Fans Show Love for the Writers' Strike

So today we are going to spread around the brownie points in honor of the growing blogger support for the writers' guild strike. Also some love for those blogging to show their non-guild writer's support for the fight against studio greed. One blogger comments that a division between studios and the better writers may find those writers using the internet to sell direct to the fans and cut out the studios themselves. Interesting concept. Elsewhere, it's plain to people that the advent of webisodes aren't an advertisement for a show but just allow networks not to pay writers. And here's one blogger's letter in support of the strike to the AMPTP. Brownie points even for the hot Republican chicks who quote Ann Coulter.

The strike goes to the heart of respecting work again in this country. What the guild has been seeking in negotiations is "exceedingly reasonable" to Republicans who read up on the issue, and it's great to see there's some hope labor issues can be seen as nonpartisan. Even though the actors of the Office have shut down their show in support of the WGA by calling out sick, it's great to see the overwhelming support of their fans. We even have a mega-site now for all fans to show their love, so check it out!!

Blackwater Provides US Intelligence to Foreign Buyers

So today we are going to contemplate the politics of using the word treason, especially when it gets so cleverly wrapped in the trapings of globalization. Blackwater developed it's own private intelligence agency and now hires out former CIA agents and their experience to the highest foreign bidder. And they admit point out that they are gleaning information from foreign contacts, developed by it's employees while they were in government service, which would be considered the treasonous exchange of state secrets to a foreign government if these foriegners took their information to a US embassy. The silent side of that logic is that capitalism permits the exchange of US classified information and state secrets to a foreign private individual for money. Shortly after 9-11 there was a lot of focus on the dangers to democracy posed by non-state actors. But it seems that instead of learning from history, conservative Republicans were falling in love with the concept of developing armed religious mercenary forces beyond the control of world government.

You learn in government service that it's not enough to avoid providing proof of wrong-doing, but you must also avoid the opportunity to do that wrong. It's not enough not to be caught having sex with a prostitute, you must also not be found in her hotel room with money in your hand. Here we have former CIA agents and other civil servants, building a shadow intelligence agency to collect intelligence they insist is only open source, after having spent a career developing skills focused on intelligence that was anything but publically available. What do they plan to provide intelligence analysis on? Their Global Fusion Center, staffed around the clock, searches for warnings on everything from terrorist plots on radical Islamic Web sites to possible political upheavals in Asia, [b]labor strikes[/b] in South America and Europe, and economic upheavals that could affect private enterprise. "We're not a private detective," former CIA's head of counterterrorism Cofer Black said. "We provide intelligence to our clients. It's not about taking pictures. It's business intelligence. We collect all information that's publicly available. This is a completely legal enterprise. We break no laws. We don't go anywhere near breaking laws. We don't have to."

America and Iraq have learned quite bloodly over the past few months that Blackwater doesn't believe that any laws apply to them at all, or should. If laws applied to Blackwater, as they have consistently argued in court, the ability of the Commander-in-Chief to wage war would be crippled, even while Blackwater was busy changing it's name from Blackwater USA to Blackwater Worldwide. Odd that Black insists that their intelligence operations don't involve pictures, while the live feed from al-Jazeera plays in the background and GoogleEarth is a common feature on computers across America. Yeah, who can blame the reader who swallows that one. But what is Black talking about in terms of gathering information from terrorist websites that's publically available. We happen to have had it out in public quite recently that the gathering of information from these sites uses technologies that provide illegal uses if they were used to hack say, information from Target's pharmacy records about whose getting emergency contraception. Even open source, we are talking about a global form of Operation CHAOS. Yes, the building of files on union activists and anti-war protestors in order to protect the interests of the highest bidder. Funded by conservative Republicans who are using your tax money.

How concerned should a democracy be considering that this intelligence is being fed into an organization with no alligence to the United States, and will consist of analysis of anyone who they have been paid to spy on. Such activities can be reasonably understood to include infiltration both of internet groups and face-to-face of anti-war and fair trade organizations, labor unions and human rights groups. A list of the children of labor rights organizers in Brazil and their schools and routes home. A method of concealing arms shipments from international inspection or even the law. The interrogation of democracy activists in Burma. The suppression of local activists protesting the corrupt regime in Nigeria and it's support by international oil companies. All of which are activities fundamentally in odds with the spread of democracy in the world and the idea of open societies.

Iraqi Victims Sue Blackwater for their Blood Money

So today, that good old American urge to sue bastards has inspired the victims and families of victims of the Blackwater massacre in Nisour Square to file in federal court against the mercenary company and it's financiers. Seeing the delaying tactics used by Blackwater for all the other lawsuits against it, they are in for one hell of a ride. Blackwater's announced that it has no interest in paying even a single penny, because hey, depriving them of their blood money will harm Bush' ability to effectively fight terrorism around the world!!

The Nisoor Square lawsuit focuses on the alleged "recklessness" of the Blackwater security contractors and seeks to punish the company for its "mercenary" tactics in the war zone that have led to "repeated callous killings of innocents," according to a complaint.

