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!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iel8rWheNQw[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd9EEJvm7z0[/youtube]
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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)
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.
Greg Anrig, Jr. is dead-on when he says that Democrats ought to aggressively attack conservatism as a failed ideology. They got everything they ever wanted during this administration, and look where that’s gotten us.  A broken government, house-of-cards financial sector, and a war that never should have been started. All courtesy of near-complete control of the Federal government by conservatives.
You may have seen the news last week that the GAO issued a report titled “The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.” The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle nailed the analysis last night:
The dollar hits an all time low against the euro, bumping against $1.60 today.
Bruce Schneier’s been great this week, but I want to highlight his essay on the difference between feeling safe and actually being safe:
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they’re different. You can feel secure even though you’re not, and you can be secure even though you don’t feel it. There are two different concepts mapped onto the same word — the English language isn’t working very well for us here — and it can be hard to know which one we’re talking about when we use the word.
This is an important distinction, and the confusion between the two concepts of security has undermined a lot of (stated) public policy. We’d all do better to remember and recognize the distinction the next time something is justified in the name of “security.”
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RIP Sakhi Gulestan, one of DC’s good people.
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The Unholy Rouleur helps us with a field guide to the seasonal species that will soon be invading our bike trails. Just yesterday I found myself in the midst of a flock of Vibrant Plumed Wannabes. Really worth a look.
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Philosophy on the rise as a college major? Hmm.
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Hmm. It’s already 66°F/19°C at 9am. And sunny. All that catch-up work and owed-email I’m sitting on and was hoping to push out late this afternoon? Sorry, all. I’ve got some other work to catch up on.
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