Make your own boarding passMake your own boarding pass and find out. That site

will produce a boarding pass good enough to get anyone past TSA, and thus, into the “secure” gate areas of the airport terminal.

Note that this will not be a valid pass, so it will not get you on the airplane. For that, you need to actually buy a ticket.

Why would you want one of these?

1. To meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
2. To ‘upgrade’ yourself once on the airplane – by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you’re already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
3. Just to demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

And read on for recipes to skirt the no-fly list.

Spend your time on the plane contemplating who benefits from the so-called “war on terror” and why it, like the American “war on drugs”, will never end and has nothing to do with keeping you safe.

hypebot’s got the scoop on the latest radio pay-for-play scam:

Just months after the major labels settled the NY payola probe, two Universal distributed labels (Blackground and the band Nickleback on Roadrunner) reportedly tried to influence chart positions by buying late night ads on NY radio that feature more than 60 seconds of the song. This practice which tricks computerized airplay reporting tools was specifically band[sic—banned] in the recent settlement.

Who were we, the ostensible owners of the public airwaves, to distrust that self-regulation works? Why charge the broadcasters rent when they’re doing us such favors?

Alexander Cockburn dispels the myths of the microloan which have gotten so much press lately due to Mohammed Younus winning a Nobel prize. Cockburn asks basic questions about the effectiveness of the microloan including why the countries that have them aren’t bringing people out of poverty, where the money to repay microloans comes from and goes, and what is the future of the microloan when state-owned and commercial banks offer microloans.

As the economist Robert Pollin put it pithily when I asked him what he thought of the award to Younus , Bangladesh and Bolivia are two countries widely recognized for having the most successful micro credit programs in the world. They also remain two of the poorest countries in the world.

In the statistical tables of human development Bangladesh ranks 139th, worse than India, with 49.8 per cent of its population of 150 million below the official poverty line. In the homeland of the Grameen Bank, about 80 per cent of the people live on less than $2 a day. A UN Development Program study in the early 1990s showed that the total microcredits in Bangladesh constituted 0.6 per cent of total credit in the country. Hardly a transformation.

Boing Boing reports the Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America is now offering a “merit patch” (they don’t call it a merit badge) for “respecting copyright”. One wonders what’s being taught to get this patch.

Boing Boing is highly suspicious that there will be much left out, with good reason:

The merit badge patch in “respecting copyright” will almost certainly not include any training on fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I’m sure it won’t mention the anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood “rating” system, or the way that the studio cartel’s copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can’t be brought back into circulation.

Not to mention the effect of the monopolistic studio-owned theater system which kept competition from locally-owned smaller theaters at bay; if a smaller theater ran a hit movie that movie was months past its popularity and most audiences had already seen it at the studio-owned theaters. Most of the time hit movies were simply not distributed to smaller theaters.

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Joshua Frank’s article in Counterpunch (or on his blog) caught my eye, particularly because it helps to begin answering the question I implicitly asked when I wrote about Cindy Sheehan before—what will she do when it comes time to make an electoral decision? Frank gives her credit for restarting the moribund anti-war movement which took some time off to champion pro-war Sen. John Kerry during his run for US President. Frank also links to another worthwhile article in Counterpunch from John Walsh. The PDA, or Progressive Democrats of America, are based on the idea that they can rebuild the Democrats from within; offering the Democrats support will somehow transform the Democrats into making better votes (not that their website offers challenge to Democrats voting records). Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan serve on the PDA Advisory Board.

From the article:

I’m not sure how working to elect “progressive” Democrats to office, which [Medea] Benjamin and Sheehan are now attempting to do with the PDA, will ever help build an alternative to the two pro-war parties. Nor am I convinced that electing Democrats to office will ever end the war in Iraq — as John Walsh recently explained in Counterpunch, even if the Democrats pick up the necessary 15 seats to reclaim the House, their overall position on the war will not be changing, as no new Democratic House contenders actually oppose the war.

Perhaps Cindy Sheehan has fallen into the vicious trap of non-profit activism, where she cannot truly speak her mind without being fearful that her liberal supporters will pull their funding from the groups she aligns with. Or maybe Sheehan just doesn’t get it. Maybe she doesn’t understand that elections are a great place to go after the war enablers for all of their awful habits and evil deeds.

Paul Mueth, co-host of News from Neptune (all cards on the table: I was the technical director of this show), frequently refers to the Lehrer NewsHour on PBS as the “LiarHour”. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting gives us another installment to indicate why; updating their work from 1990, FAIR’s 2006 survey of the PBS news program concludes that numerous identifiable biases exist within the program. Two of the most interesting are the following (all emphasis is theirs):

• At a time when a large proportion of the U.S. public already favored withdrawal from Iraq, “stay the course” sources outnumbered pro-withdrawal sources more than 5-to-1. In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq.
• Among partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats on the NewsHour by 2-to-1 (66 percent vs. 33 percent). Only one representative of a third party appeared during the study period.

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The Corporate Crime Reporter dissects a blog some of you (probably most) have never heard of which will eventually list 37 reasons to favor big business interests (including working against “environmental zealots”, thinking highly of Medicare Part D, fighting the so-called death tax, favoring drilling in ANWR). Linda Rozett admitted that the site is run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

One sentence in the CCR essay stuck out to me:

It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out ”“ vote for big business ”“ primarily Republicans, but big business Democrats like Joseph Lieberman will do.

Earlier I was thinking about big corporate media and which politicians have done so much in recent years for these corporations. The Republican-majority FCC are working on removing more of the barriers to media ownership so large media outlets like Clear Channel can own more outlets. Localism decreases or vanishes, public affairs shows that criticize the status quo disappear, and media corporations try to bamboozle you into believing that more channels means better choices.

Who’s done considerable work on these grounds before? The Democrats.

Under Pres. Clinton, copyright was extended by 20 years (largely at the behest of Disney who wanted to keep early Mickey Mouse movies out of the public domain), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was enacted (largely at the behest of corporate publishers of electronic media who use this power to make sure that even if copyright ever expires, it will remain illegal to circumvent the copy-prevention code on most electronic media), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act was signed into law (which has reduced media diversity, according to a study the FCC wants buried).

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was predictably bad news for everyone involved; millions of protesters around the world told both corporate-led parties to not invade. But the Democrats were overwhelmingly in support of the invasion and continue to agree to its continuation and funding. In 2004 their presidential candidate argued that the Iraq war was being mismanaged, not that it was illegal, unethical, and must end immediately.

Competition is hard to hear about because, as I’ve mentioned many times before here, both parties know how to get along to fight mutual threats. The two parties run the so-called TV debates with an iron fist, setting the barrier to inclusion impenetrably high and kicking out a ticket-holding Ralph Nader when he went to watch the debates via closed-circuit TV from another building. The last thing these two parties want someone who will talk to you about how the corporate paymasters don’t really care which party is in power.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes

After a wait of nearly three years, Judge Hood in the Eastern District of Michigan finally ruled yesterday on the government’s request that the court dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of Muslim and Arab-American associations challenging the constitutionality of PATRIOT Act Section 215. As you may recall, Section 215 authorizes the government to obtain a secret order from the FISA court demanding business records or any other information that investigators think is relevant to a terrorism investigation. The court’s decision? Motion denied!