Prometheus 6

Prosecute the guys who assured the telecoms they were immune to FISA...all the way up the line to Bush...and the telecoms can go free.

"We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," McConnell and Mukasey wrote to Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee. "Because of this uncertainty, some partners have reduced cooperation."

No, you lost intelligence by joining the Republican Party. Me, I lost intelligence by listening to you.

IF government lost intelligence, it is because the Administration refused to obey the law and go through the FISA process, and because YOU wouldn't vote for the extension because protecting the telecoms is more important than protecting the citizenry.

Spy Law Lapse Blamed for Lost Information
Some Telecom Firms Not Cooperating for Fear of Liability, U.S. Says
By Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 23, 2008; A03

The Bush administration said yesterday that the government "lost intelligence information" because House Democrats allowed a surveillance law to expire last week, causing some telecommunications companies to refuse to cooperate with terrorism-related wiretapping orders.

But hours later, administration officials told lawmakers that the final holdout among the companies had relented and agreed to fully participate in the surveillance program, according to an official familiar with the issue.

“They have these overlapping spheres of gangsterism and politics, militias and legitimate businesses, and legitimate politics,” said Rob Tinline, a spokesman for the British Provincial Reconstruction Team.

Iraq’s security forces are the most conspicuous example of the tension between politics and violence in Basra, and the aptly named Serious Crimes Unit of the Basra Police is perhaps the most egregious example. The British Army determined that the unit was a death squad linked to Shiite militias and dispatched Warrior tanks in December 2006 to pound the rogue force’s headquarters to rubble.

But Iraqi arrest warrants for the unit’s members have never been executed. A warrant issued by Iraq’s Interior Ministry last month singles out Abdullah Najim, also known as Abu Muslim, and accuses him of orchestrating kidnappings, torture and assassinations while leading the police unit.

Mr. Abu Muslim escaped the 2006 British assault and is still a free man.

In fact, he is still a Basra policeman.

Ominous Signs Remain in City Run by Iraqis
By SOLOMON MOORE

BASRA, Iraq — This southern port city has been, in effect, on its own since September, when British forces here moved to the outskirts, yielding authority to local leaders. British and American officials say Basra’s experiment in self-rule could serve as a model for Iraq’s future, but if so — many locals and outside advisers say — that future remains dark.

What makes the situation in Basra — Iraq’s second largest city and commercial hub — so alarming, they say, is that it is a test of Iraqi rule under relatively optimal conditions: Basra has the nation’s best economic base, little ethnic tension within a homogeneous Shiite population and no Western occupation force to inflame nationalist tensions.

Yet the city remains deeply troubled.

Desegregation Order Lifted From a School in Brooklyn
By JENNIFER MEDINA

A federal judge on Friday lifted a 1974 desegregation order for a Brooklyn middle school, effectively eliminating racial quotas that had been in place at Mark Twain Intermediate School for more than three decades.

The order was imposed when the district, No. 21, was largely white and the Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled that it was steering white, middle-class students away from the school, deliberately segregating it.

The order stated that the school had to reflect the basic makeup of the district. At the time, about 30 percent of the students were from minority groups and 70 percent were white.

This should be one of them "Rectification of Names" posts. 

The gunman, identified by the police as Brandon McInerney, “is just as much a victim as Lawrence,” said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center. “He’s a victim of homophobia and hate.”

The kid he killed was the victim...he was a channel. 

Boy’s Killing, Labeled a Hate Crime, Stuns a Town
By REBECCA CATHCART

OXNARD, Calif. — Hundreds of mourners gathered at a church here on Friday to remember an eighth-grade boy who was shot to death inside a junior high school computer lab by a fellow student in what prosecutors are calling a hate crime.

In recent weeks, the victim, Lawrence King, 15, had said publicly that he was gay, classmates said, enduring harassment from a group of schoolmates, including the 14-year-old boy charged in his death.

To Catholics like me who oppose liberal abortion laws but also think that other issues -- war or peace, health care, just wages, immigration, affordable housing, torture -- actually matter, the idea that abortion trumps everything, all the time, no matter what, is both bad religion and bad civics. It's not, for God's sake, as though we're in Nazi Germany and supporting Hitler.

Or is it? Amazingly, at least one influential bishop has made just that comparison publicly, and it's a good bet that many others believe it privately.

