Tines takes advantage of a break in the ugly weather we've been having to climb around in her avocado tree.

But I kinda applaud the effort:

A Florida teenager secretly made his way to Iraq this month for firsthand impressions of the war, and was returning home on Friday to family members who said they were galled by his recklessness but thankful he was safe.

The teenager, Farris Hassan, 16, financed the three-week journey with his own savings from investing in the stock market, said his mother, Shatha Atiya of Fort Lauderdale. He left South Florida on Dec. 11, flying to Kuwait City and reaching Iraq on Christmas Day, said his older brother, Hayder Hassan. He said American officials questioned Farris before allowing him to return here.

The family learned of Farris's adventure in e-mail messages he sent after arriving in Kuwait City, telling them not to worry or to expect him home soon. He even reminded another brother, Mehdi Hassan, to feed the cat in his absence.

Read the whole thing.

Please repost.

And DO NOT MISS CryptoKids™, NSA's totally awesome kids' program!

America's Future Codemakers!

Hey kid!? Psst!

Over here. Shhh.

Know any...vegans?

Yeah, don't go to the NSA's website. They'll track your surfing.

Classy.

The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type.

The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake.

Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program.

"Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."

Welcome to the new fascism.

It's just beginning, innit?

Hey, NSA? Track this: YOU ARE FUCKING FASCISTS. AND SOME OF YOU WILL HOPEFULLY GO TO PRISON.

So the kid who said homeland security was after him because he requested Mao's Little Red Book was lying.

Unfortunately, there was actual surveillance of terrorist domestic groups here in the US. Like PETA. And some vegans.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Welcome to the new fascism.

I hate vegans too (who doesn't, I mean, c'mon), but priorities seem a bit, um, misplaced.

I'm totally not gonna elaborate (it's just not worth it), but there's this lefty ex-blogger, now-journalist guy?

Ezra Klein?

Bit of an asshole.

And that's all I have to say.

Blog or beach? I chose beach. Sorry!

But I'm back. And it's raining. Still.

Boo.

I have a helluva tan tho.

No posting until late.

But I'll be blogging from el vacay. I feel like this story is too important to ignore.

Americablog on "activist judges":

It's funny - not in the ha ha way, but in the "this is how the Soviet people must have felt" way - that the right-wing is all upset about "activist judges" who supposedly refuse to obey the Constitution, and instead, again according to conservatives, do whatever they hell they want to impose their whim on the land. And now we have an activist president wantonly breaking the rule of law as passed by Congress and written in the Constitution in order to do the exact same thing.

You conservatives can't have it both ways. If an activist judiciary is dangerous then so is an activist president. We can't have any branch of government or any government official outright disobey the law of the land and the Constitution in order to do what THEY think is "best" for the country, especially when what they think is best just so happens to be spying on American citizens without a court order.

It's time for an all-out war on Activist Presidents.

Yes.

Squick.

Wikipedia entry here.

WARNING: Icky. Not for the faint-hearted.

Go check out the Whiskey Bar.

You want to see not-answering-the-question raised to a high art form?

Watch Condoleezza Rice on Press the Meat today.

The question she won't answer?

RUSSERT: What Democrats and Republicans in Congress are asking, what is the authority that you keep citing? What law? What statute? Where in the Constitution does it say that the President can eavesdrop, wiretap American citizens without a court order?

Ah.

That question.

[Incidentally? The guy whose theories of presidential power have justified all of this, these fiascoes, these tragedies? Is this guy. And I have walked by his office, which reeks of fascism, twice in the last two weeks.

And bitten my tongue. Because I'm trying to matriculate there...]

Athenae at First Draft:

Atrios says the president is a criminal. True, but reductive.

The president is a vigilante.

It's not just that he broke the law. It's that he's now saying, proudly, I broke the law, and it's okay because my friends (the heads of Senate committees who were briefed) said so, and it's okay because the people I broke the law to spy on were bad people.

They were, after all, Muslims in America.

That's okay, then.

