Rosio Pavoris a blog

Regional and European elections were yesterday. Results weren’t as disappointing as the federal elections in 2007 in that they likely won’t turn out as abysmally, but they’re still pretty sad in what they say about the Flemish voter.
First, the regional results. VRT always makes nice graphs, so let’s steal them:

That’s just the Flemish elections, because obviously I don’t live in Wallonia or Brussels or the German canton so I don’t have as much to say about them.
For our American viewers, this is roughly how they compare to the US Democrats and GOP, insofar as a political party can be reduced to a single dimension. Lijst Dedecker may be unfairly placed, because obviously the only LDD member who knows anything about the LDD platform is the guy who wrote it in the first place. And that’s not even Jean-Marie Dedecker.

Some of the denser political commentators seem to be baffled by the “paradox” of people preferring the “stability” of CD&V while also yearning for “change” by voting for N-VA and Lijst Dedecker.
To be absolutely clear, this is why people voted for Lijst Dedecker:

And this is why people voted for N-VA:

And this is why people keep voting for CD&V:

Their respective platforms don’t have shit to do with anything.
I’m just glad that the people shallow enough to vote for a party because their public face who wasn’t even on the list in four of the five provinces is a jolly fat guy on the whole also seem to be the people idiotic enough to vote for Vlaams Belang in the past election. Plus my mom.

I suppose it’s good enough news. Lijst Dedecker got more votes than they deserved, but still not so many that anyone would be inclined to take them seriously, and while N-VA is dumbfuck rightwingery, they’re infinitely preferable over Vlaams Belang.
Vlaams Belang, which lost eleven of its seats in the Flemish parliament (of the 32 they had), and half of its seats in the Brussels Capital Region parliament (down to three, from six).

N-VA keeps getting votes for reasons unrelated to their platform, though, and thinking that means their Flemish independence twattery is gaining legitimacy among the people. Last election they were in a cartel with CD&V and piggy-backed on Leterme’s inexplicable popularity, and this time it’s De Wever being lol fny on the picture box.

I’d hope most N-VA members also realise Flemish independence is at best a pipe dream and at most realistic a diversion from real problems that they’re cynically exploiting. I’d rather have cynics than dipshits.

Incidentally, guess which canton is the most socialist in Flanders?
I voted for them because the alternatives were worse, but they really, really didn’t deserve it. I don’t think they could have put together a more obnoxious line-up for Vlaams Brabant if they tried. If this keeps happening I’m renouncing my membership.
Or moving to Zottegem.

By the way, an honorable mention goes to PVDA+, our beloved Trotskyists. Their clown campaign is responsible for one of the largest (relative) gains in these elections: they went from 0.6% of the vote to 1%. By the end of the century, they may even make the eligibility threshold!

Anyway.
The European election results aren’t world-shaking. Vlaams Belang lost a seat and gave it to Lijst Dedecker (even though Dedecker said he has no interest in Europe, of course; his “base” is as brain-damaged as he is), and that’s all that changed for Flanders. The greens gained a lot in the Walloon regional elections, so no surprises there either. The Germans get to vote on one MEP (and are as such overrepresented, but fine), and voted for a Christian Democrat again.
I’m told “the right is on the march” in Europe in general (it has been for years), but right now I don’t particularly care.

Regardless of your political convictions, I think everyone can agree the most important thing is that Vlaams Belang got its ass handed to it. Even if Antwerp still sucks.

Edit: Also:

Yeah.

At least if you live in Estonia, when it comes to the European elections. Here’s how many people an MEP represents, broken down by country:

“Voters” is anyone over the age of 18, actual votes is how many of those people actually used the right their forebears died for in the 2004 elections. Click the image for a bigger, more legible version.

The smaller a bar is, the more power the individual voter has. Small countries are disproportionately represented for reasons that could conceivably be defensible (the countries are ordered by population, with Germany being the biggest and Malta the smallest), and obviously in countries with a really shitty turnout, your vote matters a lot more too.
Countries in both of these categories shit all over democracy: each of the six Estonian MEPs represents just 39,080 votes, whereas each of Belgium’s 24 MEPs represents 285,750, over seven times as many.

I’m not really advocating any change by posting this, I was just bored and thought it was interesting. Ideally all of those green and blue bars would be the same height and the corresponding bars across countries probably would be too, but a discussion can be had, at least on that second one.

By the way, Belgium’s high turnout isn’t a typo; it’s the result of the fact that the European elections are held on the same day as the regional elections, and our regional (and federal) elections are compulsory. I don’t doubt that if they were separated, or if our own elections stopped being compulsory, our turnout would drop considerably too.

At least we’d still beat the Americans.

And if you write in Ron Paul, I swear I will come to your house and kick your dog.

What is it about Christian democracy and a pathological inability to balance a federal budget? If we must have a prime minister from that party, it’d be nice to at some point have one who doesn’t see it as his god-given duty to triple the national debt by the end of his term.
Dehaene managed to balance the budget, particularly in his second term (though only because Belgium was very close to not being granted membership of the Eurozone otherwise, with our massive public debt amounting to well over 100% of the GDP, courtesy of the Christian democrats in the 1980s), but it wasn’t until the liberals got elected that we actually had a real federal surplus (which, given the fact that they also lowered taxes and expanded social programs, was quite impressive). Verhofstadt actually managed to bring the public debt down to 83.5% of the GDP.¹

Not that the Fortis bailout wasn’t a necessary measure² (and so far, a successful one; I made several euros in the past few days), but since Leterme already managed to restore the federal deficit by fucking up the negotiations regarding the federal reforms and losing the desperately-needed 400 million € from the Flemish regional government because of it,³ promising that “the tax-payer” won’t be asked to “carry the burden” of Belgium’s 5.7 billion € contribution to it is ridiculous.

Yes, our taxes are higher than they are in most countries, but our ridiculously extensive social programs mean that doesn’t matter for the most part. They could be quite a lot higher, and this willingness to just shove stuff on top of our debt stack is going to do a lot more harm to the economic independence of our citizens in the long run than raising income taxes by, say, another 10% possibly could.
But obviously, raising taxes would hurt Leterme’s chances of getting re-elected, and those are low enough as it is, thanks to his pigheaded contempt for Wallonia and a complete inability to come to reasonable compromises.

I guess I should be grateful that gay marriage is still legal, and abortion and euthanasia.⁴ I voted for the socialists in the last federal election, and for the liberals in the one before that, and this sort of bullshit is exactly why.
The sad part is that many CD&V voters will just blame economic difficulties on immigrants and vote even further to the right next time. And Vlaams Belang is positively Republican.

¹ Though in fairness, Dehaene started the trend.

² Unlike the retarded and not entirely unrelated bailout proposed in the US, which would only have served to ensure President Obama would start up to his eyes in debt, rather than merely up to his chin.

³ The Flemish Minister-President is also a Christian democrat (indeed, it was Leterme himself until last year), so you might be inclined to think that at least they can run regional budgets, if not federal ones. The Flemish budget was drawn up by the Flemish Minister of Finances and Budget, though, who is a liberal.

⁴ To their credit, I don’t think getting rid of gay marriage is actually part of the CD&V platform. They did block further liberalisation of our euthanasia laws, though, which made them look like asses when Hugo Claus died earlier this year.
Abortion has been a non-issue in the Belgian political discourse for the past few decades, even though those laws could do with some serious review too. Much of the point is moot, though, because we actually have real sex ed, even in the Catholic schools.

Alternative title: democracy is wasted on the ignorant.

Today I learned that if you don’t really like a candidate, you have no choice but to endorse his opponent, even if his political views are diametrically opposed to yours. Even if he’s a hypocritical bigot with anger management issues. Even if he would take away the rights your ancestors fought and died for. Even if he would kill your family and friends given half a chance. Even if he would invade Poland.
If you don’t really like the other guy (regardless, of course, of that guy’s political positions), you have to endorse him.

I also learned that the US is the most powerful and influential country in the world, whose policies, both foreign and domestic, impact the lives of billions of people, but its presidential elections don’t concern people who don’t live within its borders.
If you’re wondering why even many people who haven’t spent most of their life living under the rule of tyrants instated by the US or being terrorised by American or American-funded occupiers don’t much like the US, I think you might find one or two hints here.

