Because you can live an Irony Free Life™.
As Senator Sam Brownback demonstrates by delcaring “shocked, shocked to find that Chinese authorities are demanding monitoring of internet activities by hotels of their guests,”after voting for exactly the same thing for the entire population of the United States.
Leave Claude Rains to Claude Rains.
The IOC just meekly assented to allowing the Chinese government to filter internet access for the reporters at the games, despite promising otherwise just weeks ago.
What a bunch of losers.
That being said, ShaMao’er asks the question that immediately comes to mind, “The same old question… why are they so dumb?”
Meaning the Chinese government. They had to know that this would be found out in short order, and they had to know that the consequences of being found out would be worse than anything that a reporter pulled off Amnesty International’s web site.
My only guess is that is about a need to be in control trumped their need to get good foreign press.
A number of analyses have suggested that the primary audience that is being targeted by the PRC for the Olympics is internal, not external, and that would explain this action.
A press release from the ACLU:
Justice Department Asks Intelligence Court To Review New Wiretapping Law In Secret (7/30/2008)
ACLU Says Any Proceedings On New FISA Law Should Be As Transparent As Possible
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.orgWASHINGTON – In a brief filed late yesterday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Bush administration asked that any review of the new warrantless surveillance law be kept secret and that the court refuse to accept legal briefs from anyone other than the Justice Department itself. The government is responding to a motion the American Civil Liberties Union filed earlier this month asking the FISC to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) be open to the public to the extent possible.
The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:
“The government is proposing that the intelligence court should consider the constitutionality of the new surveillance law in proceedings that will be entirely secret. If the government’s request is granted, the court won’t hear arguments from anyone except the government and those arguments will be presented to the court in secret briefs. At the end of the process, the court will issue a ruling that is also secret. The process the government is proposing is completely unacceptable. Especially because the new surveillance law departs so significantly from the standards that have applied to government surveillance for the last 30 years, any proceedings relating to the new law’s constitutionality should be adversarial and as informed and transparent as possible.”
In a separate legal challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the ACLU seeks a court ruling declaring that the FAA is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt. Plaintiffs in the case include Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Nation and PEN American Center.
(emphasis mine)
I’m Speechless.
Because those people with the sign up sheets may want to steal your identity and get credit cards in your name.
So says Delegate Jeffrey Frederic, chairman of the Virginia Republican party.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with fact that it’s black people that are being target by the Democratic party for registration.
It was passed in 1913, and forbade marriages to residents of a state where the marriage would not be legal, but now the House has passed the repeal, following the lead of the Senate, and it’s going to the desk of Deval Patrick, who says he will sign it.
Two snaps up, particularly for caterers on Cape Cod who will doubtless see a surge in business..
Both the European Union and the United States have expanded sanctions against Zimbabwe
As to the negotiations that have been going on for a few days, we have the ZANU-PF saying that the results of the runoff are ‘Non-Negotiable’, but that could be put down to normal gamesmanship in any negotiation.
As to what will happen in the negotiations, the The Grauniad* and the Times of London have two diametrically opposed views of what is happening next, with the Guardian suggesting that the talks are a ploy, and that Mugabe is using them for time to prepare for even more extreme violence against the opposition, and the Times of London suggesting that South Africa is insisting that Robert Mugabe and his allies to surrender real power in Zimbabwe.
I think that the Times is wrong for a number of reasons. First, as the Guardian notes, this sort of negotiation has happened before, in the late 1980s with Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU party, with no real power devolving to ZAPU, and second because it would be completely out of character for Thabo Mbeki to insist that Robert Mugabe do anything.
I expect it to get much worse before it gets better.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
BTD at Talkleft has the goods:
It appears that Sunstein has suggested that only the “Egregious Crimes” of Bush and His Evil Minions™ be pursued under an Obama administration.
While both BTD and I agree that the standard of Jonathan Turley on Olbermann, that all crimes by the executive are “egregious”, is excessive (Turley supported impeachment over “Monicagate”).
