Tag Archives: homeland Security

Operation OMG

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Slim Pickens rides againNorthCom, Pacific Command and NORAD, along with the Department of Homeland Security, are planning an anti-terrorist training exercise called Operation Vigilant Shield. It will take place October 15-20 and will prepare the military for a martial law scenario. The exercise will be a mock up of a radiological weapons catastrophe. I’ve read elsewhere that the military will use members of the clergy to encourage cooperation in the event of martial law.

I called the telephone number on the Operation Vigilant Shield Fact Sheet(PDF) and spoke to one Tony Hill. I am not sure of his rank. NORAD is today in the process of moving desks and boxes to a new home at NorthCom and didn’t have the usual operator in place. He chatted amiably with me about Operation Vigilant Shield, assured me that it was going to take place, assured me that it wasn’t all that unusual.

On September 11, 2001, NORAD was conducting a training exercise called Operation Vigilant Guardian. This ensured that our military air fleet would be tied up over the Atlantic and that no adequate defense to hijacked airliners could be launched.

I think I’ll be a ghost come Halloween.

See you in prison

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Bush dictator quote from 2000Quietly, with little mention in the press, the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive was signed in May 2007. This directive places all governmental power in the hands of the President in the case of a catastrophic emergency (as defined by him alone). It also allows him to take control of the private and nonprofit sectors. It effectively abolishes the checks and balances built into the Constitution and demolishes the Bill of Rights. This is, of course, necessary to keep us safe in case of a national disaster. The “Unitary Executive” would be able to act quickly and decisively, without any interference from those other two annoying branches of government, slow-moving and contentious as they are.

Our Constitution has never been about efficiency. The checks and balances built into it were created to keep any one individual or branch of government from having unilateral power. It lays the groundwork for a democracy, not for a well-oiled machine.

George Bush has shown extreme disdain for the Constitution, the very document he swore to uphold. He has vetoed only a handful of bills while in office, but he has attached signing statements to more than a thousand, clearly indicating scorn for Congress and his commitment to enforce only the laws he chooses. He has taken bills designed to protect the American public and has amended them to be used against us. Congress recently handed Zippy even more power by passing the Police America Act 2007. He has stripped us of our right to privacy, our right against unreasonable search and seizure, our right to due process. All in the name of the fighting terror.

We already know that President “Hyperbole” Bush is a master of exaggeration, if not outright prevarication. He and his oil buddy, Cheney, lied to get us into Iraq. They’ve lied to keep us in Iraq. Long ago they planned to get their hands on all of that beautiful unctuous black gold under the desert. They are not about to cede power to a successor until they’ve gotten the goods. What terrible national catastrophe is up his sleeve that will enable him to retain power?

I won’t speculate about what the catastrophe will be, but WorldNetDaily.com reported yesterday that the administration has been authorized to set up civilian prisons at military installations, something that has not been done in our country since the WWII Japanese internment camps. Under international law, internment camps are used in times of war to incarcerate large groups of people deemed to be enemies or “belligerents,” indefinitely and without trial, of course. Hasn’t Bush already warned us that if we are not with him, then we are with the terrorists? Read the handwriting on the wall.

When the occupant of the highest office in the land decides what the law is, singlehandedly, we no longer live in a democratic society. We live under a dictator, the Unitary Executive. While we were sleeping, Zippy the Monkey’s big dream of being THE Decider has been realized. We are basically living in an autocracy. The Founding Fathers are turning over and over in their graves. But few of the living seem to care.

Prepare yourself for the war with Iran. Prepare yourself for the impending terrorist attack. Prepare for the national catastrophe that will allow the Unitary Executive to suspend the 2008 election and stay in power indefinitely.

Just watch. He’ll do it. He’s the DECIDER. We gave him that power. And he’s willing and able to use it.

Dubya, there’s been a change of plans about attacking Iran

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For months it appeared that an expansion of war from Iraq into Iran was getting underway but there has been a change in plans. No, it wasn’t that the US has been flubbing up its occupation and humiliation of Iraq so bad that made the Powers That Be pull back. Not that at all. The reason to holding back on spreading war into Iran is for another reason. That reason is Afghanistan and the Pashtuns.

It seems that the war in Afghanistan is going as bad, if not worse, as the War Against the Iraqi People is. Due to geographical , social, and historical illiteracy, the US captains of War didn’t seem to realize that the Pashtuns are spread between 2 countries, and were not merely concentrated in Afghanistan. So now, the corporate political parties are calling for new blood, but this time in Pakistan!

Obama and Hillary are fighting to out do themselves on this one. Obama doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons inside the nuclear state of Pakistan, but Hillary wants to swing with all that we got. Or at least threaten to do so. So Time Out! No bombs for you yet, Iran! Wait a sec, Tancredo.

