Any visitors to the Fortified Mountain Compound passing by my office yesterday morning would have best been warned to keep on their toes. I was listening to a Press conference at the White House by our dear leader, and that always puts me in the mood to throw empty bottles of scotch.

Never full bottles of scotch. That’d be a crime. Although it did happen once, during a moment of weakness last month while listening to our President, that butter-tongued messiac, using his often-mocked linguistic skills to transcend the boundaries of ordinary grammar.

Speaking in January about the prospect for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Mr. Bush assured his audience that, “I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be — hold hands.”

And to make things worse, we have to put up with more than 365 days of his undeclared War on the English Language, because this is a leap year.

Aren’t we lucky? This year we get an extra, 366th day to bask in the wit and wisdom of a man who once asked, “Is our children learning?” Well, is they?

There’s good news, because last year he was able to let us know that, “… childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.”

It isn’t the long hours, or the merciless axe of the editor that drives so many journalists to drink. It’s people that mangle the language. People who habitually twist words, creating linguistic monstrosities like nucular. Nucular.

Nearly eight years in office with thousands of experts, civilian and military, all of whom know how to pronounce the word, at his beck and call, and the President still says nucular.

Hearing that word hits me like one of those phantom pains that happen sometimes. Know what I’m talking about? You’ll be sitting on the couch or laying in bed, all content and relaxed, when suddenly there’s a stab of shooting pain. Usually when it happens to me it’s because I’ve just been shot with a pellet gun by Timothy “Sex Ed Poster Child” Jordan. It’s this game that we’re all playing around the Fortified Mountain Compound, called “That Could Put Your Eye Out!”

It’s best played with friends. Strangers don’t seem to get it.

They don’t know what to do with the sudden pain, and neither do I when I hear the President say, “nucular.”

I start throwing bottles. Let’s just put this one out of my reach. Thanks, Kristin.

It does have to be said that to his credit, the President is at least aware of his problem with speech and grammar. He told reporters at an appearance in Texas three months ago that, “I don’t particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the way, unless I say it.”

You said it.

And so will we, the Timothy Jordan Show News, on this 29th of February, LEAP DAY, in this leap year, of a two, two zeros, and an eight.

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It’s no secret that my staff and I believe our President to be at least two zeros, over a zero. He’s certainly accomplished more than could have been expected from a real zero. It’d make more sense that he’s an imaginary one.

Not imaginary are the zeros being racked up by the U.S. economy. With the country facing economic growth running at near-pace with inflation, much of the President’s press conference yesterday was instead focused on his belief in the need to protect telecommunications companies from warrantless wiretapping lawsuits.

When asked if his support for telecom immunity was in effect telling Americans to suck it up and accept that their privacy is gone, the President said that,

“I wouldn’t put it that way, if I were you, in public. Well, you’ve been long been long enough to — anyway, yes, I — look, there’s — people who analyze the program fully understand that America’s civil liberties are well protected. There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens aren’t — you know, are treated with respect. And that’s what I want, and that’s what most — all Americans want.”

Aaaaaaaaaigh! Kristin, could I have that bottle back? I need to break something. Maybe one of those shiny guitars?

We’ll get back to the wiretapping issue. The President, when pressed by reporters to comment, and remember that he knows how to press when there needs to be press, when asked to comment on the economy, Mr. Bush expressed surprise that gas prices were approaching $4 per gallon.

His solution? Tax cuts, and more oil drilling. Yep, heard that one before. Then how about all those people facing foreclosures on their homes because, well, they couldn’t really afford them? You guessed it, tax cuts. They can’t pay their mortgages, but at least they won’t face the worry of paying income tax on income that they don’t have because they can’t afford to pay their mortgages.

We’ll return to the President’s comments yesterday later in the program. I’m running out of things to break.

• 2/28/08 Presidential Press Conference

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In the aftermath of a public hearing before FCC commissioners on the Harvard campus earlier this week about their tampering with the internet connections of customers, Comcast has been left looking like the evil villain from a silent film melodrama, twisting their pointy corporate mustache.

Net neutrality activists were surprised and encouraged at the turnout early Monday morning when dozens of unfamiliar faces met them outside the meeting hall at Harvard’s Austin Hall. Turnout of the public could only mean that they were reaching out and engaging people to stand up to help maintain a content-neutral internet.

Imagine the surprise felt when these unexpected people filed in to the hall, took seats in the front row, and fell asleep. Network neutrality? They had no idea what the meeting was about. They were there because they’d been paid by an organizer to hold seats for someone.

These mysterious organizers were seen outside the event speaking to Comcast employees, who then attended the hearing.

Comcast, in a move of such unsurpassed subtlety that it could have been straight of of a Scooby Doo episode, paid over a hundred people to fill up seats in the FCC hearing, preventing citizens who actually had something to say about Comcast’s treatment of its customers from entering the room.

Now here’s where the mustache-twirling enters our story, because Comcast representative Jennifer Khoury told a reporte from Condé Nast that her employers had indeed paid people to stand in line.

The official story is that they were being paid to hold a place in line for local Comcast employees who may have wanted to attend the hearing.

By all eyewitness accounts not many of them got the invitation. Dozens of people with identical yellow highlighters in their pockets, marking them for Comcast organizers, are visible in photos of the event. None of them were Comcast employees.

The whole gesture screams out, “Muahahahahahaha! What are you going to do about it, Internet freedom hippie?”

Actually, proponents of net neutrality may not have to do much of anything. The FCC commissioners present at the hearing were so disgusted by Comcast’s behavior that they’re discussing holding a second public hearing over the hill at Stanford in the coming months.

• Save the Internet on the Boston meeting

• Photos of the chair-squatters sleeping

• Condé Nast coverage

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In a related follow-up, our Award of Excellence last week turned out to be less than excellent. Stanford professor, copyright warrior, and advocate for network neutrality, Lawrence Lessig, has decided against running for the seat left vacant by the recent death of Rep. Tom Lantos.

According to Mr. Lessig, the entrance of long-time state politician Jackie Speier into the race means that he simply wouldn’t be able to compete for a place in the April special election.

Lessig ‘08

——

Last week’s shootdown of a failed satellite got my Staff and I thinking about the future of our national missile defense system. Long described as a purely defensive system by advocates, the ship-based missile interceptor successfully hit a spy satellite in a falling orbit over the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

How was a interceptor designed to shoot down ballistic missiles able to hit a satellite? Software, a simple reprogramming of the guidance software. That’s it.

If a simple change to the software enabled a small interceptor to hit a low-flying satellite, what would a software change mean for larger ground-based interceptors and high-flying satellites?

Nobody’s talking about this. It’s kinda wild. This supposedly defensive missile system has just been proven to be quite effective at being hostile against satellites.

You heard it here first.

——

Back to that White House press conference and warrantless wiretapping. His speech featured more harping on the refusal of the House to pass an intelligence bill protecting the major telecommunications companies from prosecution.

According to the President the lawsuits against the telecoms are about finding, “… a financial gravy train”

We covered some of that last week. According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the telecoms may be on the hook for upwards of $11 trillion for each year that they cooperated with the wiretapping program.

This has made the companies understandably nervous about cooperating with the government.

The President, wondering aloud to the press yesterday, asked, “How can you listen to the enemy if the phone companies aren’t going to participate with you? And they’re not going to participate if they get sued. Let me rephrase — less likely to participate. And they’re facing billions of dollars of lawsuits, and they have a responsibility to their shareholders. And yet they were told what they were going to do is legal.”
Okay, I could tell our listeners that it’s legal to drive 100mph on Highway 17. I could tell our listeners that there’s a free lunch buffet in the Vice President’s dining room tomorrow afternoon. I can say all kinds of crazy things, but that doesn’t make any of them legal, or advised.

The same goes for the government. Just because someone working for the government, even if that person is the President, tells you that what they’re asking is totally legal, that doesn’t make it legal. It’s your responsibility to find out if you’re going to be breaking the law.

And no matter what the President says, he can’t write the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed by Congress nearly thirty years ago because of presidents like Nixon who thought themselves above the law. It created a defined legal framework for governing the wiretapping of American citizens, a legal framework this President thinks himself above.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but just because you told the telecoms that they weren’t breaking the law doesn’t make it so.

Unless of course he’s able to get some proxies in Congress to rewrite the law for him. That’s what this fight is all about. He wants the law re-written after the fact, and that’s just not right.

• 2/28/08 Presidential Press Conference

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Excellence this evening comes in the form of opposition to wiretapping. It’s…

The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), a self-described guerilla marketing group, has been working for a new “client”

AT&T billboards around the Bay Area have been updated to reflect the BLF’s new marketing campaign on behalf of AT&T and the NSA.

According to the BLF, “‘AT&T initially downplayed its heroic efforts in the War on Terror, preferring to serve in silence behind the scenes. ‘But then we realized we had a PR win on our hands,’… ‘Not only were we helping NSA cut through the cumbersome red tape of the FISA system, we were also helping our customers by handing over their e-mails and phone records to the government. Modern life is so hectic – who has time to cc the feds on every message? It’s a great example of how we anticipate our customers’ needs and act on them. And, it should be pointed out, we offered this service free of charge.’”

The adjusted billboards now read, “AT&T works in more places, like NSA HEADQUARTERS”.

Much as I’d like to say that billboard alteration is legal, I can’t, because it isn’t. Maybe we can get someone in Congress working on that. Anyone want to start a lobbying organization?

In the meantime, it’s still pretty damn excellent, and so the Billboard Liberation Front is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.

• Billboard Liberation Front, NSA and AT&T improvements

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And that’s the News for this Leap Day, the 29th of February in two, two zeros, and an eight.

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