Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.
…
A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

For those that don’t know, the use of the military on American soil against American citizens is unconstitutional and illegal six ways from Sunday. It has not been done since the Civil War. And yet, Cheney is a free man and Yoo still a tenured professor at UC Berkeley (though he has to teach elsewhere now).

One guy can get impeached for a blowjob.

Fifty can’t even get a dirty look for shredding the constitution and considering turning our country into a literal police state.

Yeah, that makes sense.

According to the FBI report, which was originally posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, police also found a National Socialist Movement membership application filled out by Cummings. The NSM currently is the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country, with 69 chapters in 30 states.

Amber Cummings reportedly told police that her husband was “very upset” over Barack Obama being elected president, had been in contact with white supremacist groups, and that he’d been mixing chemicals in their kitchen sink while talking about dirty bombs

Imagine if it were a Republican president and Cummings was named Garcia or Sharif.

Oh, wait, I know why… let’s talk about steroids and LiLo’s new lips. Muuuuch more important these days, because everyone knows there’s no such thing as domestic terrorism.

Here’s Pantless Jugs, for reference:

See also:
Bush Was Right

(p.s. Billy Joel’s lawyers wants a word with you, boys)

and, of course, Mann Maltmouse drunk vlogging

OK, Annie wins in a runaway due to the overwhelming accrual of pathetic narcissism points. Congrats Ann, may your law school realize what an embarrassment you are to academia, the profession, and humanity at large.

Sorry, I’ve done so much good this year, I needed to balance that out lest I find a solid platinum Bentley under my tree.

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
…
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

I’m out of words on this one. Attacking Iran will be a disaster on so many levels that the wisdom in keeping it from happening should be self-evident.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands – in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati – vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

In an unprecedented transparent attempt to severely limit the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech of low-wage Houston janitors and their supporters, a Harris County District Attorney has set an extraordinarily high bond of $888,888 cash for each of the 44 peaceful protestors arrested last night. Houston janitors and their supporters, many of them janitors from other cities, were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting in the intersection of Travis at Capitol when they were arrested in downtown Houston Thursday night. They were challenging Houston’s real estate industry to settle the janitors’ strike and agree on a contract that provides the 5,300 janitors in Houston with higher wages and affordable health insurance.

The combined $39.1 million bond for the workers and their supporters is far and above the normal amount of bail set for people accused of even violent crimes in Harris County. While each of the non-violent protestors is being held on $888,888 bail …

• For a woman charged with beating her granddaughter to death with a
  sledgehammer, bail was set at $100,000;
• For a woman accused of disconnecting her quadriplegic mother’s breathing
  machine, bail was set at $30,000;
• For a man charged with murder for stabbing another man to death in a bar
  brawl, bail was set at $30,000;
• For janitors and protesters charged with Class B misdemeanors for past
  non-violent protests, standard bail has been set at $500 each.

More than 5,300 Houston janitors are paid $20 a day with no health insurance, among the lowest wages and benefits of any workers in America.

America… where we love all the people all the time unless they carry signs and interfere with our consumerist days or the “free” market or organize collectively or are brown or…

Here’s a pic, behold the charge of the might brigade:

First two guesses don’t count.1.

Am I the only one who vomited in my mouth a little here?

1. Michael Jackson. Entering the auditorium for the 2006 World Music Awards.
Seriously.
That’s Jacko.

Yeah, here’s the promo video:

Mmmm… feel the mysogyny and objectification. Women as chattel and daddy’s little sex objects… it’s not just for medieval breakfast anymore, it’s a money making evangelical hypocrisy based industry!

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stepped down as defence secretary, a day after congressional elections in which opposition to the war in Iraq contributed to heavy Republican party losses.

President George Bush said he would nominate Robert Gates, a former CIA director, to replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

As is his practice in matters of love as well as life, Bush was premature with his announcement before Lieberman could be sworn in for the new term. Robert Gates better not get too comfortable in that leather chair in the E-ring.

Bush on 11/2:

President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain with him until the end of his presidency, extending a job guarantee to two of the most-vilified members of his administration.

“Both those men are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them,” Bush said in an interview with The Associated Press and others.

