I don’t know whether you caught it here or elsewhere last week, but we’ve lowered the jackpot someone gets who snitches and leads to the death (wanna bet?) or capture (right, uh huh) of Osama bin Laden. But here in so called “liberal loony” Vermont, we’re fighting a single opposing voice: whether to permit the broadcast of al Jazeera on a cable network here (and al Jazeera does NOT always take the side of Islam, if you have any regular reading experience there) like it’s more heinous than September 11th and what we did to Iraq rolled together.

Now, the Burlington area is considered to be the most liberal part of the state; it’s got a tiny Seattle kind of feel to it, and that it’s a multiple college town doesn’t necessarily make it more conservative.

Really? We can’t listen to the other side occasionally? Sometimes, only by looking at both sides of the supposed truth can you discern the spin, the message, the actual agendae at work.

People who can’t catch a rather distinctive man of 6′4 and extraordinary means named Osama bin Laden KEEP ACTING like it’s Mom and Pop America that needs to be locked up. Ay carumba! Reported at Common Dreams and filed under the Rape and Plunder of Civil Liberties:

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

The more last night’s breaking news of a minimum of three different times there were unauthorized accesses made to Democratic 2008 presidential hopeful Barack Obama federal-on-file passport records, the more the Republicans in charge of such agencies came out BRAGGING that it wasn’t just Obama that was violated but that of ALL the candidates on file with the State Department/Passport Service, ever-more-to-the-ridiculous right John McCain included.

Say what? This is supposed to make us feel better?

Seriously, “Catch 22” needs to be rewritten to update it based on the last eight years of the most egregious actions and doublespeak of all time, where torture is patriotic and paying a prostitute is a far worse crime than lying the world into a war on Iraq.

And I won’t even discuss how State Dept Secretary Condi Rice - for whom a beginner file clerk has more experience for the job than Condi - argued once more that she couldn’t do her job because it’s so tough and she cannot be held accountable, just as she’s not been held responsible for anything else she’s ever done TO this country under her multiple Bush tenures. And all she does is get promoted, praised, and oil tankers named for her (for her GREAT service to American-based energy companies during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, don’t-cha-know?).

Well… indicted by some Vermont communities, anyway! It’s a start!

Voters in two southern Vermont towns passed articles Tuesday calling for the indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for violating the Constitution.

More symbolic than substantive, the items sought to have police arrest Bush and Cheney if they ever visit Brattleboro or nearby Marlboro or to extradite them for prosecution elsewhere _ if they’re not impeached first.

Today, King George, in all his nervy, twitchy splendor, delivered a speech about the Protect Mah Buds America Act. And who wouldn’t want to Protect America? Well, terr’r’sts, of course.

The Senate bill will provide fair and just liability protection for companies that assisted in the efforts to protect America after the attacks of September the 11th. Without this protection, without this liability shield, we may not be able to secure the private sector’s cooperation with our intelligence efforts. And that, of course, would put the American people at risk.

Oh, Georgie, I so hoped you would make it through the whole event without referencing the one thing that is really hanging up the House. That would’ve been clutch.

Namely: a whiles back the Bush Administration went to AT&T and other telecommunications companies, sidled up to ‘em, and in quiet, spastic whispers spat out “Heh heh, hey. Hows about you give us all your phone records. Wha? Of course it’s legal. I’m Big G - that’s what they call me, heh heh - and I don’t do nothin’ illegal, so if I’m doin’ it, it’s not illegal. We’re savin’ ‘Merica from terr’r’sts. Caprice?”

So the telecoms handed over their records, the media found out and Holy Crap! - about five thousand people really gave a shit for about fifteen minutes, then it dropped to a few dozen lefty blogs.

…ya know ya want it… (more…)

[See The Progressive's Matt Rothschild, author of an article on InfraGard, an FBI "liason with business", discuss this malicious little program on Democracy Now yesterday (February 11th). You can also see the group's site - as in hiding in plain Web sight - here.]

