Scott McClellan has once again been shown to be entirely full of shit. Seriously, how does this jackoff sleep at night?

Via Atrios; he says it better than we do:

The Terrible Twos
Ivo Daalder writes:

America’s power and influence in the previous century was built not just on its military and economic prowess, but especially on the belief of many that it would use its power to the benefit of all rather than of the United States alone. But that view of the United States as a benevolent power is now gone. America’s image in the world has been tarnished by launching an unnecessary war of choice, flouting international law, and its appalling abuse of detainees. Polls indicate that large majorities in Europe have an unfavorable opinion of America and, shockingly, that a majority of Europeans now believes the United States poses the greatest threat to international security. When trust is broken, a commitment to diplomacy can only do so much. When an American secretary of state has to spend an entire week in Europe to argue that the United States does not torture people — and leave without having convinced anyone that she’s speaking the truth — you know something profound has changed in America’s relations with the world. In such circumstances, a willingness to talk, to negotiate, even to compromise is not enough. It will take a new administration, fully committed to restoring trust in an America rededicated to the rule of law, to begin to reverse the damage that has been done.

I’ve made this basic point a few times. America’s post-war power in the world has depended in large part on a perceived benevolence and general idealism. As a nation we had a kind of admirable idealism even if we certainly failed to live up to it at times. One can take a cynical view of those failures, or one can at least believe that the existence of those ideals is important. Sure it requires a bit of ignorance and naivete to say “We’re America! We don’t DO that kind of thing!” but there’s nonetheless something nice about the fact that our own self-perception, if a bit of a whitewash of the facts, embodied that idealism. But the Bush administration has done away with all of that. Instead of ignoring our imperfections we’ve proudly made them all official policy. We justify these things by pointing out that there are even worse people in the world than us! Instead of trying to lead the world we’ve thrown temper tantrums at it. Time to grow up…

Remember that illegal spying Bush has been doing on account of 9/11?

Yeah, turns out he was doing it before 9/11.

As it turns out, Leif Garrett CAN get arrested!

It’s sort of telling that former Vice President Al Gore’s Monday speech has drawn so much protest from the Administration; both Bush and AG Gonzales have seen fit to denounce it and, natch, lie about Gore’s record. Gore responds:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ — Following is a statement by former Vice President Al Gore: “The Administration’s response to my speech illustrates perfectly the need for a special counsel to review the legality of the NSA wiretapping program. The Attorney General is making a political defense of the President without even addressing the substantive legal questions that have so troubled millions of Americans in both political parties. “There are two problems with the Attorney General’s effort to focus attention on the past instead of the present Administration’s behavior. First, as others have thoroughly documented, his charges are factually wrong. Both before and after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 1995, the Clinton/Gore Administration complied fully and completely with the terms of the law. “Second, the Attorney General’s attempt to cite a previous administration’s activity as precedent for theirs — even though factually wrong — ironically demonstrates another reason why we must be so vigilant about their brazen disregard for the law. If unchecked, their behavior would serve as a precedent to encourage future presidents to claim these same powers, which many legal experts in both parties believe are clearly illegal. “The issue, simply put, is that for more than four years, the executive branch has been wiretapping many thousands of American citizens without warrants in direct contradiction of American law. It is clearly wrong and disrespectful to the American people to allow a close political associate of the president to be in charge of reviewing serious charges against him. “The country needs a full and independent investigation into the facts and legality of the present Administration’s program.”

From here, via Kos.

First, we note that the NYT has characterized said program as both huge and hugely ineffective:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 – In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. NYT via Daily Kos

Today brings notice of the group of hardcore conservatives now on record as opposing this program, including folks like Bob Barr and Grover Norquist. Salon has more on the diverse groups bringing suit over this illegal behavior. If this keeps up, Bush may well turn out to be a uniter after all, but perhaps not in the way he would prefer.

Salon also has an editorial up on the overall efficacy of such a program, and the legitimacy of the Executive Presidency theory that allows it. If it’s behind a paywall, somebody holler and we’ll PDF it.

Bruce Schneier points out that the DHS is funding an Open Source security project. As he notes, this is an excellent use of public funds. N.B. that only OPEN SOURCE tools can benefit from this investment, which will surely produce an even larger gap between FOSS and proprietary tools.

1. Start a war of choice;
2. Tell them that we “go to war with the Army we have” when they complain about lack of armor and supplies;
3. Do nothing about a Pentagon study showing that 80% of Marine fatalities in Iraq wouldn’t have happened with better body armor;
4. Threaten soldiers with loss of death benefits for using commercially available body armor of higher quality.

“He can wiretap whomever he wants, it’s really helped, but we can’t tell you how because it’s classified, so you’ll have to trust us.”

Um, Alberto? We have checks and balances in our form of government precisely because government isn’t trustworthy. But your boy Bush can’t be bothered to follow those laws even though FISA warrants are rubber-stamped 99% of the time. How’s that work?

Update: ThinkProgress debunks his smear of Gore and Clinton in his remarks quoted above. Nice try, torture boy.

Salon has an unofficial transcript of Gore’s speech from Monday.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens — Democrats and Republicans alike — to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger. In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power. As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses. It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored. […] [O]ne month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.” During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place. But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end. At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution — our system of checks and balances — was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution — an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.” Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

You probably oughta read the whole thing.

Celeb gossip site The Superficial is horribly, horribly mean. But hilarious:

Frances seems like a nice enough girl. It’s kinda inspiring to see her defend a woman who spends most of her time either a) drunk, b) high, c) naked, d) dressing monkeys in bikinis, or e) all of the above. This really surprises me, because I figured any daughter of Courtney’s would either be sold into prostitution or so strung out on drugs that she’d look like a cross between Keith Richards and Sloth. Only with boobs. And then I’d call her Sloobs.

Also, apparently, if you’re any sort of media, you get to grope Scarlett Johanson. Who knew?

Mmmmmm. Scarlett Johansson.

Taiwanese scientists have made glow-in-the-dark pigs.

“Thank God for drugs. I don’t care if they’re slowly turning Lindsay into a ring-wraith; if it keeps her playing tongue-monkey with supermodels, they should be sprinkling angel-dust on her cereal.” (Thanks, LM!)

Sienna Miller paints with her boobs. And thank God for that.

Remember Cory? He’s the guy who shot and killed a home invader who happened to be a cop serving a no-knock warrant on the wrong house. He’s on Mississippi’s death row.

Well, the part-time public defender who’s been working on his case has apparently irritated the Prentiss, MS, altermen by doing so, as they’ve fired him for doing so. Way to go, Prentiss! (Said attorney will continue to represent Maye; he just won’t be the PD anymore.)

What tools.

Marcus Vick just doesn’t know when to quit.

Juan Williams is a douchebag. After last week’s dustup on the Letterman show, Williams went on O’Reilly’s program and sided with . . . O’Reilly. Whatever, Juan.

The Oklahoma Lewdness entry is fixed now.

Lonnie Latham, a highly-placed member of the Southern Baptist Convention was busted on lewdness charges for trying to pick up a plainclothes cop outside an Oklahoma City hotel.

From the article:

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, [police Capt. Jeffrey] Becker said. Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday. When he left jail, he said: “I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police.” The arrest took place in the parking lot of the Habana Inn, which is in an area where the public has complained about male prostitutes flagging down cars, Becker said. The plainclothes officers was investigating these complaints.

My attorney wishes to alert everyone to this particular scene in downtown Austin, TX.

Go read this right now. Here’s a bit:

When the New York Times revealed that George W. Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap the foreign calls of American citizens without seeking court permission, as is indisputably required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978, he faced a decision. Would he deny the practice, or would he admit it? He admitted it. But instead of expressing regret, he took full ownership of the deed, stating that his order had been entirely justified, that he had in fact renewed it thirty times, that he would continue to renew it and–going even more boldly on the offensive–that those who had made his law-breaking known had committed a “shameful act.” As justification, he offered two arguments, one derisory, the other deeply alarming. The derisory one was that Congress, by authorizing him to use force after September 11, had authorized him to suspend FISA, although that law is unmentioned in the resolution. Thus has Bush informed the members of a supposedly co-equal branch of government of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they were thinking when they cast their vote. The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses “inherent” authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example, to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be secretly exceeded by the President?

Where does this lead us? Schell goes on:

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush’s abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war (“war of choice,” in today’s euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

Bush must be stopped. If he does not stop, he must be impeached. His doctrines and actions endanger our country far more than bin Laden ever has.

Every year, Ed Felton over at Freedom-To-Tinker makes some predictions. This year, his list includes an event we’ve been saying was coming for a while:

(19) A name-brand database vendor will go bust, unable to compete against open source.

