Tuesday July 11th, 2006

New York Tunnel Plot
Last week the FBI arrested a man in connection with a plot to bomb some tunnels in New York City. Al Qaeda was involved, we know this for an absolute iron-clad fact. So iron clad, you see, that it is impenetrable and no one can see it's inner workings. We can glean the inner workings, since maybe Abu Musab al-Zarqawi promised financial support for the plot, that is, before he died. And this plot had been in the FBI's radar for nine months. And provided they where somehow able to get in there and plant enough explosives, and somehow do more than merely crack the concrete and steel, and somehow make water run uphill, flooding Wall Street, it would have brought the American finances to a grinding halt. Well, a grinding pause. Okay, fine, a grinding barely noticeable slowdown. Anyway, the war on terror continues unabated. Despite the New York Time's efforts.

Al-Qaeda Gets Tips from the NYT Entertainment Section
This happened a few weeks ago but they won't shut up about it. The New York Times printed an article saying that the US was going to follow the money trail to catch terrorists. The Whitehouse declared this was treasonous to report, because Now They Know! Didn't they say they where going to do this back before we sent a single soldier to Iraq? Isn’t this the most obvious damn thing ever? Someone tell me how this is more treasonous than Karl Rove leaking Valerie Wilson's CIA status to the press? For the love of grandma, the TV show "Alias" came out in, what, 2001? How many episodes did they show Sydney et al tracking the money to find the bad guy? Remember Goodfellas? Remember how they stole all that money, and Bob Dinero told 'em all not to spend it too much, or the Feds would know they had gotten it illicitly? Didn't Al Capone finally go down for tax fraud i.e. having too much money and paying not enough taxes? Conspiracy Shrugging: the Whitehouse is just mad because now we know they're probably going to use the same scheme to track democrat money. Nixon? Who?

The Fine Art of Campolling
File this one under campaign finance reform. Have you ever been called by a pollster? Politicians can run polls to see how they're doing, and it gets paid for from a different purse than the calls they make, begging for your vote. So they can't use poll money to campaign. They also are not allowed to lie when they campaign… but polls are allowed to ask hypothetical questions. "Ring ring, hello, I'm taking a poll on the senatorial race. Can ask you a few questions? Great. Would you be more likely to vote for the Elephant of you knew he created thousands of job in your state, supported education funding, baked apples pies for his mom, and once strangled a terrorist with his own hands? Great, and would you be less likely to vote for the Donkey if you knew he wanted to increase unemployment to create a lopsided economy, hates teachers, stole his own mother's apple pie, and once gave a pack of smokes to a terrorist who needed a hit before getting on an airplane? K thanks bye." Sounds silly? This is going on right now. This was going on during the 2004 election. This is one way red states stay red. What can we do about it? Three words: Campaign, Finance, Reform.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room A few days ago I watched the Enron movie which could have been called Enron: The Sickest Guys in the Room. As my "target audience" (if I ever have an audience of more than two at all) would be "people who don't care enough to know or know enough to care, and wanna stay that way," I'll just sum up how Enron did wrong. First, they reported false earnings to drive up stock prices, which upper-level execs sold for personal gain. Second, to generate operating income, execs created dummy corporations to hide debt and draw money from big-name banks and lenders, skimming some of the top as it moved around. Finally, they pushed California into de-regulating their energy markets so that they could control prices, and controlled prices by shutting down power plants or simply withholding power until prices increased 20 times their normal value. For this, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling where found guilty of various fraud charges. Of course, Ken Lay died before sentencing. Other players include CFO Andy Fastow, who copped a plea in return for testimony, and Cliff Baxter, who agreed to testify but then committed suicide.

That's the nutshell. The fun comes in when you find out Enron was the largest contributor to the Bush campaign. Employees were encouraged to reinvest their earnings in Enron while execs where selling stock and using the money to get Republicans elected. Now those employees have no 401Ks, no pensions, but they have a president who might send their kids to war. Very harsh joke alert: sort of works out though, as that's one less mouth to feed.

