Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

Wynne also said the Air Force, which is already chopping 40,000 active duty, civilian and reserves jobs, is now struggling to find new ways to slash about $1.8 billion (€1.4 billion) from its budget to cover costs from the latest round of base closings.

He said he can't cut more people, and it would not be wise to take funding from military programs that are needed to protect the country. But he said he also incurs resistance when he tries to save money on operations and maintenance by retiring aging aircraft.

"We're finding out that those are, unfortunately, prized possessions of some congressional districts," said Wynne

FCC ordered media study destroyed, lawyer says

The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin

Princeton Professor Hacks Electronic Voting Machine

Remember that the vote is the cornerstone of Democracy.

Felten and graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman found that malicious programs could be placed on the Diebold by accessing the memory card slot and power button, both behind a locked door on the side of the machine. One member of the group was able to pick the lock in 10 seconds, and software could be installed in less than a minute, according to the report.

The researchers say they designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.

The programs were able to modify vote totals or cause machines to break down, something that could alter the course of an election if machines were located in crucial polling stations.

It was also possible to design a computer virus to spread malicious programs to multiple machines by piggybacking on a new software download or an election information file being transferred from machine to machine, Felten said.

"I think there are many people out there who have the type of technical ability to carry out the sort of attacks we describe here," he said.

Save your "lib" comments

Do me a favor Mike. In respect to the thousands that died 5 years ago today, please limit your self to thoughtful posts. Just a request: take fivee minutes to look at the links then five minutes to think.

Lou Dobbs

Fire fighters

I will be adding to this post later today...

Your privacy for sale

In an interview on Meet the Press , I saw the new FEMA director say this is the company that will be used to identify recipients of aid in the future:

the practices of the data collectors can rob you of your privacy, threaten you with ID theft, and profile you as, say, a deadbeat or a security risk. Worse, there’s no way to find out what they are telling others about you. When our reporters requested their own records, they were told that they could not see everything that was routinely sold to businesses. The meager information they did receive was punctuated with errors.

CIA branch invests in technology companies to help improve spying

In 2004 CallMiner, a company specializing in capturing and translating voice recordings into searchable databases, sought out In-Q-Tel, according to Cliff LaCoursiere, CallMiner's co-founder and senior vice president of business development.

Although software already exists to translate voice into text, CallMiner says it can extract more than just words from a recording. According to LaCoursiere, its software can translate conversations for not only what the people are saying, but the intent of what they were saying. For example, the company claims the software can figure out if a caller looking for technical assistance from a call center is sincerely, or sarcastically, saying, "Thank you for your help."

So far, CallMiner's products are being used by Comcast, Continental Airlines and several other clients. LaCoursiere says CallMiner's products aren't yet being used by the intelligence community, but "it's an area we're aggressively going after." In August, CallMiner launched an application making it easier to use its tools with foreignlanguages.

Am I the only one who completely missed this?

Judiciary Committee chair Orrin Hatch eventually admitted the hacking. He suspended (with pay) one of his own junior staffers and declared himself "mortified" and "shocked," adding, "There is no excuse that can justify these improper actions." It now appears that Manuel Miranda, a senior aide to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, distributed the e-mails to right-wing lobbying groups and propaganda outfits. Miranda previously worked for the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and was a public advocate for defeated Bush nominees like Miguel Estrada.

So much for checks and balances

Judge Yuri Hofmann on Tuesday afternoon dismissed the lawsuit brought by San Diego voters contesting the June 6 election of Brian Bilbray to California's 50th Congressional district seat. Bilbray was sworn in to Congress while his election was not yet certified and the vote count was not yet complete. These are but some of the many grounds cited for the election challenge. But no matter how damning the evidence, it would not get its day in court.

The motion to dismiss, filed by defendant Bilbray, claimed the court has no jurisdiction. Indeed, Hofmann cited numerous precedents of courts keeping their distance from a legislative fray.

Homeland Security and Jon Binet

Suwat said U.S. authorities informed Thai police on Aug. 11 that an arrest warrant had been issued for Karr on charges of premeditated murder. The warrant was sent to Thai police on Wednesday.

“Through investigation we were able to determine where his residence was and the Thais arrested him,” Hurst said. “He did not resist. He did express surprise.”

The U.S. Homeland Security official said Karr had left the United States several years ago and had not returned.


meanwhile back at the ranch....

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declared that the program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III."

Her ruling went on to say that "the president of the United States ... has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders."

What's the real deficit?

Using audited financial statements, the overall deficit would better reflect its fiscal situation:

The $318 billion deficit reported in 2005 would balloon up to $760 billion.
The deficit would equal $6,700 for every American household rather than the $2,800 given last year.
The running deficit since 1997 would equal $2.9 trillion, rather than the official $729 billion reported by the government.
The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years; the audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion.

