Another socialist blog

Trent Lott is a racist. Who knew?

If Lott’s desperate and hilarious campaign to apologize is successful, he will have convinced his fellow Republican senators that he’s just a good old boy who got out of hand, and has learned his lesson, and will be good from now on. Indeed he is suddenly in favor of affirmative action, unlike the conservative judges he and his colleagues have appointed. And he’s decided he would approve of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, if only it were on the Senate’s agenda.

Lott wants us to believe that he got a bum rap, because he’s not a segregationist. But that’s just a straw man. Nobody thinks Lott wants to turn back the clock on desegregation. What Lott’s opponents object to is the fact that Trent Lott is a racist, a well-known racist, who got elected by appealing to racist white voters. Far from being outside the mainstream of the Republican Party, being a racist puts him firmly at the center of it. He is the poster child for the Southern Strategy that has brought the Republicans to the White House. Lott gives the lie to the George W. Bush party line that racism is a thing of the past. No wonder Dubya is letting him twist.

So what should be his punishment? Lott thinks having to apologize on BET is all the punishment he deserves. Demoting him from his position as one of the most powerful men on the planet seems like a good start. Though I actually hope he’ll stay on as Senate majority leader. I haven’t had this much fun since Newt Gingrich.

It’s called Total Information Awareness and the man in charge of it is none other than John Poindexter, one of the Iran/Contra convicts of the Reagan administration. And there’s very little way to sugar-coat the reality: Total Information Awareness means spying on you using every means at the government’s disposal.

What are they looking for? Whatever. Since they won’t be using warrants, they don’t have to say what they’re looking for. They don’t even have to know in advance what they’re looking for. It’s just utterly open-ended fishing in the private data of law-abiding citizens, looking for whatever happens to be of interest to the powerful elite.

As a fine example of what this can mean, some lovable hackers have published some of John Poindexter’s personal information all over the web. Be sure to give the man a call at home.

NPR’s John Ydstie did this interview with a spammer, allowing her to trot out the same tired lies that all the spammers tell. Here’s my irate response to NPR:

John Ydstie’s piece on spam was woefully inadequate. Apparently he only talked to spammers in researching the piece. Unfortunately spammers are, as a rule, notorious liars.

“Permission-based marketing” is a misnomer. You can’t buy an opt-in list. If you bought the list, by definition, nobody opted in to your list. You took a FORMERLY opt-in list and used it for a purpose not agreed to by anyone on the list.

The spammer trots out the standard lie that “anyone can unsubscribe.” It can be demonstrated, and had been demonstrated over and over, that spammers use their so-called “unsubscribe” address not to DELETE email addresses, but rather to CONFIRM email addresses. Try this simple experiment: create an email account that nobody knows about. Don’t tell anyone about it and don’t email anyone from it. Then attempt to unsubscribe that “virgin” address from any spammer’s list. Watch the spam start rolling in to your new, “unsubscribed” account.

Betterly claims, as all spammers to, that they don’t send out sex-related or illegal emails. SOMEbody keeps sending me bestiality porn ads and penis enlargement schemes, daily, but none of the prominent spammers will admit to it. Hmm.

SpamCop, in particular, is chastised for not letting spammers “confront” complainers. Spammers really want to know who the complainers are. Sometimes they want to retaliate against complainers, by forging the complainer’s address on the From line of their spams, provoking thousands of angry complaints (a tactic known as a “Joe Job”). Mostly they want to “listwash,” that is, remove complainers from the list. That way the spammer can continue to spam, usually in violation of the Acceptable Use Policy of her Internet service provider, while squelching complaints. But the idea of complaining isn’t to edit the mailing list, it’s to get service providers to enforce their AUP and stop the spamming from their networks.

Questions John Ydstie should have asked Betterly:

• Why is spamming grounds for cancellation of service at every reputable Internet service provider?
• Why do spammers always forge the From header in their emails?
• Why do ISPs who shelter spammers go bankrupt so often?
• Why do so many spammers have serious criminal records?

Some basic reading for any journalist who wants to do a feature on spam:

• http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html
• http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/spam

I also recommend a counter-interview with Steve Linford, a prominent anti-spammer.

