rosie O’Donnell for saying “Radical Christians are no different than murderous radical Muslims.”

God damn it. What she said is way tamer than what I said in the recent past with a big fat list of armed, dangerous Christian Terror Cells in the United States.

Why the heck aren’t all these people crying out against me?!! Huh??! I’m doing far more than my share to piss of the religious right, and I’m just not getting any credit. Harrrumph.

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Chertoff: We Can’t Protect the Ports. Scientists: We Must Protect the Ports

At the same time that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is telling a Senate committee that we can’t afford to protect our ports from terrorist attack, and that we shouldn’t because Osama’s goal is to drive us into bankruptcy (New York Times article)….
Scientists are telling us that our biggest terrorist threat is a stolen nuclear weapon coming through the U.S. Ports system, and that to not recognize that this is a danger is an “ongoing failure of imagination” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists).
Meanwhile, we’re all still taking off our shoes at the airport and throwing away our shampoo, while our goverment spends $100 billion dollars a year in Iraq.
This is the bit where the hero’s supposed to chime in with “I’ll protect the ports!” and we all say “my hero.”
What, that’s not going to happen?

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More Gatsby

“Self-control!” Repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

Before they blamed the “breakdown of the family” on gay people, they used to blame it on interracial marriage. Of course the character quoted–Tom Buchanan–was running around cheating on his wife, but only breaks out this diatribe when his wife is in love with someone else. Fitzgerald called out this hypocrisy in 1925, and we’re still having it stuck down our throats 81 years later.

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Princeton Researchers Break Voting Machine Security

Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy have proven that they can easily, undetectibly hack Diebold voting machines and alter votes and the outcome of elections, and they’re publishing a paper on their findings.

Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

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