Snooping at the passport records of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain by the government a private company contracted by the government is a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that some politicians are pushing to make easier and more widespread. How? With “Real ID” — the national ID card program that, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that Republicans and Democrats opposed, but now is the greatest new Big Brother kool-ade flavor favored by Republican politicians and neoconservative “thinkers.”

From Ars Technica, we get the quote of the week:

As I’ve reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who’s fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

No.

And maybe we should add to the scenario Jon Stokes paints: private companies contracted by governments. After all, the passport breaches were not done by government employees, they were perpetrated by private individuals working for a private corporation.

In this day and age where our government “outsources” (read: privatizes) so much of its own business, from school lunches to prisons to heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq, where is the line drawn on privacy in a Real ID world?

Time was that this was a country of people free to live their own lives. Now we have a government that seems bent on controlling and tracking us in all we do, as though we were guilty until proven innocent.

The tipping point for this political agenda was 9/11, when foreign nationals already on CIA watch lists managed to sneak in and skyjack their way into murderous infamy. The Bush Administration, with general Republican enthusiasm, reacted by pushing for radical new powers to spy not on foreign threats, but on Americans — none of whom had anything to do with 9/11.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-1984, by George Orwell (Chapter 1)

Greg Mitchell tries to claim in Editor & Publisher that many major papers five years ago were in fact against the war on Iraq.

You may be surprised to learn that, precisely five years ago, at least one-third of the top newspapers in this country came out against President Bush taking us to war at that time. Many of the papers may have fumbled the WMD coverage, and only timidly raised questions about the need for war, but when push came to shove five years ago they wanted to wait longer to move against Saddam, or not move at all….

…Once equivocal editorial pages got straight to the point. “This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure,” The New York Times argued, “Washington’s worst in at least a generation. The Bush administration now presides over unprecedented American might. What it risks squandering is not Americans’ power, but an essential part of our glory.”

Other papers were even more blunt. The Sun of Baltimore, consistently one of the most passionate dissenters on the war, began their editorial with the sentence, “This war is wrong. It is wrong as a matter of principle, but, more importantly, it is wrong as a matter of practical policy.”

USA Today asked Bush to finally disclose risks, costs, and democratic government estimates for Iraq while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wondered “what ‘the peaceful entry’ of 280,000 troops would look like.” The Arizona Republic in Phoenix said that Bush and his “coalition of the willing,” with prodding by the French, “have left the United Nations in tatters.”

Well editorial pages are certainly where people turn to first, right? Never mind the war-fostering headlines on the front pages. Never mind the lazy absence of any meaningful fact-checking on Administration claims.

Never mind ignoring the sometimes massive anti-war demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.

No, the editors clucked and tutted and therefore should get a pass on their crappy coverage.

Any wonder why newspapers are still in trouble and mistrusted by so many?

Send this around. Please.

More at http://www.theuptake.org The UpTake and Salimah Ebrahim interview a family of Korean-Canadians going out to eat with their Austin-residing daughter in Lockhart, Texas. They speak to how electing Obama or Clinton will change the view of the U.S. abroad and how the next President should deal with a possible change in leadership in North Korea.

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: obama hillary clinton texas austin primary caucus
Added: March 3, 2008

February 27, 2008

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: Barack Obama President 2008 Democratic Party Primary Nomination
Added: February 27, 2008

Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, February 27, 2008

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: maples levin sessions waterboarding interrogation article geneva conventions international law torture
Added: February 27, 2008

He had been institutionalized for mental health … by his own parents.

He was on mind-alterning prescription medication.

He pushed his girlfriend around, part of his “abusive” behavior.

He had a history of cutting himself.

He bought all four of his guns at one shop — two of them just a few days before.

But what was the AP lead?

Steven Kazmierczak had the look of a boyish graduate student — except for the disturbing tattoos that covered his arms.

Yeah. Tattoos are the issue here. Right.

Let’s also note that he had a computer (uh-oh) and was apparently drinking large quantities of energy drinks. He also played chess. (Ooooooh!)

He had served in the Army for six months (and current status not quite clear). He also “served as an officer in two student groups dedicated to promoting understanding of the criminal justice system.”

He was also known to watch Oprah on weekday afternoons. (Okay, that part is made up. But those tattoos — obviously that’s where the story lies.)

Seems that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government wants to remove public juries from some coroner inquests. I suppose some detainees’ causes of death might threaten national security, right?

Provisions in its counter-terrorism bill, published last week, would also allow home secretaries to replace coroners with their own appointees.

Ministers insist the new powers would be used sparingly and the vast majority of inquests will still stay public.

But the move has triggered alarm among opposition MPs, human rights campaigners and lawyers.

Critics say the changes are dangerous and unnecessary meddling with a system that has worked well for 800 years.

A clause in the new bill would allow the home secretary to prevent a jury being called to an inquest and even to change the coroner for “reasons of national security”.

You know, in case Winston Smith doesn’t confess.

