Welp, it's Day 5 without seeing a new DSL modem, which means that I'm pretty much down again. Top that off my roommate inviting her boyfriend's parents over for a meal and I might be going to a party and a show later tonight (since when did *I* have a social life?), posts are going to be coming late. But, I have something on the front burner that I just need to do some research for. There's a preview of it somewhere on the web, which is basicaly me tired and rambling and I'm sure it will look embarrassing if I read it again, so I'mnot telling you where it is. :P

Speaking of tired and rambling, I just got 4 hours sleep. Somebody please shoot my roomies puppy.

Something I never thought I would say

Another reason why Tucker Carlson is cool: Giving out Fox News' Washington office telephone number on the air, claiming it's his own. This prank was pulled on Crossfire after Tucker was doing something that makes him uncool, defending telemarketers. He was challanged to give his home telephone number on on the air, so he passed off the Fox number as his own. Heh!

Then Fox News actually printed his home phone number on their website, which, even given the situation, is pretty low. It's not like Tucker passed off Bill O'Reilly's number as his own, and although I haven't checked, the Fox number could probably be found in the phone book, I imagine. Fox could have just given out the CNN Washington office number, but proving once again that they are the scumfucks of journalism, they have reached a new low in giving out a rival's personal telephone number.

Fark headline of the day

Which is better?

"Atkins' new lo-carb ice-cream line to feature flavor such as 'paste' and 'ass'"

Or

"Congress finds Cheney is still getting money from Halliburton. Still unclear who delivers his arrogance and intestinal bloat"

More email from the ACLU

These guys are so getting a donation when I have some expendable dough. For now, I will be printing their emails to the blog. I'm sure they won't mind.

At events across the country, the Secret Service has been violating the free speech rights of anti-President Bush protesters, the ACLU is charging in the first nationwide lawsuit of its kind.

The ACLU has seen a significant spike in such incidents under the Bush Administration, indicating a "pattern and practice" of discrimination against those who disagree with government policies.

Local police, acting at the direction of the Secret Service, have violated the rights of protesters in two ways:

-- People expressing views critical of the government were moved further away from public officials while those with pro-government views were allowed to remain closer; or,

-- Everyone expressing a view of any kind was herded into what is commonly known as a "protest zone," leaving those who merely observe, but express no view, to remain closer.

"The individuals we are talking about didn't pose a security threat; they posed a political threat," said Witold Walczak, Legal Director of the ACLU of Greater Pittsburgh and a member of the national ACLU legal team that filed today's lawsuit.

The ACLU's legal papers list more than a dozen examples of censorship at events around the country. The incidents described took place in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and Washington, among other places. All were initiated at the behest of the Secret Service and are evidence of a growing -- and disturbing -- trend.

Read the ACLU's complaint in this case.

Read examples of police censorship against protesters.

Read the ACLU report, "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America.

[Some people might be wondering, "Hey Adam, you've been abusing blockquote this week, when are you going to get off your lazy ass and actually write something on your own?" Soon, soon.. Like, when I get my DSL line back and I can actually have time to do research and write. Right now, getting to a website is like asking Dennis Miller to be funny, it just ain't happening.]

No posting this morning, and none tonight because I am going to a punk rock show. Sorry..

I have to ask, though, when did punk shows, and music shows in general, become so expensive? I'm going to be shelling out 15 calms tonight for a show that would have cost me $8-10 a couple years ago. I guess that's one reason why I'm more of a homebody these days. I'll be going to a show tomorrow, too.. Wondering if I'll get my paycheck in the mail tomorrow, too. That would be helpful.

Anyways, a couple news stories I read today that oyu might not have seen yet. They deal with, big surprrise, the Bush administration!

Remember, from a couple of years back, Bush's global gag rule banning government funding to non-government family planning groups who perform or otherwise think of abortion as an option? Those funding cuts have left some Afrcian communities with no healthcare at all. Compassionate conserv-- whatever. (Well he even dare use that slogan in the 2004 campaign?)

The EPA wants to exempt factory farms from air pollution laws so they can use them in a study to see what emssions they produce. One would figure that we already have a clue as to what emissions they produce, hence we have air pollution laws.. I mean, it's that simple. But, one can't expect much from an administration that purposely buries evidence of global warming just to suit the corporations who fund them.