NASA loses tape of moon landing.

This is sure to get the conspiracy folks going.

9/11 Detainee Released After Nearly Five Years

Does it make me a f@@#ing liberal to find this unaccceptable from my government?

Keeping the peace in Lebanon goes beyond the U.N.

President Bush and Israel's leaders have demanded that a new peacekeeping force, possibly drawn from outside the United Nations, must be created with the firepower and authority to disarm Hezbollah and help the Beirut government keep the peace in southern Lebanon.

But the prospect of engaging Hezbollah comes with its own hazards. Hezbollah's military wing is not a ragtag militia, easily contained or crushed. Born in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as an unruly armed band, the group evolved into a disciplined military force that drove Israel's army out of the country in May 2000.

Hezbollah is also operating in its power base. Its military wing is drawn from young men from the same southern Lebanon villages that Israel is currently bombarding. Its vast social welfare network in the impoverished, underdeveloped region strengthens its local support base.

“Read the Bills Act”

Most Congressmen are lawyers, and many others are businessmen. They know what “fiduciary responsibility” is. For Members of Congress, fiduciary responsibility means reading each word of every bill before they vote.

But Congress has not met this duty for a long time. Instead . . .

They carelessly pass mammoth bills that none of them have read. Sometimes printed copies aren't even available when they vote!


Often no one knows what these bills contain, or what they really do, or what they will really cost.


Additions and deletions are made at the last minute, in secrecy.


They combine unpopular proposals with popular measures that few in Congress want to oppose. (This practice is called “log-rolling.”)


And votes are held with little debate or public notice.


Oh, and once these bills are passed, and one of these unpopular proposals comes to light, they pretend to be shocked. “How did that get in there?” they say.
There's a basic principle at stake here. America was founded on the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” A similar slogan applies to this situation:

“No LEGISLATION without representation.”

Army Won't Extend Halliburton Contract

The Army will rebid the multibillion-dollar contract under which a Halliburton Co. subsidiary has been providing services to troops around the world after years of complaints over how the deal has worked in Iraq

THANKS John

too funny

i hope yours works better, mike

The Worst Ruling of the Week

...a ruling, on July 14, by Federal Judge John Gleeson, that the government can detain noncitizens indefinitely without explanation so long as that end of that detention is “reasonably foreseeable.”

The case before him was Turkmen v. Ashcroft, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights [1]"on behalf of male Muslim noncitizens from Arab and South Asian countries who were swept up by the INS and the FBI in the dragnet that followed September 11," the center notes.

Judge Gleeson also ruled that the government could single out people on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. “If applied to citizens,” he acknowledged,” this singling out “would be highly suspicious.”

Calling the decision "profoundly disturbing," Rachel Meeropol, an attorney for the center, said it gives the green light to detentions of noncitizens "at the whim of the President."

Gleeson’s ruling would have justified the Japanese internment camps for all except those who were citizens at the time. (David Cole, one of the attorneys in this case, makes this same point in a great article he wrote for the LA Times [2].)

In the here and now, it’s an especially distressing ruling because it bestows a blessing on one of the Bush Administration’s many powergrabs after 9/11. With the Ashcroft Raids, Special Registration, and other policies, the government rounded up 5,000 immigrants and deprived them of their due process rights.

And Judge Gleeson says that’s OK?

The Fifth Amendment says “no person” shall be deprived of due process.

The Fourteenth Amendment echoes that, and says “no person” shall be denied the equal protection of the laws.

Now the Bush Administration and Judge Gleeson are willfully ignoring those amendments. And they are treating immigrants as less than persons.

How sweet it isn’t.

Republican Candidate Calls for Forced Labor Camp for Immigrants to build wall

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."


The article described Goldwater's plan as a "concentration camp" for migrants.


Goldwater, a candidate for governor in Arizona, said in a statement Friday that his comments were taken out of context. He said he was calling for a work program for convicted nonviolent felons, similar to "tried and tested, effective and accepted practices" used by state and local jails.


But two Republicans, Arizona Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jim Kolbe, called Goldwater's comments "deeply offensive" and asked state Republicans to reject his candidacy in the Sept. 12 primary.

thank God for the religous right

Republican congressional hopeful John Jacob believes the devil is impeding his efforts to unseat five-term Representative Chris Cannon.

He says there's another force that wants to keep him from going to Washington and the devil is what it is.

Jacob says that since he decided to run for Congress, Satan has disrupted his business deals, preventing him from putting as much money into the race as he had hoped.

Jacob said during a Wednesday immigration event that the devil was working against him, then reiterated his belief yesterday in a meeting with The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board.

He says there's been a lot of adversity, and there's no question he has had experiences that believes are due to an outside force.