The potential for future damage to the constitution by the Roberts court is becoming clear. In a very upsetting 5-4 split, the Roberts court has decided against first-amendment protection for whistleblowers. Goodbye accountability in government.

The ruling affects only constitutional free-speech claims related to work, the court said, not the rights of public employees off the job. Nor does it affect state and federal labor laws or whistle-blower protection statutes, the court said.

In his opinion for the court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that those "powerful" rules still "provide checks" on supervisors.

"We reject, however, the notion that the First Amendment shields from discipline the expressions employees make pursuant to their professional duties," Kennedy wrote. "Our precedents do not support the existence of a constitutional cause of action behind every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job."

Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

But Kennedy's opinion drew a sharp dissent from Justice David H. Souter, who argued that statutory and other protections for whistle-blowers are weak. Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Souter. Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented in a solo opinion.

If O'Connor were still on the court, this would have been decided differently. Very sad. Personally, I think if a Sheriff lied to obtain a warrant the DA has a perfectly legitimate right to say, "hey, this guy lied in the pursuance of his public duties." I think this case is a real loser. What do my lawyers think?

How bad does it have to get before it gets better? First we have the New York Times disgusting and pointless front page article on the status of the Clin-tons' marriage. Now we have the WaPo publishes a pointless, stupid, and poorly written article on wing-men. Now really.

He's like the fighter pilot flying beside and slightly behind the lead pilot in a hostile environment -- thus the term.
...
"A mutual back-and-forth man love" is how Tony Moniello describes wingman camaraderie. Moniello, 22, and two buddies, Jay Jentz, 22, and Philipp Waclawiczek, 21, have been wingmanning for each other from the first week of freshman year at GW four years ago.
...
Jentz picks up: "Sometimes you're a lawyer. You may only have taken one law class, but what the heck? It adds flavor, gets people excited."

Moniello says his hometown wingman -- good wingman relationships never die -- is as adept as they come. "If I go to the bathroom, he'll make me look like Jesus. . . . The girl I'm after will say something like 'I hear he's a player' and he'll convince her I'm really in love with her."
...
Whether or not he's interested in the sidekick, he has to act like he is and, if she's really unattractive to him, be willing to, as these guys say, "fall on the grenade."

Granted, WaPo at least had the sense to put this in the Style section as opposed to the front page, but really, what is the point of this article? Is the wisdom of horny young men now worthy of being published in a national newspaper? This kind of tripe should be published in bad men's magazines, not the freaking WaPo.

Especially when they have great videos like "10 things I hate about commandments"



Watch it!

Sorry for the lax blogging. Science has been a bit overwhelming in the last few days.

However, the AP and CNN stories trying to implicate minority leader Harry Reid in an ethics debacle because he accepted "tickets" for boxing matches that could be reimbursed have been thoroughly debunked. Turns out, the tickets were actually a free-pass given to VIPs like politicians and other public servants that are non-reimburseable. When McCain supposedly reimbursed one of these passes the agency providing the pass ended up giving the money to charity because it is illegal for them to accept money for these free passes.

Bob Arum, the boxing promoter who gave the credentials to Reid and Sen. John McCain, made that claim to The Las Vegas Review Journal. But I wanted to check up on that, so I called Keith Kizer, the Executive Director of the Nevada Athletic Commission. Kizer should know - he is a lawyer and former Chief Deputy Attorney General for the state of Nevada.

"It would be illegal," Kizer said, explaining that it fell under a state law prohibiting agencies or individuals for charging access to government property. The credentials provide access to the commission's area near the ring. "It would be like charging someone for access to a senator's office," Kizer added with no apparent sense of irony.

He went on to explain that credentials are given out to governmental officials and others in order to observe the commission's activity. Sometimes the credentials are provided in addition to tickets - sometimes officials sit in the commission's area.

Hooray for the TPMmuckraker. Now, let's get back to focusing on the people accepting tens of thousands in bribes and with $90k in the freezer.

Yet another brilliant decision from the GM executive suite: Since paying people to drive their gas-guzzling pieces of crap off the lot isn't working, now GM is offering gas cards to buyers of Hummers, Tahoes, and other big-ass vehicles.

In California, eligible vehicles are the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban sport utility vehicles and Impala and Monte Carlo sedans; the GMC Yukon and Yukon XL SUVs; the Hummer H2 and H3 SUVs; the Cadillac SRX SUV; and the Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick LaCrosse sedans.
...
Each month for one year, GM will give drivers a credit on a prepaid card based on their estimated fuel usage. Fuel usage will be calculated by the miles they drive, as recorded by OnStar, and the vehicle's fuel economy rating.

GM will credit drivers the difference between the average price per gallon in their state and the $1.99 cap. The credits can be used through December 2007. Consumers wouldn't get any credits if gas prices fall below $1.99.

Just what traffic-choked California streets need - more Hummers! And I love the 'if gas prices fall below 1.99'. They might as well say that we all get free cars if monkeys fly out of my ass.

I saw somewhere today that the market cap of GM is now pretty close to that of Harley Davidson, and less than 10% of what Toyota is worth. It's sad that the executives who got the company into this position will walk away with their multimillion dollar payouts, while the poor joes that put the cars together are getting shit on. I just hope that Toyota and Honda are hiring.

Well, it's kind of a mixed bag. Apparently the massacre of civilians and subsequent cover-up by marines isn't causing that much of a fuss because the Iraqis are apparently numb to suffering and death.

After three years of war that has been fought in their streets and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, people in Baghdad could spare little more than subdued expressions of sympathy Sunday after hearing reports of a U.S. Marine massacre of 24 men, women and children in a faraway western town.
...
"So what if more innocent people were killed?" Abbas said of the reported massacre in Haditha. "Dozens of them die daily."
...
"We live in darkness,'' he said, fanning his face as the sweat rolled down. "What's the big news about Iraqis getting killed? We're powerless to change the situation."

"Were they the first...Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" Jayih said. "We're used to being killed. It's normal now to hear 25 Iraqis are killed in one day."

That's how you win hearts and minds. If you simply inflict enough suffering and death, eventually the entire population will become totally fatalistic and numb. Maybe this will be the 6th turning point in a forthcoming Bush speech. First we had the fall of Saddam, then his capture, then a couple of elections, then the meeting of a parliament, then the ratifying of a constitution, etc. Now we have a numb and population that doesn't notice massacres because everybody is already dead. They are ready for democracy! They're too tired to stay mad at us!

There are a couple of good articles today on how we're being scammed these days. The first is a nice piece from the NYT about how identity theft is the fault of credit card companies and the miracle of instant credit and the digitization of public records. It's nice to finally see a mainstream article about the problem of identity theft that actually puts some blame where it actually lies (besides with the criminals of course).

But the real problem, many officials and consumer advocates say, lies elsewhere. In recent years banks have campaigned energetically to extend more credit to more people with fewer hassles, and retailers and consumers have embraced instant, near-anonymous access to credit.

Last year a group of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and security executives from banks and credit card associations met to discuss ways of curbing identity theft. The group had plenty of ideas, including PIN numbers or fingerprint verification for all credit card purchases and a ban on mailings that include blank checks.

But all ran counter to the promotional campaigns of banks and, banks say, to the desires of consumers.

"There's a disconnect between corporate leadership at financial institutions and their security departments," said Brad H. Astrowsky, a former prosecutor who was part of the group. "Marketing people are ruling the day in banking. They can do things to fix the problem, but they have no incentive and motivation to do it. Preventing something from happening is a cost. What's the benefit? It's hard to quantify."

It's really easy to prevent identity theft, and that's giving people the option of freezing their credit, only to be opened when the consumer needs to open a new line for borrowing. There is no reason credit should be opened in someone's name without their explicit consent. Of course the banking industry says what they always do, that their criminal negligence is for the customers' "convenience."

"A credit freeze is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but people don't realize how often they need to use their credit report," Ms. Feddis said. "There's a balance between security and convenience."

She continued, "We all want fraud to go away, but we don't want to take 20 extra minutes every time we do online banking. We like buying airline tickets online, but there's a risk."

This is a bullshit argument for many reasons. One, you do not need to open new lines of credit for every online purchase, only if you want to open a new line of credite. Second, the freezes are not mandatory, they are voluntary, and there is no "convenience" about having to shred thousands of pieces of mail a year so some dumpster-diving thief doesn't open credit in your name. Tearing them up is not adequate. Seems to make this sounds like bullshit.

Fritz M. Elmendorf, a spokesman for the Consumer Bankers Association, described a chess match with identity criminals. For example, banks now protect prescreened credit card offers with address-matching technologies that make it harder for thieves to have cards sent to a drop address, Mr. Elmendorf said.

Hmmm, the evidence seems to be to the contrary.

Anyway, the second article is brought to us by the LA Times and it's about how voters are scammed into privatizing their utilities with no benefit.

The City Council approved the $428-million contract with Suez and United Water in the hope that it would control costs and help the city comply with a federal consent decree aimed at stopping sewage overflows into the Chattahoochee River. The companies shifted hundreds of city water and sewer workers onto their payrolls.

Campbell called it "a great victory for the people of Atlanta," predicting that "every city in America will go to privately run water systems."

A few months later, Suez bankrolled a $12,000 holiday for Campbell and a companion in Paris, where the mayor posed for snapshots at Napoleon's Tomb and the Arc de Triomphe. Suez executives later said they'd intended Campbell's visit as a legitimate business trip, but Campbell met with company officials for just 2 1/2 hours during his five-day stay.

Meanwhile, complaints about water quality and unresponsive service proliferated, peaking in the summer of 2002.

Gordon Certain, president of a north Atlanta neighborhood association, said poor maintenance and equipment failures caused recurrent water main breaks and boil-water alerts, at times producing tap water "the color of very well-brewed tea."

Mayor Shirley Franklin, who succeeded Campbell in early 2002, said United Water and Suez neglected basic repairs, violated federal drinking water standards, failed to regularly flush impurities out of the system and billed the city for work not done.

Ahh, privatization. Because getting screwed by the inefficient bureaucracy of a giant for-profit conglomerate (not even an American one) is better than just getting screwed by the inefficient government bureaucracy. I'd prefer to have the accountability and transparency of the latter thank you.

George Galloway serves an important reminder that I think also applies to Hugo Chavez. It's funny when eccentric crazy people are doing things to irritate the wingers, but you always have to worry they're going to go off the deep end and say something stupid, like saying it would be morally justified to kill Tony Blair in response to Iraqis killed in the war.

As much as I like having Chavez down in South America doing crazy shit like wearing a sombrero and mocking Vincente Fox with traditional Mexican ballads, and generally irritating Bush, nationalizing resources and giving to the poor, you have to worry when he's going to snap and go off the deep end like Galloway has.

Galloway has definitely lost it, if he ever had it. Between imitating a cat on Big Brother, being implicated in the oil for food scandal, and anti-Israel extremism, this is not a guy we should identify with the anti-war or any other movement. He's our version of Pat Robertson (who by the way is claiming he can leg press 2000 pounds thanks to his own formulation of Jesus-juice). I guess every political ideology needs someone to make stupid threats, predictions of divine retribution etc., but at least we can openly reject ours. Can't we?

Here's another bunch of jackasses to ignore. Did anyone see the Stephen Colbert special on the Minutemen? It was pretty great. My favorite quote was, "We should give them 6 months to get out of the country and then kill the rest." Just patriotism I'm sure, no xenophobia/racism there.

These idiots go out and "secure" small sections of the border by erecting 4-foot high barbed wire fences that you could probably clear with a good running jump. For the elderly or infirm you could probably drape a blanket over it, or, just pull the wire apart and step through. Or, since it's at most going to be a 10 mile stretch, just walk around it.

A perfect give up issue. As long as they're playing cop on the border and suffering the occasional heat stroke they can't cause any trouble where people actually live. If only we could find a useless activity to occupy bigots all year long.

The Guardian Reports that Steve Jones, a University College London professor of evolutionary biology has given up.

"I don't engage with creationists directly," he said, saying that, when he had, they had frequently quoted him out of context or accused him of lying. "If somebody has decided to believe something - whatever the evidence - then there is nothing you can do about it." ... He pointed out that acceptance of Darwin's theory on a global scale was a "minority belief". According to polls, 100 million Americans believe in creationism.

Good for him. He's realized what we did quite a while ago. Creationism is a religious belief. It is irrational. Arguing with irrational people is stupid. Give Up!

The NewScientist brings us news that Rhythm method criticised as a killer of embryos.

Isn't it ironic? Like a fly in your Chardonnay?

The range of birth control choices may have become narrower for couples that believe the sanctity of life begins when sperm meets egg. The rhythm method, a philosopher claims, may compromise millions of embryos.

"Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method," writes Luc Bovens, of the London School of Economics, in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
...
In using the rhythm method, couples avoid pregnancy by refraining from sex during a woman's fertile period. Perfect adherents claim it is over 90% effective - i.e. one couple in 10 will conceive in an average year. But, typically speaking, effectiveness is estimated at closer to 75%.

Now Bovens suggests that for those concerned about embryo loss, the rhythm method may be a bad idea. He argues that, because couples are having sex on the fringes of the fertile period, they are more likely to conceive embryos that are incapable of surviving.

So, the rhythm method, despite being ineffective (at least as compared to real methods of birth control), also might not accomplish the goal the Catholics hoped for, instead the opposite may occur.

The problem with this article, as much as I enjoy the schadenfreude it entails, is that it was written by an economist (in other words a non-scientist and self-identified purveyor of bullshit), and has lots of assumptions. The paper can be read here and PZ Myers' comments here. PZ thinks the findings are "obvious" however I don't know enough about reproductive science to evaluate this paper, there are virtually no references.

Nature brings us a groundbreaking article(SF Gate article) on a new process of inheritance in mammals, paramutation, whereby a phenotypic change is heritable from one generation to the next without the transfer of an allele. In other words, you inherit a trait without inheriting the DNA. A neat trick, but also a violation of mendelian genetics, and contrary to the dogma of molecular biology.

The researchers in this case have mice with a defective copy of a gene called Kit. The gene in a heterozygote gives the mouse white feet and a white tip of their tail. Here's a cutout from the first figure of their paper of the heterzygous mice, and their genetically normal, but white-tailed offspring.



Further, subsequent generations of these totally genetically normal mice carried the trait, with eventual fading after many generations. The researchers then showed if you transfered RNA from a heterzygous carrier mouse (either somatic or from the sperm) into an embryo you could reproduce the effect indicating RNA is responsible for the hereditary nature of the phenomenon.

Pretty freaking neat! It's still not clear to me exactly what the biochemical mechanism of the trait is. They indicate through transfer of a micro-RNA that degrades the Kit gene that they also reproduce the effect, but that raises the question, does the defective gene lead to the expression of the microRNA (miR21 or miR22)? Is the altered expression of this existing microRNA responsible for the trait?

I think it must be, because they generated the phenotype artificially through a knockout trangenic mouse, and there is no reason the knockout insert should have generated this effect. Probably a combination of a susceptibility of the Kit gene to this effect, due to targeting microRNAs that exist naturally in the cell, combined with whatever bizarre effect the knockout allele causes leads to this phenotype. Maybe the cell is sensitive to transcriptional overactivity at the Kit locus. Also very troubling about the paper, they were able to get the white-tail phenotype (albeit at much lower frequency) just by transferring normal RNA to embryos. This makes even less sense.

Lots to think about, however, no matter what the mechanism, heredity without DNA in mammals is new and interesting. It also indicates a possibly new mechanism for hereditary disease, or an explanation for why some genetic disorders don't always end up causing disease even if people end up inheriting the gene, also known as variable penetrance of genetic disorders.

USA today reports that every household owes $510,678 to cover retirement benefits for the boomers.

Wow, maybe we would have been able to afford this if the boomer sell-outs hadn't elected a bunch of fiscally irresponsible morons for the last 20 years (excepting Clin-ton, of course, who actually created a surplus) who spent us into insane national debts. Somehow I don't feel like we should bail them out for their decades of irresponsible voting. Admit it people, you had a guy promising a lock box, and a semi-retarded Texan promising easy money and you went for the get quick rich scheme.

I say we kill social security until the boomers are drop off, then we restart it for a fiscally-responsible citzenry.

I was prepared to be outraged at the custom of bride-kidnapping in Kyrgystan, (and it is really horrible -- the indifference of the men to the whole thing reveals that they view women like clock radios or crock pots -- interchangeable pieces of merchandise) but it turns out that the custom of kidnapping random women off the streets to be your wife is accompanied by yet another custom that makes the whole thing seem utterly surreal: you can only marry your kidnapped bride if you can get her to wear a traditional kerchief on her head. Since women who don't particularly care to be married to weirdos who kidnap them often struggle and refuse to accept the kerchief, the guys get tired and just go find some other woman to try this schtick on.

If you ever find yourself wondering why Kyrgyzstan isn't a major economic power, just consider the fact that a large part of their population is wandering the streets in search of people to kidnap, attempting to put scarves on the heads of unwilling persons, or otherwise angrily removing said scarves from their own heads.

Various sources reveal that Poland is preparing for a visit by Papa Ratfinger by outlawing advertisements for sundry "inappropriate" products, such as lingerie, tampons, and beer. I guess the lingerie and the tampons make sense, given that women are such dirty, fleshly things, but the beer? I thought monks made beer! And aren't Catholics required to like alcohol, given that Jesus sort of made himself into it?

Or maybe it's just that the beer commercials feature those naughty people, women. Ew! Girls! They are so totally icky!

On the Catholics and tampons front, another current controversy involves the growing popularity of birth control methods that render women period-free. Something I didn't know is that even when you're on regular old birth-control pills, with the one-week-a-month placebo, you don't have a period. You just sort of randomly bleed. Mmm!

Apparently, the choice was made, when the pill was developed, to build in this week-o-bleeding because it would seem "more natural" and make the pill more acceptable to Catholics. Kind of didn't work, I'd say, but you can't please those Catholics. Bleed and the Pope withdraws in terror. Don't bleed and suffer the horrific "unnaturalness" of your choice. All in a day's work for the wacky misogyny of organized religion!

What is it with conservatives' inability to engage with the culture around them? It gets them into such snafus. Reagan famously cited Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." as a stirring, patriotic anthem, thus revealing that the Gipper had obviously never, ever listened to the song. Similarly, in what might be termed the "Ali G Effect," the good folks on Tom Delay's defense team do not appear to understand that Stephen Colbert is not on their side, instead posting an interview he did as support for The Exterminator's innocence and rectitude of character.

Crazy! Madness! Rioting in the streets! But seriously, where do these guys live? Under a moon rock? Who on earth can reasonably remain unaware of the fact that Stephen Colbert is making fun of conservatives? No one. In fact, that's what's so scary about it -- Colbert's over-the-top, unctuous O'Reilly-clone persona obviously strikes them as perfectly reasonable. They don't get the joke because, for them, there's no joke to get.

The Rev. Dr. has an abiding hatred of ringtones. (His own phone sounds like a bird - chirpty-chirp). But even he might be persuaded by TMBG's new anti-NSA ringtone, which alerts its owner to incoming calls by cheerily warbling

"Call connected through the NSA/Complete transmission through the NSA/Suspending your rights through the duration of the permanent war"

Happy Fun! Learn more.

Science reports that Marijuana appears to carry no cancer risk. CNN coverage here.

Apparently if you compare cigarette smokers to pot smokers, the potheads don't get cancer at near the rate of the tobacco users. A major caveat though, it isn't normalized in any way to pack years, in other words, no one smokes as much marijuana as even moderate smokers can puff away on cigarettes. After all, a 4-joint a day habit would be pretty heavy for pot, but a nicotine addict may smoke between half a pack to 3 packs a day. Even if pot has 4 times more tar and pollutants, even the heaviest tokers might only be getting an exposure equivalent a minimal smoker.

It is not clear why marijuana is illegal and alcohol and cigarettes are ok. There is no physiologic withdrawal from marijuana, certainly nothing even close to cocaine withdrawal or alcohol withdrawal, which can be so dangerous as to lead to fatalities, or heroine or nicotine addiction, which both have painful withdrawal (but don't carry a risk of death).

Now Speaker Hastert is being investigated by the FBI after having written a highly suspicious letter to the Secretary of the Interior, ostensibly on behalf of one of Abramhoff's indian tribes, to block the building of a competing casino.

The letter was written shortly after a fund-raiser for Hastert at a restaurant owned by Abramoff. Abramoff and his clients contributed more than $26,000 at the time.

The day Abramoff was indicted, Hastert denied any unlawful connection and said he would donate to charity any campaign contribution he had received from Abramoff and his clients.

I'm sure Hastert's interest in the minutia of indian casino construction was purely innocent. I'm sure it had nothing to do with contributions from Abramhoff. I bet he writes all sorts of letters intervening in minor matters around the country, and this was just a coincidence that he received money from Abramhoff clients who would benefit from his actions. Via TPM Muckraker

Well, the Pacific Research Institute, official chroniclers of bizarro-land, have published the 50 state economic freedom index. This is accompanied by a bizarro op-ed from the WSJ indicating that they actually believe this rubbish that red states are somehow more "economically free" because they have lower taxes. Anyway, here are the 10 most economically free states according to this report.



And the ten least free states.



Now readers of Give Up blog will probably be able to predict how little I think of this index. First of all, who would actually want to live in Kansas? Personally I'd rather be overtaxed in New York or California than bored to death in the cultural wasteland of these flyover states. It is also interesting to note that Virginia is number 4 on this list, probably because two governors ago we had a couple of morons who cut taxes without cutting spending (of course) burying Virginia in the red, and it took a progressive Democratic governor to raise taxes on the rich in order to put the state back in the black. Then check out this map of the federal tax burden of each of the states as compiled by The Tax Foundation, Federal Taxing and Spending Benefit Some States, Leave Others Paying Bill



It seems as though 7 of the top ten states receive more federal dollars than they contribute, two of the three "economically free" states that contribute more than they take are blue states. Then take a look at the bottom ten and you seven of the ten pay out more than they receive (and the ones that don't nearly break even). So, in other words, the economically free states are the ones that end up bilking the blue states out of federal tax dollars because their tax incomes are inadequate to cover the costs of administering their state budgets.

Then consider this idea that "jobs are flocking" to these states. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics The unemployment rate in Kansas, where these jobs are supposedly flocking to, is the same as in New York, and Massachusetts and New Jersey actually have lower unemployment rates. Most unemployment rates in this country are more or less the same, falling between 4 and 5 percent, highest in Mississippi at 7.9% (eight of the ten highest unemployment rates are in red states). Then consider the rate of change in these rates, and you see California and New York are decreasing their unemployment at a faster rate than Kansas (0.8 vs 0.5 percent respectively>. The states with the most rapidly increasing unemployment rates are mostly red (8 of 10 are red states). Also, check out Figure 1 and 2 on the left, of the comparison of the so-called "right-to-work" states with other states and you see these economic freedom measures simply lower wages without any great decrease in unemployment benefit. By all means, move to these "economic freedom" states to work for a lower wage, and at the same time receive fewer services from their governments. It's clearly a measure of freedom not to have healthcare, good hospitals, decent wages, or an infant mortality rate worthy of the first world. Shit, why stop at moving to these "economically free" red states? Why not just move all the way to Mexico, not get taxed at all, and live in a place where 50% of the labor force has to work in another country in order to pay the damn bills.

If I'm wrong, explain to me how economic freedom corresponds to taking more federal tax money than other states with higher GDPs, then claiming you are somehow economically superior? The unfree states are subsidizing their tax idiocy, and then the WSJ claims that jobs are flocking to these states, when it's clear as many or more jobs are flocking to places like California and New York. Then look at any other measure of quality of life, measurements of the efficacy of state government (summarized in some of the Give Up maps) and you see that the Blue states are providing better services and quality of life while subsidizing the regressive tax policies of the "free" states.

I say, we let these jackasses cut federal taxes to nothing, because then when it comes time to cut the pork, the Blue states that are net-positive economies will make out fine, while red states living off the fat of the federal tax system will be screwed under their so-called "economic freedom" policies. Race to the bottom guys, see if we care.

There has been some interesting news on the NSA spying scandal.

Seymour Hersh has claimed they are listening to domestic conversations in the New Yorker.

A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core-the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records," the consultant said. "They’re providing total access to all the data."
...
Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

Further, documents disclosed by Wired magazine appear consistent with these accounts. Apparently the NSA has been hardwired into the phone networks for several years now.

There is a good Give Up solution, if enough people want to contribute. Just remember, begin or end every conversation with a statement including the words "Osama bin Laden" "Dirty Bomb" "Jihad" "Death to America" and that ululating noise. You can make it innocent, say something like, "Osama bin Laden's jihad better not result in a dirty bomb leading to death to America, go George Bush! Ulululululululu!"

That will screw with the system.

The defeatists point us to a wonderful Mark Shields column.

Mark Shields will always be a hero of mine, ever since I was watching some Saturday political show, maybe Capitol Gang, or some such nonsense, and he put the smack-down on Novak.

Novak had apparently made some reference to Reagan as being the "greatest president since FDR" or some silly nonsense as usually comes from between his yellow-stained, corpse-chewing teeth, and Shields' response (from my memory, be forgiving) was along the lines of, "I can't believe you just mentioned FDR and Reagan in the same sentence, shut up Novak."

I have loved him ever since. There is some bullshit you just shouldn't stay calm about. Anyway, this current article makes a good point. We don't have a whole lot of patriotic families in the leadership of this country. The British royal family, whatever their flaws, serve their country, almost universally, in war and in peace. Our leaders children? Nothing. Joe Biden I think has a son in Iraq. The Bush twins are noticeably absent from any war time service. Compare that to the Brits.

During World War II, young Princess Elizabeth, then the heir to the British throne, overcame her father -- the king's -- objections and joined the military, where she was trained as a driver and was photographed personally changing the tire on a truck. Her son, Prince Charles, served as a pilot for five years in the Royal Navy. Charles' brother Prince Andrew saw combat as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands War and made the military his career. The third brother, Prince Edward, was a second lieutenant in the British Marines.

So young Prince Harry, son of Charles and the late Princess Diane, was following family tradition when he volunteered for the grueling training at Sandhurst Military Academy, before being commissioned the equivalent of a second lieutenant. But now Harry, the Queen's grandson and third in line to the throne, has publicly insisted that he join his fellow soldiers when they are sent to Iraq.

Here is what the young prince said: "There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my (ass) back home while my boys are out fighting for their country." He added, "That may sound very patriotic, but it's true."

Shields then makes the very good point that while soldiers make sacrifices in Iraq, our leadership spends time eliminating inheritance taxes and taxes on dividends and the wealthy, while they expect no real sacrifice from their families or the citizenship at large. We are suffering, in essence, a failure of leadership by example.

Also, am I right that Al Weed, who ran against the soon-to-be-indicted Virgil Goode two years ago, I think has a kid in Iraq who was on this Baghdad ER show on HBO this weekend? Was I imagining that? I know his kid is a doc (UVa grad), and has the same name. I figure there aren't that many Al Weed doctors in this country or in the world, it couldn't have been a coincidence. I don't see anything at his website about his kid being in the documentary, but he should. The show was pretty incredible, everyone with HBO should make an effort to watch (unless you are really upset by amputated limbs).

If it wasn't for this jackass, we could have a nice uniform Republican ethics scandal. Instead, this total crook, who had 90,000 dollars in his freezer, continues to stay in office despite pretty obvious guilt.

We said it before, if you have $90,000 in cash (which the FBI gave to you, on camera, as part of a sting) in your freezer, you are a crook. Crooked crook of crookery.

Instead he's staying in office! Like being caught on tape accepting bribes and having nearly 100k in cash in the freezer is ok behavior for a public servant. Apparently when "his side" comes out it will vindicate him. Maybe the bitch set him up, but I doubt it.

Seriously, Jefferson, you are nothing but a source of shame. You're an embarrassment. Resign now. We don't need you in our party.

No really. You can. For just 4.95 the Universal Life Church will designate you a Jedi Knight with a certificate and everything. In the UK for instance, many are big fans of the Jedi religion with over 70,000 Australians, 390,000 Brits, and 53,000 Kiwis identifying themselves as Jedi.

Their government is clearly upset over this falsification of their census. But maybe, just maybe, they're all telling the truth and they really are Jedi's who've been certified by the ULC.

Is it just because of Colbert that bears are constantly in the news? We seem to be hearing about them a lot lately. First they eat a monkey in a Danish Zoo, and then there's the Grizzly-Polar hybrid, now they've returned to Germany from Austria no less.

I have no choice but to wonder, will this Austrian bear be the future leader of a fascist bear-supremacist movement that will sweep Germany into a yet another fascist nationalistic struggle? Only Colbert can tell us, and he's off for two weeks!

The number of house GOP seats that are considered "competitive" has increased from 24 to 36.

It is questionable, especially from a give up perspective, whether or not a Democratic takeover of the house would be productive in the long term, as the NYT discussed in the last weekend edition. Would it really be beneficial for Democrats to take over one wing of the the legislative branch giving us symbolic, but no real power? Wouldn't that just mean that Democrats will become a scapegoat, blamed for all the Republicans' problems without actually being able to affect any real change?

I'm beginning to feel that unless the Democrats can take both the Senate and the House it will lead only to more trouble for the party. While we'll all privately celebrate Conyers' investigation of the White House's misbehavior, the oversight finally being brought to bear will just be seen as an attack on the president, and by proxy, the soldiers (you know that's what they'll say, whether anyone believes that shit or not anymore). Republican failures can then be blamed on obstructionist Democrats, and the dirt they dig up will just be called partisan slander. I almost feel as though this train wreck of an administration needs to complete its damage before it's ok for us to take over. Anything else will just allow Democrats to be soiled with the failures of these do-nothing incompetents.

