Blacknell.net

Bring Back the Car Tax and/or Raise the Income Tax!

Hey, don’t look at me - Vivian’s the one who proposed it.

CIA Intelligence Sources & Methods

Among the most effective tools the US has (had?) are the assumptions about its capabilities and reach in military and intelligence matters.   And the gap between the assumption and the reality is often the asset that’s being protected when the public is told that something can’t be revealed to them, so that sources and methods aren’t jeopardized.

Well, over in Italy, they’re trying (in absentia) 26 Americans involved in kidnapping (and then lying about it) a suspected terrorist in Milan (all without the Italian gov’ts approval, natch).  Seems like the Italians got ahold of the laptop of the CIA station chief.   And what super stealth secret means did they use to position their people and do recon on the best path between the abduction point and dropping the kidnapped guy at a US air base? Expedia. Oh, and they know this because it seems there was a plethora of unsecured info on the laptop.

Mind the gap, please.

Chap Peterson on the VA Transportation Bills

Virginia State Sen. Chap Peterson concisely summarizes the options currently facing the special session down in Richmond.  Earlier this year, I’d had some resolve to better follow and understand the transportation debate.  But then I put it away after the usual GOP clowning over it made it pointless.  If I can find that resolve again (I might have thrown it out), I’ll try and post more about the special session.

Ashcroft’s Long Term Damage to the DOJ

This is something I’ve long suspected, but soon we’ll be sure about it:

High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department’s ranks, according to an inspector general’s report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials.

[ . . . ]

Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time.

They’ll be there long after this Administration is gone.

Update: TPM is finding lots of fun stuff in the report, but I think this email (which is sent by a US Attorney to a DOJ official vetting the applications) illustrates it pretty well:

My initial reaction is that the guy is probably quite liberal. He is clerking for a very activist, ATLA-oriented justice. His law review article appears to favor reintroduction of wolves on federal lands, a very controversial issue here which pits environmentalists against lots of other interests, including virtually all conservative and moderate thinkers. I know of better candidates through our internship and clerkship programs who have applied to the honors program.

The More Things Change: The Ronnie and Nancy Show

Got sucked into YouTube this evening.  There are a billion Spitting Image clips I’d like to post, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, given that it was a mostly Brit show and this is a mostly US audience.  We’ll start with the Ronnie and Nancy Show!

FISA Deal: Not So Fast, Please

According to the NYT:

Lawmakers are hoping for a breakthrough this week on changes to national security legislation that has divided Congress for months: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

[ . . . ]

Senior Congressional officials said they hoped to seal an agreement early this week and quickly vote in the House and Senate on legislation[.]

Yes, I’m sure they’d like to rush it through as quickly as possible, what with the bipartisan tradition of selling out citizens’ civil rights for the interests of the telecom companies.   So what’s the big compromise?

After weeks of talks, lawmakers have worked out a deal that would allow federal courts to settle the question of whether the telecommunications companies should be protected because they were assured their participation was legal.

Something tells me that that’ll turn out to be something other than what it appears.  Let’s not hurry legislation that’s designed to bury wrongdoing.

Andrew Cuomo and Verizon: Deciding What’s Best For You

Seems like Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, has cleaned up New York to such an extent that he can now spend his time convincing ISPs to shut down access to gigantic swaths of the Internet:

Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.

[ . . . ]

No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups–out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.

Ah.  All you have to do is yell “CP!” in a crowded theatre, and any subsequent trampling is okay, it seems.  It’s been years and years since I’ve been on Usenet, but it - including many alt.* groups - occupies a special place in my own personal online history.  It was a place for advanced debate and discussion when the first HTML standards hadn’t even been settled.  Usenet hosted the first forum that ever resulted in me getting on a plane to go meet a group of friends I’d never seen in real life (circa 1994).   While I’ve long since moved on, it still appears to be a busy host to exactly that kind of interaction.  But hey, Andrew Cuomo needs an issue to run on, and Verizon wants a bit of credit to trade with the regulators, so lets slash and burn the place.

