CNN International: “Sanford spending holiday weekend with family in Florida”

The poor dear. If he weren’t such a policy hypocrite on marriage, I’d give him a break.

If the reports are true and Sarah Palin is set to resign as Governor of Alaska, then surely she cannot be in the running any longer for a 2012 Republican Party presidential spot. If her level of experience was unsatisfying to the nation’s voters, six more months of time in office (mostly spent on the national speakers circuit) won’t change that. Unless Palin pulls a Perot and changes her mind before actually resigning, she’ll have nothing new to bone up her scanty resume for the presidency… unless you count a tourist trip to Little Diomede Island to go look at Russia.

Palin’s reason for resignation — that she has tired of the “political blood sport” of being Governor of Alaska and had tired of the critical attention focused upon her — leads me to wonder: if the McCain-Palin ticket of 2008 had won election, how long would she have wanted to stick around in Washington, DC?

Happy 4th of July - almost. In a little bit less than 10 hours from now, the 233rd anniversary of the United States of America will begin. This year, Independence Day falls on a Saturday, but the Congress of the United States of America has been observing the significance of July 4th all week, by shutting down and doing nothing.

That’s what the American Revolution was all about, after all: No vacation without representatives.

Here’s some far out news for you while you’re getting ready for your 4th of July weekend picnic. There is a species of ant that forms gigantic colonies, one of which is global in scale. Ants who are members of this global colony communicate peacefully with each other, even when they are from different continents.

From Japan to California to Europe, they’re gathering bread crumbs, getting into sugar bowls, and waiting… waiting… for what? Well, to get some more bread crumbs and get into more sugar bowls. Though these ants have a society that’s global, they don’t have a global communication system, nor do they have any culture to pass down a larger agenda.

Woe unto us if they ever should develop these skills. They would disable our television sets while we sleep, leaving us unable to follow the celebrity dancing contests that hold us together.

Yesterday, we thought that the Obama Administration, after two delays, was finally going to release a CIA memo revealing the breadth and knowing criminality of U.S. government torture under George W. Bush. Obama didn’t release the memo.

This morning, we thought that Obama’s delay in releasing the memo would be just three or four days, until the end of the 4th of July weekend.

This evening, we’re finding out that Barack Obama is using the occasion of the anniversary of America’s struggle for liberty to announce that he will keep secrets about torture from the American people from another two months, at which time, of course, he may just announce another delay.

The government has held this memo for years already. What on earth does Barack Obama need another two months for to decide whether to release the memo? How hard is it for Obama to choose whether to tell us the truth? How long does Obama need to figure out whether to keep his promises of a government of openness, accountability, and respect for constitutional rights?

You may have concluded a long time ago that the Obama White House is full of shit, but now there’s confirmation that your suspicion is literally true.

This spring, after weeks of high pressure from organic gardeners, the Obamas agreed to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, and share the veggies with hungry people in Washington D.C. Just weeks after the veggies began growing, however, it became apparent that nobody would be able to eat the produce that resulted from the presidential patch. The soil was contaminated with high levels of lead.

Where did this lead come from from? Mother Jones argues that it’s likely that the contamination came from processed sewage that Bill Clinton had sprayed on the White House lawn as a way to promote the use of sewage sludge in agriculture and American yards.

Sadly, what your instincts tell you about sewage sludge is more or less accurate: It’s filthy. It contains not just shit, but all sorts of chemicals that come from household cleaners, industrial activities, street runoff, and other miscellaneous dumpings of vile things down the drain. It’s been almost 20 years since the Clintons sprayed this polluted gunk all over the White House lawn, but the poisonous chemicals seem to still be there.

