November 09, 2003
Weekend Reading
Al Gore's remarks to MoveOn. A sample:
...Here’s another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you – and they don’t even have to show probable cause that you’ve done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they’re doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.
Everybody fine with that? ...
Over at dKos, Meteor Blades talks about the menace of bunker buster nukes, and Chris Bowers has an idea that might be just crazy enough to win the election. Or not. But we'd better not keep trying the same-old, same-old.
Ruminate This talks about Nader's expected run, and also pointed to a Moscow Times article that talks about what a real coup d'etat looks like.
Mark Morford pulls a Billmon, listing some of the more egregious Bush lies on foreign policy. And it's good, even if you're supersaturated on the topic.
Meanwhile, the real Billmon covers economic revisionism and Bush's magical correction of the Mideast democracy deficit.
Mary Beth reviews the job numbers and determines that while jobs have been expanding slightly, wages are stagnant or falling because the vanishing jobs paid better than the newly appearing service sector jobs. But it also occurs to me that it would be pretty astonishing for the availibility of service sector jobs to fail to rise so close to the Christmas season.
Nathan Newman looks at the ramifications of Dean's pending dual union endorsement.
Body and Soul: While our government loathes and despises Syria, they don't seem to have a problem sending detainees there to be tortured, even when the detainees are vacationing Canadians. Arnold is looking for the real groper, and thinks that California's AG is his own personal lawyer.
Calpundit on the politicization of intelligence, and the willingness of Republicans to leak as it suits them, fresh from complaining about leaks that don't suit them.
Avedon at the Sideshow brings up an article on why the cut is really a hike, and many other good tidbits that can be found by just a modicum of scrolling.
How To Save The World posts a clip from an animal rights activist wondering if we aren't all 'participating in a crime of stupefying proportions. I'm a cheerful carnivore, though I buy humanely farmed meat, but there's something deeper in the piece than the issue of meat vs. no meat. I could explain further, or I could leave you with Pollard's reaction to it:
...Nothing I have ever read has so perfectly captured the essence of how I have come to feel, more and more, as I enter the latter years of my own life: a terrible sense of dread, helplessness, outrage, despair, realization that despite all appearances and cultural propaganda everything in our world is not all right, in fact everything is horribly wrong, ugly, and totally out of control...
Indian Country covers the process that led to the attachment of a midnight rider to an Interior appropriations bill that suspends for a year the court-mandated reckoning for that department's Indian accounts. The main appropriations bill contained significant money for firefighting, and was going to be passed no matter what. How did things get so sodding broken?
From the Guardian: In keeping with being a uniter, Bush's upcoming visit to London may mobilize as many as 100,000 protestors united against him. The best the Bush entourage can hope for is that the streets through which he passes will have been utterly cleared of actual British citizens not acting in any official capacity. Also, they run a Sidney Blumenthal op-ed on the no-southern-strategy-having Democrats.
Posted by natasha at November 9, 2003 02:45 PM | TrackBackIt may well be the case that a better way of going about playing up the very real failures of the Bush administration, better, that is, than pointing out administration "lies" and duplicity, would be to begin taking the admin at its word. The fact that the supposed WMD have yet to be found does not necessarily indicate that there are no WMD in Iraq. The much more alarming fact is that Saddam and his closest cohorts may still be in possession of these weapons, contained in vials similar to those brought before the security council by Powell last February. This would demonstrate that the administration has yet to prove that it achieved its primary goal in Iraq: diasarming Saddam. With which many a right winger could agree.
Posted by: sanson on November 10, 2003 07:33 PMAs far as the seasonal service jobs go this holiday, I'm now more than a little concerned. I just picked up seasonal work a few weeks back from the largest mail-order retailer, and, you didn't hear it from me (one reason you don't see my real addy, but N. and M., I suspect you know it's me ;-D), but that retailer is 25% below projections for the month, despite having a record-breaking fall. We're actually being sent home during peak season for lack of work. It truly frightens me.
Posted by: MB on November 11, 2003 08:02 AMthe federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you – and they don’t even have to show probable cause that you’ve done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they’re doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.
Based on reading the content of my incoming email, there's gonna be some FBI agents who'll be easy to spot due to the enormously enhanced and perpetually hard penises that'll result from the spam they'll be subject to.