Dump Duhbya

Let Duhbya Protect You!

You may have read about BushCo subpoenaing Google to provide

a massive amount of random data — which could include your queries. Kudos to Google for standing up to the Department of Justice. And

brickbats to Yahoo for giving in without a squeak.

Take a look at what all these fine companies are willing to do to work with China and wonder what they won’t do to stay in business in AmeriCo. mjh

Analysis: Google Case Raises New Questions –

Forbes.com By TOM RAUM

Already on the defensive about its domestic spying program, the Bush administration has alarmed privacy

and free-speech advocates by demanding search information from millions of users of Google and other Internet companies.

The

moves raise questions about how far the government should be allowed to go to probe into American homes. The administration is pushing

back hard, defending its surveillance as helping to protect the nation from terrorism and, to a lesser extent, shield minors from

pornography.

Critics see the moves as an unwarranted expansion of presidential authority.

Yahoo China journalist – Yahoo helped Chinese to prosecute

journalist

China’s tangled Web

U.S. companies enable China censorship, critics say
Have U.S.

high-tech giants helped China bring the Internet to heel?

Microsoft Defends Censoring a Dissident’s

Blog in China

loco

Run Over This VERY Dumb Idea

ABQjournal: Coronado Puts New Ads on Parking Lot

Stripes By Charlotte Balcomb Lane, Journal Staff Writer

First it was billboards and bus placards. Then it was ads on the

stall doors of public restrooms.

Now Coronado Center is conducting an advertising campaign of a different stripe. The line

markings between 100 parking spaces at the south end of the mall near the JC Penney store have been topped with yellow and blue ads for

Qwest Internet service and digital television. …

[O]n a recent sunny January day, few shoppers seemed to notice as they walked

to and from the mall.

The consumers that did see them thought the parking spaces were blocked off or reserved for handicapped

parking. …

Qwest and General Growth Properties, which is the second largest mall owner in the United States, will decide whether

to stick with the experiment or pull it.

Dump Duhbya, QOTD

the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price

Amen to the suggestion from a Republican that “the principal remedy …

under our society is to pay a political price.” Make the Radical Right pay big this fall. mjh

Gore Says Bush Broke

the Law With Spying By Chris Cillizza, Special to The Washington Post

“The president of the United States has been

breaking the law repeatedly and insistently,” Gore said in a speech at Constitution Hall in Washington. “A president who breaks

the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.” …

“The disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of

the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to Americans in both political

parties,” Gore said. The Bush administration’s actions have “brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of

the Constitution,” he added. …

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has called Attorney General Alberto R.

Gonzales to testify at a hearing about the eavesdropping program. Specter said Sunday that if Bush broke the law in authorizing wiretaps

without going through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to get warrants, he could face impeachment.

“I’m not

suggesting remotely that there’s any basis” for impeachment, Specter told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “After

impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political

price.”

[updated 1/19/06]

Gore’s Challenge By David S. Broder

Former vice president

Al Gore has turned himself into a one-man grand jury, ready to indict the Bush administration for any number of crimes against the

Constitution. Whether you agree with Gore’s conclusions or not, the speech that the 2000 Democratic nominee for president gave this week

in Washington was as comprehensive a rundown of George W. Bush’s ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to

find. …

But even after discounting for political motivations, it seems to me that Gore has done a service by laying out

the case as clearly and copiously as he has done. His overall charge is that Bush has systematically broken the laws and bent

the Constitution by his actions in the areas of national security and domestic anti-terrorism. …

Gore is certainly right about

one thing. When he challenged the members of Congress to “start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re

supposed to be,” he was issuing a call of conscience that goes well beyond any partisan criticism.

Report Questions Legality of Briefings on Surveillance

– New York Times By SCOTT SHANE

A legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush

administration’s limited briefings for Congress on the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping without warrants are

“inconsistent with the law.”

The analysis was requested by Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on

the House Intelligence Committee, who said in a Jan. 4 letter to President Bush that she believed the briefings should be open to all the

members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Instead, the briefings have been limited to the Republican and Democratic

leaders of the House and Senate and of the Intelligence Committees, the so-called Gang of Eight. …

Of the Congressional Research

Service analysis, Ms. Harman said, “It’s a solid piece of work, and it confirms a view I’ve held for a long time.”

A White House spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program was classified, said, “We continue to brief the

appropriate members of Congress as we have been for the last several years.”

White House Disputes Gore on NSA Spying By Peter Baker,

Washington Post Staff Writer

“Al Gore’s hypocrisy knows no bounds,” Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, responded. “If he

is going to be the voice of the Democratic Party on national security matters, we welcome it.” [mjh: i.e. “Bring it

on!”]

McClellan dismissed yesterday’s court complaints as “frivolous lawsuits” that “do nothing to help enhance civil

liberties or protect the American people.”

