The most recent poll question, which I let run for a while longer than I normally do, asked if people believe government can provide both security and liberty. And while I'd like to remind you that the poll is completely unscientific, the results were a little surprising.
The City of New York has released partial audio tapes of 911 emergency calls made on September 11, 2001. The recordings include only the voices of emergency personnel; the voices of callers have been removed.
Some of the worst news possible for the security of U.S. elections came a year ago, and somehow I missed it. In March 2005, Smartmatic, a company based in Venezuela, purchased Sequoia Voting Systems, a company which makes electronic voting equipment.What's the big deal? Sequoia's systems are just as insecure as Diebold's, with irregularities being reported this week in Pittsburgh and Chicago. And the parent company, Smartmatic, whose machines were used in Venezuela's 2004 recall election, still refuses to answer questions over the results of that election.
The color-coded Homeland Security threat advisory system, criticized by just about everybody as "vague and confusing," is about to get a lot more complex and confusing under a bill currently before the House homeland security committee.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, still just another three-letter agency despite their attempts to become more self-important, is moving into a new headquarters building in Washington, D.C. And because they don't want the walls to be bare, they asked their own employees to go home, and have their children draw pictures of what they thought their parents do at work.That was yet another foolish mistake on the part of the government, as a few of them actually did.
Government bureaucrats are the same everywhere. That is, they're stupid. And today's stupid bureaucrat is Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma.
A group of people held downtown Fernandina Beach, Fla., hostage Thursday night, reported the local weekly newspaper.That group of people was the local SWAT team.
The federal government wants to perform mental health screening on infants and get them started on drugs which they will take for their entire lives, if the drugs don't kill them first. And you're going to pay for it, whether you want to or not.
Deborah Davis was arrested last September in Denver, Colo., while she was riding a bus, after security guards boarded the bus and she refused to show ID. After a large public outcry, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against Davis.Now the Denver Regional Transportation District has proposed rerouting three of its bus routes which pass through the Denver Federal Center, after complaints from passengers about being required to show ID when riding that particular bus.
Two weeks ago I told you about millionaire John Gilmore, who lost in federal district court after he sued the Transportation Security Administration because he was denied boarding to aircraft after refusing to show identification. At that time he announced The Identity Project, which is investigating whether people who fail to show ID are actually allowed to board aircraft, as TSA claimed in court. The first results are in, and for once, it's somewhat good news.
So much stupidity happens every day that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I frequently have more stories than time to post them. Here are a few things that happened in the last week. Some are noteworthy, some are funny, and all are just plain stupid.
The Bush administration is experimenting with ways to detain American citizens -- on American soil -- without probable cause when it believes that those people might be dangerous.
If you're new to the idea of liberty, you are sure to find valuable and useful information from The Advocates for Self-Government, a non-profit organization which you're probably already familiar with. The Advocates publish The World's Smallest Political Quiz and are responsible for Operation Politically Homeless, two wildly successful libertarian outreach programs. Today I'm going to tell you a bit more about The Advocates, why I just sent them $50, and why you should too.
Only 61 percent of federal government computer systems have tested contingency plans for continuing operations in the event of hardware failures, disaster or terrorist attacks. And almost 20 percent of government computer systems, and nearly one fourth of government contractors' computer systems, haven't even been evaluated for the simplest security weaknesses that your 14 year old brother could figure out.
Was the 2004 presidential election stolen? Well, as it turns out, it's easier to rig an election than to rig a Las Vegas slot machine.
Last month I let you know that the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave out far too much money in disaster assistance for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, mainly because of people defrauding the system. Now FEMA is lowering the boom. It's sending letters to everyone who got too much money, telling them they now have to pay back the amount of assistance they were overpaid.
Government investigators were able to bring materials needed to construct bombs through airport security at 21 different U.S. airports, according to NBC Nightly News.
Here's a story I never thought I would be writing while still living in the United States.The Pennsylvania Attorney General's office has ordered the seizure of four computers belonging to the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. The government claims that reporters for the newspaper gained illegal access to a law enforcement web site after the Lancaster County coroner gave them the password to the web site.
For nearly 50 years, America fought a Cold War against the Soviet Union and the ideology of Communism that it represented. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most people thought the Cold War had ended and Communism had been thoroughly discredited.Those people couldn't have been more wrong.The Cold War is still going on. The Communists have invaded America. And now they're seeking weapons of mass destruction.
You remember that new Medicare prescription drug plan that came into being this year? You know, the one that so confused all the senior citizens that it's gained only very slow acceptance? Well, it's causing yet more problems: it's threatening to put pharmacists out of business entirely.
In case you haven't heard, March 12-18 is Sunshine Week. During Sunshine Week, everyone throws a spotlight on government secrecy and shows how it is a bad thing for good government.
This week's bits start early with a roundup of stupid laws, stupid application of laws, stupid bureaucrats, and stupid people who want more stupid laws and more stupid taxes.
Occasionally when reading the news or watching the talking heads on television, you'll hear a politician referred to as "libertarian leaning." If you've never heard that word before, or you aren't too clear on what libertarianism is, you might at first think it's a pot-smoking Republican or a Democrat who's been mugged. Those may be true, but the reality goes a bit deeper than that.In this latest post in the Liberty 101 series, find out what a libertarian is, what it means to be libertarian leaning, and what the right and left aren't telling you about the right, the left, and the two other options.
Many people are concerned about the lack of civil liberties protections in the recently reauthorized USA Patriot Act. They say that it leaves the door wide open in many areas for abuse. And there's some truth to that. But the much more grave concern is that it leaves the door wide open for incompetence.A report released Friday by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General reviewed the use of the USA Patriot Act in the case of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully accused of involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. It found that incompetence, not abuse per se, led to Mayfield's prosecution.
