Open thread

I've been playing with some software that stitches photos together in a panorama. Man is it cool. Read More......

NYT reporter who broke domestic spying story, his book is now out (or coming out in days)

UPDATE: I don't know if the book is out-out, or coming out in a few days.

From TIME:

the book also argues that the NSA's eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which the war on terrorism has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions at home and abroad. Risen's chief target is the CIA, where, he argues, institutional dysfunction and feckless leadership after 9/11 led to intelligence breakdowns that continue to haunt the U.S....

Risen writes that with the White House's anything-goes mandate in place, everything went. While the NSA began monitoring communications of some Americans suspected of links to al-Qaeda--snooping on "millions of telephone calls and e-mail messages on American soil" in the process--the CIA set up a network of secret prisons around the world in which interrogators employed techniques that violated established international norms. Meanwhile, Tenet's desire to earn the favor of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led him to abandon the agency's traditional role as a nonpartisan arbiter of intelligence. That fostered a climate in which officials were discouraged from sending Bush inconvenient information--such as doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet is no stranger to opprobrium (his reputation will never recover from his telling Bush that the evidence on WMD was a "slam dunk"), but the verdict of his subordinates in State of War is particularly withering.

(Hat tip to E&P;) Read More......

Alberto Gonzales should recuse himself from domestic spying investigation

We now know, per the NYT story Joe cites below, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was a key player in the Bush administration's illegal domestic spying program. There is no way Gonzales can now investigate who leaked the existence of the program to the New York Times when the leaker might have been Gonzales himself. Gonzales was one of the key players in getting the program running, he can't also be in charge of the investigation?

And another thing. Since Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales were two of the key players getting the program running, they're liable to criminal sanctions for breaking the law. Bush may not be touchable under criminal law since he's a sitting president - the only path to get him might be impeachment - but Gonzales and Card can be investigated, arrested, and jailed for committing a major felony. I think that's one road we need to follow now. Read More......

Bush's approval among military falls significantly in latest poll

From E&P;

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9% from 2004; a bare majority, 54%, now say they view his performance on Iraq favorably. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60%, among readers of the Military Times newspapers (85% of those polled are on active duty).

These are Bush's biggest fans, they're the guys FIGHTING the war in Iraq, and support for their commander-in-chief's competence in fighting that war is only 54%. And only 13% of those polled call themselves Democrats.

Why do our soldiers hate our soldiers? Read More......

What cartoon characters will the religious right out next?

Gay marriage



Pedophilia



Sissy



Big girl



Big boy



Gay penguins



Gay aliens



He's French. Enough said.

Read More......

Put your own slogan on a t-shirt

Remember, with our newest t-shirt shop YOU create the phrase for YOUR own t-shirt. I just, for example, created a "I'm not gay but my Barbie is" t-shirt in a few seconds. You pick the words, the font, the text size, the style of shirt, color of the text and shirt, and more. It's totally cool. And, you CAN put things on the front and back of the shirt, BUT it adds to total cost. You can see the total cost as you go along on the page, it increases as you add more stuff.

Here are a few more suggestions for new shirts you can create on the spot:

Impeachment
It's not just for blowjobs anymore

Tell me again how Bush has made us safer?

The Constitution
You're either with it or against it

Spying on your own people
It's not just for communists anymore

One thing. The instructions aren't terribly clear on this new t-shirt site. Here's what you do, check out this image with the instructions below, while making your shirt on the shop here:



1. Get rid of the current image that's on the t-shirt in the template, the "Bush spied on me." Do this by clicking the white X in the red circle that's just next to the words "BUSH_SPIED_ON_ME" in the box to the right of the white t-shirt.

2. Click the type of shirt you want from the selection in the left-hand column. You'll see that the main shirt in the middle of the page is now the shirt you selected.

3. Pick what color you want your shirt to be with the color selections right below the main shirt in the middle of the page. Click the various colors to see.

4. Insert text by first clicking the "TEXT" link to the right of the main t-shirt, towards the top of the page.

Now check out this image, with the additional instructions:



5. Now that you've clicked on "TEXT" you have all sorts of options. First, where it says "YOUR TEXT HERE" write some text on as many lines as you like. You can move the text up or down, left or right, with the "position" function just to the right. You can also change the font, bold, italics, left-justify, right-justify, font size, and the color of the text with the other buttons in this same location.

6. Finally, pick your size and quantity. That's it.

And if you want to really get adventurous, you can also add imagese with your text - play around with it and see if you can figure it out. Read More......

Open thread

Damn that Barbie Read More......

