...and the winner of the way too little way too late way too self serving award goes to....

You guessed it, Mark Kirk.

After years of sending our soldiers to Iraq underequipped and at risk of head trauma, and with bad food and water from Cheney related contractors who could care less about anything but their bottom line and rejecting just about everything that could have helped these soldiers on their return home from health care to housing and debt assistance to education and job training, Mark Kirk's big idea (no really Rep Chris Carney's big idea, Kirk just signed onto it), now that Dan Seals is closing in on him for November's election, is to provide a small dental benefit to disabled veterans with at least a 10% service-connected rating after January 1, 2009. It's called the "Make Our Veterans Smile Act" (House Resolution 5595). It's sitting in the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

Take a look at Mark's dismal veterans' benefit voting record here.

A better way to help veterans now would be to create less of them by bringing our soldiers home from Iraq. Kirk will never do that because he's hooked his political future to Mr. 10000000000 years war himself, John McCain.

As for the dental benefit, I guess it's a good thing, but it should have been a no-brainer years ago not sitting in committee 5 years after the start of a needless war, badly planned, badly run.

The lesson of the lost library book and why the cover-up is worse than the crime

UPDATE UPDATE: and the so-called Green Zone is still under attack.

UPDATE: From the AP:

The Basra confrontation also served as a test for the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, which are majority Shiite and include many al-Sadr supporters.

In the campaign's first days, Iraqi forces made little headway against Mahdi fighters, who unleashed rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire every time government troops tried to enter their neighborhoods.

The headquarters of the Iraqi army's Basra operation has come under fire regularly
since the fighting began. Iraqi commanders have had to turn to the British and
American warplanes to take out militia fighters blocking their advance.

At least a dozen police, including some elite commandos, defected to the Sadrists
in Baghdad. AP Television News video showed Mahdi fighters in Basra unloading
weapons from an Iraqi army vehicle.

The vehicle didn't have a scratch on it, suggesting it was either abandoned by the Iraqi soldiers or delivered to the Mahdi Army.

Bush's American trained army in Iraq is switching sides.

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It was on again this morning while I was cleaning up after Democat, the episode of Leave it to Beaver where the Beav looses a library book he checked out on his dad's library card. Beaver spends most of the half hour trying to hide the late notices and cover up the increasing fines without telling his dad, but of course in the end has to admit what he did. Dad explains that lying never helps because if you lie, you have to keep covering up the lies with more lies until you cannot keep track of them and cannot cover any more. The fines still keeps going up.

George W. Bush, John McCain and Mark Kirk apparently never learned the lesson. The entire war has been a giant coverup of the initial mistake of invasion. They spent 5 years managing only American's perceptions of the war and let the war become a cash cow for oil men and military contractors, but an abject failure for both the region and our own fearful paranoia. Despite the interminable chorus that "the surge is working", ultimately the real shooting war, the killing war, the real war was going to catch up to them, and to us, and it did last week when the forces of Iraqi government critic Moktada al-Sadr made a stand against Iraqi troops and forced Iraqi prime minister and chief US puppet Nuri Kamal al-Maliki into a face losing compromise. Maliki was supposed to be standing firm in his requirement that al-Sadr's forces give up their weapons, but what he now appears to be ending up with is a cease fire on al-Sadr's terms--a nine point statement by al-Sadr that does not include turning over weapons to the Iraqi government:

Al-Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji said the fighters would not hand over guns. “The weapons of the resistance will not be delivered to the Iraqi government,” he told journalists.

The talking heads on the bought and paid for mainstream media can attempt to make the cease fire look like capitulation on al-Sadr's part and leave out the more interesting of the nine points, but the bottom line is that Makiki 's purpose in Basra was to take the weapons from al-Sadr's forces and now there is no talk about al-Sadr's weapons being turned in and al-Sadr is calling the shots. So, who do you think won this one?

Kirk and his supporters, who think they control the dialogue everywhere and that their cheap words and feeble Beaver Cleaver-like attempts to cover with lies, matter more than reality, get additional evidence that the only real victory of this war has been that of the oil men and military contractors who've made a pile of money on our backs and those of the Iraqi people. I guess they're ok with that which is why Kirk should be put out to pasture in November and why I don't need to be an additional conduit for their lies.

For a far better analysis of what should now happen in Iraq than anything coming out of the White House, Kirk's office, or the McCain campaign of 100000000000 years war, take a look at this op-ed by former national security adviser under Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski says:

The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.

Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsession with the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer almost certainly would have been an unequivocal "no."

Nor do the costs of this fiasco end there. The war has inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East and South Asia while fragmenting Iraqi society and increasing the influence of Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Baghdad offers ample testimony that even the U.S.-installed government in Iraq is becoming susceptible to Iranian blandishments.

In brief, the war has become a national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States. Ending it is thus in the highest national interest.

Job Posting

For those of you who like Mark Kirk as a congressman because of his tough rhetoric against immigrants (so much so that he's attracted right wing white supremacist groups), maybe because you feel these Mexican migrant workers are taking good jobs away from Americans, I have a job for you. Tomato harvester in Pennsylvania. Oh, no, sorry. Upon closer inspection of the article I see that the tomato grower actually closed down his business because none of you applied for the job. I hope you like corn because that's what is going to be the substitution crop. Corn is picked by machine. No hiring necessary.

Health Care Does Not Mean Giving Iraqi Kids Leukemia

UPDATE: Putting two and two together, we can figure out why Mark Kirk is talking health care. Apparently, the new republican party strategic initiative is to scare Americans into giving up Medicare.

********************************

Mark Kirk's having one of his fake town hall meetings again this Saturday. It's in Mt. Prospect and is on the topic of health care. Health care to Mark means tort reform which involves little reform and a lot of award caps, basically making bad care cost effective for HMOs and other health care for-profit corporations (remember when your local hospital was not-for-profit?). The district should probably make the effort to ask Mark Kirk (again) why he supports the Iraq war with its deadly depleted uranium munitions giving Iraqi kids leukemia and subjecting our own American soldiers to the same deadly risk and why he supports throwing away the $2.2 billion paid by our district alone to destroy Iraq when the same money could have provided 931,808 Americans with health care. Statistics courtesy of the National Priorities Project.

