UPI and security theater

They were shining there for you and me

or perhaps, "The Name of the Game" would have been more appropriate. I dunno, I like this one better.

BBC: Sweden approves wiretapping law

Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.

Glenn Greenwald:
Time Magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise":

The Congressional Democratic leadership explains that sacrificing the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law is necessary to win some more swing seats...

Nicole Belle, at Crooks n' Liars(via IOZ):

"Good God, is this why we elected a Democratic majority in 2006? So they can continue to enable the Bush administration as more and more independent sources have verified the criminality that we’ve claimed correctly all along? "

IOZ-

Yes.

In the above referenced post,Belle also writes:

John[Amato] mentioned our new coalition, Strange Bedfellows, earlier and I can’t reiterate more strongly the need to fight Blue Dogs like Steny Hoyer, so if you can donate, please do so. Think of the message it sends to Congress that we are willing to fight our own if they don’t represent us and our Democratic values the way they should.

I don't know about the details, but I wonder if that's true, because "Act Blue" sounds like an organization whose approach, starting with its very name, may antagonize voters in so-called "Blue-dog" districts, when outreach is needed. (I also think the views of those voters are often stereotyped, and therefore misunderstood, by people in the lefty blogosphere. Not everybody in the hinterlands is unreachable, any more than are all San Fransicans and Bostonians disappointed that Nader isn't running.) Then again that begs the question of whether abandonment of the democratic party altogether makes more sense that yet another attempt to fix it.

Tiny little dots and other points of interest

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe calls UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown "a little tiny dot on this world",

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch:Did the Elites Want MLK Dead

via the Christian Science Monitor: Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim:The Islamic state is a dead end.
I don't know too much about this guy, but he seems more serious than, say, Irshad Manji who, in her eagerness to cozy up to characters like Glenn Beck, often strikes me as a sort of Muslim Uncle Tom.

also: Turkish scholars aim to modernize Islam's Hadith


Avedon Carol: "Back in 1967, someone named Arthur Miller (no relation) wrote an article on the dangers of giant national data bases to personal privacy, published in The Atlantic. It was a real find for a poster at Modern Mechanix - as Cory Doctorow agrees, it got everything right, and could easily have been written today."

Think Progress:"Pentagon employee erases mention of homosexuality on dead soldier’s Wikipedia page."

(Andrew Sullivan writes: “I can see why outing someone who is alive and closeted is unethical; inning someone who is dead and was out is a function of utterly misplaced sensitivity, rooted in well-intentioned but incontrovertible homophobia.”)

Mitch Ratcliffe, ZD Net: Creeping totalitarianism: The NSA, personal data and you


And, oh yeah: Bush insists he wasn't out of the loop viz-a-viz approving the torture memos.

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged."
-- Justice William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice