The witch-hunt continues

Our government has now decided that more than 100,000 Muslims and Middle Eastern nationals living legally in the United States need to be fingerprinted and need to register their whereabouts. Exactly how this ethnic profiling is supposed to do anything other than encourage these people not to cooperate with the US Government is a good question, as treating all of these people as suspects is going to do little to endear us to either them or their home governments.

Read more about it here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:42 PM

Another step toward a police state

As you may have heard, last week Attorney General John Ashcroft made another move in his continuing mission to pick away at Constitutional protections in the name of fighting terrorists [remember when Communists used to be the stalking horses for things like this?]. This time it was by establishing new Guidelines for the FBI, Guidelines which threaten to bring us back to the bad old days of COINTELPRO, when the FBI decided it needed to monitor and disrupt the activities of American political dissidents. The FBI has shown in the past that it cannot be trusted to use this sort of power in the proper manner, so why should they be trusted with it now?

Read a good analysis of the new Guidelines here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:12 PM

A Quote

"The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar . . . I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -- Thomas Jefferson

posted by Michael Curry at 8:41 PM

Democrats taking progressive voters for granted. Again.

I just finished reading a great article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (at Counterpunch) about the Senate race this year in Minnesota, where the Democrats have gone nuts because the Greens had the nerve to pick a candidate of their own to run, rather than just supporting the incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone. Just like when Nader ran for President, the Democrats have begun to wring their hands over Ed McGaa's candidacy, saying he'll "steal" votes from Wellstone and cost them the race. In fact, it's the Democrats and Paul Wellstone who made every effort to give those votes away, the same way Gore did in 2000.

Anyway, read the article for yourself here.

posted by Michael Curry at 8:18 PM

Bravo

• We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel, who have always served in the front lines, and who were the first to carry out any mission, light or heavy, in order to protect the State of Israel and strengthen it.
• We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people. We, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this Occupation exacts from both sides.
• We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories, destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.
• We, who understand now that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDF’s human character and the corruption of the entire Israeli society.
• We, who know that the Territories are not Israel, and that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end.
• We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.
• We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.
• We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense.
• The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose – and we shall take no part in them.

Learn more here.

posted by Michael Curry at 8:00 PM

Keeping the war going

Bush made a speech at West Point on Saturday in which he basically said that the US must be prepared to strike at 60 countries around the world to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. In other words, self-defense now seems to include striking first, unless of course these countries change their misguided ways. Read a London Times article about his speech here. It seems to me that actually undertaking these sorts of missions will only sow the seeds of more anti-US sentiment in the future, but I find myself unsurprised that the Bush administration thinks this way. After all, this would be a wonderful way to continue the war indefinitely.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:32 PM

Global warming is apparently unstoppable

Today the Bush administration released a report admitting that global warming is happening, and that the cause of it is human actions, namely the burning of fossil fuels. So why then did the US decide not to be part of the Kyoto Protocol? Because apparently there's nothing to be done about global warming at this point, so we should be concentrating on dealing with its effects. Mind-boggling, isn't it? Read the NYT story here [registration required] or read the report for yourself here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:07 PM