A Carlin routine pilfered from the excellent JuanCole.com

' I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that.

There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.

That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we're up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.'

*******

A whole barrage of things to click around on. I am not sure whether there is any order to this chaos, but it should lead you to some interesting areas.

Antiwar.com and its many commentators:

Don't Wait for World War III- by Justin Raimondo

Truthdig - Reports - The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was

Zionism's Dead End - by Jonathan Cook

Antiwar.com Blog · GOP Rep. Gilchrest on Iran Sanctions Bill

Antiwar.com Blog · Greenwald Challenges Obama and Olbermann

Remaking the Middle East - by Philip Giraldi

Change We Can Believe In? - by Charles Peña

Can the Air Force Be Reformed? - by Ivan Eland

Turning the Recurring Joke of a New European Defense Policy into Reality - by Doug Bandow

Return of the Reds - by Nebojsa Malic

The Media Did Fail Us - by Alan Bock

The Supreme Court Gets One Right - by David R. Henderson

The US and China:<br /> Unsettling Similarities - by Sascha Matuszak

Meanwhile, Keith Olbermann pivots on a dime to support the Telecom Orwellian Bailout, which I think technically makes it a DoubleThink Double Bank shot:

Keith Olbermann's reply and Obama's secret plan to protect the rule of law - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Keith Olbermann: Then and now - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Some new tasty docs on WTC7 came out. However I will warn you that one of the docs has a Word Macro in it, which might be a virus or something: If you dare: Index of /WTC7Report

Leaked NIST Docs: "Unusual" Event Before Collapse Of WTC 7

9/11 First Responder Heard WTC 7 Demolition Countdown

YouTube - The Third Tower 1/2

YouTube - World Exclusive: WTC7 Survivor Barry Jennings Account

Ray McGovern on the Alex Jones show warns of "false flag attack" and possible nuclear strikes on Iran | 911blogger.com

shocked! Shocked at all this heroin, i tell you!

AmericanDrugWar's blog | 911blogger.com

Shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Afghanistan drug trade hits $4 billion a year | theage.com.au

YouTube - The Post-9/11 Afghan Heroin Explosion

The military-industrial-congressional-complex: Report Shows Lawmakers Heavily Invested in War

More miscellany:

Daily Kos: The neuroscience of false beliefs

Firedoglake » Fed’s Credibility “Below Zero”

MI5 spy quits over scandal | Herald Sun

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - Military operation launched in Khyber Agency

Talking Points Memo | Pentagon: Taliban a resilient force in Afghanistan

Further evidence that Capitol Hill Democrats are dragging their feet: TPM | Conyers Finally Subpoenas DOJ For Documents

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs featuring Firedoglake lady Hamsher and Libertarian prez. candidate Bob Barr!

Ruthless Reviews.Com: Where Pornographers Debate Nihilists About Pop Culture

TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Sen. Norm Coleman Rents Cheap Crash Pad From Political Pal

Le Téléprésident: Sarkozy tightens his grip over French state TV | World news | The Guardian

American Buddha Online Library and Western Cultural Bazaar (American Buddhism)

YouTube - DoZo

Some notes on the doomed media industry:Source is Romanesko, who knows what's up! Poynter Online - Romenesko

Firedoglake » Max Frankel’s Ghost

reduction in force - a set on Flickr <- MUST SEE!

Is Lara Logan being smeared for her criticism of Iraq war coverage | Philly | 06/26/2008

Alhurra Paid Former White House Aides, Washington Journalists - ProPublica

Alhurra, ProPublica, Media Ethics and Me - David Corn

globeandmail.com: I killed Tim Russert (on Wikipedia)

Poynter Online - Forums Sam Zell's comments on CNBC

Recovering Journalist: Death of Almost 1,000 Cuts

Etaoin Shrdlu: Time is the fire in which we burn

Ed Asner Reintroduces "Lou Grant" and Talks Mary Richards, The Media & More (Fancast: Inside TV)

New AP Stylebook Cuts the 'Malarkey,' Brings in the 'WMD'

The Courant To Make Deep Cuts, 'Reinvent' Paper -- Courant.com
New-Media Focus Splits Associated Press Members - WSJ.com

They're brill on Fleet St. - The Boston Globe
Poynter Online - Forums Hartford Courant details staff, content cuts

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching

Non-profit Groups Financing Independent Journalism | Online NewsHour | June 24, 2008 | PBS
Intern or Die

