You do remember don’t you?
Its full name is the:
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
Yep, our tax dollars pay for people to dream this stuff up. Read more about efforts both to undo and add to it here.
Back from the road and I hate thieves.
Is that correct? Ah, yes, associate your emotion with of the act not the actor. Well, I hate theft and today I hate thieves.
Late last night, 30 minutes from home, returning from a perfectly wonderful few days away (my how the constant caress of near by surf soothes) we get a phone call telling us one of our cars had been burglarized.
I hate thieves.
Deal with the police, deal with insurance, everything takes time and eventually the damage will be fixed and the stolen items replaced. Low deductible helps for part of the loss. But we will be out of pocket several hundred dollars when all is said and done. This is probably triple what the jerk(s) will get when they fence their take. The out of pocket is nothing compared to the psychological loss. It is partially mended by time.
I still hate thieves.
In all their forms, catch them, try them and jail them: the murderers, the rapists, the beaters and abusers, the muggers, the robbers, the vandals. Take something that does not belong to you and pay the price.
And I still hate thieves.
Read it here. This should be considered good news…both for the bushies (eleminate knee jerk responses whenever poindexters name is mentioned) and the rest of us (they could, of course, find someone worse.
James Joyner, Outside the Beltway, thinks this “may be the strangest story of the year”:
The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
Maybe not so strange when you consider the folks behind this. Just imagine the opportunities to line the pockets of selected investors. Of course, the current administration would never consider something like that.
Hmmmm, how much would someone need to bet invest before they were incented to hire lobbyists; make campaign contributions; or perhaps hire a hit squad? Just imagine the possibilities….
William Rasberry doesn’t want us to be blinded by uraniumgate:
The flap over how the falsehood about uranium purchases from Niger made it into the president’s State of the Union message should not obscure what for me is the most troubling fact: Key members of the Bush administration, convinced in their hearts that America needed to destroy Saddam Hussein, thought it reasonable to exaggerate the threat and deliberately stretch the facts in order to sell the American people on that necessity.
Read his column to see why he thinks this is a pattern of behaviour.
Via Talkleft.