There have been many times since the fraudulent awarding of the presidency to George W. Bush in December 2000 that I have thought and declared that absolutely nothing these people do can any longer surprise me. In reality - and most unfortunately - the Bushies keep exceeding their own depths of depravity, anti-democracy, draconian edicts, dismal offerings, and deadly mistakes so yes, I keep getting surprised (and never in a good way).

Well, the Bushies have done it again with a rotten little group called InfraGard, and it’s one of the top 20 worst I’ve heard: we know from many studies and experts that despite all the billions Bush-friended corporations have gotten to “protect the homeland”, we’re not just not any safer, we’re actually at greater risk than ever before. A report issued in the last few days says we’re in terrible shape to defend against an actual attack on U.S. soil, largely because of the “cakewalk” Iraq war and the nearly 1,800 days since Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq and the 6 1/2 years since Dubya announced Osama bin Laden “can run but he can’t hide” and that we’ll get him “soon”, “dead or alive.”

Yet, with all these terrific failures comes a report in The Progressive that the Bushies, ever the good friend to the worst corporate offenders - many of the same ones the Bushies offer HUGE tax breaks to in a bizarre new form of corporate welfare at the same time these creeps take jobs elsewhere - launched a program called InfraGard that:

• reports potential threats of an attack to corporations when mere mortals are not allowed to know (you may pay a hell of a much bigger percentage of your income on taxes than Exxon or Halliburton, but you just don’t rate knowing if you’re about to be bombed)
• encourages corporate leaders to “report” “problematic” employees (perhaps union organizers, those who might talk against the Bush Administration over the water cooler?) and others (say, their biggest competitor)
• potentially “rewards” these corps with extra corporate welfare
• makes US as taxpayers foot the bill to supply FBI agents and homeland (in)security folks to “interface” with the companies in the organization

(more…)

Helen Thomas seems to think that the latest Bush fruit does not fall too far from the Tree of Ignorance from which all Bush-Cheney seedlings grow. God help us with all these attorneys general in Bushdom.

At this rate, by the end of next week, we’ll learn that waterboarding is not only NOT torture, but a fun game the whole family can play. Just like snowboarding, but with more people - who don’t like you - involved AND you risk doing more than breaking a limb.

And this is supposed to protect us? Biometrics? The same thing already “helping” us detect women’s breast sizes at airport security?

No. It sounds like a much better plan for watching Americans just going about their usual business, and in a way we’ll regret mightily.

IF these organizations cannot protect us - and again and again, and even owing and acknowledging that many brave men and women have TRIED - than WHY should we let them watch US rather than the so-called “evil doers”?

Cookie Jill over at Skippy The Bush Kangaroo’s little corner of Blogtopia reminds us of this dead-on John Edwards quote:

“It’s wrong for your government to spy on you.“

Amen, three cheers, and hallelujah!

Newsweek has published an article titled “Fishing for a Way to Change the World” which is a lengthy excerpt from author Jacob Weisburg’s book “The Bush Tragedy”

I am simply amazed at the utter lack of sense or reasoning which the following revelation demonstrates as relates to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney and Libby believed that Iraq’s potential to produce a smallpox weapon necessitated universal vaccination of the general population, something that hadn’t happened in the United States since 1972. On the other side of the argument was Donald Henderson, the heroic epidemiologist who led the WHO smallpox eradication program and later became Bush 41’s science adviser. After the anthrax attacks, HHS brought Henderson in as a consultant to help develop emergency plans.

When I visited him at his office at the Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore, Henderson recounted a surprise, unpublicized visit he paid to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with Cheney and Libby on July 18, 2002. Henderson flew down with them on Air Force Two and spent most of the trip explaining to the vice president and his chief of staff why he and other epidemiologists thought a massive vaccination program would be a terrible idea. Even medical professionals were horrified when they saw the range of normal reactions to a vaccination: grotesque scabs, lesions, and pustules. Henderson showed me a pamphlet that HHS distributed to hospitals to document the abnormal reactions: blackened limbs, uncontrolled swelling, and a reaction called progressive vaccinia, in which sores cover the body from head to toe. (more…)

My apologies that I just stumbled (literally) onto this sucker today, since it’s been kicking around Capitol Hill since last summer and the House (blind, repressive motherbleeping Constitutional assassins that they are) already passed it BUT… it’s not through the Senate yet and we need this mofo deader than Ken Lay, Fred Thompson’s campaign, Bush’s brainstem, and Dick Cheney’s humanity ALL ROLLED together.