Meet the make-believe strategists of TV - Politico.com
To Our Readers - washingtonpost.com
techPresident – Open Systems, Closed Systems and Trauma in the Press
The Beachwood Reporter The [Tuesday] Papers
Awkward Questions for...Arianna Huffington - Media Blog - Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Portfolio.com
At Google, Slow Growth in News Site - NYTimes.comNieman Watchdog > Commentary > I.F. Stone's lessons for Internet journalism
The Official Website of I.F. Stone
I. Lewis Libby Trial - The Washington Back Channel - Max Frankel - New York Times

Firedoglake » FDL Book Salon Welcomes Myra MacPherson: All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone
Dan Froomkin - Washington Journalism on Trial - washingtonpost.com
Firedoglake » Access Journalism  read more »

I noted all this nonsense a while ago: March 27, 2007: New GeoMap; Kremlin warns of "Operation Bite" American attack on Iran April 6? More rumors etc.

The latest twist is that apparently the Democrats agreed to give Bush as much money as they wanted in order to do the "U.S. Covert - BALUCHIS" attack detailed on this sketch here. At roughly the time of my post, actually!

April 4, 2007: Iran paranoia, covert war escalates; Tensions rise as Persian Gulf fills with carriers, media crews, tribal revolts; US Air Force buzzes infiltrated Iranian Khuzestan

At that time we had the excellent "Approximate Covert Crisis GeoMap: Shitstorm 2007:

April 8, 2007: Jundullah: Baluchi ally of the United States... And Al Qaeda... in covert Iran war.

Since those heady days, I haven't had too much to say about the Baluchi pawn situation. However, the drums of war have continued and my tasty diagrams are as accurate as last year. Both the CIA-sponsored tribal uprisings and the Mujahideen el-Khalq actions are going forth accordingly.

At least, that's what good ol Seymour Hersh has divined from his vast array of establishment sources, who generally seem quite frightened of the alternate chains of command that Dick Cheney has built up from his office.

Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Pay very close attention to this part, kiddos, because herein lies the primary potential source of a cataclysmic Iran war: the "small group" at the White House who are developing an alternate chain of command.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

There you have it. This is huge. Bigger than the usual British-style strategy of renting local warlords like the Baluchis. Also duly noted:

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

I have zero faith in any element of America's political class to even understand what is happening, let alone get some degree of control over these covert operations, ever escalating and widening out into the aggressive galaxy of contractors and militant baby boomers, all set in motion on their own, partitioned even from the regional American military commanders.

When even the President's direct regional commander, General Fallon, couldn't find out what the fuck Special Forces are actually doing, then by definition we have a serious and insane war conspiracy unfolding.

And for now, that is basically all I can say.

Many of our choice links this afternoon come from Cryptome.org, Antiwar.com, Cryptogon.com and PrisonPlanet.com. All of these websites are only for the bad kids! They will soon be censored in the upcoming plan to kill the Internet!!

******

A lot of people are saying angry things about Tim Russert now that he's no longer with us. I thought that was not appropriate on the day he expired, but as we look back it seems pretty clear that Russert was a committed defender of the establishment status quo, generally an uncritical promoter of the war, and never really accounted for the huge and systemic distortions within his own media purview that led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands. Perhaps he would have recanted some of the stuff later, but now he'll never have the chance.

I have to steal this one paragraph from Electric Politics, which is a fine site:

Electric Politics | An Irish Flack:

For in reality, Russert practiced evasion and obfuscation, replacing real news with pap. He was no teller of great truths, no champion of the powerless, no voice of conscience. To the contrary, he diligently enforced the status quo. Sure, he was a nice guy. And he had a gift for handicapping political races. But the agitation surrounding his passing marks less his admirable qualities than his failings: without his happy face the establishment media may now more easily be seen for the toxic parasites that they are. Their exaggerated grieving serves the grievers, not the man. It would be better to remember Tim Russert without memorializing the system.

******Another subject Russert would never dream of touching: Fun video of Ben Bernanke @ Bilderberg!

Bilderbergers Leave Confab To Initiate Fresh Ordersand Castrated U.S. Media Remains Obediently Silent On Bilderberg. Ouch - gendered language! Suspicion Surrounds Governor's Mansion Fire, why not! Secret Bilderberg Agenda To Microchip Americans Leaked and Iran Threatened After Gates Bilderberg Visit

******
Good times...******Some spy stuff: Spy Legal Reference Book from the government.
******Gore Vidal doubts McCain's story, and talks some smack! Questions For Gore Vidal - Literary Lion - Questions For Gore Vidal - Deborah Solomon - Interview - NYTimes.com

And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?

Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s what he tells us.

Why would you doubt him? He’s a graduate of Annapolis. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed. Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.

So what does that have to do with the U.S. Naval Academy down in Annapolis? The service universities keep track of each other, that’s all. They have views about each other. And they are very aware of social class and eventually money, since they usually marry it.

.....What do you think is your own best novel? I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.

Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.

*******

French Government decides to censor the Internet - The INQUIRER

Feds, Denver attempt to keep DNC security info secret - Colorado Independent - News you can't find anywhere else

MadCowMorningNews: CIA "Ghost" Planes Hidden in Cayman Isles Trusts? Hell yeah!

Cool t-shirt? be+cause clothing :: SHOOTING WAR T-SHIRT

******

I have been looking a bit @ The Memory Hole, although it seems like the site is not getting any fresh content lately. Consider: Justice Dept: 2006 Forfeiture and Money-Laundering Manuals, List of CIA Inspector General Investigations, FBI File: Edward Said, "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," aka The Kerry Report Transcripts, Pfizer's Chemical/Biological Weapons Report and a compendium of some well-cited 9/11 stuff, if that's your thing.

******

Some type of coverup here: Smugglers Had Design For Advanced Warhead. This seems to involve the other nuclear smuggling network - i.e. the guys that Valerie Plame's team was after. Scooter Libby's secret friends, the people Sibel Edmonds was tracing, Turkish spies, Marc Grossman, and so forth...

******

Mainstream politics: Mr NeoCon End of History Fukuyama backs Obama for US presidency

Ron Paul's own convention coming to Minneapolis!

Op-Ed Columnist - Frank Rich - Do Angry Clinton Women Love McCain? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Satire: Ex-Nickelodeon Stars Relate Horrors Of Green Slime Syndrome | The Onion

YouTube - You Can't Do That On Television - Marketing 1 (of 3)

******

Good news from Supreme Court, which said that all these Guantanamo show trials are garbage! Emptywheel » Revenge of Article III

War Powers - Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President - NYTimes.com

******

Cryptome duly notes: Very naughty judge! Unfortunately, 9th Circuit Federal Judge Alex Kozinski (a Reagan appointee) put a bunch of hilarious files onto alex.kozinski.com and never bothered to lock the front door. (Muckrakers on it.) Unfortunately, he is indeed the cool kind of judge who has gone to bat blocking dumb Internet filters, and stuff like that. Here's the directory listing: Judge Alex Kozinski Stuff Directory

Cryptome also has the latest suspicious bureaucracies emitted from Homeland Security: National Infrastructure Protection Plan Review

and the equally dubious Interactive Data To Improve Financial Reporting... items like this tend to come from the Federal Register, which is where the Executive Branch declares what random things its doing without any control from the Legislative Branch.

Cryptome even has an interesting thing about the Secret Service and how they keep their hands in a kind of upper position, which could come from the Crav Maga or Aikido martial arts schools.

******

Antiwar.com notes! Iran Accusations Merit Skepticism - by Philip Giraldi. There's good stuff in here from the Intel side - how the news manipulations are sallying forth, etc.

The Cult of the Presidency - by Doug Bandow

Iraqis don't feel like getting colonized under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA): The Revolt of the Liberated- by Justin Raimondo

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - US missile strike kills one in S Waziristan

The blueprint for Forward Base America

******

News from Cryptogon.com. Also i strongly recommend Kevin's other site, Farmlet.co.nz, which is all about life on the farm in New Zealand!

Bank in crisis as shares collapse | theage.com.au - Aussie investment bank about to shatter

The computer is acting a little wonky so I'll leave it at that. Have a good Father's Day, everyone!

Actually I'm impressed. The list of articles of impeachment are well-chosen, and all very well-documented. Huzzah! Right now we're following it on C-SPAN, getting read aloud!

Even includes the PSYOPS of the war propaganda campaign - and the 9/11 coverup. Not bad at all!

Download it here: as a PDF

Rep. Kucinich calls for Bush impeachment | Reuters

All the supporting documents: Congressman Dennis Kucinich

What a nice list of articles: thanks to these guys: Krazy Kuncinich Offers Articles of Impeachment on GW Bush (With Text of Impeachment Articles) Updated with Video

Article I
Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II
Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V
Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI
Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII
Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII
Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX
Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X
Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI
Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII
Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources

Article XIIII
Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV
Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV
Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI
Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII
Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII
Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX
Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX
Imprisoning Children

Article XXI
Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII
Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII
Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV
Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV
Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI
Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII
Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII
Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX
Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX
Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI
Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII
Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII
Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV
Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV
Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

******

Duly noted. It was important to get this on the record, even if the mainstream Dems don't care. It's all very well cited and certainly worthy of any politician to stand on.

In any case, you could campaign against all of these articles, in talking-point form. They're quite well-worded, and I have to hand it to the clever wordsmiths that put this beast together.

Unfortunately, in our system of government the actual impeachment system is a mess - and there's really very little way for the legislative branch to chip away at patently awful leaders.

On the other hand, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Senate blocked Lt. Gov. Molnau's confirmation as Transportation Commissioner. So you've got a bit more chutzpah around these parts.

How will Obama change the structure of the Democratic Party: is it progressive or autocratic? Etc??! Matt Stoller: Obama's Consolidation of the Party - Politics on The Huffington Post and The Obama Squeeze | The Agonist.

Meanwhile over @ No Quarter they are pretty grumpy b/c they've been in the Hillary camp for a dang long time: I Call a Spade a Spade : NO QUARTER

PSYOPS update: here's your raw data: John Stauber: Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online: But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

News of the Pentagon's online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times "limited information about a military office early in the reporting process."

Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all."

Keep running the airtight ship, guys!

Meanwhile, General Electric didn't have a dog in that media game, did they? Hmmm.... The Raw Story | Chris Matthews: MSNBC bosses were 'basically pro-war'

As previously noted on this website, the Pentagon has had an extensive agenda to manipulate mainstream media in order to promote the war, via PSYOPS strategies that make the American population a "strategic" target for brain spoofing. Controlling elite opinion and mass ideas has been the big picture, which is prety obvious. But actually reading all those strategic emails about how to spoof the news via 'military analysts' is another matter altogether.

This was reported in the New York Times and then obviously deleted from the A-story media agenda because it raises too many questions about news oversight and industry-wide management practices.

Meanwhile the paranoid thread digs parallel concerns: Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet with exciting new systems designed to help the powers that be do... something.

It is not a surprise: the Pentagon's ever-expanding system of total rationality would see the off-message resistance to the war agenda as a kind of distributed evil/terrorist network. Ensuring the primacy of war and top-down information control as the organizing principles of our 21st century society would be a primary goal. True? Probably, even if the various individual humans in the system can't actually see or understand this.

WIRED adds: What's Up with the Secret Cybersecurity Plans, Senators Ask DHS | Threat Level from Wired.com

Why might citizens be worried about privacy and civil liberties? Consider that the whole initiative appears to have been launched after the Director of National Intelligence told the President Bush that a cyber attack might wreak as much economic havoc as 9/11 did.

Consider that the NSA, which currently protects classified networks, wants to expand into protecting all non-classified federal government networks. Consider that Congress is set to legalize the NSA's monitoring rooms in the nation's phone and internet infrastructure.

For its part, the FBI says it also needs access to the internet's backbone, while the Air Force is hyping its own efforts at cyber defense and offense. Meanwhile, THREAT LEVEL's sister blog Danger Room reports that DARPA is getting in on the hot cyber-action, with a project to make a fake internet to develop new cyber attacks and defenses.

It's been said many times that if the government knew what the internet was going to become when it grew up, they would had never let it out of the lab.

Now it seems the only question is whether the government will be able to turn the net into a controllable, monitorable and trackable pre-internet AOL-type service or whether the chaotic net will live on as just another frontier for the military-industrial complex to start an arm's race and rake in billions of government dollars.

Meanwhile the paranoia side also blames the schemes of the Bilberberg Group for the gas pump disaster. I'd say, well, this kind of thing wouldn't surprise me anymore. Goldman Sachs: Bilderberg Target Of $200 Dollar Oil Nears.

And why not some more stuff: Military and Homeland Security Dictate Who Lives And Who Dies In A Pandemic

Rational Annihilation. Of ideas, sick old people, whatever. The ominous specters continue, and blog posts go up apace....

Antiwar.com Blog · Did Israelis Leak New Spy Info to Thwart War?

Things in the Middle East are always too thoroughly linked together, backwards, forwards, each way through the hall of mirrors. And it's going to be the traditional 'summer fightin' months' all around the region soon enough.

Deadlock in Afghanistan, Negotiations in Pakistan | The Agonist

There's a certain preamble of mega-spin going on right now. Hillary makes these weird statements about obliterating Iran, and McCain is chuckling all the way to the Big Red Button.

