Seventies alleged psychic Uri Geller has purchased Elvis Presley’s pre-Graceland home.

On eBay.

For a million dollars.

“Tough day for monkeys in Amsterdam.”

In a shocking development, GOP senator Arlen Specter HAS been (past tense) pushing hard for a clause in a pending bill that would force (well, maybe) the administration to actually seek a legal judgement on the legality of the NSA domestic spying program.

In a not so shocking move, he’s given in, and no such clause will be in the final bill. The more Right-wing members of his committee are apparently opposed to any sort of judicial oversight on executive power. Glenn Greenwald:

Without the provision which was originally “demanded” by Sen. Specter, it is basically impossible for any plaintiff to ever challenge the legality of the NSA program. In very general terms, in order to have standing to bring such a suit, a plaintiff would have to prove that they have been specifically injured by the warrantless eavesdropping beyond the injuries of an average citizen. But the program is secret and there have been no investigations into it. As a result, nobody knows whose calls have been intercepted without warrants. Therefore, any would-be plaintiff would be immediately trapped in the type of preposterous, bureaucratic Catch-22 in which American law specializes and which the Bush administration is eager to exploit — namely, since nobody knows whose conversations have been eavesdropped on, nobody could ever make the showing necessary to maintain such a lawsuit, and since the administration claims that all such information is highly classified, the evidence necessary to make that showing can never be obtained. Thus, in the absence of the provision in Sen. Specter’s bill, the administration would be able, in virtually all circumstances, to block a ruling on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping program…

Remember when it was “oh, we’re just watching foreign calls with the NSA, no big deal!” — even though it was manifestly illegal according to FISA, which is, you know a law? And how then it was, “oh yeah, we’re also creating an enormous database of every phone call in America, but don’t worry, we won’t abuse that information”? Yeah, well, the abuse started almost immediately.

From Atrios:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation. We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls. Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation. ABC

How far will we let them go?

More major vulnerabilities have been found in Diebold voting machines. Apparently, you can 0wn one of these things in minutes if you know what you’re doing.

Americans are still mostly hysterical idiots.

The new Harris poll has Bush’s approval rating at 29%.

Bush stated today that they’re not trolling through our private lives with this massive, unprecedented database of telephone calls. That doesn’t even pass the giggle test, but it sort of doesn’t matter what he says at this point — only the raving nutbird looney right-wing fringe believe him anymore. It’s going to be amusing to see if this is the event that drags his approval ratings into Nixonian territory (though, to be fair, his disapproval numbers are already higher than Nixon’s).

Remember Bush’s aforementioned illegal domestic spying plan, wherein he insists he’s “only listening to overseas calls?” Yeah, turns out instead that the NSA has been trying to listen to every phone call in the US, and that the big telcos — with the exception of Qwest, God love ’em — totally rolled over despite the complete lack of warrants.

We’ve said it before, and we say it again: THIS ADMINISTRATION IS A FAR GREATER THREAT TO AMERICANS THAN TERRORISM.

The Justice Department inquiry into Bush’s manifestly illegal domestic spying plan has been killed because the NSA will not grant the DoJ attorneys sufficient clearance. No, we are not making this up. The NSA is apparently in a position to kill an investigation of itself, and nobody’s screaming about what a complete conflict of interest this is.

The United States has the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world, exceeded only by Latvia.

W. T. F?

So Bush has nominated a GENERAL to take over the CIVILIAN intelligence agency. That alone should give you pause, and indeed there’s broad bipartisan opposition for this very reason, not to mention the fact Gen. Hayden is strongly associated with the NSA, home of the “warrants? we don’t need not steenkin’ warrants!” domestic spying initiative. If that’s not enough to ditch this guy, may we suggest that his apparent complete ignorance of the Fourth Amendment might tip the scale?

Wired has a surprisingly nonhysterical piece on the lack of security in many RFID systems; it’s worth a read. They only miss in one area that we saw, and it’s a picky point: most supply-chain (which is to say, shipping) tags don’t have pricing data, at least not when it comes to biggies like Wal-Mart and the DoD. Those tags hold only a 96-bit number that is associated back to a database entry. They’re not secure per se, but since they’re essentially active bar codes, it matters a lot less in this application than it does in, say, keycards.

Porter Goss is out at CIA.

