Don't just tell Congress to stop the spying -- show them.

Countless citizens have told Congress to reject telecom immunity, but the Senate is still threatening to pass a bill giving immunity to lawbreaking phone companies. It's time to get creative and move beyond words. Let's show our elected representatives who supports the rule of law -- ordinary Americans from across the country.

These photographs are fun but doesn't taking a picture of yourself alongside your political opinion violate the privacy these people are fighting for? Clearly, the ones in this flikr pool will be the first rounded up when the panic begins.

(For an interesting opposing view, see this.)

Stop The Spying

Via the Democratic Caucus...

I'm rerecommending this chart because of the data it contains and not because of the conclusions it seeks to have you draw from that data.

The Bush Administration is certainly directly responsible for some of the changes on this list, such as international opinion of the US, and the increases in our budget and trade deficits.

However, in many respects this chart is pure partisan bullshit. The most starkly annoying aspect is the inclusion of US dependence on foreign oil as a percentage of total oil consumption by the party that faught domestic oil exploration in Alaska. You're blaiming your partisan enemy for the inevitable consequences of the policies you advocated. That's as low as it gets.

Many of the items on this list, such as the increase in oil prices and the amount of job creation, are related to aspects of the business cycle or developments in the global economy that aren't the direct responsibility of the Bush administration. Some, such as changes in the cost of insurance and the number of people insured, are more clearly political, but are the fault of a wide array of actors and not just the Presidency. In fact, the Administration did work on the insurance problem.

The things that I like about this chart are political but I don't see them as directly related to Bush. The most important statistic, I think, is the median household income. It dropped. In 8 years, it dropped.

Thats why our economy is contracting. Because in 8 years businesses have become more productive and they have increased their value but the people who live in this country haven't benefited. The only reason they've had more money to spend is because of phony inflation of the price of their homes built upon irresponsible credit mechanisms.

I suspect a lot of the real value is moving overseas. The question is whether American growth is just going to stop until the rest of the world catches up and our workers become competitive again? Thats going to take a long time. And I don't think its a problem that the Democrats are in a position to solve, although I suspect replacing the H1-B program with a permanent residency system would have a substantial impact.

The Legacy of George W Bush's Presidency

possibly noteworthy wrote:
And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap

Censors are always asserting that the thing they wish the censor has no real value anyway. They are usually wrong. Having just spent two weeks in Europe the assertion that tap water is "about as good as bottled water" is almost as laughable as the idea that you can get carbonated water from a tap. But why do Americans drink bottled water? Its convenient.

At home you don't have to bother filling bottles yourself, you don't have to keep track of the bottles after you are finished, and you can keep it in the fridge where it will be cold when you need it. And when you pop into a convenience store or use a drink machine you are generally presented with a collection of high calorie drinks and a few disgusting diet beverages with artificial sweeteners that don't quite taste right, as well as bottled water. While I deeply wish beverage manufacturors would market prepackaged zero calorie drinks that were genuinely tasty, like unsweet tea or crystal lite, they simply don't. I have to assume most Americans don't want such things. For the rest of us there is bottled water.

Americans would be better off if they drank more bottled water, instead of the myriad kinds of bottled corn syrup they instead injest, which surely cannot be better for the environment. Is it really the case that water bottles out number Coke bottles in our nations land fills? Impossible! This country has a serious obesity problem, and I'll admit my personal contribution to it. Ending that starts with a reduction in caloritic intake.

But I'm sure environmentalists will soon start admonishing me for drinking bottled water (ignoring those who drink bottled Coke), just as they have admonished me for driving a Ford Explorer (ignoring those who drive sports cars) and before that they admonished me for using a cell phone (ignoring the impact of overhead telephone wires). These are people who rejoice in the opportunity to tell you off for engaging in a behavior that they disapprove of, particularly if that behavior is new or high tech. They are like the church ladies of a prior generation. Punk rock made them liberal but didn't quell their taste for self-aggrandizing social control.

Instead of organizing armies to fight the popularity of bottled water why don't these people advocate that water bottling companies use bio-degradable bottles?

RE: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'

IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Hear, Hear

IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says - washingtonpost.com

Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

This is a good article. Fortunately, this relationship looks likely to continue for the time being, and it is the reason the present economic problems haven't turned into an all out catastrophy... The Chinese are literally bailing out our banks.

