Your Tax $ at Work

This spring, Republicans and Democrats voiced outrage over the news that independent counsel David M. Barrett was still pursuing a decade-long, $21 million investigation into a crime long confessed and paid for. Without debate, the Senate unanimously agreed to strip Barrett of further funding for his inquiry on former housing secretary Henry G. Cisneros.

But, prodded by conservative commentators, House Republican leaders grew convinced that Democrats were trying to suppress embarrassing revelations about the Clinton administration. The Senate provision was ditched behind closed doors, and Barrett and his staff continue to work -- at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $2 million a year -- on an inquiry that seemingly ended 13 months ago."

Pat Tillman Opposed the War in Iraq

An article in the SF Chronicle ( "FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH
New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death") describes the continuing efforts of Pat Tillman's family to get the truth about Pat's life and the circumstances of his death from the military. A fascinating article with some suprises including Tillman's belief that the war was illegal.

Does Bush believe in a role for government?

Looking at Dubya's performance in office can lead one to conclude that the President is seriously inept or just not very smart. The other possible conclusion is that the current administraton doesn't believe that government has a role in many of the areas for which it responsible. The result is an administraton that focuses on law and order or national defense but lets privatization and "free enterprise" pick up the pieces or that repays its political debts by awarding key positions in depleted agencies such as FEMA or HUD.

Bush: 'I take responsibility'

George W. Bush took responsibility on Tuesday for failures in the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do it's job right, I take responsibility," Bush said. "I want to know what went right and what went wrong."

Just what does taking repsonsbility mean to an administration that so highly prized 'accountability' during it's campaigns for office? How will this affect the constant reference to the 'blame game' by members of the administration?

Today's thoughts

'Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO, what a ride!'

Don't argue with an idiot; people watching may not be able to tell the difference."

Surprise? FBI spies on Bush critics

Those who remember when the CIA and FBI engaged in spying on left wing groups, Martin Luthur King Jr., ordinary citizens, and Nixon's "enemies list" may not be surprised to learn that the FBI is up to the same old tricks. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the FBI is again armed with expanded powers to collect information on ordinary citizens. And it has been doing so.

That is what the FBI itself disclosed in federal court yesterday. It acknowledged that it has collected 1,173 pages of files on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2,383 on Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group, and an undetermined number of files on an organisation called United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), a coalition of more than 1,000 antiwar groups. The coalition allegedly was planning protests at the time of the Republican Party National Convention in New York.

...Beau Grosscup, a professor of international relations at California State University and author of ”The Newest Explosions of Terrorism: Latest Sites of Terrorism in the 90s and Beyond”, told IPS, ”All one has to do is look at the annual FBI report on terrorism to discover that as they watch the ACLU, Earth First, Greenpeace and the peace movement, they refuse to apply their political attention to the violence of the rightwing and in particular anti-environmental groups.”

Alcohol and driving don't mix, even in the tank

We knew it was too good to be true....

A study released from University of California-Berkeley finds that for every unit of energy yielded by ethanol, it takes 1.3 units to produce it from corn, and is nearly 3 times more expensive than gasoline per unit energy delivered. The study didn’t take into account the $3B in federal and state subsidies that are given out to ethanol producers every year, which means that the true cost of ethanol is likely even higher. Ethanol is widely used as a fuel additive across the country, and in some areas can be found as a blend where it’s the primary source of energy (so-called E85 is comprised of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, and must be used only in vehicles designed for it). Since ethanol can be made from corn or other sources of biomass, it’s attracting much attention as a source of renewable energy.

Additionally, ethanol might lead to more pollution than the highly toxic MTBE that it replaces. This is because bacteria in the soil prefer ethanol to gasoline (a choice that many of our readers will agree with), and therefore will break down less gasoline before it reaches underground water sources.

Fans of biodiesel will find that their fuels didn’t fair much better, with soybeans yielding similar results to corn-based ethanol, and sunflower-based biodiesel production requiring 2.2 times the amount of energy the fuel eventually yields.

