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The outdated and now unfabulously updated FISA bill, passing 293 to 129, with near-unanimous support from Republicans, will shield phone companies from billions of dollars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…

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For some reason, I think I find this funnier than most. Funny also that this is really the only kind of media attention that G-Dub is getting these days.

11.4 million people in the world are refugees with an additional 26 million internally displaced within their own country, according to a new United Nations statistic released today in preparation for June 20, World Refugee Day.

Add those numbers together and that’s more than the entire population of California lacking a home or access to basic necessities.

So it’s not that big of a bummer that the Lakers lost, right?

This is the second year that numbers have risen, with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan accounting for half the numbers. 3.1 million were Afghans, while 2.3 million were Iraqis.  A majority of these people have sought refuge in Jordan and Syria.

Pakistan has the most refugees, with Syria, Iran, Germany and Jordan following.

The number of people displaced by conflicts - including those uprooted in their own countries, who are not strictly defined as refugees - rose to 26 million (from 24.4 million).

In April, UNHCR fed 150,000 refugees daily in Damascus, compared with only 33,000 people last September.

Read about one of their stories here. And here. And here. And here.

The first image above is a button that was on sale at the Texas GOP Convention.  According to Politico’s Ben Smith:  “The speakers were generally respectful of Obama, the Dallas Morning News reports, but this is the sort of stuff that the RNC has been warning state parties about for months.”

From P+P contributor Ryan Barrett:  “I’m actually happy the GOP is being so idiotically obvious with their bigotry. Crap like this will do nothing but seal the Democrats together. Like glue…So GOP, go ahead and bring on the blackface. I double dog dare ya.”

Honestly, nothing would suprise me at this point.  Although it’s not overtly stated, I’m assuming this was not sponsored by the GOP organizers.  Regardless, it speaks volumes to the massive racial fissures between red and blue states.

By that standard, the dustup  in Salt Lake City over the Obama sock monkey screams it.  As if the utter ignorance in missing the monkey’s offensive potentcy as a symbol wasn’t implicit enough, the people who tried to sell it before they were overwhlemed with virulent opposition decided to whine to the Salt Lake Tribune and dig the hole about 10 feet deeper:

We at TheSockObama Co. have some questions to pose. What’s really going on in America? In the good ol’ fashion spirit of entrepreneurialism ; free enterprise has been censored, and TheSockObama politically plush toy has been discriminated against in the marketplace of the United States of America.

Double standards appear to be a common thread here. It’s okay for there to be hundreds of thousands of Google sites containing references to our current president’s resemblance to a chimpanzee. However, it’s not okay to make that same association regarding our possible next president. Isn’t this the very definition of hypocrisy? We find this to be both obvious and curious in the same breath. 

To the black person brave enough to be first set foot in Utah, when you choose to cross into those uncharted waters, you have a long task ahead of you.

Thanks to Ryan for the tips on both items.

Crooks & Liars has done a bang-up job detailing no less than 10 major flip flops on the part of one John McCain and his crack team of campaign strategists in the past three weeks.

Just like the YouTube video that surfaced not too long ago, when is the man going to learn that everything is scrutinized during a presidential campaign?  Everything.   It already has 2,000 Diggs at the time of this publishing.  It was at 900 earlier in the day.  Even Forbes takes a shot at Johnny.  Methinks it’s going to be a long campaign season.  Methinks the more McCain opens his mouth, the more he sticks his foot in it.

My personal favorite:

4. The Media’s Treatment of Hillary Clinton. No doubt, John McCain suffers from recurring bouts of selective amnesia. And some episodes take only days to manifest themselves. During his disastrous “green screen” speech on June 3, McCain reached out to Hillary Clinton’s supporters by proclaiming, “The media often overlooked how compassionately she spoke to the concerns and dreams of millions of Americans, and she deserves a lot more appreciation than she sometimes received.” But by June 7, McCain denied to Newsweek that his media critique never passed his lips, “I did not–that was in prepared remarks, and I did not–I’m not in the business of commenting on the press and their coverage or not coverage.”

