Friday, June 27, 2008
America is Full of Dumbshits. Derp! They Took Our Jobs!
Today I'm sitting at my office when the phone rings. I answer and hear the following:
"Yeah, I'm a white american (Notice the implicit claim of White Priviledge) and I'd like to file a complaint about all these fuckin' mexicans taking all our fuckin' jobs! See I work in construction and every single one of these companies is hiring mexicans instead of Americans and I'm fuckin' sick and fuckin' tired of all this bullshit. They're takin' our fuckin' jobs!"
He then began to recite a list of companies that are hiring "illegals" and said that as a White American he felt is was his duty to report them.
"I'm sorry for all my swearin' but I'm madder than a one legged man at an ass kickin' contest!" said Mr. White American.
I answered, "I'm sorry sir, but I believe you have the wrong number. You want to call your local Immigration Office or possibly call your Congressional Representative. You haven't called either, you've called an Immigration Attorney's Office."
Mr. White American says, "You're an Immigration Attorney?"
I say, "Yes."
Mr. White American says, "So you help these fuckin' immigrants?"
I say, "Yep."
Mr. White American says, "Well then you're just as bad as them!" and hangs up on me.
I wish that was the end of my conversations with Mr. White American, but alas, after about 15 minutes he called back.
I answered and he says, "Yeah, I'm trying to find out the number for the immigration office."
I say, "Are you the same guy who called 15 minutes ago and cussed me out?"
Mr. White American says, "No sir, you can check your caller ID and see that this is a different person, go on check it and you'll see I'm calling from a different phone number." Seriously, he actually said that.
I say, "Really? Because you sound an awful lot like the guy who called a little while ago cussing about Mexicans and Jobs and insulting me."
Mr. White American says, "No way, sir, that wasn't me, I didn't do nothing like that! Don't you go fuckin' accusin' me of nothin' like that!"
I say, "Fuck you." And hang up on Mr. White American.
"Yeah, I'm a white american (Notice the implicit claim of White Priviledge) and I'd like to file a complaint about all these fuckin' mexicans taking all our fuckin' jobs! See I work in construction and every single one of these companies is hiring mexicans instead of Americans and I'm fuckin' sick and fuckin' tired of all this bullshit. They're takin' our fuckin' jobs!"
He then began to recite a list of companies that are hiring "illegals" and said that as a White American he felt is was his duty to report them.
"I'm sorry for all my swearin' but I'm madder than a one legged man at an ass kickin' contest!" said Mr. White American.
I answered, "I'm sorry sir, but I believe you have the wrong number. You want to call your local Immigration Office or possibly call your Congressional Representative. You haven't called either, you've called an Immigration Attorney's Office."
Mr. White American says, "You're an Immigration Attorney?"
I say, "Yes."
Mr. White American says, "So you help these fuckin' immigrants?"
I say, "Yep."
Mr. White American says, "Well then you're just as bad as them!" and hangs up on me.
I wish that was the end of my conversations with Mr. White American, but alas, after about 15 minutes he called back.
I answered and he says, "Yeah, I'm trying to find out the number for the immigration office."
I say, "Are you the same guy who called 15 minutes ago and cussed me out?"
Mr. White American says, "No sir, you can check your caller ID and see that this is a different person, go on check it and you'll see I'm calling from a different phone number." Seriously, he actually said that.
I say, "Really? Because you sound an awful lot like the guy who called a little while ago cussing about Mexicans and Jobs and insulting me."
Mr. White American says, "No way, sir, that wasn't me, I didn't do nothing like that! Don't you go fuckin' accusin' me of nothin' like that!"
I say, "Fuck you." And hang up on Mr. White American.
War Criminals: David Addington and John Yoo Lie and Obfuscate to Congress. These men should be in Prison.
June 27th, 2008 12:55 am
Dick Cheney's chief of staff testifies on detainees, torture
By Dana Milbank / Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- For all the years of the Bush presidency, he has toiled in anonymity and darkness in the White House, never stepping into the sunlight of public disclosure.
Until today.
There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president -- Dick Cheney's Cheney, if you will -- and the man most responsible for building President Bush's notion of an imperial presidency.
David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn't happy about it.
Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."
He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman's questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: "Is there a question pending, ma'am?" Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. "You have my number," he said. "If you issue a subpoena, we'll go through this again."
Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House. Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected -- in signing statements, torture policy and other brazen assertions of executive power -- Addington's unbridled hostility was live and unfiltered today.
He sat slouched in his chair, scratching his mustache, as Jerry Nadler of New York, chairman of the Constitution subcommittee, warned about "the unaccountable monarchy" before offering Addington five minutes to make an opening statement. Addington spoke for a minute and 12 seconds -- most of which was devoted to correcting two errors in Nadler's introduction.
"Is that the entirety of your statement?" the chairman asked.
"Yes, thank you," Addington replied. "I'm ready to answer your questions."
He sure was. When John Conyers, D-Mich., inquired about Addington's pet legal concept, a "unitary executive theory" that confers extreme powers on the president, Addington dished out disdain.
