In case the USURPER wants to know, I am fixin to plug in my phone.What
it is, one of my two sisters usually comes over here on Sunday
afternoons for a few minutes to see if I am still alive and kickin.

I am going to tell her if she comes over here tomorrow I will probally
be in my back yard workin on my old trailer.
So now, the whole World knows.

She usually brings me some frozen leftovers (food) too.
cuhulin

In case the USURPER B HO wants to know, I phoned my sister.She said
since Epworth (Church) closed, she is going to a new Church now.
www.churchangel.com

I didn't ask her which one.
cuhulin

On Jul 11, 12:24*am, Nickname unavailable wrote:
On Jul 10, 6:43*pm, 0baMa0 Tse Dung wrote:

now this is fascism:The Bush administration built an unprecedented
surveillance operation far beyond the warrantless wiretapping, they
were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including
a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment its mind boggling

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090711/...c_surveillance

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer – 2*mins*ago
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented
surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond
the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal
inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for
the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still
too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to
"unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies
under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs
pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be
"carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth
of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly
criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote
legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John
Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the
intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving
for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the
"President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to
terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the
"mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made
investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and
outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials
refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director
George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David
Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the
administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified
program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by
the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The
administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National
Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed
through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its
fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it
inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority
of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the
intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the
remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance
program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said
that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old
classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been
apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the
warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after
Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were
periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged
wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the
program has yielded.
The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers
Friday.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked
to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the
warrantless wiretapping.
Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference
to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But
Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the
government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence
activities, he denied it.
"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.
Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been
determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal
nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering
programs.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the
program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was
"extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden
said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top
officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national
security resources to counter threats.
Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in
the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report.
Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were
unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report
said.
The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the
program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by
Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice
Department withdrew the memos years ago.
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law
designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic
surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying
Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious
impediment" to recertifying the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to
comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure —
but the report said Yoo ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, which had previously overseen federal national security
surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John
Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program
around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of
the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand
congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White
House has threatened to veto it.

They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the
“red vanguard.” But Obama’s growing armies of Web commentators—
instigated, trained and financed by party organizations — have just
one mission: to safeguard the interests of the Liberal "Progressives"
by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Internet. They set out
to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing Liberal
"Progressive" views through chat rooms and Web forums, reporting
dangerous content to DNC authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as
280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious Obama’s
leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More
importantly, they offer tangible clues about Obama’s next generation
of information controls — what former President Clinton last month
called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

It was around 2006 that Obama's party leaders started getting more
creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The
problem was that Obama’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared
toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web
site or keyword could be blocked or filtered. But the Party found
itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own
messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of
commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and
influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the
one hand, and old DNC party mouthpieces on the other.

In March 2007, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide
purge by the Department of Education of college bulletin-board
systems. One of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied
itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure
of its popular Obama BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous
students to work part time as “Web commentators.” The team, which
trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively
argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university
work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders world-
wide began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors
traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors
received fifty cents for each positive post they made. The term Fifty
Cent Party was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-Obama
stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2008, as Obama urged party leaders
to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and
study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to
increase the strength of positive propaganda.” Sen. Hillary Clinton
stressed that the Party needed to “use” the Internet as well as
control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government
order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed
firms, to splash news of Obama’s Internet speech on their sites for a
week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the DNC and the
Department of Education issued a document calling for the selection of
“Progressivess of good ideological and political character, high
capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web
commentators ... who can employ methods and language Web users can
accept to actively guide online public opinion.”

By the middle of 2008, schools and party organizations across the
country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web
commentators. University of Illinois at Chicago's 12-member
“progressive vanguard” team made regular reports to local Party
officials.

Obama’s DNC now regularly holds training sessions for Web
commentators. An investigative report for an influential commercial
magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by
this writer, describes in some detail a August 2008 training session
held at the University of Illinois Administration building in Chicago,
at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion
Problems on the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web
Communications.”

In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the
Party’s daily business, the report quotes the vice president of New
York Times Online, as saying during the training session: “Numerous
secret internal reports are sent up to the DNC Party Committee through
the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action
by top leaders, two-thirds are now from Obama's Internet Office.”

The DNC’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the
recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations
imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best
example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall”—the
Internet has given ordinary Liberal "Progressives" a powerful
interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information,
and even to organize.

But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which Obama’s Web
commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held
belief among Party leaders that Obama, which is to say the DNC, is
engaged in a global war for public opinion. A book released earlier
this year that some regard as Obama's political blueprint, two
influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the
history of “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties
as the primary means of political participation,” played a major role
in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party
faces new challenges,” they wrote. “This is especially true with the
development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only
broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached
national boundaries.”

In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the
United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government
had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies” whose chief
purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never
substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of Obama’s
Internet culture, where Web spies are imagined to be facing off
against the Fifty Cent Party.

Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders
that Obama is defending itself against hostile “external forces” and
that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on
the “building of Web commentator teams” written last year, a Party
scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an
important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and
advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online
commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.”

Obama’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the
authors emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan.
Obama's Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both
counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but
there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by
authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent
Party members spreading messages on our site,” says an insider at one
Obama Web site.