And a big NO vote to electronic voting

The blogosphere has been talking about the perils of electronic voting, a topic which deserves much more attention. A topic which I talked about on the blog in late August:

Having a paper ballot is important because they can be subjected to a recount. They are tangible, you can hold them an store them and recount them as many times as you want.

With computerized voting, none of those things are possible, and that's dangerous to democracy. If we cannot have votes in contested elections recounted by different, independent parties, then how can we truly say that we have a democracy?

Indeed, the future and security of our democracy is at stake, and do you trust an unelected president to protect it? It should come as no surprise that, given the illegal way Bush subverted democracy and seized power, that his administration would help to usher in electronic voting by letting Diebold write the software. Diebold, headed by a partisan Republican, doesn't want to make their source code open, and they don't seem to be too concerned about security flaws.

Making their system open source would make it public domain and allow anyone to look at the source code, so programmers could check for backdoors, security flaws, etc. This would also make the system more secure, and democratic since, essentially, we have the only people with legal rights to look at the source code is a corporation headed by a partisan Republican. Of, as we all know and probably have personal experience with seeing, corporations can be victimized by their own employees compromising their security, so it doesn't matter if Diebold is noble and unbiased with their programming of electronic voting systems, one person working undetected at the company could make it insecure. If their code was open source, we wouldn't have to worry about that as much.

Daily Kos has made a couple posts about electronic voting and Diebold in the past couple of days, to quote from one:

Note that this isn't a partisan issue. Yeah, the Diebold CEO is a hardcore GOoPer who has promised to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 and all. But the vulnerabilities in the machines can be exploited by anyone. Democrats in California could use them to screw Republicans just as Republicans in Florida can use them to screw Democrats.

[snip]

What's so difficult about slapping a little printer on each machine and having it spit out a paper ballot (like a receipt)? If there are any irregularities, count the paper ballots to guarantee the integrity of the electoral process.

And another:

Blackbox Voting.org is Bev Harris' site exposing the security vulnerabilities of the Diebold voting machines.

As of 8:46 p.m. PST, the site has been pulled, with the following message:

Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.

Take a look at blackboxoting.org's mirror and tell me that the Diebold's lawsuit isn't bullshit. Not only do we have a company headed by a man who says he'll deliver Ohio to Bush, who might have already thrown elections, who isn't concerned about the security and quality of their products, but appearently they aren't too concerned about the Constitution, either. And they want to control how we vote. Hello pants, meet shit!

Corrente chimes in, quoting a recent article from Salon about Diebold:

[HARRIS:] Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.

[MANJOO:] So you can break in and then hide your tracks.

[HARRIS:] You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did.

OK, lemmie get this straight, our democracy is supposed to rest on the back of a Microsoft Access database?! We can't even upgrade to fucking MySQL? I'm no database expert, but I used to support Access for Microsoft, and I received at least one corrupted database call a day. They aren't the most stable relational databases in the world, it's Microsoft's low end relational database product meant for small businesses, not big jobs. Not mission critical jobs. That's why there's Oracle, or MySQL, or even Microsoft SQL. But not Access! This is what Diebold wants to use for electronic voting! That really makes me think they are a quality company who isn't out of their minds!

My head's about to explode. Honestly, it is. If some of the guts happen to fly your way, could you please collect them into a jar andmail them back to me? It would be much appreciated.

My only question is how do they get away with it? How can Diebold get away with putting out such a shoddy product that will undermine our democracy? And how can the Bush administration get away with supporting it? It's because what's reported on blogs like Kos, Corrente, and here, has not made it to the mainstream media.

What are you going to do about it?

[Note after the fact: After my rant,I realized that Access may only be used as a front-end to modify a non-Access back-end databse, like SQL. But, still, get a real database program, with real security.]

Help the ACLU fight the PARIOT Act

I received this email from the ACLU last night. Read it, click on the links, join the fight.

We are asking that you take two related actions this week: one urging the Senate to fix the PATRIOT Act and another asking Congress as a whole to oppose the expansion of unnecessary surveillance and other police powers that threaten civil liberties. These actions are necessary because of an unusual split in Washington -- many in Congress are working to fix the more dangerous portions of the PATRIOT Act while President Bush, Attorney General Ashcroft and their allies continue to push for new and expanded law enforcement powers.

1) Earlier this month, the House voted overwhelmingly during consideration of an appropriations bill to bar the Justice Department from using the "sneak and peek" warrants authorized in the PATRIOT Act. Despite the 309 to 118 vote in the House against the use of these black bag searches, the Senate has yet to act.

