Nellie McKay, one of my favorite new artists. Watch these videos and if you enjoy, get her CD quickly from the above link!

Read more here.

(hat tip to crooks & liars)

Find out more information about the Project for the New American Century from the official website, the Wikipedia entry, and a group opposed.

Hat tip to Kirsten for pointing out the video!

Courtesy of Crooks & Liars.

Bush is a failed president, the GOP are failed leaders. They've got nothing to run on. They're in trouble and are really hoping that they can exploit the latest terror incident (which was so terrible that Bush stayed on vacation).

He goes on to quote a Washington Post article:

The strategist, who is involved in GOP efforts to capitalize on the issue of national security, said one of the big challenges in the months ahead will be "making sure the terrorism issue sticks to Iraq." With some GOP candidates distancing themselves from Bush's Iraq policy, the strategist said, it has been difficult marrying the issues of terrorism and Iraq. This is disturbing to top GOP officials because support for the war is low, and dropping, and Iraq is a bigger issue in many of the campaigns than the less-defined effort against terrorism, the strategist said.

Then, not 24 hours later, "Bush links Hezbollah and 'plot'":

US President George W Bush says Hezbollah and alleged UK air plot suspects share a "totalitarian ideology" they are seeking to spread.

Linking their actions with insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said they all wanted to "establish safe havens from which to attack free nations".

Mr Bush said the UK terror plot was a "reminder that terrorists are still plotting attacks to kill our people".

Of course, it's good to keep in mind that this might not have been as imminent as reported. Did the US pressure Britain to announce this plot and make these arrests because Lieberman was loosing?

Here's a clip from the August 9th, 2006, episode of The Daily Show featuring their new correspondent Assif Mandvi with the middle east perspective.

Just a great show, full of biting, eye-opening and hilarious humor, whose "viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news" including The O'Reilly Factor (despite claims by Bill that those same viewers are all a bunch of "stoned slackers"). If you aren't already part of this viewership, why on earth not?! I suggest to everyone who has the "opportunity": WATCH it. It's available on Comedy Central on US television (check your local listings), or available on the web here.

Hat tip to AMERICAblog for the video link.

And that's just the Republicans.

Thus begins an opinion piece published today in the Philadelphia Daily News.

Yesterday, Cheney bashed those who voted for Democrat Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, claiming that these votes would encourage "al Qaeda types" to think that "they can break the will of the American people." ...

For Cheney - and other Republicans like GOP National Chairman Ken Mehlman - to suggest that those Americans are encouraging terrorism is reprehensible.

Cheney's comments came out a day before British intelligence officials announced they had thwarted a major terrorist attack. Surely Cheney was aware of the plot and the work to thwart it, and was no doubt aware of the timing of yesterday's announcement.

To exploit a very real terror threat that could have led to major casualties, and to even indirectly implicate Americans who were exercising their democratic right by going to the polls and making a choice borders on the criminal, to say nothing of the insane.

Has Cheney completely lost it? ...

... the real terror is this: While our Vacationer- in-Chief and his vice president shut down dissent, and discourage questions about the way our government has directed our intelligence and military resources toward a single target in Iraq, we are no closer to understanding or dismantling the threat of al Qaeda.

Cheney's remarks underscore just how unsophisticated our understanding of terrorism is. We have no more understanding of the global forces at work that lead so many to want to bomb and destroy innocent lives than we did five years ago.

America's latest crisis is not what happened in Connecticut; it's what was going to happen in airplanes over the Atlantic.

The immoral and ridiculous claims coming out of the Bush administration's reign of error could ultimately be responsible for the kind of casualties that al Qaeda can only dream of.

Hats off to the Daily News for having the gumption to say what many of us our thinking, and for reminding the others that Americans live in a Democracy, not a Bushocracy.

Now, the articles below are not the easiest to follow if you do not have a technical background (like, say, every Politician in the USA), but they are not incomprehensible. Both of these links are from The Register, and are written by a network engineer, Andrew Orlowski. The first is a piece describing an overview of the current situation, including letters from readers of The Register. The second is a detailed view at how current legislation before the US Congress could bring about the demise of the US Internet (and possibly the rest of the global network) instead of the intended purpose of saving it. But, doesn't sound like most legislation that has come out of the US Congress? No Child Left Behind ... Clean Skies ... need I say more??

It is my feeling that most of the fear currently coming out of the people who support Net Neutrality (me included) is that if a regulation is not put in place, large ISPs and backbone network operators will sell priority service to certain companies, not provide priority service based on types of packets (i.e. VoIP), and that in the end the only people screaming about the injustice will be geeks who understand what is going on, while the rest of the US remains ignorant of the entire change (i.e. "Oh look, Google doesn't work, I guess I'll just use MSN from now on."). Of course, that's just my opinion.

