Category Archives: Government

Foggo’s Fooked

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Ah, the escapades continue.  From YahooNews:

The CIA’s third ranking official, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, has been under
investigation by the FBI, IRS, Defense Criminal Investigative Service,
the CIA’s inspector general and the U.S. attorney’s office in San
Diego, said FBI spokeswoman April Langwell in San Diego.

Under a sealed warrant, officials searched Foggo’s Virginia home and
his office at the CIA’s Langley, Va., campus, Langwell said. She could
provide no other details.

The FBI and other agencies have been investigating whether Foggo
improperly intervened in the award of contracts to a San Diego
businessman and personal friend, Brent Wilkes, who has been implicated
in a congressional bribery scandal…

Wilkes has been described in court papers as an unindicted
co-conspirator in a plot to bribe then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a
California Republican who is now serving time in a federal prison for
taking $2.4 million from government contractors.

FBI agents also have been investigating whether Wilkes provided Cunningham with prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites.

Foggo has acknowledged participating in the poker parties at the
hotel rooms, but he has said there was nothing untoward about that. “If
he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr.
Foggo insists they were that and nothing more,” the CIA statement said.

Lovely.  So anyway, I’m watching the History Channel with my oldest son (he’s 13) and we’re watching a documentary about fighter pilots and dogfighting in particular.  While the documentary goes into the history of aerial dogfights they focus on one in particular during the Vietnam War and it features fighter pilot Randall “Duke” Cunningham.  Of course during one segment of the interview I point out to my son that the pilot is now in jail and when he asks me why, and I tell him, I can see in his eyes that I’ve helped speed him along the road to disillusionment.  If my kids make it to adulthood without being overwhelmed by cynicism I’ll consider it a minor miracle.

Another Reason the Forsyth County Elections Board Made the Right Call

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A while ago the Forsyth County (NC) Elections Board caught some heat when it didn’t support the recommendation of the long-time director of elections to go with a touch screen voting machine.  The dispute caused the director to leave her position to take a job with the state’s election office.

David Allen made a convincing argument at blackboxvoting.com for why the board was right and now comes more evidence that the board made a good call.  There’s a new report out about some of the security flaws in Diebold’s touch-screen system which supports some allegations made against Diebold.  Note that some of this dates all the way back to 2003.

Yup, I’d say the board made the right call.

William Gibson on the NSA and Technology in General

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Boing Boing has some interesting excerpts from an interview with William Gibson re. the new NSA controversy.  He points out that as a society we’ve (Americans) been assuming that the CIA et.al. has been doing this kind of stuff for years anyway, and that during the Cold War we were even comforted by the idea that they were listening anyway.  I’d argue that many people are still comforted by this idea as we fight terrorism.

Reading this caused me to look at this another way.  A few years ago I did some work in the “database marketing” field.  I was stunned at how much information companies like Acxiom are collecting about all of us every day, but it didn’t really bother me that much because the data they were collecting had mostly to do with our habits as consumers.  What we buy, where we buy it, etc.  And they sold that data to companies whose only real goal was to figure out how to get us to buy more of their stuff. They really didn’t have any motivation to use it any other way. Still, even then there were privacy advocates who were worried that the data could and would be used for more nefarious purposes.  They pointed out that if the government decided to pay for the data the companies would have an instant profit motive for releasing the data.  And then, of course, there was the problem of the companies losing the data or having it hijacked by hackers, but that’s another story.

What makes this “government spying on citizens” meme so disturbing to me is that the government has not been forthright about what they’re doing, and not just on this issue I might add, and so there is no reason to trust them when they say they’re just doing it to fight terrorism.  That’s what happens when you violate the public trust: just when you may need us to trust you most we say “f— you.” 

Ironically I think if the government had said, “Hey, without getting into the details we want you to know that this is the kind of thing we’re doing to fight terrorism.  To protect the innocent we’re cooperating with the fill-in-the-blank oversight committee to make sure that we don’t violate citizens’ rights…oh, and by the way we couldn’t use any of this information in any kind of court because it was not obtained in the proper manner and was never intended for that use anyway” then many of us would welcome what they’re doing in principle. 