The power of tools like PostgreSQL is undeniable, and the growing popularity of its rival MySQL has definitely made it safe to pilot or deploy with an open-source database instead of paying big bucks to Oracle and the like. We’ve seen what can be done with these tools, and it makes us wonder why the hell someone would BUY something like SQL Server.

Still, we’re not sure a vendor bust is in the cards for 2007. Collapse takes time, and so far I don’t think the FOSS options have grown quite enough yet. However, Felton is usually more right than wrong, and there’s no denying that this year will see PSQL and MYSQL take more market share from their commercial competitors. The effects of that market grab will definitely be interesting.

In any case, the big trophy comes to Austin for the first time in 35 years: Texas 41, USC 38.

Aside from points, perhaps the most telling stats are these:

• USC total yards: 574
• UT QB and Heisman runner-up Vince Young total yards: 467 (200 rushing, 267 passing)

Actually, since we’re posting other stats, we’ll also provide this:

• Heisman trophies won by active USC players: 2 (Bush this year; Leinart last year)
• Heisman trophies won by active Texas players: 0.

(We’ll join the chorus once again pointing out, however, that the USC Trojans were not in fact competing for 3 in a row. They were the winners last year (despite Auburn’s record), but there were TWO champs the year before. LSU, much as it pains us to say it, was the other “title” holder that year.)

On Sunday, Patriots backup QB and Heisman winner Doug Flutie completed the first drop-kick PAT since 1941.

Wacky.

The RIAA is now bullying witness into lying on the stand. Oh boy!

Atrios quotes Novak, of all people in speculating that Lott may retire from the Senate after his term — and that it’s Democratic Mississippi AG Mike Moore, not nakedly-ambitious GOP tool (and Heathen cousin) Chip Pickering that is the oddsmakers’ favorite in the ensuing race for Lott’s seat.

Attorney Farmer? Got any comment?

They’re on fire this time:

• Coal Now Too Expensive To Put In Christmas Stockings;
• Rising Home-Heating Costs Hitting Reptile Families Hardest; and
• Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak, which is PERFECT, including a Weekly Reader reporter jailed for refusing to name a source.

The final entry also includes this gem:

If Rove is responsible for leaking Santa’s identity to the world’s children, it would not be his first political “dirty trick.” In 1988, he was fired from George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign for sending an unsigned letter to the young daughter of a Dukakis campaign adviser. In the letter, he revealed the sad ending of the film Old Yeller.

Pope Ratz is the CREEPIEST POPE EVER.

The Department of Transportation wants very badly to track your car wherever you go all the time with mandatory, tamper-proof GPS transponders. And they’re making progress. Pay attention:

The problem, though, is that no privacy protections exist. No restrictions prevent police from continually monitoring, without a court order, the whereabouts of every vehicle on the road. No rule prohibits that massive database of GPS trails from being subpoenaed by curious divorce attorneys, or handed to insurance companies that might raise rates for someone who spent too much time at a neighborhood bar. No policy bans police from automatically sending out speeding tickets based on what the GPS data say. The Fourth Amendment provides no protection. The U.S. Supreme Court said in two cases, U.S. v. Knotts and U.S. v. Karo, that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they’re driving on a public street.

Be afraid. Then be mad, and — again — pay attention.

That story about the DHS goons visiting a kid who requested Mao’s book via interlibrary loan was a hoax after all.

Back before the turn of the century – heh – our Congress elected to impeach the President because he lied under oath. Regardless of what you think about the Whitewater witchhunt, Clinton did indeed lie, and he deserved to be punished for it. Taking it all the way to impeachment and attempting to remove him from office over that lie still strikes us as pretty ridiculous (far afield of the actual Whitewater land deal as it was), but we’ve definitely learned in the last five years that the Republicans don’t care so much about law as they do power. No impeachment would have been possible if Clinton had not made false statements under oath, and there is no question that he did that.

Well, now we have a real acid test for rule of law — and for our aformentioned theory about Republicans, law, and power. Our president has admitted, in front of a national audience, that he committed felonies, and that he will continue to do so. These crimes are far more serious that lies about a blow job; they strike at the heart of our system of government, and show contempt for Congressional oversight and the rule of law. He’s not saying he didn’t nail someone he shouldn’t have; he’s saying he can eavesdrop on anyone he wants without a warrant, law or no law. He’s saying the law — approved by both houses of Congress and a President — simply doesn’t apply to him.

