“Honestly, I’m just getting paid to hold someone’s seat,” said one person attending the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing in Boston last week (on 2008-02-25). “I don’t even know what’s going on.”x30 The FCC called the hearing to investigate citizens’ complaints that Comcast, the nation’s second largest Internet service provider (ISP), was blocking [...]
The U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to hear a case to stop President Bush’s domestic warrantless wiretapping, and let stand a 2-1 Appeals Court ruling that threw out the case on a technicality—a catch-22.x20 The ACLU brought the case on behalf of some journalists, scholars and lawyers, who claim that the specter of [...]
In 2002, John Poindexter, a major outlaw in the Iran-Contra scandal, took the reins of the U.S. Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness project (TIA).x10 One of the features of TIA, was the “Terrorism Futures Market”, which would set up a web site to allow people to bet on future violent events, such as terror [...]
Republican leaders and news outlets whipped up a little furor over MoveOn.org’s ad headlined “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?—Cooking the books for the White House.”x01 A common comment was that the ad was “over the top.”x02. The ad came out in the New York Times September 10th, the day of Petraeus’s testimony [...]
In September 2002 a reporter asked President Bush’s Chief of Staff Andy Card why the administration was suddenly pushing for an invasion of Iraq70×71. Card replied: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Shortly before that push, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech to the V.F.W., [...]
