Twitter Updates for 2010-08-21

Shit Fountain, literally. http://flic.kr/p/8tVcT9 # Cecil tackles the Very Important Question "The Straight Dope: Will alcohol in cupcakes make you drunk?" http://bit.ly/drhDQi # Parliament Buildings London http://flic.kr/p/8tSsC4 # Perched – River Thames, scoping out the tourists http://flic.kr/p/8tStcX # Lambeth Bridge http://flic.kr/p/8tSAHv # Lincoln Public Bath, North Wolcott http://flic.kr/p/8tVYqJ # ACLU… Read more“Twitter Updates for 2010-08-21”

Gale Norton Lurves the Environment

Earlier this year, after the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a Resource Management Plan authorizing the creation of nearly 10,000 new oil and gas wells on public land in the San Juan Basin–where an estimated 19,000 producing wells already exist–Tweeti filed suit against Gale Norton and the Interior Department, accusing the government of failing to balance resource extraction with conservation, recreation and other uses of federal land. … But under federal law, they note, the BLM is supposed to balance this objective with the interests of other users (hunters, ranchers) and insure that drilling is done in a way that does not wreak havoc on a precious public resource of value to all.

Bookmarks for November 28th through November 29th

A few interesting links for November 28th through November 29th: Lawmaker to Homeland Security: Don't forget to credit God for keeping Kentuckians safe – "A lawmaker is upset with his state's Department of Homeland Security for its lack of credit to a "higher power" for its work in protecting the… Read more“Bookmarks for November 28th through November 29th”

The Most Liberal Senator

Unless you are brain dead, or work for the National Review ((kind of the same thing, I guess)), you wouldn’t ever claim that Barack Obama is the most liberal Senator ((unless you are running on the Republican Party ticket, or brain dead.

…Liberals such as myself have to come up with other reasons for supporting Obama – which, for the record, isn’t that hard to do – but liberal support isn’t because Obama is a Paul Wellstone acolyte.

Constitution Free Zone

and added this in an earlier article on the same topic : The notice states that the government may share border records with federal, state, local, tribal or foreign government agencies in cases where customs believes the information would assist enforcement of civil or criminal laws or regulations, or if the information is relevant to a hiring decision. They may be shared with a court or attorney in civil litigation, which could include divorce cases; with federal contractors or consultants “to accomplish an agency function related to this system of records”; with federal and foreign intelligence or counterterrorism agencies if there is a threat to national or international security or to assist in anti-terrorism efforts; or with the news media and the public “when there exists a legitimate public interest in the disclosure of the information.”

What Is Sarah Palin Hiding in her Yahoo e-mails

These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card , and library records ; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law. The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin’s privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored .

Barack Obama’s super marketing machine

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.

…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. (( which is why I always give a few false answers to corporate seekers of data )) 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.

One Million Names

Fredrickson and Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, spoke today along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S…. “America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program.

McCain to spy on Americans Secretly

McCain’s new tack towards the Bush administration’s theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies’ cooperation with President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, before he’d support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity. … We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report show [Click to read more of FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills – New York Times ]

…It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being “good patriots” when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills.