December 28th, 2007
Congratulations to all of our listeners! You made it! The seventh year of the millennium is nearly over.
Yep, we’re just four days out from the annual New Year’s Eve celebration, and it’s time to make your plans for the debauchery. I’ve arranged to close out 2007 in style by getting into a serious drinking fight with a couple of bartenders. Nothing brings in the New Year like a four-alarm hangover and the annual cry of, “Uuunngh, what was I thinking?”
I was probably thinking about this, the Timothy Jordan Show News, coming to our listeners for the last time this year, on the 28th of December.
We rang in 2007 with the execution of Saddam Hussein, and closed it out with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
It was a year of unmet expectations for a Congress fully in the hands of the Democratic party for the first time since 1992.
It was the year, for worse and better, of ethanol and climate change.
In Iraq it was the year of the surge, of refugees, of neighborhood walls, of disgraced security contractors, missing weapons, and long-threatened Turkish interventions.
It started out looking like a rough legal year for the Bush administration, but only lead to one conviction, later commuted.
Our domestic terrorists remained incompetent, but those overseas have seen the practice of suicide bombing spread.
The U.S. government kept wiretapping American citizens, despite the efforts of a noble few to maintain the 4th Amendment.
January was the month where we confronted the odd execution of Saddam Hussein. The notorious video is available online, and once again we aren’t going to link to it. Saddam Hussein was a despot, a tyrant, one of the world’s few truly evil people, utterly committed to his own personal gain.
But his years in captivity and the stress of his showpiece of a trial appeared to have broken him. There was an unexpected nobility to the man as he was lead to the gallows early on the 30th of December last year. Saddam Hussein died under the taunts of his captors looking in comparison like an elder statesman .
We also saw the President’s State of the Union address, where he announced his plan for a surge of military personnel into Iraq to combat wildly increasing violence in Baghdad. As regular listeners know, the surge was already two months old when the President announced it, but credit remained his all the same.
As the year moved into its second month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first working group report of 2007, laying out the scientific case for climate change, and mankind’s responsibility.
I. Lewis Libby, Lord Cheney’s Chief of Staff and longtime right-hand man, saw his legal defense falter under charges of perjury in the Valerie Plame scandal.
We also caught the Department of Justice padding its terrorism arrest statistics. It turns out, according to an internal review, that just about anyone arrested for just about anything was being marked down as a terrorism-related arrest.
It turned out that 2/3 of the cases prosecuted under tough new anti-terrorism legislation weren’t related to terrorism at all. The Department of Justice was just making up the numbers, using arcane internal reporting rules to reclassify devious threats to our national security like marriage fraud as terrorist-related incidents.
• Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse survey of DoJ terrorism prosecutions
March saw a conviction on five of six charges for Lewis Libby, and a jail sentence that was later commuted by President Bush, because Washington power-brokers with insider knowledge of the Bush White House aren’t allowed to go to jail.
We also learned that the Supreme Court doesn’t consider the phrase “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” protected speech.
Meanwhile a scandal over the firing of Federal Attorneys revealed tens of thousands of missing White House emails improperly stored on private servers.
Refugees continued to pour out of Iraq in April as insurgent groups started targeting major infrastructure in the country, most significantly the bridges connecting the eastern and western halves of Baghdad.
And as the insurgency worked to separate the two halves of Iraq’s capital, the U.S. military was busy throwing up walls between neighborhoods. At $3,000 per seven feet, Baghdad’s neighborhood walls were a high-ticket indicator of just how deeply the reconciliation of Sunnis and Shiites has failed.
The Democratic leadership in Congress began the year promising to cut off funding for the occupation of Iraq, but they caved to Republican pressure in May. It was the closest that we came all year to seeing a timetable for military withdrawal from Iraq.
More productive was the testimony of former Deputy Attorney General Comey, who spun a tale of White House political operatives so obsessed with authorizing the warrantless wiretapping program in March of 2004 that they tried to strongarm a man who could have been on his deathbed into signing off on it. He refused, and the President signed it anyways.
When the Department of Justice found out about what happened, their entire senior staff threatened to resign en masse. I’d like to repeat that. In 2004 the entire senior staff of the Department of Justice threatened to resign because of warrantless wiretapping mania at the White House.
It was iPhone mania striking the nation in June. More bridges fell in Baghdad, and completely incompetent terrorists were foiled for a second time in as many months.
In both cases the alleged terrorist plotters welcomed FBI informants into their organizations, informants who immediately began filming the plotters at work. In the first case the attack was to be on a largely abandoned and decommissioned military base. In the second it was to be an assault on JFK airport. In neither case were the short bus all-star terrorists much of a threat to anyone but themselves.
June was a good month for little-known facts about government. Like the fact that Karl Rove sent 140,216 emails between ‘03 and ‘07. He peaked at over 200 per day in the early months of 2007. Our estimates were that he spent roughly six hours per day, every day simply composing and sending emails.
We also learned about a previously unknown, secret fourth branch of government. Existing in a quantum superposition between the Executive and Legislative branches of our government, the Office of the Vice President sees all and answers to no one.
Spending on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan rose to $12 billion per month in July. It’s gotten even more expensive as the year went on. We’re blowing our wads to the tune of $15 billion per month these days. For comparison’s sake the entire Apollo program only cost $135 billion even when adjusted for inflation. For a tenth of the expected $1.5 trillion cost of the Iraq debacle we could have built a permanent manned colony on the moon.
August rolled into town with a warning from our nation’s intelligence agencies that the Bush plan to arm Sunni tribal groups if they turned against foreign insurgents could potentially backfire. Hmm… you think?
