Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
I just turned on CSPAN’s coverage of the House proceedings. A Republican Congressman was quoting from a speech by some violent religious radical. But I didn’t realize that he was quoting. So I just see a guy saying “Death to America is our motto and has been for years. Death [...]

(Reposting this)
By Thoreau
Since I am leaving the DC area (aka Mordor) to go off to the West, I’d like to get together in person with all DC area UO readers, writers, commenters, lurkers, general friends of the site, and enthusiastic enemies of the site (hey, if you hate it that much you must be reading [...]

By Thoreau
Sen. Christopher Bond (R-East Germany), the co-author of the warrantless wiretap bill, said after Senate passage of the bill “I can sleep a little safer tonight.”
Really? You feel safer when the state can act without restraint? Then surely Russia must be the safest place on earth right now. Senator, would you [...]

By Thoreau
I know that details are changing rapidly, but at the moment the House Republicans are angry that Pelosi postponed a vote on FISA until after midnight. It could be that this is purely carping about having to stay up late before getting unchecked power. Or it could be that there is some [...]

Sudarsan Raghavan makes an ass of you and me:
As the U.S. military attempts to pacify Iraq so its leaders can pursue political reconciliation, Iraqi and Western observers say Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his inner circle appear increasingly unable to pull the government out of its paralysis.
The unwarranted assumption here is that the Iraqi government [...]

The DNI and AG would also have to certify (page 3) that a “significant purpose” of this new, non-FISA-compliant surveillance “is to obtain foreign intelligence information.” This doesn’t exclude the possibility that another purpose — another significant or predominant purpose, even — could be to obtain information not related to “foreign intelligence.” Moreover, there would [...]

Like Lifehacker, Unqualified Offerings will save you time. Jerome Armstrong writes
The only real solution for our role in their region is to get off their oil, get out of their countries, and work with other nations to promote global accord.
Dude. We don’t even have to “get off their oil,” except to the extent it makes [...]

Sifu Tweety
IOZ
Greenwald (though I think the last paragraph is more about hope than evidence)

in ur resort, bloggin from mah phone.

By Thoreau
They have a nice summary of myths about FISA.
Here’s where you can become a card-carrying member.
And yes, I know, anybody who wants to can come up with a perfectly good reason to object to something that the ACLU has done.  Truthfully, if certain other issues were at the forefront, I probably wouldn’t be a [...]