As usual, the rationality of the Baby Boomer generation drifts towards paranoia, incoherence, rage and infinite debt. Whether or not the American people get it together and block the Middle East mega-war from blowing up out of control seems to be the big question.

Iran gets blamed for killing American soldiers occupying Iraq. Not surprisingly, the guys selling this line never acknowledge that the arms market is quite a free market over in Iraq, with many busy arms dealers working all directions. And people are buying weapons that come from Iran. Is that some kind of surprise? "FREE MARKET WEAPONS FOR IRAQ: ALWAYS PLENTY OF DEALS!" That's a motto which the Iranians should try... Then remind everyone which country is importing the most weapons into Iraq, handing them over to parties unknown...

British dealers supply arms to Iran: The Observer

As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of extra buzz about possible American conflict with Iran in the news (after cooling for a couple months prior).

Is War With Iran Imminent?- by Justin Raimondo

A couple weeks ago, the story from last fall about the mysterious Israeli bombing of a purported nuclear-or-something site in Syria came back strong into the news: exciting tidbits that the North Koreans were propagating some nuclear research at the Syrian location. Very exciting stuff for the news.

For example, Stratfor.com is all over this case and its exciting murkiness:

What is important to note is this information is not new. It is a confirmation of the story leaked by the administration shortly after the attack and also leaked by the Israelis a bit later. The explanation for the attack was that it was designed to take out a reactor in Syria that had been built with North Korean help. There are therefore three questions. First, why did the United States go to such lengths to reveal what it has been saying privately for months? Second, why did the administration do it now? Third, why is the United States explaining an Israeli raid using, at least in part, material provided by Israel? Why isn’t Israel making the revelation?

It has never been clear to us why the Israelis and Americans didn’t immediately announce that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor. Given American hostility toward Syria over support for jihadists in Iraq, we would have thought that they would have announced it instantly. The explanation we thought most plausible at the time was that the intelligence came from the North Koreans in the course of discussions of their nuclear technology, and since the North Koreans were cooperating, the United States didn’t want to publicly embarrass them. It was the best we could come up with.

The announcement on Thursday seems to debunk that theory, at least to the extent that the primary material displayed was U.S. satellite information and the Israeli video, which was said to have been used to convince the United States of the existence of the reactor and of North Korean involvement. So why didn’t the administration condemn Syria and North Korea on Sept. 7? It still seems to us that part of the explanation is in the state of talks with North Korea over its own program. The North Koreans had said that they would provide technical information on their program — which they haven’t done. Either the United States lost its motivation to protect North Korean feelings because of this or the Bush administration felt that Thursday’s briefings would somehow bring pressure to bear on North Korea. Unless the United States is planning to use these revelations as justification for attacks on the North Koreans, we find it difficult to see how this increases pressure on them.

More interesting is the question of why the United States — and not Israel — is briefing on an Israeli raid. Israeli media reported April 23 that the Israelis had asked the Americans not to brief Congress. The reason given was that the Israelis did not want the United States to embarrass Syria at this point. As we noted on April 23, there appeared to have been some interesting diplomatic moves between Syria and Israel, and it made sense that revealing this information now might increase friction.

Meanwhile another more original story got lost in the sea of buzz: some old defense engineer, 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish, got caught by the FBI stealing secret documents from his top secret research lab during his career, and has admitted everything. Antiwar.com broke that to me:

Pollard's Ghost- by Justin Raimondo. Check this out for a well-linked background in the case, though I'm not totally sold on Raimondo's spin...

Kadish would smuggle out the papers, photograph them, send 'em over to his foreign spy handler, and bring them back to the lab, no one the wiser. A pretty classic scheme which should have gotten a bit of news bounce in the War on Terror, but of course it didn't. The engineer was passing secrets to Israel. Uff da...

This raises the question of how big the Israeli espionage thingy really gets. It's a big question especially since two AIPAC officers are supposed to go on trial this summer for circulating secrets between neo-con Pentagon staffer Lawrence "Larry" Franklin and the Mossad officers over at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

In the Fed's case for this "big" AIPAC scandal, everyone pretty much got caught red-handed, so the AIPAC defense strategy appears to be "graymailing" the Justice Department into disclosing all kinds of classified stuff. (The idea is that the feds' tummies turn sour and they give up because they don't want to cough up the docs. This is the traditional strategy DC lawyers for Oliver North / Elliot Abrams type guys use to get their guys off the hook in scandals like Iran-Contra.)

