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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Yesterday was Friday the 13th. An unfortunate day indeed.

President Bush signed into law bill H.R. 4954: Security and Accountability For Every Port Act or the SAFE Port Act.

Official title: To improve maritime and cargo security through enhanced layered defenses, and for other purposes.

Sounds good eh? Cost: $26 per American over a four year period. Good AND cheap!

Votes: 421 Ayes, 2 Nays (9 no votes). Good, cheap and popular.

Congress hammered this through on their last day ‘at work’. Probably noone cared to actually read the damned thing. Who cares about the details .. we all want to be safe, right?

Here’s how the American people gets screwed by an increasingly sleazy and sneaky government: the catch: look at the last four words of the official title given above!

Yes. Other  purposes.

What are those other purposes?

Well … whatever some really sneaky politician decides to sneak in there. So, if, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Speaker of the house Dennis Hastert (yes, that guy from the Foley scandal), based on their righteous ideas of what is ‘moral’, decide that all those millions of Americans who play that wildly popular Texas Holdem Poker game online are engaging in immoral activities and therefore should be banned from doing so, then, yes, they can in fact sneak in some rules that practically bans this form of innocent entertainment. Even in a bill about protecting our sea ports!

Not only can they do that. They did do just that.

As of yesterday, I can no longer legally fund my accounts at online poker sites in order to engage in my beloved 5 cents poker games. All in the name of making our sea ports more secure.

We live in a free country. And we have many freedoms that other countries don’t have.

But make no mistake, those freedoms, even the ones that concern only what we do in our own houses, in our own time and affect noone else, are being eroded at an alarmingly increasing rate.

This war on terrorism is quickly becoming a war on our privacy.

Americans, once again (remember the Patriot Act?) … you’re being screwed!

You’re being conned out of your freedoms by self-righteous, deceptive, manipulative, insincere, dishonest, machiavellian, cheating, lying, powerhungry and zealously selfserving politicians. Considering the oaths they took, their actions border on treason.

Why is it that people in uniforms or with a badge so often think they’re above the law and that you, in dealing with them, automatically lose all your constitutionally given rights?

We all (well, almost all) know that it is unwise to joke about carrying a bomb when you’re anywhere near an airport, and we sort of, reluctantly (don’t we all love bomb jokes?), go along with it. Even though the automatic detainment (and heavy penalty) for using the word ‘bomb’ is a bit silly: statiscally the odds of someone cracking a joke about a bomb actually carrying a bomb, is incredibly much smaller than the guy who doesn’t announce carrying a bomb, actually having one. In fact, it is a bit scarry that in the process of searching for bombs, officials would take anything said to them by the subject-under-investigation into account. Taking someone in custody for joking to have a bomb, is logically as silly as waving him through unsearched when he claims he does not have a bomb. Why all the over-reacting drama? Why not ask the joker “Really? Show me!” and pat him down. And if the bomb-jokes get a bit old, put up a big sign saying ‘Please, no bomb jokes. Heard them all. Not funny’. That would be far more effective than not puting up a sign and sending naive innocent people to jail for five years for making a joke.

 

But again, silly as it may be, I can live with it. It gets way different when the TSA starts detaining people at the gate for calmly and passively expressing non-threatening opinions, as in the case of Ryan Bird, who wrote the political protest statement ‘Kip Hawley is an idiot’ on his toiletry bag. (Kip Hawley is head of the TSA, and I’m not referring to the Tourette Syndrome Association here, although, one has to wonder). He was first told he couldn’t write those things (huh?), then the supervisor had the audacity to inform Ryan that, basically, in dealing with TSA-uniforms and badges, Ryan in essence lost all his constitutional rights (“you can express your opinions ‘out there’, but not ‘here’“), and then proceeded to have Ryan detained. I just checked the first amendment and couldn’t find any exclusion concerning TSA officials!

This is outside of outrageous. What is next? Getting detained for not smiling at some grumpy TSA nazi?

Again, ‘security theatre’, this time by the TSA, whose slogan, ironically, is “TSA … VIGILANT, EFFECTIVE, EFFICIENT” .. they were exactly the opposite in this case.

 

Link to article

In Turkey there is a law that makes it a crime to ‘insult Turkishness‘.

To criticize this law is considered an ‘attempt to influence the judiciary‘. Which is also a crime.

Turkish authors who have written about the brutal slaying of over one million Armenians during WW1 by the Turkish, have been charged with the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’.

Turkey, who is seeking membership of the European Union, has been told, by that same European Union, that European Union members have a thing against putting writers in jail for expressing opinions. Something to do with that silly thing about freedom of press and speech.

During the trials of these ‘Turkishness insulting‘ writers, there were large protests by people waving European Union flags with Nazi swastika’s on ‘m and slogans referring to ‘EU Fascism’, thereby 

• expressing their opinions about the EU’s suggestion to not put people in jail for expressing their opinions
• supporting a law which, if the EU would adopt a similar one (criminalize insulting ‘European Unioness‘), they would go to jail for.

I’d say, let’s not make Turkey a member of the European Union just yet.

(btw, when was Turkey geographically moved to Europe? Last time I was there, it was still firmly planted in the Middle East)

(link to article)

Note: I hope I didn’t insult anyone’s ‘Turkishness‘ with this post. If so: I’m profoundly sorry for your reaction! (I learned this clever way of ‘apologizing‘ from the Pope!)

I have posted about this lady before. I just read another article about her. I strongly recommend you read this article, but the main reason for bringing it up, is to inform you to I am going to borrow a ‘word’ from it. From now on, when I mean to write ‘fundamentalist Christian zealot, I will write ‘talibaptist’ instead. It’s shorter, and I’m lazy.

A few more links:

Time: “Katherine Harris’ comedy of errors”

Wikipedia entry (Not very flattering. Also interesting: “During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than … the governor.”

Slate: “Jilted. The Bush brothers kick Katherine Harris to the curb.”

Slate: A blog overview

If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin

*wipes foam off mouth*

I will probably respond to this later. It’s too soon after I read this. I need to sit down a bit for a while. Get my heart rate and blood pressure under control. 

I mean:

“Separation of church and state is ‘a lie we have been told’“?

This candidate for the US senate *gasp* calls her own nation’s constitution a lie?

“separating religion and politics is ‘wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers‘”?

Lady, go look up the meaning of the word ‘democracy’. This is neither Iran nor the Vatican. US citizens choose our leaders (check that constitution again!). In any case, if God chooses our rulers, why are you campaigning?

“God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”“?

To claim to know God’s intention is pure blashpemy, or stupidity, depending on your religiosity, but in both cases extremely arrogant. The intention of the founding fathers, however, can be known, since they wrote it down. Mrs. Harris clearly doesn’t have a clue about her own country’s history.

She means to tell me that the founding fathers didn’t mean to establish the strict separation of church and state after one of them, Thomas Jefferson, wrote this (part of a longer) letter:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.“