Framed

Partner

In sci-fi stories and the minds of political paranoids, people in the not-too-distant future  are forced to have tracking devices implanted in their bodies that enable the government to track their every move.

How 20th century.

Nowadays, in an ingenious twist, the government has simply required people to buy the tracking chips themselves.  Telecoms have been mandated to "provide enhanced 911 (E911) location tracking" in the phones they sell.  So instead of forcing people to undergo implant surgery at government expense, the feds have forced people to "voluntarily" subsidize their own loss of privacy.

Sometimes it seems that the government's #1 partner in its destruction of civil liberties in America is the public itself:

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

*  *  *

The issue is taking on greater relevance as wireless carriers are racing to offer sleek services that allow cellphone users to know with the touch of a button where their friends or families are.

*  *  *

"Most people don't realize it, but they're carrying a tracking device in their pocket," said Kevin Bankston of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Cellphones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air."

So is my fear of an ECHELON-style system that would track every cell phone-carrying person in the world the paranoid product of a delusional mind?  Hardly. 

It's Friday . . .

. . . and the streets are ours.  What can I say about this?  Hey, it was the eighties, and lots of people did lots of silly things.  But as a former bass viol player myself, I can testify to the easy anthropomorphization of the instrument.  And Kate Bush is very pretty.  And the song is good.

47 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

I didn't see last week's debate, and in fact I haven't seen any of the last three debates.  Perhaps this is odd for a political junkie like me, but I think it's reflective of my disgust with the whole format of these so-called debates.  They reduce every issue to a minute or two--or worse, a show of hands.  They allot far more time to the candidates who are leading in the polls, thus reinforcing those polls without giving people a more meaningful discussion of the issues.  They emphasize the campaign process and the candidates' attacks on each other over substantive positions.

And they include fluff questions such as the one posed to Hillary Clinton: "Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?"

Wow--the answer to that is really going to be germane to my decision on whom to vote for!  Yet this stupid question actually did reveal much--it just didn't reveal much about Clinton.  Rather, as amply documented by Greg Sargent and his commenters, it reveals much about the state of the mainstream media today, and what it's looking for in a Presidential candidate.  My favorite interpretation there is by Mitch Coleman:

Don’t you get it? Liz Phair wrote a song called “I kissed a girl.” In it, one line goes...”they can have their diamonds, we’ve got our pearls.”

The pearl is a woman’s clitoris. Hillary was being asked whether she preferred men or women, albeit in a very sly way. Nobody but me caught this? Maybe I’m nuts.

No one I've read yet, however, delves into the question of what this question--both the fact that it was posed and that Clinton deigned to answer it--says about class and wealth in American society.

Diamonds and pearls are squarely within middle class tastes and affordability.  I've seen even the most downmarket members of the distaff side sporting diamond engagement rings, though to be sure those diamonds are usually pretty small.  Real pearls, though generally less expensive, aren't as common, but there's still a lot of them about even in the meanest environs.   And while diamonds and pearls are naturally found among the wealthier set, discussing one's jewelry preferences among the old-money rich is gauche and marks one as an arriviste.  It's the lower class, though, for whom diamonds and pearls are all but unattainable.

Thus the class subtext of the question was this: you're one of us, aren't you?  One of the middies.  One familiar enough with diamonds and pearls to have worked out a preference and not so U as to sneer at the question.  In this interpretation, Clinton's answer--why, both, of course!--was designed to answer the question in the affirmative.  I'm just like you; I'd rather be shopping.

Supposing

Suppose you were an anti-sex zealot and you wanted both to make it more difficult for the young and the poor to fuck, and to exact life-changing consequences if they did.  Suppose also that you were a member of Congress, or had the ear of a like-minded Congressman. 

One thing you might do is to dramatically increase the cost of the most effective means of birth control so as to put it out of reach of a great many people.  You'd do that by slipping some language into a new Medicaid funding law that would change the way the feds subsidize birth control for poorer people, community clinics and college health care services.  That would cause the charges for some birth control methods to increase by 400%.  If anyone called you on this, you'd say the effects of the change were  "inadvertently included in a law intended to reduce Medicaid abuse."