"Blackwater created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company's financial interests at the expense of innocent human life," the 16-page complaint says. "This action seeks compensatory damages to compensate the injured and the families of those gunned down and killed."

Also today, the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq released it's biannual report. The pressure the Bush administration will use to conceal sectarian violence is quite obvious in the Iraqi government's reluctance to release statistics gathered by it's IPA constructed Health Ministry on civilian deaths. The report notes that between the period of April 1 to June 30, the UN could confirm through other sources that 88 Iraqi civilians had been killed by US air strikes as part of the US "troop surge" effort to increase security. One incident involved the deaths of seven elementary-aged students who died when helicopters bombed their school near the Iranian border. The report goes on to note several records of "killings carried out by privately hired contractors with security-related functions in support of U.S. government authorities." The UN urged the US to find ways to increase oversight and accountability of it's mercenary forces.

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Blackwater, iraq war, human rights, injustice, war contractors, moonbat

Murderer "Fired" by Blackwater Hired By Defense Department

So today, while Prince's testimony before the House Oversight replays on CSPAN RADIO, we learn that Blackwater concealed the reason it terminated Andrew J. Moonen, enabling him to be hired as a mercenary for the Defense Department in Kuwait. Although Moonen's lawyer defends his client by pointing out that he apparently doesn't shoot Americans while drunk, the former paratrooper felt free to incur six traffic offenses since 2002, including driving on a suspended license. Moonen received an honorable discharge after serving with the 82nd Airborne from April 2002 until April 2005. His wife divorced him in December of 2004, but little else has been unearthed.

Moonen who?? The New York Times revealed him as the Blackwater mercenary who got drunk at a Christmas Party in the Green Zone last year, wandered through a checkpoint being manned by the Iraqis, and shot to death a guard there who challenged him. No wonder the Iraqis don't see the point in "standing up" if it means drunk Americans get to gun them down and flee the country. After he shot the Iraqi guard three times, he fled to a nearby guard shack run by Triple Canopy (a Blackwater rival). There, he lied about what happened, claimed he was being pursued by Iraqi insurgents, and denied he was drunk. Triple Canopy pried the gun out of his fumbling hands, and then passed him off to Blackwater. The rest is history...

Andrew J. Moonen returned to the United States within a few days of the incident, his attorney said, but in February he returned to Kuwait, working for Defense Department contractor Combat Support Associates (CSA), a company spokesman said.

Mooney worked for CSA from February to August of this year, spokesman Paul Gennaro said.

Because the State Department and Blackwater kept the incident quiet and out of Moonen's personnel records, CSA was unaware of the December incident when it hired Moonen.

According to Moonen's personnel record, the U.S. Army tried to call him back to service in April 2007, but canceled the request when they were notified he was overseas.

Two months?? You get your @$$ evacked for gunning down a friendly while you were toasted, and you somehow end up next door. Avoiding getting called back to active service and real combat, and a lack of alcohol plus supervision. Meanwhile, the Defense Department either has atrocious employment screening, or else they knew he was dismissed from Blackwater for at least the listed reason: "armed while drunk." Two months later, this is no bar to contracted work with the US government, to carry arms? And then one has to wonder, what did the Blackwater representative who got the background check call say to the Department of Defense, since it obviously didn't include a little "under the table" advice about Moonen's trigger finger. And then there is the honor and integrity of Blackwater itself, measured out by the utter silence in Moonen's personnel records with both the mercenary company and the State Department, on the events of December 2006. Nothing more damning than a blank page.

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Blackwater, war contractors, defense department, iraq war, politics, current events, moonbat

Blackwater Faulted By Military for Baghdad Carnage

So today a senior US military official announced that reports from US soldiers present at the scene of the Nisoor Square shooting spree by Blackwater indicate that Blackwater was never fired on by insurgents and used excessive force in the incident. The total Blackwater killed is listed at 14 by Iraqi hospital records. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government revealed that the Blackwater convoy instigated another shooting a mere 150 meters after leaving the square, firing on five fleeing vehicles and killing another unarmed and innocent civilian. In response to its investigations, the US military has halted issuing weapons permits to mercenary companies through the DoD, holding the current level of such permits around 7,000.

"It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong," said the U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident remains the subject of several investigations. "The civilians that were fired upon, they didn't have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP or any of the local security forces fired back at them," he added, using a military abbreviation for the Iraqi police. The Blackwater guards appeared to have fired grenade launchers in addition to machine guns, the official said.

The company has said its guards acted appropriately after being attacked. Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince, in previously unpublicized remarks prepared for delivery at a congressional hearing Tuesday, said the Blackwater guards "came under small-arms fire" and "returned fire at threatening targets."