Then again, I am a proponent of giving up. It's a real toss-up. If you hate America, I still think voting Republican is the way to go, but if you hate the Democrats, a house takeover might be a blessing in disguise.

I am reminded of this map as we find out that jail and prison populations have increased by 2.6 percent.



Incarceration rates, top ten states for percent population incarcerated per 100,000 population. Note many of the states with the highest homicide rates are represented here, which might indicate fear of punishment is not a major obstacle to murder. Louisiana and Texas have the highest incarceration rates for the year 2000 at 793 per 100,000 and 779 per 100,000 respectively. Compare that to the national average of 481, and that of the lowest five states: Rhode Island 197, New Hampshire 185, North Dakota 146, Maine 130, and Minnesota at 129 per 100,000. New York, despite its draconian Rockefeller drug laws only has a rate of 393 per 100,000, a good bit less than the national average.

From Mother Jones magazine, Debt to Society: Special report Incarceration rates in 2000, incarceration rate is defined as the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one year per 100,000 residents, as recorded by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Red state justice. Pretty sad. Jail and execute a lot of people, and still you fail to reduce homicide or your crime rates.

Everybody's favorite Gwar-clone Lordi has won the Eurovision competition.

President Tarja Halonen congratulated the band in a telegram after their song Hard Rock Hallelujah won in Athens.

Hundreds of people celebrated in the streets of Helsinki, honking car horns, waving flags and singing Lordi's song.

Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat proclaimed: "It's official: Hell has frozen over. Finland has won."

The pictures are priceless.



Something about people in full demon regalia receiving bouquets of roses is hysterical.

This article on the failings of mine safety reform has a beautiful quote from a Cali Democract.

But Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who co-sponsored one of those bills, thinks Congress has been too slow in fixing a crisis, now four months after 12 miners died at West Virginia's Sago Mine.

"When Janet Jackson had her wardrobe [malfunction], it took Congress 40 days to change the law," Miller said. "It's now over 120 days, and Congress hasn't done a damn thing about securing a safer workplace for these miners and for these families."

This map, is actually a demonstration largely of problems with agricultural and mining safety in the red states.



Occupational death rate (or on-the-job death rate) per 100,000 for the top 21 states. The point of this chart is to show that working conditions in many of the red states and quite a few of the “right-to-work” states could be significantly improved. The highest rate is Alaska at 14.7 deaths per 100,000, and the spread of the top five is 9-14.7. Compare to the states with the lowest rates: New York 2.9, Delaware 2.7, Connecticut 2.4, Rhode Island 1.7, and Massachusetts at 1.4 per 100,000.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, in cooperation with State and Federal agencies, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2001-2002.

If they find 90k in cash your freezer, it doesn't matter what they're accusing you of, you did it.

William Jefferson (D-LA) is going to jail. Sadly, he hasn't realized this yet.

The eight-term congressman, whose district includes New Orleans and some of its suburbs, has denied any wrongdoing and vowed to remain in office to battle any criminal charges he may face.

We need to develop a drug that treats this kind of complete and total inability to face reality. I'm pretty sure it would work on the 29 percenters. Anyway, every day this jackass stays in office, he just embarrasses democrats and prevents an honest politician from taking his place. Send him to jail.

It seems like the Europeans have a sense of humor after all. Lordi, the Finnish Gwar look-alikes, have just been crowned the Eurovision champs. Can we get that awesome picture again?

We should probably start a word of the day entry solely drawing from the Urban Dictionary.

Today's entry? Utard.

combines the words "Utah" and "Retard"

Someone from Utah.

These utards don't even serve catsup, they only have fry sauce.

Lets try using it ourselves in a sentence.

Orrin Hatch, that Utard senator, accidentally confirmed the existence of the NSA phone record database last week. What a Utard.

It's happened again, George Will has written an excellent essay that I actually agree with. This fits with my hypothesis that Will is a good metric of how conservative people actually are, or whether they are total hacks.

So, a reminder, the George Will ratio refers to the number of times Will writes an essay I agree with (excluding his boring-ass baseball talk and lovey-dovey bios of politicians) vs. the number of times I disagree. It hovers around 1/7-8. Ratios of 1/10 or below indicate a higher rate of hackdom, usually an indication you are just an apologist for whatever Bush says is ok, rather than having a unifying ideology of conservatism, which will occasionally overlap with sanity. For instance, Max Boot, Novak and Krauthammer have ratios that are measured on quantum scale.

Anyway, he's writing today to criticize the stupidity of describing bigots as "values voters." And takes on Hilary's latest stupidity in her efforts to court people who will never vote for her ever, and just piss people like me off.

Last Saturday, when John McCain delivered the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he was said to be reaching out to values voters. Hillary Clinton, speaking recently at the annual U.S. Chamber of Commerce convention, scolded "kids," by which she evidently meant young adults, for thinking "work is a four-letter word." She was said to be courting values voters. If so, those voters must value slapdash rhetorical nonsense as well as work.

It is odd that some conservatives are eager to promote the semantic vanity of the phrase "values voters." And it is odder still that the media are cooperating with those conservatives.

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government -- about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues -- they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

Today's liberal agenda includes preservation, even expansion, of the welfare state in its current configuration in order to strengthen an egalitarian ethic of common provision. Liberals favor taxes and other measures to produce a more equal distribution of income. They may value equality indiscriminately, but they vote their values.

Hillary can suck it. She sounds like that old man yelling at you to get off his lawn. I work harder than those worthless boomers did at my age. And I will never vote for her as long as she remains an opponent of Grand Theft Auto. We might as well vote for Lieberman.

I've been having fun with the Motivational Poster Generator (thanks boingboing)

Here's my first effort.



Then I thought, I haven't been paying enough attention to the evil of hair parts lately.



Finally, a classic combination of the evil hair part and Santorum.



Try it yourselves, and send me your favorites (400pix gif or jpg), I'll host them. I'm trying to think of a good giveup blog image. Something that typifies our desire not to give a shit about idiots who vote to worsen their lives.

O, Wal-Mart! Woe betide he or she who argues against thee . . . from an economic perspective, giant importing, big-box retail companies like the Great Wal are supposed to create infinite global prosperity -- by driving prices down and creating service sector jobs in the good ole' U.S.A., while creating manufacturing jobs abroad (hey, a penny/12-hr-day is still a penny!)

But whoops, no. I'm not sure about all the foreign factory workers, but as for our domestic situation, it appears that those everyday low prices don't matter so much if the only job you can get is at Wal-Mart. Who knew?

So, it's worse than the creationists claim. Not only were our ancestors monkeys, but we probably had sex with our monkey ancestors (livescience). WP article here.

Some would also argue there are those of us who are still sleeping with chimps. I'll give a hint, her initials are LLWB.

Should have posted this yesterday, EJ Dionne takes on this bullshit that tax cuts "soak the rich" that's been presented by the WSJ and now Karl Rove. It's amazing how Republicans have turned the phenomenon of the rich getting richer into a sob story of victimization.

Most astonishingly, Rove tried to make the case that Bush's tax cuts actually left the rich paying more. Everyone knows the Bush cuts in levies on dividends, capital gains and inheritances overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. But here was Rove playing class politics by arguing that the wealthy now pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before Bush.

This is statistical flimflam, of course. It leaves out payroll taxes, which hit most Americans the hardest. And the wealthy are paying more of the total share of income taxes, even though their rates are much lower, because their share of national income has gone up. Rove's numbers actually prove the rich are getting richer. But the fact that Rove tried to sound like William Jennings Bryan is the surest indicator that the administration is worried about its image as protector of the privileged.

I'm glad someone in the MSM was willing to call bullshit on that one. What astonishes me is that the WSJ can repeatedly editorialize on the phenomenon of rich people being "soaked" by tax rates of about 22% on the richest Americans, not because they've been raised but because they've been lowered. Really, how do they say that with a straight face?

Apparently those multivitamins, you know, those things you think make you healthy? Well, they're mostly worthless and might actually hurt.

"Half of American adults are taking MVMs and the bottom line is that we don't know for sure that they're benefiting from them," said J. Michael McGinnis, chair of the panel from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, who chaired the panel. "In fact, we're concerned that some people may be getting too much of certain nutrients"

The findings pertain to the generally healthy population and do not include pregnant women, children, or those with disease.
...
Despite the general pubic perception that MVMs are safe, the panel identified several possible risks. Too much of certain nutrients can have adverse effects, the scientists said. And the combined effects of eating fortified foods, taking MVMs, and consuming single vitamins or minerals in large doses can lead to overconsumption.

Not to mention all that fun iron poisoning that results when you make vitamins look like candy for your dumb children and they decide to eat the entire bulk bottle from Sam's Club. People have this funny prejudice that natural things, vitamins, minerals, whatever, are good for you no matter what. Well, all sorts of natural things can be really bad for you, and in excess are just poison. The human body isn't that stupid, it can take care of itself with pretty much any ordinary diet, no need to supplement it to death. I'm glad to see the NAS paying attention to the incredible amounts of money wasted on these placebos. Next let's see them take out school anti-drug programs, yet another waste of money that makes us feel good, but doesn't really do anything productive.

The New York Times has an important article on how to name your daughter in such a way as to guarantee one day she will dance on a pole. I'm with Chris Rock on this one, one of the more important roles of parents is to keep their daughter off the pole, this is not the way to do it.

Also, reversing heaven, is that anything like saying the lord's prayer backwards? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet there will be a positive correlation between this name and pasties in the future.

Bush signed in another tax cut yesterday. The breakdown is pretty pathetic. I look forward to saving about 10-20 bucks next year. Yay!

	Income group		Saves		Reduces tax liability by:
	$20K-$30K		$10		0.4%
	$50K-$75K		$112		1.0%
	$75K-$100K		$406		2.3%
	$100K-$200K		$1,395		4.4%
	$200K-$500K		$4,527		5.9%
	Over $1 million		$42,766		4.5%

The train wreck continues. Oh, and the best part? Originally the Senate was planning to close loopholes allowing oil companies to save billions a year. Surprise, surprise, the White House objected and the language was dropped. There goes 5 billion in revenue.

PLoS this month again shows us that Open Access is the wave of the future. This time, it's a cohort study of papers showing that Open Access (OA) articles are more frequently cited than non-OA articles (even in the same journal - if you consider PNAS a legitimate journal), even when you control for confounding variables like number of authors, authors' lifetime publication count, country of origin, funding source etc., were controlled for.

The average number of citations of OA articles was higher compared to non-OA articles (April 2005: 1.5 [SD = 2.5] versus 1.2 [SD = 2.0]; Z = 3.123; p = 0.002; October 2005: 6.4 [SD = 10.4] versus 4.5 [SD = 4.9]; Z = 4.058; p < 0.001). In a logistic regression model, controlling for potential confounders, OA articles compared to non-OA articles remained twice as likely to be cited (odds ratio = 2.1 [1.5-2.9]) in the first 4-10 mo after publication (April 2005), with the odds ratio increasing to 2.9 (1.5-5.5) 10-16 mo after publication (October 2005).

I really think OA is the future of scientific publication. For one, congress is going to force the issue anyway, once they decide publicly-funded research deserves to be seen by the public, second, examples abound that OA publications lead to more people reading and citing your publication, which is what is most important to scientists anyway. Go PLoS!

Really, why should we even talk about Mr. 29% anymore? He's irrelevant, except for his compulsive lawbreaking, and unable to even please his own base. So, he gets on TV, and delays the season finale of Prison Break a full 20 minutes, and for what? To say he's going to send 6,000 troops to the border for one year (just long enough to cover the 2006 election) at an estimated cost of 1.9 billion. Now, remember, that's about what Wolfowitz said the Iraq war would cost, if I remember correctly.

Ok, so the left thinks this is pandering and a waste, the right sees it as a waste, but, no one has asked the most relevant question of all. What the hell is the National Guard going to think of this? Crusader Axe of the Defeatists asks the right questions.

If I'm in the Guard, and I'm back from Iraq after a year, still confused and suffering financially, spiritually and probably physically with no surety of help from the VA or anyone else, why the hell would I feel good about going to the border and collecting intelligence; or driving trucks for logistical support? Or providing communication support? Why not, I don't know, hire people to do that for the guard. Hey, there are defense contractors other than Haliburton who could do the work. Lots of ex-military would love it -- 200000 vets slept homeless last night.

It makes me think of how Bill Maher describing the US Military relationship with the Bush administration as that of an abused wife to her philandering husband. For some reason, despite all the abuse, beatings, and hardship, they still stick with the guy, and you wonder why? Why don't they abandon this dysfunctional relationship and tell this administration to go to hell? Must be all that duty and honor stuff, but still, there's got to be a limit. A year being away from your family to sit in some fucking truck in Mexico is not a good use of anyone's time. Poor guys.

As predicted, the lawsuits are starting against the phone companies. This first one is against verizon, for 50 billion dollars. Yes, billion with a 'b'.

The suit, filed Friday by two New Jersey lawyers on behalf of all Verizon subscribers, contends the phone records collection - first reported by USA Today on Thursday - violates the Constitutional right to privacy and federal law.

As a part of the snooping program, the government reportedly collects information every time a call is made on a Verizon phone line.

"The Telecommunications Act of 1934 is as clear as clear can be," plaintiff Carl Mayer said. "You can't turn over the records of your customers and if you do so it's $1,000 per violation. The Constitution is very clear. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the Fourth Amendment prevents unlawful searches and seizures which we believe this to be."

At $1,000 for each of Verizon's 50 million customers, the company and government could be made to pay $50 billion dollars in a class action suit, Mayer said. Verizon Communications said Friday that it could not confirm or deny whether it has provided phone records to the National Security Agency, but the company insisted it protects customer privacy and would never participate in a government "fishing expedition."

I have no sympathy.

Seriously rightwingers, if you don't want to be labelled as freaky racist Nazi types, make this guy shut up.

His criticism of Bush, as many right wingers these days, is that he doesn't go far enough to take care of those dang Mexicans trying to reoccupy the land we stole 170 years ago.

And he [Bush] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic - it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

He beat me to the Godwin punch! I realize this is worldnetdaily, but still, stop looking to the Nazis for your immigration solutions! This does not make you guys look good, and by virture of being a fellow citizens, I'm embarrassed. Also check out this guy's haircut, it must be the new option to transmit your ideology since the toothbrush mustache went out.

Reminds me of the racist crap out of John Gibson's mouth on May 11th (as covered by Colbert last night).

Half of the kids in this country under 5 years old are minorities, by far the greatest number are Hispanic. Know what that means? 25 years and the majority population is Hispanic...to put it bluntly, we need more babies.

