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The full-on bloodthirsty pro-Iranian war drumbeats picked up noticeably in volume today. Watch as the chickenhawk drumbeats get louder and louder.

What planet do these people live on? The current invasion plan involves, get this, 25,000 marines in a ship off the coast of Iran. This will, according the plan, lead to a popular uprising amongst the people of Iran because they love our 25,000 dudes in a boat. Or something. Then, the post-invasion plan says we can hold a country more than twice the size of Iraq with a bit over 1/3rd the number of troops we have in Iraq.

Oh, and the plan also considers acceptable the preemptive use of tactical nuclear strikes.

Seymour Hersh, of course, has been on this story from the beginning. I wonder if he thinks he should have been named Cassandra?

There is no doubt that Our Dear Leader and his despotic regime of neocon fantasists, aided and abetted by the sycophantic lap dogs of the right wing echo chamber of course, are trying to lead us in the direction of an Iranian war. Listen to the news; do you ever see a single piece showing anything good in Iran? It’s like the war on drugs in that way.

I sincerely hope and actually do believe that this sturm und drang will turn into nothing in the sands of time. I highly doubt we are going to invade Iran. Besides the impossibility of it all, I refuse to believe that we are such sheeple led by such evil. Also, it reeks of a domestic electioneering ploy.

I predict this will be highly analogous to the Reagan/Nicauragua situation in the 80s where the right was screaming for invasion to get rid of the evil, evil socialist Noriega and the lefties were certain we were heading towards Vietnam part 2. The difference, of course, was that back then we had adult morons in the administration rather than childish morons, and children through tantrums when they don’t get what they want. Don’t they, Little Boots?

Update: Atrios totally copies me one day later. Of course, he’s limited to a maximum of 50 words per post, so I’ve not only got him on timeliness, I’ve got him on length. Booya! That Hersh beats us means noth… hey! Look over there! A beautiful butterfly!

Yes, the same Bork considered to be the epitome of “radical reactionary.” The same one considered so far outside the mainstream that he was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Congress and the people of America.

The same Bork whom scAlito considers “one of the most outstanding nominees of this century.”

Aron: Do you think Robert Bork should have been confirmed?

Alito: I certainly thought he should have been confirmed. I think he was one of the most outstanding nominees of this century.

Aron: Why? How?

Alito: He is a man of unequalled intellectual ability, understanding of constitutional history, someone who had thought deeply throughout his entire life about constitutional issues and about the Supreme Court and the role that it ought to play in American society. I think that if the public had accurately understood the positions that he holds and had made those wishes known to their elected representatives that he would have been overwhelmingly confirmed. But I think that through a sort of a fluke about the way the nomination came up and the kind of campaign that was mounted against him, he was unjustifiably rejected.

Greenawald has more.

Fight, Dems, fight!

They used computer to stabilize the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Now, without addressing the cries of hoax! hoax! (which I find uncompellingly argued and appallingly moronic) and despite what otherwise intelligent people try to argue (such as, oh, Bill Hicks), it is obvious from the film that the shot came from above and behind.

Now, the throat shot (which was actually in the top of his back) may have come from somewhere else, but that part was hidden by the street sign.

If that hoax site is the best that the conspiracy theorists can do, particularly when certain aspects of it are trivial to disprove (warning: gross), then it is no wonder no one takes them seriously.

In any event, Lee Harvey Oswald was a hell of a shot. Batshit crazy and evil, but a hell of a shot.

Perhaps the territorial pissing contests of the intel agencies truly is part of a bygone era. We have entered a new peaceful era of free information sharing among the many intelligence gathering arms of our government. Aren’t you proud?

Information captured by the National Security Agency’s secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said.

The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials, although it could not be determined which agencies received what types of information. Information from intercepts — which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications — would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.

Suuure, any evidence collected against bad guys that stemmed from this illegal wiretapping is inadmissable in court and thus, the illegal wiretaps are making our country less secure against terrorists than had duhbya obeyed the law… but I’m not worried at all by the NSA sharing these illegal wiretaps with entities such as the Pentagon, which was keeping a database of anti-Iraq war activities. Or groups like the FBI that was infiltrating peaceful activist groups like Food Not Bombs. Certainly, domestic intelligence agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, would never be improperly used for partisan political gain, such as tracking Democrats who left the state of Texas and went into Oklahoma to avoid quorum over DeLay’s illegal redistricting plan.

What, me worry? You’re a terrrrrist lovin naysayer if you’re worried. You America hater, you.

Color me shocked.

I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president looks at it and says, “OK, I’ll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we’ll get something in the paper.” And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, “Hey, you want a leak? I’ll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform.” And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, “Hey, you want a leak?” And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn’t like that. And when it finally broke–it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side–but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home–you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my–everything.

duhbya has done what Nixon could not – get Safire to turn on a GOP preznit. You’re doing a heckuva job, Bushie!

Iranian agent/neocon fantasy love stud Ahmed Chalabi is baaaack. Chalabi, after proving unable to score even a single seat in Iraq’s parliament or more than 0.89% of the special Iraqi ballots (cast from overseas and hospitals) is now the Iraqi Oil Minister.

Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum has been temporarily released from his post amid a dispute over the government’s petrol pricing policy.

He is to be replaced for 30 days by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.

Since I don’t believe in the existence of the devil or an anti-god with whom Chalabi would have made a deal, he must have pictures of Cheney cornholing Rumsfeld as Wolfowitz teabags Perle. He’s a teflon Abramoff.

Bush was denied wiretaps, for the first time in the FISA court history, and he bypassed them anyway?

U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court’s operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered “substantive modifications” took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years — the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court’s history.

Where is the rule of law, not rule of man? Impeach Bush. Impeach him now.

