The 2005 Cole family Christmas Tree
by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by John Cole| 17 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Outrage
The Instapundit links to this Reason piece which notes the infamous Bridge to Nowhere is being funded anyway and states:
BRIDGES TO NOWHERE: They’re not dead. They’re baaack!
The Reason piece sums up what has happened to the ‘defunded’ bridges, which aren’t really back, because they never went anywhere:
It got so bad that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, roared, “If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body.” Taxpayer advocates could only pray that he would keep his word.
And sure enough, Congress acted. Headlines across the country echoed this one in the New York Times: “Two ‘Bridges to Nowhere’ Tumble Down in Congress.” The Times story began, “Congressional Republicans decided Wednesday to take a legislative wrecking ball to two Alaskan bridge projects that had demolished the party’s reputation for fiscal austerity.”
Good news indeed. Except – Ted Stevens didn’t resign from Congress. Why not? Because it was all a show, just smoke and mirrors. Congress removed the requirement that Alaska use the money for the bridges to nowhere. But the state still got the money – a $454 million blank check.
And sure enough, Gov. Frank Murkowski has included money for both bridges in his new state budget. Murkowski, who used to be a senator himself, works closely with the state’s congressional delegation. Indeed, when he was elected governor, he searched the length and breadth of the great state of Alaska to find a qualified replacement and eventually found her across the breakfast table – his daughter, Lisa, who now works hand in hand with Stevens and Young to keep the funding pipeline flowing.
Well, no kidding. Everyone here knew that, because I told you exactly what was going to happen last month when this took place:
In other words, they defunded mandatory spending on the ‘bridge to nowhere,’ but gave them the damned money anyway.
Fiscal Conservatism circa 2005- Defund preparations for the pandemic flu, and shower Alaska with filthy lucre as a compromise for removing a stupid piece of pork-barreling spending that should not have been there anyway.
Radley Balko was even more explicit:
This is smoke and mirrors. It’s a cheap stunt by the GOP to deflect public criticism that doesn’t really change much of anything. All the conference committee did was remove the earmark for the bridges. Alaska will still be getting the same obscene amount of money from the federal government, it’s just that the state won’t be required to use it to build those two particular bridges. It’ll be up to the executive and the state legislature to decide how to spend it.
Now it’s possible that the legislature, which seems to be at least a hair more reasonable than Alaska’s governor and congressional delegation, will nix the bridge idea. I’m not optimistic. But even if they do, the original half billion dollars earmarked for the bridges won’t go to more worthy projects like rebuilding the Gulf, or, better yet, back to the taxpayers. Instead of going toward Ted Stevens’, Don Young’s, and Lisa Murkowski’s pet projects, it’ll merely be redirected toward the pet projects of Gov. Frank Murkowski and the Alaska state legislature. And don’t forget, Murkowski, who’s wife owns land on Gravina Island, fought long and hard for this bridge, too.
No, I am not going to break my arm patting myself on the back with this self-congratulatory post, because it makes me sick that I know the current Republican party so well I can predict their bullshit weeks in advance.
We’ll file this under ‘Fiscal Conservatism’ and ‘Honesty and Integrity.’ Shameless SOB’s. And don’t tell me they didn’t know EXACTLY what they were doing, because Radley Balko and I did.
by John Cole| 10 Comments
This post is in: Sports
The Steelers went to the Mistake by the Lake v 2.0 and absolutely wiped up the place with the hapless but still hated Browns, winning 41-0. I also think Larry Foote may have killed a Brown on the final play of the game.
This win, plus the SD loss to KC, means that if the Steelers beat Detroit next week they will make the playoffs, something I thought they had played their way out of several weeks ago with the loss to the Bengals.
Go Steelers! Thanks for the early present.
This post is in: Politics, Science & Technology, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
More NSA ‘revelations’:
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
The government’s collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic “switches,” according to officials familiar with the matter.
Look- I can not be the only person who ever read the Puzzle Palace in the 90’s. I am not saying I like this, but the idea that this is ‘news’ is, well, silly. I just sort of assumed this was the sort of thing the NSA did, and was why it was there. I thought everyone knew that the NSA engaged in widespread data mining of this type.
Everyone reading this has heard the stories (urban legends? rumors?) that if you say certain ‘code words’ on the phone like ‘bomb,’ or ‘White House,’ it would be detected by some super secret program at NSA. It has been the grist for dozens of movies. I remember a 60 Minutes piece several years back when they talked about Echelon and all those b ig dome/satellite things in Europe. All my geek friends would talk about the computing power at NSA, and whether or not they actually could break PGP 64 bit encryption and stuff like that (again, I may be off on the technical details, but I remember conversations about this).
I guess my point is that pretending this is a surprise, or anything new, seems to me to be a touch disingenuous. Again, this is an issue that I have not followed closely, so if this has been taken to new levels or something, fine, fill me in. But everyone I know is aware this has been going on for a while, and this really is not surprising or shocking to me, and I certainly do not, at this point, think this Administration is doing anything different from previous administrations. In fact, I thought one of the chief complaints about NSA was that it was a ‘secret’ government to itself, regardless of who the elected government was. Again, if I am wrong, let me know.
I should probably also note that unless I am wrong about the scope of this NSA operation, and people are not freaking out over something that is widely known, people are REALLY going to freak the F–K out when they finally learn what domestic data mining companies (like, say Choicepoint) know about you and your behaviors and activities.
Again, if I am wrong about all this, let me know.
