newtonusr @ 179

Damn. Fixed…

Ahh…southern girls with really big hair. We have an expression-”the higher the hair, the closer to god”

Arizona’s former Governor Rose Mofford must have been VERY close to God:

Mofford never worried about mere appearance, even when her hair was lampooned.

The gleaming white upsweep, swirled in a way that invites comparison to a Dairy Queen treat, has topped her head for 27 years…
Her hair was the star of a 1998 ad for the Arizona Historical Society Museum, which featured a photo of Mofford above a headline that read: “If she were dead, we’d have her hair.”

Unfortunately, the picture in this article does not do justice to her fame in this area, showing only a tame memory of the Mofford Mop.

I had to go off to a meeting before finishing this comment, which will now lie buried deep in EPU territory.

Bob in HI

… Ahmadinejad said the US president was “wicked, selfish and arrogant” …

If he keeps that up Bush will have to appoint Ahmad as our new AG. You just know Bush gets a kick out of being called all those manly things.

… Her maternal grandparents were holocaust survivers I think, but she was brought up Episcopalian. Who would do that to a kid? Must have been strange. …

Are you saying she’s Jewish? Wow! I doubt her white-bread WASP audiences would never guess that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bKD6khHqCM

In honor of Redd and Jane and all the other fearless ladies of da Lake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAYK_e1uDoo

Wow. Thanks! I really like that – have never heard the song or seen the video.
A great note to say good night on to all the pups. And thanks to Christy for turning up in Late Night, cheering us up like it was Saturday morning.

Mark Knopfler & Eric Clapton – Sultans of Swing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ-JyAGUsys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDpMqKSrr7Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcnP5CjOy1Y

FBI’s Unknown Eavesdropping Network:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/08/29/1248212.shtml

“Building off the design mandates of CALEA, the FBI has constructed a point-and-click surveillance system that creates instant wiretaps on almost any communications device. A thousand pages of restricted documents released under the Freedom of Information Act were required to determine the veracity of this clandestine project, Wired News reports. Called the Digital Collection System Network, it connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure. From the article: ‘FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government’s behalf. The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone’s location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.’”

More about this phenomenal contradtion to our Independence can be found here:
http://www.wired.com/politics/…..08/wiretap

Congress to eye feds’ spy satellite scheme:
http://news.com.com/8301-10784…..blogs.item
Posted by Anne Broache

When politicians return to Washington from their August recess next week, one of their first orders of business will be lobbing questions at Bush administration officials over recently disclosed plans to open up powerful spy satellites to the likes of American border-security agents and police.
On September 6, the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee plans to hold a morning hearing entitled “Turning Spy Satellites on the Homeland: the Privacy and Civil Liberties Implications of the National Applications Office,” according to a press release issued by the panel. Scheduled to appear for questioning are the Department of Homeland Security’s Chief Intelligence Officer Charles Allen, Chief Privacy Officer Hugo Teufel, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer Dan Sutherland.
The event is apparently a direct response to a Wall Street Journal report about two weeks ago, which revealed that the sprawling federal agency had signed off on expanded use of the so-called “eyes in the sky.” By October, Homeland Security is poised to establish a new subset called the National Applications Office, which would oversee expanding access to the surveillance images.

Data about domestic incidents is already fused and sorted 24/7 at Homeland Security ‘nerve centers’ like this one. (Credit: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
The military has been using the Cold War-era surveillance gadgets overseas for years in an effort to spot terrorist hideouts, to track contraband movement and to plot routes for U.S. soldiers, the WSJ reported. Domestic agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey have also had access to the high-resolution images for mapping and environmental studies.
But the use of the monitoring technique for domestic law enforcement purposes appears to be on murkier legal grounds. That’s why the plan has attracted concern from some congressional Democrats, including Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of a congressional telecommunications and Internet panel, and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the Homeland Security Committee’s chairman (click here for a PDF of Thompson’s August 22 letter).
Homeland Security officials, for their part, say they have already briefed the various congressional intelligence committees about their plans and have even secured a budget for their activities, according to the WSJ. That may make it more difficult for politicians the House Homeland Security panel to get answers in an open forum next week, as the Bush Administration officials may claim they’re not at liberty to discuss classified details.
It’s likely no coincidence that the hearing is set to occur during Congress’s first week back in session after a month-long recess. Congressional Democrats are clearly seeking to rebuild some credibility among privacy and civil liberties advocates after caving at the last minute to the president’s demands to enact what critics argue are unacceptably sweeping changes–albeit temporary ones–to federal electronic snooping law. (Since then, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have implicitly threatened to let that law die unless the administration cooperates with Congress’s demands for more details on its surveillance programs.)

What is nice about this story is that congress is finally looking in a spy system that has been around since the 90’s, if not earlier…

Living in the Eighties.

Wardance

Millenium (Bonus intro!)