Regular readers know that I have a lot of concerns with the USA PATRIOT Act. I share the suspicion of the power of government that the founding fathers had, a suspicion that many seem to completely lose when it comes to discussions of liberty versus security (this trade-off isn’t exactly what people think it is, more on that later when I have time).

Since I am short of time during my move from France to the US, I leave at 5:00AM on Monday, I will leave you with this to consider and to provide a foundation for the full discussion I plan to post later:

Report: FBI faked terror probe documents
Officials retaliated against agent who complained, N.Y. Times says

Reuters
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET Dec. 3, 2005

NEW YORK - FBI officials mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents to try to cover mistakes and retaliated against an agent who complained about the problems, The New York Times reported in its Sunday edition.

Citing a draft report of an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office, a copy of which was obtained by the newspaper, the Times said that in one instance correction fluid was used to alter dates on three FBI forms to conceal an apparent violation of federal wiretap law.

It was not known who altered the forms.

The case dates to 2002, the Times said, when the FBI’s Tampa office opened a terror investigation into whether laundered money, possibly connected to a drug outfit, might be used to finance terrorists overseas.

The FBI was considering initiating an undercover operation and asked an agent with expertise in the area to take part.

But the agent, Mike German, soon told FBI officials the Orlando agent handling the case had “so seriously mishandled” the investigation that a prime opportunity to expose a terrorist financing plot had been wasted.

The report however concluded that “there was no viable terrorism case.”

But the draft report, dated Nov. 15, said German, who left the bureau last year after he said his career was derailed after the Florida incident, was “retaliated against” by his boss, who stopped using him for prestigious assignments in training new undercover agents.

FBI spokesman Michael Kortan told the Times the bureau had not been briefed on the findings but said that once it did get the report, “if either misconduct or other wrongdoing is found we will take appropriate action.”

The report said the inspector general found the FBI had “mishandled and mismanaged” the investigation and said supervisors were aware of problems in the case but did not take prompt action to correct them.

Once German raised his concerns, an unidentified agent in Orlando “improperly added inaccurate dates to the investigative reports in order to make it appear as though the reports were prepared earlier,” the inspector general found, according to the Times.

Correction fluid was used to backdate forms that the main informant had signed as part of a bugging operation, in which he agreed that he had to be present for all undercover taping.

The alteration was significant, the report found, because the informant had taped a 2002 meeting with suspects but left the recorder unattended while he used the restroom, in violation of federal law.

The report also said that after German began making his complaints about the case, the head of the FBI undercover unit, Jorge Martinez, froze him out of teaching assignments in undercover training and told one agent that he would “never work another undercover case.”

For those who say “no real harm was done here,” remember, the gravest illnesses start with minor symptoms.

Technorati Tags: commentary, FBI, government, opinion, patterns in the white noise

Jack must have been hitting the scotch pretty hard the other night, because he offered me a set of keys as well! I haven’t posted anything up to this point because my internet access is also limited at the moment. And for some reason, the days seem to have snuck by me this week.

Do you ever have that, where you’re doing your own thing and suddenly you realize, “Holy CRAP! It’s Thursday already!”

That’s the kind of realization I had this morning when I woke up and… somehow… it was Sunday. Now, I understand the natural progression of the days of the week, so I understand that it was Saturday yesterday, Friday the day before, etc., but for some reason it never really sunk in. Well, this week, at least.

But that got me to thinking. No, no… it’s true, despite whatever lack of it this post might indicate.

It got me to thinking about my perception of time. It never seemed to me that time was passing that quickly. As a matter of fact, this week seemed to drag on, and it seemed that the weekend would never get here. And now, lo and behold, it’s Sunday and half the weekend (or more, if you count Friday night) is already gone!

Woe is me!!!

Maybe I’ll go to a nudie bar, just so I can say I’ve done something weekend-ish this weekend. Or does going to a nudie bar even count as a “weekend-ish” activity anymore?

(actually, I was just trying to figure out a way to mention “nudie bar” on Jack’s site without sounding completely depraved - and I’m up to three times already(!), although I’m not quite sure that I don’t sound depraved)

But I’ve gotten off my point. I was talking about my perception of time this week. I suppose one’s perception of anything depends largely on your particular perspective. Since I wasn’t especially interested in most of the activities I was engaged in during the week, I suppose my perspective was one of watching the clock. Therefore, I perceived the passage of time acutely.

