Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

host · 05-12-2006, 03:26 AM

Seems like the place to ask this. Are we near a tipping point?

Quote:

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.ph...1-104853-1835r
Poll: Bush job approval at 29 percent

WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- U.S. President George W. Bush's job approval rating has fallen to 29 percent in a new Harris Interactive poll.

It is the lowest job approval rating of Bush's presidency, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone, 29 percent said Bush was doing an "excellent or pretty good" -- down from 35 percent in the Harris Interactive poll conducted in April. Bush's job approval rating had been 43 percent in the Harris Interactive poll conducted in January.

About one-quarter of U.S. adults said "things in the country are going in the right direction," while 69 percent said "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." The trend has declined every month since January, when 33 percent said the nation was heading in the right direction, the Journal reported.

The Harris poll results came on the same day that The Washington Post reported on a Gallup poll that showed Republican support for the Bush administration has fallen by 13 percent in the past two weeks based on spending policies.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051100539.html
Data on Phone Calls Monitored
Extent of Administration's Domestic Surveillance Decried in Both Parties

By Barton Gellman and Arshad Mohammed
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 12, 2006; Page A01

The Bush administration has secretly been collecting the domestic telephone records of millions of U.S. households and businesses, assembling gargantuan databases and attempting to sift through them for clues about terrorist threats, according to sources with knowledge of the program......

...........The new report, by contrast, described a far broader form of surveillance, focused primarily on domestic phone-call records. Some of its elements have been disclosed before. The Los Angeles Times reported in December that AT&T provided the NSA with a "direct hookup" into a company database, code-named Daytona, that has been recording the telephone numbers and duration of every call placed on the AT&T network since 2001. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T over that and other alleged violations of privacy law, said the call database spans 312 terabytes, a quantity that would fill more than 400,000 computer compact discs.

Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening. The mathematical techniques known as "link analysis" and "pattern analysis," they said, give grounds for suspicion that can result in further investigation.

"Let's say lots comes in and we don't see anything interesting," said a source who helped develop the technology. "Tomorrow we find out someone is communicating with a known terrorist. When you go back and look at the past data, there may be information that you missed. A pattern that was meaningless suddenly makes sense."

Critics reacted angrily yesterday, contrasting the new disclosures with the Bush administration's previous claims that domestic surveillance is narrowly targeted and restricted to international communications.

"Both the attorney general and the president have lied to the American people about the scope and nature of the NSA's program," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's clearly not focused on international calls and clearly not just focused on terrorists. . . . It's like adding more hay on the haystack to find that one needle."

Quote:

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njw...06/0223nj1.htm
ADMINISTRATION
TIA Lives On

Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

.........It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else."

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment, Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who the agency believes are connected to terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don't show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning system" that the president said the NSA is running.

Documents detailing TIA, Genoa II, Basketball, and Topsail use the phrase "early-warning system" repeatedly to describe the programs' ultimate aims. In speeches, Poindexter has described TIA as an early-warning and decision-making system. He conceived of TIA in part because of frustration over the lack of such tools when he was national security chief for Reagan.....

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000622.php
Did Gonzales Mislead Congress about NSA Program?
By Paul Kiel - May 11, 2006, 2:32 PM

Reacting to today's news that the NSA is "amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans," Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) have put out a statement questioning the legality of the program.

Their statement contains this: "when the Attorney General was forced to testify before the House Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago, he misled the Committee about the existence of the program."

Here's what they're referring to. On April 6, 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and in one exchange, Rep. Gerald Nadler (D-NY) tried to nail him down:
NADLER: Number two, can you assure us that there is no warrantless surveillance of calls between two Americans within the United States?

GONZALES: That is not what the president has authorized.

NADLER: Can you assure us that it's not being done?

GONZALES: As I indicated in response to an earlier question, no technology is perfect.

NADLER: OK.

GONZALES: We do have minimization procedures in place...

NADLER: But you're not doing that deliberately?

GONZALES: That is correct.

The Hayden appointment is exactly the wrong thing to do....unless it's a final test before all pretense of adherence to constitutional law, fair trials, and traditional rules of evidence are abandoned!

Quote:

<a href="http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29743">The General and the Telephone Companies</a>

By Reed Hundt | <a href="http://www.tpmcafe.com/user/9">bio</a>

I can understand why the Republicans and Democrats on the Hill with oversight responsibility for the CIA might not want to complicate General Hayden's confirmation hearing with discussion of NSA's warrantless searching of millions of telephone calls, as now reported.......

........<h3>Nevertheless, Congress won't be able to escape this issue: the President and Mr. Rove have forced it upon Congress by selecting General Hayden, who apparently played such a large role in the physical intrusion of NSA into the communications system of the United States..........</h3>

..........No one should imagine that what NSA has done, if reports are accurate, is normal behavior or standard procedure in the interaction between a private communications network and the government. In an authoritarian country without a bill of rights and with state ownership of the communications network, such eavesdropping by people and computers is assumed to exist. But in the United States it is assumed not to occur, except under very carefully defined circumstances that, according to reports, were not present as NSA allegedly arm-twisted telephone companies into compliance. That is a topic that can't be avoided in the general's hearing, if he gets that far.

I object but....is it already too late to stop it?

Quote:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/So...m_WLaquer.html
Fascism Past, Present and Future
a book by
Walter Laqueur, 1996

....The historical record shows that fascism (like terrorism) could succeed only in a liberal democratic system. It had a chance only where it could freely agitate. When competing with a military dictatorship (Romania or Spain)-let alone a Communist regime-it invariably suffered defeat. Even in a mildly authoritarian regime such as that in Austria, it failed in 1934. Fascists despised, rather than hated, the democratic institutions They regarded the parliament as a Schwatzbule, a place where unending inconclusive debates took place and where politicians were held in contempt because of their weakness. This mood could be found not only in the extreme Left and Right but also among many who did not consider themselves radicals. In the end, democracy collapsed because not enough democrats were willing to defend it.......

......There was an interesting difference between the votes in big cities and small towns. If the Nazi vote was 37 percent on average; nationwide, in the July 1932 elections, the small town vote was 42 percent, whereas in the big cities such as Berlin and Hamburg it was closer to 33 percent.....

A unified message from the fascists, themselves, through one of their party propaganda "organs", das CNS:

Quote:

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstor...20060512b.html
Privacy A Concern, but So Are Leaks
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
May 12, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Americans should be more worried about who's leaking sensitive national security information than they should be about the National Security Agency monitoring records of telephone calls, some Republicans are saying.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday said the NSA's telephone-call data mining program is "legal and lawful -- privacy is protected," he said.

"If al Qaeda is involved, we're going after them, and we're going after them aggressively," Frist said in an interview with Fox News's Neil Kavuto.

Sen Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) rejected the uproar provoked by the USA Today report. "This is nuts," he was quoted as saying on Thursday. "We are in a war, and we've got to collect intelligence on enemy, and you can't tell the enemy in advance how you're going to do it."

A comment added by poster, "host": Dear leader, Signore "29 percent" himself, caps off the bullshit defense for his new American Fascist Party:

"President Bush, defending his efforts to keep America safe, walked up to the microphones on Thursday and told the nation, "Every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy. Our most important job is to protect the American people from another attack, and we will do so within the laws of our country."

The president insisted that the NSA is not "mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates. So far we've been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil," he added."

<h3>Uhhhh!!!! Let's Roll......hello?? hello??? anyone???....anybody awake?</h3>