I'm sure everyone's read by now that James O' Keefe, creator of the infamous fake "Pimp and Ho" ACORN videos, was arrested today for allegedly attempting to wiretap Mary Landrieu's office. And I certainly appreciate the irony here, having been repeatedly brushed off when I called up Landrieu's office and voiced my opposition to the telecom immunity bill.

But anyway. In yet another proof of the self-similarity of the wingnut function, I found this little gem about acting Lafayette US Attorney Bill Flanagan, a Bush appointee and father of one of the suspects:

President Barack Obama has nominated a federal prosecutor in Lafayette to be U.S. Attorney for Louisiana's western district that is headquartered in Shreveport.

Stephanie Finley's nomination on Wednesday must be confirmed by the Senate before she can take the post.

Finley would replace Donald Washington, who was appointed by President George W. Bush and resigned on Monday. The U.S. Attorney's office is currently run by Bill Flanagan of Shreveport, the first assistant U.S. Attorney.

So Flanagan's "replacement" (not really, but he will be superceded) is set to be nominated tomorrow by a Democratic president. Today, his son gets busted trying to tap the phones of one of the most odious -- and therefore most important -- Democratic Senators.

Interesting, no? Alright, now let me roll out some foil for you.

Somehow I suspect that this nomination wasn't going to go through quickly. Was this part of a plan to catch Landrieu making some kinda crooked deal on healthcare and then blackmail Obama into... promoting Flanagan? Seems risky and insane, but this is Louisiana, after all.

Or maybe they were just trying to make more "gotcha" tapes. Since they're facing 10 years, things might get entertaining when the prosecution offers each of the 4 suspects a deal... I just can't believe that these were the only 4 guys in on this.

Since I've already posted about a fairly tangible resistance method and a tactic that's a bit controversial, I thought I'd go more in the direction of something that bloggers could buy into pretty easily.  First, a reminder:

Activism, by definition, cannot be done online.  At best you can be an online advocate.

A money market account is a savings account that tries to offer a low rate of return in exchange for relative safety.

Zero Hedge:

[A] typical investor in a money market seeks minute investment risk, no volatility, and instantaneous liquidity, or redeemability. These are the three pillars upon which the entire $3.3 trillion money market industry is based.

Apparently, his hair got sick and he needs to take it to a good veterinary hospital.

ABC.

NY Times:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

[…]As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Group lobbies for single-payer health care in Pa.

On Dec. 9, Lani Frank, a board member of Health Care for All Pennsylvania, made a presentation to supervisors in East Whiteland. She has been urging municipal officials throughout Chester County to send a resolution to Harrisburg supporting the bills.

East Whiteland's supervisors said they were not ready to endorse the legislation but would support another initiative of Health Care for All Pennsylvania: an economic impact study of the program.

Tech Radar:

Anyone who's a regular Google search user will know that the only way to avoid the company tracking your online activities is to log out of Gmail or whatever Google account you use. Not any more.

As of last Friday, even searchers who aren't logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a 'better service'.

[...]The company explained: "What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser."

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of noise from lefty and women's rights organizations about the next Big Thing: The rights of Afghan women and girls. Eleanor Smeal's group, Feminist.org (yes, she's one of the ones who helped with the infamous Obama Ms. Magazine cover), has a campaign for them. NOW and The Nation have also jumped on the bandwagon.

So I just spent 1.25 hours with my sister trying to help her decide her local election choices. It's an off year, so generally only those of us who are Hard Core about voting bother to do so. That just makes our votes that much more powerful. I appreciate the irony of someone like me, frequent Doomsayer on the sad state of our video poker voting reality, talking about good voting. But I'll do so anyway, cause part of me wants to Hope. /scampers away from Lambert/

Anyway, if you're voting tomorrow, are there any online resources that have helped you make your choices? Please, post them here if so. My sister and I agree that one of the really sucky things about off-year local level voting is how hard it is to find useful information about the candidates. And that problem is getting worse. Judge 4 Yourself is one resource she and I found, but it appears to be regional. I really wish there were more, and if I were an Al Gore elected official, I'd be expanding mandated government websites to include more pages about people's records in government, and also those trying to be so. A pipe dream, I'm sure, but voting blogging is one of the aspects of the blogsphere I'm most proud of and hope grows. Brad remains the intertube's own god when it comes to vote blogging.