Time for Congress to pass an amendment censuring Prince for lying to them and the American people. Time for American politicians to be serious about crime again, instead of flying murderers home first class and letting them loose on our streets. Defenders of Blackwater are quick to portray their mercenaries as former US soldiers (when they aren't former members of Columbian death squads), and to ask you who you want to defend you: Congressman Waxman or Prince. (Surely we have not come to the point in the US where we judge the integrity of a man by the size of his muscles?)One of them heads the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The other one heads a private army operating outside an oath of loyalty to the American people, but amassed on our shores. (Like the Madhi Army, say.) One stands for democratic traditions upon which America was founded and the other one isn't even a real American. One defends liberty and justice for all, and the other one wants to hold power over the streets of our cities without answering to the Constitution. And let's remember how they would exercise that power on the defenseless:

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq was driving into Nusoor Square with his sister, her three children and his 9-year-old son Ali at the same time the Blackwater team arrived.

"They gestured stop, so we all stopped," Razzaq said. "It's a secure area so we thought it will be the usual, we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception."

"My son was sitting behind me," he said. "He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car."

Blackwater also lied to Democratic Rep. Waxman of the when it claimed that it could not release documents requested for current congressional investigations without State Department approval. But State Department spokesman Tom Casey revealed that State had already granted permission. Congress isn't the only one having difficulty investigating the Sept. 16th incidents. Blackwater has refused communication with the Iraqi government outside of the FBI's investigation, stating that it is under no legal compulsion to cooperate. Additionally, Blackwater's been giving the US military the cold shoulder:

U.S. soldiers have reviewed statements from eyewitnesses and video footage recorded at Nisoor Square, the official said. Members of a U.S. unit working with Iraqi police were present in the area at the time of the shootings. U.S. soldiers also helped ferry victims to hospitals.

Blackwater, whose primary task in Iraq is to protect U.S. diplomats, has been unwilling to share information about the incident with the U.S. military, the official said, adding that military officials went to Blackwater's compound in the Green Zone but were denied access to company managers.

So far, Blackwater's key public strategies have included lying about what happened, and stressing that their mercenaries are mostly former US soldiers, in an attempt to dilute what it means to actually have the uniform on. As the details out of Nisoor Square get more gruesome as each day passes, these tactics are likely to cause the military to seek more distance in public, as it has today. A desperate Blackwater just hired itself a Public Relations firm to save it's public image. Really. The company in question, Burson-Marsteller, represents such clients as the cigarette maker Philip Morris, nuclear power plants, and the makers of Botox. How fitting of course, since Botox is an toxic agent of war. Even juicier is that Robert Tappan, one of the executives in charge of the account, worked at the State Department as the deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, and he spent six months in Baghdad as director of strategic communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority under Bremer. Undoubtedly, guarded by Blackwater mercenaries.

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Blackwater, war contractors, Iraq war, current events, politics, liberal, moonbat

The Smoking Guns of Blackwater's Mercenaries

So today the world has a view into the lives of five of the innocent people gunned down by Blackwater's mercenaries in Baghdad's Nisoor Square on September 16th. Construction workers had just finished painting flowers on the walls of the square following reconstruction after a truck bombing. A banner reading "Creators of Life are Always Victorious" fluttered in the noon breeze. Ali Khalil was a 54-year-old blacksmith and father of six children, and had felt safe enough in the capital to reopen his shop three days earlier. Osama Fadhil Abbas was a 40-year-old car dealer on business. Mehasin Muhsin Kadhum, a 46-year-old doctor, and her twenty-year-old son Ahmed Haitham, were returning home with college application forms for Kadhum's daughter. At 25, Mahdi Sahib supported his whole ten member family on his taxi driver's salary of $480 a month, and while he could not replace the broken windshield wipers of his taxi, continued to nurse the hope that he would one day save enough money to marry. Fifteen minutes later, as Blackwater sped away from the smoking scene, their murdered victims would range from grandfathers to wives to schoolgirls to an infant.

On that day, the Blackwater convoy was responding to a bombing near a State Department convoy about a mile away. As the Blackwater armored vehicles entered the square, a heavily guarded area near Baghdad's affluent Mansour neighborhood, Iraqi police officers moved to stop traffic.

Kadhum, the doctor, and her son Haitham, who were in the flow of cars the officers were trying to stop, didn't react quickly enough. A Blackwater guard fired, striking Haitham as he sat in the driver's seat, three witnesses said.

"The bullet went through the windshield and split his head open," recalled traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab. "His mother was holding him, screaming for help."

The car, which had an automatic transmission, kept rolling. Another officer, Ali Khalaf, tried to stop the vehicle as another spray of bullets killed Kadhum.

Thiab fled first, then Khalaf, followed by bullets that struck a traffic light pole, a billboard and their police guard post. Then the Blackwater guards escalated their firepower, engulfing the sedan in flames.

