jjjveryness.com

What a huge lily (a lie about a lie) caught on video.

“Among my evangelical friends who voted for Bush in 2000, they thought he was going to end abortion and gay marriages. Instead, they got the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the super rich and they got Katrina,” said Shaun Casey, a professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

According to the Associated Press, 4000 Americans soldiers have now died in the war in Iraq.
The best commentary I’ve seen on that toll is at Obsidian Wings. Staggering.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy Diseuse at Flickr)

I don’t watch much television on actual tvs. As such, most of my viewing is the product of recommendations - almost never channel-surfing. Owing to a missing battery cable, I found myself with a little free time and during a NCAA blow-out, flipped through the channels. I landed on High School Reunion, slighlty recognizing the name from someplace now distant.

After watching on and off for 45 minutes, which was all I could bear, I can say that High School Reunion is worse than very bad. It is very, very, very bad. I am not talking about the good kind of very bad, like Hall and Oates or The Core where bad is actually entertaining. I am talking about unredemptive dretch that has no higher aspiration than to fill 22 minutes of airtime and cater to the narcissistic whims of a groups of almost 40 year old would-be stars. The show was sad, dull, artificial and I am worse a man for having lost any time to it.

Philo Farnsworth must roll in grave.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy tastypiesinc at Flickr)

In the L.A. Times today there’s a story about someone firing at a woman and her 8-year-old son in a grocery store parking lot. The boy is in the hospital with injuries sustained during the shooting. They know who the shooter is and where he is, but are not arresting him. Instead, he’s on administrative leave because the shooter in question was an off-duty cop.
Note to self - before committing violent crime sign up for the police force to avoid arrest.

I’m sure Nasa spent $16b in 2007 on more than just this photo. But aside from this development from Mars, I’m not sure what we have to show for it.
While I may not have the firmest grasp on what else you could buy for $16b, I do have a few ideas. Perhaps a crazy moon base, another Halliburton no-bid contract for contaminated water for the war in Iraq or enough computers for every person in Angola.
Pretty photo, though.

Swirling rumors have hounded the Bush administrator for years regarding illegal, warrant-less spying on Americans. Today the Wall Street Journal revealed the enormity of the program.
To summarize the program, the government set up a surveillance network that can rapidly expand from monitoring an individual to an entire metropolitan area. Phone calls, web surfing, emails - all digital communication - can be immediately accessed without warrant. The program is a larger and less-regulated version of a program that Congress shut down in 2003 after a public outcry was raised.
The beauty of this arrangement is that it’s all been done in private, funded by $1b in re-appropriated funds at the National Security Administration (NSA).
That word - private - is really the crux of this whole issue.
The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution explicitly gives all people (note this isn’t limited to citizens, or even permanent residents) the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. We have a right to privacy so long as our known actions don’t warrant investigation. Our right to privacy is sacrosanct - it’s a founding principle of American democracy.
But this is not simply a question of privacy breached - it’s a question about an executive branch that privately and secretly establishes programs that run explicitly contrary to our elected legislative branch. The executive branch is responsible for executing the will of the legislative branch - not the other way around. To operate outside of that scope is to violate the very nature of the government set forth by the constitution.
So revelation exposes both the degradation of the First and Second Articles of our Constitution (which govern the legislative and executive branches), as well as a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. Worse still, our judicial branch is forcibly inert because the executive branch is withholding so many details that it’s nearly impossible difficult to bring suit. I can sue for a violation of my fourth amendment rights only if I know that they’ve been violated, and it’s unlikely that this administration will be confessing to that detail anytime soon.
And what has this gained us? There’s not quantitative justification - the administration simply offers that we should trust them. I suppose we don’t have much of a choice.