Mother Jones

Whichever side of the fence you land on, chances are you agree that America's not a very secure nation these days: economically, electorally, and of course, physically. So we grabbed our lensatic compass, rucksack, and canteen, then mounted out across the global media landscape for a quick recon. Whether you're scared because our military isn't good enough—or you're scared because it's too good—here's all the ammunition you need, in a handy debrief.

In this installment: Fine, WikiLeaks. Also, Newt Gingrich fancies himself an imam; military women win and lose; soldiers are fat; lightning is bad; Condie plays piano; Danger Room scares the hell out of everyone; and Al Qaeda states the obvious.

The sitrep:

The United States government's national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow. You're welcome.

• Blah blah WikiLeaks blah blah blah WikiLeaks blah WikiLeaks blah.
• Speaking of WikiLeaks, if founder Julian Assange's hope was to bring US soldiers to justice for committing crimes in the war zone, he's succeeding, starting with this one.
• Oh, hey, remember Iraq? Yeah? That ain't going so hot, either. Or so cheap. (Joel Wing)
• Newt Gingrich wants to tell us all why mosques and Muslims are bad for national security, m'kay. Too bad his understanding of Islamic jurisprudence is so profoundly godawful. (al-Maktabah)
• The status of women reaches a new high in the Navy, and a new low in the Army. That latter story deserved a far, far better headline than "Sexual assault conviction a shocking end to military career." Um, K, thanks. (AP/Stars & Stripes)
• New weight requirements in the armed forces are compelling service members to purge, sweat, and lipo. Or so some would have us believe. (Army Times)
• Service members get struck by lightning in disproportionately large numbers. Puzzled? Not if you've ever seen one of those freaking existential Texas thunderstorms over Ft. Hood. (Army Times)
• THE MILITARY! IS POOR! AND UNPREPARED FOR FUTURE WARS OMG! Actually, there's an interesting question in there somewhere about what our national security policy is, or ought to be. Apparently "cheaper" or "smaller" were not among the options. (Foreign Policy)
• Time kicked up a hornet's nest with its cover this week: a photo of an Afghan girl mutilated by the Taliban. Is this war cheerleading? And even if the region's thugs are this—well—thuggish, and even if we could stop them, is our continued presence worth it? (The Atlantic Wire/The American Prospect/Oil Spots)
• Former secretary of state and oil-tanker-inspirer Condoleezza Rice played a live Mozart piano concerto and a duet with Aretha Franklin. Her ivory-tickling is not unlike her Bush-era speechifyin': Technically accurate, yet soulless and mechanical. (Joe.My.God.)
• Noah Shachtman is an excellent reporter. An excellent reporter who'll never hesitate to scare the holy shit out of you. CIA + Google = Yipe. (Wired's Danger Room)
• Speaking of Shachtman, his firsthand experience in Afghanistan proves why you should take WikiLeaked significant-activities reports with a hunk of salt. (Danger Room)
• Osama bin Laden's No. 2 says he's against Jews being in Jerusalem. Yet again, Captain Obvious and his trusty sidekick Duh win the week. (al-Maktabah)

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand. "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."

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Dog Whistles: When Reagan came to Philadelphia in 1980, the town's past never came up.Jackson, Mississippi—We spent eight hours yesterday at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, known to locals as "Mississippi's Giant Houseparty" (that's a registered trademark), and to outsiders as the place where Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980 without once mentioning the three civil rights workers whose bodies were found outside of town in 1965.

If Reagan couldn't talk about Philadelphia, Philadelphia at least can't stop talking about Reagan. "You know, Ronald Reagan came here in '81 or '80, I can't remember," one woman tells me. I get this a lot. On stage during the day's political festivities, the succession of candidates hold onto their little slice of history with both hands. "I am proud and humbled to be standing on the podium where Ronald Reagan once stood," declares Wally Pang, a self-described Tea Partier who's running for Congress as an Independent. "Ronald Reagan began his campaign for the presidency right here in these fairgrounds!," notes Vernon Cotton, incumbent circuit court judge for Mississippi's eighth district. Reagan's name comes up, sooner or later, in pretty much every conversation I have at the fair.