This weekend, however, I was busy running errands, fooling around with my computer, and other random activities not worth mentioning, all of which were of particular interest to me - if not to anyone else - but which led to my perspective being one of focusing on those activities, not on the clock, and my perception of the passage of time was greatly diminished.

Anyway, I’m not sure what underlying point I wanted to make with all of this, but I just thought it was interesting to see how my perception of something depended on the perspective from which I was viewing it.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has below its masthead the line, "ONE OF AMERICA’S GREAT NEWSPAPERS." No kidding. How the paper measures the greatness of itself is a bit of an unknown. How many papers have been vetted and found wanting? Or are we in the modern Little League of news organizations wherein all are judged a winner?

I suppose that if the field of greatness is expanded sufficiently, then one could assert with a passable straight face that the Post-Gazette is among the unspecified great. And yet, I wonder.

In today’s Sunday Forum section, where editorials live, the editors sought fit to publish Joe Lieberman’s Wall Street Journal OpEd. From last Tuesday.

Still, there are a very good selection of editorialists at the P-G. Jack Kelly does a great job of countering the whining attitude of the editors. Ann McFeathers writes consistently well. But sometimes, in the midst f making good points, the P-G’s columnists betray a certain, well, bias.

In Dennis Roddy’s column today about some of the more ridiculous activity that passes for Homeland Security, the author (a good writer, generally) can’t allow the story to be told and left for the reader. He has to trump up the bona fides of the woman profiled. Roddy’s story revolves around a woman who was arrested for not giving federal officers her identification:

Guards from the Federal Protective Services marched onto the bus,
took her away and charged her with two counts under the Code of Federal
Regulations — failing to comply with signs and directions and
violating the terms of admission to federal property.

"I caught the next bus that came through," she said. "I got to work. I
was like three hours late." She had to let her children know, including
her son, Dale, who is currently recovering from wounds he received
fighting for the U.S. Army in Iraq.

Now, I would be inclined to side with the woman, Deborah Davis. However, her argument has nothing whatsoever to do with her son’s service in Iraq, for which we all should be grateful. Ms Davis’ son’s injuries give her neither more nor less legitimacy in this case. But Roddy can’t help himself. Ah! The injustice of it all! This woman’s son was injured in Iraq and what thanks does she get? Hauled off to the federal pokey! Cheap Dennis. Really cheap.

In the same M.O. but on a different subject, Dan Simpson (who has done some good reporting from Morocco lately) heads straight for the showers in an otherwise innocuous trifle about the Christmas tree exhibit at The Carnegie.

He starts with a PC apology for being at the exhibit in the first place:

Wherever the fir tree falls in the historical transition in religion
from solar monotheism to other systems, including Christianity, for me
the December holidays have always had to include Christmas trees as an
essential part.

Well, I’m relieved that Dan considers a Christmas tree essential to, uh, Christmas. But I can even forgive him this, if only because it has become so painfully predictable. But near the end, in describing one tree that incorporated cows in the design, Simpson goes a little too near some rhetorical phase out:

The theme of the fifth tree was the man in the moon. It has an enormous
kite, with a dramatic tail, and seven cows under the tree. In addition
to "the cattle are lowing" mythology attached to musical accounts of
Christ’s birth in the manger, cows add a restful pastoral touch to any
tableau. If we could adopt a bovine, cow-like approach to some of what
is going on in the world, we would probably be better off, during the
holidays and in general.

Allow me to highlight the offending sentence:

If we could adopt a bovine, cow-like approach to some of what
is going on in the world, we would probably be better off, during the
holidays and in general.

Um, Dan? I don’t where you grew up or where you lived before Pittsburgh. But even us city folk understand that cows get slaughtered.

I’m wondering what the crappy papers run on Sunday.

A group of people who work at the site where I had my expatriate assignment started a loose association of people interested in photography. The goal was to improve our skills at photography by choosing a subject that we would critique each persons photos of at the next gathering.

I wrote about the initial topic chosen, nature in the city, back when I first posted a photo of my favorite subject, the 13th century church which is about 100 yards from my former apartment in Grenoble. In that photo, the plants growing out of the crevasses and corners in the old, carved stones seemed to be a fascinating illustration of how nature takes hold even in artificial environments.

