What merit lies in false confession? When cornered between a rock and a hard place, man will acquiesce to practically anything.

When by nature, torture is accepted as perpetual mental or physical pain whose sole purpose is to obtain an outcome, how is accuracy and legitimacy tested? What Ulysses of a man can resist the continuous exploitation of his wounds, verbal rape or sleep deprivation? When the ends precede the means, the only item left dangling is counter-productivity.

It’s been revealed this morning what perhaps most already knew: Guantanamo Bay makes no sense.

As the NY Times broke this morning, military trainers there attended an interrogation class based upon Chinese techniques used on US prisoners during the Korean War shortly after 9/11. The practices were a long litany of established torture procedures: “prolonged constraint,” “exposure,” “semi-starvation,” and the most titillating, “exploitation of wounds.” The intended effects were to make the victim dependent on the interrogator, weaken the mental and physical ability to resist, and lastly, to reduce the prisoner to ‘animal level’ concerns.

Calling the use of torture at Gitmo an outrage is one step removed from the real offense, however. The issue should be, as was pointed out in the extensive investigation by  McClatchy Newspapers earlier this year, why are many of the prisoners there in the first place?

The wrongfully imprisoned majority and the few who actually belong there have been exposed to the same brutal methodology: A chart used in the training class was allegedly copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

Let’s look at a case study.

In May of this year, Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani had been held in confinement for more than six years without being charged of a crime.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported in 2006, citing the Army’s own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being subjected to documented beatings and other physical abuse, was put through an S&M routine calculated to drive him to a catatonic madness.  Sounds like it worked:

“Qahtani had been subjected to 160 days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on 48 of 54 days, for 18 to 20 hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called ‘invasion of space by a female;’ forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash and told that his mother was a whore.”

After 49 days of 20-hour-per-day interrogation, on May 12, 2008, all charges against Qahtani were dismissed.

Mohammed al Qahtani offered this final concluding statement:

To be honest with you, I just want to summarize the most important things to you. I just want to mention to you that there are other things that happened like torture and abuse. I do not want to put the image of the United States down. To be honest with you, I have been here five years and I have mentioned any of these things to the outside because I do not want to ruin the reputation of the United States military. That’s not proper. Let’s be more serious and more practical. I just want to mention to you about the torture and the things that happened to me. I just want to talk about what was said regarding me in the past and also prove to you that in the future I will not pose any threat to you or the United States.

Now let’s just look at the legal implications. A week after September 11^th, Congress authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

On a conflicting note, Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions state:

Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

Article 13 elaborates:

Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining power…seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention.

In particular, no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.

Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

In US court cases where federal and state law are at conflict, federal law is always supreme. Similarly, in cases where US and world law are at odds, it’s obnoxious to think any arbitrary set of temporary rules cooked up on the spot could have the ability to supersede precedent.

As Carl Jung once said, the healthy man just does not torture.

John McCain talks a lot about the MiddleEast and the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.” He challenged Barack Obama to take a tour with him of Iraq so McCain could educate him on the country — so Obama could get in touch with the facts on the ground. In his celebrated tour of Iraq in March, McCain made a show of visiting an open-air market in Baghdad, saying that Americans weren’t getting a full picture of the progress being made there and pointing out that he could walk freely through whole neighborhoods in the city.

As it turned out McCain walked nowhere freely. He wore a bullet proof vest the entire time and in the open-air market enjoyed the company of one hundred American soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships.

In Obama’s speech in Minnesota, when he effectively clinched the Democratic Party nomination, talked about Iraq, but mostly to scold Iraqi politicians for not stepping up and taking responsibility for running their country.

Suffice to say, in the five years since the U.S. “liberated” Iraq, we have learned very little about the country from our leaders. They tell us nothing, if they know anything, about daily life there in the wake of the “liberation” and in the midst of the ongoing occupation and civil war.

The blogosphere has more answers.

One of the weekly videos produced by the news program “Alive in Baghdad” details the problem of getting clean drinking water in Shama’iya, for example, a neighborhood in east Baghdad. In the video, residents describe the infrastructure and sanitation problems as clips show streets running with trash and overflowing sewage. A man holds up his pant legs, trying to avoid getting splattered as he walks awkwardly through the filthy streets. The video ends with an image of a young boy hanging out on the corner, rummaging through heaps of garbage.

Shama’iya sanitation problems are not a major concern to key voting groups such as Latinos in New Mexico and middle class voters in Ohio. But seeing to the basic sanitation infrastructure, the availability of clean drinking water, in the country will be a key part of any genuine successful strategy on Iraq and our eventual withdrawal.

