Let me quote from a BBC interview with Tony Blair:
Speaking on BBC One’s Fern Britton Meets programme, Mr Blair was asked whether he would still have gone on with invasion plans had he known at the time that there were no WMDs.
He said: “I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean [...] Read more »

Another snippet from Natasha:
Prison healthcare is egregious, and I’ve read a number of stories about people dying or suffering terribly because of denial of care. But denying medical treatment to a pregnant woman in jail for traffic violations surely deserves a promininent place in the annals of prison inhumanity. It’s not quite at the ‘letting [...] Read more »

An interesting quote from his book, “The Assault on Reason”
When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver [...] Read more »

This article on Wired was absolutely fascinating. Here’s a snippet:
Sorry, weirdos—I love you, but she has a point. Because of my work, many people—most of them strangers—track my various Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and blog feeds. And it’s true; I was going to be gone for a week on business. Did I really want to tell [...] Read more »

A truly, truly excellent and well-written two-part series (Part 1 | Part 2) posted on Michigal Liberal (a blog that’s unfortunately been taken over recently by a lot of auto-friendly whining) examines the legal basis - and growing threat - of permanent police checkpoints. In your neighborhood, on your street, in your apartment building. Thousands [...] Read more »

I’ve known this for a long time, and I imagine any half-witted would-be terrorist would as well. From an investigation by The Atlantic:
“The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists,” Schnei­er told me. A smart terrorist, he says, won’t try to bring a knife aboard a plane, as I had been doing; he’ll make [...] Read more »

Is it really okay for the government to do this? From ABC News:
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.
“Hey, check [...] Read more »

I dropped Verizon - mid-contract - and switched to Credo Mobile because of a little thing I like to call “not being spied on by my government“. Boy am I glad I did. Now I learn that Verizon’s fascism-loving isn’t restricted to the government in general, but to one party in particular. From the Washington [...] Read more »

This gives me an icky feeling:
The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of [...] Read more »

All you have to do is stand upright in the United States:
Shia Labeouf was in for a scare when he started filming new action thriller Eagle Eye - because CIA operatives gave him a taste of what they have on file about him.
The actor thought the film, in which he plays a man who is [...] Read more »