Wednesday Bucket O’ News

Posted by CabinGirl | Mar 22, 2006 | 23 |

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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CabinGirl

23 Comments

CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 7:27 am

Portland newspaper sues for release of documents: US News and World Report

The company that publishes the Oregonian newspaper in Portland has filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Oregon to unseal documents in a pending case that alleges the Bush administration illegally intercepted international phone conversations between the codirector of an Islamic charity and his two lawyers in the United States.

The complaint states that the government used the intercepted information against the charity, resulting in the designation of the charity and al-Buthe in September 2004 as terrorists. Then in February 2005, both were indicted for illegally taking the money out of the country. A federal judge last September dropped the case against the charity but preserved the government’s right to bring criminal charges against the organization in the future. Nelson points out that there has been no terrorism indictment against the charity or al-Buthe, who remains a fugitive.

The documents, Hinkle wrote, “may contain evidence of arguably unlawful conduct on the part of the U.S. government against U.S. citizens.”
CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 7:29 am

WashPo: Editor & Publisher

During the recent controversy surrounding Dan Froomkin’s blog at The Washington Post, editors not only decided to clearly label his column “opinion” but also to make an effort to hire a conservative blogger to balance his alleged liberal slant.

Today, the Post launched the result: A new blog called “Red America,” created by Ben Domenech, co-founder of RedState, a popular community blog. It immediately set off what Post political reporter Tom Edsall called a “firestorm” in his online chat today.

A former contributing editor to National Review Online, Domenech later became what he calls “the youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush.” After a stint as chief speechwriter for Senator John Cornyn (D-Tx.), he co-founded RedState.org and became a book editor at Regnery Publishing, where he worked with Michelle Malkin and others.

They call this balancing Froomkin’s alleged liberal slant? Isn’t this more along the lines of using a sledgehammer to crack an egg or something?
- albert on March 22, 2006 at 9:37 am
  
  that dirty commie pinko rag is trying to balance with a conservative blog!
  
  ugh. so stupid. i guess next week NYT will launch the co-authored double headed dragon blog of malkin-coulter.
  
  and off topic – show me the cabin!
  - CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 9:46 am
    
    Interior pics of latest project here
    
    I’ll have to dig out an exterior one. 🙂
- rba on March 22, 2006 at 9:49 am
  
  Calma. Go read John Winn Miller , publisher of the Olympian smacking Cal Thomas. He starts with:
  
  “Cal Thomas, you’ve made me mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.
  
  I’m tired of hearing radical columnists like you besmirch the good men and women who struggle daily to put out the very best newspaper they can.
  
  “
  
  He ends with:
  
  “We do not — we cannot — wear our religion or political views on our sleeves. That doesn’t make us less moral than you.
  
  It does, however, make us better journalists.
  
  “
  
  Perfect.
CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 7:37 am

Goin’ green: Christian Science Monitor

By the end of this month, 100 percent of the electricity that powers the Old Lady in the Harbor and Ellis Island, where millions of Americans first set foot in America, will be “green power.” Windmills in West Virginia and Pennsylvania will supply the electricity that powers up the floodlights that shine on Miss Liberty’s torch and the air conditioning that keeps all those immigration records from mildewing.
CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 7:42 am

Don’t miss Tuesday’s Undercovered News Stories from storiesinamerica.
Knoxville Progressive on March 22, 2006 at 8:55 am

Here a little earlier than usual ’cause the bucket is kinda light today…

Government ministers at the World Water Forum in Mexico City called Tuesday for a global war for water, saying the survival of two thirds of humanity is at risk from inadequate or unsafe supplies. “The lack of water or its poor quality kills 10 times more people than all the wars combined,” Loic Fauchon, the head of the France-based World Water Council, said in opening a ministerial session. The problems caused by the world’s dwindling supply of fresh water go far beyond perpetual thirst, too, extending to severe pollution, species loss, and even food insecurity, a UN study released Tuesday says. And Bolivia is refusing to sign an international declaration on the importance of clean water because it falls short of calling access to water a human right, a government minister said Monday.

Sailors who served on naval ships during the Vietnam War have been told their ships’ drinking water, which was contaminated with Agent Orange, could be causing their cancers. Story here.

Investor spending on environmental issues is soaring as climate change presents business opportunities and dangers, investors and business executives told a Reuters conference in London. Meanwhile, US oil majors lag European companies in guarding against potential lawsuits and other risks of emitting gases linked to global warming, according to a study by a group of investors and environmentalists. And the word in DC is that Sen. Diane Feinstein has draft legislation circulating that would create a mandatory cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emissions system. Details here.
Oui on March 22, 2006 at 9:10 am

.
Through tough government stance … and negotiations!

CNN Breaking News :: Eta Offers Permanent Cease Fire

MADRID (CNN News International) 5 minutes ago — Basque separatist group ETA plans to declare a permanent cease-fire from Friday, a report in the Basque newspaper Gara today.

Gara is the group’s usual vehicle for statements. The announcement was first made on Basque television.

