Bush said only Americans in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would be targets of surveillance.

He lied.

Spying has been a dragnet of all communications, as if trying to “harpoon fish from an airplane.”

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications,” said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst. “Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. … They monitored all communications.”

For many reporters and news organizations every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members is captured: Without a warrant.

Just oh so wrong.

Acknowledging tough times in America, Obama has accepted Ikea’s offer to redesign the Oval Office.

The White House has a blog, updated throughout the day: whitehouse.gov/blog/

And a blog feed. “This moment of peril must be turned to one of progress”, says Obama.

Model of Morality. The fellow in the center of this photo at Nevada’s Bunny Ranch brothel is moral crusader Sean Hannity. Link is here.

Sales for sex are falling and have been for years. Playboy is closing offices and laying off staff. Centered primarily in Southern California with sales of $12.6 billion, the adult entertainment business is not recession-proof.

Porn is tiresome for most and consumers are drifting. Since the economic crash, social-networking sites have garnered more traffic than porn sites.

But not the moral crusaders.

NYTimes: “…the Bunny Ranch visit was the last straw.”

“There will be jelly beans in the White House, that’s all I can say.”

At least 12 tons of jellybeans were shipped to the White House during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Well? How Much Do You Know About Presidential Food?

Smithsonian’s food blog asks, “Should sugar be a controlled substance?“

Horrors.

Philip K. Howard at the Wall Street Journal writes we are too snarled in rules and laws and petty bullying.

Here we stand, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, and Americans no longer feel free to do anything about it. We have lost the idea, at every level of social life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave. We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. The person of responsibility is replaced by the person of caution. When in doubt, don’t.

The modern credo is not “Yes We Can” but “No You Can’t.”

A thoughtful design study of the Republican elephant found at UK’s Creative Review blog.

Illustrator Thomas Fuchs and designer Felix Sockwell’s new self-published book, Deconstructing Dumbo, presents 100 witty reinterpretations of the US Republican party’s elephant logo.

I’m looking for a link to a source.

California’s Lottery, sold to us to help fund education, merely provides 34 cents out of every $1 spent on a ticket to our schools.

Maybe lotteries are a legitimate social enterprise. Probably not.

A late friend, California Assemblyman Bill Filante, was roaring angry about state run lottery. Pilfering pockets is not a task of good government and contributes to tolerating bad government.

It’s been so-o-o cold in Britain recently…

Said well here: The Economist crushes George Bush.

Where do you even start?

“Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of belonging, of having a family or a community or a tribe that depends on him and perhaps even loves him; who has a leg to stand on, shoes on his feet, a warm bed, clean underwear, hot water, a toilet that flushes, books to read, music to listen to, a chair to sit on, hands and feet and arms and legs and eyes and ears that still work, a cracked and compassionate heart, a brain that is still capable of manufacturing sense (even if only occasionally) and cooperates, however gracelessly, with his tongue and dispatches words to his fingers; any fool whose fingers can still grip a pen, who still has access to blank sheets or scraps of paper and who continues to feel compelled to say something; anybody, in other words, who has lived a good, long while on the planet and feels things ever stirring in his head and heart, any such person should spend at least half of whatever time he has left in the world saying nothing but thank you.”

Another marvelous original snippet of writing by Minnesota’s Brad Zellar.

Matt Thompson at Newsless says:

I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated, but always held.

I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain. By reading your newspaper over time, you’d develop a high-level understanding of the issues. You’d have an idea of the characters involved, the dilemmas at hand, the consensus facts, etc.

You’ll be armed with the information you need to make decisions on how to advance your society.

I’m taking the most linear approach possible to following the news: reading years of relevant stories strung end-to-end in order.

I should be the Platonic ideal of the well-informed citizen.

But?

No matter the effort, many times following the news doesn’t work.

Reporting takes time and money. While newspapers teeter and broadcasters cut costs and consolidate, we may not have the full story in front of us. As a society, we must keep this in mind.

An insecticide used to fumigate termite-infested buildings is a strong greenhouse gas that lives in the atmosphere nearly 10 times longer than previously thought. Read more at Science blog.

Melinda Wenner at Discover’s blog says carbon dioxide may be the least of our warming worries: New studies show an even greater accumulation of other, potentially more potent greenhouse gases.

• methane from landfills and melting perma­frost remains in the atmosphere one-tenth as long as CO2—about a decade—but traps 20 times as much heat.

• nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) used to make microchips and flat-screen TVs, increasing 11 percent each year, lingers for 550 years, is 17,000 times better at trapping heat than CO2.

Month by month, clean is better.
Although it’s taken more twenty years, the New England Journal of Medicine reports that cleaner air in 51 metropolitan areas has added nearly five more months to people’s lives.

Cleaning up Pittsburgh’s air has given residents nearly 10 months of longer life.

Long-term exposure to dirty air — specifically, the tiny specks known as fine-particulate air pollution — shortens lives and contributes to cardiovascular and lung disease. CNN

Oops, there goes trucks and fireplaces!