Dispatches from the privacy front, State Division

According to a report on Sunday from WKMG-TV in Orlando, Florida,

[a]uthorities are sending convicted sex offenders to jail on probation violations for having racy magazines such as Maxim, or sex manuals such as the Kama Sutra....

State probation officials are empowered to conduct surprise searches of the homes of sex offenders as a condition of their probation. It does seem, however, that they are going a little overboard on enforcing a ban on "sexually stimulating" material.

In one case, that of one Andrew Calderon, the search revealed

a sexy calendar, a racy poster, and a few copies of Maxim magazine. Calderon, 23, was jailed for six days before a judge ordered his release. ...

[I]n court papers, Calderon's lawyer, Mel Black, described Maxim as far from obscene. The men's magazine contains no nudity, nor does it depict sexual acts.

"This is beyond schoolmarmism here. It's really mind-blowing," Black said.

In another case, the offending "sexually stimulating" item was a copy of the Kama Sutra in a bed table. The man in question, Joseph Conte, is married and lives with his wife.

A judge is still to decide on Calderon's case; the probation complaint against Conte was tossed. Still, state officials are unrepentant.

"Anything that is sexually stimulating, we are going to violate them on and the judges are going to make those decisions," said Debbie Buchanan, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman. "If there's any question at all, we're going to violate them."

Corrections officials say they will leave it to judges to ultimately decide whether something is obscene - and whether an offender must go to jail over it.

They call it a "no tolerance" policy; I guess that stuff about all the discretion law enforcement has doesn't apply here. Personally, I call it a "jail first, think later" policy on the part of people who seem to get titillated remarkably easily and appear to be getting a little to much of a charge out of the power they are wielding.

I wonder if they went through Conte's wife's clothing as well. Maybe she owns a bustier and they could get him for that.

Dispatches from the privacy front, Federal Division

The New York Times reported on Monday that as the result of an FOIA suit brought by the ACLU and other groups against the FBI, it's been discovered that the feds have

collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies....

A smaller batch of documents already turned over by the government sheds light on the interest of F.B.I. counterterrorism officials in protests surrounding the Iraq war and last year's Republican National Convention.

The federal cops won't say what's in the files and insist oh, my, yes, it's all quite innocent and we would never ever ever do anything to hinder your blessed Constitutional rights, how could you even think such a thing?

But officials at the two groups said they were troubled by the disclosure.

"I'm still somewhat shocked by the size of the file on us," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U. "Why would the F.B.I. collect almost 1,200 pages on a civil rights organization engaged in lawful activity? What justification could there be, other than political surveillance of lawful First Amendment activities?"

What, indeed.

In a press release, the ACLU said it was urging the court to order the immediate release of the documents, calling the government's contention that it could take nearly a year to "process" the material "a stalling tactic."

The suit is seeking FBI records on 150 groups that have protested Shrub's policies. The ACLU, which in an earlier suit obtained documents revealing abuses inflicted on prisoners of the War on Terror^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)}, says FBI records on the groups could total tens of thousands of pages by the time all is said and done.

Footnote: The Fourth of July has come and gone for this year, but read this anyway. If it doesn't make your soul hurt, you are a lost cause.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is St. Patrick's Cathedral?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Tycoons

A millionaire by age twenty-four, this oil tycoon was considered the world's richest man at the time of his death in 1976.

Jeopardy! for Saturday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Gothic?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Cathedrals for $2000

This cathedral is the seat of the archbishop of New York City.

Another good reason to not shop at Wal-Mart

In addition to undermining communities, disrupting the economy, forcing jobs overseas, and treating its employees like scum, there's censorship. From the Boston Globe for Sunday:

When Willie Nelson's reggae cover album "Countryman" (Lost Highway) was released Tuesday, aficionados of country and dub alike rejoiced. ... Some fans, however, may have been perplexed by dubbing of a different sort: Copies of "Countryman" sold at Wal-Mart feature palm trees on the cover in place of the marijuana leaf chosen by Nelson. What gives?