Indeed, the larger humanitarian crisis caused by the war is rarely spoken of but is plain to see on the web. The ongoing conflict has displaced about 2.5 million Iraqis inside the country. Another 2 million have fled the violence and now reside in neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria.

“It’s a huge disappointment that this has not been a larger issue in the campaign to date,” Melissa Winkler of the International Rescue Committee told OffTheBus. “It’s really been hardly mentioned.”

President Bush has said even less about the problem.

“It is highly symbolic that the president of the United States who started this war has yet to publicly talk about its humanitarian impact,” said Jacob Kurtzer of Refugees International. “The fact that the president has not publicly acknowledged the extent of the problem, hasn’t said publicly that the U.S is committed to helping refugees, this is a discredit to the office and the person.”

Kurtzer said the lack of attention paid the humanitarian crisis in Iraq by President Bush affects the millions of displaced people there because it sends a message to decision-makers here.

“The president has never even mentioned the Iraq refugees as a concern,” Kurtzer said. “It filters down to people [working in the administration] as not a priority.”

Bloggers and journalists living in Iraq and its neighboring countries — including both those of Middle Eastern descent and Westerners traveling there — have taken it upon themselves to fill the void.

Alive in Baghdad, for example, is created by a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground. Their videos have covered topics such as the 5 million Iraqi orphans, the plight of displaced Sunni families, and the difficulties finding and holding down a job when electricity outages prevent the completion of projects and car bombs interrupt lunch breaks.

In a video on the difficulties involved in going to university in Iraq, a graduate student explains that many of the professors are missing because they have fled the country due to the ongoing violence. A female student says the situation is improving, but parents have been reluctant to send their children to school because they would hear stories about abductions and the targeting of students.

A young man named Wahid Hashem Kadhem describes the difference between getting an education under Saddam Hussein and now. The translations read: “During the buried regime, we were able to move freely, we did not think an explosion might happen, we used to think just of our work, and we did not think that an explosion or a bomb might blow up. It has become a buried regime and it passed away, but now we have a new government and it must provide a peaceful environment for the students. This is the simplest thing we ask the government for.”

This piece was originally reported for and published on The Huffington Post’s Off The Bus.

———
Update: Although you will search long and hard and find very little of substance said on the stump by either of the candidates on the humanitarian crisis caused by the war — much less on their plans to address it — Barack Obama’s website includes a six-page Iraq Fact Sheet , a section of which reports that he intends to “increase American investment in Iraq’s refugees and internally displaced people and to the neighboring countries that house them to at least $2 billion.”

The John McCain campaign has yet to get back to OffTheBus.

Question: What do you call a religious gathering with hell-fire preaching?
Answer: A thermal mass.

I’ll understand if you stop reading now. But wait!  I hear that solar energy could generate 2.5 percent of the world’s electricity by 2025.  (Yawn.)

Two billion people in the world have no access to electricity and for most of them, solar photovoltaics would be their cheapest electricity source.  (Mehh.)

Renewable energy-notfeasible-don’t care, forever 21 is having a sweet pleather belt sale, rosco wants to play flip cup tonight but he didn’t want to see kung fu panda with me- blah lol blah rofl blah, yes?

(Alright, complacent stereotypes end here.)

A few years ago, the Green Party’s own ray of sunshine, lil’ Ralphy, retorted that solar energy was kaput because the oil industry does not own the sun.

If they did, they would have a flourishing film career! In any case, over 7,100 drilling permits utilized for more than 44 million acres of coal development were approved by the Bush administration last year. That is the most in history.

The rub: while G-Dub was going bananas signing drilling permits in all their short-sighted glory, guess which alternative, renewable energy source suffered a massive legislative setback?

As of last month, a two-year moratorium has been placed on the construction of solar energy projects on public land despite the fact that bolstering its presence could be a fantastic way to catalyze the energy industry.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

No, people! I mean don’t you want this? And this?!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said: “This is the wrong signal to send to solar power developers, and to Nevadans and Westerners who need and want clean, affordable sun-powered electricity soon.”

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, photovoltaic solar projects grew by 48 percent last year in comparison to 2006. Currently, there are eleven functioning solar plants in the United States, and 20 are in various stages of planning or permit-seeking.

The majority of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land across the West coast is primed for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where bare flatlands are drenched in sunshine.

Solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management in the past three years. These proposals center on the companies’ desire to lease public land for construction of solar plants to ultimately sell the energy to utilities.

