We don't need no stinkin' list I'm catching up on my reading and I guess some kind of year end consideration comes naturally from that. I can't seem to find the link to that post about what your list says about you. I've thought about it and it seems that the whole year kinda comes down to what I have to say here because it says so much about us.

It has been a bad year for progressive democracy here in the United States. I mean we still exert the same elective forces as before, it's just that we don't seem to be using them in a just, forward thinking manner. We have, by not recalling some officials (elected and otherwise), endorsed practices far outside of what it means to be American.

It would be reasonable to say that citizen media is still in its infancy but it doesn't deserve a walk on not being able to correctly address these issues. I don't mean partisan, Lefty correctly. I mean morally upright and freedom loving correctly. I've always thought of that cliche of a certain undistilled clarity coming from the ordinary citizen. It doesn't seem like citizen media has helped at all with the issues of torture and Big Brother. If the elements of directness and immediacy so touted for this information structure were working as stated then they would have overwhelmed the totalitarian posturing by BushCo.

At some time, hopefully in the next year, we'll have to look back and say we weren't at our best: We'll just have to do better.  ¶ 12/31/2005 10:02:00 PM 0 comments

  Oedipus Tyrannos "In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

More evidence of the strange mojo goin' on with Shrub about his dad, a former CIA Director.  ¶ 12/31/2005 08:42:00 PM 0 comments

  Nieman Report- the citizen media "Technorati, the real-time search engine that tracks the blogosphere,
measures linking behavior as a proxy for attention and influence. According to
their August 2005 State of the Blogosphere report, Glenn Reynolds’ political and current events Weblog, Instapundit, has more authority in the blogosphere (based on inbound links) than the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio."

Well, that sounds like business as usual in the media world. Stupid people have way more influence than they should.  ¶ 12/31/2005 08:27:00 PM 0 comments

  Miller's Lying Eyes I've done a Google search to refresh my memory on it and reviewed the video. Miller looks like she's lying in a number of spots on the video.  ¶ 12/31/2005 11:38:00 AM 0 comments

  News stories probed "For the past two weeks, Gonzales also has been one of the administration's point men in arguing that the president has the constitutional authority to conduct the spying.

'It's pretty stunning that, rather than focus on whether the president broke his oath of office and broke federal law, they are going after the whistleblowers,' said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union."

Duh!  ¶ 12/31/2005 01:44:00 AM 0 comments

  Still waiting on 64-bit I kinda remember the switch from 16 to 32-bit processing and figured it would be a slow roll-out but this was proclaimed to be the year of 64-bit processing. Didn't happen.

The SLI thing is something I have my eye on. I'll be looking forward to using that with WinVista.  ¶ 12/30/2005 01:05:00 AM 0 comments

  Bush 41 has bloody hands in this Bush 41 and Bush 43 both have problems with making effective, workable plans. Lotsa people die when they screw-up.  ¶ 12/28/2005 01:20:00 AM 0 comments

  BushCo- if you're out to get a bunch of money for nothing, they're your friend I was as far as "BushCo, friend to money-grubbin' h..." before the legal department stopped me.  ¶ 12/26/2005 09:13:00 PM 0 comments

  Screw you, Yoo What more can I say? Convoluted, conveniently reconstructionist legal arguments for BushCo totalitarianism don't pass muster.

It seems that a big part of the conservative stance on intellectual/academic freedom consists of pushing their fanciful bias as worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Someone can't wrap their brain around the expanding knowledge of the natural science of our physical existence therefore we must consider his notion of a cosmic fable as rational.

Same here; baroque legal excuses for the excesses of torture and totalitarianism don't merit consideration in American political science. 9-11 didn't change that.

But you gotta give these guys credit for trying.  ¶ 12/26/2005 03:31:00 PM 0 comments

  More on snooping Between the holidays and this story little else is going on for me. This article also is on the theme of the NSA casting a wide net but differentiates the process from the earlier discussed TIA. It does reference Pointextor who says his little project has been quietly split up to various agencies.

Funny, I'm not getting that warm holiday feeling.  ¶ 12/25/2005 08:28:00 PM 0 comments

  Daschle gives perspective This gets back to my earlier contention that BushCo really has no respect for the law. The Constitutional framework for our governance has no meaning to them. Their zealotry blinded them to the impending threat, warped the 9-11 attack into a completely needless war and now, they feel, places them above the Constitution as they scramble to cover their misdeeds.

