Obama crosses John Cusack's "line of conscience"

The "Line of Conscience" phrase in the headline is mine. I wrote here, in the start of a series I will still complete:

Group 1 in the "Can't vote for Obama" crowd — no matter the other reasons for pulling that trigger — are those whose lines of conscience have been crossed.

I aim this at the people who say, "But President Santorum would take marching orders from Koch Bros Central." That's true; President Santorum would rule from Wichita (via its Wisconsin field office).

But there are those whose consciences are so offended (that's a war crimes link) that they cannot let themselves do one good thing for the perpetrator. Not one.

Unlike phony "consciences", these genuine cries of integrity must be honored, in my view, even if you tactically disagreed. You can fight a war, in other words, and still respect the Quakers.

There are other reasons for not voting for Obama, and many for voting for him as well. That's the point of the series — identify the reasons for and against that make sense, and sort out the ones that make no sense at all.

But back to this one — crossing lines of conscience. At what point does a generally good office-holder lose your support? What if they*:

• Stole from the office lotto pool?
• Had sex with a colleague in the back room?
• Had sex with an intern in the back room?
• Tortured frogs?
• Hit a spouse?
• Committed murder?

At the lesser "crimes" you overlook the bad for the good. But at some point in that list, if your candidate were guilty, you would not be able to support them*. He or she has crossed your "line of conscience."

Back to Obama. I've written many times:

Barack Obama is crossing lines of conscience, one Democrat at a time.

It's obvious, true on its face. And whether your line has been crossed or not, he seems to be testing us all, one step at a time. FISA betrayal? No? Bush tax cuts? Not yet? NDAA perhaps? No? Let's try this one then...

Nevertheless, as I've also said, the next Republican president will be a wrecking ball — he'll use the radical Republican governors as a template.

What are the Republican governors doing, if they can get away with it? Constitutional coup at the state level, with the goal of permanent one-party rule. It's almost impossible to say that any other way.

But this piece is not about your vote. It's about Barack Obama, lines of conscience, and John Cusack.

Here's Cusack writing at Shannyn Moore's site (my emphasis, paragraphing and asterisks; yes, plural):

[T]here are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed. ...

Three markers — the Nobel prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me…

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.”

And so we have our democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? ... Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullsh*t and an insult to the very idea of peace. ...

To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed [but] he and his satellites get their four more years.

Cusack concludes:

One is forced to ask ... Is the President just another Ivy League Assh*le shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh*thole for purely political reasons?

You really should click over if this interests you. The article continues with a terrific interchange between Cusack and constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, of whom we've written much. It's well worth your time.

This election has turned into a Rorschach test for Dems, with clusters of answers and all of them about you, not the candidates.

Romney and the Koch-couped Republicans are a solid known. ("Power please, and no, you may not have it back.") Obama is also a known. ("Look out Lame Duck; you could be Dead Duck in December. Keystone, you're next.")

But what about you? The choices define your care-line. Is drone-killing babies a bridge too far? Or do you think Republicans are doing even worse? Do you prefer the slow death of Social Security to the fast? How much new carbon before Obama is a criminal too?

How about the genuine victory of electing the first Black president, offset by the fact that he too won't help the "undeserving" — "moochers" in Repub-speak; "not-bankers" in Obama-world. Talk about an ironic choice.

Fascinating stuff, I have to admit. If I didn't care about the outcome, this would make a lively and ghoulish family drama, an aching Long Day's Journey into Night for the American people and their unguarded dying democracy.

Obama or Romney? Really. How did average Americans get shoved into this box? (Oh that's right; their addiction to hating the "undeserving" and a last little straw called Bush v Gore, which passed by majority vote of an unprotesting people.)

But I do care, and I don't want to watch a friend choose which drug to die from. Trouble is, he's doing it in front of me. Cusack is another who's noticed, as has Turley. The piece is quite a find. (Interesting thought; I'll bet Cusack has acted in Long Day's Journey. Wonder if he's thinking of it now.)

* Grammar note for fans: "They" and "them" are slowly gaining the singular meaning "he or she" ("him or her") in addition to their plural meanings. Note that they, them and their are already both singular and plural in speech — "everyone has their book."

As a talk-around for the "he or she" problem, this has become my preferred solution, far less clunky than any of the others. (Fair warning — this is deliberate. In thirty years, no one will notice.)

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
  Read the rest of this post...

Police arrest hundreds during student protests in Quebec

The real crime here is that protests are no longer allowed. People take to the street when their voices are no longer heard so to shut down protests because the message is not appreciated. The local government has taken unprecedented and extreme actions that are counter to what anyone should expect from a Western democracy.

In the case of Quebec, the most conservative government in decades simply doesn't like the protest message so they're attempting to fine anyone who protests. The local government has nobody to blame but themselves for the growing student protests. Disagree, fine, but this is too much.

On May 18, Quebec’s legislative assembly, under the authority of the provincial premier, Jean Charest, passed a draconian law in a move to break the 15-week-long student strike. Bill 78, adopted last week, is an attack on Quebecers’ freedom of speech, association and assembly. Mr. Charest has refused to use the traditional means of mediation in a representative democracy, leading to even more polarization. His administration, one of the most right-wing governments Quebec has had in 40 years, now wants to shut down opposition.

The bill threatens to impose steep fines of 25,000 to 125,000 Canadian dollars against student associations and unions — which derive their financing from tuition fees — in a direct move to break the movement. For example, student associations will be found guilty if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.

During a street demonstration, the organization that plans the protest will be penalized if individual protesters stray from the police-approved route or exceed the time limit imposed by authorities. Student associations and unions are also liable for any damage caused by a third party during a demonstration.

One Canadian reader complained (in a way that only a polite Canadian could complain, including a "thank you" at the end) that the protesting students represent a "culture of entitlement" though I don't see it that way at all. It doesn't matter what the cost of tuition used to be, an 80% increase is an 80% increase. Taxing poor students is a lousy way to behave by the political class. During my own college days, I watched my tuition double over a four year period and it wasn't pleasant.

After so many years of seeing Canada as our friendly neighbors who were more moderate than us, it's sad to see the country in this state. When you won't allow protests and insist on punishing those who voice their opinions, you've lost the plot. Please bring back the rational Canada that I used to know. Read the rest of this post...

