Akkam’s Razor

• Black September | The Big Picture - September 2008 marked the beginning…
• Robert Reich’s Blog: And Now Deflation - The good news is that all this price cutting is helping average people at a time when wages and benefits, and jobs, are also being cut. The bad news is it's also cutting deep into producer profits, causing them to cut even more jobs and wages. The big danger is it may cause some consumers to delay purchases, thinking they can get a better deal when prices drop further. That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If more and more consumers take this view, sellers will have to reduce prices further to get them to buy now. That may sound good until you realize it means more layoffs, and more cuts in wages and benefits.

This should elate approximately 30% of you and disgust the balance.

A newly formed Pro-War astroturf - think false, ideological grassroots organization - group, Freedom Watch (YouTube) has some local connections, as described at Fables of the Reconstruction.  Most prominently, sports fans, is CEO of Comcast-Spectacor Ed Snider (wiki) Comcast-Spectacorp is a partnership with the Comcast Corporation, which manages the sports arenas, the ComcastSportsnet, the 76ers, the Philadelphia Flyers, and some other related ventures.

Via Politico:

A new group, Freedom’s Watch, is launching Wednesday with a $15 million, five-week campaign of TV, radio and Web ads featuring military veterans that is aimed at retaining support in Congress for President Bush’s “surge” policy on Iraq. 

The Orwellian-named Freedom Watch, helmed by Plamegate-accomplice Ari Fleischer has an interesting cast of characters.

Again, from FotR: 

The board consists of Blakeman; [Ari] Fleischer; Mel Sembler, a Florida Republican who was Bush’s ambassador to Italy; William P. Weidner, president and chief operating officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp.; and Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The donors include Sembler; Anthony Gioia, a Buffalo businessman who was Bush’s ambassador to Malta; Kevin Moley, who was Bush’s ambassador to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva; Howard Leach, a former Republican National Committee finance chairman who was Bush’s ambassador to France; Dr. John Templeton of Pennsylvania, chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation; Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast Spectacor, the huge Philadelphia sports and entertainment firm; Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. and ranked by Forbes magazine as the third-wealthiest American; and Richard Fox, who is chairman of the Jewish Policy Center and was Pennsylvania State Chairman of the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980.

 [...]

Richard Fox is local. Comcast, as the article says, is right here in Center City Philly. So Philly is subsidizing pro-war propaganda. Wonderful. The Templeton Foundation is located in a Philadelphia suburb, and has a right-wing track record.

The TV-buys are interesting in that they attack both Democrats and any moderate Republicans who have been less than 100% loyal to the President, and seem to imply that the participation in our Democracy is tantamount to treason and "stabbing the troops in the back". 

The ads are an attempt to grab the security-moms and armchair generals by having Laura and Vicky relate the sacrifices of their sons, Travis and Jesse, as well as linking retreat from Iraq with retreat from Vietnam, and further attempting to confuse Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda with the insurgents in Iraq.  As September draws nearer, expect more political attacks designed to attack any criticism of the effectiveness of "the surge".

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, who took the 6-month extension of the Patriot Act authored by the House of Representatives and whittled it down to 1-month, as reported on CNN. 

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, trimmed the extension to one month Thursday and criticized the Senate for trying to "duck the issue until the last week in June."

"They came pretty close to wrecking everybody’s Christmas. I didn’t want to put the entire Congress in the position of them wrecking everybody’s Independence Day," Sensenbrenner said.

…to the Honorable Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter.  More over at PhillyFuture:

I ask you to reflect on your legacy, and to act as other patriots did in Philadelphia so many years ago, here in Philadelphia. Despite grave risks to their person and reputation, they stood up to a tyrant named George, and vowed that certain rights were inalienable, and offenses against those rights were grave enough to warrant extreme measures.

Probably not as much as you thought.  Take the quiz.

There’s a lot of salacious and prurient issues that get brought up regarding the red light district in Hamilton Village on UPENN’s campus, as well as some really relevant discussion on privacy and the nature of sexual harassment.  For the naughty parts, I suppose it’s really gratifying and amusing, until you realize that the “performers” are someone’s children, as is the photographer, and that more than a couple of lives are going to be changed forever if not ruined.

It’s also difficult to decipher who bears the blame for behavior such as this.  One thing is absolutely certain – none of this would have happened if the blinds were shut.

The Department of Justice has remained suspiciously quiet about the Sony rootkit scandal, which may have broken several cybersecurity laws. Instead they are pushing The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005, a pro-media industry law that will provide harsher criminal penalties for consumers who make copies of music and movies.

Yet again, this is the reason why SOMEONE like EFF should have a PAC specifically for these reasons … to advance policy that is supported by those on the web and not corporations.

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Uh Oh, looks like Pennsylvania’s Press Shield Laws don’t include new (citizen) media…

Pennsylvania

Enacted 1937. Amended 1959 and 1968.

Pennsylvania Consolidated Statues Annotated: 42 Pa. C.S.A. ? 5942(a)

Pennsylvania Constitution: Article I, ? 7

Definitions: "person engaged on, connected with, or employed by any newspaper of general circulation or any press association or any radio or television station, or any magazine of general circulation, for the purpose of gathering, procuring, compiling, editing or publishing news," [Statutes]