Be Careful What you Wear
This is old news, but I am going to talk about it anyway. A man in New York was arrested in 2003 for wearing a t-shirt that read "give peace a chance." It seems he bought the t-shirt in a mall, and was in the mall's food court, wearing the shirt, when he was approached by security guards who told him to remove it. He refused, so they told him to leave. He refused, so they called police officers, who ordered him to do the same thing. He refused, so they arrested him for trespassing. The cops say that since the mall is like a private house, his rights to free speech don't apply (indeed, your right to free speech does not give you the right to free access to controlled i.e. privately owned land).

Moving on. You all know Cindy Sheehan. She's a mom, her son died in Iraq. Last February at the State of the Union Address, she was booted out before anything even got started for wearing a t-shirt that said "2245 soldiers dead" (that's a paraphrase). Apparently it's illegal to protest at the SOTU, and her shirt was considered a protest. Of course, protesting is protected by our right to assembly and freedom of speech, but it makes sense that there are suspensions of aspects of those rights in certain places and times. Cindy's complaint was that she 1) didn't know she couldn't wear the shirt, that 2) the arresting officers treated her roughly, and didn't even give her the option to zip up her jacket and hide the shirt.

More recently, on June 30th, a Vietnam vet wearing a "veteran's for Peace" t-shirt was arrested for protesting inside a VA hospital. He was sitting alone, drinking a cup of coffee, not talking to anyone. He was told to leave by a security guard, specifically because of the shirt. When he refused, he was arrested, placed in handcuffs, and charges where written up. His 'weapon' (a Swiss army knife) was also confiscated and destroyed. The vet got to talking to the guard, who was also a vet, and eventually the weapons charge and criminal trespass charge where changed to simply disorderly conduct.

What do we do with all this? I say we look at the individuals involved, and try very hard not to extrapolate this to any kind of understanding about right-wingers, or left-wingers, for that matter. The New York security guard was fired, Cindy is considering a lawsuit, and the vet says he won't pay the fine. Note, too, that another woman was removed from the SATU for wearing a t-shirt, but this one was pro-war. I haven't heard any policy makers or even any politicians back up one side or the other. So I want to just say that these cases are nothing more than an illustration that there are people who do not agree on the use of power. No one has died, no policy has emerged to control anyone's life, and whatever message might have been suppressed has, thanks to the 4th estate, now reached more people than it would have if the officers and guards had not bothered.

Gay Marriage—The New Abortion
Red states are filled with fewer very rich people, I am guessing, than blue states. Maybe that's a stereotype, or just folk wisdom. I know blue states have all the big cities, and big cities have the ghettos and the very poor. But one imagines the red states with their large rural populations, and one wonders why they would vote for politicians who give tax breaks to the very rich and stifle education and health care. The answer is obvious: abortion. Republicans oppose abortion, and so it doesn’t matter if they also oppose a living wage for laborers. So red states stay red thanks to moral politics. Democrats have tried to take abortion off the table, which means the right–wing needs another topic to moralize the red states, and that subject is Gay Marriage. This is the only reason this topic is in the public consciousness. Take everyone who cares about politics, that's like, what, 5% of the population? The rest will only be drawn in if they are told their country is going to hell, and right now the right-wing says it’s the gays while the left-wings says it's the war. The left's message is unpatriotic, and so, the right wins. Oh well.

The Evolution of 9/11 is Just a Theory
Just so you know, there's a professor by the name of Kevin Barrett in Wisconsin who wants to teach a class on culture, Islam, and politics, and he wants to present the theory that 9/11 was an inside job. He hasn't taught the class yet, though the governor thinks he oughta be removed from his job (though he hasn't done anything to force this). Interesting, eh? I mean, if he is fired, at the behest of an elected official, it looks like he's being hushed to cover something up, right? Even if the guy is wrong wrong wrong, and he's fired for being a crappy teacher, it still looks bad. That's why you gotta love the press. The press will vilify the one who makes the boldest move, and the pundits will gather and laud each side according to the direction of their wings despite any truth that might be in effect. And the end result? Infotainment! Glad I could help.