The Senate is now poised to consider its version of the Justice Department appropriations measure and needs your support to adopt fixes like those adopted by the House.

Take Action! Urge your Senators to fix the problems with the PATRIOT Act, not give the government even more invasive and intrusive police powers.

Click here for more information and to send a free fax to your Senators:

http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=13691&c=24

2) Oppose New Surveillance Powers

Senator Hatch and other allies of Attorney General Ashcroft are expected shortly to introduce the so-called "Victory Act," a measure that would make some drug offenses a terrorist crime and allow the government new latitude in questioning people and demanding personal documents without court oversight.

This new legislation contains many provisions that were part of the leaked PATRIOT Act II and that were rejected from the original PATRIOT Act drafts. This is clearly part of a larger Ashcroft campaign to promote greater surveillance powers and remove judicial review.

Take Action! Your elected representatives in Congress need to hear that you support proper checks and balances, not unlimited government surveillance.

Click here for more information and to send a free fax to your Members of Congress:

http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=13692&c=24

Three days in jail

The Villiage Voice offers a revealing account of what it's like to be wrongfully arrested and held in prison today:

During the next three days, I was interrogated about "terrorist activity"—whether I was involved with a terrorist group or knew anyone else who was—without an attorney present. My Legal Aid lawyer claimed she was also a medical professional and diagnosed me as mentally ill when I told her I teach poetry at New York University. After my bail was posted, I was held behind bars another night because central booking ran out of the receipts required for my release. On my third day in jail, accused of two misdemeanors and a felony I knew nothing about, I was finally found innocent, and allowed to go home.

These events are not in themselves that extraordinary. Black men and women in this country have for centuries experienced far worse episodes with law enforcement. This incident is striking because it occurred at a time when I have been working to expose the injustice and inhumanity of the prison crisis in America, and because it was not the first time I was unjustly jailed.

Read the story and remind yourself that this isn't a third world country we're talking about here, then ask your nearest governement official about all those supposed freedoms that we're supposed to be fighting for.

News from the blogs

I'm lazy today and I haven't had much time to gather news since my DSL connection went down, so I am going to quote directly from some blogs. They have had the best news today anyway.

Daily Kos uncovers an interesting fact about Bush that might explain why he is such an ill-informed liar:

But not surprising. Bush himself told Fox that he "insulates" himself from the world outside, and only listens to news filtered by his own staff.

There are other great entries today on Kos, so go read them before I smack ya 'round.

Talking Points Memo cuts through the shit surrounding the Clark/Rove story to remind you that it was planted by people who are friends with Bush and Rove, placing wordsin Clark's mouth:

But wait a second. Do you see the problem here? Right. Clark isn't the one who's saying he put in calls to Karl Rove. Owens and Hotzman are saying it.

So to the extent this means anything -- and that's highly debatable -- it discredits them, not him.

In other words, the canard floated by one group of Rove's pals on day one gets shot down by another group of his friends on day two. Like I said, journalistic friendly fire on the right.

Eschaton comments on the overturning of the California recall election decision from last week:

Now, I'm not a judicial scholar of, say, Ann Coulter's stature, but it seems me that throwing up the bad rulings of higher courts back in their faces is about the only thing a lower court CAN do to make a higher court rethink a bad decision and do what it's supposed to do - establish precedents and guidelines for other courts to follow. Lithwick seems to be advocating everyone just ignore the reasoning behind one of the most important judicial decisions in recent history. The press says ignore it. The politicians say ignore it. And now, even the COURTS are supposed to ignore it.

Screw that.

If you're not reading his blog everyday, then start. Now. Do it for the children.

Ronnie sometimes thought that sex was "evil", even within marriage

Well, that explains EVERYTHING!

No posts this morning. Why? Because Verizon DSL sucks, that's why.

From Corrente, via Atrios, is a comparisan of Iraq to the early years of Vietnam, looking a the death toll on US troops. I don't like to post something that is basically copying exactly what another blog posted, but, I think this is a very interesting read, and I know some people who read this blog do not read Atrios, like my sister. So, I would like to give my sister interesting reading at the very least. :)

Bush's interview on Fox

Me and a couple friends watched Bush's interview with Brit Hume on Fox News. At the end, one of my friends said, "I want to see the rest of the interview, I wonder what it's like."

