Washington - As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
...
 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who sharply questioned [U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan] Crocker about electricity during a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, sent a letter to the State Department last week complaining about the new measurement. She said she was concerned the White House was trying to obscure the deteriorating situation in Baghdad, the focus of Bush's "surge" of 30,000 additional troops.

"The president continues to keep information away from the American people and the Congress," said Boxer, who advocates withdrawing troops. "It's obvious that he wants to paint a rosy picture."

Good thing they can use air conditioners and refrigerators for an hour or so a day.

The year before Giuliani took office, 720 people were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana-related offenses; by 2000, the number had jumped to 59,495--an increase of 4,549 percent. During a 10-month period in 1996, 50,000 people detained on misdemeanors were strip-searched by the Department of Corrections.

These kinds of aggressive policies gave a green light to the NYPD to terrorize Black and Latino communities.

When unarmed cousins Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega were shot in the back and killed while they lay face down on the floor in 1995, Giuliani called the officers and congratulated them on their performance.

But he's not running on that, he's running on his phony national security cred so the only thing he has to signal his sympathies with the neanderthal base is a full on racist attack against the entire Arab world.

Today the Times confirms that Gonzales told the truth. The legal dispute that broke out in 2004 was about the NSA's "data mining" project, in which databases of telephone records were reviewed for patterns suggestive of terrorist cells:

The fact is that the Senators who ridiculed Gonzales, questioned his credibility and called for a perjury investigation were wrong. They owe the Attorney General an apology.

UPDATE: Maybe I'm the only one who didn't already know this, but I was astonished to learn that there is no expectation of privacy in telephone records at all. Section 2702(c) sets out the circumstances in which a telecom provider can disclose phone records, not including the contents of communications. So this would cover the call information at issue in this program. 2702(c)(6) says that such phone records may be freely disclosed, at the company's discretion:

(6) to any person other than a governmental entity.

That's right. These supposedly top-secret telephone records can be given or, more likely, sold to any company or private citizen. So if I had enough money, I could buy the phone records of every person in the U.S., and donate them to the NSA.

I can see the tapes being downloaded to a company in say, India.....

link

That's what we face with electronic voting machines.

Most if not all safeguards on them are the fox watching the hen house.

What a wonderful topic to have a panel about.  All the voting issues are critically important.

We all have a duty to find out precisely how our votes will be counted and how they will be guaranteed accurate.  I encourage you ALL to ask at your local election boards.  If you don't get answers that you can understand, or make sense, ask more questions.

I did this at a demo of our new ES&S election machines, and the demonstrator literally held up a black box and said, "This is how your votes are counted."

I phoned and emailed questions of our election supervisor, back when he was deciding which machines to buy, about how he can guarantee our votes will be counted fairly and accurately.  I never received any answer.

...their anger, expressed in unique graffiti on the giant grassy hill of the governor's mansion, formerly the Simplot mansion, is at least misplaced, however, um, pointed it is.

It's pretty hard to miss if you're cruising up Bogus Basin Road. If you squint closely at the photo here, you'll see that, yes, someone used grass killing chemicals of some sort to outline the shape of a giant male phallus, pointed up, on the grass of Simplot hill.

The story starts off describing South Burlington Chief Trevor Whipple's recount of tasering an intoxicated man. The article continues...

"He apologized," Whipple said. "He described the experience of being 'Tased' and said it definitely got his attention. I asked if he had been injured at all. He said he didn't have a single scrape or bruise."

Whipple's story backs up what police officials elsewhere in Vermont say about the Taser gun in the aftermath of an incident in Brattleboro this week. There, the Taser was used to subdue two pro-environment protesters who had chained themselves to a barrel and refused to cooperate with police.

"It's the most effective new tool to come along in the police community in the last 25 years," Burlington Police Chief Tom Tremblay said. "We have significantly reduced injuries to officers and the number of confrontations with offenders by utilizing this tool."

In Burlington, where I live, the taser gun has been used 39 times. (last year, once, on a dog).

Amnesty International reports that over 150 deaths have been caused by increased use of tasers in the USA.

After I'd read the Burlington paper article, I did a search on tasers on TL and came up with some posts over the past few years - some of them mentioned TL's special dossier on tasers, but that didn't work.

FOX News chose hate-monger Melanie Morgan, with a record of anti-Islamic statements, as the sole guest to discuss a sensitive Muslim issue on last night's (7/30/07) Hannity & Colmes, the arrest of a Pace University student for throwing a Koran in the toilet on two different occasions. Sure enough, it wasn't long before she used the occasion (with a little egging on by Sean Hannity) to foment hatred and fear of Muslims. It's hard to believe there was any other purpose to the segment. With video.

Morgan admitted that she had a bias against the Muslim organization, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was involved in the case, for having tried to get her fired, yet "fair and balanced" FOX News didn't see the need for a balancing guest. They didn't even see the need to point out Morgan's bias. She admitted it on her own, without any probing from either host.

Even worse, Morgan's segment came directly after a similar one. In that discussion, the topic was three Arab princesses removed from a British plane for refusing to sit next to men. The sole guest for that discussion was the Muslim-hater Brigitte Gabriel.