Brit accused of killing wife, baby pleads not guilty

The Arizona Republic reports on a tragic situation with a humorously ambiguous headline. This will likely show up in a future issue of Fortean Times.

New Hampshire election phone-jamming tied to White House and Republican Party

An Associated Press story:

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was "preposterous" to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

The scheme involved repeated hang-up calls from a telemarketing firm to the Democratic get-out-the-vote headquarters. The owner of the firm is under indictment for the scheme. Apart from Tobin, there have already been two other convictions in the case.

UPDATE: TPM Muckraker has more details on the calling records that show calls to the White House.

Details of AT&T cooperation with the NSA emerge

Details of AT&T's cooperation with the National Security Agency are beginning to emerge as a result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T, as described by Wired:

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.

According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

The account says that AT&T's Internet peering traffic, as well as voice traffic, is being intercepted:

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.

This information goes well beyond what had already been determined about AT&T's gigantic call detail record (CDR) database, Daytona, that preserves a record of decades of telephone calls. That database included only the phone numbers and dates and times, not the actual content of the calls. This new information, by contrast, suggests the ability to actually intercept the content of voice calls and Internet data transmission.

Direct Revenue exposed

The NY AG's lawsuit against Direct Revenue has produced a bunch of interesting internal documents. The documents include complaints, internal emails, a listing of company names used by Direct Revenue, information about Direct Revenue hiring a private investigator to track down an anti-spyware researcher, payments received from Yahoo ($600,000 between April-June 2005), and revenue numbers (the adware business is extremely profitable). Ben Edelman has them up at his site.

Tiktaalik roseae and the Discovery Institute

The Discovery Institute wants to argue that Tiktaalik roseae is not a transitional fossil (images here). Nick Matzke dissects the DI's claims at The Panda's Thumb.

What European city do you belong in?

You Belong in Amsterdam

A little old fashioned, a little modern - you're the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam. Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city).

What European City Do You Belong In?

Al Franken Debates Ann Coulter

Al Franken had a debate with Ann Coulter at the University of Judaism; Franken's initial presentation is here, and is quite good. There's a bit more background here--has anyone seen Coulter's response transcribed?

At one point, Franken says:

You can’t have good government without the truth. During the crafting and passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill, the chief actuary of Medicare was told to withhold from Congress the true cost of the bill. He’d be fired if he told the truth.

The bill costs so much, in large part, because the bill prohibits Medicare from negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies on the price of drugs. As a result, seniors now pay on average 44% more than veterans getting the same drugs through the VA which is allowed to use its size to negotiate with the drug companies. To get the bill passed, the vote was held open for three hours. Tom DeLay was later admonished by Republicans on the ethics committee for attempting to bribe, and then extort, Republican Nick Smith of Michigan to get him to change his vote. The chairman of the Commerce Committee Billy Tauzin who ushered the legislation through, soon left Congress for a two million dollar a year job as the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. Obviously, a complete coincidence.

This is a series of events that shouldn't be forgotten; the details are spelled out in James Bovard's The Bush Betrayal (2004, Palgrave Macmillan) in the chapter "Spending as Caring," pp. 121-128. Some highlights:

Bush constantly portrayed the issue of new handouts in the loftiest moral terms. In a Florida speech on November 13, 2003, Bush declared, "The Medicare program is a basic trust that must be upheld throughout the generations." And because it was an issue of trust, the Bush team was entitled to use deceit and any means necessary to ram the law through Congress.
The Republican leadership thought they could score victory in the House when the bill was brought to the floor on the evening of November 2, 2003. However, when the initial vote occurred at 3 a.m., the Bush proposal lost by two votes. The Republican leadership violated House rules, which limit votes to a half hour or less, and proceeded to carry out the longest floor vote in House history--dragging out the tally until 6 a.m., when two Republicans switched their "nays" to "yeas" and the bill passed.
Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), a veteran congressman in his final term, caught intense heat for opposing the bill. Efforts to sway Smith's vote focused on his son, who was running for the congressional seat his father held. Columnist Robert Novak reported: "On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat." Smith complained widely about the threats and bribes in the days after the vote. The House Ethics Committee eventually grudgingly launched a bribery investigation.
Barely a month after Bush signed the bill, Bush's budget director, Josh Bolton, informed Congress that the estimated cost had jumped to $540 billion for the first decade, instead of the advertised $400 billion ticket price. The revision infuriated conservative Republican congressmen, but the congressional leadership tried to brush it off as a non-issue. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) declared, "In truth, nobody has any idea what the real figure will be at the end of the day, because we don't know what those assumptions should be as we go further." If Frist actually believed no one had any idea of what the legislation would cost, then he and other supporters were grossly negligent or deceptive in the claims they made to the American people when Congress considered the bill. ...
The Bush administration intentionally deceived Congress over the estimated cost of the bill. Thirteen conservative House members had vowed to vote against any bill costing more than $400 billion. Richard S. Foster, the top actuary at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, privately estimated in June 2003--5 months before the final vote--that the bill would actually cost $550 billion. Foster was contacted by Democratic stafers seeking estimates on the cost of the Bush proposal. By law, Foster was obliged to provide them the information. Thomas Scully, the chief Medicare administrator, reportedly threatened to fire Foster if he provided the information. Foster later commented that "there was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes." The much higher estimate of the cost of the Medicare bill was apparently known by top officials at the White House. Eighteen Democratic senators requested the GAO to investigate the potential violation of a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay the salary of any official who "prohibits or prevents, or threatens to prohibit or prevent" another employee from communicating with Congress. On April 1, House Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to summon Scully and White House aide Doug Badget to testify before a congressional committee.
On May 3, the Congressional Research service released a legal analysis which concluded that "such 'gag orders' have been expressly prohibited by federal law since 1912." The Supreme Court, in a 1927 ruling on the 1912 law, declared that a "legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information regarding conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change." But the Bush administration was too astute to fall for such radical notions.

