The Republican Party, the party that used to want to "get government off our backs" has led America to becoming one of the most intrusive governments in the world. We now rank right down with China and Russia as leading the world for surveillance of civilians, according to Privacy International. I should note that the study does not cover every nation, merely the EU and 20 non-EU nations including America.

Privacy International, based in London, was formed in 1990 by more than 100 human rights organizations to defend personal privacy. Here's what they have to say for themselves:

A "crowdsource" request is more than a request for help. I am asking all of you who read this blog to put in a little bit of your knowledge of this situation in the comments as part of my research for this story.

What I need from all of you is to give me whatever information you have about the Taxi Alliance strike that is going on right now and that will continue until Friday morning (that's when the scheduled 48 hours of the strike will end).

I could actually write off-the-bat a littany of reasons why the GPS system that is being rammed down the throats of taxi drivers is a really bad idea --not just from an ethical standpoint but also from a legal one; especially if we are talking about how this would impact not just the civil rights of drivers but of passengers as well.

But the one sticking poing in this situation is the division between the two unions. On one end is the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, led by a woman called Bharavi Desai. On the other end is the opposing union, New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, led by a Fernando Mateo.

I have spoken to Ms. Desai and have gotten background on their grievances. I have tried contacting Mr. Mateo to no avail.

This is what I am missing in this story :

Seriously. I know that being a Republican and all, you are predisposed to both extra-legal surveillance and lying about said activities, but please, for the love of Fiorello LaGuardia, please stop bullshitting me. It's unseemly and it makes you look like an even bigger ass. Today I read in the New York Times that you had to unleash the NYPD on all those "potential terrorist" and "anarchist" groups that may have been "planning to cause or take advantage of any disruptions", but that "We were not keeping track of political activities" and "We have no interest in doing that.”

Bullshit. You know it and so do I.

“We had a fundamental responsibility to learn whether groups might include any potential terrorists or anarchists planning to cause or take advantage of any disruptions,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters at a news conference. Toward that end, he said, the Police Department monitored those who said they intended vandalism or disruptions and, he added, “in a few instances, we did keep track of groups or individuals who did plan to come to New York for the R.N.C. convention and who might have been planning violent acts.”

From the New York Times:

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

Yeah, well; the City could have considered that before spying on a Martin Luther King Rally endorsed by sitting members of the City Council. One would think this would have been obvious at the time.

It gets better.

I have been for impeachment ever since it became clear to me that we were being "led" by a "president" who was corrupt, a criminal, lying to get us into wars, violating the Constitution, etc. But for various reasons I wasn't relly anxious to see impeachment attempted. It seemed too hard to make the case, too divisive when I wanted to see Democrats seen as the reasonable, uniting force in America, and I wanted to see Democrats get some things accomplished rather than be seen as obstructionist.

Several things have largely changed my mind. What crystalized it was meeting former Congresswoman from Brooklyn, Liz Holtzman, at the Independent Neighborhood Democrats meeting this last week in Brooklyn. You see, Liz Holtzman was a member of the House of Representatives in the early '70's and was one of the people who constructed the Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon. She has written a book on the topic called "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" and her top arguement for impeachment is based on an exact precedent from 1974. In other words, Bush has committed one act for which there already is an article of impeachment constructed, written and voted on in Congress. All that needs to be done is for the current Congress to apply the 1974 precedent to our current President.

I am not really a conspiracy theorist. I really think most of the time people are too lazy and gossip too much to carry out a really complicated conspiracy. I am pretty inclined to believe the easiest, least convoluted explanations of things. Still, sometimes there are things that should make us suspicious.

BBC's Newsnight is running a Shane O'Sullivan broadcast that claims to show the presence of known CIA agents at the scene of the RFK assassination in Los Angeles at a time when the CIA had no domestic jurisdiction. The story, adding some circumstantial evidence, claims this shows a CIA link to the assassination. I am not so quick to jump to that conclusion. But it does raise an eyebrow:

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O'Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles...

Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.

David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends:

"I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."

Aside from the thigh-slapping hilarity entailed in the Jeanine Pirro wiretap story, there are some practical and policy implications to consider as you write your condolence card to her dead campaign.

If you're looking for the theme in Eliot Spitzer's tenure in office, the underlying reason for his vast popularity, it's this: the New York State Attorney General stepped into the void created when the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District did not exercise any serious oversight of Wall Street. It's not normally the job of the Attorney General to prosecute malfeasance on The Street - but it had to be done, because the federal level just wasn't exercising its mandate. Considering the institutional power of the U.S. Attorney, it's stunning how little that office has done in the Bush era, marked as it is by egregious governmental and corporate abuses of power.

I'd think that the next AG will have a similar role to fill, because the Bush administration will still be in place for another two years (thanks again, Diebold and Nader). Both Pirro's proximity to Bush - see above - and her willingness to engage in reckless surveillance suggest that she would not be all that interested in, say, using state-level legal tools to address the wire-tapping scandal; for example, Sean Patrick Maloney campaigned on filing a lawsuit against the Bush administration over this very issue.

According to this morning's New York Times, the puppet government of Iraq plans to seal off Baghdad, a city of seven million people, frpm the rest of the country with a sixty mile trench.

The effort is one of the most ambitious security projects this year, with cars expected to be funneled through 28 checkpoints along the main arteries snaking out from the capital. Smaller roads would be closed. The trenches would run across farmland or other open areas to prevent cars from evading checkpoints, said the ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

“We’re going to build a trench around Baghdad so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up.”

So it appears that when freedom is on the march, it'll need to use a checkpoint. No word yet on whether Dick Cheney expects people to throw flowers at any point of the barricade. Oh, and are we winning yet?

The New York Times reports that the Bush CIA has closed the Clinton-era CIA unit dedicated to hunting down Osama bin Laden.

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when [Mr.] Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

Snip.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military's counterterrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

What was that about cutting and running? And do you feel safer yet?

(Image: Here is New York)

Tom DeLay called it quits today. Most infuriatingly for the ethically diseased former Congressman, nobody cared.

Image: John Aravosis at AmericaBlog; pictured is the sunrise at YearlyKos in Vegas, baby. Yes, Heavyhanded-Symbolism-R-Us.