Is Hyatt's "don't blog about us" employee policy invasive? NLRB General Counsel issues complaint

Chris in Paris has written about the employer-intrusion topic before — "Employers now demanding job seekers turn over their Facebook passwords, usernames" — but the Hyatt employee handbook goes beyond that.

Take a look:


Note:

■ "Blogging" is defined. That's not a friendly definition — looks pretty inclusive, doesn't it? These are all the activities that can get you canned.

■ "Could have an adverse affect [sic] on Hyatt's business interests" — Cuts to the chase. Off-duty and off the clock, you are responsible for protecting "Hyatt's business interests."

■ "Compliance with federal, state and/or local laws" — This has two effects [sic]. One is to scare you, like the FBI warning on your DVDs. The other is to allow them to swim, if they can, just this side of the law (they hope; we'll see).

■ "Take steps to determine their identity" — Or as Count Floyd would say, "Be very scared." Seriously.

All you need to know? If you're a Hyatt employee, your job is to protect "Hyatt's business interests" in your off hours. The implied punishment is to find yourself on the secret "under-performing" list in the next layoff.

So how is this different from being told you can't bitch about your employers ... on your own time ... at Karaoke Night ... with a big loud mic in your hand ... on Mardi Gras ... with a big loud crowd outside listening.

Hyatt wants to shut that stuff down, if they can. Welcome to your job.

And now the news — the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency) is looking into it:

Thankfully, the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel is calling these policies into question. The use of social media by off-the-clock employees has become a hot button issue recently with the NLRB, and in a recent complaint the Board’s General Counsel found that Hyatt’s policies are overly broad and illegally violate free speech [pdf]. The company has yet to change its employee handbooks or clarify its policies.

I'm of two minds on this. The first is, Yes, go for it, Mr. NLRB. The second is, Let's see if you're a captive agency, in an election year, after 30 years of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush rule.

I'm all eagerness to see which of my two minds has lost its mind. Stay tuned. I'll update this when it resolves.

Laboriously yours,

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

Ron Paul's billionaire—Peter Thiel, founder of nat'l security giant Palantir, also PayPal

It seems that every national candidate has a billionaire daddy (or is had by one). Like sports team ownership, national political ownership is a big-money game these days.

First we learned about Newt Gingrich's billionaire — casino giant Sheldon Adelson. Then we discovered Santorum was similarly possessed — by Foster Freiss, a fan of Gov. Scott Walker and aspirin.

Now comes news of Ron Paul's billionaire. What this says about Dr. Paul is well worth knowing.

Bottom line — Ron Paul's billionaire is a major player from the depths of the public-private national security industry, a very heavy hitter from the Spook-Industrial State.

Mark Ames writing in The Nation (sub may be required; March 19 newsstand copy; my emphases):

So it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies. The company profits from government espionage work for the CIA, the FBI and other agencies, and last year it was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. (Palantir takes its name from the mystical seeing stones used by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to spy on one another.)

According to recently filed FEC disclosure documents, Ron Paul’s Super PAC, Endorse Liberty, has received nearly all of its money from a single source, billionaire Peter Thiel. So far, Thiel has contributed $2.6 million to the Super PAC, providing 76 percent of the its total intake.

Thiel, a self-described libertarian and opponent of democracy [sic] who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal, launched Palantir in 2004 to profit from what the Wall Street Journal described as “the government spy-services marketplace.” The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, was brought in to back up Thiel as one of Palantir’s first outside investors. Today, Palantir’s valuation is reported to be in the billions.

I wasn't kidding when I characterized Thiel — Palantir is a major player at Spook Central, the public-private conglo that runs the U.S. national security state.

Here's BusinessWeek on Palantir, as quoted by Ames (my reparagraphing):

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter.

Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’ ”

Do check out the BW article. It's eye-opening.

If the name "Palantir" sounds familiar, it should. Palantir was involved in the early-2011 HBGary 75,000-hacked-emails story. Here's Ames on that:

[T]he technologies and know-how acquired over years of spying on suspected foreign terrorists and threats were turned against US citizens. In what became known last year as “Chamber-gate,” Palantir was outed by Anonymous as the lead outfit in a private espionage consortium, with security technology companies HBGary and Berico; the groups spent months “creating electronic dossiers on political opponents of the Chamber through illicit means.”

For more on that story, our coverage is here. This is Glenn Greenwald with just part of the fascinating detail (the whole piece is well worth your time):

And in another case, on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, they [HBGary] wanted to do the same to progressive groups and activists who are critical of the Chamber of Commerce and that’s what has kind of produced a lot of controversy is that the firms that were involved in these discussions, not just HBGary but also Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and most of all Hunton and Williams the very large and well connected DC law firm that represents both the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America. These are very serious and legitimate players and so to see all of them discussing an email on these kind of odious schemes to basically destroy the credibility of political adversaries is why this has become a news story.

When you think Ron Paul, think Spook Central. Paul is owned by a Spook Central billionaire.

Is Ron Paul really Mr. I'm Against War? Right... (Psst, wanna buy a bridge?)

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

Glenn Greenwald on Obama's power to kill

We recently wrote about the president's new ability to kill Americans by executive order.

(It still shocks me to write that — it's so stark — but that's a fair description. It also shocks me that my concern about this power is surrounded by a cone of silence from my countrymen and women.)

Our earlier article quoted lawyer Jonathan Turley at length on the subject. Here's Salon's Glenn Greenwald discussing the same topic with Sam Seder on Majority.fm.



This is a great walk-through by Glenn. He starts with the beginning of the practice by Obama, the comparison with Bush II legal opinion, and the implications of AG Holder's speech. An extremely clear, focused interview. (Don't miss the comparison to Bush II at about 17:00 — the key point, Obama can get away with stuff that Bush could never do. Guess why.)

More generally, think about "targeted killing" — executive assassination — for a minute.

1. This power-grab has implications for our "reasonable positions" discussion about voting in 2012, but I'll save that for later.

2. If Julian Assange were traveling in a country where the collateral damage, extra dead bodies, would be brown people ("Unpeople" like Afghans for example), would Obama order a drone strike to kill him?

After all, Bradley Manning is being held without trial, and because WikiLeaks is "known bad," it's all good with our freedom-loving fellow citizens. Manning's an invisible man.

