derivative work

“I do think it’s true that the large contours of national and international policy are much harder to keep secret today,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It would not be possible to conduct a secret war in Cambodia, as took place in the Nixon [...]

That’s a paraphrase of what an Illinois state Rep. Monique Davis told a man who was protesting the state of Illinois’ $1M grant to a church. Read more at Eric Zorn’s Chicago Tribune blog. link from an David S-J on an atheist mailing list 4/11 update: Rep. Davis apologized, sort of, after being excoriated in [...]

Eliot Spitzer could help us all, right now, by not resigning. It would do a huge favor to the ordinary non-politician people who have to live in America to resist the stupidity of letting the personal sex lives of our politicians affect our government. He could show a little “leadership” to his peer politicians in [...]

For the record, the menacing presence of very large german shepherds is not a plus at a train station. And when you hear their barks, whimpers, and howls nearby it makes you worry whether they’re attacking someone, upset or excited at someone’s lunch, etc. Word is they’re sniffing for bombs but I don’t think for [...]

Satellite photos reveal the depredations of illegal loggers in Mexican forests, particularly in the winter home of the migratory monarch butterflies. Is there any reason at all that we cannot have real-time monitoring of the freakin’ environment to ensure that wide-scale clearcutting, burning, stripmining, and other land and sea uses do not happen? It seems [...]

In last night’s Democratic candidate debate about The Gays, Clinton explained that she’s not anti-gay marriage: “I prefer to think of it as being very positive about civil unions.” As Michele (my Massachusetts spouse) said: “If she’s so positive, why doesn’t *she* get one.”

Bloggers & media have been all over the latest in a long, long series (at least as long as i have been reading the news, which is 20+ years now*) of sexcapades by Republicans and religious right leaders: Florida state legislator Bob Allen (R), who solicited an undercover cop for a blowjob in Titusville, FL, [...]

The US copyright lobby (as represented by the “International Intellectual Property Alliance”, a confusingly named consortium of US copyright lobbying groups) has just done a report on the failures of the rest of the world to properly protect its members’ intellectual property. We care, because it submits this report (solicited? unsolicited?) to the US Trade [...]

Ah, a fine Sunday morning reading the paper, and trashing media bias and sloppy reporting at the NYT … This annoying NYT article (11/12) on police witness “sanctuary” policies is a perfect example of how articles can be technically “balanced” but still really suck present an imbalanced picture. The police witness sanctuary policies basically tell [...]

In a time of many horrors, my eye was caught by this outrage [NYT 11/3]: Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, Bush administration officials said Thursday. “Children born in the United States” — [...]

Sometimes one despairs and relies on others to speak truth to power. Many have done so with respect to with respect to the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″, but Kent Keith Olbermann‘s was particularly eloquent. update: Ahem. Apparently that’s Keith Olbermann, and Kent Brockman. Another sign of aging, because I would never ordinarily confuse the [...]

we knew this, right? that legislative attempts to do something positive for consumers were likely doomed? [nyt 6/9] consumers, if you get Internet service from a phone or cable company, do you think you pay enough to have service already? do you think your broadband provider ought to be able to charge you more for [...]

It was the only thing to do, after such postings as: There’s No “War” in “Warrant”1 (12/17): So George Bush secretly authorized the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants or judicial oversight. Oh, it violates your civil liberties, oh, it illegally breaks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, oh, that tape of you and your [...]

Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]

9/1: Between work-stuff and watching Katrina, I’ve been too busy & too sad to post much the last few days. To sum it all up:, a letter from Switzerland (9/3) [via daily kos 9/4]: Watching the events in New Orleans unfold from here in Europe, mostly via BBC World, we have the impression that the [...]

Garrison Keilor imagines library pork like the Alaskan bridge-laden Republican Transportation bill. First, the model: For Alaska, the Republicans earmarked $223 million for a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate to link the town of Ketchikan (pop. 8,000) — which is a town that exists to sell T-shirts and postcards to cruise passengers [...]

The Copyright Office is taking comments (thank god) on the current preregistration system which supports Internet Explorer only. 70 FR 44878-79 (8/4): Preregistration of Certain Unpublished Copyright Claims [PDF] [seen on news.com via sivacracy; and zdnet via news.google] Of course, comments are not being accepted electronically (and why not? It’s easy enough to write scripts [...]

Follow-up on the seizure of IndyMedia servers from a few months (a year?) ago: Apparently, when Rackspace claimed that they were seized by the FBI, what Rackspace should have said is, “We seized them for the FBI.” Volokh Conspiracy [7/31] takes the opportunity to issue a gentle ‘i told you so’: the FBI was right [...]

So far today I am thrice annoyed: Multiple Double Standards: NY Sex Offenders Get Viagra [5/23] Jesus. Get over Viagra already. What is with the guys running the guvmint? “According to [NY State Comptroller Alan] Hevesi, the problem is an unintended consequence of a 1998 directive from federal officials telling states that Medicaid prescription programs [...]

The Poor Man explains checks & balances & the US government in commenting on the Newsweek thing: Our government was set up two centuries ago by a group of men, some quite clever, who expected that it would be administered by the corrupt, the cowardly, and the stupid – in other words, by human beings. [...]