Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has posted its list of Criminals and Scoundrels: The 25 Most Corrupt Officials of the Bush Administration. Someone seems to be missing….
More seriously, I think that including petty thieves like Claude Allen on this list cheapens the effect — the real problem with the Bush administration is not that there is the occasional shoplifter or petty fraudester in private life but rather the institutionalized corruption amounting to kleptocracy.
My father is having his 80th birthday today, and has taken himself and my mother off to Paris to celebrate, which seems like a pretty good idea (except that the rest of us have to stay back here and work or go to school).
I hope you have better things to do today than read this, but just in case, Joyeux anniversaire dad!
U.S. Declines to Join Accord on Secret Detentions:
Representatives from 57 countries on Tuesday signed a long-negotiated treaty prohibiting governments from holding people in secret detention. The United States declined to endorse the document, saying its text did not meet U.S. expectations.
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State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment, except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty but that the final wording “did not meet our expectations.”
The Associated Press reported that McCormack declined to comment on whether the U.S. stance was influenced by the Bush administration's policy of sending terrorism suspects to CIA-run prisons overseas, which President Bush acknowledged in September.
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The convention defines forced disappearance as the arrest, detention or kidnapping of a person by state agents or affiliates and subsequent denials about the detention or location of the individual.
Nelson's Weblog: googleSearchHistory
Did you know that for years Google has been keeping a record of every search you do? And did you know they're now associating your search history with your Google login for other services like Gmail, Calendar, and the like? Surprise! It's Search History. And now it's being used to personalize your search results.
I don't like Google aggregating this data about me. It is possible to opt out. You can turn off search history recording in the settings page. You can also edit your history, including removing it entirely.
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Update Tuesday, Feb 6: the instructions above let you remove the search history that you can access via the search history product. However, Google is logging your search history in other places for other purposes. See Google's privacy FAQ and privacy policy for more info on those other forms of search history.
Nothing to fear! Of course! Nothing to fear!
This announcement from the Washington Post is interesting on several levels.
High School Newspapers on washingtonpost.com: washingtonpost.com and the Washington Post Young Journalists Development Program are now enabling local high school journalists to put their school newspapers online, free of charge.
Our goal is to create a thriving virtual community for high school journalists and their peers, a place where students and other washingtonpost.com readers can see what schools are writing and comment on their work.
High-schoolers, with the aid of faculty advisors, use easily accessible blog software to publish articles and photos to a washingtonpost.com server. The blogs can be updated from any computer at any time, allowing student journalists the freedom to post stories outside of their traditional publication schedule.
We are launching the new feature in collaboration with three local high schools – located in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, respectively – and are actively recruiting more participants. The program is open to public and private high schools in The Post's circulation area.
While it appears that the newspaper faculty advisors will have some role, I wonder how that will work in practice. The Post says that “The blogs can be updated from any computer at any time, allowing student journalists the freedom to post stories outside of their traditional publication schedule.” Does that mean true freedom from the school's control? In other words, will the faculty advisors have to sign off on every posting, or just initially authenticate the students (and perhaps pull credentials)? There's a real potential here for this resource to become a liberating back-channel around the censoring grip of high school principals. Can that really be what the somewhat conservative Post has in mind?
And how about the comment sections? Presumably these will be moderated like the Post's own comment sections, but by whom? Will these become real independent forums for kids (and parents?) to talk about school issues? That would be a potentially transformative political resource as so much of family life is organized around schools.
Then there's the revenue issue. Will the Post run ads in these sections? Will it kick back any of the money to the students? Will they be recruited to sell ads for their sections and given commissions?
Done right, this could be the start of something big.
The Carpetbagger Report, We are now up to a whopping 17 John McCain Flip-Flops.
Kidding aside, while I do worry that the long campaign season will encourage the tendency of the press to pile on minor gaffes, it's also entertaining to speculate just how high the McCain flip-flop index can go. I wonder what Las Vegas or Ladbrooks would give for over/under predictions?
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