They just issued a warning that Al Qaeda is trying to boost efforts in U.S.
Let’s be clear there is no policy apparatus with Bush and His Evil Minions™, there is only a political one, so the only question is not whether this is true or not, that is irrelevant, but what they are trying to frighten people into supporting this time.
It looks like Bush will be getting what he wants on the wiretap bill. All reports are that the Democrats are caving.
It looks like telco indemnification is in, as is broad warrants that allow the state security apparatus to listen in to American conversations as long as the Americans are not specifically targeted.
The biggest knock that Republicans have on Democrats is that they have no guts, and now, the reports that “Many members continue to fear that if they don’t support whatever the president asks for, they’ll be perceived as soft on terrorism,” from a national security expert won’t help that.
The Democrats were elected to stop Bush, and they should realize that, particularly in this case, it’s the right thing to stop Bush, and it is to their political advantage.
The can do the right thing, and benefit politically. All they need is some guts.
Cowards.
They are currently getting parlimentary permission to do so.
So the only stable area in Iraq is about to get invaded. Great.
Harry Reid has assured the brokerage people that their commissions will continue to be treated as capital gains, reality be damned.
Reid is apparently arguing that he cannot get it past the Republicans, but making the ‘Phants vote for a ludicrous tax break for people percieved as hyper-rich cheats is a winning political strategy.
Stupid.
One wonders when how long it’s going to take until the voting public demands real reform from the Democrats.
My, guess is that it will be a while, as nary a week passes without some Republicans getting caught soliciting sex, taking bribes, molesting children, etc.
SITE Intelligence Group, a small private security firm, got an advanced copy of an Osama bin Laden tape. They tipped the Bush Administration at 10:00am , on the condition that the information not be released in order to protect their sources and mentods.
By mid afternoon of September 7, the tape had been leaked to Fox News.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.
“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.
The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz’s version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government’s ability to anticipate attacks.
Except for the fact that private entities who come across this won’t share the information again, and that SITE’s operation has been more compromised than Brewster Jennings.
They burnt this company, and their intelligence methods, because the Bush administration wanted to get the lead on the news, or frighten Congress into doing what they wanted.
Evil.
I guess that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, this time the clock has stopped to dispell myths about “Sick Old Europe”.
It’s a good article, and much better than what we’ve been led to expect from the Post OP/Ed section.
They are running an ad (see below) taking his quotes from his 1994 debates with Ted Kennedy during his senate run. It sounds like a pro-Romney ad, but it quotes him saying things that will make the right wing dead-enders who are the base of the Republican party hate him.
Of note, he killed himself during the debates with Kennedy for asserting that as a rich man, Kennedy never gave anything up about public service (Except, of course, for his brothers Joe, Jack, and Bobbie), and that he had no experience with regard to the complexities of gun control (except of course for his brothers Jack and Bobbie).
Sounds par for the course from Sony.
Some players will not play the new disks at all, and others take over two minutes to run the disks.
Target firmly painted on foot, Sony scores again.
Though it is tethered and brief, this is the first progress shown in the program Duncan Hunter’s started foisting this off on the Navy over 10 years ago to benefit a campaign contributor.
Somehow, Hunter is being paid off in all this.
Nouriel Roubini’s observations are as follows:
We are in a recession folks (me, not Mr. Roubini speaking).
Paul Krugman has an an interesting commentary on what he calls the return the rentier city, on his blog.
Basically, from a few hundred years ago (yes, I know not technically medieval) and before, the very rich in a city did not make their money there. They had some sort of holdings that generated their money elsewhere, typically hereditary lands, but they lived in the city.
More recently, the rich in the city have made their money in and around that city, through manufacturing, shipping, publishing, etc. Cities have been centers of business, but the rentier city is returning:
But these days, everything old is new again. Today’s Wall Street Journal (sub. Req.) has a story about the sources of London’s current boom: an influx of very wealthy foreigners, whose income comes from elsewhere. Middle Eastern sheiks, Russian beeznessmen, Indian industrialists, have become the backbone of London’s economy. It’s all helped a lot by British tax law, which gives big breaks to people who live in Britain but are “domiciled” elsewhere (don’t ask.)
Local town authorities are, of course, falling all over themselves, on the theory that it benefits the economy.
Personally, I’m of the belief that they are more of a burden than a benefit, as they push the middle class out of the cities, and raise the cost of housing and other services for everyone.
One comment on his post was very interesting, “But it doesn’t amaze me how 21st century America is starting to look like an accelerated rise and fall version of the Roman Empire: outsourcing civil functions, mercenaries, the Patriot Act, and now rentier cities.”
One very stupid, and very lucky man disrupted the decorum of a magistrates court in Australia when his cell phone rang. The ringtone was of a Woman moaning: “Oh, yeah … yeah … oh, yeah … do it to me.”
Were I the judge, he’d have at least have his cell phone confiscated, but the Magistrate was feeling charitable that day.
The gift that keeps on giving. This time, he
forgets who controlled Congress before 2007.
“The president called me up and asked me to help shepherd judge John Roberts’ nomination through the Senate confirmation process. I was honored that I got that call. I was honored that he thought I had enough friends on the Democratic side that they wouldn’t run me out of town!
