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

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…

Remember those great TV advertisements against clean coal that were playing earlier this year? Maybe they’re still playing somewhere, but I don’t see them anymore.

The commercials were produced by the Reality Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups including the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. The Reality Campaign used to have a useful blog too, but that’s dwindled away as well. The last time an article was published there was back at the beginning of April.

That’s an interesting time frame for the Reality Campaign to wind down its operations, because it’s just after the Waxman-Markey climate legislation, to become the American Clean Energy and Security Act, was made public. That’s the legislation that was passed on Friday by the U.S. House of Representatives, the legislation that Barack Obama is pushing the Senate to pass as soon as possible. It’s billed as an important stand in confronting climate change, but the fact is that the bill has provided funding for the fossil fuel fraud of clean coal.

It’s a funny thing that, just when a funding for clean coal came into consideration in Congress, an organization supposedly dedicated to exposing the sham of clean coal claims stopped speaking out. Search the Reality Campaign’s web site, and you’ll see that it never mentions the American Clean Energy and Security Act, nor its authors, Ed Markey and Henry Waxman.

It looks as if the environmentalist organizations behind the Reality Campaign shut down as soon as it was the Democrats who entered the pocket of Big Coal. Maybe the these organizations figured that they needed to keep access in Washington D.C. Maybe they figured that it would be best to pass any kind of climate legislation, no matter its flaws.

Whatever the motivation for the sudden silence from the Reality Campaign, it demonstrates a lack of reliable leadership on the issue of clean coal. If the campaign’s organizations were really concerned about confronting clean coal, it would have continued speaking out to this day, and it would have opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Its dust jacket declares Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World to be “this season’s The Name of the Rose“. I find a closer affinity between the German novel (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Kehlmann’s Measuring the World are both historical-ish fiction, both containing adventure, both written by Europeans about Europeans, to be sure. But The Name of the Rose is at base a murder mystery; Kehlmann only toys with conspiratorial intrigue in a short passage of his book. Like Jonathan Strange, Measuring the World is a novel using the trappings of revealed esoteric knowledge (magic to Clarke, science to Kehlmann) as reader-bait: the deeper purpose of both novels is to consider how the search for knowledge reflects and affects the quality of the relationships we have with one another.

Lowly, classless and forced to traffic with the world for his livelihood, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss considers humanity to be a burden and burdens others with his unrepressed id. His quest to understand the universe eschews direct observation as much as possible, retreating to an intellectual consideration of mathematics. Baron Alexander von Humboldt has all the material resource a man could wish for and uses it to satisfy his lust for empirical exploration of the world, making an encyclopedic recording of the particular characteristics his of biological and geographical specimens as he explores South America. Von Humboldt’s expeditions are put in heroic terms by trailing journalists but characterized by privation and suffering, suffering von Humboldt unwittingly or uncaringly sloughs off onto others.

Fire illuminates the dark but also burns; Gauss and von Humboldt pursue their versions of truth with a purity of vision that limits the range of their focus; they are blind to the consequences of their actions for others. As Clarke does in Jonathan Strange, Kehlmann in Measuring the World refuses to dilute the essence of his characters to make them more palatable, more digestible, more nice. Is the pursuit of knowledge and progress is above, beyond, fiercer than nice? In turn, neither of the two main characters is treated nicely by the politicians who seek to exploit them or by the universe itself which in its own progress shunts their discoveries in the past and reduces them to the status of footnote in the waning years of their lives.

Kehlmann’s prose trusts the intellect of the reader enough to suggest and to hint at the context of characters’ words and actions without bald declaration; what’s unstated between the written lines is important to attend to, and this makes for a longer reading of the short 259-page novel than you might expect. Take the time to pay attention and you’ll be rewarded. Measuring the World” has my strong recommendation.

Today I attended a demonstration against Ohio budget cuts to libraries; it has garnered print and video coverage by professional journalists. There were perhaps two hundred people there.

I can’t tell you how many people showed up for demonstrations in eight cities as part of Torture Accountability Day. I can’t tell you because despite multiple searches I cannot find a single journalist’s report on any of today’s multiple Torture Accountability protests.

Daniel Dunkle of the Camden Herald Gazette makes a point about the importance of libraries in troubled economic times:

As the recession continues, local public libraries are seeing an increased need for their services. In some cases residents are coming in to polish up their resumes and use library computers to search for jobs. Others are using the library as a place to spend some time out of the house now that they are out of work.

“As the economy worsens, library usage tends to go up,” said Molly Larson, who serves as both president of the Maine Library Association and director of the Rockport Public Library. Larson said some residents are using libraries to learn computer skills that will allow them to get a job. Rockland Public Library Director Amy Levine said the library provided a display of books and resources for job seekers that was very popular.

That’s a news story from Maine; the story is the same in West Virginia:

Basically, the library has been a source of assistance in helping displaced workers assemble a résumé and land fresh employment, West Virginia Library Commission Director J.D. Waggoner told lawmakers Monday….

Waggoner told a joint meeting of the Standing Committees on Government Operations and Government Organization that jobless residents are getting help in finding work through the libraries.

One man dropped his children off at school every week and then checked into his local library to go online and look for work. Within two weeks, the man found employment, Waggoner said. “That story is repeating itself over and over again across the state,” he said.

Move further west to the state of Ohio and you’ll find that libraries here are also providing needed services to people who are out of work. At my local Northside branch of the Columbus Public Library, there are dedicated sessions held twice a week for job seekers; librarians not only provide computer resources necessary for Ohioans out of work to write up a resume, but also provide guidance on resume strategy and education on the use of job banks databases. Other regular events in libraries across the city of Columbus — like GED classes and technology workshops — are aimed to help build citizens’ human capital so they can do more and earn more with their time. These services help Ohio pull its way out of its current deep recession.

As I pointed out last week, libraries provide essential social infrastructure to the young as well. At this time of year, summer reading clubs are in full swing, encouraging the latest generation to tap into the enjoyment of learning. In poor areas, libraries are distribution points for food to hungry kids who would have poorer educational outcomes (translation for WSJ readers: lower productivity) were it not for this supplemental nutrition.

Finally, as disposable income declines, libraries across the nation are experiencing large surges in book circulation; people are rediscovering the frugality of literacy at a starkly reduced price. I describe the economic good sense of libraries as a “starkly reduced price,” not free, because someone has to pay for the buildings, the electricity, the staff and, oh yes, the books. Our nation’s public libraries provide reading, educational, food for poor kids and job training more cheaply than if we each did all that work ourselves, and those services continue to redound positively, but it costs some money to keep them going.

Here in Ohio, public libraries have already taken cuts to their funding in stride. State funding for public libraries in Ohio is allotted as a proportion of tax revenues, so that as tax revenues have declined the funding for libraries has declined, too. In 2008, when the economy here was bad but not so bad as it is now, libraries across the state were allotted $458 million. This year, with tax revenues tanking, libraries in Ohio have already taken a $98 million cut, down to $360 million. Keep that in mind — this year, Ohio public libraries have already suffered a 21.4% cut in state funding without a complaint.

But last Friday (the day for news releases they don’t want you to hear), Governor Ted Strickland proposed cutting the state budget for public libraries by another $100 million. Strickland’s proposal would cut the libraries’ budgets disproportionately, singling them out for extra resource cuts beyond their share.

If this were an entertainment venue like a golf course or another new arena for a pampered professional team, I’d understand making another slash to the budget there. But these are libraries we’re talking about; they’re a vital piece of our social and economic infrastructure, providing services that help us get out of our slump. Ted Strickland proposing cuts to libraries as jobs leave Ohio is like the captain of a ship noticing the rudder’s broken and yelling for his first mate to cut some wood out of the hull to build a new one.

The window for comments to Governor Ted Strickland (call 614-466-3555) or to your legislator (find your member by zip code here) closes quickly — the public has less than a week left! As of July 1, 2009 the process, along with the fiscal year, will have already moved on. If you are an individual living in Ohio and you support your library, make yourself heard.

Fortunately, it’s not just an individual effort here. As George W. Bush learned during his presidency, you really don’t want to piss off the librarians. Across the state, advocates for libraries are passing out leaflets to patrons as they enter and leave their local branches. The brand spankin’ new activist website Save Ohio Libraries website indicates that pro-library rallies are happening tomorrow, Wednesday June 24 2009, at these sites:

Centerville: Centerville Public Library at 4:00 pm
Cleveland: Cleveland Public Library Main Branch at 10:30 am
Cincinnati: Loveland Branch Library at 11:00 am
London: London Public Library at 6:30 pm
Portsmouth: Portsmouth Public Library 1:00 pm

Those are just the Wednesday rallies. On Thursday, June 25 at 11:30 am, there will be a statewide Save Our Libraries rally at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. The Statehouse stands on the corner of Broad and High Streets downtown. Gather at the McKinley Statue (near High Street), and wear a red t-shirt if you have one. Bring a sign, but don’t attach any sticks — the police will confiscate these as a security threat. Stick up a flyer if you have the time.