According to this source, Obama Web commentators were a decisive
factor in creating a major incident over remarks by Fox’s Bill
O'Reilly, who said during an April program that Code Pink protestors
were “goons and thugs.” “Lately there have been a number of cases
where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most
obvious was over Fox’s Bill O'Reilly. All of the posts angrily
denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members,
who asked that we run them,” said the source.

“Priority” Web sites are under an order from the Information Office
requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-
trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty
Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the
DNC Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these
commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed
in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium
between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.

The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web
sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major
provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of
techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront,
including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking
through numerous user accounts.

“The goal of the DNC is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out diverse
voices on the Internet,” says Issac Szymanczyk, a Web entrepreneur and
expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of
censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to
monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in
the online space.”

Some analysts, however, say the emergence of Obama’s Web commentators
suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look
at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so
terrifying,” says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities
Service Centre for Social Studies at the University of Utah.
“Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the DNC has been in
carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the
notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that
authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to
expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a
signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.”

Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment
of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way Obama's party
leaders approach information controls. The Party is seeking new ways
to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately
about more than just the Internet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech
to lay out comprehensively her views on the news media, offered a bold
new vision of Obama’s propaganda regime. Mrs. Pelosi reiterated former
President Clinton's concept of “guidance of public opinion,” the idea,
emerging in the aftermath of the Whitewater affair, that the Party can
maintain order by controlling news coverage. But she also talked about
ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing
discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.” Speaker
Pelosi spoke of the Internet and Obama’s next generation of commercial
newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media]
in the lead,” she said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media,
Internet media and other resources.”

Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda
will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external
forces” but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media
consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it
increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion,
whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of
agendas.

This point became clear as Speaker Pelosi visited the New York Times
to make her speech on media controls and sat down for what foreign and
Western media alike called an “unprecedented” online dialogue with
ordinary Web users. The first question she answered came from a Web
user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country”: “Do you
usually browse the Internet?” he asked. “I am too busy to browse the
Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially
enjoy New York Times Online’s Strong DNC Forum, which I often visit,”
Speaker Pelosi answered.

On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web
users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate
netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before
long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They
claimed that Speaker Pelosi’s exchange was a “confirmed case” of Fifty
Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our
Country” had been selected on three previous occasions to interact
with party leaders in the same New York Times Online forum.

For many nternet users, these revelations could mean only one thing —
Obama's Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2008/07/07/1098/

dave wrote:


I'm 12 miles South of the San Andreas Fault. The part they're talking
about.





Will you still be able to see the mainland should the ....


errr...sorry...never mind...







mike

About time I take another Estrogen tablet now.One in the mornings, one
in the evenings.
cuhulin

Poetic Justice wrote:
dave wrote:
0baMa0 Tse Dung wrote:
Rumblings continue from the FCC on fairness, diversity and mandates
for broadcasters.

The airwaves belong to the people. They should serve the people, not
large corporations. Radio was better when ownership was limited to a
few stations per company.

The Constitution says FREE SPEECH, NOT *EQUAL SPEECH*

Critical thinking is essential to democracy. We need to make people
uncomfortable.

You ought to see the paper editions of the Clarion Ledger newspaper
www.clarionledger.com nowadays.Only two thin sections, and they want
seventy five cents for that!

The Sunday editions are much thicker.The Thursday editions have the food
stores ads.I quit subscribing to that newspaper many years when the
Jackson Daily News (Jackson Daily News was a good newspaper) merged with
the Clarion Ledger.Clarion Ledger is a commie Gannett rag.All Gannett
rags are commie.
cuhulin

m II wrote:
dave wrote:


I'm 12 miles South of the San Andreas Fault. The part they're talking
about.





Will you still be able to see the mainland should the ....


errr...sorry...never mind...







mike

I'm a one story wood frame stucco building on a concrete slab. Very
good performer in Seismic events. Keep some shoes by your bed. Don't
hang **** on the wall. Lock the kitchen cabinets. Etc.

"David Eduardo" wrote in message
...
The audience for classical has declined as it died; changes in school
music programs have pretty much eliminated the creation of a new
generation or two of classical listeners. Opera is simply an extension of
this... there was never an all.opera station, as opera was an occasional
feature of classical formats.

You must be talking specifically about LA. I've lived in cities (Salt Lake
for one) that had dedicated opera stations (KWHO).

You've pretty much made my point about choice.

That long list you made is all the same thing pretty much. Fudging the names
doesn't change that fact. Also, you are in a very large market. Smaller
markets (like Salt Lake and Portland, OR) used to have much wider variety of
choices than they now do. And I STILL resent your (and the *******
industry's assertion that all of us that like things like classical, MOR and
Beautiful music are all dead or not worth marketing to. I'm only 54 years
old, and have at least another 15 years of making an income (and spending
it) and at least another 20 years or more of time to listen. Boomers may be
aging, but dammit we're not DEAD.

"m II" wrote in message ...
dave wrote:


I'm 12 miles South of the San Andreas Fault. The part they're talking
about.





Will you still be able to see the mainland should the ....


errr...sorry...never mind...


I believe the S.A. fault is moving inward and northward. Much more likely
he'd be moving (very slowly) to southern Oregon..