Category: America

CNET News.blog: Patriot Act’s technology-related sections to be scrutinized. Declan McCullagh posts a brief summary to the three sections in question, all of which are subject to the “sunset” provisions mercifully contained in the original act. Section 209 concerns the rules for police access to voicemail stored on a provider’s system; 217 makes it easier for law enforcement to assist computer system owners in monitoring unauthorized intrusions; and 220 allows search warrants for locations anywhere in the country to be issued from the district where the crime occurs.

Declan points to a very cogent debate on 209 and 220 between Jim Dempsey and Orin Kerr, which boils down to: the need for some of the changes in these sections are clear to bring the law into the electronic world, but so is the need for extension of constitutional checks and balances on these new powers. Kerr suggests that including a suppression remedy (ensuring that improperly obtained evidence is suppressed in subsequent proceedings); extending civil action and administrative discipline guidelines to ensure that emergency exceptions are not abused; and finally some concern about how users should be notified if their electronic records are searched.

Boing Boing: TSA screener: 2-book max on flights. Ross Mayfield has an interesting conversation with a TSA screener in which the screener mentions that the number of books to be allowed in carry-on will be decreased from four to two. Is this simple confusion between matchbooks (which would make sense in the context of the rest of Ross’s conversation) and literature, or does the TSA actually think that books are possible hijacking weapons? My money is on the former, but it’s too good a story not to share.

NY Times: List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing Firm. Just when I had resolved to keep my mouth shut about the Schiavo case, this comes along. I’m not sure there’s a more heinous way to repay the kindness of strangers than to sell their personal information to a direct marketing firm.

I think I agree with the angle in this article—that the parents are so focused on their daughter’s last days that they aren’t paying attention to what the people around them are asking them to agree to. But I think that anything coming from the Christian Communication Network’s Gary McCullough, who was present with the Schindlers when the deal was made, or from Phil Sheldon, who actually struck the deal, that talks about morality and values from now on is pretty suspect. Because if there’s something that’s lower than selling the names of people who are donating money to keep your daughter alive to spam merchants, it’s persuading vulnerable and grieving parents that it’s OK to do so.

Tucson Citizen: ‘Threatening’ T-shirt barred from TCC. See the University of Arizona Young Democrats page for coverage and photos of the T-shirt. Good to know that we’re still using taxpayer dollars to keep opposing viewpoints and political parties at bay. Also, good for the student in question, Steven Gerner, who comes out sounding calm and rational when others (myself, for instance) might be a little steamed:

“It’s really important that I’m an informed citizen. I can’t do that unless I open up and listen to the other position on the issue,” Gerner said. “Regardless of what side of the aisle President Bush is on, he’s still the president of the United States, and it’s an honor to be in the presence of any elected official.”

Thanks to Oliver Willis for the link.

Whiskey Bar: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution. A simple compare-and-contrast between rhetoric and incidents from the current conservative backlash on college campuses and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” But we don’t need to worry about the implications of the comparison, right? Because America is different…

The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.

Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News columnist
CU is Worth Fighting For
March 4, 2005

In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China
Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum
August 1966

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For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity—which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”

Time
Fighting Words 101
March 7, 2005

“We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! … We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants.”

Lin Piao, Deputy Chairman
Communist Party of China
Speech to Red Guards
August 18, 1966

Hat tip to Fury for the link.

…or, as the US Senate decided yesterday in its infinite wisdom, we could just keep looking for those remaining pockets of fossil fuels like a crack addict searching for that last rock that he knows he dropped somewhere.

When one of the last pristine places on earth gets covered in pipes; when the first spill happens; when the caribou go extinct; and when the price of fuel keeps going up regardless, even after we get the first oil from that formerly pristine refuge ten years from now, I want every one of those 51 senators to wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “This is personally on my head.”

Of course, the other question has to be: where was the Democratic leadership? Given the inevitability of the Bush ideology juggernaut rolling over everything, did no one at least try to attach a rider to fund development of alternative energy resources?

Ars Technica: Followup: The FEC, FUD, and the blogpocalypse, Round II. Meant to post this yesterday as a followup to my earlier comments on the FEC’s commissioner. This is the other shoe, how it looks from the perspective of a Democrat, Ellen Weintraub, on the commission:

Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to “crack down” on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated. First of all, we’re not the speech police. We don’t tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There’s got to be some money involved, or it’s out of our jurisdiction.

Second, let’s get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of “general public political advertising.” The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we’re under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do. For example, can paid advertisements on the Web, when coordinated with a particular campaign, be considered an in-kind contribution to that campaign? Context is important, and the context here has everything to do with paid advertising, and nothing to do with individuals blogging and sending e-mails.

Third, anyone who says they know what this proposed regulation will address must be clairvoyant, because the commissioners have yet to consider even a draft of the document that will set out the scope of any such rule…

So that’s interesting. Going after bloggers isn’t an option, but going after paid advertising is. What about going after paid bloggers?

