Yes, the report is at Nice Polite Republicans but you still need to hear out Montana’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, on the load of crap that is RealID.

Traveling?  Read more 

Terror alerts, terror threats, terror among us, terror without us, terror around us, terror, terror, terror.

Headline from today’s Meet The Press: Terror is a word worn-out from over and inaccurate use; in a word, terror, and all the attached isms have become a bore.  Read more 

This seems to be the day for Cheap Little Republican Sleazeballs to be getting their long overdue comeuppance for breathtaking lapses from anything resembling proper behavior. Besides our oklahoma judge we now have Bernie Kerik, the only person I know of whom it can be said that Michael “Skeletor” Jerkoff Chertoff is demonstrably better than:

A year and a half after his Homeland Security nomination sank over ethics questions, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded guilty Friday to charges he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in gifts while he was a top city official.  Read more 

Thus a BusinessWeek reader quipped at the comments box for this little zinger. Let your imagination soar past phone calls:

The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans’ finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don’t ensure the data’s accuracy, the GAO found.

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.

“Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment,” says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.’s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.  Read more