spokesman

At a townhall in Cincinnati, Republican Congressman Steve Chabot decided that people should not be allowed to videotape the event and had a police officer seize the camera of citizens recording the public event of a public figure inside of a public building:

What is even worse is the excuse given by Chabot's spokesman:

Schwartz said that sometimes at the town hall meetings, citizens ask questions about their own personal situations and the Chabot staff did not want them videotaped. The media cameras were allowed to continue to roll, Schwartz said, “because they can be expected to respect people’s privacy.”

They are asking questions at a public townhall and they are pulling the privacy card. How stupid does Chabot's people think we are?

This has to be one of the saddest periods in American history. We have a major political party hellbent on turning us into the Soviet States of America. We can't video public events of public figures. We even have Republicans charging to talk to them now, and this is a Republican who the right was pushing to run for President!

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

A top House Republican is planning to propose that Internet service providers be required to store information about their customers to aid police in criminal investigations, CNET has learned.
But a recent draft has one huge exception: wireless companies aren't included.

That appears to be the result of lobbying from wireless providers, which don't want to have to comply with any new governmental mandates. But the exemption has already drawn the ire of the U.S. Justice Department, which says it doesn't go far enough and is likely to attract strong opposition from cable and DSL providers that would be the ones singled out for regulation.

CTIA, the wireless trade association, declined to answer questions about its involvement in drafting the exception, saying through a spokesman only that "we are committed to working with the committee on the legislation."

The committee preparing the bill is the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who has previously expressed support for mandatory requirements governing the retention of user data. The bill will be part of a larger measure dealing with strengthening criminal sanctions against child pornography.

Yesterday Twitter erupted with news that Jane Hamsher and David House had been “detained” at Quantico Marine Base when trying to visit Bradley Manning. Of course the Twitters and Internets quickly erupted with conspiracy theories of why they were being detained. According to Quantico, they were actually never detained, but they did have their car towed:

Quantico spokesman Col. Thomas V. Johnson says the car was towed after the pair could not provide proof of insurance and guards found the vehicle's license plates had expired. He says both weren't detained.

Anyone who has ever visited a military base before, as these two reportedly have, knows that things like vehicle registration and insurance are checked. Driving on expired plates and/or without insurance is illegal in all 50 states, including military bases. If Jane and Dave would have been pulled over by civilian police, then they would have been towed, detained and given a court date. It sounds like they got off easy on this one.

Moving the few hundred remaining prisoners at Guantanamo should be something conservatives rally behind. The reason for this is in the numbers:

A Bureau of Prisons spokesman on Monday revised upwards the cost of housing a captive in federal detention, days after the bureau said it spends a tiny fraction of what the military spends at Guantanamo Bay.

The new figure -- $27,251 a year per federal prisoner compared to $650,000 per captive at the U.S. base in Cuba -- is still a tiny fraction.

So it costs 23 times more to keep someone at Gitmo as it does to keep them in a federal prison. Considering the $27,251 number is an average, I’m sure it does cost more for maximum security prisoners, where the Gitmo people would go, but I highly doubt that it will cost anywhere near the $650,000 figure.

Rackspace, one of the largest hosting providers on the Internet, has decided that the Dove World Outreach Center’s planned Quran burning is hate speech and in violation of their policies. In response to that decision, Rackspace has pulled the plug on their website:

"We feel that it's definitely an indirect attack on our freedom of speech," Jones said, adding that the provider, Rackspace, is "trying to shut us down."

But he said, "This is not going to affect the event going forward."

A spokesman for the provider, Rackspace, said the company decided to cancel the center's sites after investigating a complaint and reviewing both sites.

The center "violated the hate-speech provision of our acceptable-use policy," said Rackspace spokesman Dan Goodgame.

"This is not a constitutional issue. This is a contract issue," said Goodgame, adding that his company had given the center until midnight to find another host and move its content. Goodgame said Rackspace has about 100,000 customers and he did not know how long it had hosted those two specific sites.

Now when you go to the site, www.doveworld.org, this is what you see:

It will be interesting to see how long the site remains down. I’m sure they will be able to find another provider that doesn’t have the same high standards as Rackspace, but finding a host that isn’t a reseller through Rackspace might be a little harder.

This is NOT the way to debate issues:

U.S. Rep. Steve Driehaus, D-Cincinnati, says an ad showing his two young daughters went too far in the heated debate over health care.

A spokesman says Driehaus was outraged by an advertisement Wednesday in The Cincinnati Enquirer featuring a large photo of him with his daughters. The ad was paid for by the Committee to Rethink Reform, a Washington-based group opposed to the health care overhaul nearing a vote.

Committee spokeswoman Sarah Longwell says showing the children was a mistake and that the group will take out another ad to apologize.

The Enquirer ran its own full-page retraction and apology Thursday.

What amazes me is that the Enquirer ran a full page retraction. Why not just deny the ad to begin with? It’s because the right wing Cincinnati Enquirer wanted it to go out.

A FOIA request from the ACLU has uncovered some really disturbing facts of inmate deaths inside our immigration jails:

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told a reporter that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Sick. It’s time to get rid of this screwed up system and put in place real immigration reform.

People are absolute idiots:

The US Secret Service says it is investigating after an effigy of Barack Obama was found hanging in the home town of former President Jimmy Carter.

TV footage showed the doll hanging by a noose in front of a red, white and blue sign that reads "Plains, Georgia. Home of Jimmy Carter, our 39th President".

Witnesses said the effigy had President Obama's name on it.

Plains Mayor LE Godwin III said the fire department had been called to take it down.

In Washington, US Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan confirmed that the agency was investigating the case.

Here’s the local news report of the incident:

Doing this to any president is unacceptable – that includes those on the left that did the same thing when Bush was in office. This childish acts also makes it impossible to hold serious national debates on things like health care, global warming and terrorism.