It was also the month where our fearless leader stood and tried to compare his war of opportunity to the struggle to defeat Germany and Japan in WWII.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation won several key decisions against AT&T and the government in August, and the United Nations announced that all of our efforts in Afghanistan had allowed that nation to claim the dubious title of Opium Exporter to the World, with 95% of the global production.
August began and ended with key resignations from the President’s team, with both Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales slinking into retirement while under the threat of multiple Congressional investigations.
Just weeks later Blackwater Worldwide, everybody’s favorite private military contractor, surprised us all by blowing themselves out of the water for a change. An ill-advised discharge of machine gun fire while unnecessarily escorting a convoy lead to the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians, and an unwelcome spotlight on Blackwater’s operations in Iraq.
The Constitution, so often pooped upon by the government these days, was given a breath of life when two sections of the Patriot Act were ruled to be in violation of the 4th Amendment by an Oregon District Court late in September.
Al Gore won the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to increase awareness about global climate change. He shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released four reports detailing the frankly horrific consequences of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions. All four reports were studiously ignored by the White House.
State-of-the-art technology allowed the Timothy Jordan Show News Staff to report at the end of October that next year’s Pentagon budget of $670 billion would be sufficient to purchase 110 billion super burritos, enough to build a road of burritos nine feet wide all the way to the moon, or to cover the surface of our planet’s largest satellite under a layer of super burritos five inches thick.
Chris Dodd began earning our respect for placing a hold, eventually ignored by the Senate leadership, on a bill promising immunity for any laws which may or may not have been broken by telecommunications companies which may or may not have been cooperating with a government program that may or may not be wiretapping millions of Americans.
And the long-term stability of Iraq started looking less likely when the Turkish military began staging airstrikes and ground incursions into Northern Iraq’s Kurdish regions. A portent of wider regional conflict, the Turkish attacks are apparently authorized by the U.S. government, once again showing that these clowns have no concept of what happens when you let foreign governments send militaries across sovereign borders.
It’s called a war, and it’s going to create an independent Kurdistan. That will mark the end of Iraq as a country.
In November Judge Walker Vaughn, frustrated by government and AT&T efforts to prevent the disclosure of evidence in the warrantless wiretapping lawsuits, ordered them to preserve all,
“writings, records, files, correspondence, reports, memoranda, calendars, diaries, minutes, electronic messages, voicemail, e-mail, telephone message records or logs, computer and network activity logs, hard drives, backup data, removable computer storage media such as tapes, disks and cards, printouts, document image files, web pages, databases, spreadsheets, software, books, ledgers, journals, orders, invoices, bills, vouchers, checks, statements, worksheets, summaries, compilations, computations, charts, diagrams, graphic presentations, drawings, films, digital or chemical process photographs, video, phonographic, tape or digital recordings or transcripts thereof, drafts, jottings and notes.”
• Judge Vaughn’s order to preserve records, via the EFF PDF (24.4KB)
I pulled off the Great Pumpkin Caper, wherein Timothy’s bedroom was filled with pumpkins stacked three feet high.
And Iraq was more peaceful, encouraging news and a sign of progress according to the U.S. government. And it actually was more peaceful, but only compared to the bloodshed of 2006. Iraq ended the year relatively more peaceful, but nearly five million people have fled their homes.
December was a dark month, with the news that the Arctic Sea ice is likely to be gone in 25 years if the planet continues to warm at current rates.
The first rule of warrantless wiretapping club turned out to be: don’t talk about warrantless wiretapping club, we learned from a former Department of Justice official. One of the few people briefed on the legal justification for the program, he told Congress that the Administration considered its position so tenuous that not even the National Security Agency’s lead counsel was allowed to see the justification for the program.
Iran’s WMDs were DOA in ‘03 according to the NIE, and Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated nearly one year to the day that Saddam Hussein was marched to the gallows.
Surrounded by charges of corruption on a grand scale, as a martyr Bhutto may turn out to be a better symbol for democracy in Pakistan than she ever was an agent for it.
There’s gotta be some way to salvage some excellence from the end of this year.
We found some excellence earlier this year, a lot of excellence nearly every week. From Paul Addis burning down the burning man, to the proposed Presidential Science Debate, the wit of “Buy Back Alaska,” and Iggy Pop’s incredible, unbelievable, amazing concert rider, there was a lot of excellence to be found.
It was hard to pick just one to close out the year, but here goes.
Anyone who’s seen a tesla coil in action knows just what an incredible sight they are to behold. Even when they’re turned off they have an air of sci-fi menace, with all that gleaming metal, insulated cabling, and arcane electrical equipment.
Turned on they become a spectacle. When the switch is thrown the coil’s capacitor charges up before dumping juice into a series of step-up transformers. They work together to output upwards of 100 times the original voltage entering the system. Perched on top of the second transformer is an output terminal, the classic doughnut-shaped cap familiar to fans of early science fiction movies. The result when everything gets going? Bolts of raw electricity, uncaged lightning leaping from the output terminal hundreds of times per second.
It’s always pretty impressive, but what this week’s winner did with one is pure excellence. You see, those bolts of lightning vibrate the air, and vibrations in the air make sound. Organize that sound, give it patterns and rhythm, and you’ve got music.
By controlling the output of his tesla coil, Steve Ward, an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Illinois, can make music with lightning.
Think of it as techno taken to it’s logical extreme. Each note that you’re hearing right now is a bolt of lightning.
The video, available on youtube, is from Duckon 2007, an event held each year for tesla coil hobbyists. You’ve heard what it sounds like, but it’s really worth taking a look for yourself.
And because of that, Steve Ward wins this week’s Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.