Department of Justicelessness…

I’m pissed off.  Barack Obama’s Department of ‘Justice’ is really screwing the pooch. When it comes to blatant violations of Federal Laws and out and out War Crimes, these clowns are trying wildly succeeding at topping Alberto “Torture Guy” Gonzales’ Keystone Cops er minions um partisan hacks Justice Department.

First comes a case where an Ethiopian national is taken to secret prisons in very dubious locations. He claims he was tortured and is suing the Boeing subsidiary Jeppsen for co-coordinating his transportation and thereby facilitating the alleged torture. Then a month later a case come up where a charity group called the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation was targeted by the Justice Department.  During the legal back and forth, the lawyers of the Foundation were allowed to see documentation that proved that the government was breaking its own surveillance laws before quickly retracting the documents and slapping gag orders on everyone in sight. al-Haramain sued the government for damages relating to the crimes committed under Federal Law.

In both cases the Obama lawyers in the justice department were absolutely indistinguishable from the shameless wingnuts that they replaced.  They asserted that even going forward with either case would threaten to expose state secrets and therefore the cases must be dismissed. How just.

But evidently they were just getting warmed up. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, sued the government for its warrantless wiretapping program. From their website:

Jewel v. NSA is aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

What? Undisputed? WTF?

So of course the Hopey, Changey, High on Transparency Obama Admin is going to make sure that we get to the bottom of this, right?

Wrong.  They decide that just asserting the states secret privilege did not go far enough.  What they now claim is that the Patriot Act prevents the government from being sued for any illegal activity relating to surveillance.  At All. Oh, unless of course there is “willful disclosure” by the government.  So let me see how this works.  We can’t call you on doing anything wrong unless you decide to tell us what you are doing.  Riiiight.

That is totally fucked up.  Completely jacked. Anyone with half a brain can see how that is going to turn out.

Us:         Hey, government. You doin’ anything we should punish you for?  Any little thing?

Gov’t:    No.

Us:         Whew.  That settles that.  What’s on TV?

By using all of this political mumbo-jumbo to hide, Obama’s shirt is smelling faintly of injustice and his sharp suit is starting to bear the stain of the blood of the tortured and tormented.  The more I am seeing of this (and don’t even get me started on the Treasury situation) the more I wonder if  Obama’s skill at oration is just an extra mesmerizing ruse in the rich and powerful’s long battle to take all the toys.

h/t to Glenn Greenwald who has been all over this in his own loquacious way.

CIA sez: Electronic Voting Systems are Not Secure

Just here to make sure yer old votin’ machine is in tip top order…

One of the reasons I have stopped writng for the most part is that I was feeling more and more like I had nothing original to say.  Whether or not I agree with them, I peruse most of the major lefty sites at least once a day and found it difficult to come up with original material.

I can’t believe I have not seen this report in any major blog:

CIA expert: Electronic voting not secure

A CIA cybersecurity expert said electronic voting machines like those used in the U.S. have likely been tampered with during elections in other countries.

I have written about this before.

Why do we lack the will to spend the time and money to homogenize and streamline our voting system?…I think it must have something to do with the fact that the powers that be do not want a simple and efficient system of voting. They don’t want transparency and effectiveness. Because then they cannot game the system. Cannot bend the ‘democratic ‘process to their will. And that would be bad for business.

Weird. I always thought I was just a raving moonbat. But for whatever reason, CIA agent Steve Stigall has started flapping his lips about the compromisability of electronic voting.

“wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen”
Stigall said voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren’t connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said elections officials didn’t always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines.

So were back to my suggestion, no?

We have a computer that you vote on, like our touch-screen systems. You vote and are given a receipt, which is also a ballot. You check that ballot over to make sure it reflects what you voted on the touch-screen, sign it, and drop it into a ballot box. Then one party is responsible for counting the physical ballots, and one party is responsible for the electronic tally.

As far as absentee ballots go, maybe the ballot will have a carbon-copy sort of system and two return envelopes. You send one to one party and one to the other.

So in the end, you have a redundant system that allows for cross checking of numbers. If the two tallies don’t match up, there is a problem. Simple as that.