It couldn’t be much clearer; Gonzales’ tortured reading of the Iraqi war resolution is just plain garbage, and the claims that Clinton and Carter did similar things are lies of the basest sort; the most cursory readings of the documents being selectively quoted by some on the Right makes this clear. The facts remain: there is a law covering precisely the sort of surveilance Bush wanted to do — a law enacted in response to government misconduct in the past! — and he elected to break it.

No one — repeat: NO ONE — with any principle at all can now maintain that Clinton deserved to be impeached and Bush does not. In fact, no one can argue honestly that what Bush has done does not warrant a serious investigation and, quite possibly, impeachment. This is more than party politics. Bush has violated the very Constitution that he has twice pledged to uphold, and for that he must be held accountable. Period.

Security expert Bruce Schneier examines the implications of the wiretapping scandal and the presidential power doctrine behind it — and what it means in terms of our real security. Our Founders created a system of government that included checks and balances on the power of any one branch; Bush & co. are openly contemptuous of that. Remember, this is the doctrine:

In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It’s a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country … merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world.

It’s a power grab, plain and simple, and one that must be slapped down with all possible speed and, if at all possible, serious consequences for those involved.

More from Bruce:

…[A]ccording to the Yoo memo, the president can define war however he chooses, and remain “at war” for as long as he chooses. This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don’t use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law. In the weeks after 9/11, while America and the world were grieving, Bush built a legal rationale for a dictatorship. Then he immediately started using it to avoid the law. This is, fundamentally, why this issue crossed political lines in Congress. If the president can ignore laws regulating surveillance and wiretapping, why is Congress bothering to debate reauthorizing certain provisions of the Patriot Act? Any debate over laws is predicated on the belief that the executive branch will follow the law. This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans; it’s a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don’t want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michael Moore or Ann Coulter. Laws are what give us security against the actions of the majority and the powerful. If we discard our constitutional protections against tyranny in an attempt to protect us from terrorism, we’re all less safe as a result. (Emph. mine.)

The GWB-appointed judge has given the (since ousted by voters) Dover, PA school board a serious bitch-slapping:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources. StCynic

More here; PDF of decision here.

Truth, from MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter, via Atrios:

Dec. 19, 2005 – Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate — he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda — but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation. The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists — in fact, all American Muslims, period — have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab. No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story — which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year — because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

From this CNN piece:

• “So, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, I authorized the interception of international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.” Translation: “I’m wholly ignorant and contemptuous of the Constitution and US law, and FISA be damned.”
• “I’ve reauthorized this program more 30 times since the September 11 attacks and I intend to do so for so long as the nation faces a continuing threat from an enemy that wants to kill American citizens”. Translation: “Expect the NSA to be eavesdropping on American citizens forever.”
• “My personal opinion is, it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war . . . The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.” Translation: “I’m very upset that the press is finally doing its job with respect to examining and investigating the actions of the government, and, in so doing, acting as a check on the power thereof. Also, it’s utterly impossible that terrorist operatives might have assumed we were listening in anyway.”

Via Atrios, we find these paragraphs from Digby:

Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It’s that the administration adopted John Yoo’s theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn’t really John Yoo’s theory at all; it was Dick Cheney’s muse, Richard Nixon who said, “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” This was not some off the cuff statement. It was based upon a serious constitutional theory — that the congress or the judiciary (and by inference the laws they promulgate and interpret) have no authority over an equal branch of government. The president, in the pursuit of his duties as president, is not subject to the laws. Citizens can offer their judgment of his performance every four years at the ballot box.

The problem with this “theory” is that in our republic, no one is above the law. Not even Bush.

Update: Links fixed. Oops.

Tell me again how enhanced surveillance powers don’t automatically lead to bullshit like this. Precis: college senior requests the “Little Red Book” via interlibrary loan for a paper on communism and is visited by Feds as a result. Watch what you read, kid.

THIS is what Bush wants for America. You can put a crisis face on it by chanting “9/11! 9/11! 9/11!” over and over, but that just makes it more Orwellian. Next week? Two Minutes Hate!

Those Hollywood jackasses are at it again, and Congress is behaving like a wholly owned subsidary of the MPAA. The House Judiciary Committee has introduced legislation that would effectively kill the “analog hole,” fair use be damned. In other words, they want any piece of electronics that can play or copy something being played to pay attention to some special watermarking scheme that keeps copies from being made. Want to dub that CD to tape? Not anymore.

Techdirt has a great roundup of links on this.

