New Hope
L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman at JPFO - A message from the president that must be heard throughout the world - What Alexander Hope, the ficticious president in Smith and Zelman's novel Hope, would say about Bloody Tuesday. The foreign policy of previous administrations was the real cause of this tragedy. Hope's proposed solution: pull out our troops, end all handouts to foreign governments, end all trade restrictions and taxation of foriegn trade, destroy all the airport metal detectors and X-ray machines, nullify the 25,000 victim disarmament laws, encourage energy independence by opening all federal lands to oil exploration and organizing a non-government committee to explore alternative energy sources, call upon the militia to act as the diffuse defense against a diffuse threat, don't glamorize the criminals who committed this atrocity with the label of "terrorist".
For my part, I will make this promise. Politicians and bureaucrats presently conspiring to destroy the Bill of Rights had better be well prepared to give up the freedom they appear so enthusiastic to deprive others of. The poor fools who sell their liberty for the illusion of security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others to enhance their power deserve only the end of a rope.
Eric Pianin and Bradley Graham at the Washington Post - New Homeland Defense Plans Emerge - them congress critters are wetting themselves trying to give Tom Ridge's new gestapo enough power to get anything done. I hope they fail miserably. We don't need no steenking homeland defense agency. [unknown]
Fox News - Amtrak Starts Requiring Photo ID - Sieg Heil! [unknown]
Al Guart, Larry Celona, Murray Weiss, and Dareh Gregorian at the New York Post - City Is Now a 'Police State' - this isn't news. Herr Rudy turned New York City into a police state many years ago. It's just a little worse now. [unknown]
Thomas C Greene at The Register - Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance - that face recognition software we heard about at the last Super Bowl? It is useful in controlled settings, where you can get the person to sit still at a fixed distance from the camera. But in crowd situations? Don't bother. Good news. [register]
Al Martin - Watch Out for Jackboots and Swagger Sticks - some ominous behind-the-scenes info about Amerika's new gestapo. [grabbe]
This new agency will also operate "with extralegal authority." They will then be able to act under suspension of habeus corpus and under suspension of the right against self- incrimination, the Fifth Amendment privilege, and also the Fourth Amendment privilege.
Scott McPherson at Laissez Faire City Times - The Dis-United States of America: The Dying Days of the Empire - Reasonable analysis of the real reason for the Bloody Tuesday attacks. And it's got nothing to do with "attacking freedom".
The simple, cold hard truth about what happened in New York (and aboard a plane over Pennsylvania) is that this generation has finally seen the brutal face of war--the kind of war that the United States has been helping foreign governments wage for decades. The reason for so much ignorance about US foreign policy--and thus absolute astonishment that anyone could ever really be this mad with us--is that a nation divided into paltry, bickering tribes of adolescent power brokers has better things to do than worry about weapons sales to Latin American dictators, and other forms of overseas atrocities. Such trivial distractions are for others to worry about--as long as Monday night football rolls as scheduled, the welfare check is in the mail, and no one ever says anything "unpleasant".
George F. Smith at Laissez Faire City Times - Why We Need ID Cards for Politicians - a National ID for the sheep will do exactly nothing to prevent terrorism. But ID cards for politicians would actually be useful. Hehe.
But there is a certain appeal in knowing things about people. Our politicians, with stunning novelty, imply that the danger is in the private sector, that they need to control the comings, goings, whereabouts, liaisons, toothpaste and whatnot of each of us. If they stamp out privacy, they can nab the thousand or so terrorists in our midst currently working to blow us to hell and back. And they can keep would-be murderers from coming over here and doing the same. A mere glance at their hologram IDs would tell a cop in a second what they were up to. And if they had no card to hand over, haul them away on treason.