3. How long before this power starts being used for political takedowns? (They call that "feature creep" in the tech biz; you start with code that adds two numbers, and end up with code that measures the distance to the sun.)

4. In particular, how long before the next Scott Walker, as president, jumps in with both feet and just uses it to the full? Republicans use every ounce of power they get; always.

This really is a kingly power, you know. But hey, isn't there a game on? (Maybe if Civil Liberties had a basketball team, people would care.)

GP

(To follow on Twitter: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

An FBI mole (and FBI equipment) facilitated WikiLeaks release of 5 million hacked Stratfor emails

Here's a new wrinkle to the Anonymous–Stratfor "5 million hacked emails" story.

Background — Recall that, as the story first broke, Anonymous was reported to have broken into the email archive of a big global security firm named Stratfor and hijacked about 5 million emails going back at least six years. Here's how the Telegraph characterized some of the emails released, those dealing with Osama Bin Laden and the Pakistani ISI (my emphasis and some reparagraphing everywhere):

Osama bin Laden was in routine contact with several senior figures from Pakistan's military intelligence agency while in hiding in the country, according to a large cache of secret intelligence files.

The disclosure was contained in e-mails from the private US security firm, Stratfor, which were published by WikiLeaks website on Monday after being obtained by the Anonymous hacking group.

And we've been treated to leaks from that email cache since (for example, here).

But how did Anonymous get the emails? Now we know, from a group called LulzSec.

LulzSec is a very small, skilled group of Anonymous-type hackers, but they are not Anonymous per se. LulzSec as a separate entity (if "entity" can be used to describe amorphous groups). LulzSec was responsible for hacking Sony Pictures in 2011, and they were covered by Rachel Maddow for breaking into Arizona law enforcement files.

And now the news

LulzSec has been hacked, in the old fashioned way. The FBI caught one of their leaders, a man going by the handle "Sabu," arrested and charged him, then "convinced" him to work for their side as a mole, a double-agent. He's been the FBI's man ever since.

From BoingBoing (my emphasis and reparagraphing):

The Guardian has more on the big hacking news which Fox News broke yesterday (as noted in a post by Rob). "Sabu," the trash-talking, self-appointed leader of LulzSec, has been working for the FBI for the last six months.

The FBI says he helped the US and various European governments identify and arrest five alleged LulzSec members charged with participating in defacement, DDOSing, and "doxing" against high-profile government and corporate targets. Sabu ... was charged with 12 criminal counts of conspiracy to engage in "computer hacking and other crimes" last year, pled guilty in August, 2011, then "snitched" on his LulzSec friends.

So that's how they got "Sabu" to switch teams. Here's what they got him to do.

Sabu-LulzSec hacked an FBI conference call with Scotland Yard. The Guardian:

In a US court document, the FBI's informant [Sabu] – there described as CW – "acting under the direction of the FBI" helped facilitate the publication of what was thought to be an embarrassing leak of conference call between the FBI and the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency in February [where] both sides of the Atlantic were heard discussing the progress of various hacking investigations[.]

For more on that conference call story, see our report here. If the Guardian is right, the FBI set itself up for the intercept. I wonder if they let the other side of the conference call (Scotland Yard) in on the secret.

But the other story that Sabu was involved in, post his arrest and squealage, is the story mentioned at the top, the hacking of that 50-million-email cache from Stratfor Forecasting, the one that WikiLeaks is now releasing. The Guardian again:

A second document shows that Monsegur [Sabu] – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks.

That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.

Now we know how WikiLeaks and Anonymous got the emails — from Sabu and LulzSec. Which mean ... from the FBI.

What does this add up to?

This is a lot of interesting data to absorb. For example:

(1) The FBI got its own mole to use LulzSec to hack its own conference call. Just that makes you pause.

(2) The FBI also got its mole to get LulzSec to hack 5 million badly protected emails — covering a six year span — from Stratfor, a global security consulting firm that was described thus by Bloomberg in 2008:

Strategic Forecasting in Austin, Texas ... consults for companies and governments around the world, was described in a 2001 Barron's article as "the shadow CIA."

What? What top global security company advises its clients to keep six years of emails, much less does it themselves? And what is the FBI doing hacking such a company?

(3) Did Stratfor know it was being set up? One of Stratfor's clients could easily be the U.S. government, through any one of its spook-like agencies (DHS comes to mind, for starters).

This is a many-handed game. You could get very John LeCarré as you think about this stuff — but you'd have to imagine very bad villains. After all, here's a "global intelligence company" with Fortune 500 clients, along with who-knows-from-where government agencies — yet they keep years of emails on an Internet-accessible server. These are rank amateurs; circus clowns.

So let's ask a few more questions — or let others do it — to dig a few layers deeper:

■ "tas" (a working "IT professional" writing at the Agonist) offers this thought:

So a FBI computer was used to help the Stratfor leaks. It makes me wonder if the American intelligence community decided to let the private emails of a private intelligence company leak as some sort of warning to them.

■ Marcy Wheeler adds:

One other neat detail about the suggestion, of course, is that the CIA went around claiming to be FBI agents while they tortured people. Was this Sabu preparing to go around hacking for the FBI while hinting he was CIA?

Be sure to click through to the text exchange she references between a Guardian writer and someone the writer takes to be Sabu. It contains some intriguing implications.

■ And finally, Wheeler again, in an allegation I think is dead-on:

Sabu, the head of LulzSec, offered an FBI computer to facilitate the publication of Stratfor (no doubt [to] set up a LulzSec-assisted indictment of Julian Assange in the future)

Of course. Watch your back, Julian — also your front and sides. (And if "Sabu" really is helping to bring down Assange, he better watch is own back; that's a betrayal.)

Very John LeCarré, but with casting by Austin Powers. Our world, in their hands — I feel safer already.

GP

(To follow on Twitter: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

Obama AG Holder: Obama can kill you ... any time he wants to

Did you know that U.S. President Barack Obama can now order you killed? Read on.

Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder recently raised himself on his hind legs to explain to the nation what process is used to pick targets of Barack Obama's Presidential Murder Program (my caps; Holder is lowercase-modest).

This on the heels of the fact that President Barack Obama has been doing just that. Holder presumes the power; he just wants to explain the process.

