Apparently ’tis the time of year for old friends to drop by unexpectedly. It’s a great surprise when someone you haven’t heard from in a while suddenly walks in the door.

It’s even more of a surprise when they walk in the door and you aren’t there.

As I sat at my desk, at work, I received a phone call from the Fortified Mountain Compound. Since most of the Staff was unchained earlier in the week and sent out into the woods to forage, a phone call from inside the Compound was among the last things that I expected to receive.

We have multiple layers of security, from the outer walls, to the gates and moats, the flaming spike pits, and of course several bear traps that drop real live bears. RAWR!

Unexpected visitors just aren’t part of the package when you’re living in a Fortified Mountain Compound. One could assume that the glittering field of broken glass is a clear enough symbol of how welcome visitors are to our little Compound.

But one of our associates, we’ll call him The Italian, is an unconventional thinker. To his mind, that field of glass is a welcome mat upon which to prove his friendship, as if driving halfway across the State on a whim wasn’t enough.

A man of many appetites, he is apparently also a man of many skills and unexpected resources. A Christmas Cheer welcome mat got him over the razor wire, and steel toed boots for the glass. One ladder (extendable), two fire extinguishers, three snake-bite kits, a mixed case of whiskeys, and one bear roasting over an open fire later, The Italian was inside my personal office, no doubt squeezing all the softness out of the toilet paper, and making a call from the Compound telephone down to my other work.

Unexpected wasn’t quite the word for that call, but I’m so thrown off guard that it’ll have to do.

And while you’re all off guard, I’ll be throwing our listeners the Timothy Jordan Show News for December 21st in the final days of Ought-Seven.

—————————

You know, we almost feel bad for the Republican voting base these days. They don’t have a lot to be excited about.

The problem for the Republican party is that their old issues, things like gays in the military, the right to life movement, terror, terror, terror, and jesus, jesus, jesus, aren’t exciting anyone beyond the oldest die-hard guard of the party anymore.

The ideology has gotten stale. It’s like what happens when humans are restricted to an isolated little mountain valley or a remote island. Inbreeding produces genetic freaks, unfit to exist anywhere outside of their tiny little comfort zone.

The Republican candidates are ideologically inbred like some bioengineered corn. They do beautifully in prepared ground, but outside of that comfort zone they’re revealed to be nothing more than lab freaks. Not that we need to do this for them. Thanks to the pressure of the Primary elections, they’re doing it to each other.

We can just sit back and watch as their voting base cringes. What is that voting base going to be left with? Pretty, or closing time pretty?

—————————

The end might be within sight, but the party’s not quite over at the White House. A small fire in the Executive Office building this week, probably sparked by stray lightning from Lord Cheney’s fingertips, apparently didn’t cause any damage to official records, but that may be because fewer of them are being kept around.

Thanks to a tip from Radar online, we took a look at the newly created usaspending.gov website.

Created a year ago, it’s a freely searchable database of all federal spending contracts. Anybody with an internet connection has access to the full listing of contracts for various services, the amount spent, and who’s receiving it.

The federal contracts for paper shredding services are quite interesting. In the last six years Federal spending on paper shredding has increased by 600%.

That’s right, it should come as no surprise that the Bush administration shreds more paper than anyone else has ever shredded before. When they came into power the Federal paper shredding budget was $452,000. By 2003 that had risen to over a million dollars.

Shredding has continued to rise, the IRS leading the way, with the total bill running up to $2.9 million last year. This year, 2007, was on pace to break all previous records, with $2.2 million spent in the first half of the year alone.

In all some $13 million has been spent on paper shredding services under the Bush administration. The Secret Service alone has spent $700,000 of that. They’ve contracted to shred $142,000 of documents between September and January 31st.

What could possibly cost that much to shred? Come to think of it, what could possibly cost that much to shred which can’t be lit up for the price of a few souls by Lord Cheney?

• usaspending.gov, paper shredding contracts 2000-2007

• Radar Online, Document shredding Increased 600 Percent Under George W. Bush

————————–

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) doesn’t like you. They don’t like you at all, and they don’t like the State of Oregon, either.

The State of Oregon, it seems, has started asking troublesome questions in court. Questions like how the RIAA data mining programs actually work, and whether their investigators have licenses, and if they actually have any evidence of copyright violation in the first place.

These questions are so troublesome for the RIAA that they’ve asked the judge in Arista v. Does 1-17 to not even look at the State Attorney General’s most recent motion in the case.

That’s right. They’d prefer that the judge not even start thinking about whether they actually have evidence against the seventeen people charged with copyright violations in the case.

The defendants were students at the University of Oregon, identified by IP address by the RIAA’s investigation team, MediaSentry, but not specifically by name. To fill in this gap in their lawsuit the Recording organization, Arisa records in this case, filed a subpoena asking the University to identify those students.

Students are poor and undrerepesented. Major state universities, on the other hand, have lobbyists. The State of Oregon rallied to the school’s defense last month, filing a motion to suppress the subpoena and requesting a full disclosure of the RIAA’s methods in the case.

