"Really, Mr. President? Do you really expect me to believe that you give a damn about open debate and the democratic process?" Hoelzer wrote in TechDirt. "Because it seems to me if your Administration was really committed those things, your Administration wouldn't have blocked every effort to have an open debate on these issues each time the laws that your Administration claims authorizes these programs came up for reauthorization, which -- correct me if I am wrong -- is when the democratic process recommends as the ideal time for these debates."

I won't blockquote too much of the article because  it's not that long, but this is the main point:

"Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret," Hoelzer wrote, quoting from a 2009 Huffington Post piece co-written by Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall, How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law? "Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret," Hoelzer wrote, quoting from a 2009 Huffington Post piece co-written by Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall, How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law? "Most members of Congress have not even seen the secret legal interpretations that the executive branch is currently relying on and do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. Even if these members come down to the Intelligence Committee and read these interpretations themselves, they cannot openly debate them on the floor without violating classification rules."

6 years ago, at age 9, Kevin was diagnosed with stage 4 Neuroblastoma and spent the following 6 years battling the cancers like no warrior has ever fought before.

His positive spirit, infectious laughter and profound kindness touched so many souls. For example, when he finally succumbed to the inevitable this past March, so many of his teachers from his elementary, middle and high schools attended his funeral that the school district did not have enough substitute teachers to cover the classes.

There is so much more I could say about this brave soul, of how he touched and inspired those who ever had any contact with him, but this is not really the time or place.

He was a warrior, through and through.

On saturday the 27th of July we hid our plantmines at the Vredeskermis in Utrecht to ambush unsuspecting passersby with an explosion of flower confetti!

While walking peacefully in the park or along the sidewalk, enjoying the weather, you're suddenly blasted by a multicolor explosion of flowers! You're surrounded by a cloud of flower confetti, gently floating down around you. This can only mean one thing: you've stepped on a Plantmine!

The plantmines are a new form of militant guerrilla gardening. Instead of the usual tactics of just planting flowers and plants at night, the plantmines have taken a page from guerrilla warfare. Using mines, boobytraps and roadside bombs they spread flowers, colour and happiness throughout the city, by any means necessary.

When you trigger one of these plantmines they shoot a cloud of flower confetti at you. The flower confetti contains flower seeds, to create a permanent happy and colourful spot in the place of the plantmine explosion. The explosion of flower confetti also serves as an instant party to celebrate that you live in a country where you don't have to worry about stepping on a real landmine.

Also, Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell's Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras

Have a lovely Monday peeps. I have three 13/14 y.o. boys crashed on my living room floor, one of them my son, and I'm taking bets on what time they drag themselves into the realm of the living today. I have money on noon. Ah, adolescence!

Peace.

You mentioned your dog would look for a football behind the TV if it went off the screen and remarked something about not being that bright.

There was a program on PBS that investigated the intelligence of mans best friend.  One of there tests was they used was to roll ball on the floor, there was an partition between the dog and the ball.  Same concept as you mentioned, they wanted to see if when the ball disappeared, the dog was smart enough to look on the other side partition before it cam out.

My point, your dog was very smart, not many dogs understand motion once they can't see something.

Side note.  They studied where dogs leave things, like toys, to see if there was some sort reason behind it.  While they didn't discover the reason, they figured out that they do it in patterns.  Always triangles no matter the number of toys and whether they are in the house will walls as barriers or outside.  Triangles of the same shape and size for all dogs.

In a couple cases they mounted cameras on the roofs of houses with dogs that used doggie doors.  One doberman, I believe, put like 20 toys out there in very symmetrical and organized triangular patters that was very evident because of the camera allowed one to look down at the patterns.  Something that one would never notice from the ground.

Who knows why, but I think the point is there is a lot more going on than we think there is.

Daily Gazette.

With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the main purpose behind [the] illegal, warrantless domestic spying program is not collecting intelligence on terrorists and would-be terrorists - a task for which the government's existing draconian powers of surveillance were more than sufficient. As many people have noted, [the president] already possessed the legal right to order the immediate surveillance of any person in the country, subject to the sole restraint of having to seek approval from the secret FISA court within 72 hours. Given the established record of this court's near-total acquiescence to thousands of such requests over the years, it is simply impossible to believe that it would not grant its ex post facto approval to any surveillance ordered by [the president] which had even the most tenuous connection to a potential terrorist threat.