Pakistan is calling for Great Britain to pull out of Afghanistan. Musharraf and Gordon Brown now look like Larry and Curley Stooge trying to balance themselves to not get hit by Moe. What an episode! Forty million Pashtuns….

Hey, the Arabs still have some friends around in the world. But let’s face it, we can pick on Pashtuns until Hell freezes over without anybody saying anything. And nobody in the US will ever learn a word of their Pashtun language either. It will make it that much harder for reporters to ever get out of beddedness with the Pentagon if they can’t communicate with the locals, not even in Arabic! That will teach Al Jazeera…. Al, jeer us.

This new switch in alliances is already underway as the US government plans to increase the amount of nuclear tech it gives to India. Blowback, Blowback, Blow us away back! Clowns should never be given anything other than pies to battle with. Unfortunately, our ‘leaders’ got other toys. Uh, US out of Pakistan Now! The list just gets bigger and bigger.

Pakistan is crumbling into civil war. Yet another great victory for Homeland Security!

‘Doctor’s Plot’ hysteria spreads to Australia

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Three weeks after 9/11, I called back to make a follow-up appointment with my dermatologist, an Arab doctor working in a Border community in Texas. It turns out that the local hospital had fired him, though they said that a family emergency had been the reason he was no longer available.

Perhaps, that’s why these ‘doctor’s plots’ seem like such old hat from my own personal perspective. One minute my doctor was there, and the next minute he was just disappeared. Nobody asked any questions.

Cut to the recent hysteria whipped up in Britain, where the anti-immigrant/anti-terrorist witch hunt now centers around Muslim doctors, and their supposed underground network to kill people. At best, the attempted bombings of 2 airports seem to hinge only on the actions of 2 doctors, one from Iraq and the other from Lebanon. The rest that were arrested are not even closely involved with these 2 events, though they are being held never the less. But how much confidence can be placed that even the 2 doctors mentioned above did anything illegal? Do we trusty the Military/ Homeland Security apparatus that much to believe that they are incapable of fabricating the whole event? After all, these are the people that think it their right to hold people without lawyers and trials, and torture them in secret prisons around the globe.

Now, this ‘doctor’s plot’ hysteria has spread to Australia, and it is only a short matter of time ’till it comes our way here in the USA. How gullible will our population be? I’m afraid that it is not a very reassuring scenario.

The Doctor’s Plot revisited

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In 1953, Stalin launched his ‘defense’ against Jewish doctors he said were involved in a plot to kill him. Today, with Britain’s Labor Party now thoroughly discredited for being a poodle, barking alongside Bush always in support of the US occupation of Iraq, there comes another doctor’s plot.

A plot to show the world that TERROR is a really big deal to justify spending trillions of dollars on fighting against it. A plot led by a renegade religion! But this time it is the Muslims and not the Jews.

Jews are out (or is that in?) and Muslims are in (or is that out?) for ‘plots’ to be formed around. So we seem to have a Muslim doctors plot instead of Jewish doctors making headlines in the news. Go figure. There is another evil race, culture, and religion to justify wrapping oneself in the British and US flags with, like once Germans wrapped themselves in their flags under Hitler’s guidance. And like the Jewish doctors of the ’50s, these Muslim doctors of the present seem only capable of burning themselves alive with their nefarious manipulations. How convenient.

And what is it with airplanes and airports? Are we to believe that it is not our Homeland Security bureaucracy that has an obsession (to keep their cush ‘security’ jobs loafing around) with airports and flying, but Muslims? I don”t think so. They don;t have billions of dollars invested in running around in circles like our ‘security’ burrocrats and underlings do. They will attack in other ways than using airplanes to fly into buildings next time along.

I know some stupid doctors in this world, but to believe that Muslims docs are involved in running trucks filled with flammable liquids into airport areas is just too stupid to be believable. It is much more likely a ‘terror story’ to be spoon fed to stupid kids developed by cops. Don’t be a stupid kid, hear? The fetish for airports comes from ‘our’ side, not theirs. Green, Yellow, Red… it’s all baloney for the gullible. And the modern day version of the doctor’s plot is for the gullible, too. Tony Blair needs to be in jail, and his successor probably needs to follow him quite quick for this current campaign of fabricated bullshit. WOMD anybody?

The supposed Muslim doctors’ plot to kill us all seems to follow the same plot line that Stalin used to blame Jewish doctor’s for all the problems of the world, including a supposed effort to assassinate him. Paranoia, religous hatred, stupid us-first nationalism, and lots of lies make up the basic recipe for ‘doctors plots’. Oh, and today one must throw in a dash of airport, too.

US Homeland Security exports Orwell to Mexico

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It was just a matter of time. The US State Department has awarded a contract to a US spyware company to set up intercepts of telephone calls, emails, and other information system communications in Mexico.

