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A few months ago, I was sup­posed to get some help on my job. Specifically, some­one to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actu­ally hired to do: PHP devel­op­ment. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was sec­ond, in large part because of his mas­ters degree and (minor) expe­ri­ence with .NET. In real­ity, though, find­ing some­one to do .NET CF devel­op­ment is a total pain, let alone on a startup company’s budget.

On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emer­gency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice can­di­date called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still look­ing for developers.

I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main stick­ing point for him the first time around). He was sup­posed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those con­ver­sa­tions and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a def­i­nite start date (if any­thing was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yes­ter­day at 8am.

He too, never showed up.

Five more mes­sages and 30 hours have passed since he was sup­posed to start work­ing here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this lit­tle tid­bit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (empha­sis is Greenwald’s):

In court doc­u­ments filed with the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to for­eign­ers cap­tured and held in the United States.

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indef­i­nitely on sus­pi­cion of ter­ror­ism and may not chal­lenge their impris­on­ment in civil­ian courts, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion said Monday, open­ing a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari pro­gram­mer liv­ing in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria) — about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now sim­ply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immi­grant, I’d get the fuck out of the coun­try and not look back as well.

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that dude is just an ass­hole, and the whole “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing is just a coin­ci­dence. Not that it really makes the “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing much bet­ter, sim­ply less immediate.

BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipar­ti­san­ship” non­sense pre­vent them from actu­ally doing any­thing lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?

[Kinda sorry some­thing this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this par­tic­u­lar paranoia-kicker is a lit­tle close.]

Update: Turns out dude had a “per­sonal life cri­sis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cell­phone bat­tery. I guess Texas is worse than I sus­pected, since they appar­ently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*

Last Wednesday night, I was call­ing friends to try and do a lit­tle street the­ater down­town Chicago, in the hopes of pro­vid­ing a par­tic­u­larly gritty infomer­cial and gen­er­at­ing pres­sure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same idea. No one was down for it early that Thursday after­noon, and the bill went on to pass by a hefty majority.

That night, I couldn’t help but think that this is no longer my coun­try. I’m liv­ing on the same land­mass, but “America” has packed up and left for greener pastures.

That is a fic­tion. The America I pine after has only ever existed in the fever dreams of its bohemian ide­al­ists. America as a whole has always been a bru­tal, mean-spirited hyp­ocrite. It enslaved mil­lions of Africans in the name of God. It slaugh­tered mil­lions of indige­nous Americans in the name of civ­i­liza­tion. It con­quered Cuba and the Phillipines in the name of colo­nial lib­er­a­tion. It setup banana republics in Central America in the name of democ­racy. It used nuclear weapons in the name of peace. It impov­er­ishes a large chunk of the planet in the name of devel­op­ment. It con­quered Iraq in the name of free­dom, and con­tin­ues to dec­i­mate it in the name of stability.

Now, it has decided to let itself dis­ap­pear any­one it wishes and abuse them for­ever — in the name of security.

I started writ­ing this post to point out that the coör­di­nated demands by vir­tu­ally every major nut­case over the New York Times’ reveal­ing the data-mining of bank­ing records via SWIFT—the calls for exe­cu­tion, harass­ment, lynch­ing, etc. — was a clear indi­ca­tion that Karl Rove is no longer a tar­get of Fitzgerald’s inves­ti­ga­tion. The much-vaunted “Fitzmas” is over, and you got a sweater. Huzzah. But then I real­ized that was silly, it sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction.

…sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction…

At any rate, it’s actu­ally kind of humor­ous to watch to Democrats floun­der and the Republicans go insane over the issue. Essentially, the Administration is tread­ing extremely close to fuck­ing with the money with their transaction-tracking pro­gram. I mean, how many rich peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions have their fin­gers in pies they would be embar­rassed to have them in? Monthly dues to the Arse-tickler’s, Faggot Fan Club?¹ A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. Wire-transfers to drug-running para­mil­i­taries who are later impli­cated in a string of dead com­mu­nity and union activists? A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. You get the picture.

Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader…

So the Republicans have opened the door to allow the Democrats a chance to suck Capital’s dick, because Capital is now aware that the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Therefore, the goal of the smear cam­paign is to state, quite bluntly, that only a trea­so­nous, objec­tively pro-terror com­mu­nist would note the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader.

Historically, how­ever, the chances that any of this infor­ma­tion will ever send some­one wealthy, pow­er­ful, and white to pound-me-in-the-ass prison is nil, regard­less of who is in charge. Clinton may have pun­ished the tobacco indus­try for killing his uni­ver­sal health care plan over the cig­a­rette tax hikes (which we got any­ways) with the 90s law­suits, but that’s a far cry from jail time. It appears the Democrats are either unable or unwill­ing to exploit this fis­sure pub­licly, they could have been caught off-guard by the venom directed at the Times, or they could be exploit­ing it pri­vately. I think the party is refus­ing to dis­close it’s motives pub­licly, because the DLC ulti­mately believes it can get it’s col­lege tuition paid for if it does it pri­vately. As the eco­nomic for­tunes of the U.S. decline (as they must in a free-trade envi­ron­ment), the only recourse the state will have against the pissed-off newly-poor are repres­sion and nation­al­ism, so I think the Democrats are wor­ried about giv­ing up this power now, since they’ll likely need it back in a decade or so.

I fully expect the Democrats will half-ass it on the abuse-of-power scan­dals, and will prob­a­bly end up doing what they say they want to do, if allowed: expand­ing the FISA Court again, to allow for “mass-target” war­rants. If so, I’d expect them to pitch it as a “nec­es­sary log­i­cal exten­sion of rov­ing wire­taps,” even though the abil­ity of the FISA court to issue non-FI-related war­rants in the first place is already a pretty broad exten­sion under the PATRIOT Act. Essentially, I think they’ll take another large step towards a com­pletely secret Star Chamber, and call it a check against the Monarchy.

Now that it is widely known that the CIA is tor­tur­ing peo­ple in a string of secret pris­ons around the world, is there going to be a retrac­tion from those who crit­i­cized Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for his use of the term GULAG to describe the U.S. government’s inter­ro­ga­tion cen­ters and prisons?

Somehow, I doubt it.