I replied, "Here's the rest of the interview: this is Hume's head, and here's Bush's crotch, right in front of it, and Hume's head is bobbing up and down." That's all you need to know about the interview.

Bush buries evidence of Global Warming

From The Observer:

White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal.

...Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.

Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in Britain.

...The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman.

...The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global warming.

...Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are former oil executives; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a director of the oil firm Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans once headed an oil and gas exploration company.

This article rips a new one into the Bush administration. Go read it.

Tesco Vee, right-wing visionary?

Tesco Vee, for those of you not familiar with him, used to sing for an uber-offensive band called the Meatmen. They are one of those bands that are offensive but dropdead funny, so, with my musical tastes that also include GG Allin and Anal Cunt, I must listen to them.

I popped a couple of Meatmen songs into Winamp and forgot about them. Just now, one came on, with Tesco's trademark voice blaring: "There is one thing that burns me up more then bull dykes: all the goddamn diaper-headed foreigners let into our country! Ungrateful, food-stamping Mohammeds makes me wanna make'em dance to the tune of automatic weapon fire! Here it is, the final installment in the suck trilogy, Camel Jockeys Suck!"

I've never met Tesco, so I honestly don't know if his commentary is serious. Coming from a man who once spoke out against Tipper Gore for not outing his band with her PMRC so he could reap millions in the fame and notoriety, I tend to think he's more shock than bite. One thing Tesco is good at, though it playing off common stereotypes purposely to be insulting. That's what makes his music funny - or makes your blood boil.

The song I quoted was recorded in the early 90's, and it was part of a "Suck" trilogy. The two other installmetns were the world famous "Crippled Children Suck" (it's OK to snicker.. I think) and, "French People Suck". ("They still stick the Eiffel Tower straight up their butts!"

Listening to these songs for the first time in years got me thinking, seeing that the same prejudices Tesco joked about are stronger today then at any other time in recent history. Prejudices against foreigns have existed for a while, and I have always found it ironic that people from ethic groups formerly derided has mics, wasps, and wops now spread bigotry to "spics" and "towelheads". And, for some reason, there has always been an undercurrent of French bigotry for as long as I can remember. Living in a state where you can proudly proclaim your Italian heritage but have to face ridicule if you dare to be proud of a French background, I kind of feel like I'm constantly in hiding. But, this French bigotry has always been treated has a joke.

That was until the war in Iraq, then it become serious. And arab bigotry exploded after 9/11, continuing to this day.

It's weird to think that Meanmen songs like, "Camel Jockeys Suck," and "French People Suck," which caused nervous laughter amongst fans and the rest of the country probably would have considered the songs to be childish and sophmoric (which they are), I shudder to think that these songs would now be considered downright patriotic. This, in a nutshell, is what I think about our current attitude as a nation. Don't think, don't question, doing so is tantamount to being unpatriotic. Believe your president and his simple-minded, black and white views: this is a battle between good and evil, they hate our freedoms, etc. Don't worry about all the innocent, tax paying, hard working immigrants we're deporting; they're arab anyways, so that makes them bad. Hate anybody who opposes or questions the American agenda.

What happens whn this attitude takes over? Suddenly, little punk songs like "French People Suck" and "Camel Jockeys Suck" seem less like a joke and more prophetic.

Is murdering Chavez on the "War on Terrorism" agenda?

Venezuelan Military Intelligence claims that the CIA planned to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by bringing down his plane going to NYC. Chavez was scheduled to speak at the UN.

Call me a pessimist, and maybe I could be jumping the gun since I do not know the quality of Venezuelan Military Intelligence, but I see no reason not to believe them. The whole world knows that the US most likely actively supported and aided leades who took part in the unsuccessful coup, seeing that a few of the members had gone in and out of the White Houses in the months prior to the attempted coup. But, if this is true, I'd say this reaches a new low by the American government: targetting a plane heading towards the one US city that has already seen so much damage and loss because of planes being used as instruments of terror. This is just truly evil.

And not surprising.

I'd be really happy if this report is proven to be false and I have to eat my words, but, like I said, I'm a pessimist.

I hate it when a plan fails

The Plan: Stay up so late that when I got to bed, and the spawn of satan (aka my roommate's puppy) woke up and barked for an hour, I would so be tired that I would sleep right though it.

Boy, do I feel silly. Not to mention tired, and with a strange compulsion to go out and get a sound proof dog crate and/or muzzle.