Religious right says Barbie is secretly promoting "bisexuality"

Tinky Winky, Lenny the shark, and SpongeBob SquarePants move on over. The next child icon caught promoting the homosexual agenda is none other than BARBIE!!

Here is a list of known Toon homosexuals to date:



The religious right is now attacking Barbie for promoting "gender confusion." According to the men at the Concerned Women for America, Barbie is urging kids to go bi:

"This is directed at children aged four to eight... that's a really young age to be directing something along the lines of bisexuality."

Yes, Barbie is making four year olds want to have sex with other four year olds of the same gender. And the Concerned Men would prefer that children have sex with four year olds of the opposite gender, I guess.

What's really going on here is that the religious right has been attacking Mattel for months, just like they went after Ford and Microsoft and Allstate and Kraft and every other major American company. This is just another way for them to attack Mattel and get Mattel to do something bigoted to make amends.

But claiming that Barbie is promoting bisexuality to four year olds, that's just whacked.

PS They also attack Barbie for not being a good Christian because good Christian girls only want to serve the Lord, get married, stay at home and have kids. I'm not making this up. I guess if you're a woman (or a doll) who wants a career, then you're a dyke. Read More......

FISA was set up to address the exact problem we face today with the war on terror

It's certainly cute of President Bush to claim that he had to break the law and spy on American citizens inside the US because the FISA search warrant procedures are, he claims, too out of date, too onerous, and too slow to deal with the kind of danger we face today.

It's also another lie.

As Bruce Schneier points out, the danger we face today (a terrifying enemy hiding in our midst) and the daunting task we face today (sifting through hundreds of thousands of electronic messages on a regular basis, messages that happen so fast that there isn't time to run to a court for a warrant) was faced by the nation decades ago. And in response to that danger and that task, our leaders created FISA because the eavesdropping had gone too far.

A lot of people are trying to say that it's a different world today, and that eavesdropping on a massive scale is not covered under the FISA statute, because it just wasn't possible or anticipated back then. That's a lie. Project Shamrock began in the 1950s, and ran for about twenty years. It too had a massive program to eavesdrop on all international telegram communications, including communications to and from American citizens. It too was to counter a terrorist threat inside the United States. It too was secret, and illegal. It is exactly, by name, the sort of program that the FISA process was supposed to get under control.

Twenty years ago, Senator Frank Church warned of the dangers of letting the NSA get involved in domestic intelligence gathering. He said that the "potential to violate the privacy of Americans is unmatched by any other intelligence agency." If the resources of the NSA were ever used domestically, "no American would have any privacy left.... There would be no place to hide.... We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is an abyss from which there is no return."

Bush's eavesdropping program was explicitly anticipated in 1978, and made illegal by FISA. There might not have been fax machines, or e-mail, or the Internet, but the NSA did the exact same thing with telegrams.

Read More......

Open thread

Chat away Read More......

Exactly how has Bush made America any safer in the past 4 years?

It's one thing to give up our civil liberties in exchange for the safety of our children. It's quite another to give them up and get little in return. Let's examine just how much safer George Bush has made America since September 11.

1. Osama is still free, and Bush never even talks about him anymore.
   
   
2. Our military is bogged down in a war that had nothing to do with Osama or Al Qaeda UNTIL WE INVADED AND MADE IRAQ AL QAEDA'S NEW HOME.
   
   
3. We've turned Iraq into the biggest terrorist training camp in the world:
   
   "Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank....
   
   "President Bush has frequently described the Iraq war as an integral part of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. But the council's report suggests the conflict has also helped terrorists by creating a haven for them in the chaos of war....
   
   "Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government."
   
   
4. Far too many of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, recommendations to make us safer, have still not been implemented.
   
   
5. The Homeland Security budget is being spent on frivolous pork:
   
   "The District of Columbia used part of its grant to buy leather jackets and to send sanitation workers to self-improvement seminars. Newark bought air-conditioned garbage trucks. Columbus, Ohio, bought body armor for fire department dogs. These are not the priorities of a nation under threat."
   
   
6. The 9/11 Commission gives Bush a grade of "D" under the category: "Maximum effort to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD" - i.e., he gets a D for his efforts to stop terrorists from getting nuclear bombs. Here's what the 9/11 Commissioners had to say about Bush's efforts to stop Osama from getting a nuclear bomb and dropping it on an American city:
   
   "Countering the greatest threat to America's security is still not the top national security priority of the President and the Congress."
   
   
7. Most of the world now hates us.
   
   "Iraq has joined the list of conflicts -- including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines, and southern Thailand -- that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology."
   