See the Ohio Library Council for continuing information about this fight for Ohio libraries’ future.

Once, on our New York State Progressive Directory, we had a link to an organization called the Buffalo Coalition for Progressive Media, at RadioFreeBuffalo.org. That link is not there any more.

Why? Radio Free Buffalo sold out. (Is it possible for free radio to sell out?)

The Buffalo Coalition for Progressive Media seems to have dissolved. Its web site now is filled up with non-progressive messages like how to win 250 dollars at the NBA shore, and my favorite given the current political climate, photographs of Iranian girls.

One of the most important things to remember when it comes to progressive media: Stick around. Corporate media goes to work every day. Progressive media needs to do the same.

While trying to find conference reports, presentations or minutes from this week’s Energy Ocean 2009 Conference on renewable tidal, wind and wave energies, I came across this piece of copy advocating for Maine coastal energy initiatives. “It’s In Our DNA?” State funding for technology research is in the DNA of the residents and politicians of Maine? Sounds borgish. You might make the case that “entrepreneurial spirit” could emerge as gene expression. But “lessening” fossil fuel dependence and “leveraging” resources implies a significant change from some previous constant. Does that mean that Mainers’ DNA has undergone some sort of mutation? What’s the source? A high level of natural uranium pervading the bedrock, or perhaps some widespread dioxin contamination? I had no idea.

What else is in our DNA? This glossy image gets it right: high definition is in our DNA. We humans have an excellent system for vision, including sparkling color and a good motion detection system. Raptors do better in some respects, but our species can’t have the best of everything. In the broad range of the animal kingdom, we do quite well. Compared to the vision of the rat, the mole, the rhinoceros or the caecilian, human eyesight is versatile and detailed. This can only mean one thing: when you sell us a TV set, Sony, you’d freakin’ well better get it right.

I didn’t know that supply corporations had DNA. Who’s Pitney Bowes been having sex with, Office Max? Do they do it at night behind the Xerox plant? From which race-relations-respecting corporations did Pitney Bowes inherit its social responsibility? Looking at the historical population of corporations, I can’t easily identify the father or mother. Regardless, from the distribution of this trait in the corporate population I think we could pretty confidently classify respect for diversity as a recessive allele.

And, oh dear, but if it were really true that “The idea of ‘direct’ is central to the DNA of the Dell organization,” then the Dell VP of Global Marketing would have just written “Dell is direct.” Dell’s got gene envy.

I’d call this the comment of the year:

Mark you retarded idiot, i was about to make a sane comment but then i realized your one of those americans who give other americans a bad name. I hope you die realy soon of cancer or a of a nuclear attack of some terrorist orginasation you cannot put any finger on.

It’s the enlightened conversation here at Irregular Times that I cherish most.

When reading today’s revelations in the New York Times regarding U.S. government warrantless wiretapping programs, it is crucial that you pay attention to time and tense. Wired Magazine botches the job when it comes to describing a program code named Pinwale. Wired says:

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

…The paper reports today that the NSA is continuing to over-collect e-mail because of difficulties in filtering and distinguishing between foreign and domestic correspondence.

If an American’s correspondence pops up in search results when analysts sift through the database, the analyst is allowed to read it, provided such messages account for no more than 30 percent of a search result, the paper reported.

Did you read that? Wow! That’s an incredibly radical rethinking of government power — one in which the government can spy on American domestic communications without a warrant, so long as 70% of the spying it does is foreign. Americans’ 4th Amendment constitutional guarantee — that you and I and our kids and their neighbors and their green grocers will be free of government snoops unless a judge grants a specific warrant based on probable cause — has been reduced to the equivalent of a food labeling regulation: if it’s 70% constitutional, it’s “Constitutional!”