This undeniable reality leaves us with only one logical conclusion: [the president's] secret spy program is designed for activities not covered by FISA's copious security blanket. It is now apparent that these activities include using the vast powers of federal, state and local governments to spy on the [...] Administration's perceived political "enemies" - a vast group, given that the [...] definition of an "enemy" is anyone who opposes any of their policies. ([they] don't have "opponents," in the traditional sense - honorable rivals in the give and take and compromises of ordinary politics ; like all radical extremists, they have only "enemies" who must be "destroyed.")

by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque
January 11, 2006

Volume 96
Volume 95

Peace out, peeps. It's psychotherapy day for Dadler, where he gets to talk to his shrink about what it's like to be the product of parents who have 9 marriages between the two of them. HINT: it's not good.

The Obama administration is denying that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, will control a review of the government's surveillance programs.

And that...

The review is part of the president's push to restore public trust in the program

And that all the president did was...

sent a memo to Clapper on Monday, directing him to establish the group.

So it appears that all Clapper will do is choose the people will make up the group.

Which should help lay the foundation for plausible deniability.

Heh.

Republican writers shout about the extreme policies proposed by the "radical far left" or "socialists" when even the slightest liberal policy is proposed. Democratic blogs coin inane descriptors "moderate Republican conservatives."

UCLA researcher Patricia Greenfield has long suspected that the environment around us influences our psychology - not in the classic sense that our family life or peer groups sway our behavior, but in a much broader way. Human psychology adapts differently, she theorized, to rural settings than to urban ones.

Rural living, with its subsistence economies, simpler technologies, and close-knit communities, demands of people a greater sense of deference to authority and duty to each other. Urbanization, on the other hand, generally comes with greater wealth and education, and complex technology and commerce. Adapt to life in a city, and a different set of values becomes more important: for starters, personal choice, property accumulation, and materialism.

"When you have greater wealth, you have more choices," Greenfield says. When you live in a city, there are simply more paths to chose, more things to do, more ways you might spend your money. Greater education brings choice, too. In this way, personal choice - and an emphasis on the individual - becomes more central in an urban world to our values, our behavior, and our culture.

SNIP

But in some ways, this story of the rise of the individual, at the expense of the collective, appears to contradict the idea that cities force us to rely on each other. In politics, for instance, individualism is often celebrated as a virtue of rural living. In cities, by contrast, we must rely on shared parks instead of private back yards (or farms), and shared subway cars instead of private cars.

But Greenfield says that kind of communal subway experience is different from the one early farmers experienced in rural America when whole communities got together to raise a barn.

"We're talking about a crowd of individuals, we're not talking about interdependent people," she says of your morning commute. In the rural society that she is contrasting here, people know each other. In urban society, many of the people you encounter are interchangeable. Your fellow commuters are different (most days). "Even though a policeman comes to help you," Greenfield says, "you don't even know his name."

Wasn't that a selling point of the whole thing to begin with?

WASHINGTON -- In another setback for President Obama's health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department's Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language -- which appeared as an answer to one of 137 "frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation" -- department officials confirmed the policy.

SNIP

Under the policy, many group health plans will be able to maintain separate out-of-pocket limits for benefits in 2014. As a result, a consumer may be required to pay $6,350 for doctors' services and hospital care, and an additional $6,350 for prescription drugs under a plan administered by a pharmacy benefit manager.

Some consumers may have to pay even more, as some group health plans will not be required to impose any limit on a patient's out-of-pocket costs for drugs next year. If a drug plan does not currently have a limit on out-of-pocket costs, it will not have to impose one for 2014, federal officials said Monday.

The health law, signed more than three years ago by Mr. Obama, clearly established a single overall limit on out-of-pocket costs for each individual or family. But federal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs.

In many cases, the companies have separate computer systems that cannot communicate with one another.

LV TV

from a Las Vegas TV station.  I will be interested in reading what the New Mexico SC really had to say.

Seems like a juror who could not understand English would make any criminal trial lawyer (DA or PD) shake in their boots.