Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Ready the Firing Squads, Rummy...there are Terrorists Out There!!!!!!

WASHINGTON

RULES COULD ALLOW GUANTÁNAMO EXECUTIONS The Army has issued new regulations for carrying out military executions that could allow the death penalty to be administered at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 foreign terrorism suspects are being held. The regulations, issued last week, give the secretary of the Army authority to designate locations for military executions, replacing old rules that required them to take place at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. That could open the way for executions of detainees at Guantánamo, although none of the 10 prisoners there who have been charged with war crimes are facing capital punishment. A law signed by President Bush in December bars federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from Guantánamo detainees challenging their confinement. Eugene Fidell, a Washington specialist in military law, said the Bush administration might have feared that bringing detainees to the United States for execution would allow them to challenge their sentences in federal court once they were no longer at Guantánamo. DAVID S. CLOUD (NYT)

Got Terror?

Horse Sex Porn Candy Teens!
Inside! Fresh Google search terms to confound Dubya and the FBI. Also: Is Bush a fascist?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 25, 2006


Attention, all who are reading this column right now, please put down your drink and leap up off the couch and put your pants back on and log in to Google and type the words "hot bunny terrorist fluffer banana" into the comely and world-beloved Google search engine. Do it. Do it now.

Oh no wait, make it "Osama butt pancake lube explosives yay." Or better yet, try "homemade nuke porn lollipop kiddie nipple bomb!!!" (Be sure to include extra exclamation points because as we all know, Dubya isn't the brightest of presidents and these will add zing and personality to your entry and make your search terms -- the very ones the Bush administration is right now subpoenaing the Google corporation to gain access to -- really stand out to the FBI and the Department of Justice, which are always in need of a little zing).

It shall be a mini-movement. It shall be called "Operation Screw With the DOJ and Make Lynne Cheney Squirm." It shall be a big national gigglefest as we watch George W. Bush's gummint work to force and coerce the search engines of the nation to turn over their massive logs of search terms, all in an effort to see what perverted and criminal-minded people like you are really searching for, and sure you can defend yourself and claim it's pictures of Brangelina or recipes for blood orange/vodka body shots or just what the hell is wrong with Samuel Alito to make him look so wan and malicious, when we all know you're really looking for, of course, massive amounts of porn. And so are your kids.

Is it not just the warmest and nicest sensation? Is it not just pleasing to your core to know that your government is right now trying to track your behavior in a whole new and unsettling way, using the vague excuse that they're trying to "protect" children from online porn (an effort, by the way, to reinstate nasty anti-porn laws that were blocked by the Supreme Court two years ago)? Are we now utterly charmed to death that this is the most invasive and appallingly mistrustful administration since Nixon secretly beat himself with nails?

Now here you might say, oh please, the feds issuing subpoenas to Google and Yahoo and the rest for access to their search logs is nothing to be overly paranoid about. After all, BushCo is not, at this time, asking for information on individual behaviors. They are not checking the IP address of your home computer or secretly recording your every keystroke as you type or looking through your windows with high-powered telescopes as you look up the hideous "Goetse" phenomenon (Google it, if you dare) or buy a Jesus-shaped dildo or search for a big list of all known slang terms for "penis" for use in your, uh, novel. So far as you know.

But it certainly doesn't feel very far off. BushCo's latest move against the citizenry is indeed a new and disturbing salvo, sending a shiver down the spine of civil rights proponents everywhere. Are you concerned? No?

Then try this: Simply couple this latest move with BushCo's outright love and defense of torture, along with Dubya's recent enthusiastic declaration that his team of flying monkeys has been secretly wiretapping whomever it wants in this nation for the past four years without any sort of warrant and, well, you've got yourself one hell of a big sticky taste of happy neofascism.

What, not enough? Fine. How about how Bush's insane rate of issuing those now-infamous "signing statements," those little firebombs of judicial misprision wherein your mumbling president gets to reserve for himself the right to ignore any law he signs -- yes, any law he desires: anti-torture, surveillance, you name it -- whenever he feels like it, if he deems that law unconstitutional. Screw Congress. Screw the system of law. And screw, well, you.

For the record: Ronald Reagan issued 71 signing statements during his unholy term. Bill Clinton issued 105 over the span of eight years. Bush 41 signed off on 146, the previous record.

And Dubya? Well, little George has slapped his color-crayon signature on over 500 signing statements so far, reserving his right to disregard the law more times than all former American presidents combined. It is a record. It is a disgusting abuse of power. It is another thing to stack on the pile o' embarrassment for our nation. Shall we see how high we can go before we topple and implode?

(Here is the beautiful kicker, the thing to make you shudder and sigh: As this Knight Ridder report illuminates, in 2003 lawmakers attempted to rein in Bush's abuse of signing statements by passing a bill that required the Justice Department to inform Congress whenever BushCo decided to ignore a legislative provision. Bush signed the bill into law -- but then immediately issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore it. Ah, the nauseating poetry of it all.)

It is amusing how little I am hearing in defense of BushCo anymore. The rafts of flaming hate mail I used to receive from the sanctimonious right has subsided to a withered whimper, nothing really to defend anymore, one of the most corrupt and secretive presidencies in American history, more criminals and indictments per square White House foot than a den of drug runners, a decimated economy and a failed war and thousands of soldiers dead and tens of thousands disabled and not a single explanation or apology.

No one is writing in anymore to say what a good and noble man Bush is. No one pointing up stats to prove how Dubya and his cronies have brought integrity and honor back to the White House. And never a single voiced raised in meek cry to claim that we are somehow better off than we were six years ago, that there's a new feeling of hope and renewal, the slightest hint that we are improving our ability to take care of our poor and rebuild our bankrupt cities and help heal our mauled international relations.

Hell, even the most devout of Bush sycophants are becoming increasingly disturbed by this administration's unchecked power grab, by the new American neofascist mantra that claims that wiretapping is good, and surveillance is good, and torture and secret prisons are very, very good, and Big Brother scouring America's Internet habits is fine and healthy for your family, and ignoring the law whenever you deem it appropriate, a provision that lets you get away with murder, well, in the parlance of Bush himself, that's the goodest of all.

So then, as we wait to vote huge numbers of these corrupt cretins out of office this upcoming congressional election, why not make as much noise as possible? Why not start a mini- search revolution, fluster the FBI and give a rash to the DOJ and Lynne Cheney alike? There are worse ways to spend your lunch hour.

Up, off the couch. Log in to Google. Type "Karl Rove eaten by giant homosexual squid." Type "George W. Bush beaten to lifeless pulp by swarm of angry kindergarten children." Enter "Samuel Alito loves his 'Weapons of Ass Destruction IV' DVD." It might not be much, but it sure sends the right kind of message. Don't you agree?


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.


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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/01/25/notes012506.DTL


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