Get angry or bleat. Your choice, really.

Bush and anonymous sources have indicated that certain members of Congress were briefed on the NSA spy-on-Americans program.

You would think one of them would be the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, wouldn't you?

It was Bob Graham, a Dem from Florida. And he says he wasn't told about it.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to "calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system."

Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."

The high-ranking intelligence official, who spoke with White House permission but said he was not authorized to be identified by name, said Graham is "misremembering the briefings," which in fact were "very, very comprehensive." The official declined to describe any of the substance of the meetings, but said they were intended "to make sure the Hill knows this program in its entirety, in order to never, ever be faced with the circumstance that someone says, 'I was briefed on this but I had no idea that -- ' and you can fill in the rest."

Hm.

The President himself tried to keep this one secret secret secret. Presumably even beyond the secrecy associated with other questionable terra-fightin' tactics, like renditions and torture. I wonder why.

A government official familiar with the NSA order said the president urged that the change be explained to only a very limited group of people on a "need-to-know" basis. That meant that, for nearly four years, only two people in the judicial branch of the U.S. government knew about the warrantless searches: U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and rotated off the court in May 2002, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.

And what was this thing called, informally? "The President's program." I'm creeped out just typing that.

"The President's program."

The official said that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and top officials in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review first briefed a few key officials on the plans to change the 25-year prohibition on most domestic surveillance. In a series of meetings, officials also answered Lamberth's questions about what some informally called "the president's program," and they asserted that no information gained through warrantless surveillance would be used to gain the court's authorization for secret wiretaps and warrants.

Impeach in early '06. These criminals must be punished before they can do more harm to this country and its citizens.

See this piece to discover how the Bush team is treating this like some PR issue that can be spun away and forgotten.

Criminals.

Wherein he asks the musical question:

"Do We Have To Wait Until Bush Purges 20 Million of Us Before We Can Say He's Like Stalin?"

Josh Marshall has clean rebuttals for every piece of administration garbage you'll hear thrown up to defend the secret spying of the government on its own citizens without warrants.

The FISA court is built for timeliness.

If there is a true emergency, the AG is authorized to start wiretaps and report them within 72 hours. Without a warrant.

THERE IS NO REASON FOR THIS.

Bush needs to be impeached in early '06. I don't think we can wait any longer than that.

The Times held onto the story for a year. Read this horseshit:

The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication.

In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.

In a statement yesterday, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller did not mention the book. He wrote that when the Times became aware that the NSA was conducting domestic wiretaps without warrants, "the Administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security."

"Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions," Keller continued. "As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time."

In the ensuing months, Keller wrote, two things changed the paper's thinking. The paper developed a fuller picture of misgivings about the program by some in the government. And the paper satisfied itself through more reporting that it could write the story without exposing "any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

Keller needs to be fired. Clean house at the Times and the Washington Post. They're all corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.

Keller's almost a fucking criminal himself, if it were only against the law to withhold vital information from the people about our government's imminent totalitarianism. Someone should at least punch him.

MORE: Read Athenae over at First Draft too. Good stuff.

This is the country we live in:

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.

The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.

The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.

Then Digby sez:

I keep hearing that there have been no abuses of the system, that the governemnt would never spy on people who don't deserve it. But can there be any good reason why, in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, that Mao's "Little Red Book" would be considered worthy of monitoring? Unless the Justice Department is using the Patriot Act to monitor citizens for Chi-Com sympathizing (which is entirely possible) I can only assume that a terrorist somewhere read the book and quoted from it, so reading it is considered a sign of terrorist activity.

If that's the case, then I would assume that reading any revolutionary, historical or political tract that a terrorist has been known to read makes one a terrorist suspect. That's an extremely broad brush and the only way that anyone could ensure that he or she is not going to come into the cross hairs of the government would be to not read any of those books, not criticize the government, not study terrorism, marxism, or even the American and French revolutions since a terrorist somewhere may have read about those things too.