I hope to continue to participate even if only by email, and the new subject is culture. I don’t think there is any limitation beyond that single word. The photo below was taken with that subject in mind, it is of a tower from the old city wall that has been incorporated into a museum (an aside, there is a small courtyard dedicated to the rights of man and liberty with several plaques commemorating the town participation in the French Revolution, a declaration of universal human rights in the 20th century, and a small plaque thanking the US colonel of paratroopers who liberated Grenoble in World War II), and the local theater which if the posters are any indication, has a very active resident company. Even though it is only 60 yards from my apartment, I never attended any performances because my skills in French never reached the point I thought would be sufficient to appreciate the performances. Perhaps I was wrong, for the performance is in everything other than the words themselves.

Given the tower from the old city wall juxtaposed with the 1960s-vintage metalwork in the center of the photo and the illuminated “theatre” on the right, I thought it to be an interesting juxtaposition of different aspects of culture appropriate to the topic of the group.

As always, a larger photo can be seen in a pop-up window by clicking on the image below.

This image has not been cropped, nor have the contrast or light levels been altered, so it is relatively true to the colors I saw when I took the photo. Opinions are welcome.

If I am fortunate, it was not raining today and I was able to go to the brocante (kind of a flea-market) to take more photos and perhaps buy a few small mementos before I leave France tomorrow. If I have an Internet connection and the time, I will try to post any worthwhile photos later today.

Technorati Tags: letters from Europe, photography, photos, photos of Europe, photos of Grenoble, pictures

On government:

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
   -Kin Hubbard

On life:

Life is one long process of getting tired.
   -Samuel Butler

On people (blogging has given more weight to this remark!):

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
   -Dale Carnegie

Technorati Tags: quotes

This may come as a surprise to some, but our United States Constitution does not protect the right of all citizens to vote, but rather the right of all qualified citizens to vote.

Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution requires:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

As such, state legislatures are given the power and authority to set the time, place, and manner of elections; however, the Constitution does explicitly prohibit discrimination (Amendments XV, XIX, and XXVI) in granting the franchise based on a person’s race, sex, or age.

Amendment XV to the Constitution provides:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIX states:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XXVI:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Notwithstanding, States and other governments can and do disfranchise individuals and groups of citizens. It would appear, if there is no provable bias, it is Constitutional, despite the guarantee of “equal protection” provided by Amendment XIV :

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Case in point is the disfranchisement due to criminal conviction. According to Wikipedia, there are thirteen U.S. states which deny the right to vote to those serving time for felony conviction; however, the disfranchisement is for the length of incarceration. Texas has a similar law that extends the suspension of the right to vote for a period of two years after release from custody. Thirteen other U. S. states permanently deny the right to vote with Arizona and Maryland imposing perpetual disfranchisement after two convictions. Only two states, Maine and Vermont allow prison inmates to vote unless disfranchisement is meted out as a separate punishment.

Since 1868 Florida has had a lifetime voting ban for felons.

In the case of Johnson v. Bush, 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 5945, 18 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. C 406 (11th Cir. Fla. Apr 12, 2005) eight Florida citizens, representing a class of over 613,000 Florida citizens who have fully served sentences of incarceration, probation, or parole on felony convictions, challenged the Florida Constitutional provision barring convicted felons from voting in the State of Florida.

The case synopsis is as follows:

Plaintiffs contend that this provision violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. Plaintiffs contend that: the original provision, enacted in 1868, was motivated by a discriminatory purpose to disenfranchise African-Americans; this provision was reenacted in 1968 with no explanation provided, maintaining the original taint of discriminatory purpose in the 1868 enactment; the disproportionate effect on African Americans; and, the fact that African Americans are less likely to have their rights restored.

On November 14, 2005, the United States Supreme Court, without comment or published decision, rejected the appeal of Florida felons seeking to regain their right to vote, thereby affirming the April 12, 2005 en banc decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in the Johnson case.

That court’s findings have been summarized:

The Court conceded the fact that some provisions of the 1868 Constitution were discriminatorily motivated, but this did not mean all provisions were. The Court, however, went on to state that there was no direct evidence of discriminatory motivation behind the provision in question. Additionally, in 1968, amendments to the Florida Constitution were considered and debated in a deliberative process, and amendments to the provision in question were changed to only include felons, whereas in the past people convicted of misdemeanors were also disenfranchised. No evidence of racial animus was provided, a valid reason for the provision was found, and as such the provision was found to be constitutional. Finally, the Court held that the legislative history behind Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act indicates that, while the section was intended to prevent discrimination in elections, it was never intended to affect a State’s ability to disenfranchise persons convicted of felonies.

