I woke up this morning to the sounds of the cats going nuts. Usually they are very active in the morning, wanting to get up for whatver reason, sticking wet noses and whiskers in my face at 6am just to let me know who's in control perhaps. But this morning they were more frenetic than normal. I got up walked downstairs and saw that both Mak anf Fil were on the condo rvieted to something outside and emitting their beliigerent meows, the kind you hear when they want to rip some critter apart. I walked over and saw that there was a huge gray long haired stray cat on my porch peering inside the window and checking them out.

Now I want to let my guys out. I know they love it. They are jungle cats. And I had high hopes moving here, but I just can't do it. For one thing, I have to keep their claws trimmed so they don't scratch the shit the shit out of the hard floors (and each other). Then there are just too many other lethal animals in the neighborhood from these strays to the pit bulls. It wouldn't be fair to my guys unarmed into a knife fight. This isn't Alameda anymore. This is Oakland. And Mak might think he's a devil dog who can run roughshod over his tiny sister, but he's really only a 9 pound cat who hasn't been outside much in the last several years and would get ripped to shreds if he came upon even the most novice of street cats.

Sad to say, but unless I take them out on the leash, my little guys are housebound for the duration.

Posted by andrew at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been in this indusutry as a web producer, content manager and web designer for most of the last ten years and today I'm finally going to my first industy confernece, Web Design World at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I'm really excited about it. Three days of classes, speakers, seminars, workshops, presenations on web standards, typography, flash, photoshop, user interfacve design, flash and a whole lot more. The only trouble will be deciding which track to attend and which speakers to go see because there are so many interesting events happening simultaneously.

Let the learning begin.

Posted by andrew at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, April 20, 2004

One tool that has been especially important to law enforcement is called a roving wiretap. Roving wiretaps allow investigators to follow suspects who frequently change their means of communications. These wiretaps must be approved by a judge, and they have been used for years to catch drug dealers and other criminals. Yet, before the Patriot Act, agents investigating terrorists had to get a separate authorization for each phone they wanted to tap. That means terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone. The Patriot Act fixed the problem by allowing terrorism investigators to use the same wiretaps that were already being using against drug kingpins and mob bosses.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, April 20, 2004

The Patriot Act helps us defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all Americans. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, or to track his calls, or to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of the tools we're talking about. And they are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, July 20, 2005:

Why don't we hear about this shit on in the mainstream media. Remember when Clinton was impeached? You couldn't watch a newscast without hearing his quote, "I did not have sex with that woman." Clearly the stakes here are far higher. We're talking about a President's pecker versus our civil liberties. No contest, right?

When you're talking about an essentially disconnected country, where 4 out of ten eligible voters don't even bother to show up for presidential elections, that gets the bulk of its news from the National Enquirer, US magazine or, if we're lucky, the Daily Show, is going to be far more interested, and the media is going to get substantially higher ratings, when following reportage about sex versus the erosion of civil liberties and the abuse of presidential power, which for most of America, might as well be reports of the movements of glaciers.

I even know from the response I get on this site, that people don't want to read about politics. Don't want to comment on it, don't want to discuss it, don't want to think about it. But if I post something funny about one of my cats, they are all over it. Unscientific, I know, but it suggests a larger apathy that afflicts this country and which conservatives who are anything but apathetic exploit in every day in every way.

Beyond that, the media in this country has been cowed so effectively by the conservatives who have been "working the refs" shouting "liberal bias" at the top of their lungs for 30 years to the point that people in the media are so afraid to be appear non-biased that they bend over backwards to appear objective, but in doing so, they give voice to absurdist arguments made by conservatives to throw sand in the eyes of the American people and obfuscate the truth. It makes it impossible to have a real debate about anything in this country.

Posted by andrew at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times, perhaps making ameds for previous errors and lapses of judgement in covering the current administation seems to be pulling out all the stops to cover the NSA wiretapping, domesic survelliance scandal. This morning, there's an editorial online that does a fine job of ditilling out the bullshit you're hearing from the administration and right wing pundits and lays out the facts. It's not long. It's worth a few minutes of your time to understand the issues and how we got where we are.

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.

Posted by andrew at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know why, (It's not a particularly nice day. It's been raining. It's overcast. A little on coolish side. I) maybe I needed the fresh air after , but I decided for the first time since I moved to Oakland late last year to walk home. t took me 13 minutes.

Posted by andrew at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If the can ignore laws, write statements that they intend to ignore other laws, and deny constitutional rights to American citizens, all in the name of national security under the guise of "The War on Terror" that will last for the remainder of our lifetimes, if not longer, are we not in a state of de facto martial law?

Posted by andrew at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't tell you how excited I was when I heard on NPR that Steven Soderbergh is working on a documentary about Spalding Gray on Fresh Air today. The idea, says Soderburgh, is that he has access to a huge collection of Gray's journals, home movies and other writings and he's going to try to create a completely new monlogue from all that material. I don't know if he will be able to put it off, but it will be fantastic to see if he can.

I'm huge fan of the late, great monologuist. I saw one of the last performances he gave in New York right before he committed suicide in April of 2004. I've read most of , seen most of his , and I feel like like his death was a massive tragedy for world drama.

Soderbergh is hoping to have a cut of it together by this summer or fall so it should come out some time next year. Can't wait.

Posted by andrew at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What has happened to CNN? The Most Trusted Name In News. You Can Depend on CNN. A News Channel for America. I don't think so. Whatever has happened, I can no longer watch it.

CNN has shed all it's credibility in a headlong rush to be more Fox-like than Fox. Gone is the in depth reporting. Gone are the serious newscasts. Gone are the international stories. What's left is Anderson Cooper, a chariacature of a news anchor, that zombie Larry King, endless stories of the tabloid news piece of the day, trapped minors, missing white girls, honeymoon sabotage, what have you. I can't fucking stand it. Even Headline News, which used to be a reliable place to catch up on the day's event, seems to be 24 hour wall to wall Nancy Grace all the time. (what the fuck is up with that?)

Other than C-span, there's nowhere on the cable dial to turn to for news. I still get the bulk of my news from PBS and NPR, Google News and blogs here and there. MSNBC? Forget it. Fox? You've got be kidding. Ocassionally BBC. Surely the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times.

It seems to me that there's a place in the cable universe for a network that actually reports the news. Wouldn't that be a beautiful thing? CNN does have an entity that fits this bill (or used to). It's called CNN International. Sadly, you can't get it here and possibly (it's been a long time since I've seen it) it's just as corrupted as its domestic counterpart.

Posted by andrew at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This still remains the big question about the NSA domestic, um, terrorist surveillance program run by the administration over the last 5 years. Why? I speculated on the reason a few weeks back and I would have suspected that the truth would have come out by now, but the story seems to boggled down in a political muddle.

The administration wants you to believe that they are only monitoring terrorists and that if you are against this program, say like a Democratic leader, you are unpatriotic or possibly a traitor.

But if we are only monitoring terrorists, why make an end run around the FISA court? Surely they would rubber stamp the wiretapping of any evenly closely questionable requests. They almost never turn down a request.

The answer the administration gives is that the needed to move fast, but this is an unsatisfactory answer because FISA allows for retroactive warrants as long as they are brought to the court within 24 hours.

Then there is this post on Unclaimed Territory from the amazing Glenn Greenwald:

So as of June, 2002 -- many months after the FISA bypass program was ordered -- the DoJ official who was responsible for overseeing the FISA warrant program was not aware (at least when he submitted this Statement) of any difficulties in obtaining warrants under the FISA "probable cause" standard, and for that reason, the Administration would not even support DeWine's amendment. If - as the Administration is now claiming - they had such significant difficulties obtaining the warrants they wanted for eavesdropping that they had to go outside of FISA, surely Baker - who was in charge of obtaining those warrants - would have been aware of them. And, if the Administration was really having the problems under FISA, they would have supported DeWine's Amendment. But they didn't.

You really should go over to Glenn's site and read the whole post, but the gist of it is that the administration's oft repeated justifications for their FISA bypass program are being undermined, not surprisingly, by facts.

Sadly, this story is too nuanced for the media to cover. The media has fled headlong into Bush's black and white, right or wrong, with me or against world, in which, in order to kowtow to an increasing ignorant audience, they distill stories like this to the lowest common denominator, allow comment from both sides to pass through the airwaves without being challenged, even when those comments are patently false and basically render themselves meaningless.

Posted by andrew at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are so many good reasons to dislike our current president, but this is one that absolutely drives me insane. It's the president's need to rephrase something that he has just stated and preface it with "in other words" as if no one could possibly understand his hifalutin' rhetoric and he needs to dumb it down for the masses like you and me to digest. I hear it when he gives speeches. I see it when I read the damn transcripts. It infuriates me.

Here's the lastest expample:

"First, I made the decision to do the following things because there's an enemy that still wants to harm the American people. What I'm talking about is the intercept of certain communications emanating between somebody inside the United States and outside the United States; and one of the numbers would be reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate. In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al Qaeda affiliate or al Qaeda. And if they're making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.

Anyone else bothered by this nonsense? Here are a few more gems:

Look, there's a series of things that cause the - like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate - the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those - if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."
Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, FL, Feb. 4, 2005

"A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order," he said. "What the Patriot Act said is let's give our law enforcement the tools necessary, without abridging the Constitution of the United States, the tools necessary to defend America."
Explaining the requirements for warrants, Fond Du Lac, WI, July 14, 2004

There are countless other examples on the Internets.

It iis a whole different animal when this rhetorical device is used by, say, The Rude Pundit in his post, George W. Bush, Proud Masturbator For Freedom:

"This is a -- I repeat to you, even though you hear words, 'domestic spying,' these are not phone calls within the United States. It's a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States. I'm mindful of your civil liberties, and so I had all kinds of lawyers review the process. We briefed members of the United States Congress, one of whom was Senator Pat Roberts, about this program. You know, it's amazing, when people say to me, well, he was just breaking the law -- if I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?"

In other words, he's gonna jack off as much as he wants, no matter how many sores or calluses end up on his dick, no matter how much it interferes with the functioning of his daily life. Motherfucker, the President of the United States says spyin' is necessary and no fuckin' Constitution is gonna tell him otherwise: "Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics. It's an -- you've got the power to protect us, but we're not going to tell you how. And one of the ways to protect the American people is to understand the intentions of the enemy. I told you it's a different kind of war with a different kind of enemy. If they're making phone calls into the United States, we need to know why -- to protect you."

Which is not unlike saying that if your parents give you permission to go out for the night and the keys to the car, and you snort coke off a she-male hooker's tits while drivin' and the car plunges into the neighbor's pool, taking out the hedges, the garden gnomes, and the neighbor's schnauzer, as well as causing the she-male hooker to need stitches in her tits 'cause you bit 'em when the car leaped off the road, you shouldn't be punished because your parents didn't tell you not to snort coke off a she-male hooker's tits while drivin'.

See what I mean?

Posted by andrew at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More .

Posted by andrew at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Seemingly to coincide with my photography show, Matt Gross, travel writer at th New York Times as written ar article called Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia? that highlights the changes that have taken place in Cambodia over the course of the last 10 or so years as the country has shifted from lawless backwater to tourist mecca, It's an interesting read and if you're considering a trip to Southeast Asia (the storiy also has sections on Thailand, Laos and Vietnam) it's worth your time to scan through it.

Outside, however, it was a different story: A guest assistant from Hotel de la Paix carried my bag through the parking lot - past a new terminal designed to handle 1.5 million passengers a year when it opens this summer - to a Lexus S.U.V. As we drove into town, listening to Morcheeba on the car's iPod Mini, the driver and I discussed development on the airport road: I could remember when it had few hotels and restaurants; he could remember when it had none.

At la Paix, an artfully serene white palace designed by the landscape architect Bill Bensley, another assistant led me into the expansive arts lounge, where I sipped fresh orange juice and split my attention between the movie "Indochine," which was being projected on the wall, and the youthful staff members, who moved about with a surprising sureness of purpose.

Soon, an assistant took me to my room - dark woods, creamy fabrics, functioning Wi-Fi and another iPod - and cheerfully helped me plan my stay: a trip to Angkor Wat (with an "excellence guide," he wrote on his notepad) and, almost as important, a local SIM card for my cellphone ("first thing in the morning"). I wandered to the second-floor pool, which flowed like a river from the spa and down to the courtyard, at whose center grew a knotty ficus. Everywhere: calm. The hotel was aptly named.

That sounds like a world away from the spartan, mosquito-infested hole I stayed in at Siem Reap. Then again, it probably only cost 5 bucks a night.

Posted by andrew at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After some fits and starts, some trouble with the weather (it's been raining like crazy here) and a nightmare hanging the frames on the convex wall of my gym, the Portrait of Cambodia show is open and ready for viewing.

The photos are a set of 9 color slides from my November 2001 trip to Southeast Asia and represent some of the best work I've ever done. Something about Cambodia and the ease of the people in front of the camera or my ease around them with the camera or the nature of manual film photography or my attention to composition and light because of classes I was taking at the time or some combination therein all sort of coalesced into some beautiful shots that I'm really proud of.

Unfortunately since the prints all came from slides, I do not have digital versions. The best I can do, for now, is take of the prints that are hanging in the gym. I will eventually scan the slides, but for right now, the only way to see the pictures is to go to the gym.

If you're in the area, feel free to stop by Berkeley Ironworks. You don't have to be a member. Just let them know that you want to checks out the photographs and they will gladly let you in. Ironworks is right off the 80 freeway just north of the Bay Bridge (exit Ashby Avenue) at 800 Potter Street Berkeley, CA, and very easy to get to.

The show will be up until February 15th.

Posted by andrew at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So today was the day that my show was supposed to start at the Ironworks gym. I was psyched. I dropped a load of cash to get my shots printed and framed professionally. They looked awesome. But when I brought them to the gym, there was some confusion.

The general manager, Stein, who was the one who looked at my photos and booked me, wasn't around. He doesn't keep any kind of calendar or leaves any notes, so there was no way for the guys running the desk to know what was going on. Interestingly, the photographer who's stuff is currently up on the wall was climbing in the gym this morning. When we talked to him, he said that Stein had told him a few days ago that his shots were going to be up for another month and that there was another photographer (not me) who scheduled to go up in February.

Well, I was pissed. I tried to stay clam and did. It was just a simple mistake. But I was pissed. Who wouldn't be? I had to load all the prints back into the car, drive home and stick them in the garage instead of hang them on the wall in the gym. Had this been any old show, it wouldn't have been as big a deal. But this is my first show.

I sort of had a premonition that this would happen. Stein is very cool guy, but he's also very laissez faire about the whole photography thing. I kind of expected the process to be more formal, but he just came out, saw my shots, liked them and told me he a slot for me on January 15th.

Just to be sure, I sent an email to him to confirm and got this response:

Andrew,

Thanks for the note. The best way to correspond with me is definitely through e-mail. Look forward to seeing your images in here in Jan. Talk to you soon.

Stein-Erik Skaar
General Manager
Berkeley Ironworks

But this was back in November. And I hadn't heard from him since. No confirmation. Nothing. I didn't expect it. I just assumed the show was on as planned.

Since then, so I've been told, Stein has gotten married, went on a honeymoon and hasn't really had his head in the business. So I understand that. But I hope we can sort this mixup out and get my prints up on the wall where they belong.

Posted by andrew at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

"Smile" by Andrew Hecht

Posted by andrew at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Nation is featuring an article by former Congreswoman Elizabeth Holtzman who layed a key role in House impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon entitled The Impeachment of George W. Bush.

Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail, something I have written about in these pages [see Holtzman, "Torture and Accountability," July 18/25, 2005]. These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq. But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.

As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.

The framers of our Constitution feared executive power run amok and provided the remedy of impeachment to protect against it. While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity.

High crimes and misdemeanors? Clearly. Impeachment? Probably not. Discuss?

Posted by andrew at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is from the ABC News website:

NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying

Former Employee Admits to Being a New York Times Source By BRIAN ROSS

Jan 10, 2006 — - Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.

For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.

"I specialized in what's called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them 'black world' programs and operations."

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.

Tracking Calls

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.

Tice Admits Being a New York Times Source

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't say anything that's classified, I'm not worried," he said. "We need to clean up the intelligence community. We've had abuses, and they need to be addressed."

The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had "no information to provide."

Breathtaking. More about this here.

Posted by andrew at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in October, before the 2004 election, I wrote about what I thought was the most important issues of the campaign, one that was being ignored, one which should have had more prominence. Here what I wrote:

We've got a serious problem coming up in the next 4 years. Many members of our aging Supreme Court could retire. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, has more than hinted at his desire to leave jurisprudence prudence behind and hit links. Justice Stevens is 84. O'Connor is 74. Ginsberg, a cancer survivor, is 71. All but one, Clarence Thomas is over 65.

Now George W Bush has already said that his nominees to the court will be in the mould of Scalia and Thomas, strict constructionalist and arch-conservative. Replacing Rehnquist with another conservative will have little or no affect on the many 5-4 decisions that the court has brought down in recent years. But in replacing progressives Stevens and Ginsburg and moderate O'Conner, Bush could swing the balance of the court to the right in a way that will affect decisions for years to come and put in jeopardy cases like Roe v. Wade, amongst others.

We're seeing this exact scenario played out in the Judiciary Committee as senators grill Judge Samuel Alito over his qualifications for the Supreme Court. Typically opinions fall along party lines. Republican senators think he's most qualified Supreme Court nominee in 70 years. Democratic senators think he's an ethically challenged, less than forthcoming jurist who's patently dishonest about his ultraconservative leanings and his desire to dismantle a woman's right to choose piecemeal.

The confirmation hearings started yesterday, but that was just opening statements and nothing much was said, The real fireworks started this morning with the questioning of Alito. It's early (8:19) and we've only seen 3 senators (Spector, Leahy & Hatch) question Alito but some trends are starting to emerge. One is that Alito is clearly less than comfortable being questioned on his views after 15 years on the bench when he in charge of the questioning. Two is that Hatch and the rest of the conservative Republicans are going to lob softballs at Alito while Kennedy and the Democrats are going to lob spitballs and knucklers trying to trip Alito up or get him to respond in an impolitic fashion, which could easily happen seeing Alito's unease at the questioning table. There is the fact that Alito, while more forthcoming than Roberts who was an expert evader, just seems like a liar.

Kennedy is up now. He's grilling Alito about his pledge to the Judiciary Committee to recuse himself from any case involving Vanguard, with whom he had large holdings, and his subsequent non-recusal of a case involving Vanguard. Like all the other Democratic senators, he's going to ask Alito about the balance of protecting security and civil liberties and what are the limits of executive power. They are going to ask about Roe v. Wade, which I believe, despite Alito's claim to have an open mind, will vote to overturn at the first chance he has. They are going to ask about the rights of privacy. They are going to ask about strip searching 10 year girls. They are going to ask about protecting corporate interests at the expense of individual rights. They are going to peer into everything he has said, done and written and rightly so for such an important position as the Supreme Court which is a lifetime appointment..

Unless there is some remarkable revelation or outburst, chances are Alito will be confirmed and the court will swing to the right for a quarter of a century (Alito is only 57). This is one of the direct consequences of the ascendancy of George Bush. Knowing that his fingerprints are going to be on major decisions that affect millions of Americans for years to come is less than comforting and it's why elections matter, why all citizens should pay attention to politics and why everyone who can should vote.

Posted by andrew at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

First all, let me say that I really liked Munich. It was a brilliant piece of film making, played out with dramatic flashbacks, great attention to period detail, a period, the 70s, which I think is very challenging to recreate without producing a cartoonish world full of caricature actors. Speaking of which, Eric Bana was scintillating, a huge surprise. Daniel Craig was great (I believe now that he will make a fantastic Bond). Ciaron Hinds, who plays Caesar in HBO's Rome, was also excellent. Geoffrey Rush, as always, sublime. There were many notable performances from actors who I am not familiar with but who played a huge role in coalescing this ensemble cast.

That's all good and well, but it's the subject matter that really interesting to me. As a Jew, this is a very difficult piece of history to come to terms with. I was 2 when the hostages were taken and murdered, so I have no memory of it, but I have seen documentaries and historical retrospectives, so I was probably more familiar than most of the people of my generation about what happened in Munich. It was a disgusting act that achieved very little other than the destruction of several families and the Olympics ideal of nation's competing in the peaceful forum of sport. Israel is still there. The PLO no longer exists in any kind of cohesive form. Palestinians might be on a path to having a national homeland, but who's to say that it wouldn't have happened long ago if not for a series of barbaric acts.

Now, Israel came into existence in 1948, but Jews have been living on that land continuously for at least 2000 years, probably much longer. Who knows when they first came there. If you believe the bible, Abraham, the mythical first Jew, moved there from Ur in Sumeria, but there are no dates. And I don't believe it anyway. What I do know is that we have records from the Romans in text and in monument that the Jews were there. Judea was a country that actually existed. It was sacked by Titus in 79 AD (for more information read about the Arch of Titus). Jews were dispersed around the known world, sent into exile and slavery. Before that Nebuchadnezzar from Babylon invaded Judea, sacked the place and sent the Jews into slavery in what is now Iraq. Judea was ruled by the Babylonians, the Macedonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, briefly by the Crusaders, by the Ottomans again all the way up until World War I when the Turks were defeated by the Allies and the British took control of the Holy Land. They called it Palestine, which was a bastardization of Philistines from the Old Testament. In 1948, after World War II, the UN decided to partition the country giving half to Jews to form Israel and half to the Arabs to form Palestine. Jews weren't all that happy but accepted it. The Palestinians said all or nothing and went to war. Thinking that the war would be quick and decisive, they convinced much of the population to evacuate to the neighboring Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and especially Jordan, which then included all of the West Bank). More Arabs were forced off the land during the subsequent battles for terriotroy, but fuck, it was a war, that shit happens. Unfortunately for the Arabs, they lost the war and they lost the land. Subsequent wars in '52 and '67 lost the Arabs even more land including the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt (mostly the 1967 war). Many Arabs never returned to Israel, still hold hope in their hopeless cause for "Right of Return". Meanwhile Arabs who never left are Israeli citizens (How many Jews do you think are citizens of Arab countries?).

Anyway, I digress, but you get the point with my shorter history of Israel. By 1972 Israel was an established military power and the Arabs, fearing that they would not be able to defeat the Jews in a conventional war, turned to terrorism. The result is played out in Spielberg's Munich.

I went through such a range of emotions during this movie. I was angry and bitter. I was amused and laughing (nothing like Jewish humor to a Jew). I was perplexed and enraged. I was morose and disturbed. The movie tells the story of the secret operation to kill all the parties responsible for the 1972 Munich attack, but it was more about what it means to be a Jew and what it means for Israel to exist. The issues are so complex that I have a hard time getting my head around it and articulating my feelings.

I'm strong supporter of Israel. I also want there to be peace in the Middle East. I know this probably will never happen. I know there are people who will never accept Israel despite whatever treaties are signed or agreements formed. Israel, as long as it exists, will be in a perpetual state of war, the sort of war that the Bush Administration wants Americans to think they are in, but in Israel it's real. Suicide bombers explode themselves up in coffee shops and pizza parlors and buses. Katyusha & Qassam rockets are shot over the border from Lebanon and Gaza. As soon as they put up a wall, terrorists find a way under it around it or through it.

Meanwhile, Israel has been fighting these attacks since 1972 and struggling with what it means to be a democracy that sends out killers to eliminate hostile actors, bulldozers to mow down houses, engineers to erect security barriers, soldiers to occupy Arab lands. Many people think that the Jews are some monolithic block that thinks and acts alike, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Israeli society is fractured politically, socially, religiously. As many Jews want to built settlements in the West Bank, many more have tired of the ordeal and moved to Brooklyn or Encino where they don't have to carry a gun or worry about their kids being blown up on the bus, but can still walk to shul and find kosher corned beef.

I don't know. I'm kind of babbling now. Like I said, I don't have much clarity on this issue, just a lot of emotions. I'm not a believer. I don't believe in god. I don't believe in organized religion. But I believe in Israel. But if there were a god, I'd be thanking him every night that there are strong people, Jews, men and women, willing to live in Israel and to die in Israel to preserve the ideal, however conflicted, of a Jewish Homeland.

Back to the movie. As I said, I enjoyed it. And this is despite what I think is a fatal flaw of movies where the actors are not playing American characters, yet they speak perfect English to each other. Israelis do not speak English to each other. They speak Hebrew. If Jim Caviezel can learn lines in Aramaeic or whatever for Passion of the Christ, then Eric Bana and the rest of the non-Jewish cast can learn Hebrew to play Israelis. I know they never will. This is one of the ways Hollywood makes movies more accessible, and I get that, but it irks me nonetheless.

Posted by andrew at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

On Sunday, I did something that I've wanted to do for ages, but never got around to. I went to a live auction. It was an estate auction at Clars in Berkeley of all sorts of objects ranging from oil paintings, antique furniture, Persian rugs, crystal chandeliers, grandfather clocks, china sets, musical instruments, old bottles of wine, even a 2000 Ford Mustang. I didn't buy anything but it was fascinating all the same just to be there in the room and watch how the auction proceeded.

There were maybe a hundred people in the room who slowly moved around the warehouse as different objects were put on the block. The auctioneer, Reg, who owns the place too, either sold items from the stage or from a portable dias so he could see the objects and all the bidders. At the same time, bidders were coming over the internet on an eBay property called Live Auctioneers (you can see this auction here) and there were Clars employees with cellphones handling interested parties who wanted to bid, but couldn't be there on site. The whole scene reminded me of Red Violin, but on a much, much smaller scale.

Some of the people in attendenace were dealers looking for cheap buys for the shop. Some were people just collecting for their homes. Many, like me, were just there to watch. Everyone had a small yellow piece of paper with their bidder number. Mine stayed in my pocket the whole time.

The one thing that I was interested in was a 3 foot ceramic sculpture of a samurai by someone named Yashima Gakutei. It had a warn green patina like copper. It thought it would look great in my place. In the catalog, the estimated price was from 100-300, which normally meant that the opening bid would be 50 bucks. There were hundreds of objects for sale at this auction. A few were battled over fiercerly in escalating bidding wars, but more often than not, the first bidder got in there and no one else bid, so an object with an estimated price of dollars would sell for 250 bucks. I was hoping for the same with the samurai but was quickly disabused of that notion as the opening bid was 100 bucks (becuase of "lots of interest", as Reg said) and it went finally for 475 bucks, way out of my price range, especially when you factor in the 8.25% sales tax and the 17% bidder fee that goes to the auction house. Easy come. Easy go.

I might not rush back to Clars, but I will definitely check out one of the several other auction house around the Bay Area.

Posted by andrew at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have a show of my Cambodia shots coming up in the middle of this month. It's not a big deal. It's not at a gallery. It's not a coffee shop. It's at my gym. And while there are good (some even great) photographers who have been showcased there, it's still just a gym.

That said, hundreds if not thousands of eyeballs will see my photographs. And based on that, I decided that my little 8 x 12 prints framed 15 dollar Aaron Brothers jobbie were not going to do the trick. So I decided that I would print them a little larger, 16 x 24 for all but one (which is 20 x 30) and have them framed professionally with simple yet elegant black wood frames.

But the thing is, this process is anything but cheap. It costs 40 bucks just to print the damn photo and it costs another 140 to pay for the frame, the glass, the mat and the labor to put all together. This isn't a huge show. I'm only displaying 10 images, but do the math and you can quickly see that this is a very costly endeavor.

Now I didn't have to pay sales tax (it could have cost even more), but I have to go down to the Oakland city offices, get a business license ($30) and register for a sales tax number which means if I sell anything, I have to collect sales tax and remit it to the city. No big deal, I doubt I'll sell anything anyway, but you never know.

The photographs looked fantastic printed so large and I'm really looking forward to seeing them framed and even more to see the reactions of the folks at Ironworks Gym in Berkeley. If you're in the area, fell free to stop by starting January 15th.

Posted by andrew at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I delve further into and expore the millios of photos on the site, it's hard not to be impressed by the incredible talent by the thousands of photographers who choose to share their work with the rest of the world. The people who run Flickr are not immune to this and have created a section on the site to showcase the best of the best in a place they like to call "Interestingness". This is what they like say about the mouthful of a word:

Besides being a five syllable word suitable for tongue twisters, it is also an amazing new Flickr Feature.

There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

We've added some pages (and changed some existing ones) to help you explore Flickr's most interesting photos. Before you start though, you might want to take your phone off the hook, send your boss to an executive training session and block off some time on your schedule, because we don't think you're going to be walking away from your screen any time soon. Beautiful, amazing, moving, striking - explore and discover some of Flickr's Finest.

Every day there are 500 photos that are honored on this page. In the last week or so, I've had at least 5 photos show up on the Interestness page, including three on page one (pretty cool, huh?) mostly on the strength on Fil's insane behavior when I take shower.

Don't know how they got there, the whole process is something of a mystery in the Flickr community, but nonetheless, they are there. I'm going to give you the links, but it's quite possible that the time you read this and click through to these links, they will be gone, because the quality of the interestingness clearly changes over time and photos shift position for what reason no one knows but they do.

Here they are:

Jumping in with Two Feet - 07JAN06

Fil Goes to Town - 06JAN06

Role Reversal - 05JAN06

There's a Cat on My Head - 03JAN06

Filemu & Makelani - 30 DEC 05

Posted by andrew at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saw it tonight. So many many thoughts. I need to sleep on it. One thing I will say now is that what happened to the Eric Bana who played a marble statue in Troy and a wooden soldier in Blackhawk Down? The guy was simply amazing as Avner.

Posted by andrew at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I have a new love and it's the Banh Mi Dac Biet, a French inspired Vietnamese sandwich of ham or turkey, pate, cucumbers, thinly sliced carrots, onions and radish maybe, daikon, I'm not sure, cilantro some very strong chilis all on a flaky French roll that will leave you covered in crumbs if you're not careful. I can't get enough of them. There are a few little Vietnamese cafes in Oakland's Chinatown (just across the water from Alameda and about 5 minutes from my new place) that churn them out for $2.50 a pop and they are unbelievably delicious. I love them so much, I even bought a loaf of their pate so I could make something similar at home. The combination of the tangy pate, the simmering chilis, the crunchy vegetables, fresh cilantro and the fresh bread is just so perfect. Ok, so it's not kosher, and I don't care if I'm going to hell (mostly since I don't believe in it), but I'm going to be eating dac biet for the rest of my days.

Posted by andrew at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It almost never happens like this. Fil is always the one taking care of Mak, and rightly so. Mak needs round the clock care. But it did happen and I have it all documented

Posted by andrew at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A good way to start off the new year. Homemade pizza with blue, fontina, parmesan, romano, mozzarella and provalone. Add a some sun-dried tomatoes and rosemary. God damn that's fucking good pizza.

If you want the recipe for the crust (incredibly delicious and easy to make) go here

Posted by andrew at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I haven't written much about College Football this year (or this past year) even though I watched more games than usual. I had to planned to write more, but like with so many things, I just let it slide. But now that the season is over I just want to jot down a few notes.

First let me say that I’m a huge UCLA fan. I didn't go there, but my mom is an alumnus. the campus was also less than a mile away from where I spent the first 18 years of my life. I wasted a lot of time biking around, paying videos games in the Cooperage and basically doing things that I probably shouldn't have been doing. All that and the fact that I went to a pacifist university with no football program has kept me a livelong UCLA fan.

That said, I could not get enough of watching USC this year. I know, I know. I should hate everything cardinal and gold. My favorite team is UCLA and whoever is playing SC and all that. But I just could not help. One look at Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart and company against Arkansas in the early part of the season and I was hooked. I would make sure I was home or at some place where I could watch every game that was on, and I caught most of them with the exception of the some the late season games when I was in Costa Rica.

I've never seen an offense like that. I don't know that anyone has. It was mesmerizing. I don't want to say too much about it, because it's late and I want to get to bed and I need to finish this post before I crash (I'm running on my 2 Thai iced tea lunch right now).

Anyway, I was really looking forward to the National Championship Game. It was going to be great. Two unbeaten 12-0 teams. Two storied universities. Loads of incredible players including the last two Heisman Trophy winners. 34 game winning streak versus 20 game winning streak. The Rose Bowl. It was going to be great. How could it not be. But I couldn't have imagined that the game would live up to and even far surpass the hype.

Though I'm not happy about the result for many reasons (Texas beating California at anything is never good. A red state getting over on a blue state is never good. The PAC-10 losing to the BIG-12 or the old SWC blows too), I was thrilled with the game. It was a battle for the ages, and instant classic, a back and forth struggle, neither team able to get too far out ahead, a game filled with amazing performances, brilliant runs, staggering interceptions.

Personally I wouldn't have gone for it on 4th down. I was yelling at the screen for SC to punt and make Vince Young and Texas go at least 80 yards. But Pete Carroll has been going for it on 4th down all season long, in tougher situations than that, with more yards to go than that, and LenDale White had been an unstoppable freight train all game long. The Texas D just stuffed him and then Young ran all the way down the field and punched it in. They deserved to win. Ironically it was just like last year when Young led Texas from behind in the Rose Bowl, that time against Michigan and not for the title, but clearly it was a dress rehearsal that prepared them perfectly for this year's tilt.

Was it the greatest game ever? I don't know. I haven't seen all the games. Some people will probably argue that it was. It not, it's definitely up there among the best. It was the most fun to watch with the best ending of any game that I have seen since the Doug Flutie Boston College - Miami game, way back when.

USC had a great run. 34 wins in a row and two titles. Pretty unbelievable. They are going to lose some top talent and their defense wasn't all that spectacular so they might slip a little, but they have come back from oblivion to the top of the game. You have to respect that.

Meanwhile crosstown in my hood, UCLA quietly put together a decent 11-2 season of their own (with loses only to hated USC and Arizona, whom they could not stop on the ground, well, let's face it, they couldn't stop Youngstown State on the ground). They won a bowl game for the first time in years, the Sun Bowl against a tough and talented Northwestern team. It's good to have them back in the upper echelon of the NCAA again.

Posted by andrew at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

of Fil taken this morning with my 10D.

Posted by andrew at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been a very wet late December and early January (so far). We haven't gotten any real torrential rain. It's just been more of a constant drip with cobalt gray skies more reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest than the Bay Area. Normally this time of year I would be cheering this weather because it means snow in the Sierras, but this percipication hasn't exaclty translated to massive snowpack yet. I bought my season pass for Heavenly ($319) just before I left for Costa Rica and like last year, I didn't get a chance to ski before New Year's. I wanted to go on Christmas Day or the day after, the last two days before my pass was blacked out for the remainder of the year, but then it was 48 degrees and raining in Tahoe, so I stayed indoors in Oakland. Hopefully I can make the pass worthwhile this season. I probably will not ski as much as last year when I rented a house in South Lake and was up there just about every weekend. I figure if I can get 10 days in inclduing a trip to Vail to take advantage of the 3 free days there it will have been a great season.

Posted by andrew at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)