In Mexico, the government is calling this part of the ‘War on Drugs’. Here, with our more updated propaganda system in place, it is being called a contract to help stop TERRORISM! Who could ever be against such nice goals? Don’t you feel protected? I bet you do!

This is the same company and same system given by the US Government to their friends in Colombia, the Colombian oligarch government and their allied death squads. With the ‘War on Terror’ in fool gear, the US Government and its private contractors will be exporting Orwell everywhere! Be sure to check out the contracted company, VERINT, and its brochures.

If people only knew how bad the breakdown of corporate medicine is getting

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Most Americans don’t fully realize how bad the corporate model world medical system is actually doing. Here is Democracy Now in reportage about a man held in Arizona in solitary confinement within a hospital for almost a year, appropriately titled ‘Is Sickness a Crime?‘

The victim of a new strain of TB resistant to treatment is being held without any rights in a jail inside a hospital in Phoenix. As these new antibiotic resistant infectious diseases begin to spread, we can expect to see the public panic to spread like wildfire. And rightly so.

If we don’t stop the corporate world from further destroying the environment and putting much of the world in unhygienic living conditions full of disease and poverty, then all of us are in immediate danger ourselves. There is no gated community that will protect you no matter how many Border Walls get built.

Responding to these diseases must be done in a much more thoughtful way than in mere use of a nutty police mindset ‘Homeland Security’ model. Just yesterday, I was in a Colorado Springs community center where the ‘alert warning’ for terrorism was YELLOW. The public is being treated as if they were residents of a state institution for the mentally retarded, which is where they the Bush Klan seems to have gotten their 3 color scheme from!

We live in a world that needs much more effort than this US corproate governmental nonsense to address the real problems we all face. And yet I have not heard of one elected politician that has had the courage to call for the abolition of this nut case branch of the US government called the Department of Homeland Security.

Yes, we need ‘homeland security’, but with the corporate misleadership now running the country we’re not going to get it. Your average businessman at the upper levels is basically a corrupt buffoon. Most of them themselves need to be in jail unlike this young man now being held in a hospital in Atrizona. Speak out against this sort of abuse all you can. Before too long, you just might find yourself in the same sort of predicament.

Prosecute the Department of Homeland Security for its Boston buffoonery

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When a federal agency engages in a blatantly stupid abuse of its power and interrupts an entire city like the Department of Homeland Security just did in Boston, then they should be prosecuted, not the 2 artists who set up the advertisements nor Turner Broadcasting who sponsored this innocent enough advertising campaign.

At the very least, Michael Chertoff, the acting head of that agency, should be promptly removed from his position. His stupid group of buffoons interrupted an entire city to the cost of untold millions of dollars, not just the 1/2 million plus in salaries of cops and feds that has been officially calculated.

Michael Chertoff and the Boston charade remind us of Michael Brown, another totally incompetent Bush crony who was forced out of his position at FEMA, during the Katrina Hurricane hit on New Orleans. FEMA bungled the whole hurricane victim relief operation just like Michael Chertoff’s Homeland Insecurity offices bungled security in Boston. Why ius this country tolerating without much comment these charades by Bush’s ‘security’ Klan? It’s like having the Three Stooges in charge of our country. Except Bush has put together many more more than just 3 stooges in charge of our country’s affairs.

If the Boston fiasco is what the Bush and cheney call guarding national security post 9/11, then we are all in big, big trouble. Shouldn’t we all rather be out on a bird hunting trip with the Big Dick himself than entrust further this crowd with any of our security at all.

The Poodle saves a head

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While American homeland Security were playing the clowns in Boston, America’s cross-Atlantic poodle, Tony Blair, also did his part to crank up mass hysteria. He and his troops of national security saviors moved into action to keep a ‘serviceman’ from being spit on by antiwar protesters, uh… I meant Islamic terrorists. The plan was to kidnap the British ‘serviceman’, spit on him in unison (what torture!), and then to behead him (such theater!). And I guess then, to box the head and then mail the head to Buckingham Palace? As a result, a Red alert was declared and airplanes began to fly over Birmingham to stop the people of wrong faith from getting away!

One would like to think that these are just nutty aberrations of uniformed zealots gone mad without any ulterior motivation? But is it really a coincidence that Homeland Security-America went bezerk in Boston, while at the same time Homeland Security- Britain went bezerk in Birmingham? Hysteria means war. I smell war with Iran in the air.

Boston goes bananas!!!!!!!!!!!

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Yesterday, the stooges from Homeland Security blew off a cool half million plus dollars attacking other cartoon creatures who were apparently discovered by a subway worker. Terrified, she called ‘the authorities’ who immediately mobilized a bomb squad and apparently ground Boston to a complete and total stop. Details are so embarrassing that they have been declared top secret by our whorish corporate press, and are being withheld from public scrutiny. Ted Turner has fled the country and is now being sought in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

In other news, Russian babies found gagged in hospital and Al Franken declares his candidacy for Senator from the state of Louisiana. And another country, Andorra, has now indicted CIA agents to stand trial for kidnapping one of its citizens that was rendered to an American military base in Kosovo where he was then sent to Afghanistan to later be tortured. Along with Italy and Germany, this is now the third European country to be trying to locate American CIA agents for acts of common criminality on that continent. Liechtenstein may soon follow.

US National Surveillance State issues out the national ID cards to us

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There used to be a lot of worry about the government issuing a national identification card to all of us and then requiring us to carry it all the time so that they could monitor us, The People, all the time. Well now that they are actually slipping that noose half around our neck, the population of the US is without a bleep of protest against it. Maybe it is because the name of the national ID card sounds so familiar and appears as nothing much new? The national ID card is called a passport, and it will soon be required for all travel outside the US, even to Mexico and Canada.

What? Don’t think of the passport as a national ID card? Well that’s what it is becoming in graduated steps. When you apply for one, you are registering with the federal government. They already have a list of grading people on supposed ‘flight risk’, and it will be an easy task to meld this to the passport. And what’s to stop an ‘overland travel risk’ list from being added on now? After all, one can hijack a bus and do some major damage with it if one wants. All America must be protected from that, they will say.

These new passport requirements were slipped in by the Bush Administration without even the most minimal discussion and with zero protest within the House and Senate. Millions of people (Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans) who never had passports are now being herded into having to obtain one. Our whole county is being turned into a gated community, all under the excuse of bettering our own security. In fact, much of the North American continent is being turned into a high security zone, where people will travel between countries while under a secret surveillance pegged to their passports.

This secret surveillance does not now, and certainly will not in the future, have any due process as to who gets to go, and who is made to stop at the series of gates that will be put into effect. That will be a military decision, since the Department of Homeland Security and MIGRA really are part of the military model, not civilian one. If this reminds you of Palestinians within the areas controlled by Israel, then you get the picture of the model being used by this passport system of surveillance. It is all quite arbitrary and beyond the reach of legal rules and observations.

We are only now in the first steps of this new, comprehensive surveillance system being put into place. but the fact that we don’t even recognize much what is really being done is not promising for stopping and reversing course. All the blame for ‘inconveniences’ will be placed on Osama bin Laden, and not our own misleaders. We will be told that it is wartime and that our liberties must be compromised. We will be told that there are certain elements of our society that are high risk to the rest of us. Wait! Did I say we WILL be told that? We are already being told all this, and most of us nod our heads in acquiesence.

An Iron Curtain is Descending is a good article at the counterpunch site about the already occurring effects of this new surveillance system upon people. Check it out!

Pizza Patron shows that Tancredoista Right Wingers have no good taste

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Patron means bossThe Right Wing are such ignorant nuts. Any decent red blooded American would be rushing down to the local Pizza Patron restaurante and trying out their chain’s pizzas with flair. Where else can one get a barbacoa pizza, a chorizo pizza, or chicken wings with limon y queso?

Hey! What about the one I make at home, too, with hamburger, tomates, onions, and nopalitos? And I suggest for all the nutty Right Wing racists now aghast with rage at Pizza Patron for accepting pesos when their pizzas are bought… How ’bout a pizza con sesos in the barbacoa for you taste-retarded, racist gringo types? They should give that one out free even, and help get y’alls, Conservative, gasoline powered brains recharged some! You dittoheads are in dire need for sure. Hey! Free pizza for the Gavachos, please!

Pizza Patron is even receiving death threats, and other assorted attentions from all the usual Right nutter sources. Not only are they accepting pesos, printing their menus in both Spanish and English, and sponsoring good Hispanic causes, but the owner also has an Arabic last name (he’s half Lebanese)! Now that’s just too damn much for the idiot American nationalistic Right to take. Right, Sir Tom? (Tom Tancredo is Colorado’s Congressional HouseNut serving his patria sin sesos.)

Let’s pass a law where only hamburgers can be served in restaurants for Homeland Security reasons, of course. And only if any vegetables are deep fried Tancredo style. I think even Taco Bell is too spicy and unAmerican for our Zieg Heil Right. Poor people. They are so challenged about everything, it seems.

The Move-On mugshot collection

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Move-On is making a mug-shot collection to send to Congressional Representatives. It’s asking everyone to hold up a placard expressing the issue of your choice, to prompt this new congress along. Although the uniformity of the placards make the photographs resemble jail house mugs.

The pictures are being collected physically, so as to be delivered physically, it also assuages the fear that these mugs are being collected for Homeland Security. But I wouldn’t be surprised if these will be our NSA file headers and they’ll find a way to link them to our fingerprints.

Harry Reid underlines again that Democratic Party is not an opposition party

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Harry Reid, Democratic Party senator from Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, gave his approval in an interview this Sunday, to Bush’s plan to increase US troops in Iraq.

