A voice and charm made for blogging. You could watch Pajamas TV and see Glenn Reynolds playing host to such luminaries as Joe the plumber and Michelle Malkin while showing hi-larious stock footage of clown cars as political commentary, but as Ballon Juice says, that would be 21 minutes of your life you won’t get back.
Communist fellow travellers sing red propaganda song at Obama inauguration party shock!
My first political memory is of hearing Carter lose the election to Reagan on the radio when I was six. Since then the US has never really had a president you can be proud of. Reagan was a shambling corpse held together by cuecards and tons of makeup, Bush 41 was a charmless CIA bureaucrat who barfed up his dinner in the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Bill Clinton had his charms but no substance, a bit of a clown and finally Bush 43 was a smirking fratboy asshole and a (not so) dry drunk to boot. But Obama just looks good, like a regular human being, not warped by too many years in Washington yet. Bush was hyped as a regular guy you’d like to have a beer with, but Obama actually fits that description and what’s more, you could see him as an actual leader, not just in the White House, but equally well
in a local neighbourhood activist group or something like that. In all the coverage of the election campaign and after, I’ve never seen him look uncomfortable or anything other than himself. He just looks like a proper president.
And yes, appearances aren’t everything, and yes, as a socialist or any sort of leftist he’s sure to disappoint us, he’s not going to get the revolution started, he’s not going to change the system. But dammit, it’s been so long since there actually has been any president who is even capable of disappointing us.
In Maryland the police spend years spying on political groups ranign from cyling advocates to Amnesty International:
The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored — and labeled as terrorists — activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.
Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a “security threat” because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.
One of the possible “crimes” in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: “civil rights.”
Back in the sixties, Cointelpro was an FBI led programme to infiltrate and spy on various alleged subversive groups. Not only did FBI agents infiltrate various antiwar and civil right groups, they also attempted to provoke those groups into criminal acts. Supposedly the Cointelpro programme was stopped in 1971, but since the original operation only came to light after the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI office, who knows what’s still going on. Certainly the modus operandum described here sounds a lot like what the FBI was up to:
After trawling the Internet, an analyst reported a “potential for disruption” at both executions. Mazzella dispatched a corporal who needed experience in undercover work to the Electrik Maid community center in Takoma Park, where death penalty foes were organizing rallies.
At a rally to save Vernon Evans Jr. outside the Supermax prison in Baltimore a few weeks later, the woman who said her name was Lucy McDonald asked veteran activist Max Obuszewski how she could learn more about passive resistance and civil disobedience.
The activists recall that she had a genial disposition and refreshing curiosity, and she quickly became a fixture at meetings and rallies of death penalty opponents and antiwar activists. She used a laptop computer at meetings, but the activists say no one was alarmed. “Maybe I wondered what she was typing,” said Mike Stark of Takoma Park. “But you always check yourself. In our movement it’s very important to be outward and not paranoid.”
Bonus: how clueless use of information technology made things worse:
Police had turned to the database in a low-cost effort to replace antiquated file cabinets. The Washington High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a regional clearinghouse for drug-related criminal information, offered its software for free.
But the database did not include categories that fit the nature of the protest-group investigations. So police created “terrorism” categories to track the activists, according to the state review. Some information was sent directly to HIDTA’s main database as part of an agreement to share information.
Putting the activists into the database was “a function of nothing more than the insertion of a piece of paper in a paper file in a file cabinet,” Sheridan wrote. But labeling them “terrorists,” he said was “incorrect and improper.”
Remember the above map? It was drawn up by Infinite Star Armchair general Ralph “Blood ‘N Guts” Peters back in 2006 in the last flourish of neocon thriumphalism as the way to create a “better Middle East”. The idea apparantly being that since these borders were drawn up almost a century ago by a bunch of European imperialists and have caused a lot of trouble since, what better way to end this trouble by letting another bunch of imperialists, American this time, draw up another set of borders according to their prejudice and idee-fixes, because that worked out so well last time. Also, to stop ethnic cleansing by pre-emptively ethnic cleanse these countries. At the time it seemed like a joke, if a sick one made palatable by the idea that Peters is such a loon he would be too over the top even for Dr Strangelove.
Guess what? The joke’s on us:
NEW YORK: A redrawn map of South Asia showing a truncated Pakistan, reduced to an elongated sliver of land, has sparked fear among military planners in Islamabad who think India and Afghanistan are “colluding” to destroy the only nuclear powered-Muslim nation with the US help, a media report said on Sunday.
The map, first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles, has fueled a belief among Pakistanis that what the United States really wants is the breakup of their country, the New York Times reported.
Pakistani people have reason to be paranoid about the USA’s intentions for their country, considering their mutual history, which includes enthusiastic American support for succesive Pakistani dictators, CIA backed meddling in Afghanistan during the eighties which helped destabilise Pakistan as well, not tomention the recent American airstrikes on Pakistan itself. It may look absurd now, but an invasion of Iraq looked absurd too back in the nineties. That Obama will be president in January is no guarantee: Democrats are just as prone to stupid foreign policies: even Carter supported Somoza.
Found via Randy McDonald.
Lieberman keeps his Homeland Security committee chair:
Senator Harry Reid just spoke to reporters after the private caucus meeting with Dems over Joe Lieberman’s fate, and he confirmed it: Lieberman will not be stripped of his Homeland Security chairmanship, because the “vast majority” of the Democratic caucus wants him to stay.
“This was not a time for retribution,” Reid said, adding that “we’re moving forward.”
Lieberman was removed from the Environment and Public Works Committee, a largely meaningless punishment since it’s a topic (unlike Homeland Security) on which he has no differences with Dems.
Asked about liberal “anger” towards Lieberman, Reid said: “I pretty well understand anger. I would defy anyone to be more angry than I was.”
But he added: “If you will look at the problems that we face as a nation, is this a time we walk out of here saying boy did we get even?”
That’s what you get for insisting that supporting the Democratic Party is the only way for leftists to have any influence in American politics. This is a message that the left might support the Democrats, but the Democrats like Lieberman more than you.