NOW It's Worth Doing Something

Washington, D.C. – Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), today introduced legislation to prevent federal agencies from seizing Americans’ telephone records without a court order.

H.R. 2014, the Telephone Records Protection Act, requires court approval when the government demands telephone records from service providers. Current law allows the government to subpoena such records unilaterally, without any judicial review. The Department of Justice likely used its administrative subpoena authority to seize the Associated Press’s telephone records in its recent investigation of a CIA leak.

  Rep Justin Amash (R-MI)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Boston Bombing

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the accused in Boston Marathon bombing, who was found hiding in a boat days after the blasts, left a handwritten message describing the attack as retribution for US wars in Muslim countries, an American news channel has reported.

The CBS News report on Thursday cited anonymous sources and said that Tsarnaev used a pen to write the message on an interior wall of the boat, where police found him bleeding from gunshot wounds four days after the April 15 bombing.

The note summed up with the idea that "when you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," CBS News reported.

  alJazeera

Do you wonder why they are just now giving us this information? Surely that boat was searched immediately upon the boy’s capture.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I Have My Answer

...to my indelicate question.

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. [ed: see the post for examples.]

[...]

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

[...]

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile, Back in West, Texas

Investigators confirmed a week ago that ammonium nitrate stored at the West Fertilizer Co detonated in the April 17 explosion. The cause of the fire and subsequent blast at the facility, which also injured around 200 people, is expected to be announced by officials on Thursday.

More than 70 investigators have developed more than 200 leads, from which more than 400 interviews have been conducted, investigators said last week.

Investigators believe the fire started somewhere in the 12,000-square-foot fertilizer and seed building.

Looking into the cause of the initial fire, they have eliminated the weather, natural causes, anhydrous ammonia, a railcar containing ammonium nitrate, and a fire within the ammonium nitrate bin.

Additionally, they said water used during fire-fighting activities did not contribute to the cause of the explosion as some had speculated.

  USNews

So does that get us closer to the possible non-terrorist-because-he’s-white-activity of this man?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

My Whole World Lies Waiting

I may have posted this before. Possibly more than once. But just about everything about this performance impresses me. So I'm posting it again. Or maybe for the first time.

What? That Old Thing?

A construction company owned by a local politician demolished a 2,300-year-old Mayan temple in northern Belize to use the rubble as gravel for road repair work, authorities charged.

The ancient 30-meter (yard) high pyramid, which was reduced to a small mound of debris, was part of the Noh Mul ceremonial center located 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Belize City near the border with Mexico.

  Raw Story

The Freedom of the Press

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.

[...]

The Newspaper Association of America issued a statement saying: "Today we learned of the Justice Department’s unprecedented wholesale seizure of confidential telephone records from the Associated Press. These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

  NYT

Maybe now that it’s them being targeted, the press will start extracting itself from the Beltway anus?

Justice Department regulations call for subpoenas for journalists’ phone records to be undertaken as a last resort and narrowly focused, subject to the attorney general’s personal signoff. Under normal circumstances, the regulations call for notice and negotiations, giving the news organization a chance to challenge the subpoena in court.

[...]

“Because we value the freedom of the press,” [DOJ spokesman] Miller added, “we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.”

And the none-of-the-public’s business what its government is doing interest. Don’t forget that.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about whether a similar step was taken in the other major government leak investigation Mr. Holder announced last June. It is believed to be focused on a New York Times reporter, David E. Sanger, and his disclosures in articles and in a book about a joint American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with the so-called Stuxnet virus.

I think we can safely surmise our own answer.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"Street Violence" in New Orleans

Ten men, seven women, and a girl and a boy both age 10, were hit when gunmen opened fire at the parade. Police said they were looking for three suspects, adding that a motive for the shooting was unknown. A police spokesman said the investigation was continuing. "There's nothing new to report," he said.

[...]

[Police Superintendent Ronal ] Serpas told reporters that officers saw three suspects running away, with one about age 18 to 22.

[...]

Photographs of the aftermath in the Times-Picayune newspaper showed a man lying on his stomach beside a pool of blood, being helped by two bystanders. Other photos showed a man in shorts sitting on a cobbled street, his calf bleeding and covered with a bandana.

[...]

Two victims underwent surgery and the children were grazed but in good condition, police said on Sunday.

[...]

The FBI attributed the incident to "street violence," not terrorism.

  Chicago Tribune

Because they used good old American guns and not Middle East-flavored IEDs. And because the suspects are (or at least one of them is) “African-American.”  At least until we find out if they are Muslim.  Then we might change our story.

”Street violence.”  Really?  Firing indiscriminately into parade goers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Distribution of the Wealth

The following chart is from a poll of 5,000 Americans showing how they think wealth is distributed in this country (middle) and how they think wealth SHOULD be distributed (bottom) with how it actually is (top). 



And, since talk is often of the top 1%, here's how that breaks down:



The video states that the top 1% now controls 24% of the wealth in America, whereas in 1976, that figure was 9%.  And that the average worker in a company (again, I don't know what companies were included in the data) makes in one month what the CEO makes in one hour.

Another view. This is on a scale of 100 people; those little green marks are money (how much money per mark, I don't know) - and that floating bit in the upper right is the top cut off of #s 97-99 to fit in the chart.  Number 100 has so much money, it had to be made into 10 columns to fit the chart.  To put it in perspective, imagine those ten columns stacked one on top of the other to make it one tall column. 



I'm kind of surprised that 90% of people polled thought income distribution was more equitable.  It looks about right to me - well, not RIGHT, but realistic.   Actually, the middle class, economically speaking, needs to be clearly defined as rich people.

But hey, perception IS reality.  And that's how the governers govern - by monitoring and managing perception.  And that is why "middle class" will NOT be clearly defined in our public discourse.  Because people who consider themselves middle class would not like to be thought of as so closely kin to the poor. 

h/t Marty

Disclaimer:  I did not verify the figures, but these are their references, and if they've correctly quoted Dan Ariely, then I believe them.  He's an MIT professor whose research field is the study of rationality.

:-)

h/t Marty