Grabbed this screenshot of Cmoore.com from Websites as Graphs.

Picked up on this little goodie on Barry Ritholtz’s site the Big Picture.
Seemed fitting for July 4th, a little Cmoore.com fireworks.

Happy Fourth!

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Hard to build a case and prosecute wrong doing by White House or any other government officer, intentional or otherwise, without access to evidence.
What better way to sweep the governments mistakes, misscues and corruption under the rug! From the Secrecy Blog:

The state secrets privilege has been invoked by the Bush Administration with greater frequency than ever before in American history in a wide range of lawsuits that the government says would threaten national security if allowed to proceed.

In virtually every case, the use of the privilege leads to dismissal of the lawsuit and forecloses the opportunity for an injured party to seek judicial relief.

Terrorists can kill people and destroy property. But they cannot undermine the rule of law, or deny injured parties access to the courts. Only the U.S. government can do that.

The state secrets privilege has been invoked lately in a remarkable diversity of lawsuits. See this selection of case files from recent state secrets cases.

POTUS sure must have a lot to hide considering how pervasive secrecy has become in the halls of our elected leaders in Washington!

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Tired of the same old boxy looking PC?
Look no further, Jeffery Peterson has a PC just for you.
For the musician in your life there’s the Microphone PC. Cigar smoker?
There’s a PC in a humidor.

Got an old 1930s art Deco radio you don’t know what to do with?
Turn it into an art Deco PC

You’ve got some imagination there Jeffery!

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“We’re a product of the ’60s,” he said. “We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.”

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

“The more I’m on, the scarier it gets,” he said. “It’s scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.”

It’s not just the NSA spying on Americans, the Department of Homeland Security is spying on our every move too!

This is American Democracy at work?

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Just in from the Secrecy Blog
When you’d think the White House is on the ropes, with the Katrina Debacle, the Lobbyist scandal, Libby fingering Cheney and the NSA spying controversy, continued assaults on our civil rights by the White House should come as no surprise!

There is no allegation that Rosen or Weissman “ever stole,
secreted, purloined, paid for or otherwise obtained classified
information from any person — inside or outside government — by
any illegal means.”

“The government’s construction of [the Espionage Act] would allow
for the punishment of any private citizen who obtains classified
information — regardless of how or why — and then discloses it
to another private citizen.”
The defense memorandum was filed under seal on January 19 and
unsealed by the court in the Eastern District of Virginia on
February 9.

A copy was obtained by Secrecy News and posted on the Federation
of American Scientists web site. See (4.2 MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/rosen011906.pdf

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The administration’s success with Iran ends the diplomatic charade and paves the way for war. Now, UN Ambassador John Bolton will appear before the Security Council making spurious allegations of “noncompliance” that will rattle through the corporate media and prepare the world for unilateral military action.

The administration has no hope of securing the votes needed for sanctions or punitive action. The trip to the Security Council is purely a ploy to provide the cover of international legitimacy to another act of unprovoked aggression. The case has gone as far as it will go excluding the requisite “touched up” satellite photos and bogus allegations of unreliable dissidents.

We should now be focused on how Washington intends to carry out its war plans, since war appears to be inevitable.

Those who doubt that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team will attack Iran, while so conspicuously overextended in Iraq, are ignoring the subtleties of the administration’s Middle East strategy.

The bottom line on the bourse is this; the dollar is underwritten by a national debt that now exceeds $8 trillion dollars and trade deficits that surpass $600 billion per year. That means that the greenback is the greatest swindle in the history of mankind. It’s utterly worthless. The only thing that keeps the dollar afloat is that oil is traded exclusively in greenbacks rather than some other currency. If Iran is able to smash that monopoly by trading in petro-euros then the world’s central banks will dump the greenback overnight, sending markets crashing and the US economy into a downward spiral.

The Bush administration has no intention of allowing that to take place. In fact, as the tax-cuts and the budget deficits indicate, the Bush cabal fully intends to perpetuate the system that trades worthless dollars for valuable commodities, labor, and resources. As long as the oil market is married to the dollar, this system of global indentured servitude will continue.

Step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world’s most valued resource.
They won’t let that opportunity pass them by.

