Hawaii says "get lost" to birthers

Here's a cute line from Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily, who says he "would like to see Barack Obama's actual, long-form birth certificate as the first step toward determining if he is constitutionally eligible to serve as president. "

The first step? Not only is the official state record, attested by the State Health Director and the registrar of vital statistics, not sufficient to establish Obama's nativity, but even that fabled long-form birth certificate would still not settle the issue! I have no idea what further evidence Farah would require; he probably doesn't know, either, but figures he's bright enough to think up something quickly. It's a Sisyphean task, anyway. Presenting evidence to a birther is like speaking louder when someone doesn't understand English.

So, I'm completely sympathetic to the poor employees of the Hawaii Health Department who have to deal with persistent requests for Obama's birth certificate. Hawaii has just passed a special law that allows those harassed civil servants to ignore any repeat requests for the birth certificate and my first impulse was to agree. After all, the birther movement is a grade-A piece of lunacy and doesn't deserve a soft answer, especially when the soft answer only increases the wrath.

But on second thought, no, Hawaii should not have done this. Getting 10-20 emails a week is annoying, to be sure, but that level of inquiry shouldn't impede the real work all that much. Can't it be treated like a FAQ? Set up a web page with a canned response and respond to each email by pasting in the link. Surely that's as quick as searching through your email to confirm that you've heard from this particular nut before, isn't it?

The slippery slope argument may be overdrawn. This is a truly unusual case, over a fully-answered issue, and the level of stupidity far beyond the normal level of background stupid. Still ... these folks do elect their own and I hate to see the precedent established, allowing public records requirements to be ignored when you get frustrated with a particular issue. The wingnuts might not hesitate to copy this as soon as they have power and have something to hide. I hate to give them that much of an opening. Hawaii should suck it up and find the least cumbersome way of dealing with the birthers, without compromising their public records laws.

Yellowstone grizzlies back on the list

Two years after federal officials announced their "amazing" recovery, grizzly bears near Yellowstone National Park have been given renewed federal protections by a federal judge who expressed concern that climate change, among other factors, could impair the bears' hopes for survival.

Only a short announcement, but you can read a little more here. And a longer article here.

The grizzly bears in Yellowstone seemed to be in real trouble in the early 1970's, when a crash program of closing the garbage dumps that they loved to frequent, plus a hyper-aggressive program of removing bears that spent too much time in campgrounds, combined to eliminate some 88 bears in the years 1970 and 1971. This was out of population that numbered somewhere from 150 to 300, depending on whose numbers you believed*; either way, those kinds of losses were clearly unsustainable and the Yellowstone grizzlies went on the Endangered Species List in 1975.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem now contains some 500 bears, the target level for considering grizzlies to be "recovered," and that is indeed a great success story. The bears were taken off the Endangered Species List in 2007. However, the judge agrees with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition that the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the corresponding state agencies, have failed to establish a plan that has any legal teeth to it, should the bear population start to fall again. So back on the list they go, at least until a more solid management plan can be devised.

_______________________
* The dispute over the most accurate bear census was extremely bitter. You can read about the whole fracas in Paul Schullery's The Bears of Yellowstone and Frank Criaghead's Track of the Grizzly.

Why the President's advisors don't tweet

Google News offered me this little article, which is a nice explanation of why working in the White House is different from sitting in chem lab.

Firstly and most obviously, in a sensitive environment such as the White House, controlling the flow of information to the outside world is extremely important. Secondly, Twitter is not immune to malware, viruses, and scams. Then there is the Presidential Records Act, which requires all White House communications to be saved. Abiding by these rules would prove difficult on an external service such as Twitter.

O'Brien also explains why switching to free Firefox would actually be rather expensive.

That Big Sky resides between the ears

This is what happens when:
A) wicked people get put in a position of power; or
B) stupid people are too stupid to understand how anyone could doubt their innocent intentions.

Personally, I'm leaning toward (B).

