Senate Cuts INS Special Registration Funding!

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We did it guys! We all did it together!
It looks like the folks on Capitol Hill actually listened to the last month of letters and protests!
Pat yourselves on the back and check this out:
Senate Votes to Halt INS Registration Program
By Edward Walsh for the Washington Post.

The massive appropriations bill approved by the Senate late Thursday includes a little-noticed amendment that would cut off funding for a Justice Department program that requires male immigrants from two dozen predominantly Muslim countries to register and be fingerprinted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The main purpose of the amendment was to restore funding for a congressionally mandated program that by 2005 is designed to provide information on the identity of all visitors to the United States and track when they enter and leave the country.
But the amendment also included language that bans the use of any of the money for the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), a program targeted at male temporary visitors from countries the government considers to be terrorist harbors…
Since last October, the INS also has been fingerprinting and questioning male immigrants from countries on the NSEERS list at selected ports of entry to the United States. The Senate spending ban, which would apply to “any expenses relating to NSEERS” apparently would cut off funds for that effort and the more controversial registration program, which began late last year.
The Senate amendment also would require Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to provide Congress with documents and other information on the creation and operation of NSEERS, and provide an assessment of the program’s effectiveness. Corallo said the Justice Department “will work with Congress and answer all of their questions and concerns.”
The amendment to restore $165 million for the larger tracking system, which had been cut from the bill by Senate appropriators, was offered on the Senate floor by Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl, both Arizona Republicans, and was adopted by voice vote. In their brief remarks on the floor, neither mentioned the provision cutting off funding for the NSEERS program. The Bush administration had requested $16.8 million to fund the program for the current fiscal year.
Congressional sources said the NSEERS funding cutoff was included in the amendment at the request of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). James Manley, a Kennedy spokesman, said the amendment “cuts funding until Congress has the information it needs to assess whether this is the most effective use of tax dollars in the war on terrorism.”

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Phone Message To Me From Timothy Leary In 1995

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Things are really getting interesting now that I have my camera hooked up to the stereo (with an analog cassette player).
Fifteen years of cassette archives. Yowza.
Here’s Timothy Leary leaving a message on my voicemail in August 1995 to thank me for the work I did on his graphic novel, Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel.
(Note: this file is an MP3 from a cassette tape I managed to record the voicemail on to in 1995 (through a crude patch into a friend’s computer) — and then back out from his computer onto a cassette tape.
And all that — only so I could play it back into a video camera and recapture it into a computer seven years later. Funny, isn’t it?

Shrub Manages To Attack Environment And Our Legal System At Once

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Way to go Shrub!
Alaska riders included in big federal spending bill
(Associated Press)

The U.S. Senate has adopted two riders included in a major spending bill that would bar court challenges to the new trans-Alaska Pipeline right-of-way agreement and a Forest Service decision on wilderness in the Tongass National Forest.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s amendment, included in the omnibus federal spending bill, would insulate the new trans-Alaska Pipeline right-of-way agreement from lawsuits and judicial review.
The measure, passed Thursday, would extend a key provision in the 1973 law that authorized the pipeline. Effectively, Congress would be saying that the environmental studies conducted during the pipeline reauthorization process are sufficient and shall not be subject to court review…
“The line’s been in place 30 years. And the question is if there is a legal challenge to it, you spend a couple million dollars of taxpayer money toward the lawyer fees and all that’s entailed with that. And I don’t think anybody out there is suggesting that we’re going to be taking the pipeline out of the ground. So what purpose does it serve?” Murkowski told reporters.
But critics who believe the pipeline renewal is flawed and should have undergone more thorough review are outraged by Murkowski’s amendment. Deborah Williams, executive director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, said that, if the pipeline’s environmental impact study is solid it can withstand a court challenge.
The bill also includes a rider, introduced by Sen. Ted Stevens, that would effectively bar environmental groups from using administrative appeals or the courts to press for more wilderness designations in roadless areas of the Tongass National Forest.
At issue is whether more of the 16.8 million-acre national forest in Southeast should be put off-limits to development. Environmentalists sued the Forest Service over the Tongass management plan, saying the agency ignored the possibility of designating new wilderness areas, where logging and road building are generally prohibited.
In April 2001, a judge agreed and ordered the Forest Service to review 9.7 million roadless acres and decide whether Congress should consider creating new wilderness areas. Last May, the agency issued a draft decision, saying no to new Tongass wilderness. The agency said it would issue its final decision early this year.
The intent of the sentence Stevens included in the spending bill is to allow the Forest Service’s decision to stand.
It says that the agency’s Tongass wilderness decision “shall not be reviewed under any Forest Service administrative appeal process and its adequacy shall not be subject to judicial review by any court of the United States.”

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Shrub Already Planning Mass Graves For Our Boys

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(I guess the brits are right — the Shrub’s Administration is only interested in bodies…)
I am growing increasingly concerned about our boys overseas (the 150,000 troops or so that are already there).
How well can the Shrub be planning on treating them if he’s already planning mass graves for them (per a potential bioterrorist threat)?
Pentagon Eyes Mass Graves Option Would Fight Contamination After Bioterror Deaths

By Greg Seigle for The Denver Post.

The bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by chemical or biological weapons in Iraq or future wars may be bulldozed into mass graves and burned to save the lives of surviving troops, under an option being considered by the Pentagon.
Since the Korean War, the U.S. military has taken great pride in bringing home its war dead, returning bodies to next of kin for flag-draped, taps-sounding funerals complete with 21-gun salutes.
But the 53-year-old tradition could come to an abrupt halt if large numbers of soldiers are killed by chemical or biological agents, according to a proposal quietly circulating through Pentagon corridors.