I'll cover the rest of the fair in another post (or two, or three—it was pretty wild), but for now, here are two quick thoughts on the town's past from fairgoers old enough to remember.

I tend to think that going back and forth with other bloggers on a particular issue has diminishing returns pretty quickly. I'd say that most of the time a single set of posts from each side exhausts the argument, and two posts does it 90% of the time. After that the argument usually just spirals downward along one of several increasingly predetermined paths, none of them good.

So I normally say my piece and then quit. Which I should probably do here. But I guess I'm feeling stupid this morning, because I'm going to push back yet again on the issue of credit card interchange fees. On Tuesday I linked to a Boston Fed article suggesting that the net result of interchange fees was a transfer of wealth from the poor (who pay higher prices generated by the fees even though they mostly use cash) to the middle class and the rich. I wasn't happy about this, but Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle push back:

Matt: Once you keep in mind the fact that the median household income in 2008 was slightly above $52,000 it’s not at all obvious to me that this is any kind of scam. Instead, it appears to be a classic positive sum business interaction. Credit card companies use interchange fees to cut into retailers’ monopoly rents and then rebate a share of the fee to consumers via reward programs, and on net consumers benefit and the median household appears to benefit....Now it’s true that in this particular case my conscience is pricked by the fact that poor consumers end up losing out. At the same time, do we really think it’s feasible to conduct distributive analysis of every new business model and only accept the ones that are beneficial to poor consumers?

Megan: I never understood why the progressive consumer finance types got so worked up about interchange fees, which are essentially a knock-down fight between two very powerful business lobbies, not a cosmic injustice perpetrated against the American consumer....To be sure, the current system benefits the wealthy most. But that is broadly true of many business models; shall we outlaw Costco because the poor cannot afford lavish pantries and large chest freezers in which to store their warehouse-club bounty?

First off: I'm mystified by  the "retailers’ monopoly rents" that Matt talks about. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. So maybe I'm genuinely missing something here.

But barreling ahead regardless, I'm pretty sure the issue is more on the other side: it's the card networks (Visa and Mastercard control the vast majority of the credit card market) that are effective monopolies. So the question is: are they using their monopoly position to charge interchange fees that are too high? To put it another way: who actually pays these fees, anyway?

I did a bit of desultory research to see if anyone knows the incidence of interchange fees, and the answer appears to be no. There's been some theoretical work, but not much in the way of empirical studies. This is important, because if the net effect of the fees is merely to reduce merchant profits a bit, or to balance the costs between merchant and purchaser banks, then Megan is right: who cares? Let the giants fight it out on their own. But if merchants pass along most of the fees directly to consumers, then it matters.

However, although there's no definitive evidence on this score, there are some reasons for thinking that fees are too high and that consumers do end up paying at least part of them. There's the Boston Fed study, of course. And here's an ECB report suggesting (unsurprisingly) that in a monopoly environment interchange fees will always be set too high. And there's this New York Times piece about swipe fees in the debit card market, which makes it pretty clear that Visa's fees are simply egregious abuses of its monopoly power. And if they're abusive in the debit card market, they're probably abusive in the credit card market too. Finally, there's the fact that current fees are so high that card issuing banks can afford to rebate a big chunk of them in rewards programs, something that flatly makes no sense in a sane world.

Now, even if this is all true, it's also true that on the list of ways in which the poor are screwed, this doesn't make the top ten. It probably doesn't even make the top 100. But I hate the idea of dismissing it anyway. The problem is that this is practically a paradigm example of how all this screwing works throughout the financial industry: most of it is small stuff. It's a few dollars here and there, and banks have a huge incentive to keep it that way. That way nobody really thinks it's worthwhile to bother addressing even though those dollars add up to billions if you screw enough poor and vulnerable people at a time. And Wall Street does. That's why this kind of thing deserves attention even if it's not, by itself, all that big a deal: because there's a lot of it, and it basically all benefits the haves at the expense of have-nots. We lose our humanity when this becomes merely a shrug of the shoulders and a "to be sure."

Beyond that, let's make it clear what I'm proposing. I don't want to eliminate interchange fees. Card payment networks cost money to operate and there's nothing wrong in theory with using interchange fees as a way of offsetting those costs. In fact, I'm not sure I even want to limit interchange fees. What I'm opposed to is their invisibility. All I want to do for now is bring them into the open.

There are two ways this could happen. The first would be to eliminate the merchant charge and have card companies simply add the interchange fee directly onto consumers' bills. So every month you'd get your Visa bill, and at the bottom there'd be a charge of a few dollars that represents the interchange fee. This way consumers know just how much their cards actually cost them

However, this assumes that consumers are already paying 100% of these fees, and they probably aren't. It's probably a mix of consumers, merchants, and banks. So a better, more modest idea is to keep interchange fees intact as a merchant charge but allow merchants to pass that charge along to customers if they want to. Right now, Visa and Mastercard prohibit this, something they can get away with because they're monopolies and merchants have little choice but to accept their terms. I'd like to do away with this prohibition and let merchants raise the price for credit card purchases if they want to. If they don't, that's pretty good evidence that card networks are charging a fair price for the service merchants get from them (increased sales, less handling of cash, etc.). And there's no harm done. But if they do tack on the charge, it's pretty good evidence the networks aren't charging a fair, market-clearing price. I say: let's find out. Interchange fees are hardly the biggest injustice in the world, but then again, this is hardly the most intrusive remedy in the world either. Everyone ought to be in favor of transparency, and everyone ought to be opposed to allowing monopolies to set abusive terms in their contracts. Sometimes God is in the details, and this is one detail I'd like to expose to a little sunshine.

First there was the bizarre AFP report asking where all the oil in the Gulf could have possibly gone. Then a breaking news alert from the New York Times landed in my inbox Tuesday night declaring "Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick Appears to Vanish Quickly," which seemed to imply that because a few reporters hadn't noticed much crude on a flyover, it must have magically disappeared. (The alert failed to mention the 1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP dumped on the spill to do exactly that).

Today we have yet another example of the news media promoting the idea that the Gulf disaster might not be all that bad after all, with Time's big piece, "The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?"

The story starts out by offering Rush Limbaugh as a voice of reason on the disaster against all the "end-is-nigh eco-hype," even while calling him an "obnoxious anti-environmentalist." That should give you a sense of where the story is heading. And then it goes there:

Well, Rush has a point. The Deepwater explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

In short, the story is classic man-bites-dog, knee-jerk counterintuitivism. In reality, we have no idea yet how bad the damage in the Gulf is. The federal government is still only in the early stages of a natural resources damage assessment, a process to determine the full extent of the destruction. The government hasn't even come up with an estime of how much oil leaked into the Gulf. And BP hasn't yet finished the relief wells, meaning the disaster isn't over yet. Meanwhile, the environmental impacts of the natural gas that has also been seeping into the Gulf remain unclear. And the article gives scant attention to the nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant applied by BP to break up the spill, which the country's top environmental official has acknowledged is a science experiment of monumental proportions.

"The amount of oil and toxic dispersant pumped into the Gulf is unprecedented, and we know the marine impacts will be massive, we simply don't know how long it will take for the ecosystem to rebound, and how significant the decrease in productivity will be until it recovers," says Aaron Viles, campaign director at the Gulf Restoration Network.

Referring to the Time article's author, Michael Grunwald, National Resources Defense Council lawyer David Pettit says, "I'm not sure what boats he's been out on. When I went out from Plaquemines Parish two weeks ago, there were oiled marshes as far as the eye could see, plus all the islands we saw were oiled. I would agree that it's too early to say what the long-term effect of that oiling will be, but by the same token I don't think anyone can credibly say that there will be little or no effect."

So how's healthcare reform doing? According to Kaiser, better and better: their latest poll shows that it's supported by 50% of respondents and opposed by only 35%. And of that 35%, only 27% think it should be repealed right away. The rest think it should be given a chance to work.

Now, in one sense all this tells us is that opposition has died down because healthcare is no longer the focus of 24/7 rabble rousing from Fox and Rush and Sarah Palin and half the conservative fundraising outfits in the country. But really, that's the whole point. There were always two separate questions here. #1: Could healthcare reform pass in the face of massive organized opposition? (Yes, it turns out.) #2: How would it fare once the demagoguery inevitably died down? Because it was inevitable. Nobody can keep up a fever pitch like we saw earlier this year forever unless there are continual fresh provocations.

