I have a new long piece about DAAA09-02-D-0007, the Halliburton logistics support contract, which uses published DD-350s (reports of contract actions to Congress) to track the exact spending to date against the contract. Bottom line: through the end of the government’s fiscal year 2003 (September 30, 2003), about $1.9 billion was obligated on the contract, almost half in the months of August and September. Or, to put it another way:

I finally picked up Merrill Peterson’s biography of Jefferson again after putting it aside for almost a year. I’m glad I waited to start reading it again. The words Peterson wrote about Jefferson and his colleagues in the revolution are even more relevant today:

Jefferson’s progress from Virginia burgess to American revolutionist in seven years followed the main road of the patriot cause, beginning with the protective defense of traditional rights and liberties and ending with the radical ideology that became the birth-right and creed of a new nation. ... In the course of asserting their claims within the empire, the colonists became increasingly disenchanted with the home government, distrustful of its designs, and anxious for the security of their own polities. They began to think for themselves and to search out their own identity ...

If there are better words out there to describe what is happening in the blogosphere today, I don’t know them.

Augusto Pinochet claimed on Tuesday, during an interview on the occasion of his 88th birthday, that he was a democratic leader, a “patriotic angel” with nothing to apologize for.

On Monday, new court testimonies were published giving details of how at least 400 of the thousands of Pinochet opponents who were “disappeared” during his regime (I believe Mr. Pinochet has the dubious distinction of verbing that particularly ominous adjective) were “dumped into the ocean strapped to pieces of railroad track to make them sink.”

Yes, of course, there is nothing to apologize for. In a world where the opposition does not exist and therefore has no rights.

In retrospect, Sting’s “Cueca Solo (They Dance Alone),” written in 1987, seems grossly inadequate in its description of the effects of the Pinochet regime’s atrocities. But it’s also the humane response to the horrors that the regime brokered:

They're dancing with the missing
They're dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They're dancing with their fathers
They're dancing with their sons
They're dancing with their husbands
They dance alone
They dance alone

The report that the FBI is keeping tabs on anti-war protesters casts a chilling shadow, even giving the damages already inflicted on freedom of association by the PATRIOT Act. The FBI says it’s only looking for “anarchists and ‘extremist elements’ plotting violence.”

But by Singin’ John Ashcroft’s actions last year, the agency is already using political and religious profiling to conduct surveillance without evidence of criminal activity.

Taken together, the measures suggest that anyone involved in protesting the war, “extremist” or not, could be subject to FBI surveillance as long as they meet the right political and religious profile.

I used to scoff at the tin hat brigades. Now I wonder. Maybe it’s time for that FOIA request.

I may not always agree with my country’s policies and actions abroad, but that doesn’t lessen the respect and gratitude I owe the men and women of our armed forces who gave the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their country. Also see Oliver Willis’s remembrance.

Joshua Marshall says that there have been reports of voter intimidation and harassment, including videotaping and entering the booth with the voter. Many of the reports were from predominantly minority districts. The reports were made by that irresponsible fearmonger…the Mississippi Secretary of State. Read the text of the reports here.

Interesting little story: In his press conference today ,President Bush now disclaimed responsibility for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that greeted him when he landed on the USS Lincoln. He says now that it was the sailors on the Lincoln who put out that banner. But the New York Times, following the landing in May, said that it was Bush’s media coordinator Scott Sforza (paid link; copy of the article for free here) who did the deed.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, according to Bush’s own staff after his press conference, it isn’t the Commander in Chief. According to the article, “Lincoln's crew asked the White House to have the sign made. The White House asked a private vendor to produce the sign, and the crew put it up, said the spokeswoman. She said she did not know who paid for the sign.” As Kos points out, regardless of who paid for the sign, the White House thought it was a good enough idea to act as a middleman with the private vendor who produced it.

More thoughts at Oliver Willis, Andrew Bayer, and the Clark campaign.

