Cheney Administration Votes "Go Fuck Yourself" #722

Merry Fucking Christmas, and we'll target gay pride rallies as terrorist plots if we damn well feel like lying about it. So this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back, eh? Undercover feds nostalgic for cointelpro days, staging arrests to provoke the crowd to justify tear-gassing them, and snapping photos from unmarked cars, etc? I must say, even if the NYTimes sat on these stories for a year, it hardly comes as any revelation, at least not to any of those who actually attended these protests. Yes, that's right, I confess to looking kindly on one of those "potential terrorists" insofar as he protested this war before it began as opposed to two years too late, and only when politically feasible. And I further confess that on more than one occasion he may have pointed out the aspiring photojournalist undercover gents, on more than one occasion as they sat in their speedy unmarked cars, to kind middle-aged yuppie folks concerned about the sea turtles as they deigned to walk across the street, on their merry way to and from exercising their legal right to peacable assembly (despite the very latest in police provocation) and to that dreaded once-revolutionary force known as freedom of speech. (This fellow I know, even his blond dog was a potential terrorist, wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I'm more loyal than Lieberman, Daschle, Clinton...etc.") Pointed them out, he did, half a decade ago, as they sat there snapping pictures and telling jokes.

But anyone who's read anything about the 60's era knows that it was only a massive public outcry that instigated all the reforms in 70's in surveillance laws, reforms explicitly designed to protect these rights (while in reality the insidious military-prison-industrial backlash--including the despicable torture of modern-day slaves, otherwise known as US inmates--has happily quadrupled itself, unabated). But whatever nudges the decrepit and rusting wheels of justice along at this stage, hey, let's have it. They blatantly broke the law this time, yet still expect us to blindly entrust the constitution to pathological liars. Just when you think this all-war all-petty-emotional-blackmail all-the-time schtick can't possibly get any more ridiculous, it does. That would be Chutzpah, folks; spelled "real balls." When the alternative is Lieberman, I'll grant you that it's not exactly a tough sell.

Harold Bloom waxes blunt; New discoveries in Sovietology; And better news elsewhere, particularly from the global south (narcosphere has more).