Among all the progressive and liberal blogs with which I am familiar, and that’s a lot of bloggers, IMHO the bloggers at Citizens for Legitimate Government have incomparably the best instinct for significant news breaking under the radar of most of the rest of us.
Those guys surprise me all the time, and not with trivia!
I decided to blog about them today instead of privately appreciating their constantly outside-the-box newsletter as usual because of a strangely familiar headline in the New York Times.
“D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning”
Where had I heard that before?
And then it came back to me, from the CLG newsletter almost three weeks ago, on October 16.
“Feds Confirm Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While Working for DEA”
With all due credit to Sebastian Rotella at ProPublica.org, who originally broke the story, I never would have seen it three weeks in advance of the Times if the bloodhounds at CLG hadn’t sniffed it out for me.
CLG would be an outstanding blog if they didn’t do anything else except keep me three jumps ahead of the M$M, but their most useful contribution to politics on the internet is headlining stories that never get covered, or only as the after-thoughts of editors who don’t understand their significance.
Bill would let US government block ‘infringing’ websites worldwide.
Yowza! Shut down anything on the internet, whenever they want to? Is that an important story for you and me and the rest of the blogosphere?
And again all due credit to Dan Goodin at TheRegister.co.uk, who broke the story, but why the heck wasn’t it all over the blogosphere? How did the rest of us miss it?
So I’m chasing that story, and if any other bloggers want to take a break from ranting about the same old shit and chase it, too, you can peruse this malignant threat to freedom on the internet under its innocuous title as S.3804: Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.
“It’s just a harmless little bill to shut down mp3 pirates, and we would never ever use that incredible power to stifle dissent…”
“…unless we could dream up a really good excuse!”
So thanks again to Michael Rectenwald and Lori Price and the rest of their team at Citizens for Legitimate Government for maybe waking us up before our “benevolent” masters shut us down.