November 2004 Archives

Yesterday Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), one of my favorite politicians, appeared on Meet the Pres. In the discussion he brought up his concern for the way the Congress works these days. A large omnibus spending bill was passed by Congress that was needed to fund most of the federal government. According to McCain it was a collection of nine bills that should have been passed separately, but were not. Nine bills is a lot of pages people, something like 1600 I think he said on the show. They got the bill in the morning and voted on it in the afternoon. No one read it — no one had time to even if they had wanted to. They didn’t want to, they were interested in getting home for the holiday.

Oops, someone on the Appropriations Committee slipped in a provision that wasn’t noticed by anyone before the bill was passed. A provision that would allow members of the Appropriations Committee to view any individual’s US tax return. It is claimed that the committee was simply attempting to “do oversight,” and that “the purpose of the provision was to allow investigators for the top lawmakers responsible for financing the I.R.S. to have access to that agency’s offices around the country and tax records so they could examine how the money was being spent.” John Scofield, spokesman for the Committee said that there was never any interest in looking at people’s tax returns. (see NY Times article)

What other purpose could you have in mind when you give yourself authority to look at my tax returns than to look at my tax returns? I don’t buy that and it like one more way the Congress has failed not only to conscientiously review legislation before passage (read the USA PATRIOT Act), but to protect individual (privacy) rights.

UPDATE: In my original post, I failed to mention that leaders from the House and Senate denounced the provision and vowed to correct it in a special session before the recess.

A message from Pat Robertson and the “Vote No On Jesus” campaign.

For all of you uptight people out there, take notice this is filed under “Funny”.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In our original post we neglected to mention that this post came via AMAZO. We make it a point to attribute our reblogs and regret the error.]

Everyone’s favorite moral nanny, Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, is worried about the legacy fo Walt Disney people. What a good guy. Powell is again using his bully pulpit to complain about lax morals on network television. This time his target is ABC and its new Monday Night Football intro sequence, which is apparently pretty “hot and steamy.”

Doesn’t this schmuck have anything else to do, like, I dunno, fixing the massive give away of public airwaves to broadcasters, or ensuring that they produce enough content that serves the public interest (even if it is a bit steamy).

[via Yahoo! News]

Using the same technology ranchers employ to track cattle and Wal-Mart uses to track a bazillion pallets of Cheap Chinese Tchochkies, school officials in Spring, Texas have outfitted 28,000 kids with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. The goal of the tags is to prevent kidnappings and also could be used to expand the local cattle yards output.

[via the New York Times]

Jason Kottke impresses me daily with great material, both original and reblogged stuff. After the presidential election he wrote a generally great post explaining why he thought the things turned out the way they did. I largly agree with him.

I don’t think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, “conveniently” split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We’re told we have two different choices — you’re rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy — and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. […] I can’t count how many times in the last two days I’ve heard self-righteous “liberals” call the entire middle of the country “stupid”. […] We’re not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our “red state” brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.

He’s right of course, it does seem to me that people tend to get caught up in the party lines. When I was back in Texas about a week and a half after the election, I listened as every friend and family member repeated back to me the mantras of the Bush campaign: “Kerry is a week loser, who doesn’t know what way the wind is blowing until the politics of the moment tell him, and he is a Liberal to boot.” And just as Kottke says, my liberal friends and colleagues spouted off about the war in Iraq and Bush’s utter idiocy.

I love my friends and family and respect the people that I work with, but I don’t believe that many of them truly understood the issues and could say with surety that their beliefs were based on much more than TV news swill and the party line from political ads. I can also say that I doubt many of them care, either.

[read Kottke.org]

One site has recently crept into my daily blog reading, Regret the Error. It’s basically a collection corrections run by newspapers, usually funny or interesting ones. Often they are corrections on corrections. This post is basically stolen from Regret.

A correction run by the Economist in May, 2001. They get away with using the word cock, as only the British can.

In our last issue…we may have given the impression that the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh had been exemplary; that the trial of the Oklahoma City bomber had followed the legal textbook to the letter (“none of the usual tales about drunk lawyers and uncalled witnesses”); and that, “barring a miracle”, he would be executed on May 16th. However, the FBI having suddenly discovered 3,000-odd pages of evidence that Mr McVeigh’s lawyers should have received before his trial, and his execution having thus been postponed to June 11th (at least), we now accept unreservedly that we should have always known the Bureau was bound to cock it up in the end.

I don’t know how many of you use news aggregators (Google News, Yahoo! News) to get the headlines, but I recently rediscovered a great one. It’s called Newsmap. What’s so cool is it displays headlines according to timelyness and importance, with bigger news appearing at the top left of the category square and older, less important news at the opposite corner. It’s cooler than I am making it sound. Check it out.

From the Newsmap site:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

For your lexicographic edification, I present a word:

tercel (TUR-sel)

The male of a hawk, especially of the peregrine falcon or a goshawk.