(Did I say "Barack Obama" enough? I hope so.)

To explain, I give you Jonathan Turley, writing in Foreign Policy (my emphasis and much reparagraphing):

On Monday, March 5, Northwestern University School of Law was the location of an extraordinary scene for a free nation. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder presented President Barack Obama's claim that he has the authority to kill any U.S. citizen he considers a threat.

It served as a retroactive justification for the slaying of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki last September by a drone strike in northeastern Yemen, as well as the targeted killings of at least two other Americans during Obama's term.

What's even more extraordinary is that this claim, which would be viewed by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution as the very definition of authoritarian power, was met not with outcry but muted applause.

Where due process once resided, Holder offered only an assurance that the president would kill citizens with care. While that certainly relieved any concern that Obama, or his successor, would hunt citizens for sport, Holder offered no assurances on how this power would be used in the future beyond the now all-too-familiar "trust us" approach to civil liberties of this administration. ...

Holder's speech does not materially limit that claimed authority, but stressed that "our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan." He might as well have stopped at "limited" because the administration has refused to accept any limitations on this claimed inherent power. ... [H]e insisted that "a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to 'due process.'"

Turley's summary:

What Holder is describing is a model of an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush.

If the president can kill a citizen, there are a host of other powers that fall short of killing that the president might claim, including indefinite detention of citizens -- another recent controversy.

Thus, by asserting the right to kill citizens without charge or judicial review, Holder has effectively made all of the Constitution's individual protections of accused persons [into] matters of presidential discretion.

Turley has more, as do others. Please read it through.

Let me reiterate: Obama (through Holder) has turned "all of the Constitution's individual protections" of due process before incarceration or execution (state murder) into "matters of presidential discretion."

In other words, Obama can kill you ... any time he wants to. How is that not a fair description? And don't forget to note the "muted applause" in Turley's description of the speech's reception.

Might this be one of those "lines of conscience" we talked about?

GP

(To follow on Twitter: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

Drone Industry wrote the legislation governing domestic drone use

More Tales of Our Bought Congress. But this time it's not just bought congress people; it's a whole Bought Law.

For a mere $280,000, spread across an unknown number of eager congressmen, the Drone Industry has bought a law allowing anyone in the United States, including cops, to buy and use ... drones.

As a result of this law, already signed, new drone sales are expected to reach 30,000 additional units in the next few years. (So, let's say a new drone costs $1 million; that means ... carry the three ... gosh, a whole lot of money.)

I'm going to name this the Drone Manufacturers CEO Bonus Act of 2012. (Reasons stated below; for the rubes, they're calling it an amendment in the FAA Reauthorization Act, but we know better.)

The Drone Industry has been caught bragging that it co-authored the amendment. Says a leaked industry slide presentation: "Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word."

Here's Lee Fong at the Republic Report, who is doing magnificent work on this continuing story. Fong reports (my emphasis and paragraphing):

[A] lobby group — which maintains an official partnership in Congress with Reps. Buck McKeon (R-CA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and dozens of other lawmakers — was the driving force behind the domestic drone decision passed last week.

Fong offers selections from the lobbying group's presentation, eerily titled "Connecting the Unmanned Systems Community Across the Globe":

■ Page 6: The drone lobbyists take full credit for authoring the expansion of domestic drone use codified in the FAA authorization bill passed last week, noting “the only changes made to the UAS section of the House FAA bill were made at the request of AUVSI. Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word.”

■ Pages 10-12: The drone industry eagerly anticipates that civil drone use, including use of drones for “suspect tracking” by law enforcement, will soon eclipse military use of drones.

Under a section called “Challenges facing UAS,” the lobbyists listed “Civil Liberties.”

I'm kind of a page 5 fan myself:

Globally, the unmanned systems market was estimated to be between $5.5 billion and $6 billion dollars in 2010[.]

And "factors that will influence market growth"? Well:

1. Access to Airspace
2. Expansion of civil/commercial UAS operations
3. Global Conflict–particularly U.S. and allied nation involvement in future conflicts

Oh good; global conflict.

This is not to shock you (I hope it doesn't). This is to impress you that Drone Industry CEOs have hired competent help.

After all, what better way to stuff your pockets than to use corporate money to buy a chump-change Congress ($280,000 is nothing compared to the profit on 30,000 military-style aircraft). Remember, the ROI on defense bribes is upwards of 100:1. And these lobbyists are pros; they deliver.

In case you haven't figured it out, here's the whole process from start to finish:

    ▪ CEO gives corporation's cash to lobbyist
    ▪ Lobbyist takes a nice cut, passes cash to Congress
    ▪ Congress pockets cash and passes law (in this case, to open the entire U.S. domestic market to lobbyist's product)
    ▪ Democratic president signs law
    ▪ Corporation books profits
    ▪ CEO loots corporation via compensation, stock, bonuses
    ▪ CEO & sixth wife buy seventh house in Tahiti
    ▪ Lobbyist & eighth wife join them for nine holes of golf

It's the old, old story.

And what do you get? You get to worry about everyone in the country watching your every move. Then you get to hear from the Democratic president how bad the Republicans are. Then, on April 15, you get to pay for the privilege of sending your tax dollars to Tahiti — since there's no conscience exemption for bribe-hating you.

If you're interested, the whole presentation is below (don't miss page 13, on regulation):



Did you also catch page 11, "Non-Military Applications"? I see all kinds of "pipe/power line surveillance" possibilities (insert Keystone-"terrorist" wisecrack here).

And this is kind of cute (page 8): Define "small unmanned aircraft as weighing less than 55 pounds". Can you imagine the market for Apple iDrones? Those Chinese children will be ever so pleased.

There's much more on the pesky civil liberties "challenge" from Digby, who tipped me to this story.

(Money-plane image via Shutterstock.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

Nate Silver: "The military is now the most trusted major institution in the country"

While listening to an excellent interview at Majority.fm with Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings on his new book The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan, I was sent a Nate Silver link by Twitter-friend Mtl4u2. It's a great great find, especially in the context of the Majority Report discussion.

Some background: Hastings spoke in the interview about the conflict between the top military — especially the "special forces" military represented by Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Patraeus — and the Obama administration. At one point, for example, McChrystal spoke insultingly about VP Joe Biden in a meeting with his own staff, his military subordinates.

