Friday, February 28, 2003
Beware the Whelp of Patriot. It will bury the Fourth Amendment like an old bone. FindLaw goes over some of the nasty things the Crime Dog has in store for you in John Ashscoft’s secret draft legistation. Think: government spies looking at your private data without a warrant — or any record that they did so — and FBI agents able to knock on your door and demand a DNA sample (Just a swab and for your convenience, no court order necessary).
“Even if Patriot II does end up being introduced in wartime, citizens and their representatives should fight this legislation tooth and nail, for it threatens to take even more of our liberties away. It is a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech, and freedom of information ... ” Read more now.
Express fear, outrage, disgust, despair and indignation to your legislators who are likely to have this stuff rammed through during the upcoming war frenzy. You know, when the Terror Alert level boils up to RED and that crafty old Crime Cur wraps up his ugly pup in duct tape and the flag and dares any patriotic citizen not to salute it. [Thanks, Donna]
Thursday, February 27, 2003
So desu ka? Hai, Kate-designed Japan Media Review launches! Watashiwa sake wo nomimas!
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Win Without War Virtual March. Today is a day to be counted. Call, e-mail or fax George Bush, your Senators and Congressmen to voice your opposition to war. More info on the cyber-event from MoveOn.org.
Thursday, February 20, 2003
World War 2.5 Wow! Two mints in one. Scary. Hilarious. You will laugh while you cry when you play this Gulf War II scenario spinner. Learn more about the “game”, its talented creator Dermott O'Connor and the sources of its domino theory here. [via Tom]
Friday, February 14, 2003
Free love. Send the people you love a groovy e-valentine from jezebel.com!
He knows, because he's watching. But nominate him anyway for Privacy International's Big Brother Award 2003.
In the dystopian pipeline: Patriot II. As noted here on Friday, the Justice Department has been secretly preparing a sequel to the disturbing and hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001 which granted the government sweeping new surveillance powers while reducing judicial oversight of Justice Department activities. That's right, not satisfied with just chewing up the Fourth Amendment, the Crime Dog wants to bury it in his back yard, mark the spot and dare us to dig it up.
A leaked copy of JOD's draft law was published Friday by the Center for Public Integrity — who said the legislation was being reviewed by Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Wired reports it will allow the JOD to:
• Conduct domestic wiretapping without court order for 15 days following a congressional authorization of use of force or an attack on the United States.
• Secretly detain citizens.
• Deport any alien, including green-card holders, who are convicted of drug possession or an aggravated felony.
• Access a citizen's credit reports without a subpoena.
• Abolish federal court "consent decrees" that limit police surveillance of non-criminal organizations and public events.
• Criminalize the use of encryption software in the commission or planning of a felony.
• Apply strict gag rules to those subpoenaed by a grand jury.
• Collect DNA from suspected terrorists and indeed from any individual whose DNA might assist terror investigations.
• Extend authorization periods for secret wiretaps and Internet surveillance.
• Ease restrictions on the use of secret evidence.
The original Patriot Act was passed with almost no debate in the legislative apoplexy that followed 9-11. We cannot afford to let this scary followup get a similar free hysteria pass — even if the Bush Administration pushes the world into war, even if another horrendous attack happens here. There would be no surer way to ensure a terrorist victory, than to abandon our commitment to civil rights. Write your legislators to let them know you are watching the progress of Patriot II and that you are not willing to trade our most valued rights as citizens — privacy and due process — for John Ashcroft's version of a secure society.
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Back by scary popular demand. Katecohen.com’s disaster kit shopping list. Includes duct tape and cognac. Also: The Government’s Guide to Citizen Preparedness and The Tape, The Terror, Dinner and a Poodle.
And, planning to have that duct tape delivered right to the airlock of your sealed plastic room? Outta luck. Amazon is out of duct tape.
Because we need it. Cute puppies through a fisheye lens. [via lifeuncommon]
When will Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling be going to jail? Enron paid no federal income taxes from 1996 to 1999. Yes, W’s largest campaign contributors bilked us for about $2 billion.
USA Today: “The company set up a dozen tax-sheltering transactions, using techniques such as claiming the same tax loss twice, to reap more than $2 billion in tax and accounting savings. With names like Project Apache, Project Renegade and Project Condor, the transactions show a vast new arena of Enron activity beyond the web of off-balance-sheet schemes and partnerships that have already been revealed.”
How much is $2 billion in Washington budget terms? A key initiative from the Predident's State of the Union message was the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, which Bush wants to fund with $1.2 billion. That would leave $80 million to build an especially cushy luxury prison to house Enron conspirators. (But hey, not in my backyard.)