But the government assumes we’re idiots, that we can’t be trusted and they know better than us what we need/want.  That’s the other irony: this administration has created more of a “nanny state” than any of its supposedly more liberal predecessors.  This from a regime that turned “liberal” into an epithet.

And we have three more years of this crap.

Important Reading About the NSA’s Phone Call Data Collection Program

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Lex has written a great, extensive, article on his work blog about the newest NSA scandal. After reading it my first reaction is this: because what the NSA is doing isn’t actually listening to the conversations on all the calls they are tracking I guess the NSA (and the President and Attorney General) can claim they weren’t lying when they said earlier this year that they were only tapping calls between folks in the US and overseas.  And that is exactly the kind of hair-splitting I’ve come to expect of the President and all his little people.  Will we ever find the bottom of the pit that this Administration has dug?

BovineExcrement! Drug War Coming to Your Toilet

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Two recent news stories involving the US Government and excrement:

According to a Washington Post article that bookofjoe highlighted, the US Government ran a test on a wastewater treatment plant in Fairfax County, VA to determine how many people in the area have used cocaine in the recent past. From the Post article:

County workers collected five days’ worth of water samples between
March 13 and March 17 at the pollution control plant in Lorton,
according to a March 20 memo from County Executive Anthony H. Griffin
to the Board of Supervisors.

The plant, which processes about 67 million gallons of sewage a day,
takes in commercial and residential waste from about half the county,
including Fairfax City, Vienna and Fort Belvoir.

The samples, which totaled about 500 milliliters, were shipped to
the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, where they will
be analyzed for traces of benzoylecgonine, the main urinary metabolite
byproduct of cocaine.

Nice work if you can get it, huh?  My question is, "Why bother?"  What discernible difference will knowing how many people are doing coke make?  Does it matter whether 25,000 or 2,500 people are doing coke?  How?  Why?  Why not spend the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s time on something useful, like how many toxins or traces of bio-agents are in the water?  Maybe they already are, but I don’t like the idea that they might miss something because their trying to figure out how many people are pissing cocaine.  Absurd.

The other story that ties our government to excrement, or at least the concept of excrement, is the story about the FCC deciding that the word "shit" and all its derivatives are not merely "indecent" but "profane."  That means they can fine any broadcaster that airs the "shit" words for each incidence and they can also fine those who utter the words on-air.  (If I’m ever interviewed on TV I’ll probably be broke at the end of 30 seconds).  Jeff Jarvis takes great exception to this new FCC "nannyism" as he calls it and thinks that since bullshit is the single best term to describe much of our politicians’ actions that it is infringing on our free political speech to term it "profane."  Read Jeff’s "In Defense of Bullshit" here.

To tie all this together I’ll say just this: we need to call ‘bullshit’ on much of what our government is selling us these days. Of course we can’t call "bullshit" so we’ll have to do what my kids do: come up with a suitable substitute.  How about "Bush!"?

American Theocracy?

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Rolling Stone has a long article called "God’s Senator" that is likely to scare the bejesus out of you if you’re scared of fundamentalist Christian Senators from Kansas who have aligned themselves with powerful forces like Opus Dei and something called the Fellowship.  If half the stuff in this article is true it makes "The Da Vinci Code" seem downright realistic by comparison.

The article is a feature on Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who has been ordained as the presidential front runner by the fundamentalist Christian movement.  Normally I’d write the guy off as a quack, but the article also explores his leadership positions in groups like the Fellowship.  Here’s how the article describes the fellowship:

Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide
founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and
generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that
the cells — God’s chosen, appointed to power — could construct a
Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would
do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a
hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to
say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were
known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they
were not known at all.

The Senator also converted to Catholocism through Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic group that could probably be described using many of the same adjectives as those used to describe The Fellowship. Then there’s the "Values Action Team" which the article describes this way:

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer
brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell — one explicitly
dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action
Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading
organizations on the religious right. James Dobson’s Focus on the
Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the
Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values
Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the
Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the
record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from
discussing the proceedings. It’s a little "cloak-and-dagger," says
a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the
enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure
groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights
against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime
legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win
passage of Brownback’s broadcast decency bill and made the
president’s tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting
policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to
day, the VAT is instrumental."