The blurb for the book addresses this, and reads in part (my emphasis and paragraphing):

General Stanley McChrystal, the innovative, forward-thinking commanding general of international and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was living large. He was better known to some as Big Stan, M4, Stan, and his loyal staff liked to call him a "rock star." During a spring 2010 trip across Europe to garner additional allied help for the war effort, McChrystal was accompanied by journalist Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone.

For days, Hastings looked on as McChrystal and his staff let off steam, partying and openly bashing the Obama administration for what they saw as a lack of leadership. When Hastings's piece appeared a few months later, it set off a political firestorm: McChrystal was ordered to Washington, where he was fired unceremoniously.

This raises a lot of Truman & MacArthur questions, and makes you wonder what's going on in the country that makes people like McChrystal think this is OK.

That's where Nate Silver comes in. From his blog at fivethirtyeight.com:

The longstanding project called the General Social Survey, which has polled Americans about their feelings on a variety of political and social issues for more than 35 years, just recently came out with their preliminary 2008 data[.] ... One of my favorite sets of questions on the GSS is one that asks Americans about their degree of confidence in various social institutions...

Silver then presents this chart (click to open in a new tab).

The dark blue bar is 1976; the lighter blue is 2000; the lightest is 2008. For each institution, top-to-bottom is earliest-to-latest.

Fascinating, yes? Silver comments:

The only major institution to have gained a statistically significant about [sic] of trust since 2000 is the military, which is now the most trusted major institution in the country.

Not sure I like that, especially in light of this:


Side note — If you like what you read here and you'd like to make comments or suggestions, I'm fairly active on Twitter, especially during the "morning paper" part of the day (Pacific Time, of course). Feel free to follow me and make suggestions. They are always welcome.

GP Read the rest of this post...

To My Old Master: Letter from a former slave to his ex-owner

Thanks to Dahlia Lithwick and Corey Robin on Twitter, I'm enormously pleased to bring you this treasure.

Please take a minute, if you have one, to read it through. You won't be displeased — it's a treat from end to end. This man is smart and he has style, a sense of humor, kindness, and justice. The attack comes slowly, and it's elegant.

The tone of the whole is pitch-perfect; the closing, a masterpiece of nuance and understatement. Enjoy!

Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson

It's even more amazing that this is a dictated letter. The third paragraph is genius, isn't it? And how he gets there, via the first two, is a brilliant bit of setup in my opinion, worthy of the best of modern writers.

I am reminded of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where the poet Thomas Gray muses on undiscovered Miltons among the humble of the earth. These lines especially came to mind:

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

This Milton is not mute; just quieted by time. I'm glad to see his voice resurrected.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere

Thank you, Jourdon Anderson. I'd like to write as well when I grow up.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Man arrested for DWI, held in solitary for two years, remembers almost none of it

We go to Raw Story for this hellacious tale (my emphasis):

In August of 2005, Stephen Slevin was arrested for driving while intoxicated (DWI). He spent most of the next two years in the Dona Ana County Detention Center without his case ever going before a judge.

Slevin was rarely allowed to go outside, fungus grew underneath his skin and his toenails curled around his foot because they were so long. At one point, he even had to pull his own tooth.

“He can’t really remember any of it,” Dart Society Reports’ Susan Greene, who interviewed Slevin, told Raw Story. “It’s all sort of lost in his mind, which is a typical trauma response, a pretty extreme though not unheard of trauma response.”

Attorney Matt Coyte explained to MSNBC.com that police had mistakenly believed that Slevin had stolen the car he was driving when police pulled him over and arrested him for a DWI. Slevin informed authorities that he had been depressed, but instead of getting mental help, he found himself on suicide watch in a padded cell. Three days later, he was transferred to solitary confinement.

Coyne commented: "Their policy is to then just put [detainees with mental health issues] in solitary. He disappeared into delirium...".

It's a horrifying story. Apparently, at some point he snapped alert. Once released, he sued, winning a $22 million award just last week. It's the award that makes this news, but the underlying thought is stunning.

How do you go from DWI to two years in solitary without ever seeing a judge? I knew we were a prosecutorial, punishing lot. But are we that prosecutorial, that mindlessly punishing? Guess so.

I hope it just a species thing, and not something in the American water supply.

One last quote. In an interview, Slevin said this:

“Prison officials were walking by me every day, watching me deteriorate. ... Day after day after day, they did nothing, nothing at all, to get me any help.”

Lord help him. As the article makes clear, he'll have PTSD for the rest of his life. As for the county, they're offering media tours of the facility — apparently there's nothing a PR campaign can't totally cure.

Update: I haven't chased it down, but note this comment. Worth looking into.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Can a Tweet really violate the DMCA? Twitter’s international censorship policy

I have to thank @MettaFilms via Twitter for pointing this out. This policy (and policy area) is so new to me that I don't know how to begin to think about it. But it obviously exists, so I thought I'd do what my Twitter friend did for me — point it out.

Twitter has a country-specific censorship policy. Who knew?

Here's the main part (my emphasis):

Country Withheld Content

Why Might Content Be Withheld?

If you have encountered a Tweet or an account that has been marked as withheld, you may be wondering what that means and why that may have happened. With hundreds of millions of Tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws.

Many countries, including the United States, have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content. In our continuing effort to make our services available to users everywhere, if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.

We have found that transparency is vital to freedom of expression. Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and clearly indicate to viewers when content has been withheld. We have also expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to include the publication of requests to withhold content in addition to the DMCA notifications that we already transmit.

The page goes on to talk about how they love transparency and free expression. Of course.

So I clicked on Chilling Effects and saw their current list of "take down this Tweet" complaints. At the time I looked, all were DMCA-related (there's a SOPA and PIPA element to this; DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

This is from a random complaint. A law firm writes:

The tweet references sheet music of copyrighted compositions written by our clients Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and alerts Twitter users of a pirate site distributing the sheet music without authorization.

So three points:

1. I have no idea how long this policy has been in effect. Weeks? Years? Most of my mayfly Twitter life? Dunno.

2. It's apparently "illegal" to distribute links; not pirated material, just links.

Is it really illegal? I seriously doubt it, since the link is just a pointer to something, not the thing itself. But the Feds are acting like it is. (More from an earlier pre–Super Bowl instance here.)

