The Senate Sergeant-at-arms — i.e., the fellow ultimate responsible for the crowd problems on Inauguration Day — has joined Facebook to post an exhaustive and complete apology for the problems some encountered trying to enter their seating areas, including the “tunnel of doom” problem.

It doesn’t make it right for those who couldn’t see the event despite having tickets (fairly fancy, privileged tickets, even — it was Blues and Purples who had trouble, not lowly Silvers like Mrs Heathen and I), but it certainly IS refreshing to see a public figure issue such an honest mea culpa.

Radley Balko weighs in on the non-troversy of twentysomething aquatic wunderkind Michael Phelps getting high.

Professional poker player David Peat was mugged by the DEA to the tune of about sixty large at the Detroit airport for buying a first class ticket with cash. They say he may get his cash and watch back later.

Someone needs to put the legal smackdown on these thugs. Seizing property without a criminal conviction is theft, plain and simple, and those who engage in it should be held accountable, from the agents doing the seizing to their supervisors to those who made the policy. It’s absurd, grotesque, and unamerican. Cash is not a crime.

Obama, as it turns out, is not a douchebag about White House dress codes; Bush had a standing policy of coat-and-tie-only in the Oval Office, even to the extent of refusing entry to folks who, on Saturdays or Sundays, were in what 99% of America would consider high business casual.

Hackers Crack Into Texas Road Sign, Warn of Zombies Ahead.

Check this out.

Rove and O’Reilly: Media are hyping economic troubles to help Obama. Riiiiiight.

People take these goofballs seriously. It’s astounding.

In Jackson, MS, the problem of “baggy pants” is apparently “bigger than the Constitution.”

Today, President Obama signed orders closing Gitmo and other extrajudicial CIA prisons.

And if that wasn’t enough, his directives regarding disclosure and transparency are worrying convervatives who think they might enable investigations of Bush-era crimes. Make no mistake; their worry is about disclosure, not about crimes, which is so wrong I’m sort of dizzy just considering it. Incidentally, this shift in policy — to lean towards disclosure, not secrecy — is essentially a return to Clinton-era rules:

[The Bush administration’s 2001 FOIA] directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no ”foreseeable harm” from the release.

… you should really read these two paragraphs from President Obama’s Inaugural Address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

There’s an op-ed today in the NYT that supposes any two-state solution for Israel and Palestine is by default untenable, since both groups have legitimate claims to the land. It’s an even-handed, thoughtful piece about the realities of this aspect of Mid-east politics. Some excerpts:

THE shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

It’s a calm call for the participants to please stop being fuckheads and just get along. And the author is Muammar Qaddafi, I shit you not.

(Via Rob.)

Ricardo Montalban, 1920 – 2009.

The Buffalo Beast’s 50 Most Loathesome People of 2008 is out. Some highlights:

Antonin Scalia:

it was Scalia’s asinine, compartmentalized semantic parsing on torture that we hoped would give pause to his lionizers. Arguing that torture isn’t “cruel and unusual punishment” because the subject hasn’t been convicted of a crime, so he can’t be “punished,” the so-called Constitutional Originalist puts the framers in the awkward position of saying that it’s wrong to beat up a convicted criminal, but it’s just dandy to kick the shit out of him before he is even charged.

Exhibit A: “Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.”

On Frank “worst impressionist ever” Caliendo:

The retarded man’s Rich Little … His TBS vehicle, “Frank TV,” is the least amusing thing to appear on television since the morning of September 11, 2001.

Sarah Palin:

In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.

Rush Limbaugh:

The father of modern stupidity, Limbaugh spins reflexively, never struggling with issues, because he knows his conclusion must favor Republicans, and his only task is finding a way to get there.

Joe Lieberman:

After promising that he was “not going to go to the Republican convention, and spend my time attacking Barack Obama,” Lieberman went to the Republican convention and attacked Barack Obama. But that was just the beginning of his descent into a self-dug hole of betrayal that should have proved inescapable. Lieberman thought it was a good question to ask if Obama was a Marxist. He campaigned not just with McCain, but with Palin and down-ticket Republicans, another thing he said he wouldn’t do. But the most loathsome trait Lieberman exhibits is that most loathsome of all: Smearing dissent as treasonous. The kind of suppressive asshole who would accuse you of helping terrorists by beating him at checkers should not be Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, and is not someone worth rewarding for his own dissent.

