Letters to the Editor
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@ Ondolette
You are obscuring an important distinction here. Legal searches and seizures require a warrant with probable cause. General Hayden's NSA was working mostly on illegal searches and seizures. They don't require any warrants unless someone finds out.
Our dearly-departed and sadly-missed "Bart" was nice enough to explain to the legal beagles at Balkinization that is it only "unreasonable searches" that require a warrant. Reasonable ones, who can argue with? C'mon, be reasonable, let us in....
Cheers,
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@ L.W.M.
Norway is probably the most productive, high growth economy on the planet. Check the numbers. Not the WSJ or conservative propaganda.
And my sweetie wonders why, given my strong interest in U.S. politics, I don't surrender my Norwegian passport and become a U.S. citizen so I can vote.... As John McCutcheon said in a joke he tells in concert, "If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates...." ;-)
Cheers,
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@Arne
Yes, indeed, welfare queens [and you know who "these people" are, of course <*wink-wink*>] shouldn't be buying Cadillacs. So spake that Nobel Laureate of Economics and Sociology, Sir Ronny Reagan. Of course, like everything he talked about, he was just making this sh*te up. Is our resident eedjit Sh**ter following in his shoes? I vote "yes"...
Everyone know poor people loot their expensive luxury commodities like Cadillacs and HDTVs.
Bart thinks he's John Yoo and the WH will be calling him any day now.
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The Sad Truth
It is all propaganda now. Time has no credibility. They don't care, they will do what they think they have to to get McCain elected.
Their 'reporters' know if they don't give em what they want, they'll get another reporter to cash the check.
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@Arne
And my sweetie wonders why, given my strong interest in U.S. politics, I don't surrender my Norwegian passport and become a U.S. citizen so I can vote.... As John McCutcheon said in a joke he tells in concert, "If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates...." ;-)
I think it's the lutefisk but I promise I won't tell anyone.
;-)
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@conslayer
I so love sentences that start "You would do well to remember..." Don't you?
I imagine this guy fancies himself a character out of Conan Doyle.
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I have to give credit for reading that stuff...
I imagine this guy fancies himself a character out of Conan Doyle.
-- Paul Daniel Ash
I will read most everybody here, but that guy has been proven to be so not worth the effort. Plus anything worth making fun of gets summarized in the "reflections" as with your post, which is pretty funny BTW.
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When will people
figure out that they have to protect their 4th amendment rights or they will lose their 5th amendment rights?
I mean, seriously, does anyone think that all this illegally gotten data will not ever be used against them*? Do they not realize how easily data can be doctored?
*I was a witness in a CoIntelPro case: the CIA paid informants for 'useful' information, so the informants supplied doctored 'useful' information to the CIA in order to get paid. Computer files are just as easy to doctor, and if the doctoring is detected by the defense, the Feds only have to say that their data was 'corrupted', no harm, no foul, unless the' corrupted' data is already supported by testimony via 'non torturous' waterboarding.
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Time owned by Time-Warner; thus conflicted?
Time-Warner is both a major media conglomerate and a telecom company. As a media conglomerate, T-W's motives in going along with Bush Administration policy seem clear; they have been in each other's pockets for years on issues of media concentration. But T-W's status as a telecom is also noteworthy. Perhaps they also cooperated with the illegal programs?
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@ondelette - re: Gen. Hayden's Briefs (Or Shorts)
I am a proud obscurantsist.
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@ L.W.M.
I think it's the lutefisk but I promise I won't tell anyone.
Perhaps, but real Norwegians don't eat lutefisk; they are gracious and save that for the guests (click my sig for the grisly details).
Actually, as I keep trying to tell her, I think we need some place to escape once (or better yet, before
Cheers,
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Oooops.
.... before the U.S. implodes.
Cheers,
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Media rules and the public mind
Times' attitude and the figures posted for the amount of coverage of various stories serve to point up yet again something I have maintained for a long time:
Media moguls will claim at every opportunity that the media can't control what people think. That's likely true - but they do have considerable control over what people think about. If an issue isn't covered, it ceases to exist.
So is is true that more people can define the term "Client #9" than the term "PAA?" Probably, because they've surely heard about it a lot more. And then the media will claim that "proves" the public is more interested in the former than the latter when all it really proves is that the media are more interested in the former than the latter.
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How can we target the cancer without killing the body?
Long ago, when Time fused with Warner, I cancelled my subscription. I just didn't trust an entertainment company to do good journalism. But I must admit that while I did expect Time to confuse news and money, I never in my worst dreams thought it would be to worship at the altar of authority. The exception being its Middle East blog and general Middle East coverage, one of the very few MSM sources of unbiased information on that part of the world outside of McClatchy.
What this disparity in journalistic standards within the same magazine shows, is that it's all about turf and who controls it. What would be interesting would be to find ways to target not Time (or any other non-Murdoch MSM) as a whole, but only those parts of the chaotic structure that publish this sort of tripe. But I frankly don't know how it could be done. I did send an email to Tony Karon (now senior editor at Time) about this, at his private email address.
Dear Mr Karon,
This may be the wrong venue, but obviously writing to Time Magazine isn't the right one either. I write to you as the one senior editor I am aware of who sticks to journalistic standards.
You are probably aware that the blogosphere has been up in arms about some of Joe Klein's questionable reporting. Today a new Time article written by Massimo Calabres titled 'Do Americans Care about Big Brother' went even further than Mr Klein in stating as facts the exact opposite of the (verifiable) truth, namely that the general public doesn't care a fig about its fundamental liberties, and that the Bush Administration in any case has not abused its extraordinary powers. Glenn Greenwald at salon.com convincingly destroys the arguments in the article one by one.
Is there any way Time readers and the public in general can protest this kind of sloppy, authority-worshipping 'reporting' without simultaneously punishing the worthwhile parts of Time, such as the Middle East blog?
Sincerely, etc."