No.

Paper receipts aren’t a guarantor of electronic voting security, the CIA expert added, because the votes can be changed when or after they are transmitted to a master computer tabulating the votes or when they’re posted online.

Okay, that doesn’t incorporate the adversarial two-party system I proposed, so maybe my idea still holds water.

Any way you slice it, there is a real possibility that the electronic voting machines in the US are at best unsecure and at worst outright enablers of cheating the democratic system.

Well…

I have stepped out of the blogging game for a while. I decided that there is enough hootin’ and hollerin’ out there without my acerbic and mercurial voice adding to the din.

Interestingly enough, my traffic has not changed since I stopped writing new content. Evidently I am fairly adept at naming my photo files, because a decent number of people come here to look at my photos. Bedbugs, bongs and gays. That is what my ‘audience’ seems to demand. I guess it’s better than brown bag ripple and meth.

I would be interested in collaborative efforts, whether it be on piece or a series, etc.

Also I’m an ordained minister, so if anyone would be interested at having me show up and berate them in my official capacity as arbiter of all that is moral, just let me know.

But for now you can probably find me at my favorite spot:

O? Crap.

First Obama stayed silent on Israel’s taking of a giant steaming dump on Gaza. He claimed that there was only one President, and that it would be improper to say anything. Nice dodge.

On January 23rd Predator drones fires missiles into Pakistan, killing at least 15, or 17. It took only three days for Obama to launch an attack inside a sovereign nation, an ally to boot. Hey, nobody said he isn’t efficient.

Then he dissed journalistic legend Helen Thomas by refusing to answer a question about nukes in the Mideast. The correct answer, common knowledge to anyone paying attention to international politics since JFK, is Israel. At this point I’m starting to not feel very hopeful about change, but how much did I really expect?

Then the DOJ lawyers, to the astonishment of the judges reviewing the case, fully assert the Bush-era States Secrets dodge. This has the audacity to really start pissing me off.

And now. Well, take it away, Mr. San Francisco Chronicle Reporter:

For the second time this week, the Obama administration has gone to court in San Francisco to argue for secrecy in defending a terrorism policy crafted under George W. Bush – in this case, wiretapping that President Obama denounced as a candidate.

What. The. Fuck.

I didn’t have unrealistic expectations for this administration. I knew I was going to be let down. But I was not prepared to be this let down this quickly.
At this point it appears that the Obama administration wants to double down on many of Bush’s policies. And this is a terrible wager to risk.

I wonder if Dennis is already writing a sequel to Savage Mules. At the rate this administration is going there will be more than enough fodder for the record books.

Hoping my daughter isn’t psychic.

As I rode the city bus to take my daughter to school this morning, she told me she had a really bad dream last night. Here’s what she described:

There was war in our neighborhood. Guns and bombs could be heard, and she knew the fighting was near. Then she, her sister & I were together. A strange man came into the room and I told the girls that he was going to take care of them now because I had to join the fight. She cried for me not to go, but I left. we were living in a communal house and she went into the kitchen, where some ladies were making food and doing domestic things. She kept asking them how they could just act like nothing was wrong when there was a war going on just outside, but they wouldn’t answer her. Then she saw the guy that was supposed to take care of her, and she started to yell for him to get away from her because he really scared her, and then she woke up. She said she was convinced it was real until she woke up and realized she had been dreaming.

Why would my eight year old daughter intuit this situation so clearly? We certainly don’t talk about guerrilla warfare or war in Seattle, or war in general, for that matter. I do not own a cache of guns or rail against black helicopters. But she seemed acutely aware of what it would be like if war did come to White Center.

I asked her what she thought people should do if there was a war going on, and explained that even in war people have to keep living life.

This reminds me of the The Blue and the Gray, a TV miniseries I remember from when I was young. I was pretty into war and strategy and such when I was young. I started playing Dungeon & Dragons when I was six, and I was fascinated by all that was feudal, so a show about the civil war was right up my alley.

