Monthly Archive

Tom Tomorrow captures the entire mindset of every single radical rightwinger on the net in six simple panels. Pure genius.

Declan McCullagh points out that the DMV may be planning to pick up where the NSA leaves off:

The U.S. Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go… Details of the tracking systems vary. But the general idea is that a small GPS device, which knows its location by receiving satellite signals, is placed inside the vehicle.

There is little indication that any privacy protections are being considered. How will this travel data be stored? For how long? Who will have access to it, and for what reasons? How will the data be protected from hackers and identity thieves?

There are rational economic reasons for doing this—for instance, it makes sense that the heaviest users of a roadway would be expected to should a proportionate burden of the cost of its repair and upkeep. But with little or no regard for the rights of Americans in this increasingly paranoid culture, proposals like this bear careful watching.

What is it about the radical rightwingers that causes them to feel free to lie blatantly, transparently, and often? Woody is at it again:

Ted Kennedy Attacks on Homeland Security: “Fake but Accurate”

Woody has invented this quote out of whole cloth. Read the rest of this entry »

Heidi at ‘Euphoric Reality’ claims that the recent revelations regarding warrantless wiretaps aren’t worth discussing:

It’s not news – we’ve known about this for years. It was news about 4 years ago.

Really, Heidi? You can find news stories published in late 2001 that reveal that Bush had already ordered wiretaps without approval from the FISA court? Cite them. Read the rest of this entry »

Poor Woody has apparently never heard the old saying that “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. He’s all too ready to parrot the current line about Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, from a recent article in the Washington Times:

Previous administrations, as well as the court that oversees national security cases, agreed with President Bush’s position that a president legally may authorize searches without warrants in pursuit of foreign intelligence.

“The Department of Justice believes—and the case law supports—that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the president may, as he has done, delegate this authority to the attorney general,” Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick said in 1994 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

In 1994, President Clinton expanded the use of warrantless searches to entirely domestic situations with no foreign intelligence value whatsoever. In a radio address promoting a crime-fighting bill, Mr. Clinton discussed a new policy to conduct warrantless searches in highly violent public housing projects.

The problem with this—as with most of the radical right’s memes—is that it’s only part of the story. The facts cast a somewhat different light on the matter:

The foreign intelligence activity that the Bush administration has argued it can conduct without warrants—domestic wiretapping—has for 27 years been governed by FISA, which specifically requires court orders. On the other hand, the foreign intelligence activity to which Gorelick was referring—“physical searches”—was not covered by FISA when she said that Clinton had the “inherent authority to conduct” them. Further, Gorelick testified that she supported legislation requiring FISA warrants for physical searches. Following the passage of such legislation in 1995, the Clinton administration no longer asserted that it had the authority to conduct warrantless physical searches. By contrast, the Bush administration has claimed that it is not bound by the corresponding FISA provision requiring warrants for domestic eavesdropping.

David Neiwert makes a great point about rightwing rhetoric:

Conservatives’ complaints about left-wing ugliness are akin to those of the lunatic who walks about the town square poking his fellow citizens in the eye with a sharp stick—and then complaining about their lack of civility afterward.

UPDATE: Kit Jarrell has responded, and I reply below. Experience suggests that she will fail to answer the questions I ask.

This needs to be said, and said loudly: Kit Jarrell is a bigot.

In her latest spew, she comments on the recent explosions at a mosque in Cincinnati:

I don’t care if some mosque got a taste of the medicine they’re handing out. How’s it feel, folks?

Let’s be clear on this: Kit is implying that all Muslims are terrorists. That’s bigotry at its most blatant. Does she have evidence that this mosque has been “handing out” bomb blasts? She does not. Someone says “mosque”, and Kit hears “terrorists”. No real thought is involved—just the knee-jerk fear of those who do not look or speak like us.

This is no different from the person who believes all Jews are greedy, or who believes all blacks are criminals. Someone who makes claims of that sort about Jews or blacks is instantly recognizable as a bigot. Kit merely chooses to be bigoted against a different group. Read the rest of this entry »

PZ Myers makes some interesting point about using ID in the classroom to illustrate how science works, as well as basic concepts in biology. I’m surprised that more secondary and university teachers don’t do this. Science should be taught as a method, not as a dry collection of facts… and if a pseudoscience like ID can be used (and demolished) in that cause, so much the better.

There’s a fine line to be trod here, to be sure. ID proponents are desperate to frame their attempts to force-feed their religion to students as part of a ‘controversy’, where no such controversy exists. It would be a capital mistake to ‘debate’ ID, as there’s nothing to debate: ID is religious dogma masquerading as science, and cannot be ‘debated’ on scientific terms. Nevertheless, a thoughtful teacher can make good use of the claims of ID to demonstrate how real science is performed, and how pseudosciences can be recognized as such.

A. J. Liebling warned us that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. Happily, the Internet gives just about anyone in the developed world access to a worldwide audience. Now Robert Scheer, a veteran investigative reporter, has launched Truthdig.

The site presents in-depth reports, or “digs”, on matters of current interest. Its debut outing includes digs into religion and homosexuality, China, Syria, and the Jack Abramoff scandal. This will be one to watch.

In another of Woody’s content-free rants, he warns his readers to

Question their motives and watch for tell-tale signs such as anger or evading your points, as this is common to the alien Democrats.

We’ve already seen just how calmly and rationally Woody reacts to being questioned, so this should be fun. I’ll post some questions here. He’ll likely just ignore them, as he prefers to pretend that he cannot be questioned about anything.

1. Woody claims that evidence “of global disaster is manipulated”. Which specific evidence, Woody? Manipulated how and by whom?
2. Woody claims that Democrats “spread propaganda through school programs put in place eighty years ago”. Which specific programs, Woody? What specific “propaganda” is being spread?
3. Woody claims that Democrats are responsible for “classes that won’t teach our nation’s founding”. Which classes, in which specific schools, Woody?

Those three will do for starters. I predict that Woody will again shows us that he behaves exactly as he accuses others of behaving: with anger and evasion.

UPDATE 12/05/05: Woody certainly fulfilled my predictions in spades: he has protested that questions which challenge him to supply the facts to support his claims are “unreasonable demands for documentation”. He evaded every attempt to find out where he gets his “facts”. Heh.

Gotta love the right-wing “thinkers” who blame journalists for all the ills of the world. “Heidi” spends paragraphs pretending to be intimately familiar with how journalists think, spewing a huge load of psychobabble about how they “imagine” this and “HATE” that (quite the telepath, is our Heidi). She ends with:

Journalists are small-minded, intolerant peripheral players in history, each yearning to be and yet incapable of being a hero.

The point? All of this, apparently, is supposed to justify the bombing of two Al-Jazeera offices by US planes. This is, apparently, her answer to most disagreements: If you don’t like what the other fellow has to say, kill hm.

Sorry, Heidi. There are Americans who don’t think that out-and-out murder is a viable component of US foreign policy. Not that anyone expects you to understand what’s wrong with murder…