Hispanics are the new black. Doesn't make right-wingers look so hot does it?

Maybe I'm picking on the Catholics a little too much lately, but their attacks on the Da Vinci Code are just too funny. First, let me assure you, I have zero interest in seeing this movie, nor do I believe any of the silly crap in the book. It's fiction, get over it, much like other books which shall remain nameless.

Strangely, the Catholics are very uncomfortable about fictional works that suggest made-up conspiracies having to do with Catholic dogma. We've warned them again and again, you don't want people to start focusing on the real cover-ups in the church **cough** butsecks with children **cough**, but they just can't help themselves.

Then it gets even funnier, they attack the film with an argument...wait, just read it for yourselves.

"This is a shocking and worrying cultural phenomenon that reflects, on the one hand, the ignorance of millions of people and, on the other, the voluptuous pleasure the media take in promoting products that have nothing to do with the truth," the French-born cardinal, 75, told the Paris radio station.
...
"If a product that mixes up claims made as fact, fiction and so on, and comes out with elucubrations that have no relation to history, the whole world's media promote it," he said.
...
"What I'm concerned about is that decent people who do not have the proper religious education will take this nonsense for the real thing," said the cardinal, who has headed the Pontifical Council for Culture since 1988.

Gosh, those are the best arguments I've ever heard for not reading the Bible, or seeing any movie based on the Bible, especially considering the Catholics themselves have long dispensed with the idea that the book is literal truth. Doesn't that mean it contains some fiction guys? If you're going to accept evolution and that Noah probably didn't find polar bears in Palestine, then why are you upset about Tom Hanks' fictional exploits?

The best part, is it's coming from a leader of a religion that uses the story of Onan to discourage masturbation. Talk about not having the proper religious education. And as far as the media promoting it "worldwide," has this guy ever seen the news around any Christian holiday? Has he noticed that at least once a year Time, Newsweek and every other pathetic example of journalism has some article on whether or not Jebus was real, or where the Virgin Mary might have stubbed her toe? These guys seem to have no appreciation for how good they have it, and they really shouldn't rock the boat, or someone will start writing books called "The Buttsecks with Children Code." It will star such prominent members of the Catholic church as the founder of The Legion of Christ, Cardinal Bernard Law, 4% of the priesthood and Pope Ratfinger himself for his personal efforts to conceal child sexual abuse. Sheesh. Give this controversy over this book a rest people. It's fiction!

A lot of people have responded to criticism over the NSA spy program saying, "so what if they want to look at my phone records, I don't do anything wrong." Well, a reporter can be doing nothing wrong but still get spied on so the FBI can identify their confidential sources. Turns out ABC has a little spy problem, and their phones have been illegally compromised by the feds who clearly don't know about the tasty first-amendment protections at play.

Kos has some good analysis on how this relates to established case law on protections for journalists that suggests this is the most illegal thing yet.

In New York Times Co. v. Gonzales, 382 F.Supp.2d 457 (S.D.N.Y. 2005), the New York Times sought a declaratory judgment to protect the telephone records of two of its reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon. Miller and Shenon had written articles in the aftermath of September 11th detailing how the government planned to block assets and search the offices of two Islamic charities.

Patrick Fitzgerald wanted to know who leaked this information. He argued that Miller and Shenon's reporting tipped off the charities to the searches and increased the likelihood that evidence and assets were destroyed or concealed. As part of his investigation into the leak, he requested that Miller and Shenon voluntarily produce their phone records. They refused and eventually filed the lawsuit to determine whether their phone records were protected.

Judge Sweet ruled that indeed the phone records in that case were "protected by the qualified reporters' privilege for confidential sources, which exists pursuant to the First Amendment and federal common law." The government in that case was unable to overcome that privilege, so it could not have access to the phone records.

**update**
Maybe Hayden was trying to find out about this guy ABC was talking to.

NSA whistleblower Russ Tice says he will tell Congress Wednesday of "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" involving the agency's former director, Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee to run the CIA.

Tice, a former technical intelligence specialist at NSA who first went public on ABC News, says he has been asked to meet in closed session with staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a letter to the committee, Tice says the alleged illegal acts involved "very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAPs)."

Adam Nagourney writes for the New York Times Week in Review, the most Give-Uppy article I've ever seen! I think he must be a lurker. His argument, which I think is a good example of the Give Up hypothesis, is that letting Republicans hit rock bottom would lead to greater future success for the Democratic party. Hence, it might be a good thing to lose again in 2006 midterms, so Republicans won't be able to spread the blame for their horrific failures onto Democrats.

From this perspective, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world politically to watch the Republicans struggle through the last two years of the Bush presidency. There's the prospect of continued conflict in Iraq, high gas prices, corruption investigations, Republican infighting and a gridlocked Congress. Democrats would have a better chance of winning the presidency in 2008, by this reasoning, and for the future they enhance their stature at a time when Republicans are faltering.

Indeed, some Democrats worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress by a slim margin, giving them responsibility without real authority. They might serve as a foil to Republicans and President Bush, who would be looking for someone to share the blame. Democrats need a net gain of 6 seats in the Senate, and 15 seats in the House. "The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and 3 or 4 seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government," said Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip. "We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything."

Mr. Coelho quickly added, "Obviously, from a party point of view we want to get in and do things, but I'm talking about the ideal political thing."

Ha! Damn right! I love this stuff. I might just vote Republican in November just to fuck them over.

Now, Clin-ton isn't onboard for this plan, but I'm not surprised. However he does make another Give Up point.

"I don't buy the argument that we'd be better off if we almost got there and didn't win a majority in either house," Bill Clinton, the former president, said in an interview. "I think when you suit up you've got to try to win, and I hope we will win because we will get better public policy and it'll be better for America."

Exactly, Democrats will eventually win because our public policy is objectively better. Republicans are a slow-motion and inevitable trainwreck, Clin-ton and I agree on that, and the longer they're in power the more they demonstrate their inability to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. However, my argument isn't to try to stop the train from wrecking by throwing the Democratic party onto the tracks, that's just futile and destructive. We should let this wreck complete itself, then pick up the pieces and move on. Now, I think if we could take over both the Senate and the House in 2006 that would excellent, because we may be able to then ameliorate the worst effects of Republicanism on this country, but, anything short of real power would probably just be counterproductive.

So, anyway, Give Up! Failure is victory!

Thanks Jeff E

So, McCain gave his little talk at Falwell's joke of a commuter college, Liberty University.

The more I know about McCain the more I dislike him. His new thing, pandering to all sides, just comes across as pathetic wishy-washiness.

At a time when polls show a decline in public support of the war, and with calls on Capitol Hill for the United States to figure out a way to withdraw, McCain argued for staying in Iraq, even as he acknowledged the toll it has taken on the nation.

"Americans should argue about this war," he said. "It has cost the lives of nearly 2,500 of the best of us. It has taken innocent life. It has imposed an enormous financial burden on our economy."

But he said he had not varied in his own support.

"I stand that ground not to chase vainglorious dreams of empire; not for a noxious sense of racial superiority over a subject people; not for cheap oil," he said. "I stand that ground because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it."

In other words, the war is a mess, people are right to be pissed and should be vocal, but they're still wrong, and I'm right, and have always been right. Talk about trying to play all sides of the room.

Here's a picture to keep around for the 2008 election.

the Guardian Reports on decreasing arctic ice cover with each passing year, this year being the worst on record (the satellite data only goes back to 1979, but it has shown a direct linear decline from 16.5 million sq-miles to 14.5). The question being asked is, have we hit a tipping point?

I havent been as up on the arctic ice problem, hopefully realclimate.org will take a look and give an evaluation of this effect.

Lynch some Mexicans! That will please those wackjobs who seem to have enough free time to patrol the border for free. Are these jackasses on welfare? How can they afford to sit out on the border all damn year? Do we even need to worry what these guys think? They can't possibly be major donors, they sound like unemployed ex-KKK fanatics (the confederate flags present at their little Klan-bakes are a clue).

The pathetic thing is how transparent this pandering is. The guy hits 29%, then all of a sudden he's all about securing the borders. Republicans pass a tax cut that benefits the 1%, at the same time they underfunded their own plan to put 10,000 border agents into action. How many did they actually fund? 210. Ha! Panderers. Mr. 29% is in trouble, especially considering a new non-hack poll indicates a majority of Americans actually disapprove of the NSA program

Jackasses. Thanks to Kos for the historical linkage.

Live Science is reporting on the fierce competition to build the next popemobile! Apparently Mercedes has been the manufacturer of this hysterical vehicle for the last 30 years or so. I so want one of these. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to drive around in this thing waving to people?

Anyway, I think in honor of his Nazi roots, Pope Ratfinger should choose the Volkswagon popemobile. Maybe Volkswagon will also make one for the people, you know, to make up for all those tanks they made.

So, I'm thinking of dumping my phone to use VOIP or maybe just only take calls at work. I love that EFF is suing AT&T for this violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, various Telecommunications acts, FISA regulations, and AT&T's own contract with customers that says it will not share information with a government agency without a warrant. However, this weekend, the DOJ moved to quash their lawsuit. (News coverage here) I don't know if it's just to protect their secret program or whether they realize this lawsuit probably represents the largest class action in US history. At $1000 dollars a violation, and with literally billions of violations of the law, this could sink these companies without some form of bailout for the phone companies. Qwest is looking awfully smart in the wake of all this, and all they asked for a permission slip from the attorney general and the NSA couldn't even get that from Ashcroft - now there's an illegal program. Let the eagle soar...like she's never soared before.

My lawyer experts seem to think that EFF is screwed though. It sounds like the whole executive privelege thing is going to sink the lawsuit and any kind of accountability for these phone companies is therefore ephemeral. So in Give Up spirit, I suggest we take the following actions to render any potential spying using this stupid ass big-brother program useless (also to be proactive because they're probably doing the same thing with email).

The official Give Up blog anti-NSA protocol

1. Dial lots of wrong numbers, if you're really ambitious, just start calling numbers in Saudi Arabia and hang up before anyone can answer.
   
2. Begin every phone conversation (remember NSA has satellites capable of recording every cell phone conversation on earth) with the following statement, "Hijacking and bombing are bad, Bush should catch Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi and other extremists in the name of Allah so their plans for blowing up targets with dirty bombs, anthrax, and chemical and biological weapons can be foiled, praise Allah." If you can ululate that would be good too.
   
3. Include a similar message in the signature of all of your emails (ululation not required since I don't know how to write out that sound).
   

If ten million or so Americans follow these three simple steps maybe we can render the program useless and they'll stop spying on us, the creeps.

Stephen Kinzer has written an Op-Ed for the LA Times that is worth a read. I find this guy really interesting. He's made a study of US intervention and finds, not surprisingly, that we're not that good at it (especially in the long term).

Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh - chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among Iranians - angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry. President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful, but it set the stage for future disaster.

The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to undermine U.S. interests around the world.
...
Overthrowing a government is like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill - you have no idea exactly what will happen next. Iranians are not the only ones who know this. In slightly more than a century, the United States has overthrown the governments of at least 14 countries, beginning with the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and forcibly intervened in dozens more. Long before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were the Philippines, Panama, South Vietnam and Chile, among others.

Most of these interventions not only have brought great pain to the target countries but also, in the long run, weakened American security.

Cuba, half a world away from Iran, is a fine example. In 1898, the United States sent troops there to help rebels overthrow Spanish colonial rule. Once victory was secured, the U.S. reneged on its promise to allow Cuba to become independent and turned it into a protectorate.

More than 60 years later, in his first speech as leader of the victorious Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro recalled that episode and made a promise. "This time," he vowed, "it will not be like 1898, when the Americans came in and made themselves masters of the country."

Those words suggest that perhaps if the U.S. had allowed Cuba to go its own way in 1898, the entire phenomenon of Castro communism might never have emerged.

The U.S. deposed a visionary leader of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, in 1909 and sent his unlucky country into a long spiral of repression and rebellion.

Forty-five years later, still believing that "regime change" can end well, the U.S. overthrew the left-leaning president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, and imposed a military regime. That regime's brutality set off a 30-year civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.

Today, Latin America and the Middle East are the regions of the world in the most open political rebellion against U.S. policies. It is no coincidence that these are the regions where the U.S. has intervened most often. Resentment over intervention festers. It passes from generation to generation. Ultimately it produces a backlash.

I love this stuff, it's really interesting to learn all the times we've played this game and how often it's failed to produce good results, namely, every time.

That wacky Homeland Security is holding up the director of Donnie Darko from going to Cannes because his name is on the no-fly list.

The guy's name is James Kelly. So far, I have heard about one million stories of people with names on the watchlist, and they are all the most common names you could imagine. No one named, say, Porphyria Rumplybottom is on the list. It's all "Ann Smith" and "John Rogers." How many taxonomically dull Americans have to miss flights before we realize that this common-named-terror-suspect thing is just an Al-Qaeda plot to slowly annoy the great Satan into submission?

EJ Dionne might be reading Give Up blog, he's talking about liberals looking to the states to make up for gaps in federal regulation.

The new states' rights means enhancing the ability of states to solve problems that our current federal government won't confront. These days the real opponents of allowing our 50 laboratories of democracy to step up are conservatives who fear the power grass-roots progressives can wield at the state level.

Contrast this week in our nation's capital with the week in Boston, capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Congress was solving the enormously important problem of making sure that wealthy Americans can continue to pay low taxes on their dividends and capital gains.

In Boston, legislators were completing work on a remarkable law that -- if it works -- will provide health coverage for almost all of the state's residents. The bill passed overwhelmingly last month in the Democratic-controlled legislature and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney. This week the legislature was dealing with Romney's vetoes of a few of the bill's provisions.

Looks like some more mainstream pundits are starting to see the beauty of the blue state. It's also interesting because he covers the positives and negatives of the state-based regulation strategy. Namely, asshats like Enzi may decide to shill for insurance companies everywhere and knock down your cool state laws.

Massachusetts has an advantage over other states, McDonough said, because it has a comparatively low number of poor people who are uninsured. But imagine if the federal government provided coverage for all poor and working-class Americans and then encouraged states to find their own market innovations to allow the rest to afford insurance.

Instead, the Senate is considering a bill this week by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) that would sweep away state insurance regulations. Killing some of these -- notably, limits on the premiums insurance companies can impose on older and sicker people -- could destroy the Massachusetts plan by making insurance unaffordable for many. What Boston giveth, Washington could take away.

This is a backward form of federalism. The federal government should solve problems or, failing that, give states the room, the incentives and the opportunities to solve problems for themselves. It's amazing what local politicians can accomplish when good ideas and skilled agitators come together.

Well, we all agree that the federal government is a total failure, and congressional Republicans are now all asshats. Given that all they could accomplish this term is extending tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% through estate tax and dividend tax cuts, and are planning to waste more of everyone's time on flag burning and the new wehatefags.gov website, how can they possibly pretend to be governing? Where else can we look except to the blue states?