Their very thin argument that there is a Constitutional basis for their actions has its feeble legs kicked out from under it with this piece by Daschle. War making powers were Constitutionally vested with Congress for the obvious reasons that Shrub embodies: Highhanded incompetents should not have their finger on any trigger without it passing the review of the people's representatives.

Our elected representatives spoke and BushCo chose to ignore it. And they used a program that couldn't make it through Congress because it was so onerous: This is Total Information Awareness reincarnated. John Poindextor is living proof that old fascists never die, they just skulk off to do their dirty work hidden behind the scenes. It is not by coincidence that this is not the first time that Poindextor has been involved with thwarting the will of Congress. Think of death squads in Central America and Ollie North.

I've looked at the talk of impeachment as more or less just political trappings: Not something likely to happen and not anything that really furthers the process of governance. However, my expressed desire that the Repug's be sent home seems to be gaining an urgency that makes waiting for the elections unacceptable. It would seem that things are just going to get worse as this administration thrashes about in the entanglements of incompetence.

Further perspective on this from Robert Parry here.  ¶ 12/24/2005 12:44:00 PM 0 comments

  NSA snooping wider than Bush says Who woulda guessed that he would lie? Again?

According to the NYTimes, the intercepts included purely domestic communications. It does appear that it is very much like (identical?) to the Total Information Awareness program that was scuttled earlier because of the same concerns about casting too wide a net.  ¶ 12/24/2005 02:08:00 AM 0 comments

  Alito's nomination gets the kiss of death Just released papers indicate that he backs warrantless wiretaps. Bad timing, scratch one fascist.  ¶ 12/24/2005 12:19:00 AM 0 comments

  TIA-like snooping Here's one blogger that thinks the new wrinkle to the NSA snooping is technical.

Not at all beyond BushCo to have Congress shoot down a project and to proceed anyway.  ¶ 12/22/2005 09:48:00 PM 0 comments

  FISA judge resigns Speculation is swirling around the NSA activity. It has been assumed that there is some extraordinary elements to it, be they technical or in the nature of the targets. This resignation seems to play into that notion.

New stories are being broken about non-terrorist targets of governmental snooping.

As I've stated, I'm not in the least surprised by any of this.  ¶ 12/21/2005 09:20:00 PM 0 comments

  Cheney chimes in The lame excuses and pseudo-legalisms are endless in trying to justify this grab for power.  ¶ 12/20/2005 07:52:00 PM 0 comments

  Folksonomy makes a statement Went throught the first two pages of diggdot just now and there is nothing on the domestic spying issue. Way to go nerds, too busy worryin' about DRM?  ¶ 12/19/2005 05:36:00 PM 0 comments

  FAS- DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE THREATENS RULE OF LAW "In a 2000 statement describing oversight of NSA activities, then NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden said 'The American people must be confident that the power they have entrusted to us is not being, and will not be, abused.'
NSA 'operates within detailed, constitutionally-based, substantive and procedural limits under the watchful eyes of Congress, numerous institutions within the Executive Branch, and -- through the FISA-- the judiciary. The privacy framework is technology neutral and does not require amendment to accommodate new communications technologies,' he said.
'The regulatory and oversight structure, in place now for nearly aquarter of a century, has ensured that the imperatives of national security are balanced with democratic values,' Gen. Hayden said then."  ¶ 12/19/2005 04:29:00 PM 0 comments

  Via Crooks and Liars- Condi meets Pumpkinhead I'm listening to this and I'm so mad I could just spit. "I'm not a lawyer..." but you're a lyin' bitch.

I could give them the benefit of a cynical doubt on this but the thing about these kinds of programs is they always seem to turn to things like the military spying on Quakers.

The most I could come up with is three sentences in a row without an outright lie. The single most telling factor in our inability to catch the 9/11 hijackers was BushCo incompetence. Condi, you played a big part in that and I find it uproariously ironic that you managed to bring up the Presidential Daily Brief.

I've always thought of BushCo as being just a bunch of self-aggrandizing (get rich) fascists. The domestic spying, that I always figured was going on and is now coming to light, is the issue to use to neutralize this administration. They've done enough damage and they should now be busy defending themselves against criminal charges instead of making their harebrained schemes.