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Green Piece. In Southern California, the rare syncopation of downpour lures me away from work. I stand in the frame of my open back door, nursing coffee, enjoying how sweet the earth can be. All my green things — that live on hose water most of the desert year — reach up to the generous storm and push up eager shoots, grow greener, send off fresh green smells. My garden and I are tucked under the comforting blanket of clouds — not at all like the unforgiving blue-sky background of the new-century disasters — I think: this is what peace is like. And for a while, I am able to think of nothing.
But inside, George Bush comes on CNN hyping his stimulus plan. He is listing the useless things he's going to do to help us out: tax cuts and small business deductions, a new SEC chairman. All of which he knows mean nothing because he has got to know that the economy is in fibrillation because everybody is scared blind about the war. If he was really committed to stimulating the economy, he'd step up to the podium and say:
“Were gonna contain that sonofabitch and — make no mistake about it — I won’t be starting WWIII this year!”
That would light a rocket under the Dow. The French would be drinking Napa wine. And we could avoid taking out a Homeland Equity Line of Credit to finance his War. But, damnit, I am thinking again. I go in and turn off the TV, get my camera and go out into the rain to take pictures of the once-a-year day in the garden.
U.S. Poet Laureate comes out against the war. Billy Collins tells AP: “I have tried to keep the West Wing and the East Wing of the White House as separate as possible because I support what Mrs. Bush has done for the causes of literacy and reading. But as this country is being pushed into a violent confrontation, I find it increasingly difficult to maintain that separation.”
Laura gets some American Lit. 101 from Katha Pollitt of The Nation. Concerning Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson — the “apolitical” poets to be discussed at her now-cancelled “Poetry and the American Voice” tea party:
“There is nothing political about American literature,” Laura Bush has said. But it would be hard to find writers more subversive than the three she chose for her event. Whitman’s epic of radical democracy, Leaves of Grass, was so scandalous it got him fired from his government job; Hughes, a Communist sympathizer hounded by McCarthy, wrote constantly and indelibly about racism, injustice, power; Dickinson might seem the least political, but in some ways she was the most lastingly so — every line she wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language, gender, thought. None of these quintessentially American writers would have given two cents for family values (Whitman was gay, as perhaps were Hughes and Dickinson), abstinence education, the death penalty, tax cuts for the rich, Ashcroftian attacks on civil liberties or the other hallmarks of the Bush regime. It's hard to imagine them cheering the bombing of Baghdad.”
Poetsagainstthewar.org has declared today — the scheduled date of the defunct event — A Day of Poetry Against the War.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Evil Johnny takes another poke in the all-seeing eye. Reuters reports: Congress will keep the amendment to the Omnibus Spending Bill that will put John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program on ice! The compromise bill returns to the House and Senate by the end of this week and it will contain the amendment which calls for congressional oversight of the Defense Department Uber-snoop and his data-sniffing minions. Let your representatives know that you believe the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects the rights of law-abiding citizens to be free from government spying. You can send a free fax here.
Can you make a difference? “It looks to me like the Congress is getting the message loud and clear from the public, and that message is stop the trifling with the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans,” Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and the author of the amendment, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Need to know more? Read previous entries (1) and (2) or visit the Total Information Awareness Resource Center.
Duck Duct and cover, 2003. The Homeland Security Office suggests that we all create personal disaster plans in case of terror — including stocking up on duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal a room in our house in case of bio or chemical attack.
At dinner, we discuss our plans with friend Laurie. We joke. Val says, they want us to get tape and Visqueen and build us a bomb shelter in the back yard. Back in the Cold War at least we had a hole in the ground. Yeah, and a lock on the door. We laugh about all the terrorist targets on Val’s gauntlet home: the fuel tank field, the electricity plant, the oil field, the Naval Weapons Station, the El Torito. We talk about the smallpox vaccination that Laurie, a nurse, will eventually be offered. (She'll take it.) We imagine out loud what evacuation would be like — all those SUVs full of every-man-for-himself yahoos off-roading their way north and east and running out of fuel and flipping over and bursting into flames in Riverside, where gunplay will ensue. Laurie says she’ll avoid the traffic and wait for the end of the world in her pretty, comfy bedroom — reading People magazine with Nuala the poodle. We talk about over-the-counter suicide; we talk about plague. I say, I’ve already chosen the room in the house to seal up. Laurie and Val shake their heads. They don’t think that duct tape can really stand between us and nerve gas and the pox. I insist that the Israelis all have rolls and rolls of duct tape in their houses. Val points out that they also have gas masks to wear inside their visqueen clean-rooms.
Damn, there is no way I’m buying a gas mask — that’s way too far down Old Panic Road. But how panicked is too panicked? We talk about all the very bad shit that could happen up at the Port. That leaves us sighing and silent, munching on Laurie’s new crispy/tender potatoes. I think about the Vienna Sausages in my disaster kit. Soon we’re calculating how much water we’d need and making plans to buy in bulk at Costco. We wonder about the neighbors who won’t stock up. If they don’t get The Tape, will they need the water?
