William Shatner’s kidney stone sold for $25,000 at a charity auction.

Ok, charity is good and all — but seriously, W. T. F?

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.