Nothing we haven't seen before. Just last year, Wal-Mart declined to carry comedian Jon Stewart's best-selling America (The Book), because its cover depicted the Supreme Court justices naked. [Actually, the picture wasn't on the cover.] Beginning in the early 1990s, the Bentonville, Ark.-headquartered retail giant stopped carrying the racy lad mags Maxim, FHM, and Stuff; partly obscured the provocative covers of women's magazines like Redbook, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan; and refused to sell CDs or DVDs that bear a parental-warning sticker. Ever since, media and entertainment companies have censored themselves like, as Nelson might say, crazy. Some record labels have even produced Wal-Mart-specific versions of records, in which curse words were dubbed out, and magazine publishers have been known to run forthcoming covers past Wal-Mart execs. This has given rise to a new coinage: Earlier this year, when several phone networks refused to permit their cell phone customers to download pornography and violent video games, critics warned of "the Wal-Martization effect."

At what point does the cost of saving a buck on a three-pack of underpants become too high?

Foresight

Alternet had a story on Thursday about Google's patent application for a new technology to rank sources in a news search according to the "quality" of the source. The article expresses concern over the fact that among the criteria to be used in judging said quality are the amount of traffic to the site, the source's circulation, staff size, and number of bureaus - all criteria that heavily favor big, mainstream media sources at the expense of smaller, independent ones.

Gee, it seems to me I said exactly that just last, uh, month.

My first comment on the Karl Rove business in a while

And probably my last for another while, too. I'll note at the top that I'm not going to consider the option that, as one person suggested, Karl Rove should be praised because outing a CIA agent is a good thing. The legitimacy of having an intelligence service and the differences among intelligence gathering, covert intelligence gathering (i.e., spying), and covert action (e.g., engineering a coup) is a discussion for another day. What I'm concerned with here are the political considerations involved.

Those start with the fact that Matthew Cooper of "Time," having decided that it was okay to talk, has decided to go all the way: He has written an article about what he told the grand jury when he testified last week. The key part is that Cooper says, according to Reuters for Sunday, that Rove was the one who put him onto Valerie Plame as someone who

worked at the "agency," or CIA, on weapons of mass destruction issues, and ended the call by saying "I've already said too much." ...

"So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD'? Yes," Cooper wrote in Time's current edition.

Personally, I've not given much attention to the arguments over whether or not a crime was committed precisely because it gets into technical details of what constitutes "knowing" in a legal sense - did Rove "knowingly" leak Plame's identity, "knowing" she was covert and please don't say "of course he did," you don't know that for a fact; rather, it's something you want to be true but that doesn't mean it is. I'll let others argue the legalities for the time being, except to note the "defense" that he didn't say her name, that referring to "Joseph Wilson's wife" was not identifying her, is so laughably absurd that even Rove's lawyer dismissed it.

I leave the issue of criminality aside because I regard the question, while certainly worthy of investigation (and we would not be at this point otherwise), as not relevant to the broader, the real, issue: Someone in the Bush administration - apparently but not necessarily Rove and certainly not only Rove (Novak referred to two senior officials in the column that started all this) - blew the cover of a CIA agent, something under which other circumstances they would have considered at least borderline treason, for the purpose of punishing and damaging someone who had embarrassed them. (Have we forgotten that the day after Wilson's New York Times op-ed appeared the White House had to admit the infamous "16 words" should not have been in the State of the Union address?)

Even if not technically illegal, that behavior is truly scummy, a clear abuse of power, and because of that disturbing, frightening, and revealing. Revealing not only of their style and their ethics, but also of their methods. It's almost been fun (in the Molly Ivins sense of the word) watching the spin machine rev up, spewing out bits and pieces of arguments, seeing what sticks. Raw Story got hold of a copy of the GOPper talking points on Rove and it's been a treat seeing them emerge from the mouths and keyboards of various reactionaries and their apologists who present them with straight faces and sober expressions as their own original thoughts. Initially, it's all scattershot, all the points get a workout, even the truly lame ones, but over time it gets focused down to the few that seem to have the biggest effect.

The main methods are nitpicking and distraction: Was she technically "covert" and did he "name" her are two obvious examples of the former. The latter is equally easy to see: The talking points (and much of the discussion using them) spend much more energy on attacking Joseph Wilson than on defending Karl Rove. Someone - I don't recall who just now - called it the "Look over there! TITS!" defense. The attacks range from the clever to the bogus to the pathetic, but the point isn't their quality or accuracy - it's to try to make the conversation about something, anything, else.

But of course, this is not about Joe Wilson or Valerie Plame. They are not the issue here. Karl Rove is. Joe Wilson could be the worst lying bastard in all of humanity who got a cushy junket through nepotism and the issue would still be what Karl Rove did. Anyone who is serious about inflicting political damage on the White House in this needs to keep that in mind.