John Kerry, the man spanked silly by Karl Rove for being a flip-flopper in 2004, is getting in on the action, taking his old buddy to task for abandoning logic and his core principles in his latest energy policy declarations.  Even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal jumps on board the procession, albeit in much lighter fashion (it’s a necessary flip-flop!).

For the record:  Here is a pretty solid breakdown of the actual impact drilling in the ANWR and offshore locations would have on the price of gas (hint:  next to nothing, apparently).  The main source of the article?  The current administration’s Department of Energy.

Just when you feel as though you are getting to know a place, when you start to feel at home in a strange environment, something grabs you and forces the question “Where the hell am I?”  These are just a few observations from the past few weeks that served as little personal culture clashes while spending the summer in Hong Kong.

A day at the beach
I was feeling relaxed and was perfectly positioned for an afternoon of sunning when a loud announcement filled my ears - first in Cantonese and then in British English. “No spitting on the beach.  Make sure to properly warm-up before swimming and if you are full or hungry make sure to not go swimming.”  Serious.

A rainy day
A day in HK is always somewhat cloudy but this morning was something unlike I have ever experienced.  I had a feeling that it might rain a little, so I wore my rain jacket and brought along an umbrella.  There are men that stand inside buildings and hand you a plastic bag to put your soaking umbrella into - genius, really. I felt as though I was on a ship out at sea and massive swells were pouring over the front of the boat.  And there are constant announcements on loud speakers reminding everyone that it may be slippery and to watch your step.  They like loudspeakers.

Seat belt checkpoints in HK
They have an official standing in the middle of the street serving as a human roadblock.  The uniformed man peers into the window of every car to see if people are wearing their seatbelts.

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The question has finally wafted over to CNN – is Barack Obama Black or Biracial?

Biologically, White parent + Black parent = Biracial.

But culturally, it’s a different issue altogether. An issue that plays itself out both within the Black and White community.

Inside the Black community, I think there’s a simultaneous and seemingly illogical embrace and sharp snub of the variety of Black skin tones. We see Black as Black, and yet the African-American community has a profound and deep color complex that dates back to slavery. House slave vs. field slave. African features vs. European features. Or, as Spike Lee so theatrically illustrated in his film School Daze, Good hair vs. Bad hair.

On a personal level, this is something I feel every day, especially among Black women. And I’m sure I’m not alone. Black women scrutinize other Black women, trying to figure them out. It’s something Black women don’t do to White women – it’s an inside thing that’s also quite intimidating. I think the stare is a manifestation of curiosity, competition, and insecurity – all rolled into one.

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Are you an artist worried about the public interpreting your pretentious, froufrou pieces?

Well, let the FBI have a crack at it.

(Actually, don’t.)

Back in May 2004, SUNY art history professor Steve Kurtz became involved in just that: a convoluted, complicated and wholly unnecessary FBI bio-terrorism investigation based on Kurtz’s art supplies. In April this year, he was aquitted of all charges.

Today, he gave a fantastic interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on the ordeal.

“On May 11, 2004, his wife Hope Kurtz tragically died in her sleep. When he called 911 for help, a nightmare that would last for the next four years began to unfold. The police became suspicious of his art supplies and harmless bacteria cultures that he was using for an antiwar project about the public health impact of germ warfare programs. His home was raided by the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Homeland Security. His belongings, his cat, and even his wife’s body were seized.”

Also: Read about the spectacular, equally froufrou film based on the incident here.

Last Friday, hot on the heels of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in the US Court System, Sen. John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Really, John?  Was that hyperbole, like when your mom orders the Monte Cristo and calls the lunch “the worst I have ever had” because the cole slaw had too much mayo?

Or the type of “worst decision” that one would apply when discussing the needless squandering of international political capital in the Arab world in the face of an extensive McClatchy Newspapers investigation which shows the Gitmo boogeymen were (and are) not, as you and your misinformed brethren insist, “the worst of the worst”?

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

In addition to claiming that legislation he helped passed all but assured the civil treatment of detainees at Gitmo — or en route there — McCain also claimed that of the people let go, several were apprehended attacking US forces in Iraq, proving their nature as dangerous individuals.

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