SoBe:

Reaction at this busy intersection was mostly positive. There were quite a few horn honks and thumbs up, a couple of thumbs down, but not as many as I had expected. One person, predictably, shouted "get a job!" There's always one asshole who has to remind us of the country's unemployment rate. I'm not being sarcastic here, either: I have yet to attend a rally or visibility event where there wasn't one person shouting "get a job!" Probably the same guy, too.

This is me, making that "she's not wrong" face.

What do you think intelligent alien life would make of us?

I'm a big scifi reader, and I've read countless stories about this question. Seems to me most of the time, writers posit one of two things. Either they would be highly advanced, ethically and morally speaking, because that is a prerequisite to achieving the technology of space travel; or they would be totally predatory, and treat us as we treat "lower" forms of life on this planet. Personally, I'm not excited about the idea that intelligent life would come by for a visit. I'm too embarrassed by our own primitive natures to want to have to explain it to the Vulcans.

This is science fiction thread, so none of that downer stuff about how interstellar travel is impossible or how if other intelligent life is out there we'd have heard it by now. According to this NASA guy, the aliens are already here, btw.

ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue

Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer.

Can we get serious about election integrity already?

The SEIU, Service Emloyees Internal Union, headed by Andy Stern has decided to concentrate its effort, not on the goals and the benefits of the union members, on usurping parts of the UNITE HERE union. SEIU represents over 100 occupations in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The main divisions are health care (around 50% of the union's membership), including hospital, home care and nursing home workers, public services (government employees), and property services (including janitors and security officers). UNITE HERE represents predominantly in the hotel, food services employees with a very strong division of the gaming industry (e.g. Las Vegas).

I'm sure you all recall the early days of the NSA Hoovering up all domestic data warrantless wiretapping scandal, when they referred to it as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and assured us that they were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Naturally, this turned out to be a lie enhanced duplicity technique, because it turns out they were spying on all of us everyday American citizens. Nobody was off the target list, and we were all potential Al-Qaeda operatives.

Now, there's a big hubbub about some sketchy CIA assassination ring, apparently answering to Cheney himself. Nobody's willing to talk about the nitty-gritty details, but it's enough to have even Nancy "off the table" Pelosi spooked or pissed off enough to start publicly discussing how fucked-up it was, whatever "it" was.

The public justification for this shadowy, super-classified, apparently reprehensible death squad?

They were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Does anyone seriously doubt that what we'll eventually learn is that they formed a group to assassinate American citizens in the National Interest? Consider this, via TPM:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization...

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

Hmm, I wonder...

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

*BOOP*

Brad DeLong has, this morning, put up a rather oblique post citing the lyrics of a classic song (Last.fm Chumbawumba song link) about Nedd Ludd. And immediately after, one about Swing. I can hardly imagine the motivation for it at this moment.

Wikipedia has this interesting comment about the Luddites that may put Brad's post into a certain perspective:

Thompson argues that it was the newly-introduced economic system that the Luddites were protesting. For example, the Luddite song, "General Ludd's Triumph":

So I was planning to write a long, witty song-and-dance about a theme to which I've occasionally alluded lately: the importance of globalization in this bailout crisis. But then I decided I'd spare the words and write it out as a few easy and very approximate steps.

Let it not be said that Mandos does not bring the yum, if absurdly spicy food is to your taste. Let it also not be said that Mandos is not up on his Bahb Dohle impressions.

I was visiting close relatives very recently and raided the pantry to make dinner completely out of ad hoc ingredients which I didn't measure, and hence what I made will never be made again. If I could find a few spoonfuls at the bottom of an old jar, I used it. And if I may say so myself, it was delicious, a culinary leprechaun of deliciousness that has been let go for all eternity. But here is the vague guideline from memory on how to repeat this experiment.

