Dammit!

I knew at the time that it would come to this. All right—I couldn’t imagine quite how bad the “this” was going to be, but I knew it would be bad.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to check for drugs via urine testing.

Did it ever make sense?

Of course not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely, if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but not spilling metabolites.

Then there was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly, they were also more expensive.

It was a period of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that was presumably drug addiction and whispering hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember Bill, who smoked but didn’t inhale?

Of all people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he said:

The impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.

Right—knew we had to agree on something….

So I was prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it, and then let me use the sink.

Full disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the point….

So I knew about that. What didn’t I know?

47% of employers routinely do a credit check on job applicants.

Well, you can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.

Consider the case of Alfred J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to get health insurance, he reasoned.

Wrong—he tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too; soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice. Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.

The irony of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the moment.

I can hear you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The New York Times says this:

“Employers are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they buy.”

There are several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times again:

“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Obviously, Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:

To Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

The other problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.

The solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the federal level—not the state level.

So it was the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your calls or reading your email.

It was Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question. Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….

And does that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?

Who's Crazy?

Well—so where is everybody? A guy comes out and says that he tapped Obama’s phone, as well as Senator Feinstein, Supreme Court justice Alito, General David Petraeus, and a host of others. He goes on to suggest that Obama may be being blackmailed, and that there is a sinister force at work. He calls it a “rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities at a monstrous scale on steroids."

And the guy—Russell Tice—has a track record: he worked for twenty years in the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Department of Intelligence Agency, and ended up in the National Security Agency. He turned to The New York Times in 2005, and was one of the principal sources for the wiretapping revelations published that year.

So he has the connections, and he has big news—shouldn’t be a problem to pick up the phone and get the news splashed over the country’s papers, computer screens, and cell phones. Instead, with the exception of the Huffington Post, the mainstream media have ignored Tice’s most recent allegations.

Instead, Tice had to go to another whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, and make his revelations on her Boiling Frogs podcast. And Sibel, who worked as a translator for the FBI until 2002, makes a damning charge: the mainstream media are controlled by the corporations and the government. She tells the story of MSNBC who sent a town car to pick up Tice for an interview, and then cancelled the interview on the way to the studio. Huffington Post picked up the news, and then MSNBC called again, stating that they hadn’t canceled, rather they had only meant to reschedule. The town car arrives again, and all is well until minutes before the interview. Then, Tice is told that MSNBC’s New York lawyers have advised them—don’t talk about the recent allegations, just talk in general terms. He protests: he’s in the studio to do just that, but goes through with the interview, anyway.

Edmonds makes further charges in an interview on the James Corbett Report. She alleges that the whistleblowing process that is supposed to protect people who step forward is completely ineffective. And she should know: she was fired in 2002 and the FBI’s own internal process stated that it was likely true that “some” of her claims of retaliation were true.

She also maintains that the FBI keeps both digital and paper files in huge quantities. And if, in the process of investigating a person who FISA has issued an order on, the FBI gets information on another, non-FISA ordered person—the policy is to destroy that evidence. Does it? No way—it keeps everything, because guess what? It may come in handy.

Edmonds makes the point that Congress has never taken on the FBI in any meaningful way—removing a director, taking it to the justice department, etc.

Edmonds goes places I wouldn’t go. She’s convinced that the Boston bombings were a government sponsored set up; she has appeared on The Alex Jones Show. It’s hard to know—who’s telling the truth?

But check out the two clips below—and you decide.   

The Rest of the Story?

It’s an invitation into the shadowy world of conspiracy theory.

As you can see in the video below, the first NSA whistle blower, Russell Tice, is making some heavy charges. No, he says, NSA is listening in on calls, not just collecting metadata. The NSA listened in on Barack Obama, when he was running for Senate; they spied on Supreme Court justice Alito, as well as General Petraeus. They’ve spied on any general above a three star level, and also Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The activity seemed to take place in the evenings, and seemed to be directed by someone connected to the vice president at the time, Dick Cheney. And Tice, though a Republican, decided to vote for Obama just on the hope that Obama would follow through and stop the abuse.

Tice is asked—why is this going on, is it blackmail? He fumbles for a bit, and then says the obvious. What else can it be?

It’s an old trick. When I was growing up, the local police chief had secret files on people, and knew that an alderman had a daughter working as a prostitute in a west coast city. That kind of information comes in handy when the police need a little boost in budget, of the chief himself needs a little help in a corruption scandal.

What’s new is the capacity to snoop, and the sheer power that we—or is it they?—have to spy. Here’s Tice on the subject:

Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.

"I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now." 

