Critical Brain Candy

After being sued recently on anti-trust charges by webcasters, the RIAA/MPAA lobbyists have “persuaded” Senator Orin Hatch to add this to a pending bill. I’m sure no money was exchanged. It essentially makes those two entities permenantly exempt from being sued on anti-trust charges. In case anyone hadn’t already noticed, yes, the government is officially run by corporations.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34191.html

Wow, this guy is scary. I’m glad he’s not in any kind of political office.

General Tommy Franks thinks that the US would scrap the constitution in favour of a military government if it were ever attacked with a WMD.

A direct quote: “It?s not in the history of civilization for peace ever to reign. Never has in the history of man. … I doubt that we?ll ever have a time when the world will actually be at peace.” Well, not with people like him and Bush around…

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml

Interesting interview with Gore Vidal over the current state of politics. He compares the current political climate to despotism caused by rampant corruption. He makes a lot of good points. The fact that elections are won by the candidate with the most cash and the patriot act are cited in his analysis.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php

I agree with all of his analysis, but not with his outlook. Actually, I take that back – I do agree with his outlook unless something drastically changes. I guess I try to be more optimistic.

It still amazes me that people haven’t started reacting recently. I think if people actually took the time to figure out what is in the patriot act – that any citizen can be held without cause or access to a lawyer, indefinitely – I think things would be different. It’s sad that people don’t care about politics anymore unless something comes and kicks them directly in their own lives. Politicians know this and push through things that people don’t notice until it’s too late.

The patriot act asks us to put too much trust in the federal government. It gives them a power they can blatantly use against anyone and they are asking “average citizens” to trust that it won’t get used against them. Yeah Right. Do we learn nothing from history?

NPR just got a donation of $200 million dollars from the estate of Joan B. Kroc (her husband started McDonalds). It’s nice to see that some rich people don’t just want to horde their cash.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-kroc07.html

I find it amusing that the Republican party totes itself as being fiscally conservative. The vast majority of people who vote Republican do so (they say) because they like fiscal conservitism, yet they claim to be socially liberal. However, take a look back at the last 2 decades. All 3 of the Republican administrations have consitently posted deficits. The only administration to claim a surplus was Clinton.

There definitely are differences in what each party likes to spend money on. I guess these days fiscally conservative only applies to areas like schools, health care and other useful programs. As long as you spend less money there, you can spend as much money as you want and still be “fiscally conservative.”

Here’s a link to a CNN article on the latest spending numbers. Keep in mind that even though they say that even though they are discussing mainly Congress’ spending, the Congress is currently controlled by the Republicans.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28252-2003Nov11?language=printer

The words of a 6-year Fox News employee:

http://www.guerrillanews.com/media/doc3306.html

Here are 2 very good articles that talk about the current US administrations intimidation tactics. Everything they do (seems) perfectly legal. However, how can you claim to live in a country with freedom of the press when they intimidate reporters and label people as traitors for brining up any opinion that doesn’t agree with theirs? The first instance of this that really caught my attention was when Alan Greenspan said publically that he thought Bush’s tax cut wouldn’t help the economy. Republicans came out in the press and labelled him as a traitor, un-american and called for him to step down.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROW310A.html

Next is an interesting article by Walter Cronkite comparing Ashcroft’s changes to the justice department to an inquisition.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~29003~1640999,00.html