Regardless, Twitter is acting as though every lawyer with a suit and an IP complaint can put the kabosh on ... tweets. Guess there's money at stake, and even at Twitter, CEOs must have needs.

3. While this looks like it's just a greedy property-rights squeeze ("My client wants the last dime off the last table in the last room his song is being played") — there's an obvious political angle.

Do the Saudis censor tweets related to, oh, solar power? Anti-Wahhabi teachings? Comments unfriendly to a certain widespread kingly family?

And what are our take-down practices, here in the land of freedom? Twitter again:

Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so...

Wasn't it part of the (delightfully named) PATRIOT Act that when the Feds do stuff to you, you can't be told about it? I lose track of how much freedom I've lost; it changes day by day. Maybe that was in another country, where rule of law's not dead.

This implications of this policy clearly need more investigation, but the policy itself is not in dispute. So here's my due diligence to you — be aware.

By the way, if you'd like to risk your own Internet freedom and follow me on Twitter, I'd be glad to share the risk with you.

Yours in 140 [grayed out] characters,

GP Read the rest of this post...

George Soros on "the coming U.S. class war"

George Soros is one of the smartest investors in the world. Here's a taste:

You know George Soros. He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed $1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

The article goes on to note that Soros "doesn’t make small bets on anything." There's quite a lot here, and it's a really good read.

But I want to focus on this (my paragraphing):

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead.

He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.”

Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

That's as stark a statement as I've read from anyone with near his credibility. Go back (you who have strong stomachs) and read that again. No sentence was spoken at random.

He adds:

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Note the quotes; Soros is speaking in his own voice, unparaphrased by the writer.

Three short notes, then I'll leave you to your thoughts:

■ We've been warning on these pages about the risk of deflation for a while. It's likely that no one reading this has experienced such a world. To get a sense of life in a deflationary world, try this.

■ About the euro, is this why it bounced off of $1.26 and sits at $1.31 at the moment? (Euro chart here.)

■ About civil liberties and the mental "state of the nation," I offer this thought experiment.

Imagine that there were a second big terrorist attack sometime during Bush II's reign, in 2005 or 2006 for example. The response would have been to shut down the country even further. The experiment — how much further? If the "authorities" wanted to institute exit visas, for example, would the country have objected?

The point is this — the degree of loss of liberty we could experience is not a function of what the American people will tolerate. The American people tolerated Bush v Gore. It's a function of how much loss of liberty the "authorities" (Our Betters) are interested in imposing.

So what is that extent? What's the lower limit to the shutdown, in a world gone into the streets — Occupyers, homeless; browns and blacks; criminals, druggies, the terminally unemployed — in other words, all the Unpeople we have within us?

Again, I'll leave you to your thoughts. Me, could be having a wide-awake night chez moi. (Yet another of George Soros' sins. Thank you, sir.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

A major Julian Assange–WikiLeaks interview in Rolling Stone

I wanted to point you to this, in case you haven't seen it yet. The estimable Michael Hastings has a major interview with Julian Assange in Rolling Stone, and it's a great read.

It's also long; abstracting and commenting on its twists and angles would make a very complicated post. So maybe it's best just to bring it to your attention and let you have at. I may come back to it later, picking at the bits.

Here's the start, a terrific piece of writing in its own right. Note the visuals, note the conclusion (sorry, my asterisk):

It's a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it's not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

Assange sits on a tattered couch, wearing a wool sweater, dark pants and an electronic manacle around his right ankle, visible only when he crosses his legs. At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews – but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was f*cked," Assange says.

I've been calling Assange a classic case of "stain on the pavement" material. But maybe they've gotten more sophisticated — death-by-miserable-life, a fate Assange may well share with Bradley Manning. After all, it saves on all that "pressure-washing the concrete" money, and it's more fun for the torturer if the victim lingers, broken.

Anyway, please go read. It's engrossing and thought-provoking. This fight will not get less messy — it's widening as we speak.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Chris Hedges: Why I’m suing Barack Obama over NDAA

The counter-assault continues.

NDAA, if you recall, is the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that Barack Obama signed as his personal gift to a sleeping nation on New Years Eve. It authorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens by the military — since the battlefield is everywhere, you can be arrested anywhere. You read that right.

There has been quite the groundswell of reaction, including at our site. Here's the latest, from Chris Hedges (my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing.

With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

Hedges, a veteran war reporter (and one of the best before he stopped), then talks about his experience in countries with "military gulags":

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism. ...

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador?

What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one.

To that last question, I can answer the implied answer ("Well, we would not have arrested you") with two words — selective enforcement. What better way than selective enforcement to achieve this goal:

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. ...

Please do read the whole thing.

As he says, the gesture may be quixotic; but if you don't push back, you lose for sure. Thank you for your service.

[Update: Fixed bad link.]

GP Read the rest of this post...

Our ten most-read posts of 2011 on AMERICAblog

As the new year rings in, it's ten-best time the world over. And here at AMERICAblog we have a pretty good list of our own. These are the posts that have garnered the most interest in the previous 12 months.

In a very real sense, these posts are your favorites, chosen by your clicks. In some cases, you considered the topic important; in others, it was the news itself.

Either way, here they are. AMERICAblog's top ten posts, selected by your clicks. Thanks for each of those!  Here's the list, starting with the most-read post of 2011.

1. Did Romney adopt KKK slogan: "Keep America American"?

By far our most-read post in 2011. This sparked quite a controversy, with follow-ups here — after Chris Matthews apologized to Romney for MSNBC simply mentioning the controversy. And here — where the New York Times weighs in.

There were others as well; amazing the convulsions this caused. Good catch by John.

2. Mubarak ordered Tiananmen-style massacre of demonstrators, Army refused

One of my favorites, not for what it did, but for what it didn't do.  It got over 1000 retweets and nearly 4000 Facebook likes. It's sourced to respected, long-time Middle East reporter Robert Fisk. And yet the underlying story failed utterly to attract any mainstream media coverage at all. As near as I could find, not one big-media outlet picked up Fisk's explosive discovery.

And the underlying story is explosive. It was Mubarak's Tiananmen Square moment, the hour that Mubarak lost control of his army at the enlisted-man level. (For a discussion of aspects of the Egyptian army, try this, "A portrait of the Egyptian military"; my best shot at teasing out those layers.)

