(hat tip to Cab Drollery)

So the entire 109th Congress advised America re: Bush’s actions, BOHICA. But in the 110th, two Senators when confronted with Bush’s order to the states not to let S-CHIP coverage “crowd out” private insurers — and neither of the two is now a candidate for President, please note, though one is from each party — wondered, “Can he really do that?”

Being Senators, they went looking for an answer — except instead of a junket to China they chose an inquiry to the Government Accounting Office. On Friday the GAO issued its answer.

Bush can’t do that. He’s breaking the law.

Of course, this doesn’t make the mainstream news.  Read more 

[Hi, Elliot! Just kidding!]

No time to excerpt this, just go read.

Then cancel your Verizon account.  Read more 

“Mr. Chertoff, tear down this wall!”

Oh, wait. St. Ronnie was in Russia, and he didn’t mean the “Security Fence” along the US-Mexico border.

I blame a lot of the crap in the world on Ronnie Reagan and his see-no, hear-no, speak-no-evil wilful neglect of his office during his two terms, as the enabler of the Nixon survivors — and who’s to say it wasn’t a GOP coup in Dallas on 11-22-1963?

I’m sure this may come as a shock to you, but military is hiring bloggers to work as moles, “verbally attack[ing] specific person[s] or promot[ing] a specific message.”

Wait, sorry, wrong link.

Here’s the article.  Read more 

You know, I’m starting to think that this “security” thing is just a little over-rated. AP:

[Mandi Hamlin of Texas] said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

Hamlin said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

Good thing all the fillings in my teeth have fallen out (no insurance). I’d hate to have to take those out with pliers.  Read more 

It’s a floorwax and a dessert topping! It robs you blind and destroys your Constitution, and it is grossly and absurdly incompetent:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Authorities revealed Tuesday that a man carrying a loaded shotgun was arrested in January near the U.S. Capitol, and explosives left in his truck nearby went undetected for three weeks.

According to an indictment filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, Michael Gorbey, 38, of Rapidan, Virginia, faces charges of planning to set off a bomb. He also is accused of making or transporting an explosive device with the intent of using it against people or property and multiple firearms charges.  Read more 

H/t the Good Dr. Barmpot. People who contract work with passports:

The next time you have to renew your U.S. passport ? assuming it’s not already in process or due in the next month or two ? it most likely will be mailed to you from right here in Tucson.

Stanley Inc., a provider of systems integration and professional services to the United States government, announced Dec. 10 it will open a passport production facility in what was the Gateway Ice Center, 7333 E. Rosewood St., near East Speedway and Kolb Road on the eastside. Stanley will use about 52,000 square-feet of the 80,000 square-foot facility but has an option to expand, if necessary, Eric Wolking, a senior vice president, said in a telephone interview.

A passport ready to be mailed from Stanley’s production facility in Arkansas.
The Tucson facility will be Stanley’s second production facility, after one it opened in March in Hot Springs, Ark. Stanley, based in Arlington, Va., produces passports under a $164 million, 10-year-contract with the Department of State.

The company plans to “ramp up fairly quickly” once it opens mid-April, said Paul Belanger, another senior vice president at Stanley. He who said he anticipates the company will begin hiring soon after the new year. He said the plant will open with one shift but move up to two shifts by the end of summer.

Between 150 and 200 employees will be hired from the local workforce, about 85 percent of whom will be processing clerk associates whose salaries will range from $10 to $13.50 per hour, plus “a generous benefits package that is not insignificant,” Belanger said. The remainder of the workforce will be made up of varying salaried management positions that will be paid from $30,000 to $70,000 per year.

Wolking said the State Department is expecting even more demand for passports as a result of new travel requirements and, as older passports are due for renewal. In the last year, the State Department issued 18 million passports and the new Tucson facility will significantly increase that ability.  Read more 

Cointelpro, anyone?  Read more 

The House, to its great credit, passed a FISA reform bill that doesn’t eviscerate the rule of law by granting the telcos retroactive immunity, and doesn’t completely gut the Fourth Amendment*. That’s good news, and if we get lucky, the whole abomination might just get deep-sixed, at which point we would return to the status quo ante legally, while much strengthened politically. Kudos, I freely grant, to Nancy Pelosi** and the rest of the House leadership, including — lambert blushes modestly for calling this one, against all odds — Steny Hoyer. That said, let’s do the classic blogospheric media critique thing on WaPo’s not totally fucked coverage. Jonathan Weisman reports:  Read more 

I’ll just let Diane say it:

Last week I posted on FBI Director Robert Mueller’s attempt to defuse the impact of a pending Inspector General’s report on the agency’s improper use of “national security letters” to obtain records. He pointed out in testimony to Congress that the report covers a period before the FBI instituted reforms to stop the improprieties. Well, the report is now out, and I can see why Mr. Mueller made the effort. From an AP report published in today’s NY Times:

Top-level FBI counterterrorism executives issued improper blanket demands in 2006 for records of 3,860 telephone lines to justify the fact that agents already had obtained the data using an illegal procedure that is now prohibited, the Justice Department inspector general reported Thursday.

