I will never go to an Indiana County Fair
posted by TheDon
Not with this kind of stuff going on:

BAGHDAD (AP) – In a dawn strike Friday, unidentified gunmen attacked the house
of the police chief in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, killing his wife, two brothers and 11 guards, Diyala provincial police reported.The attackers also abducted two sons and a daughter of police chief Col. Ali Dilayan al-Jorani, police said. The chief, head of central Baqouba’s Balda police station, wasn’t at home at the time, they said.

Can you even imagine the brutality of this attack? ELEVEN guards killed, along with the wife and two brothers! Yikes. I’m guessing this will make them hate us for our freedoms even more.

I meant for OTHER people…
posted by TheDon
If a conservative is a Democrat who has been mugged, I guess a liberal is a Republican who has had a slip-and-fall. According to ACSBlog, Robert Bork joins the long list of “tort reform” advocates who want a little taste of the pain and suffering money.

Judge Robert Bork, one of the fathers of the modern judicial conservative movement whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate, is seeking $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, after he slipped and fell at the Yale Club of New York City. Judge Bork was scheduled to give a speech at the club, but he fell when mounting the dais, and injured his head and left leg. He alleges that the Yale Club is liable for the $1m plus punitive damages because they “wantonly, willfully, and recklessly” failed to provide staging which he could climb safely.
Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs’ ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy–the official journal of the Federalist Society–Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing.

$1 million, huh? His left leg must be priceless, because at MOST an injury to his head is worth $1.25.

A Progressive Appointment
posted by TheDon

Bush’s appointment of a gay Surgeon General is a big step forward for his hate-filled regime. Although James Holsinger is not the first gay appointee in the administration, he is the most openly gay one since Ken Mehlman.

Think Progress has Holsinger’s story,

including founding a church that “ministers to people who no longer wish to be gay or lesbian.”

Look for him in a public restroom near you.

Like father, Like son
posted by TheDon

It has long been known that Chimpy takes after his mother. His temper, his cruelty, his beady-eyed stupidity, his disregard for all things decent are a perfect reflection of the former First Lady. Now, finally, we see King George share some characteristics with dear old dad.

Scooter Libby just became the highest ranking government official to get sentenced since the heady days of Iran-Contra. The disregard for the Constitution, extra-governmental intelligence gathering, the war-mongering, the corporate cronyism? That’s from dad.

Internet Suppression and Amnesty International
posted by Susan Stark

Lately, Amnesty International has broadened it’s human rights focus to include foreign government suppression of the internet, and the use of IT companies like Google and Yahoo to supply information to these governments about dissidents using their services. The examples that Amnesty uses are countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

I’ll take Amnesty’s word for it that these countries are indeed repressing the internet and using the internet to track down dissidents. But unfortunately, there is one country that Amnesty overlooks at it’s website:

The United States.

Yes, the US is currently trying to censor the internet, with dissidents along with it. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner provide the bandwidth which internet traffic flows through. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the vehicles which drive on this information superhighway, and websites are the people inside the vehicles. The bandwidth providers wish to institute tolls along this highway whenever and wherever they wish, and the ISPs that can’t pay the tolls will be stuck, and those that can will pass through with ease. These tolls will be passed on to websites.

This means that the more money a website gives to it’s network, the more access it has on the internet.

This is plainly discriminatory, and it’s plain censorship. Smaller internet businesses will suffer because they can’t pay what larger businesses can, and people with ideas and opinions will only get heard according to what they can pay. Which means that a corporate hack like Rush Limbaugh will pass with ease on the highway, but not an anarchist in Kansas City. On the flip side, a liberal corporate hack like Air America will pass through more quickly than an Alabaman with a confederate flag on his truck.

As it stands right now, we can get to the anarchist and the Alabaman just as quickly as Limbaugh and Air America, but if the cable and telephone bandwidth providers have their way, we won’t in the future.

