Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle explains how important “Protection from Pornography Week” is, or was. An excerpt:

After all, porn ruins families. And communities. And children. And puppies. And the upholstery. This is the government line. This is what they would like you to believe. This is why they invented Protection from Pornography Week. Because you need to know They Care. They are on guard. Because you, as always, are under attack. Here is the message: Despite how porn is a multibillion-dollar, record-breaking, insanely popular, widely accepted, gigglingly discussed, generally harmless, often exceedingly sexy and fun and unstoppable force of skin and fake orgasm and cheesy background music and money shots and thrust thrust thrust, it doesn’t really matter. It is pure evil, they say. And it’s coming for your children. Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless porn remains merely that beloved slippery devil so reviled by every sanctimonious group in modern history, that final frontier of bogus moralism and excessive alarmism and puffed-chest indignation and oh my God who pray who will save the children. Statistics are of little use over at the official government PPW site. They do not talk about anything so frivolous as details, such as the porn biz raking in upward of $12 billion per annum, which is more than ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox combined. Or that the combined subscriber base of Penthouse and Playboy exceeds that of Newsweek and Time . Or that more money is spent on porn than on, say, church. Or the NFL. Or Starbucks. Or socks.

Heh.

The White House has announced a new policy on questions from lawmakers, particularly with regard to questions about how it’s spending money.

Now, all such questions must be submitted in writing through the relevant Congressional committees. It is of course a complete coincidence that the chairs of all these committees — and therefore the gatekeepers for all questions — will be Republicans, and that said chairs will be unlikely to forward any Democrat-authored queries to 1600 Pennsylvania.

Former POW Jessica Lynch is now a civilian, and is not shy about speaking her mind in re: the Pentagon’s portrayal of her capture and, in particular, her rescue.

In an ABC interview quoted in this Washington Post story, she says “I’m no hero. . . I’m just a survivor.” She also laments the over-dramatic rescue coverage (“Yeah, I don’t think it happened quite like that”) and expresses her irritation at being used as the Pentagon’s poster soldier.

CNN covers the same interview, as does the New York Times, which includes this quote, absent from the other two stories:

“From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing,” Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, “I’m so thankful for those people, because that’s why I’m alive today.”

It would have been very, very easy for her to just accept and support the Pentagon’s initial version — a blonde Rambo bravely fighting off Iraqi hordes, only to be captured and held in an enemy prison hospital, under heavy guard, awaiting her fate until a daring commando rescue spirited her away — instead of telling the truth, especially in light of the gung-ho war effort. There were no other survivors from her group; hers would be the only voice. It’s impressive that instead of doing so, she tells the truth — that she was terrified, that her gun jammed, that she fired not a shot, that she remembers no mistreatment in the hospital, and that the treatment she did receive saved her life. She thanks her rescuers, too, of course, though she still wonders why they filmed her rescue.

Surely the reason isn’t “calculated PR,” right? I mean, we can completely discount the reports from hospital officials that they attempted to alert US forces of Lych’s whereabouts as soon as she was stable, right? Surely the Pentagon wouldn’t manipulate something like this for public opinion, right?

I just wish I was sure.

This article from the Economist dicusses the horror that is Bush’s fiscal policies in some detail. The phrase from the title of this post comes from a Republican analyst, and is used in reference to their spending habits. Whatever happened to “fiscally conservative” Republicans? Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be the spendthrifts?

Now the GOP is complaining about electronic voting machine trouble in Fairfax County. They’ve even filed suit. Maybe with everybody pissed off, we can do something about ’em.

The USA-PATRIOT Act, like the mob-targeting RICO Act before it, is now being used opportunistically by the FBI in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.

A Shreveport man has been found guilty of obscenity for selling X-rated tapes to undercover officers. Dan Birman, 23, is the owner of Fantasy Video, and now faces 6 months to 3 years in prison, and a fine of up to $2,500. Lincoln Parish DA Bob Levy appears to be on some sort of Ashcroftian anti-porn crusade, and set out to prove that Shreveport’s community standards don’t allow for explicit sexual behavior on tape. The conviction is on appeal.

Now community standards are notoriously fluid things; I suspect it’s possible to show that question to be settled either way, depending on the evidence brought to trial (how about those in-room motel movie rental records?). The bigger problem here isn’t porn vs. puritans; it’s the fact that the D.A. and the state troopers apparently don’t have enough actual crime to pursue — you know, with victims, and maybe even violence — so they decided on an undercover porn operation. I’m sure the good people of Lincoln parish feel much safer now.

