From N.Y. Times

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the National Security Agency’s program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant violated the Constitution, and she ordered it shut down.

The ruling was the first judicial assessment of the Bush administration’s arguments in defense of the surveillance program, which has provoked fierce legal and political debate since it was disclosed last December. But the issue is far from settled, with the Justice Department filing an immediate appeal and succeeding in allowing the wiretapping to continue for the time being.

Judge Taylor ruled that the program violated both the Fourth Amendment and a 1978 law that requires warrants from a secret court for intelligence wiretaps involving people in the United States. She rejected the administration’s repeated assertions that a 2001 Congressional authorization and the president’s constitutional authority allowed the program.

“It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights,” she wrote. “The three separate branches of government were developed as a check and balance for one another.”

Read On

© Nick Anderson - 08.18.2006

http://www.107.peugeot.co.uk/peugeot.swf

From Reuters:

Up to 200 strip poker players will compete Saturday to see who will lose their shirts -- and more -- and who will scoop 10,000 pounds by retaining their clothes and modesty.

Read full article

From Wired

Legal experts begin to decipher a federal judge's ruling ordering the administration to stop its secret wiretapping. A Supreme constitutional battle may be at hand. In 27B Stroke 6.

Decoding Judge's NSA Injunction

Via Christian Science Monitor

The video-sharing website best known for offbeat amateur video is becoming a major political tool.

Politicos beware: You live in YouTube's world.

Stuart Carlson - 08.18.2006

Op- Ed from L.A Times:
The CIA-Contra-Crack Connection, 10 Years Later: Reporter Gary Webb was the victim of his own hyperbole, but he never got credit for what he got right.

Ten years ago today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance," the headline ran beneath the provocative image of a man smoking crack — superimposed on the official seal of the CIA.

The three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s.

This is the paragraph that caught me the most (it is my emphasis on chosen sentences)

Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism, one in which top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004.Unlike the media pariahs who came after "Dark Alliance" — most notably fabulists Stephen Glass of the New Republic and Jayson Blair of the New York Times — Webb didn't invent facts. Contrary to the wholly discredited reporting on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Webb was the only victim of his mistakes. Nobody else died because of his work, and no one, either at the CIA or the Mercury News, is known to have lost so much as a paycheck. The editors involved with the story, including Managing Editor David Yarnold, survived the scandal to receive generous promotions.

Read More

On the blog The Tattered Coat, Matt has a post about how the Bush administration force the timing of the recent London arrests. His analysis of reports by NBC amonst others is a must read.

This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.

It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.

For the GOP, the short-term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.

The Republicans, in other words, once again played politics with national security, and hurt anti-terrorism efforts as they did so.

They cannot be trusted to protect us from the threat of terrorism because — to paraphrase The Downing Street Memo — they fix terror investigations around smear campaigns.

Read More

Listen to the sound of water. Listen to the water running through chasms and rocks. It is the minor streams that make a loud noise; the great waters flow silently.

The hollow resounds and the full is still. Foolishness is like a half-filled pot; the wise man is a lake full of water.

-Sutta Nipata

Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn - Garrison Keillor

© Bill Watterson - 08.18.1995

Matt McClain - Rocky Mountain News

Olathe Sweet Corn Festival - Eating a total of 19 ears of corn in a seven-minute period, Dan "Tiny" Parker won the men's corn eating contest at the 15th annual Olathe Sweet Corn Festival in Olathe, Colo. "I had lost the last two years (in the corn eating contest) but, they still treat me like a champion", he said.

Bush is a Speechalist? A video on Veoh Networks by tommyuki

http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e105745ssDkBTjj

Thanks Mark

From High Country News

Donald Rumsfeld’s televised get-together with five hand-picked soldiers at Iraq’s Balad Air Base July 12 was probably meant to be one of those staged, nice-nice interviews. It didn’t turn out that way, reports the Navajo Times, because "one of the Navajo Nation’s finest," Marine Cpl. Arthur King from St. Michaels, Ariz., put the visiting secretary of Defense on the hot seat. King began by telling Rumsfeld that his job was looking for the kind of deadly IEDs - improvised explosive devices - that have killed more than 2,000 troops in Iraq. He then pointed out that his unit had been waiting three months for a new IED detector to replace "one of the oldest pieces of equipment in country." That was bad enough, but then the soldiers in his unit were watching television when they saw a state-of-the-art IED detector on display in New York City. "We just wondered why that was?" King inquired. Rumsfeld quickly said that New York City had its own budget and could buy what it wants - although he added proudly that his department’s $3.6 billion budget "dwarfs" that of the Big Apple. The government was working hard on what he called the "IED problem," Rumsfeld said, but the Defense secretary stumbled through an explanation that ended with him wondering why King’s Marine unit was "still stuck with an old piece of equipment?" Rumsfeld turned to George Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and asked if he could answer the question. Casey told King, "We’ll get back to you on that."

© Nick Anderson - 08.13.2006

This is a great video on YouTube.

Google has quite a bit on info on the whole craze (along with tons more video)

Floating Belly Up: it's stink or swim at Isamoralda - Westword

This has to one of the most creatively written restaurant reviews that just rips apart the establishment

Trust me, when someone invites you over for a beer, this is what you want to see - lots and lots of New Belgium beer !

© Chan Lowe - 08.22.2004

© Stuart Carlson - 08.24.2004

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

© Paul Conrad - 08.24.2004

Or is it, W eye spy you?