This guy is a player and he’s tapped into some powerful and monied networks and that makes the author’s analysis that "Brownback seeks something far more radical: not
faith-based politics but faith in place of politics" very frightening indeed if it’s true.

What I Hope I’d Say

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If I were a publisher and the Bushies came after me I hope I’d have the same reaction as the publisher of Capital Hill Blue:

"This flamboyant use of the forces of criminal prosecution to
threaten whistle-blowers and intimidate journalists are nothing more
than the naked tactics of street thugs and authoritarian juntas."

Just how widespread, and uncontrolled, this latest government
assault has become hit close to home last week when one of the FBI’s
National Security Letters arrived at the company that hosts the servers
for this web site, Capitol Hill Blue.

The letter demanded traffic data, payment records and other
information about the web site along with information on me, the
publisher.

Now that’s a problem. I own the company that hosts Capitol Hill Blue.
So, in effect, the feds want me to turn over information on myself and
not tell myself that I’m doing it. You’d think they’d know better.

I turned the letter over to my lawyer and told him to send the following message to the feds:

Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.

Normally I redact the f-bomb from this blog since I know my mom and wife read it, but that’s exactly how I feel about Bush and company these days and I suspect they share my view. However, my message would read: "Fuck you. Strong vote against you and your ilk to follow."

One Reason There Will Never Be a Flat Tax

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There’s a new study from the Tax Foundation that says that for every dollar in taxes that are collected Americans will spend 22 cents in compliance costs.  From the TaxProf Blog:

The study estimates that complying with the federal income tax code
during 2005 cost U.S. taxpayers $265.1 billion (up from $134.2 billion
in 1995 (in inflation-adjusted dollars)), or 22 cents per dollar of tax
revenues collected (up from 15 cents per dollar of tax revenues
collected in 1995). By 2015, compliance costs are projected to grow to
$482.7 billion.

Compliance
costs are highly regressive, taking a larger toll on low-income
taxpayers as a percentage of income than high-income taxpayers. On the
low end, taxpayers with AG) under $20,000 incur a compliance cost equal
to 5.9% of income while the compliance cost incurred by taxpayers with
AGI over $200,000 amounts to just 0.5% percent of income.

That’s serious money and it’s money going to accountants, lawyers and tax preparation services.  Do you think they’re lobbying for tax reform or simplified taxes?  Hah!  I would LOVE to see a study done on what the economic impact of implementing a flat tax would be.  $265 billion could buy a lot of something besides time with accountants, lawyers and tax preparers but then where would all the lawyers, accountants and tax preparers (and the dollars they spend on their toys) go?

And what about businesses?  What would happen to the capital they would save if all the exemptions went away AND all the costs of accounting went away as well?  Would it be a positive for the economy?

My gut tells me that a simplified or flat tax would be a net positive for the economy, but I can’t see the scumbags, er, leaders of our country letting it happen.

Oh, and as for that argument against a flat tax, you know the one that says it’s unfair to the lower end of the income scale, what does the regressive nature of the compliance costs do to that argument?

You can find the Tax Foundation’s report here.

Will My Parents and Their Ilk Bankrupt the Country?

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In a stunning outbreak of nuance the National Journal has an article that explores the ramifications of the impending "retirement" of the baby-boom generation.  I’m not sure if I found the article interesting because of the subject matter or because it does a good job at looking at the issue from multiple angles, or to put it more succinctly, because the article is nuanced.  Either way it’s fascinating and a good read.

Oh, and to be totally accurate I don’t think my parents technically qualify as boomers since they were born during WWII and not after.  I just missed the boomer designation since I was born in 1966 and apparently the boom ended in 1964.  Still, I’d rather blame them than myself for any impending doom as that’s truly the American way.  Anyone know a good psychiatrist that can reaffirm that none of us are responsible for our own failures/inadequacies since it’s all our parents’ fault?  Of course any success we have is due only to our own actions…but I digress.

One More Good Idea I Can Forget

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I’ve always thought that it would be very cool to build a database of voting records for members of Congress, but I was hampered by the fact that I don’t know diddly squat about building databases and I couldn’t name 15 members of Congress if you spotted me 12 of them.  Still, it’s a cool idea.

Well, the Washington Post has done it.  One more get-rich-not-so-quick idea down the drain!