While O'Donnell and Hasselbeck had a tiff, to be sure, it was Fox guest Curtis Sliwa who actually threatened violence, openly and on national television expressing his wish to take a baseball bat to O'Donnell and beat her like a "human piñata."...Covert action: In her blog, Larisa also has some much needed words for Mitt Romney, who takes ABC News to task for reporting on an unauthorized covert action undertaken by the intelligence community. The lack of authorization did not bother Mitt; the reporting ticked him off.
Obviously such misogyny is normal for men of little intellect and commonplace among the Fox propagandists. But it is not what these lunatics say that is at issue; rather, it is how the country reacts or does not react that is of concern.
I know Democrats have been singing this song for six years, but let's sing it again: Imagine how the right would have reacted at the news of an unauthorized covert action during the Clinton era? Why do guys like Romney think that the terms "President" and "King" should be synonymous -- if the president is a Republican?
Email tax? Yeah, I know: Folks have been offering scare stories about plans to tax the internet for ten years or more. But this NYT piece indicates that the scare story may come true.
Of course, any attempt by a Democratic congress to implement such a measure would end Democratic control of congress. The Republicans would loudly decry governmental control of the internet, sweep back into office, then continue to collect the taxes.
Backfire: I just caught up with a good story by Paul Craig Roberts on the under-duress "confessions" of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He admitted guilt to so many outrages ("It was I, not Godzilla, who destroyed Tokyo in all those movies") that no-one believed him, not even the Americans who beat those words out of him.
The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don't know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 "high value detainees."...And Mitt Romney wants more Gitmos. I'm really starting to dislike that guy.
And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged "enemy combatants," are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for "terrorists."
Beef. This quote from El Presidente comes to us by way of lukery:
"One area where I've been disappointed is beef. (The Chinese) need to be eating U.S. beef. It's good for them. They'll like it."Why does Bush always have to sound like an over-the-top comic doing a Bush impression? As Bill Maher noted in his last "New Rules" segment, the really appalling moment occurs when W walks away from one these speeches: He always wears a smirk that says "Nailed it!"
Immigration or caging? Marcy Wheeler has a small but important post on the politicization of federal immigration judges.
I can imagine that it would be very useful to have solid party shills as immigration judges-especially ones with a background in "voter fraud"--if you were using ICE to trump up voter fraud cases.
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An e-mail tax? Who would pay it, the sender or the receiver? It would have deleterious effects either way, wouldn't it? If the sender is taxed, what will that do to political groups and companies that have adapted to cyberspatial ways of communicating? Writers of newsletters? And if the US taxes e-mail, won't other countries do the same? But worse, what is the government going to do with the taxes it raises? Oh boy, let's add more bureaucracy!
On the upside, of course, it will put spammers out of business, and put a stop to those chain letters with jokes, funny pictures, urban myth alerts, etc. Not to mention Nigeria scams.
Taxing the receivers of e-mail, of course, would provoke a revolution in short order. Would you like to pay a penny or two for every spam e-mail you get?
And if anyone thinks compelling the collection of sales tax for online transactions is going to work, take a look at the internet cigarette marketplace.
As for the law against spyware, I don't know why it won't work. I just know it won't, because the government is trying to fix a problem. And when that happens, it always makes things worse.
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