Osama died trying to flee from his truck when Blackwater turned their guns on it next. Khalil died within minutes of being brought to the hospital; when his wife arrived with bed sheets and water, she was sent to the morgue. Sahib died slowly over three hours from internal bleeding, while family members held his hands. The uncle of twenty-year-old Ahmed Haitham, had rushed to aid the shooting victims, and come upon Ahmed's and his mother's burned bodies in the hospital. He called Ahmed's father, who rushed to the Square, only to find the family's charred car missing it's license plate, but the number written next to it in the sand. Later in the hospital, Haitham Ahmed was able to recognize the bodies of his family by his wife's dental work and one of his son's shoes.

On the cab roof of Osama's white Volkswagon truck are bullet entry holes, with trajectories that indicate they came from fire from above. Although witnesses testify that Blackwater mercenaries fired out of their helicopters as people tried to flee for their lives, the company has denied this claim. Dr. Kadhum's white car still sits in Nisoor Square, and Haitham Ahmed is determined to see it remains there until there is justice for the deaths of his wife and son. Iraq's government has not responded to his inquiries.

"They have killed my beloveds. They were innocent," he lamented on Wednesday. "We don't have any contacts with any party, any side. We are all doctors."

"What I want is the law to prevail," he added. "I hope that this act will not go without punishment."

There were opportunities, he said, for his family to flee Iraq. But he and his wife believed in the promise of a new Iraq. "I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq," he said.

His son was going to follow in his footsteps. In his third year of medical school, the soccer-loving, multilingual Ahmed planned to become a surgeon.

Now, he said, his two other children, Mariam, 18, and Haidar, 16, are concerned about his safety. "Enough of the pain, enough of death in Iraq."

Mariam was born in the last phases of the Iran-Iraq conflict. Her eyes filling with tears, she said she wanted to leave: "I was born in one war, I don't want to die in another."

Original plans for the FBI's investigation included Blackwater guards. It took a release to the press about these plans and pressure from Congress, and 24 hours, for the State Department to think it was wise to alter these arrangements so that the department's Diplomatic Security Services would be assigned to that task. The White House is meanwhile denouncing legislation passed by the House which would apply all regulations currently used to provide oversight and federal jurisdiction over Defense Department war contractors in Iraq, to those under contract with State, including Blackwater. The law in question is the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The bill passed 389-30. Via the Office of Budget Management is the claim that such equal jurisdiction in contracting would have "intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations."

Questions continue to emerge on the conduct and operations of Blackwater on that day. Blackwater revamped it's website since the shooting, dropping press reports and news briefings, and reducing the publicly available information about it's company. However, you can still buy company apparel. The State Department's intial report on the Sept. 16th incident was written by a current Blackwater employee. Secretary of State Condollezza Rice exerted pressure on the Iraqi government to allow Blackwater to remain inside Iraq, creating the public perception that the government of Iraq cannot act with autonomy. Even the officials Blackwater guarded on September 16th highlight the need for impartial investigations:

A bomb exploded on the median of a road a few hundred yards away from the meeting, causing no injuries to the Americans, but prompting a fateful decision to evacuate. One American official who knew about the meeting cast doubt on the decision to move the diplomats out of a secure compound.

“It raises the first question of why didn’t they just stay in place, since they are safe in the compound,” the official said. “Usually the concept would be, if an I.E.D. detonates in the street, you would wait 15 to 30 minutes, until things calmed down,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.

But instead of waiting, a Blackwater convoy began carrying the diplomats south, toward the Green Zone. Because their route would pass through Nisour Square, another convoy drove there to block traffic and ensure that the diplomats would be able to pass.

CNN interviewed one of the Iraqi Police stationed at the Square, who stated that Blackwater threw water bottles at the police upon entering the Square and then proceeded to drive the wrong way around. The police officer Sarhan noticed that the guards looked nervous. When the traffic didn't immediately halt, the mercenaries opened fire with warning shots, and then began shooting vehicles. When Sarhan attempted to rescue Kadhum, after her son was shot dead in the driver's seat, he and another police officer were unable to halt the rolling car. Even in uniform, he too became a target:

"I wanted to get his mother out, but could not because she was holding her son tight and did not want to let him go," Sarhan said. "They immediately opened heavy fire at us."

"Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street," Sarhan said.

The shooting lasted about 20 minutes, he said.

"When it was over we were looking around and about 15 cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road."

Sarhan said no one ever fired at the Blackwater team.

"They became the terrorists, not attacked by the terrorists," he said.

"I saw parts of the woman's head flying in front of me, blow up and then her entire body was charred," he said. "What do you expect my reaction to be? Are they protecting the country? No. If I had a weapon I would have shot at them."

War is ugly, that much is true. But this was not war, this was murder, done by a company operating for profit committing acts of barbarity for which our own uniformed soldiers will face an accounting for on the streets of Baghdad. For how much longer will we tolerate having a military and a foreign policy held hostage to the profit margins of neoconservatives, who would see the power to make war and peace shifted to an auction? How does having the readiness of our forces undermined to create overpaid positions for at-will war contractors further American security? What does it say about the future of democracy as a government about humans that we allow senseless bloodshed for the mere sake of convenience? Who should be held accountable for the descent of the "war of the willing" into the "war of the billing?" How long will the burned out car of a woman doctor sit on the side of the road?

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Blackwater, war contractors, Iraq war, current events, politics, moonbat, liberal

Open Call to Boycott China's "Genocide Olympics"

So today we will take a cold-hearted look at the 63% of Americans who would boycott China over product saftey and the fact that they eat dogs and cats. Moonbat herself flirts off and on with doing her best to avoid buying in China over the plight of Tibet, in homage to the fact that reading Tibetan Buddhism has done wonders for her temper. Yet the time has come for a concerted and public, liberal and conservative, all-American push to boycott funding China through our purchases, policies, and misplaced attempts to protect "the free market." Somewhere along the line, we fought a near fourty year Cold War to halt the global expansion of communism and the totalitarian states which embraced it's doctrine. Our White House takes a different view towards "the red scourge" these days because "It's not appropriate to interfere in the private decisions of Americans..."



Capitalism funding the expansion of the communist police state, funding by the capitalistic greed of US investors and the Republican Party Leadership. Say it ain't so! And yet, we have the bewildering knowledge before us that under the name of fighing terrorism, China is openly reaping hedge fund investments on Wall Street, in new forms of public surveillance that will allow it to hunt down democratic protestors at it's leisure... and anyone who stops to watch. China faces no threat of terrorism, let's be clear. But China does find itself:

...subject to strikes of workers who don't get paid; to revolts over deadly environmental conditions; to religious activists who worship gods other than mammon and the state (the two that are officially sanctioned); to Web surfers enamored of a free exchange of ideas; to Tibetans seeking autonomy; and maybe, someday, to another outburst of Tiananmen Square-like, pro-democracy agitation.



An authoritarian government can never be sure how many of its citizens would relish its demise, which means the Chinese Communist Party has 1.3 billion potential targets for surveillance. Bradsher reports that 660 Chinese cities have begun installing high-tech surveillance systems. By one estimate, high-end surveillance will expand from a $500 million industry in 2003 to a $43 billion industry by 2010.

Of course, workers who don't get paid, people sickened by industrial pollutants, people who pray to foreign gods, liberal web-surfers, Iraqis seeking independence, and CodePink, are all foes of the White House as well. Perhaps it's not so unusual to find the Leader of the Free World playing footsie with the World Communist Regime. In the end, all radical Islamic terrorists have ever managed is to blow up a few buildings or airplanes. What could China do, when it's survelliance abilities we have paid for completely shut out our own CIA operatives and quash the last murmurs of democratic dissent? Given the spectacular web war launched against Estonia last spring that shut down its newspapers, banks, and government for days? Given that we are creating the worst border disaster of all with our open embrace of spammers and ad-ware programmers, who turn hordes of our own computers into digital zombie soldiers for sale? To the highest bidder? How can we defeat the enemy we arm to destroy us?

China's love for the world should be apparent, from their open funding of the genocidal regime of Sudan, to their conquest and brutal subjegation of the Tibetan people. China happens to be Sudan's largest oil customer. After the UN Security Council moved forward to with plans to deploy the largest peace-keeping force in the world to Darfur, China began it's manuverings to use it's suddenly enthusiasitc involvement to ward off high profile threats to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. With this slight of hand, China continues it's own version of a Marshal Plan, buying into the regimes of other African nations, while the US remains bogged down in Iraq. China hurries its efforts to place it's troops inside Darfur before the rest of the UN peacekeeping force reaches Sudan. A force significantly larger than the few soldiers China has lent elsewhere, and likely they plan to outstay the UN.

And as for poor Tibet and her people? Richard Gere and the International Campaign for Tibet have called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, but received little press. China just finished a train right through the center of Tibet to it's old capital, linking it to the communist state in a way that claims permanent ownership even to satellites in space.




Sacrifice is hardly popular anymore unless it's happenstance or something you were going to do anyways. China's grip on the lowest segments of America's economy makes it a formidle political opponent, as proven through it's growing alliance with Wal-Mart. Yet how impossible? How close do how many people have to be to create a watershed affect? What outcome do we seek? The answer: Tibet must be free, democracy must become something more than a means to inrease oil exploration, democracies must never again become hostage to the economic production of communism police states. Moonbat started with shopping at Target for her nephew's birthday party, buying Crayola "MadeintheUSA" art supplies over RoseArt's "MadeinChina." A few minutes effort also produced a means to hang pictures using supertape also "MadeintheUSA." And organic chocolate grown in Belize and melted into bars in Italy. So good.

Democracy finds itself too weakened by the siren call of profits and revenue to take heed of the warning signs. China will use American investors to create the means to survey and control it's urban polulations in a way only a global dark age could end. The arguement that allowing China into the World Trade Organization to use economic advancement to induce democratic change will have been defeated, under the combined efforts of communism and it's new capitalist backers. Green Fertility gives a compelling argument to still boycott over China's own internal human rights abuses. Yet liberals need to find a way to light a fire under the entire of our country, and it will not be to the cause of foreign gods or Chinese food.