This comes just days after Nancy Pelosi appointed the utterly ignorant Silvestre Reyes to head up the House Intelligence Committee, where he promptly stated that he also supported a troop increase, and not withdrawal. The Democrats as a whole are utterly enthusiastic about continuing this war, even as they in the same breath blame Bush and the neocons for it. Can it be underlined any more, that the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party to the Republicans? Only their powerless rank and file voters are against the Iraq occupation to some degree or other. But so what? These people most often act as if paralyzed beyond being able to vote. Otherwise, they go about their business as if it didn’t much matter at all to them.

The Democrats are not just a non-oppositional party in regards to the Republican plan to continue the occupation of Iraq. Harry Reid is great case in point. His pretense of being something different than a Republican in donkey suit is rather ludicrous. An example is him stating strongly that the Democrats are going for an increase in the US minimum wage. How? He is going to try tying getting the increase to legislation giving members of the Congress yet another pay raise! Pay raises they don’t deserve and shouldn’t get.

Reid is a Mormon. That being said, can any even mildly liberal person actually think that he represents possible progressive change because he is a Democrat too? Any visit to his Senate website shows nothing but the most mealy mouthed rhetoric on other issues such as immigration, women’s rights, labor, environment, etc. Cases in point, he is opposed to radioactive waste being dumped in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, yet supports nuclear reactors. He wants to grab more of the boondoggle ‘Homeland Security’ funds for Nevada. He supports building a giant Border wall while talking of ‘reform’. He is for better medical care for people, yet can’t voice support for universal coverage. Wants to help women out, yet can’t support abortion rights for them. No opposition to the use of torture, etc. No defense of habeus corpus. He supports phoney ‘war on terror’ that actually makes us more endangered by it.

In short, he is a mealy mouthed, fork tongued Democratic Party hack, who is planning to do absolutely nothing to block the Republican assault on the American and Iraqi people. The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party, and Reid is what you get, Liberals, when you continue to cast your votes for these asses. Get out of the Democratic Party and demonstrate if you want change. You have to spend more time in opposing the corporate hacks that run this country, than by just going out and voting for one of them or the other.

The majority of Democratic Party politicians are not going to oppose this war in any meaningful way.

In more fashion news… change to come to Holland in headwear

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In more fashion news, the Netherlands is set to ban motorcycle helmets with visors that obscure the face. They are deemed as a subversive threat to that country’s majority Christian population. IMHO, they should even consider passing a constituional admendment against this type of motorcycle helmet to protect their Homeland Security.

So, on your next vacation to Amsterdam, whatever you do don’t wear a motorcycle helmet with a visor that completely covers your face. You might want to go out and burn an American flag instead, or go out and get whipped by a dominatrix, but practice some prudence when it comes to putting on one of these helmets with visors. It is a serious problem in that country according to, I guess???, the Dutch government. They want you to be outed if you are wearing that naughty motocycle helmet with a visor.

So do you want to be hauled in front of a judge and have to explain such criminal behavior while on your pleasure seeking foreign vacation? For more info about Dutch law and how best to protect yourself in The Land of Dikes click here… Find out about different syles of Dutch headgear

They Don’t Care and the jumping mouse

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Rodent member of endangered ecosystemMighty Mouse or Mighty Myth? asks The Gazette of their readership today and yesterday in quarter page announcements in their paper. “Does the Preble’s Meadow Mouse really exist?” (Or did that evil environmental movement make it all up?)
 
The editorial board over at our loony local rag really is brain dead when it comes to environmental affairs. Just weeks ago they were also running an editorial expressing doubts about whether global warming was real. (Or did the evil environmental movement make the whole thing up?)

The announcement suggesting that it was all “mighty myth” that another wild animal was endangered, was part of the announcement to invite people to a Right Wing think tank presentation at the U. of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus, all designed to push for the virtual annulment of the Endangered Species Act. So I headed over there at noon to show my support for the jumping mouse and Yogi the Bear vs the real estate and construction magnates. Nature vs more crappy development was my message. It’s not just about the jumping mouse. It’s about whether we destroy all nature’s natural habitats or not.

Well, it turns out that my sign saying,
—They don’t care
—Developers just want to pave over nature and
—DAMN THE WILDLIFE!
provoked some interest as I parked myself inside next to some buffet items as the developers broke for lunch.

First, I was berated by some of the overly dressed crowd for having missed the morning presentations by the all Right Wing panel. Actually, they had one lonely environmentalist who had not made it yet from Denver. But how dare I have an opinion about the mouse without hearing all their important commentary?!!! My response was to just shuck it off. I told them I thought the whole thing was about the spotted owl, and I had heard enough about that rare bird already while living in Washington. Jesus, you tell me I came all this way about a mouse?

It turns out that some of the developers took my sign personally. So I had to discuss whether they were evil people or not. And then the two campus cops showed up, and I thought I might get scanned to see if I was a threat to Homeland Security. But Professor Null, jefe of the Right Wing think tank sponsor, said that he would vouch for me, and even offered me lunch. I thanked him, but told him I wasn’t sure whether their food was organic or not. But that I might come in and listen to their accumulation of proof that nature’s wetlands really were no longer necessary to preserve. Full speed ahead!

I only stayed 2 hours. I did get to hear the last panelist, the liberal who could make it from Denver. I also got to shake hands with Craig Manson, Bush’s creep who had formerly been put in charge over “our nation’s critters” to dismantle the Endangered Species Act. He was still working on it as I could see. Nobody quite like him since James Watt had been in charge. He was definitely the big wig invite for sure. I told him that I was sorry I had missed his work in the morning, but that I had read some interviews he had done online, and that “they were quite interesting,” as I politely and sarcastically put it.

One of our CS city councilman recognized me from the city council picnics we sometimes do together. We had a nice cheerful talk about torture, in which he told me that he believed that it did not exist. Then, ala Cheney, he told me that he was for it, except it did not exist! lol…. These White Men speak with forked tongue. He told me that he had family in the military, so that was why he had forked tongue. I will withhold his identity in order to protect the guilty.

I did have a few who came up and whispered that they were in agreement with my sign. But they kind of looked worried that they might get fired for fraternizing if done too openly. So was I too hard on the hard working real estate developers, as some of them had told me? “We’re not all bad.” Well, look at this list of the folk on the board of the Right Wing think tank co-sponsor of this event with The Gazette. Scroll down and check out the many developer folk at The Center for the Study of Government and the Individual

New Orleans- the city George lost

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New Orleans will go down as the American city that Dubya lost, and that will be his place in history, along with having blown the Middle East apart. Now that New Orleans slipped by the hurricane season, this Southern city has virtually disappeared from public view once again, as the press kept quiet during the elections. Too troubling for Americans to know that over $100 billion dollars later, the levee system there in Louisiana is still in shambles. On the scale of American corporate corruption, FEMA (a branch of the hilariously named Department of Homeland Security) ranks #3 top dog, right behind #1 Pentagon and #2, the US healthcare system. Here is what the New Orleans daily has to say about the partially constructed new levees.

Department of Homeland Security Department

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I attended a symposium at UCCS to address Defense Department funding of the University of Colorado school system. Throughout, the science professors generally disavowed understanding of direct military funding. In addition, they stressed that Near-Space research was being pursued for two civilian benefits: communications and imaging. Due to the nascent payload limitations, they explained, current military interests do not involve weaponry and focus instead on two congruent areas of research: communications and imaging. Marvelous synchronicity might describe their self-reflection on the matter.

I asked the panel to defend the school’s new PHD program in, would you believe it, Homeland Security. The government has just endowed the CU Denver campus with its very own DHS building, but most of the classes will be taught in Colorado Springs. Homeland Security is not a field of study, I offered, it’s a political phrase coined by the Germans the last time they were the center of attention.

There were no takers, so the dean gave it a try. In this new age of global community, we have to explore contemporary subjects with equanimity. Etc.

Really?

Must we endow each inquiry with a department? I’ll agree we should study state sponsored terror, but should it be a major? The School of the Americas is already one institution too many for that vocation.

But I took issue with the other part of the dean’s answer. Because it was a phrase that turned up later in every panelist’s rationale: this New Age.

What UCCS needed was a history professor on their panel. New age my foot! Every dawn is a new age, if you want to be literal. Otherwise, there is only the New Age utopia dreamed of in incense shops. Thinking there is a new age is really just an excuse to toss off the lessons of the past. Global Community? The globe has always been one earthbound community, since Alexander thought he’d conquered it all, to when Caesar and Genghis thought they could administrate it. Certainly transportation and communication have amplified the cohesion, but nothing’s changed under the sun. The thinking from the top is still imperial.

Do not tell me technology has changed everything. There’s always been technology. The wheel, the plow, technology’s role is unchanged. Whether Pong or Xbox, it’s still technology, still an agent of transformation, not change. Science, technology’s more noble companion, increases understanding, as understanding approaches -shall we say- infinity. If our self perception of human nature grows by such increments, how can we assert there is any net change? From the Cave of Lascaux to the MOMA, the artist is the same.

To define a Department of Homeland Security as a field of education, is to give credence to ignoble propaganda. Repeating the New World Order mantra as a justification is to give inanity credulity that academics must not countenance. I’m all for freedom of academic pursuit, but certainly there must be standards, be they rational or humanist. I’d even accept standards of IQ or hairstyle to keep this crew out.

Your Homeland Security Bill

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A friend and I were talking about how to make the American taxpayer take more ownership of our nation’s outrages over the seas. By making him pay for it. It’s not a new idea, to mandate that government not dip into the deficit to fund its wars –burrow furiously is more like it, with an earth mover– but here’s a novel application. Let’s make every expense of war come straight out of the taxpayer’s pocket.
 