Since it’s so important to find the truth about how 9/11 happened, one of the most notorious living liars has been appointed chairman of the commission investigating 9/11.

Henry Kissinger, regarded by many as a war criminal, is (in)famous for his secret war in Cambodia, his secret bombing of Laos, and his involvement in the Chilean coup that overthrew and murdered the democratically elected President Salvador Allende and replaced him with right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. His appointment can only mean that George W. Bush wants not just a whitewash, but an extremely well done whitewash.

Kissinger brazenly promises not to bend to any undue influences on the so-called investigation.

In an interview with NPR, Al Gore makes clear that the Democratic Party doesn’t stand for anything, something Socialists have been saying for decades. About 6 minutes 17 seconds into the interview, he is asked “What does it mean to be a Democrat?” His answer:

Well, I can tell you what I think it means to be a Democrat, but in the Presidential election of 2004, we will pick a nominee, and that person will define, for many, what it means to be a Democrat.

There you have it. The standard-bearer of the Democratic Party says there’s nothing that defines what the Democratic Party is all about, except whatever their next candidate says the party is about.

I commute a long way to work (about 50 miles), so I’ve been waiting for a chance to get a car with great mileage. When the maintenance on my Olds Calais started getting too high (at 185,000 miles), I bought a Honda Insight, and it’s a great car.

Except for one thing: the seat belts don’t fit large-size passengers, such as for instance my beautiful wife. I figured I could solve that problem by just going out and buying a seat belt extender for the car. The Honda sales guy told me I could do that. How hard could that be?

Turns out it could be impossible. There are no seat belt extenders for Honda cars available anywhere in the United States. And Honda, as a matter of corporate policy, refuses to manufacture them. If you call Honda they will tell you—I am not making this up—that if you can’t fasten their safety belts you should drive one of their competitors’ products instead.

It turns out federal regulations only require the auto makers to provide a belt to fit people ranging from a 102-lb woman to a 215-lb man. That’s supposed to cover 90% of the population, but in fact the standard is so out of date that it may exclude a quarter of all adult women And it ignores the needs of the people who fall outside the standard. All of whom are subject to seat belt laws.

There are links on Elizabeth Fisher’s fine site that will allow you to file an online comment with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is considering a more sensible regulation. Let them hear from you.

It is Election Day in the United States, a day reserved for the peaceful resolution of conflicts by democratic means.

Today NPR reports that the CIA has assassinated a suspected terrorist using a missile fired from an unmanned aircraft. Assassinations are illegal under U.S. law, but the Bush Administrations claims that law doesn’t apply in wartime, and of course we’re in a state of permanent war, so the White House is asserting the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere, at any time.

There is celebration in Redmond as the anti-trust settlement written by Microsoft has now been approved by a judge. There’s to be no breakup of the company, no forced disclosure of source code, certainly no multi-billion-dollar fine levied at the company, which is still guilty of violating antitrust law.

Looks like Microsoft’s $1 million bribe to the Republican Party has paid off big. The Ashcroft Justice Department has been their shameless ally in getting this sweetheart deal.

We’ve heard over and over that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has used chemical weapons within his own borders. What we haven’t heard is that he isn’t the only one who’s done so. In 1919 Winston Churchill, then secretary of state at the British war office, was a strong advocate of using chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iraqis. I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes, he said. And indeed gas was used against Iraqi rebels. as Geoff Simons documents in Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam.

If you thought you were paying too much for music CDs, you were right: it turns out that music retailers and publishers were colluding in a scheme to prevent the retailers from selling at a discount. Retailers Trans World Entertainment, Tower Records, and Musicland Stores, and publishers Universal Music & Video Distribution (UMVD), BMG Distribution, WEA, and EMI Distribution (EMD), and Sony Music Distribution together will pay $143 million to settle an anti-trust lawsuit brought by state attorneys general.

Yeah, it’s just a slap on the wrist for a multi-billion-dollar industry, and they don’t have to admit any wrongdoing, but it still couldn’t happen to a nicer gang of defendants.