Bush is fed up with hearing how his actions and policies violate our privacy rights. True to Bush's Orwellian worldview, his answer is to create a privacy board to ostensibly protect our rights. In reality, it is Mr. Decider who controls the privacy board so that his interpretation of laws will determine how and if our rights are actually protected by more than shallow words. It is the implementation of these interpretations which will chip away through the backdoor or repeal/amend our privacy rights under federal law. The chipping has already started.

(For those wondering, lawyering lesson #1 is "Get your fee money up front.")

The headlines on the front pages of all the NYC area papers today are sharing space between panning The Unit's speech last night, and a couple scandals - it's all sex, drugs, and full-auto rock'n'roll in Iraq.

The Daily News (great headline)is working an exclusive on baseball slugger Barry Bonds, alleging he failed a drug test last year.  Not for steroids, but for amphetamines.  We'll leave that to the News, though, because the other papers are all covering the story of a prominent criminal defense lawyer busted for his involvement with a high-end escort service.  And, since sex sells, I'm sure the papers will beat on this case to avoid having to look at the dog's breakfast that The Unit's "Iran and Syria = Cambodian and Laotian Sanctuaries" speech is.  

FWIW, while the Unit was trash-talking Iran and Syria, his subordinate soldiers were finishing raiding an Iranian consulate in Iraq. Per the BBC, this raid actually took place about 7 PM ET, or about 2 hours before Bushie's speech.

And, yes, technically, raiding another country's consulate is an invasion.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario.  The United States is engaged in a naval war with Islandia in the Gulf of Halliburton.  U.S. efforts to secure the Gulf and its precious oil reserves have been hampered by an unrelenting tempest that began not long after the onset of hostilities.  (Although experts had previously warned of the region's volatile climate, the White House blamed faulty meteorological intelligence.)  With each passing year, the tempest has seemed to intensify, and U.S. forces--caught betwixt the raging seas and the fierce winds--have suffered growing casualties.  At home, discontent for the war is also growing, with both public and expert opinion significantly favoring a withdrawal of troops.  Despite such circumstances, the President concludes that the best course of action is to send more troops into the tempest!

Perhaps the President has put aside the works of Camus in favor of Cervantes.  However, the irony has seemingly escaped him:

We all remember the kabuki hearings Specter's Judiciary Committee held, when it came out that the Administration had decided to wiretap Americans, regardless of what the FISA and Constitution say.

It's been a while since we processed user MT comment claims so I figured we were due. We were able to claim 9,235 MT comments on behalf of 114 users, listed below. 57% of MT comments from the old sitet have now been claimed by Scoop users.

I'll keep this diary short.   I've been pointed to a fascinating law review article (published 2002), dealing with the ways Congress can extract information from a reluctant executive branch.  Like most law review articles, it's long and has lots and lots of footnotes.  But, as a guide to the methodologies and devices available to Congress to forcibly extract information from a reluctant executive, I haven't seen a better primer.  

I was never one to buy into the whole "me generation" myth of a vast majority of hundreds of millions of people living their lives on the basis of an 'I got mine - screw everyone else' mentality - but it seems that that has been truly the case for too many years among the real leaders of America and the western world - the financial policy makers and corporations and the military industrial complex - and that they have been doing exactly that for so many years now that the problems they have created for the entire population and for the world may now, finally, be insurmountable.

I can see no way out of the situation they have placed all of us in.

I do know that sailing merrily along with my head buried in the sand refusing to look at or acknowledge an onrushing disaster short of and contributing to catastrophic climate collapse that would dwarf anything the world has ever seen would be the most delusional in denial way I can think of to live my life.

I do not have the skills, education, experience, ideas, or the brains to figure out even the least of ways to approach much less deal with the problem, but I have never been one to throw my hands up, roll over and give up, and live in a fantasy that everything will somehow be alright and the problem will just evaporate if I pretend it is not there.

One of the legacies of six years of the George W. Bush Administration is that America has gone "From $20 trillion in fiscal exposures in 2000 to over $50 trillion in only six years? What shall we do for an encore... shoot for $100 trillion?"

Typing this I feel like Alice talking with the Cheshire Cat:

"But I don't want to go among mad people" Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that" said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad.  You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be" said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Since at this point I don't know what else to say about the subject and the problem I refer to - I wonder If we have finally truly arrived at a 'Get It While You Can' stage of western civilization.

I really hope there are people out there smart enough, skilled enough, and dedicated enough to do something about this.