And it’s not just websites. Internet radio is also currently in jeopardy. On March 2, 2007, there was a ruling passed by the Copyright Royalty Board that increased the royalties internet radio must pay to artists and record labels by 500%. Most internet radio would have to go out of business if it had to pay these royalties. And ironically, most artists and record labels are against this, because it would cut off a very important venue for their music to be heard. Internet radio is currently fighting tooth and nail against this ruling.

This may not be a dictatorship censoring dissident websites and putting the dissidents in jail, but it is just as serious. If Amnesty International treats Chinese internet censorship as a human rights issue, then it should treat American and corporate internet censorship as a human rights issue as well. If censorship by the Tunisian government is wrong, than so is censorship by Comcast.

Amnesty International’s website: http://irrepressible.info

Save The Internet website: http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Save Internet Radio: http://www.savenetradio.org/

Judicial Process for Dummies
posted by TheDon
Another boneheaded laugher from Atlanta hate-yakker Neal Boortz. From his June 5 “Nuze“:

Bad news out of Guantanamo Bay because of a mislabeling. The terrorists were only labeled as “enemy combatants” rather than “unlawful enemy combatants,” and the entire case was thrown out. Talk about insignificant details.

“Unlawful enemy combatants” are spies and terrorists. The other name for captured “enemy combatants” is POWs, and there are a *lot* of rules about how you treat them. Read the Geneva Conventions for details, if you don’t think that’s too quaint. Moron.

Shortwave Report for Central Asia, Part 3
posted by Susan Stark (Parts 1 and 2 posted below)

SHORTWAVE TRANSMISSIONS TO CENTRAL ASIA

Besides the BBC, that relic of the Cold War–RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty–still broadcasts into the former Soviet Republics, and that would include the Central Asian ones. RFE/RF was started back in the 1940’s by Congress and the CIA to combat the spread of communism, and now it functions as a type of psy-ops for American foreign policy. The transmitter sites are in such American-friendly countries like Germany, Bosnia, and Thailand. It does not transmit in English, though.

The Voice of America performs the same psy-ops function, but has English broadcasting. It transmits to Afghanistan in both shortwave and AM radio. The AM frequency has a 400 kilowatt range, which makes it able to be heard by the entire country. The English segment of VOA Afghanistan is here:

Here are the schedules for the BBC in Afghanistan:

AM:

Frequency 1413 kHz serves Afghanistan and Iran at certain times of day.

FM:

In Kabul, Afghanistan, BBC World Service in Persian, Pashto & English is on 89.0 FM.

In Mazar-e Sharif, 89.0 FM carries English service 24 hours a day.

SHORTWAVE TRANSMITTERS WITHIN CENTRAL ASIA

(Warning: some of the programming information is from 2004, and therefore may be out-of-date. But the transmitter-location info is from 2006, so it should be still pretty accurate. Better to find BBC for English broadcasts.)

Kazakhstan has two transmitters, one in Almaty and the other in Qaraturyq. It leases out it’s transmitters to other countries, so it may broadcast in English.

Uzbekistan has one transmitter in Tashkent. These are the English programs:

The beginning of these programs should say, “This is Radio Tashkent International”.

Turkmenistan has one transmitter at Ashgabat. It’s got some English, but minimal.

Kyrgyzstan has one transmitter at Bishkek. English minimal.

Tajikistan has two transmitters, one outside of Dushanbe and the other at Orzu. Two fifteen minute English broadcasts.

Afghanistan has two transmitters, one in Kabul and one in Bagram, where I believe the US Forces are stationed. Lots of English programming on all AM/FM/SW frequencies.

That’s it for now.

Apparently watching our current administration get its guidance from daily prayers hasn’t taught the electorate anything. They still insist that credible candidates proclaim belief in the christian god, and reliance on prayer.

Hillary is just the latest example, saying prayer got her through Bill’s infidelities, and that she is “grounded in my faith”. Skipping right over the fact that being “grounded in faith” is a moronic statement of the oxy variety, can’t we try a different basis for decisions, for reasoning, for governance? Please?