Monthly Archive

You’ll All Pay #11

© Joe Conat 2004

As I’ve said in past articles it appears that the government feels there is no part of your life they should not be privy to. Latest case: John Ashcroft’s subpoena of womens’ medical records.

Remember last year when Bush signed the ban on partial birth abortions? Well, some doctors got together and said “You know…we think that’s unconstitutional” and decided to sue.

In response John “Bull Dog” Ashcroft has subpoenae’d private medical records.

You know…I don’t agree with much of what the government does, that’s a given. I don’t think it’s any of their business if I want to e-mail a dirty joke to a thousand friends (not that I have a thousand friends) or that I want to read “Catcher in the Rye” from my local library over and over or that I buy Spaghetti-O’s, Twinkies, whipped cream, four feet of garden hose and a leash at my local party supply store. But them knowing all of that pales in comparison to their greedy little probing of a woman’s most private of areas.

Personally, I’m starting to think that John Ashcroft, denied any release due to the lofty heights of his office and the all-seeing eye of the Patriot Act, is casting far afield to get his kicks.

It’s typical of the sort of bullying shown by this administration in the past three years. Don’t wanna play ball and say Iraq bought uranium in Nigeria? We’ll tell the newspapers your wife’s a CIA agent. Want to protest the government’s policies? We’ll spy on you, call you a terrorist and lock you up. Or, at best, corral you and your “dissident” pals in “free speech zones” out of sight of the President until the motorcade passes.

Wanna question the ban on a medical procedure? We’ll subpoena your records and blare your most intimate secrets in federal court. No doubt with plenty of cameras present.

It’s as though, feeling they’re losing popular support for their decisions, the administration is resorting to schoolyard threat tactics. “Don’t you look at me funny, I’ll knock yer teeth out. Gimme your milk money.”

In the meantime, the President feels its perfectly justifiable to deny public viewings of his records. Of course he did his duty in the Texas Air National Guard. How dare you question it? Those papers to show he did? Oh, we threw those out years ago. Around…1997, in fact. When he was running for gubernatorial re-election. And contemplating a run for the White House. Yes, of course it was a coincidence.

How dare you ask?

How dare they ask? That’s my question You can argue that the individual records of women who had the procedure may bear some relevance to your argument, but if you can’t make that argument without violating their privacy…in other words, if you can’t argue for or against the procedure on its merits…then you don’t really have a case, do you?

I’m not going to go into whether or not partial-birth abortions should be allowed. It’s a heavily controversial issue with no clear resolution and, to tell the truth, it doesn’t affect my day-to-day (knock wood). But I do know that if Ashcroft and his Keystone Kops can’t debate the issue without threatening the fundamental rights to privacy guaranteed by law and custom, they shouldn’t be making the argument at all.

They must’ve really sucked at debate squad.

But I bet they were hard-core top-of-the-line hall monitors.

You’ll All Pay #10

© 2004 Joe Conat

I once asked a Republican I trust and respect “Really, in your opinion, what’s the main difference between Democrats and Republicans?”

His answer: “Democrats want government involved in every aspect of your lives. Republicans don’t; they want small government.”

I was assured this position was practically universal among members of the GOP.

And yet…

This administration…which, I remind you, is Republican…seems to go against that “universal” position.

Item the first:

“Today’s ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is deeply troubling. Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”
–Pres. George W. Bush, February 4, 2004

That’s right. Bush wants to constitutionally define marriage. This would make his proposed 28th Amendment, which is borne of Clinton’s abomination the Defense of Marriage Act, the first amendment to the Constitution that purposefully and specifically marginalizes a section of our populace. He’s writing bigotry into the Laws of Our Land.

Granted, Clinton attempted to subvert the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution with DOMA. But leaving it as an act lets the legislature battle it out over the act’s constitutionality. Many Constitutional scholars consider the DOMA garbage…it violates Full Faith and Credit, it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and substantive due process. In due time the Act would probably be tossed out and gratefully forgotten by an embarrassed legislature as a shoddy piece of work.

However if Bush has his way, DOMA, which strictly defines and limits marriage to a heterosexual coupling, would in essence be carved in stone. It would, at best, become another 18th Amendment, best known as Prohibition. Also known as the only amendment to be repealed. Because it was stupid. And unconstitutional. And stupid.

At worst it stays on the books forever and our country has to change its name from “The Land of the Free” to “The Land of the Somewhat Free So Long As You Ain’t No Freak”.

Why is this such a big deal? Homosexual couples can still have civil unions, still have the same rights as straight couples so why the fuss?