I would further argue that pursuing all the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the Bush administration would not be possible, as there are simply too few lawyers in Washington, DC to do this.
That being said, there are certain crimes that must be pursued, because otherwise it subverts the rule of law, which is already quite weak inside the Beltway.
What sort of crimes? Things like illegal wiretapping, WHICH CASS SUNSTEIN SUPPORTED, and the military kangaroo courts of Gitmo detainees, WHICH CASS SUNSTEIN SUPPORTED (See here and here).
He justifies them by supporting the proposition that we elect a king with unlimited power every 4 years.
This should be reason enough to remove him completely from the campaign, and from any position in your future administration.
They found the law uvague and an infringement on the first amendment and so declared the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional:
“It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, ‘effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,’ Reno, 521 U.S. at 874, 117 S.Ct. at 2346, and thus is overbroad. For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment,” the judges wrote. “These burdens would chill protected speech.”
I expect an appeal, but the fact is that the mechanisms are more restrictive, and less effective than filters, and as such appear to be unconstitutional, though IANAL.
According to Zimbabaw’s state run newspaper, The Herald, reconciliation talks are to start tomorrow.
It’s not a bad sign, but I don’t expect to see progress while Mbeki is the chief mediator.
A slightly more positive note, the EU is pressing ahead with more sanctions.
Michael Mukasey, George Bush’s new bottom at the department of justice is now saying that allowing Gitmo detainees to actually be physically present in court to contest their detention would constitute an “extraordinary risk”, so Congress needs to act to prevent this.
His proposal:
One hopes that the Dems have some backbone on this, but I doubt it.
Sue Jones-Davies, Mayor of Aberystwyth, Wales, is campaigning to remove a ban on the Monty Python movie Life of Brian.
It turns out that the ban was instituted 30 years ago, and then promptly forgotten about.
Her Honor, Ms. Jones-Davies, also played Judith Iscariot in the movie….Yes, it was her naked in that scene.
Funny the way that things come together.
BTW, the article mentions that George Harrison, who bankrolled the film, had a cameo. I must have missed that. Could someone email me with where it is in the film, preferably with a still?
Well, it’s actually the CBS television network that won before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
They ruled that the FCC had, “arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy”.
Needless to say, the Parent’s Television Council, which gins up 99.8% of all broadcast indecency complaints, was apoplectic.
Ms. Jackson’s nipple was unavailable for comment.
On the bright side, Mugabe and Tsvangerai have signed an agreement to enter into negotiations.
I’m not optimistic about the outcome, as Mugabe is still engaging in retribution, and just threatened to expropriate “unfriendly” firms.
Even more concerning is that Thabo Mbeki appears to still be the only mediator involved in the process, which seems to be a recipe for an “Epic Fail”.
It’s clear that his clear favoritism toward Mugabe has weakened the SADC, the regional governmental organization, with a number of countries, most notably Zambia and Botswana, breaking with Mbeki’s accommodation of Mugabe.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri a legal US resident who was arrested for credit card fraud, and then declared an “enemy combatant” will now have his day in court, after more than 5 years in solitary confinement.
The court ruled that he could be detained, but that the basis of the detention, the statement of a defense department official without supporting evidence, was insufficient to justify his classification.
Note that as a legal resident, he has the same rights to due process as a US citizen, and so the Bush administration’s position was thus that they were free to detain anyone at any time forever without any supporting facts.
Personally, I think that if they have evidence, it should be addressed in a real trial, though I would be not at all surprised if this hearing reveals that the emperor has no clothes.
In 1913, Massachusetts passed a law making it illegal for people to marry their if it was not legal in their home state. It was intended to prevent blacks and whites from other states from conducting an interracial marriage there.
No one paid too much attention to it, until Mitt Romney dusted it off to hinder gay marriage in Massachusetts to further his efforts to appeal to bigots in the ‘Phant base in his race for president.