We have in our favor the deciding point: things with China have gotten to the point where either democracy will decide the future of humanity in the world... or we will continue to sell away every part of our inhereitance to the resurgence of communism. When last democracy contested with communism, the USSR fell. Now there is no open contest, and our greed may yet fire the eternal shine of China.


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Made in China, globalization, communism, Darfur, Free Tibet, Genocide Olympics, politics, current affairs, moonbat

Moonbat Takes On Idiot Private Security Force

So today found moonbat off to do her volunteer work at her favorite Museum, all up in her girlie clothes and girlie heels. Of course, just beyond the front door lies the private security force and their little amateur screening area, which impresses a real Transportation Security Officer not in the least bit. One key difference between TSA and this gaggle of guards, is that unlike an airport there is no same-gender screening, which means that they have a group of 30-40 year old men waiting around to screen women who set off the alarm because they were high heels. As moonbat prefers and has done for the past two years, she yanked hers off and tossed them on the x-ray belt. One of the male officers immediately jumped forward and insisted that she had to wear them through the walk-through metal detector.

Oh yeah? There might be glass. Really? Now, if all passengers who fly on airplanes are required to remove their shoes to pass through airport security at the decision of the Department of Homeland Security, one can reasonably conclude that there are no realistic legal or saftey concerns, especially since liability rests with the Museum and not the security force. So why the eager insistance? Well... moonbat could trip. What, into your waiting arms? So, moonbat insists on a supervisor, and after it becomes apparent that no one else will be allowed to enter until one is summoned, behold, when it was insisted that none were in the building, one can be found. After listening to the presented case, and looking at the growing line of scowling visitors, the supervisor relents.

Moonbat prances shoe-free through the walk-through metal detector. She slings her now x-rayed purse up onto her shoulder and begins to put on her heels. Supervisor insists that she come with him because he is going to have to file an incident report about her behavior, so that her supervisor can councel her on cooperating with security in the future. Sure. Glad to put things on paper. Not a problem. Moonbat reaches for her other heel.

Oh no, that won't do. Even though so many concerns were sighted to prevent moonbat from removing her heels for screening, it suddenly is okay for her to walk through the museum in bare feet.... because the supervisor seizes moonbat via her purse and attempt to haul her physically across the museum whilst she puts her other heel back on her foot. Oh now it was on. A good measure of steel in "take your hands off me" and he let go, all full of apologies, and made a quick retreat to his office. Another guard waddled up and with almost 300 lbs of authority told me there was no need to have an "attitude" and took down moonbat's information on a napkin. Moonbat found great amusement in forcing a choice between allowed to use her cell phone in the security area to listen to her voicemail (which even TSA allows) and being able to give the extention of her boss. Hah! So the guard had to waddle back off to look up the correct number. Now of course, for moonbat's chance to file a grievance. Only after twice insisting that complaint forms be provided for her, were such forms produced, and she was assured she could fill them out at her station and drop them off on her way out of the Museum later. Likely there was some hope moonbat would cool off and forget. Fat chance!!

Flew through the paperwork, scanned off a copy for her dear readers and also for the head cheese, and pranced right back down to drop them off. Of course, the real sticker is that this will likely result in absolutely no discipline measures against the guard, or any productive change in screening policies, like same gender or the right to remove your heels. Though people might love to whine and complain about the security screening procedures for airports done by TSA, few consider the alternatives of using private security firms to whom politicians have to curry favor in order to get campaign contributions. If Lockheed Martin did airport screening, you can be assured that your local Congressmen could never afford to investigate any real offense that occurred... but since it's all in house, it's safe to wack away at any infraction on the part of TSA. So for all those of you who like to complain that you got screened because the wire in your bra set off the walk-through metal detector, imagine instead of a female screener, an eager 30-year-old and 6 ft tall slobering hulk. And oh, yes, moonbat always wears her Victoria Secret... even today. Cheers!!

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liberal, democrat, washington DC, security, privatization, big government, congress, homeland security, TSA, moonbat

Iraq Makes the Case for Big Government

So employee appreciation day brought a letter from the head cheese lauding how much we at TSA are "appreciated"... and an increase in employee parking fees with less than a week before the increase goes into effect by automatic withdrawal. More money for a private contractor for whom works a wonderful driver who litterally had the nerve to squash me with the bus door because we weren't loading fast enough. And more part-time employees should swell our ranks soon and take away our weekend hours, just to make us even more enthusiastic about defending the nation from terrorism. For those of you outside of the retail world, from which our cheese takes inspiration, Wal-Mart's brilliant innovation means you hire tons of people part-time, which means if you need them for a little extra, you still don't pay overtime. And also of course, they pay more and you pay less for their benefits. Of course, people who don't get hired full-time are the dregs of the barrel, tend not to show up for work, apply themselves, take their oath as a federal employee seriously, and oh... quit!!