"I frankly don't know what you mean by unitary theory," Addington replied.
"Have you ever heard of that theory before?"
"I see it in the newspapers all the time," Addington replied.
"Do you support it?"
"I don't know what it is."
The usually mild Conyers was angry. "You're telling me you don't know what the unitary theory means?"
"I don't know what you mean by it," Addington answered.
"Do you know what you mean by it?"
"I know exactly what I mean by it."
Addington went on to explain how the enemy's actions -- "smoke was still rising. ... 3,000 Americans were just killed" -- justified his legal reasoning. And he showed abundant disdain for dissenters, such as Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., who asked whether Addington consulted lawmakers about anti-torture statutes. "There is no reason their opinion on that would be relevant," he answered.
Addington's insolence appeared to embolden another witness on the panel, his former administration colleague, John Yoo. Yoo took Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., on a semantic spin when asked about whether a torture memo was implemented.
"What do you mean by 'implemented'?" Yoo asked.
"Mr. Yoo," Ellison pressed, "are you denying knowledge of what the word 'implement' means?"
"You're asking me to define what you mean by the word?"
"No, I'm asking you to define what (begin ital) you (end ital) mean by the word 'implement,' " the exasperated lawmaker clarified.
"It can mean a wide number of things," Yoo demurred.
After several such dances around the questions (whether, for example, the president could order somebody buried alive), Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., offered his grudging respect: "You guys are great on 'Beat the Clock,' " he said.
"I don't play basketball," replied the 41-year-old Yoo.
"That was a game show," Cohen explained.
But Yoo was not about to win a nastiness contest with Addington. As Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., questioned him, he put his chin in his hand, stroked his beard and cut off the congresswoman with an offer of advice "that may be helpful to you in asking your questions."
Schultz, declining the offer, asked him to describe an interrogation he witnessed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "You could look and see mouths moving," Addington answered. "I infer that there was communication going on."
Cohen asked Addington to explain his curious theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch. Addington explained that the vice president "belongs to neither" branch but is "attached by the Constitution" to the Congress.
"So he's kind of a barnacle?" Cohen inquired.
"I don't consider the Constitution a barnacle," Addington said reproachfully.
Cheney's Cheney continued to dole out the scorn ("You asked that question earlier, today, and I'll give you the same answer.") until Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the last questioner, inquired about waterboarding. "I can't talk to you -- al-Qaida may watch these meetings," Addington said.
"I'm glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington," Delahunt joked.
"I'm sure you're pleased," Addington growled.
Dick Cheney's chief of staff testifies on detainees, torture
By Dana Milbank / Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- For all the years of the Bush presidency, he has toiled in anonymity and darkness in the White House, never stepping into the sunlight of public disclosure.
Until today.
There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president -- Dick Cheney's Cheney, if you will -- and the man most responsible for building President Bush's notion of an imperial presidency.
David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn't happy about it.
Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."
He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman's questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: "Is there a question pending, ma'am?" Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. "You have my number," he said. "If you issue a subpoena, we'll go through this again."
Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House. Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected -- in signing statements, torture policy and other brazen assertions of executive power -- Addington's unbridled hostility was live and unfiltered today.
He sat slouched in his chair, scratching his mustache, as Jerry Nadler of New York, chairman of the Constitution subcommittee, warned about "the unaccountable monarchy" before offering Addington five minutes to make an opening statement. Addington spoke for a minute and 12 seconds -- most of which was devoted to correcting two errors in Nadler's introduction.
"Is that the entirety of your statement?" the chairman asked.
"Yes, thank you," Addington replied. "I'm ready to answer your questions."
He sure was. When John Conyers, D-Mich., inquired about Addington's pet legal concept, a "unitary executive theory" that confers extreme powers on the president, Addington dished out disdain.
"I frankly don't know what you mean by unitary theory," Addington replied.
"Have you ever heard of that theory before?"
"I see it in the newspapers all the time," Addington replied.
"Do you support it?"
"I don't know what it is."
The usually mild Conyers was angry. "You're telling me you don't know what the unitary theory means?"
"I don't know what you mean by it," Addington answered.
"Do you know what you mean by it?"
"I know exactly what I mean by it."
Addington went on to explain how the enemy's actions -- "smoke was still rising. ... 3,000 Americans were just killed" -- justified his legal reasoning. And he showed abundant disdain for dissenters, such as Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., who asked whether Addington consulted lawmakers about anti-torture statutes. "There is no reason their opinion on that would be relevant," he answered.
Addington's insolence appeared to embolden another witness on the panel, his former administration colleague, John Yoo. Yoo took Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., on a semantic spin when asked about whether a torture memo was implemented.
"What do you mean by 'implemented'?" Yoo asked.
"Mr. Yoo," Ellison pressed, "are you denying knowledge of what the word 'implement' means?"
"You're asking me to define what you mean by the word?"
"No, I'm asking you to define what (begin ital) you (end ital) mean by the word 'implement,' " the exasperated lawmaker clarified.
"It can mean a wide number of things," Yoo demurred.