The final tactic is simply stalling: The Washington Post said last week that

[t]he emerging GOP strategy ... is to try to undermine those Democrats calling for Rove's ouster, play down Rove's role and wait for President Bush's forthcoming Supreme Court selection to drown out the controversy....

Facing an "opposition" party that seems incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, that just might work.

They got 'em there, too, eh?

Canada, just days away from joining Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain in giving legal recognition to same-sex marriages, is facing a last-ditch attempt by the Catholic Church to maintain discrimination. The LA Times for Saturday tells us that Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the archbishop of Quebec and primate of the Canadian Catholic Church, is threatening that the Church will refuse to baptize the children of same-sex parents.

Already, two Roman Catholic MPs have already been reprimanded for supporting the legislation: One was denied communion and the other was stripped of his duties with his congregation ""until [he] has a change of mind." (The latter did not come without opposition: When it was announced, about 30 members of the congregation walked out of Mass.) Even Prime Minister Paul Martin has been threatened with loss of communion.

Ouellet declared that the Catholic clergy felt "threatened" by the same-sex legislation.

"Even our priests sometimes do not feel free to preach on homosexual and sexual morality because they are accused of homophobia," he said in his testimony [before a Parliament committee] ... on Wednesday.

"Once the state imposes a new standard affirming that homosexual behavior is a social good, those who oppose it for religious motives or motives of conscience will be considered as bigots, anti-gay and homophobes...."

Good. Because they are.

Footnote: Ouellet reprised the old inanity about same-sex marriages being wrong because they don't produce children. First, I wonder at the logic: Are we supposed to think that if gays and lesbians can't get married they will have children? If not that, then what the hell is this supposed to mean?

And then, of course, there is always the too-delicious-for-words irony of a Roman Catholic Cardinal griping about other people not producing offspring.

Jeopardy! for Friday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Germany?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Cathedrals for $1200

Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence was begun in this architectural style, like Charteres.

Jeopardy! for Thursday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "the fat lady sings?"

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Cathedrals for $400

Worms in this country has a famous cathedral; so does Ulm (but we'd never start a sentence with Ulm).

Uh, hello

I have been phoneless - and thus online-less - since sometime Wednesday night/Thursday morning. The problem appears to be fixed now but the hassles and frustrations of trying to do something like this via dialup are growing. I have to work tonight but will try to get some things up even if they're just quick notes.

Anyone out there willing to think about staking a poor blogger to high-speed access, maybe in return for your highlighted name declaring "hi-speed access donated by...?"

No, I didn't think so....

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "healthy, wealthy, and wise?"

JEOPARDY!
Complete the Proverb for $600

"The opera isn't over till ..."

Jeopardy! for Tuesday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "good news?"

JEOPARDY!
Complete the Proverb for $600

"Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man ..."

"They died because they were women and they made music"

We don't have to wonder what Iraq will look like when, if Juan Cole is right, we leave sectarian militias in charge of different regions of Iraq just so that, if I'm right, Shrub and the Shrubberies can look good going into the 2006 elections. We've already seen it. We've already created it. This is from Wednesday's Christian Science Monitor:

In Basra these days, it's not uncommon to see armed men from Shiite religious groups standing at the gates of Basra University, scrutinizing female students to make sure their dresses are the right length and their makeup properly modest.

Any woman violating their standards of Muslim dignity, relates Henan, a psychology student, is ordered home. ...

"No alcohol, no music CDs, woman forced to wear hijab, people murdered in the streets - this is not the city I remember," says Samir, an editor of one of Basra's largest newspapers. (His name, and others, have been changed for security reasons.) ...

One woman living in Basra says, "Before, we had Saddam; now we have religious parties and militias. To them, a woman's smile is a crime." ...

"Today, our society is changing, becoming more religious," says provincial governor Mohammad al-Waali, who belongs to the Fadhallah (Virtue) Party. "We must reflect that Basra is becoming a purely Islamic city."

A public picnic of Basra University students was attacked by followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, who beat and robbed students because men and women, the latter with uncovered hair, were mingling and playing secular music. Camera crews trying to film the event were also attacked. The author of a newspaper article about Sadr's movement received death threats because the article was accompanied by a photograph showing women with uncovered hair.