But wait a moment and notice that the last paragraph is written in the present tense. In regards to Pinwale, the New York Times actually makes a different claim about Pinwale and the Bizarro 30%/70% standard. Starting with a description of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which stepped over the prone constitution to declare such behavior legal, the Times writes:

That measure, which also resolved the long controversy over N.S.A.’s program of wiretapping without warrants by offering immunity to telecommunications companies, tacitly acknowledged that some amount of Americans’ e-mail would inevitably be captured by the N.S.A.

But even before that, the agency appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

Other intelligence officials confirmed the existence of the Pinwale e-mail database…

Although the Pinwale database is described in the present tense, the 30% rule is described in the past tense as a Bush-era artifact and not necessarily as a continuing standard. As the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union continue to drag more information into the light of day about the amazingly extensive program of domestic government warrantless surveillance, it’s important to maintain a clear distinction between what we know and what we don’t know, because identifying the boundaries of what we know is vital in the effort to know more.

Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin displayed a canny ability to skate the line of public knowledge regarding U.S. government warrantless wiretapping in his questioning of Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder earlier today (play video or read below for transcript):

Senator Russell Feingold: I think I wrote to the president Monday about my continued concern that the administration has not formally withdrawn certain legal opinions, including the January 2006 White Paper that provided legal justifications for the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The letter was prompted by, in part by a recent speech that I’m sure you’re aware of by the Director of National Intelligence in which he asserted that the program was not illegal. But he later clarified that. In a speech to the American Constitutional Society in June 2008 you, sir, said the following. “I never thought that I would see the day when a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens.” And the president himself also, several times as a senator and during the campaign, said the program was illegal. Now that you are the attorney general, is there any doubt in your mind that the warrantless wiretapping program was illegal?

Attorney General Eric Holder: Well, I think that the warrantless wiretapping program as it existed at that point was certainly unwise in that it was put together without the approval of Congress, um, and as a result did not have, um, all the protections, um, all the strength that it might have had behind it, as, as I think it now exists with regard to having had congressional approval of it. So I think that the concerns that I expressed in that speech no longer exist because of the action that Congress has taken.

Feingold: But I asked you, Mr. Attorney General, not whether it was unwise, but whether you consider it to have been illegal, because that’s certainly the implication of what you said in the quote I read and the explicit statement of the man who is now President of the United States.

Holder: Yeah, well, what I was saying in that speech was that I thought the action that the administration had taken was inconsistent with, um, the dictates of FISA, and I think I used the word contravention, um, and as a result I thought that the policy was an unwise one. And I think that the concerns that I expressed then have really been remedied by the fact that Congress has now authorized the program.

Feingold: But did you think it was illegal?

Holder: Well, I thought that, as I said, it was inconsistent with, um, with the FISA statute and unwise as a matter of policy.

Feingold: Has something happened that’s changed your opinion since your June 2008 statement that would make it hard for you to just simply say what the president said, that it’s illegal?

Holder: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think what I’m saying now is necessarily inconsistent with what I said at the, um, at the, um the ACS convention or speech that I gave.

Feingold: Well, it sounds awfully mild compared to some very clear statements and a very important principle here, which is not only that this has to do with the scope of the FISA law, but the underlying constitutional issue that people like me and many people believe: that if the statute is that explicit under the third test, under Justice Jackson’s test, that it is in fact unconstitutional for the president and illegal, of course, for the president to override the expressed will of, of the Congress.

Holder: Yeah, well, as I said, I think I said contravention of, inconsistent with. I’m not sure I’d use the term illegal, and, um, I would adhere to, I’d adhere to what I said then. I think what I’m saying now is consistent with what I said in the speech.

Feingold: Well, that may well be, but I would hope that you would use the word illegal now, then. And I request in a letter I sent to the president on Monday, and also in a letter dated April 29th, that the administration withdraw the January 2006 white paper and other classified OLC memos providing legal justification of the program. I know you have initiated a review of the Bush era OLC memos. And, of course, certain memos that authorize torture have been withdrawn. Apparently, you discussed this a bit already today with Senator Feinstein. What is the status of your review of the memos concerning the warrantless wiretapping program?

Holder: Well, I asked the Office of Legal Counsel to review these prior opinions, including those that deal with surveillance, with the goal of making as many of these opinions public as we can, consistent with our national security interests and also consistent with ensuring that robust debate can happen within the executive branch. It is my hope that that process, which is ongoing, will lead to the release of several opinions in a relatively short period of time.