Where's the money? Oh the front page of the WaPost covered how Bush shelled out 548 million over the past three years to two British private mercenary companies to protect the Army Corp of Engineers in Iraq. $200 million over budget!! The average payout per merc per month under these contracts has been $15,000. More than twice what any of the Iraq veterans I work with got paid when they were over there for far more dangerous work. The military claims that this indicates they are saving money, and that the plan to save even more money by consolidating two of the current Green Zone contracts into one, reducing the monthly cost from $18 million to $11 million. One of the companies lost in the first round of bidding and has twice held up the contract award (and the savings) by filing protest lawsuits against the government (costing more money just for the suit, and also because the DoD had to re-eliminate that company). Where are the Republicans who are supposed to be out howling that these people are aiding and abetting the enemy? Spending campaign contributions?

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported earlier this month that the Defense Dept. has recovered about $2 billion since 2001 from all outside contractors and government procurement officials accused of dishonesty or mismanagement, but the GAO didn't isolate those working in Iraq.


Is your guess that comes curtosy of DailyKos? Oh no- that's BusinessWeek. A year ago. Best known for the deaths of four of it's wayward employees in Fallujah, Blackwater employes about 1,000 in Iraq for $800 million in government contracts. Do 1,000 soldiers cost $800 million? $800 million of your taxpayer dollars of course, as Iraq oil production remains below pre-2003 invasion levels. To buy what, exactly?

Months ago, Bush's administration initiated and then ceased a failed attempt to increase border security by merely requiring everyone who flies into the country to have a valid passport. The core of the administration's failure remains that it created an unfunded mandate, by coming up with a simple idea and then refusing to hire the needed government employees. Imagine what all that fraud would have bought in military terms for our troops in Iraq. Just look to Bush's latest immigration idea, unfunded soundbite mandates to be paid for by small businesses, at least until they figure out that none of it comes with oh... only border agents to enfore the new rules. Who ah.. stay on the border. Get the picture? Perhaps key to a great deal of this administration's failures has been the overwhelming value it places on campaign contributors and the golden calf of small government, and how much it undervalues those patriots who raise their hand and swear to sweat for their country for peanuts.

Modern Witchhunt Kills Fetus, Imprisons Mother

So today Connecticut officially is on probation as a State and if the March 2 sentencing phase of Julie Amero's wrongful conviction sends this innocent woman to jail, they need to just be expelled from the Union. Seriously. Imagine volunteering your time as a substitute teacher, retired after a career as an underpaid kindegarten teacher, during a high risk pregnancy, panicking when a trojan horse floods the classroom computer with porn pop-ups, getting arrested by the baying mob of local townspeople lead by an ethically-challenged detective (investigated for giving beer to minors on the job), locked up, slapped with charges that carry a 40 year sentence.

And then you miscarry the preciously wanted baby you and your husband have sought for years and endured a great deal of fertility treatments to conceive and cherish.

And then... you get found guilty because you didn't wear a burqah to work like a real modest woman and the judge for your trial is Sleeping Beauty. All because a few 7th-graders saw a still-frame of a blowjob for a couple of seconds before you physically pushed them away from the computer. Pretty much makes everyone else's spam story pale in comparison. The only way Conneticut can redeem itself at this point is if the prosecutor and the detective/"expert witness" are placed in stocks in the town square so that we may all go to boo.

Julie originally faced ten counts of "risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-21)....The statute punishes '[a]ny person who...unlawfully...permits any child under the age of 16 years to be placed in such a situation that...the morals of such child are likely to be impaired, or does any act likely to impair the...morals of any such child'." So at least 6 parents refused to join up in this witchhunt, leaving only those of the remaining 4 students. Why did she keep surfing after the second brief spat of pop-ups around 9 a.m.? Substitute teachers don't teach and aren't required to have teaching degrees; they babysit while students do worksheets or take tests. How could they jump into the middle of some else's lesson plans? They can't, so they don't. The teacher left the computer on so Julie could surf, so it was okay with the teacher who asked her to substitute! Why wasn't she wearing a burqah to shroud the computer? Women aren't forced to wear them in public in this country, and she wasn't wearing a sweater or coat either!

Why didn't she yank the cord? The tech answer is that you aren't supposed to do so:

There are significant forensic reasons not to simply unplug a misbehaving computer. Sure, the question now is whether there was malware, spyware, pop-ups, or possible a Trojan horse on the computer. But what if the computer was being actively attacked, through a Trojan or back-door? Turning off the CPU likely would prevent the tracking needed to find the source of the attack. Unplugging the computer, for example, would prevent the creation of certain registry entries that are created only when, for example, the browser is closed properly – such as the registry entry indicating what URLs were typed into the browser – an important evidentiary issue in this case.