So healthcare reform is safe. In fact, it's so safe that it's not even clear it will be a decent campaign issue this November, let alone anything else. Thirty years from now Republicans will probably be telling stories about how it's part of the fabric of America and it's a liberal myth that they ever opposed it in the first place.

Remember the Volcker Rule? It was designed to get commercial banks out of proprietary trading — i.e., the practice of making money from speculative bets of their own instead of making money based on selling actual services to their clients. It got watered down considerably before the final financial reform bill was passed, but it was still there and it still held out some hope of limiting the casino atmosphere at investment banks like Goldman Sachs unless they gave up their commercial bank designation. So what's Goldman going to do about this? Charlie Gasparino reports:

The big Wall Street firm has moved about half of its “proprietary” stock-trading operations — which had made market bets using the firm’s own capital — into its asset management division, where these traders can talk to Goldman clients and then place their market bets....By having the traders work in asset management, where they will take market positions while dealing with clients, Goldman believes it can meet the rule’s mandates, avoid large-scale layoffs and preserve some of the same risk taking that has earned it enormous profits, people close to the firm say.

....People close to Goldman say Goldman will now be weighing other similar moves — taking traders out of the firm’s brokerage division and moving them to other areas of the firm where they can deal with clients and circumvent the rule.

That didn't take long, did it? If this sticks, Goldman and others will essentially be completely unaffected by this new regulation. Sadly, I suspect this is going to end up being true of much of the rest of the bill too. It was worth passing, but only barely.

On a related note, I think this partly explains why liberals are in such a funk right now. The conventional wisdom is that we ought to be pretty happy. As Jon Cohn says, liberal dejection is hard to figure: "This seems totally nuts, purely on the merits. Obama and the Democrats passed a major stimulus that cut taxes for the middle class and invested heavily in public works. They saved the auto industry, created a new regulatory framework for the financial industry, and enacted comprehensive health care reform."

That's true, but think of this in a different way. Prior to 2008, what kinds of things had been on the lefty wish list? What made our hearts sing? A temporary tax cut and a one-time investment in infrastructure and energy projects? Nope. Bailing out General Motors? Nope. Financial industry reform? Nope. Before 2008, Wall Street reform was barely even on anyone's radar. It's purely a reaction to a crisis, not the culmination of a long campaign by populist liberals — and in any case the final result was watery enough that it's highly unlikely to change Wall Street in any serious way.

So that leaves healthcare reform. And watered down or not, that really is a big deal. But among big ticket items on the lefty wish list, that's it. That's all we got. And I hardly have to tell you that not every lefty is as enthusiastic about its final form as I am.

So in terms of setting liberal hearts aflutter, there's basically been just one thing — and not much hope of getting anything more for the rest of Obama's term. And to tot up against that, we've had an almost complete acquiescence to the Bush/Cheney vision of national security; an escalation of the war in Afghanistan; the reappointment of Ben Bernanke; a couple of very moderate Supreme Court picks; an obvious unwillingness to back a serious energy bill; and indefensibly slow progress in naming new appointments. All of these things can be justified individually, but if you put 'em together and weigh them against a single major piece of liberal legislation you don't get a very pretty picture. And that's the picture a lot of liberals are seeing.

Following in the footsteps of Nevada conservative Sharron "the unemployed are spoiled" Angle, another GOPer, Delaware congressional candidate Michele Rollins, recently claimed that jobless benefits make people "continue to do nothing." Ouch. Via Greg Sargent, the Democratic National Committee got Norris, who's running for Republican Mike Castle's open House seat, on tape saying this:

"I know this is a bad market and a very bad time. But you just cannot keep paying people, cannot keep taxing us to pay people to do nothing, because they will continue to do nothing for a very long time."

Any chance of Rollins winning over the 8.5 percent of Delaware citizens who are unemnployed just plummeted. Indeed, I'll bet that those 37,000 or so jobless people in her state would take offense to her claim that unemployment insurance is the same as "pay[ing] people to do nothing" and that aid makes people "do nothing for a long time." I'll bet most of them would tell Rollins they're sending out resumes every week, showing up at job fairs, dropping in on employers to ask about openings—hardly sitting around and continuing "to do nothing."

