Activism

Karl Rove Not Quite Punk’d

Activism, Civil liberties, creative direct action
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A protestor tries, not very hard, to handcuff Karl Rove as he speaks to a convention of mortgage brokers (boo, hiss) in San Francisco:

ABC:

There was major political theater involving President Bush’s former chief of staff Karl Rove. A protestor tried to arrest Rove for treason Tuesday morning while he was speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association Convention, continuing in San Francisco.

There were three protests during a very lively back and forth between former senate majority leader George Mitchell and Karl Rove. Rove blamed the Democrats for everything wrong with the economy.

A protestor tried to smack handcuffs on Karl Rove, but Rove slapped back, and the woman was taken off stage.

Hmmm. Not sure I’d call that ‘major political theatre’: it was a bit lame, really. ‘Slapped back’? Rove looked like he was shooing a fly.

This lot could do with some lessons from Fathers for Justice. Some of them may be certifiable nutjobs, but by heck they’re good at this sort of thing.

Tits and Bums For Freedom

Activism, Civil liberties, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Media, New Labour, Policing, UK politics, War on Terror
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Strange days indeed, when it takes a porn baron to keep an eye on Britons’ online liberty. Could Richard Desmond become the UK’s Larry Flynt, I wonder? He’s had a hand in politics before…

Back along I posted about the Interception Modernisation Programme and the paucity of the available information about it:

Speaking of IT clusterfscks…

Somebody tipped me off to the innocent sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme”, but what is this exactly? It’s mentioned in this “Security and Counter-Terrorism Science and Innovation Strategy” document (PDF) from the Home Office, which seems to be some sort of happy face p.r.-minded strategy overview to show how on the ball the government is in combatting terrorism through innovation and science . In this context, the “Interception Modernisation Programme” is only mentioned in an aside and it sounds like it could be anything:

Intercepting terrorist communications

Knowing the content of terrorist communications is vital to the UK’s ability to respond to terrorism. The cutting-edge interception technology required is therefore critical to building up our intelligence and to understanding the nature of the threat.

The Interception Modernisation Programme is a cross-Government programme which aims to maintain the UK’s world-class capability in obtaining and exploiting terrorist communications data. It is a key example of how Government is using innovative and ground-breaking technology to stay well ahead of the terrorists

Well, now I know, courtesy of the Daily Express, proprietor New Labour’s favourite pornographer, Mr Richard Desmond:

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

ALL telephone calls, emails and text messages in Britain will be monitored under new Government snooping plans. A £12billion identity database at the GCHQ spy centre could even log every website visited by computer users nationwide.

Hundreds of bugging probes will be installed in the telephone system and computer networks to monitor communications traffic.

GCHQ has already been handed £1billion of taxpayers’ cash to begin developing the database.

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

The plan for the biggest surveillance system in British history is being spearheaded by GCHQ director Sir David Pepper.

It is currently classified as top secret and is being developed under the title: Interception Modernisation Programme.

The aim is to set up a “live tap” on every electronic communication in the country. At present, security service MI5 carries out limited monitoring of email exchanges and internet use.

Ministers have been told that the latest computer technology lays the grounds of a massive expansion of monitoring.

The database is likely to be centred at GCHQ’s famous “doughnut”-shaped spy centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Further details will be released when the Government’s legislative programme is announced in the Queen’s Speech in December.

The plan is even more ambitious than the Identity Cards scheme being gradually introduced by the Government at a cost of £5billion. While a final decision has yet to be taken, ministers are understood to have agreed to the move “in principle”.

No wonder the Express is worried, considering how much money Desmond’s business empire makes from soft porn and technology – and considering some of the very dodgy people he’s done business with too.

Sometimes private (very private) interests and public interest collide – so shouldn’t Desmond put some of his porn-derived cash behind the privacy campaigns, if he’s so concerned?