But let's go back to the beginning of the "big" AIPAC scandal. How did it start? The FBI was already spying on the AIPAC officers when Franklin wandered up to them at a DC restaurant. The Feds already wanted AIPAC on espionage. Why? The short speculative answer: the FBI has continuously been looking for a high-level spy/mole known by code name MEGA.

MEGA was the secret guy somewhere in the U.S. government in the 1980s who (among other things) provided extremely secret document numbers to the Israelis. In turn, the Israelis sent a more disposable spy, Jonathan Pollard, the low-level Pentagon staffer, as a gofer to get the documents. Pollard got caught; he's still in a U.S. jail. (There's a rumor Bush might pardon him, ugh). MEGA never got caught. So we could speculate that officially the FBI was looking to see if MEGA sends AIPAC messages, enter Franklin accidentally.

Ok ok... this is pretty baroque spy stuff. Why did this engineer get exposed? How did the FBI catch him? Well, they got a tip. A tip from somewhere in Israel.

Reportedly, someone in Ehud Olmert's government tipped off the FBI about the engineer spy because they wanted to prevent the expanding middle east war. In other words, an Israeli exposed an old engineer spy in order to damage the neocons / hawks' chances of ginning up the war with Iran.

Old school ex-CIA dude Phil Giraldi spilled it:

"Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau's opening of a full investigation. One source reports that the National Security Agency was provided with Yosef Yagur's current phone number and address and was able to obtain corroborating information on the case by tapping the phone."

It was interesting to read that, in a change-up, some Israeli military officials would not brief the U.S. Congress about the big bad Muslim threats because the Congress would now grill them over that just-exposed Israeli espionage.

Sounds like a good time to put out some fun stories about evil Syrians and bombing their weird shacks of shadiness.

Interesting stuff I suppose... If you're into that kind of thing. Beyond that, there is of course the Sibel Edmonds scandal, which involves a certain network of nuclear secrets traffickers, intersecting with heroin and Washington lobbyists, or something.

Someone speculated that MEGA was really Marc Grossman, a longterm DC hack who is certainly in well over his head on this scandal. Grossman also has been rumored to have tipped off the Turks and Pakistanis that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, was really a CIA front. But he got caught on an FBI wiretap which Sibel Edmonds probably had to listen to, while she worked there.

So there is that angle. Good luck figuring it out, kids! There's a good chance this stuff will get some sunlight during the summer. I'll drink to that!!

********

Some more awkward PR that had to get drowned out: Carter calls Gaza blockade a crime and atrocity | World | Reuters

"Countless people will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it."
--HG Wells - "The New World Order" (1939). This quote opens the flick.

The rich are going to kill everyone, then try to merge with technology and live forever!!!1!!! w0000

Get ready for the Internet Paranoia Movie of the Season, everyone! Texas loud guy Alex Jones has just released Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement! And it's free to copy on the Internet: Get the Word out against the New World Order!! etc!!!

Basically, it goes through history, looking at various evil empires that dominated and killed the masses all along the way. Combine eugenics, false-flag terror, war financing, and the big NWO scheme, confronted by a loud Texas guy with a bullhorn. Result: Pretty good stuff!

There are some fun guerilla video adventures: Jones turns up at the mysterious Bilderberg Group meeting in Ottowa, wherein the Evil Schemers plot their stuff. Jim Tucker, crusading Bilderberg watcher in cowboy hat, knows the ways around their devious schemes. They catch numerous officials, including George Pataki (of the Patakilluminati) violating the Logan Act by meeting in secret with foreign politicians. (someday we gotta nail the neocons with Logan. More later on that).

A major element is how the Global New World Order Microsoft McDonalds Dictatorship will create regional super-governments. First the European Union. Makes the point that the African Union is really the gendarme force of the NWO in Africa. The Asian Union and North American Union are examined. Secret plans for the SPP - Security and Prosperity Partnership - are revealed for all. Secret summits plotting the merging of military and trade, so that more goods may flood into the USA via Mexico from Asia.

Crusty old Texans bitch about how they're going to kill the New World Order and its Trans Texas Corridor schemes first of all. RFID tags will be installed on your car to tax you for the global empire - just like the Romans!

Modern China is the test case for the New World Order, the laboratory if you will. Organ harvesting of prisoners and other total Capitalism police state elements are examined in jarring detail (as is David Rockefeller's enthusiasm for Mao).