Way back in November I told you about the so-called Online Freedom of Speech Act, which would grant an exemption from campaign finance laws for speech on the Internet. At the time, the bill failed to gain a 2/3 majority vote needed to fast-track the bill, and the House is set to reconsider it next week. In light of that, the Center for Democracy and Technology has offered a very complex amendment to the very simple bill.
The Department of Homeland Security has several top-level management vacancies, including director-level postions with responsibilities for disaster management and preventing terrorist attacks.
Twice a year, the Department of Justice Inspector General reports on problems related to the Patriot Act, and one of the problems he reported on was the Federal Bureau of Investigation committing over 100 possible eavesdropping violations.
A new seven-member Senate subcommittee received a briefing from the White House Thursday on President George W. Bush's terrorist surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. As you might expect, none of them are talking about it.The Senate intelligence committee had decided Wednesday not to investigate the legality of the program, choosing instead to create a subcommittee which would be briefed on the program and to propose a law which would make the program legal and provide Congressional oversight through that same subcommittee.
President George W. Bush today signed the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act, which renews the 2001 Patriot Act and makes 14 of its 16 temporary provisions permanent, saying that "we cannot let the fact that America has not been attacked since September the 11th lull us into the illusion that the terrorist threat has disappeared."
The House of Representatives voted 280-138 Tuesday to reauthorize the Patriot Act, following an 89-10 Senate vote to reauthorize the act last week. The measure has gone to President Bush, who had urged Congress to pass the reauthorization.The reauthorization makes permanent 14 of 16 provisions of the original Patriot act, adds only minimal protections for civil rights, and adds a provision to restrict the sale of cold medicine. That's right, cold medicine.
In this update to stories previously covered here, we actually have some good news to report.
On September 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came right out and identified one of the biggest threats to national security. He said, "It's really about the security of the United States of America. And let there be no mistake, it is a matter of life and death." And after September 11, that great threat to national security got swept under the rug.
The tiny southwest Alaska town of Dillingham recently received a $202,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to install 80 surveillance cameras to protect its port. But local residents are worried that the cameras will be misused to keep them under surveillance.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scrambling to complete rebuilding of levees in and around New Orleans which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina six months ago. But critics are saying that the Corps is using substandard materials and ignoring levees with structural damage, which will leave the city with even less protection than it had last year.
This week's roundup of stupid news headlines comes from the Department of Recto-Cranial Inversion.
If you took a poll nationwide to find the most corrupt, out-of-control, heads-up-asses law enforcement agency in the whole country, the clear winner would be the Orange County, Calif., Sheriff's Department.In order to get harassed by the OCSD, all you have to do is be somewhere within the county. You don't even have to be doing anything wrong. This is exactly what happened when Posh, one of the Suicide Girls, committed the horrific crime of being alive in Orange County.
The risk of catastrophe resulting from a terrorist attack on a chemical plant is too great to chance leaving chemical plant security to the chemical plants themselves, says a new Government Accountability Office report, and of course, the recent rash of terrorist attacks against chemical plants in the U.S. seems to bear out this finding.Wait a minute. What terrorist attacks?
The Bush administration is desperately trying to plug leaks of classified information to journalists by launching investigations of those journalists and their sources. Several FBI investigations are underway, the CIA is administering polygraph tests all over the agency, and the Justice Department is hinting that journalists might be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
I suppose it's time for my annual post about how much Bill O'Reilly sucks. Usually I stay away from this because he does such a great job of making a fool of himself on his own, and if you go anywhere near his no spin zone, your head is going to start spinning.I should also say that I don't really care about his ongoing feud with Keith Olbermann, except insofar as it seems to bring out the worst in Bill O'Reilly. Here's a prime example:
If you want to criticize the Federal Emergency Management Agency, today's lesson is: don't do it when FEMA is looking.George Barisich, 49, received a $75 ticket from Homeland Security officials when he gave away a T-shirt with a message critical to FEMA printed on it Feb. 1 in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Chalmette, La.
In the U.S., terrorists are everywhere. They're hiding under every rock, behind every tree, and when you least expect it, they will jump out and strike. And so, since 9/11, the search for terrorists has greatly expanded to cover almost every aspect of Americans' lives.Walter Soehnge, of Providence, R.I., found himself the subject of scrutiny from the Department of Homeland Security, because of the potentially terrorist act of paying off his credit card bill.
If you've been paying more than the least bit of attention, you know the American mass media is virtually ignoring anything coming out of the war in Iraq that might come close to the level of good news. In order to get such news, you have to turn to alternate sources, such as military blogs. And behind those military blogs, making sure the good news continues to flow, is Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.
It's very easy to take for granted the normal, everyday things and people in our lives. As many of us know, it can also be a terrible mistake to do so. When is the last time you told your significant other how you feel? Yeah, that's what I thought. Go do it now. This message will still be here in a couple of hours.Welcome back. I hope you had fun. Today I am talking about something else we as Americans take for granted, and do so at our peril: our freedom.
High profile Web sites, such as Boing Boing and Wonkette, are finding that visitors from such diverse places as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and, er, U.S. military bases in Iraq, can no longer access their sites.The blocking of all three sites has a common thread. In fact, if you have a Web site, it's likely your site is tied into this, too.
That's right. A Utah psychiatrist says that if you think guns should be banned, you probably need professional help.
Here's a short message for those of you who feel you have the God-given right to pass laws against what other people are doing, even when they aren't doing anything to harm anyone else. Like purchasing sex, or smoking a joint, or believing in evolution.
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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