A World Quite Mad

This is some funny shit.

Is it wrong? Criminal? Well I suppose that depends on your definition of wrong and criminal. Wrong is suing poor grandmothers for an absurd amount of money for downloading a song. Criminal is G. Dubya Bush, but I digress. Plenty of people get away with wrong and criminal actions all the time. Got money? Got a good lawyer? You too can get away with shit.

Poor? No lawyer? 1/2 ounce of pot? Go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200!

I never thought of Anonymous as being leverage against stupid corporate shit, but maybe it could be. Except, I don't think they do enough. And they probably aren't organized enough. And are most of them even in this country? Do they all share similar goals? Probably not on both of those counts. That's probably all that keeps corporations from being under constant attack by them. Or maybe they have better things to do? Hard to say.

What pisses me off, is that the laws of this country, our Constitution, etc. were designed to protect individuals, not Corporations. Copyright law was intended so that individuals would not be stolen from. And individual musicians, they don't get shit from the behemoth that is the record industry. The majority of the profit goes to the industry, not to the musician. Maybe the big name ones get advertising gigs and that's how they wind up with a lot of money, but the small time musicians rely on their concerts and personally selling their CDs at said concerts to generate income. So, the industry is not suing on behalf of the musician. They're suing to protect their own profits.

Is being sympathetic to Anonymous a way of promoting anarchy? Maybe. But socialism, communism and capitalism don't work. Why not try anarchy for a while? I'm kidding. Aren't I? The problem with any form of government, is that the greedy always worm their way into power, and then use their power to rewrite whatever laws they want in order to line their pockets. That's the way it always is. The only way it won't be like that, is if greedy people cease to be. And that probably ain't happening any time in the next ten millenia.


"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." --Henry David Thoreau

From Crooks and Liars:



Watching Glenn Beck is like watching a real life version of Orwell's 1984 in action.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Corporations are your friend.

Hey Beck! The 13th century called, they want you back. Because that's what this boils down to. They don't want the plebes to have information, just like the medieval Church didn't want the peasants to be literate, because then they might get ideas in their head. And when they say they want broadband access for everyone, that doesn't necessarily mean in their homes. It means that you can go to a library or some other publicly funded place and access the internet. I think that's an important thing.

The only thing that disturbs me is that people believe everything Beck says. As much as he mentions him, I wonder if Beck has ever read anything by Karl Marx. I wonder if he can define "socialism" or "fascism" or "Marxism" beyond just saying that the Obama administration is "all of those things."

“You have a freedom of speech or the government. You can’t really have both,” said Beck.

Really? I could have sworn that the piece of paper that G. Dubya Bush wiped his ass with, also known as our Constitution said that *we the People* are the government. And herein lies the danger. The right-wing wackos scream about how terrible the government is, but we're all supposed to be the government. We're supposed to decide what happens, by electing officials who carry out our wishes. The Constitution, that piece of paper that so many religious fundies want to throw out and replace with the Bible, is supposed to protect our rights. And yet we have Conservatives screaming we need a revolution, we need to overthrow a duly elected government, yadda yadda yadda. There is nothing wrong with our Constitution. It has served this country well (for the most part) for over two hundred years. I do believe that there is a word for that. It's called treachery. And, as Jack Sparrow said in Pirates of the Caribbean, "The deepest circle of Hell is reserved for betrayers and mutineers." But on a more serious note, these people have apparently never read the Declaration of Independence (or anything else of value for that matter):

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Maybe what it boils down to is that Beck is so paranoid, he's afraid of himself.

Think Progress has more.

I don't think that any of these Republicans who are clamoring for their own little totalitarian theocracy have ever read 1984. Because if they had read it, they'd realize that what they're doing is straight out of Big Brother's propaganda machine. These are all from ThinkProgress and all from this evening.

The Democrats are just as bad as the North Korean and Iranian regimes.

Phil Gingrey (R. Ga): "Americans are watching as from Iran to North Korea, the forces of darkness are attempting to silence the forces of democracy and freedom. The irony is on this day, the Democratic process and the nation’s economic freedom are under threat not by some rogue state, but in this very chamber in which we stand."

Pelosi has created an autocracy in the House.

John McCain (R. Az): "And I guarantee you we are using every parliamentary possibility we have and I have great sympathy for my friends in the House because it’s almost under an autocracy now with Speaker Pelosi."

Obama is an Colonial African Despot.

Rush Limbaugh: "We’ve elected somebody who’s more African in his roots than he is American…and is behaving like an African colonial despot."

Because, G.W. Bush wiping his ass with the Constitution of the United States, getting us into two wars we had no business being in, and sending our economy down the fucking drain, promoting theocracy in this country, and being an overall dipshit that the whole world hated, didn't cause these asshats any sort of bother at all. They didn't wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if maybe they should be doing something to save this country.

