Maybe I've missed it around the blogosphere, but seeing as I have four lil nieces and nephews with more on the way, I'm very happy to have found the perfect War on Xmas gift for them, albeit a tad early this year. The reader reviews alone are worth the clickthru. Go for it, Correntians! Be creative- come up with your own New Order for Toddlers Ideas and pitch them to Lego/Playmobil; it's not like there are so many jobs for all us Lucky Duckies that we've got better things to do with our time. Who knows? You could be the next subversive to infect the young, all across the Homeland! I'm still snickering over "deadly nail file."

Haw.

An atheists-rights group is suing the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security because state law requires the agency to stress "dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth."

American Atheists of Parsippany, N.J., and 10 non-religious Kentuckians are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, set to be filed Tuesday in Franklin Circuit Court.

Edwin Kagin, a Boone County lawyer and the national legal director of American Atheists, said he was appalled to read in the Herald-Leader last week that state law establishes praising God — and installing a plaque in God's honor — as the first duty of the Homeland Security Office.

The state and federal constitutions both prohibit government from getting involved in religion, Kagin said Monday.

"This is one of the most outrageous things I've seen in 35 years of practicing law. It's breathtakingly unconstitutional," Kagin said.

Yes. Yes, it is. Go KY atheists! And FSM be praised for McClatchy for bringing us this news.

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?

Yes, the report is at Nice Polite Republicans but you still need to hear out Montana's Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, on the load of crap that is RealID.

Traveling?

Terror alerts, terror threats, terror among us, terror without us, terror around us, terror, terror, terror.

Headline from today’s Meet The Press: Terror is a word worn-out from over and inaccurate use; in a word, terror, and all the attached isms have become a bore.

This seems to be the day for Cheap Little Republican Sleazeballs to be getting their long overdue comeuppance for breathtaking lapses from anything resembling proper behavior. Besides our oklahoma judge we now have Bernie Kerik, the only person I know of whom it can be said that Michael "Skeletor" Jerkoff Chertoff is demonstrably better than:

A year and a half after his Homeland Security nomination sank over ethics questions, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded guilty Friday to charges he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in gifts while he was a top city official.

Thus a BusinessWeek reader quipped at the comments box for this little zinger. Let your imagination soar past phone calls:

The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans' finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don't ensure the data's accuracy, the GAO found.

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.

"Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.'s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.