"This is a city where if you have a birthday party for your child, you could end up dead," says one Iraqi journalist.

As drama professor Thawra Yousif Yaakub relates, her sister-in-law Salina belonged to an all-female band that performed at baby showers, birthday parties, and other festive occasions, playing before all-women audiences only. Last May, the band were unloading their equipment on the street after a gig, when a man leaped out of a car and opened fire, killing Salina and another band member.

"They died because they were women and they made music," Yaakub says.

According to Iraqi officials, nearly 1,000 people - most of them Sunni Muslims - have been killed in the city over the past three months, with 100 murdered in one week in May alone.

CSM says "the majority of religious party members are horrified by these assassinations," but that sounds to me too much like those here who rage and yell about the "holocaust" of abortions performed by "murderer" doctors and then proclaim with wide eyes and wounded voices that they have no responsibility for, no connection with, those who shot down abortion providers.

But not to worry too much:

Many Basrans, tired of the increasing "Iranification" of their city and a lack of basic services, plan to vote in December for secular candidates, such as those headed by former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

Oh, yeah, that'll make everything okay. Still, it is true that instead of militias, security could be in the hands of Iraqi security forces. As the BBC makes clear, that would be better, surely:

Nine building workers have died in Iraq after being arrested on suspicion of insurgent activity and then left in a closed metal container.

Three men survived the ordeal, police sources said, despite being left for 14 hours in the burning Iraqi summer heat.

They had apparently been caught up in a firefight between US troops and Iraqi gunmen, and were detained after taking an injured colleague to hospital.

It seems someone figured them for insurgents and called police, who staged a commando raid on the hospital to arrest the men when they returned to visit their comrade. The prisoners were tossed into a metal police truck while the outside temperature was over 40^oC (104^oF). By nightfall, eight were dead and three more were in critical condition. At least one more died later at the hospital.

The survivors were kept under police guard as they were treated and were taken away without being allowed to speak to journalists.

According to the Guardian (UK),

[a]n official at the human rights ministry in Baghdad said: "Under Saddam we feared and despised the police. What has changed?"

Only the excuses. Then again, that's not right: The excuse - "internal security" - hasn't changed, either.

Footnote: A flash presentation worth checking out is at this link.

Memo, memo, who's got the memo?

I have to admit that I've been skeptical about the latest leaked memo from the British government, this one saying that the US and the UK are actually secretly planning to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq by the middle of next year. I find the timing - just as calls for a timetable and/or a deadline for withdrawal are gaining enough traction among the US public to start some mutterings in Congress - more than a little suspicious. "Don't worry," the message becomes, "it's already in the works. Just hang on." Iraqization, it seems, is well in hand.

But since UK Defense Secretary John Reid, the memo's author, has acknowledged its authenticity, I'll put aside my tendency to raise question marks over anything the White creeps (-hall or House) do and consider the memo on its own terms. (Although the memo being genuine does not mean it wasn't deliberately leaked to undermine calls for withdrawal.)

As you likely know, the memo, reported by the Mail on Sunday (UK),

reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later. ...

The document [also] states: "There is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions.

"Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops (brackets in original)] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious."

The UK contingent would be reduced from about 8,500 presently to about 3,000 a year from now, a "minimal" presence.

The meaning of the cut in US forces is more complex. The Christian Science Monitor's Daily Update for Monday quotes Reuters as saying a cut to 66,000

would leave manpower for just two full US divisions. Enough, probably, to prevent Iraqi militia from contemplating all-out sectarian war, but not enough to participate in day-to-day patrolling of most of the country.

That is, the idea is to withdraw enough troops to look really good at home without having all hell break loose before the 2006 elections. If the timing of the leak isn't suspicious, I think that damn well is.

What's also worth considering is how this withdrawal is going to be achieved. CSM quotes Juan Cole of Informed Comment as saying

[i]n practice, I think the withdrawal plan implies a willingness to turn the five northern provinces over to the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitary, and the 9 southern provinces over to a combination of Shiite militias and new Iraqi government security forces (Interior Ministry gendarmes and regular army). And, I think this obviously desperate plan really risks damaging the integrity of Iraq as a nation-state. But, it is unlikely that for the US to remain at its present force levels would help maintain that integrity, anyway.

