CMoore.com

People seem to like big brother OK

Now that Vivendi and General Electric have struck a deal, cable giant Comcast is expected to to buy a controlling stake in NBC-Universal; marking the biggest proposed media merger in recent memory. Comcast, the largest cable company and the No. 1 residential Internet service provider in the nation, would take over the NBC empire: a television network, Universal Studios, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Telemundo, the Weather Channel, Hulu.com, 27 television stations and a host of other properties.

This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity. On average, nearly one quarter of all channels offered to cable subscribers will be owned by the bloated Comcast.

I’m not sure I buy that this deal must mean free content moving behind a pay wall, but for the rest… pretty much. Consolidation of formal, accepted media (that is, not the internet) into such a small number of companies is a Really Bad Idea, for democracy, freedom, and overall entertainment value. Think about it – in just a few months, 80% of everything you see on TV will be coming from one of four companies. That’s just crazy.

Also known as my new reading list

1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2) The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence

3) “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes
Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language

4) “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
Reasons: Religious Viewpoint

5) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
Reasons: Racism

6) “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language,

7) “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
Reasons: Sexually Explicit

9) “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
Reasons: Sex Education, Sexually Explicit

10) “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

I’m kind of sad I’ve only read four of those, actually.

Online checkin and printout of your boarding pass? Not so much.

Woohoo! I’m famous, bitches! Bow before me, for I am dangerous!

Oh, and the TSA and Bush administration can lick my sweaty nutsac. I’ve got your freedom of speech right here.

The anti-sex misogyny brigade strikes again! Louisiana gov. signs another incest protection act into law.

Louisiana Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law a ban on most abortions, which would be triggered if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 ruling legalizing the procedure, a spokesman said on Saturday.

The ban would apply to all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, except when the mother’s life is threatened. It is similar to a South Dakota law that has become the latest focus of the abortion battle.

Bonus points for having a woman sign the bill. Nice job, traitor to your gender. I’m putting in my claim on Kathleen Blanco’s uterus now. Kathleen, I expect you to ask me permission before you use your uterus for anything. Even menstruate.

I already gave for NOLA/Katrina, but Louisiana will never see another dime out of me.

Unannounced, formerly illegal cop entries into your home… are now legal.

A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that evidence could be used even when the police entered a suspect’s home illegally by failing to knock on the door or announce their presence.

By a 5-4 vote, splitting along conservative-liberal lines, the high court ruled that a police violation of the so-called knock-and-announce rule does not require that the evidence seized during the search be thrown out.

…

“Today’s opinion is thus doubly troubling. It represents a significant departure from the court’s precedents. And it weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution’s knock-and-announce protection,” Breyer wrote.

Tell me again, how five justices departing from precedent are not activist judges? How they are not legislating from the bench?
Oh yeah, those are just meaningless code words to use when you disagree with the outcome.

So long, Fourth Amendment! Thanks, scAlito! Thanks bigot voters! Thanks compliant media! Thanks eletion fraud and disenfranchisement!

via Apostropher

I’m with Billmon on this one:

the news that a committee of scholarly bootlickers has blackballed Juan Cole’s candidacy for a tenured professorship at Yale absolutely refuses to leave me in peace.

This may not seem like particularly noxious news, at least when compared to the stench of putrefying corpses hanging over Haditha, or the Nazi stab-in-the-back myths now being recycled in Right Blogistan, but it’s touched an extremely raw nerve with me – because of what it says about the age of fear and intellectual intimidation that we live in, because of the unadulterated vileness of the self-appointed commissars involved, and, not least, because I consider Juan Cole my friend, and a man who won’t take the time to speak up for a friend who’s being blacklisted is, as the Godfather might put it, less than a man.

Now, I don’t know Juan Cole. He and I aren’t friends, and he probably doesn’t need any defense from me. What I do know is that he is a fair-minded intellectual history professor who is an expert on the Middle East, fluent in the languages of the region. And english. Which is nice, since I don’t know those other languages.

In addition to his other pursuits, Professor Cole maintains a blog, focusing on the news out of Iraq and the region at large, gathered in large part from the news sources of the region and translated by Cole. Because he’s fair-minded, because he speaks the truth about things like Zarqawi and Ahmadinejad and the actual situation on the ground and Israel’s policies and how it affects Palestinians, he has been relentlessly attacked by the mouthbreathing pond scum of the right wing bigotsphere. It’s his view that Palestinians are people too, and whose rights are being infringed, that has brought the thermonuclear righty meltdown (see also, the uproar over the papers about AIPAC’s influence, etc.)

Cole doesn’t need our defense in any substantive way; he’s ably smote all of the fools who challenged him on factual or interpretive grounds (particularly Goldberg, a repeat ass kickee). Cole could probably use some moral and publicly-stated support, however, because you see, the vile, dishonest, cowardly, Stalinist cretins of the right have finally found a way they could hurt him: by working money angles to keep him from getting tenure at Yale. And it worked.

(more…)

Bar group will review Bush’s legal challenges

The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office.

Meeting in New Orleans, the board of governors for the world’s largest association of legal professionals approved the creation of an all-star legal panel with a number of members from both political parties.

They include a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI director, and several prominent scholars — to evaluate Bush’s assertions that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Bush has appended statements to new laws when he signs them, noting which provisions he believes interfere with his powers.