Get worried, people. Remember: I'm no alarmist. But things may turn ugly.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the President of the United States ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without a court order, in clear violation of the law.

Here's the Times today on Bush's speech, for background:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - President Bush acknowledged on Saturday that he had ordered the National Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States without first obtaining warrants, and said he would continue the highly classified program because it was "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists."

In an unusual step, Mr. Bush delivered a live weekly radio address from the White House in which he defended his action as "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities." He also lashed out at senators - both Democrats and Republicans - who voted on Friday to block the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the president's power to conduct surveillance, with warrants, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The revelation that Mr. Bush had secretly instructed the security agency to intercept the communications of Americans and suspected terrorists inside the United States, without first obtaining warrants from a secret court that oversees intelligence matters, was cited by several senators as a reason for their vote.

...

Mr. Bush's public confirmation on Saturday of the existence of one of the country's most secret intelligence programs, which had been known to only a select number of his aides, was a rare moment in his presidency. Few presidents have publicly confirmed the existence of heavily classified intelligence programs like this one.

His admission was reminiscent of Dwight Eisenhower's in 1960 that he had authorized U-2 flights over the Soviet Union after Francis Gary Powers was shot down on a reconnaissance mission. At the time, President Eisenhower declared "No one wants another Pearl Harbor," an argument Mr. Bush echoed on Saturday in defending his program as a critical component of defending against terror attacks.

...

As recently as Friday, when he was interviewed by Jim Lehrer of PBS, Mr. Bush refused to confirm the report the previous evening in The New York Times that in 2002 he authorized the domestic spying operation by the security agency, which is usually barred from intercepting domestic communications. While not denying the report, he called it "speculation" and said he did not "talk about ongoing intelligence operations."

But as the clamor over the revelation rose and Vice President Dick Cheney and Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, went to Capitol Hill on Friday to answer charges that the program was an illegal assumption of presidential powers, even in a time of war, Mr. Bush and his senior aides decided to abandon that approach.

...

Not surprisingly, Democrats saw the issue differently. "Our government must follow the laws and respect the Constitution while it protects Americans' security and liberty," said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the Senate's leading critic of the Patriot Act. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the committee, said on Friday that "there is no doubt this is inappropriate" and that he would conduct hearings to determine why Mr. Bush took the action.

...

In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.

Wow.

Here's some response from "critics of the President":

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA):

Feinstein, a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees, called the program "the most significant thing I have heard in my 12 years" in the Senate and suggested that the president may have broken the law by authorizing surveillance without proper warrants.

"How can I go out, how can any member of this body go out, and say that under the Patriot Act we protect the rights of American citizens if, in fact, the president is not going to be bound by the law?" she asked.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Salto's Favorite Senator™:

Feingold's response on CNN this morning: "It's a sad day when the president is deciding to play politics with national security. By saying he authorized wire taps, the president is saying he runs the war on terror and can bypass Congress. There is a pattern of the president not listening to Congress; he feels that even if he doesn't have authority from Congress, he has authority to make up law himself." ... Feingold mentions Gitmo, torture in Abu Ghraib and says he sees a pattern of someone who sees himself as above the law. "It's a shocking series; a shocking record." Feingold says he did not know that this was going on. "If we haven't passed a law to do this, it is illegal. Its a shocking moment in the history of this country."

More outraged reaction at Eschaton here.

It is a fact that Bush is a criminal. A felon. 'Member when it was the loonies using the word "criminal"? It's not a particularly good word when it comes to "war crimes" because "war crimes" are kind of hard to define, if you're not genocidin' and stuff.

But Bush admitted to violating the law today. And his executive order was probably unconstitutional as well.

He's a criminal. He needs to be impeached. Cheney too. Gonzalez. Harriet Miers. (Can you impeach non-elected officials?) Then Rumsfeld and Steven Hadley and the rest of the happy-face Iraq crew that lied it up.

Get ready for the shitstorm, everyone. You think it was bad before?

This is the biggest story of the year. Bigger than Iraq, or Plame, or WMD, or Katrina, or Michael "Heckuvajob" Brown. Far bigger.

