[...] interspersed with griping from representatives of the telecommunications industry who oppose, on principle, any government interference in their business.

Except when said government asks the telecommunications industry to help spy on their customers. Then it's A-OK. See how fast principle goes by the board! Bastards.

And what Marcy Kaptur said neatly captures the essence of the patronizing authoritarian:

Now, that doesn't mean that I don't want good communication systems out there for homeland security and the defense of the nation. But if what I'm doing is bringing smut to more households in America, you know what? I really don't want to do it.

Translation: She's all for state-of-the-art communications so that our government can keep tabs on us (all for our own good, you see), but not for the unwashed masses; We just can't handle it!

Is this the same WaPo reporter who recently (10/16) conflated Social Security and Medicare to claim that Baby Boomers would "bankrupt the nation"? As Paul Krugman aptly put it,

It has become standard practice among privatizers to talk as if there is some program called Socialsecurityandmedicare. They hope to use scary numbers about future medical costs to panic us into abandoning a retirement program that's actually in pretty good shape

Mr. Milbank persists in repeating distorting and misleading and thoroughly debunked arguments to scare us into thinking that Social Security is in big trouble. These are not the actions of a reporter, but a partisan hack. When debunked information resurfaces again and again, despite correction from the likes of Krugman and even Alan Greenspan, one can only conclude that it is done willfully and maliciously. (for more, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3200)

I'm not a fan at all.

Hey, is waterboarding torture, or is it not? Rudy pretends not to know! It's just water, right Rudy? Rudy also spoke of sleep deprivation as if it were no big deal: "But they talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I'm getting tortured running for president of the United States."

I propose a simple test: If people are willing to sign their own death warrant just to make the "procedure" stop, then it's definitely torture. (That's not to say that less coercive measures aren't torture, just that these definitely are.)

Both of these torture methods were used to terrorize political dissidents with great success by the Soviets and the Khmer Rouge, among others. The desire was usually to obtain confessions to be used in sham trials, not to obtain actionable intelligence. And people did sign these confessions just to make the torture stop, even when they knew it meant certain death.

...ever spends time worrying about the legal costs of someone sent up the river for having a gram of crack. Or those being bankrupted by the RIAA for sharing a few tunes.

What Col. Boylan and a newly politicized military are doing, as pointed out by others, fits a pattern of intimidation to silence dissenting voices. The idea of a dominant military in our government has a nightmarish quality to it.

As if this weren't bad enough, there is another front in this battle: media consolidation, led by FCC chair Kevin Martin. Those who can't be intimidated can be bought out. What Martin, Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell (Tribune Co.) et al aim to do is to own as much media as possible, from the most local to the national level. With this level of ownership no dissenting voice can be heard loudly enough to make a difference.

It makes no difference to Mr. Martin that an earlier attempt to do this was beaten back by the public, Congress and the courts. He is at it again, damn what the people think, and couldn't give a fig for the wishes of the people he supposedly serves. And if he succeeds it will be exceedingly difficult to do the things that matter to us the most: ending this war, returning to a sane foreign policy, and using our treasure not to enrich the war-profiteering elite, but to look after our own people

For more, see on DemocracyNow.org:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/22/1415254

Funny how Bush keeps giving advice he never follows himself. How he lectures Chavez and Castro about freedom and democracy, when by his actions he shows he has no clue what these things really mean!

So they hate our freedoms, right? Isn't this what he and his shills have been telling us all this time? But bin Laden gives plenty of reasons for his actions, and they have little or nothing to do with hating our freedoms. This has been pointed out before by people as diverse as Michael Scheuer (in "Imperial Hubris") and Robert Fisk (in "The Great War For Civilization"), and many others.

And of course there is the issue that, at Bush's request, his toadies at the networks will not broadcast what bin Laden has to say in any case. So how can we even listen to what bin Laden says? Oh yeah, I forgot. In this age of instant telecommunications, The Terrorists need wink code from bin Laden to tell them what to do!

Bush and his elites treat us like children. Maybe his supporters feel comforted by having a Daddy Government to protect their freedom to buy an SUV, but in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave there should be no room for his kind of authoritarianism, no matter how afraid of The Terrorists you may be.