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 Monday, August 26, 2002
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Blogging vacation
Oops, forgot to announce it. Due to family obligations, I am on a vacation from blogging from last week until Labor Day.
For politics, I recommend Tapped, for high energy semi-geek, check out Scott, and for interesting observations on life, see Robert. And there is always Cary to let you know what's happening on the net. Enjoy.
See you after Labor Day,
Thanks,
Tim aka Geodog
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| Sunday, August 18, 2002
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Air Marshal program in disarray
McPaper strikes again. Here is a really scary article on how the federal air marshal program, which operates under all kind of secret provisions, is being terribly run, and is putting people who don't have training on airplanes and running them ragged, so we end up with untrained people with guns falling asleep on planes "protecting" us.
Another example of how the Bush administration's passion for secrecy harms us all.
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| Saturday, August 17, 2002
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Our hero, Judge Doumar, acts again
Judge Doumar, in a beautifully written decision dissecting the 2 page piece of garbage that the government handed him as justification for Hamdi's indefinite detention, has ordered the Bush administration to provide him with some information as to how the decision to detain Hamdi was made, and on what basis. I can't provide provide excerpts, because the decision is a pdf file, but I strongly encourage anybody interested in it to read the decision itself. We have some judges who are patriots capable of poetry -- Doumar is one of them.
Now, back to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, I fear.
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How to make friends and influence people
USA Today, which until recently I only knew as McPaper, turns out to have some surprisingly good articles sometimes. I ran across this one, Global warmth for US after 9/11 turns to frost, a couple days ago. The article notes the growing dislike of America and American policies worldwide, and asks why has there been such a growth of anti-american sentiment. Some of the answers they found:
What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?
"It was squandered," says Meghnad Desai ... "America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States," he says.
Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush's refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming.
Many are enraged by Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his refusal to involve the United States in the new international criminal court and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
The rash of corporate malfeasance and blanket arrest of terrorism suspects after Sept. 11 further fuels critics, who say the United States preaches democracy, human rights and free enterprise — but doesn't practice them.
The Council on Foreign Relations ... issued a biting report warning the Bush administration that it urgently needs to upgrade its efforts at public diplomacy to counteract the country's "shaky" image abroad... "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our closest European allies."
Quite an indictment, and there is a lot more in the article that I didn't excerpt. I think a lot of it comes down to the Bush administration's frequently expressed view that they don't really care what anybody else thinks, because they know what is right. People like people in power to at least pretend they care what the other people think, especially when the person in power is capable of causing vast changes in their life. When the world's only superpower claims it that has the right to go into any country and do whatever it wants in the name of "The War on Terrorism", that it doesn't really need its allies, and that it plans to ignores multilateral institutions, people are fearful. It is like living next door to the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla. Who knows what it will do next?
I fear for the time when America needs other countries' assistance. Bush is sowing bitter seeds that America will be reaping for a long time.
Tip o the hat to The War in Context, which does an excellent job of pointing to other countries' media coverage of the war.
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| Friday, August 16, 2002
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An alternative view of the war in Afghanistan
Robert Fisk of the Independent has written 2 long articles with a lot of scary details on how American actions in Afghanistan are turning many Afghans against the US. If you are interested in learning more, here are links along with excerpts:
Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster: The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are there during the beatings.
It was the Special Forces man in the south who saw things a little more globally. "Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there's another war – if they go to war in Iraq. But the US can't handle two wars at the same time. They would be overstretched." So to end America's "war against terror" in Afghanistan – a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qa'ida men on the loose and absolutely no peace in the country – we have to have another war in Iraq.
Return to Afghanistan: Americans begin to suffer grim and bloody backlash:
"The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have been promised," the local district officer in Maiwind muttered to me a few hours later. "We believe the Americans want to help us. They promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this. After that ..." He didn't need to say more. Out at Maiwind, in the oven-like grey desert west of Kandahar, the Americans do raids, not aid.... As long as Washington goes on paying the private salaries of local warlords, including some who oppose President Hamid Karzai, a kind of truce will continue to exist, but Afghans take a shrewd interest in America's activities here and their anger has been stoked by US bombing raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.
It is starting to sound a lot like a place in Asia that America got involved in trying to pick winners and losers in the 1960's, notably a place where today's most aggressive hawks found ways to avoid serving.
