Update

Days the color-coded federal terror alert system has been in place: 2,103
Days spent at terror alert level Blue or Green: 0

QOTD

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

–Louis D. Brandeis

Terror Update

Days the color-coded terror alert system has been in place: 1,958
Days spent at terror alert level Blue or Green: 0

For those of you counting, that’s over five and a third years.

Tax Myths

Today I got an email containing a list of about 25 different types of taxes (liquor, social security, property, etc…). At the end, it said the following:

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids…

What the hell happened????

This set off my bullshit-meter big time. Ten minutes of google searches later, I replied:

In 1906:

The average lifespan was also 47 years, since biomedical research wasn’t getting funded by the government. Would you prefer to give up 30 years of your life?

We didn’t have the largest highway and road system in the world to maintain, because cars weren’t being used. Would you prefer to go back to a horse and buggy?

Over 45% percent of people labored in the country’s fields as subsistence farmers. That’s hardly what we think of as ‘middle-class’. In fact, in 1900, 99% of the nation’s wealth was owned by just 1% of the people. How’s that for economic inequity?

Women didn’t stay home with the kids - most women either toiled on the farm, like the rest of the family, or worked in sweatshop-ike conditions in city factories. Even children worked 10-12 hour shifts in factories starting at a very early age. But boy, we sure saved a lot of tax money on education…

By this point, you won’t be surprised to hear that the “no national debt” claim is false too. In 2006, the US national debt was over 2 billion dollars (a hell of a lot of money in those days)

All this took less than 10 minutes to find using google. Get your facts straight before getting all nostalgic for a time that never existed.

Responses like this are probably why I don’t get many forwarded emails anymore. I find it hard to ignore crap like this, though.

Hrmmmm

Days the federal terror alert system has been in place: 1,444
Days spent at terror alert level Green or Blue: 0

What Civil Liberties?

Former NSA agent Russell Tice is the whistleblower who leaked information about the NSA’s illegal spying activities to the New York Times. He’s now gone public and will be testifying before Congress about the blatant abuses of power going on in his former agency.

I’m not going to analyze why wiretapping American citizens without a court warrant is reprehensible - that’s been covered pretty well elsewhere (and frankly, should be common sense). I do want to pass along this thought, though, which came up during a discussion of the issue over at Slashdot

In America we have no excuse for saying “the gov’t abuses us”. We ARE the gov’t. And if we’ve let it grow out of control it is not due to technology, information, or any other excuse. It is due to public inattention and apathy. I find those things far more dangerous than information or even gov’t itself.

Update: There’s a better article and transcript of the interview over at Democracy Now

Digital Television

A bill passed by congress sets February 17, 2009 as the date for the switch from analog to digital television. This means that roughly 70 million TV sets in the US will become obsolete. Don’t worry though - Congress has its priorities straight:

To avoid a consumer revolt, Congress has set aside about $1.5 billion to smooth the transition. Owners of outmoded TV sets will be eligible for two vouchers, worth $40 each, to help buy converter boxes that will enable today’s analog TV sets to receive digital signals.

Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers.

Link

As an aside, I’ve always wondered why CSPAN isn’t a broadcast station, instead of cable-only. The goal was to make government accessible to everyone. Having CSPAN on cable only makes it accessible to those who can afford to shell out 50 bucks a month.

Surprised?

It’s good to see that the GOP is still the party of fiscal responsibility:

“President Bush and the current administration have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 presidents combined”

Tax-Exempt Churches

From Reuters:

The Internal Revenue Service has threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of a Los Angeles Episcopal church because a priest implied to parishioners before the 2004 presidential election that Jesus would not have voted for George W. Bush.

I’m all for crackdowns like this one, as long as they’re applied fairly. That means any church which encouraged its members to vote for any Republican candidate should also lose their tax-exempt status. I suspect there are far more churches that fit this description.

On Schiavo

“Come down, President Bush. Come talk to me. Meet my wife. Talk to my wife and see if you get an answer. Ask her to lift her arm to shake your hand. She won’t do it.”

“Have they ever met her? What color are her eyes? What’s her middle name? What’s her favorite color? They don’t have any clue who Terri is. They should all be ashamed of themselves.”

“Instead of worrying about my wife, who was granted her wishes by the state courts the past seven years … Why doesn’t Congress worry about people not having health insurance? Or the budget? Let’s talk about all the children who don’t have homes.”

—Michael Schiavo

Source: St. Petersburg Times

And from the conservative New York Post:

“…the idea of Congress convening a weekend session to push through a potentially precedent-setting law for one single individual, with little regard to the long-term consequences, is profoundly troubling. Political opportunism? No question about it.”

Torture

I’m sure that there are some hard-hitting assholes out there who think that ‘torturing the towel-heads’ is okay. The vast majority of Americans, not to mention ALL Christians, should be vehemently against it. It’s illegal in this country, it’s illegal under international law, and it sure as hell isn’t a moral thing to do, regardless of the stakes.

Sadly, Republicans seem to be okay with it. Bush’s proposed new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, played an integral part in the authorization of torture at Guatanamo, Abu Gharib, and other places:

The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

This goes all the way to the top, folks. There’s plenty of evidence to show that Bush knew what was going on, as well. And despite a huge outcry, both domestically and internationally, Republicans continue to defend the practice:

In the afternoon, I was treated to Sean Hannity and Mark Levin defending torture against a well-informed but out-shouted caller. They fell back on two ideas: one, that what we did was not torture (there are pictures and sworn accounts that makes this only a semantic argument that won’t fly in the long run with decent folks) and two, that it was necessary to get information. This second point is easily debunked (torture does not provide reliable information, and what prosecutions have resulted from this oh-so-critical information?) None of these excuse torture.

In case you haven’t picked up on the problem thus far, try this:

The Republicans are defending torture. Torture is not legal, not effective military policy, and disastrous as a policy within the war on terror. It is not Christian, and it’s fundamentally unAmerican.

But the GOP is the party of moral values…

Senate Democrats, fight this guy’s appointment with everything you’ve got. He could be worse than Ashcroft.

Link

Ahead of his time

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

–H.L. Menken

Was he prophetic or what?

Raising Red Flags

Joel: heh, i’m sure the guys at chernobyl called themselves scientists too.
Joel: granted we aren’t playing with nuclear material
Chris: no, no…. we’ll leave that one for another party
Joel: maybe we can get a hold of depeleted uranium. I hear that stuff is all over the place.
Chris: hello? yes, comrade.. I’m interested in, how you say, uranium…
Chris: part of me hopes the NSA is reading this right now
Joel: who knows how many people i’ve pissed off in the past. heh
Chris: dirty bomb osama nuclear war iraq al qaeda washington dc president bush
Chris: if that doesn’t set off their filters, nothing will…

Corruption is Rife

Does this seem ridiculous to anyone else?

“Of the U.S. corporations on the list [of the world's top 200 in 2000], 44 did not pay the full standard 35 percent federal corporate tax rate during the period 1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world�s biggest corporation [at the time of the study] �General Motors.”

From Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power.