Thanks For The Reminder…

Activism, Feminism, Wingnuts, Women
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…that unlike their customary portrayal in imported US TV shows, American women don’t only come in a few flavours. From what we see on our screens the average American woman is either a scary, psychopathic ballbreaker, a neurotic fundy, a crack whore, a botoxed glamourpuss or a scarily efficient soccer mom. Palin seems surprisingly normal when fitted into this limited range of prototypes.

But of course that’s not the truth; American women are as diverse in their politics and opinions as those in any other nation. Many ordinary women are seriously pissed off at Sarah Palin’s nomination and are saying loudly and very clearly, notably Cintra Wilson in Salon,who’s written something that just makes me want to cheer:

[…]

I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime. I thought it was like polio, or witch burning — an inhumane error that had already been corrected. But after eight years of Republican hegemony, and now the potential ascendance of this sheep in ewe’s clothing, I am so mortally offended I feel like it is really time for women to be angry, hardcore and disgusted again. Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies whose ambitions and eagerness to please the powerful males of their tribe are so desperate that they would sell out their sovereignty over their own bodies. And yours too.

[…]

Sarah Palin, in this light, makes so little sense that she makes perfect sense. She speciously represents a new power paradigm of the Nice Mommy: the opposite of Hillary (the Mean Mommy), the opposite of Oprah (black, and therefore foreign), the opposite of Martha Stewart (another Mean Mommy). In her support for women on women’s issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles — like Old Testament-style old. Her morality is fixed, predictable and inflexible. There are those who will find comfort in the fact that they will know exactly what can be expected from Palin: Free will subordinated to obedience of an airtight, evangelical interpretation of the demands of God, country and Republican men.

[…]

Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

Read whole thing

Yes, do read the whole thing. “Offended…angry hardcore and disgusted” – yup, that pretty much sums up what I feel about the nomination too, and I’m not even voting. I can only imagine the simmering anger that thinking American women must be feeling at this insult to their intelligence.

Note:

Scrolling through the comments I see the concern trolls are out in force: indeed Salon’s editors have elevated three of the most concern trollish of the comments to their star letter spots. Typical do-nothing liberal hedge-bettery and ass-covering.

Frog-Boiling Their Way To Victory

'08/12 Election, Activism, Democratic (in)action, Manufacturing consent, Media, US politics
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Arrgh, the Palin, it just goes on and on. Just when you think there couldn’t be anything worse…

The latest? Charging rape victims for the rape testing kits used in investigating the crime.

RNC operatives are adamant they thoroughly and comprehensively vetted this candidate and that they know all the skeletons in her closet. If that’s true (though Republicans and McCain aren’t known for their veracity) it leads one to the inescapable conclusion that revelations already known to the McCain press team are being deliberately drip-fed to the blogosphere to keep them distracted and to wear the public capacity for shock down. It’s war by attrition. Each new story lowers the bar; a pregnant teen daughter? Ho hum. So last week. Lies? Stale news. Racism? So what? Eventually they’ll expose Palin as a kitten-torturing suicide bomber and by that point the media response will be a shrug and articles on Obama’s kids’ hair.

Whilst I love all this stuff and I share emptywheel of Firedoglake’s outrage at the latest story –

Count me in among those who think that this is easily the single most disgusting thing I have seen since the 1600 Crew allowed Abu Gonzales to run the Justice Department. The village idiot of Wasilla could run up debts in excess of $20 million dollars during her tenure, but providing law enforcement (a government service) on a pay-as-you-go basis under the guise of “protect and serve” for women who have been raped hits a new low even among republicans who are law-enforcement junkies willing to toss a DFH in jail for a bad haircut.

What I actually want to know right now is what fresh hell Bush, Cheney and the rump of the neocons are wreaking while the media old and new are otherwise occupied salivating over the latest Palin outrage.

I’m also wondering what on earth the Democrats and Obama’s advisers are up to. Call this a campaign? It’s all very well putting out high-minded response videos but currently the Republicans are controlling the horizontal and the vertical.

“If Team Obama don’t pull their collective fingers out they’re going to lose this thing”, think some Democrats:

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