Rick Warren:

Dubbed “America’s Pastor” by The Nation, he’s duped people from both sides of the political spectrum into thinking he’s the kinder, fatter version of James Dobson. […] Exhibit A: “God tells us that he created all the land animals on the sixth day of creation, the same day that he created mankind. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time.” Can you feel the wisdom?

Peggy Noonan:

A Catholic hysteric who should be submitting poems about her kitty cats to online poetry-contest scams, Noonan’s call for “Patriotic Grace,” which is nothing more than a call for liberals to stop picking on Republicans for being wrong all the time, comes a little late, after actively helping the most despicable, character assassination-driven campaigns of her lifetime.

The site’s hammered; you may want to wait a day or so before trying to load it. But don’t miss it; they suggest Cheney be eaten alive by baboons, which is really hard to argue with on any level.

Barack Obama will appear in Spider-Man.

NY restaurant frees 120-year-old, 20-pound lobster.

Vassalboro, Maine is apparently getting a topless coffee shop.

You know, since that whole Abstinence-based sex ed thing isn’t working out so well, how about we try ABSINTHE-based sex ed? It’s got lots of the same letters, which is as logically sound a reason to choose policy as underpins this bizarre sexual just-say-no fact-free thing we’ve been pushing for years. Who’s with me? I’ve got a spoon…

Jenny McCarthy, with an honorable mention to Jim Carrey. McCarthy has taken “airhead blonde” to new heights by going with her gut feeling that her son’s autism was caused by vaccination — despite all medical evidence to the contrary. And because she’s wealthy — and is dating the even wealthier Carrey — she can get people to listen to her, which is a public health disaster in a country (and world) where critical thinking skills are in absurdly short supply.

McCarthy is too arrogantly ignorant to appreciate the depths of her own ignorance. She feels that her mommy instincts and her dabblings on the internet were enough to trump the consensus of expert opinion built on numerous high quality studies that shows that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

[…]

Jenny McCarthy is a dangerous deluded crank who does not have the sliver of common sense or humility it would take to consider the possibility that perhaps she does not understand the science as well as trained scientists. At the very least she should recognize that this is a controversy – one that should be decided by the scientific evidence.

Text messages cost carriers essentially zero dollars, but of course they’re not shy about charging absurd fees to customers for their use.

Oh, cell carriers, is there any way you WON’T try to fuck your customers? Isn’t there room in the world for at least one carrier predicted on the simple idea of great service for a great price with no chicanery?

What is it with cops killing unthreatening dogs? Radley Balko explores the issue, along with its strong correlation with absurdly out-of-scale paramilitary tactics. One anecdote involves plainclothes cops skulking around a private home with no warrant, and then killing the dog anyway.

Nothing, of course, ever happens to the cops who do this.

Heathen, you’re gonna LOVE this:

Mexican beauty queen arrested in gun-filled truck.

(Cribbed from Reid on Facebook.)

From Signal vs. Noise, who got it from Andy Sullivan, who was quoting Peter Klein:

The proposed bailout of GM, Ford, and Chrysler overlooks an important fact. The US has one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and efficient automobile industries in the world. It produces several million cars, trucks, and SUVs per year, employing (in 2006) 402,800 Americans at an average salary of $63,358. That’s vehicle assembly alone; the rest of the supply chain employs even more people and generates more income. It’s an industry to be proud of. Its products are among the best in the world.

Their names are Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.

In Columbia, they call him Captain Nemo:

Reporting from Tumaco, Colombia — Squat, bull-necked and sullen-looking, Enrique Portocarrero hardly seems a dashing character out of a Jules Verne science fiction novel.

But law enforcement officers here have dubbed him “Captain Nemo,” after the dark genius of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” They say the 45-year-old has designed and built as many as 20 fiberglass submarines, strange vessels with the look of sea creatures, for drug traffickers to haul cocaine from this area of southern Colombia to Central America and Mexico.

(Via BB)

Michael Lewis revisits the Wall Street of his youth, and what became of it, in this long Portfolio piece. It’s worth a read, but makes more sense if you read his book.

