he Halloween fright-fest isn’t until next week, but Conservative pundits, most notably Michael Horowitz, have been promoting a scare session of their own. Yes, whether you realized it or not, this evening marks the official end of Islamo-facism Awareness week. Coined by a handful of truly insane right-wing bloggers a few years back, the term has been picked up by the mainstream Republican party, even featuring in a few recent speeches by our most esteemed President.

It is, according to Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, “… the greatest threat our country has ever faced…”

Excuse me? The greatest threat that our country has ever faced? I have one name to offer Mr. Huckabee: Adolf Hitler. Or what about the thousands of nuclear warheads that are still minutes away from being launched?

The greatest threat that our country has ever faced? A handful of wealthy religious nutbags convincing semi-literate goatherds to blow themselves up in the name of defending Islam hardly seem to be an existential threat to the United States.

What have they managed to do? Kill a few thousand Americans? Hell, Americans kill ten times that many with our cars every year.

So why the focus on a few Islamic radicals with a penchant for blowing themselves up?

It’s not because they’re a great threat to our country. It’s because the Republican candidates don’t have anything else left. Gay marriage? Only the whackiest religious cases still care. Gun control? All those school shootings have made that a hard one to argue against. Immigration? Their party is so divided over the topic that they don’t even want to think about it.

All they have left is a simple scare tactic: Elect a Democrat, and Islamo-Fascists will topple western civilization as we know it.

Somehow wiretapping our phones is going to prevent the downfall of western civilization?

Warrantless wiretapping didn’t help the East German government, and it’s not going to help ours either.

This is the Timothy Jordan Show News for Friday, the 26th of October, 2007.

• Islamo-Facism Awareness week

• NYT, Transcript of the Oct 21st Republican presidential debate

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That’s not going to stop them from trying, despite the efforts of a growing number of Congressional members who have pledged to oppose the current wiretapping program. As we mentioned last week the recent controversy is over the administration’s request that the major Telecom companies receive retroactive immunity for any crimes which may have been committed while assisting in the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

The most recent addition to the ranks of those in Congress opposed to immunity is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Speaking before students at Georgetown Law School, Mr. Hoyer said that, “it would be grossly irresponsible for Congress to grant blanket immunity for companies without even knowing whether their conduct was legal or not.”

The man most likely to be making that decision, Judge Vaughn Walker, has already made his views on the legality of wiretapping known, writing in his June 20th, 2006 decision that, “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.”

In other words, just because someone working for the government asks you to do something, that doesn’t mean that what they’re asking is legal. AT&T should have known better.

• Rep. Hoyer’s Oct 23rd speech at Georgetown Law

• Judge Walker’s ruling on the Motion to dismiss Hepting v AT&T Corp. PDF (245.4KB)

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Congress should have known better back in 2002 when the President and his cronies were telling them that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be over in a few months and only cost a few billion dollars.

Five years later we find the President asking for an additional $46 billion over the $150 billion in funding that he requested back in February for the ongoing GWoT. All but $3.6 billion of that money would go to the Department of Defense, which continues to find new ways to avoid Congressional oversight by asking for supplemental funding once their wildly dishonest budget estimates don’t match up to reality.

Among the things the military would like is $69 million for new chemical and biological weapons protection gear. All of the existing gear must be getting worn out from not being used. They’d also like a new dining hall for the base in Djibouti.

According to the Department of Defense their base budget has grown from $302 billion in 2001, to $481 billion in their 2008 budget request. Meanwhile the last seven years has seen “emergency supplemental spending” grow from $17 billion to $189.3 billion.

The total military budget for next year is over $670 billion, and that’s assuming we don’t see an “extra-special emergency supplemental spending request” two months down the line.

These numbers don’t mean much to you listeners out there, I’m sure. They’re too large to comprehend. I don’t think that anyone, even the people spending this money, really understands them.

So we’re going to return to an old favorite on this program. A unit of measurement that’s immediately familiar to anyone: the burrito dollar. This is information that you won’t get on any other News program on any other radio station.

To put the Pentagon budget in perspective, $670 billion would buy over 110 billion super burritos. Assuming that the average super burrito is six inches long, that’s over 10,416,000 miles of burritos laid end-to-end.

The Moon is only 238,855 miles away, which means that we could build a road of burritos nine feet wide all the way from the earth to the moon for the cost of next year’s Pentagon budget.

To take this image a little further, If the average super burrito has a surface area of 15 square inches, then 110 billion of them could also be used to bury the entire surface of the Moon under a layer of burritos five inches thick.

• 2008 Supplemental GWoT budget request PDF (1.3MB)

• 2008 Pentagon Defense Budget

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That seems like a pretty big number, but it’s small change compared to the most recent estimates of what our occupation of Iraq will cost the United States.

The Congressional Budget Office updated its previous estimates of the long-term cost of occupation. Their high-end estimate, which has been revised upward after every review of spending since the war began, now totals $2.4 trillion.

Forget the Moon. For what the occupation of Iraq is likely to cost us we could build a burrito bridge to Venus and halfway back. We could build a conga line of burritos all the way to Mars, for that matter. Or, like the Moon, bury its entire surface under another five-inch layer of burritos.

This is assuming, of course, that the issues of working with salsa in zero gravity can be overcome.

• CBO: Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism

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And meanwhile the Turkish government has begun major cross-border military operations into northern Iraq. International criticism has been limited since Turkey, unlike our country, actually has been attacked by Iraq.

The Kurdish Workers Party, known as the PKK and based in the Kurdish regions of norther Iraq, has been conducting a guerilla war against the Turkish government for decades. The Turks have had enough, and despite the objections of the Bush administration, are now taking the fight back to the PKK.

It’s a mountainous region, similar in many ways to the wilds of Afghanistan or Chechnya. Fighting is likely to continue for quite a while.

It’s also the beginning of the end for Iraq. Turkish border incursions are a lead-in to inevitable Turkish occupation of PKK territory, and open conflict between Turkey and Iraq.

• Talking Points Memo, Turkish troops, weapons head toward Iraq

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In other news of government run amok, the General Accountability Office found that the FBI has expanded the Terrorist Watch List to encompass 755,000 records. Since 2004 they’ve been adding an average of 544 people per day to the watch list.

These numbers don’t indicate a slow and cautious addition of names to the watch list.

• GAO, TERRORIST WATCH LIST
SCREENING PDF (316.8KB)

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And now put on your party hats, because it’s time for excellence.

The Internet is a wild place, with plenty of dark corners where people doing bad things are able to hide. Al Qaeda in particular is known for coordinating its organization via internet chat rooms.

But not all of the people using those websites are wanna-be jihadis. Some of them are people like Shannen Rossmiller, a Utah-based amateur terrorist-baiter who was just profiled in Wired Magazine.

She works for the Utah Attorney General’s office, but spends her free time at home working her way into the confidence of Islamist radicals online. According to the article in Wired profiling her, Mrs. Rossmiller often poses as a recruit, using an already established identity to talk her way into gaining greater access to Islamist networks online.

To really get a sense of how committed she is to her work, and just how important she’s been, you’ll have to read the article in Wired, which can be found linked in the posting of this evening’s News segment at timothyjordanshow.com.

I’ll leave it by saying that she’s doing excellent work, with a record of success that should make her an example of what our intelligence agencies could be doing.

• Wired, Behind Enemy Lines With a Suburban Counterterrorist

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