THIS MODERN WORLD

Was out of town overnight. Got home around noon, and immediately cranked out a new cartoon about the latest NSA revelations, which I just finished a few minutes ago. The cartoon that got bumped was about Porter Goss and the hookergate stuff. Now I see that Dusty Foggo’s home has been raided by the FBI. (Atrios will have the links, I’m too beat right now). It’s always a balancing act, trying to look ahead and guess what’s going to be in the news and on people’s minds, when the next cartoon sees print. We’ll see if I guessed right or not on this one.

Anyway, a reader sent these images in, noting that they were suddenly timely again, and I wanted to post them before I closed up shop for the day. These are a couple of posters I designed in the early nineties, for a software company that somehow was involved in these issues — I don’t remember the details. They’ve apparently become quite the collector’s items — I get email pretty regularly from people wanting to know if they’re available anywhere. Unfortunately, I don’t even have copies of the full size posters myself. If anybody does have them, I wouldn’t mind getting a high quality scan from you.

If you always assume that the administration is lying and that things are much worse than you’re being told, you will rarely be proven wrong:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

I certainly agree with Señor Mañana’s views below about the new Save the Children report on U.S infant mortality rates. It is obscene that the only industrialized country we’re beating out is Latvia.

However, I think our host actually lets the U.S. off a little easy. America has favorable conditions matched by no other nation that’s ever existed. We’ve suffered less than almost any country from armed conflict, even given the ferocious devastation that was the War of 1812. Meanwhile we have an extremely helpful, temperate climate and natural resources coming out of our noses. By contrast, Japan has 1/3 the infant mortality rate of ours, with no natural resources and sixty years after it was burned to the ground and nuked. Europe is also far better, after it almost obliterated itself twice within the past century.

In other words, not only should we have the highest level of average health in the world, it shouldn’t even be CLOSE. How far we’ve fallen short of this says something extremely unflattering about us.

For instance, here’s how Canadian malcontent John Ralston Saul describes America in his book The Doubter’s Companion:

To quote Justice Potter Stewart’s famous non-definition, I know it when I see it. And this is fucking obscene:

An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

* * *

The report, which analyzed data from governments, research institutions and international agencies, found higher newborn death rates among U.S. minorities and disadvantaged groups. For African-Americans, the mortality rate is nearly double that of the United States as a whole, with 9.3 deaths per 1,000 births.

Because of some unholy confluence of conservatism, free-marketism, and general head-up-ass-ism, this country has never made health care for all a national priority. Things like this are the result, and it infuriates me. Next time some right wing asshole starts talking about the scary, scary dangers of socialized medicine, just remember: among industrialized nations, only Latvia has a higher death rate for newborns than the United Fucking States of America.

For a nation as advanced and wealthy as we are alleged to be, that’s unspeakably obscene.

Let’s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Living With War is starting to show up in stores. Go buy it.

Contrary to the pitch Neil Young’s PR people have come up with, he’s really never been an overtly political artist (“Ohio” notwithstanding), and I say this as someone who’s been listening to the music pretty closely for about thirty years now. He also has a history of being politically enigmatic, famously sugesting during the eighties that he was not unsympathetic to Ronald Reagan’s policies. Anyway, it seems like a pretty extraordinary thing for any musician to put out an entire album on which every song makes a direct political statement, whether he/she is known as a “protest” artist or not. Springsteen’s Nebraska might have been a commentary on the bleakness of the early Reagan years, but it didn’t contain lyrics as straightforward as “Let’s impeach the President.” Even U2 really has no more than a handful of overtly political songs in its catalogue, if you go back and think about it.

On a related note, displeased reactions from John Gibson and Neil Cavuto. And a “bonus” interview from Rolling Stone, here.

What was the tipping point when you decided you had to write and record these songs? I assume it was a cumulative thing, that they were building up inside your for a while. But what was the one thing — a conversation, a news report, a White House statement, something else — that made you say “Alright, I’m going to do this NOW.”

We were in a small hotel and I had already written four songs and was playing them in the room. I knew I was getting sucked in. I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA TODAY, the cover showed the inside of a C130 or similar large military craft, completely converted into a flying hospital. Soldiers were lying on operating tables, with physicians furiously trying to save lives at 100s of miles an hour some 20,000 feet in the air. The plane was a shuttle between Iraq and Germany, where we have these big bases and hospitals. The USA TODAY caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict. That just caught me off guard, and i went upstairs and wrote “Families” for one of those soldiers who didn’t get to come home. Then I cried in my wife’s arms. That was the turning point for me.