KC8DNE.com

I was not clear about one, or two of these. You might not be, either.

There is less than five weeks before Election Day, and rumors about voting rights are running wild. Read the information below then share the facts about voting rights in Michigan with a friend.

Fact: You have the right to vote without photo ID in Michigan

Just ask to sign the affidavit form at the polls. Michigan’s new photo ID law allows registered voters who don’t have photo identification, or those who have forgotten to bring photo ID, to vote by signing a form at the polls stating they are not in possession of photo ID. Voters without ID need to know their right to vote because Michigan cities are getting this wrong. Shortly before the August 2008 primary election, both the cities of Allen Park and Grand Blanc sent newsletters to city residents stating the need for photo ID with no mention of the affidavit form for those without ID. The Secretary of State estimates that approximately 370,000 Michigan residents have no form of photo identification.

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Poor Sarah Palin. She was thrown into the political deep water without her waterwings.

Kelly Martin’s blog Nonbovine Ruminations recently discussed the spike in interest in the relationship between John McCain and Amateur Radio.

I’ve noticed recently, on my Google Webmaster Tools reports, that the third most common search that actually reaches my blog is "McCain ham radio". Now, I haven’t blogged about this, and frankly I don’t see what McCain has to do with ham radio, so I’m quite curious about this phenomenon.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. I feel that this speech, given at Fordham University, ranks in importance with Dwight Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” speech.

America’s Democratic Collapse by Chris Hedges

Here they go again. On Monday, Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, called on Congress to take dramatic steps to subvert the Constitution. Mukasey is demanding that Congress issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe — including the United States itself — a “battlefield” where the president decides who will be locked up forever.

Instead of ending the Bush system of injustice, he wants Congress to make it permanent.

Not only has Bush’s Attorney General called on Congress to issue a new declaration of war, but he is also asking Congress to:

1. Gut habeas corpus — the freedom that protects people from being thrown in prison illegally — with no help, no end in sight and no due process.
2. Cover up the Bush administration’s systemic torture and abuse of detainees. Judges would not be allowed to see evidence of torture and abuse and would instead simply have to trust that a president is holding the right people as ”enemy combatants.”

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Today, elected officials in Washington sold out the Constitution — again.

Cowed by the Bush administration’s pre-election scare tactics, the Senate passed freedom-stealing FISA legislation undermining your Fourth Amendment rights.

This is not a “compromise,” as some in Congress would have us believe. The only thing they compromised is your freedom. The FISA Amendments Act allows for mass, untargeted and warrantless surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States. And to top it off, it hands immunity to telecom companies for their role in domestic spying. This means your phone calls can be tapped and emails read with virtually no proof of threat, and there’s no chance to learn how the telecoms invaded your privacy. (Read more)

The reason the FISA Amendments Act is so important is that it is at the heart of the struggle to maintain a democracy in the face of, at times, overwhelming pressure to scuttle the rule of law for expediency, self-interest, or just plain old stupidity. A law does not cease to exist just because the president says it does. Please, let us remember that there are still two other branches of our government to be dealt with first. It is a good system. It is what has kept the US from becoming a monarchy. There is no reason to change it. One King George was enough.

The comments after the original Slashdot post are also worth reading.

ivantheshifty writes with news of a delayed vote (failed filibuster attempt aside) on the updated FISA bill which has been discussed here recently, in particular because it would grant telecom companies immunity (under certain conditions) from suits for wiretapping conducted at government request. According to the Associated Press story carried by the Washington Post,

"Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and more than a dozen other senators who oppose telecom immunity threw up procedural delays that threatened to force the Senate into a midnight or weekend session. The prospect of further delays was enough to cause Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to postpone the vote until after the weeklong July 4 vacation."  (Read more)

SOURCE: Shashdot

Unless you have always harbored the dream of living under a benign dictatorship, you need to give this issue your full attention. It involves the right of the Executive Branch of our democratic system to ignore the rule of law. Keep in mind that once that has been done — for whatever seemingly “good” reason — it is only logical to do it again for any other “good” reason. You do not need to be a constitutional scholar to see the ramifications of this one. The fact is that the telcos got snookered by the administration and now are pushing Congress to rape the Constitution in order to to escape their responsibility.

It’s okay to break the law if the President tells you it’s okay.

That’s the outrageous proposition at the heart of a new FISA “compromise” that Republican Senator Kit Bond is pushing on Capitol Hill.

His goal: to let off the hook telecommunications companies that willfully cooperated with illegal spying.

Senator Bond wants to bury lawsuits filed against telecom companies in a secret court. And, when they get there, he wants cases dismissed if the companies can show that the President gave them a note saying his request for customer information was legal.

Tell your representative: Just because the president says it’s legal doesn’t make it so! (Read more)

Pakistan has lifted its ban on YouTube after its attempts to block local access to the video hosting service have been blamed for a near global blackout of the site for about two hours on Sunday. This appears to have been a misguided attempt to change DNS routing.

supposedly, a trailer for a forthcoming film, which portrays Islam in a negative light, was the cause of the restrictions. A leading net professional told BBC News: “This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.” Other countries that have temporarily blocked access to YouTube include Turkey and Thailand.

You can find the full story is at BBC News.

President Bush has gone on the offensive for the confirmation of Michael Mukasey, his nominee for attorney general. His tactic? Calling any senator who insists Mukasey give real answers to questions on torture and wiretapping — you guessed it — soft on terrorism.

Having served as a top federal prosecutor and judge, Michael Mukasey is perhaps the best-qualified nominee for attorney general in history to answer the questions he has been asked by senators.

Yet when it comes to straightforward questions, like whether waterboarding (simulated drowning) is torture, and even whether it is legal for foreign governments to beat and administer electric shocks to American soldiers overseas(1), Mukasey won’t give straightforward answers. Until he gives real answers, it is impossible for senators to fully exercise their constitutional duty to “advise and consent” on the Mukasey nomination. (Read more)