In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1205119733... ) shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.” Authorities employ “sophisticated software programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.” In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it’s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. “The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. “Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.”

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards.

more at http://www.joyengine.com/misc/the-main-cor... /

The Last Roundup
For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- - 28/04/08 --- -In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

more at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/a...

since the clergy follow his lead.

Most religions including Christianity believes the vagina to be dirty and are so oppressive toward sexuality that this type of deviant behavior is to be expected.

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 5, 2007; Page A06

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."


more @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

but then again I don't try to equate every piece of shit to divinity.

I lived in al-Jubail and have been to your compound to compete in soccer, basketball, and baseball tournaments when I was in school. I too explored the desert and occasionally found a desert rose. We would go to Bahrain once in awhile to get bacon, salami, or any other pork products and bring them back home to Jubail. My compound even purched two whole pigs one Thanksgiving from the Navy. Its funny how things are much more deirable when they are illegal. One year my school had a beach clean up on Earth Day and all we picked up were thousands of alcohol bottles, Vodka, whisky, Tequila, you name it. Sidiki is some nasty stuff and for those of you who know what I'm talking about, check your water bottles and make sure its water. My friends and I also fought the Saudi kids with all the white rocks lining the sidewalks. We never shook hands nor became friends though. I believe by the time I was there in the mid 90's right after the first gulf war tensions were a little high with our military presence. Saudi is one of the most beautiful places on Earth and some of my greatest childhood memories are from that region. Good times, good times! Living in that region has made it so easy to understand the situation we are in right now. I try to explain it to all the freepers in my family but there is no common experience for them to understand. Ironically, my best friend of the last 12 years is arabic from Jeddah.

"Religiosity and science
In one study, 90% of the general population surveyed professed a distinct belief in a personal god and afterlife, while only 40% of the scientists with a BS surveyed did so, and only 10% of those considered "eminent."<1>. Another study found that mathematicians were just over 40%, biologists just under 30%, and physicists were barely over 20% likely to believe in God.<2>

A 1998 survey<3> by Larson and Witham of the 517 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences showed that 72.2% of the members expressed "personal disbelief" in a personal God while 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism" and only 7.0% expressed "personal belief". This was a follow-up to their own earlier 1996 study<4> which itself was a follow-up to a 1916 study by James Leuba<5>."

"A June 2006 Gallup survey further supported that a definite belief in God declines with educational level."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_a...

So yes, we are intellectually superior.

DU this please

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14602723/?GT1=8404

Yes. Bin Laden and others are the Hitlers and Stalins of our times.
43%

Maybe. But I'm going to need some more convincing one way or the other.
4.3%

No. This is just dishonest, warmongering designed to scare voters about national security in time for this fall's elections.
53%



Thanks fellow DUers

What do you think of the way President Bush uses presidential power?
He goes too far 100%
I approve 0%
He doesn't go far enough 0%

only 5 votes, though, so lets DU it early before the freeper get to it.

link http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/bush-...

This is the same argument that Intelligent design fundies say. Oh there must be a higher power because we are too lazy to figure it out on our own. religion came about as a coping mechanism to deal with our emotions of losing a member of the group. As our minds developed we became conscience of self and realized the finality of death. As we ate more protein our brains grew, our emotions became more developed as our social system became more complex and our lack of knowledge was replaced by what the shamans told us about the spiritual world. The stories became more complex to compete with our growing knowledge of the real world and has evolved to what it is today, the bane of humanity.

Bible humpers fear the unknown i.e. death, that is why they flock to a mythical being promising eternal life. The ones who are educated, who know history, politics, sciences, anthropology, and mathmatics, are able to see the entire picture. We understand that gods were created from igorance and rose to power on the heels of man's own self interest. Oh look, a flash of lightning. what could it be other than a more powerful being throwing them down to Earth. Let's call him Zeus and if we worship him he'll favor our people instead of our enemies. A couple thousand years later, a fat bald womanizer, figures it out with a kite and a key. For the freethinkers, we can see as plain as day the evolution of religion, from the first burial of early hominids to the incorporation of Egyptian creation myths being rewritten into christian beliefs. Science had proven the bible false time and time again, but yet the masses keep their minds forced shut. That would be fine if it didn't affect me, but they are changing America into a Theocracy, and the very political system our forefathers fled and in which the constitution protects against; however, this president thinks of it as just a piece of paper and that church and state go hand in hand. Disgusting!

The war on science is very disturbing but as in most systems there is a balancing act to reach equilibrium. The Religious fundamentalists take pride in their ignorance and their stupidity will come back to bite them in the ass. As this country falls behind in science education eventually so too will the economy and we will all suffer. Then as in the times just before the period of enlightenment, people will wake up and realize religion is a farce created by man, and that True knowledge is in plain sight waiting to be understood by scientific thought.

"Religion is a crutch for those who can't think for themselves!" at least that's what my bumper sticker says, right above my Darwin fish with legs humping the jesus fish, across form another sticker that says, "One Nation Under Educated." That about sums up my feelings toward ignorance, because most people have the capacity to retain vast amounts of knowledge, and with knowledge comes greater responsibility, but for the religious ignorance is bliss. Religious people are just intellectually lazy.

Religion should be treated the same as porn in the fact that it should be a private matter within the confines of your home. Who claims that religion is genetic? Religion is purely nurtured and taught by ignorant parents who know nothing of history nor science. Religion is making a comeback in this country because of the dumbing down of America and "Intelligent design" is proof. The constitution specifically implies freedom of religion and the lesser known freedom FROM religion. My constitutional rights are being trampled every time I use U.S. currency in which it is stated "IN GOD WE TRUST." Who's we? Certainly its not me. Am I not an American if I do not believe in God, and am not part of the "WE." My taxes pay for the Treasury to add that crap to the currency as well as the wasted ink that reads "One nation, under God." As our forefathers before us, we too might have to flee a theocracy for the pursuit of freedom from religion.

Just remember that Bush might be the most dangerous when backed into a corner. Like a trapped chimp, he might lash out.