“Truckload of Missing Art Found in Trailer Park“

Our love for it, however, is eclipsed by the highlighted graf below, which is perhaps the finest one to ever appear in an article about an art heist:

A multimillion-dollar art heist that began two weeks ago when a truckload of paintings, sculpture and antique furniture vanished on the road from southern Florida to New York ended on Wednesday night in a most unlikely place: a 30-year-old trailer park in Gainesville. It was there, at the 300-family Arredondo Farms, that a task force of the Gainesville Police Department and the Alachua County sheriff’s office arrested the driver of the truck, Patrick J. McIntosh, after they had surrounded a trailer belonging to what one official called “his baby’s momma’s sister.” Mr. McIntosh surrendered without incident, the authorities said, and the art was found intact. “The guy gave up,” said Sgt. Keith Faulk, who works for the sheriff’s office. “He was a big ol’ boy, too — 6-8, 280. I think he might have thought about slipping out. Then again we had the residence surrounded.” Mr. McIntosh, 36, had been missing since April 17, when he and his 24-foot Budget rental truck pulled out of Boca Raton with millions of dollars worth of art, including seven canvasses by the Abstract Expressionist painter Milton Avery. He had been hired by David Jones Fine Art Services to deliver the art from private dealers and collectors — and at least one museum — in Boca Raton to a series of homes and galleries in New York. “He appeared to be very polite, very hardworking, you know, dependable,” said Susan Buzzi, who works for David Jones. “But who knows what lurks — well, it’s a mystery I suppose.”

Thank you, Jesus, for blessing us with such abject beauty. Thanks too to Miss Griggaloo, who says “There should be more of that sort of thing in today’s journalism.” Indeed, Griggy, indeed.

Dell has taken the lead in Windows efficiency by shipping machines with spyware already on them — and then charging users to remove it. Nice! (Thanks to Our Man In Chile for the tip.)

Go read TechDirt’s summary; Ted Stevens is still trying to resurrect the fucking broadcast flag bullshit, for crying out loud. There’s coverage all over, natch — see BoingBoing here and here, for example.

So, some researchers have found another pyramid.

In Bosnia. Bigger than Giza. That nobody knew about.

We repeat: Whoa.

Update: We Been duped, but we’re in good company. Hat tip to the Attorney.

Notwithstanding the clear contempt he holds for the notion of “rule of law,” Bush has declared today Law Day. Mmmm, delicious irony.

…this URL says it all: ThankYouStephenColbert.org.

Apparently, ol’ W didn’t enjoy this too much. Tough. Our favorite commentary is here, found via JWZ.

Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws:

WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ”whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Seriously, go read the whole thing. We use BugMeNot.com to get in — the login that worked was holy_fool_69@yahoo.com with the password “bugmenot”.

Bush has made clear his contempt for the rule of law and the idea of separation of powers. What must we do to remind him of the oath he took to uphold the Constitution?

So remember that EFF lawsuit against AT&T brought because, apparently, AT&T has been surreptitiously allowing the Feds to eavesdrop on pretty much everything for years?

Yeah, the Feds have weighed in</>, and are bringing a motion to dismiss this lawsuit under the state secrets privilege.

This is more or less proof that (a) the Feds have been doing some naughty things and (b) are deeply committed to continuing to do said naughty things no matter what the law says and (c) are willing to use all the power of the state to get their way.

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

Scott McNealy is stepping down as CEO of Sun. He will stay on as chairman.

Once a silicon darling, Sun has fallen on hard times since the dot-com bust. Their problems weren’t dot-com related, though; they’ve been torpedoed by some very basic business problems.

Their bread and butter was proprietary systems running their own version of Unix called Solaris (oddly named, given that the book and movie entity named Solaris drives people insane). Solaris was, in its heyday, easily the best such animal available. Sun’s hardware, too, was impressive at the time, and for a while at least was synonymous with computing power in a time when Intel hardware was barely capable of running Win3.1. We remember being amused and amazed when, in 1997, we helped deploy one of the first web stores with Oracle, Netscape Application Server, and the Netscape web server all on one fairly low-end Sun (an Ultra 5 — just like the one we use a doorstop in Heathen World HQ now). Of course, now the much-cheaper Xserve that runs Heathen is completely capable of running all that and more, and in fact does.

The the world changed. Intel hardware got much better, and did so very quickly. Linux came out of nowhere and caught all the expensive, proprietary Unixes flat-footed; the combination has been huge for Sun. Other firms were caught, too, but some managed to be more agile; IBM in particular adopted Linux as its own, and has been busily giving back to the FOSS community. Sun, on the other hand, became convinced that they could give away hardware and make it up on software — i.e., the still proprietary Solaris — and survive. They were, and are, wrong. Sun hardware may still be an acceptable choice for HUGE database applications, but those jobs are few and far between, and Sun no longer owns the market. For 95% of the applications, there’s no reason to buy fancy hardware or software, and that’s the problem. For 100% of the applications, there’s no reason to use Solaris and be tied to Sun when choosing a supported enterprise Linux keeps your options open.

