Build a prison, then hire a 'security' company to fill it ...

So that you can use the revenue to support a police department?

Can the farce get any worse/better/more absurd?

Hardin Official Fights 'Outlandish' APF Rumors

Yesterday's QUOTES ...

To simply accept that these people skirted FISA only for the righteous purposes of chasing down terrorist operations is absurd. We already know the kinds of thing the Bush justice department did. Why in the world would we not assume they used all the powers at their disposal to spy on political opponents?

Of course they did. We'd have to be complete idiots to think otherwise.

... The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.

After his slaying on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King died a second death. His work and message were sanitized, scrubbed clean of all threat -- and all promise. ...

... All the helots must be kept down on the same low level, so that in every region of the world -- the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East -- there is only one hegemon, one dominant power, one master: the United States. Yes, this is madness; but it also happens to be ruling philosophy of our "bipartisan foreign policy community."

... any nation that legalizes torture has lost its honor and the only way to get it back it to hold those responsible for doing it accountable.

Unfortunately for Cavalier McCain, the prodigal son, --- he's one of them.

Will Free Ride McCain get a free ride into the White House?


Last month the Republicans had a great victory in their effort to undo the New Deal, by eliminating completely any distinction between commercial banks and investment banks, while at the same time giving investment banks unfettered access to the public treasury with none of the responsibilities or burdens placed on commercial banks. ...

... Obama’s biggest flaw is his hubristic sense of entitlement. ...

... It's so clear that lack of regulation gave the investment banks a license to steal, and that Phil Gramm and his puppet Presidential candidate [Free-Ride, Bomb-Bomb-Bomb-Iran McCain], who doesn't know or care about the economy, want the theft to continue.

Yesterday's QUOTES ...

But there’s got to be a better way to keep the country on its toes than scaring the tar out of us. It’s a high the American psyche can’t and won’t maintain and I wish the Feds would grasp a better understanding of this.

For about three years following the Sept. 11 attacks, the watchword was Mexico. For a little while, 2003 to 2005, it became Canada but that proved to be boring.

Then things picked up again in 2004 when a South African woman, Farida Ahmed, with pages missing from her passport, was popped crossing the Rio Grande.

That story was reluctantly let go by most congressmen and newspapers after she was held on immigration violations and deported home. Now the word coming down from Washington is that the terrorists walk among us.

Frankly, Secretary Chertoff, I wish you and the terrorists would make up your damned minds.

... Harry Reid ... took our money and support last year to become majority leader apparently so he could advance the Bush agenda as well or better than Mitch McConnell could. Harry Reid --not a poor puppy but-- a wolf in Democratic clothing?

... an international research team has discovered that during the warm period following the next-to-last ice age, when global temperatures reached at least 2°C above the current average, the seas rose by as much as 6 meters over just a few hundred years.

Arizona Governor Napolitano caved on internal US travel control called Real ID ...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who signed an agreement with Napolitano on Thursday, said the effort to stiffen identification standards is essential to making the country safer in the wake of the 2001 attacks.

"In the hands of terrorists and criminals, fraudulent documentation, phony identification are really weapons that enable people to carry out acts of violence and destruction," Chertoff said.

If the old passports and driver's licences were really weapons when used by the wrong people, then the new super Real ID documents will be super weapons when used by the wrong people? And don't tell me they can't be faked or subverted in some way. The real purpose of Real ID is to control US Citizens, not secure the country. This is obvious from the fact that real security issues, like port security, is ignored by this administration while they pursue such things as wiretapping the nation and consolidating personal information on all Americans.

And the Democrats go along quite willingly most of the time ...

Yesterday's QUOTES ...

No one's happy but the Department of Homeland (in)Security ... "The precedent is basically set that if there's a use that is incompatible with a refuge, then we'll just hand over our land to the Department of Homeland Security," Clark said. "I don't think that's any better precedent than waiving laws."
[Near-done border fence stirs critics, defenders --Land swap: best deal possible or bad precedent? by Brady McCombs, Arizona Daily Star] ... but then, nothing matters anymore than using threats and fear to scam the entire country.
The Beltway obsession with Social Security is a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. People have picked up a few facts about demography, and think they understand the long run budget problem. They don’t. ... and neither does Obama, sorry to say.
The Bush/Cheney Legacy ... With the confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, one cannot but fear that we are descending into the hell that was the destination of those human societies that did not give sufficient weight to moral and ethical standards and the rule of law. Rather we have squandered morality and ethics in expedient actions that returned less than nothing: no security, no safety and no honor. That is the legacy of Bush and Cheney.

