Secret Agent Man

Have you outed yours lately?

Patriot Boy outed his again in response to this post about the Pentagon's expansion of domestic spying.

Patriot Boy in July 2004

In a similar surveillance scam we learn that no papers mean no ride the bus in Denver.

My secret agent man is Bill Pickle or someone in his office.

...The bulk of Mr. Pickle's service, though, was with the Secret Service, where he moved up through the ranks over 26 years. Mr. Pickle was Deputy Assistant Director for Human Resources and Training, and Special Agent in Charge of the Vice Presidential Protective Division.

As Deputy Assistant Director for Human Resources and Training, Mr. Pickle provided leadership in human resources, training and personnel issues related to the agency. He was responsible for all Secret Service Training, including Protective Detail Training, firearms training and physical training.

In his role as Special Agent in Charge of the Vice Presidential Protective Division, one of the largest divisions of the Secret Service, he was responsible for all aspects of protection of the Vice President and his family. In this role, Mr. Pickle maintained daily contact with Vice President Gore and Senior White House Staff and coordinated all aspects of security for the Vice President's 2000 Presidential Campaign.

In 2002, Mr. Pickle was one of only two finalists the President considered to hold the position of Director of the Secret Service.

Mr. Pickle served with the first Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 as an infantry sergeant and Medevac helicopter door gunner. Among his commendations are a Bronze Star, seven Air Medals, a Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

The next bit showed up with my copy and paste although I don't see it on the page:

He attended American University and Metro State College in Denver, and holds a degree in political science. Mr. Pickle is married




Domain Name senate.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address 156.33.52.# (U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms)
156.33.52.29
ISP U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms
Location
Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
State : Virginia
City : Centreville
Lat/Long : 38.8321, -77.4614 (Map)

Who is yours and why are we wasting taxpayer dollars for government employees to be checking out grannyinsanity?

Also related is this robots txt and the emergence of the 404's.

We Don't Do Torture

We only arrest old clergy for protesting our teaching of it.

Formerly the School Of the Americas (SOA), WHINSEC is located at Fort Benning where over 60,000 personnel have been trained in courses including counterinsurgency, psychological warfare and interrogation techniques.

Graduates of the school have been consistently linked to human rights violations and to the suppression of popular movements in Central and South America.

Protests against the SOA/WHINSEC began 16 years ago, and since then 180 people have served federal prison sentences.

Other Christians including a nun are amongst those who have been jailed.

Fr. Louis Vitale, 73, of San Francisco, California, Fr. Jerome Zawada, 68, of Cedar Lake, Indiana, and Sr. Mary Dennis Lentsch, 68, of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were arrested on Sunday, November 20 after crossing onto Fort Benning.

The group “crossed the line” to protest current concerns about the school’s role in training Latin American militaries and a legacy of torture and human rights abuses committed by graduates of the school.

The three clergy negotiated 10-foot barbed-wire fences to enter the base.

Their acts of civil disobedience came at the culmination of a weekend of protest that drew 19,000 people to the gates of Fort Benning, the largest protest yet calling for the schools’ closure.

Thousands of people from across the Americas, including a large contingent of Catholic clergy, came together to call for the closure but also to protest the Bush Administration’s opposition to banning torture techniques.

Protestors at the vigil called attention to the recent pictures of abuse at the hands U.S. personnel, and reports about secret CIA detention facilities as part of a broader legacy of US support for torture and human rights abuses.

The annual Vigil to close the SOA/ WHINSEC has grown from a dozen people in November of 1990 to this year’s record numbers.


19,000 people show up at a single protest and nobody ever hears a word about it in the United States?

Hound Dogging It

Have you been over to see what Harry Dogwater has cornered yet?

Depends on Senator Burns

I imagine he is not completely in control of his own body functions lately.

Garbage in = garbage out.

How messy can this get?

Who Else Is Well Known For Their Incoherence?

This teacher needs to teach his students what the word coherent means without referring to the most famous and widely acknowleged example of our time.


What is an educator to do?

