What to call a time-reduced News Segment? Diet News? Light Content? Light on Content? Yeah, that sounds like it.

Not for any lack of News this week. Just because my Staff was tasked with a short duration side project doesn’t mean that the world’s decision-makers are going to take it easy on us. I really wish that they would.

I need a phone number that I can call and say, “Hey guys, we’re really busy this week, so could you all keep it light and simple?”

“How about a train derailment and gas leak somewhere unimportant? Or, even better, a global holiday: no work, no politics, no news.”

Man, that’d be great. Then I wouldn’t have broken the handle on the office espresso machine earlier today. I don’t like seeing a molecule of caffeine left in those grounds, so I hammer the damn things down. Our office coffee is brutally good.

Even so it wasn’t strong enough to work much out of my Staff this morning, and so I present this smaller, more efficient, Euro-model of the Timothy Jordan Show News for this, π day, the 14th day of the 3rd month, March of Ought-Eight.

——

We may as well switch to the Euro model permanently. Everybody else will be soon.

That’s because we’re number two! We’re number two! We’re number two! We’re numb-

Eh. Yeha. Meh.

The United States economy has been on top for so long that it’s an institution. In the days ahead it may only be institutional loyalty that keeps the dollar as the de-facto international currency of choice, because we are no longer the top dog.

Thanks to a deliberate policy of devaluation by the Bush administration, the dollar continues to fall in value, enough so that as of today the U.S. economy is no longer on top.

The total value of the European economy, those countries sharing the Euro as a common currency, has surpassed that of our own economy. The dollar is rapidly falling towards half the value of a Euro. Friday’s trading, with the stock market and the dollar falling on news of the largest bank bailout since the Great Depression, saw the dollar fall to 0.63 Euros.

The President voiced confidence in his financial team this afternoon, telling the Economic Club of New York that his bailout spending package is going to save the nation’s economy.

His words did not comfort traders on Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Index fell another 1.6% in heavy trading.

• President Bush speaks to the Economic Club of New York

——

The news out of Congress this morning was, frankly, amazing. The House of Representatives held a closed session late last night to discuss sensitive aspects of the warrantless wiretapping authorization bill. Democratic leaders had indicated that they’d be pushing for a version of the bill which didn’t include immunity from prosecution for the major telecom companies, which lead to great uproar out of the President’s supporters in Congress and the right-wing media.

In recent weeks they’ve been targeting several key legislators with attack ads charging that the House version of the bill will let terrorists escape wiretapping, impregnate our daughters, and fill the skies with raining cats and dogs, which will then live together in some sort of marital bliss, all because the giant telecommunications companies need protection from those nasty lawsuits.

You think I exaggerate. Watch the ads, you’ll see.

House leaders looked at those ads and, quite to my surprise, refused to back down in the face of patent fear-mongering. That’s right, early this afternoon Democrats in Congress stood up to the White House and their corporate allies by passing a version of the wiretapping bill that doesn’t include immunity from prosecution for the telecoms.

So it’s a victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups fighting for privacy rights in the electronic age, and a double blow for the Bush administration, because immunity isn’t the whole story.

The House explicitly recognized in their version of the bill that the greatest challenge any ongoing lawsuits face is the government assertion of a state secrets privilege to block all disclosure of information about the warrantless wiretapping program. No disclosure means no case for the defense, and therefore no trial. Rather than allow our President to block court cases by keeping material essential to the defense of the telecoms as state secrets, the House version would provide authorization for Federal judges to review any classified material that comes up during trials.

The President has promised to veto any bill that leaves Congress without immunity, and the removal of his state secrets claim is temper-tantrum material. Like other supporters of warrantless wiretapping, the President claims that terrorists are set to run loose and threaten the world if they aren’t wiretapped under his rules.

House Speaker Pelosi told members of the press this morning that the President knows he’s not telling the truth, just like he knew that he wasn’t telling the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

• H.R. 3773, The RESTORE Act

——

The FBI Inspector General released another report this week documenting widespread violations of the law by FBI Agents.

It turns out that the FBI has been issuing National Security Letters illegally, requesting information they aren’t allowed to have, based on nobody’s authorization but their own.

And our President would prefer if you pay no attention to the FBI agent behind the curtain.

• FBI Inspector General’s report on National Security Letters PDF

——

It’s curtains for us, but not before one more thing. It’s…

I really wanted to give this weeks Award of Excellence to the folks at lollyphile for their maple-bacon lollypops, but I can’t.

Do you all understand how awesome maple bacon lollypops are? They’re excellent, really. Hell, I may just give the Award to them next week, but they just couldn’t win today.

That’s because of what a programmer named Dustin Brooks did last week. He was looking for a way to archive mail from his gmail account onto his desktop computer when he came across G-Archiver.

A skilled programmer, Dustin decided to take a look at the inner workings of G-Archiver, and we’re glad that he did.

It turns out that the guy who wrote G-Achiver, John Terry, set it up to record the user name and password of everybody that used the program, and mail them to his own email account.

Our winner this week, a good man, took it upon himself to contact each and every person listed in Mr. Terry’s account and warn them that their private information had been compromised.

Then he reported John Terry’s account, and deleted it.

Yeah, he’s a good guy, and this week’s Winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.

• Dustin Brooks reports on his exploits, via Coding Horror

And that’s the News for the 14th of March, π day, 3/14/08.

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