Feingold: I just want to reiterate how important it is for the legal justification for this program to be withdrawn concerning these memos that make unsupportable claims of executive power that will come back to haunt us if they remain in effect. And if you believe, as I think the president has indicated in the past, that the program was illegal, they cannot stand.

Did you catch that? Here’s what Senator Feingold was able to establish:

1. Although both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder definitively termed warrantless wiretapping against Americans to be illegal before they took office, now that they are in a position of executing the program they refuse to declare the program illegal. Indeed, even under repeated questioning Attorney General Holder refuses to use the word “illegal” to describe such practices. This is a downright Mukasey-like refusal to declare the obvious, a refusal that makes it clear what the Obama administration has hidden beneath its deep blue draperies.

2. Although it continues to proclaim its intention to make its rulings public at some obscure date in the future (as it has done since Inauguration Day), the Obama administration has not yet repudiated the Bush administration “White Paper” that deemed warrantless wiretapping of Americans to be kosher.

3. For those of you still sniffing the fumes of the idea that last year Barack Obama voted for the FISA Amendments Act so that as President he could implement his secret plan to dismantle it, listen to Eric Holder’s argument: maybe warrantless wiretapping of Americans was [insert vague not-quite-synonym of "illegal" here] under George W. Bush, but now that the FISA Amendments Act has been passed by Congress, it’s all OK. If you still don’t get it, reference Eric Holder’s testimony in January, wishing only that the FISA Amendments Act had been passed sooner.

These points of discovery — thank you Senator Feingold, and thank you New York Times — lead to three further questions that must be asked and should be answered:

1. Is the 70% constitutional = “Constitutional” labeling standard for warrantless wiretapping of Americans still in operational use? If not, what is the operational standard? 60/40? 80/20? What level of constitutionally impermissible spying on Americans has been branded “Constitutional?” How does this new “Constitutional” brand actually fit within the mandates of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution?

2. Considering how gung-ho candidate Barack Obama was for transparency in government, and considering President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day promise that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” why hasn’t the Obama administration released its legal opinion regarding warrantless wiretapping, and when will this be rectified?

3. In what alternative language does the phrase “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” allow this behavior to continue? Insert a pause there for consideration. Then, when they start to drift away, you add “no, no, no really.”

One of the less known problems with the Obama White House has to do with satellite spying against Americans. You would think that here, in the United States of America, a person could reasonable expect to step outside of his or her home without being watched by the police. In fact, we have a little thing called the Bill of Rights, which guarantees protection from that sort of thing - it’s called the Fourth Amendment, and it reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. “

I would hope that everyone could agree that people cannot be reasonably regarded as secure from unreasonable search when there are machines flying overhead, beyond the range of sight, snapping photographs of the people and things below, without any search warrant. Yet, that’s just what’s happening now, and Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, is failing to stop this abuse of our constitutional rights. Military spy satellites that were designed to snoop on the activities of foreign armies are now watching over the private activities of American citizens within the borders of the USA.

The problem was started under George W. Bush, but with the cooperation of Democrats in Congress, who helped pass the Protect America Act and the FISA Amendments Act, the laws that enable the satellite spying program to operate. However, Barack Obama cannot be said to be merely continuing this spy program that targets Americans. President Obama is seeking to expand its funding and operations.

At the hub of this satellite spy program is a Homeland Security organization called the National Applications Office. The NAO takes the information gathered through satellites, and coordinates the sharing of that information with local, state and federal law enforcement officials. So, the military conducts spying against Americans, without a search warrant, which is then made available even to local sheriffs to use as they will.

At the beginning of this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised to conduct a review of the threats to American civil liberties created by the spying program, and to present the review to members of Congress. Yet, according to members of Congress on relevant committees, no such review has taken place.

Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security requested additional funding for the National Applications Office this year - but without even consulting congressional committees that are supposed to be conducting oversight of the NAO. How much funding did they ask for? That’s classified.

Yes, the Obama White House is seeking to expand unconstitutional, warrantless spying against Americans using military satellites, and they’re asking you to help pay the bill. But, Barack Obama and his aides won’t even let you know how much you’re being charged for the satellites that are spying on you.

These operations are so far into the territory of “unreasonable searches” that I would have expected a firestorm of outrage. However, corporate journalists aren’t reporting on the story. There are only handful of journalistic articles mentioning the National Applications Office, and none of them dig very far into the story. No professional journalists are connecting the dots. It’s up to little folks like us, here at Irregular Times, to look at the public record and try to put the pieces together.