Technological sophistication and the secret history of eugenics are examined with great care. An Aldous Huxley clip where he talks about how the "Brave New World" plan was basically real, combined with an ugly Texas bureaucrat explaining how the foster kids need to be pumped full of drugs because they come from a bad gene pool. Excellent work! Margaret Sanger's eugenics schemes financed by the Rockefellers - that's really the nut of it. Points out that the big environmental groups are purchasing all the land, perhaps intending to depopulate rural America, but don't give a damn about genetic engineering.

Lastly, probably my favorite element (besides the choice quotes from Kissinger et al about Total Depopulation of the Third World) was how trans-humanist New Age hippiedom with the synthetic cyborg stuff fits into the Big Plan. The rich are going to kill 80% of everyone, then try to merge with technology and live forever!

Carbon trading is just there to kill the middle class and finance the elite schemes. Police forces and the military are recruiting foreigners to repress the domestic population. Etc!

Well that's about it. I have to say, I was impressed. The visual trimmings are the most sophisticated Jones has released. He doesn't ever bother to even say that 9/11 was staged by the Secret Government, which of course has been his bread and butter for a while. Instead, Jones takes a step back, and his core point is that "Governments are more likely to kill people than anyone else. The elite always do this shit!" Fair enough, sir.

I have been worrying about Rationalized Annihilation for quite a while. Living in these times of war, extreme annihilationist ideologies are very chic. Look at TV for a bit, or listen to the corporate talk radio. People that make a lot of money are telling you to kill, and everyone else to kill.

Say what you will about Alex Jones: he is definitely against the perpetual war agenda, and it takes a guy like him to run around and yell at "those guys", the rich and shady cats that have been fucking everything up.

Better yet: It's free! Legally!

Take a look at your typical BitTorrent sites for downloadable/DVD burnable versions. Also posted on Google Video, but it's too chunky on parts with text. Here is the promo copy:

For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest wars—creating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

* Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.

* Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.

* Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.

* View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union

Here it is on Google Video: it's two hours long though, I would make a new window and so forth, or find a sharper download somewhere:

All right Alex, way to fuck up the program. Go have a margarita or something, just relax a bit before you get an embolism, dude!

There is no doubt that this is somehow related to an unprecedented number of categories!! Haha!

No doubt about that! You can purchase a linked slice of one freakin awesome image map. Most assuredly, if you follow all the links on this page, you will surely find the Ultimate Truth until the Black Helicopters come and take you away!!

Visit conpix.thegatekeepers.biz today, and find out the secrets which only the awesome wall of links may tell you!! They gots a blog too!

People are asking me if the war in Iran is going to start on the 15th of October. Well, I answer, in the 4th generation warfare sense, it already has started..... Seymour Hersh's latest missive must be read. Now it's 'counterterrorism' with the Republican Guard. Joe Lieberman practically tried to start the war last week. Fuckin A. The new war messaging. The whole bit... Goddamn... Goddamn...

Daily dimension of Minnesota conspiratoria: Jesse Ventura questions 9/11 and compares it to the JFK assassination:

Fourth dimension of power: your partisan bickering, removed: This Modern World. Obvious statements: Boondocks is teh awesome. Doonesbury too.

OpenCircuit, a new Twin Cities tech collective concept. Related: MinneDemo: DemoCamp Minnesota.

Yong Ho from the Macalester days has a sweet trilingual website.

AIR is a new Adobe app platform (Like Java). You can do your GoogleAnalytics through it. Didn't seem to have much advantage over the web way though.

OpenDNS is a nifty new DNS management service. Get rid of those "looking up website....." delays by getting better DNS! Bonus for businesses and fundies: it can filter porn too!

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This is a great long summary, the major sectors of the book distilled so you can better understand the IMF/Pinochet/supercapitalist doom mode, seen everywhere from Katrina to Iraq. And how are people are building "shock absorbers" into their local societies in order to thrive once more. A powerful argument against the dying 'Washington consensus' of exploitative trade and debt slavery economics. Much more useful as an analytic frame than most things these days.

Alternatives to the conventional 'crazy talk': Icarus, community alternatives for mental illness.

Cool stuff: Free Speech TV and Keynote: Jeremy Scahill on his new "Blackwater" book, and something called Conspiracy Theory Rock.

Wall Street Journal fantasyland, convinced $100 barrels of oil wouldn't kill the economy. Dangerous groupthink from on high, and Mr. Murdoch's property working nicely: How Economy Could Survive $100 Oil.