Friday Notes: Bike to Work Edition

Today was National Bike to Work Day, and in DC we did it in the rain. WABA set up a few meeting points around the metro area, and I stopped by the one in Rosslyn. For some reason, I bothered registering this year (I usually don’t, as I don’t need any more t-shirts), and ended up winning a nice $40 bike lock for my troubles. Turnout was what one might expect for a light-rain day: the usual hardcore group, weekend racers, and the brave friends that didn’t bail on them. A shame that it wasn’t a nicer day - I hope those that bailed will give it a crack next weekend. Really, there’s much to be said for the pleasure you get flying past the barely moving traffic on I-66 or Lee Highway.

~

Speaking of biking to work, the best of those that do are currently racing the sixth stage of the Giro d’Italia, one of the “Grand Tours” of pro racing. If you’re interested in following along, Cyclingfans.com is a resource without comparison for online video and audio feeds. You can take one of the video feeds (from, say, Norwegian television) and match up the Eurosport feed in whichever language you choose (I’ve switched between English and Spanish (it really is a good way to learn some new words and whatnot)). If you care enough to talk about it, jump over to the overhauled PodiumCafe (a completely new look, ajax-based commenting, etc.). The Giro stage coverage is generally run between 9 and 11am EDT, Sunday stages are available on Versus, and the race goes through June 1st. Give it a look.

~

There’s an interesting article on the efficacy and saftey of bike lanes over at the BikePortland site. I’m a vehicular cyclist - that is, I act like a car on the road - and thus am pretty sympathetic to the article that BikePortland is rather upset with. That said, I realize that not everyone is comfortable going wheel to wheel with multi-ton vehicles, and bike lanes help address that. Anyway, it’s an interesting discussion.

Pointless Already: The VA Transportation Bill

It seems like it was just yesterday I was saying that I intended to do a better job of paying attention to the (Democratic) Virginia Governor Tim Kaine’s proposed transportation bill this time around. Wait, it was. And yet already the usual flat earth Republicans (who control the Virginia House) have declared that they intend to - once again - just stick their fingers in their ears and yell “nyah nyah nyah, can’t hear you!”, making any serious examination of the issue near pointless.

Short of Charleton Heston bringing a burning bush into the VA GOP caucus that instructs them to actually *do* something (and even then . . . ), it looks like Virginia’s Republicans are planning to simply sit and watch NoVA’s traffic strangle itself. There’s a lesson about a goose and a golden egg here, but these Republicans aren’t exactly the forward looking sort. (For real insight into the Virginia Republican mind on this, see Waldo’s helpful translation of Attorney General Bob McDonnell’s take on the bill.)

This is one of the reasons I’m not entirely kidding when I say that Northern Virginia would be better off on its own. As a result of Virginia’s Constitution, the localities in Northern Virginia can’t do anything without the permission of the rest of the state. Despite the fact that the most economically robust region in Virginia can afford to fix its own problems, it instead exists in virtual gridlock. The Republican politicians in the House reject any transportation solution involving taxes, thus burnishing their No New Taxes Ever credentials for the voters back home (places where “traffic” involves two cars approaching a one-lane bridge, it seems). These Republicans trade addressing a fundamental public need of the citizens of Northern Virginia for their own personal political advantage. And there’s nothing Northern Virginia can do about it.

There’s no Republican plan to do anything about transportation, and there won’t be, as long as they’ve got the power to block progress. So maybe it’s not the best idea to spend too much time picking through the details of a bill that, as necessary as it is, looks to be going nowhere.

Photo: Elephants holding up traffic (admittedly not in Virginia)

When Profits Just Aren’t Enough

An interesting case study of an American manufacturing firm where solid profitability and millions in the CEO/owner’s pocket still isn’t enough to keep him from threatening to shut the whole thing down and taking it to a cheaper labor market.