(Speaking of which, I paid our hosting bill today, which, because our server is in Michigan, was in dollars. After conversion, it came to 75 €. Last year, it was 88 €. While that’s a nice side-effect of the comical incompetence of the self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” when it comes to running an economy, US recessions tend to cross the ocean as well, which isn’t good for my investments.
While the US is working very hard to dismantle its influence on the global stage, everything that goes on there still quite directly affects me, and given the circumstances much of it affects me more directly than it does many American citizens. So quit telling me US politics are none of my business just because you don’t know enough about them to defend your own ill-considered positions, hypothetical Republican/Libertarian reader.)

There’s this sentiment, primarily in the US, that civilians owning guns is a good thing because it keeps their government afraid of them. This is mostly repeated by the idiots at the NRA, but also by people who are supposed to know better (such as Penn and Teller in their Bullshit! episode on gun control), so it bears addressing.

There are two things fundamentally retarded about the statement. The first is that the government should be afraid of the populace.
This meme is surprisingly popular in the US, but almost unheard of outside it, at least in the Western world, and with good reason. The idea that the government is the enemy in a democratic society is mind-boggling. Protip: the government isn’t the enemy of the people. It is the people.

Unfortunately, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the US, which, of course, has only helped the popularity of the meme.
I don’t think it’s a reversible trend for as long as a significant portion of the voting population keeps believing it can’t be any other way, though. The American populace doesn’t seem to have a clue what a democratic society is anymore (if they ever did), and wide-spread apathy creates fun vicious cycles.

Anyway. The second flawed assumption here is that an armed populace scares the government.
This is just a schoolboy fantasy that sadly carried over into adulthood, and its considerably more harmful than you might think.

What are you going to do when the police knock on your door, with or without a warrant? Refuse them entry? They’ll break down your door, regardless of whether you’re armed. Are you going to open fire? That’s a great way to get yourself (and your family) killed rather than detained for a bit. Yeah, you may take one or two of them down with you. I’m sure the families of the victims will appreciate that as well. At “best”, this mentality leads to situations like Waco.

Or maybe you’d like to organise an armed revolution? Get a few of your buddies together and burn down city hall? Depending on the city and the number of buddies you can gather, you may succeed, until they call in the military.
Most people seem to forget half the global military expenditure is the US’s, and despite efforts to cripple science on all fronts, they still have the most advanced army on the planet. Iraq may tie up a lot of resources, but you can be pretty sure they’ll be able to scrounge up enough firepower to take out your little insurgency.

Or maybe you think a nation-wide revolution is on the table? Surely even the US military wouldn’t be able to counter that!
If you really think you can organise that many people, why not just vote? The US is still nominally a democracy, despite your best efforts, and while vote fraud can fudge the numbers a bit (and has in the past), you don’t just disappear the opinion of, say, two hundred million people.

But no, what this basically boils down to is puerile schoolboy fancy. Surprisingly, though, owning big guns does not give you a bigger penis, it just advertises your insecurity to the rest of the world.
If there are good arguments against gun control (and I haven’t seen any yet, except possibly to defend against a zombie plague, and everyone knows only shotguns work for that), this is very much not one of them. Grow the fuck up.

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled defendants cannot be forced to reveal their PGP passphrase:

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

In this regard, the US is more sane than the UK.
This is good news, but not primarily from a constitutional angle.

The main problem with forcing people to turn over their encryption keys (any encryption keys, not just PGP passphrases) is that good encryption produces essentially random data, but on any computer, the empty space on the HD (for example) is going to contain pretty much random data as well (as deleting a file doesn’t actually zero out the bits, generally (ignoring tools like shred and the safe deletion option on Macs), but just flags the area it was stored in as being empty space), so the only thing a prosecutor would have to do if withholding encryption keys were against the law would be to claim (part of) the empty space is actually an encrypted file, cleverly hidden (which a lot of software is capable of doing). There would be no way of disproving it.
I use the empty space example, but of course this applies to steganography of any kind. If you look hard enough, you can find random data “hidden” anywhere, and that’s all you need to claim someone is hiding encryption keys and thus breaking the law. The UK’s RIPA can make criminals out of anyone.