The FCC has approved the controversial Broadcast Flag, ignoring thousands and thousands of protest letters. This is a profoundly bad idea; it puts technological innovation in the hands of the content providers, and strikes another blow against the whole idea of Fair Use (a copyright doctrine the RIAA, MPAA and Broadcasters would dearly love to destroy). It also creates a huge class of “legacy” equipment: for example, a DVD recorder purchased next summer (if the rule stands) won’t be able to create DVDs that will play on your current player.

Coverage:

• BoingBoing
• At the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Via PC World

Fortunately, a legal challenge is already in the works. Keep your fingers crossed, folks.

And we’ve got to stop it. Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian. Returning to Canada from vacation in Tunis last September, he flew from there to Zurich to New York, intending to continue on to Montreal. US officials detained him in New York, refused his requests for an attorney, would not tell him what charges or allegations resulted in his arrest, and eventually deported him — to SYRIA, where they knew he would be tortured or killed. He was held for over a year in total — ten months in Syria — before finally being released on October 5, thanks to the efforts of his wife and Canadian authorities.

This is his statement. Read it, and try to figure out why our Shining City on the Hill decided to detain a Canadian citizen on nebulous grounds and ultimately — and deliberately — subject him to the treatment they knew Syria would provide.

Longtime Heathen and fellow Mississippi expatriate R.N. called my attention to this entry at Talking Points Memo. Apparently, the Mississippi Secretary of State has already notified Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore and both Mississippi district US Attorneys about allegations of voter intimidation in minority counties. Here’s a PDF of the letter sent by Secretary Clark.

I’m very glad Clark has taken quick action here, but the fact that he needed to makes me feel ill.

Two bits, actually.

1. First, the EFF announced today that it’s filing suit against Diebold for abuse of copyright claims; they’ll be representing the Swarthmore students who linked to the leaked memos.
2. In other news, Wired News is running a story about electronic voting systems that DON’T suck — in Australia. Quotes:

   “Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me — someone with a vested interest in the project’s success?” [Lead engineer Matt Quinn] said. “A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to ‘prove’ the system’s integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.”

   And on the wretched security and design of the Diebold system:

   “The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections,” Quinn said. “It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.”

Maybe now this story will get the legs it needs.

Frank notes that perhaps I was unfair to Mississippi yesterday, so I’ve provided supplemental and clarifying remarks in reply to his comments.

On one hand, we have shameless mouthpiece Condi Rice, insisting in New York (NYT link; use nogators/nogators) that the terror attacks happened because prior administrations didn’t do enough to stop terrorism (odd, by the way, that instead of just naming Clinton, she used a phrase that implicitly damns GHWB as well, not to mention the Gipper himself). Er, right, Condi.

As a counterpoint, I’ll note that Clinton’s attempts at neutralizing Osama bin Laden are frequently held up as “wag the dog” scenarios by the Right, happening as they did during the GOP’s 7-year attempt to remove Clinton from office. Make of this what you will.

On the other hand, we have Paula Zahn being horrified that 9/11 is being used for political gain in this election cycle. Is she talking about Condi Rice? No. She means Wes Clark’s comments:

There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9/11. You can’t blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated memos with each other. The buck rests with the commander-in-chief, right on George W. Bush’s desk.

Zahn and her guest, Joe Klein, behave as if the notion of a leader taking responsibility for events that happen on his watch comes straight from Red China, or at least Mars. They say nothing, of course, of the aforementioned “not my fault” claim from Rice, and conveniently fail to mention the fact that the Bush White House has done everything in its power to avoid cooperating with the Congressional 9/11 investigation. An inciteful analysis of this little bit can be had at the oft-cited, always compelling Slacktivist.

Who’s politicizing 9/11? Tell me again: which president’s go-it-alone, isolationist, we-ought-not-be-nation-building policies ruled the roost until September 10? You do the math. Obviously the truly responsible parties are (a) atomized bits languishing in Fishkill; and (b) Osama bin Laden, whereabouts unknown. However, the buck does stop at 1600 Pennsylvania. He doesn’t get blame, but as our President he is expected to take responsibility. To do so would be a mark of character, which heretofore has been something that mattered to the GOP. Instead, we get the behavior Slacktivist describes here:

To this very day, the Bush administration is stonewalling the commission led by Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey. This determined refusal to investigate smells rotten — it stinks of corruption, complicity and an utter rejection of adult responsibility.

The Justice Department has been trying for quite some time to prevent the release of an independent workforce diversity study. It finally turned loose of the document this week, though nearly half of it was redacted.

Nobody told Justice, however, that the format they released it in (PDF Image+Text) retained the redacted portions, so now the whole thing is available via MemoryHole. Clever, aren’t they? (Calpundit coverage).

