Your Papers Please...

Check out this article in our local rag the Daily Camera (Leysia calls it “the Boulder Newsletter”) about the government's program called the Clear Card:

Airline Passengers eye fast lane

So, here's the government strategy:

1. Take advantage of 9/11 to impose a lot of useless security measures that don't make us safer but provide the illusion of "security": this is called "security theatre".

2. Wait for these security measures to become so onerous and stupid (see here for an article on how the TSA detained a 5 year old boy recently) that people will do anything, including giving up their civil liberties, to avoid the long lines caused by these procedures.

3. Offer a "fast track" approach to getting through security at the airport, all the citizen has to do is "register" their information with the government.

With the above program and the impending disaster of the Real-Id program, we will soon have reached the point in the USA that was achieved back in Nazi germany, when the SS would ask everyone they met for “your papers please”…

The country I grew up respecting and admiring, the USA, is slowly slipping away. Its a tragedy and makes me wonder how I'm going to protect my children as they grow older and our society grows more and more totalitarian.

Adorable moppet sings Beatles songs

Adorable moppet sings Beatles songs:

Here is a really cool video of a three year old singing Hey Jude. If the rest of us could just hang on to this type of innocence, the world would be a better place.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

Favorite Picture of L.

Standing at the end of a rainbow in 1996 on a beach on Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands.

DHS: A Complete Waste

Here's a link to a sad story that demonstrates just what a complete waste of time, money, and effort the Department of Homeland Security is:

A 14-day old baby from Samoa was being flown to Hawaii for emergency heart surgery. The DHS immediately whipped into action and classified the baby as a terrorist threat. How do we know this? Because they detained the baby, his mother, and a nurse in a custom's room and the baby died while trapped in that room.

Wouldn't it have been nice to say, I don't know, send the baby to the hospital for his surgery?

The delegate to the U.S. congress from Samoa is calling for an investigation and the baby's family is suing the federal government. More power to them. Maybe we can get lucky and they can sue the DHS out of existence.

My condolences to the baby's family.

Ken

Bush lies (again)

This story on CNN is funny... the headline says:

Bush: Inaction on FISA endangers U.S.

Bush wants you to think that somehow the FISA bill is going away, due to the inaction of Congress.

Actually, its not going away, instead a temporary revision of the 1978 law is set to expire. Not the bill itself.

What Bush wants is a new revision passed that includes (and don't say this too loudly or people might get upset) immunity from lawsuits for the telecom companies that participated in Bush's illegal spying on U.S. citizens. You see, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed against the companies that participated in this program. I think that's justified, since when asked to engage in this illegal behavior, those companies should have said, "Sorry, that's not constitutional and besides don't we have this law called FISA that provides everything you need to spy on suspected terrorists?" but instead said "Uh, okay."

Alas, our Senate caved to administration pressure and passed a FISA revision that includes telecom immunity. I think perhaps those senators that voted for that law should step down, as they are not really doing their jobs, just following the administration's orders. They need to be replaced with people who understand the meaning of the phrase "checks and balances".

If you're a U.S. citizen, you have to hope that the House will continue to reject any attempt to include telecom immunity in new FISA-related legislation. If they cave as well, then we can pretty much shut the country down as the transformation of the United States from a Republic into a Fascist state (one that elevates the rights of companies over the rights of people) will be complete.

Keep your fingers crossed,

Ken

Out of touch with Reality

Reuters reported today that Senator John McCain thinks that Senators Clinton and Obama are weak on national security and their Iraq stance would hand al Qaeda a victory.

This assertion is laughable as the Iraq war and this disastrous War on Terror that was started by the Bush Administration in response to the attacks of September 11 already ARE victories for al Qaeda!

Let's review. Before the Iraq war, Iraq was a secular state run by the evil Saddam Hussein. Note the use of the word "secular", Islam was allowed but religion had nothing to do with the government of Saddam Hussein. See for instance the third paragraph of the "Modernisation" section of Saddam's Wikipedia page.

As a result, al Qaeda HATED Saddam's regime and had called for Islamic forces to rise up and overthrow them. However, Saddam's regime was so brutal and kept such tight control of the country, that al Qaeda had made zero progress towards that goal.

We then invaded, overthrew Saddam's government, disbanded his Ba'athist army, and then enacted our "plan" of protecting Iraq's oil fields for Halliburton while watching the rest of the country slide into chaos. al Qaeda then used that chaos to ENTER Iraq in the first place, handing them a major victory. Now they had an excellent arena for recruiting and training new members at our great expense (both in terms of the nigh trillion dollars our county has wasted on this war, not to mention the greater expense of the loss of life, limb, and sanity of our brave troops).

And after all this, with the actions of the Bush administration demonstrably making our country less secure, placing our country at greater risk, shamelessly profiteering on the War, and relentlessly assaulting our civil liberties, the de facto Republican nominee has the audacity to say that the Democrats will hand al Qaeda a victory just demonstrates how out of touch with reality Republicans are.

Its frightening... and makes me all the more satisfied with my decision to support Obama to be the nominee for the Democratic party. Its time we run these war profiteering scoundrels out of office and do what we can to clean up the mess the Republicans have made of this county over the last eight years.

We were in such a good place eight years ago... peace, prosperity, strong civil liberties, and more.

Lets hope we can get back.

Ken