Forget no-fly lists. If Uncle Sam gets its way, beginning on Jan. 14, 2007, we’ll all be on no-fly lists, unless the government gives us permission to leave-or re-enter-the United States.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSA) has proposed that all airlines, cruise lines-even fishing boats-be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States.

It doesn’t matter if you have a U.S. Passport – a “travel document” that now, absent a court order to the contrary, gives you a virtually unqualified right to enter or leave the United States, any time you want. When the DHS system comes into effect next January, if the agency says “no” to a clearance request, or doesn’t answer the request at all, you won’t be permitted to enter-or leave-the United States.
…
The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized there is a constitutional right to travel internationally. Indeed, it has declared that the right to travel is “a virtually unconditional personal right.” The United States has also signed treaties guaranteeing “freedom of travel.” So if these regulations do go into effect, you can expect a
lengthy court battle, both nationally and internationally.

Think this can’t happen? Think again. It’s ALREADY happening. Earlier this year, HSA forbade airlines from transporting an 18-year-old a native-born U.S. citizen, back to the United States. The prohibition lasted nearly six months until it was finally lifted a few weeks ago. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are two countries in recent history that didn’t allow their citizens to travel abroad without permission. If these regulations go into effect, you can add the United States to this list.

As someone who is already on the no-fly list, I can tell you that this is not something I look forward to. Aside from the proposed rule being unconstitutional and a great example of just how authoritarian this country has become under the Busheviks of course.

Read the IDP’s comments on the proposed rule change for a fuller understanding of just what, precisely is at stake here. You may think it hyperbole when I say “nothing less than our freedoms, nothing less than our lives”… but it’s not.

It’s no small step for authoritarianism to take even more control of our society after this rule is implemented. After all, it’s not like the DHS hasn’t been used for domestic partisan purposes in contravention of its charter, the law, and the Constution before.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

You’re kidding, right? The form of torture we are using is a national security secret? The Bush administration is once again obviously abusing classification laws to hide their own illegal, inhuman actions.

For those that don’t know, Helperin ABC New’s political director and is the responsible for the widely-read kewl kids news factory The Note. Why people read it before, I don’t know. Why they would read it after seeing what a craven, snivveling, subhuman sychophant Helperin is I really don’t know.

Unless they’re conservative, in which case The Note is teh b0mb!!!1!111!

Dear Hugh,

I really enjoyed our radio talk and I appreciated the opportunity to appear with someone I respect so much.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback, mostly from conservatives, including this reaction on Powerlineblog.com.

But, as I have said to you privately, I am beginning to think you are intellectually dishonest on a few points. It seems strange that someone who seems to be trying to bring truth to people would do such a thing, but I can’t really explain your behavior any other way. As I said on the show, you and I agree on almost everything we discussed. On most of the points of disagreement, I respect your position and accept our disagreement. . . .

As for your repeated insistence that you could reach no other conclusion but one that says that I am “very liberal,” I’m sure if you think it over, you will reconsider. You went to a liberal school and you appear to not be liberal. And I am sure you have heard of people having different political views than their parents.

Again, I respect much about you, but I am mystified by your determination to lump me in with others. Acknowledging the liberal bias that exists in the Old Media — as John Harris and I do in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 doesn’t necessarily prove that I am not liberal, but I would think you would be open to giving me the benefit of the doubt, when you have no actual evidence to the contrary.

Hewitt may be a C-level echospheritarian/worst law professor in the world, but he sure knows the bully routine by heart. This was Helprin’s second message, by the way, and Hewitt has made Halperin his bitch not once, not twice, but three times now. You know, if I thought Halperin was worthy of anything more than scorn and a mild disinterest, I might feel sorry for the wormy little crybaby.

So, submissives take note (or bottoms, as we like to call you little bitches): this is how a proper sub behaves! Now lick my boot. Harder! Faster! You missed a spot, you naughty little thing. Have a nipple clamp. Now on your knees and beg for my forgiveness!

The U.S. military said on Thursday it believed an American soldier who was abducted in Baghdad 10 days ago is still being held by his captors.

Good thing the Bush administration allowed our military to be commanded by the Iraqi head of state and stop looking for the soldier.

American soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near siege of the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad on Tuesday, heeding the orders of a Shiite-led Iraqi government whose assertion of sovereignty had Shiites celebrating in the streets.

The order by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to lift the week-old blockade of Sadr City was one of the most overt expressions of self-determination by Iraqi leaders in the 3 1/2 -year-old U.S. occupation. It followed two weeks of increasingly pointed exchanges between Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as a video conference between Maliki and President Bush on Saturday.

The soldiers had sealed off Sadr city in pursuit of a kidnapped American soldier, and now, on the orders of a foreign national that pursuit is being called off. Excuse me? Is the US military now taking orders from a puppet head of state?

Of course they aren’t. What they are doing is taking orders from Bush-Cheny-Rumsfeld who told them to abandon an American soldier because of political considerations.

The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.

Remember when the righties said that we could have won in Vietnam if not for the micromanaging of targets? Of the directives that came from DC to the operatives in the field? This is no different than McNamara, but even McNamara never abandoned an American soldier to a hostile force.

The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, “Unleash the sex kitten inside…simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!

“Soon you’ll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars”.

The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8ft 6ins, a ‘sexy dance garter’ and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.

God that’s hot. I think I’ll get it for BoonDoggle’s 2 year old.

There was nothing more inflammatory in my first book, about the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, than my assertion that Special Operations was a hotbed of racism and reaction. “Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) was my personal account of that operation, and I was explicit not only about the significant number of white supremacists in Special Operations but how the attitudes of these extremists connected with the less explicit white male supremacy of white patriarchal American society and defined, in some respects, the attitude taken by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti toward the Haitian population.

The resistance to this allegation was particularly fierce, and not merely from those inside the Special Operations “community,” whose outrage was more public-relations stagecraft than anything else. There was outrage from people who hadn’t a moment of actual experience in the military at all. This is an affront to something sacred in the public imaginary of a thoroughly militarized United States: that we are an international beacon of civilized virtue, and that our military is the masculine epitome of that virtue standing between our suburban security and the dark chaos of the Outside. Questioning the mystique of the armed forces is tantamount to lunacy at best and treason at worst.

It’s a great article and well worth your time. I’ve previously argued that we’re already living in a fascist state (there’s a movie too, and that post could use an update in the post-Minuteman world). Rather than focus on endpoint analysis, Goff’s article goes over much the same ground, but also addresses some root causes responsible for making that fascism acceptable. A how-did-we-get-here look (or, pedantically, a look at how some key elements for the establishment of a fascist state are already normative values in American society). All this from someone who was SpecOps for many years.

Much of the article focuses on the neonazis in the military – and how the invasion of Iraq has accelerated our military’s destruction from within by neonazis – but there are asides to Straussian ideology, master-race impulses, gender issues, and the like. This is more of a precis for a journal article, but in internet terms, it’s a tome. Go read it.

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

I’ve been sitting on this because I don’t know quite what to say. The total deaths caused by our country in an illegal, elective war of invasion, brought about by the lies and bloodthirsty sociopathy of a small number of chickenhawks is beyond my powers of comprehension.

Maybe this will help. Iraq had approximately the population of California. Due to our invasion of Iraq we have wiped out the equivalent of most of San Francisco, or all of Anaheim and Bakersfield. Or Sacramento and Fremont.

All of those people are dead because of us. Because of Bush. Impeachment is an insufficient remedy, but it is at least a step towards justice.

Oh, and the story? It was carried on page A12 of the WaPo. A-12, people, so that the valuable front page real estate could carry things like a warning of the demise of handwriting. What liberal media?

Love your kids? Prove it by beating them.

How come everyone today is too much of a pussy to smack their kids around? That’s what I want to know: why are parents afraid to beat their kids? When I was a kid and I screwed up, my parents beat my ass. We didn’t have a conversation about it. I didn’t have a “time out.” In fact, I’ve never even once been grounded in my life. What’s the point? Send your kid to his room and make him play video games and read comic books all day? Great idea, why don’t you take him to a psychiatrist while you’re at it so she can pull some disorder out of her ass to hide the fact that you’re a bad parent?

A crowd of protesters gathered in central Moscow yesterday to express their anger at the assassination of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who at the weekend became the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.

