Letters-to-the-Editor

Unchecked Police Power

Big Brother Is Watching By Lance Ulanoff, PCMag.com

A recent Associated Press article about the FBI raiding an Ohio-based chat host company’s offices and confiscating its servers sent

a chill up my spine. The FBI acted on information that someone may have used the service for hacking. It was within its jurisdiction,

obtaining a warrant for the search and seizure. But it’s what they could do with those servers and the information stored on them that

really has me spooked. …

Who gets to draw the line about what the FBI can see? A warrant to confiscate a server is like giving

the FBI a warrant to search every house in the state of Maine. The level and kinds of information that could be on the servers is

certainly as varied as what you could find in a few thousand homes. …

Right now, I’m envisioning a series of frightening

home raids where the FBI confiscates personal computers from anyone they think may have been involved.

This new Big Brother-ish

environment is fueled, to some extent, by the Patriot Act, which is giving federal authorities far more latitude in their pursuit of

cybercriminals. I have no love for jerks that create viruses and attack or take over other people’s PCs, but I worry that the Feds

now have more power than they know what to do with. I believe this is primarily because they don’t understand just how twisted the

thread of cyberterrorism can become and how hard it can be to trace an attack to its correct origin.

All of law

enforcement has such expanded powers these days. This article is one of many showing just how real the threat to us all is. It is sad

that the author’s conclusion is not that we need to re-assert the Bill of Rights and curtail unrestricted policing; instead, he

says stay away from certain Internet resources because you may get implicated in spite of your innocence. mjh

FBI Removes Servers From

Chat Room Company
February 24, 2004

POWELL, Ohio (AP) — Federal agents conducting an Internet crime investigation confiscated

computer equipment and data files from a company that hosts private Internet chat rooms, an FBI spokesman said Tuesday.

Letters-to-the-Editor

The Past Repeats Itself

GOP Collegians are not claiming ”victim

status.” … These young men and women eager for knowledge are merely seeking a balanced presentation of materials. Classrooms today

do not foster a ”marketplace of ideas” — which is at the very core of an education.

Students are being inundated with

left-wing ideology, without an alternative viewpoint presented in the classroom. — CHARLES MESSIN, Rio Rancho, ABQjournal: Letters to the

Editor

The recent furor over too many Democrats at the University reminds me of Spiro Agnew. Young

Republicans may have to google Agnew to find he was a foul-mouthed petty thug who was forced to resign from the Vice Presidency (yes,

before Dick Nixon, conservative Republican, did the same thing). Before Agnew’s fall, he railed against the liberal media and

universities. So did another great conservative, George Wallace.

Funny that we hear the same crap today, more than 30 years later.

Apparently, conservatives believe they narrowly escaped the fiendish programming of their liberal teachers. Who taught you to read, to

write, to reason, to listen? Must have been all those Republican grade school teachers. It certainly wasn’t Rush Limbaugh, Jerry

Falwell, Pat Robertson, ad nauseum. mjh

Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering

isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law

and order. — Spiro T. Agnew

[notice it is no longer necessary to append ”ultra-” — just liberalism

is scathing enough.]

Spiro AgnewSpiro Agnew – Wikipedia

On October 10, 1973, Agnew became the

second Vice President to resign the office. Unlike John C. Calhoun, who resigned to take a seat in the Senate, Agnew resigned after

pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to a criminal charge of tax evasion, part of a scheme where he allegedly accepted $29,500 in

bribes during his tenure as governor of Maryland. Agnew was fined $10,000 and put on three years’ probation.

Online NewsHour:

Remembering Spiro Agnew — September 18, 1996

Dump Duhbya

Exercise Your Right to Free Speech!

ABQjournal: Bush Coming to Duke City

President George Bush will be making a stop in New Mexico next week for a discussion on home ownership, the White House has announced.

Bush is scheduled to be in Albuquerque on Friday.

Bush plans to stop in New Hampshire on Thursday for a “conversation” on home ownership. The event will feature hand-picked residents who discuss their support for Bush and his policies.

The same format is to be used again for Friday’s New Mexico stop. The location and details of the event have not been released.

New Mexico is expected to be one of several battleground states in this year’s presidential election. In the 2000 election, Bush lost New Mexico by 366 votes to then-opponent Democrat Al Gore.

Free Speech Zones will be set up in the desert. Machine-gun-totting police will protect your safety. mjh

Dump Duhbya

I’m a Uniter, not a Divider

1 Comment

One of the earliest and biggest lies Bush made during the 2000 campaign was to claim, ”I’m a Uniter, not a Divider.” From the moment he took office, he acted unilaterally and presumptuously. In the aftermath of 9/11, when we all needed a Uniter, he made his infamous ”you’re with us or you’re against us” speech. mjh

www.PantsOnFire.net

LIE: ”We know where [Iraq’s WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

TRUTH: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise.

Pants On Fire is a campaign to make Americans aware that George Bush has lied to us about many of the most important issues facing our country. Our aim is to make sure that Americans never forget about those lies so that we DON’T GET BURNED AGAIN.

Dump Duhbya

Who Cares What You Think?

Salon.com | ‘Who cares what you think?’ By Bill Hangley Jr., Salon.com

It has been almost three years since I spoke with the president of the United States, and I still get mail about it.

It was July 4, 2001, and we were both at one of those things that the late historian Daniel Boorstin would have labeled a ”pseudo-event:” A church picnic in Philadelphia, designed to help George W. Bush promote his faith-based policies. I was working at the time for a local nonprofit that had helped set it up, but I had some serious misgivings about the president’s performance up to that point, and being a part of the whole operation had left me feeling a bit like a pseudo-person. So when I had the chance to shake Bush’s hand, I said, ”Mr. President, I’m very disappointed in your work so far. I hope you only serve four years.”

His smiling response was swift: ”Who cares what you think?”

Dump Duhbya

Democrats FOR Bush?

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Democrats for Bush/Cheney 2004

I am a lifelong Democrat, and yes, I do work for a Democrat in the Arizona Legislature.

I started this site after talking with a former college friend and classmate, Josh from BushBlog2004, about how I’ve just been dismayed at how my party swayed from the ideals I hold so dear. He set up the site at my request, and when I see a story in the news or on the internet that proves my point again, I bring it here to share with a small corner of the world. I’m an avowed Democrat, I voted for Clinton twice as well as Gore. If some of my fellow Democrats could get passed their absolute hatred, they would be surprised to see how central Bush’s agenda really is. Do I agree with the President on every issue? No – I’m pro-choice, and I’m not happy at many of the environmental restrictions that have been rolled back, and the fiscal mismanagement is reason to be angry. But are we better off with him at the helm, are we a safer nation because of his actions in Iraq and the war on Terror. You bet your ass we are. The next time you want to shout AWOL – remember that merely 12 years ago we were screaming at Republicans for attacking our candidate for avoiding the draft. The next time you want to scream about the War in Iraq being an act of unilateralism, remember how we backed our Democratic President for going to NATO, not the UN, to oust Milosevic in the Bosnia.

It’s a reminder of just how far the Radical Right has pushed its agenda that a Democrat can refer to Bush as a Centrist. mjh

"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