Well, the Mass. Senate just voted to repeal it, and passage looks likely in the Mass House, and governor Patrick says that he will sign it.
Woot!
The Rude Pundit notes that he gets a lot of chickensh#@ criticisms of Obama in his email from people who never listed to what Obama said, and so are shocked to find that he is pro gun, pro death penalty, pro “faith based program”, etc. and in his own profane way, says that these people are either clueless, or McCain concern trolls.
That being said, but he does state that there are valid critiques:
Like this one: Barack Obama’s reversal of his position on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was a craven, cowardly bullsh#$ move that ought to haunt him with the left (and libertarian right) for the rest of the campaign. By voting for the bill yesterday (including voting for cloture), Obama made a mistake that is the political equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s Iraq war vote. (They are not morally equivalent, since the dead would probably rather be alive and spied on.) And while there’s no telling how Clinton would have voted had she been the nominee, just as there’s no way to know how Obama would have voted on the war had he been in the Senate in 2002, the New York Senator was unencumbered and able to take the moral high ground and voted against the bill.
I honestly believe that the Rude Pundit cannot believe that he wrote that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
I can’t believe that I’m writing that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
In any case, if Obama loses to the sick old man in November, he did it today, because at its core, much of the power of movement supporting him comes not from the number of supporters, but from the enthusiasm of those supporters, and a whole lot of them are seriously non-enthused.
He just made the same vote that Hillary Clinton did to authorize the war. The only question is whether it will kill his campaign as it did hers.
In any case, go read his post. He’s always insightful and entertaining, if somewhat profane.
In a Democracy, the cure for a dimwit, sociopath king is not a hip, smart king who pledges to snake our overflowing toilets after he assumes the throne.
In a Democracy, we cannot allow there to be a throne in the first place.
Obama deserves condemnation for his FISA capitulation for this reason.
Go read the whole article, along with his masterful use of photoshop.
Well, it looks like FIFA is weighing in on Zimbabwe and Mbeki’s support of Mugabe, as they are now making statements that seem to imply that the world cup may be moved because of “regional instability”.
As lame as it sounds, this may be the only thing to keep Mbeki from being Mugabe’s agent in this matter.
Still the news is generally not good with ZANU-PF planning to escalate the violence against the opposition.
As to negotiations, were are getting conflicting reports, and Tsvangirai has just denied that there are any talks in process.
Botswana has taken what I believe to be the proper stance, saying that they do not recognize Mugabe as president.
Interestingly, we have reports that Mugabe has been effectively sidelined by the 6 top members of the state security apparatus, and that they are more brutal than Mugabe.
We are also seeing increasing calls for sanctions, which, predicably, the Mugabe regime called racist.
According to FDL it was 69:28.
Of my senators, Cardin voted nay, Mikulski voted aye.
Barbara Mikulski will never get my money or my vote again.
As to the Democrats, to paraphrase a book I read decades ago from memory:
In the old days, there was an operation performed on young boys.
They would either die, keep a lovely singing voice into adulthood, or become a Democrat in Congress.
Contact your Senators, any friends of the Senators, any pets of the Senators, and tell them that a vote for this bill is a betrayal of the basic values of this nation.
Note that in addition to an amendment to strip immunity, there is also an amendment to make immunity contingent on the final Ispector General report as to whether government agencies broke the law, which Mukasey and McConnell say is worth vetoing the whole bill.
Also, please give to the Blue America/FISA fund, which will punish Dems who capitulate on basic American rights and value when no capitulation is necessary.
They are running this full page ad in the WaPo today.
Also help Regina Thomas defeat John Barrow, one the most reactionary Democrat in Congress, and one of the most prominent supporters of the FISA capitulation in the primary a week from today in Georgia’s 12th Congressional district.
The Bush Blue Dogs need to be shown that their votes against America have consequences.
No more Vichy Dems.
