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Category Archives: Creeping Totalitarianism

An apostate speaks

Read this. As a friend of mine wrote, there’s little here that’s new (I’ve certainly made most of these points), but it’s all in one place, and from an insider from the other side. More proof, by the way, that the present day function of the Democratic party is to appear to oppose the Republicans.

A small bit of welcome news

We in Connecticut can take some pride in our House delegation, everyone of whom voted against renewing the Patriot Act. I owe an apology to Joe Courtney, since a short while ago I predicted he’d vote the wrong way, as, in my defense, he has in the past. When they are old and grey, the […]

The fruits of bi-partisanship

We can all take heart that bipartisanship is indeed not dead. When it comes to depriving the American people of their civil liberties, Republicans and Democrats are able to come together with amazing alacrity. Witness the recent announcement that Harry Reid has reached agreement with the Republicans to continue the egregious provisions of the so-called […]

Say it ain’t so, Steve

Yoicks: A pair of programmers has discovered that iOS 4 devices are regularly recording their positions to hidden files, which reside on the devices and are transferred to any computer the devices are synced with during backup. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden report for O’Reilly that while working on data visualization projects, they discovered a […]

Wisconsin Republicans learned from their favorite son

Joe McCarthy must be proud of his home grown emulators. The Wisconsin Republicans have launched a brazenly open witch hunt against a Wisconsin professor who dared to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times that they didn’t like. The GOP demanded access to his emails, in the hope that they could make a […]

What’s with Enfield?

It would appear that the Republicans that are running Enfield have a secret agenda: enriching the ACLU, which is entitled to attorneys fees from losing defendants when it vindicates the constitution. After handing the ACLU a slam dunk victory when they insisted on having the high school graduation in a church, the Enfielders decided to […]

Obama continues Bush’s assault on the law

The Constitution really is on life support. Citing the Obama administration’s evocation of the state secrets privilege, a divided federal appeals court agreed Wednesday to toss a lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary accused of helping the CIA transport detainees to secret foreign prisons where they allegedly were tortured. Ruling 6-5, a panel of the 9th […]

Curiouser and curiouser

My first thought upon hearing about the warrant for the arrest (followed hard upon by the dropping of the charges) of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was “CIA”. It took me a long time to come to this sort of reflexive thinking. I remember back in the dim and distant past, the halcyon days of the […]

A modest proposal about a perfectly reasonable law

There are many who are criticizing Arizona’s new immigration law, but I am certainly not among them. As the New York Times describes it, it seems entirely reasonable to me: It requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal […]

Capuano moves to muzzle the corporations

An intrepid young reporter at the Boston Globe (who shall go unnamed, but whose last name rhymes, and more, with mine) informs us that US Representative Michael E. Capuano (who in retrospect should have been nominated for the Senate) has come up with a nifty way to all but nullify the recent court ruling handing […]