badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

Let's all report each otherOh,

Let's all report each other

Oh, look, how useful!

How to report suspicious activity to the FBI

Name: Badgerbag

Please describe your information:

Dear FBI guys, please investigate the Bush family. They live down the street from me on Pennsylvania Avenue in a big white house. I think they've done some really suspicious things! And I think they do drugs, too! They encourage people to be violent and they give money to paramilitary forces! Please keep America safe for me and my family by putting these freaks under surveillance!

Oddly cheeringOkay, maybe somebody's noticing

Oddly cheering

Okay, maybe somebody's noticing that Bush & Co. are utterly mad. This is just a little bit encouraging.

Advisers split as War Unfolds - from the Washington Post.

Oh, wait, I forgot, isn't it unpatriotic, evil, and a sign of being brainwashed by terrorists, merely to question that our government's assholes doesn't smell like roses and apple pie?

Aaaaaaaagh!Meanwhile, actual horrible things are

Aaaaaaaagh!

Meanwhile, actual horrible things are happening. As opposed to the scary but in comparison trivially horrifying things happening here like artists being followed by rabid crazy spies.

Descriptions from the field where people are actually dying.

Thought crimes again!Oh, great, it's

Thought crimes again!

Oh, great, it's happening already: Anti-war hip hop band members tracked by government agents. What do they do but track his every move and contact his family, telling them their son is part of "the resistance".

They had pictures of us performing the day before at the rally, they had pictures of us performing at some of our annual concerts that we put on that are in support of peace and human rights. They had his flight records for the past several months, they had the names of everybody who works in my office, our management office Guerilla Management. They had his checking account records. They asked his mother a lot of questions about where he was, what he was doing in this place, why he was going here. They confiscated his sibling's CD collection that they had brought over to listen to while they were in the Gulf, and basically were intimidating ? told her which members of the press she could talk to and which members of the press she should not speak to.

My mind boggles that anyone would actually believe that some sort of terrorist organization is funding a bunch of musicians who play at peace rallies. Give me a break. I suppose that in their minds, Yassir Arafat is sending me fat checks to pay me for writing this blog that about 5 people ever read. Do "they" really believe it? Or do they just think that ideas and words are dangerous in themselves, and if their fascist state is to come to fruition, the idea-makers have to be intimidated starting now? When will we start "disappearing"?

I guess all you oldsters out there are laughing at me, as the political climate was so much crazier than this with McCarthy and the civil rights movement and Vietnam, but I didn't live through all that, nor have I ever learned much about it! I am a child of the kindly late 70s! I thought that feminism and the hippies had fixed everything and there was no more racism or sexism until I was 12 or 13! Reagan seemed like an ugly blot on the face of the universe, not like a normal part of America!

Someone recommend some good books for me on Vietnam and McCarthy. Was it really worse then? It might have been, but right now this country has a lot of potential to go straight to hell.

I must add just now as I cruise AlterNet -- how much I love Jim Hightower, that trash-talking Texan!

dam rumorEarlier this morning I

dam rumor

Earlier this morning I read a rumor on debka.com that the Iraqi army had opened or breached the dam on the Tigris/Euphrates to flood out U.S. troops on the way to Baghdad. I can't find any other confirmation of this.

Can't believe now Powell is making it sound like we're about to invade Syria and Iran both. WTF.

Salam Pax, I think of you and all the people in your city, almost constantly, sick at heart to think of the destruction and suffering.

Lincoln's example of dissentFrom There

Lincoln's example of dissent

From There Will Absolutely Be No Dissension, by Stanley I. Kutler:

Challenging President James Polk's dubious response to alleged Mexican aggression against the United States, Congressman Lincoln voted to censure the president in 1848--while the war against Mexico still raged. He contended that the president's justification for war was "from beginning to end the sheerest deception." Polk would have "gone further with his proof if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him." Lincoln threw down the gauntlet: "Let him answer fully, fairly and candidly. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments. ... Let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation." Lincoln more than suspected that the president was "deeply conscious of being in the wrong."

PenaltyCorrupt sons of bitches... this

Penalty

Corrupt sons of bitches... this makes my blood boil. You libertarians who think that big companies will just nicely regulate themselves because it's in their best interests, take note.

And I will be sending out my legions of grim toddlers on scooty toys, my paramilitary squirt gun squads, to go beat up these guys any day now. Oh, whoops, was that a terrorist threat? Better surveil me, Patriot dickweeds and energy company executives!

The claims of evidence destruction and collusion were in addition to a broad array of documents alleging widespread use of now-infamous Enron-type strategies. Those tactics often involved filing false information to state electric grid operators or creating bogus congestion on power lines.
The California parties sought to bolster their case that suppliers understood they were engaging in prohibited behavior by providing a telephone transcript of a Reliant employee describing the conditions under which he would respect market rules.

"You know when we might follow the rules?" the employee says, according to the transcript. "If there's some sort of penalty."
-- Craig D. Rose, San Diego Union-Tribune

Police state legislation underwayOkay, this

Police state legislation underway

Okay, this is maybe even scarier. Take a look at the ACLU's analysis of the draft of the 2nd 'Patriot Act'. Most of it is scary. Keep in mind that if it passes, civil disobedience itself could be considered 'terrorism'.

How about this:

Using an overbroad definition of terrorism that could cover tactics used by some protest groups as a predicate for criminal wiretapping and other surveillance...The draft bill extends the predicate even further, to cover offenses that are not�defined as terrorism crimes�under federal law, but do fit the definition of either international or domestic terrorism, i.e., they involve acts that are a violation of federal or state law, are committed with the intent of affecting government policy, and are potentially dangerous.

Or here's a good one:

Terminating court-approved limits on police spying designed to prevent McCarthy-style law enforcement persecution based on political or religious affiliation��(Section 312). *** Police spying on political and religious activity is not a relic of some distant past. Recently, citizens in Denver, Colorado, were shocked to learn that the Denver Police Department had kept approximately 3,048 illegal files on peaceful protest groups including Amnesty International and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning American Friends Service Committee. The file on the American Friends Service Committee labeled them a ?criminal extremist? group. The files pre-dated September 11, 2001, and were not collected as a response to the terrorist attacks.

Also note section 107, "Further expanding pen register and trap and trace authority for intelligence surveillance of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents beyond terrorism investigations": this means your web surfing and email and addresses of people you email can be recorded, on the testimony of any government official who believes your information might be important to some ongoing investigation. You don't have to be suspected of terrorism by anyone to be tapped and made part of the CARNIVORE-style database to track our thought crimes.

Time to break out a glass of wine and pry my fingers off this computer screen, I can't take this anymore tonight... What good is it doing me, all this information I'm sucking up and all this outrage I'm building up? Does it do any good to be a seeing person in this country of the blind?

World War lurches closerHoly fuck,

World War lurches closer

Holy fuck, did I just hallucinate this, or did our government just threaten to invade more countries?

bloated and pithy!When the bug-eyed

bloated and pithy!

When the bug-eyed former senator and current New School prez got word that the New York Times was about to publish an article asserting his involvement in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1969, he came forward a few days ahead of time to give his own version of the story?and was immediately applauded for his courage in facing up to his "painful" past despite the fact that 1) he?d sat on the story for 32 years and 2) the real pain was on the other side of the machine gun. Kerrey is the face of that bloated, self-centered, delusional America that somehow still manages to see itself as the victim in Vietnam - as though its pseudo-literary "loss of innocence" and, in this case, ruined political prospects, somehow compare to two million actual dead people and a mine-strewn countryside of ravaged moonscapes.