The Vatican has drawn fire this week for opposing the decriminalization of homosexuality as called for in a UN resolution.

It’s hard to figure out how they’ll defend that.

Fed up with the advertising demonization of the word “chemical,” the Royal Society of Chemistry has offered a £1,000,000 bounty for the first person to present them with a sample of a “100% chemical free” substance.

The Detroit CEOs who went, tin cup out, to request a bailout went to Washington in three separate corporate jets.

So it was hard to feel sorry for the executives when Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), late in the hearing, reminded them again that “the symbolism of the private jet is difficult,” and mischievously asked the witnesses whether, in another symbolic gesture, they would be willing to work for $1 a year, as [Chrysler head Robert] Nardelli has offered to do.

“I don’t have a position on that today,” demurred [GM CEO Richard] Wagoner (2007 total compensation: $15.7 million).

“I understand the intent, but I think where we are is okay,” said [Ford top Alan] Mulally ($21.7 million).

“I’m asking about you,” Roskam pressed.

“I think I’m okay where I am,” Mulally said.

And don’t even think about asking him to fly commercial.

It’s Veteran’s Day, which was once Armistice Day — i.e., the day that commemorated the end of World War I, which ended 90 years ago today. You might think all the US veterans of that war are dead. You’d be wrong.

Kip Hawley — the mushmouthed factotum in charge of TSA — responded to day to the Atlantic piece on TSA penetration; Bruce Schneier has more. It should come as no surprise that Hawley says virtually nothing of substance or value.

What happens when a journalist tries to act suspicious and shifty, or exploits problems with airport security widely reported?

Turns out: nothing. Yet again, we see the TSA is completely worthless.

Paul Krugman, of course, won the Nobel in economics earlier this week, and bully for him. However, Tor books points out that perhaps Krugman’s most interesting work came early in his career:

Krugman is famous for his work on the economics of international trade, but as our corporate cousins at Nature remind us, one of his early works was a pioneering examination entitled The Theory of Interstellar Trade:

Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

The young Krugman observed that “This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”

(Krugman is also known as an unapologetic fan of SF.)

… it’s hard to read stories like this and not think the DEA is just a bunch of bureaucrats and tools. Turns out, they routinely cover up murder by their informants, and then force folks who blow the whistle into early retirement. Nice.

It enriches law enforcement. You see, law-enforcement organizations are able to seize and use assets from drug raids — even in the absence of charges being filed, let alone convictions. Happen to like to keep cash around? Better hope nobody calls in a false report on you, because the cops will take it and you’ll have to sue them to recover it.

The Birmingham News, of all places, points out why this is a terrible idea.

A Canadian who was tired of continual bullshit harassment by the TSA thanks to his name being on the no-fly list has finally figured out a way to stop it: he changed his name.

Carl Malamud. Who is he? He’s the guy who is, essentially, daring states to try to assert copyright over their laws.

Yeah, read that again. Some states are actually claiming that their laws are copyrighted, and that reproducing them without permission — and without paying the state! — is a violation of copyright law. Obviously, this is a terrible idea — the states should instead be making it as easy as possible for citizens to read the laws that govern them. So Mr Malamud is publishing them online via scanned copies for any and all to read, download, print, etc., for free.

And he’s hoping very much that his home state sues.

In an LA Times op-ed, security expert Bruce Schneier rips the TSA a new one over the ID rules:

[T]he photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

[…]

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I first wrote about it in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives.

[…]

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

Needless to say, the TSA has no intelligent answer to any of this. Their usual angle is “trust us; we know what we’re doing.” Frankly, we’ve never seen any evidence that’s true.

So, the Mythbusters were all set to do a segment on RFID security w/r/t credit cards — until the credit card companies got wind of it, lawyered up, and pressured Discovery to quash the bit. We’re sure that this makes the stupid RFID credit card implementations MUCH more secure, since everyone knows that security through obscurity is nearly foolproof.

Um. Wait.

This is a pretty fantastic photo of the still-incomplete tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai Tower. The last official height statement was from May: 160 floors, 636m tall.

The Sears Tower, by comparison, is “only” 442m and 108 floors.