The $1.4 Trillion Question

The US is at risk of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating within a decade unless it takes radical action to curb soaring healthcare and social security spending, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, said on Thursday.

The warning over the future of the triple-A rating – granted to US government debt since it was first assessed in 1917 – reflects growing concerns over the country’s ability to retain its financial and economic supremacy.

What is the Democrat's Social Security Plan?

FT.com / World - Moody’s says spending threatens US rating

ubernoir wrote:
Stanley Fish takes apart a piece of non-sense so-called independents simply occupy the idealogical interzone between the parties, the fuzzy edge where the skimishing is and the general election battle takes place. The primary system is organising the army and deciding battle order before the fight, it not just about deciding who's in charge it's about designing, or at least building, the Spitfire to win the crucial battle. Independents are the World War 2 equivilant of Italy on one side and then the other.

I disagree with this perspective so completely that its hard to know where to start with it. Let me break this issue down into four parts:

1. There are reasons to select a leader that have nothing to do with politics. You are voting for people as well as their opinions. Some people are more qualified to handle top leadership positions than others, and those qualifications exist regardless of politics. While the author claims that voting for this reason is stupid, he doesn't do so convincingly. Incompetent people make incompetent appointments. These things matter in a way that is perhaps difficult for radical partisans, like the author, to understand. 99% of what needs to be done isn't a matter of partisan politics, its a matter of professionalism, and getting the right answers matters.

2. There are completely consistent political perspectives that do not fit neatly into one of the party frameworks. In fact the two parties in the United States are driven by radical participants in the primary process and are greatly split to the degree that neither faithfully represents what most Americans actually think. Furthermore, they themselves are not self consistent. The Republican party is an allegiance of economic libertarians who support federalism mostly as an avenue to limiting the overall power of governments, and social conservatives who support federalism mostly as an avenue to cut civil liberties protections without federal interference. Only the most small minded Republican cheerleaders fail to understand the difference between these two, mutually opposed positions, one of which seeks to minimize government power and the other which seeks to maximize it. In the Democratic party the philosophical lines are less stark, but here you have ACLU style civil liberties advocates who are aligned, mostly through mutual opposition to conservative designs on abortion clinics, with the women's movement, which is associated with efforts to censor video games, rock music, and other pop culture and advocates gun control. Its not really possible for a thinking person to agree with all of these positions simultaneously.

3. Open minded, well informed voters are the enemies of organized power and subtle, private interests. The party system uses ideology and peer pressure to turn the well informed voters into closed minded ones, ensuring that party managers (and their funding sources) main... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Against Independent Voters - Stanley Fish - Think Again - Opinion - New York Times Blog

You can now preview your posts before submitting them. Please let me know if you run into any problems with this.

As 2008 dawns, it has become apparent that though this strategy engendered many unforeseen costs, it has proven successful at grinding al Qaeda into nonfunctionality. Put simply, the jihadist war is all but over; the United States not only is winning but also has an alliance with the entire constellation of Sunni powers that made al Qaeda possible in the first place. The United States will attempt to use this alliance to pressure the remnants of al Qaeda and its allies, as well as those in the region who are not in the alliance.

According to Freidman the GWOT is mostly over. Conservative election year rhetoric about the threat of Al'Queda will be just as hard to square against this reality as liberal demands for immediate withdrawl from Iraq are hard to square against developments there. The later, however, can be despun, as obviously some scaling back is imminent, and liberals can cast those withdrawls as the product of domestic political victory even if they're not. The former is very different... Consider the comment Chertoff made last week:

When I lift my eyes and look around the world and I look at what happens in Britain and Germany and Spain and Bali and Pakistan, I don't see terrorism going away, I see an al Qaeda that's emboldened...

Frankly, you'd think it would be in their interest for word to get out that they won the war. If anything, this kind of rhetoric emboldens conspiracy theories that Bin Lauden has been kept alive because of his usefulness as a wedge against the Constitution. Remember, these anti-terrorism security measures are useful for pursuing all kinds of policy objectives,

including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

Friedman Writes Back » Annual Forecast 2008: Beyond the Jihadist War

01.18.08 : desktop zen

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