Faithful With the Small Things

From time to time there have been external enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within, the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain destruction to our life and future than any nuclear warhead. There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
I salute the present generation. Hang on to one of your most precious parts of youth, laughter – don’t lose it as many of you seem to have done, you need it. Together we may find some of what we’re looking for – laughter, beauty, love and the chance to create.

Saul Alinksky

The situation at hand is dire indeed, unsustainable at best.


By now you are probably asking yourself "so what can I do?". You could start by taking a few small actions like buying local, buy blue, watching what you eat, Join or start a food co-op and clicking on the Hunger Site every day.

Why not make yourself somePumpkin Pie Spice, Russian Tea and Onion Soup Slow food is yummy, I can't wait to try this eggplant dish and this bernaise sauce after I finish off all the red beans and rice that I stuck in the crockpot.

You could get in touch with your Governor and congresspeople and ask them if they would ask Venezuela for help for the less fortunate in your state and ask them and your state representatives to invest in energy independence and job creation with the Apollo Alliance. Explore ways to Green your home.

Make Poverty History, visit the National Concil Of Churches become self sufficientish, learn how to reduce your wastes with something like the Flathead Valley's Waste Not project or Tampaction.

Small steps, take some and offer some more ideas in the comments.

I see tht Tony is off on the same tangent in his own Tonyish way. Enjoy the story and look for ways to do your own right thing. Let's take these small steps together and multiply them to create a wonderful journey.


I have to add a link to eRobin's Thanksgiving post because she has more, and to Riggsveda's blog where you can find links to donate directly to Louisiana's victims and their state on her left hand sidebar and you can see some of what she saw when she went there to help.

One Step Forward Two Steps Back

Step forward: Jose Padilla was charged with a crime.

Step back:Fear: The Mother Of Stupidity

Another Step Back: When US bars its door to foreign scholars



Of course they are still tracking peace activists; the few old women who hold signs by the road for an hour a week were blessed by a visit by someone from the State Department a few months ago, Tony got himself a visit from the Secret Service, grannyinsanity still has a regular reader (Hi Bill!), the FBI is spying on 30,000 Americans a year, and the Department of Defense is still tracking our kids. The DOD also runs lots of commercials aimed at us and they spent a ton of money on their 9/11 freedom walk and concert celebration. Does anybody remember who got arrested for thinking he could walk without registering?

WooHoo

Liberal Blog Carnival!

This is good:

"The first and only blog carnival devoted to highlighting the best of liberal blogging from all around the web."

Thanks to moos who not only linked a Mantid source and 10,000 Birds where one thing led to another and my evening disappeared, moos also cast the lone vote for grannyinsanity at the Montana bloggers contest that Rob so generously hosted while he was waiting for more and better football.

That's all for now, I haven't caught up with Patia for a while so it's time to go.

No One There At All

It wasn't very long ago that we were all up in arms about the President using an official taxpayer funded website to save his sorry ass from himself, but towski noticed something else.

The website didn't mention any troop deaths, car bombings, tortured bodies or anything about Iraq in their zeal to propogate their talking points about pre war intellinence.

The Whitehouse does not list troop deaths anywhere on their website. The Whitehouse also does not list individual school paintings anywhere on their website. I'm thinking that it would be very helpful to busy Americans to have that information right there with the rest of the master's accomplishments.

Another Reason To Pay Women Less

Women are naturally problematic and more likely to care for another's needs.

In another era, the task of caring for elderly parents often fell to the unmarried daughter who never left home and never worked for a living. But now, in a 21st-century twist on the 19th-century spinster, career women like Ms. Geist who have made their mark in the world are returning home to care for parents in old age.

They are embracing a filial role that few could have imagined in their futures and are doing so by choice. In fact, sociologists are beginning to give the phenomenon a name: the Daughter Track, a late-in-life version of the Mommy Track, a career downsizing popular with younger women.

[...]

Increasingly, employers are recognizing this burden.

"Smart corporations are paying attention" to the challenges that caring for elderly parents presents, said Meryle Mahrer-Kaplan, vice president of advisory services at Catalyst, which has more than 300 corporate members interested in the issues of women in the workplace. "It's so pressing because you can't plan for it, you can't put it off, and it's not a good-news activity. It weighs people down."