Jeff Jarvis seems about as ambivalent about Commissioner Smith’s statement as I am, but says more strongly than I did that it smells like a stunt. MetaFilter has weighed in as well. The consensus is: either he’s pushing the commission’s rulings to their logical or illogical extremes so that the Supremes will have to smack down McCain-Feingold in toto, or he’s pushing bloggers’ buttons so they’ll work even harder to take down his political opponents as they did Dan Rather.

Both are dangerous strategies.

Why else would the White House and Justice Department step in to ask the courts to deny compensation to American POWs from the first Gulf War while saying that America ought to compensate Iraqis who were tortured by Americans in Abu Ghraib?

I’ve been pleased to see Howard Dean step up to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Like him or laugh at him, he’s espoused some solid stands on things that matter, not centrist waffling, and has proven that he can energize at least some of the base. Of course, I also note that the media continues to replay the Scream clip every time they talk about this, no matter how long it’s been debunked. Oliver Willis is also keeping an ear out for bias in the way the coverage is handled, including a less-than-up-and-up blind quote question in the press conference.

More than two years after the rules for press access to the White House were tightened in the aftermath of 9/11, a guy with no journalistic credentials who writes under an assumed name and is tied to a dubious political advocacy organization gets to enter through a revolving door of one-day passes and lob softballs cribbed from Rush Limbaugh and the White House’s own talking points? Until he’s revealed to be working under an alias and associated with gay prostitution? AND he was privy to the classified documents that broke the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s putting the lie to the administration’s “Niger/uranium/Iraq” rumormongering in the warm-up to the invasion?

Am I on Candid Camera?

Doc Weinberger points to the State of the Union backchannel, with three open IRC channels (liberal, conservative, free for all) on which to discuss tonight’s SOTU. Sounds like a good way to go, preferably with a good stiff drink in hand.

A conservative reader just challenged me (in the comments to this post) to respond to a quotation from an anti-war activist that was printed in NewsDay:

“If the election touches off even greater violent conflict, engaging U.S. troops even more,” said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of the Manhattan-based anti-war group known as United for Peace and Justice, “that could be a kind of shot in the arm for us.

“Even if the election is considered ‘successful,’ but our troops remain on the ground [for a long time], that, too, would call into question the purpose of our presence. Either way …”

First, let me say, as I said in the comments, that you should never assume that one liberal speaks for all of us, just as I’m working on never assuming that all conservatives think alike.

Second, I am glad that any elections at all happened in Iraq that were more open than those under the previous regime, and I hope—with all the purple-fingered voters of Iraq—that the elections are a sign of better things to come.

Third, because I am glad and I hope does not mean that I forfeit my right and duty as a citizen to ask questions. Such as: we have now completed the elections, the last rationale for our presence in Iraq (after WMDs were proved not to exist), but the country is still wracked with unrest. Does the President have a plan for continued US presence after the elections? If so, for how long? If anything, the early reports after the voting suggest that we now have two large groups in Iraq: moderates and radical fundamentalists, where the moderates are willing to give democracy a shot and the radicals reject it out of hand and are willing to use violence to prevent its taking effect. Is our mission now to stamp out radical Islam? Is that an achievable goal? Are our troops ever coming home?

Last, regarding the post on which this comment thread started. For the sake of my gay and lesbian friends, I don’t ever make the mistake of taking lightly people who reject their claims for fair treatment, tolerance, and equal protection. Because I think that in a democracy, the civil rights of the individual citizen are the most precious thing we have and that they must be protected.

I went into Boston yesterday to audition for a part time gig while I continue looking for my next opportunity. My preparatory instructions said, “Treat this like a job interview, because it is one.” Okay, I said, and put on the suit I normally wear for first interviews. It wasn’t the smartest move, because I ended up having to walk eight slushy blocks when the Red Line slowed to a crawl two stops before Park Street, but when I got into the room I felt like a million bucks—and like I was intimidating the other people who were there. It was kind of cool.

Then there’s our vice president, who decided that the appropriate way to dress to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz was to dress like he was going to clean the streets I walked down last night in Boston:

Sources: Washington Post, Dick Cheney, Dressing Down; Oliver Willis, Vice President Disgrace; Tin Man; Wonkette, In Defense of Cheney.

Proving once again…well, something, I don’t know, the United Church of Christ issued a press release unequivocally welcoming SpongeBob Squarepants to the UCC after his “outing” by nasty intolerant bigot James Dobson. (Thanks to The Village Gate for the link.) Ups to the UCC for being the one Christian voice to consistently oppose the uncharitable utterances of the wingnuts who monopolize faith discussions these days—no matter how silly they look in responding.

I have to keep remembering, as Steven Waldman puts it, that the religious right and social conservatives “don’t want a religious dictatorship,” “feel they’re under assault,” and “believe that American culture has become an insult to God.” I’m not sure that excuses Dobson from looking for evidence of creeping homosexuality in every animated feature that comes down the pike. Then again, the Rev. Wildmon went after “Lonesome Dove” and “The Wonder Years” in the 1980s (not to mention “Bloom County”), so I guess Dobson is just following in Wildmon’s creepy footsteps.