Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

They’re really smart people over there at Cornell University. They have the ivy growing on their buildings to prove it. That’s why, when I saw an advertisement reading…

“Research participant needed for a study on credit cards conducted by a Cornell PhD student. Monetary compensation of $60 will be paid to participants who complete a photo-taking task and an interview. Participants need to bake pictures of anything that comes to their minds when they think about credit cards, and anything that can express how they think and feel about credit card, either by the disposable camera provided or by their own digital cameras depending on their own preference.”

… why, I just knew it had to make sense. So, I’ve gone and used my own digital camera, because that’s my own preference, and taken a whole lot of pictures of everything that I think of when it comes to credit cards. Now, I’ve set my oven to 450 degrees, and put my digital camera in on a no-stick pan.

I can’t wait to get my 60 dollars!

Swine flu vaccine slowly trickles in, reads the headline of an article from the San Francisco.

I’m picturing a room full of people, all afraid of the H1N1 virus, waiting in a room all together, with IV drips in their arms, looking at the clock, waiting.

An extremely cynical trick by the leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee was picked up on today by That’s My Congress, our congressional research arm. It seems that Senator Leahy and Senator Feinstein thought that they could pull the wool over the eyes of America’s librarians.

America’s librarians have been ringing the alarm for years, noting that they are being served with huge numbers of National Security Letters enabling the FBI to keep records on the books being read by ordinary Americans who are not suspected of any crime. Leahy thought that he could placate them by throwing them a distraction.

Leahy put his support behind an amendment that would provide a few protections for libraries when it comes to Patriot Act Section 215 database seizures of records by the FBI. He said that ought to be enough for people who wanted restrictions of the Patriot Act. Sound good? Go read the previous paragraph over again, then, and think about it.

It’s not Section 215 seizures that are the problem when it comes to libraries. Senator Dick Durbin revealed today that the FBI has decided to use National Security Letters, not Section 215 powers, to seize private information about Americans’ reading habits from public libraries.

Guess how Senator Leahy arranged to get his bill, S. 1692, to extent the Patriot Act through committee – with no reform of National Security Letters in libraries. Leahy only put small reforms on a tool that the FBI doesn’t use anyway! The National Security Letters, the method that the FBI actually uses to run roughshod over the constitutional rights of people who use libraries, were untouched.

That he would engage in a tactic so transparently deceptive is a sign that Senator Patrick Leahy doesn’t have any respect for libraries, for the intelligence of the American people, or for our constitutional rights. Vermont voters, Patrick Leahy has embraced the dark totalitarian vision of George W. Bush. He doesn’t deserve to be re-elected to the United States Senate in 2010.

Cracked magazine notices our t-shirts for kids, notices that there are political messages on some of them, and calls it “political brainwashing!” I suppose anything that has an idea in it, including Cracked, might influence the kiddies. Wouldn’t that be brainwashing, too?

There’s another possibility, one that Cracked doesn’t seem to have considered. Maybe the editors of Cracked hang out with particularly dull kids all the time, but there are children out there — I’ve even met some of them — who have their own brains, their own opinions, and a desire to express themselves. It’s the kookiest thing…

… but maybe a few of these kids wearing shirts up to size 12 are picking out their own. Stranger things have happened.