“We fought hard against each other, but I always thought that we had mutual respect. And that’s what it takes.
“Even though the other party controlled the Judiciary committee, we got some votes there. For a good, sound, what I would call conservative justice.”
This is particularly egregious because he was the Bush point man for getting Roberts through confirmation.
There really seems to be no “there” there.
All in all, this is bad news for the people of Costa Rica, which they will discover as the terms of the agreement systematically dismantle the social protections, particularly their nation health care system, which is going to be gutted like a fish by Pharma.
This highly irregular. Normally, the contract negotiated with the target firm is adopted across the industry.
I can think of two potential things driving this, either the differences between GM and Chrysler are driving significantly different contracts, or Cerberus Capital Management is coming from a very different philosophy on running the company.
If it’s the latter, it means that the private equity firm is intending to flip and flee, which is beyond even the incompetent and crony laden management at GM.
I think that it’s the latter, and that Cerberus wants to treat Chrysler like a chop shop treats a stolen car.
The Public Editor of the New York Times*, Clark Hoyt, just called General David H. Petraeus a liar. He was circumspect, but here is the money quote:
Stephen Biddle, a scholar at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, said Petraeus’s December number was “very high” but was likely the result of “statistical noise” — the tendency of Iraq numbers to jump all over the place. Biddle was an adviser to Petraeus last spring but believes the general’s testimony was “potentially misleading” because it didn’t discuss all the reasons why the numbers might have improved.
He said the best way to analyze statistics from Iraq is to gather all the numbers from all sources and look for broad trends instead of picking isolated points, as Petraeus did. Biddle examined data from nine sources on Iraqi civilian deaths, including the U.S. military, independent organizations like Brookings and Iraq Body Count and four news organizations. Although the specific monthly numbers varied widely, he said they all showed declines since late 2006.
Let’s be clear. The general is not a politician, or a pundit, and his testimony is given under the authority of his rank, and he purposely misled congress. The man is a liar, and a suck-up, at least that is what his boss thinks.
Petraeus used numbers that his numbers guy said were unreliable, because he’s a lying sack of excrement REMF.
*In less pretentious papers, they are called an Ombudsman.
Larry Magid, of Siliconvalley.com, had a dystopian vision a couple of weeks ago, September 26 to be specific.
Two things happened that day:
His vision, and one that I also fear, is one where the wireless carriers, using voice recognition, choose to allow only those communications that they choose over their networks.
When it comes to the two events of Sept. 26, I worry about the misuse of technology similar to what Pudding Media is using. Not only would it be easy to provide transcripts of our calls to authorities, but all calls could be parsed in real time. Say the wrong thing and your call could be interrupted or you could get an immediate visit from some guys with guns in a big sport-utility vehicle.
Such a scenario would not be in the interest of phone companies, and it certainly wouldn’t be tolerated by civil-liberties minded Americans. But based on what I’ve seen since 9/11, I have no doubt some in government and the private sector would love to see this happen.
The mere thought of it is creepy.
It’s more than creepy. It is very, very likely. It’s like some vision of George Orwell or William Gibson, and it’s closer than most of us would like to think.
Even more than its use to arrest dissenters, is its use by folks like Bush and His Evil Minions&trade to blackmail political opponents. It’s Karl Rove’s wet dream, and it’s Verizon’s wet dream too, because they can use the tech to become the advertising conduit for everything.
If property rights for private operators trump civil rights for people, we are already 90% of the way there.
I’d scream, but I have laryngitis (really…chest cold).
Let’s see, first, we have Senator “Wide Stance” being inducted into the Idaho hall of fame, and then we have the male prostitute who outed Ted Haggard says that he met Larry Craig, and finally, Bob “The Traitor” Novak says that the Senate republicans knew about his behavior:
I have talked to several of my sources in the Senate, and this came as a surprise to me…They knew about it. They knew that he had this problem, and it was in the closet. And it was not just a homosexual relationship. It was this weird conduct. They didn’t do anything about it.
It turns out that a few months agoForeign Minister Tzipi Livni said that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel. The article also reports that former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy has similar views.
This is no surprise. Given that any Iranian action would inevitably result in a devastating Israeli counterstrike, some of which would be submarine bases, and hence secure from a first strike, we would be at mutually assured destruction, which worked between the US and the USSR for years.
Additionally, considering the Iranians as Persian, rather than Arab, it would be unusual to expect them to take actions that would result in the destruction of their culture in order to benefit an what is largely an Arab agenda.
There is also an insight into Israeli politics, specifically how Kadima would look to hold onto power with Ariel Sharon:
Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.
I would be very surprised if Kadima were above 3rd place in votes next elections, and I would not be surprised if the losses were stunning. It really is Ariel Sharon’s vanity party, and he is now gone.
So says the GAO, which reports that FCC meeting agendas were leaked to industry stakeholders in advance of their being made public.
This allowed industry players to lobby the FCC prior to the official release of the agenda, after which lobbying is prohibited.
More corruption to shut out public interest by Bush and His Evil Minions™.