There was a scene in the series where there was this horrific battle occurring on a hill at the top of which stood a big, old gray house. The house belonged to on old woman, and as the battle raged on, she just sat in her rocking chair on her porch knitting and singing to herself. All hell was breaking loose around her, and she was just doing what she always did, carrying on with life despite the chaos. That is until a cannon ball landed in her lap.

The other scene I remember was this guy who fancied himself as the Angel of Death who roamed the battlefields after the fighting was over, bayoneting anyone left alive to put them out of their misery. I was 8 when this miniseries came out, the same age my daughter is now.

But I digress. Why is my daughter dreaming about this? Is she seeing into the future? Where else would she get the helplessness and chaos of living in a war zone. She doesn’t watch shows about war, or fighting. She is not into role playing games or the history of martial engagements. She is more into Tokio Hotel (yes, those are all boys) and skinny jeans and Club Penguin.

I don’t know what to make of it. It was a creepy thing to hear her describe. It seemed prescient. I actually felt the wrenching in my heart if I would have to make the decision between staying with the girls or fighting to keep them safe. And I had the worst feeling that I would choose to fight, and would give my life in an attempt to keep them safe, and they would never see me again.

Ah, the joys of fatherhood.

Lost

Are those crickets I hear
Chirping the night through
Or echoes I sense
Of what is left to do?

Image h/t to this guy, who stole it from someone else.

Religion we can believe in.

“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears – tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS. Bless this nation with anger – anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future. Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world. Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences. Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable. And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States. Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people. Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain. Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead. Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States. Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims. Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods. And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen.”

Bishop Gene Robinson is my homeboy.

h/t Kevin @ Rumproast.

Wrong. Wrong! WRONG!

Okay.  I’ll play.

Dennis Perrin has a great post up today.  I thought I’d piggyback off of it.

“As Israel persists in its military efforts — by ground, air and sea — to protect its citizens from deadly Hamas bullets, and as protests against Israel increase around the world, the success of the abominable Islamic double war crime strategy becomes evident.

“People forget the usual rules of morality and law. For example, when a murderer takes a hostage and fires from behind his human shield, and a policeman, in an effort to stop the shooting accidentally kills the hostage, the law of every country holds the hostage taker guilty of murder even though the policeman fired the fatal shot.

“The same is true of the law of war. The use of human shields, in the way Hamas uses the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, is a war crime — as is their firing at IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians. Every human shield that is killed by Israel self-defense measures is the responsibility of Hamas, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the press coverage.

“Moreover, the number of civilians killed by Israel is almost always exaggerated. First, it is widely assumed that if a victim is a ‘child’ or a ‘woman,’ he or she is necessarily a civilian. Hamas often use 14-, 15-, 16-and 17-year-olds, as well as women, as terrorists. Israel is entitled under international law to treat these children and women as the combatants they have become.

“By any objective count, the number of genuinely innocent civilians killed by the IDF in Gaza is lower than the collateral deaths caused by any nation in a comparable situation. Muslims do everything in their power to provoke Israel into killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible, in order to generate condemnation against the Israeli state.”

That was fun. The words in red were changed. Can you guess who said this? The same man that said these all time greatest hits:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

and

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”

and

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

I’ll give you a hint. This was one of his homies:

Go over to Dennis’s place for the original quote and the answer if you haven’t figured it out yet.

God Damn It! Enough!

Fuck Israel. Seriously. Fuck them. A bunch of whiny, annoying, inhuman bastards.

To wit:

Mohammed Shaheen, a volunteer with Palestinian Red Crescent, was in the first convoy of ambulances to reach the site of the blast in Zeitoun since it was first occupied then shelled by the Israeli army.

His testimony confirmed accounts, first reported in The Telegraph, from survivors of the extended al Samouni clan who said they feared between 60 and 70 family members had been killed.

Okay that is pretty bad. But war is hell. Here’s what really got me mad:

We found fifteen people still alive but injured so we took them in the ambulances.

“I could see an Israeli army bulldozer knocking down houses nearby but we ran out of time and the Israeli soldiers started shooting at us.

“We had to leave about eight injured people behind because we could not get to them and it was no longer safe for us to stay.”

