Fingers Crossed

I use Speakeasy for my DSL service, and with a few exceptions, I've been happy with the service and the quality. I'm glad a friend gladly recommended it to me in the first place, and I've recommended it to others.

Learning today that Speakeasy was just bought by Best Buy, I hope all of the above will still be true six months from now. My Best Buy experiences have ranged from mediocre to WFT, which isn't particularly encouraging. Here's hoping that in this case I'm not disappointed.

David Stockman Schadenfreude

Busted!

U.S. prosecutors on Monday charged David Stockman, a former chief executive of Collins & Aikman Corp, and other former executives of fraud.

Stockman, a former Reagan administration budget director, and the other ex-Collins & Aikman executives are accused of misleading the company's investors to hide its true financial condition, according to the indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

Remember how Stockman repeatedly lied about how great supply-side economics was in the early 1980s? He should have done jail time then, with all the damage he helped do to our country's finances. I guess I'll just have to find some comfort in his arrest and humiliation now instead.

Charlotte, Sunday Style

Because Charlotte is smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt, it has a few antiquated laws that still catch people by surprise sometimes. Like the guy at the grocery store yesterday morning taking the 3 cases of beer out of his shopping cart and putting them back on the shelf after finding out during checkout that you can't buy beer before noon on Sunday. Bad for him, but at least he could take comfort that he wasn't the only person I saw doing exactly the same thing during my 45 seconds in the beer aisle. March Madness, indeed.

Geeks for Kucinich

Wow, I'll say one thing about the Kucinich campaign — they don't hire anyone who isn't a true believer in the cause. Here's an email I received this morning:

In the upcoming days, you'll notice some changes in our website. As part of this new look, we have moved the user log-in box to the Forum area of the website. You can find it easily by using the pull-down menu for Forum-Chat Room Users at the top of the page.

Those who told lies to take us into war should be held accountable under the U.S. Constitution and at the International Criminal Court.

We hope that you will be as pleased as we are with the new design. It is our goal to always improve your experience.

Now that's some kind of message discipline.

"Nothing Improper"

I'm watching Bush's press conference right now about Purgegate, and it's hard to keep track of how many misdirections and untruths the President has just issued in the last 10 minutes. But his remark that there is "no indication that anything improper was done" is just flat-out false, and everybody knows it. The very fact that he is giving a press conference now is evidence that there are lots of such indications.

And no testimony under oath? Please, that's just a joke. Like this President. Like this Attorney General. Like this whole, shameful mess.

Stupid Wisconsin

Didn't they know they were supposed to win the whole thing?!?

On the bright side, given that my brackets are now busted, my tournament anxiety level can drop down a few notches. Mary will appreciate that, I think.

Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking?

Shorter Washington Post: "This whole Iraq thing is really complicated, and there aren't really any important lessons to be learned from what we've done. Therefore, we should just stay there as long as it takes to win."

You'd think the editorial board would occasionally read and think hard about the stories that the news division writes, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Bad Editing

On Thursday, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan sent me an email with the subject line "The Democrat Retreat Plan." It's no surprise Duncan wants the US to stay in Iraq until… well, he doesn't really say. But he isn't shy about stating that leaving now would be a really bad idea. To support his position, he points to what the recent National Intelligence Estimate said about that:

"If Coalition forces were withdrawn … we judge that this almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq."

Wow, pretty strong stuff. But what's with the ellipses? Let's check the original (emphasis mine):

If Coalition forces were withdrawn rapidly during the course of this Estimate [the next 12-18 months], we judge that this almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq, intensify Sunn resistance to the Iraqi government, and have adverse consequences for national reconciliation.

The NIE doesn't explain what might constitute a rapid withdrawal, but what the Democrats are proposing is withdrawing troops over the next 12 -18 months, which doesn't seem all that rapid to me. But be that as it may, it's really disingenuous of Duncan to remove that crucial qualifier. But I'm passed being surprised that Republicans don't want to debate this issue on the merits — five years of misinformation has certainly lowered my expectations in that respect.

Stupid Eric

As expected, my wild March Madness ride ended yesterday with a 10-6 crackup. I'm left with a mediocre 25-7, but my Sweet 16 is still intact, at least for now. Mary, however, came from behind yesterday to finish the first round at 27-5. Her brackets always do better than mine, so what's a guy to do except sit back and hope to avoid complete humiliation? On Wisconsin!

Stupid Butler

If Butler had lost to ODU the way they were supposed to, I would have been a perfect 16-0 to start off March Madness. Of course, starting off so well inevitably means that I will crash and burn today — the basketball gods do have a way of keeping me in my place come tournament time.