The bill is S.1959 with the designed-to-scare-your-pants-into-a-brown-mess name of The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (see here and here) which is likely to do NOTHING but kill my right and your right to speak out against an unjust, corporation-controlled government (like the one we have).

Wait… let me pile about a thousand soapboxes atop one another before I say… (whew…. wiping righteous sweat from my brow)

LEARN ABOUT THIS BILL. CALL YOUR SENATOR. KILL THIS BILL!

Well, we know Congressional Oversight failed with watching the White House; apparently, we’re the ones who need to oversee Congress! The Media, after all, is too busy watching Britney’s crotch to detect a lack of underwear.

Our forefathers - and generations of leading minds since the nation known today as The United States was founded - held certain truths to stand above the will of capricious government. One was that we would never be required to proclaim our allegiance to the throne (in whatever form it takes, including the Bush White House) because they remembered how it would be abused, and one of the others was that Americans should not be required to prove they are, uh, you know, Americans.

Yet the Bush White House, under Major Demon Homeland InSecurity Secretary Michael Chertoff, has announced that really, they’d like you to pledge allegiance to THEM and, while you’re at it, PROVE you’re an American by signing up for one of the most invasive and yes, ridiculous, national ID systems we can imagine. And - oh yeah - according to Chertoff, if you don’t want to have a national ID, you’re either Osama bin Laden (or other terrorist), an illegal alien who wants to steal the job of toilet bowl brushing many other Americans choose not to perform, OR you’re a criminal.

I guess the idea that a patriot, much less than a regular citizen, might balk at being FORCED to prove he or she was born here, isn’t a terrorist (and according to the Bush White House, terrorism has repeatedly been expanded to mean ANYONE who does not agree 312% with some fascist program of the Bushies), and isn’t a serial killer (like Bush, in many respects, isn’t one of the world’s WORST of those and now wants to expand his killing fields into Iran).

I’ll fight this with everything I have. I hope you will, too. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

Soon after I posted my piece about the rather ridiculous situation where the Justice Department will investigate its own CIA in the destruction of two videotapes depicting the feds’ torture techniques used on anyone they feel like hurting in the so-called “War on Terror”, Glenn Greenwald ably proved by point with this post on his Salon blog about how the 9-11 Commission’s investigation was blocked by the feds (with Bush and Cheney at the top of the mammoth dung pile).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has pulled back his revised FISA bill that would grant retroactive immunity to those communications giants like Verizon and AT&T who fell all over themselves helping the Bush Administration wipe its ass on the U.S. Constitution by illegally wiretapping the phone calls of American citizens never charged or suspected of a crime.

But even if the bill languishes and dies, it will be hard for me to forgive Reid for allowing it to make it to the Senate floor at all.

We don’t need more Bushies, Mr. Reid. Nor do the American people appear to WANT more.

Today, Monday, Harry Reid is expected to introduce a measure on the FISA/domestic wiretapping measure that gives retroactive immunity to all those companies (like AT&T and Verizon) who helped the government do the unconstitutional: conduct warrantless, cause-less spying on the phone calls and other forms of communications of innocent American citizens. Who needs the U.S. Constitution, after all?

DISGUSTING.

With a Democrat like Reid, who needs the worst of the Republicans?

Americans - and not all of them Dems - are looking for people on Capitol Hill who will oppose the illegal acts of the treasonous Bushies. Reid and company need to supply the backbone, rather than just doing what makes Bush and major corporations happy.