According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that could power more than 20 million homes.

In the early 1930s, Thomas Edison had a conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. Edison quipped, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Oops.  Solar-powered turbo sunglasses will have to wait.

On another note, did you hear the one about the nuclear physicist that had a sign on his door that said… “Gone Fission”?

Campaign letters are always at least a little comic — the faux-personal tone, the formal-informal style, the beggarliness. There are also the “artful” decisions made by the authors that are fun to explore for hidden meanings.

A recent Hillary dispatch to her supporters is a gem. Her campaign is over, the thrill of future campaign-related possibilities long past, and yet she is forced to continue asking for cash. The word “help” is plastered all over the thing, the smell of bad management rising from the text. One particularly pained passage makes the campaign seem like a shamefaced mutt who has left an unwanted deposit on the kitchen floor for the family to clean up.

“There’s something else — less endearing and I hope less enduring — that our campaign has left behind: our substantial campaign debt.”

Yuck.

There is also the decision to leave off entirely the name of the man Hillary is going to be campaigning for beginning Friday, the man now at the center of the “fight she believes in” and the “cause” she “believes deeply in” and the “next phase” of the “journey” she’s embarking on and the “cause” again she wants to advance and maybe even one of the people she wants to “advocate alongside.”

Or maybe not. The need to not offend in order to raise the cash to clean up the debt has left Hillary inarticulate. What’s the real message of this letter?

“The Democratic party is my cause, of course, as is the Democratic president, the name of whom, however, I can not bear to write.”

or

“My true cause above all is you, dear Hillary supporters, no matter what I say — and you know that and so, ha, I don’t have to say it!”

or

“Even if you hate hate hate Barack Obama, don’t hate me, still love me, always, and show that love by sending me money, please. And for that, I won’t mention his name!”

Enjoy!

Dear X,

I made a promise to you, and I intend to keep it.

I told you that if you stood up for me, I would always stand up for you. You did more for me than I could have ever imagined, and I’m going to keep my end of the bargain and keep fighting for what we believe in — in the Senate and on the campaign trail, helping to elect a new Democratic president and a bigger Democratic majority in Congress.

That relationship will endure thanks to the remarkable journey you and I have shared. But there’s something else — less endearing and I hope less enduring — that our campaign has left behind: our substantial campaign debt.

I’m so grateful for all you’ve done for me — all the ways you have given your time, energy, and financial resources. But today I am asking once again for your help ridding our campaign of debt so we can keep fighting together.

Contribute today to help us reduce our campaign debt.

As you know, I had to loan money to my campaign at critical moments. I’m not asking for anyone’s help to pay that back. That was my investment and my commitment because I believe so deeply in our cause.

But I do need your help paying the debts we accrued to others over the course of this campaign. We put everything we had into winning this race, and we came just about as close as you can.

I will never regret the energy, effort, and passion we put into one of the closest and most expensive primary contests in history. But I need your help to move on to the next phase of our journey together.

Your contribution today will help us pay down our campaign debt.

You’ve done so much for me over the past 17 months, and I can never thank you enough. But I hope you know how much I appreciate everything you put into our campaign.

Sincerely,
Hillary
Hillary Rodham Clinton

P.S. Everywhere I go, people tell me what a big difference our campaign has made in their lives. Let’s keep working together throughout 2008 and beyond to advance the causes we believe in and to advocate alongside people whose voices need to be heard.

This piece was originally published on The Huffington Post’s Off The Bus section.

While everyone remains trigger happy about a ruling that just means that Fred Thompson and Robert Byrd can now have a pistol duel on the Capitol steps that would make Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr feel like the morons from L’Executer, the Supreme Court made an even bigger doozy this morning.

Exxon Valdez now must pay 1/10^th of its punitive damages from an original amount of $4.5 billion to only $530 million. In the spill, Valdez had dumped 11 million US gallons of crude oil and contaminated about 1,300 miles of coastline, killed 500,000 seabirds, nearly 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales.

Will money bring back the Alaskan seabird? Will it bring back memories of the orca whale? No, but that’s why they’re called punitive damages, and the Supreme Court clearly thinks time erases mistakes.

By a 5-3 vote, the court ruled the original amount was excessive under federal maritime law. In the majority opinion, judge David Souter concluded that damages should be cut to the amount of “actual harm.” As he wrote, “We … hold that the federal statutory law does not bar a punitive award on top of damages for economic loss, but that the award here should be limited to an amount equal to compensatory damages.”