Sun has given the world Java, of course. Their vision for Java has never been completely in line with reality, but that’s Silicon Valley for you. Java remains a solid contender for server-side development (and even the occasional client-side app); aspects of the language make it a much better choice than almost any other compiled language. However, you still need a pretty big app to justify it over options like the stack, or Ruby on Rails, or other open source offerings. The world of Java is often an overly complex one full of cargo-cult dogma and huge codebases nobody actually understands; more recent approaches tend toward the simple, with attendant increases in maintainability. Java was and is free, however, so it’s not about to fix Sun’s bottom line issues; the minute they try to charge for it is the minute the FOSS options bury it.

So that’s what Sun’s got: expensive hardware of dubious value, a white-elephant operating system, and a language/technology they gave away for free. Vanishingly few people want the first two, and the third can’t save them. And all this has been true for years. The surprise isn’t McNealy’s departure; the surprise is that it took the board this long to do it.

“Man dies after plummeting into large hole that opened beneath his home.” Via BoingBoing.

But it’s not over, and if you stay informed, you’ll be better able to help save it.

The Internet is a giant open network that, basically, no one has been allowed to exert much control over, even bandwidth companies. They’re expected to carry all traffic, and treat it equally, and this is how we’ve gotten this far. If the telcos had their way, the Internet as we know it would never have happened; now they’d like to be able to block traffic they don’t like, or charge more for some kinds of traffic, because they think they can make more money that way. Is your ISP also your cable company? Maybe they’d rather you didn’t get to watch TV at iTunes anymore. Is your ISP also your phone company? Kiss Skype goodbye, and ditto any other competitive VOIP service.

This is real. Pay attention.

FOX — Fox! — has Bush’s approval rating at THIRTY THREE PERCENT, or several bucks less than half the cost of a barrel of oil today.

The Heathen wonder what the floor is. We mean, presumably, there exists a hardcore cult-of-personality segment who will approve of Bush’s administration even if he and Rove do a televised tag-team gang-rape of the Olsen Twins in prime time (like they haven’t been doing that to Lady Liberty for 6 years already…). What is that chunk? 30% 25%?

(Via TPM.)

The jackbooted government thugs are desperate to sift through the papers left by muckraking journalist — and therefore agent of liberty — Jack Anderson. They’re insisting he may have gotten some secret papers, or something, and that they have the right to review, remove, and redact that which constitutes the most valuable segment of his estate. Fortunately, his heirs are none to pleased about this, and are fighting the demands in the courts.

The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism. Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen. Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection. “It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”

(Local PDF.)

Best. Headline. Ever. It’s Onionesque.

Hertz is going to add Shelby Mustangs to its rental fleet again.

Sy Hersh reports in the current New Yorker that the Administration is deep in the planning phases for a possibly nuclear military campaign against Iran.

Apparently, AT&T has been routing its Internet traffic to the NSA. The EFF is suing.

So, remember a while back, when one of the new talking points from the White House was that the Vice President’s powers included the ability to declassify information? People wondered a little about why this was important, but the reason is pretty transparent: if Libby flips on Cheney and says that it was the Veep who told him to link Plame’s identity, their fallback position is that because Cheney is VP, his order to disclose Plame’s classified status means he was declassifying her status. Ergo, no classified leak exists. It’s an end run around the laws concerning classified material, but certainly par for the course with this most mendacious of administrations.

Now the story’s getting more interesting, as Libby is asserting that the order came from Bush. We can assume that the GOP noise machine will immediately start in with a variant of the “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” canard that is so dangerously close to Louis XIV’s (in)famous pronouncement in re: state-monarch unity. However, it ain’t necessarily so, and I pray that won’t fly. Bush deciding to leak Plame’s CIA identity would and should remain a crime. Surely Bush cannot simply decide to declassify her status as political payback and get away with it. At least, I’d be sure of that if we still lived in a country that enjoyed the rule of law a bit more universally; Bush’s imperial presidency has already done substantial damage to that most basic of governmental ideals. It remains to be seen how much more damage he’ll do.

(Thanks for the heads-up, Triple-F!)

Harry Taylor is my hero. Somehow, a non-ass-kisser managed to get into a Bush Q&A PR event in Charlotte. Harry rules.

They’ve killed a network neutrality measure, paving the way for folks like AT&T to rape and ultimately destroy the Internet as we know it.

Wired is running a story on the gradual disintermediation of local NPR affiliates in favor of podcasts, mp3 downloads, and online streaming of the popular shows. NPR is different than, say, the RIAA in that they’re not pretending that their business model doesn’t need to evolve, and Wired makes much of this, but they don’t make one key point quite clear enough.