The Diebold machines are so insecure, that Slashdot reports they can be compromised in minutes, with minimal skill to wreak havok. link to article.

Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.

"This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental," said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.
...
Preparations could be made days or weeks beforehand, and the loading of the software could take only a minute or so once the machines are delivered to the polling places. In some cases, machines are delivered several days before an election to schools, churches, homes and other common polling places.

Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa's Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.

"All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design," he said.

I think I know how Republicans plan to stay in power. It certainly isn't through competent management. It sounds like Diebold has designed machines with open USB ports! Are they totally fucking retarded? Don't they know that USB plugs directly into the OS?

This guy wants AT&T to tell him what they've been doing with his phone records.

Maybe 35% is too small a number to make a difference in the cowardly Democrats spineless questioning of this new, incredibly illegal, anti-American spying activity. But it might be enough to make a difference in the profits of Qwest, and hurt the profits of the Quizling companies, AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South.

I don't think I have Qwest coverage available in my area. But if you do, switch goddamnit! Switch now, and let's fuck AT&T and Verizon and Bell South for selling our civil liberties out from under us.

Qwest is quickly emerging as a hero in all this mess. Qwest refused the NSA, the NSA threatened to suspend NSA contracts, Qwest asked, "why don't you get FISA approval," NSA said, "we doubt they'd say ok," Qwest asked, "how about the attorney general," NSA, "not so much."

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Wow, note the bolded section. Of course, this is what always happens. It starts out with national security, but eventually becomes a law enforcement tool.

Can you believe it? This guy is now at 29% approval, and still Democrats won't stand up to him.

This NSA spying on every single American (except those who have Qwest), constitutes the largest crime ever committed by a president against the American people, and what do the Democrats do? Bitch for a day, then say they'll question Hayden carefully.

How about calling for his arrest? How about calling for impeachment? There is no legal justification for forcing phone companies to divulge private information on every single American for the purpose of data mining. Besides the fact that it has proven ineffective with the NSA being described as having "gone deaf" probably from the excess of clatter that this idiotic program created.

Even sadder? WP/ABC's polling showed only 35% of people have a problem with this intrusion. Pathetic. It's really hard to be liberal and care about the freedoms of citizens in this country when they're so unwilling to care for themselves. I guess I better give up.

Now I feel better.

Can you even believe how many of these guys are going down?
Have you heard about how the HUD secretary inadvertantly admitted to illegally punished contractors for their political beliefs (and now is under investigation by congress and the inspector general)? Now the Republican governor of Kentucky is under indictment. Oh, and those phone-bank jamming Republicans in New Hampshire are probably going to spend 18 to 24 months in jail.

The "grand old docket" at TPM is getting out of control!

Now if we could only figure out a way to get Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Goss, and Hayden on it (Rove will certainly be there soon).

Or so I thought, until fark pointed me to these guys.

Check it out.


I'll never mock improv again. Until I'm forced to sit through it and remember how much I hate it.

Slate informs us of the many ways in which it is difficult to become six again. Like, when you watch he-man as an adult, all you can see is it's homoerotic overtones.

The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism—an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader. In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!" Once you start thinking along these lines, it's impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It's a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.

Oddly, now I really do want to see it again. I can't believe I missed this stuff.

The Dukester probe has expanded to include Congressman Jerry Lewis head of the House Appropriations Committee.

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles has issued subpoenas in an investigation into the relationship between Lewis (R-Redlands) and a Washington lobbyist linked to disgraced former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe), three people familiar with the investigation said.
...
The government is looking into the connection between Lewis and his longtime friend Bill Lowery, the sources said. Lowery, a lobbyist, is a former congressman from San Diego.

As chairman of the Appropriations panel, Lewis has earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts for many of Lowery's clients, one of the sources said.

Lewis said he knew Lowery well, having spent 12 years in Congress with him, but denied favoring earmarks for Lowery's clients.
...
Shortly after leaving Congress, Lowery founded Copeland Lowery Jacquez Denton & White, a Washington lobbying firm whose clients include Brent R. Wilkes, a defense contractor who is the focus of a separate probe in San Diego.

Wilkes and his companies have given Lewis at least $60,000 in campaign contributions over the years, making them among the lawmaker's largest contributors.
...
Jeff Shockey, a key Lewis staffer, went to work for Lowery as a lobbyist in 1999 and then returned to Lewis' staff last year. According to a source familiar with the investigation, Shockey received $600,000 in severance payments from Lowery's firm before returning to Lewis to become the deputy staff director for the House Appropriations Committee — with an annual salary of $170,000.

"He is now the gatekeeper for more than $850 billion," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, referring to the Appropriations Committee's role in disbursing government funds.

The sad thing is, even though all of these things sound disgusting, like earmarking tons of money to companies in your district and to friends of your friends, it's probably all legal.

Vermont makes it into the kickass blue state category today for passing a bill creating near-universal health coverage. Once again, blue states showing how it's done. I especially liked this quote.

Advocates said Catamount Health would go further than the universal health care plan approved in Massachusetts earlier this spring. That is because the plan is designed to provide better care for people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer and head off serious complications.

It is designed "so we pay for the blood work and not the amputation," said House Health Care Committee chairman Rep. John Tracy, a Democrat.

Especially in regards to my "US Healthcare is the Worst in the World" post, this is exactly what should be provided to the citizens of every state in the union.

The best thing is, all those stupid arguments the libertarians use to try to avoid a single-payer or government subsidized system will be proven to be bunk. Between Massachusetts and Vermont we should be able to show that universal healthcare not only works, but can give a (blue) state a comparative advantage (as long as that state isn't Tennessee which ran their universal healthcare program into the ground).

After all, if the state subsidized health care it's actually a boon for small business (and large businesses too). This is one of the issues that's hurting Americas ability to compete with other countries worldwide. Other nations are well on their way towards nationalizing medical care, which it is clear, costs less and provides better healthcare. Americans get some of the poorest care in the industrialized world (we are ranked 37th in the world behind every other industrialized nation except Turkey I think), as a result our health is worse (even when you control for race, poverty, and other risk factors), and at the same time we pay the most for care. We have to stop listening to these fearmongers who say stupid shit like you won't ever be able to get MRIs on demand if we nationalize health care. So fucking what. It's more important that people receive preventative care, vaccines, check-ups, medicines for chronic diseases, and screening than it is for them to get an MRI on demand. Besides, it's not like nationalization will make all the machines we do have disappear, we're always going to have better access because we invented the damn things and spread them all over the country already.

Good health care is cheap, simple and preventative. It means you provide routine screening and basic medical checkups to everybody, before they get sick. When they do get sick you use time-tested generic medications, and don't immediately send everyone to an MRI. It should be possible to provide this to American citizens at half the expense we currently forward to the insurance companies that are busy ass-raping the nation.

Two pieces of good Give Up news this morning.

Plans are in the works to give DC the vote. That's right. After 200-some years, the citizens of the nations capital will be allowed representation in congress.

That is probably the saddest example of an absence of Democracy in the world. In the capital city of the nation that always says it invented modern Democracy, the 500 thousand citizens have no (voting) representation in congress. Anyone who opposes voting for the residents of DC is worse than Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein (I'm trying to sound like a Republican, how'd I do?)

Also, in Florida Give Up news, no Republicans plan to oppose Katherine Harris in a senate primary.

That means Republicans are losing that particular battle. She's about as popular as foot fungus.

Why do people think that Republicans are good on foreign policy? It always seems this is an issue Republicans cite as one of their strengths, probably because they think they can always "out-crazy" the other guy. Well, now our genious leaders seem to be instigating a "who's crazier" war with Putin, who's now saying Russia is rearming to deal with "foreign pressure". Good job on starting that new cold war guys.

Can we please just ITMFA?

The big news story today? All the phone companies have been complicit in spying on tens of millions of Americans. Maybe this is why, under Hayden, the NSA was described as having gone "deaf" from being overwhelmed with new sources of information.

Maybe if they hadn't been spying on tens of millions of innocent people, this wouldn't be a problem. So, Hayden seems to meet all the requirements for a potential Bush appointee. He's a criminal (and has a bunch of connections to real MZM criminals), and he's incompetent. At least they're not breaking the pattern.

Also, fitting with the pattern, the Justice Department investigation into the NSA spying has been cancelled. Why? Because they won't give the investigators the higher clearance required to look at the files. Once again, hiding behind executive priviledge and classification to hide illegal activity.

NYT reports that Sunnis are forming armed bands to keep the police out of their neighborhoods. Here's a bad sign, the police seem to be acting as death squads, killing Sunnis with impunity.

As evidence mounts that Shiite police commandos are carrying out secret killings, Sunni Arab neighborhoods across Baghdad have begun forming citizen groups to keep the paramilitary forces out of their areas entirely.
...
Three years after the American invasion, the war has settled here, in the quiet of neighborhoods, streets and Iraqis' backyards. Dozens of bodies surface daily. People are taken from their homes and executed. Assassinations are routine. But instead of looking to the government for protection, ordinary Sunni Arabs are taking up arms against it, perhaps the most vivid illustration of the depth of Sunni mistrust of the American backed, Shiite-led security forces. "There is no bridge of confidence between the government and the Iraqi people," said Tarik al-Hashimy, a vice president of Iraq who is a Sunni Arab.
...
In March, the Baghdad morgue received 1,294 bodies, more than double the 596 received in March 2005. In April, the figure was up by 88 percent from the previous April. Nearly 90 percent died violently, most by gunfire, according to the morgue.

"The killing, you can't imagine the killing," said Yusra Abdul Aziz, 47, a teacher, whose block, in Adhamiya, organized its watch group in March, after four neighbors were shot dead over several days. "Without any reason. Cars come and shoot us. We run to the hospital and get our wounded. We live in a nightmare, actually."

The Sunnis in these neighborhoods cite the American troops and Iraqi military as slightly more trustworthy, and capable of keeping the Shiite police/death squads from killing them. It's disturbing. It sounds as if we withdraw without adequately training and establishing the army the Sunnis will be exterminated by Shiite police forces.

So, let's summarize. Over 1000 civilians killed a month, the Iraqi interior minister estimating 100,000 refugees, foreign terrorists leading attacks on Sunnis and government facilities, open gunfighting in city streets, Shiite death squads made up of police killing Sunnis, and Sunnis forming local militias to keep the police out of their neighborhoods. When is everyone else going to see this is a civil war? What part of the definition of a civil war is missing?

Wikipedia defines a Civil War:

A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight for political power or control of an area. Some civil wars are also categorized as revolutions when major societal restructuring is a possible outcome of the conflict. An insurgency, whether successful or not, is likely to be classified as a civil war by some historians if, and only if, organized armies fight conventional battles. Other historians state the criteria for a civil war is that there must be prolonged violence between organized factions or defined regions of a country (conventionally fought or not).

Hmmm. Seems the only thing missing is uniforms. Do the Shiite police uniforms count? Well, the BBC had an article about this last month but pretty much the only reason they could come up with for not calling this a civil war is a fuzzy optimism that a government might form and by deus ex machina everything will get better. I'm less optimistic, this is a civil war, deal with it.

So what do the tech people think of using Tor servers to bypass censorware, allow anonymous internet surfing, and allow unfettered access from any internet terminal?

It's called Torpark, you can install it on a USB chip drive, and by running the executable you can bypass all the crap on a machine and directly access the interweb.

I think it would be neat if only to get past the stupid crippleware put on public computers that make them useless for browsing the internets. It's on my thumbdrive now.

As we hear that Republicans are continuing their hopeless policy of uneccessary and irresponsible tax cuts their numbers and Bush's are crashing. The complete results of the Times/CBS poll are here.

Some highlights? Bush is at 31% approval, 63% disapproval, 23% think we're on the right track, 27% approve of Bush's foreign policy, 28% of his handling the economy, 29% on Iraq, 26% approve of his handling of immigration, 29% have a favorable view of Bush(20% for Cheney), 62% say things are worse than they were 6 years ago, 67% would like more Congressional oversight of the administration, 55% say he lacks leadership skills, 56% say the Iraq war wasn't worth it, and a stunning 13% approve his handling of high gas prices.

Further, only 23% approve of congress (hmm, pointless tax cuts don't seem to be working), of registered voters 33% would vote for a Republican congressman, and 44% would vote for a Democrat, 49% would prefer a Congress of a different party than the president compared to 23% who prefer both be the same party.

Now, for the Democrats, 55% view them favorably (37% unfavorable) compared to 37% for Republicans (57% unfavorable). 55% think Democrats could make taxes "more fair", and 50% think Democrats share their values compared to 37% who feel Republicans do. On prescription drugs, 60% think the Democrats are more trustworthy. On oil 9% believe Democrats are influenced by oil companies compared to 66% believing Republicans are in their pockets. Republicans are seen as more dishonest with 40% thinking they are corrupt vs 15% who think the Democrats are crooked. 60% are concerned global warming will have a negative impact on the environment. Finally, 45% of people think Democrats have more new ideas compared to 21% for Republicans.

So there you have it people. Democrats have ideas, and are trusted more than Bush on just about every issue (they break even on security, the Republican's strongest point). Issues to emphasize in the next election? Let's make it competent government, gas prices (new technology), tax fairness, the environment and corruption. Looks like we'd win on values, and might break even on security, maybe we can steal those, but the basic honesty/competence/fairness and environmental/gas issues are the real winners.

Looks like the voters are starting to taste the shit sandwich!

Unlike other studios backing the MPAA in their bizarre and counter-productive lawsuit/legislation based attack on piracy, Warner Brothers has actually decided to innovate, and use technology to benefit their consumers. That's right, Warner Brothers is going to start allowing people to legitimately torrent their movies. If they include the ability to burn to DVD at home the business model will be perfect (not everybody wants to watch movies on a computer screen or has a HDTV capable of receiving digital signal).

It's kind of striking how stupid the major music and movie companies have been. Here they have this great wave of technology that allows direct access to consumers over their computers without middlemen or CD/DVD production in their way, and they don't see it as an opportunity. There even exists excellent models of distribution that could be replicated, like eMusic or iTunes for legitimate distribution of their product, and they still refuse to innovate. Instead, they dig in behind their outdated business model and 10-15 year old technologies and sue, sue, sue. Or convince Orrin Hatch that computers should be made to self-destruct when someone allegedly pirates their material (oh what a minefield of stupidity that was).

Hooray for Warner Brothers. Finally someone is catching on.

Christopher Wanjek writes for LiveScience an article that is actually realistic about American healthcare. It's pretty simple, we pay the most, and we get the least. We have the worst healthcare, for the money, in the world, and we rank about 37th in the world overall.

Anyone thinking that America has the best health system is delusional, and hopefully they can get treatment for that in Canada. This is a country in which African Americans men in Harlem are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh, as relayed in an eye-opening study published in the New England Journal of Medicine over a decade ago.

