First, the DoJ is drafting legislation to mandate that eavesdropping back-doors be included in all networking hardware in order to make sure they can wiretap whenever they want. This is a terrible idea, prone to all sorts of evil, and needs to get strangled in its crib.

Second, the military is paying a law school to find ways around the Freedom of Information Act. This is yet another terrible idea; governmental transparency is paramount in a free society.

A Denver paper ran an editorial calling for the legalization of marijuana, so lying douchebag and DEA administrator Karen Tandy felt the need to respond. With lies. Drug War Rant has the summary.

Subway rider attacked with power saws.

Lieberman has declared he’ll run as an indy in the fall if he loses his primary battle against Ned Lamont.

Not that this is news.

As it turns out, the NSA has been sifting call records since before 9/11. Lovely.

From one of their own anchors, no less:

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: [T]he Japanese did learn that we broke their code, and so they started using a new code.

BRIAN KILMEADE: And guess what? What would you rather have? The Japanese knowing that we broke their code or a decision saying that journalists are allowed to write anything they can or want to write because they think the public needs to know. See, I’m more into the ends justifying the means. And what they do is you can sunset this, Judge. The same way they have the Patriot Act sunsetted. You put up the Office of Censorship. You get a consensus to journalists to analyze and then you realize what FDR realized early. Winning is everything. Freedom is — you don’t have any freedom if the Nazis are the victors. You have no one to trade with if Western Europe falls. That’s the reality. You’re in love with the law, but I’m in love with survival.

NAPOLITANO: I’m in love with your freedom, and I want you and me all the people we work with —

KILMEADE: You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.

NAPOLITANO: Of course, we can. We have it both ways now. We can say whatever we want and the government can’t censor us and the government can still fight the war on terror. If we were to allow some office of the government to decide what journalists can say, that would be the same that the King of England imposed on newspapers in England and in the U.S. and that prompted the Revolution. It would be about the most un-American thing you can imagine. How can we fight a war to bring freedom to another country, to bring freedom of the press to another country when we’re crushing freedom of the press here at home?

KILMEADE: Not crushing — preserving our freedom by preserving our secrets because war is not a free thing. Intelligence is not something to be shared: It’s to be coveted and used to our advantage. Here’s what Roosevelt did. He appointed Byron Price, a respected journalist, to run the office. Price accepts the post on the condition that the media can voluntarily agree on a self-censorship. The Office employs 14,000, and they are civilians, to monitor cable, mail, and radio communications between the United States and other nations. The Office closes in 1945. Our nation still flies. The flag still soars.

NAPOLITANO: Scaring me to death, Brian, because I know they’d come after [Fox News host Bill] O’Reilly and me and you’d have to visit us in Gitmo.

KILMEADE: No, they wouldn’t. You’re not doing anything anti-American.

This guy quoted here is, as they say, so far of the mark that he’s not even wrong. Techdirt takes a cable exec to school. Fun ensues.

A senior Vatican official is advocating excommunication for researchers working with human stem cells.

Never forget this is the organization that jailed Galileo for being right.

The political right is deeply invested in insisting that global warming isn’t happening, or that if it’s happening it’s not our fault, and in either case we should do nothing about it. It’s an article of faith with them, in no small part because of the degree to which they’re beholden to Big Oil.

Ergo, it’s no surprise they’ve tried to come out with the long knives for Al Gore’s documentary. The first attacks were pretty funny: insisting it was a flop based on radically selective readings of box office receipts. Of course, now that it’s one of the most financially successful documentaries of all time, it’s awful hard to make that stick. Yes, “Cars” made more money. No, no one is surprised by that. No, this doesn’t make “An Inconvenient Truth” a flop.

Comes now boneheads like John Stossel, trotting out long-dismissed canards purporting to undercut the conclusions of the vast majority of climatologists. He doesn’t do well, as Media Matters can show, but at least he didn’t start with attacks on Gore himself, unlike most who oppose his film.

The “liberal” media has gotten all matter of things wrong on the financial tracking story. MediaMatters has a rundown of the top falsehoods.

We’ve not covered it, as it’s been all over the news, but here’s the summary: Warren Buffett is so rich he’s hired Bill Gates to spend his money for him. (Yes, it’s a Colbert line.) The Oracle of Omaha is donating the bulk of his US$44B wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which combats (among other things) disease and poverty in developing countries.