As usual, Kirk is padding the event with other topics so he can avoid discussing the real issue at hand, how Iraq is sucking the life blood out of this country. He wants to discuss his hypocritical moratorium on earmarks. Kirk only likes his own earmarks, the ones he's bragged about each election year like how he invented the railroad and called the Orkin man for Wilmette. Now that he's in the minority party and cannot get his earmarks passed, he doesn't want anyone to get theirs either so he doesn't look so bad.

Kirk is also going to be discussing immigration to make sure he keeps momentum among the white supremists in the district. Kirk says his staff will be on hand to answer your questions. I wonder if Kirk's buddies at the Chicagoland Friends of the American Renaissance will be on hand to answer all your anti-Semitic white power issues.

The event is last minute as usual at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, at the Mount Prospect Public Library at 10 South Emerson in Mount Prospect.

McCain on the Wrong Side of His Own Campaign Finance Law

UPDATE: CNN covers McCain FEC problems:



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McCain violates his own campaign finance law. Several bloggers got together and filed a complaint. Typical republican. Thinks the law is for everyone else, but does not apply to him.

Bucking for the Dean's List

I've been pretty busy lately, but I did have time to stop by Tenth Dems U last night. Jan Schakowsky spoke about various issues including the election, Iraq, the economy and Bill Foster. I've missed a lot of spring semester, but heard from one of the faculty that I'm still eligible for the Dean's List.

Jan's comments on Foster's victory in the IL-14 included the facts and figures. republicans spent about 20% of their congressional committee coffers on Oberweis and still lost. The comment that caught my attention the most was when she discribed her door to door experience. She said she met people who are really hurting as victims of the Bush administration and they "got that". She also saw that they got the connection between their economic hurt and the Iraq War.

Jan was also at the Take Back America Conference in DC and noted that people had tears in their eyes listening to Obama's speech on race in America.

On McCain, Jan reminded us that these supposed senior moments McCain is having about a relationship between Iran and al Qaeda are reminicient of the outright lies about a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda told by the Bush administration to get us into Iraq. She also wanted us all to remember and remind voters we know that McCain isn't so very middle of the road when it comes to a woman's right to choose. McCain is anti-choice and has been so for his entire career.

There was a lot of talk about the Iraq war among audience members. One person reminded us all of the Frontline series Bush's War. Click on the link to watch it online.

Another member of the audience brought up the problem we've caused by using depleted uranium in munitions. This problem is not new. Depleted uranium was used in Gulf War I and is often credited with what is called Gulf War Syndrome. Childhood leukemia has been a big problem in Iraq since that Bush I war. The story has gotten recent traction because of recent reports of soaring cancer rates not only among Iraqis, but among our US Soldiers.

On the economy, Jan talked about the laws that reward US corporations for moving jobs and their HQ off shore. She suggested we change tax and trade policy to stop these rewards for taking jobs out of the US and work to create green jobs. She also mentioned Barney Frank's effort to further regulate financial services to help prevent another mortgage meltdown in the future. You can read about Frank's proposal here.

Jan said not to worry, the Michigan and Florida bylaws committees of the DNC will figure out how to seat the delegates and that we are going to be very proud of our country the day we elect President Barack Obama.

Lucky for me Jan didn't assign any Tenth Dems U homework, but you can read this article in The Nation, Progressives for Obama.

Oh, by the way, it appears that Hillary is a reader of the blog: see this and this (#2 on the list).

Mark Kirk to Tibet: Eat Your Congressional Gold Medal

It's damage control time for Mark Kirk and his U.S-China Working Group. They've spent the better of 3 years telling the Chinese government that human rights issues are off the table. Kirk now says he and Rick Larsen have called a meeting on the topic, no date or location mentioned on his site.

Oddly, as cover, Kirk couldn't manage a better argument than the same nonsense his current designated commenter on this blog has spouted, that his cosponsorship of a Congressional Gold Medal for the Dalai Lama makes up for telling the Chinese goverment that human rights issues were off the table, not to be a factor, not to be discussed.

As I said before in the comments, I'd bet the Dalai Lama would exchange that medal for some U.S. pressure on China to improve conditions in Tibet. Tibetans cannot eat that gold medal as they are re-located away from their homes and Chinese brought in to change the ethnic makeup of Tibet. The gold medal won't get the detainees out of prison or bring back the dead.

Mark, your supporters really should be nicer to me as the best friends are the ones that tell you the truth. I advised you long ago that China's unwillingness to recognize basic human rights was a real problem. You should have stood up for Tibet and the Chinese people back when I first mentioned it rather than going off on your blitz to increase trade with China despite their dismal labor record and worse than dismal product safety record, but being careful of course to make sure they don't violate any patents.

Over 90,000 Served or No, Grandma is Not a Terrorist

Last month, as part of a lawsuit filed by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) of the San Francisco Bay Area under the Freedom of Information Act, a US District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the Treasury Department to release certain documents, letters and emails describing the complaints of people who were wrongly placed on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, a terrorist/drug dealer watch list maintained by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

The Court did not require the Treasury Dept. to provide information of complaints made by telephone despite the earlier Senate Appropriations Committee testimony of Treasury Department Secretary Paulson that that the OFAC hotline received over 90,000 calls over the last year makign similar complaints and did not require the release of information about OFAC's policies and procedures regarding how it ensures accuracy or how it handles complaints, apparently because there are none. LCCR claims that common names on the list are triggering false postitives preventing non-terrorist and non-drug dealing Americans from engaging in normal transactions such as purchasing a house or a car, renting an apartment, getting a job, or obtaining health insurance.

In response, Treasury released about 100 pages of documents last week, not all of the documents required by the court order, specifically excluding copies of "delisting" petitions . Thomas R. Burke, representing LCCR described what he saw:

The records released today suggest that little if anything is being done by the government to help individuals who are wrongly linked by their own government with illegal activity. The plight of innocent Americans who have the misfortune of sharing a common name that matches or is similar to a known terrorist should not be ignored by a government that increasingly relies on such watch lists..... One should question the efficacy of a terrorist watch list that wrongly stigmatizes innocent Americans and provides them no recourse.

