Politics

Lott said he would survive any challenge to his post as majority leader, and Tuesday he picked up the support of a few GOP senators, including Alaska’s Ted Stevens, who vowed to “defend my friend.” Others who have voiced support for Lott include Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Michael DeWine of Ohio.

The comments from Stevens, the second-most senior Republican senator, were one of the strongest endorsements of Lott since he set off a political firestorm when he praised Thurmond’s unsuccessful presidential bid at a birthday party December 5. Praise of that campaign drew condemnation — from President Bush and others — because Thurmond ran on a segregationist platform.

Stevens said he believes Lott meant the comments as praise for Thurmond as a military man and longtime Senate colleague — not praise for his past segregationist ways. He said Lott’s comments have been blown “out of proportion.”

From CNN.com, “Lott vows to fight for leadership job”

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sen. Stevens’ turn the Senatorial spot over to someone else — though that’s not likely to happen until he dies. Ah, well.

Drug company Eli Lilly is the maker of the drug Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that used to be a common ingredient in childhood vaccines. There is now substantial evidence that due to the mercury content, Thimerosal may be the cause of autism in many, many children, and Eli Lilly has been facing a number of lawsuits from parents looking for some help in caring for their children that were affected by the drug from this company.

Unfortunately, at the last minute, a provision was inserted into the Homeland Security Act that protects Eli Lilly from these lawsuits, moving the suits from state courts to a federal ‘vaccine court’ where damages are capped at $250,000.

And apparently, nobody knows how this piece of legislation got into the bill.

Now there is a $10,000 reward being offered for anyone who can identify who inserted this provision into the Homeland Security Act.

Lots more information on the issue can be found on TomPaine.com’s links to articles, with Counterspin digging into the background a bit.

(Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the heads-up.)

Now that Al Gore has decided to step out of the ring for the next presidential race, the field looks pretty wide open. A few months ago, or even now, there wouldn’t be much chance of ousting Dubya from office, but who knows where things might stand in a couple years. In the meantime, I don’t really know much about any of the other potential Democratic candidates, so it was nice to see a quick rundown on the current possibilities over on BackupBrain last Sunday. Definitely gives me an idea of who to keep an eye on.

Lieberman: He’ll definitely run. …but there’s not a chance in hell that he could win against Bush in the general. Deplorably, there are too many people in this country that still will not vote for a Jew for president.

Kerry: He’s already running. …my issue with Kerry is part of the problem that Gore has: he’s so cautious, you think that everything coming out of his mouth has been pre-digested, run by a focus group, and vetted six ways from Sunday.

Edwards: Not this time, John. He’s smart, attractive, and he’s from the South, all of which helps a winner. But he’s a first-term senator, and he’s still finding out how things work in Washington.

Gephardt: He’s run for president before. He lost. …under his fabulous leadership, last month Democrats lost the best chance to regain the House for the next decade. He’s on the wrong side of many issues for me.

Daschle: He’s been a crappy Majority Leader. Period. Last week, he let Trent Lott off the hook for his racist comments, for pity’s sake. He can’t see a friggin’ red-meat issue when it slaps him in the face.

Howard Dean: (who?) This guy is already running. …at the moment, he’s the candidate with the best lineup on the issues. He’s a doctor, has, by all accounts, been a pretty good governor, and is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That works for me. …I like this quote: “I have no patience with ideologues. I think they’re fundamentally disturbed.”

Biden, Feingold, Dodd, Wesley Clark: Puh-leeze.

Well, actually, it’s more or less what I said, only better written, and without using pull quotes from other sites for 90% of the content.

OK, the joke’s over. Will someone tell that chowderhead in the White House to stop playing his Fantasy President computer game and get serious? He exhumes John Poindexter, a retired Navy admiral who was such a bumbler and scoundrel that he got fired by the Reagan administration after being convicted of lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal and he puts Poindexter in charge of the Information Awareness Office, which has a legal right to tap electronic information about you, including your prescription records, bank statements, buying patterns, telephone, travel, etc.