The Olympian: Many soldiers, same letter: Newspapers around US get identical missives from Iraq. The letter apparently was handed out by the platoon leader, who asked soldiers to sign it; speculation is that someone is trying really hard to put a positive face on the war. Some of the soldiers were unhappy that their signatures appeared on papers that weren’t their own thoughts:

2nd Battalion soldier [Sgt. Shawn Grueser] said he did not sign any letter.

Although Grueser said he agrees with the letter’s sentiments, he was uncomfortable that a letter with his signature did not contain his own words or spell out his own accomplishments.

“It makes it look like you cheated on a test, and everybody got the same grade,” Grueser said by phone from a base in Italy where he had just arrived from Iraq.

Infothought has a follow-up that shows how to search for all the astroturfed letters on Google. About fourteen hits from different papers.

Here’s Instapundit on the astroturfs: most of the letters seem to be sent out voluntarily, even if they were all the same.

Compare this with the GOP astroturf campaign a few months back. I know it’s common practice, but you know, it still smells. A few of the papers did features on the letters from the front, as though the boys that signed them had actually written the letters.

An old Virginia Glee Club friend, Paul Stancil, emailed me to give some balance to my sour grapes about Schwarzenegger’s victory last night. Paul is hereby voted Hoo who most needs to get a blog. I’ll wait to post the 500-word letter until I get his permission to share it, but the gist is that there are bits of the Hitler story that don’t hang together, that the credibility of the rumors about Schwarzenegger and Enron bear investigating, and that Davis and Bustamente were attempting to make political hay from an economically bad situation with Enron. If anything, Paul reminds me of an assertion that I’ve often (though not nearly often enough) made about the blogosphere: It’s all too easy to find only opinions and commentary that confirm your own opinions and worst fears.

Joseph de Maistre once said “every people gets the government it deserves.” Not sure what that says about California, whose people just elected Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man with no previous political experience and no stated policies or philosophy of government, who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and ran his only business venture into bankruptcy, as well as allegedly selling the state’s settlement with Enron down the river, Governor.

Just the guy to lead the nation’s largest state out of the nation’s second-largest deficit, right?

Well. If the most populous state in the nation has transformed the political process into a circus—complete with the Strongman—is it any wonder some of us look to the blogosphere, or anywhere else, for the salvation of the political process?

Some additional thoughts and links about the Diebold voting machine security issue: Greg was kind enough to point out to me over IM, rather than chiding me publicly for it on his blog, that it’s unlikely that Georgia’s Democrat Secretary of State, who has responsibility for running elections, would be unlikely to help rig an election via voting machines in favor of the Republicans. He also passed along a link or two, including one I should have caught in the MIT Technology Review, about security issues with the voting machines.

At bottom, the whole mess still feels to me like a problem of under-secured, under-audited, badly-managed software development.

I’ve been on the fence about this whole California recall thing. While California is clearly a state in the toilet right now, its voters re-elected Gray Davis fair and square even after he had screwed the state up. If someone wanted to prevent him from doing future harm, the best way would seem to be to invest in voter turnout programs.

Then I read today’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which quotes GOP congressman Darrell Issa, whose $1.6 million expenditure funded the effort to get signatures for the recall petition, as saying that voters should vote against the recall if the GOP ticket remains split. “"If two major Republicans remain on the ballot, I'd advise you to vote 'no' on the recall…It would absolutely guarantee that (Democratic Lt. Gov.) Cruz Bustamante will be the governor, even though a majority of voters are asking for a no-tax solution…”

Hmm. I thought the purpose of a recall was to state that the office holder was so awful that no matter who replaced him, the state would be better off. Did Issa really not think that the Democrats stood a chance of doing that? Issa’s statement totally recasts the recall for me. It’s all just another cynical attempt to rewrite the results of a fair and legitimate election in favor of the GOP.

A closer look at the smoking gun memos. I think that Bev Harris does a good job pointing out the issues from a business perspective—and Salon plays up the possibility of tampering probably more than is supported by the data, though it makes for a fun conspiracy theory.