"In our country we have, for the most part, allowed the party of death and the court system it has produced to eliminate, since 1973, upwards of 40 million of our fellow citizens without allowing them to see the light of day," wrote Rockford, Ill., Bishop Thomas Doran in 2006. "No doubt, we shall soon outstrip the Nazis in doing human beings to death." He continued, "We know . . . that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people."

That Doran forgets his history (five of the seven justices who supported Roe v. Wade were actually appointed by Republican presidents) doesn't obscure his point. He is not alone among Catholic bishops in his attempt to anathematize the Democrats, to make the party and its candidates illegitimate in the mind of the electorate.

I Voted for Obama. Will I Go Straight to. . . ?
By Joe Feuerherd
Sunday, February 24, 2008; B05

Like most Maryland Democrats, I voted for Sen. Barack Obama in the recent Potomac Primary. By doing so, according to the leaders of my church, I put my soul at risk. That's right, says the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops -- tap the touch screen for a pro-abortion-rights candidate, and you're probably punching your ticket to Hell.

In McCain's case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign -- most of them as volunteers -- seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric. "He has a closer relationship with lobbyists than he lets on," said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists
By Michael D. Shear and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 22, 2008; A01

For years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has railed against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in Washington, touting on his campaign Web site his fight against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided."

You can analyze the Clinton campaign every which way from sundown. But I suspect that the senator’s biggest hurdle from the beginning was the unforgiving nature of time.

Hillary on the High Road?
By BOB HERBERT

A referee would stop the fight. Hillary Clinton is exhausted, and her supporters are becoming increasingly demoralized. The candidate who tried to present herself as inevitable has been out-maneuvered nearly every step of the way by a prodigy with a warm and brilliant smile who still seems as energetic as an athlete doing calisthenics before a big game.

Texas and Ohio and several other states still have to vote. But there was a wistful quality and a strong hint of resignation in Senator Clinton’s voice at the end of the debate Thursday night when, after saying she was “honored to be here with Barack Obama,” she added:

“The cop that fired 31 shots, he faces having to show that his actions under the circumstances were reasonable. The number of bullets does not denote whether it was reasonable or not.”

vs.

It is known in police parlance as “contagious shooting” — gunfire that spreads among officers who believe that they, or their colleagues, are facing a threat. It spreads like germs, like laughter, or fear. An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too....

Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning.

You know, if everyone had a rule requiring the prosecution to wait a couple of days before even talking to them, very few people would actually be in jail.

In Trial Over Police Killing in Queens, Focus May Be on First 2 of 50 Bullets
By MICHAEL WILSON

It has become widely known as the “50-shot” case, but as the trial of the detectives accused in the killing of Sean Bell approaches on Monday, the defense is expected to concentrate in particular on 2 of those 50 bullets: the first one fired by each of the two detectives who are charged with manslaughter.

Professor Kim is live-blogging Tavis' The State of the Black Union thing. I got it on record and will likely dead-blog it.

In fact, Muller argues, GSM encryption was cracked--theoretically--in academic papers as early as 1998...Undetectable, "passive" systems like the one that Muller and Hulton have created aren't new either, though previous technologies required about a million dollars worth of hardware and used a "brute force" tactic that tried 33 million times as many passwords to decrypt a cell signal.

All of that means, Hulton and Muller argue, that their cheaper technique is simply drawing needed attention to a problem that mobile carriers have long ignored--one that well-financed eavesdroppers may have been exploiting for years. "If governments or other people with millions of dollars can listen to your conversations right now, why shouldn't your next-door neighbor?" Muller says. 

Wiretapping Made Easy
Andy Greenberg, 02.21.08, 12:53 AM ET

Washington - Silently tapping into a private cellphone conversation is no longer a high-tech trick reserved for spies and the FBI. Thanks to the work of two young cyber-security researchers, cellular snooping may soon be affordable enough for your next-door neighbor.

In a presentation Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, D.C., David Hulton and Steve Muller demonstrated a new technique for cracking the encryption used to prevent eavesdropping on global system for mobile communications (GSM) cellular signals, the type of radio frequency coding used by major cellular service providers including AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile. Combined with a radio receiver, the pair say their technique allows an eavesdropper to record a conversation on these networks from miles away and decode it in about half an hour with just $1,000 in computer storage and processing equipment.

“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. 

Oh yes, you did!

The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.

The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning. 