We don't do our children any service, either.

America ranks first in child gun violence and first among industrialized nations in preschool children not immunized. Children under age 15 are 12 times more likely to die from gunfire, 16 times more likely to be murdered by a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and 9 times more likely to be killed in a firearm accident compared to 25 other industrialized nations combined. These sobering facts come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The United States' health care system ranked 37th on a list of 191 systems compiled by the World Health Organization in 2000. So last week's JAMA article should come as no surprise. We spend more money per person on health care than any other country, yet we are consistently ranked rock bottom for most health indicators when compared to other wealthy nations.
...
Something is clearly wrong, and it is likely our emphasis on treatment instead of prevention. The whole system is whacked. Insurance companies will cover the cost of a diabetic's amputation, yet they usually won't pay for nutritional counseling that could prevent or minimize the negative health effects of diabetes.

Complicating issues is the fact that the United States has three distinct populations: the wealthy, a somewhat insured middle-class, and the poor. The poor are not just from the much-discussed inner city. Large tracts of the United States—from Native American reservations and the Appalachian Mountains to rural and remote regions of the South—have a health care infrastructure no better than many developing nations in Africa and Central America.

What's wrong is a lack of a single-payer system combined with the poor health status of the red states. Healthcare in red states is the worst in the country. Take for instance these news stories on infant mortality in the US being the 2nd worst in the industrialized world. Where in this country do you think the problem is? Here:



Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births) by state 2000-2002. To put the numbers in perspective, Mississippi, with its stunning rate of 10.5 deaths per 1000 live births (or 1 in 100), has more than double the infant mortality rate of Massachusetts at 4.8, and places it somewhere between Macedonia and Uruguay on an international scale. It is also interesting to note that of the 26 states that have rates greater than the national average, 75% are so-called "Red" states, and of the 10 states with the lowest infant mortality 8 are "Blue". When you compare states with the highest infant mortality rates (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee all have rates of 8 deaths per 1000 live births or greater), and the states with the lowest infant mortality rates (California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, and Utah all have rates of infant mortality in the range of 4.8- 5.5 deaths per 1000 births) you see that a certain portion of America actually enjoys comparable or lower infant mortality than the combined average for the EU or countries like Great Britain and the Netherlands.

Our infant mortality rate year to year is between 6.5-7 per 1000 per year according to the CIA factbook. However, the rate is being dragged up by the red states, particularly in the South.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics. Health, United States, 2004 With Chartbook on Trends in the Health of Americans. Hyattsville, Maryland: 2004.

These are slightly older statistics than those being reported on today. Once the NCHS publishes the 2006 report online (and I have time to process it) I'll update the map. The issue here is that our healthcare system nationally is a disgrace, and the people who suffer the most are those poor red-staters who refuse to elect someone who could actually manage to create a national healthcare system, and wrest our medical care back from the insurance companies.

Poor Richard Cohen, he's been receiving hate mail ever since he said that he was funny, and Colbert isn't.

His proof Colbert isn't funny? Colbert doesn't have the ratings of American Idol.

What to make of all this? First, it's not about Colbert. His show has an audience of about 1 million -- not exactly "American Idol" numbers.

Oh, and if you disagree with him, you will extend the war in Iraq.

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.
...
Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

Sorry Richard, we don't think you're Bush's lap dog because you don't like Colbert. We think so because you unapologetically supported the Iraq war, and because all you do is bitch and moan about a liberal movement that has left you in the dust. And helping elect Richard Nixon isn't an apt comparison, Bush is about as popular as Nixon after watergate. Your argument might have applied to the 2004 election, not the next. And, let's be clear. You're not our friend, that's why you're getting hate mail.

Colbert wasn't there to make you or anyone else in that audience (yeah you weren't there) laugh. As an astute commenter has pointed out, it was a beautiful act of Dada genius. He was there to screw with the audience, and have his own laugh at your (as in the media's) expense as he always does, every night. His response reminds me of those hysterical interviews of the audience members of the wrestling matches Andy Kaufman went to as a fake Hollywood anti-woman villain wrestler. They couldn't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that Kaufman wasn't there to be loved and play monkey for the audience, quite the opposite. This seems to be the big disconnect. The audience at the correspondents' dinner expected some nice safe old-fashioned comedian to prance about for them and make them feel good about themselves by prodding gently at their egos. Sorry, Colbert wasn't going to be your monkey boy, he was there to kick you all in the pants for his and our benefit. Not yours.

Cohen feels victimized because so many people disagreed with him that he couldn't open his email up and read fawning love-letters to his outdated and boring mealy-mouthed mediocrity. I'm crying.

Here's some advice to Cohen and all the other so-called liberal op-ed writers out there who don't get what's happening. You guys have failed us, failed us all. We are creating a new system; a new political operation through the netroots. Our favorite shows exist to mock you and your ineffectual coverage of the biggest presidential failure in U.S. history. Get with it, join us, we'll forgive all and welcome you back into the fold. Don't be complacent and expect your print op-eds to be the dominant form of liberal discussion for all time. Log in to Daily Kos and find out what your liberal brethren are doing. Don't shit on it, it's the future, and it will leave you in the dust if you don't adapt.

It seems that the pattern in the press following every major Republican failing was some idiotic piece of crap reporting about how the Democrats were helpless and disorganized. Well, finally the press is reporting that Democrats might have something simple to offer the American people. That is, competence.

Many of these analysts argue that Republicans have pushed the ideological limits of the American people so far - notably, with Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the affluent and his effort to partly privatize Social Security - that Americans are ready for something different. Elaine Kamarck, a former top aide to former Vice President Al Gore, argues that the combination of the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina has driven home to Americans the need for strong and effective government, "and gets us back to our strengths - a government that can deliver."

This is the whole point of Give Up Blog. We don't need specific positions, although the members of this blog definitely have them. The fact is, when Democrats were in charge, things went well (other than sex scandals). The Republican agenda is a big shit sandwich, and as Americans start to realize what they've bitten into over the last few election cycles, they're going to remember that Clinton, despite his sexual peccadillos, got things done and done well. At a certain point, they're going to cease to be distracted by abortion, gays, and flag burning and realize they've been had. They're chewing a big shit sandwich and the distractions Republicans use to keep them from realizing their policies only benefit 3% of Americans won't last forever. They're starting to taste it.

The NYT is reporting on cash going missing after the deaths of foreign aid workers in Iraq.

Now, we were told one of the reasons that they needed to just dump cash in large quantities in this country, in an unregulated and difficult-to-audit way was that there simply wasn't the time or infrastructure to implement proper accounting procedures.

Well, this is what happens when you dump cash in a place where there are lots of desperate people with guns.

The killing of Fern Holland, a human rights worker from Oklahoma, remains unsolved and as mysterious as it was when her body was found riddled with bullets on a desolate stretch of road near one of Iraq's southern holy cities in March 2004.

Now, federal investigators are grappling with a second mystery: what happened to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash issued by American authorities to Ms. Holland and Robert J. Zangas, a press officer who died in the same attack near Karbala, in the days before their deaths?

Financial records from the American-run compound in Hilla, the south-central Iraqi city where Ms. Holland and Mr. Zangas were based, have established that much or all of that money - issued for things like programs to train Iraqis in democratic governance and construction of women's rights centers that Ms. Holland was setting up - was either missing or improperly accounted for after their deaths.

But wait, was it Iraqi desperados killing these poor people for money? Oh shit, no, it looks like it was Americans.

American investigators are trying to determine whether that money was stolen as part of the web of bribery, kickbacks, theft and conspiracy that they have laid out in a series of indictments and court papers describing corruption by American officials in Hilla in 2003 and 2004, according to officials involved in the inquiry. That corruption case, centered on reconstruction efforts, has led to four arrests, and more are expected.
...
One of those, Robert J. Stein Jr., a former American occupation official in Hilla, pleaded guilty in February to five counts of bribery, conspiracy and other charges, and could serve up to 30 years in prison. Mr. Stein disbursed the cash to Ms. Holland and Mr. Zangas and was involved in accounting for it after their deaths.

The name of another American arrested in the corruption case, Philip H. Bloom, a businessman who was working in Iraq, appeared in contracting documents involving changes in Ms. Holland's projects after her death. He pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy, bribery and money laundering last month. Two Army Reserve officers, Lt. Col. Debra Harrison and Lt. Col. Michael Wheeler, who oversaw projects in Hilla, have been arrested and charged with accepting bribes.

Hmm. It would be one thing if Iraqis, operating as insurgents or members of organized criminal gangs, had done this, but it looks like it was Americans behind the crimes.

It is pathetic that the attitude that such measures aren't needed for Americans because we're first-worlders and beyond reproach. It is clear that greed is universal, and not just restricted to those poor uncivilized Iraqis. The war profiteers that spread across Iraq like a plague of locusts are justification enough for better management and accounting of the tax payer dollars that flooded Iraq following the invasion. Until we stop throwing money at Iraq like some underperforming inner-city school, expect most of it to end up in the pockets of scumbags like these. Scum like this will always show up to scam the weak or idealistic out of well-intentioned largesse.

Despite all of Ney's protestation to the contrary, it looks like he was corrupt.

A former top aide to Representative Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio, pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiring with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to corrupt public officials and said gifts had been "corruptly offered to and accepted by" Mr. Ney.

In court papers, the former aide, Neil G. Volz, said the gifts included a 2002 trip to Scotland by private jet that included rounds of golf at the fabled course at St. Andrews.
...
But lawyers for Mr. Ney acknowledged that he was the House member identified in the plea agreement as "Representative No. 1." He is accused with other members of his staff of accepting gifts from Mr. Abramoff's lobbying firm, including the trip to Scotland and trips to New Orleans and the 2003 Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., as well as free meals and drinks at Washington restaurants and use of Mr. Abramoff's box suites at the MCI Center in Washington and Camden Yards stadium, home of the Baltimore Orioles.

The plea agreement charged that "Representative No. 1 and others performed official acts at the behest of Abramoff and others, which were motivated in part by the things of value received," suggesting bribery.

The court papers offered a long list of actions taken by Mr. Ney to help Mr. Abramoff, including meeting with his Indian tribe clients and promising to introduce legislation to benefit their gambling operations.

Mr. Volz acknowledged in the plea agreement that he began accepting illegal gifts from Mr. Abramoff while he was working in the House and that as a result he did several official favors for the lobbyist, including having Mr. Ney place statements into The Congressional Record that were helpful to Mr. Abramoff in pursuing his purchase of a fleet of casino boats in Florida.

If I ever get invited to St. Andrews on a junkett I'll be sure to consult a lawyer first. Sheesh. Showing up there is like going to a KKK charity pancake breakfast. Everyone who goes is just implicated as being a crook.

Anyway, does it amaze anyone else that all these Republicans are going down, at all levels and in all branches of government over corruption? Everything from ordinary bureaucrats like Safavian, to congressional aides like Rudy and Scanlon, to Congressmen like Delay, Dukester, and Ney, to White House bigwigs like Scooter and Claude Allen to heads and deputies of agencies like Goss and Foggo. It's stunning. At all levels and functions of government these guys are corrupt or incompetent and I'm beginning to think the ordinary citizens of this country are starting to taste the shit sandwich they bit into when they voted these jackasses into power.

This article is making the rounds of mainstream media sites suggesting that there is a physiological basis for homosexuality (link to previous article using this method herehere). The researchers use MRI and PET imaging in combination with exposure to putative pheromones to show that individuals that score a 6 on the Kinsey scale for homosexuality (aka totally gay) like pheromones corresponding to the same sex.

While I have little doubt that homosexuality has nothing to do with choice, having gone through puberty myself and recalling little thought about making a choice to like boobies, this type of article isn't truly of great value. While they show a physiologic response to pheromones, those of us who understand science know that environment and behavior is going to feed back on our brains and even if homosexuality were a choice, which it isn't, there is no reason to expect a PET scan to act as a kind of sexual orientation lie detector.

It's entirely possible, if you believed the ridiculous proposition that people would choose to be gay despite all the hatred and alienation involved, that such a choice of lifestyle and behavior would then allow one to be excited by male pheromones from non-genetic or environmental programming of neural responses. Scientists have to keep looking and find the real origins of homosexual behavior which quite reasonably exist, based on normal variation and other examples of homosexuality in nature, within the spectrum of human sexual variation.

Nothing has really changed since Kinsey studied this 50 years ago, there is a continuum of human sexual orientation, and that is to be expected. The focus should instead be on the genetic basis of this variation, and I'm sure one day through analysis of SNPs and human genetic screening we'll find genes that contribute to a higher probability of homosexual behavior in humans. Studying adult humans' brains isn't necessarily informative in contradicting the bigot view that homosexuality is an evil choice of hellbound souls.

update - Can anyone figure out where this damn thing is published? I'm trying to find the article supposedly published today in PNAS and I can't find it in the table of contents or in AOP.

His chief aide has turned into a witness for the prosecution. Remember when Delay's guy Scanlon Tony Rudy decided to cooperate, Delay announced he would resign within days.

Just a little prediction.

In other scandal-plagued Republican news, the CIA #3, Foggo, has just resigned in the wake of bribery allegations tied to Dukester and MZM. Also, this new guy Hayden is tied to MZM by TPM Muckrakers.

Tom Tomorrow has discovered the power of the shit-sandwich.

I should have copyrighted that idea when I had the chance. Oh well, it was too obvious.

Here's the article, and here's the offending quote:

"Purity Balls," which fathers attend with their teenage daughters. "We think the relationship between fathers and their daughters is the key," she told me. At the purity ball, a father gives a "purity ring" to his daughter — a symbol of the promise she makes to maintain her virginity for her future husband. Then, during her marriage ceremony, the daughter gives the ring to her new husband. Abstinence Clearinghouse's Web site advertises the purity ball as an event "which celebrates your 'little girl' and her gift of sexual purity."

That last bit is straight from the Right's own literature. It sounds like it was written by some myspace.com-trolling pederast.

Eww.

If anybody it's Dick Cheney. He's apparently trying to start a new cold war according to the Russian media. Further he says he's unperturbed by the negative reaction to his comments.

I for one, remember the cold war, and would prefer this idiot be more diplomatic if at all possible. Is that too much to ask? Anyway, Putin is a proto-dictator, whatever, so are lot's of people (Chavez doesn't even come close to Putin). He hasn't threatened to shove a hedgehog down our pants yet, so let's try not to actively piss off the only country that has enough nuclear armaments to wipe us off the map.

And as far as spreading democracy and how that's the right thing to do no matter what, that's a load of bullshit. Democracy is a cure for nothing, Cheney's single-handedly proven that one false. In fact, historians will probably look back on this time as a great failure of Democracies. Failure to combat HIV, failure to combat poverty, failure to avert war, failure to protect freedoms, failure to prevent human rights violations, failure to do nearly everything the assholes at PNAC thought it would. The question is, is this a fundamental failing of democracy as a system of governance, or is just a failing of these jackasses to use democracy for good (or even just not-evil).

