“…Bush opponents must finally overcome the one weapon which has protected George Bush again and again: fear. Fear of terrorism is what the Administration has successfully inflamed and exploited for four years in order to justify its most extreme and even illegal actions undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism.”Dr. Sanity posits Mr. Greenwald has his own fears, and then asks:
“Without pause, the Administration has sought to make Americans as frightened as possible about terrorism and has used that fear to justify its actions with regard to almost every issue.”
The basic tenor of his fear is easy to deduce: while we are fighting this illusory enemy, Bushitler has been amassing power and will soon set himself up as a dictator and destroy our freedom. I will let you decide who we have to fear more--the President of the United States or the religious fanatics of Islam who want to obtain a nuclear weapon? Who do we have to fear more: those who are trying to prevent another 9/11 or those who would like nothing better than to do something even worse in our country?A good read, and a good response when your liberal friends accuse you of succumbing to BushCheney-induced “fear.” As the ol’ saying goes: “It ain’t paranoia when the bastards are really out to get you!”
Via Powerline: A brief but unnoticed moment of sanity in the NSA surveillance kerfluffle:
Rep. Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Dec. 21:I’ve been watching the rerun of this morning’s Washington Journal on C-SPAN with one eye while doing my morning reading with the other. Brian Lamb interviewed the political editor from The Center for Public Integrity, who stepped the audience through various pages on the Center’s web site. There’s a wealth of information on this site about who’s lobbying whom, and how much the lobbyists spend, in an aggregated form. As an example, I was curious about the USAF. After a very quick search on the web site, here are the top ten organizations lobbying the Air Force:
As the Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to US national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.
1) Northrop Grumman Corp.No real surprises there, other than wondering just who, or what, the “21st Century Partnership” is? Another interesting aspect of this site is the ability to identify the lobbying firms, individual lobbyists (by name), the states doing lobbying (in the USAF’s case, Virginia was number one), and countries lobbying the USAF. Yes, countries. In USAF’s case, 99% of the lobbying is done by US-based organizations. But the UK, Israel, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Sweden (?) each had at least one instance of lobbying contact between 1998 and 2004.
2) General Dynamics Corp.
3) Twenty-First Century Partnership
4) Northwest Airlines Corp.
5) Military Officers Association of America
6) Abilene Industrial Foundation
7) Federal Managers Association
8) Firearms Training Systems
9) Non Commissioned Officers Association
10) Lockheed Martin
The web site contains various “projects,” one of which is the Telecommunications and Media project. You can search the Telecom Project by zip code and get a comprehensive report of who owns the media in your neck of the woods, how many outlets (print, radio, TV) there are, and a complete listing of those companies. As an example, I found there are 16 radio stations, five TV stations, and two newspapers in the Clovis-Portales area. Interesting stuff!
There’s much, much more. One could spend hours exploring the various projects and features on this fascinating site.
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