Glenn A. Fine also reported that in one case FBI anti-terrorism agents circumvented a federal court which twice had refused a warrant for personal records because the judges believed the agents were investigating conduct protected by the First Amendment. Fine said the agents got the records using national security letters, which do not require a judge’s approval, without altering or re-examining the basis of their suspicions — the target’s association with others under investigation. [Emphasis added]  Read more 

You know you want it…

Not to be foily, but Jane does have just a few questions, and alert reader Steve-AR sets up an obvious alternative narrative:

After reading that, it is starting to look as if they caught him in a wiretap and then reversed “engineered” the criminal charges to get the Dem.

No! They would never do that. I mean, it’s not like they would ever watch everything! Oh, wait…  Read more 

Via TPM, this from the Online WSJ:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

What could go wrong?  Read more 

Even if your business is based outside the U.S. (Listening, GoDaddy? Can you put your lobbyists on this one?) International Herald Tribune:

Steve Marshall is a British travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working because of the U.S. government.

It turned out, though, that Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his domain name registrar, eNom, which is based in the United States, had disabled them. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Well, thank The God(ess)(e)(s) Of Your Choice, If Any, that somebody reads blogs.

Peter Fitzgerald, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the blacklist, said its operation was quite mysterious. “There really is no explanation or standard”, he said, “for why someone gets on the list.”

Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech - none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.”

“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,” Crawford said.

The law under which the Treasury Department is acting has an exemption that seeks to protect “information or informational materials.” Marshall’s Web sites, though ultimately commercial, would seem to qualify, and it is not clear why they appear on the blacklist.

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. “If they want to be taken off the list,” Rankin said, “they should contact us to make their case.”

Will Franz Kafka please pick up the white courtesy phone?  Read more 

Won’t happen anytime soon. Why? Because there are more high ranking, trannie/gay/metrosexual/perv Republicans who worry about such a law than any large gathering of liberals and progressives could ever produce.

We’re not ashamed of what we do, who we are, who we love. They are. There have been many times in history when pr0n has safeguarded freedom; this is one of them. The domestic use of the FISA laws is your guide; they spy because they expect to find us doing what they are, and they can’t imagine life without hatred, fear and perversion. And they despise us not only because we can, but because we are/do.

Excellent work by Stoller, getting this statement from the Foster campaign:

[FOSTER] Nobody is above the law and telecom companies who engaged in illegal surveillance should be held accountable, not given retroactive immunity. I flatly oppose giving these companies an out for cooperating with Alberto Gonzalez on short-circuiting the FISA courts and the rule of law.”

Bill Foster, Democratic Candidate in IL-14 March 8th Special Election

So, when you make your calls to the Blue Dog traitors on FISA, be sure you stress that point.  Read more 

AP:

[Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] wants the judge to compel the Executive Office of the President to explain why it should not be held in contempt of court.

In a sworn declaration, White House official Theresa Payton told the court on Jan. 16 that “substantially all” e-mails from 2003 to 2005 should be contained on back-up computer tapes.

However, at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 26, the panel’s Democrats released a White House document that called that claim into question.

E-mail was missing from a White House archive for the period of Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2003 from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House document states. The backup tape covering that seven-day period was not created until Oct. 21, 2003, raising the possibility that e-mail was missing from the earlier period. That time span was in the earliest days of the Justice Department’s probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the CIA identity of Valerie Plame. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was eventually convicted by a jury of four felonies in the leak probe.

The congressional panel also released written statements by a former White House technical supervisor saying that a 15-person team conducted an extensive multi-phase assessment that resulted in a final 250-page analysis on the problem of missing White House e-mail.

In her sworn declaration to the federal court in January, the White House official said she was aware of a chart created by a former employee regarding missing e-mails, but said nothing about the 250-page analysis.

