We’ve been so bombarded with advertising that the meaning of a word has changed – is an advertisement using that fact ironic? Or just sad?

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Here’s a whoops with a capital W.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

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It’s not immediately clear whether the mistake will lead to the exposure of those who had contacted the committee. There are more than 150 recipient addresses revealed in the email. Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but there’s also, much more troubling, a vice_president@whitehouse.gov carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, an email containing the email addresses of all the whistleblowers who had written in to the committee tipline was sent to public email address of Vice President Cheney.

What an excellent demonstration of Grey’s Law.

Tip for marketeers: always look at what the end-product of your advertising idea looks like.

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Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld got an unpleasant surprise during his visit to France today when human rights groups filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the “Court of First Instance” (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging the chief architect of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” with ordering and authorizing torture.

International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint while Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, and under French law, an investigation must be opened if an alleged torturer is inside France.

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The criminal complaint states that because of the failure of authorities in the United States and Iraq to launch any independent investigation into the responsibility of Rumsfeld and other high-level U.S. officials for torture despite a documented paper trail and government memos implicating them in direct as well as command responsibility for torture – and because the U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court – it is the legal obligation of states such as France to take up the case.

Rumsfeld’s presence on French territory gives French courts jurisdiction to prosecute him for having ordered and authorized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

“We want to combat impunity and therefore demand a judicial investigation and a criminal prosecution wherever there is jurisdiction over the torture incidents,” said ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck.

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In addition, having resigned from his position of U.S. Secretary of Defense a year ago, Rumsfeld can no longer try to claim immunity as a head of state or government official. Nor can he claim immunity as former state official, as international law does not recognize such immunity in the case of international crimes including the crime of torture.

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In a Rasmussen Report telephone survey, results showed that in a race versus Republican Rudy Giuliani and Democrat Hilary Clinton, comedian Stephen Colbert would receive 13% of all votes, this just a week after Colbert’s maybe/sort of/probably fake announcement of his candidacy for President. Those numbers are staggering and, from all I can tell, look to be legitimate results of a legitimate survey.

This is a quiz that you cannot lose: the trick is always to vote porn star. That way, you get all the porn stars right, and you get to call all the Fox anchors whores.

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With the ban on taxing Internet connections set to expire at the end of October, both houses of Congress are taking action. Last night, the Senate passed a bill that would extend the 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act yet again, this time for seven years. A version of the legislation passed by the House earlier this week would only extend it for another four years.

The moratorium was originally enacted in 1998 and has since been extended twice, in 2001 and 2004. Under the law, local governments are prohibited from levying access taxes on Internet connections (purchases can be subject to applicable state taxes). The nine states that managed to enact ‘Net access taxes prior to the moratorium’s enactment in 1998 are exempt from the ban, and would continue to be under the just-passed legislation.

Why not permanent? Simple: this is an issue they can sollicit campaign donations on when it is close to expiring again.

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Holden Lenz, 18 months old, is the pajama-clad star of a 29-second home movie shot by his mother in the family’s rural Pennsylvania kitchen and posted last February on the popular video site YouTube.

In the video, the child is seen bouncing and swaying for the camera, as, faintly, the Prince hit “Let’s Go Crazy” plays on a CD player in the background.

Twenty eight people, mostly friends and family, had viewed the YouTube video by June, when mom Stephanie Lenz said she received an e-mail from YouTube informing her that her video had been removed from the site at the request of Universal Music Publishing Group, the recording industry’s largest label, and warning her that future copyright infringements on her part could force the Web site to cancel her account.

“All of my [YouTube] videos are home videos, so I thought it was some kind of scam,” Lenz told ABC News’ Law & Justice Unit. When she realized YouTube had actually taken her video down, she said she was shocked.

“At first it frightened me, because I saw who had filed” the takedown notice, she said.

“It was Universal Music Publishing Group, and I was afraid that … they might come after me. … And the more afraid I got, the angrier I got. … I was afraid that the recording industry might come after me the way they’ve come after other people for downloading music or file sharing.

“I thought even though I didn’t do anything wrong that they might want to file some kind of suit against me, take my house, come after me.

“And I didn’t like feeling afraid,” she continued. “I didn’t like feeling that I could get in trouble for something as simple as posting a home video for my friends and family to see.”

Lenz filed a “counter-notice” with YouTube, and the Web site put her video back up about six weeks later.

She contacted a leading cyber rights legal organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and filed a civil lawsuit against the music publisher, claiming they were abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by sending out reams of what are known in the industry as “take down notices” to Web sites like YouTube, claiming their artists’ copyrights had been infringed upon — when in fact, sometimes they may not have been at all.

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Dazed and confused after more than 15 hours of travel, unable to communicate in English and scared because he couldn’t find his mother, Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was jolted by a taser just 24 seconds after being confronted by police in Vancouver International Airport.

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Mr. Dziekanski arrived at about 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14.

“He made his way to primary customs in the ordinary fashion … he went through there in the normal time frame … he then proceeded through and was directed to secondary customs, which is normal for someone who doesn’t speak English and is immigrating to the country,” Mr. Kosteckyj said. His papers were in order and he proceeded without difficulty.

But what happened after that was far from normal. For nearly 10 hours, Mr. Dziekanski stayed in the Arrivals Hall, growing increasingly frustrated and eventually becoming frantic.

Outside, in the public area, his mother spent nearly six hours pacing the corridors and, in broken English, asking airport officials for help in locating her son.

Mr. Kosteckyj said she visited one booth in international arrivals “at least three to four times and conveyed to them that she was concerned about her son being in the area and she wanted to get a message to him and how could she do that? They wrote her name down and said that they would make inquiries.”

At about 10 p.m., she was told he wasn’t there. She made the long drive home, only to find a phone message waiting, saying her son had been found.

“She called back to immigration when she got in, which would have been around 2 a.m., and spoke to someone there and was advised that her son was somewhere in the area and was fine. And she advised, you know, ‘Please take care of him because he can’t speak English and I’ll get there as soon as I can.’ And of course he had died, been killed really, some time on or about 1 or 1:30,” Mr. Kosteckyj said.

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The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.

The agency — much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago — arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency’s deputy director.

The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.

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State officials have decided not to publicize their list of polling places in Pennsylvania, citing concerns that terrorists could disrupt elections in the commonwealth.

And if you’re worried about how voters are supposed to figure out where to go…

Information on individual polling places remains available on the state voter services Web site.

I hear Iran is trying to develop search engine technology. We must act now before Iran gets the Google.

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In what it calls “the final wake-up call to the international community,” a UN report (press release, website, 21 MB PDF) warns that damage to the environment is reaching a “point of no return” and now threatens “humanity’s very survival.”

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Besides, any species stupid enough to invent something like Dove Gentle Exfoliating Body Wash* doesn’t deserve to go on reproducing.

* filled with thousands of tiny plastic beads that, once they’re finished exfoliating your skin, get washed down the drain and into the ocean, where fish eat them. Then we eat the fish, and thus the circle of life is complete.

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New York State has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.

From a statement issued by Cuomo’s office:

The settlement follows a nine-month investigation into the marketing of NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess plans for wireless access to the internet for laptop computer users. Attorney General’s investigation found that Verizon Wireless prominently marketed these plans as “Unlimited,” without disclosing that common usages such as downloading movies or playing games online were prohibited. The company also cut off heavy internet users for exceeding an undisclosed cap of usage per month. As a result, customers misled by the company’s claims, enrolled in its Unlimited plans, only to have their accounts abruptly terminated for excessive use, leaving them without internet services and unable to obtain refunds.

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As for Verizon’s take on the matter? Well, it’s priceless:

“We are pleased to have cooperated with the New York Attorney General and to have voluntarily reached this agreement,” a company spokesman told Associated Press. “When this was brought to our attention, we understood that advertising for our NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess services could provide more clarity.”

Corporate spokespeople earn good salaries to spout such nonsense, of course, but even by that standard we should take a moment to count up all the lies in this statement.

1. Verizon is pleased by this outcome. … Bet they had a big office party.

2. The settlement was voluntary. … Yes, in the time-honored way that criminals voluntarily confess after the cops show them the bloody glove (OK, this doesn’t always work, but still …).

3. Verizon only understood the problem after it was brought to their attention. … He meant after it was brought to their attention 13,000 times and the subpoenas started to fly, so maybe I’m being harsh on that one.

4. And the real whopper: What we’re talking about here is a lack of “clarity” in the advertising, nothing more. … You’d think a multibillion-dollar company could afford a dictionary.

A

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What do you get when you select prosecutors by their skill and experience, and make your cases based on evidence and law?

From 1993 to 2001, prosecutors in Manhattan convicted some three dozen terrorists through guilty pleas and in six major trials.

…

The pre-9/11 cases brought in Manhattan, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, “reflected U.S. attorneys and federal prosecutors at their best, using their discretion, bringing cases when they had strong cases and declining to bring them when they were weak.”

What do you get when you select federal prosecutors for willingness to go after Democrats and pick your cases to score political points?

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government’s track record has been decidedly spottier, and its failure to obtain a single conviction on Monday in its terrorism-financing prosecution of what was once the nation’s largest Islamic charity was another in a series of missteps and setbacks.

…

William Neal, a juror in the Holy Land case, complained that the government’s evidence “was pieced together over the course of a decade — a phone call this year, a message another year.”

Instead of trying to prove that the defendants knew they were supporting terrorists, Mr. Neal said, prosecutors “danced around the wire transfers by showing us videos of little kids in bomb belts and people singing about Hamas, things that didn’t directly relate to the case.”

The Bush Justice Department, keeping us safer though incompetence.

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I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who’s seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might’ve written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It’s absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don’t spend enough time outdoors and don’t get any real exercise and therefore can’t, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

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De ministeries van VROM en Financiën hebben het MNP gevraagd een aantal maatregelen die in Belastingplan 2008 zijn opgenomen door te rekenen op milieueffecten. Het gaat met name om maatregelen in de sector verkeer zoals de belasting op vliegtickets en het vergroenen van de autobelastingen. De maatregelen zorgen in 2020 voor een vermindering de Nederlandse CO₂-emissies van 0,1 tot 0,5 miljoen ton. De verkeersgerelateerde CO₂-emissies in 2020 nemen hierdoor met maximaal 1% af, de nationale CO₂-emissies in 2020 met maximaal 0,2%. Het effect van het belastingplan op de CO₂-emissies is daarmee gering te noemen.

De overheid had dit doorberekend op 30%, dus dat dit op 18 september aan Wouter Bos overhandigde rapport verder de media niet heeft gehaald, is denk ik geen verrassing.

Coming Friday, together with the new OS X 10.5, Leopard, Apple will also release a new mobile computer, the iBook nano, and pictures have been leaked online!