Then you'd gloat behind a facade of "concern":

“From our perspective, this does bring to light a public health concern, but for a different reason,” said Kimberly Martinez, the executive director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, which advocates abstinence from sex until marriage. “These young women are relying on this contraception to protect them. But contraception isn’t 100 percent — for pregnancy or for disease.”

And if you were lucky, you might even force members of Congress and Presidential candidates to take a stand on discounting birth control in an election year, just in time to energize your fellow Calvinists and get them to the polls to ensure that they all voted against promiscuity, fornication and orgasms.

Of course, I've got no evidence to support the idea that this is all a culture wars conspiracy.  I'm just sayin' . . . .

Thanksgiving

Among the many things I am thankful for is the fact that I am not a member of the U.S. armed forces, where they arrest you in the middle of the night in VA hospitals for seeking psychiatric treatment and then demand that you give your enlistment bonus back when you are maimed in Iraq and unable to finish your tour of duty.

If the Bush administration keeps treating our military men and women this way, pretty soon the U.S. armed forces will go the way of U.S. health care and the American dollar.

48 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.  That's the news today.  The state has officially set January 8 as primary day, earlier than the January 27 date of 2004.

Monetary

I don't understand monetary policy, but I do listen to 89x, a powerful alt-rock station out of Windsor, Ontario.  Right now, they're running Wal-Mart commercials talking about how a strong (Canadian) dollar is good for you.

As long as you're Canadian, of course.

Just a few years ago, I was sending my kids to summer camp in Ontario on the cheap. Now perhaps Canadian parents will send their kids here and chuckle about what a bargain they're getting.  Yes it's all fun and games, until someone loses an eye . . . or can't afford gas . . . or loses control of the world economy.

Finally

One of the most frustrating things about the Democratic Senatorial leadership is that they have seemed slow to pick up the instruments of power that are available to them now that they have a majority.  Thus we've seen Democrat-sponsored legislation on withdrawing from Iraq, immigration, and warrantless surveillance stymied by Republican filibuster threats, which impose a de facto 60-vote majority requirement.  Paradoxically, though, the necessity of having 60 votes seems to vanish whenever the Republicans want to get something done, like confirming Michael "Waterboard" Mukasey as Attorney General.  As Glenn Greenwald has written,

The so-called "60-vote requirement" applies only when it is time to do something to limit the Bush administration. It is merely the excuse Senate Democrats use to explain away their chronic failure/unwillingness to limit the President, and it is what the media uses to depict the GOP filibuster as something normal and benign. There obviously is no "60-vote requirement" when it comes to having the Senate comply with the President's demands, as the 53-vote confirmation of Michael Mukasey amply demonstrates.

It's heartening, then, to see that Harry Reid is finally using some of his procedural control to stand up to the Bush administration:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided to keep the chamber in session over the Thanksgiving break to block President Bush from making any unsavory recess appointments while Senators are out of town.

In a statement inserted in the record Friday, the Majority Leader said he will hold the Senate in a series of pro forma or nonvoting sessions to prevent the controversial practice.

The "unsavory" characters that Reid's action may prevent from assuming high office include James Holsinger, Bush's choice for Surgeon General who believes that Jesus can "cure" homosexuals and has written extensively on the horrors of gay male sex.

It's about time started taking its advise-and-consent function more seriously.

Porn

In order to see these clips from the pro-family conservative traditional values news network, a/k/a Fox News, you first have to click past these warnings on YouTube:

This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community.

By clicking "Confirm", you are agreeing that all videos or groups flagged by the YouTube community will be viewable by this account.

I once heard it said that all the major networks would broadcast live executions if they could get the footage. . . except Fox.  Fox would broadcast naked live executions.

Maybe they should replace the "o" in their name with a "u."

Congratulations

Congratulations to President Bush for mastering eighth grade civics.  This is the President of the United States of America two days ago, giving his deep and inghtful analysis of the meaning of the Constitution:

When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny. They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government's powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each of these branches plays a vital role in our free society. Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities -- and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.

What discernment.  What subtle understanding!  What original interpretation!!  I mean, almost no one ever speaks of the Constitution in terms of separation of powers.  Wow.

And of course, he explains all this in a tone of voice normally used to speak to slow children.

Maybe someday we'll have  a President with something more than a junior high understanding of the American system of government.