After several such dances around the questions (whether, for example, the president could order somebody buried alive), Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., offered his grudging respect: "You guys are great on 'Beat the Clock,' " he said.
"I don't play basketball," replied the 41-year-old Yoo.
"That was a game show," Cohen explained.
But Yoo was not about to win a nastiness contest with Addington. As Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., questioned him, he put his chin in his hand, stroked his beard and cut off the congresswoman with an offer of advice "that may be helpful to you in asking your questions."
Schultz, declining the offer, asked him to describe an interrogation he witnessed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "You could look and see mouths moving," Addington answered. "I infer that there was communication going on."
Cohen asked Addington to explain his curious theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch. Addington explained that the vice president "belongs to neither" branch but is "attached by the Constitution" to the Congress.
"So he's kind of a barnacle?" Cohen inquired.
"I don't consider the Constitution a barnacle," Addington said reproachfully.
Cheney's Cheney continued to dole out the scorn ("You asked that question earlier, today, and I'll give you the same answer.") until Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the last questioner, inquired about waterboarding. "I can't talk to you -- al-Qaida may watch these meetings," Addington said.
"I'm glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington," Delahunt joked.
"I'm sure you're pleased," Addington growled.
Labels: War Criminals
Monday, June 23, 2008
shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Why Do We Care About FISA?
by Hunter
So, why have activists spent so much effort opposing retroactive corporate immunity as part of new FISA legislation, when there are so many other things in the world to be outraged about? Why do so many people care so much about a mere technical issue such as whether such-and-such is legal or illegal?
I can count three reasons.
- It goes to the heart of illegal actions by this administration. The Bush administration has broken law after law, and been enmeshed in scandal after scandal, and been met with no substantive actions. There are investigations that never end; there are stern letters that are never answered; there are subpoenas that are simply ignored. So to respond to a clearly illegal act by, of all possible things, writing legislation that offers retroactive immunity for those acts, maintains the secrecy of those acts, and declares that the Bush administration itself will be responsible for the future integrity of those acts -- it is patently asinine. It is an insult. It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law, and for the very responsibilities of each branch of government. In this, it is symbolic of the entire current Congress, which has proved itself all but nonfunctional when it comes to checking abuses by the executive branch -- or even by their own branch.
- It is a Constitutional question, and of a sort that the administration has fought long and hard to cripple. Among the more basic premises of the Bill of Rights is the notion of probable cause; your government may not conduct searches or seizures without a warrant, and the judicial branch shall judge the merit of those warrants. But the Bush administration wishes simply nullify that entire concept, if those searches are electronic in nature. It takes no imagination at all to observe that once one type of widespread, warrantless, causeless electronic search is deemed to be outside of 4th Amendment protections, an entire series of other electronic searches will follow. That is, after all, the entire reason the Bush administration pursued these searches illegally, rather than attempting to change FISA law in advance; they have every intention of creating a precedent for future searches, and they now have been given exactly that.
- It was easy. I mean, Jesus H. Christmas, it has been the easiest thing in the world -- all they had to do was not do it. It's not freakin' rocket science -- but thanks to the efforts of a number of Democrats, not just Rockefeller and Hoyer but people like Reid and Pelosi, they just couldn't not put immunity in. We were never told why it was so all-fired important -- they would never grace us with any non-childish, non-condescending, non-flagrantly-insulting explanation. But instead of just not passing bills granting immunity, we had Reid treating Dodd more shabbily than he ever treated any Republican, and Hoyer apparently going around Pelosi, and all manner of prodding and dealing by Democrats to get immunity for these acts. It is baffling, and the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one -- it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions. No other explanation would seem to suffice.
So those are the reasons. Because of all the issues we've faced, in the last few years, this one was an absolute no-brainer, the one thing that the Democrats, no matter how stunningly incompetent, humiliatingly ineffective or bafflingly capitulating they may be, could manage to win simply by sitting on their damn hands. But no; it took serious work to lose on this one. Serious, burning-the-midnight-oil work to manage to quite so cravenly negate their own oversight duties.
And that is why this will not be forgotten anytime soon. A caucus willing to go to these lengths to satisfy the illegalities of the Bush administration is not one that can easily be defended. It is understandable that it would take a great deal of courage to enforce Congressional subpoenas. We can understand that voting against funding for the war could be risky, if we were to presume that Bush would simply keep the troops in the Iraqi desert to rot regardless of funding.
But this one? This petty, stinking issue of granting retroactive immunity to companies that violated the law, such that they need not even say how they violated the law, or when they violated the law, or how often, or against who, and the whole thing started before 9/11 so it is clear that terrorism wasn't even a prime factor for doing it -- that whole mess is now absolved, no lawsuits, no discovery, no evidence allowed to be presented?
No, that one is indefensible. It is indefensible because it requires not just passive acceptance of a corrupt administration performing illegal acts, but legislators actively condoning those acts with the stroke of a pen. The Democrats are determined to set themselves as partners in committing crimes, then absolving them; there should be nothing but contempt for such acts.
Labels: FISA
