Quote of note:

The ad, which may air again during future "24" episodes broadcast in the home states of Republican senators who have raised questions about the Patriot Act, is an unusual example of an interest group so closely meshing political persuasion and fictional entertainment.

"The producers of this ad are playing off fictional fears to create pressure for their point of view on legislative reality," said Peter Hart, a Democratic-leaning pollster. "I think it's unique."

Group airs ad during `24,' hoping to influence Patriot Act debate
BY MIKE DORNING
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - Jack Bauer, the fictional counter-terrorism agent on the Fox Network's popular "24" show, hasn't actually waded into the debate on civil liberties versus terrorism surveillance as Congress considers making changes in the USA Patriot Act.

And hey...why not see if anyone in the Bush regime learned anything.

La Niña warms winter, bodes ill for hurricanes
By MIKE TONER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/03/06<

A new La Niña, a cooling of the ocean surface that can have global consequences — from the promise of a warmer, drier spring in Georgia to a new wild card in what forecasters already expect will be a hyperactive hurricane season — has emerged in the Pacific, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday.

Past cooling episodes in the same area of the central Pacific have been linked to increases in the number and intensity of hurricanes, but climate experts say it's too early to tell what role this La Niña will play in the 2006 hurricane season, already expected to be more active.

TOPEKA — The Kansas Supreme Court today ordered a district judge to reconsider subpoenas issued at Attorney General Phill Kline’s request for abortion clinic medical records.

The unanimous ruling orders Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson to use tightly drawn restrictions on any requests for medical records.

That means Kline’s investigation of late-term abortion and sexual predators may go forward, but only if the court’s demands are met to keep the privacy of clinic patients.

Kline is seeking the complete medical records of 90 girls and women who received abortions at two Kansas abortion clinics. He said the records — containing the sexual, mental and physical health histories of patients — are vital to investigating illegal late term abortions and child predators.

The common excuse for the corruption is the cost of campaigning, specifically television ads.The obvious answer: public financing of political campaigns.

But how? Actually, I think we have a model: C-Span. I propose two new channels, supported by cable networks as C-Span is.

1. E-PAN: Election Public Access Network. Nothing...and I mean NOTHING...but official ads released directly by the candidates' campaigns.
2. B-PAN: Bullshit Public Access Network: Nothing...and I mean NOTHING...but third party advocacy ads. These ads would be paid for as they are today

The names are open to negotiation, of course. Get all the politics in a single spot (or two) where they can be found by interested parties. You know the official position of the candidates immediately.

Gun-toting motorists more prone to road rage
03 February 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition

GUN lobbyists like to repeat the quote often attributed to American writer Robert Heinlein, that "an armed society is a polite society". But this is certainly not true for motorists.

A survey of 2400 drivers carried out by David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health shows that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists without guns. Some 23 per cent of gun-toting drivers admitted making rude signs, compared with 16 per cent of those who did not carry guns (Accident Analysis and Prevention, DOI:10.1016/j.aap.2005.12.014).

Quote of note:

At the core of all three cases are questions about the expanded powers the police were granted after the 2001 attacks, and how much the department needs to know about the politics of people who are expressing their views.

In 2003, a federal judge eased longstanding and strict limits on surveillance of political activity at the request of lawyers from the city's corporation counsel office, who argued that the Police Department needed broader authority to use such tactics to fight terrorism.

Since then, police officers in disguise have taken part in demonstrations, an approach the Police Department says it used before receiving the expanded powers; other officers have made hundreds of hours of videotapes of people involved in protests and rallies, very few of whom were charged with breaking any law. Neither form of surveillance, the city argues, violates the Constitution.

Quote of note:

The Associated Press reported that a court filing attached to the arrest warrant said a patron of the bar had recognized Mr. Robida from New Bedford High School, but Captain Spirlet said that Mr. Robida was no longer enrolled there.

The A.P. reported that a police affidavit said officers had found "Nazi regalia" and anti-Semitic writings on the walls of Mr. Robida's home.

Captain Spirlet said Mr. Robida had attended the junior police academy in New Bedford, which teaches discipline to adolescents.

Teenager Attacks Three Men at Gay Bar in Massachusetts
By KATIE ZEZIMA

Quote of note:

Bear in mind also that at the United Nations, Asia may not be what you think. For bureaucratic and historical reasons, the Asian group runs from the shores of the Mediterranean to the far islands of the South Pacific; it includes most of the Arab world and even Turkey, which has, in Kemal Dervis, currently head of the U.N. Development Program, an excellent dark-horse candidate respected by all.

The Next 'S-G'
At Stake in This Election: U.N.'s Future, Asia's Clout
By Richard Holbrooke
Friday, February 3, 2006; Page A19

Almost invisible to the general public, a major international election campaign is underway. It is the equivalent of primary time now, and candidates are flying quietly into New York, Washington, Beijing, Paris, Moscow and London, meeting with foreign ministers and other officials with little or no fanfare, and slipping out of town again, often denying they are running for anything at all. Although most Americans have not yet heard of any of the candidates, the winner will instantly become a major world figure.

NO.

Really?

The complaints describe efforts by Cobb to shut down or ignore investigations on issues such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center, and the theft of an estimated $1.9 billion worth of data on rocket engines from NASA computers. [P6: emphasis added]

How much you wanna bet he has a job lined up with someone that wants to privatize launch operations?

NASA's Inspector General Probed
Failure to Investigate Safety Violations Is Among the Charges
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 3, 2006; A01

From the Los Angeles Times By Matt Lait and Lance Pugmire
Times Staff Writers
February 2, 2006

A San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy who shot a 21-year-old Air Force security officer in an incident captured by a video camera appears to have violated accepted police tactics and may have committed a criminal offense, experts in the use of force by police said Wednesday.