The damages would have been awarded to the 32,000 commercial fishermen, Alaskan property owners, natives and others harmed by the most devastating environmental sea disaster in recent history. At the height of the response, more than 11,000 personnel, 1,400 vessels and 85 aircraft were involved in the cleanup.

2,000 Alaskan plaintiffs have been waiting for their compensation since 1994. The Supreme Court’s action will reduce the average award from $75,000 to about $15,000.

Despite the extensive cleanup attempts, a study conducted by NOAA determined that as of early 2007 more than 26,000 U.S. gallons of oil remain in the sandy soil of the contaminated Alaskan shoreline, declining at a rate of less than 4% per year.

A spokesman for the Alaska department of environment said efforts to steer the Valdez back into the narrow shipping lane was like “trying to park a Cadillac in a Volkswagen spot”.

Exxon Mobil, the most profitable company in the United States, subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing it had already paid more than $3.5 billion for the spill.

Souter and the Court have seemed to champion capitalism and amnesia today.

Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce, said: “This is good news for companies concerned about reining in excessive punitive damages.”

Good news for big business, bad news for those afflicted with its malfeasance, and an even adverse effect on federal maritime law.

The ruling “makes a mockery of justice,” argued John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace.

Even more troubling, according to the BBC, Exxon captain, Joseph Hazelwood, was drinking vodka before boarding the vessel. And although the Valdez was repaired and renamed the Sea River Mediterranean, it is banned from returning to Alaska

In Alaska, Riki Ott, a fisherman, scientist and environmental activist in the Prince William Sound town of Cordova, where most of the area’s fishing fleet is concentrated, was disappointed.

“We were really counting on punitive damages paying for our long-term losses in the fishery. That’s obviously not going to happen,” Mr Ott said. “Well, that’s an affront to everyone’s sense of justice.”

In 2007, Exxon Mobil made just over $40 billion in profit. This means the oil company will be able to pay the punitive damages in only four days.

And I beg you to watch this video, the headline, and incredible sense of inequity will make more sense.

The mecca of youth culture is opening its airwaves to a different kind of advertising.

Sandwiched between ads for Trojan brand condoms and the newest albums, loyal MTV viewers will now be inundated with the flood of campaign ads leading up to the November election.

It’s the first time the network has decided to accept political advertising since it launched in 1981.

In an effort to keep the content clean, the birthplace of such cultural gems as Bevis and Butthead and Tila Tequila will only take ads from political candidates and party political committees — not 527s, which have come under fire recently as a legal loophole for launching smear campaigns.

MTV execs say the move will highlight its efforts to engage young eligible voters in the political process and promote a youth voice on the campaign trail (Most recently, get-out-the-vote PSAs featuring the tabloids starlets of “The Hills.”).

“It’s a good thing when candidates want to reach out to young people and the best way to do that is through MTV,” MTV’s Executive VP of Communications told industry rag TVNewser.

But let’s not kid ourselves — media buys are the ultimate cash cow on the campaign trail. Campaigns these days devote upwards of 80 percent of their total budget on “paid” media, and most of that goes to television buys. MTV declined to say how much it expects to make off the deals, but there’s no need to brush off that calculus text book to see that 80 percent of a campaign that is going to cost an estimated $1 billion ain’t no chump change.

Strategists think they’ve hit the goldmine in tapping into youth vote.

“Now campaigns have the opportunity to reach young voters in a venue where they congregate,” Democratic campaign strategist Tad Devine also told TVNewser.

A place where young voters congregate? Hasn’t he heard of the Facebook-YouTube phenomenon?

Six years ago, Brazilian singer Caetano Velosa penned of the most haunting songs about Haiti ever written, “And no matter if the eyes of the world may be for a moment turned off,” he pleaded, “Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti. Haiti is not here.”

And it won’t be here anytime soon.

Over $54 million in loans promised to the Haitian government by a subsidiary of the Treasury Department in 1998 have been suspended, as revealed in documents released yesterday by four independent human rights organizations.

Critics have called the lack of oversight by the Machiavellian American government in the incident, “one of the most egregious examples of malfeasance by the United States in recent years.”

With a GDP decline of -2% a year, 7% (300,000) of its children considered enslaved by the United Nations, 40% of the population devoid of access to elementary health care, 76% of births delivered by non-qualified personnel and an illiteracy rate of 45%, Haiti is indisputably the poorest country on Earth.

The loans were approved by the Inter-American Development Bank in 1998, originally intended for to improve the country’s sanitation system in the Haitian towns of Cayes and Port-de-Paix. Only 30 percent of Haiti in direct access to drinking water, which has lead to a scourge of dysentery and intestinal parasites.