Good for secrets and such: cryptogon.com.

Retired CIA analysts spell out the mideast gig: The Teflon Alliance with Israel. (Counterpunch rules)

A selection of interesting stuff from the Agonist, one of my favorite sites:

The Hope In Weakness (Morality II) | The Agonist

The Land of Cotton: Uzbekist@n, Not Dixie and East Germany on the Amu Darya: Ubzekist@n.

Blackwater Woes: More Elite than Our Military? and Blackwater, The Privatization of War And Public Enemy Number One.

Old Folks In the US Unhealthier Than Europeans. A LOT Unhealthier.

Morality | The Agonist

Air War: Target Iran! | The Agonist

That's all for now kiddos. Go read Hersh if you didn't already.

Ah shit: Sarkozy calls for UN-led 'new world order':

The United Nations should avail itself as an instrument for a "new world order of the 21st century," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday in his first address to the General Assembly. Sarkozy, who won the presidency this year on a strong reform platform to modernize France, urged the world body to embark on programmes ranging from equal wealth distribution to fighting corruption in his speech full of references to France's past revolutionary ideals.

Jacobin Commie! Yikes!! The Neo Con New World Order etc. w00000!!11!!!

An ugly scenario: World War III: What World War III May Look Like - by Philip Giraldi - a former Intelligence officer:

The United States uses a neutron-type bomb against the main Iranian nuclear research center at Natanz, which it had already bombed conventionally and destroyed. It vows to bomb again if Iran continues to resist. Iran is defiant and fires another wave of Silkworms at U.S. ships, sinking one. Suicide bombers hit U.S. targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia and China place their nuclear forces on high alert. Pakistani militants take over parliament, aided by radical elements in the army and the intelligence service. India launches a preemptive strike against the main Pakistani nuclear centers at Wah and Multan, where the country's arsenal is believed to be concentrated. Pakistan has hidden some of its nukes elsewhere, however, and is able to strike back by bombing New Delhi. World War III has begun.

Someone said recently that this stuff with total NSA surveillance and paramilitary Blackwater insanity looks like Baron Hausmann's reorganization of Paris: the creation of new forms and institutions that aren't really helpful against Islamic terrorists, but quite useful against violent domestic insurrections. Haussmann built those big Parisian avenues so that revolt organizers couldn't blockade parts of the city. Saddam took a page from this when rebuilding Baghdad...

Seems too true. And all the damn compasses keep pointing that way. The fascist shift, the real deal.......

Classic colonial powers in Iraq:

Here is the legal framework on that. More from Prof. Juan Cole:

A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing 'extra-territoriality' on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can't have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.

The argument about whether Cheney/Bush went into Iraq over petroleum is not interesting. Of course they did, one way or another. The question is what exactly they thought they were doing about Iraq's petroleum. I would argue that they threw public resources (perhaps as much as two trillion dollars worth when all is said and done) to secure profits for private companies.

Fake terror threat manipulates Congress to further spy powers: The insanity continues as Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) claims that "bogus" intelligence claims were bandied about by the White House in order to get the extension of spy powers. Here you have a legislative example of the classic fear "staged war on terror" dynamic. It's all right here.

When did the dissing of generals start? Right wing noxious fumers like Jonah Goldberg have been ripping on generals since quite a while ago: VAPAHS!!!

Hence, in any case, conventional wisdom will always be happy if Republicans More Happy With the "Democratic" Congress than Democrats.

Dan Rather: the video producer, Mary Mapes, who got nailed by some kind of repackaged info bomb, thinks Dan Rather's big lawsuit is courageous. Mary Mapes: Courage for Dan Rather.

The Drugging of our children: Someone made a video, mainly about ADHD and pumping the kids' heads full of psychotropic social control agents. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's by someone named Gary Null (Google Video), who seems to have some other weird offbeat medical videos on Google Video.

AT&T going to tap the Internet & scan to catch your bad movies: Slashdot carried the story that:

Save the Internet writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the MPAA is trying to convince major ISPs to do content filtering. Now, merely wanting it is one thing, but the more important point is that 'AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future.' We're left to wonder about the legal implications of that, but given that AT&T already has the ability to wiretap everything for the NSA, it was only a matter of time before they found a way to profit from it, too."

The chic TASER police state: Andrew Meyer was that kid at the Kerry rally tagged for no particular reason (though of course it's not safe to suggest elections are rigged in Florida, let alone mention secret societies