Bovard's account goes on to describe how the Medicare prescription plan gives the bulk of its benefits to non-needy seniors--75% of recipients already have prescription drug coverage through insurance, and the National Center for Policy Analysis "estimated that only 6 to 7 percent of the expenditures in the Medicare reform bill will pay for additional drugs for the elderly." The beneficiaries are non-needy elderly, insurance companies, corporations ("the Congressional Budget Office forecast that 'at least one-third of all private companies will dump their retirees into the Medicare system as a result of the new bill'"), and, of course, the pharmaceutical companies, since there is no price negotiation under the bill.

Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story

This story got some coverage a little over a year ago when Ian Frazier quoted this passage from Jerry Falwell's autobiography in a humor piece in The New Yorker and Jonathan Schwarz covered it in his blog. I found it so twisted that I had to validate its reality by purchasing a used copy of Falwell's book on Amazon.com Marketplace (for about $0.50). I think it's worth bringing up again now that Sen. John McCain has agreed to give a commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University ("crazy base world"), since it shows Falwell's lack of empathy--I think the attribute "bordered on" here is not cruelty but sociopathy.

From Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography by Jerry Falwell (1987, Simon and Schuster), pp. 49-50:

There were times that Dad's pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed "Crip" Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip's co-workers got tired of the old man's bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip's old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad's little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it "the toughest squirrel meat" he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.

This story immediately follows another story in which Falwell invites his young friend William from the neighborhood, who is afraid of his father, into the house for milk and cookies, after telling his father that William is afraid (p. 49):

William hesitated at the door. He knew my father carried a gun, and there were too many stories circulating about that gun to leave William feeling easy about entering our home. Quickly I pushed my friend inside and closed the door behind us. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. Suddenly he looked directly at us and shouted.
"Both of you, stop!" William froze in his tracks, and I leaned forward eagerly to see what Dad was up to. William's eyes opened wide as Dad drew his gun and pointed it at the floor just in front of my friend's trembling legs.
"Don't move," he said quietly. Then he took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The shot from the .38 Remington pistol blew a fairly impressive hole in the kitchen floor. Calmly, Dad blew smoke from the barrel and placed the pistol back on the table.
"I've been trying to get that fly all day," he said, looking back down at his paper. "And finally I got it."
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a gasp, William bolted out the door. I never got him back inside our house again, and the legend about my father continued to spread throughout the neighborhood. Later Dad and I laughed ourselves hoarse just remembering William's startled look and sudden exit.

For additional context, Falwell reports that his father killed his own brother with a shotgun (in self-defense, pp. 22-24), and attributes part of his father's problem to the fact that "After all, Dad grew up in the home of an atheist" (p. 17), even though he had a Christian mother. His book says that his father had a deathbed conversion to Christianity (p. 83).

Verified Voting Bill in the House (HR 550)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with Verified Voting to try to get members of the U.S. House of Representatives to sign up as co-sponsors of HR 550, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005, which was re-introduced in the House in February. This bill would require that electronic voting include a paper receipt and the capacity for manual recounts, ensure that disabled and those who don't speak English as their native tongue are capable of voting, and enhances security requirements for electronic voting systems. The latter requirements include disclosure and certification of source code, prohibition of the use of wireless connections, and a number of other provisions which appear to me to be reasonable requirements for security. The bill authorizes expenditure of $150M for fiscal year 2006 to enable states to meet these requirements.

Arizona Reps. Grijalva and Pastor have already signed on as co-sponsors. Hayworth, Flake, Kolbe, Renzi, Shadegg, and Franks have not.

To send a request to your Representative to support his bill, you can use the EFF's support site.

How Plan B works

Pharyngula has a nice, simple explanation of how Plan B emergency contraception works, and how it can't remotely be construed as a form of abortion (unlike the use of RU-486, which is an abortifacient). The use of Plan B prevents ovulation--it doesn't do anything to an already fertilized egg. It thereby prevents the need for abortions when it's used effectively. Yet this timeline of events shows how the Republicans have been preventing it from being made available as an over-the-counter medicine.