But the real story is the state of the software development behind these more-than-mission-critical systems. No software testing policies, no release process, no documented support procedures… some really good firefighters fixing problems for clients on the ground… friction between the developer and the certification agency… trade-offs between design criteria and customer business process reality… major undocumented functional changes between minor point releases suggesting poor or nonexistent requirements management… bad architecture leaving gaping security holes…

Yeah. I’ve been there (present job excepted, of course). I think it’s safe to say that every software developer has been there. But it really points out how important process is.

Why would a manufacturer of voting machines claim that the ability to easily tamper with votes recorded in them is no big deal? Oh, there are reasons, according to this Salon article about flaws in Diebold’s system, not least of which is the stated commitment of the CEO to deliver his state up to Bush next year. The flaw: anyone who has Microsoft Access can get at the database that stores the results and do anything with the data that they want. Including the audit logs. And in many cases the computers are connected to the Internet.

And the Diebold memos suggest that these back doors are not only known, but have been exploited, in Gaston County, NC—and in King County, Washington. Of course, I should note I’ve never seen these touch-panel systems in Kirkland, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

Other places that have used Diebold machines? The state of Georgia, where Max Cleland suffered an overnight 11 point shift, and Sonny Perdue was elected—the first Republican to be elected Governor in 134 years. Coincidence?

Wonder what Greg thinks about all this?

(For those without Salon day passes: The initial investigation by Bev Harris; the first Salon story from earlier this year; the smoking gun memos.)

A post on the WyethWire mocking Instapundit as an adherent of Newspeak made me think a little bit about some of what we’ve seen this week. After months of statements calculated to link Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq to the 9-11 attacks, President Bush stated that there was “no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” Isn’t that just a little bit like “No, we’re not at war with Eurasia”?

Interesting that the confession, which has long been obvious to most people who paid attention to the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were Al Qaeda and not Saddam’s imperial guard—and led by Osama bin Laden (gee, whatever happened to him? Haven’t heard Bush say his name since, oh, last year some time), was made in response to a comment by the VP on Meet the Press that Iraq was the “geographic base” for the 9/11 terrorists. No, Dick, that would be Saudi Arabia…

Would it be too much to ask for an administration that would tell the truth?

Update: Ted Kennedy calls BS on the president. About time.

Former Senator Max Cleland, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, drops the V-bomb on the Bush administration with a stinging editorial that points out not only the damning parallels between the Vietnam War and our current extended occupation in Iraq, but the damning fact that “the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam.” Former Senator Cleland should know on both counts, since he lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam.

Side note: his attack was remarkably factual and even-tempered from a man who was smeared with Republican 2002 campaign ads accusing him of being on the side of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden because he voted against Homeland Security legislation that denied civil service protection to the employees of the new Homeland Security administration.

Looks like Greg and an old Virginia friend, Sarah Shalf, have teamed up to fight the good fight in Atlanta. They’re starting an Atlanta chapter of the American Constitution Society, an organization of progressive legal professionals that aim to counter the narrow conservative view of American law. Good luck, guys.

One year ago today we marked a year of mourning. Should we still mourn today? Greg points to some provocative thoughts about how best to address the day:

Soon the columns, weblogs and airwaves will be full of people instructing us that we must “never forget” what happened in New York City, Washington DC and the sky above western Pennsylvania two years ago. As if any of us could or would forget the despicable acts that took place that day, the heroism, the damage, the wasted lives. What they really mean is not “remember,” but dwell. Obsess. Lingeringly finger the scab. And most of all, fall in line when assured that some grand policy, however wise or unwise, is put forth in the name of that day and the atrocities that marked it.

For me, I think if we’re still in mourning even as we invade and remake nations, we are in danger of seeing the decisions we must face through eyes clouded with the smoke of the past. So I am going to let others remember the day, and I’m going to continue to do my part by asking questions about actions taken in the names of the fallen that I believe do them no honor.

Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, the honorary chair of the Republican Unity Coalition, writes in today’s New York Times against the proposed constitutional amendment attacking gay marriage. He argues that the real purpose of the proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage as being “a union between a man and a woman” has nothing to do with strengthening families but would tear them apart, and that it represents a power grab on the part of conservatives for the federal government. Which is ironic, as Simpson points out, because conservatives usually argue violently when the federal government tries to “usurp” “issues better left to the states, like abortion or gun control.” It’s a brilliantly written argument that rings all the conservative chords and points them solely against those who argue that destroying the lives of gays somehow “preserves families.”

