Patriot II raising ire

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Finally, some good movement happening on the polictical front — a very welcome change from last week’s ranting and raving. It seems that the recently-leaked ‘Patriot II’ draft, in addition to getting attention in the blogging world, is also raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill.

Unlike its hastily passed predecessor, the Justice Department’s wide-ranging follow-up to the Patriot Act of 2001 is already facing intense scrutiny, just days after a civil rights group posted a leaked version of the legislation on its website.

The legislation, nicknamed Patriot II, would broadly expand the government’s surveillance and detention powers. Among other measures, it calls for the creation of a terrorist DNA database and allows the attorney general to revoke citizenship of those who provide “material support” to terrorist groups.

Despite assurances to lawmakers that no bill was in the works, the Justice Department internally circulated a confidential 120-page summary and text of the Domestic Security and Enhancement Act in early January.

Given the intense attention already focused on this bill, some doubt it will be introduced soon.

“This is a very audacious bill designed to strike while the iron is still hot, but I wonder if it is still hot,” said Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center . “There is already resistance to new government surveillance powers .”

“This is something you have on the shelf,” said Hoofnagle. “You wait for an opportune moment, like going to war, to introduce it. They call this a draft, but this bill is definitely close to final and gives a good road map of what the Justice Department wants.”

Recommend me?

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Actually, I’m not out to be a boyfriend right now — pretty happy staying single for the foreseeable future — but I can think of plenty of times when I wouldn’t have minded getting a recommendation on greatboyfriends.com! It’s a really clever idea, too —

DOLLS! We all have charming male friends…smart, noble, successful, honest, good-looking guys who’re between girlfriends…or who’re just a tad shy…or who’ve had bad luck with women.

Here’s the open-hearted place where we women can write-up recommendations of these wonderful fellows, show their pictures and vouch for them. And here’s the delicious part. If you want to FIND a great boyfriend, Darling, you have all these lovely men to choose from!

(Via Jeremy Zawodny)

Awww – how sweet!

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WUDI LOVE

Just a little “Wüdi love” from me to my readers, in honor of the coming Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, even I can get a little mushy from time to time. Who knew?

If you want some cheap and fairly risque amusment, take a look at this list of recently created hearts. Some of them are pretty predictable, but some of them amuse me to no end. Just don’t expect them all to be lovey-dovey. Consider yourself warned.

(Thanks to the ACME Heart Maker, via Jeremy Zawodny)

Still tempin'

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My boss got back to me with Xerox’s employment offer. What did they use to try to entice me into the Xerox family?

A position as a Xerox temp (as opposed to a third-party temp contracted to Xerox) with an \$11/hr pay rate (I’m getting \$11.20 through the temp agency) with no holiday or vacation pay (which I get through the temp agency) and no medical benefits (which I’m eligible for through the temp agency).

Needless to say, I turned them down, and re-started another 18-month cycle as a temp contracting to Xerox. My boss is still optimistic about future possibilities, but he made it clear without actually saying so that he thought it would be in my best interest to do what I did and stick with the temp agency. So, for now, I’m still where I was before, with no real changes for better or for worse. Guess I’ll keep keeping my eyes open.

Anybody know of any Dream Job openings?

Impeach Bush?

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Could it be time to start thinking about impeaching Bush? Realistically, we’re probably not at a point where it’s going to happen, but that hasn’t stopped some people from considering the idea — including Johnson Administration US Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Mr. Clark has drafted articles of impeachment, outlining the crimes and misdemeanors that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft should answer for, and the Vote to Impeach website is collecting ‘signatures’ to move the process forward.

The U.S. Constitution provides the means for preventing George W. Bush from engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, and from advancing a first strike potentially nuclear preemptive war. It’s called impeachment.

Impeachment is the direct constitutional means for removing a President, Vice President or other civil officers of the United States who has acted or threatened acts that are serious offenses against the Constitution, its system of government, or the rule of law, or that are conventional crimes of such a serious nature that they would injure the Presidency if there was no removal.

Impeachment appears six times in the U.S. Constitution. The Founders weren’t concerned with anything more than with impeachment because they had lived under King George III and had in 1776 accused the king of all the things that George W. Bush wants to do: Usurpation of the power of the people; Being above the law; Criminal abuse of authority.

(Via Stavros)

Cookies finally fixed!

