On Monday, Rudolph Elmer is said to have turned over to Wikileaks names of US, UK and Asian celebrities, lawmakers and business-folks who may or may not have been trying to avoid paying taxes. Apparently, the data are confusing even to those used to dealing with such, so release won't be soon. Still, it will be interesting to see who is in the Heidi Fleiss Black Book of off-shore accounts. Most particularly if there are any prominent (and current) US lawmakers.
Glenn Greenwald has written about the federal government's common practice of seizing laptops and smartphones of American citizens who are re-entering the United States and reviewing their private data. Amazingly, our government is seizing this personal data without probable cause and even without reasonable suspicion:
When you really think about it, it's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this. Seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable. A laptop and its equivalents reveal whom you talk to, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you view, what you think, and virtually everything else about your life. It can -- and often does -- contain not only the most private and intimate information about you, but also information which the government is legally barred from accessing (attorney/client or clergy/penitent communications, private medical and psychiatric information and the like). But these border seizures result in all of that being limitlessly invaded. This is infinitely more invasive than the TSA patdowns that caused so much controversy just two months ago.But how often are these e-strip searches occurring?
[T]his is happening to far more than people associated with WikiLeaks. As a result of writing about this, I've spoken with several writers, filmmakers, and activists who are critics of the government and who have been subjected to similar seizures -- some every time they re-enter the country.But this is the tip of the iceberg:
A FOIA request from the ACLU revealed that in the 18-month period beginning October 1, 2008, more than 6,600 people -- roughly half of whom are American citizens -- were subjected to electronic device searches at the border by DHS, all without a search warrant.I highly recommend reading Greenwald's detailed article for the reaction to this practice by a smattering of members of Congress and by a few court decisions. The sad bottom line is that there is no political momentum to condemn and bar this practice, even in the context of ubiquitous rhetoric regarding the need to limit the power of the federal government.
According to Scientific American, there are more dangers to smoking cigarettes than tar and nicotine. There's also polonium:
[P]eople worldwide smoke almost six trillion cigarettes a year, and each one delivers a small amount of polonium 210 to the lungs. Puff by puff, the poison builds up to the equivalent radiation dosage of 300 chest x-rays a year for a person who smokes one and a half packs a day. Although polonium may not be the primary carcinogen in cigarette smoke, it may nonetheless cause thousands of deaths a year in the U.S. alone. And what sets polonium apart is that these deaths could be avoided with simple measures.The print edition of this article reveals that most of the polonium could be removed from cigarettes by removing it from the fertilizer and by washing the tobacco leaves with a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide. What follows is an old sad story: the tobacco industry has long refused to incorporate these changes to reduce the polonium. The good news is that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, passed in June 2009, requires the tobacco industry to address this problem, which it has ignored for more than four decades. Now let's be conservative with the numbers. Let's assume that only 2,500 people needlessly died each year from polonium poisoning for the past 40 years. That's 100,000 people who have been sent to early deaths by tobacco executives. That's the moral equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on Green Bay, Wisconsin. Yet no tobacco executives have ever been prosecuted, much less thrown in prison for this hideous conduct.
Mix Lux sees what's coming. Will it be another bailout for the banks in the form of a federal invasion of states rights? Will it be a federal law that says that banks don't need to obey state law? It could be ugly, and it might involve the transfer of massive amounts of money to banks that caused the current foreclosure problem. Lux cites to the writings of someone named "Numerian":
With increasing desperation, banks along with their enablers in Washington are going to try to jerry-rig a way out of this problem. Unfortunately for the banks, ex post facto laws are strictly forbidden by the Constitution, which is now being treated with new-found reverence by the Congress. It may be impossible to construct a law that solves problems like this that already exist. Perhaps the banks will get lucky, and some courts will begin to find in their favor, though that is certainly not the trend at the moment. Maybe the US Supreme Court will accept the banks’ argument that the securitization process in itself established a valid foreclosure claim even though mortgages were not properly assigned as required by state laws. This, however, would require the Supreme Court to make up a legal doctrine out of the blue (as the banks have done), thereby overturning all state laws and court rulings going back well over 100 years. Only a Supreme Court bought and paid for by bank lobbyists, and willing to prostitute itself publicly to its paymasters, would issue such a ruling. This means that the likely progression of events – the path we are now on - will lead to a near complete collapse of the housing market, because the big banks and the two government enterprises responsible for supporting the housing market will be fatally crippled wards of the state. The US government itself, including the Federal Reserve, will be equally crippled. Try as you might, you will find no words in the Bible – no phrases applicable to The Flood or to the destruction of whole cities at the hands of a vengeful God – that appropriately capture the financial gravity of this situation. But if we are forced to come up with some metaphor, Financial Armageddon will have to do.
In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions. Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe. As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind. We’re getting a picture of a loner who made no friends and indulged in a distorted worldview tending toward the paranoid. How much of his actions can be laid on politics and how much on his own obsessions is debatable. Many commentators very quickly tried to label him a right-winger, based largely on the political climate in Arizona and that he targeted a moderate, “blue dog” Democrat. This in the context of years of shrill right-wing political rhetoric that fully employs a take-no-prisoner ethic, including comments from some Tea Party candidates about so-called Second Amendment solutions. It’s looking like trying to label this man’s politics will be next to impossible and, as I say, if he is mentally unbalanced, what real difference does that make? (Although to see some people say “Look, he’s a Lefty, one of his favorite books is Mein Kampf ” is in itself bizarre—how does anyone figure Mein Kampf indicates leftist political leanings? Because the Nazis were “National Socialists”? Please.) Whatever the determination of Mr. Loughner’s motives may turn out to be, his actions have forced the topic of political stupidity and slipshod rhetoric to the forefront, at least until Gabrielle Gifford is out of danger of dying. Regardless of his influences, in this instance he has served as the trigger for a debate we have been needing to have for decades. This time, hopefully, it won’t be shoved aside after a few well-meaning sound-bites from politicians wanting to appear sensitive and concerned, only to have everyone go right back to beating each other bloody with nouns and verbs. But while it may be fair to say that Mr. Loughner is unbalanced and might have gone off and shot anyone, the fact is he shot a politician, one who had been targeted by the Right. Perhaps the heated rhetoric did not make Mr. Loughner prone to violence, but what about his choice of victims? [More . . . ]