Bush Calls Wiretapping a Vital Part of War on Terror; Bush Says Domestic Eavesdropping Program Is Legal and Necessary
 
This, folks, is why the American Civil Liberties Union is neither obsolete nor misguided.
 
Thankfully, they’re on the case, having recently slapped the NSA with a lawsuit challenging their oh-so-retro Tom Peepery (I can just hear GW now - “Oh, Wiretappy, I wish I could quit you!”). Their message: a very radical “No President is above the law” (imagine that !). 
 
So far, they’ve ran a series of four ads; the most recent appeared in The Washington Post  last week:
 
 

 
 
Normally, I don’t think too highly of individuals and organizations that appropriate a cultural icon in order to pimp him or her out for their own cause, but this particular comparison seems, well, appropriate. I was born in ‘78, but suddenly it feels as though I’m living in the ’60s. And don’t think I’m not in someone’s  terrorist watch database - after all, I’m on Bite Back’s mailing list!
 
Christopher Hitchens, who - along with the ACLU - I totally ♥, also signed on to the lawsuit. Lest anyone brand him a dirty right-winger (blasphemy, I say, blasphemy!), here’s an excerpt from his ACLU statement:
 

We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of "national security" however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.
 
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration’s own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
 
I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.
 
The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies.

 
Hardly seems like one of GW’s lapdogs to me (hmph! ).
 
Anyway, to add your own voice, click on over to the ACLU’s action center, where you’ll find a handy sample letter that you can personalize and send to your Senators. 
 
And here’s hoping that tomorrow’s (err, today’s) Senate Judiciary vote goes better - much  better - than the hearings.
 

Shannon Castillo was expecting to get a Hummer from Dirty Sanchez. When that didn’t happen, the California woman filed a lawsuit.

Yes, in a timely follow-up to my earlier post, today’s The Smoking Gun newsletter detailed the story of Shannon Castillo, a Bakersfield crybaby who sued a local radio station after she won an Hummer H2, valued at $60,000. Or so she ASSumed. Apparently oblivious to the contest’s suspicious timing - April 1st - Castillo was infuriated when she showed up to claim the prize and was instead presented with a remote-controlled replica of an H2. Rather than laughing the incident off, she saw fit to waste the court’s time with a lawsuit. Crybaby. I mean, really, if you trust a guy named Dirty Sanchez, don’t be surprised if you end up with a spot o’ shit on your face.

Included in The Smoking Gun’s write-up was a link to - whadya know - a second fool-me-once-and-I’m-gonna-sue story, this time involving a 100 Grand contest! This seems to be a fairly popular prank…probably because it’s so damned funny.

TSG gives us all the dream-crushing details:

Radio Candy Stunt Not So Sweet

Woman sues when “100 Grand” prize turns out to be chocolate bar

JUNE 23–A Kentucky woman who thought she won $100,000 in a radio station giveaway is suing for breach of contract after learning that her prize was actually a Nestle’s 100 Grand candy bar. According to the below June 22 Circuit Court complaint, Norreasha Gill, 28, claims that she was listening to Lexington’s WLTO-FM on the evening of May 25 when host DJ Slick announced that he would award “100 Grand” to the tenth caller. When Gill, the pregnant mother of three children, was that tenth caller, the radio host told her she could pick up her prize the following day at WLTO’s studio. She subsequently learned that the contest was a “joke,” according to her lawsuit, which names the radio station’s parent company, Cumulus Media, as a defendant. Gill’s lawsuit seeks the $100,000 prize and additional punitive damages.

The Associated Press offers more juicy morsels:

Norreasha Gill says she listened for several hours, called at the right time and won the contest.

She went to the station the next morning to pick up her prize and was told to come back later. When she got home, she says, she found that the station manager had left a message telling her she’d won a Nestle’s “100 Grand” candy bar not money.

Later, she says, he offered five-thousand dollars but Gill says she wants the rest.

Gill tells the Lexington Herald-Leader that when she first found out she’d won the contest, she promised her kids they’d get a minivan, a shopping spree, and a home with a back yard.

Fucking irresponsible crybaby.

Norreasha, instead of further gumming up our legal system with bullshit lawsuits, perhaps your time would be best spent learning how to use birth control. If you need to depend on a radio contest to provide for your children, then you’ve got no business popping out more. You should have taken that $5,000 and run - right to the nearest community college, to enroll in night classes and better yourself for the sake of your swelling brood.

But why work for $100,000 when you have a chance at winning it in a legal lottery, eh? I mean, hey, the taxpayers are the ones picking up the tab for your lotto ticket. And crying over spilt soymilk until Uncle Sammy hands ya a glass of Chardonnay is fast becoming the American way.

By the way, excellent example to set for your toeheads. Before you know it, your 11-year-old will get in on the act too, god-less willing. When he’s fleeing from your neighbor’s house after robbing him at gunpoint and he trips on the walkway, shooting off half of his own face in the process, he’ll know just what do to - sue the bastard for negligence. Just like dear ole ma.

- K

Woman sues Stephen King over Misery character

Yup, you read that right.

Now, you’re probably thinking what I was thinking - assuming you haven’t yet read this in your local rag, of course! Namely, that the woman’s suing King because she claims to have created the Annie Wilkes character, which King somehow managed to appropriate for use in Misery. Probably an innocent mistake; at most, King’s Wilkes is unintentionally similar to another literary character created by the as-of-yet unnamed woman. Right?

Well, not quite:

In the chilling novel-turned-movie Misery, a famous author is held hostage by a psychotic nurse.

She tortures him into writing one more book, whacking his feet with a sledgehammer when he doesn’t write it the way she wants.

In reality, a New Jersey woman claiming to be the psycho nurse wants Stephen King to stop writing about her.

Anne Hiltner, a freelance writer, says she is the inspiration for King’s sadistic nurse, Annie Wilkes.

Oh, awesome!

This was actually the first thought that popped into my head, but I quickly dismissed it - it seemed so bizarre, like something that only my cynical imagination could conjure up.

But it gets better. Way better:

Hiltner, 58, filed a $US500 million ($645 million) federal lawsuit this month against the author, his publishers and several movie studios, accusing them of violating her privacy.

The lawsuit also accuses King and his distributors of defamation, copyright infringement and violation of antitrust laws for allegedly using her private diaries to create psychic Sally Druse, a similarly frightening character in King’s TV miniseries The Journals of Eleanor Druse: The Kingdom Hospital Incident, which aired in the US last year.

In a similar 1991 suit that was ultimately dismissed, Hiltner accused King of breaking into her home numerous times and stealing several manuscripts written by her and her brother.

Sounds like she just offered up King’s next plot on a silver platter!

And finally, my favorite line in the article:

The jumbled lawsuit doesn’t detail how King allegedly pilfered the diaries or what was in them.

Hmmm, I wonder what the reporter thinks of all this?

Someone get that psychowitch a Stella Award A-SAP! Or a straitjacket. Your call.

BTW, I’m a huge Stephen King fan, but I’d have a lot more sympathy for the man if not for the recent Entertainment Weekly article in which he defends the “Teflon Molester” - errr, Michael Jackson.

King opines:

This came down to a prosecutor either so sure Jackson was bad or so offended by Jackson’s combination of celebrity and wackiness that he rushed into a case that looked shaky from hello. It looked worse as Tom Sneddon went along, and had become nearly ludicrous by the time Jackson’s ex-wife left the stand. No matter how pure Sneddon’s motives may have been (and I’m not saying they were, believe me), he began to look like a man pursuing a vendetta, one whose chief hope of securing a conviction lay in the obvious fact that the trial was a sideshow and the accused was . . . well, a freak.

Ahhh, yes, yes…Poor Michael, everyone’s out to get him, trying to keep the black man down. Uh, wait…

The media first turned the trial into a freak-show by emphasizing Jackson’s peculiarities rather than his humanity…

Humanity? How’s that? Because he let his prepubescent charges play with his pet chimp before he fondled them?

Ah, but it doesn’t matter now. The Pale Peculiarity has floated out of the courthouse to his black SUV for the last time.

Well, we can only hope so. Ol’ Wacko has promised not to share his bed with boys anymore, but please. As Stephen Colbert pointed out, SoCal is a criminal’s dream; in order to be convicted of a crime, you have to murder someone in front of the jury, and maybe splatter some blood on ‘em for good measure. First O.J., then Robert Blake, now Jackson. Not guilty by reason of celebrity, indeed!

- K