This student got a taste of Department of Homeland Security efficiency when visited by them for requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book through inter-library loan. What the hell has that got to do with anything?
Update: Kos has the debunking of the student. I shoulda gone with my gut on this one but in my defense I gotta say there is a Kafkaesque sense to a lot of what is going on. Our government is combing the communications of Americans while Osama is eating falafel and slapping his knee. Probably the thing that has him the most upset is this.  ¶ 12/18/2005 10:33:00 PM 0 comments

  A journalism great, Jack Anderson, passes While Drew Pearson used the column to grind his personal axes, Anderson brought a higher level of integrity to the Merry-Go-Round. Anderson, while winning a Pulitzer, had to make a few retractions in his career but they were honest mistakes.

Anderson set a high standard.  ¶ 12/17/2005 07:30:00 PM 0 comments

  NYTimes, a profile in journalistic courage- not The Times sat on this story, continuing its role as enabler for the Repugs.  ¶ 12/17/2005 05:13:00 AM 0 comments

  Dissent on the rocks ACLU objects to one more assault on our civil liberties. But I think we just need more pictures of Shrub flippin' off the protestors.  ¶ 12/17/2005 04:53:00 AM 0 comments

  NerdTV #11 So what is wrong with the notion of a piece of software being aware of what the user needs for operation and delivering that information.

Let's swing for the fences by trying to put that capability into these $100 laptops.  ¶ 12/16/2005 01:26:00 AM 0 comments

  No guts, no glory for Chinese journalists I feel somewhat like a chickenhawk for advocating this position for Chinese journalists but their dilemma seems easily resolved when you think about a journalist's true mission. The question comes down to the fundamental issue of whether they should be concerned with the economic advantages of working in a corrupt system or advancing the principles of their craft.

There is irony aplenty when you think of our own Washington press corps in that light. But illustrative of the persistence of this issue.

When you start to weasel on this point it becomes just a short hop to being an apologist for the role that Yahoo and others are playing in the Chinese government's information control.

Once again I must mention that Google, the fine folks that host this blog, are running dogs of the counter-revolutionaries.  ¶ 12/14/2005 11:41:00 PM 0 comments

  PC of 2007 It's the end of the year and this is one of the usual crystal ball articles that come at this time. I'm gonna resist the urge to make any of my own predictions but this one gave me a "duh" moment when it pointed to one advantage of software over the network that I hadn't integrated into my thinking.

The spread of wireless (and/or cellular) data delivery will push the availability of networked software. I've been somewhat resistant because, as the article points out, folks are comfortable with the knowledge that their data is on the device they're carrying and not dependent on the availability of a wireless signal.

This article points to the security advantage of having your data on the network and not on the mobile device that can be left somewhere. This is assuming, of course, you have a secure network. Oh yeah, and don't forget the cache wipe.  ¶ 12/14/2005 11:07:00 PM 0 comments

  Via Rocketboom- Santa and crack Obviously, it's the link with the kid in a Santa hat.  ¶ 12/12/2005 07:43:00 PM 0 comments

  Web 2.0 meets the mall lawyer   ¶ 12/12/2005 07:10:00 PM 0 comments

  Historical moral relativism We were the good guys, so of course we could never be quite as bad as the commies. But there were times when we were bad enough that we didn't deserve to think of ourselves as the good guys. We are still paying the cost, in some cases, for those times when we didn't live up to who we were supposed to be.

That's the lesson we need to take forward in our dealings with the world.  ¶ 12/12/2005 04:59:00 PM 0 comments

  Digg not dug He's kinda got a point. Folksonomy has got its limits.  ¶ 12/11/2005 08:25:00 PM 0 comments

  Failure; updated and continued There has never been much of a doubt in my mind that Iraq redux had more to do with Shrub trying to work out some shit in the relationship with his father than anything else.

