Tuesday, June 27, 2006

 

Rescued from the memory hole

Via ICH, here are some things you aren't supposed to remember: Remember that the Bush Administration swore they weren't kidnapping suspects and housing them in European prisons? Well, the rendition side of the denial just collapsed. The right stole the 1988 election in Mexico by jacking the computers. If, as is widely anticipated, they try it again, it could lead to Millions of angry protesters claiming vote fraud, chaos in the courts, financial markets collapsing, troops in the streets .... Just a 10% chance of that happening. The US is claiming that it's not violating banking secrecy, because it's only trolling the electronic transactions of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunications, which handles 9 million transactions per day. Sort of like their claim they aren't wiretapping you because they're also trolling millions of other people's phone calls.
Comments:
I know I'm a drive by commenter... but basically... here ya go.

I'm all for the first item, secret prisons, sneaking away with our enemies, etc... Bring back the era of big CIA and NSA secret operations... harkens back to the cold war.


On the second note, Mexico has elections? A country so rife with corruption and fraud has elections? Cool. Maybe I should go down there... I could buy a seat on their government.


As towards the financial thing... seriously do you not get that the IRS tracks all financial transactions to determine if they are taxable? That data is just being examined in a slightly different method, and so what has changed? Not a lot for the average joe.
 
Well, then Fistandantalus, if as you say "the IRS tracks all financial transactions" and is thus no big deal in your mind, then why should the NYT be condemned by the Bushies and their media parrots as traitors over revealing the extra-special monitoring being done by BushCO? (Especially since the WSJ and LAT did stories on this issue as well.)

On the one hand, the right-wingers argue it's treason; on the other, they argue that it's no big deal. Orwell, here we come!
 
Fistandantulus might as well have renounced his citizenship. Holding people without trial at the whim of the monarch was one of the causes of the American Revolution. It is memorialized in our Sixth Amendment, in a Constitution which regards these to be inalienable (God-given) human rights, not rights peculiar to Americans nor rights that can be revoked because of circumstance.

No real American would make such an ignorant statement.

As for the IRS monitoring every financial transaction, this is simply manure. Three hundred billion in taxes goes unpaid every year precisely because the IRS is so understaffed it can't even do its job.

But who cares when one can just throw out nonsense and then refuse to acknowledge when one is wrong? It's the perfect dodge for a narcissist.

[Revision: I modified the statement that the Constitution declares rights to be inalienable. It is the Declaration of Independence that uses that language. However, the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were not subject to any government,as the Ninth Amendment makes clear.]
 
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