We call it the Homeland Security Bill. Not the Homeland Security Bill, but your Homeland Security Bill.

YHSB would be a bill that comes every month to you, like your electric bill or cable bill or credit card minimum payment. This bill would be for the costs of war, calculated up to the minute, and prorated across our population in whatever fashion seems fair, each expected to pay their share.

And the costs should be itemized. A new venture against a new foe? Additional R&D overhead. New medical procedures to treat the head trauma injuries of our wounded troopers? Elective of course. As would be alms for the poor invadees.

The Homeland Security Bill should be effective no matter which cheerleading team you are on. If you are pro-war, then you get to feel pro-war. “By Golly, it’s my war and I’m going to pay for it!”

Kill Bush

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Kill Bush! Kill, kill, kill. Let’s do it, Julia. In case people don’t know by now, Julia is a 14 year old school girl in California who had posted a photo of Bush with the words ‘Kill Bush’ onto her My Place website. Despite the fact that months went by and Bush had visited her city twice during that time unprotected from Julia, all of a sudden the Secret Service came by. Two big beefy ones, too. Julia had posted this material when she was 13 years old, so their visit was not exactly that of a speedy response team. And it seems that despite the Zillions already spent on Homeland Security bureaucracy, that nationally we still got basically what New Orleans has… which is A Confederacy of Dunces on the security job. So just who called the cops?

Well, we personally don’t know the answer on that one. No doubt, some self righteous super zealot of the Right, since they are all crawling out of the woodwork these days. We got the self-hating red diaper baby, David Horowitz, outing liberal professors all around the country. We got the racist Anglo ‘Minutemen’ calling up cops with info about people not speaking America’s official language, English without acent…. as they compare themselves to Neighborhood Watch, chuckle as you will. And Barnes and Noble has stacks of the excremental works of Bill O’Reilly as you go in. He’s watching you, American liberals! And we got lynch mobs here in Colorado trying to hang Ward Churchill from a pole. If they can’t do that, they’ll probably send him a blanket with small pox on it. And we got the airport security branch of the US military waging war everywhere on our behalf at the airports. Of course, they do do a little collateral damage from time to time. But heck, if you don’t like the gated community called America, then get out, ay?

Just 4 months ago, my high school buddy who I had lost contact with for years and I, reestablished a correspondence. But it got torpedoed for me when he got on the case against a University of Texas prof, an international specialist in lizards, no less! My friend was aghast that this evilutionist expert, Professor Eric Pianka, had just said in a university talk that bacteria deserved to live, whereas mankind really didn’t, since our species was working night and day to destroy the planet. Good Lord, what a crime!

MY high school buddy had heard about it on the Drudge Report. And they had heard about it from some Southern Baptist scientists (yes, unbelievable, isn’t it?) who had called the government alleging that Pianka was advocating biological warfare! And they had called all their Intelligent Design friends, and Drudge, too. So, Homerland Security again went to work. You see, they take our security quite seriously, so they marched out to the Univ of Texas to check out this liberal terrorist. And they examined, under a microscope, all his words of wisdom ever uttered about evolution and lizards. Clear it was, that this non-Creationist had a greater love for lizards and bacteria than he did for humankind. Yet he had not started a biological warfare lab at the U.

Well, in short, both Professor Eric Pianka and Julia remain free. After all, America doesn’t burn witches yet. But Homeland Security does take reports from an alert citizenry, and that’s a citizenry full of finks, evidently. And they do take seriously any jokes at the airport about bombs. We may even begin to see signs saying that ‘This School is a Gun Free School’ posted at our kindergardens. So, Liberals, please join me in my effort to give these nice folk all something to think about.

Kill Bush. Shotgun pellet Donald Rumsfield. Deny Habeus Corpus to Alberto Gonzales. Put Condaleeza in bondage… no… I mean a ‘stress position’. Nuke Washington DC! Go after them in their bunkers, and blow the whole crew to smithereens! Please, do it now.

Liberals, start advocating violence (including the violent overthrow of America’s government) everywhere. If you can’t beat them, then join them. Oops, you do that already by voting for the Democratic Party. So try advocating violence instead. Let it out of your Gandhian souls. Kill, Kill, Kill!

Kill Bush.

NPR versus Habeas Corpus

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I caught a little of National Public Radio today. Here’s what I heard: A news story about a new program of repatriating illegal immigrants: by flying them back their ancestral homes, away from the Mexico-American border. It’s working rather well administrators say. The program interviewed a freshly apprehended Mexican who has been returned to his $12 a day parking lot attendent job in Mexico City. He said through a translator that he is likely inclined to give up his dream of reaching El Norte.