As Julie at DailyKos (”Kiss Your 4th Amendment Goodbye“) points out from an article posted yesterday at Green Mountain Daily, the Vermont state police wants prescription drug records on citizens (not those suspected of committing crimes but information about anyone who takes drugs the police find “interesting” - full-scale data-mining of which any fascist police state would be damned proud).

Excuse me, is there a constitutional lawyer reading here who might be willing to help me start a class action suit? I won’t stand for this, so I certainly won’t sit back.

This isn’t some “silly trip down the rabbit hole” - this is yet another bad butcher job on the U.S. Constitution, the Vermont government, and individual privacy. If they are allowed to do it here in Vermont, they WILL do it where you live, too. And imagine the myriad ways they can abuse it and “lose” it to data insecurity.

With so much bad news - from the economy to the declaration that we’re having our deadliest years E-V-E-R in both Iraq and Afghanistan to a host of other awfuls, the Bushies have made a few really TELLING declarations in the past week that are worthy of note.

First, there was Bush’s insistence that anything Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf wanted to do to for his country was A-OK with Bush. But that’s not quite the NEWS. Bush, when asked if it was appropriate for Musharraf to claim the presidency when he came to power through a military coupe with Musharraf heading the military at the time, Bush comes out with:

Can a leader run both the military AND be president of his country at the same time? Of course not!

Uh…. Houston to the president: YOU ostensibly run the military as commander in cheat.. uh chief WHILE you are also supposedly president.

Then there’s White House spokesvermin Dana Perino, Tony Snow(job)’s even sorrier replacement who, when asked if it was appropriate for any country’s leadership to choose arbitrarily to end his/her nation’s democracy and civil liberties in the name of protecting its citizens from terrorism, said NO!

But all the Bushies have done, since even before Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, is spy upon us as its citizens without ANY proof any of us is jeopardizing national security, to wiretap and remove constitutionally protected liberties, all in the name of “homeland security.” In fact, in the same week Perino uttered this startling declaration (and removing our liberties have NOT made us any safer, I must add), the Bushies had several new initiatives underway to snoop upon us without due cause.

Stop the insanity, people!

To have Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein argue that they had to approve Bush’s latest pick of U.S. Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, because - if these two Dems did not - Bush would do a “recess appointment” of an even less worthy candidate makes me ill.

Their reasoning amounts to: “Let’s take the unacceptable choice now, forced upon us by Bush, so Bush can’t appoint an unacceptable choice later he forces upon us.” Either way, Feinstein and Schumer handed Bush another (sigh) win.

Bush declared of Osama just days after the attacks on the U.S. on September 11th, 2001: “He can run, but he can’t hide.”

Well, I count six years PLUS our infamous bogeyman has been hiding and, whenever the president doesn’t trot him out to scare the masses for his own political gain, Bush and Cheney declare him “irrelevant”. Hmm.

What makes the situation in Pakistan right now - and the Bushies reaction to discuss stopping their funds to our “partner in terror fighting” (who conveniently declares martial law when he might get unseated and then fires or arrests anyone he opposes), is that Osama - to the best of what the Bushies have told us (never very true) - is hiding in the remote passes between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If he’s not minimalized (as the Bushies keep telling us he is except when it’s convenient for them to say he’s still very dangerous), then wouldn’t an Osama and company BENEFIT from the chaos in Pakistan? Who will watch him if everyone’s worried about their own asses there? And why should Pakistan help us, really, when in the same period they “help” us, we gave their sworn enemies, the Indian government, THE BOMB and the resources to build it?

I advise you not only to pay attention to the mess in Pakistan, because it reeks of Bush corruption as much as here, but also because the Bushies have a strong impetus to scare the bejesus out of the American public with less than a year to go to the 2008 presidential campaign. They won’t want to hand all this newly created “executive” power no American president has ever been allowed to declare go to anyone else. There are some who feel that we’ll see “martial law” or some semblance enacted here before or immediately after a Democratic sweep in November 2008.

I encourage Democrats and others alike to let Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein know how very disappointed you are with their decision to vote for a Michael Mukasey appointment as Attorney General. I also encourage you to read bhfrik’s earlier post on this subject here.