   
8. And let me leave you with the words of the head of Republican head of the 9/11 commission, just a few weeks ago:
   
   "Four years after 9/11 it is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis," said Thomas Kean, the Republican who was chairman of the commission.
   
   "It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on a terrorist watch list.
   
   "It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk...."
   
   "While the terrorists are learning and adapting, our government is still moving at a crawl."
   

Tell me again how Bush has made us safer?

Read More......

The public is very worried about government spying

Before anyone dismisses criticism of the Bush criminal domestic spying program by assuming the American people welcome that behavior, they should read the article in yesterday's NY Times Week in Review on the issue of privacy. The American people make a distinction between commercial privacy and privacy from their government. And, government spying freaks out the public:

[A] poll conducted for Mr. Ponemon last month may show that people hold different views on commercial and government privacy issues. Conducted after The New York Times revealed the N.S.A. surveillance, it suggested great concern. Of those polled, 88 percent expressed concern, and 54 percent said they were "very concerned," he said.

"It was, 'Wow,' " Mr. Ponemon said. The 88 percent figure was more than twice the level of concern of past studies he had seen of public attitudes toward commercial privacy breaches.

The reaction to the president's program could be cumulative, said Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who speaks out on civil liberties issues in alliance with conservative libertarian groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. When the privacy violations on the business side and those on the government side are taken into account, he said, "you get a truly frightening picture."

The issue of government abuse of privacy in the name of security has been growing since the 9/11 attacks, said Alan F. Westin, a privacy expert and consultant who is a professor emeritus of public law and government at Columbia University. He has been tracking consumer attitudes about domestic security issues with telephone surveys since 2001, and has found a growing concern that the checks on government surveillance might be weakening.

Support for expanded government monitoring of cellphones and e-mail messages dropped from 54 percent in September 2001 to 37 percent in June 2005. Those who said they were "very confident" that expanded surveillance powers would be used in a "proper way" dropped from 34 percent in 2001 to 23 percent in 2004, the last year that that specific question was asked. Those who were "somewhat" confident in the government's conduct of surveillance stood at 53 percent in 2004, unchanged from 2001.

"The essence really is a majority of the public does not believe the administration should be given a blank check," Mr. Westin said.

Bush thinks he has a blank check -- even if it means breaking the law. I just have this nagging fear that some of the Democratic consultant and pundit types are going to run to the Hill over the next couple weeks telling the Democrats to back off this issue. On this one, the Democrats have to take a stand and play hard ball. They cannot listen to the same old people who got us to the point where we don't have the House, the Senate or the White House. The American people want bold leadership. And, they don't want their government breaking the law to spy on them. Read More......

Congressional leaders were informed, not consulted about domestic spying

Bush is just plain lying about having Congressional support for his criminal spying program:

Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided to go forward with the program anyway because it was convinced that the President possessed the inherent power to act.

The Administration likes to stress that congressional leaders were briefed about the new program from the start. But some of them object that they were told about it under ground rules that made it impossible for them to mount any opposition. Daschle tells TIME that he, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt, then House minority leader, were briefed in early 2002 by Cheney. There was a second briefing in 2004. "A couple of us expressed our concerns," Daschle says. "But the information we were given was more technical and less substantive. We were told we were being informed and not consulted." Within the intelligence community, officials knew that legal justifications for the spying were subject to challenge. At the NSA, says a former senior intelligence official, "there was apprehension, uncertainty in the minds of many about whether or not the President did have that constitutional or statutory authority."

Read More......

In Iraq, we broke it, but we're not fixing it

Hey, just because the U.S. invaded their country and destroyed the infrastructure, doesn't mean we're actually going to rebuild the country. Because, think about it, everyone in America know that clean water and electricity are so overrated, right?:

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

We're going to build a democracy but not rebuild the basic services we helped destroy. That'll work. Read More......

Another excellent reason to visit Spain

No smoking. Spain joins Italy and Ireland as smoke-free countries and the UK is still discussing the possibility of either a limited or a complete smoke free environment. Read More......

Newsweek managing editor says Bush Sr. was conservative, Reagan was a centrist, Giuliani is a conservative, and McCain is a centrist

Uh, pretty much wrong on every single count. But nice revisionist history - Reagan ran as a centrist? What? And Bush senior was the conservative guy? As is Giuliani? Giuliani?! Especially compared to McCain, who's an arch-conservative on most issues, including being far to the right of Giuliani on civil rights issues.

More from Atrios, et. al. Read More......