LINKS:

Digby has must-read background and context here.

See Reddhedd too. She's got some outrage. Not enough, in my mind.

Bush needs to be put in jail with his cronies. I mean it.

[rewritten to add more background material]

When next I blog (most likely), I'll be doing so from Maui.

Chew on that, suckas.

I really loved Richard Pryor.

He was such a deliciously smooth, funny truth-teller. His humanity was always on display: sometimes it was pretty and sometimes it wasn't so pretty. I thought he always believed what he was saying though. And he said it so well.

Also, growing up in the white midwest? Not so many black people around. Pryor's stuff gave me a little access to the race issue early, in junior high school, when I devoted all of my time to absorbing as much comedy as I could find. I didn't really understand some of what he was saying, but it was a little access to black culture and racial issues. It was old Pryor routines and Yo! MTV Raps on that count. Pretty much. And I remember loving NWA and borrowing Ryan Blenker's cassette copy of the first album because I knew my mom wouldn't let me buy it.

Anyway, back to Pryor.

He was a giant. And a genius. And a real human being. He exposed his own warts and flaws to show us all our own warts and flaws. So we could laugh at them and feel a little better.

Good obits:

The New York Times
Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post
David Edelstein in Slate
Digby at Hullaballoo

And here's a bit of the wonderful New Yorker profile of Pryor that you can buy here. I've managed to find a bit online:

ALTHOUGH Richard Pryor was more or less forced to retire in 1994, eight years after he discovered that he had multiple sclerosis ("It's the stuff God hits your ass with when he doesn't want to kill ya -- just slow ya down," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1993), his work as a comedian, a writer, an actor, and a director amounts to a significant chapter not only in late twentieth-century American comedy but in American entertainment in general. Pryor is best known now for his work in the lackadaisical Gene Wilder buddy movies or for abominations like "The Toy". But far more important was the prescient commentary on the issues of race and sex in America that he presented through standup and sketches like "Juke and Opal" -- the heartfelt and acute social observation, the comedy that littered the stage with the trash of the quotidian as it was sifted through his harsh and poetic imagination, and that changed the very definition of the word "entertainment," particularly for a black entertainer.

The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought: first, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and, second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell - a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt. The writers behind the collective modern ur-text of blackness -- James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison -- all performed some variation on the theme. Angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked. Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not, they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most -- white liberals.

Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken-word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy -- picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Bert Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Russell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson -- he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audiences' white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck. And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere lie also brought the issue of interracial love into the country's discourse. In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust, Pryor's gleeful, "fuck it" attitude had an effect on the general population which Wright's "Native Son" or Baldwin's "Another Country" had not had. His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement; in his life and onstage, he performed the great, largely unspoken story of America.

RIP Richard.

See here.

Don't forget to scroll all the way down.

Let's be honest: my heart's not in this.

So Salto will be on leave until January 1, 2006.

Site redesign! A working biography of the creator!

A whole new Salto! On January 1!

YOU WILL LUV IT

Is this seriously the best you can do?

To some Americans at least, the way the charges about secret prisons and C.I.A. flights have gained currency illustrates the readiness of many Europeans always to believe the worst about the United States.

More than one commentator over the last few days has referred to the secret prisons as a Gulag Archipelago, even though Romania and Poland, the countries where the prisons are said to be situated, have denied their existence. Moreover, their total prison population would be at most a few dozen - compared with the hundreds of thousands that were confined in Stalin's real Gulag Archipelago.

It's not all that good.

Lots of news in the world of Creed* this week, apparently.

This story has a quote so laden with awesome that I can't begin to describe it. I'll put it in comments to not ruin it for you.

And this story? Its beauty is perfect. Like a perfect diamond. A diamond that is actually the humiliation of a really bad corporate Christian rock band...um, guy. Who is desperate for pussy.

*Creed was a really bad Christian rock band. See here for background, philistine. (Or non-philistine?)