Jules sent me this link to an excellent video that sums up the real differences between humans and other animals. It’s entertaining but makes some really good points about humans vs other homonids.

I Just found this via Atrios. Last week USA Today published a story stating that phone companies AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon helped the National Security Agency violate the law by turning over millions of of their customers calling records without any subpoenas. In case you are unaware, the CIA and NSA are both expressly forbidden from participating in intelligence gathering activities inside the United States. But the Bush administration authorized them to do it anyway. Almost immediately multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits were filed against the phone companies for violating their customers privacy. Over the past few days each of the companies has issued public statements denying that they turned over phone records. Now it appears that they and very likely Qwest too (who denied involvement immediately) lied in those statements. Because these are publicly traded companies, Securities laws forbid them from making untruthful public statements regarding things that impact the value of the company.

Well now it is revealed that on May 5, 2006 George W. Bush signed an Executive Memorandum that allows the Director of National Intelligence to authorize companies to conceal activities that are related national security. So it appears that they are telling the phone companies and who knows what other companies (banks, credit bureaus, insurance companies?) that it is OK to violate securities laws if the white house tells them to. When will congress show some backbone and start impeachment proceedings against this guy?

An anonymous commenter over on Ypsidixit.com pointed me to a very disturbing film strip from Encyclopedia Britannica Films. You should definitely go watch this. It is a short educational film from 1946 that warns of the dangers of creeping despotism. This film was created in the wake of world war 2. There are some very interesting and disturbing warning signs. One brief segment that will definitely irritate a lot of today’s christian fascists is the absence of the words under god when a group of people are saying the pledge of allegiance. Of course this film was made eight years before congress added those unconstitutional words to the pledge during the height of the red scare.

The film discusses four scales for judging whether a country is moving toward despotism, power, respect, economic distribution, and information. In each case the scales vary from mass distribution, to concentration. The more the particular scale moves toward concentration, the greater the risk of despotism. The fewer people who control power, the fewer people in a society who are shown respect the more chance there is of despotism. Here clearly, there has been increased concentration, with politicians being entrenched in office for decades at a time, and power positions seemingly being passed on withing families. Just look at the Bush’s, first old Prescott, then George H.W. then George W. and Jeb and on down the line. Respect is also being concentrated particularly among certain religious fundamentalists. With demands to strip away civil rights protections from gays, blacks, poor people and people of other faiths or no faith, the only ones who get respect are born-again christians.

The more that economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few at the top the greater the odds of despotism. As incomes have stagnated causing a loss of real income the middle and lower classes have lost ground but the wealthy have moved even further away. The income gap has grown dramatically in the past five years. And of course information has in many respects been dramatically concentrated in recent years. As big media and communications companies have continued to consolidate, the number of voices at the highest levels has shrunk dramatically. The questioning and criticism of government policies by the major news media has almost completely dried up as it has been consolidated and subsumed into huge corporations whose only diving force is profit.

One point that was made in the film was that when the education system emphasizes accepting what is taught without question and discouraged from critical thinking it also dramatically increases the chance of despotism. There are two major forces at work here. One is the home schooling movement. Many of the people who home school are christians who don’t want their kids exposed to dangerous ideas like evolution, or the thought that the earth may be more than 6000 years old. The other is the Leave No Child Behind act. With the obsession with standardized testing every year, teachers often spend an inordinate amount of time teaching students how to pass that years test, instead of teaching them the real skills needed to learn in life and advance both themselves and society as a whole.

The one positive thing I can see that may be pushing at least the information scale back toward the democracy side is the growth of grassroots media. The digital revolution has allowed more people than ever to easily create and distribute their own media. Thanks to digital cameras (still and video), people can create remarkable images for very little money. With personal computer based sound, photo and video editing people can make music, and films that would have cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just one or two decades ago. Through the growth of voip, blogging and podcasting people can write ideas and distribute all kinds of media over the internet and communicate to the entire world at remarkably little cost. If we can avoid having it all snuffed out by the efforts of big phone and cable companies to kill network neutrality we could be on the verge of a major renaissance. I certainly hope so and I continue to write here because of that hope. If not we are all at the mercy of the fascists (be they islamic or christian, equally dangerous in my eyes) and we are all fucked.

Ford Motor company has long been a leader in promoting equal rights for all their workers including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. They have explicit anti-discrimination policies that include GLBT employees. They provide domestic partner benefits to all employees regardless of gender. For some time christian fascists (no I will no longer refer to them as conservatives, because they do not qualify as conservatives) have been trying to get Ford to stop treating people equally and also to stop advertising in gay publications and sponsoring gay events. Ford is a public company and as such they have a responsibility to sell their products to whoever they can and also to get the best employees. It makes no difference to Ford who those people have relationships with. Christian Fascists have no right to be telling anyone else how to live.

Well one Ford shareholder went to the SEC to get a vote on stripping these equality provisions at the Ford annual meeting. Fortunately most Ford shareholders didn’t agree and voted 95% to reject the proposal and to maintain the anti-discrimination protections as they are. Good for Ford Motor Company and almost all their shareholders.

