If everyone is {X}, no one is {X}

Another victim of the "Terrorist Watch List."

Seriously, what's fucking point? My six-syllable first-last-name combination may be a mouthful, but there are 10 of us in the US, maybe. I'd hate to be named John Williams or something. Because not only do you have to face the fact that 99.999% of the people on that list have nothing to do with terrorism, but any one of 15,000 other people could have fucked your traveling life up for eternity. Because it doesn't matter who's in the White House in Jan 2009. Government programs like this do not die.

Bwaaaaaahhhh!

h/t Ezra


Also:

The McCains increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain's tax returns.

The additional cash supports an "increase in the number of employees," the McCain aide told Politico. The aide did not answer a question about whether the growing staff stemmed from addition of new properties to the family's real estate portfolio.

And:

Facing a Democratic Party positively giddy over his recent admission that he didn't know how many houses he owned, John McCain quickly returned to a political trump card: his POW experience.

Speaking to the Washington Post, aide Brian Rogers, in full damage-control mode, acknowledged that his boss had "some investment properties and stuff," but added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison."

The article goes on to list the many ways McCain and his lackeys have woven his POW experience into every conversation on anything.


But, the winner is Andrew Sullivan:

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

Your privacy, as it were

Gizmodo discusses the extension of the RealID deadline, and whether privacy concerns are even worth the argument any more.

Diaz makes some good points, and yes, for the most part the "privacy" cat is out of the bag.

Still, just because they've already got us by the balls, there's no reason to meekly go along with handing them a leash for our necks too...