Chimp archaeology. Neat.
Revival of Cointelpro, demise of law enforcement. The answer to the massive incompetance in FBI middle and upper management is to… give the FBI more power? “We are turning the ship 180 degrees from prosecution of crimes as our main focus to the prevention of terrorist acts,” a senior Justice Department official said tonight. [...] [...]
Carnivore screwup costs bin Laden investigation: Privacy groups and some members of Congress have complained that Carnivore had the potential to collect more information than allowed by a warrant. “Here's confirmation of the fact that not only did it do that, but it resulted in a loss of legitimately acquired intelligence,” said David Sobel, general [...]
Intellectual midget or criminal incompetent? Here are some mostly-familiar retreads of Bush admin hypocrisy, conflicts of interest, etc., and comparisons to Clinton's real and imagined misdeeds. What I love best about this article is the fact that it's a Utah columnist calling for the impeachment of Bush. Pootie-Poot mocks court-appointed president Bush. Journalist suspects Bush [...]
Paul Krugman explains in the New York Times why the economy is only barely recovering: “The funny thing is that there hasn't been much negative economic news, just an absence of the good news that we were told to expect. Above all, business investment, whose plunge led us into this slump, has yet to show [...]
The LA Times reports that prospects are dimming for post-Enron reform legislation as surviving big businesses fight for the right to implode in exactly the same messy way. “'It is unlikely that we will get strong reform unless there is a new event that captures the [public] imagination,' said Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) “[...] President [...]
Regarding the cases of the 3 FL counties to be scapegoated for the year 2000 election disaster, a Long Island Newsday columnist says, “None [of the charges against the counties] involves the mayhem created by machines that couldn't read votes properly and resulted, according to several independent studies, in African-American voters being far more likely [...]
Getting a sense of perspective on the terror “war”: Pete Hammill's eloquent Memorial Day column from The New York Daily News. And Geov Parrish asks, “Let's say that sometime next month [...] in Chicago [...] a fanatic of indeterminate national origin sets off a small, dirty nuclear weapon. Let's say he immolates himself and thousands [...]
And more information has been leaked about FBI Agent Rowley's allegations: “Officials who have seen Ms. Rowley's letter say it accuses the supervisor of altering the application to play down the significance of information provided by French intelligence officials about Mr. Moussaoui's links to Islamic extremists. “[...] Officials said that particularly damaging for the F.B.I. [...]
“Let me pause a moment at the notion of George W. Bush actually thinking. I have seen no evidence of it. I'm not saying he doesn't, but how would you know if he had the ability? Well, he might answer a question with an argument, rather than a homily or a bromide. “But has anyone [...]
William Pitt calls court-appointed president Bush a terrorist because of his administration's use of public terror warnings to deflect criticism: “Now, with leaders like Daschle and Gephardt calling for a public investigation into the obvious intelligence failures behind 9/11, we have well-known members of the Bush administration going on national television to terrify the American [...]
Bartcop sez, “Ignore the admittedly fascinating details about which mid-level FBI and CIA bureaucrats screwed up [...] and you're left with a story line in which CIA director George J. Tenet and NSC counterterrorism head Richard Clarke, according the the Washington Post, were “nearly frantic” last summer with warnings of impending al-Qaeda attacks. On July [...]
The Prime Minister of India abuses metaphor. Oh, and he scares the hell out of everybody by parroting court-appointed president Bush's rhetoric.
More corporate welfare The great irony of Ex-Im policy is not just that taxpayer support goes to wealthy and profitable corporations that don't need it, but that in the name of “job creation” a substantial amount of federal funding goes to precisely those corporations that are eliminating hundreds of thousands of American jobs. [...] For [...]
Our diplomatic team in the U.N. seeks support for its desire to neuter the International Criminal Court, and the House of Reps is considering passing a version of the Senate bill that authorizes invasion of the Netherlands in the event that a U.S. citizen should be tried by the ICC. And (some) news media are [...]
“I still believe the libertarian analysis of power as corrupting and the state as intrinsically threatening to the individual is accurate. But as I've aged, it's become clear to me that libertarianism hasn't had anything useful to say about racism and sexism, oligarchy and monopoly, pollution and global warming, or how commerce can damage culture. [...]
What is a journalist?, wonders the Society of Professional Journalists. Is it my imagination, or are many of the opinions summarized in this article inherently self-contradictory?
Free markets only work when they are also free of fraud. Source
“There's no smoking gun-evidence that Bush was told about the exact specifics of 9-11–so far. But it's hard to escape an inevitable, disturbing conclusion that itself bears consideration: We are in the hands of liars, morons or both.” –from Ted Rall.
James Carroll wonders, “The more powerful the United States becomes, the more frightened we are. Why is that?“ And, after mentioning the Bush-Putin nuclear weapons treaty (which, instead of reducing, calls for the stockpiling of WMDs, just in case we need them to defend against future dangers of which we currently know nothing), he points [...]