Category: Posts from Radio

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.