Bullying the troops from the pulpit

Evidently the investigation of excessive recruiting and influence of evangelical chaplains at the US Air Force Academy was only one indication of the growing influence of evangelicals in the military. Here's an account of a weekend event sponsored by the Air Force:

"There were personal testimonies about Jesus from the stage, a comedian quoting Scripture and a five-piece band performing contemporary Christian praise songs. Then hundreds of Air Force chaplains stood and sang, many with palms upturned, in a service with a distinctively evangelical tone. It was the opening ceremony of a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at a Hilton hotel here last month organized and paid for by the Air Force for many of its United States-based chaplains and their families, at a cost of $300,000. The chaplains, who pledge when they enter the military to minister to everyone, Methodist, Mormon or Muslim, attended workshops on "The Purpose Driven Life," the best seller by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, and on how to improve their worship services."

See link for entire article from NY Times.

Pew Survey: U.S. Image Still Thumbs Down Overseas

Even China ranks higher than the US in a 16 nation survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. While Americans score high as hardworking and inventive, we are also thought of as violent, greedy and immoral.

The magnitude of America's image problem is such that even popular U.S. policies have done little to repair it. President George W. Bush's calls for greater democracy in the Middle East and U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Asia have been well-received in many countries, but only in Indonesia, India and Russia has there been significant improvement in overall opinions of the U.S.

Head of Central Command Says Cheney Wrong on Iraq

While Rumsfeld was out supporting the contention that Iraq is not a quagmire, his own General was contradicting the rosy view of Iraq being painted by Vice President Cheney.

'During a tense Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Army Gen. John Abizaid, who as head of Central Command is the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, declined to endorse Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that Iraq's insurgency was in its "last throes."

Abizaid said insurgents' strength had not diminished and that more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq than six months ago. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency," Abizaid said, adding: "I'm sure you'll forgive me from criticizing the vice president."'

Jack Kilby, inventor of integrated circuit, dead at 81 - Jun. 21, 2005

The man who made as big a contribution to American industry as Thomas Edison or Alexander Bell died on Tuesday. Too few people know his name.

"Kilby, 81, made the discovery 47 years ago, when, as a recently hired engineer at Texas Instruments Inc. (Research), he was left to work alone in a laboratory while most of his 7,500 colleagues were taking a company-wide summer vacation leave.

As a new hire, Kilby did not qualify to take a vacation in August 1958.

"It was a very quiet time and he got a lot done," said Pat Weber, 65, a long-time colleague and friend of Kilby's".

If you are making DVD's, you're probably breaking at least one law.

Exerpt of a meeting between an Intel Exec (Whiteside) and Senate staffers that highlights how pernicious the Digit Millineum Copyright Act (DCMA)is. It makes criminals of us all.

Darknet: Story: The tech exec who broke federal law (and why the law is broken): "Whiteside explained how the homemade DVD came to be. His nine-year-old son Timmy played on a Pop Warner team called the Typhoons, and Whiteside spent the better part of a football season capturing images of the action with his digital camcorder. At long last Whiteside culled together the highlights, imported them into his PC, and began creating his digital masterpiece.

“I used a program to copy a few seconds from the DVD of the movie Rudy,” he said. “It’s the scene showing the final game of the Notre Dame season with Rudy’s family in the stands cheering wildly when he got to play. I then spliced in some snippets of pro players doing a touchdown dance from NFL Films, and I overlaid it with audio from ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’

'I stitched this all together with video of my son, and it turned out to be the piece of home video that gets watched the most in our house. When relatives or members of the football team come over, we pop it in and we just laugh. The added scenes and music really bring it all to life.”

There was just one problem. “It turns out to do this, I violated the DMCA. I used the DeCSS program to circumvent the encryption and access the movie clips on the DVD that I own,” Whiteside told the aides. “The end product is a DVD that I don’t sell or distribute but is considered a derivative work under copyright law.”

To their credit, none of the congressional aides flipped open their cell phones to call the attorney general. (When I described Whiteside’s home movie to Jack Valenti, he said, “He’s committing a violation of federal law.”)

DeCSS, software devised largely by fifteen-year-old Norwegian Jon Lech Johansen in 1999 to circumvent the digital locks on a DVD, has been widely popular since it first appeared on the Net. (He wrote the code so he could play a DVD movie on his Linux computer. Johansen tells me his original DeCSS code may have been downloaded a million times over the years, and related ripper programs millions more.)

Authorities have brandished the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a club, threatening to use it against anyone who uses, distributes, or even links to a program like DeCSS. First-time offenders are subject to civil fines of up to $2,500, with penalties of up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine if the violation was willful and for profit. Whiteside said he didn’t know he was violating the law at the time and hasn’t done it since.