I've been reading a lot about this new breed of South American leftists like Morales and Chavez, and I can't help thinking about this post on the nature of U.S. intervention as described by Stephen Kinzer.

If his hypothesis is correct, that the nature of U.S. interventions is a three part process including these steps:

1. A leftist/nationalist in a foreign country nationalizes a resource or in some way pisses off an American company
   
2. Those corporations complain to the U.S. government, and they starting making noise about human rights violations or a spreading communist threat etc.
   
3. The U.S. then invades/sponsors a coup to remove said leader, ostensibly for political reasons but truly at the behest of pissed business leaders.
   

For many of our interventions it seems quite plausible, and this weekend reading about Chaves and Morales in the Guardian, I can't help thinking these guys' days are numbered, and we're going to be behind what ever awful thing happens (and the subsequent pro-US dictators that emerge). Both are nationalizing resources, and damn good for them. US corporations should have known that contracts made with dirty, lying dictators or corrupt lying bureaucrats should be considered risky investments. This will be true for the Nigerians as well when they finally take their national resources back from the oil companies that have been poisoning their land for decades to profit corrupt politicians and at the cost of the poor peons trying to live off the land.

The question is, is recent noise from Condi and Rummy that Chavez is, "the most dangerous man in the world" (ha ha) and "like Hitler" a sign of future US intervention against Chavez? I think it certainly is, and he has good reason to be paranoid that we'll sponsor (another) coup against him, and Morales should probably be careful too. I for one am glad to see countries taking back their resources from imperialistic corporations. Those resources belong to the people, not Exxon, no matter what dictator signed the rights over. I can't help but think that the noise against Chavez I read about in the WSJ editorial page and from right wing op-eds in other publications are just so much bullshit designed to lay the basis for a strike or US-sponsored military action. So keep a lookout, let's start exposing the bullshit for what it is. Chavez might be crazy, but he's certainly not "the most dangerous man in the world." It's unlikely he's even the most dangerous man in Venezuela, and he's certainly not a dictator...yet.

CNN is reporting that Fox is considering bringing back Futurama. And not just as straight-to-DVD movies as has been suggested.

I wanted the Republicans to pass their $100 refund thingy just so I could use it to buy 100 cups of coffee. Either that or to buy a cigar wrapped in an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. That's how much I love the Futurama.

Seriously, Give UP! They just can't seem to think straight these days, these Republicans. Now they're talking about amending the voting rights act to make it more difficult for hispanics to vote.

Please, let them succeed. Please let them piss off the largest and most rapidly growing minority group in the United States again. Please let them pass this, so that any hispanic voter who votes in the future will only have to know how to recognize one word, Democrat.

How stupid are these guys? Their base doesn't even bitch about tranlators at polls or bilingual ballots, they're bitching about illegal immigration. Why are these retards conflating the two issues again with this anti-spanish language crap? Don't they know this is just a lose-lose proposition?

Sebastian Mallaby writes today on the political philosophy of starving the beast.

This is actually a nice little piece of Give Up news, because according to the Cato (yes Cato) study he cites indicates that for the last 25 years every time taxes have been cut, spending increases, while when taxes are increased, spending is constrained. So those who will ever believe Republicans will cut taxes and spending are now officially deluded.

Although, I disagree with Mallaby that there is some reason that tax cuts encourage increased spending having to do with some psychological effect.

Maybe cutting taxes before cutting spending makes government feel cheap: People are still getting all the services they want, but they are paying less for them. Maybe this illusory cheapening has a perverse effect: Now that government feels like a bargain, people want more of it. But the really interesting question isn't why the starve-the-beast theory is 180 degrees wrong. It's how Republicans will react to this finding.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just being facetious. The real reason the tax cutters are increasing spending like idiots, is because people who are irresponsible enough to cut taxes with the idea of "starving the beast" are not responsible enough or mature enough in their economic/political philosophy to show fiscal restraint. They believe in economic theories, like trickle-down, that have been discredited again, and again, and again, and now again, why would you expect them to excercise any fiscal responsibility ever?

This is how gullible anti-sex right wingers are, they believe teenagers when they say they're not having sex.

Ha! Anyway, I like this article, not because it tells us the obvious, that virginity pledges do not work.

The 14,000 survey subjects were interviewed in 1995 and reinterviewed in 1996 and 2001. They ranged in age from 12 to 18 and came from across the country.

Rosenbaum found that 52% of those who said they had signed virginity pledges had had sex within a year. And of those who had sex after telling the first interviewers they had taken the pledge, 73% denied in the second interview having made the pledge.

"This may indicate that they are not that closely affiliated with the pledge," Rosenbaum said.

The adolescents also were unreliable in reporting their sexual experiences, Rosenbaum said. More than a quarter of nonvirgins in the first interview who later took a virginity pledge said in the next interview that they had never had sex.

"That puts a lot of error in these studies," Rosenbaum said. Virginity pledgers, she concluded, "are more likely to give bad information — unreliable data — about their sexual history."

But of course, conservatives instantly deny the scientists found anything resembling the truth.

The findings have raised the ire of Concerned Women for America, a prominent conservative organization that advocates adolescent sexual abstinence.

"The Harvard report is wrong," said Janice Crouse, a fellow at a Concerned Women for America think tank.

"This study is in direct contradiction with trends we have been seeing in recent years," Crouse said. "Those who make virginity pledges have shown greater resolve to save sex for marriage."

Um, no. That's just what they've been telling you, and for some stupid reason you believed them. Then the scientists come along and look at it very carefully and find all these teenagers are actually lying about their sexual history, whether they took the pledge etc. Which result should any reasonable human being believe? The scientists? Or the teenagers?

Hmmm.

NYT/AP reports Porter Goss has suddenly resigned.

They say it was because of Bush's plans to shake up his administration, but wasn't there some talk about a former legislator and now "big-wig" at the CIA being involved with the Dukester? The CIA hotly denied this saying he hadn't been to the Watergate or Westin in decades (but that wouldn't cover Foggo's house), but this is somewhat suddenly on the heels of the allegations.

A little suspicious. That's all I'm saying.

Sorry ladies, you've all gotten really fat, but the fashion industry doesn't have the heart to tell you.

I find this kind of disturbing. Do average consumers fall for this ruse and think they haven't gained any weight because their size has stayed the same?

For those of you who love schadenfreude, you'll love Rumsfeld being struck dumb by a former CIA analyst heckler at a recent speech. Think progress has the video. The heckler was smart enough to use Rumsfelds own words against him and he's just completely unable to say anything for about 10 seconds. It's priceless.

A bunch of interesting science in this week's issue of the journal Science. Including a new hypothesis that the universe is actually nearly a trillion years old (lay article here) and has gone through many big bangs and crunches. The physics here is over my head as always but it seems plausible. Then again, anything that complicated seems plausible, however, it does explain a lot of the known unknowns cosmologists currently face. Here's the abstract (*thanks minimalist for catching my error*)

Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical mechanism that automatically relaxes the value of the cosmological constant, taking account of contributions to the vacuum density at all energy scales. Because the relaxation time grows exponentially as the vacuum density decreases, nearly every volume of space spends an overwhelming majority of the time at the stage when the cosmological constant is small and positive, as observed today.

Their previous paper which is more descriptive of their cyclic theory can be found here.

Science also has an article about the birth of a new field, Hurricane Climatology. The field seems to have direct relation to effects of global warming forcing more extreme storms.

In the 16 September 2005 issue of Science (p. 1844), less than 3 weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Webster and colleagues reported that in fact the abundance of tropical cyclones had not increased between 1970 and 2004. But the number of the strongest storms--those in categories 4 and 5--had jumped 57% from the first half of the period to the second. That reinforced findings by meteorologist and hurricane specialist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He had reported in the 4 August 2005 issue of Nature that the total power released during the lives of Atlantic and western North Pacific storms had risen between 40% and 50% from the first half of a 45-year record to the last half.

Both Webster and Emanuel were taken aback by their own findings. "I changed my mind in a big way" about how much the warming could be intensifying storms, says Emanuel. But it wasn't just because of the apparent upward trend of storm intensity. When Emanuel looked at how storm power and ocean temperature had varied, "what I found startled me," he told the conference. In the area just north of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, where most hurricanes get their start, the power released during the lifetimes of storms is "spectacularly well correlated with sea surface temperature," says Emanuel. Hurricane intensity had risen along with temperature over the past half-century, even matching ups and downs along the way.

The region where Atlantic hurricanes develop has in turn warmed in step with the Northern Hemisphere for the past half-century, Emanuel noted. And that warming is widely held to be driven at least in part by rising greenhouse gases. Two studies may not be enough to prove that Trenberth is right about greenhouse warming driving storm activity, but both Emanuel and Webster now believe they see a strengthening of tropical cyclones suspiciously in synchrony with global warming.
...
Additional support for intensification also came from a new, independent analysis of wind data, mentioned in passing at the conference. Climate researchers Ryan Sriver and Matthew Huber of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, will soon report in Geophysical Research Letters on how they measured the power released by storms by using a compilation of the world's weather data developed at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Reading, U.K. They found a 25% increase in storm power between the first half of the 45-year record and the second, consistent with Emanuel's analyses.

Finally, you know that whole thing Bush has been talking about how we're addicted to oil and need to pursue new technologies? Well, Science reports Conservation programs are getting cut. It fits with the pattern. If Bush talks approvingly about your field, science etc., prepare for it to disappear.

Happy Cinco de Mustache! You know where I'll be at 5pm today, feel free to join me.

In honor of a day dedicated to drinking for no good reason other than we enjoy any excuse, let's go over congressional plans for the coming summer term.

They're gearing up big time to appease the right wing. The Christian Science Monitor has coverage of their plans. It includes a pointless flag-burning amendment (despite no one in this country burning flags in protest since the boomers were at it).

GOP leaders are gearing up to bring a number of issues on the Christian conservative agenda to the floor of the House and Senate in the next few weeks, including gay marriage, broadcast decency, the 10 Commandments Act, a cloning ban, and laws protecting "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

"There's going to be some trouble down the road if they don't get on the ball," said Dr. James Dobson, in an interview with the Fox News Network on May 1. He's the chairman and founder of Focus on the Family, a Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, Colo., which is helping to organize some 40,000 events for the National Day of Prayer.

Inside the Capitol, lawmakers and historians are winding down their debate over how prominent the Bible should be in the text and displays on the history of the Congress in the $522 million Capitol Visitors Center, slated to open in 2007.

What is James Dobson a doctor of again? Advanced bigotry studies or something.

Anyway, since it's so much harder to mock Christians, in honor of the release of Mission Impossible III the jokers at HailXenu.net are planning to hire a plane to carry the message "Hail Xenu LOL <3 OT" over the opening night festivities in Hollywood. I don't understand exactly what they're saying, but I'm sure it's funny.

Maybe in honor of the FSM we should insist that the founding fathers were influenced by Xenu while drafting the constitution (they just didn't know it because their thetan levels were too low) and Scientology must be included in the future displays of the history of congress.

Ok, the remainder of the articles today of Give Up interest.

This idiot at the WSJ accuses Bush of soaking the rich with his tax cuts. He seems to fail to understand when people make more money, even if the rates stay the same, they pay more. That is not news, nor is it "soaking" the rich via tax cuts. This editorial just makes me tired all over.

Moussaoui will live with no chance for martyrdom. This makes me happy. One, he was a crazy idiot, but probably not half the terrorist (or even a 10th) he aspired to be. Two, this means he will drop out of the news forever. If he got the death penalty we'd be hearing about his crazy stupid-ass for decades as he appealed constantly just so he could yell about America in courts, forever.

The next filibuster threat has emerged. His name is Brett Kavanaugh, and he's worthless. Reading the WSJ editorial is telling, they go through his resume. 1st, he worked for Ken Starr on impeachment, then he participated in the Florida recount of 2000, then he worked with Gonzales on torture and rendition, then, finally, he worked as White House staff secretary. Why can't Bush walk further than down the fucking hall to find a candidate for a court as important as the DC Circuit Court of Appeals? Anyway, after such a stunning resume, one has to ask, what about this work qualifies him to be a appelate judge? You might as well ask any schmuck working within 20 feet of Bush with a law degree to be a judge. And do I have to remind everybody that the last guy Bush nominated (and was rejected) by finding the closest JD possible was recently arrested for shoplifting at Target!

Richard Cohen is continuing his trend of being a worthless hack by not apologizing for supporting the Iraq war and saying Stephen Colbert wasn't funny. Stephen Colbert was funny, just not to anyone in that room. He wasn't there for those people, believe it or not. He was there for us, we found him funny, sorry you guys he called ineffectual losers didn't (because you are ineffectual losers who failed the American people for the last 6 years). Yes, ineffectual losers like you, specifically you who supported this war, and blindly followed a man we all know is probably retarded.

Finally, the Give Up incompetence news. The do-nothing congress has passed worthless lobbying reform. It increases disclosure. Big friggin whoop. Why don't they just ban the money! No one is going to spend their time reading through who gives money to who (other than public interests), or even bother to read the reports from the public interests who actually will. The do-nothing congress is actually considering increasing mileage standards about a decade late. Tax cuts are extended through 2010 Finally, in related news, that Medicare program that will go bankrupt in 2012 now? Well, it's already near-worthless so who cares?

Hey, Catholic Church. Stop bitching about the Da Vinci code and the fake conspiracy it alledges against your church. We all get it, it's not real, it's a work of fiction, it's a movie with Tom Hanks, don't get your panties in a bunch.

Seriously. I'm warning you.

Ok, that's it. Everybody, there is a conspiracy in the Catholic Church, except it doesn't involve the Virgin Mary. Well, it does involve anal virgins, but most are probably not named Mary.

So, Catholic Church, enjoy the attention on the fake conspiracy. It will distract from the real conspiracy of you covering up priests having buttsex with little boys. Knock it off.

The Guardian reports gay people may be fleeing the US for the gay-friendly UK.

Now, I thought gay people should give up and move their excess disposable income and gentrifying capabilities to the Blue states. Instead they up and jump the pond! That was a little farther than I wanted them to move. Dammit.

Anyway, the article lacks any numbers, so I don't even know how they came up with this article, but if true, interesting. UK cities are about to get some nice new nightclubs, boutique bookstores and novelty shops, restaurants with outdoor seating, and apartments with rainbow flags and pretty flower-boxes.

Lookout! Code Orange! Where's Tom Ridge! It's an election year prepare for more bullshit security alerts!

Notice we didn't see any of these for two years? Now get ready for a whole lot of reports lacking any actual information to make us feel afraid. Here's the basic format.