THEY ARE FUCKING SHOOTING AT THE FUCKING RED CRESCENT!!!1! How is that not some kind of war crime?

It is time for this shit to end. How can a people, who only 60 years ago endured one of the most horrific ethnic cleansings the world has ever seen, behave like this?

Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Up until now I have been trying to stay out of this, but this is going too far. Way, way too far. I just can’t wrap my mind around this. How. Can. They?

From The Times Online:

“We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all of us.” It was signed Mads Gilbert, one of two Norwegian doctors toiling relentlessly alongside exhausted Palestinian medics.

There is no excuse, no explanation. They have decided to give up their humanity in search of… What? What is the point of this? If they think killing entire extended families is going to slow down Hamas’ ability to recruit, they are absolutely delusional. Untethered. Criminally Insane.

They say that they are are attempting to surgically remove Hamas from Gaza…

It is a brutal surgery, though, with blunt instruments and without anaesthetic.

Pretty much.

Saber Abu Aisha, whose brother was killed with his two wives and four children when an F16 rocket struck the basement directly beneath his apartment

Imagine having those words after your name in an article.

“The Israelis claim they are not killing civilians but that is all they are killing. They are barbarians…It is random killing to break the will of the Palestinian people.”

Here’s some fun facts about the Gaza strip:

- Refugees as % of Population – 70%
- Unemployment – 45.5%
- Average Age – 17.2 years – some estimates have put the median age at 15.3.

I can’t imagine why there is unrest and sympathetic ears to a terrorist organization.

More fun with stats:

Jan 7, 2009, 10:28 GMT

Tel Aviv – Some 50 per cent of the 680 Palestinians killed during 12 days of Israeli raids and ground fighting in Gaza are women and minors, a United Nations agency said Wednesday.

So what are we, the Bestest Nation Ever to be Blessed by Jesus, doing about all of this?

The US blocked a United Nations Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East within hours of the start of Israel’s ground offensive into the Gaza Strip.

Well. That’s nice.

How about a joke from my friend Dennis?

Q: What do you call a Palestinian mass grave?
A: Israel.

Oh, and…Fuck Israel.

Crumbs.

From the Great Orange Satan:

An Open Letter to the 111th Congress

Dear Congress,

Let’s get this out of the way right now: I think you’re gonna suck balls.

I base my opinion on your performance during the previous administration, and I see no reason to change my mind just because y’all have a bunch of new members and America has a new president.

It’s all so predictable. With virtually no exceptions, Republican members will continue insisting that the policies of shitting on the little guy are the only ones that they’ll support, and Democratic members will continue to give these idiots serious thought and consideration in the futile hope that we can all just get along. In essence, you’ll continue governing as if we are a “center-right” nation, which we most assuredly are not.

You’ll continue to act quickly on things that should be acted on slowly, and you’ll act slowly on things that should be acted on quickly. You’ll insult our intelligence, waste our money (or, rather, waste our grandchildren’s money since you spent ours and our kids’ long ago), give plenty of face time to the rich and powerful, and collapse at the mere hint of a filibuster threat.

I know you want me to believe you’ll do things differently, but that’s like Lucy promising Charlie Brown that she won’t pull the football away—for real this time. Uh huh. George Bush may be the worst president ever, but at least he was right when he stammered, “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me…can’t get fooled again.”

I know I’m being a tad negative, but can you blame me? You authorized the Iraq war, legalized warrantless wiretapping to make Bush’s illegal wiretapping retroactively legal (that was a neat backflip), agreed that habeas corpus was disposable, wasted floor time condemning MoveOn.org for exercising its freedom of speech, took impeachment off the table, failed to notice the collapsing economy, and wouldn’t even allow the government to use its power to negotiate lower drug prices. You failed us and failed us and failed us. Collectively you’re a bunch of irresponsible opportunistic whiny ether-sniffing assface sissypants bedwetters until such time that you prove through your deeds that you’re not.

I’ll close on a happy note in the interest of bipartisanship: nice shoes.

Hugs,

Billy

Couldn’t have said it better myself.