Clinton Donors Worried by Campaign’s Spending
By MICHAEL LUO, JO BECKER and PATRICK HEALY

This article was reported by Michael Luo, Jo Becker and Patrick Healy and was written by Mr. Healy.

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

Turkish Military Tells of Incursion Into Iraq
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s military said Friday it had sent troops into northern Iraq on Thursday night, in a limited operation to weaken Kurdish militants there.

The Turkish military announced the operation on its Web site on Friday, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan later played it down, describing the mission as “limited” in size and emphasizing that the soldiers would return to Turkey “in the shortest possible time.”

Reports of the numbers of troops varied. Reuters cited Turkey’s foreign minister and an unnamed American official in Baghdad as saying that only a few hundred had been deployed, while Turkish television reported that around 10,000 troops had been deployed.

In Baghdad, Rear Admiral Gregg Smith described the incursion as “an operation of limited duration to specifically target P.K.K. terrorists in that region.”

Metalosis Maligna

Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary about a spectacular yet chronically disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.

Watch full length (17 mb).

Watch interview with Floris Kaayk about Metalosis Maligna (5 mb).

The Order Electrus

Nature adapts, even to human actions that seem to destroy everything.

The amazing power of evolution has given birth to a new species of insect. Their ideal habitats are old industrial locations.Some call them electrical insects, others simply speak of a miraculous phenomenon,or even better, a self supporting order; The Order Electrus.

Watch full length [62 mb]

Continuing tribal violence has forced the evacuation of all non-essential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade.

U.S. Sues 2 Over Gold-Mine Tax Promotion
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

The Justice Department filed two lawsuits on Thursday in a move against what it said was a fraudulent gold-mining scheme sold to dozens of wealthy investors, including seven current or former National Football League players.

Prosecutors say the promoters of the investment, known as Midas, for mining interest development action strategy, promised investors a return of at least 34 percent if they invested refunds they got after filing amended tax returns that claimed bogus deductions related to supposed gold-mining expenses in Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere.

According to prosecutors, the amended returns generated large tax refunds for earlier years. Investors were to give those refunds to the promoters as their investment in the mining project, and in some cases they did so.

The Justice Department lawsuits did not name the professional football players, but said that one was from Texas and another was from Georgia.

Hope you like pythons: Climate conditions in southern U.S. perfect for invasive constrictors' spread
Ted Alvarez on February 21, 2008 11:47 AM

Back around the turn of the century, some genius with a Burmese python realized his chosen pet was a lot more difficult to manage than a goldfish, so he dumped it in the Everglades. Meanwhile, another genius discovered the same thing and also released his or her Burmese python in the Everglades, and — voila! — by 2003, biologists with the park service confirmed an established breeding population of a 20-foot, 300-lb. snake.

I just read Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism. It's long...long...well thought out, well written.

It also convinced me that anyone that expected the election of a single politician to resolve their internal issues is destined for disappointment. 

Paranoid? Read the two links posted immediatelybefore this one.

Police concerned about order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally
By JACK DOUGLAS Jr.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.

American Renaissance Conference
Feb. 22 – Feb. 24, 2008, Herndon, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.)
In the Name of Our People.

In all parts of the world, whites are afraid to speak out in their own interests. Racial differences in IQ, the costs of “diversity,” the challenges of non-white immigration—politicians and the media dare not discuss what these things mean for whites and their civilization.

We are different. We believe these are vital questions....

The first speaker they list:

J. Philippe Rushton — “The Heritability of World IQ Differences.” Prof. Rushton teaches at the University of Western Ontario, and is the world’s foremost scholar of racial differences. He is the author of many books and articles, most notably, Race, Evolution and Behavior.

...is the thoroughly discredited Rushton, who is looking more like a global warming denier by the second

Racist Attacks on Obama Growing More Heated
Posted By Mark Potok On February 20, 2008 @ 4:16 pm In Klan, White Supremacist, Hate Groups

With the selection of Barack Obama as the first black Democratic nominee for president seeming more possible by the day, racists and white supremacists are posting increasingly ugly and even threatening remarks on the Internet.

“OBAMA WILL DIE, KKK FOREVER,” concludes a Feb. 15 post by “Rodney” to a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. Above that signoff, Rodney wrote: “The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a NIGGER President all you NIGGER’s [sic] will think you’ve won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you[.] FUCK THAT.”

