End of Silence

Glenn Greenwald on the still unfolding Mark Foley scandal:

The Big Revelation has not yet occurred. That is going to be the first confirmed report of Foley’s having actual, in-person sex with one of the pages. At this point, there is no doubt that he did so. He wasn’t inviting them over to his apartment to drink alcohol in order to watch television with them. Still, that hasn’t been reported yet. We’ve been building up to it incrementally and Brian Ross is, I have no doubt, scouring his inbox at this moment for the lead that will take him there.

These endless, incremental disclosures are much more painful for the Republicans — not unlike Chinese Water Torture (which, coincidentally enough, is a technique that the President now has the power to use, thanks in part to legislation approved last week by Denny Hastert, John Boehner, Tom Reynolds and Mark Foley).

[tags]markfoley, glenngreenwald, scandal, torture[/tags]

There were tons of opinions and articles written over the last week to coincide with the 5 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I posted something of my own on the Austin Metblog. My del.icio.us posting setup does a decent job of echoing links now, so I’d like to try and avoid that, but here’s the best of what I saw this past week.

• Mahablog links the transcript and video of Keith Olbermann’s commentary.
• This Modern World comments on that commentary and points out the Twilight Zone reference. Awesome.
• Washington Post article on the still-at-large Osama Bin Laden
• Matt Lauer grows a pair and confronts Bush on his policies.
• NY Times’s Paul Krugman on Promises Not Kept

The “Internets” are abuzz with new revelations about NSA snooping and then there’s this story about the government abruptly ending a probe into the first revelation of NSA snooping. And, of course, Bushie has nominated the guy who was in charge at the NSA to head the CIA.

Let me be clear. I’m not willing to allow the NSA in cahoots with AT&T and most of the other telecom companies to break the law and make 1984 a reality to protect me from the remote possibility that a wacko terrorist might try to off me. This does not mean that I’m “for the terrorists”. It means that I’m not willing to make a massive trade-off in civil liberties and trust an administration that’s done nothing to warrant it that they won’t use the information for other purposes. Don’t make me pull out the classic Hermann Goering quote.

Update: Looks like AG Gonzales lied about the NSA program. Good thing he refused to testify under oath.

[tags]nsa, tia, at&t, bigbrother, 1984, goering, bush[/tags]