Impeachment, Part Deux

Read this article on the Newsweek website.

An excerpt, which gets right down to the crux of the issue that I’ve mentioned previously:

What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow—as the president seemed to claim in his press conference—or in any way required extra-constitutional action.

And the part that gives me hope:

This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

Hell, Congressman John Conyers isn’t even waiting. Go to his website and take a look at the report he just issued, and the call for action.

This situation distills nearly everything that has been going wrong in this country since the administration took over: The paranoia, the secrecy, the slow erosion of our freedom, the arrogance of an administration who believes that they are above the law, and the complicity of the media. It’s like a Greatest Hits collection for Outrage.

Hell Week Bright Spots

This is Hell Week, for the most part. Getting Christmas shopping done…..Running around like a maniac getting the house in order, for the visit of my folks and my other two kids, and getting the rest of the December releases for Adamant released so that I can take next week off, etc.

There have been a few bright spots.

Yesterday, played hooky from work, to drive me around so that I could get my shopping done. Thanks for that!

Also yesterday, I got my new external hard drive from MacMall. (I also ordered an additional 512mb of memory, but accidentally ordered DIMM rather than SO DIMM, so it didn’t fit. Boo. But in the plus column, it was easy to get a return authorization, offered to drop it off at the Post Office for me, and the replacement memory is already on its way.) I transferred my rather copious amount of music over to the new drive, freeing up a 20 gigabyte hunk of the main drive.

I also named the new hard drive. There is an icon sitting on my desktop now, labeled “The Cortex.”

Yes, I’m a geek. Shaddap.

Now if I could only find some Firefly-themed OS X icons. (I instead used a computer-screen icon taken from a Space:1999-themed set.)

EDIT: Another bright spot: KJHK is in their Winter-break Freeform format, where fill-in DJs, not constrained by the usual show schedule, can play whatever the hell they want. GREAT stuff. (and you can listen online, at the website.)