Lots of affiliates suck unmitigated ass. The Heathen household is a big NPR consumer, but we don’t sponsor the local station. Why? They’re awful. Their programming choices are pedestrian, and their locally produced content is amateurish at best. We view KUHF as a necessary evil, and the only reason we ever tune in is to get the national programming. In that sense, they are indistinguishable from the television broadcast network affiliates; we’d ditch them, too, if it were convenient to just get a national feed. It’s only under very rare circumstances that local broadcast media provide anything of value to us — e.g., during Hurricane Rita — and when that happens, we’ll gladly use rabbit ears. For the other 99.9% of the time, the local stations are the people screwing up our Tivo’s attempts to capture Letterman because they’ve decided people really want a 45 minute evening news show.

But back to NPR. We’d happily pay money directly to NPR for a feed of their national programs — Morning Edition, ATC, Marketplace, Fresh Air, etc. — as long as they were blissfully free of local interruption. They’re worth at least as much as HBO. Disintermediation is happening to the KUHFs of the world now because the internet makes it possible, but also because the affiliates offer nothing of value. It’s not just the pledge drives. It’s pledge drives in service of overwhelmingly half-assed programming. Radio is easy; getting content from the Internet is orders of magnitude more difficult compared to turning on the radio. That people are opting for that despite the higher barrier is an indictment of the local affiliate system. The desire to disintermediate is, in this case, a prerequisite to the actual disintermediation. It’s a choice listeners are making consciously and deliberately; it’s the market speaking. NPR and its affiliates would do well to listen carefully, and act accordingly.

A: When it’s in Arizona, and you’re the son of the state Senate president. Holy crap.

Oh, yes, of course the politico in the picture is a Republican. Did you really have to ask?

And we love him for it. Telephonic cryptography for the masses, from the guy who gave us easy public key crypto. With the GOP content to allow George to eavesdrop on whomever he likes with no oversight, widespread unbreakable crypto is probably the only way to keep your communications private.

You’re idiots.

Diebold is trying to charge a county $40,000 for testing its voting machines. Jackasses.

From the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON — When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act’s expanded police powers. The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates. Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ”a piece of legislation that’s vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people.” But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ”signing statement,” an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law. In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law’s requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ”impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.”

We have separation of powers for a reason. When will the people wake up to what evil this administration is doing? The biggest threat to the US since 9/11 has never been Bin Laden; it’s Bush and his imperial presidency.

From security expert Bruce Schneier’s weblog, and also Wired:

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently (see also this), testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn’t the “underwear bomber.”)

Go read this. MM is the only source of “fair and balanced” media criticism you’ll find.

But that doesn’t make this any less funny: Franz Ferdinand Frontman Shot By Gavrilo Princip Bassist. From today’s Onion, natch:

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — Lead singer and guitarist for pop band Franz Ferdinand, Alexander Kapranos, is in critical condition today after being shot by a man identified as the bassist for rock group Gavrilo Princip. “We ask fans to cooperate with Interpol to find the assailant, and call upon British Sea Power, Snow Patrol, and The Postal Service for help,” drummer Paul Thompson told music magazine NME Monday. “The suspect had links to The Decemberists and The Libertines, and we are following up on all leads.” It is unclear whether the shooting was linked to The Polyphonic Spree’s invasion of Belgium earlier this week.

The Post has utterly caved to the right, who keep whining about nonexistent liberal bias, by hiring a right-wing blogger. There are no progressive bloggers employed by the Post; just this guy on the right. Josh has more (see link), as does Media Matters here and here.

Cops up there made a sweep of 36 bars last week wherein they arrested about 30 people on charges of public intoxication. Inside the bars. Their rationale? These people might drive later. That one of the bars was a hotel bar, and at least some of the arrested persons were registered there, is apparently irrelevant.

What jackasses. Somebody fire these thugs. More via The Agitator<a/>.

However, it’s probably only hard because, at least in the corporate world, “PR” means “LIES.”

Someone at the Post got an amusing release from some flack somewhere about the valuable role funeral directors will play in the event of a mass fatality event. (I am not making this up.) Post reporter calls back for clarification, and transcribes conversation. Madcap hilarity ensues. (Local Copy)

Marvel and DC are asserting that they own, jointly, the rights to the term “super-hero.”

The marines are tracking down Vietnam-era deserters, presumably to emphasize to the current force that desertion isn’t an option.

The prosecution may well have totally screwed any chance of the so-called 20th hijacker getting the death penalty.

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 13 — The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui teetered on the brink of a mistrial today, as the judge in the case angrily said she might spare him the death penalty following the disclosure that a government lawyer had improperly coached some witnesses. “In all my years on the bench, I’ve never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses,” Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said.

Shouldn’t this be a slam dunk? Isn’t Moussaoui (a) barking mad and (b) representing himself? They can’t win under those circumstances, so they have to CHEAT, even knowing what the stakes are? Wow.

More here.

They’re going ahead with the RFID passport scheme despite grave concerns about its security. Trust us: we Heathen know from RFID, and this is a bad idea. A very bad idea.