The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.
Why do I get the feeling that the Republicans are preparing to close the border? Get the feeling the emigration numbers are beginning to worry them?
Google, in its letter to committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), Markey, Stearns and Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.), stressed [claimed] that it did not engage in potentially the most invasive of technologies — deep-packet inspection, which companies such as NebuAd have tested with some [which?] broadband providers [and the NSA?]. But Google did note that it had begun to use across its network the “DoubleClick ad-serving cookie,” a computer code that allows the tracking of Web surfing.
So, apparently “deep packet inspection” — that is, actually opening our mail, instead of just checking the subject line and the To and From headers — is what the corporations and the government are definitely, absolutely, posi-fucking-tively not doing, this time around? Read more
[Mary Lou McFate, a] gun-control activist who championed the cause for more than a decade and served on the boards of two anti-violence groups is suspected of working as a paid spy for the National Rifle Association, and now those organizations are expelling her and sweeping their offices for bugs.
Boxes of documents filed in the dispute reveal that McFate worked as a subcontractor for Beckett Brown and that the firm’s clients included the NRA. And they show that McFate billed the firm for unspecified intelligence-gathering services, submitting among other things a request for a $4,500-a-month retainer in 1999.
Bruce E. Ivins, reportedly on the verge of being indicted for capital murder in the anthrax killings, was a registered Democrat, according to the Fredrick County, MD, Board of Elections. He had been registered there since 1982 and records indicate that he voted in “every election since 1996,” including Democratic primaries, according to the official who responded to a request from West Virginia-based radio host Bob Kincaid.
Now, obviously, one can be a regular Dem voter and still despise them, but it seems worthy of more discussion, this latest detail. It’d be nice if “serious” reporters could dig a little deeper and get more info about what the fuck really happened. Not that any will, but I remain convinced that we’re still not getting anything close to the truth about the Why, How and Who of the anthrax events from that increasingly forgotten and inscrutable past.
The timing is certainly curious. If Ivins offed himself several days ago, why is the report just coming to light?
Reports indicate that Ivins had been informed of his pending indictment. I’m not sure how that happened, as federal grand juries operate in secret, most importantly so indicted suspects don’t hit the road before they can be detained.
The method of his reported suicide simply doesn’t square with how men kill themselves. Men put guns to their head or jump off a bridge; they generally don’t pill themselves to death. Plus, I’d hazard a guess that someone would have to take a whole lot of Tylenol III’s (a controlled substance) and get no medical attention in order for death to result.
The first question that any amateur CSI sleuth asks is, “What’s the motivation?” According to earlier reports, Ivins was loosing the deadly spores into the wild in order to field test a vaccine that he’d been involved in developing. Is that a normal government protocol for testing bioweapons? (Just kidding. Maybe.)
I think we should all just trust the government. Read more
For months now the claims that John Sidney McCain III would be more of the same as the Bush administration have been beaten like the drums of war.
A McCain administration might not be the same as another Bush term, though — it might be worse, especially if their respective flying records are anything to go by.
Don’t misunderstand. This is not to disrespect McCain or denigrate his service. It’s to suggest, strongly, that in light of what a younger and arguably less (flight-related) accident-prone Republican President has achieved in the past two terms, accepting McCain as just like Bush might seriously understate Read more
At 1:30 in the morning on July 23, a double-hulled tanker collided with a barge being pushed by a tugboat in the Mississippi River. More than 9980 barrels of fuel oil emptied from the destroyed barge into the water. Yet there’s been no national television coverage. No photos like this one:
have been reprinted on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Why?
When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989, as had happened with the Ixtoc I spill from a leaking Gulf well and happened with the Santa Barbara spill (out of which came the ban on drilling the GOP so desperately wants to rip aside now), the pictures of oil-soaked birds and the descriptions of the damage done to the shores and seabeds were inescapable.
Photo from wwwl-tv, NOLa. Taken from US Coast Guard patrol boat.
That prescription you just picked up at the drugstore could hurt your chances of getting health insurance.
An untold number of people have been rejected for medical coverage for a reason they never could have guessed: Insurance companies are using huge, commercially available prescription databases to screen out applicants based on their drug purchases. Read more
So it turns out that there’s a bit of history behind the latest Taser killing. Officer Nugent arrested (and Tased, natch) the late Baron Pikes’s own father in 2007; said father is currently imprisoned for a drug-related offense. I can’t find any more details than this, but it got me to thinking.
What happened to Baron Pikes was no less than cold-blooded murder:
After consulting about the case with Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist, Williams ruled last month that Pikes’ death was a homicide. On the death certificate, he listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest following nine 50,000-volt electroshock applications from a conductive electrical weapon.”
“God did not just call this young man home,” said Williams, who has served as parish coroner for the past 33 years. “If somebody can tell me anything else that killed this otherwise perfectly healthy young man … I’d like to know it.” […]
“This case may be the most unnecessary death I have ever had to investigate,” Williams said. “[Pikes] put up no fuss, no fighting, no physical aggression. … He just didn’t respond quickly enough to the officer’s commands.”
What I’m wondering is, was it premeditated? Read more
First Obama started moving part of the Democratic National Committee to Chicago. Then he began pushing to prevent Clinton’s name be put in nomination, contrary to all precedent.
All this is keeping with the shock doctrine of hitting people with so many radical changes all at once that they don’t have time to take stock of what is happening and respond.
Why did he vote for the FISA bill, because he caved? Or because he wants police state powers when he is president?