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The war in Afghanistan in not going well
Newsweek had a cover article this week about how Al-Quaeda fighters slipped away from pursuing US troops. Buried in the article is the revelation that the war in Afghanistan is not going very well, and that we have achieved few of our objectives:
Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us.
At a time when leaders in Washington are agitating to move on to the next war—to remove Saddam Hussein—it’s perhaps surprising that few if any are critiquing the Afghan campaign. Criticism is deemed to be almost unpatriotic. But the Afghan war is not over, and the primary mission is not accomplished. The fledgling regime of Hamid Karzai has little power beyond the capital, and Karzai himself needs U.S. Special Forces to ensure his safety...
It surprised me to see this evaluation in the mainstream media -- it seemed the media concluded "the war is over" after the bombing of Tora Bora and the installation of American candidate Hamid Karzai as president. And it scares me that this Bush administration may well turn out to be The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, incompetent as it is secretive. It's our lives, and the lives of our children they are playing with. What do they think the long term legitimacy of president installed by America, guarded by American soldiers, is going to be in an Islamic country? What would we have said twenty years ago about an Afghan president guarded by Russian troops? This administration really is clueless.
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Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, is evil
In a story in today's NYT, Richard Perle, late of the Let's invade Saudi Arabia briefing flap, and currently head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, is quoted as saying:
"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism."
So now we need to invade Iraq so that the world doesn't lose faith that George W. Bush means what he says? This kind of thinking is what kept us in Vietnam for years after it was clear that no good was going to be accomplished there. Perle's statement is an evil attempt at creating a self fulfilling prophecy, by subtly attacking George W's manhood. Excuse the language, but in Junior High I heard this kind of thing all the time, expressed as "You said you'd fight him, if you don't you are a p##sy". Anybody but a moron outgrew this kind of logic, but I fear our moronic president is probably very susceptible to it. And who better to push that button but an elder from the Reagan administration.
Richard Perle is evil and scary. No wonder he is referred to as the Prince of Darkness.
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And I thought that William Saletan was funny about the Bush "economic summit"
Arianna Huffington's latest column, "The Wacko in Waco" is hilarous. It starts off:
At the behest of their charismatic leader, the cult members gathered in Waco, a hot, dusty town on the flat, featureless central Texas plain. They had been summoned to hear an endless series of droning sermons from the leader himself and his fellow fanatics.
Thunderously denouncing all doubters, all those who didn't believe as the cult members did, the speakers put forward a bizarre religious vision, one that no sane person could accept. As the hours passed, the group became more and more isolated from the real world until it was incapable of dealing with it.
The only thing missing was Janet Reno and her flamethrower.
George W. Bush's economic forum ended with the steady whoosh of departing corporate jets instead of a fiery apocalypse ...
and it just gets better from there. Highly Recommended.
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Count on Molly Ivans to tell it like it is
Molly Ivan's latest column addresses the Shrub solution to our economic problems, cutting capital gains taxes again, with some frightful statistics from Kevin Phillips' book, Wealth and Democracy:
- In 1999, the average after-tax income of the middle 60 percent of Americans was lower than in 1977.
- The 400 richest Americans between 1982 and 1999 increased their average net worth from $230 million to $2.6 billion, over 500 percent in constant dollars.
- By 1999, over one decade the average work year had expanded by 184 hours
- Less than half of all Americans have any pension plan other than Social Security.
She goes on to point out, in her indomitable style: "The health care system is falling apart in front of our eyes; schoolteachers should be paid at least twice what they make now; lack of low-income housing is making life hell for the working class; and now the right wing wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again? That's class warfare."
I wonder why Molly Ivans isn't more widely syndicated. She writes well, she is funny, and she is usually right. If you see her in person, she is even funnier than in print. She tells a great story. This column is recommended.
Thanks as usual to Tapped for the link.
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| Thursday, August 15, 2002
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Subscribed to The American Prospect
Regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom) know that since discovering Tapped a few months ago (in a link from Eugene Volokh, praising them for their intellectual honesty), I have turned to Tapped more and more often for links and stories. It is now first on my daily reading list. It is like reading The New Republic before Andrew Sullivan, when TNR was actually a liberal magazine, and TRB made sense.