Osama’s Niece Poses in Racy Photo Shoot. Maybe this’ll get him off his dialysis machine and flush him out of Pakistan. Naaaah

Osama bin Laden’s niece, in an interview with GQ magazine in which she appears scantily clad, says she has nothing in common with the al-Qaida leader and simply wants acceptance by Americans.

“Everyone relates me to that man, and I have nothing to do with him,” Wafah Dufour, the daughter of bin Laden’s half brother, Yeslam Binladin, says in the January edition of the magazine, referring to the al-Qaida leader.

I may be setting myself up for a fatwah here, but what the hell. Who wants to live forever?

being a bin Laden, she is, of course, uber rich. A quick search shows that she’s big on the socialite scene in NY. Probably good friends with Paris. Nothing like an obscene infidel socialite trying to push her vanity album to bring the whole family together at Ramadan, eh Osama?

Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo to Secret Service

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

Hmm… who doesthis remind me of? Oh yes, the gestapo and the KGB.

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, “I am a shameless agitator.” She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

There is no rational explanation for these tactics that is based on anything except fear or lust for power for why they are doing this. There certainly is no legal justification.

The Ohio “Patriot” Act allows for the cops to arrest citizens for no reason at all. No, I am not making this up.

The Ohio Patriot Act has made it to the Taft’s desk, and with the stroke of a pen, it would most likely become the toughest terrorism bill in the country. The lengthy piece of legislation would let police arrest people in public places who will not give their names, address and birth dates, even if they are not doing anything wrong.

Jesus, we really have sunk this low. No way does this law survive under any form of Constitutional scrutiny, even if you have to go through the Fourteenth Amendment (which I don’t think you do, since I think it unconstitutional under the Ohio Constitution as well).

Hell, as long as we’re going that low, I think Ohio should set up a huge new Police State Superstore. No probable cause? No problem! Come on down to Bob’s Handcuff and Waterboard Emporium Today!!!

Posner on Bush: break the law? No big deal.

We’ve learned that the Defense Department is deeply involved in domestic intelligence (intelligence concerning threats to national security that unfold on U.S. soil). The department’s National Security Agency has been conducting, outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens within the United States. Other Pentagon agencies, notably the one known as Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), have, as described in Walter Pincus’s recent articles in The Post, been conducting domestic intelligence on a large scale. Although the CIFA’s formal mission is to prevent attacks on military installations in the United States, the scale of its activities suggests a broader concern with domestic security. Other Pentagon agencies have gotten into the domestic intelligence act, such as the Information Dominance Center, which developed the Able Danger data-mining program.

blahblahblah we need more securitycakes.

Posner, for those of you who don’t know, is considered one of the preeminent conservative legal minds. He’s a justice for the 7th circuit court of appeals, a graduate of UChicago Law, and generally a go-to kind of guy.

Is it just me, or is anyone else here disturbed by the fact that a sitting justice of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is apparently untroubled by the fact that the executive branch is breaking the law?

The issue isn’t whether we need to rein in on civil liberties. The issue isn’t whether the laws need to be changed. The issue isn’t sacrificing a few liberties for security. The issue is – did the President break the law. And on this issue, it is a clear-cut, unambiguous, loud YES.

What the right wing noise machine is going to do, and Posner is signed on for this operation, is make a bunch of obfuscatory noise trying to distract you from that.

The issue remains: the President knowingly and willfully broke the law.
For this, the President should be impeached.

And all the hollerin’ and arm wavin’ and acquiescence by the media is going to try and distract you from this one central point.

The President broke the law, and for that he should be impeached.

It’s remarkably similar to the Nixon era with a nice dash of fascism thrown in.

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

(emphasis mine)

But of course, the PATRIOT Act would never be used to violate your civil liberties. Of course it wouldn’t! You can trust these guys.

Ignoring the depraved, heinous nature of this violation of our right of privacy and First Amendment rights (and probably Fourth as well) with the library snooping… why is Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book on a “watch list”? Mao == Commie atheist. Islamofascists == reactionary theocrats. Why would a terrrrrrist of the swarthy kind we are profiling today be reading Mao’s book? The philosophies are anathema to each other.

Fucking idiots. Still fighting the Red Scare with their police state bullshit. Lovely government we’ve got going here.

Update: Fucking dick. The student lied about the whole thing. It was a hoax. I hope he gets expelled. Still, it should have set off my bullshit detector and it didn’t. Bad on me.

under the guise of the war on terra, duhbya pulled a Nixon.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

In 2002, President Bush toured the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., with Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the agency’s director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

a) this is clearly unconstitutional and would be, in any rational world, grounds for impeachment and imprisonment for all involved

b) People, if you don’t use GnuPG/PGP when you email me, it’s your own damn fault. Our civil liberties are gone, our privacy is gone. With this administration and its executive-power-trumps-all paradigm, we have no rights but those we can secure for ourselves. So at the very least, encrypt your mails to me, even if we’re just talking about the weather.

c) This should be an issue that unites conservatives, liberals, and libertarians alike. That the conservatives are not coming out en masse to rally against this is a fantastic demonstration of the bankruptcy of their ideals and their cause.

Feingold may have the votes to block the renewal of the PATRIOT Act!

In Congress, where numbers are everything, the math on the Patriot Act suddenly seems to be moving in favor of Sen. Russell Feingold.

He was a minority of one four years ago, when the Wisconsin Democrat cast the lone Senate vote against the USA Patriot Act in the traumatic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. The law, he said then, gave government too much power to investigate its citizens. Ninety-nine senators disagreed.

Now add more than two dozen senators to Feingold’s side, including the leaders of his party and some of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans, and the balance of power shifts.

If Russ pulls this off, I’m on the Feingold ’08 banwagon right. now. Seriously, this is the best news I’ve heard all year.