Homeland Security spokesman **insert stooge-name here** said **day** there is no specific or credible intelligence to indicate U.S. **spin wheel, insert potential target here** are being targeted by **spin wheel, choose between hijacking, suicide bombs, guy with torch trying to cut down Brooklyn bridge, or cooler full of bombs floating on river**.

I made none of those up. Yes, in the 2004 election cycle we were warned that terrorists might blow us up with beer coolers.

In the WSJ there is a report that they lose up to 6.1 billion dollars worldwide due to piracy.

The study, by LEK Consulting LLC, was completed last year, and people familiar with it say it reached a startling conclusion: U.S. movie studios are losing about $6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue to piracy, about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods. On top of that, losses are coming not only from lost ticket sales, but from DVD sales that have been Hollywood's cash cow in recent years.
...
The new approach reduces the estimated losses in some of the world's most notorious pirate markets, even as it adds Internet-related losses for the first time. China's losses slipped to an estimated $244 million in 2005, from $280 million in 2004 under the old counting technique. Russia's estimate declined by about $10 million. These international results have also generated skepticism about whether Mexico could really be a bigger piracy market than giants like China.

Ummm, exactly. What a load of bullshit. The way I see it, there are three critical flaws to this study. One, it fails to acknowledge that Hollywood has produced an unprecedented amount of total and complete crap movies consistently, week to week, month to month, year to year. Ticket sales are down in the US not because we're downloading movies, but because the movies aren't worth seeing, and certainly not worth sitting through 20 minutes of ads for. Two, any study that shows Mexico is a bigger pirate than China or Russia is simply incorrect. Three, they are treating markets that can't afford the product as legitimate markets. If some 10 year old kid in China is downloading your movie, why do you care? The kid probably can't scrape together the 50 cents it costs him to see it in the theater or the $1.20 to buy the DVD anyway, so why would you include piracy in undeveloped markets as a threat? It's like drug companies complaining about generic rip offs being sold in Africa. Was Africa a valid market in the first place? Did you expect some orphan named Otumbo Motamba in Congo to pay the 8-10k a year to buy the on-patent drug? Why do you care if someone takes a market you don't want?

Anyway, more lying crap from the jackasses suing teenagers, dead people, and old ladies over their shitty product since they don't have the cajones or the cognitive ability to adjust to technology. Instead they sue, legislate, and bitch to protect their outdated and outmoded business model, and it's not the job of government or the courts to protect some industry's business model.

Hey, if I'm wrong, why is porn beating their pants off (haha) without any DRM, suing of consumers, or legislation protecting their product? Maybe it's because they innovate! Maybe because they don't force you to watch 20 minutes of ads first! Maybe it's because they give the consumers what they want! Like boobies, on their computer, burnable to DVD, and at a reasonable price?

It makes me sad, vaccinations are one of the great success stories of 20th century medicine. We cured polio, we eliminated smallpox, we eliminated the 2-10,000 cases a year of blindness from maternally transmitted Rubella, we similarly decreased the prevalence of a host of other dangerous, if not deadly infections like tetanus, mumps and chicken pox. This week in the JCI is a review of HPV vaccines that could end genital wart infections and eliminate cervical cancer but since idiots identify it as a "sex vaccine" there is resistance to widespread use.

However, a weird correlation (not so weird given vaccination schedules) exists between autism and vaccination where about 6 months after vaccinations are administered, a lot of kids seem to come down with autism. Luckily, this correlation is disappearing as the diagnosis of autism occurs earlier and earlier, and eventually it will disappear. Yeah, yeah, they used to use a tiny amount of mercury in the adjuvants in the vaccines (note the study last week that showed similar use in dental fillings was also harmless) up to 1998 and that may change the correlation, but whatever. It was still all correlation and not a very good one, and you know it's bullshit if the lead proponent of anti-vaccine studies is Dan Burton, of alternative medicine and "Clinton is a scumbag" fame.

Now a direct genetic link to autism has been established showing the disorder is probably more nature than nurture. It's interesting the evolution of the blame for autism has emerged in a similar pattern to many other misunderstood diseases. First you blame the mother for being emotionally distant (the so-called frigidaire-mom or something), then you blame some random external cause (vaccines), now we're probably narrowing down on the truth by finding a gene (Pten). It still might involve environmental causes, or be exacerbated by them, but really, the fact that there are hot spots in areas where really smart people get together and breed (like Silicon Valley) is very telling. I look forward to seeing where this stuff goes in the future, and to finally shutting down this anti-vaccine crap. Bring on the flame war, I can take it.

That's what they keep telling us to justify not switching over to a single-payer system. Also, they say, "you wont be able to get an MRI on demand!", "You won't have PET scans!"

Blah, blah, fucking blah. The last thing in the world 99.999% of Americans need from their medical system is an MRI. In fact, if you gave everybody and MRI, more people would die, because doctors would start trying to figure out what this dot is and that dot is, and iatrogenic deaths would soar. It's been studied, it's true.

Now we find out what we should already know. Expensive medicine is not better medicine. In fact the best medicine, is cheap, old, and simple. The best drugs are the old drugs, the best cures are the old cures, and the best doctors are the old doctors (until they're senile anyway).

Americans had higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung disease and cancer — findings that held true no matter what income or education level.

Those dismal results are despite the fact that U.S. health care spending is double what England spends on each of its citizens.

"Everybody should be discussing it: Why isn't the richest country in the world the healthiest country in the world?" asks study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.
...
Even the U.S. obesity epidemic couldn't solve the mystery. The researchers crunched numbers to create a hypothetical statistical world in which the English had American lifestyle risk factors, including being as fat as Americans. In that model, Americans were still sicker.

Smoking rates are about the same on both sides of the pond. The English have a higher rate of heavy drinking.

Only non-Hispanic whites were included in the study to eliminate the influence of racial disparities. The researchers looked only at people ages 55 through 64, and the average age of the samples was the same.

Now, the studies authors discount nationalized medicine for being the sole cause of this effect, but I disagree with them. The reason Americans have these high rates of everything is that health care costs more, they are more reluctant to enter the system (even if they are wealthy) and less able to afford treatments if they do. National health emphasizes preventative health care measures, early screenings, early testing, early treatment. Our health care system stresses saving money, costs of procedures and using whatever medicine the insurance company has a coupon for that week. Also, because we have direct-to-consumer advertising, people are taking all sorts of shit they shouldn't be, or for things they should be treating they're taking the new, untested drug rather than the cheaper, old and well tested drug.

This result screams national health care is better, it doesn't counter it.

All the major papers have coverage of the new NOAA study confirming that warming trends are real. Apparently they've been having trouble correlating satellite data with ground data (frankly I believe the ground data would be better since it isn't relying on proxies), but now they've got it straightened out and guess what? Yeah, it's real.

Rafe Pomerance, chairman of the Climate Policy Center, a group that advocates mandatory curbs on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to global warming, said the new report settles the scientific debate over humans' role.

"This puts the nail in the coffin of [the skeptics'] argument as much as anything I've seen," Pomerance said. "It may not be the first time it's been said, but it's the clearest I've seen it stated coming out of a government agency. Game over."

Regular readers already know how I feel about experimenting with carbon in the atmosphere while we remain on Earth. Short answer, I'm not a fan. But of course, what does the administration that just refused to hike taxes on oil companies (and congress backed off after the oil companies objected) say? (from the times coverage)

White House officials noted that this was just the first of 21 assessments planned by the federal Climate Change Science Program, which was created by the administration in 2002 to address what it called unresolved questions. The officials said that while the new finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.

Of course, it needs more study. I know these guys are motivated by greed and all, but have they come up with Mars dollars or something I don't know about? Where are they going to spend this money in the future?

In other news, extinctions are occurring faster than when the dinosaurs died off and hurricane alley is heating up.

Yay!

I've relieved to see that the whole "let's give everybody 100 bucks" crap fizzled and died.

Although, they did manage to extend their tax cuts so maybe I spoke to soon.

Wow, on the same day we hear that medicare is going to be dead 12 years earlier than previously predicted we get news they extended their irresponsible tax cuts. Does anyone else want to give up? That is, any other non-boomers out there who aren't about to retire?

I hope all those selfish boomers that voted for Bush are now very proud of themselves. Looks like Medicare will now be bankrupt 12 years earlier in 2018.

I'm feeling very spiteful towards the boomers lately, maybe I blame them for everything that's gone wrong in this country, or maybe it's my disappointment that they grew up to be SUV-driving, McMansion-buying, Republican-voting, selfish sellouts. Maybe what we need is to have this generation that wasn't interested in adequately funding Social Security or Medicare for the last 30 years (for the obvious crisis of their impending retirement) not get social security or medicare?

We can re-establish it for the X-ers.

Finally got around to the NYT today and here it is, the ultimate headline.

10 States, in Challenge to U.S., Plan Suit to Force Better Mileage Rules for S.U.V.'s

Now before I even opened up the article, I knew at least 4 of those states would be Cali, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, you know, the really blue ones, and the remainder would all be blue states. Turns out I was wrong. One, New Mexico, is red (although it is a flipper).

California will be lead plaintiff in the suit, which also includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as New York City and the District of Columbia. Many of the same states have teamed up in other environmental suits against the administration, though with mixed success; a recent suit against the Environmental Protection Agency over power plant emissions was dismissed.

"It's disappointing when you see power exercised to benefit the auto industry rather than consumers or environmental challenges," said Bill Lockyer, the attorney general of California, discussing the Bush administration's fuel economy rules.

The attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas F. Reilly, said in a statement, "At a time when we are all facing a gas crisis, the Bush administration is pushing for fuel economy standards that appear to be authored by the oil and auto industries."

Go blue states! They will provide the regulatory force to fix the nations problems when retards run the federal government. Why? Because liberals elect sensible leaders to run their states rather than tax-cutting demogogues. Exceptions abound, sure (like Ahnold and Ehrlichman), but they usually end up looking like ineffectual jackasses in the face of a progressive majority who don't let the occasional Republican run the state into the ground (like Ahnold and Ehrlichman).

This week in the JCI they want to talk about intelligent design and defend science against it. The second article is really worth a read, and it even has a "This Modern World" cartoon in it which I just love. JCI is really on fire lately, going after Zerhouni and now taking on the IDers.

However, ID doesn't bother me as much as crap science articles such as the one described here. (Here is the article in the journal)

"Almost all (96.8 percent) of the adult drinkers with alcohol abuse and dependence began drinking prior to the age of 21 years," the researchers write. "With at least 37.5 percent of sales linked to underage drinking and adult abusive and dependent drinking, the alcohol industry has a compelling financial motive to attempt to maintain or increase rates of underage drinking. Alcohol advertisements in magazines, for example, expose youth aged 12 to 20 years to 45 percent more beer advertisements and 27 percent more advertisements for distilled spirits than adults of legal drinking age."

This morality masquerading as science funded by the anti-drug anti-alcohol junkies at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse is totally worthless correlative crap. So what, you find that kids who drink before they're 21 are more likely to become dependent on alcohol than those that wait. Big surprise. Did you ever think the people that become dependent on alcohol would be the same group if you raised the drinking age to 40 or lowered it to 8? Everybody drinks before 21, only a tiny minority of teetotalers waits until they're 21 before they lose their alcoholic virginity and if they wait that long, they'll probably never drink much because they're not the type of people who would ever be interested in alcohol, not because they just have so much respect for the law that they wait.

How is this a valid comparison? How does this compare to every other country in the freaking world without a drinking age? The answer is it doesn't, the study is invalid as long as it is performed in this country, and not designed as a cohort or case-control study. There is no meaningful relationship between the age of onset of drinking and alcoholism, sorry. There is probably a much better relationship between having a high drinking age and drinking to excess, drinking and driving, and general underaged alcoholic stupidity.

Seriously people, get a life. If you're devoting your life to this kind of correlative "won't someone please think of the children" crap research please find another job.

For the Bush is a dictator file, the Boston globe reports that Bush has used his signing statements to challenge the legitimacy of over 750 laws. This must be why he's never vetoed anything.

Can we just call him a dictator now and go home? What, for instance, has this guy done that Castro hasn't? Imprisoned people in Cuba? Check. Declared himself sole interpreter of all of his country's laws? Check. We just need to get him a camoflauge uniform and some cigars and we might be done.

It's amazing how historically, the worst governments in history have existed through the passive acceptance of their populace. I think I should read Jose Saramago's new book "Seeing" to try to figure out this phenomenon and what can we do about it. Probably nothing, since the willingness of people to stick up for Bush is no longer a political belief or behavior but a cult. Wait, that makes sense, a cult of personality. But even so, how do newspapers not attack this guy over this BS attempt to declare himself king of America? For instance, they don't even mention Colbert in any of the coverage except for passing references to the guy. No one mentions that Colbert was probably the first person to tell the president the truth to his face in 6 years.

But in the end, isn't the whole philosophy of Give Up not to care? That this damage will be undone by the time figure out these people are crooked crackpots lacking competence in anything? Probably. Arguing with people over Bush is like arguing with the religious. They might concede a point or two but they'll never change their mind, not until they realize they've been duped on their own. I don't know, for the most part I see this damage as self-correcting and leading to the permanent death of Republican bullshit. Just look at the reaction to the "let's give everyone $100" idea these retards came up with. Even Rush Limbaugh derided it as a pre-election payoff that was making everyone in the country a whore.

However, the signing statement thing makes me feel like quoting Jefferson and starting a revolution. It is really over-the-top monarchy-like behavior, and I don't truck with no monarchs. Especially not borderline retarded ones, so soon I won't be able to live here or in England. Anyway, discuss. I'm not sure signing statements are a problem consistent with Give Up. It's more consistent with angry mobs and molatov cocktails.

In a followup to our previous discussion on why the MPAA, RIAA, record companies, movie theaters etc., don't just follow porn's lead but instead attack their own consumers, I point everyone to this article on the economics of porn. (via fark.

Pornography is now globally worth $57 billion, with the United States - porn's spiritual home - accounting for $12 billion (by comparison, Hollywood is worth a mere $10 billion). In the United States, a conservative estimate of new pornographic movie production is 50 new movies a day, and more than 500 million porno films are rented every year. The latter figure of course excludes telephone sex - 250,000 Americans pay for this daily - and Internet porn, which is estimated to be worth at least $1 billion globally and generates an astonishing 70 percent of all revenues earned by online content providers.

The rest of the article is totally idiotic and suggests porn is responsible for rape, violence against women, and the fall of society, the end of sex, blah blah blah, but ignore that crap and just think about the economics of this. The porn industry in this country makes more money than Hollywood, and all without suing their consumers, and they've built it up from nothing in about 30 years. What could the RIAA and Hollywood learn from this industry (other than boobies sell)? Maybe, like the porn industry, they should focus on maximally utilizing technology to sell their product, rather than restricting it with digital rights management and other crippleware that keeps our mp3 players and computers from maximizing their potential. Maybe they should stop punishing their own consumers, treating us all like thieves, and give us the options they we want. Just a thought.