In March of 2008, Adam Davidson of NPR revealed the massive increase in “Suspicious Activity Reports” to monitor the purchasing and financial transactions of you and prominent “politically exposed persons,” without a warrant, to uncover evidence of precrime. Here’s Davidson’s description of how Suspicious Activity Reports work in the age of Homeland Security:

Banks monitor every transaction. Every one, no matter how small…. “Your transaction is being transferred to the bank and it will be loaded into our transaction monitoring system and we will actually add this transaction together with several other types of transaction that you’ve done recently.” The software is checking to see if maybe that $4 is part of a pattern…. The report goes to a bank’s compliance officer, listing all recent suspicious transactions. Every transaction is given a numerical score…. The computer makes the score based on who is making the transaction, where does he come from, who is he associated with, what else is he up to. Every bank customer has, somewhere, in some computer database, a risk assessment score…. It also checks a bunch of lists. Are you on a terror watch list? A list of criminals?… A PEP — banks really do use that term — is anybody with political power. That means a Nigerian General, a U.S. Senator, or say the Governor of New York. And any PEP — any Politically Exposed Person — is monitored more carefully…. The Patriot Act forced banks to more closely monitor suspicious activity.

Remember Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York? He was brought down politically after — without any evidence, without a warrant — his extramural, extramarital activity was brought to light through government collection and analysis of, yes, Suspicious Activity Reports.

Since then, I’ve been tracking the Department of Treasury’s twice-annual reports of these Suspicious Activity Reports (also known as SARs). The SAR Activity Review By The Numbers report has been issued twice a year — once in the fall and once in May or June — since 2003, with trend information extending back to 1996. Here’s a representation of the available data as of the release of the last By The Numbers report in November 2008 during the waning days of the Bush administration:

You can see why the trends are important to follow; since the passage of the Patriot Act the volume of Suspicious Activity Reports filed with the government has ballooned. Notice the asterisk for 2008 — the November 2008 report, of course, could not include all data for 2008, but only data on reports up through June 2008. The figure for 2008 was a preliminary extrapolation. To get full data on the volume of SARs for 2008, we’d have to wait for the regular By The Numbers report, scheduled to be released in May or June of 2009.

May and June of 2009 have passed, and as you can see here (as of today, July 2) there is no new report available.

Candidate Barack Obama ran for president on the pledge that his administration would champion transparency in government. When federal snooping on the financial activity of everyday Joes and “Politically Exposed Persons” goes undisclosed, that does not strike me as “transparent.”

Did I mention that at the end of this year, a number of provisions of the Patriot Act will expire unless they are renewed by Congress? Continued public disclosure of Suspicious Activity Report trends would complicate this renewal. When information about Patriot Act surveillance is swept quietly under the carpet, renewal of the Patriot Act’s provisions is made that much simpler.

You may remember that I wrote yesterday morning that the big news of the day about torture would be the release of a CIA memo written during the Bush Administration, revealing the scope of planned torture under George W. Bush. The Obama Administration had promised to release the memo requested by the ACLU yesterday, after all, and with Barack Obama a promise is a… suggestion that may be later completely reversed.

The CIA memo was not released. The Obama Administration asked for a three day extension, and then suggested that maybe the memo wouldn’t be released until next week, when of course, Obama may change his mind again.

Apparently, there’s some uncertainty within the Obama Administration about whether to follow President Obama’s pledge to have a government of unprecedented openness, or to keep most of the memo secret, just as George W. Bush did. Obama is delaying while he decides how much information about government torture he will continue to conceal. Supporters of Barack Obama ought to be asking themselves why Mr. Yes We Can can’t muster the willpower to finally allow the American public to learn the whole truth about U.S. government torture.

If we aren’t even given full information about what went on with torture under Bush, how can we know that torture has actually stopped under Obama? Given Obama’s efforts to keep military interrogations undocumented, and his opposition to justice for those who have been tortured, I don’t see how he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Mother Davis looks at the accounts of her America’s third party, as she notices a particular deficit and remarks,

The Green Party of the United States is formally centered around ten “key values”, but operationally, much of the Green Party’s identity is focused on celebrity. There are plenty of good Green Party activists who are building their party from the local level up. However, every now and then, the Green Party as a whole gets tripped up in the sticky stories of individual personality.

This week, the Green Party’s personality trap has been sprung by Israel’s seizure of a boat of activists bringing humanitarian relief to the Gaza Strip. The boat contained last year’s Green Party candidate for President, Cynthia McKinney. The capture of Cynthia McKinney has created a pivotal moment in which the Green Party can demonstrate a commitment to communicating in an effective way to recruit new members, or that it understands nothing more than its own troubles.

