News For A Day

A bit of a mixed bag starting with...

CONSERVATISM -- REAGAN AIDE BRUCE BARTLETT FIRED FOR CRITICIZING BUSH: "In the latest sign of the deepening split among conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush," conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett was dismissed yesterday as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a prominent conservative research group based in Dallas. Bartlett is a former White House aide under President Reagan and the first President Bush, and had been with the Center for 10 years. The dismissal came after Bartlett supplied NCPA president John C. Goodman with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, "The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." In his next column, to be published on Wednesday, "Mr. Bartlett wrote that it is dawning on many conservatives 'that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been,'" the New York Times reports.

Which Reagan legacy was that HUGE military spending and a deficit to go with it? Union Busting? Tax breaks for people and corporations that don't need them? All seem to be alive and well under Bush II's regime...


Now onto DMCA,RIAA and Music....

UNDERNEWS: WOMAN COUNTERSUES RIAA: "RYAN PAUL, ARSTECHNICA - There are two commodities that the RIAA has in great abundance: cash, and consumer resentment. Since the start of its concerted legal assault on digital media piracy, the RIAA has become a veritable pariah... Tanya Anderson, a 42 year old disabled single mother from Oregon, has filed a countersuit against the RIAA, in which she claims that the organization engaged in numerous crimes, including fraud, deceptive business practices, and racketeering. In addition, she claims that RIAA has been 'abusing the federal court judicial system for the purpose of waging a public relations and public threat campaign targeting digital file sharing activities.'

... According to Anderson, shortly after she received notice of the suit, she was contacted by the Settlement Support Center, which claimed that a company called Media Sentry illegally infiltrated her computer and found evidence of copyright infringement. Anderson, who has no interest in gangster rap, contested the accusation and even requested that the Settlement Support Center inspect her computer to verify her innocence.

Okay, but doesn't it get freaky? I mean what's a good rock'n'roll story if something doesn't get freaky?

Brace yourselves, this is where it really starts to get freaky.

There we go! Yeah!

In her countersuit, Anderson claims that the Settlement Support Center acknowledged the probability of her innocence, but informed her that should she refuse to settle, the RIAA would proceed with a suit in order to discourage others from attempting to defend themselves against unwarranted litigation.

That 'S a bit freaky but sounds more like just plain WRONG!

Lets have a look at the countersuit:

Despite knowing that infringing activity was not observed, the record companies used the threat of expensive and intrusive litigation as a tool to coerce Ms. Andersen to pay many thousands of dollars for an obligation she did not owe. The record companies pursued their collection activities and this lawsuit for the primary purpose of threatening Ms. Andersen (and many others) as part of its public relations campaign targeting electronic file sharing.



Anderson isn't the only one crying foul. Employees of Kim's Video and Music Store in New York claim that they were wrongfully arrested in June on bogus piracy charges when New York Police Department officials and RIAA representatives raided the store. Econoculture, a web site devoted to the defense of modern music culture, has a chilling article containing numerous allegations of egregiously unlawful behavior purportedly perpetrated by the RIAA and law enforcement agents.

According to the article, the police officers may have confiscated CD-R discs legally produced and burned by independent artists, simply because the discs did not look like the legitimate, recorded CDs distributed by RIAA member companies:

RIAA regional officer Kenneth Rivera, who worked as an undercover agent on the Kim's case, identified the store's mix tapes and CDs as piratical, testifying in an affidavit that they "listed unfamiliar company names, do not display the name of the owner of the copyright, have packaging inferior in quality when compared with legitimate discs," and because "many are recorded on CD-R media. Legitimate recordings released by RIAA member companies do not release their recording on CD-R format."

Okay these folks are just out of hand. I mean garage bands record on CD-r and by the way as soon as you create an original work you own the copyright to it (whether you register it or not).

And Finally the Religious Right...

CHRIS HEDGES, THEOCRACY WATCH, 2004 - Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the 'Christian fascists.' The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

This is one of the thing that bothers me most about the current regime and their friends. A few years ago people who were raving about how fascist and evil these people are sounded like nuts, now they are making sense and I am one of them! It's a bit frightening but so is what is happening to this country.