A cease-fire would be the first step in a long-awaited peace process with ETA, which has killed 850 people since 1968 in its fight to carve an independent state out of northern Spain and south western France.

Five ETA bombs explode on Spanish roads

● ETA Timeline: Four decades of violence

≈ Cross-posted from my diary —
Breaking News: ETA Offers Permanent Truce ≈

“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
idredit on March 22, 2006 at 11:36 am

I’ve not seen any post here on this new IRS rule that’ll change and affect privacy issues. via an Alternet alert:

The IRS’s proposed rule change will allow tax preparers to sell — uh, (‘safeguard’) — your data.

But that depends on what ‘is’ IS or what ‘safeguard’ is meant to be.

“IRS Issues Proposed Regulations to Safeguard Taxpayer Information.”

[..] The Internal Revenue Service is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. … If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers for the first time would be able to sell information from individual returns — or even entire returns — to marketers and data brokers. … The change is in a set of proposed rules the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them “not a significant regulatory action.” [..]

Yea, not significant at all. Surprised? …with this administration everything is for sale. Everything.
- CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 12:23 pm
  
  That’s scary…who are they selling to? Choicepoint? They certainly have a reputation for “safeguarding” data.
  - Arcturus on March 22, 2006 at 12:40 pm
    
    I forget now where I read this (recent though), but apparently John Ashcroft has a new career as a lobbyist. Unusual for an Attorney General. And Choicepoint, major private data collector & distributor, is now one of his clients.
- SallyCat on March 22, 2006 at 12:28 pm
  
  Enrolled Agents – like H & R Block may be able to under that theory. Other thought – scarier – is that Intuit aka Turbo Tax has your information if you prepare your tax return via their web site. In theory Intuit could (and probably would) sell your personal tax info.
  
  As a CA CPA it would be in violation of my state license to sell information. AND my own personal ethics!
  
  Not sure what Treasury is trying to accomplish with this regulation.
  - idredit on March 22, 2006 at 12:56 pm
    
    persumably anyone who hands out a shingle as a data broker or marketer, already in the thousands will buy and sell. Not to overlook companies like Choicepoint, mentioned upthread, with an established cozy relationship made even cozier with lobbyist Ashcroft.
    
    Did you say personal ethics? Unfortunately, with the Bushcos, it’s missing. The moral benchmark for these wingnuts is: ‘if we can cash in on it, it’s down right ethical’.
    
    Beyond the pale.
boran2 on March 22, 2006 at 11:37 am

Sorry, this is from yesterday, but it is important:

NYT Link

GOP Makes Its Pitch to a Pivotal Union

WASHINGTON, March 20 — With the election season heating up, the Bush administration and the Republican Party used a good deal of energy and charm on Monday to woo a group that has long been part of the Democrats’ base: organized labor.
- CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 12:25 pm
  
  Thanks, I had missed that.
Arcturus on March 22, 2006 at 12:14 pm

Court rejects Internet obscenity appeal

from Barbara Nitke:

We’ve come a long way and accomplished a lot – but in the end the Supreme Court has decided not to hear our case against the Communications Decency Act. They have affirmed the decision of the District Court to leave this unfair law in place.

I am deeply disappointed. I believe their decision was motivated by the current political climate, and not based on our constitution or the law.

The good news is that we have proven that the current obscenity laws don’t work and we’ve changed the way future obscenity cases will be judged (details at http://jwirenius.livejournal.com/ entry for March 21, 2006). We have also brought public attention to our government’s attempt at criminalizing free speech on the Internet. {snip}

I appreciate your support and your friendship. I’m not sure what my next
step will be, but I’m not giving up on the battle for artistic freedom. I’ll let
you know what’s next.

Yours,
Barbara Nitke

from the NCSF press release:

March 20, 2006 – Washington D.C. Today the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Federal District Court’s decision in Barbara Nitke and NCSF v. Alberto
Gonzales, the challenge to the Communications Decency Act, #01 CIV 11476 (RMB).
The Supreme Court has affirmed the lower court’s decision without hearing oral
arguments, sending a clear signal that the court will not protect free speech rights
when it comes to sexually explicit materials.

The NCSF and Nitke lawsuit was successful in weakening the Miller standard of
judging obscenity: the District Court for the Southern District of NY made a factual finding that the SLAPS prong of Miller does not provide protection against
prosecution as it was intended to do. The Miller decision (1973) stated that materials were constitutionally protected if the work, taken as a whole, has “serious literary,
artistic, political, or scientific value.” However the District court accepted evidence
from NCSF and Nitke that prosecutors and juries in more restrictive communities are less likely to extend protection to artistic and literary materials that are outside the
mainstream of traditional sexuality.

“We have proven that Miller does not work,” says Susan Wright, Spokesperson for NCSF. “But the Supreme Court has declined to strike it down at this time. That means every website on the Internet can be judged by the most repressive local community standards in the U.S.”

