mardi 19 octobre 2010

The News at a Furtive Glance


Sometimes the headline tells you everything you need to know, such as this one: "U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping." Essentially, the Obama administration is applying pressure on cell phone and internet carriers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast to keep their systems vulnerable to wiretaps. The FBI spends $20,000,000 a year to ensure this, meaning we're paying the government to spy on us and paying handsomely to greedy carriers to allow the government to spy on us. I'd like to know if our Constitutional scholar president, unlike Bush, is going through the FISA courts on these wiretaps or if, like Bush, he considers court orders a cumbersome obstacle. In the meantime, watch who you friend on Facebook or Twitter: It could be your Uncle Sam.

Meanwhile, in case you started missing Bush, this bit of nostalgia ought to cheer you up: We've killed another 18 people in Afghanistan in another drone attack. We went after a specific Taliban commander and even our lying military won't claim that we got him. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses on the ground in Baghlan Province are saying that all 18 bodies were those of civilians.

Meanwhile, back at the other glorious front in the war on terror, comrades, we'd launched yet another unauthorized air strike in Pakistan, killing 8 more people, although a local security official said the death toll would go up. Says the article,
The aerial assaults, initiated by former US President George W. Bush, have been escalated under President Barack Obama.

Washington claims the airstrikes target militants, but most of the attacks result in civilian casualties.

Since August 2008, about one thousand people have been killed in about 100 attacks by US drones in tribal areas of Pakistan. Over 90 percent of the victims were civilians.

And, just to let Yemen know they haven't been forgotten and that we're letting Pakistan and Afghanistan have all the fun, we also just killed one of their old men.

"Miss me, yet?" Hell, Dubya, it's like you never left!

And speaking of Pakistan, did you know that our allies in the Glorious War on Terror are terrorists themselves? According to David Headley, an American citizen who was picked up after the terrorist attack in Mumbai last year, Pakistan's ISI, or their government's intelligence service, met many times "with senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks." This shouldn't come as any surprise for those of us in the reality-based community. After all, our staunch allies not only helped let bin Laden escape from Tora Bora but even guarded him while he was receiving treatment on September 10th and even controlled the financing for the 9/11 attacks. Yes, we have met the enemy and it is us.

Also out of Pakistan, and just in time for Halloween, the late Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have come back from the dead. But this isn't the first time al-Zawahiri has been resurrected: Just two years ago, he came back in spooky audio tapes taunting then President-elect Obama.

Speaking of a tale of two dictatorships, as further proof that the Obama administration is merely a third Bush term, here's another ethical outrage as well as an ethical outage: The Obama admnistration is openly advocating for former Attorney General John Ashcroft in light of speculation that he abused the power of his office to illegally detain people and under false pretenses. In the DOJ's brief filed with the Supreme Court, it would "severely damage law enforcement" if Ashcroft or any AG were found guilty of breaking the law and abusing the power of the AG's office. IOW, as long as terrorism exists, anything the AG does isn't illegal. Shades of Nixon.

Speaking of scumbags getting off scot-free, the Obama DOJ just announced that it won't seek an indictment of Andrew Moonen, the drunken Blackwater thug who murdered the bodyguard of the Iraqi Vice President back in 2006. Meanwhile, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is still being hunted down by the Pentagon (even as they beg the media not to exercise their first amendment rights) and Sweden rejected his application for residency status. Thank God we still remember who wears the white hats and black hats.

Finally, the Obama administration thinks odds are you're being foreclosed on for good reason, even if you don't have a mortgage and paid for your house cash on the barrel head. Because our government is once again letting Wall Street have its way by refusing to step in to get BoA to extend its moratorium on foreclosures. Instead, they're standing idly by while letting BoA ramp up the foreclosure mills again by ending their moratorium sooner than expected. Just a week and a half ago, BoA decided to extend their moratorium to all 50 states but those palmy days are gone forever so the repo men are fanning out again while Obama, as he so often does, saturninely looks on.

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