Via BoingBoing:

A Hong Kong computer programmer who had legally resided in the US for 15 years (since he was 17) and fathered two American children went for his final green card interview and was locked up, detained until he died of cancer that the DHS refused to treat him for. […] In detention, his complaints of excruciating back pain were treated as fakery, and he was dragged around in shackles after he lost the ability to walk, taken on long, bumpy drives while official demanded that he drop his immigration appeals. The jailers who caused his death were private contractors with fat deals with the DHS to lock up immigration detainees.

As he lay dying, his family — wife and two children, aged 1 and 3 — were denied access to him while the warden considered their request to visit.

More at NYT.

Slate explains why Georgia and Georgia have the same name. Interesting fact: it’s only in English that they do.

These are not factory second posts; they’re full quality, and include the usual guarantee. Use as directed:

• In South Africa, somebody put a bar inside a boabab tree.
• Traveling to or from the US? Don’t take your good laptop. The DHS has decided that it can take your electronics for examination, keep them as long as they want, expose themselves to zero liability, and do all of this without any sort of cause whatsoever. Lovely.
• Old but splendid: Alzheimer’s Sufferers Demand Cure For Pancakes
• Worried that you like baseball, but that the Olympic version might not suck enough? Fear not! We give you the 11th inning rule.

Last year in their fine snowy state, a SWAT team raided an innocent family’s home unannounced; they threw in flash-bang grenades and ended up in a shooting match with the homeowner, who thought he was being attacked by some armed gang. Fortunately, no one was killed.

Guess what happens if you raid the wrong house and shoot at innocent people in Minnesota? Yep, that’s right: you get a commendation. No one was held accountable at all.

On Sunday, a redneck jackass in Tennessee barged into a Unitarian church during a children’s performance and shot several people because he “hates liberals.”

The story’s here, there’s followup here, and I found it here, with commentary I consider more or less spot on.

For the lazy: A student at the University of Central Florida left an on-campus Mass without eating his Jesus biscuit. Mayhem — including assault and death threats, and of course including apoplexy from fundies and mealy-mouthed commentary from halfwit university administrators — ensues. Note the absurd headlines and ledes in the Fox affiliates’ stories, by the way; they’d have us believe he was stealing something and holding it hostage, when in fact all he did was take something that was freely given and then not swallow it. Wack. O.

Bruce Schneier explains why killswitches are a bad idea. Basically, it comes down to a question of whether or not items you buy are owned by you, or by others.

People seem to continually forget to ask “what will happen with this new regulation or feature is misused?” when they ask for schemes like this. It’s not a question of whether it’ll be hacked; it’s a question of when.

“Brothel Bus“

This story makes the case for ditching General Motors from the Dow Jones Industrial Average given its poor performance lately (the stock’s at a 33-year low). GM’s market cap — the value of the firm, arrived by by the markets by multiplying the number of shares by the share price — is down to a paltry $7.5 billion (lower than Ford, which is about $11.9 billion). GM’s sales will be about $179 billion this year, but they just don’t make money on all that income, which hurts the stock.

For the sake of comparison, non-Dow member company Apple Computer has a market cap of about 20 times that (about $153 billion, with revenues of $40 billion and, you know, persistent profits out the wazoo). Cisco has similar numbers.

This photo of a tornado should probably send you into hysterics.

As it turns out, at least five Americans still believe in the Constitution:

The Supreme Court ruled today that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The fascist wing — Scalia, his mini-me, and Bush’s twins — dissented.

In late 2003, Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen, was detained in Macedonia (en route to vacation) by local officials because he has the same name as some terror watchlist person. The Macedonians eventually released him (1/2004) — at which point he was snatched off the street in Macedonia by Americans, who stripped and beat him before flying him to Baghdad and then, eventually, a CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan where he was repeatedly beaten and interrogated. By March, he was taking part in a hunger strike to protest his detention. At some point, American officials realized that perhaps they had the wrong guy, but refused to do anything about it. Finally, in late May, they flew him to Albania and released him at night on a deserted road.

al-Masri has brought suit against the US for his kidnapping and torture, only to have the suit dismissed on national security grounds. He has now gone to court in Germany to force his government to seek the extradition of the CIA agents who kidnapped him in 2004; we hope very much he succeeds, but we’re cynical enough to know he won’t. Justice isn’t something our government is particularly interested in when it’s inconvenient.