(Pieces like the offhand comment by the New York Times back in April that spy satellites are being used to gather information about Americans’ telephone calls and emails - a reminder that spy satellites these days do a heck of a lot more than just take photographs)

I appreciate the opportunity to do some original investigation into an important issue, but it really shouldn’t be this way. The Associated Press ought to be all over this. The Washington Post ought to devote a team to the story. Sadly, such is the state of American journalism that we get more articles about President Obama’s love of cheeseburgers than about the Obama Administration’s continuation of George W. Bush’s electronic spying programs.

Among the tidbits that almost no one has taken note of is that on Friday, the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security held a markup hearing on the 2010 fiscal year appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. Norman Dicks, a member of that subcommittee, has co-authored H.R. 2703, a bill to completely defund the National Applications Office. It was hoped that Representative Dicks would use the occasion of the markup hearing to remove funding from the National Applications Office. However, Dicks chose not to do so.

The subcommittee suggests that it might be reducing the amount of funding for the National Applications Office to an amount that is somewhat less than what President Obama requested. However, as of this morning, the markup listings (here and here) of the Homeland Security programs with reduced or eliminated funding do not include the National Applications Office.

The trick is that the budget for the National Applications Office might have been reduced in the Homeland Security 2010 appropriations bill, but without any public sign that such a reduction has taken place. The funding for the National Applications Office is classified, after all. We the people of the United States of America are not allowed to know how much money is being spent to spy on us.

We’re supposed to simply trust that the House Appropriations Committee has made the reductions, and trust that the Obama Administration will get the message, and trust that the National Applications Office is only being used to spy against bad people. That trust has not been earned.

When our own government has established a program capable of using military agencies to spy against us with satellites flying in orbit over our neighborhoods, in violation of the Constitution and posse comitatus law, there is no reason for Americans to trust that everything is as it should be.

The only way that we can know that National Applications Office satellite spy operations targeting American citizens are not taking place is to pass the legislation introduced by Representative Dicks and Representative Jane Harman, H.R. 2703 and H.R. 2704, to completely eliminate the NAO’s funding and shut the office down for good.

So far, it seems that support for these bills among congressional Democrats is next to nonexistent.

Our writer Jim has done an excellent job documenting how CafePress has deprived its shopkeepers of income by incorrectly calling listing shopkeepers’ own sales as coming from the CafePress marketplace directory. CafePress shopkeepers make significantly less money when their items sell through the marketplace.

As a result of these kinds of problems, many CafePress shopkeepers have pulled out of participation in the marketplace directory. Theoretically, that shouldn’t harm shopkeepers’ own efforts to sell their items without the marketplace’s outrageous markups. Of course, we’ve learned over the last few weeks that that the way that CafePress operates in theory does not match the way that CafePress operates in reality.

This brings me to Squidoo. Squidoo has been a good tool for CafePress shopkeepers, giving free space in which to develop issue-focused pages that can include quick-to-create modules for selling related CafePress items. Sometime in the last couple weeks, this system has broken down.

The image you see here is from a Squidoo page I set up recently to provide an easy way to follow news on the effort to legalize marriage equality in New York state. It’s the CafePress module in that page, which had bumper stickers, buttons and a tshirt for people who wanted gear to express support for the effort. As you can see, it’s blank.

Why is it blank? I had 5 items there before, and I certainly didn’t take them out. There are a couple of possibilities I can think of.

First, since I set up the module, Squidoo has altered its own model a little bit, offering different themes of appearance, and taking away a tool that encouraged Squidoo members to link to other Squidoo pages. It’s possible that this shift has caused some kind of programming glitch that empties out CafePress modules.

Second, since I set up the module, we at Irregular Times have removed our CafePress shops from the marketplace program. It’s possible that this shift has caused problems with CafePress modules at Squidoo. If this is the case, it suggests that CafePress was counting sales made as a result of shopkeers going through the trouble to market their own products, not as shopkeepers’ own sales, but as sales made through the marketplace. That would contradict what CafePress has told its shopkeepers, that marketplace sales were due to the hard work of people CafePress, and not shopkeepers’ efforts.