Between 1939 and 1945 tens of millions of people around the world died in a battle against fascist dictatorships led by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo. In the wake of the war the victors conducted the first war crimes trials in history. The people responsible for the carnage were imprisoned and some were executed even they claimed to be following orders. Today Gen. Michael Hayden, currently director of the National Security Agency and overseer of the monitoring of millions of Americans essentially said he was following orders. He is also currently nominated to take over as director the Central intelligence agency. The entire Bush Administration seems to believe that the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights are meaningless and subordinate to their twisted interpretation of the bible. We are witnessing the transformation of the United States from a constitutional democracy into a theocratic fascist dictatorship.

Via AmericaBlog comes this message from Jack Cafferty of CNN:

CNN’s WOLF BLITZER: …[some wisdom] from Jack Cafferty in New York.

CNN’s JACK CAFFERTY: I don’t know about wisdom but you’ll get a bit of outrage. We better hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that’s standing between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.

Why don’t you go find Osama Bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government’s doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.

Is it? Is it legal?

Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.

Read that sentence again.

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says okay and drops the whole thing.

We’re in some serious trouble here boys and girls.

Here’s the question.

“Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or permission?”

If it doesn’t it sure as hell ought to.

Last night was the annual White House Correspondent’s Association dinner. Stephen Colbert has more balls than anyone in American media today. Last night Colbert was the keynote speaker and he gave what was easily the most blistering rip-up of the Bush administration ever. As he stood about 4 feet from Bush he repeatedly showed that he was the truest American in the room. He looked over at Bush repeatedly throughout the address and never wavered in his attack. He gave the speech in the persona of his character on the Colbert Report. If you haven’t seen the show his character is basically a parody of Bill O’Reilly. Unfortunately the most of the rest of the room sat stone-faced throughout, demonstrating that most of them are either spineless weasels or true bush supporters. In either case they obviously cannot be trusted to tell us the truth. Only the likes of Colbert and Jon Stewart can be trusted to help lead America out of the wilderness. Editor and Publisher has a good write-up on the speech. One example was this brilliant line:

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs–on the Hindenburg.”

I love Stephen Colbert! We’ll miss you when they send you off for rendition.

update: Crooks and Liars has a video up of part of the speech

From dvorak.org/blog Nice photoshop work!

Bob Garfield is the co-host of the NPR program On the Media where they discuss issues related to media around the world. This week’s show included segments on the FBI trying to get Jack Anderson’s personal papers before they are publicized, and the press coverage of the Chernobyl disaster 20 years ago. The most interesting segment was Bob Garfield interviewing the authors of two children’s books about politics, “Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!,” and “Why Mommy is a Democrat.” One thing you can always count on with Bob is that he never holds back during an interview. He can be very snarky and sarcastic but he never lets anyone pull any bullshit on him. He got on both authors about writing books that seemed to be less about giving kids a civics lesson than about indoctrinating them in the political philosophy of the respective books. He followed up the author interviews by talking to psychology professor Dr. Andrew Getzfeld about whether young children at whom these books are targeted are even capable of understanding abstract concepts like political ideology. Bob Garfield is a very thoughtful interviewer asks tough questions, listens and follows up on the responses. In many respects Bob Garfield is like the Jon Stewart of NPR.

Bill Maher on the other hand is a light-weight, spineless dilettante. He became widely known some years back when his original Politically Incorrect show was on Comedy Central. The show was eventually picked up by ABC and moved to the time slot following Nightline. The show did OK but ultimately canceled some time after he made an unpopular comment after 9/11. He said that what the terrorists did took more courage than pilots dropping smart bombs from high altitudes. As soon as people complained about and sponsors threatened to pull out, he backed down. Instead of standing up for what he said, he bailed. His ratings had been sinking for a long time anyway, and eventually the show was canceled. Eventually HBO signed him to do a new show Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher often has some really good guests on the show. Unfortunately, the weak link in the show is Maher himself. Frankly he is just not funny the majority of the time. When a comic laughs at his own jokes more often the audience does, that is a really bad sign. But the thing that irritates me more than anything about Bill Maher is that in the past year he has begun following up every joke about a member of the Bush administration with “but I kid the president!”. Well I say the this to Bill Maher. Fuck that shit. You’re a comedian of course you kid. But this is also a political show with opinions. This is America! No one should be apologizing for their opinion. If you are afraid of criticism for a joke, don’t tell the damn joke! Get out of the business if you are going to be like that.

Everyone in this country has a right to freely express their opinions no matter how unpopular that opinion might be. Bill Maher sets an extremely bad precedent by apologizing for his jokes. No one needs to apologize for their opinions especially when it concerns politicians that purport to lead this country. No one in America is above criticism, especially in “a time of war.” Leaders of this country should be doing what is best for America, and if they are not than it is the responsibility of the citizenry to criticize and change the government as necessary. This is at least theoretically still a democracy, not a monarchy. If the people are afraid of their government, then that government must go. Bill Maher is an unfunny lame excuse for a comedian.