Privacy/Surveillance

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

By Dave Lindorff

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has gone whining to his
professional organization, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers
Assn., asking for support in calling for President Obama to apologize
for saying he acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Gates
after first suspecting the prominent African-American scholar of being
a burglar caught breaking into Gates' own home.

By Dave Lindorff

The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of
Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the
police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host
and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into
Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a
cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make
the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to
report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

By Dave Lindorff

For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able
to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of
progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and catering
primarily to the interests of Wall Street and the nation’s corporate
interests.

The Democrats managed this sleight of hand for so long by claiming
that while they had the best of intentions, reality, in the form of
their inability to pass legislation, even when they were in the
majority in both houses of Congress, that could avoid being
filibustered to death by a Republican minority.

That situation has continued to this day, with the party currently having 58 seats in the Senate.

This should be at the top of the list. Get this Orwellian nightmare out of our lives ASAP!! From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: 

The federal government is trying to force states to turn your drivers license into a national ID. Unless you tell your state legislator to push back, the Real ID Act will create grave dangers to privacy and impose massive financial burdens without improving national security in the least.

Signed into law in May 2005 without meaningful debate, the Real ID Act states that drivers licenses will only be accepted for "federal purposes"—like accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses—if they conform to certain uniform standards. The law also requires a vast national database linking all of the ID records together.

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.