Quick Hitts

Maryland cops are now putting the names of peaceful activists on terrorist lists.

This follows on the heels of five paramilitary strikes against protesters just before the Republican National Convention.  Groups with no history of violence were violently raided by SWAT teams, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and terrorized by police thugs.  The cops then stole their political literature, cell phones, computers, cameras, personal diaries, and household items like paint, rope, and roofing nails.  In a two of the raids they arrested a couple of people after terrorizing everyone else, but in most cases they just left them shaken and angry.

What was even more appalling than the behavior of these thugs was the behavior of the media.  This should have been a national story, but it was pretty much ignored.  I guess the media bigwigs are either enthralled with the police state, or so used to it they no longer consider it news.

You can read some of the local coverage here. There is also a story about it on Salon.

Thomas E. Hutchins, thug responsible for putting peaceful protesters on the terrorist watch list, defends his actions, saying it was a defense against violence and “fringe people.”

Names put on these lists tend to migrate to other lists and are virtually impossible to have removed.  It took Ted Kennedy, one of the best known and most influential politicians in the country, eight months to get his name off the no-fly list.  How likely is it that anyone else can get their names removed?

These large databases are becoming increasingly common.  Big Brother loves them, and the general public doesn’t care.

Since we can’t get rid of these lists, I have a suggestion for any liberty lovers with access to them.  Please, whenever you have a chance to do it without getting caught, enter the names and personal information of the politicians and police chiefs who think they’re a great idea.  Start with Thomas E. Hutchins.  Then add the names of cops who participate on raids like the ones on the RNC protesters, and those involved with the War on Some Drugs. Put them on lists of terrorists, sex offenders, the no-fly list, “deadbeat” dad lists, and anything else you have access to.  Let them experience the joy of being in these databases, and the impossibility of getting out.  If enough people do this, over time the lists will become as useless as the thugs who rely on them.

A friend just sent me two boxes of cigars and a link to this article.  The cigars were Comachos and Hoyo de Monterrey Excaliburs.  He also included a limited edition CAO thrown in for good measure.  The article breaks down the likely real cost of the bailout. It includes multi-billion dollar handouts to private companies including Bear Stearns, JP Morgan and AIG. It also includes over a hundred and fifty billion dollars of pork thrown in for good measure.

The bill not only hands out pork to just about everyone (except, of course, American taxpayers), it also extends expansions on federal snooping, especially by the IRS.

It’s incredibly infuriating.  Good thing I’ve got some cigars to relax me.

The left and the right disagree on most issues. Usually, one side is right and the other is wrong. Quiet often, both sides are wrong. There have been rare instances where both sides agreed, but on side reached the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. But in my forty years as a political junky, this is the first situation I’ve seen where both sides had very different reasons for reaching the same conclusion and both were bang-on correct.

The left saw the bailout as history’s worst example of corporate welfare, a trillion dollar reward for greed and incompetence that will bankrupt the country. The right saw it as economic meddling on an unprecedented scale which is guaranteed to have horrible results and deadly unintended consequences. Both sides are absolutely, unequivocally correct.

This should disabuse every American citizen of the idea the congress works for us. Some people still held on to that quaint notion even after congress handed the recoding industry the gift of the DCMA. They still believed it when the weasels rewrote the law to make it virtually impossible for people to declare bankruptcy, a gift to the banking industry at the expense of their victims. But neither of those laws generated a citizen’s response anywhere near the reaction to the bailout.

Congress was inundated with an unprecedented number of e-mails and phone calls. When I wrote to my weasels their servers were timing out under the load. This bill united Americans like no other issue – the response was reported to be 300-1 against the bailout. And under this crushing wave of responses, the clearest mandate congress has ever received, against the virtually unanimous demand of the American people, they passed it.

The house failed to pass the first $700,000,000,000 bill by a mere 12 votes. That’s pathetic, considering the will of the people, but at least it was blocked. The senate, undaunted by the demands of the people they pretend to represent, created their own bill, in direct violation of the constitution, which states that all appropriations bills must originate in the house. The larded it up with another $100,000,000,000 worth of pork, passed it by a 75% margin, then kicked it back to the house, who, salivating at the new bacon, passed it as well.

If anyone still believes we have a representative government I will personally sponsor them for the Special Olympics.

Our wonderful presidential candidates proved beyond contention that they are lying weasels just like the rest of them. The Lord Messiah Obama, Mr. Change himself, helped sign this into law. McCain, who promised to stop the pork, also gleefully signed it.

I’d like to put on my size 11 steel-toed work boots, travel to Washington, and kick every one of these useless scumbags in the left testicle. Then start again, aiming for the right. Then once more, aiming for the middle, just in case I missed the first two times. I’d force the female members of congress to have a painful sex-change operation at their own expense, then kick them in the nuts. Then I’d take off the boots and pass them to the next citizen in line, a line of three hundred million people.

But since that fantasy is impractical, I urge everyone to do the next best thing and fire the bastards. Find out how your weasel voted, and if they voted for this abomination, start campaigning against them, immediately. Vote for their opponent, no matter how pathetic he or she may be. If we can’t kick these vile dirtbags in the nuts, at least we can kick them out of office.

The latest Quick Hitts Podcast expalins the real cause of the meltdown, which has been overlooked by most of the mass media.

Use this post to comment on the show.

A friend, who has one of the funniest blogs on the internet, sent me a link to a story about PETA that was too disgusting to even consider writing about. So I considered it. And he considered it. We wrote back and forth about how disgusting it was. It was like a contest between adolescent boys daring each other to eat some unidentifiable fuzzy green thing found in the back of the fridge.

He won. I think. You can find it here. NSFW.

Here’s on old story I did about them back in ’99, which is SFW.

Will they ever stop entertaining us with their stupidity?

Yet another incident where Thugs in Blue shot a harmless dog.  This time they added insult to injury by stuffing the body into a plastic bag and leaving it by the curb as trash. 

Doesn’t that make you happy that the boys in blue are there to protect you?

Never underestimate the creativity of Americans.  Give us a problem and one of us will come up with a creative solution.  Big problems, little problems, we’ll take on all of them. We can even find solutions to problems that might seem intractable, like naked squirrels.