I’m a little late on posting this one, but I had to link to another judicial victory for common sense over conservative ideology: Court blocks US media rules. On Wednesday—a day before new rules that would allow a single company to own TV stations that reach 45% of the national market and to own radio, TV, and newspaper outlets in the same city would have gone into effect—a federal court blocked the rules pending a full judicial review, citing irretrievable harm to the petitioner, the Prometheus Radio Project.

One question that might be asked of FCC commissioner Powell: what was the damned hurry in the first place? These rules, the most sweeping revision of media ownership laws in recent memory, were pushed through with no public debate and, until folks like MoveOn squawked, no congressional inquiry. I’ve said it before: thank God for the common sense of the court, who both noted the possibility that there would be someone harmed and that the big media giants could certainly wait while the review was conducted.

I hadn’t heard of the Prometheus Radio Project before, but reading their stay motion—which notes that the Congress is moving to overturn the FCC ruling, that the FCC acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by failing to analyze fully the impact of their actions, that their limited analysis is contradictory, that they didn’t include the public, in fact everything but that they quartered large bodies of troops among us—I like them a lot.

Thanks to MediaMouse for the links.

Excerpted in Salon (membership or day pass required), the introduction to Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look At The Right. Good parody even in the intro about writing nonfiction in the Internet age:

"Look, God, I'm flattered, but I think you got the wrong guy. The kind of book you're talking about would require months of research."

And God said, "LET THERE BE GOOGLE. AND LET THERE BE LEXISNEXIS."

Salon: Lenny Bruce died for our sins (membership or day pass required). Fascinating look back at Lenny Bruce’s legal fights and the history of obscenity law, with a nod toward Singin’ John Ashcroft’s recent porn film busts. Quote from Supreme Court Justice William Brennan:

At the end of his career, in an extraordinary interview, Brennan admitted that his Herculean attempts to come up with a workable obscenity formula — he penned seven obscenity decisions — had failed. Speaking to journalist Nat Hentoff, a staunch Bruce defender and free-speech advocate, Brennan said, “I put 16 years into that damn obscenity thing. I tried and tried, and I waffled back and forth, and finally I gave up.” The key point, for Brennan: “If you can't define it, you can't prosecute people for it. And that's why ... I finally abandoned the whole effort.”

The article posits that, absent strong legal standards, only social mores are left, and that if society is confused about how to deal with the problem, the most powerful voice wins. It suggests that in this light, Ashcroft’s actions are best read as a power play.

Our attorney general in a power play? Say it ain’t so.

Salon: federal judge Denny Chin threw out Fox’s attempted injunction against Al Franken’s new book, which uses “fair and balanced” (a phrase trademarked by Fox) in its subtitle. The judge appears to have had a field day slamming Fox, suggesting that they could be in danger of losing the trademark if they pursued the suit further, and getting in some fabulous zingers:

…the judge pointed out that one of O'Reilly's own books is titled “The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.” “Is that not a play on ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly?’” Chin asked, noting that the movie title is also trademarked.

“I don't know,” replied [Fox lawyer] Hanswirth.

“You don't know?” asked the judge…

Hanswirth went on to argue that Franken has diluted Fox’s trademark by using it “to ridicule Fox’s No. 1 talent, Mr. O’Reilly.” She then suggested that, because Coulter is on the cover, “somebody looking at this could determine Ms. Coulter has some kind of official relationship with Fox.”

“The President and Vice President are also on the cover, are they not?” asked Chin. “Are consumers likely to believe they are associated with Fox News?”

God bless the judicial branch, which appears to be the only part of our government that has retained any common sense.