Well, they can’t have the same rights under this proposed amendment. They can’t have the right to call their union a “marriage”. That’s an undue restriction.

Why does the president feel it’s necessary to restrict American citizens based on their sexual orientation? Hell, why does he feel the need to restrict any American citizen who is acting in a lawful manner?

Beats me, bud. Beats me.

Item the second:

Don’t like the war in Iraq? Not too fond of President Bush or his policies? Ever join a group to discuss it? Ever participate in a peaceful protest or demonstration?

You’re on a list.

Anti-war demonstration groups, activist groups…they’ve all been infiltrated, surveilled and their members noted in federal databases by local police acting in conjunction with the FBI under the aegis of being a Joint Terrorism Task Force. Bad enough they can read your e-mail with Predator programs, subpoena your recent library check-outs under PATRIOT…now they lie to your face, proclaim their brotherhood with you and your cause and sell you up the river, bro, in a New Yawk second.

Sound familiar? Why, yes…yes it does. It sounds alot like the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of the J. Edgar Hoover era. If HUAC couldn’t getcha, if Joe McCarthy’s grasp wasn’t tight enough, Hoover got you with COINTELPRO, which was specifically designed to neutralize your activities if you could no longer be prosecuted for them. Because they weren’t, you know…illegal.

COINTELPRO stood for “Counter Intelligence Programs”, which sounds like cool James Bond-ian anti-spy stuff, but it wasn’t. Its targets were American dissidents, activists exercising their First Amendment rights. And the intelligence COINTELPRO gathered wasn’t used for criminal prosecution, it was used to foment discord in activist groups, cause chaos and discredit activist leaders in the eyes of the press and their own people. It was covert warfare against American citizens who didn’t toe the party line.

It was after the discovery and exposure of COINTELPRO that Attorney General Edward Levi authored a set of guidelines that set required criteria for initiating investigations, laid out a standard of criminal conduct (as opposed to writings, ideas or thoughts) and clearly stated what was and was not acceptable techniques for investigation, limiting the circumstances under which the FBI could justify intrusive surveillance.

I wonder what Levi would think now?

These latest acts by local police in Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico and elsewhere are eerily similar to operations unde COINTELPRO. In Colorado an undercover police officer infiltrated a group and suggested they engage in blatantly illegal acts that would not only result in their arrest but possibly get them hurt or killed as opposed to the non-violent protest they planned.

And they are now entirely condoned by the current Attorney General.

After 9/11 Ashcroft razed the Levi Guidelines. Under his new edict any group can be monitored under the flimsiest of justifications. Whether you’re protesting the war in Iraq or the WTO, the police and FBI can infiltrate your group and listen to what you say without notifying you. Whether your actions are criminal or not. In their eyes dissent=terrorism. In fact, according to a June 1, 2003 interview with the Oakland Tribune, California Anti-Terrorism Information Center spokesman Mike Van Winkle stated it quite baldly: “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)…You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

That’s a law enforcement official’s statement, kids. Protest is a terrorist act.

So watch what you say and who you say it to. The government doesn’t want you to say it and they will arrest or harass you for it.

Item the third:

Are you deaf? I’m not being mean, here…if you’re deaf and you rely on television captioning to enjoy your television shows, you’re not going to be getting the enjoyment you want.

Under an October 2003 decision by the U.S. Department of Education nearly 200 television shows have been deemed “inappropriate” for captioning by the DOE’s Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities and will be denied government grants to pay for said captioning.

Normally the decision on whether to fund captioning for a show is based on recommendations from Consumer Advisory Boards or similar committees. These committees are formed by the grantees, and select shows that are “educational, news or informational” (sic) and take consumer preferences into account.

This recent decision by the DOE was apparently based entirely on desriptions by an external group of five…just five…unnamed people.

Since the DOE did an end-run around the normal procedure for picking shows, the public was denied its chance to contest the new, narrower definition of “educational, news or informational” shows. It could be argued that this amounts to censorship.

It also takes the choice out of the hands of the now disenfranchised deaf viewers who can no longer watch re-runs of “Law & Order”, “Pokemon”, “Behind The Music”, “Justice League” or just about any sporting event.

What right do they have to circumvent the process and tell deaf American viewers what they can and cannot watch with ease? I don’t know, but if you do, tell me. Because I’m at a loss.

So, this is where we stand. The government wants to tell you:

Whether or not you can get married.
What you can say in opposition to the government and its policies…in essence, what political opinion you can have.
What shows deaf people can enjoy.

Small government? Sounds like they want a pretty big piece of my day-to-day life to me.