GOP bigwig and almost-certain Mississippi governor Haley Barbour is busily wrapping himself in the Confederate Battle Flag via his campaign literature, no doubt to appeal to those who see removing the symbol from the state flag as creeping Yankee-ism. Many in the state (two years ago, the vote was 2 to 1 to keep the current state flag) continue to insist that it’s a symbol of “heritage, not hate,” and that it’s tied to Southern history and not the war specifically.

This is, of course, absurdly wrong. The battle flag wasn’t used until the South took up arms against the Union and its Constitution. It’s not about State’s Rights (an argument which seems to suggest that states need not honor the Bill of Rights). It’s not about heritage. It’s about a war fought over slavery, and our ancestors seemed to think owning people was a good idea — or, at least, they wanted to fight for their right to do so.

The most stunning thing to me is how hell-bent some folks seem on keeping the battle flag despite how offensive it is to a huge percentage of Americans and Mississippians. Even if the heritage argument held water, it’s still indisputably a flag tied directly to a treasonous regime dedicated to positions such as this:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [i.e., opposing the notion that all men are created equal – ed]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. March, 1861 speech by CSA VP Alexander Stephens, cited here.

Given that, what do we gain by insisting on its continued presence on our flags? And what do we lose? And what would our mommas say about us clinging to this battle flag despite the distress it causes the decendents of those same slaves? What does this say about us? And what does Barbour’s cynical use of it, and almost certain success therein, say about my home state?

I want to be proud of Mississippi. I really do. But issues like Barbour and the battle flag make it damned hard to convince outsiders that my home state isn’t full of unreconstructed racists.

Hollywood, Inc., is about to win another battle in the war on Fair Use and flexible technology. The FCC is set to approve something called the Broadcast Flag, which will require that personal computers and other devices contain technology to block unauthorized copying of copyrighted content. This will make just about every existing computer and operating system illegal, and is unlikely to sit well with just about anybody who isn’t Jack Valenti. The Electronic Frontier Foundation — a fine organization you should support — has coverage here and provides a way for you to make your voice heard here. The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Krim summarizes the issue in a column from a week ago.

Read. Act.

A trade group representing Diebold & others is working on a PR offensive designed to counter critics’ charges that the machines are unreliable, insecure, and tailor-made to facilitate election fraud. This, presumably, in lieu of manufacturing a secure, auditable system that we could, you know, TRUST. From the story:

David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University who runs a website called VerifiedVoting.org , said: “The voting machine industry doesn’t have a PR problem. It has a technology problem. It is impossible to determine whether their machines, in their current form, can be trusted with our elections.” Instead of trying to convince people the machines are safe, the industry should fix the technology and restore public confidence by “making the voting process transparent, improving certification standards for the equipment and (ensuring) there is some way to do a recount if there is a question about an election,” Dill said.

In a surprise move, however, Diebold has reversed its position on issuing paper receipts to voters.

I hate to keep baning the Diebold voting machine danger drum, but dammit, it’s important. The Independent has a great story on the direction voting technology is taking in this country, and how dangerous it is to the very idea of one man, one vote. READ IT. A sample:

The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal – on pain of stiff criminal penalties – for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up.

If that doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what will.

The Agonist has a great rundown of a variety of stories on the leak investigation, including the ongoing call for a special prosecutor as well as the first public appearance by Plame herself. Novak, of course, continues to hide behind his (negligable) journalistic integrity (never mentioning, of course, his own anger when Mike Spann was “outed” as a CIA operative in the early days of the Afghan war — after he was killed; for Novak, outing the dead is apparently wrong, but the living are fair game).

Easily the best story of the lot is also covered in a Slacktivist post. It seems Bush is really upset about this whole leak thing, and he’s made it clear on no uncertain terms that such leaks from his staff will have serious consequences. How do we know this? To quote the Philadelphia Inquirer:

WASHINGTON -Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush – living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge – told his top officials to “stop the leaks” to the media, or else. News of Bush’s order leaked almost immediately. Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories” quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

A more accurate description of this turn of events is almost certainly “theater for the masses;” they want to look like they’re doing something, when in reality they’re anything but serious about this investigation.

Just ask the Stars and Stripes.

The White House is using the Secret Service and local police to sequester dissenting voices in “free speech areas” far from motorcades, media, and the public at large at Presidential appearances. Just dissenters, not supporters, mind you.

There is no reasonable justification for this behavior. It’s certainly not safety; do we think a militant anti-Bush nut bent on violence can’t pretend to be a supporter long enough to get closer? I think not. This is about control, about scripting appearances, and about hiding and marginalizing dissent. This is not American. We’re said to be fighting those who “hate freedom,” but what do actions like this suggest about those leading that fight?