Despite a growing number of men helping aging relatives, women account for 71 percent of those devoting 40 or more hours a week to the task, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP in a 2004 study. Among those with the greatest burden of care, regardless of sex, 88 percent either take leaves of absence, quit or retire.

Shot In Their Beds

Thanksgiving in our 51st state is a little different than it is on the mainland.

The Power of Make-Up

This is amazing.

No peeks or hints from me, you will have to go see for yourself.

That was pretty darn good wasn't it?

Meanwhile, back in the real world granny wants to know why a Gitmo detainee has to sue to get a bible* and Josh Marshall is on the case of the elusive Zarquawi who can seemingly regenerate limbs and ressurect himself at will and don't miss this newsflash about Dick Cheney sticking us with millions of dollars worth of travel expenses and saying we got no business asking where he's been..

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

* courtesy of The Heretic

Who Bought Barak?

The hopes I once had for that man are laying in shards by my feet.I think I've been had.

First he votes for the Firebombing and Loanshark Protection Act of 2005, now he doesn't care how we got in this war or how we get out as long as we stay and don't ask questions.

I smell unseen money.

Will Padilla Have a Press Conference?

Iloth on his head? am so curious about what somebody who has been hidden for 3 1/2 years in America might look like or have to say about the conditions.

Does he really wear a tablecoth on his head? God help me, but I can't look at those things without imagining Sangria bottles with dripping candles illuminating heaping platters of spaghetti.

Angie Babie

Does anybody have an opinion of the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel?

70%

This Newsweek poll has 70% who believe we should begin an immediate withdrawl from Iraq, but the article finds the "shrewder analysts" who still believe in the War to Paint All Schools With a Durable Semi Gloss.

We should all think about those schools and ignore the Halliburton/Bechtel aspect of the war.

Painted schools. Can I change my vote to "continued painting?"

Bayh, Biden, Clinton and Kerry

Those folks would all like to be President in '08.

Each and every one of those folks voted for the war and continue to stand behind it today. Each and every one of those folks appear to be saying that it was (and presumably will be again) to lie this country into a war. Their only objection appears to be that this war was run so poorly.

American's for Bayh makes the argument that they had to vote for the war so they wouldn't appear to be weak and that their first job was political survival. That sounds like a coward's argument to me.

What I wish for is someone brave enough to ask questions before they send people off to die. Could we possibly try to find a candidate that puts America, not their political aspirations or the military industrial complex first?

America needs to come first and the military industrial complex needs to sit in the corner, face judgement and pay reparations or we can kiss the little liberty we have left good-bye.

I Must Have Misheard This

I have the ABC News on in the background, and they surely didn't say that President Bush wants Massachusets to refuse Venezuela's (Citgo)offer of low cost heating oil for the poor because George doesn't like Venezuela's chosen president?

I have a very clear understanding that George Bush and his Republican controlled Congress do not wish to give America's underpriveleged assistance in any form at all, something I attributed to their distaste for sharing the wealth that effortlessly flowed to their own pockets.

I must have misheard the story about Junior wanting to make sure that America's underpriveleged do not get assistance. period.

Everytime I Think I Have It Rough

When it rains it pours.

Cheaper Solar

We need to be making some headway here.

30,000 Layoffs

General Motors revealed a plan to close plants and lay off 30,000 employees over the next few years with the explanation that they will save a lot of money because they really don't need that much production capability anyway.

Frankly I am shocked that more people aren't lining up to buy all those extremely low MPG vehicles that they insisted on investing everything in.

I am sorry, that was rather witchy of me. I am not surprised at all.

Of course the failed leadership will continue to be richly rewarded for their insistance on the oil industry enrichment program. Failed leadership, lack of vision.

Once again, it will be the employees and the shareholders who lose out.

Congress Gets a Pay Raise

$3,100.00

This dirty trick was pointed out by dirty trix if you go there you simply must check out the elephant graphic at the upper right corner of his blog.

Take a Bullet, Please

And I just wish someone would be willing to take a bullet for this country and commit fellatio on you so we could impeach your lying ass.

h/t Gordon