The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services website has handy flashcards teaching new citizens about American civics.
Flashcard 80 asks about the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The answer lists them all, except one: freedom of the press.
Guess that was taken out of the Constitution when nobody was looking.
Conservative Christians don’t want you to see it because they don’t want people to entertain the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child.
Religious sect Opus Dei don’t want you to see it because they don’t like the fact that they’re depicted in the film as a bunch of self-flagellating albino weirdos.
But there’s another (and more compelling) reason not to see "The Da Vinci Code": It supposedly sucks.
Strange. Both BellSouth and Verizon are denying they gave telephone records to the NSA, as USA Today reported last week.
Is it word-parsing or lying on the part of the telecoms, or did USA Today simply get the story wrong? And why has AT&T remained silent? And if the story is incorrect, why did it take Bellsouth and Verizon so long to deny it (suffering blows to their stock)?
I suspect, as do others, that the denials are merely word-parsing: the telecomes didn’t actually "provide data", but they allowed the NSA to have access to internal switches from which the data could be obtained.
Well, if you saw "Idol" tonight, I’m sure you can pick one Katharine moment, and one (if not two) Taylor moments. Can you remember an Eliott moment? Can you even remember what he sang?
No. And that’s why he’s going to be out this week.
The second round of songs was the best. I thought Katharine nailed her song ("Somewhere Over The Rainbow") which is (a) deceptively hard and (b) way overdone. So double props to her. There were only a couple of times when she pushed it with the runs (as only Katharine can do), but it was very good.
Taylor’s "You Are So Beautiful To Me" was a nice change of pace for him, and a perfect song for him. It was refreshing to see him mellow out to a ballad. But whereas I was surprised to see Katharine do so well with "Over The Rainbow", I wasn’t surprised to see Taylor hit his mark with "You Are So Beautiful". Taylor rocks every time, which is why he’s a shoo-in to take the competition (especially with Chris gone grumble grumble).
In the third round, Elliott, who was incredibly sharp (meaning, "pitchy", not "well-dressed") in the second round, was slightly better doing a Ray Charles number, but all I could think of was how much better Taylor would be singing it. Katharine did a showy number, firmly confirming her status as the second female lead in a Broadway touring company. Taylor ended the show with "Try A Little Tenderness", and while it was over-the-top, he — like always — made it work. No fear, that guy.
He’s going all the way.
UPDATE: Simon agrees.
Ex-pretty boy George Michael ain’t lookin’ so pretty these days.
Especially when he’s woken up.
Especially when he’s woken up from being asleep at the wheel of his car.
Especially when he woken up from a stoned stupor while wearing an iPod at 4:00 in the morning at the wheel of his car, only to speed off and get into a car accident.
Amusing story and photos here.
No, George. We don’t want you to be our father figure either.
Earlier today, Bush responded to a question about whether Americans should feel that their privacy has been invaded by a government effort to collect data on tens of millions of phone calls.
Bush responded: "We got accused of not connecting the dots prior to Sept. 11. "We’re (now) going to connect the dots."
I hate to state the obvious, but there is a vast difference between connecting dots, and collecting dots.
The pre-9/11 intelligence was a failure of making the connection between pieces of information. Suspected terrorist information was not cross-tabulated with immigration data. Information about pilot schools obtained by the FBI did not make it into other hands. The data points (i.e., the "dots") were there — 9/11 came about because of failure to make the connections.
When the government gets the phone records of millions of Americans, it is connecting nothing. In fact, it is probably making the process of connection harder, adding white noise to an already difficult task.
The "connect the dots" analogy is actually pretty useful. Imagine a piece of paper with five dots, and try to find a pattern (say, a perfectly symmetrical five-pointed star). Now imagine the same piece of paper with a thousand dots, and try to find the same star shape. Easier in a sense, because there are more data points to choose from, but you are less likely to find the star. In other words, lots of false positives.
Consider what FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley said back in 2004:
Outspoken Minneapolis FBI agent Coleen Rowley, appearing on a panel for the nonpartisan Eisenhower Foundation on Wednesday, warned that counter-terrorism agents now are swamped with intelligence data and have "too many dots" to connect.
Continuing to press her concerns publicly in her last months as an active agent, Rowley also questioned the need for an intelligence "czar," a central recommendation of the 9/11 commission.
She said the bureau’s dramatic shift to focus its resources on terrorism has resulted in "a huge pendulum swing . . . from the mistakes of overcomplacency before Sept. 11. Now we’re perhaps embarking on what I call the uncharted waters of massive intelligence collection.
"That changes the problem, and it also changes the mistakes and the errors that are being made now," she said.
So aside from the civil liberties angle, there is reason to believe that massive "dot" collection is actually hurting our national security.
Complete list below the fold…
DHS head Michael Chertoff said that putting the National Guard on the U.S.-Mexico border would be "horribly over-expensive and very difficult".
That was six months ago, on O’Reilly’s show. I wonder if he would say the same thing today.
Zoo visitors shocked as bear eats monkey:
The park confirmed the killing. "The habitats here in the safari park are arranged in such a way that one animal almost never kills another…," it said in a statement.
Nevertheless, they’re rethinking the zebra/lion compound.
RELATED: Robotic spacecraft designed to rendezvous with orbitting satellite destroys satellite
I didn’t see it (the Bosox were playing on ESPN), but I read the transcript. As Kevin Drum notes the main elements of the plan are to deploy the military to the border without calling it "militarizing the border," to launch a guest worker program without calling it a "guest worker program," and to offer amnesty to illegal immigrants without calling it "amnesty." Fine.
Many on the right are not pleased. Powerline’s John Hindrocket says Bush "blew it"
As soon as he started talking about guest worker programs and the impossibility of deporting 11 million illegals, it was all over. President Bush keeps trying to find the middle ground, on this and many other issues. But sometimes, there isn’t a viable middle ground. This is one of those instances.
