throw your hands up and
May 28, 2006 @ 14:56
My friend Jon got married yesterday, and I was an usher. Friday was the rehearsal, and afterwards the best man and three of the ushers went out with Jon to a couple bars and then came home to our mini keg and watched the movie Wet Hot American Summer for like 30 minutes before we all fell asleep.
We woke up in the morning, showered, and tried to go get shaved at a barber, but they said they didn't do shaves anymore. Jon thought that was a load of crap because he had just asked them a few days ago. So, with no shaves to be had, we got some breakfast, and then arrived back at Jon's house to shave already with no time left before we're supposed to be at the church.
We got to the church a little bit after the 10:30 were were supposed to be there. And I'm trying to remember... but the service wasn't until 3 or 4. We were wearing black tuxes with vests, and the church didn't have AC. It was one of the hottest days of the year. Awesome! Our ushering was most excellent.
The reception afterwards involved much of the eating and the drinking and the dancing. Ian managed to pull off a very good best man's speech. I bought a dozen shots for a big crowd, mostly for the hot single ladies. Let me hear a hell yeah.
I think the funniest moment may have been when the wedding party was on the dance floor getting low to that Skeet Skeet Skeet song and none of the adults knew what was going on. There was just like a room full of people looking at us.
I have a pink inflatable guitar on my floor right now.
on the count of meow
May 26, 2006 @ 09:21
a scanner darkly
May 26, 2006 @ 09:14
"The hardest thing to determine is the purely domestic, self-motivated, self-initiating threat from the guy who never talks to anybody, just gets himself wound up over the Internet" --Michael Chertoff
Just.... Wow. So, the Department of Homeland Security thinks the real threat is domestic, angry liberals. They're only listening in on the phone calls of terrorists. And they get to define what qualifies you as a terrorist.
sunshine and puffy clouds
May 26, 2006 @ 09:00
It's good to see that with the government spending your money on buying your phone records from the phone companies, and with the government listening in on phone conversations, and with the government scanning the internet... with all of that it is good to see that the majority of the prosecutions relating to these programs have been for minor crimes unrelated to terrorism. Hey, but they're only after the terrorists, right?
Washington Post:
"This higher risk of acquittals is one we acknowledge and accept," McNulty said.
McNulty also revived the use of terrorism statistics compiled by the Justice Department that have been called into question in the past. He said prosecutors have secured 253 convictions against 435 defendants in terrorism-related cases with a "clear international connection."
The Post reported in June 2005 that, according to a computer analysis of an earlier version of the same Justice records, most defendants were charged with minor crimes unrelated to terrorism and nearly half had no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorists.
McNulty said prosecutors often needed to use minor crimes, such as immigration violations or fraud charges, as a way to charge suspects who posed a potential threat.
This McNulty guy, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, spoke at the American Enterprise Institute (there's a link to video in the upper right of the AEI page). Somebody asked:
"What is your policy about pursuing prosecutions of people who you run across [through counter-terrorism programs] who have violated the law but about whom you have no suspicions of terrorism?"
McNulty responsed:
"The enforcement of immigration laws, identity theft, identity related laws, financial support, security access - enforcement of crimes associated with those issues is important even if there isn't information specifically tying a particular subject to a national security threat. Why? Because those systems are so vital to us in securing our country, and it's the exploitation of those systems that we have seen as a method of operation for terrorism. So we do put some emphasis on making sure that - and I would say renewed emphasis or special emphasis in recent years in going after things like document fraud crime."
So much for Bush's "we're only going after the terrorists" assertion. You know, Bush says they're not spying on ordinary Americans, but ordinary Americans do things like buy illegal drugs, steal money, steal identities, forge documents, make fake IDs so they can drink under age... And by the Department of Justice's own statements, if an American with no ties to terror pops up through their counter terrorism programs, and they're committing a crime unrelated to terror, they could be prosecuted.