Now that the democrats are trying to save it, perhaps slowly and perhaps ineffectively, all they can do is scream about how the democrats are really despots and tyrants. Oh please. They wouldn't know a tyrant if they were arrested by them, thrown into prison without trial, and taken out behind a woodshed and summarily executed. Why? Because they don't have any cognizant thought or reason in their heads. Nor do they have any empathy. All they have is a singular idea that god tells them they're special and deserve to have absolute power over everyone else, and because they're rich, they don't have to bother with the lesser classes who should know their place.

Forces of darkness? The only forces of darkness I see are McCain, Limbaugh and the rest of their hangers-on.

Well that's a job description you don't see everyday. Apparently the Bush administration paid a couple of psychologists a lot of money to engineer how to torture people. Were they consulting the records of the Inquisition or what?

Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites.

You can watch a short video about it here, it doesn't have an option to embed.
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7475437

If ever you believed the argument that this was just a couple of "bad apples" I think that argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. This was planned, organized, and implemented by those in the highest of places. And a few grunts took the fall, while the ones responsible for instituting it are still walking around free.

So, the election in Minnesota isn't such as big of a fiasco as the 2000 election in which the Supreme Court appointed G.W. Bush to the Presidency of the United States, but it is a fiasco nevertheless on a smaller scale. As you well know, if you've read my prior posts, I'm on Conservative Republican mailing lists. It makes for amusing reading, most of the time. Tonight I get a letter from Orrin Hatch and John Cornyn (my Senator as a matter of fact), pleading with me to donate to the National Republic Senatorial Committee (like hell) for the support of Norm Coleman in the contested election in Minnesota. Now, perhaps that in and of itself isn't so crazy. What is crazy is what Orrin Hatch and John Cornyn, or whoever wrote this for the two of them, says:

"...Unbelievably, the very basic right to have a legal vote counted and ballot weighted evenly against another is under assault in Minnesota.

Norm was ahead on Election Day, he was ahead when the canvassing concluded, and then, instead of recounting votes, different standards were applied to ballots with some counting twice and non-existent ballots being added to the count.

To make matters worse, a three-judge panel issued rulings inconsistent with previous standards resulting in the disenfranchisement of more than 4,000 Minnesotans...

Just the other day, former Congressman Vin Weber wrote in the Star Tribune, "The decision by Norm Coleman to appeal the ruling by the three-judge panel in the U.S. Senate election contest ought to be viewed as a courageous step in the long-term interests of all Minnesotans.

"While political analysts, Democratic stalwarts, Al Franken and a bored popular media want to call an end to what has become the longest election contest in Minnesota history, it should be noted that Coleman's courage and conviction will serve him well whatever the final outcome.

"Let's be clear. The issues here are not about expediency. That's not how Minnesotans view civic life. On the contrary, Minnesota is the place where we value the legitimacy of our elections and the equal opportunity of all citizens to cast a legal ballot and have it counted."

I couldn't agree more. I know I speak for my colleagues when I say we remain completely and wholly committed to supporting Senator Coleman in his effort to achieve fairness in the election contest in Minnesota. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Senator Orrin Hatch
Vice Chairman
National Republican Senatorial Committee

Really? Not about expediency? Everyone should have an equal opportunity to cast a legal ballot and have it counted? Really? What about all those blacks in Florida? You remember, the hanging chads in 2000. The Supreme Court making the decision to crown G.W. Bush dictator... I mean President. Surely Orrin Hatch must have agreed in 2000 that Al Gore had the right to challenge the results in court and a fair recount. Right? That's not what you told CNN...

Wolf Blitzer asks Orrin Hatch if it's fair to move the deadline from 5pm to 9pm so they can finish counting the ballots by hand. Orrin responds, "I'm not sure that it is under the circumstances, because we're now -- remember, this was all supposed to be certified by the 14th."

What was that about expediency? Or is that only when it favors your candidate?

"I think when a court gives an order, then you abide by the order," when asked by Blitzer about extending the recount beyond what the court had approved of.

Really? But you just said now the court shouldn't decide, you're decrying the fact that three judges made a decision you didn't like. What a bloody hypocrite.

You see the thing is, and I'm not in Minnesota so I haven't been following this very closely, so correct me if I'm wrong, but they did a recount, and Al Franken came out three hundred and some odd votes ahead. The Republicans are just mad they lost and accusing the election commission and the court of fraud, doesn't make you look very good. It doesn't matter if the man was ahead on election night, he wasn't ahead by very much. It was a close race, but in the end, it looks like Al Franken has more votes. Do the honorable thing and give a concession speech.

BTW, what is it with these Al's having so many problem with elections?