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Proof or GTFO.

It's quite simple. The question isn't where to begin, but rather where to end. Let's start at the present and work backwards shall we?

We've got over racist elements in the Tea Party. ("Obama-nomics: Monkey See Monkey Spend", "Zoo Has an African, and the White House has a Lyin' African!".

Obama as witchdoctor, isn't intrinsically racist, but is racially charged given the context. On the other hand, telling Obama to return to Kenya, isn't racist, it's a mistaken, but not a fringe belief with right wing activists.

Are these fringe elements of the Tea Party? I hope, and believe so. But it's hard to dismiss when the leaders of the "movement," exhibit racist signs themselves. As seen with Daje Robertson, self-refered founder of the Texas Tea Party, and operator of teaparty.org, holds a sign that reads "Congress = Slave Owner; Taxpayer = Niggar [sic]." Most people would have used,"slave," also they would have spelled the word correctly.

Also, we've got the pre-Tea Party the president is a pimp, and the first lady is his (presumably) number one ho, and Michelle Obama is a monkey, and who could forget, "Obama Bucks"?

Now how does the leadership of the GOP respond to statements like this? That's the real question. You might not be able to help it if idiots show up to your public rally, but nothing stops you from calling them out. Well silence.

Why? Well the Republic party has long used racism as a main tactic for stirring up votes.
Jesse Helms' infamous "Hands" ad for instance. So was the ad racist? It certainly was immediately perceived that way, but let's use the words of the Helms' campaign manager, and later CHAIRMAN of the Republican Party, Lee Atwater:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger,’ that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt worse than Whites ”

This is called "The Southern Strategy", and hinges almost exclusively on promoting racism, and racist policies. One legacy of this is the fetishization of the Confederacy and Civil War. It is not a coincidence that Confederate flags regained prominence at the start of the Civil Rights movement, long after the symbol had become associated with explicitly racist groups such as the Klan. (See South Carolina,1962; Georgia, 1956) ("It's pride, not prejudice," the apologists say. Yet, many of these people aren't from the Confederacy, regularly make racist statements, and invoke "freedom" and "patriotism" while lionizing, traitors who began an armed rebellion for the "freedom" to keep slaves. The mind reels at the irony.)

Prawn?

The one story of the woman classified as a sex offender for performing oral sex as a teenager is unbelievable.

Very sad. Especially since the Wendy Whitaker blowjob happened in 1996, the year that all the fat chicks were doing it.

Creative Loafing's Andisheh Nouraee has a list of better ways to stop Somali pirates:

How can America stop Somalia's sea pirates?

Creative Loafing's Andisheh Nouraee has a list of better ways to stop Somali pirates:

How can America stop Somalia's sea pirates?

What's more absurd is how they don't seem to mind the official US servicemembers' studio portraits, which are taken in front of a backdrop, frequently of an American flag. That is, a fake non-existant flag, like the one that's supposedly at issue here.

example:
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A106980

Or how about other people and press conferences photographed in front of backdrops, or blue-screened and televised with an alternate scene behind them? Or CNN's edited-in "hologram" during the election?

So are they against the photo because the background is fake? Which thy don't mind in other studio photos? Or because it was edited after the fact? Which they don't seem to mind when they do it themselves?

Tm

Here's an example where the government is trying to deport a canadian who was caught with marijuana when he was 15 years old. http://www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2005-03-03/ news_feature.html

Consider what happened in Florida leading up to the 2000 presidential election. In 1998, the state hired a company called Database Technologies to scrub its voter rolls of ineligible voters. The scrub list was mandated by Florida legislators after a voting fraud investigation revealed dead people had cast ballots in the 1997 Miami mayoral election.

DBT combed through Florida's rolls and handed over the "ineligible" list to elections officials in May 2000 -- within days of the company's merger with ChoicePoint.

The problem was that DBT'S list purged the voter rolls not just of felons, who are disqualified from voting in Florida, but of eligible voters whose names resembled those of the felons.

While Florida and DBT failed to check a number of criteria that could have distinguished the actual felons from the non-felons, one criterion that DBT did bother cross-referencing was race. BBC reporter Greg Palast and a handful of US journalists reported that the majority of the felons on the list were black, so thousands of legitimate black voters with the same names as black felons were struck from the rolls. Because Florida blacks vote heavily Democratic, a disproportionate number of votes for Al Gore were thrown out.

According to analyses by news organizations, somewhere between 8,000 and 22,000 qualified votes went uncounted. Whatever the number, it towers over 537 -- the margin by which George W. Bush won Florida, and therefore the national election.

The most jarring part, according to Palast, who broke the story, was that DBT knew the list was flawed -- because a Florida official told DBT, in a 1999 e-mail, "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let the county supervisors make a final determination." Palast says the fact that the company would even hand over known mistakes shows that it doesn't always do its best -- contrary to its corporate mantra -- to protect the government against itself.

Source

Cobb County is not part of the City of Atlanta. Cobb hates Atlanta. Just look at this week's Creative Loafing to see what a difference there is between Atlanta and the Bush voting, religious right sprawl that surrounds it. The city school board has nothing to do with this. It is the suburbs, not the city!

What, like SpyWiper and Spamford Wallace? His credentials are very well known, and I have never had any doubts about his decency.

He's currently under a TRO to keep him from marketing his "spyware removal tool" which was advertised by spam and spyware, and which appears to do lots of harm but to be no help at all in removing spyware.

