Pondering the recent Spanish Star-Spangled Banner controversy I have to agree with Atrios that we indeed are "living in stupid times."  Let's leave history out of this faux controversy, which doesn't bode well for the outraged, and look at those hoping to exploit some sort of immigrant backlash.  I know a lot has happened in the last five years, but don't you think that the President when asked to make a statement might also mention that his 2000 campaign regularly pandered to the Hispanic vote by, yes, singing the national anthem in Spanish at campaign events or that that particular campaign spectacle was so popular that Jon Secada performed the national anthem in Spanish at the first Bush inaugural and somehow nobody thought it was a big deal?  

Lesson:  Okay to use national anthem to pander to ethnic group you hope will help you get elected, not okay to use national anthem to pander to ethnic group if its suddenly a big political issue that offends the more conservative and nativistic element of your political base in an election year.  Who knew?

Kudos to Think Progress for being all over this.  Too bad somebody in the mainstream media couldn't have done a little more research on this instead... although I guess CNN's Ed Henry has finally asked the question.

Update (5/4/06): I meant to do this sooner, but the Washington Post looked into it yesterday and it appears Jon Secada sang "America, the Beautiful" in Spanish at the inaugural.  On everything else, the White House communications people seems to have "CRS" disease.

Conservation at its finest.  Kudos to the enterprising photographer who snapped Denny Hastert getting out of his hydrogen-powered prop vehicle and getting back in that good old gas guzzler of an SUV.  Seems they were doing a press conference at a local gas station talking about our current energy problems, although if its the gas station I'm thinking of, they pretty much could have walked back to Capitol Hill because they were only a few blocks away...not to mention that Metro line nearby? 

(via Ezra at Tapped)

The President usually puts me at a loss but has anybody noticed that his preferred governing style seems to be, "Give me the powers of a Monarch and despite my record so far I'll save the day."   I'm surprised he hasn't just declared that rising gas prices are part of the War on Terror and declared Congress' authorization of force legislation allows him to unilaterally set fuel standards. 

BTW, did anyone else laugh when Bush said in this piece, "... I intend to use it wisely if Congress will give me that authority"? 

Did anybody notice something strange about this piece in TPM Muckraker?  No, not the fact that a lobbyist ran a hooker ring/poker party out of the Watergate geared toward servicing members of Congress or the fact that the current CIA chief and his #3 likely met at Mr. Wilke's party.  No, the oddest statement in this piece comes from former Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) who quote, "says he was there, although he never stuck around for the women."  "Good-time Charlie" Wilson not staying around for the ladies?  I know the man has slowed down in his later years, but anyone whose read Charlie Wilson's War would have a hard time believing that statement.   

Ever wonder why the White House always remains so cocksure of itself and/or out of touch with the national mood in general?  Well, maybe its because nobody there watches anything but Fox News.  Check out this exchange between Scott McClellan and a reporter complaining that he can't get anyone at the White House to turn to another news channel, even on Air Force One!

I'm not sure I get it?  Bill Frist puts forth a GOP plan to give everyone a $100 gas rebate check...did somebody just pull that number out of thin air or something?  For my family, that would amount to maybe 40% of what we spend on gas EVERY MONTH.  How is a one-time $100 rebate suppose to help anyone?  Seriously!  Maybe we should just look at it as an attempted bribe, or something?  The worst part is they've come up with a dumb idea because in an election year they're under pressure to look like they care, but then they came up with a plan that makes them look even more out of touch with what most American's are going through than if they proposed nothing at all!

In only five years, FEMA went from being an example of a well-run and effective federal agency to so broken that the Senate committee investigating the government's response to Hurricane Katrina says scrap the whole damn thing and start over.  Just one more thing to remember when assessing the leadership and management abilities of our "CEO President."

Fitzgerald goes before the new grand jury for the first time since December 7, 2005.  Expect a Friday announcement of an indictment of the the right-hand man of the President of the United States.  The fun's just getting started.

I'm with John: If Tony Snow were to be named White House Communications Director it wouldn't be much of a change from his current position at Fox News.

The core problem in the Iran nuclear situation is Iran's objective need for nuclear weapons.

Okay, I don't know how big the Vatican is, but we are currently building a walled compound of 21 buildings spread out over 104 acres in a section of the Green Zone in Baghdad that will have its own military force, self-contained utilities and a population of over 5,500 people which we will soon call the U.S. Embassy, Iraq.  Excuse me, can you say ten times the size of the typical US embassy compound, six times larger than the United Nations compound and roughly two-thirds the sized of the National Mall in D.C.!?!?  

Now, I understand how the size of this new embassy complex pretty much shows that Iraq is supremely messed up and its still too dangerous for most American civilians to go outside the Green Zone, but how do you build something so obtrusively large and representative of our continued control of the country and not undermine the authority of whatever government might eventually be formed by the Iraqis? 

Who in the hell came up with that plan?  Anybody???   

Those are the words of Lt. Col. Chris Pease, deputy commander for Iraqi police training in east Baghdad after admitting that sectarian militia death squads are not only active but have infiltrated his police force and for the most part his hands are tied.   

Let's see, an average of 85 bodies a day come into the Baghdad morgue, most killed execution style and showing signs of torture, now multiply that by seven days a week, four weeks a month and 12 months a year....and that's just Baghdad!  Iraq is starting to put up the kind of monthly death statistics we haven't seen since the twenty years of violence in Lebanon or more recently Bosnia, but somehow if we don't see major urban combat with artillery battles between militias we can pat ourselves on the back and breathe a heavy sigh of relief that we don't see any sort of civil war going on.

At the core of the Bush administration's illegal eavesdropping on the American public's telephone calls is a black box called the Narus STA 6400.  The manufacturer, Narus, is a company that provides software programs for internet billing and tracking which has now branched out into the area of survellance.  The company's own webpage tells you what you need to know:

As the foundation for the industry’s most advanced IP security, intercept and traffic classification applications, NarusInsight is unique in its ability to simultaneously provide deep packet inspection from layer 3 to layer 7 and complete correlation across every link and element on the network. NarusInsight provides carriers with the flexibility and superior price performance benefits associated with deployment either at the network edge, the high-speed core or both simultaneously.

The core of the survellance operations is the Narus Insight Intercept Suite:

[The] capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners’ powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.

That's right, using these tools, the government can look at your email and its attachments, listen in to your internet telephone calls and see everything you are searching.

But Narus isn't only helping the U.S. control communications, its also helping Communist China do the same by allowing the Communist party to close off access to internet telephone calls in Shanghai.

How does our government use the device?  Read the affidavit of an AT&T technician who worked with the NSA to install the equipment:

In 2002, when I was working in an AT&T office in San Francisco, the site manager told me to expect a visit from a National Security Agency agent, who was to interview a management-level technician for a special job. The agent came, and by chance I met him and directed him to the appropriate people.

In January 2003, I, along with others, toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco -- actually three floors of an SBC building. There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room.

While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. . .   I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the "splitter" cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.

One of the documents listed the equipment installed in the secret room, and this list included a Narus STA 6400, which is a "Semantic Traffic Analyzer". The Narus STA technology is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.

My job required me to connect new circuits to the "splitter" cabinet and get them up and running. While working on a particularly difficult one with a technician back East, I learned that other such "splitter" cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. . . Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, Web surfing or any other data.

This is how your government spies on you and everyone else on the planet.