Witchhunts spurn evidence; their purpose is to convict on any charge possible. What Connecticut doesn't want you to understand is that the porn pop-ups occurred as a result of links clicked before the start of class when students accessed the computer without permission while Julie was in the bathroom. Also that they appeared as the result of a malware called Pasco, which was likely picked up when the computer's user (the teacher?) accessed e-Harmony earlier that month. Also, the prosecution used a computer program called ComputerCop to examine the harddrive in question that can't tell if a site URL was typed into a computer, accessed via a link, or the result of malware, although the prosecution testified in the case that their program proved Julie had typed those several links from memory.

The judge reduced the defense's expert witness testimony to two single slides, showing what a legitamate website looks like, and what a psuedo-website that has been set up to infest a computer looks like. Please. If someone is making millions to fool surfers, a jury of people to stupid to get out of the duty isn't easy prey? Also, the prosecutor claimed the porn was visible "for hours" just for shock effect, when the pop-ups were visible for only a few minutes.

Defense witness W. Herbert Homer posted his complete analysis of the harddrive here, and all the testimony he wishes he could have given to save this innocent woman. His examination showed that the teacher logged on, surfed for a few minutes, and then Julie checked her AOL email. Around 0835, the computer access the psuedo-hairstyle site that activated the trojan horse program, that spat out a few porn pop-ups. The computer went inactive, showing that someone stoped the students (Julie). Then at 0920, the trojan horse activated another spat of porn pop-ups, and then activity ceased again. Homer was able to show that these were indeed pop-ups by the size of the images shown.

All of the jpg's that we looked at in the internet cache folders were of the 5, 6 and 15 kB size, very small images indeed. Normally, when a person goes to a pornographic website they are interested in the larger pictures of greater resolution and those jpgs would be at least 35 kB and larger. We found no evidence of where this kind of surfing was exercised on October 19, 2004

That the prosecution blocked the vast bulk of his testimony to sacrafice the truth in pursuit of a conviction to mollify the prudish parents (toting battery operated hedge clippers only their gardeners use because they've never even seen a real pitchfork) marks a witchhunt has occured. And. Its. 2007.

Julie's plight should matter to you, because another day, another time, another innocent click, and you'll face felony charges yourself. Nothing may save you and you may have no warning before just one pop-up makes you a criminal. Spyware is the dark boogyman of the explosive phenomenon of the internet, targeting 8 year-olds googling Barbie.

I have my own sob story. A visit to eHarmony to check out some guys, picked me up a trojan horse made by a company called "AffiliateTarget" using a search engine called "Gleaned." Which I had an IT friend puzzle out for me. I don't suggest attempting to access either of these companies websites... my blockers are just shutting down my browser each time I try so I can give you links. What happened to me? The software kicks in when you click on a link or send an email. It reroutes you to a flash advertisement for an online company (use your imagination, perverts!) and requires you to watch it or wait for it to download completely before it will give you an optional link to click out. It also apparently will just redirect you wholesale to another website and destroy your back-key link to wherever you were (I'm guessing for a higher fee). It also prevents you from using your copy key to copy an email or a blog to a word document before you sent. If it kicks in when you are sending email or posting a blog you loose everything. It even interrupted my webmail's spell checker, for frak's sake.

AffiliateTarget's website at the time had an email link that was broken, and only allowed you to "buy" the promotional software after proving you were a company. I contacted Gleaned who never responded. I contacted the BetterBusinessBureau in both Maryland and in Atlanta, Georgia where an online software reviewer Taming the Beast had given me the address for the company's owner. AffiliateTarget never responded, and failed to respond to the BBB, who then told me if the other party won't engage, they can't help you. A link so people don't think this is normal moonbat lunacy. And then it got much worse. IT told me that all I could do was wipe the computer and start over from scratch, and there was no way they were saving anything saved on it for me! $2500 of Gateway laptopiness now sits unuseable on my desk. At least I'm not behind bars.

Why does the law not protect us? Why aren't these sorts of malware and their creators prosecuted with the zeal shown for band students and toothless grandmothers downloading from Napster? They make money? They target people with content that causes immorality to be assumed by it's meer proximity? Prosecutors don't want to look into a television camera and say "penile enhancement?" I escaped once, but I don't kid myself, and my new laptop has 7 different malware programs that take 3 minutes searching my computer each time I turn it on. Who wants to be Julie, who could have accepted a probation plea that would have scrubbed her record but left her with the reputation as a pervert?

Who wants to end up in the good fight for the worst reason of all?

"I was sitting there looking at porno? I was sitting there pregnant," Amero says, before telling me too much about a private life publicly unraveled.

So why not just accept a probation offer that would have wiped her record clean?

"The baby," Amero, now 40, explains as we sit in her living room in rural Windham. She'd spent years trying to get pregnant before losing the child after her arrest.

Absolutely the worst reason. Protest! Like a lot. Cough up a benjamin. Right this frakking minute!! Before you end up lashed to the stake and watching that on coming match.

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