Last week, the Washington Post ran an article describing some of the stories of those who were wrongly identified as being on the SDN list, including a teen, a police officer and a veteran. The typical story describes the run around people receive between the government and the credit reporting agencies who falsely tag the people. One of the main problems is that the commercial entities charged with enforcing this list have no idea how to handle it or verify identity. When you think about it, apart from obvious mistakes involving children, if give nothing more than a list of names, how is the average loan officer supposed to determine whether or not the person in front of him is the person on the list? This is just another example of the US government taking a serious issue and putting so little thought into it that the solution is not only no solution, but creates a situation that tags ordinary Americans as criminals and leaves the real criminals alone. It's also another example, much like the breach of Senator Obama's passport records, where the Bush administration is using the terrorist threat to harass Americans exercising their everyday rights.

Remember, McCain's promising more of the same.

Dedicated to Lieberman and McCain

Seems Lieberman is needed to make sure McCain uses the right boogeman with the right country with which he wants to war. Some say the song, Pet Shop Boys I'm With Stupid was originally written about Blair and Bush. Good for the PSBs who wrote a recyclable song for republicans and the people who follow them around enabling their wars.

Here's the I'm With Stupid game. It's no Smite Thee, but it's ok.

Free Trade Mark Kirk

I just happened upon this while doing research on the web. I do not know the person who posted this, but see that he's someone else who has Kirk's number. Apparently, he wrote to Mark about the loss of American jobs to outsourcing and Kirk sent him one of his typically arrogant responses. Kirk told this person that he really could not care less about the loss of American jobs because he " strong supporter of free trade and open markets" and recognizes "the importance of U.S. companies' investment overseas." Kirk's sure a lot like his buddy John McCain who helped send jobs from US Boeing to France's Airbus. What happened to John Kerry looking French and Freedom Fries. These guys cannot keep their narrative straight. Good thing I took 6 years of French in high school and college: Ami, pourvez-vous donner une dime?

I guess if you make your money overseas and don't take any medicines or eat too much, or have children or pets, Mark is your guy, but if you are like the vast majority of Americans who work and invest locally and have loved ones and enjoy a meal once in a while, you have to ask yourself if shipping jobs to China so it can ship defective products back to us is a great idea.

Pelosi Does What Mark Kirk Will Not

Nancy Pelosi had some strong words for Kirk's buddies in the Chinese government when she met with the Dalai Lama this week in India:

If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.

China is not too pleased with her.

I am.

Two Year Olds With Practice

UPDATE: Now, I'm seeing reports that the State Department confirms all three candidates files were breached. H.W. Bush's State Department breached the file of Bill Clinton back in 1992 for the purpose of finding information about his avoidance of the Vietnam War to destroy his presidential campaign. These people simply have no respect for anything and need to be removed from office ASAP. Impeachment should have never been taken off the table and should move forward.

***********************

Mothers often laugh off the end of the terrible twos by saying their three year olds are just two year olds with practice. Same applies to republican administrations. The Bush administration just proved once again that it's little more than the Nixon administration with practice and the benefit of hindsight as it's State Department fails to immediately investigate multiple breachs of Barack Obama's passport records. Dan Abrams on MSNBC is reporting that the Inspector General is only now being asked to investigate. Sure, now that the country knows about it.

This reminds me of 2004 when there was a lot of talk about whether the Kerry campaign headquarters was wiretapped. In fact, with what we know now from whistleblowers about the scope and timing of the wiretaps, it's likely that was the case. They weren't listening for terrorists unless of course you define terrorist as any Democrat running for office which they obviously do. In the Watergate hearings, it was obvious from the testimony of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman that they considered Democrats running for office a breach of national security entitling them to break into Democratic Party Headquarters.

You think I'm jumping the gun on this one? Sorry, don't bother with the argument in the comments. There has just been too much of this from Florida in 2000 to Iraq to Ohio 2004 to illegal vacuum cleaner wiretaps to political firing of US attorneys and the list goes on and on and on. They lost all credibility long ago and only react when they get caught. It's time to put the two year olds in time out and get some adults into our government.

The saving grace of Watergate was that many republicans in Congress refused to stand for Nixon's shenanigans and joined with Democrats to investigate. Will Mark Kirk sit back and say nothing, do nothing or take a stand against politically motivated breaches of privacy and violations of law? I give it a Buddhist monk's chance in Tibet.

The War To Start More Wars

Iraq
Iran
These are not wars to end all wars.
These are not wars to protect our families and way of life.
It's not complex. There are no secret successes that make it all ok.
It's simple.
Bush, Cheney and Kirk are lying.
Not to make you safe.
But for money.

It's time to stop pretending they are telling the truth so we don't have to think about it too much. It's time to bring our sons and daughters home, complete the reconstruction we promised and let Iraq heal. It's time to be honest with ourselves and understand what we have become under their leadership so we can save ourselves.

Don't They Say That Silence is Assent

Mark Kirk seems to consider himself an expert on China and has touted a stronger relationship between the US and China. In 2006, he proudly introduced legislation to pour our tax dollars into an increased diplomatic relationship with China and programs to teach Americans how to do more business with China. He never once addressed human rights violations in China, said that his U.S.-China Working Group would only trouble a the Chinese president with concerns about intellectual property law violations, and even admonished Americans for being culturally arrogant in its bias against China.

Kirk recently participated in a US Chamber of Commerce forum on what is being called the "U.S.-China Competitiveness Agenda." The Chamber called on Congress to facilitate trade with China and labeled anything less as isolationism. See my earlier post on the forum here. At that forum, Kirk made some strange head-in-the-sand comments complimenting China's president Hu for his stand on talks with Taiwan while agreeing that Taiwan could never join the UN as Taiwan, promising increased exchanges and cooperation between the US Congress and the NPC, and voicing concern only for security against terrorism at the Beijing Olympics. Nothing about Tibet or even general human rights for workers in China.

OK, that was last week, but nothing yet from Kirk now that the world is watching Chinese police and military quash protests in Tibet (see here and here too) while the Chinese government attempts to hide the results from the world (see here too). He also said nothing when his leader, Mr. Bush, recently took China off the list of the world's worst human rights violators. The reason for the removal articulated by Jonathan Farrar, the acting assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, was "economic reform." Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) did have something to say about this and was quoted in his local paper, the Daily Pilot:

It is well documented that the Chinese Communist Party murders its political ppponents and sells their body parts,” Rohrabacher said. “How ghoulish can things get? And the State Department calls this progress . . .. Economic improvements are no excuse for ignoring brutal political repression, otherwise, we would have given Hitler an A+.

