Author: swanksalot

Always good to have a second user look at things

Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power

swanksalot0 comment

Tim Shorrock writes in Salon:

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA’s working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi’s and Conyers’ offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses — and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

“If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration’s attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don’t know,” says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

“You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don’t know [the extent of] what laws have been violated.”

[Click to read more of Salon.com News | Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power]

Troubling, frightening, disturbing, pick your adjective. There is apparently a database called Main Core which contains the names of over 8,000,000 American citizens who are considered to be persons of interest to the state, and who would be imprisoned, or worse, if a national emergency occurred.

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration’s alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

[snip]

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

Scary stuff.

links for 2008-07-23

swanksalot0 comment

Medical Marijuana transforming California

swanksalot0 comment

Well, duh.

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.”

The counties of California were allowed to amend the state guidelines, and the result was a patchwork of rules and regulations. Upstate in Humboldt County, the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California, the district attorney, Paul Gallegos, decided that a resident could grow up to ninety-nine plants at a time, in a space of a hundred square feet or less, on behalf of a qualified patient. The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic “gray area” business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that California’s judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420’s cap on the amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional, because voters had not approved the limits.

[From A Reporter at Large: Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry: The New Yorker]

I had some pithy commentary here, but in the light of day, didn’t make sense. Whatever.

 

Oversized Volcano

Oversized Volcano

Cheney’s Office Thwarts Climate Rules

swanksalot0 comment

These bums need to be run out of office sooner than 2009, else our planet will be destroyed. Environmental policy should not be set by oil corporations.

Bush administration officials agreed that greenhouse gases could endanger the public and should be regulated under clean-air laws, but later reversed course amid opposition from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the oil industry, a congressional report said.

The report, by the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, offers a look at the breadth of Bush administration support for regulations before such plans abruptly stopped. The report draws heavily on an interview with a former Environmental Protection Agency official who had told Congress that Mr. Cheney’s office tried to censor federal testimony on the danger of global warming. It is also based on confidential interviews with EPA staff and documents subpoenaed from the EPA.

“This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare,” Chairman Ed Markey (D., Mass.) said in a statement.

[From Cheney’s Office Accused Of Thwarting Climate Rules – WSJ.com]

[Non-subscribers use this link to read the entire article]

Supermarkets and the CTA

swanksalot0 comment

Sort of odd.

The Chicago Transit Authority is said to be looking into the possibility of having some L trains stop inside area supermarkets, or potentially consider adding bank branches and restaurants on its properties in an effort to get more mileage out of its extensive network of rail and bus routes situated on prime real estate.

“Right off the bat we are going to be looking at the idea of grocery stores right at train stations,” said Jeff Ahmadian, CTA’s deputy general counsel for the CTA, was quoted in a report in the Chicago Tribune. “People could get off directly inside the grocery store and go shopping without ever going outside,” he said, citing the Red Line’s Berwyn, Wilson and North/Clybourn stops as candidates for grocery stores, as well as other L stops that could also add supermarkets.

[From Chicago Transit Authority Looking to Add Supermarkets to Routes]

Don’t really see the advantage of this, I guess budget has to be spent somewhere, but seems like this is more of a way to waste money on consultants finding the perfect location.

To get the concept rolling, the CTA on Wednesday hired real estate giant Jones Lang LaSalle to help it assess transit property, as well as secure businesses for CTA stations and other transit-oriented development. Chicago-based JLL will be paid $4.2 million over five years to represent the CTA.

Wisconsin Crazy for Brett Favre

swanksalot0 comment

Visible to visitors to/from Roswell

ELEVA, Wis. – Carlene and Duane Schultz decided to use Brett Favre’s image in their corn maze after he announced his retirement in the spring. And even though Favre’s desire to be released from the Packers has created controversy, Carlene Schultz thinks people will be open to going through the maze when it opens Sept. 1.

The maze at Schultz’s Country Barn in Eleva reads “thanks” and shows Favre’s upper body holding a football, with his No. 4 jersey.

[From Wisconsin family creates maze to thank Brett Favre – Yahoo! News]

I still hate football.

McCain Attended Zero Afghanistan Hearings In Last Two Years

swanksalot0 comment


McCain was too busy vetoing bills that would require plans to cover birth control if they covered prescription meds, and too busy flying around Arizona on Cindy McCain’s private plane to attend any of these hearings1 .
More on John McCain
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Footnotes:
  1. testing out a feature at the Huff Post that cross-posts here [↩]

An anarchic birthday

swanksalot0 comment

Madman's Honey
RIP, Tina

Sad news indeed. Friend of this blog, and friend of me, Tina Oiticica Harris has passed away after a long bout of anarchic illness. We’ll miss you Tina!

Around 3am this morning, I woke up with a weird sense of anachronism about Tina’s 56th birthday.
Unfortunately, Tina-la-vecina as she was known in the Santa Monica Unified School District checked in Hotel California on Monday and isn’t available to solve this riddle.

[Click to read more An anarchic birthday]

Barack Obama’s super marketing machine

swanksalot0 comment

No wonder Obama decided to ultimately support FISA and illegal surveillance of US citizens. You never know where database marketing will lead.

You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you’re registered to vote — including whether that’s a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He’s got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you’re likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you’re more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

The 5 million people on Obama’s e-mail list are just the start of what political strategists say is one of the most sophisticated voter databases ever built. Using a combination of the information that supporters are volunteering, data the campaign is digging up on its own and powerful market research tools first developed for corporations, Obama’s staff has combined new online organizing with old-school methods of voter outreach to assemble a central database for hitting people with messages tailored as closely as possible to what they’re likely to want to hear. It’s an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall.

[From Salon.com News | Barack Obama’s super marketing machine]

It isn’t groundbreaking to compile such a database, but it is new in the political arena. Credit card companies, automobile manufacturers, and other corporations have been doing this sort of data mining for several years now, with the statistical models becoming increasingly sophisticated.1

Neither the campaign or its consultants would offer up many details about the operation; what they have is most likely a mix of hard data and predictions based on statistical models. Some very specific tidbits are available from consumer marketing firms; if you’ve ever registered a product — a TV, a computer or a microwave, for example — chances are the campaign knows you own it. Likewise, they know if you’ve signed up for the frequent customer club at your local Whole Foods, or if you’ve joined the American Civil Liberties Union. (Yes, those last two probably make you an Obama supporter). Or whether you own a gun and have a current hunting license. (An indicator you’re less likely to pull the lever for him in November.)

They can add that to what they know about the neighborhood in which you live — even about your specific block — then run all the information through a computer, and voilà: Obama aides can pull up a list of, say, married white men over 30 from an area where people buy a lot of gourmet potato chips and Miller High Life sells well.

For the most part, no one particular piece of information has an overwhelming Democratic or Republican tilt, though there are a few exceptions. For instance, people who live in “multi-unit dwellings” — apartment buildings — tend to be overwhelmingly Democrats, possibly because that one indicator tends to bring others along, like income, neighborhood density and living in a city

Footnotes:
  1. which is why I always give a few false answers to corporate seekers of data [↩]