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Don't forget to consider that Plame was hardly a secret agent.

How much time, money and news cycles did we waste with Valerie Plame? Google would have told you she was working undercover at Nathan's. They even knew about it in Duluth. Well, I guess "Scooter" deserves to prosecuted not for revealing a known "secret" but for being a grown man named "Scooter".

I dunno, I was skimming over that link and read this:

"I supported the war in Iraq and the world is much safer. (Oct 2004)"

Missing something here?

That's bizarre - it's even miscategorized as Homeland Security instead of War and Peace.

As far as I can tell (based on web searching), it's based on a mistaken identity of a quotation from the Feingold-Michels debate of 2004:

FEINGOLD: We are better off Saddam Hussein is gone, but we are not safer.

MICHELS: I supported the war in Iraq, progress is being made and putting a democracy in place will make the Middle East and the world much safer. Osama bin Laden has his troops deployed in Iraq right now.

To eliminate any remaining confusion over this error, here is another account of the debate in question.

The web site has been made aware of this error. Begin the right-wing hacker conspiracy theories!

Or in Wisconsin...

No, it's the sound of Zambonis exploding.

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/n ews/local/10134626.htm

Shoppers aren't getting away with this anymore:

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/b usiness/10134625.htm

WASHINGTON - Darlene Salerno considers herself a loyal customer of the Express clothing chain, shelling out about $2,000 for its trendy outfits each year for the past decade. On a recent shopping trip, she bought a tank top, a button-down shirt and some khaki pants, but realized when she got home that she had similar items in her closet. So a few days later, she took them back to the store. She presented the items, the receipt and waited for her money.

Instead, the saleswoman handed her a slip of paper that said "RETURN DECLINED" and told her to call the toll-free number at the bottom for more information. She phoned and was informed her account showed "excessive" returns.

As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, a number of major retailers are rolling out electronic systems that weigh the number of returns and exchanges a person has made, the dollar value of the items and the dates of the transactions to decide whether a consumer should be granted another. The systems are designed to catch shoplifters and those who "wardrobe," wearing clothes and then returning them for a refund.

I'm still feeling haunted.... QUOTES FOLLOW: --- http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=113502&cid= 9615153/ Stratcom Jamming (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, @11:33AM (#9615153) I used to work with an engineer who was a former air force tech on the Looking Glass. The Looking Glass missions were a group of USAF command/control aircraft ... ... one of their amusements was lowering a long antenna and jamming garage door frequencies and other civilian applications (e.g. keyless door locks). I couldn't imagine why the air force would want to interfere with garage doors and he never had a good explanation other than they were told to do that and the crew always found it amusing.... ----http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthtribun e/news/opinion/7306797.htm?template=contentModules /printstory.jsp/ ... the National Transportation Safety Board's own simulations of the plane, the pilots and the weather were unable to bring the plane down. ... An abrupt cessation of communication between the plane and the tower took place at about 10:18 a.m., the same time an odd cell phone phenomenon occurred with a driver in the immediate vicinity.... ... Carol Carmody, a former employee with the CIA, the head of the team, announced the day after that the FBI had found no indications of terrorist involvement.... So how could the FBI possibly know? ... a team of FBI agents was quickly on the crash site about noon, less than an hour after ... the (fire) chief had first located the site and found a way to access the wreck. This FBI team had come ... from the FBI office in Minneapolis." I calculate that this team would have had to have left the Twin Cities at about the same time the Wellstone plane was taking off. -----

ACORN is misbehaving in Minnesota too.

http://badnarik.org/newsfromthetrail.php?p=1346 and http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/n ews/nation/9872659.htm

To those never entering the shitlist, what made a difference was the constant pounding of head against the beaurocratic [sic] brickwall, the humiliation of "sorry, you're not allowed to enter that flight", "you're not authorized by proper authorities", always have to submit to some greater authority. Always hearing "you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong". To most, that's something they could live with. And what it would take to change it had very little to do with leadership, it had to do with people getting off their asses.

Yours is one of the most informative comments I've read on Slashdot.

To anyone who doubts just how much we've become like the totalitarian societies we once despised, just compare what Dovregubbens Hall (583591) writes to your last visit to an airport or a Federal building.

We've learned to fear the screener for the Transportation Security agency, because if he doesn't like your attitude, he can keep you off your flight -- or from flying ever again. A year ago that screener was a janitor or a Microsoft Certification dropout. Today he can seriously disrupt your life if he wants to -- and for the first time in his life, he know he holds that kind of power.

We've got the government "training" long-haul truck drivers -- guys who routinely drive twelve or eighteen hours straight to meet deadlines --, and bus drivers, and rest stop workers to identify "suspicious" people and report them to a secret toll-free phone number. To think that this volunteer force can't be used to suppress dissent -- "Just keep a count of pro-choice bumper stickers" --is to be willfully blind to a century or more of police misconduct.

Even guys with cameras aren't safe from being scrutinized and added to government databases, because cops today wave the bloody shirt of 9-11 and invoke "patriotism" as a fig-leaf to justify anything they care do to -- reasonable or not, legal or not.

Protesters, exercising their First Amendment rights, are already being arrested solely because of the content of their speech. Whether they are eventually convicted or just harassed by cops and city inspectors, the message is clear: dissent will cost you at least a day in jail, enough money to hire a lawyer (or rely on a possibly incompetent court-appointed lawyer), and maybe a little roughing up by the cops.

Every war attracts a few war profiteers along with the honest, self-sacrificing patriots. Every increase in police powers gives police new tools to fight crime, but at the same time gives that minority of cops who are bullies, busybodies, and braggarts interested in throwing their weight around more occasion to lord that power over the innocent citizens.

The thing to fear is not another 9-11. It's not even Stalinist knocks on the door at midnight. What we need to fear is more subtle: a steady erosion of American liberties, of what it means to be an American.

I always believed that, as an American, I had a right to protest my government. It said so right in the Constitution. But now I'm reluctant not only to protest, but to even view protests, giving that several nurses at a conference in Washington D.C. were arrested along with protesters, just for being nearby.

I always believed that, as a citizen in a democracy, the police were not to be feared -- and weren't any "better" than me. Now we have the Hiibel decisi

The big story in the media last week, was that DVDs actually supply over 50% of the movie industry income.

The average american home purchase ~15 DVDs per year.

That's huge- and it is ON TOP of record-setting box office receipts. They make a lot of money from them.

But somehow, they still manage to claim that they are bleeding money out the ass.

I'd like to say that I will be boycotting them, and not supporting their industry. But looking at the top 100 films in the past 2 years, I've seen all but two. So whether or not we like their business, we do like their product.

I'm dumbfounded.... But it's essentially a modified glider, so it could glide back to the ground if the propulsion fails.

That does not make me feel safe, this makes me feel safe. Almost every piston aircraft glides to the ground on such an event - some better than others. Most folks spend tons of time practicing for engine events. Seriously... I'm way to many years into restoring a '58 Stitts and have put more love into that o200 continental engine with the express purpose of NEVER having to land because of engine failures.

Yup, this one is for the marketing department. They might fly it to Oshkosh once, and then trailer it back for a roadshow/museem. Not something I would commute between Minneapolis and Chicago with... or leave the pattern... even it was environmentally friendly.

You're not the first person to laugh at the concept. In this article the owner of Cirrus Design Corp says that the rest of the industry harshly ridiculed the idea all through development. Now vindicated, he countered, "We spent more than $10 million developing our parachute system, and if this is the only life we save, it will have been worth it."

I haven't seen the article yet (slashdotted, natch), so cut me some slack.

But they could use an emergancy parachute system in case of failure.