politics

Here’s something worth a grin:

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., has become a “major donor” to New York’s biggest gay rights organization, thanks to a gay comedian’s off-Broadway show.

Seth Rudetsky, who stars in the one-man show, “Rhapsody in Seth,” started the Sen. Rick Santorum Education Fund earlier this month by donating 5 percent of all ticket sales to the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) in the senator’s name.

The move was a response to Sen. Santorum’s widely published remarks that compared homosexuality to polygamy and incest. The comments ignited protests from gay groups and Democratic leaders, but most Republican leaders, including President Bush, backed him.

On Friday, the ESPA said donations from the Santorum fund reached “major donor” status (\$1,200 minimum), qualifying the named donor for the Empire Club. A letter thanking the senator and outlining the benefits of club membership was mailed and faxed to his office on Friday.

Sen. Santorum’s press office did not return calls for comment.

(via Atrios)

Another excellent speech from Sen. Byrd. Can we please get more politicians like this man in office?

The entire thing is so well worth reading, it’s hard to choose any snippet for a decent pull quote, but…

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein’s direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

Not satisfied with our current land-based campaigns to keep a grip on the rest of the world (whether they want it or not), it appears the US is looking to lock down space-based tactics also — and other countries don’t get a choice.

The nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time — not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide “persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation’s war fighters.” If allies don’t like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have “no veto power.”

“Insane,” was my first thought. Here’s an arms race that is bound to get dangerous quickly.

(via Ars Technica)

Kirsten mentioned this a couple days ago, and today Wired posted an article, so I figured I’d head over to check out Howard Dean TV. My first three thoughts were…

“Cool idea!”

“Ick — Windows only (sigh).”

“Oh, wait — Quicktime videos too!”

So it looks like us oddball Mac users won’t be completely left out in the cold. I don’t have time to actually watch the videos right now, but I’ll definitely be checking them out in the future.

This is absolutely wonderful to hear — Alaska has become the second state, after Hawaii, to pass a resolution “expressing concern over the federal USA Patriot Act.”

“When we stand on this floor and we salute that flag, the final words that we use are ‘One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” said Sen. Robin Taylor, R-Wrangell. “I take it deadly serious when we start removing groups of people from ‘justice for all.'”

Many congratulations to Alaska, and to every legislator who sponsored and supported this resolution.

(via Kirsten)

Postscript: Think there’s any significance to the fact that the only two states to take such a step so far are the two that aren’t part of the “Lower 48”, but instead are seperated by many miles of land or sea? Just a thought….

Back in January, I (and many other people) were appalled at the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Sonny Bono Act, extending copyrights and essentially preventing anything from entering the public domain.

This morning, Kirsten pointed out that Prof. Larry Lessig (who had been arguing against the Sonny Bono Law) is still working on finding a solution that will both allow Disney (one of the primary lobbyists for the copyright extention) to keep control over Mickey Mouse, and would allow the majority of works to enter the public domain after a limited time period.

Here’s his proposal:

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a \$1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

At the moment, the proposal is ready to go, but Mr. Lessig is in need of a congressperson willing to present the bill. In that vein, he is asking everyone with an interest in this case to write their Representative and Senators to ask for their help.

Jason Buberel has posted a sample letter that can be used, and Prof. Lessig is keeping track of the work at The Eric Eldred Act.

Hopefully, with a little work, we can see our way to a compromise that satisfies the media conglomerates, and yet still allows more and more work to find its way into the public domain for all of us to have access to.

Ever tried to visualize the number one trillion? It’s not easy to do — the number is so big, it’s really difficult to wrap your head around.

1,000,000,000,000

That’s a lot of zeroes. Thankfully, we’ve got places like the MegaPenny project to help us out — it turns out that one trillion pennies would form a cube 273 feet to a side. That’s roughly half the height of the Washington Monument. The cube would weigh approximately 3,125,000 pounds.

Now, just to boggle your mind a bit further: multiply that cube by 100 times, and you’d have the number of pennies that the Department of Defense can’t account for.

The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending \$640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn’t account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.

[…]

Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports suggest the Pentagon’s money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A study by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.

And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet “for pennies on the dollar,” a GAO official said.

As Prairie so eloquently put earlier (and therefore contributed the title for this post) — that’s a big-ass cube.

(via MeFi)

Can’t say I’m dissapointed to read this…

“I informed President Bush last week that after 21 years of doing nothing but government and politics…that I have decided that my time has come to leave the White House. And I will leave later this summer, most likely in July,” Fleischer said.

…I just wish the article wasn’t so frustratingly brief. What prompted this?

(via Atrios)

[Update:]{.underline}

There are a few more details in this CNN article, including this somewhat bizarre little piece of information:

He notified Bush of his decision Friday. The president ended the conversation “by kissing me on the head,” the spokesman said.

So…was this kiss a benediction of some sort? Does Bush now think he’s the Pope? Or maybe just Godfather Coreleone? (Snarky, non-PC possibility — which head? Could we have a scandal to put Clinton/Lewinsky to shame?) It just seems odd to me, behaviour more fitting of a religious figure than a political appointee. But then, given Bush’s conservative religious leanings, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise.

I haven’t read this yet (it’s pushing 2am, and bed is sounding better and better all the time), but the ACLU has released a report on the suppression of dissent in the US since Sept. 11^th^, 2001.

The 18-page report finds that dissent since 9/11 has taken three principal forms: mass protests and rallies, messages on signs or clothing, and other acts of defiance by communities and individuals. These have ranged from silent vigils in parks to the passage of resolutions in more than 100 communities across the country protesting federal measures that violate civil liberties.

Police have beaten and maced protestors in Missouri, charged on horseback into crowds of demonstrators in New York, fired on demonstrators in California, and helped FBI agents to spy on professors and students at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the ACLU report said.

Attorney General Ashcroft’s Justice Department has further asserted the right to seize protesters’ assets and deport immigrants under anti-terrorism statutes rushed through Congress after the attacks, and debated whether to revoke U.S. citizenship in some cases.

The press release and the full report are both available online.

(via Brooke Biggs)