1. “The Myth of the Menacing Militias
Think the Hutaree are the leading edge of a vast new paramilitary threat? Think again.”
http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/05/the-myth-of-the-menacing
2. “The Secretary of Defense gave a good speech over the weekend at the Eisenhower library. Gates used the occasion to evoke Eisenhower and call for discipline in defense spending. But he didn’t really mean it.
…
But the speech shows no indication that Gates wants to cut defense spending. It isn’t even clear that he has changed his view that defense spending should grow by about 2% annually no matter what happens in the world. He claims that while defense secretary he has canceled programs worth $330 billion in their lifetime. True, but they were replaced by other programs, and the budgets Gates has sent to the Hill have been bigger each year in real terms. A cynical take is that Gates is trying to preempt calls for defense cuts by acting as if roughly flat budgets require great discipline.
What’s really going on here is that the cost of the current defense program is growing so fast that you need large annual increases just to keep what you have.
…
Real reductions in military spending require reductions in the ambitions it serves. A cheaper military means doing less. This administration has shown no interest in that. Maybe the fiscal situation will force them to reconsider.”
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/05/10/no-eisenhower/
3. “The UK Elections: A Very British Fraud
The growing corruption of the British electoral process is well documented and doesn’t require anything additional from conspiracy theorists such as myself. Listen to Richard Mawley QC, the judge presiding over a case of vote-rigging in Birmingham in June 2004:
“The system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that”. Citing evidence of “massive, systematic and organised fraud”, Judge Mawley said the system was “hopelessly insecure” and sent a message to those that claimed that the current postal voting system was working, adding: “Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising.”
“The best and simplest way to procure false votes is to invent false voters – “ghosts”, as they are known in the trade” reports Nick Davies in a highly recommended 2001 Guardian article which exposed the various modalities of UK electoral fraud. He elaborates:
“The real joy of raising electoral ghosts is that there are no ghostbusters: there is no system for checking the accuracy of the electoral register. Riggers can find a derelict building, or add a couple of extra houses to a street, or use the address of a hostel or anywhere else with a transitory population, and simply bung in names. If they are unlucky or particularly clumsy, and happen to catch the eye of an electoral registration officer, the police may be called. But, under normal circumstances, the paperwork is routinely processed straight on to the register with no attempt at checking.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19105
4. “Washington Intellectual Dishonesty” defined
Presumably, her contempt for the Supreme Court confirmation process and her demand that nominees forthrightly answer questions about their views of the law was a well thought-out position. Does anyone, anywhere, believe that her “reversal” is motivated by anything other than a desire to avoid adhering to the standards she tried to impose on others?
What makes this reversal particularly troubling here is that having Kagan answer questions in her confirmation hearing is the only way to learn about who she is, how she thinks, and what kind of Justice she would be. Given what an absolute blank slate she has made of herself, having her answer questions about prior Court rulings is the only conceivable way for a rational person to make any meaningful judgments about the impact she would have on the Court. But the “conventions” of the confirmation process — which she once condemned but now apparently intends to embrace — are designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate who a nominee really is. When a nominee is asked whether they agree with past Court decisions, they say their opinion is irrelevant because it’s settled law and they will apply it. When asked about matters the Court hasn’t yet decided, the nominee says that they can’t give their opinion on cases that might come before the Court. So, by design, we end up learning absolutely nothing about the nominee’s views or approach to the law.
That was the absurd ritual which Kagan rightly condemned in 1995 and demanded be changed. But now that she’s in a position to do so, she suddenly has a change of heart (indeed, her “change of heart” was first announced during her confirmation hearing as Solicitor General). This is the sort of blatant hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty that pervades our political process and, more than anything, makes it so rancid and spawns pervasive cynicism. The views expressed by Beltway mavens are so often a by-product exclusively of self-interest and political advantage, not any actual conviction, and it’s not hard for even casual observers to see that.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/11/kagan/index.html