Via Atrios again, this fine bit from the Washington Monthly site, concerning the extralegal domestic surveilance Bush ordered the military and NSA to do:

This is against the law. I have put references to the relevant statute below the fold; the brief version is: the law forbids warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and it provides procedures to be followed in emergencies that do not leave enough time for federal agents to get a warrant. If the NY Times report is correct, the government did not follow these procedures. It therefore acted illegally. Bush’s order is arguably unconstitutional as well: it seems to violate the fourth amendment, and it certainly violates the requirement (Article II, sec. 3) that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” I am normally extremely wary of talking about impeachment. I think that impeachment is a trauma for the country, and that it should only be considered in extreme cases. Moreover, I think that the fact that Clinton was impeached raises the bar as far as impeaching Bush: two traumas in a row is really not good for the country, and even though my reluctance to go through a second impeachment benefits the very Republicans who needlessly inflicted the first on us, I don’t care. It’s bad for the country, and that matters most. But I have a high bar, not a nonexistent one. And for a President to order violations of the law meets my criteria for impeachment. This is exactly what got Nixon in trouble: he ordered his subordinates to obstruct justice. To the extent that the two cases differ, the differences make what Bush did worse: after all, it’s not as though warrants are hard to get, or the law makes no provision for emergencies. Bush could have followed the law had he wanted to. He chose to set it aside. And this is something that no American should tolerate. We claim to have a government of laws, not of men. That claim means nothing if we are not prepared to act when a President (or anyone else) places himself above the law. If the New York Times report is true, then Bush should be impeached.

Update: Rep. Miller (D-CA) agrees.

John Spencer, best known as President Bartlett’s Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, died suddenly this morning of a heart attack.

His filibuster on PATRIOT has survived a cloture vote; Pandagon says it was 52-47.

Robert Novak, douchebag for liberty, is leaving CNN. (He’s going to Fox.)

The Pentagon is spying on US citizens, like, say, Quakers.

Add this to the provisions of the PATRIOT act that essentially criminalize protest under certain conditions, and we Heathen begin to wonder just exactly what the hell happened to our country.

Our cousin made an Onion story this week.

I mean, he’s a Republican tool, but at least we can laugh at him, right?

Or, at least, it will be if points of view like this one are widely held. First Draft provides a much-needed rebuttal. (Via Atrios.)

From Bruce Schneier, quoting Salon’s pilot columnist:

In the days ahead, you can expect sharp debate on whether the killing was justified, and whether the nation’s several thousand air marshals — their exact number is a tightly guarded secret — undergo sufficient training. How are they taught to deal with mentally ill individuals who might be unpredictable and unstable, but not necessarily dangerous? Are the rules of engagement overly aggressive? Those are fair questions, but not the most important ones. Wednesday’s incident fulfills what many of us predicted ever since the Federal Air Marshals Service was widely expanded following the 2001 terror attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington: The first person killed by a sky marshal, whether through accident or misunderstanding, would not be a terrorist. In a lot of ways, Alpizar is the latest casualty of Sept. 11. He is not the victim of a trigger-happy federal marshal but of our own, now fully metastasized security mania.

Diebold CEO resigns after reports of fraud litigation, internal woes (RawStory). Developing, as they say.

Say you’re asleep in your house with your kid in the middle of the night, and some people bust in with paramilitary gear, and you — law-abiding, gun-owning citizen that you are — open fire on the intruders in an effort to protect yourself, your daughter, and your home. Say you kill one of the intruders. Why, where I live, they’d probably give you a slap on the back and buy you a beer.

You certainly wouldn’t expect to end up on death row, would you? Certainly not in Texas. Certainly not in the Mississippi I grew up in, either. Except, of course, if you’re black, and the intruders are dimwitted redneck cops storming the wrong home in search of a drug den, and the guy you killed is the white son of the chief of police. Then all bets are off, and you may well find yourself in a world of hurt. For example, you might be on death row.

Christ.

There are some things so irredeemably fucked that they transcend party politics, and this is one of them. It’s monstrous.

More on the case here; that blogger follows it pretty closely, so his top page is always a good place to go.

Remember Sami al Arian? The Florida professor so evil and so terroristic that then-AG John Ashcroft went on national TV to announce his indictment in 2003?

Yeah, he was aquitted. In gaining this aquittal, his lawyers called no witnesses at all. What does this tell you about the Feds’ case?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. TBogg, though, points us at some folks who see things in an altogether more wacky way.

Except when we do.

Or, when we do it on accident.

But other than that, we’re golden.

Update: Or maybe not:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she can give no guarantee that terrorism detainees won’t be abused again despite what she called the United States’ clear rules against torture. cite