Regarding this little toy, just a few questions:

1. Was the White House consulted when this toy was being designed?
2. Or did the White House call BBI with the idea?
3. Either way, is taxpayer money paying someone in the White House to work on the production details for this doll?
4. Does the White House get a cut of the $39.99 per doll? Does George?
5. Does the doll come with a Greg Jenkins doll to make sure it’s only photographed in strong, manly poses?
6. Does the doll make your car move ten times slower than normal to facilitate said photo ops?
7. Does the doll go missing from your child’s collection for up to a year at a time?
8. Will there be a Singin’ John Ashcroft doll? How about a Poindexter? A Rumsfeld?

Thanks to Esta, among others, for the link.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “how can Congress or the public make informed votes if both are fed distorted information?” He’s writing about the trend of government agencies under this administration, in this instance the Treasury Department, to release incomplete information in a way that suppresses information that could put the Administration’s tax policies in a bad light.

The original article, by Martin Sullivan in Tax Notes, sounds like it would be a good read, except of course Tax Notes is behind a pay-wall. Another analysis by Robert Greenstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is good reading.

It looks like I was wrong to allege that the Bush policy on logging national forests to save trees was cynical and a sell out of government resources to support industry. This article in the New York Times reports on an accidental experiment that showed that thinned forest patches that had been subjected to prescribed burns—controlled forest fires—stopped a rampaging non-prescribed burn dead in its tracks. Note that Charlie called this one in the comments to my original post.

Now that people have finally decided to take the Presidential lie problem seriously (why this lie, as opposed to the other ones, is anyone’s guess), it’s interesting to watch the articles pop up blaming just about everyone else in the administration: from the administration’s scapegoat, the director of the CIA, to Dick Cheney, to Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans (Salon link, day pass required; story also here).

Folks, unless you’re claiming that this President is like Ronald Reagan and can’t expect to be held accountable for the decisions he signed up for, and the things he said, and the actions of the people that worked for him, the blame can only accrue to one person.

Won’t you join me and Greg in raising a glass to that home of liberty (and Bordeaux, and Fauré, and the second best cuisine in the world after Italy’s), America’s oldest friend and ally, what Thomas Jefferson called “the most agreeable country on earth”?

No, not Great Britain…

(Incidentally, one of the sweatiest performances I’ve ever given was a summer sing in July at the Washington National Cathedral (no air conditioning!) at which we sang the entirety of the Marseillaise. And then proceeded to swoon with something in between patriotic fervor and heat prostration. Ah, the glories of amateur music.)

Open Government Information Awareness still isn’t fully functional, but it’s getting there. I can now dig in and get full information on my representative and both my senators, for instance—including campaign contributions.

What’s missing—and who should add it? Links into information about what the politicians are doing would be helpful. Also, I miss the human voice. To this end, I suggested a public group blog to cover the elections a while back (at Lazyweb), and it looks like KnitWit has taken it up—BlogTheVote.org is registered but looking for organizers and designers—and ideas.

My feature request remains the same: first person coverage of campaign stops and actions, in a way that makes it possible to drill candidate actions by geography, issue, and contributor. Also, it shouldn’t replicate OpenGov, but link into it.

Other thoughts?

In a neat reversal of the government’s proposed Total Information Awareness scheme, MIT’s Media Lab has launched Open Government Information Awareness. As the FAQ notes:

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government. Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government “by the people, and for the people.”

Anyone can submit information, and the system is designed to allow citizens to drill down into their specific areas of interest about government and see everything that’s going on about that particular level of government. Or at least it appears to be designed that way; the server has fallen over under heavy load right now. I look forward to seeing how it shapes up.

Thomas Jefferson is on my mind, as he is every July 4th (I wouldn’t be a good Wahoo otherwise, I suppose). I wonder whether today, looking out at the world, and at his own United States, he would still feel the same as he did in 1821, when he penned the following to John Adams:

The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

And there’s another optimistic note that seems to speak directly to today’s nation:

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

Part 1: Greg writes an article that compares the Howard Dean candidacy and its fundraising prowess (and grab of a plurality, though not a majority, of the MoveOn primary) to a Smart Mob a la Howard Rheingold’s seminal work. The next day, he points to an article (via Doc Searls) that points out that it took the Dean campaign 84 days to raise $3.2 million, and since then it’s almost doubled the amount, with more than $2 million coming in over the Internet. And counting. People putting their money where their mouths are?

