I'm going to have to learn to speak Portuguese so that when the retards in the government are listening into my conversations, they won't know what I'm saying.
One thing this article got wrong - The Democrats aren't capitulating, they are enthusiastically uniting with the Republicans to abridge people's rights. Our government hates us, and they hate the rights and freedoms we have wrested from the ruling class down through the decades and centuries, they want to roll it all back.
You know what there is still so much venom directed against the french, still on the part of people in the US? I mean, you'd think it would be all over by now, but all over the internet, on YouTube for example, the hate is just extraordinary. It's because the French were right about Iraq. They didn't get involved, and look where things are now. 2 million people have fled Iraq, many of them stranded in camps in neighboring countries, victems of what one Canadian broadcaster rightly called "the horror of Bush's Democracy in Iraq" this morning.
I heard an interview with an Iraqi woman who's family has been scattered all over Europe. She wants to come to the US, and believes that she will; she thinks that Bush will take care of her because Bush created this problem. You know how many Iraqi refugees have been allowed into the US since the beginning of the occupation? 70. To admit refugees would be to admit they have to flee from something, and the illusion must be maintained that the occupation is the solution, not the problem. I presume a good deal more wealthy Iraqis have been admitted under different pretexts, though.
Once we were in Europe, we didn't show our passports again until we were in the airport on the way back out. We visited four countries - Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Germany, and nobody was worried about us or tracked our movements.
In the States, you can't cross the border to or from harmless ol Canada without a major shakedown.
We crossed the strait between Denmark and Germany on a ferry that (in addition to three decks of cars and one for trucks) carried our train across! They drove the train right onto the ferry,and drove it off the other side. As a guy who was involved in transportation for many years, I found it exhilarting and amazing. I've never seen anything like that. Washington State DOT brags about their ferry system - it's a crude joke compared to what I saw.
I think there is still room for American innovation and ingenuity, but it's being crushed by our political leadership, and our own apathetic acceptence of the dismantling of everything that makes the US worthwhile. It's time to get out of our hole where the only way we interact with the rest of the world is to bomb them, and learn a few things from parts of the world that have passed us by while we were busy patting outselves on the back for being so wonderful.
Monday, August 6th, 2007
Democrats Capitulate to President Bush As Congress Gives Government Broad New Powers To Conduct Warrantless Surveillance on American Citizens
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Attorneys and writers Glenn Greenwald and Marjorie Cohn join Democracy Now! for the hour to discuss warrantless spying, torture, the Iraq war and the future of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Greenwald is a blogger at Salon.com and author of "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law."
"Warrantless Surrender" – that's what the Washington Post called the Democrat-led Congress handing President Bush a major legislative victory this weekend when it voted to broadly expand the government's authority to eavesdrop without warrants on the international telephone calls and email messages of American citizens.
After weeks of pressure from President Bush, both the House and Senate approved rewriting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The New York Times reports that the new law sharply alters the legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States. No protections exist for Americans whose calls or emails are vacuumed up.
The new legislation moves the power to approve the international surveillance from a special intelligence court to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence.
The legislation was rushed through both the House and Senate in the last days before the August recess began. On Friday President Bush pressured Democrats to support the bill
- President Bush
The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the votes. Anthony Romero of the ACLU said "This Congress may prove to be as spineless in standing up to the Bush Administration as the one that enacted the Patriot Act or the Military Commissions Act."
Critics of the legislation say it gives the Bush administration the power to order the nation's communication services providers to create permanent spying outposts for the federal government.
According to Wired.com this could affect traditional phone companies, Internet service providers, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, instant messaging sites and online phone companies.
The law also grants immunity from liability to any company that cooperates with the government's spying operations.
Today we are joined by two attorneys and commentators who have been closely monitoring the Bush administration for years.
- Glenn Greenwald, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He is a constitutional attorney and author of the new book "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency."
- Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of the new book "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law."
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The typical American says, "Why don't allthese foreigners learn ta talk English?""My pappy learned me ta talk English real good.".
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