Stop the New FISA
Allowing the new surveillance law to stand would seriously cripple our free press
by Chris Hedges
This law will cripple the work of those of us who as reporters communicate regularly with people overseas, especially those in the Middle East. It will intimidate dissidents, human rights activists and courageous officials who seek to expose the lies of our government or governments allied with ours. It will hang like the sword of Damocles over all who dare to defy the official versions of events. It leaves open the possibility of retribution and invites the potential for abuse by those whose concern is not with national security but with the consolidation of their own power.
I have joined an ACLU lawsuit challenging the new law along with other journalists, human rights organizations and defense attorneys who also rely on confidentiality to do their work. I have joined not only because this law takes aim at my work but because I believe it signals a serious erosion of safeguards that make possible our democratic state. Laws and their just application are the only protection we have as citizens. Once the law is changed to permit the impermissible, we have no recourse with which to fight back.
As the McCain campaign tries to dig itself out from under Phil Gramm’s comments yesterday the we are a "nation of whiners" who are only going through a "mental recession" the hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
Senator McCain said that "Phil Gramm doesn’t speak for me" even though that’s exactly what Gramm was doing at the time he made the remarks, speaking to the Wall Street Journal editorial board on behalf of the McCain campaign.
McCain also said that he "strongly disagrees" with Gramm’s comments, although on more than one occasion Sen. McCain has made reference to his opinion that many of our problems are "psychological." See for yourself:
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is failing.
Totally Gay Happy Meals
It is the end of the nutball Christian right. Here is your proof. To go.
by Mark Morford
Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush into office and seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating?
Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried housefly limbs after a sneeze. You should know this now.
Did you know the AFA recently boycotted McDonald's? That's right, this once semi-powerful tub of right-wing brain-caulk recently declared a comestible fatwa against America's foremost purveyor of toxic foodstuffs because, apparently, some high-ranking McD's VP just joined the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, which, to the AFA, somehow translates directly into free pink condoms and mind-controlling rainbow flags in every toxic God-fearing Happy Meal.
Did you read about that? No? Of course you didn't. Here is why: No one cared. Well, that's not quite true. McDonald's sort of cared, just enough to write up a nice letter of response to Wildmon stating, in essence, that the AFA is a bunch of troglodytic knuckle-draggers with the sociosexual awareness of a fungal spore, and they should crawl away right now before God spanks them even harder with the 2x4 of total irrelevance.
Today we'll have a serious discussion of the ongoing feud between presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for 12 years, and Colorado Springs' equally intelligent evangelical guru James Dobson, who thinks gay people are weird and creepy and smell like cheese.
Dobson's snit with Obama began a few weeks ago, right after Focus on the Family's founder stunned the scientific community by announcing irrefutable evidence that global warming is caused entirely by motorized floats in gay-pride parades.
John McCain, polygamist? He's been lying about his divorce and remarriage, it turns out he got his marriage license for Cindy while still legally married to Carol. [details]
University of Arizona
law professor says McCain is ineligible to be president. The law that made children born to US citizens in the Panama Canal zone was not passed until after McCain was born, therefore he was not a "naturally born" citizen as the US Constitution requires. Then again, who pays attention to that old rag anymore? It also said that Bush and Cheney, being from the same state, could not be elected together.
Stop the New FISA
Allowing the new surveillance law to stand would seriously cripple our free press