How far will this go? What’s next? Will they want to tell you what church you can go to? What books you can read? Who you can vote for?

Big decisions for a small government.

You’ll All Pay #9

© Joe Conat 2004

Politics is a continuation of war by other means.

At least that’s how the GOP seems to regard it. It seems there is no underhanded trick too low, no depth to which they won’t gladly sink, no law they won’t break in the furthering of their agenda.

From the…let’s say “shady”, rather than “outright criminal”…acts surrounding the Florida Fiasco in 2000 to latest act of computer invasion by Republican members of Senate Judicial Committee, it seems that members of the Bush administration and/or the Republican party are getting bolder and more outrageous in their willful disregard of the law.

Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane:

The year is 2000. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother to then Presidential candidate George W. Bush, Jr., decides to take a stand for his bro. He (allegedly) instructs two Secretaries of State—Sandra Mortham and the stammering numbwit Katherine Harris—to purge the voter rolls of ex-felons. Felons cannot vote in Florida (though they can in thirty-five other states), so getting these names off the list seemed a wise and prudent move.

So Florida hires DBT Online to compile the list of people to get rid of and pays them $4.3 million to do it. The company that did it for them previously charged an outrageous $5,700 a year, so fiscal responsibility thy name is not Bush.

DBT Online compiled a set of “scrub lists” for the Florida counties. The “scrub lists” that were distributed appear to the a “first pass” kind of thing. Essentially, the names on the list were there because they matched or nearly matched name, race, gender and birthdate of one of some tens of millions ex-felons in the U.S.

DBT Online is often hired by the F.B.I. to aid or conduct manhunts. They use address histories and financial records to confirm that a name in the phone book is actually the guy they’re after. So they don’t get the wrong guy. ‘Cause that would be wrong. You see? But Florida passed on that option, saying they didn’t need it. “Thanks for the list, we’re good.”

And zaniness ensued. 325 names on the “purge” list had convictions for crimes that hadn’t happened yet. That’s right, the conviction dates were in the future! (How that happened is beyond me.) Where the elections offices recognized that such data might be “bad news” they substituted some questionable conviction dates for blank dates. Nearly 5,000 blank dates were found on the purge lists. One Florida county, upon being issued their list, bothered to check all 694 names on it. Of those 694 only 34 could be verified as felons.

In a few cases, people were removed from the rolls because they shared a name with felons from other states. Felons who weren’t in Florida. Ever. And even if that state were one of the thirty-five that allows ex-felons to vote, their names were removed from the list, which is, by the way, unconstitutional. The “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution forbids one state from removing any civil right granted to a citizen by another state.

All of this was done by Florida state directive. In Congressional hearings James Lee, vice-president of Choicepoint, DBT’s parent company, admitted to incorrect matching of voter names with out-of-state felons and other data “massaging” at Florida’s behest.

Overall around 90% of the 57,700 names on those scrub lists were innocent of any felony. Considering that Bush won Florida by a mere 500 votes, and lost the popular vote by half a million votes, it may be safe to say that without Florida’s stolen electoral votes Bush might not be President today.

Why, you may ask, was JEB Bush so eager to get these people off the rolls? Well, they comprised nearly 3 percent of the state’s African-American voters, and studies have shown that African-Americans tend to vote Democratic. Let’s see if we can lose some of those pesky opposition voters, in other words.

So, right from the outset the Bush clan has violated a number of federal laws. The result? Bush Jr. moves into the White House.

As an aside, DBT Online is getting some choice Iraq reconstruction contracts including immigration reviews, cataloging of DNA…and voting systems.

If Bush loses his re-election, he’ll probably have a good shot at being the next President of Iraq.

2003:

Did you know that disclosing the identity of an undercover agent is a federal crime? Yep, sure is. And yet that’s exactly what one “unidentified White House source” decided to do to Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson and undercover C.I.A. agent. Why? Well, the reason seems to be because Joseph Wilson, at the behest of the White House, went to Nigeria to investigate whether or not that country had been approached by Iraq to sell “yellow cake” uranium and help Iraq further its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Mr. Wilson came back and dutifully reported that he had not, in fact, found any indications of such a collusion. Bush decided that didn’t have the punch of “Yes, they did” and so dismissed Mr. Wilson’s report and said in his State of The Union for 2003 that Iraq was developing “nucular” weapons and we should go in there and stomp him pre-emptively to keep ourselves safe.