What would it take Mark Kirk to utter a peep about human rights in Tibet?

Obama's Speech and the Myth of Zero Sum Gain

I just had the opportunity to listen to it in its entirety. Of course it speaks for itself and Barack sure doesn't need my two cents, but I have one point to make. Barack talked about the common misunderstanding that opportunity is a zero sum gain, the idea that if you succeed, I lose. The zero sum gain theory was the foundation of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign when he talked about the statistically non-existent welfare queen driving a cadillac and “strapping young buck using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks" to white voters. It was also the methodology of early 20th century corporations that used race to break up the fledgling labor movement and keep workers of all races in poverty and dangerous working conditions as described by W.E.B. DuBois.

Truth is, there is no zero sum gain of opportunity. When more people succeed, even more people succeed. Success is not stagnant, it cycles up. FDR proved that in the 1930s and Bill Clinton proved it again in the 1990s. Working people making a living wage are more secure and can buy things like houses and cars and vacations and clothes. However, when Americans buy into the republican idea of the zero sum gain of opportunity, we sink into economic stagnation and are either too afraid to spend or cannot. Businesses lose business and we sink even deeper and blaming each other just increases hatred and misunderstanding leaving us vulnerable to the first politician who comes around to exploit it. Zero sum gain is not an idea that helps the average American. It only helps the average republican politican who has bought into the Reagan model.

It is long past time to break the cycle and Obama is the one to lead us because he's the only one who really gets it and is willing to trust that Americans can get it too.

Feeding Frenzy

Remember when you got that gold fish as a kid? My sister, Robyn, and I got ours some time in the mid-1960s at a grade school fair. Mine died right away, but Robyn's fish, Sam, lived for an unusually long time until he was injured in a tragic kosher wine bottle accident and died shortly thereafter of tail rot.

Goldfish partying on the Passover wine nothwithstanding, the big warning about these pets was not to feed them too much. We were told that we had to be very careful not to put too much food into the fish bowl and if we did, the fish would eat themselves to death. Robyn was very careful to give Sam just a pinch of food each day as per the instructions on the fish food label and it seemed Sam was going to set a goldfish longevity record. I don't remember who slammed the door that sent the wine bottle hurling into the fish bowl, but it wasn't me.

Two turtles (one day my mom can tell you the turtle story), and three cats later, we come to my adoption of Democat and the era of the subprime loan pooled investments. At this point, mortgage brokers and lenders are making and Wall Street firms are buying and selling pooled subprime loans in a feeding frenzy of easy money. There is something both the lenders who made the loans and the investment houses who pooled and sold the loans were supposed to do. It's called due diligence and it's not at all like goldfish food. They're supposed to have a lot of it. Due diligence involves gathering up and reviewing all the paperwork relevant to the borrowers and loans and comparing it against standards. E. Scott Reckard writing for the Los Angeles Times described what went down:

Sub-prime mortgages skyrocketed in popularity -- with the volume of sub-prime-backed securities soaring from $13 billion in 1995 to $594 billion in 2005 and $521 billion in 2006 -- and business exploded for Clayton and Bohan. At the peak, Clayton had about 900 loan-review contractors working for it at any given time, and privately held Bohan had about 350. At publicly held Clayton, revenue rose from $19 million in 2000 to $239.2 million in 2006.

As time passed, Clayton and Bohan executives said, Wall Street firms and their investor customers accepted increasing levels of default and fraud in sub-prime loans as they grew to trust software designed to offset those risks by charging higher interest rates, extra fees and penalties for paying off mortgages early.

As Wall Street grew more comfortable, it demanded less of the review process. Early in the decade, a securities firm might have asked Clayton to review 25% to 40% of the sub-prime loans in a pool, compared with typically 10% in 2006, although the requirements varied, Filipps said.

By contrast, loan buyers who kept the mortgages as an investment instead of packaging them into securities would have 50% to 100% of the loans examined, Bohan President Mark Hughes said. [Emphasis added]

I think the part of Reckard's article that got me thinking about goldfish in a feeding frenzy was the line I put in bold above. They were pushing off the risk of not doing their due diligence onto borrowers through higher interest rates, fees and penalties, not for not paying, but for paying early. Investors paid more too bearing the risk of less due diligence on the securitization side. So, all you folks who argue against bailing out the people who bought homes with subprime loans, but love that Bear Stearns just got bailed out no fuss or questions asked, are condoning the feeding frenzy of easy money by the folks who knew what due diligence was supposed to be done, and punishing the people who had no idea that the lenders and investment houses were not doing their jobs, and pushing off the risk of that onto them.

Mark Kirk is wrong on the subprime lending mess because he does not advocate for stronger regulation and enforcement against brokers, lenders and Wall Street. It seems to me that these banks and other financial companies need to be treated like Sam the fish, fed opportunity judiciously by someone whose paying a lot of attention to the instructions on the label. They weren't and they ate themselves to death.

When they are not after Spitzer, New York State prosecutors are investigating what went wrong. New York state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has exchanged immunity for information from one of the companies that was supposed to complete the due diligence on the investment side. It appears now that the only ones who will go down from this mess are Spitzer and the homeowners who will lose their homes to foreclosure.

Is Illinois Flakey?

UPDATE: The Illinois corn flake sold for $1,350.

I mean literally. Here's our official state flake. OK, I'm kidding about the official part, but this corn flake is supposed to look like the state of Illinois and be worth in excess of $500 according to an ebay auction of same. Well, it is a frosted corn flake, but without the milk and the tiger, I'm not sure it's worth all that. The same $500 would have been better spent on the Seals campaign.

Earmark Kirk Thinks We're Stupid

After spending the last 7 years sending out emails about all the terrific earmarks he obtained for the district (whether he actually did the work or not), Mark Kirk joined the earmark moratorium trying to ride on the coattails of Russ Feingold and Barack Obama. He's now sent out a campaign email about that figuring he'll ride the current tide, whatever that might be, doesn't really matter. Remember, though, when you consider this, to note what exactly Mark Kirk sees as an earmark. Last time I checked, it was feeding poor children.

Next time you see him, ask him if, now that he's against earmarks, he'll have another townhall to discuss the Iraq war, this time without the hour of time wasting on how much funding he's going to get for Winnetka to eraticate the emerald ash borer.

You might also ask him to explain how we continue to do business with China while it attacks Tibetans in the streets. Ask him also how he feels about our Iraq War debt interest being used by the Chinese government to fund paramilitary police who are beating up on Buddhist monks.

To Bush and Kirk, Ignorance is Bliss, but the Deterioration of America's Schools Is Bad News for Your Kids

I finally figured out No Child Left Behind. If we teach none of them, no one of them is left behind the others. They are all equally eating the dust of students from Europe and Asia. Since Bush and Kirk got into power in 2001, it's been a struggle for any bill that actually helps students. republicans consider the education of your children unnecessary luxury while cheerfully funding failed war in Iraq and more nuclear weapons. The proof is out with Thursday's release of the The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. The panel, made up of 24 mathematicians, educators and psychologists, concluded that "without substantial and sustained changes to its educational system, the United States will relinquish its leadership in the 21st century." One of the main problems they found is that American schools teach too many subjects broadly rather than digging deeply into the core topics:

There seem to be two major differences between the curricula in top performing countries and those in the U.S.—in the number of mathematical concepts or topics presented at each grade level and in the expectations for learning. U.S. curricula typically include many topics at each grade level, with each receiving relatively limited development, while top-performing countries present fewer topics at each grade level but in greater depth.

The panel then goes on to describe my dad's old complaint about school when he was a boy:

In addition, U.S. curricula generally review and extend at successive grade levels many (if not most) topics already presented at earlier grade levels, while the top-performing countries are more likely to expect closure after exposure, development, and refinement of a particular topic. These critical differences distinguish a spiral curriculum (common in many subjects in U.S. curricula) from one built on developing proficiency—a curriculum that expects proficiency in the topics that are presented before more complex or difficult topics are introduced.

Dad, you are right, our schools keep going back to the same topics year after year, so the students never move forward. I learned most of my math by continuing on with in in college and I got to college with strong writing skills and knowledge in the social sciences, not strong math or science skills. In later years, after law school, I got my BS in Information Systems at DePaul in a class where most of the students were from Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East. One of my classmates was brought to the US from Poland by Motorola on the promise of employment. She said that her American higher education would not be good enough if she went back home. At one point, Motorola threatened to send her home through a layoff and she was panicked until they decided to keep her.

The NMAP report went on to discuss the role of teachers in math education:

There are large, measurable differences in the effectiveness of mathematics teachers in generating achievement gains:
• Differences in teachers account for 12% to 14% of total variabilityin students’ mathematics achievement gains during an elementary school year.
• When teachers are ranked according to their ability to produce student achievement gains, there is a 10 percentile point difference across the course of a school year between achievement gains of students of top quartile teachers versus bottom-quartile teachers.
• The effects of teachers on student achievement compound dramatically if students receive a series of effective or ineffective teachers.

Mark Kirk voted for the failed No Child Left Behind and for every Bush budget that shorted education in favor of war. More recently, Kirk was a no-show for last year's vote on funding education for math and science teachers. Kirk is focused on more local control of the schools, a plan the NMAP report rejects because the local authorities have "no research base to guide them." Kirk favors vouchers, willing to destroy the public schools for the sake of more tax cuts for the wealthy, and for the mostpart, sees public education as a law enforcement issue, willing to invest funds to take the Internet out of schools and for some vague plans that are supposed to take gangs out of the schools, but the actual provision of public education for the vast majority of students not in gangs or in online trouble is not on his agenda. For his efforts in education, Kirk has received a score of 27% by the NEA.

Kirk love war and tax cuts for the wealthy. He is bad for education and it's hurting our country's future. For our parts, it's time to stop overvaluing some fake promise of security, the quick buck and entertainment, and start putting our dollars where they will be most effective to insure a better future.

$3 Trillion Down the Rat Hole of Unnecessary and Failed War

The North Shore Women for Peace together with the American Friends Service Committee is holding a vigil today at the very cold and windy Port Clinton Square in Highland Park to highlight the economic cost of the Iraq War. Vicki Bailyn of the North Shore Women for Peace said that the $720 million spent on this war each day is unsustainable. Even those who initially agreed with this war have to see how this is hurting our country in terms of human and economic cost.

The American Friends Service Committee put together a list of alternative ways the money spent on the Iraq War could be spent:

• 423,529 children provided with health care
• 34,904 four-year scholoarships for university students
• 12,478 elementary school teachers salaries
• 1,274,336 homes with renewable electricity
• 93, 364 hear start places for children
• 6,482 families with homes
• 1,153,846 children with free school lunches
• 84 new elementary schools
• 163, 525 people with heath care.

The cost of the war has not only been far greater than originally sold to the American people, as of now about 10 times Rumsfeld's original stated estimate, and estimated at ultimately $3 trillion, but also has been purposefully clouded and hidden from us. According to Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes writing in April's Vanity Fair, the cost of the war has been hidden by burying costs in different government accounts and in the use of cash basis accounting rather than the more customary accrual basis accounting which takes future obligations into consideration:

Why the huge difference between our number and the administration’s? One big reason lies in the misleading way the federal government does its accounting. Any publicly owned business, no matter how small, is required by law to use a method of accounting that takes future obligations into consideration. This is known as “accrual” accounting. But Defense Department accounting is done on a “cash” basis, which logs only what the government is actually spending day by day and ignores future obligations. In the case of the Iraq war, the future obligations are huge. They include the cost of replacing military equipment, which is being used up at 6 to 10 times the peacetime rate. They also include the cost of providing health care and disability payments for our returning troops. These costs will be especially high because of our improved ability to keep even the most horribly wounded soldiers alive.

Stiglitz and Bilmes also point out that cash basis accounting also encourages short term thinking and spending. As an example, they point to the Bush administration's failure to provide adequate supplies and health care for the soldiers. It just ended up costing more in the long run, not to mention the increased paid and suffering to these people.