The point of his demonstration, Whiteside said, was not a mea culpa, but a real-world example of how Washington’s penchant for legislative solutions can hobble a new, flowering marketplace of innovation.

“This is precisely the kind of exciting consumer creativity that should be enabled,” he said. “I don’t claim to have all the answers. Should I have to go clear rights to use ten seconds from Rudy in my son’s video, or does it fall under fair use? Should I have to pay pennies for every second of a snippet? I don’t know. But I do know that we have to figure out a way for consumers to do something creative without breaking the law."

The Harris Poll - Partisanship is Not What Most of the American Public Desires

Sizable majorities of U.S. adults favor both moderate and Independent candidates for office and also believe that todays' politicians are more corrupt than those of 10 years ago.

"Regardless of ideology, when asked if they favor or oppose candidates who are conservative, moderate or liberal, over three-quarters (79%) of U.S. adults favor moderate candidates while only 48 percent favor conservative candidates and 41 percent favor liberal candidates."

"When examined by party ID, half or more of each party believes members of Congress are more corrupt today than they were 10 years ago – (50% of Republicans, 60% of Democrats and 55% of Independents)."

WEP cracking for dummies

"For those who still don’t think it’s a major problem to run WEP encryption on a wireless LAN, this is your final warning. Humphrey Cheung of Tomsnetworking has released a tutorial that can essentially be summed up as 'WEP cracking for dummies'. "

"Any WEP based wireless LAN can be cracked in a matter of minutes. The current set of attacks are all implemented in a simple all-in-one CD that is available for free download over the web and it employs the latest packet injection techniques and advanced statistical analysis tools to rapidly recover WEP keys. ...Corporations and homes must protect themselves with a minimum of WPA TKIP encryption but preferably use WPA2 AES encryption."

California bill would ban tracking chips in IDs

Leave it to California to take the lead in limiting abuses of the new REAL ID Federal legislation. "Consumer advocates also worry about the ability of data thieves to intercept RFID signals or break into databases storing the information collected by such systems. The RFID chips are designed to broadcast personal data, such as name, address and date of birth, to special receivers at close range."

National ID cards: Pretty Much a Done deal

National ID cards legislation will soon be passed for implementation within three years. The House of Representatives approved the package on Thursday by a vote of 368-58. Only three of the "nay" votes were Republicans; the rest were Democrats. The Senate is scheduled to vote on it next week and is expected to approve it as well.

When implemented there may well be a national data base that keeps track of every beer, bottle of wine, cigarette, train ticket, magazine you buy, doctor's office visit or everything you do. Big Brother is here.

IRS Flaws Expose Taxpayers to Snooping, Study Finds

Information on tax returns could expose millions of taxpayers to potential identity theft or illegal police snooping, according to a new congressional report.

The Internal Revenue Service also is unlikely to know if outsiders are browsing through citizens' tax returns because barriers between tax returns and money-laundering reports don't exist, the GAO found. Thus a police officer checking up on money-laundering reports can also read personal tax returns, in violation of federal law.

U.S. eliminates annual terrorism report

One way to deal with bad news is to simply sweep it under the rug which is what Condi Rice decided to do when the annual terrorism report revealed that terrorist incidents in 2004 were the highest since 1985.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Too Many Foreign Visitors Believe the US an Open Democracy

A Chinese man demanding to talk to President Bush who had suitcases authorities feared might contain explosives was tackled outside the U.S. Capitol on Monday and arrested. After tackling the man and blowing up one of hiis suitcases, Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said the bags contained no explosives or other dangerous materials and that the suspicious wires turned out to be part of a CD player.

The man drew the attention of a Capitol police officer in the early afternoon. When the man would not respond to police, they cleared the surrounding area and told people to stay away from the windows and asked staff to clear offices closest to the area.

Gainer said the man wanted to talk to Bush.

Several helmeted police officers tackled him and dragged him away by his arms before the hazardous materials response team moved in. He put up no resistance."

Spammer Sues Victim for $ 4 Mill

Cruise.com is suing its spamming victim for $3.8Million.

"Imagine asking a corporation to stop spamming you and instead of honoring your request, it sues you in federal court and continues to send the same unwanted, junk email you asked it to stop sending in the first place. This is precisely what happened to Mark W. Mumma, a web hosting and email service provider in Oklahoma City. A suit was filed against Mumma in the U.S. District Court's Eastern District of Virginia on Feb. 8 by suspected spammer cruise.com, its parent company and the parent's principals."