FURTHERMORE. . .

WONKETTE - At his press conference with Tony Blair today, Bush again
revealed his deep spirituality - spiritualism, actually - when he proved
to reporters how much he knows about how much Iraq sucks: "Make no
mistake about it, I understand how tough it is — I talk to families who
died.". . . No American families have died in Iraq, thanks to tough
military recruitment standards that prevent entire families from
enlisting, but it's reasonable to assume entire families are among the
600,000+ Iraqis killed in the war. Are there entire dead Iraq families
that speak English, or does Bush secretly speak Arabic, or does the
Ouija board have live Babelfish translation or what?

http://wonkette.com/

IRAQ STUDY GROUP - In addition, there is significant underreporting of
the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a
filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi
is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the
source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the
database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt
U.S. personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there
were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful
review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of
violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is
systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with
policy goals.

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/

AL KAMEN, WASHINGTON POST - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice laid
down [rules for handling the Baker report] early Wednesday. An e-mail
"Watch Alert" from the department's operations center went out at 11:07
a.m., announcing that the report "has been released and is now
available" at various Web sites. Within minutes, all the folks in
Assistant Secretary John C. Rood's Bureau of International Security and
Nonproliferation got this e-mail: "All - Strict guidance this a.m. from
the Secretary that she does not want any public 'musing' by State
officers on the Iraq Study Group report. All public comments will be
handled by PA[Public Affairs]."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/
AR2006120701559.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns


PROTESTS, like everything else in life, can become pretty sterile. But
browsing an online history of punk in DC, we came across a fascinating
description of the role of local punk rockers in the anti-apartheid
movement including drumming the hell out of the South African embassy.
Go to the site, click on enter and then find the embassy on the map.

http://yellowarrow.net/capitolofpunk/

GUARDIAN WRAP - "About one thing George W Bush is right; though,
unsurprisingly, for the wrong reasons," says the FT's Philip Stephens in
a penetrating column today. "There can be no 'graceful exit' from Iraq.
America faces a resounding defeat. The eventual cost, in lost prestige
and influence in the Middle East and beyond as well as in blood and
treasure in Iraq, will be immense. . . "

SALT LAKE TRIBUNE EDITIORIAL - When U.S. District Court Judge Paul
Cassell sentenced Utah record producer and pot dealer Weldon Angelos to
55 years in prison, he was following the law. When he joined with a
who's who of the American bar to argue that that very sentence was, in
Cassell's words, "unjust, cruel and even irrational," he was seeking
justice. The fact that justice and the law do not match is not Cassell's
fault. It is the fault of Congress. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to hear the case brought by Angelos that his sentence, though
mandated by law, is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. If an
effective life sentence for such a common crime, invoked merely because
Angelos was found to be carrying a gun when he was caught selling
marijuana to undercover police officers, is not cruel and unusual, it's
hard to imagine what would be. As the brief filed by 145 one-time
prosecutors, including four former U.S. attorneys general, pointed out,
Angelos' sentence is double what would be handed down to someone who was
convicted of hijacking an airliner or being the kingpin behind a
death-dealing drug cartel. Angelos was operating in a Advertisement

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4798395

BOING BOING - A Platform for RFID Security and Privacy Administration is
a paper by Melanie R. Rieback and Georgi N. Gaydadjiev that won the
award for Best Paper at the USENIX LISA (Large Installation Systems
Administration) conference. It proposes a "firewall for RFID tags" -- a
device that sits on your person and jams the signals from all your
personal wireless tags (transit passes, etc), then selectively
impersonates them according to rules you set. Your contactless transit
card will only send its signal when you authorize it, not when some jerk
with an RFID scanner snipes it as you walk down the street. The
implementation details are both ingenious and plausible -- it's a
remarkable piece of work. Up until now, the standard answer to privacy
concerns with RFIDs is to just kill them -- put your new US Passport in
a microwave for a few minutes to nuke the chip. But with an RFID
firewall, it might be possible to reap the benefits of RFID without the
cost.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/06/personal_firewall_fo.html

SUPREME COURT DECIDING LESS CASES
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07scotus.html?ei=5090&en=
2cf0513bff0ac891&ex=1323147600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

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