Well, shit. “Substantially all” could mean there’s a week’s worth of mail missing! Let’s be reasonable, here, people!  Read more 

Remember how Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program was originally about wiretaps? And then morphed into being about foreign-to-foreign communication? Well, that was all disinformation. Turns out it’s all about email. Your “papers,” as the Fourth Amendment has it. WaPo:

At the breakfast yesterday [Kenneth Weinstein, assistant attorney general for national security] highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA’s current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because “essentially you don’t know where the recipient is going to be” and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Just as we said from the very beginning.

10-to-1, 100-to-1, these fascist weasels decided to suck up all email, just to get some of it right away. And the odds are that they archived it all, on the chance that some of it would be useful later (especially if privatized).  Read more 

From Congressional Daily (subscription only, no link, sorry)

To break an impasse over legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, House Democratic leaders are considering the option of taking up a Senate-passed FISA bill in stages, congressional sources said today. Under the plan, the House would vote separately on the first title of the bill, which authorizes surveillance activities, and then on the bill’s second title, which grants retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance activities. The two would be recombined, assuming passage of both titles. In this way, Democratic leaders believe they can give an out to lawmakers opposed to the retroactive immunity provision. Republican leadership sources said their caucus would back such a plan because not only would it give Democratic leaders the out they need, it would provide a political win for the GOP. It remains to be seen if such a move will placate liberal Democrats who adamantly oppose giving in to the Bush administration on the immunity issue.  Read more 

Glenn speaks for me:

There is some (understandable) confusion around about what is going to happen tomorrow with the FISA vote and Dodd’s promised filibuster… I shared this confusion until earlier today when these matters were clarified.

Contrary to the emphatic promise Dodd repeatedly made during his presidential campaign to lead a filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop any bill that has telecom immunity in it (a promise which, incidentally, led to hundreds of thousands of dollars being donated to his campaign), there isn’t going to be any actual filibuster tomorrow. Under the Unanimous Consent framework agreed to by all Senators (including Dodd), there will be a 60-vote requirement to invoke cloture on the FISA bill and for ultimate passage, followed by an allotted 4 hours of post-cloture “debate,” but there will not be any real filibuster to prevent cloture. When Leahy says that he will “join” Dodd’s filibuster, what he means is that he will merely cast a vote against cloture.

Dodd’s efforts against this bill have been quite commendable, and the UC Agreement isn’t completely worthless. It means that Democrats do not need 60 votes, or even 50 votes, to stop this bill. Rather, they only need 41 Senators willing to oppose cloture (which everyone knows they’re not going to get).

Still, Dodd is not, after all, going to lead an actual filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop the bill. Worse, the Republicans are going to be permitted to impose 60-vote requirements on key Democratic amendments without actually having to filibuster at all — exactly the situation which Harry Reid vowed just two weeks ago he would not permit.  Read more 

Via Digby:

Delahunt: You said if an opinion was rendered, that would insulate him from any consequences.

[Mike Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States, before the House Judiciary Committee today]: We could not investigate or prosecute somebody for acting in reliance on a justice department opinion.

…

Delahunt: If that opinion was inaccurate and in fact violated a section of US Criminal Code, that reliance is in effect an immunity from any criminal culpability.

MM: Immunity connoted culpability. [Well, is anyone culpable? -scar]

…

Delahunt: I find that a new legal doctrine. The law is the law.  Read more 

I’ve got to run, so forgive the C&P post direct out of my email box. From CQ:

Legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act remained stalled in the Senate Tuesday, held hostage by a partisan clash over procedures for consideration of an unrelated economic stimulus package.

A frustrated Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complained that Republicans were blocking his efforts to schedule votes on proposed amendments to the bill (S 2248). He questioned Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s commitment to the legislation, saying Republicans have declined to allow FISA to move forward.

“The Orwellian Bush administration has now slopped over into the Senate, and now the Republican leader is now becoming Orwellian himself,” Reid said.  Read more 

Go here. Listen to what Operation Iraqi Freedom hath wrought. Tell me again why Bush, Cheney, Petraeus, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz aren’t in chains before the Hague right now.

All your social networking belong to us:

DAVOS, Switzerland - AT&T Inc. is still evaluating whether to examine traffic on its Internet lines to stop illegal sharing of copyright material, its chief executive said Wednesday.

CEO Randall Stephenson told a conference at the World Economic Forum that the company is looking at monitoring peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, one of the largest drivers of online traffic but also a common way to illegally exchange copyright files.  Read more