"Good Faith"

How many more stories like this one before Gonzales loses his job, do you think?

In testimony on Jan. 18, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had no intention of avoiding Senate input on the hiring of U.S. attorneys.

Just a month earlier, D. Kyle Sampson, who was then Gonzales's chief of staff, laid out a plan to do just that. In an e-mail, he detailed a strategy for evading Arkansas Democrats in installing Tim Griffin, a former GOP operative and protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

"We should gum this to death," Sampson wrote to a White House aide on Dec. 19. "[A]sk the senators to give Tim a chance … then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

I guess if you're willing to lie to the Senate under oath, then you don't have much compunction about dicking them around outside of the hearing room. I'm sure this email will make AG AG (and the White House) a lot of new friends on the Hill.

It Depends What the Meaning of "Win" Is

A new CNN poll is out about the War in Iraq. Here's their lede:

Less than half of Americans think the United States can win the war in Iraq, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.

Forty-six percent said the United States could not win the war in Iraq.

And although 46 percent also said the United States still could win, the results mark the first time since the war began four years ago that a majority of Americans said the United States is not capable of winning.

Too late now, but I wish there had been a followup question for the people who said the US could still win: "What do you mean by 'win'?" I bet we'd have gotten some interesting answers.

Pure Speculation

White House spokeswoman Dan Perino said yesterday:

We stand by the Department of Justice assertion that they identified the seven U.S. attorneys who were removed, as they have said, based on performance and managerial reasons.

If the White House were really serious about defending AG Gonzales, wouldn't they have used a stronger term than "assertion?" Just saying…

The Purge, Phase II

Fire 8 US Attorneys for political reasons and what do you get? One bad day after another, it seems.

Yesterday, the worst day was probably had by Gonzales' Chief of Staff, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned after it was revealed that he had been talking to White House Counsel Harriet Miers for approximately two years about which US Attorneys to fire (Miers, it seems, originally wanted to replace all 93).

Gonzales himself probably had a pretty bad day, since he's the obvious next person to decide to spend more time with his family. Not helpful to Gonzales in this respect was the statement by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leahy that "the Attorney General was less than forthcoming with the Senate while under oath." In less formal settings, we call that called perjury.

Today's Washington Post has the best story on the growing scandal, full of timeline-y goodness. The inescapable conclusion is that most (if not all) of the eight Attorneys were fired for political reasons. The specific reason that keeps coming up: refusing to file charges against Democrats for voter fraud.

The Post also names names, and it seems that the only person in the administration not directly involved in getting those US Attorneys fired was Scooter Libby. Bush and Rove were, however, as was Sen. Pete Domenici. Something tells me that Sampson won't be the only person to lose his job over this. Miers, of course, resigned back in January, but you have to wonder now if she saw this particular dust-up coming.

And let's not forget that amendment to the Patriot Act that allowed the DOJ to appoint the replacement US Attorneys without the need for a pesky Senate confirmation process. As it turns out, that was passed right in the middle of the planning for this purge. It wouldn't be the first time Bush played politics with national security, but the specificity of this example is particularly stunning.

Card Checks and Balances

Today, the increasingly conservative Washington Post editorial board against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill passed by the House that would permit workers to form a union using a card check system rather than a lengthy election process. I don't think I've said anything about this issue yet, but as a former UAW member who has been through a union certification process, allow me to say a few words.

The Post's first objection, that workers would be subject to coercion by the union to sign the card, is a bugaboo: the data shows that union coercion is lower in card check elections. And besides, coercion by management is always the bigger problem (both quantitatively and qualitatively), and the data also shows that card checks reduce that by half.

I practically did a spit take when I read their second objection. I'm surprised they didn't just admit that it came from some Chamber of Commerce talking points:

The so-called card-check arrangement would give labor too much power to spring unions on employers. Employers who don't want to see their workers organize deserve a chance to make that case to employees in advance of the decision.

Oh, pity the poor, powerless employer… Look, employers get to make their anti-union case to their workers every single day. Some use carrots, some use sticks. In the end, that case might not be convincing, but it is absurd to suggest that employers aren't given a a chance to communicate it.

To be fair, the Post does say that the current system is tilted too far in favor of employers, and they suggest a number of tweaks to the system: shorter elections, greater union access to the workplace, and harsher penalties for intimidation by employers. But this seems to me to be just another way of skirting the main issue, which is: if a majority of workers want a union, they should get one. And since card check is the fairest way to determine the will of the majority, it should be allowed. QED.

Of course, we're not going to get card check this year, as the Post rightly notes. The Senate probably won't pass it, and the President would never sign it. But are any of the changes that the Post suggests any more politically realistic? Frankly, I don't see the Bush administration voluntarily doing anything to make union organizing easier. Hell, the DOL won't even enforce the weak laws we currently have; stronger penalties for breaking laws that are never enforced isn't really an answer. And besides, the EFCA and election reforms aren't mutually exclusive, since the EFCA doesn't do away with elections — it just adds card check as an option.

If the Post would just come straight out and say that they believe unions are a bad thing, I could respect that — at least then their opposition to card check would be consistent. But as it is, they're just incoherent.

Sleepless in DC?

I could be enjoying the DOJ FBI scandal all by itself, but the DOJ USA scandal just won't stop vying for my attention. The latest:

Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

Huh. GOP politicos ask Rove to fire and US Attorney, and what do you know… he gets fired. The whole story makes all this look much worse (which is hard to believe, but all too true), so make sure to get the background. I can only hope that Gonzales is having trouble sleeping; he certainly should.

Via Atrios.

What's That Old Saying About Power Again?

The news keeps getting worse for the FBI. But as damning as the Inspector General's report is, I'm curious as to why it backs off from making accusations of "deliberate lawbreaking." Because it does include items like this:

For example, the FBI on 739 occasions used secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain records related to 3,000 phone numbers after asserting — in most instances — that the records were needed because of "exigent circumstances" and promising that requests for subpoenas had already been sent to U.S. attorney's offices.

In fact, many of these claims were false, according to the report: The letters were mostly used in "non-emergency circumstances"; no documentation existed of a connection to "pending national security investigations"; and "subpoenas requesting the information had not been provided to the U.S. Attorney's Office before the letters were sent."

Now I'm no lawyer, but this sounds an awful lot like knowingly lying to get a warrant, which sounds an awful lot like "deliberate lawbreaking." I'm not really sure how you spin this any other way.

Maybe the IG was just as confused as I am about why any agents would feel the need to break the law when issuing national security letters, given that there are so few rules to begin with. And since companies were so eager to comply with the letters that they often provided more information than was asked for, it really does seem odd that these agents felt they had to resort to illegal tactics to get what they wanted.

When confronted with mysteries such as these, it's sometimes best just to chalk it up to "human nature," in this case the tendency of people to become drunk with power, especially power that can be exercised in secret with no meaningful oversight. It's amazing the bad things even good people will do when they think the rules don't apply to them.

FBI agents aren't superheroes, just normal folk working incredibly stressful jobs and subject to the breakdowns in judgment that can bring. Combined with the not-so-thinly veiled contempt for the law that the Attorney General in particular and the Bush administration in general evince, you get an environment that practically begs for scandals like this one to happen.

What cases like this one show is how we all need to stop thinking that the rule of law, due process, and oversight just get in the way of perfect people doing their jobs perfectly. Rather, these are the bulwarks that keep everything from going off the rails in a real and quite imperfect world.

The Case of the Purloined Letters

Well, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you! As it turns out, when you give law enforcement agents the power to conduct secret and unreviewable searches and seizures, they just go on and abuse it. From today's Washington Post:

A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.

The inspector general's audit, mandated by Congress over Bush administration objections, found that 22 of the errors were possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations — some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293 "national security letters." The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.

That's a total of 48 "mistakes" out of the 293 cases they looked at. But how many national security letters are issued each year? About 19,000. I guess the founders knew what they were doing after all when they wrote the 4th Amendment.

Guilty

The jury's in:

A federal jury today convicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of lying about his role in the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity, finding the vice president's former chief of staff guilty of two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, while acquitting him of a single count of lying to the FBI.

Today is a good day. Of course, the people over at the National Review aren't having fun, but that just doubles the schadenfreude.

I'd like to believe that Administration would grok the right moral of this story, but I think they're far more inclined to bunker themselves even further in denial. Shame, that.

WhiteHouse.gov Redesign

WhiteHouse.gov just got a facelift, so let's take a quick look at the new homepage.

Design: I'm not a fan. It's too boxy, too monochromatic, and uses whitespace really poorly. For the most part, the text is too small, except for the second box in the center column where it is inexplicably larger. Overall, the design comes across as cramped and amateurish.

Features: According to White House website boss David Almacy, there's nothing new to see here. The changes that were made were intended, among other things, to highlight the AV and RSS features. These sections, however, don't seem to have made it into the main navigation yet. Video and photos aren't linked from most of the interior pages; podcasts and RSS are linked from every page, but only in a jumble of extra stuff next to the search box. There is a nice integration of audio and video with the text-based stories in some of the section archives, but too often, a video or audio link lands you on a blank page with an embedded player — not the nicest presentation. And the RSS feeds are oddly organized.

Standards: Viewing the HTML source, it's like a trip back to 1999 — tables, tables, everywhere. The HTML doesn't validate, either — a whopping 127 errors! Lots of careless closing tag problems, but lots of other errors that are reflective of amateur hour: two title tags in the head; ids being reused, etc. I don't think the developers bothered to validate the HTML, but given their apparent skill level, they really should have.

The markup is littered with inline styles combined with 22 1/2 sets of font tags (yup, an end tag is missing). There is also an external style sheet with doesn't validate (although the error is a simple typo). The style declarations themselves don't seem to have a standard unit of measure — px mixed with em mixed with font-size keywords — which make them very confusing.

Conclusion: The whitehouse.gov team really should have taken some extra time to get more of this stuff right. There is certainly potential here. There are some nice design elements on some of the interior pages, and this site has multimedia content too burn. But it's handicapped by spaghetti code and the lack of a unifying aesthetic vision. These are common problems with large sites, to be sure — but they are solvable with effort. So I wonder — why aren't they being solved here?

Conservapedia

When I followed my first link to Conservapedia last week, I figured the whole thing had to be a joke. Claiming to be the conservative version to Wikipedia is a pretty clever premise, and the list of Wikipedia's sins against God and Christianity is a damn funny joke all by itself. Wikipedia using C.E. instead of A.D. in dates is the number one complaint? Priceless.

But despite appearances, I've learned that Conservapedia is a sincere effort, which just serves to make it all the more hilarious. So take a few minutes to enjoy all the wingnut goodness that Conservapedia has to offer. My favorite so far? This 3rd-grade oral report masquerading as the entry on Fox News. LOL!

Don't You Know It's Not True?

"Young Voices" is a regular feature in the Charlotte paper. A question is posed to a bunch of secondary school and college students, and the paper prints their answers. Sometimes, hilarity ensues.

But today I just couldn't get past this question, which asks whether Speaker Pelosi should get a plane to fly her non-stop to her district. Not the most current of current events, to be sure, but even with weeks of hindsight, the editors couldn't get their facts straight. The question begins:

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker, was criticized recently for requesting access to an Air Force transport plane.

The question goes on to discuss the need for a larger plane, and repeats the criticisms made by some Republicans that Pelosi asked for the larger plane to fly her donors around in the lap of luxury, etc.

For some reason, the Pelosi/plane story just won't die, and that's odd because here's the thing: Pelosi never asked for the plane. We've known for weeks that there's no basis whatsoever to this story. And yet, here it is again, a month later, being repeated in the Charlotte Observer.

Even the Republicans who were so vocal in their criticisms have since admitted that they really didn't know what they were talking about, but simply parroted an "anonymously-sourced story in The Washington Times." And here's the kicker:

"This was a classic case where the media got out in front of us," [Rep. Adam] Putnam said. "Did we jump on it? Yes."

And he is unapologetic about that. He calls the Pelosi plane story, whatever its legitimacy, "the first break [Republicans] have had from the media in driving our message since before the Mark Foley story broke."

And these days, as chairman of the House Republican conference committee, it is in Putnam's congressional job description to care intensely about that.

See, Putnam was just doing his job, and that job doesn't require him to care that much about the truth. If the "story" is good for the GOP, that's all he needs to know to trumpet it from the mountain top. It would seem that the editor's of the Charlotte Observer share his casual disregard for the facts.

To their credit, however, almost every one of 24 kids who answered the question stated unambiguously that Pelosi should get the larger plane. I guess the GOP's mock outrage wasn't that convincing after all. Perhaps we should give these kids the editors' jobs.

Zoning Away Smoking

As someone who used to smoke, I'm delighted my former "hometown" of Alexandria, VA is trying to figure out a way to ban smoking in restaurants. The state government doesn't give municipalities much authority in this area, so they can't just pass a local ordinance. But Alexandria is trying to get around that limitation by using the zoning process to mandate smoke-free establishments. I hope it works, and that it inspires other places in similar situations to use this new approach.

Places like Charlotte, for instance, which is also hamstrung by state law. I hope the mayor and city council are paying attention.