Per se, the issue of convicted felons losing their right to vote while incarcerated and during their period of probation is of little interest to me; however, I am not of the opinion the loss of franchisement should be permanent once one has served the requisite time and complied with all probationary matters. Further, I have no problem with some State-instituted process whereby a convicted felon is required to apply for re-institution of the right to vote.

What I find provocative about this topic is the assertion by the plaintiffs in the Johnson case that 10 percent of African-American adults in the state are prohibited from voting under the ban and this percentage does not include those presently incarcerated.

This is further apparent in the Petition for Writ of Certiorari filed by the Johnson plaintiffs with the United States Supreme Court:

Questions Presented

1. Is a permanent felony disenfranchisement provision - like all other voting qualifications subject to challenge under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act on the ground it results in denial of the right to vote on account of race?

2. When a provision as enacted by a state for the purpose of disqualifying otherwise eligible black voters, and it has disenfranchised blacks at twice the rate of others for more that one hundred years, does the state bear the evidentiary burdens of production and persuasion in proving it reenacted the provision for an independent, nondiscriminatory reason sufficient to purge its unconstitutional taint?

As stated above, it would appear, if there is no provable bias, disfranchisement is Constitutional, despite the guarantee of “equal protection” provided by Amendment XIV.

The implications of this extend beyond race, sex, and age.

It’s happening again. On televisions across the country, I suppose - although it’s possible that it’s only in the South, another example of Northern Oppression perhaps - McDonald’s is advertising the Return of the McRib.

It even has it’s own website. To be honest, I don’t know how often the McRib returns. I remember trying one once, and thinking it was maybe the worst sin committed in the name of barbeque since the advent of fire. But I don’t know if the McRib shows up every year, or every couple of years, or on some sort of random basis. It’s just amazing to me that it ever made more than one appearance. Maybe McDonald’s thinks if they just put enough of that vaguely barbequeish sauce on it, they can convince people to buy it. “For a short time only, try the new McDonald’s McBuffalo Chip Sandwich!! It has sauce!” I’ve never heard anyone proclaim a desire to actually get, and eat, a McRib. Someone must, because McDonald’s wouldn’t otherwise try to foist this culinary apostasy off on us. At least, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t. Maybe there’s some corporate calculation that making the McRib available will cause an increase in hamburger sales, as a grateful nation of consumers decides that maybe the Double Cheeseburger, or the Quarter Pounder, or the Big Mac, isn’t so bad after all. Maybe they have some obscure contract that requires them to buy a couple of million tons of some vague pork-like meat periodically. Or maybe they just figured that a country that just re-elected George Bush as President is ripe for persuading that they really, truly, want/desire/crave a McRib. I figure by this time Jack has probably rowed about halfway across, maybe less if he swung south to avoid Hurricane Epsilon. If he catches the westerlies soon enough, maybe he can reach the shores of our great McNation in time to partake of a McRib. Washed down with a carbonated beverage of his choice, and served with a side of French Fries cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil, or hell, it might be partially strained Castrol 5W30), it would be just the thing to wipe away the memory of those nasty French meals and French wines that poor Jacques has been forced to consume. So, Jack, keep rowing and don’t fret. After all, you, more than most, deserve a break today.

FOR ALL YOU LOVERS OF WORDS

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

When you’ve seen one shopping center you’ve seen a mall.

Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine.

Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat.

(Pssst… are you groaning yet?)

It has been determined that the most used sexual position for married couples is a doggie position.

The husband sits up and begs.

The wife rolls over and plays dead.

** vw note: this reverses rolls after the woman hits 35 years of age. :-)
** UPDATE: Do you remember the story of the Rabbit and the Turtle? This is the PERFECT example of it. The Jack Rabbit runs around humping everything in site while young and just can’t make it to the finish line as he gets older… while the Turtle goes slow and easy, winning as she passes the finish line around age 35.

Yaaaa, I know… it’s getting worse. Only 2 more days for me to be posting… now the questions are… which days and how bad can it get? If I can make you smile and groan at least once… I have succeeded!!!