Another socialist blog

In the time-honored tradition of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama has been moving rightward ever since he clinched the nomination. Though bloggers and mainstream media like to say he’s moving “toward the center,” that’s not a direction.

• He criticized African-American men who are bad fathers and don’t take personal responsiblity for their families, an obvious attempt to appease whites who are, well, “uncomfortable” with African-Americans.
• Two Muslim women who attended Barack Obama’s event June 16 in Detroit were told they couldn’t stand behind the candidate, according to NPR. One was told her head covering was an issue, and another was told by an Obama volunteer that for political reasons they didn’t want Muslims appearing with him on TV.
• NPR reports Obama supported legalizing Bush’s illegal wiretaps and supported the right of states to execute rapists.

What the Democrats won’t say out loud is that they are going to take liberal voters for granted from now until election day. Obama, like Gore and Kerrey and Clinton and a long parade of other Democratic Party phonies, knows that the two-party system ensures that principled liberal voters now have nowhere else to go. Because there are no left third party candidates pulling the political center of gravity to the left, Obama is free to sprint to the right. Will you still recognize him by election day?

Pam’s House Blend mentions that Bill Clinton has been acting like an ass. Well, sure, he could be a better sport about his wife losing the primary elections. But I think if Democrats really want to make a change, they should dump center-right leaders like Bill Clinton altogether, rather than giving a damn about what he says or how he feels about it. This is the President who sided with racist conservatives on ending welfare, who drummed out gays from the military, who rejected single-payer national health care, supported the death penalty, supported censorship on the Internet, just to scratch the surface.

Even liberals, who have historically been too trusting, should have gotten the message by now.  Bill Clinton never was a liberal, and he’s no friend to liberals.  If you want things to get better, you have to stop going back to your abusive boyfriend.

Brilliant at Breakfast has awarded today’s worst person in the world award to T. Boone Pickens, who created the campaign of “Switf Boar” lies against John Kerrey. Pickens offered $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single charge made by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. So Kerry and his sympathizers disproved several. And Pickens won’t pay. What a surprise, a liar got caught in another lie.

According to the New York Times,

Extensive media accounts undermined the Swift Boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift Boat critics had written statements during Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up. (One accuser in particular had become upset by his portrayal in a Kerry biography in 2004.) One critic had himself received a medal for heroism during a hail of gunfire he later claimed Mr. Kerry had concocted to win his third purple heart.

As Bill Gates leaves the helm of Microsoft, there are lots of puff pieces in the media, helped along by the Microsoft PR machine of course, about what a swell guy he is. American Public Media’s Marketplace, which was in a position to know better, joined the love feast with a story about how terribly, terribly innovative Gates has been.

Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Corporation, begged to differ: “Claims by Microsoft that people were buying the software because it was good are pretty self-serving. I’d like to smoke what he’s smoking.” Kapor is right. Innovation is hard. Anti-competitive practices and bogus patent lawsuits are easier. And bribing politicians to avoid punishment for anti-trust violations is easier yet.

This Modern World is usually dead-on hilarious, but especially so this week as we take a look at those oh-so-color-blind Republicans.

I’m no fan of the Democratic Party, especially this month, but an enterprising liberal blogger has come up with a scheme to Google bomb John McCain, and I’ll help in whatever small way I can.

If you’re not familiar with the term, Google bombing is a way to increase the ranking of particular web pages in the Google search results, by linking to those pages. It would be nice if people searching for information on John McCain came up with the articles that describe how John McCain voted to filibuster a minimum wage hike, how John McCain said it would be “fine” to keep the troops in Iraq for a hundred years, how John McCain said Bush was right to veto health care funding for poor children…you get the idea.

Nine articles are part of the project. I can’t figure out why McCain’s admitted use of the word “gook” wasn’t one of them. I think he’d lose a vote or two if one of the top ten Google searches for “McCain” pointed to his recent use of the racist epithet. This wasn’t just during his time as a POW, no, he said “gook” right out during a conversation with reporters, on his campaign bus, in 2000. “I hated the gooks,” said McCain. “I will hate them as long as I live.” Sounds like straight talk to me, much more believable than the apology that followed some days later.

When governments are run by corporations, you’ll hear a lot about “private property,” but it won’t refer to your stuff. Only the corporations will actually have property rights, and your stuff will all be rented from them. Just a few recent examples:

• Virgin Media cable says that the record industry is in charge of your router configuration. Customers of the British internet provider are being told they can’t provide open WiFi connections because someone could use them to download music. The internet connection you paid for, and the router you thought you owned, turn out to be someone else’s.
• The MPAA has convinced the FCC to begin a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs. All your DVRs are belong to us.
• The Associated Press now expects you to pay a license fee to them, for the privilege of quoting and commenting on an A.P. story. And they reserve the right to cancel your license if you criticize A.P.

Fortunately I don’t have to pay to quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s excellent comment:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

Slashdot reports that a provision has been slipped into the Senate mortgage bill, requiring all electronic payment processors to send detailed transaction data to the federal government.  That’s right.  All your eBay, Google Checkout, and Amazon transactions, all your credit card transactions, handed without a warrant to the feds for them to browse on.  Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader and hardly a left-wing bomb-thrower, says “The privacy implications for America’s small businesses are breathtaking.”

True to form, the Democratic Party is once again helping the Bush administration get away with it. This time it’s the House Democrats who approved the FISA Amendments Act, which contains blanket immunity for telecoms that cooperated in warrantless government spying. Far from being a compromise, this bill is complete victory and vindication for illegal wiretapping by the White House, and will scuttle all civil lawsuits against the telecoms before they can be heard in court. Up with the lawless government, down with the rule of law. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Now it’s up to the Senate to vote final passage for the bill. See http://stopthespying.org for information on how you can give your Senators a piece of your mind.

Warrantless bag searches at commuter rail stations: Los Angeles Metrolink riders will be subjected to “random” bag searches. Signs will announce the random searches so terrorists will know to use a different station.

Protest police cameras, and the police raid your house. Philadelphia residents who circulated a petition protesting police surveillance cameras in their neighborhood, had their home raided by local police who entered and searched it without a warrant. The place was ransacked while the residents were held under arrest for 12 hours. No charges were filed.