The rest of this diary is a cross posting of an article from December 19, 2006 by Dr. Chris Martenson and posted on AxixOfLogic December 26.

Martenson is an economist, holds an MBA from Cornell and PhD from Duke, and is the author of the website and blog titled "The End Of Money".

Though the towers of the World Trade Center cast a shadow no more, their destruction by Muslim extremists throws an enduring shadow upon those of similar ethnicity and/or faith. To be a Muslim or Middle Easterner visiting or residing in the United States is to be automatically suspect. That is decidedly unreasonable. Hysteria and prejudice offer scant warmth against the chill of violence and extemism. The answer to intolerance is not more intolerance. Safety is compromised not enhanced by actions which marginalize or antagonize those deemed suspect. When will those in positions of authority--whether they be representatives of Congress such as Virgil Goode or officials in the Department of Homeland Security--recognize the error (and the terror) of their ways?

From the St. Petersburg Times:

I'm not a computer geek by any means, but I can read, and I have some idea both of how computers, software and networks operate, and some understanding of the legalities surrounding copying computer stuff.  The system knowledge is, like for so many lawyers, courtesy of firm experience, where it's always one of the lawyers who has to fix the copier and the computers, so as to avoid service call expense and lost time....

But, recently, Microsoft introduced a new operating system, called "Vista".  The real thrust of this O/S seems to be preventing people from copying copyrighted content, not making computers easier and simpler to use.  The big question is:  is this program a piece of garbage (or not)?  The next big question is:  is this MS' attempt to take over and control your computer?

Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey once said that "the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped." Some 30 years ago or so, as a young teen, I met Mr. Humphrey in Miami, Florida. He was exiting an airplane, along with my Uncle Joe--who at the time was in the employ of the U.S. Agency for International Development and had previously worked many years with the Red Cross. The two had met some time ago and renewed their acquaintance on the plane. After disembarking, while still in the airport, my uncle was kind enough to make introductions, and I shook then Senator Humphrey's hand. It was my first encounter with a public figure (not including the time I inadvertently bumped into the mayor while dashing to class in elementary school), and I recall feeling rather thrilled.

Both Humphrey and my uncle were men of considerable compassion and drive, dedicating their professional lives to making the world a better place than they found it. Hubert Humphrey died in 1978. My uncle, Joseph Salzburg, died just a few weeks ago. In the time since I attended his funeral (at Quantico, Virginia), I have been more contemplative than usual, reflecting on both this loss and the miserable state of affairs in this country (election results notwithstanding). I suspect that Mr. Humphrey and Uncle Joe would view the current social and political landscape with more than a little disapproval and despair--and, indeed, might argue that government is failing the "moral test" (or, in the terminology of No Child Left Behind, not achieving adequate yearly progress). As if further evidence of such were needed, consider this article from today's Washington Post:

Not surprisingly, Hillary's pollster Mark Penn thinks so. But he does have numbers to buttress his argument:

Penn cited the ABC News/Washington Post poll of adults this month, which found 56% with favorable opinions of Clinton and 40% with unfavorable opinions. In the poll, she is the only Democratic contender viewed favorably by more than half the country.

. . . "She gets very, very strong support from the younger generation, and particularly younger women," he said. In recent months, Penn said, he sees "a very significant surge of support" for Clinton among Democrats.

This trend is particularly dramatic in a CNN poll taken this month that showed Clinton gaining 9 percentage points since late October, to 37% in a Democratic primary, while Obama actually lost 2 points to fall to 15%. Other polls show her up by a similar margin but haven't measured his support over time. "If you notice in these polls she has a very strong lead, Democratic and otherwise, among the African-American community," he said. Obama is black and is widely expected to cut deeply into the Clintons' traditional support among African-Americans. . . .

And the recent Newsweek poll showing Hillary up 7 over MCCain would also support his view. Personally, I don't buy these polls so far out and do not think Hillary is  very electable. But that is the least of it. more so than Obama, I find Hillary's political rhetoric and style an abandonment of the Politics of Contrast (see my posts on the subject for more detail)  that I think won Dems the 2006 election and the type of politics that  Dems must adopt in the near future in all national elections. To wit, Hillary is BENEFITTING from an improved Dem brand and weakened GOP brand but her style was not part of that success. To adopt it, or Obama's, is to reject success.

I do not understand why Dems would do that. But Dems have proven to be political fools in the past so it certainly is possible they will again be so in the future.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, of the District of the District of Coumbia, today rendered his opinion in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, addressing the United States' motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdication pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Read the opinion and weep.