Cynthia McKinney is a member of the Green Party, but she is not the head of the Green Party, and she was not acting on behalf of the Green Party in joining the independent relief mission on board the ship Spirit of Humanity. Yet, Greens in the US have seized upon this event with a special fervor, writing articles and engaging in activism at a rate we haven’t seen since Election Day 2008.

Activism is good, but activism ought to be focused on what will get results. What results will a Green Party obsession with Cynthia McKinney’s experiences on a boat lead to? Cynthia McKinney will get some attention, and perhaps the ship Spirit of Humanity will be freed. Perhaps some people will think about Gaza and Israel for a few moments more than they otherwise would. In the large scale, however, these events are not the most important issue of the day.

I don’t think that the story is without merit. There’s reason to believe that Israel’s actions in seizing the boat and its passengers could have violated international law. The situation in Gaza is an important foreign policy issue, and deserves some attention.

However, I don’t believe that the Green Party’s tenacious coverage of this story is called for. Green media has become obsessed with the story of Cynthia McKinney’s capture in a way that it hasn’t been focused on any issue all year - and there have been plenty of issues that Green Party writers ought to have been communicating about, but weren’t.

I’m worried that the Green Party is focused on McKinney’s adventure not because of the story itself, but because McKinney is a prominent Green politician. There are plenty of other stories of comparable magnitude that Green Party media hasn’t discussed at all, because there were no Green Party politicians involved.

I’m extremely sympathetic to the ideals that the Green Party purports to hold. I am not very sympathetic to the Green Party’s whining about its own troubles, and otherwise talking about itself all the time. If the Green Party wants to be taken seriously, it needs to become less self-referential, and learn to tell the stories that progressive Americans in general will respond to.

Taking the green shade off her office lamp,
Mother Davis

Really. Which is worse: that Maine Republican candidate for Governor Les Otten has pretty obviously copied President Barack Obama’s website theme…

… or that President Barack Obama has pretty obviously copied from the Republican Party platform on warrantless surveillance, state secrets, torture, the imbalance of power and anti-gay discrimination?

If you garden, you’ve been there: delighted at the success of your zucchini patch, you enjoy a zucchini salad, a nice loaf of zucchini bread, another loaf of zucchini bread, a pot of zucchini-cheese soup…. It’s after the second pot of zucchini soup that you might throw in the towel, but that doesn’t mean your squash have to rot on the vine. Find a local Plant a Row for the Hungry participant and arrange to donate your produce to a nearby food pantry. The Plant a Row effort, maintained for years by the Garden Writers’ Assocation, works best locally to provide poor families with the sort of fresh fruits and vegetables that are so valuable nutritionally yet so difficult to stock in food pantries otherwise. Bully for them.

Expect the big civil liberties news of the day to be the release of a memo from the CIA related to torture. That’s all well and good, but that memo is about what happened during the Bush Administration, in the past, and President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have made it clear that they’re not going to allow any efforts to hold anyone accountable for torture that took place in the past.

Given that inaction, I think that we need to take extra care to hold Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats accountable for their actions on torture in the present. Yesterday, I focused on a particular aspect of congressional accountability for torture when it came to an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill passed last week. The amendment was offered by Democrat Rush Holt, yet 31 Democrats voted against it.

That amendment was something you’re not going to read about in the news today. No journalists are reporting on it, but it gives an extremely important insight into the difference between what the Obama Administration says it’s going to do, and what it actually intends to do. The Obama Administration says it’s going to end torture, and restore open government, but it’s actually moved to protect illegal government secrecy in order to cover up torture. The Obama Administration continues that pattern with its position on the Holt amendment.

The Holt amendment passed last week has to do with interrogations. It would require the military to videotape all interrogations, except for tactical interrogations on the battlefield where videotaping is impractical. The measure was actually recommended by a military task force that was assembled by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the end of the Bush Administration. In a document called The Walsh Report, the task force recommended that all military interrogations be videotaped in order to prevent torture and other forms of abuse and coercion, in order to protect military interrogation teams from false accusations of torture, abuse and coercion, and in order to provide better military intelligence.