The very premise of Rollins' belief about unemployment aid—that it makes people "continue to do nothing for a very long time"—is factually wrong. As Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found, unemployment aid almost always is not a disincentive to finding a new job. And in the few instances where aid does somewhat prolong the duration of unemployment, it's not because some mom or dad found their check in the mail and got lazy; it's because that dad, who'd stopped spending time with his family or keeping up on medical appointments or going grocery shopping because he was looking for work nonstop, can now afford to see his kids once in a while. All told, Chetty says, general economic well-being increases when the unemployed receive aid. (For a thorough debunking of the jobless-aid-makes-people-lazy meme, I recommend watching Chetty's two-part presentation, here and here.)

Seeing as this bloc of jobless-aid bashers—Angle, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Ron Johnson—continues to grow, Greg Sargent has crowned them the "Let Them Eat Want Ads" Caucus. T-shirts, anyone?

Karl Smith thinks the criticisms of Elizabeth Warren's academic work are probably overblown, but argues that she'd be a poor choice to head the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau anyway. Like Paul Krugman, he says, she's an intellectual steamroller with strong opinions:

Having the formidable, and seemingly strong priored Warren at the head of CPFA is dangerous. She seems to have strong beliefs and the analytical ability to plow through anyone in her way. A cold-hearted pointy head would make a better referee.

That’s not to say that passion has no place in intellectual discourse, but it is why its important that passions balanced. It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, confirmation bias and a lack of diversity will leave glaring blind spots.

Consider me convinced. For a position like this — the very first head of an agency that needs to develop both a strong identity and an ethic that puts it squarely on the consumer's side — I think this is exactly what we need. Cold-hearted pointy heads are pretty useful in some areas, but not this one. We don't need a referee right now, we need a pioneer. Elizabeth Warren for CFPB!

Doyle McManus on the WikiLeaks affair:

The most surprising thing about WikiLeaks' released trove of officially secret documents is how few surprises it contains.

That's largely because of a little-noticed, little-credited change in important parts of the U.S. military establishment over the last five years: a conscious decision to deploy the unconventional weapons of honesty and candor about the conduct of the war.

Mired in two wars that have been longer and more difficult than initially advertised, U.S. commanders have adopted an audacious but sensible strategy in describing facts on the ground: No more sugarcoating.

Why? Because one of the lessons of Vietnam was relearned in Iraq: When Americans believe they are being lied to about military operations, they stop supporting them.

Well, if this is true then the White House owes Julian Assange a debt of gratitude, doesn't it? After all, until now we couldn't really be sure they were telling us the truth about the war. Now, apparently, we can. That should be nothing but good news for the war effort. Maybe Obama should send Assange a thank you note.

Ever since the terrorist attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead, September 11th has been a day of national mourning, a time to set politics aside and focus on honoring the victims. But this year, a coalition of tea party and assorted conservative "liberty" groups have other plans. They intend to commemorate the 9th anniversary of 9/11 with a political rally on the National Mall, less than three miles from the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 crashed.

Unite in Action (UIA)—an umbrella organization for a host of other conservative groups that has ties to Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project—is planning a four-day extravaganza of "patriot" events in DC, marking the anniversary of the massive tea party rally held in Washington last September 12th. On the agenda for the 11th is a "9/11 Memorial and Unity Rally," which UIA describes as a "call to action rally focused on the social issues threatening our freedom."

The organizations involved are far from a neutral bunch. UIA's advisory board includes the Oath Keepers, a militant group that has pledged to take up arms against the government if it comes down to it. (On its site, the group is advertising the 9/11 event as a "Defend the Constitution" rally.) There's also ResistNet, a social networking organization for self-proclaimed patriots that has been heavily involved in anti-immigration campaigns. And there are veterans' groups with ties to the Constitution Party, whose goal is to return American jurisprudence to its "Biblical roots." While UIA claims it's holding a "unity" rally, the event will be preceded by signmaking parties—a staple of protest marches.

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Think you're frustrated by the Senate's inability to act on climate change? Try being Nancy Pelosi. The House climate and energy measure that she worked so hard to pass was attacked by many on the left as a half-measure. Then she had to watch as the bill, which she will admit was, at best, a "compromise" by the time it passed in the House, was watered down even more and eventually burried in the Senate.

