Posts tagged “waterboarding”

Purging the 2009 story hopper

For various reasons, these stories and videos never made their way into posts this year, though they were all worthy. This is in no way intended as your typical PR, tactical news dump. These are important stories that I actually want you to read. I just needed to clean out the hopper for the new year. So, please take your time and dig through these links and videos. There’s even some “feel good” links mixed in for good measure! Happy New Year!

Monsanto: Farmer suicides in India

The World According To Monsanto, Part 1

Elizabeth Warren on the Economy

Bill to “ban” organic farming

Monsanto’s dream bill

Buy “The World According To Monsanto”

Making the TransAfghanistan pipeline safe for democracy

Stop making sense by digby

In search of morale: are Americans too broken for the truth to set us free?

Who should resist and who will become serfs?

Why is America apathetic? Aww, screw it. Who cares?

From EFF’s secret files: Anatomy of a bogus subpoena

What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?

Vienna students march on US embassy (in solidarity with UC students)

Waterboarding the rule of law

Spain investigates what America should

Amy Goodman and Canada’s Olympic Paranoia

Time Warner and Embarq can’t compete with city-owned ISP, trying to outlaw it

Cablevision power play: 101 Mbps Internet, no caps, $99

Parkinson’s Dirty Deal, Part 1

Student hoaxes world’s media on Wikipedia

Buggy ‘smart meters’ open door to power-grid botnet

Time Warner cable cannot possibly compete with the small city of Wilson, North Carolina

Literary Lessons: Authors, Poet write the news

FCC to examine mobile phone exclusives

Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts

Should linking be illegal?

Bush’s secret NSA spying may have tainted prosecutions, report warns

Free the patents and laws, activist tells the Feds

Birth of new species witnessed by scientists [evolution in action]

Clinic with two doors, a symbol of two-tier care

Corporations rule (II): Walmart can close stores in Canada to block unions

Democracy Now! covers Olympic security

US forgoes billions in tax on Citi

Feds ‘pinged’ Sprint GPS data 8 million times over a year

American’s consume 34 Gb of content per day

Millions of missing Bush administration emails found

Scott Demuth’ statement on facing terrorism charges [graduate student charged as terrorist for not revealing his research sources]

The credit card’s newest trick: 79.9 percent interest

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Obama administration re-invokes “State Secrets” privilege

From page 23 of the EFF opposition brief in re Shubert, filed with the Hon. Vaughn R. Walker in the Northern District of California on July 20, 2007 (emphasis added by Glenn Greenwald; click to enlarge)

Full Document: Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF)

From page 23 of the EFF opposition brief in re Shubert, filed with the Hon. Vaughn R. Walker in the Northern District of California on July 20, 2007
(emphasis added by Glenn Greenwald; click to enlarge)


When the Obama administration announced they were going to limit the use of the State Secrets privilege six weeks ago, I simply did not believe it (see reasons 1, 2). Then, the news broke last Friday in a White House “trash dump“, a maneuver used to hide important stories amid numerous bits of procedural dross, that

the Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the “state secrets” privilege — which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) — to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government’s domestic surveillance activities.Glenn Greenwald

Rather than hem and haw again about how this is the fall of the Republic, which this very well could be, I will simply ask that you please take the time to go read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent piece on this matter of great consequence. It is as well-linked and well-written as anything I could have hoped for. Plus, he is an actual constitutional lawyer, instead of an armchair litigator like me. Go! Read it right now! Then come back here to discuss, tweet it, facebook it and tell all your friends this is happening.

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Quotable: George W. Bush

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.George W. Bush
Christian Crusader; Ex-President

This quote comes from a 2003 phone conversation between Bush and former French President Jacques Chirac. Bush called to get Chirac’s support for the invasion of Iraq. Chirac declined and immediately sought the advice of a scholar to help understand the meaning of the insane reference.

Honestly, as more information emerges from the darkness of the Bush-Cheney years, I am amazed that the world was not re-terraformed at the hands of those zealots. This man had control of a nuclear arsenal tens of thousands of times stronger than that unleashed on Hiroshima 64 years ago. If there is a god, it surely saved us from the likes of George W. Bush.

Via Jon Taplin’s blog
Read the rest of this entry »

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