Politkovskaya, 48, had today been due to publish an article on torture and kidnappings by pro-Moscow forces in the restless southern republic of Chechnya, her colleagues said.

That’s a nice little “free press” thing you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

That GIMP’d pic is totally © me, btw.

The firing of Melanie Martinez, 34, marks the second PBS moral values scandal. The first was the censorship of the “Postcards from Buster” episode last year where Buster the Bunny, who regularly visits families in every episode, went to visit a family with two mommies. Previous families featured in “Postcards” episodes have included Mormons, Hmong and Pentecostal Christians.

Melanie Martinez was fired from her position as host of PBS KIDS Sprout’s “The Good Night Show” because she appeared in two 30-second online films when she was 27, “Technical Virgin” and “Boys Can Wait,” that spoofed abstinence-only education. The PBS ombudsman dedicated two of his columns to voice his opposition to the firing of Melanie, but her job wasn’t saved. Melanie says there is no lawsuit in sight.

The Technical Virgin parodies were genius and not inappropriate (the videos have all been taken down so far as I can tell, or I’d link them). Martinez’ firing is on par with that schoolteacher who was fired for taking a class to a museum where a nude statue was seen. This statue:

© Thomas Hawk

Ooooh, yeah, baby. Can’t you just feel the prurient interests being piqued?

Feel free to sign the petition to PBS about Martinez, though she’s already been replaced.

What the hell is this country coming to?

Up to a million cluster bomblets discharged by Israel in its conflict with Hezbollah remain unexploded in southern Lebanon, the UN has said.

The UN’s mine disposal agency says about 40% of the cluster bombs fired or dropped by Israel failed to detonate – three times the UN’s previous estimate.

It says the problem could delay the return home of about 200,000 displaced people by up to two years.

The devices have killed 14 people in south Lebanon since the August truce.

They’re the same as unexploded mines, particularly in urban environments. Don’t believe me? Ask the Lebanese kids who think the bombs are toys and are dying for their curiosity.

When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun.

Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object. Sukna picked it up. The terrifying blast flung her to the ground, thrusting metal shards into her liver. Hassan’s abdomen was cut open. Merwa was hit in the leg and arm.

“We thought it was just a little ball,” said Hassan with a hoarse whisper in the intensive care ward at Tyre’s Jabal Amel hospital. In the next bed Sukna, a ventilator cupped to her mouth and a tangle of tubes from her arms, said even less.

House approves Iran Freedom Support Act

The House voted Thursday to impose mandatory sanctions on entities that provide goods or services for Iran’s weapons programs. The vote came as U.S diplomats continued to press the U.N. Security Council to penalize Tehran if it fails to end its uranium enrichment program.

House sponsors of the Iran Freedom Support Act said they had hoped for Senate action as early as Thursday night, sending it to President Bush for his signature. But they said there was resistance from Senate Democrats to passing it without a debate.

The bill, passed by a voice vote, sanctions any entity that contributes to Iran’s ability to acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The president has the authority to waive those sanctions, but only when he can show that it is in the vital national interest.

Reading the article, my question is – if these are codifying the sanctions in place for the last 27 years… why now? Why voice vote only? What possible reason could you have for creating a false urgency for a situation that will be at least 10 years in the making?

This totally doesn’t remind me of the runup to Iraq. At all. For one, they’re not releasing bullshit “intelligence” leaks of the DANGER we are in. Where are the anthrax-spraying drones/barnstormers?

Shit, if we’re going to nuke a country without pretext, causus belli, a declaration of war, or any rational justification, at least give me a fucking show.

EUROPEAN scientists voiced shock today as they viewed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe’s most northerly outpost to the North Pole.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice – thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer – had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said:

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions in the international community over any possible safety concerns, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

”If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. ”(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

The Air Force has funded research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service isn’t likely to spend more money on development until injury issues are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

The fact that he even consider this a viable testing procedure is absolutely apolling.
Where’s the sanctity of being a citizen of the United States of America?

Civil liberties, we don’t need no stinking civil liberties.
The Military Industrial Complex is out of frigging control to even suggest such a test!
Corporate Facism in full bloom I’m sorry to say!

American terrorism is alive and well it appears!

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