Dump Duhbya

Land of the Brave, Home of the Free

1 Comment

First, we simply have corporate welfare going on with the Feds underwriting

the purchase of this technology — along with all the military gear police now use. Second, we have a population growing used to always

being watched — and perfectly fine with that. mjh

Federal Grants Bring

Surveillance Cameras to Small Towns
Village in Vermont Has Almost as Many as D.C.
By David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

Staff Writer

This snowy village [of Bellows Falls, Vt. — population 3,050] , in the shadow of Fall Mountain and alongside the

iced-over Connecticut River, is the kind of place where a little of anything usually suffices. There are just eight full-time police

officers on the town’s force, two chairs in the barbershop and one screen in the theater.

A little of anything — except

surveillance cameras. Bellows Falls has decided it needs 16 of those.

Using federal grant money, police plan to put up the

24-hour cameras at such spots as intersections, a sewage plant and the town square. All told, this hamlet will have just three

fewer police surveillance cameras than the District of Columbia, which has 181 times Bellows Falls’s population. …

On

Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for example, Ridgely Police Chief Merl Evans got a homeland security grant, funneled through the state, to pay

for five cameras apiece in Ridgely, population 1,300, and Preston, population 573. The cameras went up on water towers, at water-

treatment plants and in the two small downtowns.

“It was difficult to be able to find something to use the money

for,” said Evans [mjh: because the Congress makes sure you can only spend it on things that enrich their

contributors.], who is also temporary chief in Preston. He said because the grants needed to be used on “target hardening” —

protecting infrastructure — “the cameras fit in real nice.” …

“What you do in

public, you’ve got no expectation of privacy,” said Police Chief Rick Clark.

media

When MSM Attacks

2 Comments

The Net, relationships

and credible information by Steve Lawrence, Editor of Crosswinds Weekly

Blogs are the New Journalism, the new sources for

information for the masses, the new News. Blogs and those Internet hangouts, share some glaring and disturbing

commonalities. Each is a high�tech substitute for a bedrock social or intellectual institution. Each poses as its

predecessor. And each is profoundly different in ways that are changing the culture � and not for the better. Each is

diluting, if not perverting, the quality, intensity � reliability, if you will � of the institutions they are quickly

replacing.

It’s a little ironic that Steve Lawrence used an opinion piece to denigrate the entire

blogosphere. He reminds me of those bloggers, mainly conservatives, who completely dismiss the “MSM” (Mainstream Media) as archaic. Both

extremes are ridiculous.

With millions of people blogging, we can find anecdotal evidence we need to support any argument. Suffice

it to say, you used to have to be a Steve Lawrence to get your opinion out there and now that’s no longer necessary. The Internet has

opened up communication world-wide, the Web has put a printing press in every person’s hands, and the blogosphere is a public forum as

faulty as any group of people.

While there are just a handful of print publications in Albuquerque, there are several dozen very good blogs.

If Steve’s editorial were a blog entry, you

could easily add your reaction *now*. In such a case, we might see hundreds of people from anywhere in the world participating in a real

discussion, instead of waiting a week for Steve to print his favorite letter-to-the-editor.

Ironically, when Steve’s column is 6

days old, the paper version will never be seen again. Whereas, linked from a blog entry, it could find new readers to appreciate and

appraise it. Most of my blog entries involve excerpts from and links to items from the MSM that I think my readers may have missed; some

find them months after the original item has sunk beneath the constantly growing mound of “news.” Often, I don’t include any opinion at

all, though as often, my opinion is probably obvious. But, by linking to the source that stimulated my thoughts, I let you decide for

yourself.

I have a place in my daily life for both old and new media. If Lawrence completely dismisses new media for being beneath

his dignity, he’s depriving himself, as is his right. But his wholesale dismissal comes across as a bit self-serving (as is my defense

of blogging, you’ll note). mjh

Update 1/26/06: mjh�s blog — A Moment of Silence for Crosswinds Weekly

Dump Duhbya

Impeach Bush for Violation of the Sixth Amendment

Note very carefully that

the following story is about detainees in Guantanamo who the military says should never have been incarcerated 5 years ago.

Trapped in limbo at the whim of Duhbya. mjh

Chinese Detainees’ Lawyers Will Take Case to High Court By Carol

D. Leonnig, Washington Post Staff Writer

The government acknowledges that the Uighurs were imprisoned by mistake in 2002. Military

officials determined in 2004 that they were not enemy combatants and should be released. …

Lawyers working on behalf of the

Uighurs argue that Robertson’s decision effectively “proclaims an Executive with unchecked power . . . to seize and perpetually imprison

persons from around the globe.”

“The prospect of innocent men detained indefinitely, and of an Executive wielding powers beyond

those granted to it by the Constitution . . . is simply intolerable,” they wrote. …

The administration has argued in court that

the president can continue to detain the Uighurs under the executive’s “necessary power to wind up wartime detentions in an orderly

fashion.”

The two men at the center of the dispute, Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu Hakim, were seized by bounty hunters in

Pakistan after they fled U.S. bombing in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. They were turned over to U.S. forces and taken to Guantanamo

Bay in 2002. A military tribunal formally ruled in the spring of 2004 that they were not enemy combatants and should be released. Their

case could affect as many as nine Uighurs currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

—–

FindLaw: U.S. Constitution: Sixth Amendment

In all

criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ….

The U.S. Constitution Online

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams