The Department of Homeland Security can't keep unauthorized people from posting to their mailing list. Computerword has the details of another small but telling example of Bush administration incompetence.

Here’s the story: DHS provides a daily summary of news items for its mailing list subscribers,  which includes people with security and disaster response roles, vendors and news media. But its mailing list was misconfigured today. Anyone who hit "reply all" reached everyone one the list,  triggering some 200 emails -- and counting.   The temptation to reach out was too much.  It quickly became a big networking party.

The results soon became hilarious...

In a continuation of the War on Truth, Bill Proenza, the head of the National Hurricane Center has been warned by his boss, acting director of the National Weather Service, Mary Glackin, to shut up about the failure of the Bush Administration to provide adequate funding for hurricane forecasting. He has been complaining since his appointment in January that NOAA should be spending money on a replacement for the obsolete QuickSat weather satellite, rather than on public relations campaigns. This is not his first warning. According to the Miami Herald

Proenza said that on April 13, he was told by Louis Uccellini, a high-ranking weather service official: ``You better stop these QuikScat [and other] complaints. I'm warning you. You have NOAA, DOC [the U.S. Department of Commerce] and the White House pissed off.''

There's more...

Who created the list, and why?

Part 1 is here with contact information for committee members

Link to part 2 is here.

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I don't mean America of course, but America's fourth closest neighbor, the Bahamas. The closest three are Mexico, Canada and Russia (which is only three miles away from America.) The closest Bahamian island is fifty miles from Florida, so in good weather you can get across on a jetski.

Red is the color of the Free National Movement, which this week defeated the incumbent Progressive Liberal Party (yellow) in a noisy and enthusiastic campaign. The issues at stake included sale of land to foreigners, national health insurance and fishing limits.

More about sex, drugs, money and politics in the Bahamas below the fold...

The state of Israel receives a lot of political support from fundamentalist Christians in the US. Many of them believe (due to a strange reading of Revelations, the wackiest book in the Bible) that Armageddon will only happen when the Jews are in full possession of the Promised Land, including all of Jerusalem. I have a much more reliable suggestion for arranging the second coming. Let's get DNA samples from the shroud of Turin, and clone Jesus. With the right host mother we could even arrange yet another virgin birth. I'd love to check in with Big J what he thinks about the USA's current policy in the Middle East. Did he really say, "Turn that other cheek," or was it, "Bomb those bastards back into the stone age"? Of course, the DNA on the shroud is pretty messed up and there are also some wine stains, so the second coming of the Lord might well look like a giant grape, but that's a risk we have to take.

OK, much as I love trashing the administration, I'm going to take a few minutes to defend Brian Doyle.

First of all, he's innocent until proven guilty. Maybe he did not see the age in the profile and thought he was dealing with an adult. Maybe he saw the age, but thought it was an adult role playing a little girl. That sort of thing happens a lot on the internets. Heck, there are whole web sites where you can have virtual sex with other ponies, and I'd be willing to bet there are no real horses involved.

There was no victim. I repeat, there was no fourteen year old girl. There was a cop, posing as a fourteen year old girl. If Doyle thought he was talking to an adult role playing a teenager, he would have been right.

There's more...

According to a friend of mine who works for a suicide prevention hotline in the San Francisco Bay Area, her supervisor has been transferred to New Orleans because: "It seems they are getting over 30,000 calls a day on the crisis lines there because FEMA keeps rolling callers over to the suicide prevention lines."

Yow!

Weeks after the disaster FEMA still can't deal with the call volume and so is clogging up the suicide hotlines. This is only hearsay right now of course. Is there anyone out there who can confirm this? If it is indeed true, then it deserves some publicity as a further example of the incompetence of FEMA. Enough publicity and they might even hire the staff they seen to answer the darn phones.

According to Reuters, Scooter Libby was pressured by Fitzgerald into renewing his waiver of confidentiality. This means that the second waiver was not as uncoerced as Miller was saying. It also puts Libby's line about the aspens all turning together in a new light. Was he saying to her, "I've turned, and you should as well" ?

Quotes from Reuters in the extended entry.

Oh, this is going to be good.

HCA said it believes the subpoena relates to the sale of HCA stock by Senator William H. Frist, the Republican Majority Leader. The company said it intends to cooperate fully.

Is there a single member of the Republican leadership who isn't corrupt? "Privelege" means "private law". The Republicans all seem to believe that there is a private law for them, and that if you have enough money and influence, the rules just don't apply to you.

Scum.

The venerable BBC science fiction series Doctor Who is back in a new series, and the writers are taking the opportunity to throw in a few comments about comtemporary politics. A couple of weeks ago a the British Government (which had been taken over by evil aliens) is attempting to get permission from the UN to use nuclear weapons. They claim to be threatned by "Massive Weapons of Destruction which can be deployed in 45 seconds."

"That's all lies," says one character. "Are people going to believe them?"

"Why not, they did last time"

In this week's episode, set in the year 200,000, a different evil alien is controlling the entire earth empire by taking over the news media. We are given a description of how the right word here and there in a news broadcast, repeated over and over, can destroy an economy, stop immigration (a big issue in the UK politics) or start a war.

Hmmmm...

Thanks to the writers of Doctor Who for giving a new generation of UK kids a little healthy scepticism about politicians and the media.

I'm taking my family, and planning on spending the next four years (at least) in the Bahamas. I wrote this to explain to my friends why I felt it necessary to do this.

A huge number of Americans actually voted for George Bush, in spite of the fact that he took the country to war based on a tissue of lies and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. I chose to be an American, and for the first time in twenty years I am ashamed of that decision.

(Continued below the fold)

Current betting on the Tradesports exchange shows Kerry with a 51% chance of being elected, and Bush at 47.5% and falling. Bush traded as high as 59.5% earlier today, so this shows a substantial swing to Kerry.

While I was typing this up, Kerry went to 52%, and Bush to 47.1%. Can you feel the momentum?

Update [2004-11-2 16:17:55 by misterajc]: Tradesports appears to be down now, possibly due to all the Kossacks looking at it. The last odds I saw were 45% Bush, 55% Kerry. We may well see panic selling of Bush when it comes back up.

This was forwarded to me today.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Sheila Paquette [mailto:xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 9:15 AM
>To: Sandy Post
>Subject: Chakras Army Nurse
>
>
>
>I want to share an email Chakras Spa in Greensboro, NC received from an
>Army nurse stationed in Iraq...
>
>
>
>"I am a 43 year old Army nurse stationed in Iraq in a Combat Support
>Hospital for the past 9 1/2 months. I will be home on R&R and would love
>a "pamper me day." I would like some help designing a full day package
>for Oct 28 or Oct 29. I am in a high profile combat zone and have been
>under a great deal of stress for quite a while. I only have a short time
>at home before returning for 3 1/2 more months and really want to feel
>like a "regular girl" again.

Read what the nurse had to say when she turned up for her spa treatment after the fold.

Kerry says he will not bring back the draft. Bush says he will keep the army "all volunteer". Is there a difference? Maybe, and given the semantic games that the neocons like to play, probably. Suppose the draft does come back, but you are given a choice of four years "commnity service" (ie slave labor) or two years in the army, well, it will still be an all volunteer army, won't it?