*** Update ***
Interesting piece by William Arkin here:
Massive amounts of collected data — actual intercepts of phone calls, e-mails, etc. — together with “transaction” data — travel or credit card records or telephone or Internet service provider logs — are mixed through a mind-boggling array of government and private sector software programs to look for potential matches.
In discussing the “Able Danger” program, I previously described how information targeters began data mining in the 1990’s to discover new patterns of indicators to identify events of interest when they could not be directly observed. The theory is that data mining techniques applied to the intelligence take, combined with massive “transaction” databases, can uncover clandestine relationships or activities.
In Section B above, when the law says “the search does not use personal identifiers of a specific individual or does not utilize inputs that appear on their face to identify or be associated with a specified individual to acquire information,” I take it to mean the new computer-based data mining isn’t looking for an individual per se, it is looking at information about all individuals (at least all who make international telephone calls or send e-mails overseas or travel to foreign countries according to the government) to select individuals who may be worthy of a closer look.
In other words, with the digitization of everything and new computer and software capabilities, the government couldn’t go to the Court or the Congress and say, “hey, we’d like to monitor everyone on a fishing expedition to find the next Mohamed Atta.”
It’s one conceivable explanation. If this in fact is what the NSA has been doing since 9/11, perhaps Congress should figure out: one, whether it’s legal; and two, how it can be done consistent with the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment.
More relevant stuff as I find it.
*** Update ***
Seth from The World According to Pooh emails:
Nuance certainly plays well, huh? [Ed- No kidding.] Anyway, I thought it might help you out if I could crystallize what this whole NSA thing boils down to. By way of preface, I am a lawyer, and have done a fair bit of reading on the subject, but it is far from certain how much of this would play out. Though some of the claims advanced by the admin, frankly suck,
The “my lawyer said it was ok” argument carries no weight with me because how it works is, you ask your lawyer “how do I get away with this” and he makes the best argument, Of course they can say “I asked for an objective appraisal,” to which I respond “did Gonzales and Miers get where they are by NOT telling the boss what he wants to hear? (not a fault limited to W’s admin, natch) Conversely, ask the folks in the Civil Rights Division how well ‘objective’ analysis is received.
Anyway, the administration has an excellent argument that it can conduct wireless surveillance of foreign operatives. In fact, that’s a lock under FISA. Under Hamdi (which I don’t find compelling, but it’s not ridiculous, and is also the Law), warrantless surveillance on ‘terrorist operatives’ is probably legal also. Warrantless surveillance on U.S. citizens NOT terrorist operatives is still in fact a felony. (The less said about the argument that AUMF repeals FISA, the better. It’s that bad on Constitutional, legal and prudential grounds.)
So, we have an issue here in that if the President is indeed spying solely on those who are ‘bad’ then he has no problem. However, without anything ensuring that those people are in fact arguably ‘bad’, there are no meaningful assurances that he isn’t spying on you or me (and since the program is ‘secret’ and we are not likely to be criminally prosecuted, finding out we are being snooped is going to be a bitch.)
This leads to an intractable problem – the President has plenary power to spy on actual terrorists, but no power to spy on anyone else (absent PC). That plenary power means that it is not subject to review. But ensuring he does not EXCEED that power necessarily subjects the power to review. If the President truly wishes to push his power to the edge on this, it creates a Constitutional controversy not seen since probably reconstruction (or maybe the New Deal rise of the administrative state). Now that may not seem like a big deal to the layperson, but it scares the crap out of me, and is certainly not something that should happen behind closed doors.
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Traveling today, and then the Steelers play at 1, so I will probably not be posting until later.
Consider this an open thread until then.
by John Cole| 50 Comments
This post is in: Outrage
I didn’t think this Mao/Dartmouth student story was true. Looks like it wasn’t.
*** Update ***
Yep- Complete horseshit:
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for “The Little Red Book” by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.
But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details.
It just sounded made up from the get-go.
by John Cole| 14 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Science & Technology
Rick Santorum takes a step back from the chief defenders of the school board in Dover, The Thomas More Law center:
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) withdrew on Thursday his affiliation from the Christian-rights law center that defended a school district’s policy requiring the teaching of “intelligent design.”
Santorum, the Senate’s third-ranking Republican, is facing a tough reelection challenge next year. Earlier, he praised the Dover Area School District for “attempting to teach the controversy of evolution.”
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) criticized work on “intelligent design” policy. (H. Rumph Jr – AP)
But the day after a federal judge ruled that the district’s policy on intelligent design is unconstitutional, Santorum told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was troubled by testimony indicating that religion motivated some school board members to adopt the policy.
Santorum was on the advisory board of the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, which defended the district’s policy. “I thought the Thomas More Law Center made a huge mistake in taking this case and in pushing this case to the extent they did,” Santorum said. He said he will end his affiliation with the center.
This is more about how close Santorum’s re-election bid is in 2006 than the result of any core beliefs, because earlier this year, Santorum was advocating the teaching of Intelligent Design (and in science classes, and not, as it should be, in religion or philosophy courses). Apparently, his pollsters told him that politicians ‘monkeying’ (not sorry) around with science curricula is not real popular with PA voters.
Rather than beat up too much on Santorum, who, barring divine intervention, is finished as a Senator, let’s just be happy that for now, Pennsylvania has two Senate candidates who reject injecting religion into science. It is a pity it took brute political force for Santorum to see the light, and his rejection of ID as science was not the result of his using the brains God gave him, but this is a positive development nonetheless.