Just when it seemed like a Schleicher County grand jury might be making the kind of unspectacular progress grand juries are supposed to make in the FLDS raid on the Yearning For Zion ranch where Warren Jeffs bragged, with pictures, about his religious right to enjoy “spiritual marriages” to underage girls, somewhere between the cops being called and the day the headlines and perp walks start, a woman with serious chops in the study of religious cults pointed out exactly how the Texas Supreme Court has opened the door to all manner of religions who want to abuse children as part of their faith. Not only did the TSC order more than 420 children returned to the FLDS compound, it has now overturned damages awarded a 17-year-old girl who was injured during an “exorcism”.
Marci Hamilton, a professor at Princeton and Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School, told a conference of the International Cultic Studies Association that the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to release the FLDS children from foster care paired with a ruling Friday that tossed out an award for injuries a teenager suffered during an exorcism made a dangerous statement.
“When you add yesterday’s decision to FLDS, the state of the Texas has just sent out an engraved invitation to any group who wants to abuse children,” Hamilton said. The two decisions make “Texas a very dangerous place for children.”
The other decision Hamilton pointed to came down Friday, when the Texas high court overturned a lower-court ruling awarding damages to a 17-year-old girl who was held down and injured during an exorcism.
Hamilton’s remarks came at a Philadelphia conference where social workers and scholars, sociologists and psychiatrists had gathered to study cults and similar groups, including but not limited to the FLDS. Read more
Columbia Journalism Review gets the point, and tells the story like it is: the Main$tream Media manufactured the flap about General Wes Clark’s remark regarding John McCain. Time we all start asking one question: “Is riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down a qualification to be President?”
Riding in a fighter plane and getting grounded for incompetence, as we have all spent the last seven years learning the hard way, sure as hell is not.
This is the exchange that started the flap:
When moderator Bob Schieffer interjected that “Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down”, Clark responded: “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”
What did Wes Clark say that wasn’t true? Read more
When Mr. Perry learned the fire was arson, he said, his emotions “went from heartache to pretty damn mad.” This was his family’s home, he said, and a place where children have “slid down banisters and chased pets in the yard” for more than a century.
Mr. Perry didn’t say whether he was disappointed with the Department of Public Safety, whose troopers are responsible for safeguarding the mansion.
The mansion wasn’t just home to Perry, or W before him. Read more
Are there any limits to what can be said about political opponents? Should there be any limits? Does anything go, no matter who is the target? Are we all no better now than Karl Rove? Read more
Bringiton, I think you’re lumping the wildass speculation in No Quarter’s comment streams with the relatively well-considered and sourced work Diamond has done. It’s part of his job as a labor activist to fight the damage corporations have done in spreading the “Labor = Mafia/Corruption/Communists!” meme.
Read this post, and tell me he’s not discussing the same subject as we are: How Obama’s most feral handlers and supporters would really appreciate it if we stopped asking for solid reasons to support his campaign, and instead just give them our money and loyalty now, OK? Read more
[Sarah, this is huge. If the FDLS is getting its twelve-year-old child brides airbrushed out of previously posted stories… We need to know that. Especially since it might happen to other stories, eh? Great Soviet Encyclopedia-style… —lambert]
Splenda is not satisfying—at least according to the brain. A new study found that even when the palate cannot distinguish between the artificial sweetener and sugar, our brain knows the difference.
At the University of California, San Diego, 12 women underwent functional MRI while sipping water sweetened with either real sugar (sucrose) or Splenda (sucralose). Sweeteners, real or artificial, bind to and stimulate receptors on the taste buds, which then signal the brain via the cranial nerve. Although both sugar and Splenda initiate the same taste and pleasure pathways in the brain—and the subjects could not tell the solutions apart—the sugar activated pleasure-related brain regions more extensively than the Splenda did. In particular, “the real thing, the sugar, elicits a much greater response in the insula,” says the study’s lead author, psychiatrist Guido Frank, now at the University of Colorado at Denver. The insula, involved with taste, also plays a role in enjoyment by connecting regions in the reward system that encode the sensation of pleasantness.
“Looking at the connection between the taste areas, Splenda is stronger,” Frank says. He suggests that when we taste Splenda, the reward system becomes activated but not satiated. “Our hypothesis is that Splenda has less of a feedback mechanism to stop the craving, to get satisfied.”
“The reward system becomes activated but not satiated…” What could go wrong? Read more
Black campers recruit against history, stereotype
(…)
GADSDEN, Ala.—The throngs filling campgrounds across America this weekend will include hardy outdoors types and those who prefer creature comforts, but they’ll have at least one important thing in common: Nearly all of them are white.
A small but committed group of campers is trying to change that by growing a generation of black campers, one person at a time.
The National African-American RVers Association is composed almost exclusively of black people who camp, although it includes a few whites and Hispanics. The group doesn’t have much money to buy ads or solicit new members. Read more
Infantilization is not liberation, people.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a black man, a white woman, or an entire generation you’re infantilizing, it’s still a putdown and it’s still wrong. Of course, it goes hand-in-hand with today’s political Read more
It really is weird. Everywhere this guy goes shit implodes. I’ve been watching him for years and it’s fucking amazing. He’s like that guy in the Stephen King Movie “Needful Things.”
I mean Barry really has a gift for projection. Read more
Ok, yes I saw the Wright speech on CNN tonight. I know I saw it because I just saw another thread on corrente where Wright talked about the right-brained creative black child vs the wrong brained who-gives-a-damn white child. I thought that I had fallen asleep on the couch and dreamed that. Now I have to reconcile reality with um reality. Yes, Virginia this is 2008 not 1846.
Letting that sink in.
Wright went on to say in a tone that was as if all whites during desegregation ran and met in a big assembly room and said “we know what to do, they are right-brained creative AFRICAN children, we will desegregate thus keeping them down forever and ever!” Read more
Harry Reid asked the Justice Department to look into the FLDS and how it treated children before — in 2006, and with Alberto Gonzales at the helm, DOJ turned a blind eye. Why?