Yet the IDB, over which the U.S. Treasury holds considerable influence, have failed to initiate projects involving water improvement, which the report said is, “largely the result of aggressive attempts by the U.S. government to block the disbursement of these loans.”

According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, an institute commissioned by the University of Passau in Germany, Haiti is considered by international scholars as the most politically corrupt nation in the world. Certainly, Haiti’s political turmoil and financial difficulties contributed to the delays, as the report consistently reinforces.

With over 50 years of military dictatorship, the current puppet government is a subordinate of the United States. Jean-Aristide was Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, taking office in 1990 amid great popular support. Yet having weathered a bloody military coup and enduring economic crises, he was booted out in February 2004 when opposition to his rule grew increasingly vicious.

Now in exile in South Africa, Mr. Aristide has fostered promises to return to Haiti and points fingers at the United States as the culprit to his exile. Washington denies this.

The loan report was prepared by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law; a Haiti-based health care provider called Partners in Health; the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights; and Zanmi Lasante, a Haitian advocacy group.

The groups filed a lawsuit to gain access to internal government correspondence explaining why the United States sought to avert the approved loans from reaching Haiti in the years after their approval. The Inter-American Development Bank’s charter says that the bank should not interfere in the political affairs of member countries.

But the delays in disbursing the loans were linked by U.S. officials to their concerns about the administration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose first presidency was overthrown by a military coup in 1991 and whose return to power in 2001 was cut short three years later with the encouragement of the Bush administration.

The current president, René Garcia Préval, took office in May 2006, and almost immediately signed an oil deal with Venezuela, subsequently traveling to the United States and meeting with its politicians.

Whatever the political circumstances, armed gangs roam Haiti as free as cockroaches. Most of these gangs are composed of former soldiers from the Haitian army, which was disbanded 10 years ago. Residents of poor neighborhoods and members of Lavalas, President Aristide’s political party, are murdered without legal consequences. Members of Haiti’s wealthy elite, are suspected of financing the former soldiers and paying gangs to kill Lavalas supporters. In some neighborhoods, Lavalas supporters have taken up arms and begun resist the oppression.

The interim government has been unable to enforce the rule of law, disarm the gangs, or restore the government’s authority in the cities controlled by former soldiers. When Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue set a deadline of September 14, 2004 for all groups holding illegal weapons to disarm, the deadline came and went, but stagnancy assumed the role of change.

Several members of President Aristide’s government and prominent supporters of Lavalas have been detained illegally, including former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, former Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert, and Haitian singer Anne Auguste. As of February 18, there were over 700 political prisoners in Haiti’s jails. Most of these prisoners have been held illegally for months without formal charges.

Back in February, Colin Powell made an abnormally frank statement about the ordeal, saying the United States would resist $200 million in loans from the Inter-American Development Bank until the Haitian government and its opposition found a method to resolve disputes from their interim elections held in 2000.

”We are terribly concerned about the political unrest that continues to haunt Haiti,” Powell said. ”We are concerned about some of the actions of the government, and we do not believe enough has been done yet to move the political process forward.”

”We believe we have to hold the Haitian government to fairly high standards of performance before we can simply allow funds to flow into the country,” he added.

Whatever the economic and governmental restrictions, basic sanitation supersedes political racket.

It is excessive, unreasonable and the greatest example of political realpolitik to deny the poorest nation in the world funds that can be funneled with government oversight. The United States holds more than enough power to guarantee a country a measly water project if need be. But they clearly choose to need not.

Congressman Eliot Engel once said, “We all would like to see a brighter future for Haiti. Human rights, freedom, and the rule of law must be established in the poorest nation in our hemisphere.”

What this rule is will be determined by the actions of the U.S. government in the approaching months.

Let’s close with Veloso. “From thieves and other mulattos almost white, or treaties just as black, when you hear the silence of smiling in the face of slaughter…

Think of Haiti…”

Hearing that, Henry Kissinger just popped some Celexa, and is turning in his grave.

If you’re not into updating your Entourage or throwing vampires, the only real thing to do on Facebook is to check out your friend’s profiles. You know… read their updates, comment on their photos, peruse their walls.

So about a year ago, I was scanning a family member’s MySpace page and came across some very disturbing language. His page was littered with the n-word – used by both his friends and he himself.