The bank was worried about his ability to repay the loan if he exited the federal financing program and started to lose in the primary race. McCain promised the bank that, if that happened, he would reapply for matching money and offer those as collateral for the loan. While McCain's aides have argued that the campaign was careful to make sure that they technically complied with the rules, Mason indicated that the question needs further FEC review....

Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.

FEC Warns McCain on Campaign Spending
By Matthew Mosk and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 22, 2008; A01

The nation's top federal election official told Sen. John McCain yesterday that he cannot immediately withdraw from the presidential public financing system as he had requested, a decision that threatens to dramatically restrict his spending until the general election campaign begins in the fall.

The prospect of being financially hamstrung by the very fundraising system he helped create is the latest in a series of bitter challenges for the presumed GOP nominee, who still faces a fractured conservative coalition as he assumes the mantle of party leadership.

"Many of these offenders are among the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system, and their early release . . . at a time when violent crime had increased in some communities will produce tragic but predictable results," Mukasey said at a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing.

The staff analysis indicated that about 6 percent of the inmates' sentences were increased because they were supervisors or leaders of a drug crew of four or more, 6 percent of prisoners' sentences were enhanced for arms specifications, and 1 percent were considered career criminals. The findings were consistent with a U.S. Sentencing Commission report to Congress in May that showed that 90 percent of federal crack cases did not involve violence. Only 5 percent involved a threat, and even fewer involved injury or death. 

Crack Offenders Set for Release Mostly Nonviolent, Study Says
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 22, 2008; A04

Most of the more than 1,500 crack cocaine offenders who are immediately eligible to petition courts to be released from federal prisons under new guidelines issued by the U.S. Sentencing Commission are small-time dealers or addicts who are not career criminals and whose charges did not involve violence or firearms, according to a new analysis by the commission staff.

About 6 percent of the inmates were supervisors or leaders of drug rings, and about 5 percent were convicted of obstructing justice, generally by trying to get rid of their drugs as they were being arrested or contacting witnesses or co-defendants before trial, according to the analysis being circulated on Capitol Hill by the commission to counter Bush administration assertions that the guidelines would prompt the release of thousands of dangerous criminals.

Early on, the pundits saw Mr. Jackson's candidacy as laudable but symbolic; then the voters began to make it increasingly credible.

Then the pundits began to focus on ''what does Jesse want?'' The voters have given their answer: the Presidency.

Then the pundits zeroed in on whether a black could win enough white votes to be elected; never mind that in every state thus far Mr. Jackson has been dramatically improving upon the support that white voters gave him when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1984.

Something has been going on in the lives and minds of those whites to cause this impressive increase in support. How do we know where it might lead? The pundits have been caught often enough with their polls and paradigms down for them to exercise much more caution in their seemingly certain conclusions.

April 5, 1988
Op-Ed: They Misled The Voters On Jackson
By CHARLES V. HAMILTON

In the wake of the frenzy after the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Michigan victory, we should all calm down as the normal process of the candidates' competition for votes goes forward. That process is unduly beset by the intervention of a host of other players - political pundits in and out of the media, and pollsters - who are scurrying around analyzing this, interpreting that, projecting, assuming and concluding all over the place.

These so-called experts tend to create a political picture that might well be at variance with what is actually happening between the candidates and voters.

But no law can correct active mendacity.

When it passed the 1976 law, Congress almost certainly had no intention of removing the right to sue. Senator Edward Kennedy, the Senate sponsor of the law, and Representative Henry Waxman, who sat on the House panel that approved it, have both said that Congress had no intention of granting the manufacturers immunity from lawsuits over injuries caused by their devices.

No Recourse for the Injured

Consumers are already at the mercy of the all-too-fallible Food and Drug Administration. So it is especially disturbing that the Supreme Court ruled this week that patients injured by defective medical devices cannot sue for damages in state courts if the device was approved for marketing by the F.D.A. and made to the agency’s specifications.

Paul Krugman:

Until recently, I thought the biggest political struggle facing the next president was likely to be over health care reform. But right now it looks as if the first thing on the next administration’s plate will have to be dealing with a weak economy.

And if effective action isn’t forthcoming, the next president will suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, who began his administration with words of uplift — “Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust” — and ended up delivering America into the hands of the hard right.

Yup.

If the next president is a Republican, he will be captive to the doctrine that tax cuts are the answer to all problems, and therefore won’t seek an effective response to the economy’s troubles.

True.