Experian buys Maple Grove health data provider

Experian is spending $90 million to acquire Maple Grove-based SearchAmerica Inc., which provides data services to health providers.

One of SearchAmerica’s top businesses involves using credit bureau and other financial data to help health care providers gauge whether patients will be able to pay. Experian, an Irish company with U.S. headquarters in Costa Mesa, Calif., is one of the largest credit reporting companies in the United States.

Do you think medical decisions should be based on your credit history?

Story here. See Cannonfire for responsible speculation.

So, I wonder if Connell's lawyer has an envelope to open in the event of his death? Read more…

Law Enforcement Looks to Video Surveillance Networks

2008 may have been The Year of the Large-Scale Wireless Video Surveillance System, as several cities and their police departments joined the growing market, while others expanded existing systems.

These systems stream high-resolution video to monitoring stations and police squad cars from cameras strategically located throughout downtown areas or other high-priority, high-crime districts. The cameras can prove valuable to police and prosecutors for capturing and convicting criminals and as a crime deterrent. Read more…

Do not be fooled, amidst all of the election hoopla the fact has remained that the right (wrong) is still totally bat-shit crazy. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas penned in his December 1st column that: Read more…

Dr. James Galbraith says, “In principle, economic growth can come from household consumption, business investment, government spending, or exports. This is a tautology, indisputable and known to everyone who has ever opened a textbook...”

Well, yeah. Note the “in principle,” though. Snort. What about in practice? Practically speaking, economic growth can also come from stealing. But be that as it may…I’m making fun because I am in disagreement with Dr. Galbraith, Dr. Krugman, and a bunch of other smart people regarding the fiscal stimulus and I am too insecure to take them head on. So I will occasionally be snide. It’s a weakness but I accept this flaw in my character.

But less about me and more about why I am confused… Read more…

Obama vows to cut wasteful spending, doesn't rule out tax cuts or new programs

CHICAGO -- Facing a first-year deficit that could approach a staggering $2 trillion, President-elect Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to cut out wasteful spending wherever he finds it but insisted that the scope of the economic crisis demands an extraordinary - and expensive - response.

I will just repeat something I have said before, FISA abuse costs us 8 BILLION dollars a year. We could save a lot of money if we would just honor the constitution.

Here you have a guy who basically invented modern banking, and what does he get? A Nobel Laureate? The top job at Treasury? Free parking?

No, sadly the world is not fair.

From wiki: Read more…

I'd brought this up in another thread, but thought it deserving of its own post.

Two sections of The USA Patriot Act of 2001, which is an acronym for the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001", are up for reauthorization on December 31, 2009. Now, this may seem far off, but those that care about this should get cracking on it early if we've learned nothing else. We need to voice our opinion on this reauthorization early and often. Perhaps, it would be a good tactic to start the emails and calls exactly a year out on the 31st of next month. Read more…

before realization sets in, and even the Kool-Aid addicts will recognize that a Democratic president -- any Democratic President, but particularly a historic one -- will be hostage to the same Village Clinton was, and Carter before him, and LBJ before them?
Government is like a freight train. It takes a long time to get the thing in motion, even longer to stop it, and changing its direction without tracks on the ground leading the way you want to go is simply not going to happen. It's economics, it's politics -- and it's simple physics.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Read more…

Oxon Hill Man Fatally Shot at Stop Light

Sean Nicholas Green, 31, had stopped at a red light at about 5:31 p.m. when a man approached his car and fired several shots into the driver's side window of his black Cadillac Deville, police and family members said.

Cpl. Clinton Copeland, a spokesman for Prince George's County police, said detectives do not have a suspect and are still working to establish a motive for the killing. "It doesn't appear to be a carjacking, he was sitting at the light, he wasn't the only car there -- it's weird stuff, a mystery right now," Copeland said. ... Read more…

This time it's Santa Barbara / Montecito. More than 100 homes burned, with 2,500 more people facing evacuation. Fire season along the CA coast isn't over yet.

and the verdicts are, on each of the seven counts, GUILTY.
Orrin Hatch's Senatorial legend is a felon. Wonder how that'll play with his constituents. Oh, wait ... Alaska GOP...

who calmly explains that the mess on Wall Street, contrary to what the current crop of talking heads wants you to believe, isn't going to be fixed without another HOLC.

The difference between October 2008 and October 1929, he says, is that there's been a JFK and an LBJ since October '29, so Read more…

All this talk about how Obama will have to give up doing anything for ordinary people because of the budget crisis got me to thinking, what should we cut? Then I remembered this old post: Read more…

And if they do, I'm sure the Democrats would never grant them retroactive immunity for them anyhow. Sure, Bush, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama did just that for the telcos with FISA [cough] reform, but the two situations are completely different. For some reason. But isn't technology swell? The great Walter Pincus:

[S]ome insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems," according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.

"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public," he said.

Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait -- in other words, human identification.

Of course, the volume of data is so great that it's hard to analyze -- hence the contract for working out how to index it. Read more…

Broader FBI powers now set in stone

Among the powers agents now have for an assessment:

• Conduct surveillance without an otherwise required court order

• Obtain grand jury subpoenas for personal telephone and e-mail accounts

• Recruit informants for feeding information about a group or person to the bureau

• Examine records maintained by federal, state and local government agencies, which are typically not accessible to the public, like police databases profiling past criminal suspects. Read more…

I'm not really joking. The banking crisis is rapidly getting, how do they say? "Out of hand." These idiots in charge have long since proven they aren't capable of dealing with Reality, when it gets ugly (cf Katrina, Iraq, Georgia, etc.) So: what are you doing to prepare?

I've put down ~75 quarts of homegrown, so far. There's more I know I should do. Ideas? I'm not the only one asking.

Now here's the GOP I've come to know and loathe. After that recycled Alan Keyes bullshit I was worried that this country had fallen so far that the GOP couldn't even manufacture a decent smear campaign. But I see now that other GOP fundamentals remain strong:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day. Read more…

Data From Checkpoints To Be Kept for 15 Years

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?

WaPo:

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…

AP:

[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.

And then again: Read more…

Brad's been on this one a lot.

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.

More foil on anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins from the All-Spin Zone:

• 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…

[Welcome, Michael Tomaskey readers!]

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.

So why is the 10,000-barrel oil spill on the Mississippi river different? No M$M coverage of the devastation unleashed by more than 400,000 gallons of oil in the water supply for New Orleans; no film of black gunk on the shorelines, trapped wildlife dying Read more…