Who Can It Be Now?

Please stop calling me.



William Arkin suggests in the Post that the phone records database is the tip of this privacy invading iceberg. According to the blog, "The following is a list of some 500 software tools, databases, data mining and processing efforts contracted for, under development or in use at the NSA and other intelligence agencies today..."

500 processes. This data can serve no practical law enforcement purpose unless the government can attach names to this data, and then determine the context of coversations, emails, blogs, and whatever other communication is being monitored.

4th Amendment articles aside for a moment: how does mining the data of practically every phone call in the United States prevent 20 guys in a room in Hamburg from hatching a simple plot to learn to fly, buy plane tickets for a predetermined date, and within two hours take 3,000 lives?

Please stop calling me.

Kingdom Coming

From Upcoming...
Michelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com (and one articulate mfer -- ed.), has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism—the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers—is threatening the foundations of democracy.

In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage.

Drugs Not Working

A report from Ohio reports that a man who was being executed by lethal injection rose from the stretcher to inform his executioners that the drugs were not taking effect.

When are we going to stop this barbaric practice?

Report on Colbert

After all of the hubbub (sp?) I finally watched Steven Colbert's routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I have been reading the blogs and the pundits who are arguing that he bombed, that no one laughed, that his attacks on the President were inappropriate.

Watch the video (Slate.com has it) and you'll discover:

a) C-Span showed shots of those people who did not laugh. There was steady laughter throughout.

2) Several jokes got raves, including the Glacier and DC-marshmallow jokes (Watch the video). Even Antonin Scalia cracked up at the mention of his famed gestures incident.

3) Several jokes did indeed fall flat, especially the one about the generals standing on a bank of computers and ordering men into battle. I didn't think that was very funny.

4) Colbert was being Colbert. Watch the show before you book a guest at that dinner.

5) He was hysterical.

6) Satire is not comedy. It is not a standup routine or an SNL opening monologue. It is, as my Freshman English professor, Chris Rawson told us, an indirect attack on a serious subject. An Attack. On Serious subjects.

7) Of course the president didn't laugh. It isn't funny.