plezWorld Remembers 9/11

It was a bright sunny Tuesday morning, I had taken the week off from work because we were bringing the newborn SugarPlum home for the first time. My wife had gone into the office in downtown Atlanta to grab a few things and then were going to get our daughter at noon.

plezWorld saw something on the television about about a plane flying into the World Trade Center in NYC and decided to turn to CNN and see what was going on.  I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane slam into the tower... in disbelief!  The imagery of the moment, no, that entire day will forever be etched in my memory.


The most joyous day of my life - bringing home my baby girl - merged with the most horrific day in US history. I remember holding her in my arms that afternoon and into the night wondering what had become of the world, when someone would plot and plan such a diabolical attack. And I remember fighting back the tears while thinking of what a hateful world we had brought my daughter into... I could only pray she would be capable of growing up devoid of the cynicism and hate this day brought us.


It is now a decade later, two wars have run their course, we have a Black President, bin Laden is dead... and my innocent little girl is a pre-teen. She is pretty as a button, lovable, and kind. But we have raised her in a changed world, where every motive is suspect, our freedoms have been abridged, our economy has tanked, and political vitriol has damn near crippled President Obama. This post-9/11 world is vastly different than the one I grew up in. I can only hope we can use this tenth anniversary of 9/11 to put this behind us and move on to a kinder, more understanding America.

WTF - Obama Votes to Approve FISA

The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers. The bill, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that President Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. The vote came two and a half years after public disclosure of the wiretapping program set off a fierce national debate over the balance between protecting the country from another terrorist strike and ensuring civil liberties.

The contentious part of the bill provides immunity against lawsuits for telecommunications (phone, internet, etc.) companies for divulging information to federal authorities. Supporters claim that the final plan, which overhauls the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Act passed by Congress in 1978 in the wake of Watergate, reflected both political reality and legal practicality. Wiretapping orders approved by secret orders under the previous version of the surveillance law were set to begin expiring in August unless Congress acted. The Democrats did not want the Republicans to go to their convention in August with an apparent hole in our national security.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and helped broker the deal, said modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was essential to give intelligence officials the technology tools they need to deter another attack. But he said the plan “was made even more complicated by the president’s decision, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, to go outside of FISA rather than work with Congress to fix it.”

He was referring to the secret program approved by Mr. Bush weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks that allowed the N.S.A, in a sharp legal and operational shift, to wiretap the international communications of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda without first getting court orders. The program was disclosed in December 2005 by The New York Times. Congress repeatedly tried to find a legislative solution, but the main stumbling block was Mr. Bush’s insistence on legal immunity for the phone companies. The program itself ended in January 2007, when the White House agreed to bring it under the auspices of the FISA court, but more than 40 lawsuits continued churning through federal courts, charging AT&T, Verizon and other major carriers with violating customers’ privacy by conducting wiretaps at the White House’s direction without court orders. The passage of the bill by the House essentially ended the lawsuits.

The FISA issue put Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. He had long opposed giving legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program, even threatening a filibuster during his run for the nomination. But on Wednesday, he ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment. Senator Hillary Clinton voted against the bill.

Read the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as approved by the House and Senate here.

Read the entire New York Times article about passage of the FISA bill here.


plez sez: WTF?!?

how does the lamest of lame duck presidents continue to wield such power when the opposition party is in power? and was Barack Obama's vote to support the bill an indication that he intends to use these powers - which many claim is a direct violation of the 4th amendment - when he takes over next january?

it is clear that he initially opposed the measure and failed at trying to negotiate a compromise, but questions of his integrity must be asked if he bowed to political pressure from the bush administration to support their objectionable areas of the bill. his vote was not necessary for the bill to pass, so i wonder why he chose to vote for the "improved but imperfect" bill?

i agree with other Obama supporters who are pissed off with Obama's FISA vote. by permitting the president to continue to trample the rights of americans for political reasons shows a lack of conviction and betrays the basic tenet under which the Obama for President campaign was waged: change the way of doing things in washington. this vote was simply politics as usual!

It makes plezWorld wanna holler: WTF?!?

5 Years - 4,000 Dead

CNN reports that four U.S. soldiers died last night in a roadside bombing in Iraq. That brings the American toll in the 5-year-old war to 4,000 deaths. This number does not count the tens of thousands who have been maimed and seriously injured in combat. It does not count the tens of thousands who will suffer from their injuries for the rest of their lives.

Read the entire CNN article here.


plez sez: five years after invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to the united states, we have now lost more americans in battle than were lost in the september 11th attack (which incidently involved no iraqis terrorists). this is now the third longest war in the history of the united states behind the revolutionary war and the vietnam war. it is now known that cause for the war - weapons of mass destruction - do not exist, and never existed. it is now known that the bush administration knew that they would never find WMD.

al-qaeda took responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. when the war started, al-qaeda was operating in afghanistan and pakistan, yet we invaded iraq.

bill clinton was impeached for lying to congress about an illicit sexual encounter with a white house groupie. george w. bush has not even been investigated for lying to congress about the reasons why the united states invaded iraq... something is wrong with this picture.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

plez sez: this day will always be indelibly engraved in my mind and more so today because this is the first time that 9/11 has fallen on a Tuesday since 2001.

i happened to be home from work that day, because it was the day that my daughter came home for the first time: she was only 12 days old... two weeks ago, we had a BIG A** 6th birthday party for her at my subdivision's pool and clubhouse. twenty-five of her close friends from school and the neighborhood were in attendance. they splashed in the pool. they ate pizza, cake, and punch. and they hammed it up on my daughter's karaoke machine.

like millions of Americans, i watched in horror as the very symbols of our way of life first stood lifeless with smoke billowing from their windows and then witnessed them crumble into piles of rubble at the feet of New York City.

my stomach churned as accounts of the Pentagon attack and the plane that went down in Pennsylvania surfaced.

the "war on terror" was subsequently launched. we sat and watched as our civil liberties were restricted. we sat and watched as our president demonized an entire religion and then invaded a sovereign nation. we continue to sit and watch as over 3,700 U.S. troops have given their lives to our "war on terror."

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 will always be remembered as the most joyous day of my life as i started my life: a new father holding my beautiful daughter for the very first time... and i will always remember it as the day that we became more callous and hateful as a nation, like when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor or when James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.

Zeitgeist - The Movie

plez sez: "Zeitgeist" comes in at just under 2 hours; this movie questions the basis of Christianity, the controversy surrounding September 11, 2001 (9/11), the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Federal Income Tax, and history of profiteering from war. If you cannot watch this movie with an open mind and natural skepticism, then I recommend that you do not watch!

This is MORE POWERFUL than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

After watching this video, I have begun to re-think everything that I have learned about anything. EVERYTHING!

hat tip: The Free Slave and Wandering the Ether