Will Bush and company manage to pull off their coup de grâce, before his term as president is over,stay tuned?

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Another story missing in action, Iran’s plans to open up their own commodity exchange, trading oil for Euros.

In essence, Iran is about to commit a far greater “offense” than Saddam Hussein’s conversion to the euro for Iraq’s oil exports in the fall of 2000. Beginning in March 2006, the Tehran government has plans to begin competing with New York’s NYMEX and London’s IPE with respect to international oil trades – using a euro-based international oil-trading mechanism.[7] The proposed Iranian oil bourse signifies that without some sort of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given U.S. debt levels and the stated neoconservative project of U.S. global domination, Tehran’s objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on dollar supremacy in the crucial international oil market.

Could this be the real reason the United States invaded Iraq?
The threat to America’s PetroDollar hegimony.

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And to further erode the freedoms of all Americans this just in from the BBC. Some how this story has been overlooked so far by MSM in the United States.

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The “roadmap” calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military’s ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap“. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

The document says that information is “critical to military success”. Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Now we have the US military spying on computer networks inside the United States to win the war on Cyber terrorism.

Constitution we don’t need no stinking Constitution, so much for our Civil Rights.

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From Engadget

So there seems to be some fallout from Verizon’s music download service — users who choose to “upgrade” their handsets to support the Verizon Wireless music store are doing so at a tradeoff: you’ll no longer be able to play MP3s on your phone. The new phone software prevents you from playing MP3s on the phone as a result of an agreement Verizon Wireless made with Microsoft, the latter of whom stipulated that if the Verizon Wireless music store was gonna fly at all, MS wanted to make sure that phones using it could only play back Microsoft’s audio format.

Supposedly there is an internal memo floating around at VZW Wireless saying that if anyone complains about the new “featureset,” they’ll be given a refurbished phone with older firmware to “correct” the “problem” — but that users aren’t being warned ahead of time that they’ll lose MP3 playing functionality by upgrading their phones. Very tricksy, guys, very tricksy! You know, if the customer didn’t always come first with these big corps we’d really be in trouble, folks.

How does Microsoft get away with this?? Whatever happened to the anti-trust suit that said Microsoft had to play nice?

I know I won’t be switching to Verizon Wireless anytime soon.
Sheesh and I thought Cingular was bad.

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A near-agreement to extend the controversial Patriot Act was blocked Friday by an odd-bedfellows coalition of liberals and conservatives who protested that it did too little to protect Americans’ civil liberties.

There’s still a long ways to go to regain our consitutional rights taken away by the Patriot Act but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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This a little early for humor Friday but hey it’s close to midnight:

The independent Brockton Rox, who play about 30 minutes south of Fenway Park, offered Epstein their GM job on Thursday.
The team, which plays in the Canadian-American League, is restricted to a total player payroll of $87,500 — far less than the major league minimum of $316,000 per player and far below Boston’s $126.8 million payroll this year.

“It’s assumed that Epstein is looking for a greater challenge,” the team said in a statement, noting that Epstein could sweeten the pot for players with an $18 per diem and put them up with a host family.

Current Rox GM Andy Crossley basically dared Epstein to replace him.

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Fitzgerald, 45, has also questioned administration officials about any knowledge Bush may have had of the campaign against Wilson. Yet most administration observers have noted that on Iraq, as with most matters, it’s Cheney who has played the more hands-on role.

One lawyer intimately involved in the case, who like the others demanded anonymity, said one reason Fitzgerald was willing to send Miller to jail to compel testimony was because he was pursuing evidence the vice president may have been aware of the specifics of the anti-Wilson strategy.

And it looks like the neo-cons zeal to persecute Clinton will come back to haunt them,

In an interview yesterday, Wilson said that once the criminal questions are settled, he and his wife may file a civil lawsuit against Bush, Cheney and others seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame’s career.

If they do so, the current state of the law makes it likely that the suit will be allowed to proceed — and Bush and Cheney will face questioning under oath — while they are in office. The reason for that is a unanimous 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit against then-President Bill Clinton could go forward immediately, a decision that was hailed by conservatives at the time.

