Skip to content

Category Archives: Creeping Totalitarianism

U.S. government to legalize lying

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

It’s always okay if done in the name of the security state: The Justice Department is proposing new Freedom of Information Act rules allowing the government to inform the public that records do not exist even if they do. The judiciary has rolled over and played dead while the government has kept its crimes secret […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

An apostate speaks

Monday, September 5, 2011

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.

Also filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

A small bit of welcome news

Friday, May 27, 2011

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 […]

Also filed in Joe Courtney | | Comments (0)

The fruits of bi-partisanship

Sunday, May 22, 2011

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 […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Say it ain’t so, Steve

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

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 […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

Wisconsin Republicans learned from their favorite son

Friday, March 25, 2011

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 […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

What’s with Enfield?

Sunday, January 23, 2011

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 […]

Also filed in Local issues, Republicans | | Comments (2)

Obama continues Bush’s assault on the law

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

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 […]

Also filed in Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

Curiouser and curiouser

Sunday, August 22, 2010

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 […]

Also filed in | | Comments (0)

A modest proposal about a perfectly reasonable law

Saturday, April 24, 2010

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 […]

Also filed in | | Comments (4)