Another socialist blog

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.

The Iraqi government apparently thinks that the security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq must respect Iraqi sovereignty. A letter to Congress about the treaty, signed by a majority of the parliament, insists that:

The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq.

Ouch.  Did no one explain it to them?  Are they missing the last few pages of the script?  The U.S. doesn’t recognize Iraqi sovereignty.  That much was clear as soon as Bush invaded.  Since then there have been some half-hearted efforts to create the pretense of Iraqi sovereignty, but really, what sovereignty does a country have that is under military occupation by a foreign power?  The U.S. appointed collaborators to run the government, exerted complete physical control of the 2005 election (U.S. troops handled all the ballot boxes and decided which districts would get ballot boxes at all), and operates beyond the reach of Iraqi law.  What part of the word “colony” do they not understand?

The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the United States has apparently quit the Human Rights Council, an international body within the United Nations System whose purpose is to address human rights violations.  The U.S. had only observer status to begin with, by its own choice, but now has apparently withdrawn completely as a gesture of opposition to the policy of the Council.

This is a departure even for the Bush administration, which usually offers lip service to human rights while ignoring them in practice.  Perhaps they didn’t want any embarrassing questions about human rights violations at Guantanamo?  More likely, they don’t want to do anything to legitimize U.N. involvement in the enforcement of human rights, at a time when the pro-torture policy of the administration will be getting increasing public scrutiny.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will get the death penalty as sure as the sun will come up on January 20. The alleged mastermind of September 11th was arraigned in a military tribunal at Guantanamo today. As of yesterday his lawyers still hadn’t seen the evidence against him, which may be forever classified Top Secret. No matter; this tribunal isn’t going to be about actual due process, only the pretense of due process.

The defendant has supposedly confessed. At least his captors/torturers, who have shown zero regard for the rule of law so far, say so. Jonathan Stein made an interesting comment about Mohammed back in 2007:

The two questions I have are:

(1) Were these admissions the product of torture? I mean torture in the immediate sense and in the “KSM has been through the black site prison system for three years and has probably been tortured dozens of times, creating a lasting psychological effect that might impair his ability to think, judge, and communicate.” If KSM were to be tried in a court of law, would his confessions hold up?

(2) Should we be suspicious of the timing? Who knows when these admissions were actually made. All we do know — as Josh Marshall points out — is that their release is timed to knock Alberto Gonzales and the Attorney General flap off the front pages. Remember when Jose Padilla’s arrest was announced? John Ashcroft interrupted a trip to Russia to declare that the U.S. had arrested a domestic terrorist and heroically stopped his “dirty bomb” attack. As it turned out, Padilla had been arrested a month before and Ashcroft’s announcement was timed to knock a bunch of bad news out of the headlines. And the government could never prove the “dirty bomb” charge.

It’s a true shame that even when a really nasty guy is caught and proven guilty, alert citizens have to be suspicious and skeptical of the Administration’s behavior. But it poisoned the well from which we all drink.

Stein makes a good point about the timing. Here Mohammed is, being arraigned on the exact day when the news would otherwise be dominated by the first ever nomination of a person of color to be President of the United States. The so-called trial is scheduled for September, ensuring that we will have a steady diet of September 11th all that month and clear through to election day.

Barack Obama, now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, lost no time assuring the Israel lobby that it has his unquestioning support. Pandering to the supporters of Israel is nothing new in American politics, of course, but for a guy who claims to be all about change, Obama is looking an awful lot like reheated Bush.

Like George Bush, he continues to beat the drum of the supposed Iranian threat. Like George Bush, he is willing to threaten military action to stop Iran from exercising its sovereignty by building nuclear weapons. (Of course they shouldn’t build nukes, but they don’t have less right to do so than Israel and the U.S., both of which have recently started wars in the Middle East.) Like George Bush, he supports full funding of military assistance to Israel. Like George Bush, he supports enforcement of U.N. resolutions against Israel’s enemies, while ignoring U.N. resolutions against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Like George Bush, Obama believes in one-sided preconditions for negotiations with Hamas, e.g., Hamas must renounce violence while Israel does not. Obama even says Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel, going beyond even Republican policy.

With Obama in the White House we can forget about a one-state solution in which Palestinians can exercise their right to return to their homes in Israel. And we can forget about U.S. helping to dismantle the Berlin Wall that Israel is building deep inside Palestinian territory. Justice for the victims of Israeli war crimes? Forget about it. An end of the occupation? Oh please, we’ll be paying to maintain it.

Meet the new boss.

If former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan isn’t going to Hell, nobody’s going.  He helped the Bush administration use big-lie tactics to sell a war that has killed over six hundred thousand people.  Now he’s written a memoir in which he simultaneously accuses the Bush administration of dishonesty, and denies that he himself was an enthusiastic part of the conspiracy.

He must think we’ve all got short memories.  McClellan claimed to possess proof that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons.  He claimed Iraq supported terrorists.  He claimed that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.  (These are documented at the excellent searchable database on Bush administration lies at http://www.publicintegrity.org.)  He strongarmed reporters who dared ask embarrassing questions about the war.  He lied for Bush about the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and then refused even to stand by his own remarks about the subject.

These lies, told with his very own lips, he spins as “It’s just the way the game’s become played in Washington….”  You’ve heard this argument before, usually from fourteen-year-olds, and usually phrased as “Everybody’s doing it.”  Bullshit.  He’s a liar.  He knew he was lying.  He could have refused to lie, but he didn’t because he knew he’d get fired.  Simple as that.  And he’s still lying now.  Because “I was deceived” sells more books than “I’m a lying scumbag.”