While we’re reeling from that, Bush digs up the most gruesome, festering corpse in the catacombs of crooked government, and he puts HENRY KISSINGER in charge of an investigation into the 9/11/01 attacks. This is worse than putting the fox into the henhouse. At least the fox is up front about his intentions. Kissinger is so crooked he can watch himself walking out of the room. If the families of the people lost on 9/11 had any hopes for a fair and just account of what happened, they can forget it.

— Ray Holley, editor for the Healdsburg Tribune, as quoted by Dori Smith

This is why I’m a ‘blogger’, and he’s a newspaper editor.

I don’t have the posts available at the moment to reference (I’m still in the process of resurrecting all my posts from April through August of this year after my webserver crashed), but if you’ve been checking in on me for a bit, you may remember my being up in arms about Operation TIPS. In essence, this was a to be a government-sponsored system for US citizens to snitch on each other, calling on postal workers, utility workers, and anyone who volunteered to “turn in” people they suspected of “suspicious activity”. Ick.

Well, according to Wired news today, one of the upsides to the recently passed ‘Homeland Security Act’ was the nixing of the TIPS program.

A controversial government initiative to recruit Americans to spy on each other in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks was quietly killed with the passage of the Homeland Security Act.

Caught in a hail of criticism, the Justice Department decided not to engage mail or utility workers in the program. Officials then toned down the TIPS website, deleting references to the one million snoops and excising the exhortation to “Volunteer now!”

In July, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), introduced legislation to ban TIPS (Sec. 880). The bill also prevented the Justice Department from using the Homeland Security Act as a launch pad to create a National ID system (Sec. 1514), and to create a Privacy Officer (Sec. 222).

“Mr. Armey was adamant about keeping those provisions in the bill,” said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Armey, who recently retired after 18 years in Congress. “He felt the programs were not consistent with free society.”

Kudos to Mr. Armey for standing up for the freedoms of his constituents — I have to wonder of that was doubly galling for Pres. Bush, as Mr. Armey was representing Bush’s home state! A pity he recently retired, but at least he got some good work in before he stepped down.

On the “lose some” side of the equation, however, we’ve still got the Homeland Security Act itself to cope with, full of goodies like provisions allowing ISPs to turn over customer’s e-mail records without a warrant, and of course, Mr. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System.

Wheeeeeee.

High school students nationwide may be surprised to know that the Pentagon knows their name, address and phone number.

A provision of a new federal education law requires high schools to hand over the information for recruiting purposes, or risk losing federal funds.

— via Boing Boing

Just freaky. I suppose I can kind of understand that school rosters would be a prime source for recruiting people (though I’d prefer that the government at least waited until people were 18, and just stuck to colleges), but threatening to withold funding if they don’t get the rosters? That’s just ridiculous.

So, over the past few weeks, it’s been announced that Henry Kissinger is heading up the 9/11 inquiry, and John Poindexter is the new head of the Total Information Awareness office. And we’re supposed to accept these announcements as good decisions?

When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the “secret bombing” of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church’s commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile. Rep. Otis Pike’s parallel inquiry in the House (which brought to light Kissinger’s personal role in the not-insignificant matter of the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, among other offenses) was thwarted by Kissinger at every turn, and its eventual findings were classified. In other words, the new “commission” will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public.

— Slate, “The Latest Kissinger Outrage — Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation? (via Antipixel)

Some people are suspicious that the degenerate Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness system will be used to harass and track the activities of people who some significant fraction of society disagree with. They fear a replacement of today’s general tolerance (and official blindness to one’s Bill-of-Rights-protected activities such as speech and association), with specific harassment of those whose names pop up in the database. Such harassment of people who are not reasonably suspected of criminal activity would destroy much of value in our society, such as the presumption of innocence and the “live and let live” philosophy that encourages diversity. Offering dissidents “a death of a thousand cuts” by constantly harassing them and denying them the privileges of ordinary life would be far worse than charging them with a (bogus) crime, which they could clear up merely by demonstrating their innocence in court.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink’s system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for “People finder”. (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to “publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally”.) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

— Eyeballing Total Information Awareness (via Aaron Swartz)

I think if I could cringe any more violently, I’d implode.