When Pelosi took the reins as Speaker of the House following the 2006 election, one of her first actions was the creation of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. And within the first two years of Pelosi taking over as Speaker, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES, a landmark climate and energy package. It was a tough vote, by all accounts, passing by a narrow margin and incurring a good deal of "cap and tax" rhetoric from opponents on the right.

So it has been particularly painful to watch what was already a "compromise bill," as Pelosi calls it, in the House die repeatedly in the Senate. First, there was a bill from Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), which looked much like ACES. That died in November. Then Kerry teamed up with Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to pen yet another bill. They finally rolled out a bill more than seven months later, but only after losing the lone Republican cosponsor and bending over backward to please big oil and other interest groups. When that died, there was fleeting hope that maybe a pared down, utility-focused cap could pass, but that soon died too.

Pelosi has tried to remain positive. "This is an issue the Senate can't walk away from," Pelosi told the crowd of liberal activists at Netroots Nation last Saturday. Even if the Senate has, for now, Pelosi is optimistic. "It cannot be ignored," she tells Mother Jones. "I have confidence in the issue."

Despite her confidence that the issue resonates with voters, the bill has caused electoral angst for some House members. ACES was demonized by the right as an "energy tax" and dismissed by plenty of moderate Senate Democrats, not a good signal for those House members who face an uncertain future this November. But Pelosi says her members aren't too worried.  "I'm very proud of House members for taking the bold stand they did," she said. "Our members are proud of their vote. They know why they voted for it."

She called on advocates of climate action to create a stronger grassroots push that will ensure that members of Congress know this issue is important. "There really has to be a stronger outside mobilization on all of these, because members are asked to take many tough votes, and we want to give priority to certain ones over others," she said. "They have to hear from the outside how important this is."

Pelosi was hesitant to be too critical of the Senate bill, which includes oil-spill response and some pared-down energy incentives. "I would like them to have a stronger bill coming out, but whatever they're doing if we're making progress going in a forward direction, I welcome it … I would have liked to have seen a better bill, but we're not giving up on this."

She held out the hope that ACES, the various oil spill measures, and the Senate's energy provisions could be reconciled in conference at some point—and the House's tougher energy and climate measures could be included. (Though at this point, even the Senate's spill bill might be in jeopardy.) "We will go to conference on the bill," said Pelosi. "There isn't a chance that we won't." She didn't rule out the possibility of dealing with it in a lame-duck session, though she said she hopes they don't have to have one.

But to get anything dealing with energy signed into law, she continued, "they have to pass something first."

This is just excellent news:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — "electronic communication transactional records" — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

I forget. How many NSLs do the FBI and other federal agencies already send out every year? 30,000? 50,000? What's it up to now? Whatever it is, I guess it's still not enough. That business of getting approval from a judge is just so annoying, after all.

You know, if I'd wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.

hello, world.

Ah, excellent. Everything seems to be working. Sorry for the radio silence today. Last week Southern California Edison informed us that we might suffer a planned power outage today, and I foolishly assumed this meant the lights might go out for half an hour at some point during the morning. Nope. The lights went out at 8:30 am, a whole bunch of big trucks with gigantic reels of thick cable pulled up, workers did mysterious things all day, and at 5:30 pm the lights came back on.

So....did anything interesting happen while I was gone?

Hours before it was set to take effect, a federal judge blocked some of the most controversial parts of Arizona's harsh immigration law, issuing an injunction applauded by its opponents. But starting Thursday at midnight, there will still be a slew of anti-immigration measures that will take hold in the state. And it's only the beginning of the political and legal firefight surrounding the law.

In her decision on Wednesday, US District Judge Susan Bolton blocked parts of the law that would have required police to determine the immigration status of everyone they stop and suspect to be in the country illegally, saying that the measure could cause "irreparable harm" if they were implemented. "Even though Arizona’s interests may be consistent with those of the federal government, it is not in the public interest for Arizona to enforce preempted laws," Bolton wrote in her injunction. The ruling also prevents Arizona from enforcing provisions making it illegal to be caught without immigration documents and allowing the arrests of suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant.