Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The willow is too close to the house.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Second rate reporter says what?

We are aware of all internet traditions.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Books are my comfort food!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

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Archives for 2005

Domestic Surveillance

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Domestic surveillance is one of those things which I am knee-jerk opposed to, but at the same time I recognize that some form of following the actions of the citizenry is probably necessary. This seems to be the big story of the day:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

What I do not understand is WHY they need to conduct this surveillance without a court order. Does that mean this surveillance is taking place randomly and haphazardly, without any reason? Does that mean that the rules for issuing a warrant are too stringent? Or are they making the case that the surveillance was time sensitive? Or what?

*** Update ***

Ok. I am not alone o nmy questions. The Instapundit wonders the same thing:

I can’t see any very compelling reason to bypass the courts here, especially given that warrants in these cases are almost always granted. Which makes me wonder what’s up.

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Life Repeats Itself

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Remember this story from 2002:

Le Lavandou, France – The mayor of this small resort town on the Riviera issued a decree making it illegal for anyone not owning a burial plot to die within town limits. The local cemetery is running short of room.

“I know it’s absurd but it’s no less absurd than the court order which banned us from building a new cemetery,” Mayor Gil Bernardi said.

The idea is apparently spreading:

Municipal regulations normally ban anything from smoking in public places to parking in certain zones.
But officials in the Brazilian town of Biritiba Mirim, 70km (45 miles) east of Sao Paulo, have gone far beyond that.

They plan to prohibit residents from dying because the local cemetery has reached full capacity.

Mayor Roberto Pereira says the bill is meant as a protest against federal regulations that bar new or expanded cemeteries in preservation areas.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite blogs, Will Warren’s Unremitting Verse, who wrote a poem about the original story:

If you want to skip a jailing
when your body takes to ailing
And the doctor starts to shake his head and sigh,

Just don’t find yourself a-dwellin’
in the town that makes a felon
Out of any citoyen who tries to die.

If your chest hurts something awful,
go and do it where it’s lawful:
The boneyard’s full in fair Le Lavandou.

All the signs they’re now requiring
say “Merci for not expiring!”—
Find somewhere else to bid your last adieu.

When your breathing turns to wheezing,
Mayor Gil you’ll be displeasing,
And he’ll cut you with his fearsome Gallic scowl:

“Not in this town—it’s illicit.
Could we make it more explicit?
Get up, get out, allez,” he’ll fairly growl.

When you’re nearly nonexistent,
Mayor Gil is most insistent:
“Just hit the road—you might try St. Tropez.”

If you’re soon to be deceasing,
say bonjour to French policing
When you pick Le Lavandou to pass away.

A lot of good blogs have come and gone in just a few short years.

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Electronic Voting (cont.)

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The failure of electronic voting machines we discussed yesterday (as reported by BradBlog and Black Box Voting) is now receiving mainstream media attention:

A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines — and possibly other new voting systems in Florida — according to the state capital’s election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.

Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines.

After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold’s system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho’s machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

”That’s kind of scary. If there’s no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,” said Sancho, who once headed the state’s elections supervisors association.

Read the whole report.

One of the things that is going to give me an ulcer about this whole black box voting thing is that it has, to a large extent, already been framed as a left v. right issue. I understand why that has happened, as most of the discussion of the electronic voting issue is always done in the context of charges that the elections were stolen (in 2000 and 2004) and the brain-dead quote from the owner of Diebold, which I don’t think means what it has been made out to mean.

Furthermore, most of the people discussing the issue are decided lefties- from my personal correspondence, Brad Friedman and Mark Crispin Miller are good guys, but conservatives they ain’t.

At any rate, I have really decided this electronic voting movement is not a good thing- at least for now. I just don’t think that a system this open to fraud, with or without a paper trail (and to make matters worse, most don’t give receipts), is a good idea, and I rush to embrace every new technology there is. Furthermore, as I have stated before, the simple fact that it erodes confidence in the electoral process should be reason enough to can it for now.

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An Open Letter to Pranksters

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Folks- I don’t mind if you play games in the comments section here, and quite honestly, I find DougJ’s antics amusing most of the time (except for when he intentionally queers a debate, as he has been known to do). But not everyone else does, and I am asking you to knock it off at places you go to that I have linked to.

It makes me look bad, other people are not as willing to play along as I am, and other websites don’t have a core of commenters who are “IN” on what is going on. In short, I really don’t care what you do here, but please stop doing it at places I link to, because it is making me look bad with people I respect.

Furthermore, folks like TBOGG, who really need all the help they can get to begin with and are never going to understand that DougJ (and NorthwestPHD and others) are a joke, think you are serious. This does nothing to advance any debate whatsoever.

So please knock it off.

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The Accuracy of Wikipedia

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This is an interesting development for online collective information-gathering:

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.

The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.

Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Such errors appear to be the exception rather than the rule, Nature said in Wednesday’s article, which the scientific journal said was the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica. Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

As someone who uses Wikipedia a great deal, this is both reassuring and yet still provides me with ample reason to doublecheck Wikipedia entries before linking them. All in all, though, a win for the ffort, I would say.

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The Revolutionary

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The Political Teen has the video you don’t want to miss, this bizarre/amusing interview of Don King in which he states the following:

WOLF BLITZER, HOST: You love George Bush?

DON KING: I love George Walker Bush because I think he’s a revolutionary. He’s a president that comes in with conclusiveness. What they’re doing in tomorrow in Iraq is a demonstration of that for the vote for democracy. The fundamental process of democracy is freedom of speech, law and order, being able to have freedom, working with people and working and governing yourselves. George Bush is that. He included in…

Go watch the whole thing.

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