So let’s see, that’s a story about subsidizing airlines, budgeting Homeland Security funds for the tickets, to be clear. And the one-way-trips seem to be along the logic of driving a live-trapped vermint a minimum of five miles away from your home to keep him from coming back. Works sometimes.

So is it working with the persistent Mexicans? Hard to say as yet. And yet, here’s a report about it on NPR.

Switch over online to Democracy Now and what are they talking about?

Holy Shit, the Senate has passed a torture/anti-human rights bill which repeals the right of Habeas Corpus! The Right of Habeas Corpus has been nearly universal in the western world since the Magna Carta, since 1215 AD. Thirteen Democrats joined with the Republicans to pass the bill, including our man Ken Salazar, and everybody’s slippery rodent Joe Lieberman. Commentators have likened this bill to the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII and similar national disgraces. We’ll be struggling to apologize and pay reparations. Many are sensibly embarrassed already.

Next up, a description of the Green Zone in Baghdad. Halliburton is serving pork there, and alcohol, insensitive to the Iraqis who must work and eat there, unclean. And on and on.

Can you imagine an informed American populace without the media telling them what’s happening? Why are your friends and neighbors not able to hear Democracy Now on their radios? Who’s standing in their way from hearing the truth over the public airwaves?

In Colorado Springs the gatekeeper is KRCC, the public radio station with a dedicated community of listeners, most of whom are kept in the dark about Democracy Now. On a day like today, it would seem the difference of opinion about station programming is less about taste and more unthinkably out of touch.

Celebrities to soothe airport terror anxiety

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In an airport the other day I overheard Connie Chung making an announcement. Our national threat level is elevated to Orange apparently, further precautions are necessary, etc, etc, please report any suspicious activity to the TSA.

Was that Connie Chung’s voice? Why? What was wrong with the usual anonymous voice paging John Smith, paging Mister John Smith? Was a celebrity voice necessary? Did her publicist get Connie the gig, was it a court ordered community service, or did the Department of Homeland Security feel a familiar yet authorative voice was a necessary means to ease passenger suspicion that they are the dupes?

So here was Connie Chung doing her part to calm the travelling masses being led to their ignoble fate of unreasonable suspicion. I don’t know why, I thought of Judas Goats in the slaughterhouses. Does Connie have to Fedex a recording to the TSA at each elevation of the Threat Level?

Now I remember seeing Homeland Security TSA infomercials starring a variety of famous comedians, playing on monitors above the first post-911 lines awaiting the beefed-up airport security. So you laugh off, or shrug off while laughing, the indignity of being told to take off your shoes for the inspectors. Most people bring flip-flops to the gym navigate the few steps from the locker room to the showers lest they contract someone else’s athlete’s foot. These same people are being forced to share foot fungus with thousands more public soles than they are accustomed.

As I was about to board the airplane, I was called out for an additional search by a TSA officer. By called out, I do not mean approached, nor addressed. He simply barked “Sir. Step over here.” He may have said please, I do not remember it in his abruptness. Instead I was looking beside me to see to whom he might have been addressing his command. Maybe I had come in after he had begun with a salutation as is customary when strangers initiate communication. Having seen no one beside me, I looked back at the uniformed TSA guy in time for him to shout “STEP OVER HERE!”

I’m of course only about to respond “Who? Me?” but he’s already talking over me shouting his order again. I was left with no option but to offer my hasty compliance.

I’d have to say I was too startled to fuss about his manners, and I was eager to get aboard the plane, but I would otherwise have loved to mess with this little tin-pot jerk.

I had no objection to being frisked again, or to having my bag searched once more for whatever items I may have purchased from Southland Corporation in the terminal after the last security check. But I will not be shouted at. No.

And my thoughts return to the celebrities trying to facilitate our compliance. I’m reminded of Tadeusz Borowski’s memoir of the concentration camps “This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Restarting economy with repurchased toiletry items

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Never mind that the London plotters never got beyond plotting. Never mind that the likely success of their bomb smuggling strategy is yet unproved. Already the Department of Homeland Security has decreed that no one can take liquids or gels aboard a plane.

If the NSA should eavesdrop upon another group of dark skinned men discussing the smuggling of incindiary devices made out of toothpicks, no matter how improbable, would toothpicks then be banned?

To combust a passenger aircraft with explosives stored in contact cleaning fluid bottles would require two soccer teams of suicide brethren pooling their resources in a probably pretty conspicuous Islamic in-flight Tupperware party.

And now the foiled terrorist plot is looking like it was a hoax.
 
This latest Neocon fear-mongering looks more like a baby steps approach to increasing consumer spending. They’re giving up on the everybody-buy-a-hybred industrial initiative.
 
Instead they’re forcing airline passengers to repurchase the personal products they need at each destination. Are the conservatives thinking they will bolster consumer spending one plane load of toiletry items at a time? 		  picture