Doug Flutie is retiring. He started with the famed Hail Mary in 1984, and goes out on the first drop-kick in the NFL since ’41 or ’48, depending on how you count. Cool.

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?