By the way: no one knows where al-Libi is today. He has been "disappeared" by Bush. Perhaps because his very testimony is such an indictment of Bush and his embrace of the Torture Regime.

I wonder if Chris Matthews realizes that every time he or one of his fellow gasbags blithely reveal their sexist lizard brains like this, another little feminist gets her (or his) wings.

Fascism entrenched ...

One sure way for the fascist minded to keep control of the government is to pass control of intelligence gathering and covert operations to 'hired' contractors.

Outsourcing intelligence by James Carroll

... The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency is transferring "core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection" to private contractors -- up to a billion dollars worth. This raises the prospect that hired guns, instead of sworn officials, will be conducting covert operations, spying missions, interrogations, "renditions," surveillance -- the whole dangerous complex of shadow activity that began as the government's most sensitive responsibility.

Given the often shocking record of what US intelligence officials have done over the years, why does it matter if such activities are carried out by contractors? The answer patently goes to the question of accountability. Public servants who are bound by oaths to the Constitution and the law understand what the measure of behavior must be, even if they fall short of it. Activities involving the surreptitious, especially, have properly been reserved to public institutions subject to political oversight. Private parties, bound by contract, operate at remove from such limit and accountability, which may be why borderline activities like interrogation or rendition are increasingly farmed out to them. ...

Spy or chemical detector? What about nanoscopic WMD's?

Talk about a surveillance society. Not only surveillance blimps in the sky near and not so near the southern border. Not only cameras to record (and mis-record) a vehicle license plate for a traffic infraction. Not only camera's increasingly recording when one scratches or blows one's nose in public ...

Now we literally have a Fly-On-The-Wall robot.

Robotic Insect Takes Off for the First Time --Researchers at Harvard have created a robotic fly that could one day be used for covert surveillance and detecting toxic chemicals.

Just think, a few days ago Jon Kyl was a GOoPer 'fair-haired' boy ...

Now Jon Kyl is the target of the ire of some of the GOP's most rabid (according to Scarpy Scarpinato). Go figure ...

GOP says backlash in party due to Kyl by Daniel Scarpinato

"We have people coming in every day, tearing up their registration cards and throwing them on the floor, or coming in and changing their registration from Republican to independent," said party Chairman Randy Pullen during a press conference at the state headquarters in Phoenix.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul ...

BushCo's at it again. Now they are soliciting members of the Border Patrol with a $134,114 for a one-year contract, plus a $25,000 signing bonus (via DynCorp) to go to Iraq to train Iraqi's in how to 'guard their border.' Is this a joke?

First Bush takes the US into an unnecessary and illegal war. Then he destroys our armed services. He removes most of the National Guard from their intended role of providing security here at home and moves them and their equipment to Iraq leaving the US without needed resources. Now it's the Border Patrol's turn. Are you sure George W. Bush isn't working for the enemy?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The US is going to keep comedians and terrorists in business for years to come.

_____________________
Arizona Daily Star: Bidding war is on for border agents --Private company offers six figures for year in Iraq by Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

A government that can't find it way out of a paper bag, though it has the power to blast the bag and everything else around to smithereens ...

Read 'Confusing Osama bin Laden with Johnny Rotten' and feel secure in the idiocy of your government.

Riding while brown ...

The Tucson Citizen has an article titled: Lawyers' advice to migrants: Stay out of cars by Claudine LoMonaco

How does this work? Do they question all the brown colored people in the car?

So the police stop me for a non-working turn signal (which used to happen frequently years ago in my Datsun, 'scuse me, Nissan) and any and all passengers who look like they might have had ancestors from down south get interrogated? But us sorta German/English looking sorts only just get a ticket instructing us to get our car fixed (again).

A ticket for operating an unsafe vehicle is the price of a well regulated society. But interrogation for those riding in a car that got a ticket because you might possibly have entered the country illegally is called a police state. If our society is going to question all passengers in order to identify possible illegal aliens then why not collect ID's on all the passengers and run them through to see if there are any other crimes these people might be involved in. Why don't we set up road blocks every 25 miles and check everyone. Why not have them searched and require that they take their shoes off to check for bombs.

Just think how 'safe' we could be ...

The Bush Administration protects us by hiding 100 year old government documents ...

The Bush Administration is removing willy-nilly millions of pages of historical documents from public view. Some of the document being removed are over a hundred years old.

-----
USA Today: 1M archived pages removed post-9/11 by Frank Bass and Randy Herschafthttp