In case you don't know what happened, or are American and don't even know what the World Cup is (just kidding), Zidane was red carded, or removed from play, at the 110th min for headbutting Materazzi to the ground suddenly while walking down the field.

Well, what struck me was that in the American press (AP/Newsday) the quotes for Marco Materazzi, regarding a claim made by the Paris-based anti-racism advocacy group SOS-Racism that Materazzi had made a racist comment to provoke Zidane, were different than in other non-US English langauge services. These are articles all claiming the exact same source for the quote as well.

ANSA (source of quote):

"It is absolutely not true. I didn't say terrorist. I'm ignorant, I don't even know what it means," said Marco Materazzi on the incident in last night's World Cup final which led to Zinedine Zidane's sending-off.

"It is absolutely not true, I did not call him a terrorist. I'm ignorant. I don't even know what the word means," the Italian news agency Ansa quoted Materazzi as saying after the Italian team returned to Rome.

"It is absolutely not true, I did not call him a terrorist. I'm ignorant. I don't even know what the word means," the Italian news agency Ansa quoted Materazzi as saying after the Italian team returned to Rome.

"It is absolutely not true, I did not call him a terrorist," materazzi said overnight.
"I'm ignorant. I don't even know what the word means," the Italian news agency Ansa quoted Materazzi as saying after the Italy team returned to Rome.

"It is absolutely not true, I didn't call him a terrorist, I don't know anything about that," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Materazzi as saying when he arrived with his team at an Italian military airfield.

While all the above quotes all have been altered slightly (replacement of the pronoun it with the noun it stood for without proper brackets; replacing the word say with the words call him without brackets), this was most likely all translated by ANSA into English from Italian and those may have been just differences in interpretation. The APs version though removes an entire sentence and alters the final sentence to have a new meaning. I don't even know what it means, to me, is completely different than I don't know anything about that. So, why did the AP/Newsday report an altered quote? Was it just sloppy reporting? How does this happen in the age of high tech with advanced features like "cut and paste"? Does the AP make a habit of taking things out of context and misrepresenting things? How many more quotes reported by the AP are also altered?

While in this instance I see no major issue, I have seen many other instances where the movement of just one word or removal of a sentence could alter the intent of the speaker or writer to something that was not meant; sometimes to the exact opposite of what is meant. Though really, it shouldn't surprise me to much ... taking things out of context and altering facts as one sees fit seems to be a standard play in our current administration, and who doesn't like to play follow the leader?

Gives me just one more reason to always accept "news" reports from the US with a grain of salt ... though now-a-days, I might need the entire shaker.

World Cup Champions: Italy
2nd Place: France
3rd Place: Germany

From Lesley Ashmall, BBC Five Live Sport, in Rome:

"I don't think anyone in Italy will sleep tonight. Circus Maximus has erupted and they do not care about the match-fixing scandal. They went through hell but are going crazy and will have the biggest party."

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming ...

Not surprising to me at all. I am very familiar with the way that the FBI currently has every telephone switch in the US connected to them so that they do not have to contact the service provider to tap a conversation going through that switch (a switch is the device that sits at the other end of the phone cable leaving your house and processes your calls and connects you to other phone lines through other switches).

In a former position I worked in a switching office for a cellular provider and was in charge of the all office phone and computer systems. One day, at a new switching facility, I found three new phone lines going through my area that were not authorized or ordered by me, so I severed them then and there. Within 30 minutes the switching operator had a call from the FBI, and the operator in turn called me. I reconnected them, of course, but I have never forgotten how quickly the FBI became aware of it. This, by the way, occured in the late 90's and technology has made leaps and bounds since.

Of course, the wiretapping of landlines is well covered in our existing law (though Bush and his administration believe they are above those provisions, i.e. Bush NSA Spying Scandal), as pointed out in the article.

Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute and member of a Homeland Security advisory board, said the proposal would "have a negative impact on Internet users' privacy."

"People expect their information to be private unless the government meets certain legal standards," Harper said. "Right now the Department of Justice is pushing the wrong way on all this."

The 27-page proposed CALEA amendments seen by CNET News.com would: ... Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The NY Times is reporting that banking records, through not just the Swift cooperative, but others as well, are being viewed without approval or oversight. This is just in, and it's a long article, but the points that jumped out at me were:

Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."

Officials described the Swift program as the biggest and most far-reaching of several secret efforts to trace terrorist financing. Much more limited agreements with other companies have provided access to A.T.M. transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire payments, the officials said.

I will post more when I have a chance to read more about this. Do laws not matter at all to the Bush Administration? I thought we revolted against the King in 1776.

UPDATE: The BBC now has a follow up article on this issue.

I got 7 right. How many did you get right?