Can wait to see who’s indicted, does the evidence trail lead all the way to Cheney’s door?

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What I’d like to see in America, a return to a government for the people, not just Big business.
John Edward’s speech today outlines his New American Initiative to combat the rise in poverty in America.

We have all seen the images from the wreckage of Katrina – people packed into the Superdome and convention center with only the clothes on their backs. And we’ve all asked what brought them there. Many things did, but one of them was poverty.

Widespread poverty existed before Katrina and it will persist after the Gulf region is rebuilt, if we let the images that we have watched on the news fade from our memories as they fade from our television screens.

But today we have a historic opportunity. We do not have to live in an America that accepts poverty as a fact of life or chooses to ignore it. The day after Katrina hit, new government statistics showed that 37 million Americans live in poverty, up for the fourth year in a row.

The first test of the working society will be in the Gulf. And the central principle of our effort should be the one I just outlined: We can only renew the Gulf if we renew the lives of the Gulf’s people by encouraging and honoring work.

The President doesn’t get that. At a time when a million people have been displaced, many already poor before the storm; when the only shot many people have is a good job rebuilding New Orleans, the President intervened to suspend prevailing wage laws so his contractor friends can cut wages for a hard day’s work.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the President never suggested cutting million-dollar salaries for the heads of Halliburton or the other companies profiting from these contracts. A President who never met an earmark he wouldn’t approve or a millionaire tax cut he wouldn’t promote decided to slash wages for the least of us.

Seventy-five years ago, our government was led by a President who actually succeeded in navigating America through a disaster. Faced with the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt saw that relief requires more than food and shelter; it requires the dignity that comes from a job at a decent wage. And he saw something else: as Allida Black put it at a forum here last week, we have to “build to last.”

Many of our children still go to schools that the WPA constructed; many of our homes are lighted because of dams that the PWA built; many of our families still hike on trails that his CCC blazed. That’s why trailer parks are not the answer.

In fact, if we know anything from a half century of urban development, it is that concentrating poor people close to each other and away from jobs is a lousy idea. If the Great Depression brought forth Hoovervilles, these trailer towns may someday be known as Bushvilles.

We can do better. I’ve proposed a New America Initiative based on the principles that FDR and the WPA taught us.

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Michael Jay, Blair’s representative at the weekend meeting, told journalists in London today that the talks were “extremely difficult” and refused to rule out a statement on climate change that excludes the U.S.

`Action Plan’

“The key question is how to reconcile the need to curb emissions with the need for economic growth,” Jay said. “The ideal is to have an action plan but also agreement on reasons for the action plan. We’ve got 48 hours to go and the last 48 hours of negotiations are often the most difficult, but I sense a desire to reach agreement.”

The U.S. has gone some way toward meeting calls for it to agree to the science of global warming, something Jay described as “the most difficult issue.”

“We know that the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem,” a statement from Bush’s office said Friday. “Though there have been past disagreements about the best way to address this issue, we are acting to help developing countries adopt new energy sources.”

Bush said there was no question of Blair, his closest ally in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, asking favors for support.

“I go to the G-8 not really trying to make him look bad or good,” Bush said of Blair in the ITV interview. “I go to the G- 8 with a political agenda that I think is best for corporate American interests our country.”

Again Bush’s agenda, flys in the face of proven scientific data.
No surprise here, wonder if he gave Tony Blair a head ups before the meeting?

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A California man, angry over a U.S. Supreme Court decision expanding government power to take private property, says he will try to use the ruling to seize the New Hampshire home of Justice David Souter and convert it into a hotel to be named the Lost Liberty Hotel.

Souter voted with the 5-4 majority last week when the Supreme Court ruled a Connecticut city could use its powers of eminent domain to take private homes to make way for a riverfront hotel, health club and offices

He said the hotel would be called the Lost Liberty Hotel and would include a restaurant called the Just Desserts Cafe and a museum with a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America.

He said instead of a Gideon’s Bible, each room would include a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” which many people embrace as a treatise on liberty and self-determination.

“This is not a prank,” he said. “The town of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land (from Justice Souter) we can begin our hotel development.”.

Wake up call for the Supreme Court, can’t think of a more fitting first case.

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