Among the laws Bush has challenged are the ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and “whistle-blower” protections for federal employees.

The challenges also have included safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.

Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined.

Short answer: looks like it.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong.

This echoes my thoughts almost precisely. The bookies, too, were betting on Kerry. The bookies!

I’m generally loathe to join in conspiracy theories, but I think it a likely truth that the last two national elections were stolen from we, the People. The scale of the corruption and antidemocratic evil is just so astounding that is almost incomprehinsible, and to quote Han Solo, “I can imagine a lot.” It may not be centrally directed (who needs to centrally direct when you’ve got willing, fanatical authoritarian participants in positions of power in every county? You read the bulletpoint memo and let them loose), but the corrupt effort is widespread, and on the state level pervasive, particularly as to intimidation and disenfranchisement via bureaucratic moves or lies (adding up to more than vote count fraud, though I have no studies to back me up as the subject is impossible to study).

However, as there’s no clenis involved and the fascists GOP holds all the reins of power, there will never be an investigation, nor will anyone be held accountable. Except the powerless and the small whose backs are going to be first against the wall, that is. The media hand-waves it all away without really looking at the issue. After all, what’s in it for them?

Kennedy’s article is the most important so far on our disenfranchisement, not necessarily due to the depth, but due to the publication it appears in – Rolling Stone. This is the widest reading yet and as close to mainstream as this will probably ever become. Hell, I may have covered this a couple times before (here and here), but Jane and Joe Schmoe have probably never even considered the issue.

Once the sheeple wake up and realize we’re living under the autocratic thumb of authoritarian cultists with no democratic legitimacy, well… I’m sure they’ll flip the channel right back to American Idol.

But a couple might not.

Update: Manjoo raises substantive issues with RFKjr’s article. RFKjr has been reliable in the past, but it is possible he overreached and possibly been dishonest. I’m looking forward to the reply.

Update 2: RFK responds. I find Manjoo’s overall points uncompelling and his rebuttal of the RFK response particularly weak. I think what we can all agree on is that something about the results from Ohio 2004 stinks like a frat house bathroom the night after a party. The particulars may not be precise, but we know something was up, as all the results went wildly in favor of the GOP beyond all reason or expectation, and the situation needs to be examined and fixed.

Go fuck yourselves

High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com.

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of “illegal or inappropriate” behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

Pray tell where a public school district gains the authority to punish students for activities they perform outside of school. This is no different than if the Feds were monitoring the phone calls of US citizens without warrants and then detaining them.

Legally, speaking, the schools have no right to monitor, prohibit, inhibit, or punish students for extracurricular free speech activities. In fact, every time this has been done, the schools have lost and lost big. We’re talking money and a public, formal apology big. If you have been affected, or know someone who has, your first steps should be the ACLU and the Student Press Law Center.

Because the whole internet is being tapped.

In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

Seriously, people. Encryption + obfuscation == you maintain your privacy

Zimmerman brings Zfone. Zimmerman was behind PGP, and for which he was also investigated and sued. This must feel like groundhog’s day to him.

Philip R. Zimmermann created a program to encrypt e-mail. His Zfone will do the same for Internet calls.

He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

Now he is again inviting government scrutiny. On Sunday, he released a free Windows software program, Zfone, that encrypts a computer-to-computer voice conversation so both parties can be confident that no one is listening in. It became available earlier this year to Macintosh and Linux users of the system known as voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP.

Or, it’s not a lie when Duhbya and John “death squad” Negroponte say you don’t have to tell the truth.

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))

Though it’s not considered one of the signs of fascism, an obsession with secrecy is certainly a hallmark of a despotic government.

If the Executive issues an ad hoc presidential memorandum that authorizes corporations to violate laws passed by the Legislative, how are we not in the middle of Constitutional crisis right now?

I asked them if they had complied with NSA requests to allow access to their phone records. This is there response.

Dear M. Moore:

Thank you for your email concerning your interest in the subject of warrantless monitoring of American citizens’ communications by the National Security Agency.

Working Assets has taken the following position on this subject:

Working Assets believes that the warrantless monitoring of phone conversations ordered by the Bush administration is both illegal and alarming.

We will pursue this issue through our citizen action program, and by supporting organizations committed to preserving civil liberties in America.

Working Assets has never been approached by any government agency seeking our help in illegally accessing the content of conversations by our customers, and we would refuse any such request.

We have information regarding the conduct of our underlying carrier (Sprint). For more information, please visit: http://www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/nsa.html#blog

They can’t control Sprint, but WA will not release your records. Using the theory of doing what one can, a) use encryption (because this is email as well as phone), b) use a traffic obfuscator like Tor, and c) switch providers to one who will not comply with illegal Executive requests.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile say they did not share information. Verizon, the land line company, did. Cingular and Sprint declined to comment, which you can probably read as they have shared their information with the NSA.

Known involved companies at this point are entirely land line. VOIP, particularly encrypted VOIP, looks to be a great option. Not that it really matters, but you may want to avoid Skype, since I’m sure the NSA is applying the “they’re a European company, therefore every Skype packet is international and we can intercept it” card.

Welcome to your new police state, you know, the one without the free press. Who needs that First Amendment anyway? It just gets in the way of catching terrrrrrists.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Looks like time to add another notch to points 3 and 6 of the defining steps of fascism to me. Probably 13 as well.