War on Terrorism

Sock Puppets and Partners

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Jaerome Doolittle argues that w is osama’s sock puppet:

Giving Osama bin Laden an instrument like George W.Bush to play is like handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.
Bin Laden has got from Bush virtually everything he wanted: U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia, his enemy Saddam is dead, the Al Qaeda franchise has gone international, his hideout in Pakistan is safer than ever, the Taliban is resurgent, the Great Satan is globally hated and isolated, and Bush has done, praise be to Allah, effectively nothing to end the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Sweet!

Perhaps.
The way things have played out bush has gotten from osama virtually everything that he wanted: a huge popularity hit in his first term, a mission accomplished photo op, a 2nd term in office, billions in oil profit windfalls for his cronies around the world, the war on terror, the shredding of the bill of rights and so on ad infinitum.
It is not at all clear who is pulling the strings.

Perhaps they are each others sock puppet and, if so, perhaps they are partners.

Just Say No!

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It is time for congress to just say no to the misadministration’s request:

The Bush administration has earlier this year said it would need $147.5 billion for fiscal 2008, but the estimates have been raised by another $47 billion. This request is in addition to the Pentagon’s nearly half-trillion annual budget, which omits war spending but covers routine costs, including training, payrolls and weapons procurement.

If congress doesn’t do its job then, as we fire the congress critters, we should petition the bushies Chinese financiers to put an end to the waste.

Brin on bush’s Accomplishments

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David Brin on the accomplishments of the bush administration::

Our topic is the number one accomplishment of the George W. Bush administration. Not the record deficits, or stagnant science, or rampant theft, or even a legacy of nation-dividing Culture War. Rather, it is something that until a few years ago seemed downright impossible — bringing low the finest and most professional national military the world has ever seen.

Read the rest. It is quite good and thought provoking.
For your leisure time I highly recommend Brin’s Uplift series! Read his more recent The Kiln People only if you become a Brin completist.

Via Robert Farley.

The International Traveler

This entry was posted in Anarchism Government Law Enforcement Libertarianism War on Terrorism on by

Kafka would be hard put to one up the folks at homeland security:

Under the proposed rules, orders by the CBP [Customs adn Border Patrol] to common carriers not to transport specific persons would not be based on restraining orders (injunctions) issued by competent judicial authorities. Instead,they would be based on an undefined, secret, administrative permission-to-travel (“clearance”) procedure subject to none of the procedural or substantive due process required for orders prohibiting or restricting the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.

Jill provides perspective:

I remember watching Sound of Music when I was a child and feeling my heart race as the Von Trapp family made its escape from Nazified Austria. I could never have imagined that a day would come when those wanting to leave the United States would be forced to “make a run” for the border to evade a myriad of obstacles placed by an American government in the path of those who wished to exercise their fundamental human right to emigrate.
That day has not yet arrived. But it will on January 14.

Don’t count on the Mexican or Canadian borders being your safety valve. The fences and the electronic surveillance can be just as effective at keeping people in as at keeping people out.

The newly powerful dems need to put the elimination of this star chamber behavior close to the top of their early 2007 agenda . If they don’t then a free people would be well within their rights to take the job into their own hands.