Daddy Bush would never admit to it but the big plus (as far as he was concerned) of the outcome of the initial conflict was that it allowed us to expand our presence in the oil producing region.  ¶ 12/11/2005 08:02:00 PM 0 comments

  Another reason to be glad Bork isn't on the SCOTUS This got on the bottom of the stack and was lost. I bring it up now so as to keep in mind what the conservatives would do to the court if left unhindered.  ¶ 12/11/2005 07:55:00 PM 0 comments

  Murtha responds   ¶ 12/10/2005 08:05:00 PM 0 comments

  Rational response to intelligent design   ¶ 12/10/2005 07:36:00 PM 0 comments

  What Constitution? This site is outside the usual range of the digg. I wonder if this story will gather the mass that will make a WH comment necessary.  ¶ 12/10/2005 12:47:00 PM 0 comments

  Coulter finally acknowledges she is stupid   ¶ 12/08/2005 12:41:00 AM 0 comments

  MoveOn gets slapped around It's not like they were wrong about WMD's like the people doing the slapping but I really don't feel bad about the abuse they're getting on this. Come on MoveON, put a little work into it.

You see, when you allow them (the neocon idiots that were wrong on just about everything concerning Iraq) to generate that level of noise over a blunder, it does take something away from your message.  ¶ 12/07/2005 07:02:00 PM 0 comments

  48 Laws for being a weasel Cynical and short-sighted; the fryer crew at the local fast food franchise might be calling you "sir" but everybody else will be calling you asshole.  ¶ 12/06/2005 10:49:00 PM 0 comments

  More god warriors   ¶ 12/06/2005 08:08:00 PM 0 comments

  Fox scary via Crooks and Liars Kinda scary funny, with the first thing popping into mind is that this woman needs a lobotomy not gastric bypass.

Then I start to wonder how many Fox viewers really buy into this manner of "god warrior". There was plainly some kind of messed-up dynamic going on between her and her family, very little godly about it.  ¶ 12/04/2005 09:08:00 PM 0 comments

  AP has new catch phrase "... the official said on condition of anonymity because he was unauthorized to speak to the media."

I've seen it repeated many times recently in AP stories with anonymous officials.  ¶ 12/04/2005 08:11:00 PM 0 comments

  Hong Kong demonstrators seek self-governance This AP story lays it out pretty well. Beijing isn't interested in following through on the promised reforms because then the government of Hong Kong would be more concerned with answering to its citizens and not Beijing.  ¶ 12/04/2005 07:47:00 PM 0 comments

  War is hell and this is one of the tools It is time to differentiate myself, once again, from my lefty brethren.

Alright, this war sucks. We shouldn't be there, period. We should come home as soon as possible, something like the week after next. But that by no means should be taken as an excuse to not use every reasonable tool (which obviously excludes torture) to protect the lives of our forces. Sad fact is that propaganda and information control are accepted tools of armed struggle. I can't imagine any thoughtful American advocating that our commanders not do everything humanely possible in their power to protect our troops. A big problem here is that the hubris of the neocons allowed such sloppy work of it.

Two factors are making this play badly: The globalization of media and the fact that BushCo tried running this same horseshit for domestic consumption.

An informed electorate that is made up of savvy media consumers would mitigate the domestic effect of this militarized pr. Such an electorate would also send the neocons home or back to their think tanks to retool the malarky.  ¶ 12/04/2005 04:33:00 PM 0 comments

  Lieberman in trouble This could very well become the kind of affair that the Republicans will relish. Screw Lieberman, anyway. He's been way too close to BushCo on too many things for having once been a darling of the Dem's. It was like he was trying to wash off the Gore association.  ¶ 12/04/2005 03:54:00 PM 0 comments

  PriceRitePhoto to sue the internet The original blogger didn't orchestrate the response and it would be next to impossible to prove that he anticipated the backlash. Good luck with that one.  ¶ 12/04/2005 03:49:00 PM 0 comments

  CIA Sabotage Manual This is one of a set and is old hat. This trick was given to me back in the 70's by a political science professor who said that he had used it some years before in his radical union activist days. The teeth from a tractor mounted sickle-bar work quite well, as he told it.  ¶ 12/04/2005 02:57:00 PM 0 comments

  DL.TV There are a few tech webstreams online. This one covers a fairly wide area of subject matter and, as that type, is one of the best.  ¶ 12/03/2005 03:03:00 PM 0 comments

  Baby Bush on tour with Rev. Moon It seems Neil Bush just can't stay away from a fraud, banking or otherwise.  ¶ 12/03/2005 11:57:00 AM 0 comments

  Science under assault We have met the enemy and they are us. Well, Pat Robertson anyway.  ¶ 12/01/2005 08:06:00 PM 0 comments