What makes our leaders think that we can grow continuously, forever? This seems to be a fundamental flaw in the philosophy by which we are guided. I am no “expert” but I feel that when we look at anything else in the world we see that there are cycles which govern. Just look at the seasons and see how the cycles enact themselves in the natural world. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. Birth, growth, decay, death, REBIRTH, growth, decay, death. The cycle goes on and on. We as human beings do not continue to grow indefinitely in a single lifetime. Why then is it expected that our economy should do the same? It just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t seem natural. Why then do we strive for it? Why do our leaders place this expectation upon us? Furthermore, unless we are to accept that we are under the control of some unseen force, we must acknowledge that our leaders are an extension of ourselves, so we must rephrase the question. Why do we place this expectation on ourselves? Why? Because we are afraid. We Americans are afraid. This is what allows those in positions of power to influence us, and except such ridiculous nonsense as the idea of eternal continuous growth. What are we afraid of? Death. Annihilation at multiple levels. We are afraid of losing. We are afraid of losing our seat of power and control. At the national level we are afraid that if we lose (as if there is something win) and if we are not able to dominate and control, then we will be killed. We are afraid that America will die. We are America…right? And we don’t want to die.

So what does this have to do with the economic stimulus package? The lie that continuous growth is the way to survive is perpetuated as a means to further control us. This package will not change anything, other than the amount of debt that we owe when they print the money. More debt equals more interest which equals more debt. That is the only thing that is going on with this package. It is a noose being presented as a band-aid. The illusion is that there is actually something that needs the band-aids help. This illusion is the idea that recession is bad. The illusion is the idea that recession is preventable. I suspect recession can be held off for a while, but it will never be prevented for ever.

We have been trained to believe that recession is bad. We have been trained to believe that it is our eternal economic growth and prosperity that is what gives us our freedom. We could be wrong. We might have it all backwards. It might be our need for eternal economic growth that has us working nonstop to continue it. Depending on your definition of freedom one could argue that this is the very thing that takes it away.

Recession is being treated like a “cut” on the national skin. It isn’t a cut. It’s a disease. Another thing we are trained to believe is bad. I’m not all that into facts, but here’s one; We don’t heal disease with band-aids, and disease isn’t always bad.
It’s the size, intensity, and amount of pain associated with disease that determines if we judge it to be “bad”. And after we are sick, we often judge it to have been a “good” thing because of other factors which were hidden by the blinding pain of the symptoms. The same as disease, it is the size of the recession that will determine how the common person experiences it. How do we create a really intense, large and potentially lethal recession? Keep putting band-aids on a disease, and a psychological one at that! The disease is the idea that says eternal continuous growth is healthy, let alone possible. Recession is simply a symptom of that disease. We can either choose to suppress it, and risk the possibility of it coming back in a nastier, stronger form, or do we let it play out, and trust that it is healing us?

So what would happen if we didn’t believe in eternal economic growth? Would we shrink and wither and eventually die? Which we are we talking about? Are we talking about us as Americans, or us as individuals? I assure you that each of us will die, with or without a recession, and with or without America. I would be willing to bet, that America will survive, whether I am alive or not. But since I am planning on living for a while longer, I wonder more about the potential realities that might occur while I am living. Would the “bad guys” come and take over our land, steal our women and children and leave us alone, cold and starving? Why would we even think such a thing? Maybe because thats what our forefathers did to get us into the state of civilization that we find ourselves in. I don’t know. And does that really have anything to do with economic growth? It does if the way your define growth is completely economical, physical and material, able to be measured by devices and proven. Utterly Newtonian. It does if what we choose to do with our economic growth is to impose our way of life on others, “helping” them attain “freedom” like ours, so they can fit into our financial system, allow our companies to sell more, thus providing the needed “proof” that we are “growing”. What’s this all about? Whats the big fear against not growing? It’s the fear of getting old. It’s the fear of dying. We are afraid that if we as a country do not continue to grow, that we will get old and die.

What if we found ourselves in a recession? What would that look like? Would the grocery store go away? Would the cars stop driving? Would there be murder in the streets? There might be, and we have plenty of movie scenes to gain a picture from. But there always is, somewhere. Even in our own country. So what would it look like? Maybe it would look a bit like the end of fall. Maybe a lot of color would be stripped away. Maybe a lot of the exuberant details would start to vanish from the landscape. Maybe we would know that we still have to get through the winter. Maybe we will remember that there are amazing things that can only be done in winter. Maybe we would trust that the spring will come again and we will still have color in our world and that we will still be warmed by the sun. Maybe, just maybe, by the end of the hot summer we will look forward once again to fall and we will get to do it all over again.

Would we not be foolish to believe that we as a nation will grow forever? Would it not be even more foolish to think that we will never die? To be truly powerful is to be at peace, knowing that you will die, and to live free of that fear. What would it look like if we as Americans just accepted that one day, a day we can never know, America will die. Would it change our ability to “grow”? Maybe our need for growth would shift from a need to grow externally to a desire to grow internally? Is this impossible? What would it take? It would require us to trust ourselves and each other that what we are all experiencing is right, and to go with it, rather than fight against it. It would require us to abandon the need to measure the results, it would take for us to remove the need to prove to ourselves and to each other that where we are heading is the right way. We would simply have to be in acceptance with what is, and choose how to be with it now.

I say let the recession come. Let the healing begin, and if it kills us, so be it.

If we allow them to make us believe. It shall be so.