13. January 2008 by Ken.

I must have slept through last October to miss this article.

It’s titled “Is God running for president?“. One of the best lines here is a quote from Sinclair Lewis: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” If you like to read, try his book: “It Can’t Happen Here” which is a novel about fascism in America in the pre-WWII era. I highly recommend it.

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13. January 2008 by Ken.

This collection of quotes below courtesy of The Daily Kos. I challenge you to see if you are in agreement with these and thus could truly be called a conservative. If this were the only qualification, I would be right there!

Open Thread and Diary Rescue
by SusanG
Sat Jan 12, 2008 at 08:13:08 PM PST

On this day in 1729 Edmund Burke was born. According to Wiki, as well as being an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who supported the American Revolution, he is also often regarded by conservatives to be the father of Anglo-American conservatism. Let’s have a brief look at a few of Burke’s musings to see how the current crop of conservatives measures up to the standards of their “father.”

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”

“Patience will achieve more than force.”

“By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.”

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13. January 2008 by Ken.

I have been invited to create a little Mitt mischief in Michigan here. I am a Michigan resident, and, as the article says, we don’t register in a political party here; we just plain register to vote. So, on election day, I can vote anywhere I want as long as I don’t cross party lines. My area is heavily Republican and the Dems rarely even nominate anyone locally, so I often vote the “other side” of the ballot. I last did that in a presidential primary when I voted for McCain just to deny Bush the state as our Republican Governor, John Engler, had promised. The place I worked at the time had a VP of Manufacturing who was more Republican than anyone else in the county, and I relayed that information to him, trying to goad him into a political disagreement. Such fun it was! He started turning red, ranted and raved about how what I did was illegal (it was not) and that I was undermining the established political process. I calmly (the best way to argue with him) told him that if the state didn’t want this sort of thing to happen, the solidly Republican Legislature would not have made it the law, and that if he wanted to prevent me from doing so in the future, he would exercise his considerable (in his mind, anyway) influence on the lawmakers to change our state back to a closed primary system, as it had had in the past.

So, next Tuesday, I’ll stop on the way home from work and vote the “other side” of the ballot and give Mitt my vote. Is this right? Well, the state says I can do it and I see the logic behind it, so I’ll do it. Why should I waste my time and energy to vote for the only Democrat on the ballot?

If you’re in Michigan and reading this one, consider doing the same thing. Let’s give the Republicans a dose of their own medicine!

By the way, I just viewed this video about Mormonism. It taught me a lot, even if a few sections are wrong (but not the majority!) according to Mormon scholars. See also this article.

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13. January 2008 by Ken.

CNN reports thusly:

Phone companies cut FBI wiretaps due to unpaid bills

WASHINGTON (AP) — Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

“We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

The FBI did not have an immediate comment.

The report released Thursday was a highly edited version of Fine’s 87-page audit that the FBI deemed too sensitive to be viewed publicly. It focused on what the FBI admitted was an “antiquated” system to track money sent to its 56 field offices nationwide for undercover work. Generally, the money pays for rental cars, leases and surveillance, the audit noted.

It also found that some field offices paid for expenses on undercover cases that should have been financed by FBI headquarters. Out of 130 undercover payments examined, auditors found 14 cases of at least $6,000 each where field offices dipped into their own budgets to pay for work that should have been picked up by headquarters.

The faulty bookkeeping was blamed, in large part, in the case of an FBI agent who pleaded guilty in June 2006 to stealing $25,000 for her own use, the audit noted.

“As demonstrated by the FBI employee who stole funds intended to support undercover activities, procedural controls by themselves have not ensured proper tracking and use of confidential case funds,” it concluded.

Fine’s report offered 16 recommendations to improve the FBI’s tracking and management of the funding system, including its telecommunication costs. The FBI has agreed to follow 11 of the suggestions but said that four “would be either unfeasible or too cost prohibitive.” The recommendations were not specifically outlined in the edited version of the report.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

I wonder about this with the US gubmint spending billions and billions on terrorism and war and they can’t manage their telephone bills. You would think that someone would be in charge of this. I’m thinking that our “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) is so disorganized and unplanned that there is absolutely no one in charge and no one knows what’s going on in the big picture. My personal belief is that the US (and its armed forces) would be a lot safer if we just worried more about “here” and not so much “there”.

One final quote for you:

“Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.” — George Orwell, 1984

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