For my money, this was the biggest non-story story of the year, and a complete surprise to me how it played out.

3. OMG Cops pepper-spray UC Davis students, point blank in face, who are just sitting there doing nothing

Another very big deal, this time domestic, with many follow-ups. But I think one reminder is all you need; perhaps this one:


There's more at the link, including video, but that image is iconic and pretty much tells the tale. Occupy indeed.

4. Deaf, disabled senior citizen on bicycle deemed threat by police, tased to death for not hearing cop

This is one of many "I can't believe they did that; I can't believe America allows this" stories that got sprinkled through the year. Maybe the UC Davis pepper-spray story (above) made us more aware of gratuitous police violence. Hope so.

And this post allowed me space for one of my favorite rants — on rule of America by Rightwing Nation, and rule of Rightwing Nation by "Where's my daddy?"

I've never met a country more in need of Daddy's protection than Right Wing Nation, the country that writes the rules for how America is governed.

There's more of that at the link, if you care, along with a simply amazing story. Rest in peace, Mr. Anthony.

5. Att Gen asks Americans to report IP violations on their neighbors but not 1 prosecution of Wall Street

A beautiful catch by Chris in Paris:

Not a single prosecution against Wall Street for the collapse of 2008 but [Attorney General Holder] wants people to give a damn about IP violations for Hollywood and the recording industry

This is a prelude to all the PIPA and SOPA stories you're going to be reading as the billionaire-begging season resumes. Stay seriously tuned.

6. Law firm, that held Halloween party mocking people who lost their homes, to close

Myrddin wrote this one, but it comes straight from Karma Central. Kind of like if the guy who invented "Bumvertising" ended up drinking with the Sterno crowd. Great catch.

7. Next time...

This is a Scott Olsen OWS story, one of many. It's short; I'll let you click and read Daily Kos' David Waldman's immortal tweet. Heart-breaking.

8. Iceland arrests failed bank CEO and top trader; America arrests those who protest bank CEOs, traders

Another great catch by Chris in Paris.

Iceland's special prosecutor has taken Larus Welding, the former head of the failed Glitnir Bank, into custody, Reuters reports.

Glitnir Bank was the first of the top three Icelandic commercial banks to fail in 2008.

As Chris points out, only in not-America.

9. BREAKING: Obama to address nation soon. Rumors that Bin Laden is dead

Without question, one of the top stories of the year. Lots of updates, and quite a few questions.

10. US cable providers eye 'usage-based' billing

Another great find from Chris in Paris. Lots of good info in this post. For example:

Here's another industry that is bloated and worthless, thanks to the political class. As expensive as things can be here in Europe, people choke when they hear how much Americans pay for internet/cable/phone services. At home in Paris, our fiber optic 100MB connection also includes free phone calls to 100 countries around the world, plus 140 TV channels for €33.90 per month (around US$45). No limits. Other countries in Europe have faster speeds and better prices.

And more. As John says, "Fleecing the customers." Indeed.

All in all, a rough year for news, and not likely to get better. But interesting, very interesting.

We learned a lot last year. If nothing else, we learned how to Occupy, and for me, that made the year very sweet indeed.

More of that please?

GP Read the rest of this post...

Obama administration pushes back on liberal criticism of NDAA's "Indefinite Detention"

Of course; you knew that was coming. The base is restless (here's our clue that this is true). The admin needs a song to sooth the troubled base.

Here's the news part (my emphasis):

The Obama administration thinks many in the liberal blogosphere are mistaken in their belief that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by the president on New Year’s Eve authorizes the indefinite detention of citizens captured on U.S. soil.

Many progressive and libertarians have argued that the NDAA codifies the president’s ability to detain a U.S. citizen captured on American soil until the war on terrorism is declared over. The administration believes that the NDAA doesn’t specifically allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens, but concedes that it doesn’t specifically ban the practice either.

A senior administration official maintained in an interview with TPM that the NDAA “changes nothing” about the legal question of whether the government could allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens captured in the United States. ... “Whether you can pick up a U.S. citizen inside the United States and place them in military detention — which was done in the Padilla case but was never resolved up to the Supreme Court — we would argue still sort of an open legal question[.] ... The administration official said their interpretation was that the NDAA “wouldn’t allow you to detain anybody you couldn’t have detained before the bill passed.”

In other words (paraphrasing) — "We already do it in practice; the NDAA doesn't ban it; the NDAA is vague (because we made sure that amendments banning the practice were defeated); therefore indefinite detention isn't fully allowed (since we haven't completed the process of making it fully legal via judicial confirmation)."

Got that?

All you need to know:

▪ Nothing about this announcement responds to the "liberal criticism" summarized here.

▪ The administration is arguing that Padilla was a case of "indefinite detention" in the past and "nothing has changed."

▪ Remember: Dems and Repubs both accumulate executive power; but only Repubs take full advantage of it (though Obama I is going toe-to-toe with the Bush II legacy in the international sphere).

▪ Vagueness isn't a defense of the current law; it's one of its features, allowing the courts to put the final stamp on it with nobody's fingerprints fully on it. (Again, read this summary, and click through for the full detail.)

In other words, this is a denial that answers nothing and confirms all.

As I've said before:

Obama is systematically crossing Dem lines of conscience, Dem after Dem after Dem.

At some point, there simply won't be enough Dems who can, in conscience, vote for him, no matter what drek the other side spits up.

He must be feeling bullet-proof, ballot-wise. For a whole lot of people, this is really beyond the pale.

GP Read the rest of this post...

And in other news ... Montana high court upholds ban on election spending by corporations

Via Matt Taibbi, we're pointed to this (my emphasis):

The Montana Supreme Court restored the state's century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees in a ruling Friday that interest groups say bucks a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decision granting political speech rights to corporations.

The decision grants a big win to Attorney General Steve Bullock, who personally represented the state in defending its ban that came under fire after the "Citizens United" decision last year from the U.S. Supreme court.

"The Citizens United decision dealt with federal laws and elections — like those contests for president and Congress," said Bullock, who is now running for governor. "But the vast majority of elections are held at the state or local level, and this is the first case I am aware of that examines state laws and elections."