Given the military’s own recommendation in the Walsh Report, and the way that videotaping protections soldiers and prisoners alike, it seems that voting for the Holt amendment would be an obvious decision. Yet, 31 Democrats and 162 Republicans voted against it. Why?

During the debate over the amendment last week, Republican Representative Howard McKeon offered a surprising reason for opposing the measure: The Obama Administration opposes it. McKeon presented the following statement from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, explaining why the Obama White House asked for the videotaping requirement to be defeated:

“The Department of Defense strongly opposes the provision because it would severely restrict the collection of intelligence through interrogations, undercut the Department’s ability to recruit sources, and impose an unreasonable administrative and logistical burden on the warfighter.”

It’s a bit bizarre, but Robert Gates is now arguing against the opinion of the panel of experts that he himself assembled, and the Obama Administration is giving political support to efforts by Republicans and right wing Democrats in Congress to block the prevention of torture.

The justifications for this reversal offered by Gates don’t make sense. There’s no logistical burden on the “warfighter” (is that a word?). The Holt amendment specifically provides an exception for tactical interrogations that take place on the battlefield, where videotaping may not be practical. The videotaping provision shouldn’t harm the military’s ability to recruit sources either, as there’s no requirement in the amendment that voluntary sources be told that they will be videotaped.

The protest from Gates that I am most bothered by is his claim that videotaping interrogations will “severely restrict the collection of intelligence through interrogations”. First of all, the Walsh Report makes it clear that the videotaping would actually make interrogations more successful, providing a better quality of intelligence than would otherwise be available. Secondly, it doesn’t make sense to claim that the videotaping of an interrogation would interfere with the collection of intelligence at all, much less “severely restrict” it, unless the military intends to use interrogation techniques, such as torture, that are illegal.

There’s reason for us to worry about such a possibility, given Barack Obama’s sudden insistence this spring that he must not release photographic and video evidence of torture. The Obama Administration’s move to oppose the videotaping of interrogations is yet another instance of Obama’s overall effort to preserve the government secrecy that made widespread violations of the Constitution and international law possible. The Obama White House appears to be concerned not just with keeping the torture of the past a secret, but with preserving a shroud over interrogations in the present, making torture and abuse likely to continue.

You read that right. Over the weekend five people were arrested on charges related to the practice and coverup of U.S. government torture, and three of those people were jailed.

What did these five people do? They stood on the sidewalk outside the White House protesting the practice and coverup of torture by the U.S. government, and for that they were arrested on June 28. Three were sent to jail.

In the meantime, no one actually involved in the government conspiracy to commit torture has been jailed or even charged with a crime.

Here’s an example of how not to use people’s IP address to customize an advertisement to make it seem more personal to them:

Gee, that mother over in Petoskey lost 47 pounds using just one rule. Gosh, that’s just near here. If she lives near me, she must lose weight in ways that are quite like me, rather than those people way over in Australia, who lose weight in exotic ways that I could never use. So, I bet that if I just click on that picture, I’ll find out about how people in my neighborhood can lose weight, and I’ll get all the information I need for absolutely free…

…except that, golly, right next to that first advertisement is the very same picture that claims that that mom in Petoskey lost 52 pounds using that same rule.

Curious. Is there really a mom in Petoskey who lost that weight? I kind of doubt it, given that, no matter where I travel in the USA, I see the same advertisement, claiming that some mom, who just happens to be right next to wear I’m staying for the night, has lost a bunch of pounds using that one rule they keep on talking about.

That advertisement is customized to me. It’s just lying, with one little variable in its lie changing according to my IP address.

Some self-proclaimed Internet gurus seem to think that customized advertisements are as spiffy as spandex, but when the customization takes the form of a cheesy approach suggesting that my web browser knows all about what’s important to me, the spandex gets stretched. This advertising method needs to lose 52 pounds, and I know just one method it needs to get the job done…