Of course, what with the presumption of innocence it might take a mildly corrupt (or ignorant) judiciary to allow it, but let’s face it, those aren’t in short supply.

If this decision holds in appeal, this could be a very important precedent.

(Of course, since this involves an alleged pedophile, many people are getting entirely the wrong message out of this decision, and a lot of the knee-jerk retards are actually rooting for it to be overturned. Let’s hope the judge isn’t swayed by the public opinion, because the public is comprised of ignorant morons.)

I didn’t get anything. ;____;
I did, however, skip class to help my mom set up the Christmas tree. It’s made of blinky lights and tastelessness.

And then it turned out classes were cancelled anyway because of some student demonstration (well, not officially cancelled, but the “we won’t punish you if you don’t show up” type of cancelled, which is the same thing in a hogeschool) against some proposed law that would fund higher education based on the number of credits students acquire each year.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is a fucking retarded idea, but apparently only 800 1,500 students (from all over Flanders) showed up to protest. I’m guessing the weather had something to do with that. And maybe the fact that although it was announced well in advance and there were posters all over our building, nobody actually knew what they were supposed to be protesting.

And of course, since the twit proposing it (Frank Vandenbroucke) is a member of the SP.a (the Flemish socialist party, which I voted for), the socialist education union didn’t support the manifestation, because obviously party loyalty comes before common sense, and even fucking party principles.
Neither did the KUL student council, by the way, though the KHL student council, which is technically subservient to said council, did. Of course, the problem with the KHL is that very few people there care about politics, what with the brain damage and everything.

Anyway, it’s just a proposal at this point. With luck it’ll get shot down in January.

(Side note: annual government funding for the entire Flemish higher education system is about a thirtieth of the endowment of Harvard University alone, even with the 10% increase in funding over the past decade or so.)

Edit: Okay, the Standaard said 800 students, VRT Nieuws said 1,500. I’m more inclined to trust the VRT.
1,500 still isn’t an enormous number, given the fact that there are nearly a hundred thousand students in just the five Flemish universities, and presumably considerably more than that in the hogescholen, but it’s better, at least.

Apparently WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.
I don’t understand why people are still seriously considering Turkey’s accession to the EU, considering that they keep doing shit like this. Most famously, they also blocked YouTube last March after someone posted a video claiming Atatürk was homosexual (which is probably the most ironic way they could have dealt with that), though that only lasted two days.

Turkey’s Great Firewall isn’t nearly as extensive as China’s, obviously, nor is it as hard to circumvent.
It just works on DNS level, so if you can specify different DNS servers than Turkey’s national ones, or you can access a website through its IP (which it probably isn’t, in WordPress.com’s case; subdomains can be odd), it’s trivial to get around the block.
If you can’t do that, you can just use Google as a proxy, or any of the countless proxy providers out there. Or you could use Tor or similar networks, which more people need to familiarise themselves with.

Still, since all of these things are likely to be beyond the average user still, and considering the influence of blogs and the influence of the blogosphere in keeping tabs on governments in general, this is a significant blow to freedom of speech (which, of course, is a basic human right, and the most important indicator of a free society) in Turkey.
Fewer people use WordPress.com than YouTube (I’m pretty sure), but the protest will probably be significant enough to repeal this block relatively quickly. Still, the fact that the Turkish government thinks they can get away with this (and without explanation) is a very bad sign.

This isn’t the first time some public figures have made controversial edits to Wikipedia—Diebold, Walmart, and Congressional gimps have all done it before—and I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that the news network with the biggest problem with reality has taken a page out of Colbert’s book. Still, the extent and blatantness (and especially the pettiness) of it are surprising, even by Fox’s standards.
Geeks are Sexy has the details.

Yes, much of that (all, maybe) is probably just individual Kool-Aid drinkers who happen to be using Fox’s connection rather than a deliberate attempt by the network to smear people who keep shattering their illusions (after all, that would be the type of employee they’d attract), but it’s still pretty funny.
Keep fighting the good fight, dickweeds.