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Thanks to a comment answering a question of Jonathon’s, I’m about 95% sure that the cookies for djwudi.com are finally being set correctly, so that the comment forms will actually remember your information, instead of just teasing you with the possibility that they might remember one day if they feel like it.

Turns out it was just six characters I needed to add to the JavaScript code in the template. Sheez.

In Scott’s words from his post on Jonathon’s page (emphasis mine):

The cookie code does not pass a path, so the browser by default make the path that of the calling page.

In other words, the code really was setting the cookies — but only for one page at a time. This led to some of the confusion, where both Dyanna and I thought it was working at first, then it wasn’t working again. We’d leave a comment and the cookie would get set for that page, so when the page reloaded, our info was there, and it looked like it worked. But then, as soon as we went to another page, the info was lost again.

Luckily, the fix is easy enough:

If you want the cookies to apply to the entire site, you can adjust the code to pass the path ‘/’ as a parameter…

function rememberMe (f) {
var now = new Date();
fixDate(now);
now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
}

function forgetMe (f) {
deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
deleteCookie('mtcmthome', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
f.email.value = '';
f.author.value = '';
f.url.value = '';
}

The bolded bits in the above code were the only parts of my individual entry template I had to change — once those were fixed, I rebuilt my site, and things actually seem to be working now!

The reason that this problem doesn’t affect most people is that by default, MT stores all archives in a single directory. Since every archive page is pulled from the directory the cookie is set for, it works fine.

I’ve adjusted my archives to fall into directories based upon when they are posted — for instance, this entry will end up in the /archives/2003/02/10/ directory. So, when the cookies are only set for one directory at a time, it causes problems. By adding the slash to the above lines of JavaScript, the cookie is set for the entire site, and will be read for every page, no matter which directory it lives in.

Much better.

Just in case things weren't tense enough

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North Korea is entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against the US rather than wait until the American military have finished with Iraq, the North’s foreign ministry told the Guardian yesterday.

“The United States says that after Iraq, we are next”, said the deputy director Ri Pyong-gap, “but we have our own countermeasures. Pre-emptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the US.”

I have got to find some more cheerful news to post soon, this is getting ridiculous.

Blacker than black

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For my last birthday, my parents sent me a t-shirt with the phrase, “I’m only wearing black until they make something darker.”

Well, according to New Scientist, researchers just did make something darker!

Researchers have created the blackest black ever made on Earth, by bubbling a shiny metal plate in nitric acid for a few seconds.

It reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections in instruments. And this means the super-black coating may one day help improve the vision of the Hubble Space Telescope, says Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL.

Okay, so forget the telescopes. When can I start buying new clothing?

(Via Boing Boing)

Rebutting Powell

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I just stumbled across a very well written rebuttal to Powell’s UN address in the Pakistan Daily Times: World Views: Rebutting Powell:

If one believes everything Colin Powell said to the Security Council on February 5^th^, one’s first response ought to be that there’s no reason to fight a war, since US surveillance capabilities are so awesome that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) can easily be found. And one’s first question should be why has the United States for over two months withheld this apparently so damaging evidence from those weapons inspectors, who could have verified conjectures and destroyed WMD stocks and production facilities.

If indeed the evidence presented is of the character claimed by Powell, then the United States has chosen to sabotage UN Security Council Resolution 1441, clause 10 of which “Requests all Member States to give full support to UNMOVIC and the IAEA in the discharge of their mandates, including by providing any information related to prohibited programmes.”

[…]

It is becoming increasingly likely that the United States will obtain a Security Council resolution authorizing war. And if it does, its main argument will be that it must go to war with Iraq to uphold international law. It’s important to understand ahead of time just how obscene that argument is. It’s not just because the United States has systematically undermined international law with regard to Iraq, by refusing to acknowledge the basis (disarmament) for lifting the sanctions, by committing repeated acts of illegal aggression against Iraq (like the Desert Fox bombing), and by deliberately making the sanctions bite Iraqi society as hard as possible for purely political reasons (see “Economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction,” Joy Gordon, Harper’s, November 2002). It’s not just because the United States enforces a double standard, in which itself and favoured allies are exempt from legal requirements while states it decided to target are not.

It’s because this war is a violation of the ultimate international law. It is a “crime against peace,” a war of aggression. It was decided on long ago in the White House, and the only reason other countries may vote in support of it is the repeated statements that the war will happen whether they want it or not. It is the United States holding not just Iraq but the entire world hostage.