My Lawsuit against the Communications Decency Act

The CDA lawsuit, which I filed in December 2001 as a co-plaintiff with the National Coalition of Sexual Freedom, is fighting for everyone’s right to freedom of expression on the Internet. {snip}

This law makes it a felony crime in the United States to put obscene material on the Internet, in effect criminalizing free speech. Material is obscene if it is found by a jury to ‘appeal to the prurient interest in sex’ and be ‘patently offensive’ according to local community standards, and if it does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific social value (usually called the SLAPS test). These standards for judging obscenity were established in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. California.

That ruling has made it very confusing for anyone to know what’s obscene and what’s not for over thirty years — first because ‘prurient interest,’ ‘patently offensive,’ and SLAPS are all outmoded and highly subjective concepts, and secondly because it’s impossible to know what constitutes a ‘community’. A community could be a couple of square blocks, or an entire state. Back then there was no Internet, and most big porn companies just didn’t send outrageous cutting edge sexual material through the US postal system into extremely conservative states. And the people who lived in conservative states got their sexual entertainment by traveling to the more liberal states. {snip}

When I decided to create a website of my fine art photography work in early 2001, I asked John Wirenius and other lawyers what they thought would be legally permissible. I was told that my images of loving SM couples and people behind the scenes on porn sets might be acceptable in New York where I live, but obscene to people living in other areas. Therefore it was impossible to say what was safe for me to put on a website and be within the law.

I can’t prevent people living in a small enclave in the middle of the Bible Belt from bypassing the disclaimer on the front page of my website, and going directly to an inside page. If they found my photographs there objectionable, they would have the power to go to their local district attorney’s office and demand that a federal obscenity case be brought against me under the CDA. {snip}

As the CDA is enforced in our country, most prudent people will hesitate to put up a website with any sexually based text or imagery. Their free speech will be ‘chilled’ out of the fear of what their own government might do to them. In effect, this gives the people in one small neighborhood the ability to tell people all over the world what they’re allowed to look at on the Internet.

Our Justice Department announced in July 2005 that it would be forming an anti-obscenity task force and stepping up obscenity prosecutions in our country. The FBI is also forming an anti-obscenity squad. The Bush administration is under tremendous pressure from the radical religious right to crack down on all forms of sexual education and expression and to ‘clean up’ the Internet. That means a lot of people who work with sexual subjects are potentially at risk, from artists whose works are in major museum collections, to members of the alternative sexual community, to scientists whose work involves researching the human body.

This is in sharp contrast to the previous administration under President Clinton, which chose to prosecute only child obscenity. Janet Reno, the attorney general at that time, felt that adult obscenity cases were a waste of time, and put the entire obscenity budget towards tracking down child pornographers.

Forty people and businesses have been convicted of obscenity since 2001, and twenty additional indictments are pending, according to Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department’s child exploitation and obscenity section. There were only four obscenity prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration. {snip}

In the first round of this lawsuit, a district court three-judge panel in New York ruled that while I and the other members of the National Coalition for Sexual Expression were clearly at risk, more proof was needed that the CDA causes us and many others to self-censor our work, unfairly limiting our free speech. The case is currently on appeal to the US Supreme Court. {snip}

For more information on the lawsuit, please go to http://www.ncsfreedom.org and
http://jwirenius.livejournal.com.
maryb2004 on March 22, 2006 at 12:36 pm

Supreme Court rules on a 4th amendment case. Roberts, Scalia and Thomas are in the minority. Alito did not participate.

In the case where the police show up and ask for permission to search a house controlled by two people, the majority ruled that the express refusal of consent by one person was dispositive of the consent issue regardless of the consent of the other person. Majority opinion by Souter who said that under the view of the dissenters:

“The centuries of special protection for the privacy of the home are over.”
- SallyCat on March 22, 2006 at 12:39 pm
  
  I wonder why Alito didn’t participate though?
  - maryb2004 on March 22, 2006 at 12:40 pm
    
    I assume oral arguments were heard when O’Connor was still on the court.
SallyCat on March 22, 2006 at 12:37 pm

Unabashedly copied in part from Sunfell’s diary at DailyKos Sunfell’s Diary

Cecilia Fire Thunder, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe at Pine Ridge, SD, says that she is going to stand up to Gov. Rounds’ ban of all abortion in the state of South Dakota.

According to an Native American Times article by Tim Giago, Ms. Fire Thunder was “incensed…that a body made up of mostly white males would make such a stupid law against women.”

Worth passing on….everywhere!
- CabinGirl on March 22, 2006 at 12:44 pm
  
  I LOVE it!
idredit on March 22, 2006 at 7:18 pm

A must read for those with stock portfolios, here’s advice from Bears Stearns-what stocks to shed, hold or buy; they’re telling clients ‘with bird flu imminent, it’s time to Immunize your stock portfolio’

guess I’ll have to pass on thisinvestor’s guide. With just enough $$$, my ‘stock-pile’ will be some tuna and milk.

Wednesday Bucket O’ News

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CabinGirl

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