American Red Cross sued over its emblem by Johnson & Johnson

After more than a century of sharing the same emblem, a red cross on a white field, Johnson & Johnson has sued the American Red Cross for using its trademark for other than non-profit purposes.

J&J claims the ARC is marketing first-aid kits to make a profit, while the Red Cross says the money from the sale of the kits goes exclusively to its relief services and called the pharmaceutical giant’s lawsuit “obscene.”

And ARC is right.

J&J registered “their” logo as a trademark in 1905, and claim to have been using it since 1887. The Red Cross has been using it since 1864, and the Geneva Conventions stipulate that it’s the only organisation that can use it.
When the US ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1882, it took a while to enable the necessary legislation (no surprise there), and by the time they did, lobbying by J&J ensured that they got to use the logo themselves, in violation of said Conventions.

So for over a century, J&J has been using this logo (illegally, though obviously not in the American sense of the word) for commercial purposes, while the American Red Cross has been using it for non-profit purposes.
Now they think the fact that the ARC is selling things to fund their (still non-profit) projects infringes on “their” trademark, and they’re demanding punitive damages (and legal fees).

Seriously.
The only way they could be more evil is if they actually shot puppies for profit.

You may or may not be aware that a while ago, bookseller Borders in the UK moved all copies of the comic book Tintin in the Congo to its adult section, and added stickers warning of shocking content, because it was considered racist. Since Tintin is Belgian, this made the news here at the time.

If you aren’t familiar with the album, in it, Tintin visits Congo, which was a Belgian colony at the time (1931). The actual storyline isn’t very interesting, but he interacts with the natives on several occasions, and yes, by today’s standards it’s quite racist.

And now, it’s in the news again.

Parket opent onderzoek naar racisme in ‘Kuifje in Afrika’

Bij het Brusselse parket is een vooronderzoek geopend naar de strip ‘Kuifje in Afrika’ van Hergé nadat een Congolese student een klacht had ingediend omdat hij het album “een belediging voor alle Congolezen” vindt.

A Congolese student filed a complaint because he thinks the album is “an insult to all Congolese”.
In particular, he objects to the stereotypical way the Congolese are drawn and speak, and the way Snowy talks to them.

This is a comic book written in 1931. Hergé was aware it was racist, but he was trying to capture the Zeitgeist of the time. He was quite explicit about this.
Nevertheless, he still toned it down when it was redrawn in 1946, and he even removed references to Congo being a Belgian colony, even though they wouldn’t become independent for another decade and a half. Newer editions are toned down even further.

Hergé has been dead for twenty-four years. The album is seventy-six years old, and somehow it went without lawsuit for all that time.
It’s a work of art, very obviously not intended to target blacks. It reflects the spirit of the time, and is emphatically not covered by hate speech or discrimination laws.

This guy is complaining about a cartoon dog thinking rudely in the general direction of cartoon black people.

It’s just a retarded attempt to get national attention, and apparently it worked.
If there was any sort of black/white racial tension in Belgium (there isn’t, really; Flanders can be retardedly racist, but really only towards brown people), this would be exactly the sort of thing to make it worse.

Congratulations, Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu. You’ve successfully wasted the court’s time, and fed the stereotype of blacks being hypersensitive to racism.
Oh, and you got to appear on national TV. Go you.

So apparently my blog was crashing IE consistently (as opposed to randomly, which it manages all by itself). I couldn’t actually be bothered to figure out why, and embedded YouTube videos were blamed.
When I looked at today’s announcement to see what the transparent PNG looks like in IE, though, it still crashed, so clearly it was something in the sidebar.
Apparently it was that sidebar election poll.

It’s been up for about a month now, so I doubt it’s going to change much in the near future, except for maybe a few more random trolls voting for Republicans, so I took it down. Result are →

As expected, most people voted for Gore. The Ron Paul voters are the ‘tards trolling Technorati for Ron Paul posts, who dropped by a while ago. Not sure who voted for Thompson. Probably random Karel Dillen masturbators.

Anywae.

A poll by Het Laatste Nieuws found that if elections were held today, Yves Leterme would receive a hundred thousand fewer votes than he did in the June elections. Considering that he had 796,521 of them (not counting the votes to his party; voters can vote either for a party or for individuals within a party, here), I’d say that’s pretty significant.

(Incidentally, 796,521 was almost a record high. I think only one person in the history of Belgia got more individual votes than that. If it seems low to you, keep in mind that since he’s a Flemish politician running for a Flemish party, only voters in Flanders can vote for him (about six million people live in Flanders, though I’m not sure how many of those are over 18), and most people tend to vote for parties, not individuals.)

The main reason, apparently, is that the formation of the new government still isn’t over yet. He also essentially just sent away Jean-Luc Dehaene, one of our former (and still quite popular) Prime Ministers, who was appointed by the King to make sure things proceeded smoothly (presumably because he managed to resolve the apparently irresolvable political crisis in 1987 as an informateur, in much the same circumstances (“Sire, geef me honderd dagen”; it ended up taking 106, but it was still regarded as miraculous)).
Much of the reason things are moving so slowly is the fact that half of the people in these negotations (well, a little under) are, obviously, Walloon, and Leterme is at this point notorious for his contempt for Wallonia. Apparently this contempt wasn’t a real factor in losing him those votes, though.

Either way, if Leterme does end up Prime Minister (which is pretty much inevitable, though the way he’s been going, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he was asked to leave), I’d bet he’ll only serve one term. People tend to have a short memory for things that happen during a term, but they tend to remember what happened at the start and at the end.

MySpace bars 29,000 sex offenders

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace – up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

I’ve complained about this before—”sex offender” is far too broad a term, Megan’s Law is a miscarriage of justice, if these people are online they’ve already done their time (though double jeopardy doesn’t apply in this case, obviously), it’s not Myspace’s place to be a parent to your children, &c. &c.

“The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace – 29,000 and counting – screams for action,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

In North Carolina, Attorney General Roy Cooper wants a state law that would require children to obtain parental permission before creating profiles on sites such as MySpace, and require the site to check parents’ identity.

Attorneys General Blumenthal and Cooper are fucking idiots, either out to get some easy votes or insane paranoiacs ignorant of their own laws.

That is all.

Edit: Alright, not quite all. There’s also this post by Stephanie Booth, which for the most part articulates my thoughts a bit more coherently. Go read it.

This dude is supposed to be our next Prime Minister, y’know.
I can kind of understand not knowing why the Nationale Feestdag is when it is (and not just because Verhofstadt didn’t know either), but confusing the Brabançonne with the Marseillaise?

(Via Kosmopolit.)

For some unfathomable reason, Hillary Clinton is still leading in the polls, and it’s looking increasingly likely that she’ll be the next president of the US. Whether the Bush → Clinton → Bush → Clinton pattern is neat or profoundly disturbing is open to debate, but what worries me more is that Democratic voters would actually vote for Clinton.

Clinton has the right idea about some issues. She’s right about fiscal policy (she opposes government debt and opposed Bush’s tax cuts). She’s right about energy policy, as far as I can tell. She right about the free market, which is a rare thing indeed in Ameriko (she’s opposed to an unfettered free market, and supports fair trade agreements). She’s right about the importance of the UN, human rights (and it’s sad this has to be explicitly stated), gun control (though obviously she doesn’t go far enough for my tastes), abortion (if you look past the “I’m personally opposed to it” pandering), stem cell research, and net neutrality.

However, she’s wrong on so many more issues, many of which are considerably more important.
She’s wrong about healthcare (she thinks she’s trying to help, but privatisation will destroy it). She’s wrong about immigration (though beyond “border security” (that is, building that goddamn wall, which she supports), her voting record isn’t actually that bad, I’ll grant). She’s profoundly wrong about Israel. She’s wrong (so very, very wrong) about flag burning. She’s wrong about crime (she’s in favor of the three strikes law, and is generally in favor of tougher punishments, which is so wrong-headed it’s not even funny). She’s wrong about the death penalty. She’s wrong about No Child Left Behind.

