There is a huge buzz crackling through the wires right now about the fascist lock down already beginning at the RNC.
I bit my tongue about the DNC protests and decided to wait and see what happened at the RNC.

AOTP blogger Mona has already written an informative post about the events, called *This* is the face of facism. I also read about the events earlier today at DailyKos.

But I’m writing now to suggest that the most effective demonstration that could be made right now is none. (more…)

I have to agree with ChrisinDC on this about Obama’s nomination speech:

Now, I realize what some might say - that by failing to attack on certain themes such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and other forms of Republican lawlessness, Obama’s boost is rivaled or outweighed by the effect of his condoning silence on those things. As you might imagine, I do not believe this to be the case. From speech to speech, especially on ones as heavily watched and scrutinized as tonight’s, Obama has to make utility calculations as to what to say and how to say it. With literally millions of people crying out for him to address innumerable issues, and a dizzying array of political factors to consider, some things - even major things - are bound to be left out. That said, I do think Obama twisted the knife on enough matters, and for other matters made his attack more subliminal, to avoid essentially endorsing the things he did not mention.

Much of the chatter in my formerly-red-turning-purple county is that they loved Obama’s oration. If he turns out bad — I mean BAD — on war and civil liberties, well, we can all go hang ourselves or take to the streets with pitchforks and torches. But for now, this seems as good as it is gonna get.
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I’m even more excited than ever we will have Glenn in chat on Wed. [6:30-7:30 p.m., EDT.] Read how he, Jane Hamsher and others, all with press credentials, were chased off a Denver public sidewalk by the police as the intrepid bloggers tried to identify and inquire of Blue Dog Democrats — who handed AT&T telecom amnesty — why these pols and telecom lobbyists were attending a lavish, private party held by. . . AT&T. (And there is video!)

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My tax dollars, if not yours, were recently going toward keeping tabs on peaceful groups of Maryland war and death-penalty protesters. Nick Madigan of the Baltimore Sun and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post offer overlapping but not identical accounts. State police spies entered the name of one fellow, Max Obuszewski, “a former Peace Corps member and longtime activist who moved to Baltimore in 1983.” into the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database. The stories suggest that the surveillance team may have caused others to end up on America’s million-strong “terrorist” “watch” list. (I scarequoted “watch” as well as “terrorist” because, let’s face it, the government can’t actually keep track of a million people.) The project passed names and personal information the National Security Agency (Motto: Maryland’s Own Panopticon) and various state and local departments.

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AoTP participated in announcing the Strangebedfellows coalition and the AccountabilityNow PAC when we interviewed Richard Williams and Trevor Lyman, the geniuses who propelled Ron Paul’s campaign into the spotlight via “money bombs.” Bob Barr has now endorsed the PAC, and Glenn Greenwald has a great post explicating both why this coalition is crucial, and why we must be targeting certain vulnerable Democrats where there is a viable, Constitution- and civil-liberties-respecting Democratic primary challenger (or a Republican who is willing to break from the even more hopeless GOP hordes, a la Ron Paul): (more…)

At Unqualified Offerings, Neel Krishnaswami makes sense. Given how easy it is to learn anything about anyone these days, and further given that the govt has computers, too, we should: “Take things like FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and put it on steroids — the presumption should be that documents are not revealed on request, but that they are made publicly electronically available and searchable by default.”

Megan McArdle has a useful summary of the reasons that terrorism is not an “existential threat” to the United States. My call-out:

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Okay Frank Gaffney, you want your chance to soil your sheets, Leonidas-style, over the silent and perhaps at this point irreversible Islamofascist conquest of America? You don’t need to resort to fantasizing about Muslim sovereign fund managers putting a hex on their bond issues, or, I don’t know, doing a universal find and replace of “New York” for “London” in whatever Melanie Phillips wrote this week. You don’t need to make up anything at all. Because it turns out that the most cunningly disguised Islamofascist sleeper cell ever has just planted the bloody banner of the false prophet Mahound and his demonic minions in a courtroom a mere stone’s throw from the Capitol: (more…)

You know, call me a naive youth, but I’d been holding out a little hope that Barack Obama’s weaselly hedging on the new (awful) FISA bill was just a tactic to allow him to mitigate the risk of voting against a bill the White House, the RNC, and the McCain campaign is suggesting could be the difference between whether hard-working Americans live or die. I.e., Obama could have been trying to make himself sound like the voice of centrist, moderate, non-ideological wisdom, emphasizing his support for the bill in general and expressing his opposition to telecom immunity sotto voce, so that when it came up for a vote, he could claim that the immunity-free legislation he supported was a sensible compromise, and that the Republicans were extremists who insisted on getting 100% of what they wanted or else they’d walk. That might not have been a very effective tactic, given that Steny Hoyer has already quite voluntarily allowed the Republicans to frame their 99% non-compromise as a centrist, moderate, non-ideological compromise, but hey, it would have been consistent with Obama’s usual manner of positioning himself when he takes the liberal side in a lost cause. (Cf. his vote against confirming John Roberts on the Supreme Court.)

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As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

[...]

To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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This, my friends, is corporatism and the military-industrial complex at work; companies so in bed with the federal govt that they do the state’s (dubious) bidding, at the expense of their customers’ trust and for fine pay (links omitted): (more…)

Today I came across three articles, from three sources, dealing with three different
types of privacy issues. The first two deal with Internet privacy. The last with
wiretapping (in which a New York governor finds himself caught red-handed doing things he shouldn’t have).
The first piece is from Southern Beale. Apparently, Rep. Tim Couch (R-Hyden) out of Kentucky is pushing a bill that, if passed, would make it illegal for people to post anonymously. Here’s an excerpt from the original newstory cited by SB: (more…)