Hindrocket also uses the "I met a cabbie which proves my point" rhetorical device, a favorite among right wing pundits.
Michelle Malkin liveblogged the speech, pointing to the exact minute that Bush "lost touch with reality" (it was 8:11).
That’s only the tip of the enraged iceberg. Glenn has many, many more exmaples.
But Hugh Hewitt thought it was a "good start" and Jonah Golberg thought it "sounded pretty reasonable".
Me, I can’t get fired up about the whole issue. Immigration is a problem, but unlike most on ther right, I don’t think it is a matter of national security.
Of course, if it was really about national security (i.e., al Qaeda), the right would want troops on the U.S.-Canada border, too, yes? After all, that border is much longer, much more porous, and al Qaeda has already used it several times.
Of course, if it was really about national security, the right would have been all up in arms about Bush cutting border control agents (almost 10,000 of them). But not a peep.
But you would think it’s about national security, the way the right uses bellicose phrases like "foreign invaders" and "appeasement of Vincente Fox", like this is another war. I think such hyperbolic language to be overdone, and the unhinged reaction to be based more on racism than reason.
UPDATE: The rightosphere is eating itself. After years of left-bashing, they are now bashing each other on the immigration issue. Pass the popcorn.
And she wasn’t kidding:
New England is bracing for the region’s worst flooding since the 1930s, The Associated Press reports, with the most serious situation in the Merrimack Valley, north of Boston on the New Hampshire border.
There, AP reported, the Merrimack and Spicket rivers have overflowed their banks and forced the evacuations of hundreds of people. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said sewage was a major problem. About 35 million gallons a day was being dumped into the Merrimack River due to a burst in the pipes in Haverhill while another 115 million gallons a day were expected to spill in from a regional treatment plant in Lawrence, because power for the plant was under water.
National Guard activated. Manditory evacuations in many southern NH communities. [UPDATE: And parts of not-so-southern communities as well]
In my hometown of Concord, upstate a spell from the brunt of the flooding, St. Paul’s School has closed due to flooding of Turkey Pond, sending many of its international students home.
Not to fear, New Hampshirites. FEMA’s a-comin’! They sent a guy up who is a "hydrologist in FEMA’s Boston office responsible for providing technical support to environmental contractors and communities in the Northeast Region."
The Union Leader has a good Floodblog, as well as reader’s photos.
Time magazine, June 1998:
"The G.O.P. could lose its narrow 11-seat majority in the House if it didn’t find a way to galvanize its grass-roots activists, many of whom are Christian conservatives."
New York Times, May 13, 2006:
Some of President Bush’s most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.
I’m fascinated by the love-hate relationship that the religious right has with the GOP. Time and time again, Republicans cater to the religious right at election time. But as soon as they get voted in, the religious right is (thankfully) ignored for the most part.
We saw this in the presidential elections of 2004, where gay marriage was put on the table. Bush suddenly started speaking about the ridiculously-named Marriage Protection Act, ensuring that all marriages must be between a man and a woman. Homophobics and the Christian right came out enough to give Bush the narrow victory he needed.
And what happened to the legislation after the election? Nada.
The religious right is none to happy.
Dr. Dobson, whose daily radio broadcast has millions of listeners, has already signaled his willingness to criticize Republican leaders. In a recent interview with Fox News on the eve of a visit to the White House, he accused Republicans of "just ignoring those that put them in office."
Dr. Dobson cited the House’s actions on two measures that passed over the objections of social conservatives: a hate-crime bill that extended protections to gay people, and increased support for embryonic stem cell research.
In fact, the only time when Republicans supported the religious right was on Terri Schiavo, a battle which they together lost, and which left a sour taste among independents and mainstream Americans. I suspect that many Republican politicians also realized that bowing to the religious right results in a net negative approval among all voters.
The political right and the religious right are indeed strange bedfellows, both using each other to forward their own goals. However, it looks like the strained relationship may be seeing its final days.
"Final days", that is, unless the religious right gets fooled again this election cycle, just as they did in 1998 and 2004. It’ll be interesting to watch.
RELATED: The New Republic asks "Will The Christian Right Get A Spine This Year?"
ANOTHER RELATED: When did Pat Robertson get sane?
On a piece of sheet metal?
On the side of a tree?
On some bedroom furniture in Romania? Or the drywall in Alabama?
With his mother in a Chicago underpass?
With his mother on a grilled cheese sandwich? You know, she’s the sandwich; he’s the potato chips? No, that’s silly. Jesus wouldn’t be on a potato chip — he’d be in some pasta!
Nope. Jesus is none of those places today.
Jesus has been hiding underground — under some asparagus growing in England.
He’s either puckering up for a kiss, or he’s sticking his tongue out. I can’t tell.
Last week it was revealed that Qwest Communications was one of the few major telecom companies that didn’t voluntarily provide customers records to the NSA, insisting instead that the NSA get a court order or at least an opinion from the Attorney General first.
The blogospheric fallout was predictable. Liberals and civil libertarians applauded Qwest. On the right, pundits accused Qwest of cooperating with terrorists, or at least facilitating them.
One good metric of how America feels about the NSA phone record-mining is whether people have since dropped their accounts from terrorist-loving Qwest, or changed their phone accounts to freedom-loving Qwest.
It looks like the latter:
“Oh yeah, it’s been busy around here,” said Becky. “We’ve been getting almost twice the normal amount and a lot of people switching their service.” According to Sandra, another representative, “A lot of people have switched over from their providers because they’re upset about AT&T and Verizon handing over records to the government.” None of the six representatives we interviewed could cite the opposite circumstance, a Qwest customer who dropped their service over the company’s stance.
