Some things old, some things new

I save links. I have hundreds of them, some dating back as far as three years. So I'm doing a little year end cleaning up and here's a few of the more recent ones that caught my eye and I didn't time to blog about.

My new co-blogger in Detroit, Christine Barry thought her best Christmas present was the demise of the PNAC plan.

This one's a keeper. TPM Muckracker is making a list of Bush administration secrecy and checking it twice. Needless to say, it's a work in progress. I could probably add a few items myself if I ever really cleared out all my links.

I loved this song when it came out but I didn't want to link to the video yesterday because it made me cry. Still I recommend you watch it today to remind yourself why we're fighting at home against the occupation of Iraq.

This one is actually new today but I don't have much more to say than this. How far have we fallen when it's a major news story that our president has admitted publicly to actually reading a newspaper? I mean it wasn't even a whole newspaper, it was just one article.

This is new today too but I just just get it. For the life of me, I don't understand why people would spend real money for virtual property. I mean, Second Life? I don't even have a first life at the moment. Just what I need is to spend all my time in somebody else's virtual world. Still I have to admit, the thought of being able to make $60 Gs a year in real money for pretend merchandise appeals to the entrepreneur in me. I guess if I was at all technosmart I might be tempted to start a business there, but frankly I think it would easier to sell surplus goods on eBay.

The next time some money grubbing neo-con tells you we have to eliminate the estate tax to save the family farm, have them read this. There is no such thing as the family farm anymore. Government subsidies have created huge monoculture farms that are not only destroying biological diversity but have all but put the family farms out of business.

And Making Light points us to underreported stories in 2006. It's a good reminder of all the small but important ways this White House is destroying our civil liberties. In particular, Bush’s Post-Katrina Power Grab should have received much more attention.

Overlooked in the $532 billion federal defense spending bill Bushed signed in October was a revision of a nearly 200-year-old law which restricts the president’s power during major crises. In December, Congressional Quarterly examined the changes, saying that the new law “takes the cuffs off” federal restraint during emergencies. Rather than limiting the circumstances under which a president may deploy troops to “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy,” the 2006 revision expands them to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident.” In other words, it’s now easier for the federal government to send in troops without a governor’s invitation.

And people called me a conspiracy theorist when I told them the White House is hellbent on creating a police state? Little by little, martial law is creeping up on us.