Tory teabaggers

The tea party "movement" has been an astroturf effort from the beginning. Here's my evidence: My lovable liberal email address is on their list. How did it get there? A human teabagger wouldn't put me on their email list, though a webbot harvesting email addresses for a PR firm wouldn't care about my opposing ideology as it tried to pump up the appearance of a big movement.

There's more evidence. I get teabagger email from state organizations in many different states. Since I stopped reflexively deleting the teabagger email, I've heard from:

• Colorado - via Blue Sky Factory - multiple times
  
• Arkansas - via the same email server - multiple times
  
• Texas - yep, same server - multiple times
  
• Ohio - uh-huh (previously had no idea where the hell Zanesville is, not to mention local wingnut "Coach" Dave Daubenmire)
• New York - multiple times
  
• and a Virginia/Tennessee two-fer

All these far-flung organizations just happen to have the same email provider and list.

Of course, CNN continues to imagine that it might be possible that the teabagging organizations are really grassroots eruptions of popular sentiment:

Some Tea Partiers have voiced anger and concern over whether the powerful groups are "astroturfing'' what is supposed to be a grass-roots coalition -- the idea that the movement is being organized by old-fashioned GOP bigwigs to promote their agenda.

It's plainly obvious that they're centralized exploitations of the passion of wingnut ignoramuses. But CNN won't tell its readers the plain truth. CNN has to pretend its own ignorance in order to split the difference between, in this case, corporate conservatives and teabaggers.

It's maddening to try to get news out of our media. I imagine it's a lot like reading Pravda in the Soviet days.

Why is Fred Thompson spamming me?

Fred, I'm not interested, never have been. I know you need something to keep you busy in your retirement. Did you ever consider needlepoint? Star of MP3 - isn't that quite a comedown?

I'm going to try the unsubscribe link, see if that gets yet another yammerhead out of my inbox.

Obama expected to obey the law

Duhbya's White House blithely ignored the Presidential Records Act, but Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry to comply:

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas.

I don't buy it. As long as his friends know that their correspondence is going to be an open book in five to twelve years after the end of the administration or could be subpoenaed, and as long as Obama refrains from classified discussions, the only reason for him to give up his back channel is that it's a time sink. He seems disciplined enough to me to handle that.

Can we please at least pretend that law can work in ways that make sense?

Mother's maiden name

The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account should be a teachable moment for people who really are regular people. Don't use stuff that other people know to "secure" your data!

When your bank or your credit card or your service provider asks you to choose a challenge question on your account and they offer you vintage 1950 questions - mother's maiden name, place of birth, high school graduated from, last four digits of SSN, etc. - it's pretty clear that either (1) they don't know what they're doing, or (2) they don't care, and their real goal is to fob responsibility for security off on you. (Of course, CNN sanitizes the story, hiding how the hacker reset the password and pretending that the contents of Palin's account only appeared "briefly.")

The hacker committed a crime, and David Kernell is probably guilty as alleged. This level of foolishness should be best resolved by a misdemeanor plea agreement and a slap on the wrist, say public service, much as has happened in various past illegal taping cases involving partisans of both sides.

The crime exposed the fact that Palin has indeed used unofficial email for official acts, shades of the Bushists. She's an apt pupil. I seriously doubt that this is a crime in Alaska (though it's clearly an evasion of law in Washington), but it's a legitimate subject for political controversy even if it isn't illegal.

At least Palin can send email, even though her writing skills are right in line with her extemporaneous speaking skills. Which is to say, right up with some of the wingnut commenters on this blog.

Scofflaws, conspirators, and willful criminals

No one cares about the rule of law any more. Natch, that only applies to Democrats.

No doubt the Bushists have had the chance by now to be absolutely sure that culpable or embarrassing emails are now nothing more than bits scattered in a degaussing wind.

Yeah, we got email

What this says is that the ISPs are cavalier about what they give to the government and are likely to err on the side of too much. They don't really care about their customers' privacy or legal rights. They just want to keep the government happy and doing business with them.

Data mining vs. connecting the dots

The NSA is collecting your email. Does it have to go offshore? No, they only have to have a reasonable belief it's going somewhere outside the U.S. Like, maybe, Canada, 'cause we know we can't trust anyone who's so damn polite.

Are they keeping your email for posterity? Who knows? Probably. I mean, they're scanning it for keywords and analyzing context, so the temptation to archive it has to be great. My suggestion: If you have anything you want to keep secret, disguise it as spam; there's no way they'll keep all of that.

Of course, the NSA data mining program is a state secret, so no one is allowed to know this for sure. It's just obvious. If someone could prove it, he might have standing to sue, and the Supremes already bolted out that procedural escape hatch, so that they didn't have to face the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment.

I'm sure they're not interested in your correspondence with Amy, Mistress of Pain. But just in case, better mention Cialis or Viagra whenever you beg her for mercy. And you'll have to tell her that you'll cut up your credit card if she keeps threatening to give you a jihad-on.