This is all not to mention the intentional aspect of this deception regarding the real cost of the war. Again, Stiglitz and Bilmes point out some of the ways that the Bush administration has downplayed the real cost of war:

Finally, we should point out that the procedure used by the administration to fund the Iraq war was chosen deliberately in order to deflect close attention. The administration has requested nearly all the money for the war in the form of “emergency” funding, which is not subject to standard budget caps or vigorous scrutiny. Emergency funding is intended for genuine crises, such as Hurricane Katrina, where the utmost speed is required to get the money to the field. The continued use of this emergency procedure—five years after the war began—is budgetary sleight of hand that makes a mockery of a democratic budget process.

The Bush administration lied to get us into Iraq and continues to lie to keep us in Iraq. They cut taxes for the wealthy to show they can still help out their campaign contributors while maintaining their wars for fun and power without a care about how they were bankrupting our country. Then, they borrowed money from countries like Saudi Arabia and China further increasing the deficit with the cost of interest, and further decreasing our national security. John McCain promises more of the same, 100 more years of the same. Even those who might have agreed with the invasion of Iraq 5 year ago should see that this war is madness and it's time for a change.

The House Kills Telecom Immunity. Kirk Tries To Give It CPR

Today, the House put an end to republican maneuverings to push through the Senate version of the FISA bill that included telecom immunity by passing its own version (changed back to its original form without telecom immunity). The bill passed by a 213-197 margin. You can read all the details about the procedural maneuverings on Kos and Glenn Greenwald, but here we talk about Mark Kirk, and you can bet the farm that Mark Kirk voted against the House Bill proving once again that he'd rip our Constitution to shreds if it would get him one inch closer to the seat of republican campaign dollars. What Kirk doesn't get is that if he would demonstrate some consideration for the rights of people in the district, he might not need to stockpile millions for November. Mark, you cannot always buy an election. Oberweis couldn't and Bloomberg figured that out and decided not to run.

A Friday Blog

Friday potpourri:

1. Just say no to drugs? Sorry, no can do if you drink tap water in some US cities each day. You are supposed to drink about 2 liters each day to replace fluids. I looked up Deerfield to see what's in the water. They found 8 contaminants and 8 water treatment and distribution byproducts in our water during the study from 1998 through 2003 including: Dichloroacetic acid, Trichloroacetic acid, Dibromoacetic acid, Total haloacetic acids, Chloroform, Bromodichloromethane, Dibromochloromethane, Total trihalomethanes (TTHMs). Libertyville was worse with 10 contaminants and 10 water treatment and distribution byproducts including: Dichloroacetic acid, Trichloroacetic acid, Monobromoacetic acid, Dibromoacetic acid, Total haloacetic acids, Chloroform, Bromoform, Bromodichloromethane, Dibromochloromethane, Total trihalomethanes (TTHMs). Winnetka? Oh boy. 18 contaminants, 4 agricultural pollutants, 3 sprawl and urban pollutants, 6 industrial pollutants, 10 water treatment and distribution byproducts, 5 naturally occuring pollutants and 1 unregulated contaminant. If you go to Winnetka, by golly don't drink anything. Planning on substituting bottled water? Maybe not. Here and here too.

2. I figured out what's the deal with Hillary. She's not getting enough sleep. Sleepeducation.com has a page on its site for the candidates. Making mistakes and acting irritable are among the symptoms, Hillary's major mistake being not understanding that we know Barack Obama is where he is due to his own merit. Anyone who has ever met, seen or read the record of Barack Obama knows that he is bursting with merit. For Hillary, I recommend yoga. McCain? His problem is that he cannot get enough of right wing extremists the newist one being Rod Parsley who is a strong believer in religious war. For McCain, I recommend stepping back and observing himself as one would observe a third party and deciding if he really likes what he sees. If so, he is what he is.

3. What a week. The dollar weakened, Carlyle Capital failed (you'll remember that the Carlyle Group is a Bush connected global private equity investment firm that has benefited from Iraq war contracts and increased business from China), and the price of oil went up to a record $110 a barrel.

4. What happens when good federal regulatory agencies go bad:

WARNING: Do not read before a meal (or maybe just after): Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. finds meat from downer cows yummy. Cows too sick to stand were put into our food supply.

WARNING: Do not read just before a flight. Southwest Airlines didn't like to inspect it's planes so much. They say they were just figuring out how to do them correctly. Ok, so a few planes were cracked. What's the big deal? If the downer cows for dinner don't kill us and the water doesn't kill us, we have the opportunity to go quickly on a cracked jet.

5. Cute cat meets eagle picture courtesy of Stacey. Thanks Stace. Only problem I see is that usually when cat meets eagle, it doesn't end well for the cat.

Bush Expanding Nuclear Arsenal

FCNL recently reported on Bush's new nuclear program. It's called Complex Transformation and its goal is "to consolidate exisiting nuclear facilities and expand capacity to produce material for new nuclear weapons to an annual production capacity of 80 plutonium pits" which are triggers for new nuclear bombs. The cost of the program is estimated at around $2 billion. They are asking for $100 million from the 2009 budget. The production facility is to be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, located northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Here's a good explanation of the program from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability:



Here is more information on the program from the 2020 Vision Education Fund. We are supposed to be trying to reduce nuclear weapons in the world, so why are we going to spend billions for more? Since nothing out of the Bush administration since he took office ever had to do with any real national security (ignoring the report that was entitled bin Laden actively seeking to hit the US, outing an active CIA agent looking for WMD in Iraq, inadequate and defective supplies to our soldiers etc), it seems the only reason to build more nukes is to enrich the nukemaking corporations and lobbyists. What good is all the money going to do them when they succeed in blowing the entire world to bits?

Dan's Red to Blue

Congratulations to Dan Seals for his inclusion on the DCCC's Red to Blue list. The DCCC describes its Red to Blue program: it's "designed to provide financial and structural aid to the strongest Democratic candidates across the country. " The DCCC now knows what we knew all the time. Great Job Dan and all the Dan supporters.

Does Mark Kirk Think China is a Good Role Model for the United States?

I would argue that China is no longer communist. It's fascist under the traditional definition of fascism as corporationism, the close connection of unaccountable totalitarian government and unaccountable corporations. I'm not the only one who thinks so either. See here, here, here.

Mark Kirk loves China and many have posted comments here suggesting that Kirk wants to be a lobbyist for China after he leaves Congress. Kirk wants the US to do more business with China and not worry about their treatment of workers or their treatment of customers (us) by selling us dangerous products. On March 6, 2008, Kirk and his U.S.-China Working Group held a roundtable on the topic at the Nixon (sort of fits the theme of selling Americans out) Center. I found very little on the roundtable. Kirk doesn't mention it on his own congressional website. I guess it's not something he wants his district to know much about. However, there is a brief report on the roundtable here.

I found this paragraph of the report curious:

But, as Kirk noted, within Congress and the U.S. government, there is still a "cultural affinity for democracies" and "across the board . . . there is just a lack of dialogue at a basic level if you’re dealing with someone that hasn’t been elected." Chinese officials don’t have to answer to an electorate or go through a "searing" electoral process, which means that a fundamental commonality is missing. And that makes bridging the gap all the more difficult.

I would think that "cultural affinity for democracies" to be a good thing and the lack of accountability of Chinese officials to be nothing we'd want to emulate. Kirk also stressed that the U.S. should not attempt to sanction China for its trade practices which I imagine from previous statement he has made about focusing only on intellectual property violations and ignoring human rights violations, includes it's use of slave labor and other human rights violations. He's more worried about a trade war that would hurt American businesses, but we already knew that Kirk believes in nothing just because it's the right thing to do. He also ignores that sometimes doing the right thing turns out better as it would have in the cases of dangerous products sold to us by those fully unaccountable Chinese businesses. It seems that he's also talking about selling out Taiwan.

I also found Kirk's comments on the U.S. dependency on China in dealing with N. Korea strange because I would think we would not want to be so very dependent on such an unreliable ally. Our dependence on China is a major failure of the Bush administration and rather than simply hoping to deepen that relationship dynamic, I'd like to see us work to end it.

Kirk seems overly impressed with China. I don't think China, with its corruption, slave labor and its fully unaccountable corporations and government, is a good role model for the United States. I thought we were supposed to be the role model for countries like China to emulate.

Who is a better source of information on China. The Dalai Lama. He tried to work with them long before Kirk was born and saw the results. Recently, the Dalai Lama marked the 49th anniversary of his exile and said of China:

Repression continues to increase, with numerous unimaginable and gross violations of human rights, denial of religious freedom and politicisation of religious issues.

The Dalai Lama would like the Beijing Olympics to highlight China's treatment of Tibetans. Mark Kirk sees the Beijing Olympics as an example for the city of Chicago that wants to host in 2016. I imagine Chicago can find a better example to follow. I dont' want to see slave labor building an olympic city in Chicago. Not all republicans agree with Kirk on China. Even Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia said of Bush's planned attendance at the Beijing Olympics:

China is a criminal state and should be treated as such. However, Bush will ignore the ugly facts and attend the Beijing Olympics as if he was watching a Sunday baseball game. By doing so, he will send a message to the world that the U.S. approves of their behavior, and the Chinese will take his visit as a sign of weakness and ignorance to be exploited.

Mark Kirk originally campaigned on his concern about rogue states with WMD (Source On the Issues quoting www.kirkforcongress.com Sep 9, 2000). So, to Kirk, is China an acceptable rogue state with WMD? What makes China and it's nukes acceptable? I'd guess its the cash. They are making money and what is more acceptable to a guy like Kirk than making money hand over fist no matter the human consequences left in its wake.

Torture Override

UPDATE: There never really was a doubt. Mark Kirk loves torture. No word on why he doesn't think our soldiers deserve clean drinking water or why he wants this country to become the Soviet Union.

************************

I just heard that the override vote to Bush's veto of the anti-torture bill is coming up today.

Do you want torture being done in your name?

Do you want our troops subject to acts of outlaw states because we've become an outlaw state ourselves?

Kirk will probably vote against the override as he voted against the conference report containing the original ban and in favor of torture. His new leader McCain already made the betrayal claiming torture supports the troops. However, it's pretty clear from the stories of our soldiers being sickened by contaminated water provided by KBR that they don't care about the troops, so I don't buy that as the argument for torture. I dont' see McCain or Kirk fighting Cheney to end the Halliburton/KBR monopoly on contracts that end up hurting young American men and women. One more reason to vote Kirk out in November, vote against McCain and really support our soldiers by bringing them home (can't guaranty clean water here though, can we?)

The Mother Scandal

Bush and his supporters like Mark Kirk have brought us to this and it's not good and has never happened before in the history of this country:

Today the House Judiciary Committee sued former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten for failing to comply with subpoenas to testify in the US Attorney firing scandal. US-Attorney-Firing-gate is what I see as the mother scandal that created the atmosphere that allowed, or at least allowed to go on unchecked, the many other Bush Administration scandals that have plagued our nation, risked its security and our basic Constitutional government. The policies of the Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department allowed only "loyal Bushies", willing to prosecute, or not, for purely political reasons, to serve as US Attorneys. These Justice Department policies led to late prosecution of republican criminals like Ney, Cunningham and Abramoff and the likely politically motivated overly agressive prosecutions such as the one that destroyed former Alabama Governor Don Siegleman. It also relates to scandals related to vote supression in the name of protecting against vote fraud that never happened, the outing of active CIA agent Valerie Plame (who was working on finding WMD in Iraq if you care about that as many of you say you do, but usually only when attacking Democrats seeking the truth) and advice from the AG's office that torture is A-OK. So, yes, this is important.

You might remember that guys like John Boehner and Mark Kirk have mocked the importance of this matter by walking out of the House when the contempt citations came up for a vote. Many House republicans still value party far over country and sadly Mark Kirk is one of them. Note that I'm not the only one who feels this way. The Washington Post article first linked in this post quoted Mickey Edwards (former R-OK) who said it was " 'embarrassing' that [r]epublican members of Congress are not joining in the attempt to get the administration to respond to the subpoenas." Extend your embarrassment to your republican Attorney General Mr. Edwards because Mukasey refused to enforce the law last month (while he was also refusing to investigate illegal torture) showing that loyal Bushidom is far more important to him than are his duties as AG. No wonder he won't be getting the big award at Boston College this graduation and I imagine he can be impeached too.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers announced the suit:

We will not allow the Administration to steamroll Congress. Under our system of checks and balances, Congress provides oversight of the Executive Branch to make sure that government power is not abused. The Administration's extreme claims to be immune from the oversight process are at odds with our constitutional principles on which this country was founded, and I am confident the federal courts will agree.

I'm not as optimistic as Rep. Conyers noting that the Bush administration has also gone out of its way to pack the federal courts with loyal Bushies.

Among the allegations of the suit, is this:

The record tp date also reveals numerous questionable or outright false statements to Congress and the public on this issue, including the purported reasons for seeking the forced resignations and the nature and scope of the involvement of White House personnel in the matter.

The complaint goes on to describe how the lies and stonewalling has made it impossible for Congress to complete its investigation. That reminds me of Patrick Fitzgerald's baseball umpire analogy when describing the charges against Scooter Libby for his actions prevented the full investigation of the Plame/CIA leak:

And what you'd want to do is have as much information as you could. You'd want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you'd want to know. And then you'd make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, "Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it."

In this case, it's a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us. And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray? And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view. As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it. So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge. This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

The Bush administration has systematically worked to make itself fully unaccountable for its actions and Mark Kirk applauds it and is willing to walk out of the House, walk out on his duty to the constituents of his district, us, for Bush's right to do so.

Sad News

I'm sorry to report that Wheeling Democratic Committeeman Patrick Botterman passed away this weekend. My condolences to his family and all the members of WTDO.

Folks are Talking about Foster's Win

Not a fluke:

* This was not a "normal" seat in Congress. This was the home of the congressman who, until the GOP lost control of the chamber in the 2006 elections, was the most powerful man in the House. Oberweis was the candidate he backed to replace him. As psychological victories go for a party, this is on par with Republicans knocking off former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004.

* Oberweis' loss will fan fears that Illinois demographics are trending away from Republicans. When Melissa Bean beat GOP Rep. Phil Crane in the suburban 8th Congressional District in 2004, Republicans called it a fluke. Then she won re-election, and now she has another suburban/exurban Democrat joining her in Congress. Other Republicans in similar seats outside of Chicago - including Reps. Mark Kirk and Peter Roskam - are surely taking notice of that trend.

Cash isn't everything:

Along the lake, four-term Republican Rep. Mark Kirk of Highland Park has been stockpiling campaign cash for a rematch against Dan Seals, who came surprisingly close in 2006.

Oberweis lent his campaign $2.3 million and Foster $1.8 million. Both national parties spent more than $1 million each.

My endorsers coattails are longer than yours:

The race was a proxy war between Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama cut an add for Foster....

Facts are stubborn things:

The scientific training teaches you always to look at the facts first. If you look at the places this country's gotten itself in trouble, it's very often where we ignore facts for political reasons," Foster said, citing the Iraq war.

The Quantico Circuit

No, it's not the title of a new movie, but it probably should be. The Quantico Circuit is what they are calling the high-speed digital line that allows completely unfettered access to what appears to be Verizon's infrastructure, including the ability to eavesdrop on all [yes, ALL] calls through its network. The whistleblower, Babak Pasdar, a security specialist, did not specifically name Verizon, but the allegations match those of a 2006 lawsuit identifying Verizon as the telecom.
It's called the Quantico Circuit after the FBI office in Quantico, Virginia that apparently has the direct access.

Pasdar found the line while working as a contractor on a project to migrate security hardware. He was instructed by senior consultants not to migrate the traffic for one particular DS-3 line. The security analyst in him wondered why there were no firewalls or access controls (like log-ins and passwords) on the line and upon his inquiry, he was told that the client wanted the network structured so usage logs could not be created.

A memo describing Pasdar's February 28, 2008 affidavit completed by the Government Accountability Project, lists the types of information available through this line:

The scope of uncontrolled “Quantico Circuit” access allowed the third party to obtain significant information about any mobile phone subscribers, including --

• listening in and recording all conversations en-mass;
• collecting and recording mobile phone data use en-mass;
• obtaining the data they accessed from their mobile phone (Internet access,
  e-mail, web);
• trending their calling patterns and other call behavior;
• identifying inbound and outbound callers;
• tracking all in and outbound callstracing the user's physical location
  

This is the same sort of illegal vacuum cleaner surveillance that has been described several times on this blog and most security experts agree does not add anything to the hunt for actual terrorists. A commenter on Talking Points memo pointed out that Mr. Pasdar may be the unnamed security consultant mentioned in this 2006 article by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker.

While a memo describing a proposed compromise in a new surveillance bill sans retroactive immunity made it's way around the House last week, Mr. Pasdar's affidavit raised the ire of three House members, Dingell, Stupak, and Markey, who wrote a letter to their House collegues on Thursday pointing out that, while the allegations of the affidavit are not new, the White House has consistently refused to give further information on its various surveillance programs, and that such information should be given before the House brings any new surveillance compromise to a vote. In the meantime, republicans continue to support fake "protection" of America in the form of trying to rush through legislation before the facts are known. They know one thing, if Americans knew who was really being protected under their pet FISA changes, we'd never support it.

Congrats Bill Foster!!!!

The Sun-Times is calling it for Foster with 96% of the vote counted.

I don't know if there is a district outside of Texas more obviously shaped to protect the GOP, but it didn't work. McCain's endorsement didn't do it for Oberweis either. This bodes well for our lightly tailed IL-1oth particularly as the population shifts and more people are starting to see how very extreme Mark Kirk has become in his defense of Bush, the Iraq War, illegal spying on Americans, dangerous products from China, support of economic and religious extremism etc.

A few things are becoming clear. First, IL-14 Democrats would be nuts to push for Laesch over Foster to run in November. While I consider myself a progressive Democrat, I think we need to pick and choose our battles including who should lead the charge where. While I'm not fond of his blue dog positions, Foster has it all over Laesch in credentials, demeanor, money and ability to get votes in that district. A good candidate is a good candidate and if progressives want to push the envelope in the IL-14, they need a better credentialled candidate with a longer fuse and more elegant manner than John Laesch. Second, Obama's coattails are stronger than ever in Illinois and he appears to be the best chance for