Those methods, according to Assistant Attorney General Katherine Von Ter Stegge, leave much to be desired. Aside from allegedly using unlicensed investigators, they’ve also apparently been abusing court orders to provide information for collection agencies, concealing material facts from the court, and don’t actually have any evidence against the purported file sharers in question.

While asking for an explanation regarding Arista’s methods, Assistant AG Von Ter Stegge said that, “Plaintiffs have refused to provide the University with answers to these basic questions. If Plaintiffs have nothing to hide, they should be able to agree to these reasonable requests.”

Hmm… reasonable requests? Nothing to hide? Is this starting to sound to our listeners like AT&T and its friends trying to avoid answering questions about warrantless wiretapping?

• RIAA lawyers try to quash the University of Oregon

• Assistant Attorney General Von Ter Stegge’s reply

———————–

Someone involved in that program has been answering questions about warrantless wiretapping this week.

Jack Goldsmith is former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, responsible for providing legal opinions to the Executive branch. He resigned from the Department of Justice in 2004, but returned to the limelight with a recently published book aptly titled, The Terror Presidency.

This attracted the attention of Congress, and Goldsmith was asked to speak before the Senate Judiciary Committee early in October. The transcript of that testimony just came to the attention of my Staff, and based upon their whooping and hollering around the office, it featured some gems.

Key among them was his opinion that, “there were certain aspects of programs related to the [Terrorist Surveillance Program] that I could not find legal support for.

Among those programs related is likely to have been the wholesale wiretapping of U.S. citizens making phone calls to Central and Southern America in support of the Global War on Drugs, revealed by the New York Times last weekend. No warrants, no evidence, just a connection in a database, one of these “second-generation communities of interest” that they’ve been so concerned about being able to track and monitor.

But the justification for doing so was held very close to the White House, according to Mr. Goldsmith. He was among the few people permitted access to the legal opinions behind the warrantless wiretapping programs.

Asked by Sen. Leahy why there was a veil of secrecy so deep that even the National Security Agency’s chief lawyer, the legal counsel for the agency that’s actually operating the program, wasn’t permitted to see the justification, Mr. Goldsmith said that, “Well, there are two possible explanations. One possible explanation, the reason for the secrecy was to make sure that the information did not leak to the public. The second possible explanation was that they did not want the legal analysis scrutinized by anyone even inside the executive branch.”

• Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Preserving the rule of law in the fight against terrorism

————————

If they aren’t even comfortable letting their own people look at the justifications behind the warrantless wiretapping program, then it should come as no surprise that the idea of public lawsuits against companies assisting in the program terrifies them.

Efforts by the administration and its supporters to provide those companies legal immunity hit a snag on Monday, thanks to Sen. Chris Dodd. He may be fading into the distance in the rear view mirrors of the major Democratic candidates for president, but he won some respect from my Staff and I earlier this week.

Living up to his promise, Sen. Dodd stood on the Senate floor and spoke, and spoke, and spoke until Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to give up and withdraw the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reauthorization bill.

Reid and the bill’s backers will try again when Congress returns to from recess in January. The current FISA authorization expires in February, so expect to be hearing more about this from us in the early days of the coming year.

• Dodd Wins Fight to Block Passage of Surveillance Legislation

————————–

We’ve got a local follow up story to the Greenpeace effort to quash Mr. Spashy Pants as the Internet’s choice for their name-a-whale campaign.

Our own Monterey Bay Aquarium is holding a contest to name a newly born otter pup. But they assured that Chuckles McUrchinbreath will not be the winning name. The Aquarium has learned from Greenpeace’s mistakes and limited the possible name to one of three Swahili words.

The currently unnamed African spotted-necked otter pup was born three months ago. Your chance to help choose her name runs out December 31st at 5pm.

• Monterey Bay Aquarium, Help Us Name Our Pup

—————————-

And that’s about it. We’re all set to get the hell out of here and spread some unwelcome holiday cheer all over the town, but not before some excellence. It’s…

This week’s Award of Excellence is another entry in the “improving government” series. Didn’t know that we had an “improving government” series? Well that’s because we didn’t, until right before just now.

The image that most people have of Congress is of the two main chambers of the House and Senate, filled with legislators debating and casting their votes. The thing is that most of the business happens elsewhere, in the committee chambers, and it’s not always easy to get in touch with the committees.

This week’s winner does away with that, or at least makes the process easier. Known as Committee Caller, it’s an automated telephone exchange system that’s hooked up to a database of committee members’ office phone numbers.

As the site’s author, Fred Beneson, describes it, simply “Select a committee, enter in your phone number and click ‘Put me in touch with democracy!’ and you’ll be called by our system and sequentially patched through to the front office of each member on that committee. You can even rate how each call went; information that will enable us to rank representatives on how accountable and responsive they are to their constituents.”

Kickass, that’s excellent, Fred. For your work putting together committeecaller.com and making it easier for people to contact their elected representatives, you’re this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.

• Committee Caller

And that’s the News for December 21st, Ought-Seven. Remember, if you haven’t taken care of your Christmas shopping, it’s too late now. May as well buy bacon for everyone.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.