Whichever is the case, the timing couldn’t be worse for CafePress, which already is dealing with a large number of angry shopkeepers. There are a lot of Squidoo pages that had been directing traffic to CafePress, but aren’t any more. It’s likely that many CafePress shopkeepers who had maintained CafePress modules at Squidoo pages are feeling too disenchanted with CafePress to repair these modules, and may work with plain text modules linking to alternative print on demand companies, such as Skreened, instead.

I’m one of those people who don’t subscribe to cable television. I can’t afford it lately, and even if I could afford the expense I wouldn’t take it on. I’m impatient at cable television when I’ve encountered it: there’s so much noise, and so little content of interest, to me at least. To compensate for low volumes of information, for-profit documentary channels stretch their delivery beyond my capacity for patience.

I have enjoyed PBS, though. My kids get a cackle from Word Girl, NOVA programs can be really informative, Frontline gets me upset and more than occasionally delivers new reporting, and my daughter picks up phonics from Between the Lions. Or picked up, rather. Past tense. As of today, there’s no analog signal for PBS TV in my home. And no matter how I fiddle with the positioning of my antenna, there’s no digital signal for PBS either.

I live right smack dab in the inner city of Columbus, Ohio, the 15th most populous city in the nation (right below San Francisco), so this is not a problem of rural living. It’s not that I’ve hooked up my digital converter equipment incorrectly; I get clear digital reception of NBC (boring), CBS (boringer) and FOX (ack). When I tried to get digital PBS reception last year and failed, visitors reassured me that when the analog signal was cut, digital broadcasting power would be boosted. No dice. What’s happened is the disappearance of good PBS television from central Columbus. This “improvement” isn’t an improvement at all from where I’m planted; a public good is gone. What makes this an advance? My government tells me:

An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum… some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

Now I get it. It’s an “improvement” for the telecoms. Forward!

Click here to read the writings of white supremacist shooter James Von Brunn on Free Republic, along with right-wing readers’ positive reaction to his writings. This is a mirror of the Google Cache of von Brunn’s writings, posted here for historical reference in light of Free Republic’s decision to taken the post down. Here’s what Free Republic replaced Von Brunn’s postings with as the news was coming out today that Von Brunn had shot multiple people at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC:

Free Republic is trying to shove von Brunn’s writings down the memory hole, but I don’t believe the Internet will oblige. Tip of the hat to Think Progress for noting the erased existence of von Brunn’s writings on Free Republic.

Von Brunn’s writings represent a typical reaction to cognitive dissonance between the belief that no black man could be president and the clear existence of Barack Obama as President of the United States. The psychological-rhetorical resolution James W. Von Brunn arrived at, along with thousands of other white supremacists: clearly, Barack Obama cannot be the real president! Everything else, including the wildest of fabrications, follows.

Fellow Free Republic readers (or “freepers,” as they’re known) enthusiastically ditto-headed James Von Brunn’s writings; a sampler from the mirror of his Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy writings:

Tutstar:
“Just about everyone in the world ‘gets it’ except for our media and the sheep who voted for him.”

Seeing More Clearly Now:
“Shame on half the American public for allowing themselves to have their morality turned upside down and for allowing themselves to be dumbed down so badly. The half that can still think logically have a job ahead of them.”

MHGinTN:
“Those who voted for him, for the most part, were playing ‘affirmative action’ to promote a black guy to the presidency, reagrdless of eligibility or qualification. And the fifth column enemedia swept the little Chicago squirrel along to get their dream Marxist into office. Bastards”

Jersey117:
“Awesome post!”

Pabianist:
YOU A RASIST!

Grampa Dave:
“Excellent summary of the phantom oreo, who is about to become our president.”

Eye of Unk:
“Are we almost to the shooting stage yet?
Seriously even the dummies are starting to attack each other, I am prepared to hear of riots starting during the inauguration of disenchanted Obama followers, they are sure getting their wealth spread around, almost every single corporation now has its hand out for cash, like the movie of Steve Martin, the Jerk, after all he had and what he had to pay back it was $1 each.

Thats your check America, one dollar, maybe a small town can pitch it all together and buy a ring like Michelle’s!”

Not all of these people are shooters. But they’re all showing the same serious cognitive strain that results when you refuse to abandon your belief that a black man, even an “oreo,” cannot be president.

Update: Free Republic, undoubtedly seeing the public relations disaster in trying to hide the traces of writings there by James von Brunn, has restored the page featuring his writings. I’m maintaining the mirror, because who knows what Free Republic will decide to do next?