obfuscated.org

At it again, our ever compassionate president has called for discrimination to be written in to the constitution. His stated aim is to “protect” marriage. That it is under assault in the first place no doubt comes as news to many. That bigotry will somehow cure any ill certainly comes as news to more.

Bush’s crusade to “save marriage” is often couched as the promotion of “traditional values.” Shining some light on the sort of tradition that Bush and his kind are aiming for, Scalzi recalls George Wallace who stood up in front of the nation to support school segregation. To what end? Did he want to save us from the menace of educated minorities? Now Bush wants to do the same thing and fight to keep us safe from married homosexuals. Where’s the threat? Why the fight?

There are traditional values in danger here, but marriage — which is only in a position to be strengthened if more people adopt it as an institution — isn’t one of them. Granted that some of these values — for example, equal protection of the laws — were only accepted under duress, but I think it’s fair to consider them traditional. Others — Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, for example — are even considered “self-evident” and “unalienable.” If it’s traditional values we need to protect, perhaps we should start with these.

The push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is, at its core, anti-American. It’s bigoted, rooted in hatred and fear and stands against the freedom and tolerance that this nation has fought for time and time again. The fact that our elected leader promotes such an idea is bad enough. That we the people tolerate as much is beyond comprehension.

That Noam Chomsky and his wacky ideas. Doesn’t he know that might makes right and playing nice with others never gets you anywhere? Sheesh!

One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomised society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.

I’d put off reading about el Presidente’s signing statements because, honestly, I’d rather just wait until the coronation to find out that he’s abolished congress and the supreme court and declared himself emperor for life. Anyway, this joyful little nugget appeared as part of the Boston Globe’s piece on W’s executive signing orders.

Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information ”prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay.”

Bush’s signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

This from the guy who supports the teaching of the horriffically harmful pseudoscience intelligent design and takes the word of a science fiction author over that of the science research community. Why do people still stand behind this guy? Seriously. How can one say that they care abour or even vaguely understand the importance of science to this nation or the world as a whole and not denounce this raving lunatic?

A former NSA analyst suggests that the Bush administration’s much-loved warrantless domestic spying program could be causing more harm than good.

This scattershot attempt at data mining drags FBI agents away from real investigations, while destroying the NSA’s credibility in the eyes of law enforcement and the public in general. That loss of credibility makes the NSA the agency that cried wolf — and after so many false leads, should they provide something useful, the data will be looked at skeptically and perhaps given lower priority by law enforcement than it would otherwise have been given.

Worse, FBI agents working real and pressing investigations such as organized crime, child pornography and missing persons are being pulled away from their normal law enforcement duties to follow up on NSA leads. Nobody wants another 9/11, of course, but we experience real crimes on a daily basis that, over the course of even one year, cause far greater loss of life and damage than the 9/11 attacks did. There are children abused on a daily basis to facilitate online child pornography, yet I know of at least two agents who were pulled from their duties tracking down child abusers to investigate everyone who called the same pizza parlor as a person who received a call from a person who received an overseas call. There are plenty of similar examples.

We have snakes in our midst, yet we are chasing a mythical beast with completely unreliable evidence.

Tax prep in California has apparently become too easy in recent years, as the tax prep industry is lobbying to make it more difficult:

Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax?

But what is surprising is that their “arguments” are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its “concerns” about the program - for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient “violates the proper role of government.” Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

I love the “proper role of government” argument. Lord forbid that government make things easy for its citizens. They don’t even charge for it! Clearly government’s role is to prop up industries when and if they become irrelevant.

I think Lessig’s parting comments are worth posting as well:

Free markets aren’t pro-business - they don’t favor incumbent companies if upstarts do the job better. Competition is good wherever it comes from - even the government - so long as it lowers social costs and increases wealth. And efficiency is good regardless of who it might hurt; it is especially good if it hurts those who feed off inefficiency. Thus, lawyers are good, but a world that needed fewer of them would be much better. Doctors are great, but that’s no argument against better health. And TurboTax is fantastic, but it shouldn’t prevent the government from making paying taxes easier.

Are you sick of the federal government playing big brother? Do you think all the terrorists in the world don’t have the potential for bad that a government insistent on illegally spying on its citizens does? Donate to the EFF! They’re suing one of the phone companies complicit in GWB’s extralegal shenanigans. Hopefully they’ll make it to the rest of them sooner rather than later.

In December of 2005, the press revealed that the government had instituted a comprehensive and warrantless electronic surveillance program that ignored the careful safeguards set forth by Congress. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001 and primarily undertaken by the NSA, intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of ordinary Americans.

In the largest “fishing expedition” ever devised, the NSA uses powerful computers to “data-mine” the contents of these Internet and telephone communications for suspicious names, numbers, and words, and to analyze traffic data indicating who is calling and emailing whom in order to identify persons who may be “linked” to “suspicious activities,” suspected terrorists or other investigatory targets, whether directly or indirectly.

But the government did not act-and is not acting-alone. The government requires the collaboration of major telecommunications companies to implement its unprecedented and illegal domestic spying program.

The NSA’s current round of legally-questionable domestic spying is using a technology called “Traffic Analysis” to try to find terrorists. Wikipedia provides a few example where this tool has been used, advantageously or otherwise, in the past.

Admiral Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor Attack Force sailed under radio silence, with its radios physically locked down, and left its radio operators in Japan to simulate ordinary traffic for the benefit of listeners, as, in those days, an operator’s ‘fist’ was individually recognizable. There was a famous exchange on December 2, 1941, five days before the Pearl Harbor attack, between Admiral Husband Kimmel, Pacific Fleet Commander, and his Intelligence Officer, Captain Edwin Layton. Kimmel remarked on the absence of information about Japanese aircraft carriers, and Layton explained that he didn’t know where most of them were. Kimmel then asked whether they might be rounding Diamond Head (a volcano on Hawaii). Layton replied that he didn’t think so. Pearl Harbor was hit five days later.

If the NSA can’t know — in secret — about every telephone call you make, the terrorists have already won.

“Chances are that your cell phone calls, as well as your home phone calls, have been tracked,” said Leslie Cauley, the reporter who broke the story. She said there was a “high likelihood” that this information was being passed on to the FBI and CIA.

The paper reports that three of the nation’s largest phone companies — AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth — have been turning over detailed call histories of all their customers since Sept. 11, 2001, to help the NSA compile what they hope will be “the largest database ever assembled in the world.”

I’m glad W has elected to go the secret police route to cure our nation’s ills. It worked quite so well for Nazi Germany.

MSNBC Gives the president the respect he deserves.

Steven Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner is making the rounds. Some of the quotes from various writeups are hillarious. I can’t wait until I get home so I can watch the whole thing.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk-show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”