Today I decided to put my money where my mouth was and to support Tapped by subscribing to its parent magazine, The American Prospect. At $14.95 for a year, it is affordable, even for the marginally employed. Chances are that it will join the backlog in the bathroom, along with old copies of Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and countless freebie Tech trade rags, but maybe I'll read every issue in paper. Maybe.
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The Ministry of Homeland Security
Micah Wright has put up this wonderful site with posters done in the style of US WWII propganda posters. Here are reduced versions of two of my favorites that he did. Go to his site to see the full size versions. Recommended (although he says that the site, hosted on Apple's iMac service, is frequently taken down towards the afternoon as it exceeds bandwidth limitations).  
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The Economic Summit
This is William Saletan's take on Bush's so-called economic forum:
This afternoon at the President's Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, President Bush and Vice President Cheney sat side by side on the stage of a packed auditorium for more than an hour. That's the first time they've been that close together for that long in public since Sept. 11. Evidently they're no longer afraid of terrorists. What they're afraid of is Americans.
Like plantation owners, the employers on hand spoke for their employees." One CEO told Bush, "they are so happy to have jobs."
I wish I could write like that, funny, with an edge, and concise.
Tip o the hat again to Tapped, who has some good coverage of the summit.
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Scooped by Tapped
I had the experience tonight of spending about an hour writing up my thoughts about Judge Doumar and the Hamdi case, because I feel strongly about it. Then I start my nightly troll through news sources, and what's the first thing I run accross? A write-up on the same subject, but better written, exceprting even more of the Post article, and calling Doumar a hero, by Tapped. Today's issue of Tapped is really good.
What does this mean:
- Great minds think alike?
- I should apply for a job with Tapped?
or
- I should just go to bed earlier and leave the journalism to professionals?
Feedback (email is fine) wanted.
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Some other people get it too
It is nice to see the broader segments of our society opposing Bush's war on civil liberties.
The Washington Post, in an editorial today, Two Pages Are Not Enough, asked "What burden does the government have to shoulder before it can lock away an American citizen indefinitely without charge as an enemy combatant?" and concluded that it was certainly more than a two page declaration consisting entirely of assertions by a government official who does not purport to be offering firsthand information.
The American Bar Association voted yesterday to oppose the Bush administration's secret detention of foreign nationals after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging that their names be disclosed and they be given immediate access to lawyers and family members.
And there was the previously blogged Newsweek story about the paucity of evidence that Jose Padilla was up to anything besides coming to the US to see his kid.
Update: and there is this LA times Op-Ed piece, Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision by somebody who evidently feels even stronger than I do. Tip o the hat to Tapped.
While I don't labor under the misapprehension that the Bush administration pays a lot of attention to what the Washington Post or Newsweek or the ABA say, it seems like wider and more mainstream groups are starting to see the danger in the usurpation of legislative and judicial power by the Bush administration. That's gotta be good.
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| Wednesday, August 14, 2002
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A judge who gets it
Three cheers for U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar, who is currently hearing the petition by the father of American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi to let his son see a lawyer. While I think the government has some legal ground to declare Hamdi an enemy combatant (he was apparently captured in Afghanistan - the government says as part of Taliban, his father said that he was a charitable worker who got caught up in the conflict,) I don't think that any US citizen can be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and held incommunicado forever, as the Bush administration claims the right to do.
The Washington Post reports that Judge Doumar has been presented with a 2 page declaration by an undersecretary of defense, Michael H. Mobbs, explaining how Hamdi was determined to be enemy combatant, and the Government's position is that once the declaration was presented, the Judge is foreclosed from asking any more questions or getting any more involved. Fortunately, Judge Doumar seems to be made of sterner stuff. He has been asking questions like:
"Can the military do anything they want with him, without a tribunal?"
and he has been getting answers like: "The present detention is lawful,"
The best quote in the article was the final one:
"I have no desire to have an enemy combatant get out of any status," Doumar said. "However, I do think that due process requires something other than a basic assertion by someone named Mobbs that they have looked at some papers and therefore they have determined he should be held incommunicado. Just think of the impact of that. Is that what we're fighting for?"
A judge who gets it. Unfortunately, the 4th Circuit has ruled against Judge Doumar every time he has ruled that Hamdi is entitled to see a lawyer, and they will probably do so again.
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| Tuesday, August 13, 2002
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More American citizens to be held without charges
Newsweek is reporting that US citizen Jose Padilla has been in an "isolation cell with a lamp burning 24 hours a day and a phalanx of guards around the clock" since the beginning of June, and he still isn't charged with any crime and the government has no plans to charge him with a crime. In what Newsweek called "a hastily signed finding" by Bush, he has been declared an enemy combatants, even though there were high-level doubts inside the U.S. intelligence community about Ashcroft’s dramatic announcement of an ongoing plot from the very beginning. Newsweek reports that much of the evidence against Padilla comes from a single, less-than-reliable informant: Abu Zubaydah, a former chief of Qaeda training camps who was picked up in Pakistan last fall.
I can't believe that a US citizen has now been in prison without charges for almost three months on one losing politician's and one informer's say-so, and that Bush is denying that the courts have any right to inquire into the circumstances of his detention. 600 years civil liberties progress out the window. It is going to be a little hard for us to criticize another country's human rights after this, even assuming that we come to our senses before too much more damage is done.
And now Newsweek reports that last week administration officials confirmed they were talking about creating a panel to review whether others should join the list [of confined US citizen detainees].
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The Cheney Factor
A nice quote from the Grey Lady:
"At a moment when Americans are looking to the government to help remedy the nation's economic ills, Mr. Cheney looks more like part of the problem than the solution."
From The Cheney Factor, an editorial in today's NYT.
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| Monday, August 12, 2002
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Fortune magazine shocked to find corporate execs are greedy
Fortune magazine, which spent the 1990's publishing puffed up profiles of corporate execs and running features on how to spend that 10th million, has published a list of the 25 greediest executives who got obscenely wealthy while their stockholders lost their investments. How quickly fashions change. It used to be that Fortune thought that "greed is good. Government is bad."
Aside from the laughable source, the information itself is interesting and astonishing. Fortune says:
Executives and directors of the 1,035 corporations that met our criteria took out, by our estimate, roughly $66 billion. Of that amount, a total haul of $23 billion went to 466 insiders at the 25 corporations where the executives cashed out the most.
The numbers truly are obscene. And specially for my friend John, who called it at the time it was happening, all star CEO Perks.
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Catching up on the news
Decided to give blogging a break over the weekend and concentrate on family time and the wonderful weather we are having in the Bay Area this summer. The dreaded fog has barely been seen this summer, and when it has been around, it has burned off early. You won't hear any complaints about the weather from me. I had a great family hike out at Pt. Reyes. Recommended.
So I turn the computer back on and what do I find? Enough to turn an optimist into a pessimist. The Bush administration, taking advantage of everybody on vacation, led of course by our fearless leader taking a month off, has rolled back the medical records privacy protections created by the Clinton administration. Says the NYT:
The administration decided to abandon the core of the Clinton rules, a requirement that doctors, hospitals and other health care providers obtain written consent from patients before using or disclosing personal medical information for treatment or paying claims.
Now your pharmacists can be paid by the drug companies to get you to switch medicines. Confirmed by the administration.
In other news, the Justice Department, deaf to the voice of the people as ever, announces that it will go ahead with a modified version of Operation TIPS. And it announced that it now will argue that National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 doesn't apply to the vast majority of oceans under United States control.
On the more positive side, Robert K Brown pointed me to a great editorial by Ted Rail, The Truth About September 11, It's Time For Our Government To Answer Questions. I didn't realize how many questions are still open about Sept 11 until I saw Ted Rail's list. Highly Recommended. I'm starting to get suspicious of the Bush administration's stonewalling a 9-11 investigation. What is our government hiding, besides the incompetence that we already know about? The last time we had a intelligence failure this big was Pearl Harbor, and that failure was investigated and people at the top took responsibility for mistakes and lost their jobs. Is Bush afraid he would get impeached if some truth gets out? Or just that his popularity rating would crater as fast as it soared after the attacks? I wonder.
I caught this great article in the Washington Monthly, Confidence Men, Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary by Joshua Micah Marshall. This wonderful article points out that we all (even die hard democrats) expected that Bush Jr. would bring competent experienced people into the administration, so we assume he did. However, Marshall looks at the legislative and administrative record so far and shows that it is mostly image that the Bush people have been good at. Recommended Reading. 
Finally, on the fun side, there is this great picture from the folks at the cellar. Here is a small version - click on it to go to the original:
There were a lot of comments speculating on the relationship between the cat and the mouse. My favorite was someone named russotto's comment:
It's just an unusually patient cat. She's tasting him. When he's perfect, she'll eat him.
Thanks to Tapped, Robert K Brown, the Grey Lady, and the Talking Points Memo for helping me catch up on the news, and the cellar for the humor.
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| Friday, August 09, 2002
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Now for an optimist's point of view
While I am a naturally pessimistic person who does see our civil liberties under siege from an administration that loves secrecy and power, I loved this post by Eugene Volokh appraising the state of of civil liberties today, finding them very good, and concluding about how to look at future, "optimism is just more fun." Touché. Recommended. I often don't agree with the man, but his reasoning is good and he can write. A good antidote to a pessimist.
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A Republican I respect on the smallpox vaccine
Bill Frist, Republican Senator from Tennessee, is someone that I respect, at least on medical, public health, and bioterrorism issues. He did a great job of informing the public during the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, when the Bush administration was trying to control the release of information and downplay the threat (while all taking Cipro themselves) "to avoid panic". In an op-ed piece today in the NYT, he argues that once there is enough smallpox vaccine available for everybody, the government and the public health community educate the people as to the potential risks and benefits of the smallpox vaccine, then let the people themselves decided whether to get vaccinated now, in advance of any possible attack.
What a radical idea! Inform citizens, then let them decide what they want to do. I like it. Let's see if the control freaks at the White House can bear to let the people decide.
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People are getting creative!
I had one of those fun browsing evenings where I was pointed toward one thing on the web, which lead me to another, which lead me to another and so on. I have concluded that there are some really creative people doing fun political stuff on the net these days. I wonder if it is a function of all the unemployed web designers? In any case, we partisan political junkies are the beneficiaries.
Joe Conanson of Salon pointed to this both funny and pointed advertisement for the Democrats, done by some creative webbie with Flash skills, to the tune of Pink Floyd's Money. If only the Democrats had enough spine to run ads like this.
I decided to look around www.blah3.com and see what else was on the site. There are a fair number of Flash ads, most of them accurate but with a strong message. Then I followed the top link to http://www.stolenelectioncoin.com/, where I found these coins:  
Then back to www.blah3.com where I found this wonderful poster above, cited as being originally "From Barney Gumble on the BartCop Forum".
So off to see what BartCop was, where I  found this TIPS button, as well as a hilarious and terrifying doctored picture of Ashcroft that I wouldn't want to show on a family friendly blog. Then I decided to call it a night, happy with the treasures I found on the net tonight. I hope that you enjoy them too.
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The Post Office wants to be on America's Most Wanted too.
Apparently the post office and the FBI are also Using America's Most Wanted to handle calls about suspects in the anthrax mailing. According to a press release on the post office website:
The public is aware of the service that America's Most Wanted has provided law enforcement over the years and this is a natural progression of that partnership. Thanks to action by the viewing public, AMW programs have led to the arrest of 683 fugitives in 30 different countries. The Postal Inspection Service hopes that, through this important partnership, we'll find the individuals responsible for these acts of terrorism involving the U.S. Mail. According to John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted, "In these trying and troubling times, the partnership between law enforcement - the Postal Inspection Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation - and America's Most Wanted is more important than ever."
Tip o' the hat to Bobcat on the Politech mailing list
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| Thursday, August 08, 2002
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Ad Campaign for Freedom
The ad council has put together some great advertisements for freedom. I gather they are being shown on TV, but they can also be viewed on the net. Especially recommended are the Library and the Arrest ad.
At a time when our civil rights are under assault, it is great to see these ads. I wonder if the Bush administration's "Americans need to watch what they say" Ari Fleischer and "dissent aids terrorism" Ashcroft will see themselves targeted by the ads and will try to suppress them. I love the tag line:
"Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it."
Seen all over the net, but I believe I first spotted in on Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing list.
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The passion for secrecy
An interesting article on how hard it is to get information on anything from the Bush administration.
"For example, the Bush administration has treated some environmental issues with the same level of circumspection previous administrations have reserved for national security."
Tip o the hat to Tapped.
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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