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Brits Aren’t Buying Into Blair/Shrub Agenda

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Looks like “the people” of England aren’t buying into the Bush/Blair doublespeak.
(New! Just got a link to the actual video here. Thanks Danny!)

In Britain, War Concern Grows Into Resentment of U.S. Power
Anxiety Over Attack on Iraq Moves to Political Mainstream
By Glenn Frankel for the Washington Post Foreign Service (in London).

In a recently televised satire here titled “Between Iraq and a Hard Place,” George W. Bush is depicted as an idiot who can’t seem to grasp why Saddam Hussein isn’t cooperating with the U.S. timetable for war. American democracy is defined as “where there are two candidates and the one with the most votes loses,” and Britain’s role in the forthcoming military campaign is starkly simple:
“What is it that the Americans want from us?” asks a British official.
“From us?” replies an army general. “Dead bodies.”
…There are fears that the United States is determined to act without heeding the concerns of its allies — and fears that Britain will be dragged along in its wake. These fears have spread far beyond the traditionally anti-American hard left — known here as “the usual suspects” — to include moderates and conservatives as well.

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Back From A Break

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I’m making those MP3s of the KQED radio show on crowd estimation, and then I’ll be linking to a ton of stuff I’ve been working on this last week, including an interview from MLK Day with Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (that I recorded off of my local news channel), an interview with Bill Gates Senior speaking out against abolishing our country’s death tax (and catching the Shrub in another bunch of lies) on Bill Moyers’ NOW show — along with just a ton of news articles I’ve been collecting over the last few days.

Rumsfield Continues To Insult The World

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Rumsfeld’s Remarks Draw Anger in France

Rumsfeld downplayed France and Germany’s reluctance, saying he was confident that other NATO members would come together behind the United States.
“Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem … but you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they’re not with France and Germany on this. They’re with the United States,” he said.
In responding to a reporter’s question about French and German qualms, Rumsfeld hinted the United States would turn to new NATO members in Eastern Europe for support.
“You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t,” he said. “I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east and there are a lot of new members.”
Washington’s European allies are deeply divided over the possibility of war, with the French and Germans opposing any rush toward military action while the United States and Britain intensify their military buildup on Iraq’s borders.
The Bush administration accuses Iraq of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Russia and China have also expressed reservations about going to war against Iraq. On Thursday, China said it supports French efforts to find a peaceful solution, underlining the challenge the United States would face if it seeks U.N. Security Council support for military action.
“We have always stood for a diplomatic and political resolution of the Iraqi issue,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue.

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Robert Kaye On Endless Community Jukebox In The Sky

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Wireless == great jukebox in the sky?

While aggregated wireless music collections won’t provide everything to everyone everywhere, they do have some interesting qualities that are worth exploring.
If the community around you has the music, do you need to download all of the music to your machine? Better get another bigger harddrive, because the community will have more music than you have harddrive space. So, I hope that people will truely start sharing their collections instead of actually copying them as the current file sharing networks do. And if we’re just sharing and not copying does that fall under fair use? (Never mind that fair use has been erradicated in the last few years).

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200,000 Estimate From Objective Third Party

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This seems reasonably fair and balanced. (Note: The photograph of Civic Center seems right but the picture of market street seems to have been taken later in the day after the crowds had moved on.)
An Independent Count at the Jan 18, 2003 San Francisco Anti-War Demonstration

I took as my project for the SF demonstration to do my own crowd estimate to see whether the organizers or the media were giving a better version of the numbers.
We arrived early and started our march from Embarcadaro. By 11:00, the nominal starting time, the street was packed to the point where you couldn’t easily move around in the crowd without people squeezing out of the way to let you by. Some people who had walked ahead and scouted out the parade route said they had gone 15 blocks and still couldn’t see the front of the crowd. They estimated that the entire parade route was essentially filled from the start. It was well over an hour before we started to move.
My estimate of the stationary crowd density was 500 people for each 10 feet along the parade route. That’s 1000 people per 20 feet or upward of 10,000 people in the first city block. To make that more conservative, allowing for lack of uniformity, I would allow a factor of 2 margin of error. That makes my initial estimate 5 thousand people in that first block. The blocks don’t appear to be the same length, the first one being about 100 m long, but it is easy to see that a 20 block stretch would put the numbers in the 100,000 range.
When I got home I downloaded aerial photographs of Market Street from http://mapserver.maptech.com. Based on the images Market Street is about 34 m across and the parade route was 2.7 km long. This put the total area of the parade route, not counting the square at Civic Center, at 92,000 square meters. For comparison, the first block was about 100 m long, so its area was 3400 sq.m. If we use the 5000 people per block estimate of the crowd density, that makes it about 1.5 people per square meter. If you place a bunch of people 1 m apart you will see this is fairly loose packing, so 1.5 per sq.m is not very far off. Once we got walking the spacing increased somewhat, but not by much. The moving crowd was almost stationary much of the time. It took us about 3 hours to amble a mile and a half.
Using that density for the parade route, not counting the square at the civic center, the count would be 138,000, which I would round down to 100,000, again just to be conservative. The kicker is that when we arrived at the civic center there was an announcement that the end of the parade was back where we had started! In other words we filled the parade route twice. 200,000 people is not at all out of line.

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