This version of an "exit strategy," proposing to leave different portions of Iraq in the hands of different ethic or sectarian militias, looks a great deal like a Henry Kissinger-style "decent interval" where the important thing isn't the disaster waiting to happen but insuring that we don't get blamed for it.

Footnote: The memo says that the withdrawal plans are not a "ministerially endorsed position" - but it also said what is:

The current ministerially endorsed policy position is that the UK should not:
a) Agree to any changes to the UK area of responsibility.
b) Agree to any specific deployments outside Multinational Division South East.
c) Agree to any specific increases in the roughly 8,500 UK service personnel currently deployed in Iraq.

That is, it's the formal position of the Blair government that the UK will do absolutely nothing more in Iraq than it already is. Sounds like, despite the public butt-kissing, even Shrub's most loyal ally is not a particularly happy camper.

Footnote to the preceding

Relevant fact:

The four young British men, all thought to be of Pakistani origin, are believed to have blown themselves up with rucksack bombs on Thursday, killing at least 52 people. ...

The four men, including one teenager, all from Leeds and Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, were not considered Islamic extremists and were not thought to have significant links with terrorism.

That from The Independent (UK), July 13.

Relevant quote:

Meanwhile, "blowback," the spooks' version of "what goes around, comes around," is the buzzword of the day and some people have commented on how the Taliban was a recipient of US aid and support when it was a useful tool in "the global East-West conflict" during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Some even have noted how US insistence on stationing troops in Saudi Arabia angered conservative Muslims - including Osama bin Laden. But perhaps unsurprisingly, I've seen nothing giving consideration to how what we're doing now could blowback in the future. What new converts to the cause of the most radical, reactionary forms of Islam are we creating, what new volunteers for suicide bombings?

That from me, October 18, 2001.

Another possible answer to "Why do they hate us?"

CNN reports that while speaking to Parliament on Wednesday, Tony Blair

urged Britons to react calmly to the bombings that killed at least 52 people, and he condemned attacks against Muslims.

"Particularly with the shock of knowing that those that have perpetrated this were actually born and brought up in this country, I think it is particularly important we recognize the worldwide dimension of this," Blair said.

And just why was this such a "shock," Tony? What, it was supposed to be impossible for anyone British to do such a thing? Is it supposed to be something only "foreigners" could have done? What does that say about how your government views the rest of the world?

Some economic notes adding up to a picture

- Can't Win 'em All: Bernard Ebbers, former CEO of telcom giant WorldCom Inc., has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for his part in the huge accounting fraud that ultimately bankrupted the company and cost investors billions of dollars.

Five other former WorldCom executives, including ex-finance chief Scott Sullivan - the chief prosecution witness in Ebbers' trial - are also expected to face sentencing this summer. All five have pleaded guilty to fraud.

He joins Adelphia Communications' ex-CEO John Rigas, sentenced to 15 years for conspiracy and fraud, and Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, convicted of looting nearly $600 million from the company and who faces up to 30 years in prison.

Absent from the party is Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth Corporation; the feds have given up on pursuing further criminal charges after his acquittal in a multi-billion dollar fraud scandal.

Fifteen former HealthSouth executives pleaded guilty in the fraud, including five former finance chiefs who implicated Scrushy in the conspiracy. Jurors rejected that testimony and sided with the defense, which argued that Scrushy was duped by corrupt subordinates.

Scrushy does still face "dozens" of civil lawsuits, including one filed by the SEC.

Ebbers also tried the "Wha'? Who, me?" defense employed by Scrushy, but without success.

- Meanwhile, Back in the Real World: AP reports that

[s]hareholders gave overwhelming support to Sprint Corp.'s $35 billion acquisition of Nextel Communications Inc. on Wednesday, in another step toward creating the nation's No. 3 wireless company. ...

The combination, which still requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department....

I'm all a-flutter with suspense.

- And Finally, An Entry from the Unintentional Humor Dept.: "White House: Deficit Plummeting to $333B" - headline on AP article for July 13.

The tax-cut-for-the-filthy-rich-Iraq-War-DOD-budget-driven deficit? Now, a mere bagatelle!

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is I(eoh) M(ing) Pei?

JEOPARDY!
Complete the Proverb for $200

"No news is ..."

Jeopardy! for Sunday

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Adélie (penguin)?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Architects

This architect's original proposal for the Kennedy Library included an eighty-five-foot-high truncated glass pyramid.