Way to go, right?

Well, it’s angered some Catholic nutjobs and other pro-lifers on account of the Gates Foundation giving money to Planned Parenthood. And by “money” we mean “less than 1 percent of their giving,” not that this matters; PP is an excellent organization that spends most of its time and money on education, well-women exams, the distribution of birth control, and the preservation of access thereto. It is not, as the anti-choicers like to say, “primarily an abortion provider.”

“The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world,” said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

Referring to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi death camp doctor, Euteneuer said Buffett “will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents.”

We are certain Jesus is very, very proud. Seriously, where the hell do you get off claiming this is anything but a watershed moment in philanthropy? Buffett and Gates are the templates by which we ought to measure the wealthy: they realize their money can make serious changes in the lives of literally millions of people, and they’re acting accordingly. They have no room for dogma or bullshit, and they clearly entertain no wrongheaded notions about denying birth control or contraceptive education because some jackasses think sex is icky.

If your reaction to the most momentous charitable gift ever is to claim it spells doom for the recipients because they might get ahold of some rubbers, well, I’m not sure what the hell is wrong with you. It’s certainly proof that you care more about dogma than you do about people.

The first post-Armstrong Tour will also be missing several other huge names thanks to an enormous doping scandal, it was reported today. Armstrong’s friendly rival, 1997 winner and five time runner-up Jan Ullrich won’t be riding, nor will Ivan Basso. In all, more than fifty cyclists have been implicated in an Spanish doping scandal now several weeks old. Basso and Ullrich have been pulled by their teams (CSC and T-Mobile, respectively), as was Spaniard Franciso Mancebo, who came in 4th last year.

CNN is reporting that T-Mobile has in fact cut all ties with veteran Ullrich, and will require him to prove his innocence to ride for them again. If true, this is a terrible end to Ullrich’s career; in a non-Lance world, he would certainly have won the Tour more than once — as noted above, he was bested only by Lance in 5 of his trips to France.

Blessedly, Americans George Hincapie (Discovery Channel), Levi Leipheimer (Gerolsteiner) and Floyd Landis (Phonak) are thus far untouched. A field free of Ullrich and Basso makes American success more likely, of course, but by no means a certainty.

This crap oughta rile even the reactionary Heathen Attorney.

One: A New Hampshire man has been arrested for videotaping police on his property with the surveillance system he installed for security reasons. Said arrest came after he was sufficiently pissed off by the rude behavior of a cop investigating his son that he took the videotape down to HQ to use it as evidence in a complaint.

Two: You can be found guilty of DUI in Michigan now for having THC residue in your bloodstream from exposure days or weeks earlier even though no impairing effects could be (or can be) shown.

The bad news is that the Texas redistricting map has been largely upheld by the Supremes. Apparently, legislatures can redistrict any damn time they want within some fairly flexible guidelines. Expect redistricting, then, every time control shifts from one party to the other. This can’t be a good idea.

The good news is that those same Supremes also held that Bush does not have the right to try the Gitmo detainees with military tribunals, i.e. kangaroo courts. This, at least, is a pretty big rebuke from the Court on Bush’s assertions of virtually unlimited wartime power.

If they did, the “liberal” media wouldn’t be so happy about discussing charges of treason for the New York Times over the financial snooping program.

Seriously. What. The. Fuck? Treason? For reporting the truth? About a possibly illegal secret program? Bush’s ongoing hostility to the press is well documented, but this is completely beyond the pale. Claiming investigative reporters are “helping the enemy” when they report on possibly extralegal surveillance programs is complete and utter bullshit, and only serves to illustrate how far down the river we’ve been sold.

Majikthise’s got more.

Aaron Spelling has been cancelled by the great ratings body in the sky. He was 83.

IMDB lists 212 producer credits for Spelling, including The Mod Squad, The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Vega$, Dynasty, T. J. Hooker, Hart to Hart, and Beverly Hills 90210.

Librarian insists police provide subpoena for requested data, as per law. Said librarian may be reprimanded for it, on the grounds that she “put the interests of the library first.” Um, isn’t that her job?