The city of Bozeman is asking all job applicants to hand over the usernames and passwords to all internet sites to which they belong. You read that right - they even want your passwords!

Because maybe, just maybe, that guy who wants to be a policeman has been posting child porn somewhere and will be stupid enough to lead you to it. "This is just a component of a thorough background check," says Chuck Winn, Bozeman's assistant city manager.

No, no it isn't. On all my social site accounts, I've signed an agreement that I won't be turning my passwords over to another person and I wouldn't do it even I didn't care about violating terms and agreements. For starters, there are things about me that an employer has no right to ask - for example, my religious beliefs. Job application forms do not ask you list all of your club memberships because the employer has no right to ask it.

Yet these clowns not only want you to disclose all your internet memberships - "any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc." - but demand to be able to peruse all your activities there.

And that Google password? That's my email! They're asking people to give them unrestricted access to their email account!

Now, what kind of asshole would I be if, without asking your permission, I allowed some nimwit of a city official to go poking through everything I've written to you and everything you've written to me? Grade A, that's what kind. And that's before I even start worrying about what would happen if some jerk decided to start writing messages under my name.

The city attorney hopes this will be reassuring: "One thing that's important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don't use those." Need we even reply?

I chose (B) because I really think these folks are just too ignorant to comprehend why this is a big deal. When I see comments like, "They can show us what's on their face page," I'm pretty sure I'm listening to someone who's vaguely heard of Facebook, but has no idea what it's about. Heck, I probably don't even have to worry about him finding this blog that I publish under my real name.

That's doubly embarrassing when Bozeman is a nice college town that no doubt holds plenty of tech-savvy people; apparently, none of them are running the city.

__________

PS. The Facebook entry that tipped me off to the story also mentions the Montana Constitution, Article II, Section 10:
"The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest."

Power of the UN

The Onion sums up the terrifying powers of the United Nations:


Ambassador Stages Coup At UN, Issues Long List of Non-Binding Resolutions



Thanks to the indispensable slactivist

Apologetics 101

“If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Richard Nixon, 1977.

"And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture." Condaleezza Rice, 2009.

[Via Foreign Policy]



Oh, that part about "Did you know that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said Guantanamo was a model medium security prison?" Here's what the OCSE had to say about that back in 2006:

The OSCE Spokesperson said that, in the light of these reports, he wished to make it clear the Organization itself had not sent an expert to Guantanamo: "The person quoted in several of the stories as "an OSCE expert", Professor Alain Grignard, accompanied the delegation despatched by the Parliamentary Assembly, based in Copenhagen, but he was not employed or commissioned by the OSCE."

Damn, these people know how to stretch a fig leaf! A few "make-it-up-as-you-go" memos, one friendly opinion from a carefully-scheduled foreigner, and that's all the proof we should need that Guantanamo was a model prison and no one (by definition) could have been tortured.

And that part about Nazi Germany being less of a threat to America than the al-Quaeda ... imagine that we could somehow manipulate history and offer Condaleezza Rice this choice:

(a) Germany loses, 9/11 happens
(b) Germany wins, 9/11 never happens

... she would choose (b)?

Well, she did say that foreign policy is tricky and you don't always get to choose who you work with. I'm sure she would have been pragmatic.

White House and YouTube

From Tech_sassy, at the Fayette Observer:

White House stops using YouTube due to privacy concerns

The White House received quite a bit of criticism when they decided to use YouTube to host President Obama’s videos on a government Web site — and for various reasons. There’s the government-business relationship with Google and more importantly, privacy and security issues resulting from “Google’s insatiable thirst for detailed data on the browsing habits of web surfers.”

But now the White House has done away with YouTube videos and, instead, is using a Flash-based video player:

“This solution, which appears to use Akamai’s content delivery network, does not make use of tracking cookies.”

However, they are still posting copies of the videos to their official YouTube channel for everyone to see. This is fine, considering the main issue before was running the Google tracking cookies on a government website.