As you read through the article, note that the phrase "The corporation that brought the case" refers to the Montana complaint that came to the state Supreme Court in the first place, and not the Citizens United case. That corporation lost and the state's AG won. (I found that part confusing, and wanted to save you some re-reading time.)

Not all of the judiciary is benched with corporate hacks sent by Thank You Street to rubber-stamp the executive take-over — just a great many.

Thank the mistress of the universe for the few remaining.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Lieberman's Internet "Kill Switch" makes a return

Lieberman proposed this once before. He's back at it, just in time for the SOPA and PIPA debates. CBS News (h/t Amanda Marcotte; my emphasis):

A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a "national cyberemergency," and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.
...
Instead, Milhorn said at a conference in Washington, D.C., the point of the proposal is to assert governmental control only over those "crucial components that form our nation's critical infrastructure."

Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. ... The revised version includes new language saying that the federal government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems "shall not be subject to judicial review." Another addition expanded the definition of critical infrastructure to include "provider of information technology," and a third authorized the submission of "classified" reports on security vulnerabilities.

So there are two parts to this story. The first is the obvious — Mr. Security, Sen. Joe Lieberman (along with colleague "moderate" Republican Susan Collins), would like to hand tons of power to the president.

Do you wonder what a "cyberemergency" is? Or what the president could do if he declares one? Well, that's nicely unclear:

President Obama would then have the power to "issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency." What that entails is a little unclear, including whether DHS could pry user information out of Internet companies that it would not normally be entitled to obtain without a court order. One section says they can disclose certain types of noncommunications data if "specifically authorized by law," but a presidential decree may suffice.

Read the last sentence again. It says what you think it says — domestic snoopage.

The second part of this story is about the media. Go back to the CBS News story and read the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, where I placed the inter-paragraph elipsis in the quote.

The deleted section starts "Internet companies should not be alarmed". Note how that statement appears to be a bare assertion by the writer, until you jump past a bunch of pro-forma senatorial details and get (if you're still reading that paragraph) to the anonymous "Senate aid" attribution part. The "Senate aid" quote isn't a quote until you read that part — no quote marks to show someone else is the speaker.

So the piece is neatly crafted for the fast reader as follows:

1. The Internet "kills switch" bill is back.
2. (But) it's not a problem, so not to worry (plus eye-glaze phrases with names).
3. (After all) "We're not trying to mandate any requirements ..." (plus eye-glaze phrases with tech words like "backbone").

That "fast reader" I mentioned is most people on the planet. Do you think CBS News has an agenda?

If so, that makes three — Lieberman, who always wants Daddy to have the biggest stick available (wonder what he's hiding); CBS News, which wants to be news-credible without alarming the sheep with what the news actually contains (in this case at least); and Susan Collins, who's providing "moderate Republican" cover for a radical proposal, and is safely not up for re-election until 2014).

The radical stars aligned. This will get a new set of votes soon. The Senate is fun place these days. Al Franken sponsors PIPA, the "kill the Internet" bill; the full Senate passes the NDAA "Indefinite Detention by the Military" bill; and now Lieberman's Internet Kill Switch bill will return for discussion and a vote.

Dear Team Not So Smart As You Think — this is a terrible way to ask for votes in 2012. Just sayin'.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Is Obama under-estimating the NDAA & PIPA reactions?

There's a little bit of inside-baseball in this post, so forgive me. But I think there's an important and under-appreciated point.

I follow post stats at AMERICAblog pretty closely. Google, which owns Blogger thanks to one of its many buying runs, provides several statistics tables — among them, 10 best posts of the day (the "BOD" list), 10 best posts of the week (BOW list), and 10 best posts of the month (BOM list). What's measured is individual "views" for a given post, the number of people who actually click on a post to read it and its comments.

Normally, a "good" post does well in the BOD list, maybe moves to the BOW list, and fades. The process lasts a few days at most. A "very good" post moves to the BOM list fairly quickly, climbs in number of views, then peaks and disappears as it's replaced in the list. That takes no more than a week.

So that's my measurable — the life-cycle in days of "good" and "very good" posts, and when their peaks appear. Time moves on; interest passes to other newer subjects; the rhythm is almost boring in its predictability.

Now contrast that with this:

■ Our primary PIPA post, from November, is at the top of the BOD list — today. That's a shock; no post that old gets that high on that list. It also re-entered the BOW list last week and hasn't left it.

■ Our primary NDAA post, from mid-December, entered the BOM list almost immediately and has never stopped adding views. The total number of views is staggering. Every day it adds hundreds, as new viewers come to the post. It's on the BOD list today, despite its age, despite the holidays. It should have peaked and faded before Christmas.

■ We have a mortgage fraud post about an anti-bank whistleblower who died without suicide insurance, also from November. That post faded at the right time, but now has new life — it's on both the BOD and BOW lists, today.

I've never seen his behavior before. What does it mean?

1. There's an interest in these subjects (NDAA, PIPA, & mortgage fraud) that's deep and persistent. All of our site's regulars have weighed with their "views" a long time ago. As near as I can tell, the driver to all three posts is Google (search terms: PIPA, NDAA, "whistleblower found dead") as new people search on these subjects. If so, Google is telling us something.

2. Message for the left — If this really is a clue to the mind of left-leaning voters, it would be smart to hit these subjects hard, starting now. There are far more listeners, I suspect, for whom the PIPA, NDAA, and mortgage fraud messages resonate, than anyone appreciates.

I'd suggest taking advantage of this opportunity. If our small indicators are right, the time to plant seeds is now, not months from now. The soil is ready, so to speak. Let's not lose the chance.

3. Note to Obama & his merry band — I would not underestimate the extent to which these issues, especially NDAA, are a bridge too far for your base. It seems you've been playing a game of "how low can we go" — how far can we stoop to the demands of the money-soaked property rights and national security establishments and not lose our dependable triangulated base.

You act like you're bullet-proof, ballot-wise. Team We Dare You To Quit Us has been playing chicken with progressives and assuming victory at every step.

Dear Team: That may not be a safe assumption. There is always a bridge too far. These issues — especially NDAA, with its Indefinite Detention provisions — may be on it. Tread lightly; some things even a Wall Street billion can't buy.

Just my thoughts on a midweek holiday day. For what they're worth.

GP Read the rest of this post...