Part 2: Larry Lessig and the folks at eldred.cc have been fighting to get a bill introduced into Congress that would tip some of the balance of the copyrighted works back into the public domain—by making owners of works that have been in copyright for more than fifty and less than 75 years pay a $1 renewal fee each year. If the fee is not paid, the copyright lapses and the work falls into the public domain. This would help to unlock works that have no significant commercial potential, but cultural significance into the public domain.

On June 24 Lessig posted that he had found sponsors for this, the Public Domain Enhancement Act, in the form of Lofgren and Doolittle, Democrat and Republican (respectively) Representatives from California. The bill has since been introduced. We can only hope…

MoveOn’s primary starts today. The organization is sponsoring an online primary to allow its members to choose from the declared Democratic candidates; the organization will then endorse and support the candidate who receives a plurality of the votes. (In the preliminary straw poll, Governor Howard Dean, Senator John Kerry, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich got the most votes.) If you are a registered MoveOn member, you can help this experiment in online democracy by casting your vote today.

The irony? There is just as much of a vast right-wing conspiracy on line, and it’s easier to find. Greg pointed yesterday to fellow Hooblogger Wyeth Ruthven, who pointed to an article at Common Voice in which conservative columnist Jimmy Moore gives step by step instructions on how to submarine the MoveOn primary by voting for Al Sharpton. While Sharpton is unlikely to get a plurality of the votes as a result, unless there are more mean-spirited Cassiuses out there than MoveOn members, the action is likely to deny a plurality to the candidates which MoveOn members would legitimately vote for.

Wyeth also points to a discussion thread on FreeRepublic.com which illuminates the depth of intelligence and gentility which would lead someone to pull a stunt like this:

Go Al go! "If de candidate fit, you mus' run de dimwit"… (1)

This is not a FReeping opportunity - this is lunacy! These people are COMMUNISTS!

THINK ABOUT IT ...!!

DO YOU REALLY WANT YOUR NAME ON A LIST ASSOCIATED WITH A COMMUNIST ORGANIZATION ...??

HOW WILL YOU EXPLAIN THIS WHEN THE DOJ OR THE FBI COME CALLING AND ASKING YOU QUESTIONS AND POKING INTO YOUR PRIVATE AFFAIRS ...??(2)

Heh. It was only a matter of time before someone dusted off the C-word to smear opponents of our current Administration. I find it humorous that the poster seems as concerned about Ashcroft’s DOJ as I am.

So business as usual, but I’m glad that it’s moved online. Here it’s much easier to turn over the rocks and find what’s crawling underneath.

I used MoveOn to contact my congressman, Jay Inslee, about the pending media deregulation. He contacted me back:

Thank you for contacting me about the proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding further deregulation of the ownership rules for media companies.  I appreciate hearing from you.

Like you, I believe that the airwaves belong to the American people, and I share your concerns about the end result of the FCC's most recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  It is important to maintain the diversity of information sources so that the public interest can best be served. 

I have joined with several of my colleagues in leading the fight in Congress to prevent the FCC from allowing this rule change to go through.  Recently I sent a letter to my colleagues in Congress alerting them to the potential negative effects of the deregulation.  I also testified against the rule at the FCC hearing in Seattle held in March, and I wrote an editorial published in the Seattle Times that further expressed the dangers that further media consolidation pose to our system of free press and American democracy.  I have attached the editorial below for your review.

As you may know, in the FCC's 2002 Biennial Review there are four major rules being considered for possible relaxation:

1. Broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership rule: This prohibits the daily newspaper and a broadcast TV station from being owned by the same company within the same market.
2. Local TV multiple ownership rule and the radio/TV cross-ownership rule: These rules limit somewhat the number of stations that any one entity can own in a single community.
3. National TV ownership rule: This policy limits the number of TV stations a single company can own. The current limit prohibits a company from controlling stations that collectively reach 35 percent of all TV households.
4. Dual Network Rule: This policy prevents one of the four major networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox-from buying another network.

Please be assured I will be monitoring the FCC's decisions closely.  I hope you will continue to contact me about the issues that concern you, as I both need and welcome your thoughts and ideas.  I encourage you to contact me via email, telephone, or fax, because security measures are causing House offices to experience delays in receiving postal mail.  My email address is: Jay.Inslee@mail.house.gov. ; Please be sure to include your full name, address, including your zip code, in your message.  If you are a resident of the First Congressional District and would like to receive policy updates and newsletters via email, please email me to let me know.

Very Truly Yours,

JAY INSLEE
Member of Congress

The email included the content of Inslee’s editorial in the Seattle Times, which, as the paper notes in its archives, contains a factual error but is otherwise on the money.

So what has your representative done about the FCC action?

Someone finally pulled together all the wonderful administration lines about the Weapons of Mass Destruction that were the reason we bombed hell out of Iraq, risked American and coalition lives, destroyed our international credibility and moral authority, and set the precedent that nations can invade each other on suspicions and flimsy pretexts.

Starting with: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” (Dick Cheney, August 2002), going through “I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago—I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago—whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden” (Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne), and ending with “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on” (Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003). All sourced and hyperlinked.

Still any question about the contempt with which this “administration” holds its citizens, and the world?

Greg points to a BBC report that a Canadian scientist has found “astonishing” levels of uranium in the urine of two samples of 17 and 25 Afghan civilians. The conclusion the scientist, Dr. Asaf Durakovic of the Canadian Uranium Medical Research Center, reaches is that a new kind of uranium weapon was used during the war in Afghanistan.

I’m not saying Dr. Durakovic is wrong. Levels of uranium 100-500 times higher than those found in veterans suffering Gulf War Syndrome, after all, are awfully suggestive (the mean concentration was 315.5 nanograms per liter, while the US allowable is a mere 12). But I would like some information about the general background levels of uranium found in the Afghan population. Two samples is a seriously alarming indicator, but it’s not a smoking gun yet.

And I want a smoking gun. This administration has built such a wall of secrecy around itself and its policies that it’s been impossible to make any of the charges about inhumane and unAmerican conduct during wartime, let alone infringements of civil, legal, and Constitutional rights at home, stick. If this is real evidence, it needs to be bulletproof.

When you’ve mounted some of the most effective online anti-war protests ever, but still refused to prevent the war or convince the president to pay any more attention to your arguments than he did to his b-school classes, what’s your next act?

Some might give up. Not MoveOn. Currently they’re mounting a petition against the pending FCC ruling to further deregulate media ownership. The first round of this process was radio. Like your local radio station? Odds are you liked it better before Clear Channel bought it and started running it out of a central location hundreds of miles away. How do you like your local newspaper and television station? Want them all controlled by the same corporate interest? Before you say “it couldn’t happen,” think about what’s happened to radio. Yet most congresspeople only hear from the media on this one.

MoveOn is mounting a petition to convince Congress to block the FCC’s move. I think this one is worth signing, or at least looking at.

Salon is serializing Sidney Blumenthal’s White House memoir, The Clinton Wars. It’s amazing reading. Certainly not objective, but after reading everything that the rabid Clinton-haters have slung for almost a decade at the man, it’s interesting to read a perspective from the opposite side, inside the second administration just before all hell broke loose.

I wonder if it’s coincidence that the depiction of the president in the first installment sounds a lot like President Bartlett on The West Wing.

Philip Greenspun discusses things that could be done on the Internet to improve our ability during the next Presidential campaign to understand what the candidates are saying and doing, including distributed outlining and blogging. He suggests that blogging will not help us get a “comprehensive view of any one candidate.” But what if there were a centralized site with a channel for each candidate, like PolState, with a bunch of people having the ability to post information to that channel about the candidate, like BlogCritics?

I invoke LazyWeb. Let’s get a group blog going on this.

The US has restarted production of plutonium for nuclear weapons, the LA Times reported (via Detroit News) today.

Because, of course, all the nuclear weapons we already had weren’t enough.