Crit­ics Fear Emer­gency Cen­ters Could Be Used for Immi­gra­tion Round-Ups. The mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that built the prison in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba, and jails through­out Iraq has been tapped to con­struct facil­i­ties in the United States to be used in the event of “an emer­gency influx of immi­grants into the U.S.”

The con­tract has sparked wide spec­u­la­tion that mas­sive pris­ons are going to be built to detain ille­gal immi­grants or even U.S cit­i­zens, fears that gov­ern­ment offi­cials say are unfounded. [Fox News]

Dur­ing the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion there were repeated rumors that the Feds were secretly build­ing con­cen­tra­tion camps inside Amer­ica. Once again the Bushe­viks have done some­thing that they once attacked Clin­ton for want­ing to do.

A Few Pre­dic­tions. Every­one seems very happy that Abu Museb Al-Zarqaawi, the alleged and self-proclaimed leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in the U.S. mis­sile strike some­time Wednes­day. National Pub­lic Radio made this the big news of the morn­ing, inter­view­ing many Iraqis… By Charles Feath­er­stone. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

He’s almost cer­tainly right.

I’ve started to inves­ti­gate the options for migrat­ing this weblog to another sys­tem, such as Mov­able Type or Con­ver­sant. Radio is cur­rently work­ing for me (mostly), but I have had prob­lems with it in the past, and sup­port from User­Land is pretty much nonex­is­tent. Also, I’ve used up two-thirds of the 40MB quota that comes with a Radio sub­scrip­tion, and when it even­tu­ally fills up I don’t want to pay User­Land any more money for space when I’ve got over 4GB free on orange-road.com.

My main pri­or­i­ties when look­ing at alter­na­tive sys­tems are that I must be able to import all of the posts from this site, and that it must be able to work with some sort of news aggre­ga­tor software.

Look­ing back at Teddy Roo­sevelt. Ali­son Fish writes a ret­ro­spec­tive.… [John Robb’s Weblog]

Pre­dictably, the arti­cle goes on about what a great guy he was and cheers for the death tax. This sen­tence stands out:

bq. It was Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent Teddy Roo­sevelt, after all, who intro­duced the idea of an inher­i­tance tax in his speech The Man with the Muck-Rake, given exactly one hun­dred years, one month, and eleven days ago today.

Blame for the idea of an inher­i­tance tax should actu­ally go to the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, which was pub­lished in 1848.

Book Review. Excel­lent review at the P2P Foun­da­tion blog: Illicit: How Smug­glers, Traf­fick­ers and Copy­cats are Hijack­ing the Global Econ­omy by Moi­ses Naim is a wel­come and much-needed counter-balance and cor­rec­tive to the unfor­tu­nate pre­pon­der­ance of Utopian dog­geral sat­u­rat­ing many accounts of… [John Robb’s Weblog]

The “counter-balance” is that glob­al­iza­tion includes actual cap­i­tal­ism. The horror.

I’ve been doing some test­ing with “DEVON­a­gent”, an Inter­net search tool for OS X. So far I’m quite impressed. My first test was to search for the solu­tion to an eso­teric Apple­Script prob­lem which I had been try­ing to fig­ure out via Google for sev­eral days with­out suc­cess. DEVON­a­gent turned up exactly the infor­ma­tion I was look­ing for almost immediately.

Main­stream Media Sources Con­firm Bush-Rice Affair. The Wayne Mad­sen Report has more on the alleged affair between George W. Bush and Con­doleeza Rice:
bq. A White House source, speak­ing on back­ground, vehe­mently denied to WMR that there are mar­i­tal prob­lems between Pres­i­dent Bush and First Lady Laura Bush over a reported extra­mar­i­tal affair between Mr. Bush and Sec­re­tary of State Con­doleezza Rice. How­ever, two main­stream media sources [my empha­sis] have con­firmed that their sources also have reported an ongo­ing affair between Mr. Bush and Rice.

The main­stream media is ham­strung in report­ing sto­ries about Bush’s per­sonal life. For exam­ple, in 2001, the media high­lighted Bush’s com­ments about his pass­ing out from chok­ing on a pret­zel while watch­ing a foot­ball game in the White House. In real­ity, Bush, who claims he gave up drink­ing years ago, passed out from being ine­bri­ated. Washington’s movers and shak­ers knew the story about Bush’s drink­ing but the media stu­diously avoided it.