The experts cautioned that the low quality of the digital recording may obscure some important evidence. But what is visible — the image of the deputy firing multiple rounds at 21-year-old Elio Carrion as he appeared to follow the deputy's order to get off the ground — was shocking, they said.

THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S CALL TO REDUCE MIDDLE EAST IMPORTS: On Tuesday, President Bush announced a "great goal": "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." But that isn't as great as it sounds. Consider that foreign imports currently make up about 65 percent of our total oil consumption, but imports from the Middle East constitute just 17 percent of total imports, about 11 percent of total oil use. In other words, President Bush's goal amounts to reducing oil consumption by just 8.25 percent over 19 years.

That Colored Fella is all old and crotchety.

Quote of note:

The audience members who laughed and applauded Mr. Bush's version of the truth may have forgot that he said he briefed Congress fully on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know how that turned out.

The March of the Straw Soldiers

President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He's fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings.

In his State of the Union address and in a follow-up speech in Nashville yesterday, Mr. Bush threw out a dizzying array of misleading analogies, propaganda slogans and false choices: Congress authorized the president to spy on Americans and knew all about it ... 9/11 could have been prevented by warrantless spying ... you can't fight terrorism and also obey the law ... and Democrats are not just soft on national defense, they actually don't want to beat Al Qaeda.

Powell is America's nowhere man
By Fred Kaplan
Special to the Los Angeles Times

It's been one year since Colin L. Powell left high office. Where did he go?

So sad, even tragic, is the tale of this man's evaporation. Once, he might have made a serious run for president, under either party's banner. Just a few years ago, he ranked among the most-admired Americans: a proud Jamaican immigrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, rose through the Army's ranks to general, then to White House assistant, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and finally the first black secretary of State.

It was from this pinnacle that he crashed and burned. Outmaneuvered at every turn by the tag team of Cheney & Rumsfeld, shut out of policy on the major issues of the day, bamboozled by false intelligence on Iraq and ordered to link his credibility to the public case for a war he didn't believe in, Powell left office in tatters after George W.

Quote of note

The official said the administration's legal arguments had already been aired, most prominently in a 42-page "white paper" issued last month. "Everything that's in those memos was in the white paper," said the official, who, like other administration and Congressional officials, was granted anonymity because classified material was involved.

Did you read that thing? If that's it, the program is illegal as hell.

Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

All he did was not allow Missouri to bypass the appeals court. And we do not appreciate the blatant distortion.

He was also was given his assignment for handling emergency appeals: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. As a result, Missouri filed with Alito its request for the high court to void a stay and allow Taylor's execution.

In First Case, Alito Leans Left
Associated Press
Thursday, February 2, 2006; Page A06

New Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. split with the court's conservatives last night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.

During my recent blunder I lost your email address. Could you hit the contact form or re-register?

By LiveScience Staff
posted: 31 January 2006
12:26 pm ET

Archaeologists have found what they think are the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World.

The remains, in a colonial era graveyard in one of the oldest European cities in Mexico, date between the late-16th century and the mid-17th century, not long after Columbus first set foot in the Americas.

On the whole, librarians rock.

Mr. Cohen said in an interview on Monday that he and Ms. Glick-Weil demanded the warrant because the FBI agents did not indicate that anyone at Brandeis faced a "clear and present danger." If there had been such a danger, Mr. Cohen added, agents probably would have seized the computers without even asking for them.

"We were able to both protect public safety and also protect the rights of people, the sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers," he said. "Had we given them the computers, they would have gotten to see e-mails from ordinary citizens doing ordinary things and would not have preserved privacy."

FBI Agents Back Down When Librarian Refuses to Let Them Seize 30 Computers Without a Warrant
By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Pardon my lack of introspection on the question, but here it is. Canada is the leading exporter of petro to the US but appears to wield none of the political influence of nations like Saudi Arabia. What are some of the geo-political and historical factors informing this apparent disparity? Thanks.

...who is is missing Mrs. King, but also the unity of purpose of the of the mid-20th century Civil Rights movement.

What do I think? Well, I was going to write it up here but I decided it would make a good second (second ? yup.) post at Intrapolitics.org.

Y'all who expressed interest should register over there so I can give you posting privileges. Right now, just think of it as blogging until I get some other stuff going.

Quote of note:

"We changed from a court split 4 to 3, with two in the middle," said Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, referring to the dual swing votes of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy. "Now it's 4-1-4, and now it's Kennedy."

Alito Vote May Be Decisive in Marquee Cases This Term
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. will have only one vote, of course, but it may be the decisive one in several of the marquee cases that will dominate the balance of the Supreme Court's term.

Quote of note:

"We would not want states or other entities to not enforce laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1968 Civil Rights Act on some notion that they don't have enough money to enforce it," said Mr. Goode, the N.A.A.C.P. lawyer. "We don't want the door to be opened to this sort of thing."

N.A.A.C.P. Is Bush Ally in Connecticut School Case
By AVI SALZMAN

NEW HAVEN, Jan. 31 — N.A.A.C.P. officials said on Tuesday that they were trying to intervene in a lawsuit over the No Child Left Behind Law on the side of the Bush administration and against the State of Connecticut because of a core principle: that states do not have the right to ignore federal legislation that aims to help minorities.

Alito Is Sworn In as Justice After 58-42 Vote to Confirm Him
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 —Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has been widely praised for his intellect and integrity but both admired and assailed for his conservative judicial philosophy, was sworn in today as the 110th justice in the history of the Supreme Court.

The ceremony, at the Supreme Court, came shortly after Justice Alito was confirmed by a sharply divided Senate, which voted 58 to 42, largely along party lines.

The vote gave President Bush a political triumph just hours ahead of his televised State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress at 9 p.m. Eastern time.