Regardless, I still operate under the assumption that the government is always watching us. Not because I’m paranoid, but because I just give them way too much credit.

I like that last line.

Maps don't bomb people - people bomb people!

Joel Anderson, a California assemblyman, recently learned that terrorists use services like Google Earth to plan their attacks. Now he wants to pass a law requiring the blurring of all images of possible terrorist attack, including government buildings, hospitals, schools, and churches.*

[A] security expert, Bruce Schneier recently wondered what other things legislators might consider banning to prevent terrorism:

"Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven’t seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are — by and large — small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular."

Of course, this would be a state, not a federal, law. Wait'll those international terrorists learn they have to leave California every time they want to plot an attack. Oooh, they'll be tearing their beards out by the roots!

_____________
* Yeah, churches. Not shopping centers or sports arenas or high-rise office buildings, but definitely the churches.

Transparent government? Nope.

Distracted as he may be by the economic crisis, Obama is fast running out of excuses for why he talked a good game about open government, but in reality his DOJ is backing Bush positions on concealing records at every turn. The latest:

Obama’s DOJ quietly sought dismissal of missing White House emails lawsuit

But despite it all, the newly minted Obama administration said in court papers that the issue revolving around the missing emails is “moot” because some steps, however incomplete, had been taken by the Bush White House to preserve and restore missing emails, even though the work has been conducted under the cover of secrecy by an unknown outside contractor hired by Bush administration officials.

*snip*

In a mid-January court filing that sought dismissal of the lawsuit, the Justice Department claimed that the 14 million emails were never actually “missing,” rather the emails were simply unaccounted for due to a “flawed and limited” internal review by the Office of Administration in 2005. The documents were retrieved, the Justice Department claims, “through a three-phased email recovery process.”

*snip*

Obama’s Justice Department appears to have taken the Bush administration on its word that a good faith effort has been made to restore missing emails, according to CREW’s 24-page motion arguing against having the case dismissed.

“One day after the Bush administration ended, defendants filed a motion to dismiss that reflects an incredibly cynical and narrow view of defendants’ obligations under the Federal Records Act (“FRA”),” the watchdog group’s court filing says. “According to defendants, because they have taken some action -- no matter how flawed, incomplete or limited -- the first four counts of plaintiffs’ complaints are now moot. Hiding behind technical jargon and theoretical constructs, defendants attempt to obscure three basic facts: we still do not know how many emails are missing; we still do not know the source of the problem that caused emails to be missing in the first place; and we still do not know if the problem has been fixed.

State secrets

I don't like this:

Obama Administration Maintains Bush Position on 'Extraordinary Rendition' Lawsuit

A representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

I'm willing to consider that this might be a necessary and reasonable position -- pending further actions which the new administration takes in cleaning up our act in the GWOT. But it doesn't obviously fit in with the other actions Obama has taken toward ordering a more open, law-abiding government. Which way is the story going to go? A) Openness is the general guiding principle, but there are a few rare exceptions that have to be made; or B) Openness will be played for its political value when there's not much at stake, but any time there's a rub Obama will readily claim all the privilege and power that other presidents have claimed.

It's too soon to either condemn or excuse the new President on this one action, but conservatives disgraced themselves by refusing to be skeptical of Their Guy in the White House; liberals don't need to go repeating their failures. We want the rule of law again, and we want it now.


(via D.A. Ridgley at Positive Liberty)

Changing the culture

Among the sort of writers that I read, there has been great excitement about some of the new President's comments regarding open government, especially the Executive Order which places limits on former Presidents' ability to restrict their records. The National Coalition for History also links me to these two memos which don't have the force of law, but do make promises that are somewhat binding, politically:

Transparency and Open Government
Freedom of Information Act

The key phrase in the latter is:

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

In the transparency memo, this paragraph caught my eye:

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

Government 2.0! The President with a Blackberry! And to highlight the contrast with the previous Administration, I heard Bush say in one of his farewell interviews, "People wanted Barack Obama in their living rooms explaining policy." That's a very Government 1.0* outlook: for Bush, the role of the people after Election Day was to simply listen to what they were told. Obama is claiming a different approach and, while we have yet to see how he'll really govern, he's making some promises that he'll find it hard to renege on. Unlike Bush & Cheney, his power is his popularity and he stands to take more damage if he's seen as a liar.

