Speaking to an anti-abortion group in Texas, Santorum explained his take on the enthusiasm gap between the spirited liberal and the passive conservative activists: "The pro-choice movement infuses passion about abortion rights into every aspect of their life. What the pro-choice movement does is they just don't focus on their little issue, they focus on everything.  They make it uncomfortable for students who come to Austin to shower in the YMCA gym."

"[Pro-choice leftists] make it uncomfortable for students who come to Austin to shower at a Young Men's Christian Association, YMCA, gym. Because they live it. They're passionate, they're willing to do and say uncomfortable things in mixed company. They're willing to make the sacrifice at their business because they care enough."

Never mind the debate over whether Santorum should hold public office. Given the crazy homoerotic and / or misogynist-laden spew that often comes out of his mouth, I don't think I'd ever leave him alone with a young person for an instant. The guy's clearly got some serious personal issues.

President Obama today canceled a long-scheduled summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in part because the US president is upset that Russia defied his personal directive to hand over Edward Snowden despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the two nations. That means that US media outlets will spend the next 24 hours or so channeling the government's views (excuse the redundancy) by denouncing the Russian evil of refusing extradition. When doing so, very few, if any, establishment media accounts will mention any of these cases:

1.  US refuses Italian request for extradition of CIA agents.

2.  Panama releases former CIA operative wanted by Italy (we intervened to have him returned to US, instead of to Italy)

3.  America refuses to extradite Bolivia's ex-president on genocide charges

4.  Luis Posada Carilles won't be extradited to Venezuela

The US constantly refuses requests to extradite - even where (unlike Russia) they have an extradition treaty with the requesting country and even where (unlike Snowden) the request involves actual, serious crimes, such as genocide, kidnapping, and terrorism. Maybe those facts should be part of whatever media commentary there is on Putin's refusal to extradite Snowden and Obama's rather extreme reaction to it.

Former NSA and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden speculated on Tuesday that hackers and transparency groups would turn to cyberterror attacks if the United States captured NSA leaker Edward Snowden. He went on to dismiss Snowden supporters as "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years."

That probably wasn't the smartest thing to say because the government desperately needs hackers. And usually, when you desperately need someone, implying that they're sex-starved, basement-dwelling, would-be terrorists isn't a good idea. link

Vol. 91
Vol. 90

Happy Thursday, my friends. I have tedious bullsh*t to attend to now. Oh joy.

Bloomberg.com, July 29
Al-Qaeda Backers Found With U.S. Contracts in Afghanistan

Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing "due process rights" as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.

The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.

"I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract," Sopko said.

I love my mother, tho, such a long and winding road we've had together. From welfare in the hood together in 1969 to this. And every odd step in between. Gotta love the variety of life, when it ain't killing you. Since it's about all we got in this brief mortal coil.

Peace, my friends.

An encrypted email service believed to have been used by US leaker Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday apparently as a result of pressure from US authorities.

Lavabit owner Ladar Levison posted a message at the website telling users that the he was pulling the plug on the secure email service launched in Texas nearly a decade ago.

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," Levison said.

"After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations."

Levison lamented that he was barred from sharing details of what prompted Lavabit's demise.

Vol. 90
Vol. 89

Caught some yacht racing on the bay. Then I discovered there was Krugerand in my penny-loafer.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/08/07/judge-amy-salerno-tells-jurors-they-got-ver dict-wrong.html

Another article, same news item, is here:

http://tinyurl.com/kcohbaa

BTW: I'm sorry, I'm clueless how to make a word show up as a link.

...requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook Inc. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our email to Google Inc, Microsoft Corp or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Sprint Corp; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter Inc, Facebook, LinkedIn Corp or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government's intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.

Americans have undoubtedly learned more in the past couple of months about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its extensive powers than in the previous 35 years of the court's existence. But it shouldn't have taken the renegade intelligence analyst Edward J. Snowden to let us in on a fact that, while hardly secret, had been little noticed: in establishing the court, Congress gave the authority to name its judges to one individual, the chief justice of the United States.

As Charlie Savage reported in The Times last month, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has used that authority to name Republican-appointed judges to 10 of the court's 11 seats. (While Republicans in Congress accuse President Obama of trying to "pack" the federal appeals court in Washington simply by filling its vacant seats, they have expressed no such concern over the fact that the chief justice has over-weighted the surveillance court with Republican judges to a considerably greater degree than either of the two other Republican-appointed chief justices who have served since the court's creation in 1978.)

The ensuing controversy is, I think, a good thing. The country is overdue for a discussion about whether we have given the chief justice - any chief justice, not just this one - too much to do.

Vol. 92
Vol. 91

Watergate remains the greatest political scandal in modern American history. It culminated not only in President Nixon's announcement of his resignation, 39 years ago Thursday, but in the conviction and imprisonment of his three most senior aides. Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the three-month Watergate cover-up trial, which ended on January 1, 1975.

I saw it all unfold. I was a young lawyer working on the White House staff and assisting in Nixon's defense efforts. It is true that we failed spectacularly. Of course, I'm disappointed we weren't more successful. But whether the defendants were innocent or guilty, I've always worried on a more basic level that the heightened emotions of the times denied them the due process of law envisioned by our Constitution.

As a result of some recent discoveries I made while researching a book on the Watergate trials, my concern has been vindicated. It turns out that the notion that "no man is above the law" somehow didn't apply to judges or prosecutors involved in the cover-up trial. Documents I have uncovered indicate that the efforts to punish the wrongdoings of Watergate led to further wrongdoing by the very officials given the task of bringing the Watergate defendants to justice.

The new documents suggest that defendants in the Watergate cover-up trial, held before Judge John Sirica, received anything but a fair trial. Indeed, they suggest prosecutorial and judicial misconduct so serious -- secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion -- that their disclosure at the time either would have prevented Sirica from presiding over the trial or would have resulted in the reversal of the convictions and the cases being remanded for new trials.

It matters not whether you believe that a retrial, under a different judge and perhaps held outside of the District of Columbia, might have resulted in one or more acquittals. That could well have been the result. The strong possibility remains that the Watergate defendants did not receive the fair trial guaranteed by our Constitution. For a nation that prides itself on the rule of law, even in cases of intense publicity and partisanship, this should be cause for concern.

Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance

Seriously disgusting. At least they're getting some pushback from a few sane commenters.