Ha Ha Ha America

Just Watched "Ha Ha Ha America", a Sundance film by JD Ligon. It is a truly brutal look at our relationship with China. Takes about 10 minutes. Guess which country has more English speakers? Guess which country has more people employed by American companies? Ooooh, yeah. Ha ha

Killing The Messenger (A Little Perspective)

In retrospect, I think I got part of this rant wrong: The worst thing about this situation is not the chilling effect of this President's witch hunt for the "traitor" who ratted him out. That's really kind of par for the course. One can only hope that anyone in the intelligence community who finks the chief executive has made appropriate arrangements.

Ignorant Opposition

Sometimes, you can judge a movement by its advocates. While such ad hominem conclusions are not logically impeccable, they are certainly empirically generally accurate. As such, I’m fairly embarrassed by some of my “friends” in California.

Killing the Messenger

These are the undisputed facts: In 1978, the federal government passed the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" (FISA), which requires the President to get a warrant to authorize electronic surveillance of American citizens. Beginning in 2001, President Bush authorized surveillance of American citizens without court order. In 2005, the US Justice department opened an inquiry into how knowledge of the afore mentioned surveillance was leaked to the New York Times.

Radical Militant Librarians

I was listening to NPR during my commute the other day, when a segment on the pending PATRIOT Act legislation came on. A note was read in which an FBI agent lamented the paranoid protests of civil libertarians and blamed the current conflict on "Radical Militant Librarians". If I hadn't been strapped in, I'd have fallen out of my car laughing.

Putting Our Best Feet Elsewhere

The unprecedented number of troops who are returning from Iraq with missing limbs has given the US Paralympic Team an unexpected recruitment boost and the chance to become “unbeatable” at the next Games in Beijing in 2008.

The Invisible Fist

I was just reading SlashDot and came across an interesting comment in a thread discussing the wonders of ala carte cable packages:

Now, you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but I'd like to point out that it's the free market that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels you want well enough to keep them afloat on their own?