I can’t say that I know the full context of his posse’s word choice. Perhaps they use the word all the time? Perhaps it’s an inside joke? Who knows. But the thing is, I do know my family member (a cousin on my Caucasian side) – we grew up together, and had always been somewhat close. So, while I felt it would be inappropriate to write a public message on his profile decrying the language, I did think it would be entirely within my familial limits to mention my unease to his brother (who I am much closer with). Our conversation was quite illuminating… and somewhat sad. In the end, I felt it best not to bring up my concern with the cousin in question.

Admittedly, I’m listening in on someone else’s conversation by reading his or her public wall. But public walls are, for all intents and purposes, meant for all to see. In fact, in the Facebook/MySpace world, one’s wall is a living, breathing testament to one’s popularity.

Since this incident, I’ve been wondering what I’d do if the same thing ever occurred with a close friend or family member whose life I am an integral part of - a sister, a brother, a best friend, etc. Is it enough to remind said person that you love them dearly? Does this type of situation warrant a more in-depth discussion (of course, not out of anger, but out of love)? Or is “letting it go” the best approach?

This piece was originally posted on Ryan’s blog Cheap Thrills.

You may have noticed a few changes here and there at Pop + Politics.  Some cosmetic, some added functionality.  A lot have taken place on the backend without you even noticing.

We appreciate your patience if the flow of content is not always constant as a result of the changes being made, but rest-assured, everything is being done to make the experience at P+P more engaging, speedier, and more inter-connected with all of the networking possibilities the internet has to offer.

We have migrated to a new, faster, completely green hosting service called Dreamhost.  Read more about the glorious carbon neutrality of our new host here.

We have also installed the latest Wordpress (v 2.5) which allows much more streamlined posting of music and video content.

You’ll also notice the “Share This” button at the bottom of every post.  Click on it and you will see a pop-up that will allow you to share the post on every major social networking and news sites around (Facebook, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace…just to name a few).  It also allows easy emailing to friends directly from the site.

And lastly, we are long overdue in fixing our busted tag cloud.  It may disappear for a while and reappear in a new form, or it may go away completely.  We’re still tinkering and figuring out what will be best.  Either way, we will also be pulling in a bunch of RSS news feeds and beefing up our blogroll to make P+P more of a one-stop shop for great web content beyond the earth-shattering material we post ourselves.

Woot.  Stay tuned.

The NY Times buried the story this afternoon. Maybe they were busy getting wiretapped on the phone.

After close to a year of in-house cock fighting, the House passed a bill today that will listen into your cavernous soul. Or something similar.

The outdated and now unfabulously updated FISA bill, passing 293 to 129, with near-unanimous support from Republicans, will shield phone companies from billions of dollars in lawsuits for their participation in the warrant-less surveillance program that were initiated by Bush after the September 11 attacks. It now travels to the Senate, where it’s expected to pass easily. Kidney stones everywhere grimace.

The only senator who opposed the Patriot Act, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, also said the following today about the telecommunication tragedy: “The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation.”

“The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program…”

Remember when Russ and McCain were friends?

The bill will allow the following…

· Grants amnesty to the nation’s telecoms that are being sued for allegedly breaking federal wiretapping laws by turning over billions of Americans’ call records to government data-mining programs

· Strips the right of a federal district court to decide whether the companies violated federal laws prohibiting wiretapping without a court order.

· Use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise.

· The intelligence community will be able to issue broad orders to U.S. ISPs, phone companies and online communications services like Hotmail and Skype to turn over all communications that are reasonably believed to involve a non-American who is outside the country.

· Spy agencies will not have to name their targets or get prior court approval for the surveillance. 

The government has eavesdropped on phone and computer lines ever since the Sept. 11 attacks without authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Close to 40 lawsuits have been filed against the telecommunications companies by those believing the Bush administration illegally monitored them.Yet not so fast, lawsuit-pants, says the attorney general. Our nation’s lawyer would merely need to tell a courts that a sued company was under government authorization during the surveillance. Thusly, granted full immunity.

And that immunity is clearly unconstitutional, according to the ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson.

“The telecom companies simply have to produce a piece of paper we already know exists, resulting in immediate dismissal,” Fredrickson said. “That’s not accountability. Loopholes and judicial theater don’t do our Fourth Amendment rights justice.”

The White House has threatened to veto any surveillance bill that will not also shield the companies. The deal marks a mammoth, though fabulously late victory for the lame-duck in office

This all but substantiates what many have feared, suspected and hoped was untrue: there is much more independent surveillance than the government or its lawyers have ever admitted. And will never have to justify.

Now listen to a sane man. Wait, there are two!