New York City has one of the coolest things for finding information. It’s not 911 and it’s not 411, it’s 311, the city’s information service. You can dial them up to report noise in your neighborhood, find out which city agency deals with water pressure complaints, ask where the nearest park is, or any number of other questions.

Read at Wired

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) on the president’s immigration reform plan from last January.

… and if they send the same pig with lipstick back to Congress next January, it will suffer the same fate.

Today is henceforth a day of joy and celebration for John Ashcroft has resigned as Attorney General of the United States. In his resignation letter Ashcroft said that the “demands of justice are both rewarding and depleting,” but forgot to add that he was never up to it in the first place because he is a small-minded freak.

Two down four to go.

[via Yahoo! News]

McSweeny’s has a summary of General Broadcasting Standards Concerning Upper-torso Nudity that every contentious TV viewer needs to look over. I promise you won’t regret it.

(Sorry Julie.)

Everyone’s bastion of moderate Liberalism, New Yorker magazine, has chimed in on the Bush “ownership society”. I haven’t thought much about this part of the president’s campaign message but I probably should have because it sounds like more of this “rugged individualism” run amuck. As I was telling some friends this weekend, I am generally in favor of individual responsibility and paying for one’s mistakes and vice versa, however, there is such a thing as social responsibility. The idea that as an aggregate body we, as Americans, are in some way mutually responsible for the welfare of one another. By no means should I be supporting my neighbor’s lavish lifestyle or even a their moderate one. This is not the same as saying that I want to make sure that programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are intended to help those in the most acute need, are bolstered not undermined.

The Drudge Report tonight says that Attorney General John Ashcroft plans to submit his resignation to the president the next few days. I’m not religious and I don’t pray, but I am praying for this to be true.

A new look at the US of A.

Yesterday, citizens in 10 states voted to approve constitutional amendments banning same sex marriages, including a very sweeping measure in Ohio, which bans an arrangement that eve looks like a marriage. Oregon is the only state with such a measure on the ballot that rejected the move.

It may make me wince to think about the effects of these efforts, but I have to say that this is all the more argument against things like the Federal Marriage Amendment. The states have always decided marriage issues, and oh my god, they managed to decide this one without the help of the federal constitution.

The system isn’t broken, it’s people making crazy decisions that screw things up.

The combination of the reelection of President Bush and the bolstered Republican control of the Senate have the potential to be completely disastrous over the next four year. Not only was the President reelected but now he has a mandate to lead that was laking in his previous term. Although this apparently has never made much of a difference, I expect that he will take full advantage of it now. I also predict that we will see major legislative announcements from the White House and the Congress, i.e. dismantling the progressive tax system, expanded environmental “reforms,” etc.

Most of all I am frightened for the integrity of the Supreme Court. In the next four years two or three justices may retire over age or health concerns. If this president, who is so beholden to conservative Christians, the gun lobby, and big business, is able to appoint even one justice, the impact of the Court will be not only destructive but incredibly long lasting. Will we see the likes of another Antonin Scalia? This is a justice who refuses to allow his public speeches to be recorded, either by video or audio; and has ordered federal marshals to confiscate and destroy tapes legally made a reporter under First Amendment protections. He is rash and his opinions are more statements of conservative values than of good jurisprudence.

I don’t doubt the outcome of yesterday’s election; barring a miracle in Ohio, President Bush was reelected with a comfortable popular margin and a very decisive Electoral College margin. As always I respect the office of the president, but I think that American’s have made a very poor choice in leadership. It is not a Republican or a Democratic issue, it is an issue of good judgment, fair leadership, responsibility (in all its forms), and respect for American values.

The New York Times published this helpful list of information about election day.

1. Know where to go. In many states, you will not be allowed to vote if you show up at the wrong polling place. Worse still, you may be given a provisional ballot to vote on that will later be thrown out. Your board of elections can tell you where to vote. If you can’t reach the board, a nonpartisan hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE, has a polling place locator. So does the Web site www.mypollingplace.com.

5. Know your rights concerning provisional ballots. No voter can be turned away in any state this year without being allowed to vote. If there is a question about your eligibility, you must be allowed to vote on a provisional ballot, the validity of which will be determined later. But if you are entitled to vote on a regular ballot, you should insist on doing so, since a provisional ballot may be disqualified later on a technicality.

6. Know where to turn for help. If you experience problems voting, or if you see anything improper at the polls, you may want to get help. There will be nonpartisan poll monitors at many polling places. (There may also be partisan poll watchers, and it’s possible one of them may be the person objecting to your voting.) It is a good idea to bring a cellphone, and phone numbers of nonpartisan hotlines like the Election Protection program’s 1-866-OURVOTE and Common Cause’s 1-866-MYVOTE1.

7. Be prepared for long lines. In some precincts, the wait may stretch into hours. Try to get to your polling place very early in the morning, or between the before-work and after-work rushes. As long as you are in line before the polls close, you are legally entitled to vote. Do not let poll workers close the polls until you have voted.

Vote tomorrow, it’s your right and it is worth it!