The Government Versus The American People

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U.S. News reports today on the apparently random seizing of laptops and cameras (and loose memory cards) by U.S. customs agents.As John Amato writes at Crooks & Liars:

A controversial customs practice creates a legal backlash:
Returning from a brief vacation to Germany in February, Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Agents searched Hogan’s luggage and then popped an unexpected question: Was he carrying any digital media cards or drives in his pockets? “Then they told me that they were impounding my laptop,” says Hogan, a freelance investigative reporter whose recent stories have ranged from the origins of the Iraq war to the impact of money in presidential politics.Shaken by the encounter, Hogan says he left the airport and examined his bags, finding that the agents had also removed and inspected the memory card from his digital camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use that machine for work or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information,” he said. When customs offered to return the machine nearly two weeks later, Hogan told them to ship it to his lawyer…read on
I don’t know why, but I thought of this movie as I read the article: “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming. (h/t Mike Finnegan)
This is just one more example of the inexcusable excesses our customs agents perpetrate every day on American citizens. Here's the excerpt from the original article that I think represents most clearly the attitude that has permeated our government:
Now, businesses and other organizations are pushing back, Congress is investigating, and lawsuits have been filed challenging how the program selects travelers for inspection. The ninth circuit ruling was the result of more than 20 lawsuits involving electronics seized from travelers who were nearly all of Muslim, Middle Eastern, or South Asian descent.
Citing the lawsuits, customs officials decline to say how many computers, storage drives, cellphones, and BlackBerrys they have confiscated or what happens to them afterward. Officials declined to testify at a recent Senate hearing, although they wrote in a prepared statement that officers "have the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public." (emphasis mine)
If the Customs folks were a corporation or a private individual, this position would at least make sense.

Abraham Lincoln, revered by Democrats and Republicans alike, used these words to close his famous Gettysburg Address: "...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"

So if the government's (theoretically) ours, what's our interest in their refusing to answer a question about how frequently seizure occurs and the disposition of the seized items, whether there are pending lawsuits or not.

If nothing else, the incident clearly demonstrates how far we have come, from a government of the people, by the people, for the people, to the Cheny-Bush America where we now have the government versus the people.

O'Reilly In One Minute

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George Carlin, 1937 - 2008 RIP

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One of America's most brilliant and articulate social commentators, George Carlin, is dead at the tender age of 71. I'll miss him a lot.

Here's one of my favorite Carlin clips in which he riffs on America's war on Iraq:


(h/t Publius)

How I Learned Political Cynicism

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In the summer of 1963, my best friend Chris and I were attending summer school at Springfield HS in Illinois to pick up some extra credit for graduation the following spring. (I took typing, one of the few things I learned in high school that actually turned out to be useful for the rest of my life.)

Chris's dad "knew somebody" in the state legislature and arranged for us to be "honorary pages" in the House of Representatives for a week, and for that week, after class we'd trot down to the nearby State House, clip on our badges, and earn a few bucks sitting on the pages' bench and running errands for various Democratic representatives.

The Dem's bench was in the front of the Illinois House chamber, right next to the desk of a rep from Chicago named Mike _______. I'm not being coy here, I simply have no idea what his last name was. I'm not sure I knew even then. Mike was the pages' buddy, tipped generously, and used us for everything from getting him a cocktail to picking up his laundry. But the thing that we all liked most about him was that he spent a fair amount of time away from his desk, and if he was going to be away for a vote, one of us lucky pages would get to sit in his chair and vote for him!

At that time, the Illinois House used an electro-mechanical voting system manufactured by the American Totalizator Company. Voting required flipping the electrical switch that sat on each member's desk to the right for "yea" or the left for "nay". Representatives who actually cared about a bill but were going to be away for the vote could vote by pressing the switch in the desired direction and sticking a toothpick in it to hold it there until the machine was turned on to record the vote. Giant "tote boards" with each rep's name and a red and green light were on the wall at the front of the house, Dems on one side and Republicans on the other.

Before Mike would leave the floor, his instructions to the lucky page always went something like this: "Watch the Democratic tote board, and when nearly everybody has voted, vote me with the majority. If the vote is pretty evenly divided, look at the Republican tote board and vote me with the minority. If their vote is evenly divided, don't do anything."

Ah, sweet! Democracy in action! Whenever I catch myself foolishly wondering how so many horribly stupid laws get passed, I remember Mike and the 1963 Illinois State Legislature, and my mind switches back into reality mode.

FISA Rage

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I'm so angry with Barack Obama right now that if the alternatives weren't so horrible, I wouldn't vote for the sob. Obama is the Man in the Democratic party at the moment, and he could have stopped Steny Hoyer's FISA capitulation bill dead in its tracks if he had an ounce of political courage. Watch this:


The House passed this abomination this afternoon.

The New U.S. Border Patrol

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My wonderful friend, Harry Hilton, sent me this photo. Finally, a solution to our nation's immigration problem!

I'm Voting Republican

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It's all beginning to make sense now.


Learn more about the film here.

Senate Hearings Interrupted | American News Project

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On two consecutive days, hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee were suspended when Republicans invoked the rarely used "two hour rule" that states no hearing can run more than two hours.

ANP cameras were covering both hearings as part of ongoing stories and were able to capture the latest moves in the political chess match both parties are currently waging on Capitol Hill.

The $300 Billion Betrayal

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The folks at American News Project have put together this report on waste in Pentagon procurement programs under the Bush administration:

Yes, that's right, they said that cost overruns under Bush are four times what they were under Clinton.

John Cusack Gives the Bush-McCain Challenge - 30 sec version

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Powerful TV spot from Cusack and Move On.

Bill Moyers: 'Journalism in Profound Crisis' (Video) | MediaCulture | AlterNet

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Bill Moyers addressed the National Conference for Media Reform today. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth a watch.

Chris Hedges: Iraq War Now About Murder

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As noted in the comments section of the post I'm about to refer you to, "[Chris] Hedges is the preeminent voice of the anti-war movement. His writings on the wars of our time will be the record that historians teach from generations from now. His speech at Rockford College in 2003 was one of the few acts of heroism and strength and truth spoken to power as the world went insane."

What Hedges has to say is, as another comment pointed out, nothing that human beings haven't known for thousands of years. But Hedges has a gift for outrage that we all need a good shot of now and then. If the rest of the book is like the excerpt, Hedges and Al-Arian have delivered.

Hedges piece in Salon originally appeared on TomDispatch.com and has been adapted from the newly released
book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, which Chris Hedges coauthored with Laila Al-Arian. Here's a taste:

June 5, 2008 | Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity-producing situations." Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.

Read more . . . .

Or better yet, read the book. I'm planning on it, myself.

Froomkin On Significance Of McClellan's Revelations

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WaPo's Dan Froomkin points out that despite the flawed nature of the messenger, Scott McClellan's revelations are a vindication of critics of the Bush administration:

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But the significance of McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now. Among them:

* That Bush and his top aides manipulated the country into embarking upon an unnecessary war on false pretenses;

* That Bush is an incurious man, happily protected from dissenting views inside the White House's bubble of self-delusion;

* That Karl Rove's huge influence on the Bush White House erased any distinction between policy and politics, so governing became about achieving partisan goals, not the common good;

* That Vice President Cheney manipulates the levers of power;

* That all those people who denied White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity were either lying or had been lied to;

* That the mainstream media were complicit enablers of the Bush White House and that its members didn't understand how badly they were being played.

By coming back again and again to the CIA leak story, McClellan also validates a key theme of the Bush critique: That the Plame case was a microcosm of much that was wrong with the way the Bush White House did business.

Read the whole post here.