She’s wrong about violent video games, which I wouldn’t consider that big a deal if not for this incident involving GTA:SA (remember the Hot Coffee bullshit?): she warned Rockstar that if they didn’t change the game’s rating from M (17+) to AO (18+, because apparently that’s not an empty gesture since people go through a magical transformation when they turn 18, making them a whole different person from when they were 17), she would introduce federal legislation to regulate the sexual content of video games.
Rockstar changed it, and five months later, she introduced the legislation anyway.

She’s wrong about Iraq, obviously. She voted in favor of the war, and still refuses to admit that was a mistake. Considering her warmongering hawkishness, I don’t trust her not to piss off Iran.
And naturally, she’s wrong about “homeland security”. She voted for the Patriot Act, but so did everyone else (except Feingold, yes), so I’ll forgive her for that. She supported the filibuster against renewing it in 2005, but apparently only because New York (for which she’s the junior senator) didn’t receive enough funds.
I’m not convinced she understands the importance of not sacrificing civil liberties to gain some illusory sense of security.

And she seems to be a homophobe. She’s opposed to gay marriage (though she supports separate-but-equal “civil unions”, as if that’s not a retarded concept), she supports the (unconstitutional and Orwellianly named) Defense of Marriage Act, and she even refused to say homosexuality isn’t immoral when asked.

Now, you could say her wrongness is just a result of trying to pander to literally everyone at once (and it is; she’s even more blatant than McCain), and doesn’t necessarily reflect anything about how she’ll behave once she’s in office, but are you willing to take that chance?

My main concern, though, is that she’ll pull the Democratic Party even further to the right, thereby destroying any chance the US has of sensible government for decades to come. Bush and the neo-cons did it for the Republican Party (though the religious right, of course, already beat them to it; they just made it even worse), and the anti-Bush backswing isn’t undoing it.
From that perspective, it almost might be better if a Republican won the election, though not really. The most immediate problems are global warming and the threat to global stability posed by the Middle East, and a Republican can only aggravate both.

I seriously think that if Gore doesn’t run (he’s the only one with enough support to beat out Clinton, at this point), we’re all screwed.

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Fuck it, way too verbose.
Boils down to this: the Secretary of the Treasury can now, without prior notice, freeze the assets (all of them) of anyone suspected of wanting to undermine Iraq’s “reconstruction”, or of anyone who has or is suspected of having any dealings with such a person, regardless of whether or not this person is a US citizen, as long as these assets are within reach of the US.

Just for the record, here’s the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Between this and the suspension of habeas corpus (still in effect), the only real part of that that apparently still applies is the double jeopardy one, and that’s essentially moot now anyway.

Of course, we can trust it’ll only be used against “terrorists”, right?
Note how the justification is some nebulous “national emergency”, yet again.

Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

–Hermann Göring

Met given real time c-charge data

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras – allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blamed the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” for the change.

(…)

But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.

(For the non-British, “Met” is the Metropolitan Police Force, which is responsible for Greater London. Because apparently London is a separate country now.)

To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised they hadn’t been doing this, and that it took six years for them to actually have the gall to.

Yes, if there were a legitimate terrorist threat, this would be understandable, and perhaps even defensible, but remember, the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” consists of a single amateurish case involving two car bombs, neither of which would have been detected using these cameras.
Islamic terrorism over the past six years has had far less impact than the IRA in the ’80s and ’90s, and they apparently never merited this sort of bullshit.

But the worst part of this: why, pray tell, is “national security” suddenly an acceptable excuse when “ordinary” crime isn’t? They know damn well the people wouldn’t put up with using these cameras for regular crime-fighting (well, considering that this is London, they probably would; I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years, they expanded their power to also allow for regular crime-fighting, and the people of London wouldn’t even notice), so why the fuck are we (well, they) supposed to put up with this for “national security”, a term so vague it might as well mean nothing at all?

Anyway. This acknowledgement probably means it’s been going on for years by now, and it’s a good example of how you will lose your rights if you don’t care about them.
I’m not sure if apathy or fear is the greater driving force behind the Londoners not doing something about this, but in the end, it amounts to the same thing.