Now, Bob Somerby has an excellent post up about the obsession with earmarks:

Those high-profile spending measures total nearly $2 trillion. By way of contrast, the EARMARKS which have Sheneman frightened total $7.7 billion. (No one has made the slightest attempt to show how much of that is “wasteful.”) But guess what? Trillions are much larger than billions! In fact, those EARMARKS represent roughly one two hundred and fiftieth of the total spending in these high-profiles measures. That amounts to one quarter of one percent—one dollar of every 250.

But to Sheneman, these EARMARKS are larger than human life. They may swallow the White House itself.

Department of NOW NOW NOW NOW

Thus Sprach Rep. Paul Kanjorski: It (was) the End of the World as We Know It..

From BoingBoing, and Capitalism Gone Wild

The Capital Markets Subcommittee Chair, Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, tells C-Span how the world economy almost collapsed in a matter of hours.

..2 minutes and 15 seconds into the tape [he] reveals what Paulson and Bernanke told congress that shocked them into supporting the first $700 billion bailout:

On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. Money was being removed electronically.

So I got this in an email about Obama's speech and plan to save the economy today. I'm going to just focus on this one part:

Making the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized.

Color me totally unimpressed. Discussing it with some people, I'm told that doing so will "reduce costs" by cutting down on fraud and redundancy, thus making insurance more affordable. Anyone want to take the bet, that 5 years from now, barring real reform of the insurance industry, costs won't have gone down?

And anyway, it's not the "cost" of health care that's killing me, it's the complete lack, and inability to get insurance if I do pay out of pocket for care and am diagnosed with some condition. When, if ever, is Obama going to do anything about that? Is it really too much to ask, that he mandate that insurance companies must offer coverage at the same rates to all people? I guess so. I know better than to expect the words "universal single payer" to ever come from Obama's lips/Presidential Signing pen.

Being especially cynical, and recalling all the many, many stories about lost, hacked and disrupted mega-databases in both the government and private sector these last few years, I'm also going to add that I bet "total computerization" of records will make things worse, in more cases than it makes better. And I bet if I followed the money trail after this initiative gets going, at the bottom end will be some big donor, who runs a computerization service or sells the software for it. Really, it's such an absurd idea to tout as "great for the economy," I can't believe there's another ultimate motivation to include it in these early speeches.

OK, I'm no economist. And hey! I'm really fucking glad! Next to "child rapist" and "warmonger," I can hardly think of a more despicable title to hold right now. What I'm going to write here is likely flawed, unrealistic, naive, and all that other stuff Serious People tell me at the cocktail parties when I've had a few too many and start talking like this. But I'd like to stimulate some conversation about what Our Leaderz can do right now, to help our economy, and not just that of their richee buddies and buttboi friends. Because believe it or not (heh), I'm told that part of the problem with the incoming bunch is that they, um, well...don't really know what to do, when it comes to fixing the actual majority economy. You're shocked to hear that, I'm sure.

Today, when most of you get to work, the Canadian polls will open. Aux urnes! as they say in French. So, I've been in Canada for the past week or so, and I had grand plans of not only finishing off some posts which I owe some people, but writing a sort of last-days political travelogue of the Canadian election, as I've been wandering around southern and eastern Ontario. But not least due to the surprising spottiness of Internet access, I have failed. *hangs head*

I'm out in the garden today and so I don't really have time to get into this. But if true I'd be unsurprised. It reminds me of bad Clancy novels, or something. Anyway, via Avedon, haxxorwarz:

Last week, VR interviewed GOP Cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the upcoming election and his testimony in the new Ohio litigation to take depositions of Karl Rove and others.

The video is posted in full below with ten short clips for You Tube viewing. This interview is so important and explosive that we urge everyone to watch it.

Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.

Spoon also makes a crucial point about the people who have been implicated in much of the election theft: "They are religious extremists." He names those who know about stolen elections, and he insists that the only way to protect this election is with paper ballots, hand-counted.