This is all very welcome to us liberal, open-society types. Obama was always rather vague and cautious on the campaign trail and didn't always challenge the Bush methods as openly as some of us would have liked. Perhaps this is a sign that he's going to be as aggressive about dismantling the secretive, unitary executive


_________________
* Not that I really use these phrases; please don't think I go around talking like this all the time.

Presidents can't use BlackBerrys

Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe

But before he arrives at the White House, [Obama] will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.

Meanwhile, electronic records and the PRA are still not reconciled for the outgoing Administration.

Will the truth come out?

Bush Spy Revelations Anticipated When Obama Is Sworn In

New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh already has a slew of sources waiting to spill the Bush administration's darkest secrets, he said in an interview last month. "You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on January 20. [They say,] 'You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.'"

So far, virtually everything we know about the NSA's warrantless surveillance has come from whistle-blowers.

One encouraging sign for civil liberties groups is that John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, is a key figure in Obama's transition team, which will staff and set priorities for the new administration. The center was a tough and influential critic of the Bush administration's warrantless spying.

It got little play during the campaign, but it's been a huge issue for me. Let's hope Obama comes through and restores some desperately needed glasnost to America. I expect he'll at least refrain from acting against whistleblowers, but I'll feel better if he takes positive steps toward dismantling those programs that are secret and illegal.

EPA libraries

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
SHUTTERED EPA LIBRARIES OPEN DOORS TOMORROW AFTER TWO YEARS

Of course, the damage is not so easily undone:

This ends a 30-month campaign by the Bush administration to restrict availability of technical materials within EPA but leaves in its wake scattered and incomplete collections.

What I'm paranoid about

[I was originally going to title this post, "Why I'm paranoid," but that may not be the same question.]

Via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub:
Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

... snip ...

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

Now put this side by side with this event from Inside Iraq:

Yesterday, a force from the Iraqi army came to my neighborhoods to evacuate the governmental flats where about 600 families live in. One of my neighbors tried to inquire about the evacuation order. He asked the army force "why does the army implement the evacuation orders? This is not the duty of the army". The question developed into an argument and the soldiers lost their mind because they didn't use to listen but they used to beat, fight and kill. They beat my neighbor violently to give a lesson to others to obey and execute only "Execute and then discusses"

I know, I know, I shouldn't be comparing the American army to the Iraqi. But I keep seeing (and I'll continue posting) too many similar events from American police who react with only moderately more restraint if they're asked to explain their actions and commands. "Execute and then discusses." When authorities don't believe they should be bothered with questions, violence isn't far behind.*

And now we're going to have Army brigades especially trained to operate in US cities the way they operated in Baghdad. If I'm supposed to sleep better at night, it isn't working.


* And, yes, there are extreme cases when this has to be done. Army authority is built on the needs of the battlefield, where committees might not live long enough to pass a resolution. But dealing with reporters or escorting a student out of a library just aren't that kind of emergency.

$700,000,000,000 grant request

Fred Clark at Slacktivist is outraged at Treasury Secretary Paulson's request for lots of money + lots of discretion - any oversight at all. Well, many people are, but I especially enjoyed Clark's slant on the issue:

I'm not usually in a position to say that I have more experience, knowledge and know-how than Ben Bernanke, but he really should've talked to somebody like me before heading to Capitol Hill yesterday to help Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson present a three-page memo asking for $700,000,000,000 of the public's money.

Three pages. Seriously.

... snip ...

