Much as expected...

...My grandmother died today at 1330GMT.  She went quietly, with my mother and my aunt Pat holding her hands.

That is all.

More PATRIOT abuses

This post tells the story of a published "mainstream women's fiction" author who was targeted and raided because she was researching Cambodia and terrorist atrocities there on the Internet and in her local library for an adventure novel she was writing.  She was raided pre-dawn by an armed multi-jurisdictional Federal task force, some of whom wouldn't even identify what agency they came from.  They threatened to kill her dogs, intimidated her, and took virtually everything in her office except her desk and the carpet -- including not only her computers and files, but contracts with her publisher, her music CDs, the TV from her office, pictures off the walls, books, pens, a case of blank paper, even POSTAGE STAMPS fer crissake.  She's gotten nothing back except her computer, which was bugged to the gills with FBI spyware.

Folks, this isn't even any kind of pretense at searching and seizing evidence according to a search warrant..  A TV?  Pictures off the walls?  Postage stamps?  They were quite plainly, blatantly, and unashamedly STEALING ANYTHING THEY COULD CARRY THAT WASN'T BOLTED DOWN.  This wasn't a search and seizure.  This was an armed home-invasion robbery carried out under the color of Federal authority.

And Chaos knows, we all desperately need to be protected from romance writers....

Vote Suppression

It's unknown yet who's distributing them, but the flyer at right is being distributed around Milwaukee's black communities.  See here for the details, and note the observation that "the GOP must keep voters away from the polls in order to have any chance to win."

The [impending] Fall of the House of Saud, from Frontpage magazine

An analysis of the world's dependence upon Saudi Arabia's oil reserves and, more specifically, its reserve production capacity; and of exactly how much our friend the House of Saud is, and how much it isn't.  Go read.

Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil.  The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount.  This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at war with itself.  In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."

We can try to wish this away all we want.  But the reality is getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001.  The country's birth rate has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world.  Its police force is corrupt, and the rule of law is a sham.  Saudi Arabia almost certainly leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square.  Illegal arms routinely flow into and out of the country.  Taking into account its murky "off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud believes this is necessary for its personal protection.  The regime is threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies within the country's borders.  Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there.  The kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant Islam.  Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within Saudi Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the House of Saud itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert their attention abroad.

Recent examples of Saudi support for the fundamentalists abound.  In 1997 a high-ranking member of the royal family coordinated a $100 million aid package for the Taliban.  In Los Angeles two of the 9/11 hijackers met with a Saudi working for a company contracted to the Ministry of Defense.  A raid on the Hamburg apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers turned up the business card of a Saudi diplomat attached to the religious-affairs section of the embassy in Berlin.  Most of the more than 650 al Qaeda prisoners being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba--"the worst of the worst," according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--are rumored to be Saudis.