Well, as I pointed out — I mentioned this yesterday, and for — let me see if I can find my quote, because I pulled it out. Chuck Hagel, as you may recall, made a fair amount of news over the weekend when he first said that — let’s see — “Well, I want to listen to the details and I want to listen to the President,” said Senator Hagel — he said this on “This Week” on a competing network.
And there’s Sten on KATU talking about his 15 point lead and how that’s better than they thought they’d be able to get against Burdick. Unmentioned is that if you combine Ginny Burdick’s current votes with Dave Lister’s, Sten’s opponents combine to meet exactly the 45% Sten himself currently has. Which means, going into the general election, it’s a dead heat.
Addendum: Yes, the figures actually mean that if you combine all candidates, Sten’s opponents combine to have a larger share of the vote than he does. Obviously I was sticking with the context of his two main challengers.
According to KGW’s elections returns, with 38% of the vote counted in the Commissioner No. 3 seat held by Dan Saltzman, “Watchman” is winning with 62% of the vote.
Addendum: In case you don’t believe me, here’s the screen capture to prove it.
You didn’t think I’d forget to tell you that this year, did you? Me, I will drop off my ballot at the elections building after work. I always vote on election day itself.
One small problem with my ballot, however: Mine seems to be missing the spot for the question, “Impeach George Bush?”
A final piece of advice. If you don’t care for any of the candidates for City Council, just write in “Nick Fish” since last time around I would have been perfectly content if there had been a way to get him and Sam Adams on the Council.
I am still drinking the same drink I originally made at like 7:00 PM, because I keep replacing the ice when it melts, which it has done countless times over the course of these intervening hours.
“A senior federal law enforcement official,” reports The Blotter, “tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.”
Also targeted at reporters for The New York Times and the Washington Post.
“I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope,” writes Josh Marshall. “But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists.”
Addendum: The FBI confirms, and says they get to do it because the USA PATRIOT Act lets them. You know, the law that was supposed to be about terrorists, and which the administration assured everyone would never be abused for other purposes.
Addendum: “This is what the Patriot Act is being used for,” says Josh Marshall. “In a free society, law enforcement goes before independent magistrates. Apparently we’re now beyond that.”
Interviewed on Fox News Sunday, Laura Bush said she did not think people were losing confidence in President George W. Bush, despite a series of polls showing support for him at its lowest point in his five-year presidency and among the lowest for any president in the past 50 years.
- Reuters
“If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.”
“It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’ exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security,” Rich continues. “That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin.”
patriotism n: impeaching the President for lying about receiving an extra-marital hummer [syn: rule of law, checks and balances]
partisanship n: opposing the President for long-term, widespread abuse of power [syn: politics of personal destruction, treason, aid and comfort to the enemy]
“The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans,” says a newspaper, “using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.”
According to the article, it’s the records of calls, and not the content of the calls themselves, which are involved in this program, under which the telcos hands over to the NSA all the records of your telephone calls, without first seeing a warrant from the government.
Oddly (given the rather intense hatred many of us have of the company), only Qwest reportedly refused to cooperate, “because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.”
I wonder if I can time a sequence of telephone calls so that their lengths end up spelling out FUCK YOU in Morse code.
(Meanwhile, just think of what sort of “marketing” Emilie Oy’s daughter could do with this information.)