I have a feel­ing that this story is going to break into the main­stream media some time before the fall elec­tions. Then the illu­sion that Pres­i­dent Bush, despite his many fail­ings which even Bush sup­port­ers grudg­ingly acknowl­edge, is a “good, Chris­t­ian man” will be shat­tered. — Wayne Mad­sen Report [Police State USA]

It really says some­thing about Chris­tians that order­ing the deaths of tens of thou­sands, the tor­ture of hun­dred or thou­sands more, and the destruc­tion of an entire coun­try is just fine and dandy, but hav­ing an affair would sud­denly mean that he’s not a “good, Chris­t­ian man.”

Head­line of the Year: “Do Hadithans Hate Us for Our Free­doms?”. The above is the title of a new piece by Jacob Horn­berger over at the Future of Free­dom Foun­da­tion. His piece very nicely skew­ers the Bush administration’s exploita­tion of free­dom since 9/11.
And that is one triple-kegger head­line.
[BOVARD]

bq. Today, defend­ers of the president’s war and occu­pa­tion of Iraq are sug­gest­ing that the killing of 24 defense­less civil­ians in Haditha, includ­ing defense­less women and chil­dren and even an old man in a wheel­chair, were com­mit­ted by only a few U.S. sol­diers and that the rest of America

Inter­net: Ran­somware. Very cool inno­va­tion but poorly imple­mented: This virus swaps files found in the “My Doc­u­ments” folder on Win­dows with a sin­gle file pro­tected by a 30-digit pass­word. Vic­tims are only told the pass­word if they buy drugs from one of… [John Robb’s Weblog]

That sounds like some­thing the DEA would come up with. They could wait until some poor sucker bought the drugs (thus vio­lat­ing some obscure uncon­sti­tu­tional law), then swoop in and throw him and his spouse in prison for twenty years, and empty out his bank accounts and sell his prop­erty and chil­dren under the guise of “asset for­fei­ture” and “child protection.”

New CIA Direc­tor Plans Mas­sive Increase in Domes­tic Spy­ing. Doug Thomp­son reports that the new Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence, Gen­eral Michael Hay­den plans to build a domes­tic spy­ing net­work that will pry into the lives of most Amer­i­cans around the clock.
bq. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush told Hay­den to “take what­ever steps nec­es­sary” to mon­i­tor Amer­i­cans 24/7 by lis­ten­ing in on their phone calls, bug­ging their homes and offices, prob­ing their pri­vate lives, snoop­ing into their finan­cial records and watch­ing their travel habits.
…“What Hay­den plans to do is not only ille­gal, it is immoral” says a long­time CIA oper­a­tive who may retire early rather than par­tic­i­pate in what he sees as an ille­gal exten­sion of the spy agency’s activ­i­ties.
Hay­den, who over­saw the National Secu­rity Agency’s ques­tion­able mon­i­tor­ing of phone calls and emails of Amer­i­cas, plans to con­sol­i­date much of the country’s domes­tic spy­ing into a new desk at the CIA, call­ing it a “domes­tic ter­ror­ism pre­ven­tion” oper­a­tion.
Does this actu­ally sur­prise any­one? And did the Sen­ate know what it was get­ting when it con­firmed Gen­eral Hay­den as CIA Direc­tor? Of course, it did. As Thomp­son con­cludes:
bq. This nation is under attack. We, the peo­ple, are under attack. And the enemy in this case is not an Islamic rad­i­cal hid­ing in a cave in Afghanistan but a cabal of truly evil men and women at 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue and on Capi­tol Hill aided by carefully-picked, law-ignoring appointees at the Hoover Build­ing on Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue, a black glass-walled build­ing at Fort Meade, MD, and a com­plex in Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia. — Capi­tol Hill Blue

[Police State USA]

Of course this answers the ques­tion of why Con­gress was so eager to con­firm Hay­den. It’s a par­tic­u­larly good arrange­ment for Democ­rats, as they get their police state infra­struc­ture and get to blame any polit­i­cal fall­out on the Republicans.