[W]e wrote a lot of grants. And the thing is that every one of those grants was longer, more detailed and better documented than the sorry excuse for a memo that Paulson threw together to request $700 billion from the public coffers. It means your $15,000 grant application gets turned down. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and if you're going to ask someone to hand over that kind of cash, then you're going to have to do your homework. You're going to have to explain, in detail, what the money is for, where and when it's going to be spent. You're going to have to explain how you intend to report back, with detailed documentation, after the money is spent. And you're probably going to have to describe a detailed plan ensuring that you won't need to come back six months later to ask for another $15,000 for exactly the same thing.

Fail to provide that kind of documentation and detail and your grant application will be rejected. Not only that, but you'll be lucky if you're ever allowed to come back and re-apply with the same foundation.

Clark helpfully provides this link:

Cheney's records

Cheney must keep records, judge orders

From the ruling, it appears that attempts to negotiate a settlement failed because the OVP insisted on using their own private definition of Vice-Presidential records, which could exclude any activity which was not "specially assigned to the Vice President by the President in the discharge of executive duties and responsibilities." That's a loophole large enough to shovel any number of documents through, so the judge rightly concluded that there was a risk of irreparable harm if the OVP was allowed to operate as they see fit.

Bush Admin - The Most Secretive Govt Ever?

In its “Secrecy Report Card 2008,” released Sep. 9, the group concluded that the Bush administration “exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources.”

Lawsuit to Ask That Cheney's Papers Be Made Public

Their lawsuit contends that President Bush sought to improperly narrow the scope of the records law in a 2001 executive order that declares, in part, that the statute "applies to the executive records of the Vice President."

Scholars say "executive records" is a term that is not found in the original act, and that seemingly opens the door to withholding some documents on the grounds that they are "non-executive" records -- legislative records, for instance. It raised red flags because Cheney has frequently argued that his office is not part of the executive branch but rather is "attached" to the legislative branch by virtue of the vice president's role as president of the Senate.

So what I keep wondering is ... what happens if the White House passes to the Democrats? Unless everything the Bush Administration has done is legal and legitimate (and supposing Michigan wins the BCS championship game this year), the Bushies have a dilemma on the secret activities they've taken in the name of national security. Can they afford to let a Democratic President know everything they've done? Nothing in their history suggests that they believe they can tolerate exposure. Do they try to hide any illegal programs we might not have heard about yet?* When word leaks out , then they face a new dilemma: either the program was never essential to national security, or they sabotaged national security in order to protect their image.** Blundering into the second dilemma is the fool's choice, but the Bush/Cheny history strongly suggests they'll do exactly that.



* (Or, more likely, the full extent of programs we only know a little about)

** (The talk radio crowd, of course, will simply claim that Democrats are not real
Americans, cannot be a legitimate government, and so hiding national security matters from them is the only safe and honorable thing to do.)

Cheney's records

A story I'll be watching. Yeah, I'm partisan, but Cheney has a history. I'd sooner expect a snake to fly than for this dude to ever let people see what he was really doing and thinking.

Handling secret documents

Report Describes Careless Handling of U.S. Secrets
Gonzales Says He Does Not Recall

So does this man ever remember anything?

Gonzales improperly carried notes about the warrantless wiretapping program in an unlocked briefcase and failed to keep them in a safe at his Northern Virginia home three years ago because he "could not remember the combination," the department's inspector general reported.
...
Ultimately, Gonzales stored them in a safe outside his Justice Department office that was accessible by people who lacked the requisite security clearances to see them ... In one instance, employees searching for material related to a Freedom of Information Act request in 2006 sifted through the sensitive material in the safe "document by document."
...
Gonzales characterized the amount of material he possessed as limited and said the lapses were unintentional. He said he had followed policies as he understood them during his time at the White House. "He always placed the notes in the most secure place over which he had immediate personal control"

The most insightful comment:

"Because so much information is classified, there's a tendency to treat classified records in a cavalier fashion," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.