Who would have thought that a slimeball like him would lie to people that way?

His partner in the Spy Wiper business is Rob Martinson. Rob, like Spamford, is also salt of the earth. You can read his history in this article "A Hated Man".

What happened anyway? It used to be the republican party stood for low taxes, small government, strict interpretation of the constitution and bill of rights, and keeping out of the daily lives of people (for better or worse). Now they are for big government, new branches of the beuracracy, deficiet spending, and reducing the seperation between church and state.

I think they got taken over the by the Christian Right, which is the moralistic wing of the Republican party. Bob Barr is about as "conservative" as it gets and he almost gave the Libertarian an endorsement over this a number of core conservative issues. I do miss the pre-Nixon republican era, that's for sure. Regan was alright, but I'm not sure he was that conservative, especially in the end. I think Regan's success may have something to do with the new direction of the party though.

Republican Bob Barr (of all people) just wrote this article here is the last couple of paragraphs :

"Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.

History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do. Hmmm. Who's the Libertarian candidate again?"

If someone like bob barr endorses Badnarik, this could get REALLY interesting.

Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.

History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do. Hmmm. Who's the Libertarian candidate again?

If someone like bob barr endorses Badnarik, this could get REALLY interesting.

It happened to me once too in a honda, it hit 120 before I could get it under control. The weird part was that the button I hit was not to accelerate, but to decelerate. It just kept going faster. Jamming on the brakes didn't shut it off, but it did slow me down. I tried shutting the cruise off and that didn't work. I then tried the master switch on the dash and that didn't work either. I pulled up on the accelerator by placing my foot underneath the pedal, and hit the brakes. I still don't understand why and neither did honda but it promptly shut off. It is a scary thing when you know you don't have control of the vehicle. Sidenote: http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/news_cover.ht ml

where is the FBI actually using this to spy on 'average people'?

You know it is a little difficult finding examples of this, what with the gag order and all (see Section 215). Still though, here's the primary example offered up by most media outlets, and here's another, more obscure example from my home city.

Hell, white noise is more pleasing to listen to than Corey Feldman's Band...

Um, it never stopped. Try this: call up the FBI, tell them that coworker you don't like has been distributing "subversive literature" (use those words exactly), give them the address of your company, then hang up. Doesn't matter if your coworker is a choir boy who's never been in trouble w/ the law before, he will be picked up and his family will be paid a visit by gun-toting agents.

Alternatively, you can take a close look at the weapons of mass destruction they just found in Texas. Plans to lob chemical bombs capable of killing hundreds of people in under a minute all over the country foiled by the local police, but it still took forever to get the FBI involved. You see John Ashcroft touting this as a victory in the war on terror? Now if those guys had been Muslim, "Whoo boy, we nailed us some brown-skin folk!! Yeeeeeeehaw!"

The FBI has plenty of things to do that would be worth their while and would be worth the amount of money that we pay them, but they're far too busy doing dirty work for the people in charge to give a damn.

If you looked to the right of the article, you would see a "More By Bob Barr" sidebar, and a link to an article where he criticizes neo-conservatives and their agenda.

These folks make the case far better than I can:

EFF's position paper
The American Library Association
Joe Barr mentioned a couple good points in his article at Creative Loafing.

Here's the DOJ's take. When you read it, ask yourself who defines a terrorist, and would you be willing to believe them?

Finally, the USA PATRIOT Act
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Hell, with a cool ass acronym like that for a name, how could you possibly be against it ;)
(read: How could you possibly not be against it. Tortuously clever acronyms are often a sign of bad policy)

However, even if they can't see your face, they still got your seat number, so they'll know who is trying to evade the benevolent all-seeing glare of Big Brother; these refuseniks will be put on the dubious-behavior terror-suspect list and may risk being denied future flight privileges (don't worry, you'll be in good company with thousands of peaceful human rights and anti-war activists.)

People downplaying this new privacy threat as analogous to existing store surveillance cameras are simply ignorant of the potential future data-mining abuse of extended video facial footage matched to confirmed ID. Cash machine cameras only capture a few single frames in bad backlight, and few bank teller cam systems register transaction data or client IDs on the tapes. It usually takes some effort to infer from timestamps who is actually on the picture.

Building good and reliable face tracking metrics requires a broad sample of angles and facial expressions. For this reason the extended duration video capture, matched to seat number and confirmed ID, is of grave concern to those concerne about privacy. I expect this shit to go down well in CCTV-happy Britain, which already employs face trackers extensively.

Does anybody really believe this will prevent terrorism?

I'd rather a luddite doing the music

Then you should try listening to The Luddites. They're geeks and good at music.

Former (thankfully) Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell recieved donations from Oracle as well, then had Spectronics purchase spend millions of dollars of Oracle software to be used at the Atlanta airport. The deal was put together by an associate of Campbell's who took money from Spectronics. Spectronics also gave Campbell money for his campaign, laundering it through a drug treatment center. Spectronics was rewarded when the city forced MediaOne to resolve a legal dispute with the company. Spectronics also received money from the city for setting up the Oracle deal - but an audit team was never able to find the Oracle software Spectronics was paid to buy. Most of the Spectronics executives were convicted of fraud, as were a lot of the mayor's employees, but the mayor himself charged the world with being racist and escaped without a scratch. Oracle was not charged with any crimes either, but I'm not personally sure the company is entirely innocent.

Also see Online Athens and Creative Loafing.