On hearing that, Wilson spoke out and revealed what he had really told the President. And Robert Novak gets a call from an anonymous source. Badda bing, badda boom, Plame is outed as a spy and her career ruined. The intelligence community is in revolt: between the mismanagement, political pressure to produce the “correct” intelligence and the atmosphere of bullying exemplified by the Plame incident, our national security is at risk. And why? Because of petty political revenge and a refusal to bow to reality in favor of a wrong-headed agenda.

Federal crime numero dos for El Bushos.

And now we come to Number Three, a little incident I like to call “Watergate Redux”. Turns out the Republican member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee took advantage of a glitch in their Democratic counterparts’ computer system that gained the Republicans access without a password. For a year or so they sifted through hundreds of memos detailing who the Democrats would fight against being judicial nominees and how they would fight them. They handed this info to their good friend, willing mouthpiece and journalistic hack Robert Novak who slavishly details key points and direct quotes into a November column. Novak, when pressed to reveal where he got this information falls back on the old standby we heard during the Plame incident “I don’t reveal my sources.” Even if those sources are possibly guilty of computer invasion and may be facing criminal charges. What am I saying? Especially if those sources are possibly facing criminal charges.

The truly laughable part of this is the Republican defense of this act. They say that the Democrats were informed of the glitch in their computers in summer 2002.

Um, yeah? So? That’s like a burglar saying that it was okay he ripped off the silverware and the DVD player, because the homeowners left a window open and he left them a polite note. “F.Y.I. You can get in through the window over the sink using a credit card. Just thought you should know. The Bad Guy. P.S. Thanks for the TiVo!! XXXOOO.”

You know, I may be old fashioned but in my day we did something a little odd to people, even people in high office, who broke the law. We ARRESTED THEM!

Where’s the independent counsel to investigate the constant criminal behavior our current administration indulges in? Oh, that’s right…the 1978 Independent Counsel Act expired in 1999 and was conveniently not renewed. I mean, it had served its purpose hadn’t it? Spending millions so Ken Starr could compile the world’s longest Penthouse Forum letter and smear President Clinton much to the boredom of the American Public. We don’t need that old thing anymore, Bush would never have oral sex in the Oval Office.

Okay, I can buy that Bush wouldn’t have oral sex in the Oval Office. In fact, I’m relieved…there’s a mental image that’ll scar you for life.

And when the Plame story broke and a call went out to reinstate the act the response from the White House was a suspiciously non-chalant “Nah. We don’t really think it’s necessary, do you?”

Yes. Yes, I do.

It’s not like it’s the first time for Dubya to piss on the law. Drunk-driving in 1976, desertion from the Air National Guard from ’72 – ’73…why should we be surprised? The monkey stole the keys to the banana plantation and now he’s gorging himself (and inviting his friends to the trough) and flinging his feces all over. What did we expect? He’s a monkey!

We may as well have put Tony Soprano into office. At least he’d have more style, you know? His lies, while still blatant, would have a certain amount of charm.

Look, politicians lie. I know that. Clinton was impeached for lying to a grand jury about banging Monica Lewinsky. Nixon resigned after getting caught in his lies with Watergate. JFK allegedly had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and FDR may have had advance warning of Pearl Harbor and chose to let it happen. Politicians lie, it’s a given in our lives. That doesn’t make it excusable, not for past presidents and not for the current one.

Bush’s lies are costing us dear, in money and, most importantly, human lives. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and programs to make WMDs in Iraq, incidentally sending hundreds of troops to their deaths. The opinion of at least a handful of retired intelligence officers is that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror and may actually be a step back. Bush is stone-walling an investigation into 9/11, likely to cover either failures in our intelligence to predict the attack, or failures of our leaders to correctly interpret what the intelligence was telling them and act to prevent that horrific attack. Bush is stonewalling an investigation into who in his office outed Valerie Plame, aiding the perpetrator of a crime and bullying our intelligence agencies into compliance with the implicit threat “do not criticize or this will happen to you”. And the question we have to ask ourselves is “How long are going to let these people get away with it?”

Politicians lie. How long are we going to put up with it? When do we say “We’ve had enough, no more”?

Call your congressperson, your representatives, the local papers and TV and radio stations, make some noise people. Tell them we want the truth, damn it, and we want it now! Remind them that they work for us and they have a duty to uphold the laws of this land.

Bush has us all scared with the Patriot Act and the constant threat of terrorism. The thinking he’s trying to push is “You don’t switch horses mid-stream”.

Well, you do if the horse is lame. Or rabid. Or both.

Yippee kai yo kai yay.

“You’ll All Pay” is written by Joe Conat. You can tell him to shut up at conat@martyandgroovechicken.com. He won’t listen, but what the hell, right?