“The whole congressional action [on Total Information Awareness] looks like a shell game. There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing.”

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, as quoted by the Associated Press

I was thinking of writing an essay about the Nader ’04 run, but Tom Tomorrow pretty much has it all covered.

From Charles Pierce, by way of Eric Alterman, by way of Patrick Nielsen-Hayden (Patrick’s is the link to see the full quote):

The New Scientist reports that new bioweapons research laws are effectively shutting down the research. One scientist faces life in prison. Quote from the article: “Trying to meet the unwarranted burden of what the government considers ‘biosafety’ is simply not coincident with the practice of sound, creative scientific research.”

“There’s a lot of—some people who are upset [Saddam Hussein] is no longer in power.” GWB, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.

The US is finally following Canada and most of the rest of the free world by adding a little color to our money. See the new $20 for yourself.

The Register points out that all visits to the Do-Not-Call list are being tracked by a subsidiary of AT&T, which is running the site for the FTC.

The release of the new poverty data on Friday—just in time for those of us with money to forget about it over the weekend—inspired me to pull out my calculator and do a little math.

The Post ran some slicing and dicing of the numbers, but didn’t give me what I was looking for, so I popped on over to the Census web site and got the full report. In summary, 12.1% of us—ballpark 34,570,000 Americans—are officially poor.

So what does it mean to be poor? If you live by yourself, it means you make less than $9,359 a year. Unless you’re over 65, in which case you’re deemed able to get by on $8,628 a year. But if you’re in a family of two, you’re poor if you pull down $11,756 per annum, or about six grand each. The scale goes up to “nine people or more” at $37,062, which works out to just over four grand each (forgetting about the “or more” part for the moment).

Really, the table is much more complex than this, and includes various columns for non-wage-earning kids, so take my word for it that this is just the gist.

A few pages later, we learn that of those 34 million in poverty, 24,534,000 people live in 7,229,000 poor families, the rest being singly impoverished.

Another subset of poverty: 14,068,000 people make less than half the poverty threshold, with the rest being between half and 100% of the poverty line.

So, what’s the point of these numbers?

My question is, what’s the aggregate amount of money that the poor are falling short of being not impoverished? Since the numbers are different for the singles and the families, we have to work that out separately.

There are 10,036,000 single poor. Their per capita poverty deficit is $4,798. So this group is collectively falling short by $48,152,730,000.

For the 24 million and change who are in poor families, they’re short by $2,123 each. So this group needs $52,085,680,000 to be on the poverty line.

So we have a nice round number of around $100 billion to make all of these people just barely poor. If you want to make them officially not poor, crank this number up to $125 billion, and everyone’s falling on the official line of “nearly poor”. (Skipping for the moment that this leaves out the currently nearly poor, which is 13 million other folks.)

That’s it. You want to declare war on poverty, and pretending for a moment that we had the political will to do so by just handing out checks, it would cost between $100 and $125 billion. Comparing this to a few other numbers currently in the news: $77 billion spent so far turning Iraq into rubble. $87 billion proposed to rebuild the rubble. $396 billion proposed for the Department of Defense, in addition to the Iraqi supplementary.

So… do you think we have our priorities straight?

The jury is still out on whether this blog is for real—a 24-year-old Iraqi woman in Baghdad. I’m not sure, but I’m sure as hell not qualified to judge.

But if you do believe her, then read this entry: “Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me…. A woman, or girl, out alone, risks anything from insults to abduction…. Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50% of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore. We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying.”

In the Washington Post, photographic evidence of GWB desecrating the US flag. And campaign finance law. And the Hatch Act.

Okay, we don’t have photos of the last two. Just regular evidence.

From the New York Observer via MetaFilter, a story on four women who lost their husbands on 9/11 trying to get the government to actually investigate it.

I can understand why the Bushies want to avoid embarrassment here, but is there any other conceivable reason why the administration is stonewalling? What is their rationale? I’ve never heard one.

Fuji Electric has announced development of a new hard drive that stores up to 6 gigs on a disk that’s 2 centimeters wide—about 8/10ths of an inch. They’re hoping to ramp it up to 30 gigs and have it available in cell phones by 2005. And you thought the iPod was small.

The Register reports that a computer security technician was sent to jail on federal charges for telling customers at his former company that they were exposed to a security flaw.

Fred Kaplan opines that Friday proves that we’re not quite as vulnerable to terrorism as some would have you think.

Next time you get a call from someone asking you to donate to the Republican party, ask them if they’re calling you from New Delhi.

Apparently, “buy American” only applies when you’re being watched.

Maybe I’m not being paranoid when I shut off my Bluetooth connections when they’re not in use. The New Scientist reports that software called “Red Fang” can browse nearby Bluetooth gadgets and scan for access. Found this software and downloaded it after about a 30 second Google search.

Many thanks to Comedy Central for pointing this out.

“What I did before the war was predict a short, easy war, and the peace from hell, and so far I think I’m two for two. I didn’t want us to go into Iraq, not because I didn’t understand that Saddam Hussein was a miserable sonuvabitch. I’ve been active in human rights work for 35 years. I knew he was a miserable sonuvabitch when the Reagan administration was sending him weapons.

And I said from the beginning that you could make a case for going in on humanitarian grounds alone. But that’s not the case that the Bush administration made. The only reason I opposed going in after him is that I was terribly afraid that this country would get caught in an awful quagmire over there, and the only reason I opposed it is because I love this country.” —Molly Ivins

On the left, the GWB flight suit action figure, available for $40 at Kay-Bee stores everywhere.

On the right, the GWB Texas Air National Guard action figure. Yes, it’s an empty box. Astonishingly, you can buy it on eBay, and the current bid is $61. Update, 10 minutes later: now it’s $75. Update, 7:55 AM: “The item you requested ( 3141998098 ) is invalid, still pending, or no longer in our database.” A shame, because the description of the item was priceless.

Terrifying proof that Gray Davis is taking Schwarzenegger seriously. Link to the site where I found this pic from the AP, no word on where it’s originally from.