I volunteer to go to Home Depot for some duct tape, because we decide that nothing would piss us off more than to die just because we were too cynical to get some goddamned duct tape. And that’s enough. Dinner is done, the Ravenswood is almost gone and this conversation is givng me the creeps. We put on our coats to head home, thanking Laurie for the food, yummy as always — just like when our dinner conversation is movies and books and dog park gossip, instead of terror and danger and death. She stands on the steps of her beautiful bungalow home and waves as we get into the Jeep. “Pick me up a roll of that tape,” she calls from the porch. Nuala wags her puffy tail. “Will do,“ I say. And I will.
Driving home through sleepy Long Beach, I'm thinking: maybe the whole announcement is part of the Bush Administration’s clever stimulus package: saving the economy by pumping our money through the duct tape, visqueen and Vienna Sausage industries. And it must be working; sagging Home Depot is up today +.27. On The Street, I think they're calling it The Naked Screaming Fear Recovery.
If like me, you're doing your patriotic part for the NSFR and priming that economic pump by shopping for your own disaster kit, you might be interested in this. An entry from the last bio-attack panic, it includes an actual disaster kit shopping list.
Friday, February 7, 2003
The Crime Dog's new plans mean the chances that innocent Americans will be spied on by their own government are elevated to:
The Center for Public Integrity reports that the Bush Administration has drafted “a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act that will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information.” The full draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 is available here. [Thanks Nikki]
Pay no attention to that masterpiece behind the curtain. Art daily reports that a tapestry reproduction of Picasso's Guernica which hangs at at the entrance of the UN security council has been covered with a curtain. Says Newsday, “As the council gathered to hear Powell, workers placed a baby-blue curtain and flags of the council's member countries in front of the tapestry's jarring images of women and children, men and animals under bombardment.”
And, “Diplomats at the United Nations, speaking on condition they not be named, have been quoted in recent days telling journalists that they believe the United States leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq.”
A UN official said the curtain was just “an appropriate background for cameras.”
Maybe in a most appropriate configuration, the diplomats would be made to face the tapestry while they argue for war, so they might be mindful of what they are bringing into being. [thanks as always, Paul]
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Die Volk werden leichter atmen. Volkswagen successfully tests its first hydrogen fuel-cell car.
Now is the time to make sure your representatives know you want to kill Johnny’s Evil Plan to spy on the private data of innocent American citizens. The Wyden Amendment to the current Omnibus Appropriations Bill for 2003 revokes the funding for the Pentagon's massive data-mining scheme (Total Information Awareness) pending Congressional hearings. The bill will be voted on in the next two weeks. Click here and scroll to the botttom of the page to send a free fax to your members of Congress telling them to keep the Wyden Amendment in the bill. It takes less than a minute to speak out against this insidious idea, and the minute is now.
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Facist web sites for children. Concerned that your children might not be getting the guidance that they need in their quest to grow up to be healthy and productive citizens of the Fatherland Homeland? Worry no more! With the help of the BEAST Guide to fascist web sites for children, you can steer your kids to a new world of online right-wing indoctrination. [right offa mefi]
Monday, February 3, 2003
Mega-media mourning (TM). “ ... watching hour after hour of televised shock and awe, one begins to wonder when and by what process these news anchors and commentators came to be appointed our official encomiasts, eulogists, undertakers, funeral-following marching band, interpreters of history and diviners of omens and portents. ... The shift from media as bystander to media as protagonist goes hand in hand with the broadcast view of corporate Intellectual Property. In their view, they own and deliver it; we receive and pay for it. Even Death comes packaged brightly: no sharing allowed.” Read more Tom.
Saturday, February 1, 2003
No dissent — however lyrical — at 1600 Pennsylvania. Laura Bush — dismayed that poets invited to a symposium at the White House might voice eloquent opposition to the war in Iraq — uninvited the lot. Completely ignorant of what poetry is for — completely in the dark about the deeply subversive nature of poetry, its way of using language to move under and around the usual, sheep-following way of thinking; its way of arriving, by unsanctioned roads, at something important — the First Lady sent out a statement that she didn't want her literary event turned into a political forum. Exactly wrong. Let all our literary events be political forums. All burning with the primary issues of being human. All unruly and un-spinnable, ungoverned — curdling the milk of all the milk-toast would-be culture ministers. Let the poets sell out stadiums when they sing songs of men and governments and religion and injustice and the eternal nature of humanity. Let us have a thinking world.
You can imagine how much Karl Rove would like that. (Who the hell invited freakin’ poets to the White House? Heads are gonna roll, fer damn sure!)
What do the poets think? Visit poetsagainstthewar.org.