I came on Tice through the usual circuitous path—investigating a report that Gilberto Valle, a NYPD cop, had been found guilty of accessing an FBI database, the National Crime Information Center, obtaining information, plotting to abduct women, all for the purpose of…

…eating them.

OK—my day has not been improved by realizing that there is a fetish—for some—for cannibalism. Valle, who was turned in by his wife, maintains that it was an innocent, though kinky, fetish. The prosecution maintained that he was on a street corner where he had said he’d be in one of his communications—and the block of the street where one of his “victims” lived. Was he there to abduct? Had he moved out of fantasy and into the street?

However interesting the question, the point is that he tapped into a system that 90,000 law enforcement agencies can access. Here’s Business Insider on the subject:

• Tom Hays of The Associated Press reports there are "a batch of corruption cases in recent years against NYPD officers accused of abusing the FBI-operated National Crime Information Center database to cyber snoop on co-workers, tip off drug dealers, stage robberies and — most notoriously — scheme to abduct and eat women."

Speaking of which, the same article goes on to say this:

In 2008 two former NSA analysts who worked at the NSA center in Fort Gordon, Georgia told ABC they and their coworkers had listened in on the personal phone calls of soldiers stationed overseas.

"Hey, check this out," one said he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-nsa-can-abuse-data-on-americans-2013-7#ixzz2YesFhNIz

No, it wasn’t crazy. It’s scary, and much more.

Tice was the original whistle blower, leaking the phone monitoring scandal in 2005. And at the end of the interview, he’s asked, “are we living in a police state?”

His answer is nuanced: it a light police state. No, we don’t have all the oppression of the old communist regimes. We’ve learned subtlety; the iron fist wears a velvet glove but is—after all…

A fist.

A Great Concerto Grosso

All right—let’s get the players straight. In the clip below, you have three groups of people. On the left will be a baroque flute and violin—and they’re the soloists. Next up are the cello and the harpsichord. The cello is playing at times the basso continuo, which for any less complicated composer / thinker than Bach, would be simple chords that provided the harmonic structure. But here Bach has the cello constantly shifting back and forth from the traditional role to one of almost soloist status. The cellist who doesn’t itch to play these parts is dead.

The continuo, by the way, is often left unspecified by baroque composers—whatever bass instrument came along could be used. Nor was the part frequently written out; like jazz musicians today, there was a complicated notation of numbers denoting notes based on the bass note. Sounds complicated? Initially it is, but after a bit, it starts to feel natural. Here, by the way, is what it looks like….

The other part of the basso continuo is the harpsichord, or really, any other keyboard or strummed instrument (The theorbo makes a really good one). And in this concerto, the Brandenburg 5, the harpsichord is given what some have called the first modern cadenza. It’s the long, showy solo at the end of the first movement. The cadenza, designed to showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, is also meant to fool around with the main themes of the movement—it’s all a showy rehash.

And this cadenza is spectacular—I’ve heard knowledgeable folk argue that it shouldn’t be played on the harpsichord at all. It’s so far ahead of its time, the thinking goes, that the piano is better suited to bring out all the nuances. Bach was writing for an instrument that didn’t exist. (Don’t please, argue this point with anyone connected to what is now being called HIP—historically informed performance.)

OK—you have on the left two soloists; in the center is the harpsichord and the cellist, who are both soloists and basso continuo; so who’s on the right? Well, it’s a little group called the ripieno—yes, computer, there are words you don’t know—who join in and form an “orchestral” backdrop. In this case, you have a violin, viola, and bass.

Bach wrote this concerto in 1719, and dedicated it to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. Here, should you ever need an example of a dedication that goes from fulsome straight into brownnose, is the dedication:

As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness's commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness's most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.[3][4]

All right—be fair. It was the style of the time.

And it also has to be said—this is a terrific piece of music. Yes, it may be a warhorse, a piece that is played so often it stops sounding new. Then, the curious thing happens—people shun the work because it seems trite, or overplayed. And then, of course, you go years without sitting down to listen to it again. And then when you hear it, you’re amazed—what were you doing all this time, listening to perfectly good though obscure music but neglecting a masterpiece?

Well, fortunately we have YouTube, which spies on me and then makes suggestions (I know, I should be upset and I’m not…). So when they suggested that I listen to the Croatian Baroque Ensemble playing the Brandenburg 5^th, I thought, ‘why not?’  Nor was I disappointed—they’re a knockout.    

I may have shot myself in the musical foot, by starting out with Bach—what else do you play after that?

Well, Corelli came to mind, and he wrote, in the good Baroque manner, a set of twelve of the little guys, written in the 1690’s but published in 1714—almost exactly at the time of Bach’s Brandenburgs. And they are as clean and fresh three hundred year later as the day Corelli wrote them. One of them gets trotted out regularly at Christmas—it even bears the name “Christmas Concerto.” The name was given by Corelli himself: Fatto per la notte di Natale ("Made for the night of Christmas").

It’s serenic—all right, not a word, but you know what I mean—music punctuated by gleeful, almost manic, sections. And check the guy playing what looks like a weird guitar or lute; that’s a theorbo.

Handel wrote two sets of concerti grossi—and composed them in 1739. Yes, they’re conventional—there’s nothing as thought-out as Bach, nor really as fresh as Corelli. But still, Handel on an off day is still Handel.

After the baroque era, everybody went off to compose other things, until, in the twentieth century, the form was rediscovered. Ernest Bloch composed one in 1925 in Cleveland Ohio. To me, it’s bombastic and unpleasant music; but interesting to listen to. Stravinsky, more notably, composed Dumbarton Oaks in 1937—and the main theme of the first movement is a direct reference to the Third Brandenburg Concerto. Lastly, Vaughan Williams composed a concerto grosso in 1950. Here they all are….

La Madre de las Estafas

Well, it’s starting to look as if Mr. Fernández is right.

“It’s the damn Spaniards,” he’d say, when I asked him why, in Puerto Rico, spectacular frauds are committed to the accompaniment of shrugs and yawns. Our secretary of health, who formerly was the medical director and executive vice president of Triple-S, recently awarded a juicy (think it was $200 million) contract to a health provider—and guess who it was?

Triple-S!

But wait, cried the secretary, it’s saving us 43 million!

Sure, but Triple-S has declined to accept liability—leaving the government stuck if any Triple-S patient sues. The previous health provider—Humana—had accepted liability.

The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul once propounded a theory—corruption was the national sport of Trinidad and Tobago. As proof, he told the story of a concert promoter, who came to town promising an extraordinary gala of unbelievable names—the greatest singers of Europe and America would be there. He published lavish ads, he spoke on radio, he showed pictures of himself with Sinatra and Carlos Gardel. He sold zillions of tickets and then….

Those points of ellipsis kinda tell the story, right?

OK—you saw that coming. But what might surprise you is the reaction—all of the Trinidadians walking around the next day shaking their heads and saying, “wow, that guy was great! Hey, that was the best scheme I’ve seen in YEARS! Totally cool!”

That said, let me whip out my pistol and shoot myself in the foot. Because, as you can see in the video below, the Spaniards themselves are anything but amused by the estafa or con that got practiced on them—a con perpetrated by the Spanish government.

If you’re living in the United States, you may not be aware of how dire the situation in Spain is. Unemployment is around 25% (unofficially), but unemployment of Spanish youth is nearing 50%. The economy has contracted wildly, and Spanish banks, which had expanded aggressively, were hit hard. So they needed cash, and fast.

Into this picture steps Rodrigo Rato, whose last name means what you think it does, and who cooks up the perfect scheme.

Rato came from money, and has made money his profession. He got an MBA from Berkeley, went on to become first deputy prime minister of Spain, and later served as managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

In 2003, Rato was vice president of the government minister of the economy, and he was facing bad news: the banks had to be shorn up. So what did he do?

He legalized a practice, and allowed banks to begin selling preferentes, a financial instrument that you and I—assuming you’re as dumb about money as I—don’t want to touch.

In fact, it’s hard to see why anyone would, except under very special circumstances. Essentially, you’re lending money to the bank, but have no voting rights, no say in the corporation, no guarantee of interest, and no rights to withdraw your money. Oh, and you’re pretty much last on the list of debtors to get paid. In short, you’re giving your money away, and hoping that you’ll get something back. I’d only do that if I controlled 51% of the company….

They are called high-risk investments for a reason, and that makes it all the more galling that the banks began to sell the preferentes to the very people who should never have bought them—middle aged or older modest savers who put all their money into these investments.

You can argue—they should have known better, they should have read the fine print. Confession—I am writing this in an apartment bought through a mortgage which was only given to us after we signed well over twenty documents, not one of which we read. And Mr. Fernández has an MBA, to boot.

Right, so if we—with our twelve years of higher education—were infernally stupid and trusting, who can fault the elderly Spaniards, who listen as that nice bank manager they’ve known and trusted all those years calls them up and tells them about a really great deal. 7% interest!

They fell for it. But it’s not just that the banks had sold them a questionable investment—one writer alleges that the banks had in fact set up subsidiaries in paraísos fiscales (don’t have to translate, do I?) The only thing the subsidiary did was to collect the money and ship it off to the main bank, but the fiscal paradise was considerably sunnier for the bank than the small investor, trying to retake his money. The bank, in short, was in the Cayman Islands; the investor was on the street.

Quite literally on the street, with their whistles and pots and pans, as well as hand-written placards. Thousands of protestors; perhaps a million people out 80% of their money. And then, according to El País, the police responded to the protests, fining the organizers for various supposed infractions to the peace.

El País also reports that the Supreme Court has just told one large Spanish bank (BBVA) that it has to return almost 300,000 Euros plus interest to a couple who had invested in preferentes. And that the bank had the obligation to assess the couple’s financial status and acumen.

Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Oh, and what happened to Rato, who legalized this particular fraud?

Forbes named him worst CEO of the year in 2012.

Right—Got That Taken Care Of....

It’s such a good idea, why didn’t I think about it?

I spent seven years working for Wal-Mart, ostensibly as an English teacher. A good part of that time, in fact, I was busy dreaming up great ideas that absolutely no one liked. The sustainable shopping bag that we were pushing all the customers to use was a great idea, but there’s one little problem: you have to remember to take them with you every time you go shopping. And what if you decide on the spur of the moment to drop into a store? Your bags are at home.

Enter the Newhouse KeyChainShoppingBag!

OK—the problem of keeping meats separate from vegetables and fruits? Easy—redesign the shopping cart!

So I’m totally impressed with two like-minded people, Simon and Jane Berry, who looked around them one day in Northeast Zambia, and realized: Coca-Cola was everywhere.

The Berry’s also put together that fact with another two. First, one in five children in developing countries will die of dehydration before their fifth birthday. Second, though a simple solution of salts and sugar will cure the diarrhea, most public health clinics are too far away, or may not have the formula.

Right—so we can get Coca-Cola to kids, but not life-saving kits?

Then they looked at the Coca-Cola crates and realized—hey, there’s a lot of space wasted there. What if we made a kit of a bar of soap (prevention, as well as cure), the oral salts and sugar formula, zinc pills, and put it all in a container that would wedge in between the necks of the Coca-Cola bottles? So the Berrys created an organization, ColaLife, which produced a product called Kit Yamoyo. Here’s what it looked like:

That way, you could simply piggyback on to Coca-Cola’s distribution system, and not have to invest all that energy on reinventing the wheel.

So Berry went running around—trying to get Coca-Cola’s attention, which proved at first difficult. Finally, he got an interview with the BBC, and the door cracked open. They met to discuss Berry’s great idea.

And like all great ideas, it had to be tweaked. The peak period for diarrhea is in rainy season, which is when Coke sells the least. As well, there may be times when Coca-Cola may prefer not to distribute to a remote location—it simply isn’t worth it. But the kids still need the medicine.

So, in the end, they decided not to distribute through Coca-Cola, but rather to use the company to learn about Coca-Cola’s distribution chain. Consider this photo:

For Coca-Cola to get its products into a small shop in a tiny town in a remote area, they have to work with a lot of people, from the local producer to the regional suppliers to smaller supplier to individuals who have a horse and cart. And many times, the break in the chain was the guy with a horse and cart; therefore, Coca-Cola started their Last Mile program. (Nice name, guys!)

So the Berrys worked with Coca-Cola, often tagging along with them and meeting the people who delivered the Coke. And they soon discovered—it would be better if the shopkeepers simply ordered the Kit Yamoyo as a regular item, like laundry detergent.

The ColaLife began its pilot project in September 2012, and so far, the results are encouraging. Here’s what Berry has to say, as quoted in The New York Times:

Thus far, ColaLife has received mostly positive feedback from customers regarding Kit Yamoyo. “People are convinced it cures diarrhea,” said Simon Berry. “They say it’s much stronger than the medicine you get at the health center. And there’s some evidence that we’re stopping chronic diarrhea.” (While conclusive data has not yet been published, Berry’s assessment is based on more than 20, 000 kits sold and surveys of more than 1000 households.) The team also found that shops that sell Kit Yamoyo are, on average, two-thirds closer than health centers — making it much easier for a mother to obtain O.R.S. (oral rehydrating salts) when a child is sick.

There’s a little problem, for which, of course, I have the answer. And that is, you say?

The kit costs one dollar, unaffordable to many people. Sales have slumped by 60 percent from when the kit was introduced free.

My answer?

I think the genius of the Berrys was to see that the Kit Yamoyo was a product and could be treated like one, not a medicine or a health care issue. So we have a product, a nice product with a terrific potential and an un-mined gold field in public relations. A nice product that Wal-Mart (ASDA in Britain) can sell for $2.49—a steal. Wal-Mart pockets 74 cents, pays ColaLife $1.75. ColaLife, in turn, can use that money to lower their price substantially. They then employ an unemployed blogger in Puerto Rico to write terrific press releases, which I will.

Yes?

Sorry, guys—gotta go. Gonna call some friends at Wal-Mart….

Trust Us

Well, Greta Van Susteren says she knows the guy, so it must be all right.

Granted, I didn’t know Greta Van Susteren, so I had to do a little checking around to see if I could trust Greta enough for her to tell me that Reggie B. Walton is OK.

Don’t know Reggie B. Walton?

Join the club, but I can now tell you that he is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And he came out in a rare statement bristling at the idea that the court—which had 1856 petitions last year and approved all 1856 of them—is a rubber stamp. Here, with the impartiality for which this family of wordsmiths is famous, is what the guy said:

“The perception that the court is a rubberstamp is absolutely false. There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the Executive Branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts, and then by the judges to ensure that the court’s authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize.”

Here’s the deal with the FISA courts—they only hear one side of the story. In every other court in the United States, the opposition gets a chance to come forward, state his defense, and have a judge or jury weigh in. But FISA listens to the government’s case, and then decides.

So that means, that you and I never had a say in the question of whether Verizon turned over your call history to the government. Oh, and not just your call history but your Internet history and also your snail mail, which is photographed—every single last piece of it. All of which can be accessed by the government by petitioning the “rigorous” FISA court, so famously not a rubber stamp.

OK—here’s the dope on Walton: he grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania, a steel town, and was dabbling in gangs when he saw a friend nearly get killed. So that sobered him up, and he went to West Virginia State College on a football scholarship and then to The American University, Washington College of Law for his law degree. Here’s Wikipedia on Walton:

Walton served as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 1981 to 1989 and from 1991 to 2001. He also served as associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In 2001, he was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 2004, Bush appointed him to chair the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, investigating ways to curb prison rape. In May 2007, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. appointed him to a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[3]

The Washington Post reported, "fellow judges and lawyers who appear before him say Walton's decisions do not appear to be guided by politics but by a tough-on-crime mentality." Walton is known by local defense attorneys as a "long ball hitter" - a judge willing to impose long sentences in order to deter future crimes.[3] In fall 2005, the judge was driving his wife and daughter to the airport for a vacation when he came across an assailant attacking a cab driver on the side of the road. Walton tackled the assailant and subdued him until police arrived. The D.C. police spokesperson noted in response, "God bless Judge Walton. I surely wouldn't want to mess with him."[3]

OK—that’s a good story. Sounds like the kind of guy you could trust to make the right decision, right? And I like it that Walton was the guy who sent Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to jail.

Now then, what about Roger Vinson.

Having another “who he” moment?

He’s the Florida judge who authorized the government to demand that Verizon turn over your telephone history (assuming you’re a Verizon customer—but don’t worry, because all of the wireless providers have done so).

OK—Walton may be OK, this guy is questionable. Good news—he’s moderate on drug sentencing. Bad news, he’s a Tea Party conservative who even he acknowledges gives out draconian sentences. He also is the author of the famous broccoli quote:  “If they decided that everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli is healthy they could mandate that everybody has to buy a certain amount of broccoli each week.”

One piece of good news, via Huffington Post: “Vinson is known for his love of the flowering camellia tree. He is a longtime member of the Pensacola Camellia Club and is a former president of the American Camellia Society.”

Well, it’s a thing to know….

Here’s something else to know—Vinson’s order to Verizon expires on 19 July—in twelve days. Presumably, someone will walk into the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse and ask Vinson or another judge to approve the petition for another three months.

Will we know? Will anyone be around to argue the case for NOT collecting the data?

Don’t think so.

Earlier this week, I was watching Rachel Maddow explain—as only she could—how the FBI has killed 70 people and shot another 80. Here’s the New York Times quoting the FBI:

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

It may be that the FBI takes shooting incidents seriously, but guess how many of 150 shootings have been found to be justified? That’s right—all 150 of them. And, like the FISA courts, this is wholly internal—no district attorney can declare that the death of, for example, a young Chechen was a homicide committed by agents of the Federal government. A young Chechen whose family retrieved the body, and discovered it with six bullet holes, including one fired point blank to the temple.

More than ever, I am mistrusting my government. We have got to find a way of putting advocates for civil liberties to argue the case for privacy in every FISA petition.

And we gotta do it quick.