So the VA secretary trots off to Capital Hill to 'splain away how the data theft occured (wait for it...)
Officials of the Veterans Affairs Department told angry lawmakers today that an agency employee had been taking home sensitive data for three years before it was stolen from his residence, compromising the records of 26.5 million veterans.
"He said that he routinely took such data home to work on it, and had been doing so since 2003," George J. Opfer, the department's inspector general, told senators, some of whom expressed amazement at how the department has handled the theft.
Three years, eh? Well, then that makes it alright then.
Apparently some congresscritters are making noises about the VA doing more than just telling us to check our credit reports.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Representative John T. Salazar of Colorado, both Democrats, have introduced a bill that would provide free credit monitoring for veterans affected by the lapse. "This breach should not have happened in the first place, and someone needs to be fired for it," Mr. Kerry said.
Well, that's a start, I guess. Now, how about some offset to pay for "fraud insurance" offered by most major carriers, or at least some sort of guarantee of getting it since now we're probably considered "uninsurable" since we are pretty much grapes?
Oh, and as for the 1600 Crew HQ holding anyone responsible? Well, it's the same old story...
At the House hearing, Rep. Bob Filner (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., called Nicholson's response unacceptable.
"In the last five years, a host of agencies have reported that the VA has had many problems with information security," he said. "How did the VA react? With indifference."
"You're not taking responsibility for this mismanagement debacle," he said. "The most dramatic thing to take responsibility is to resign."
White House press secretary Tony Snow said Thursday that wasn't going to happen.
"He'll have his opportunity to testify on Capitol Hill today," Snow said of Nicholson. "I'm sure they will have sharp questions for him. But he's not tendering his resignation."
Resign? Accountability is a foreign concept to the 1600 Crew. Proven one more time.
Beloved Leader has "great confidence" in Nicholson...he'll be handed his hat only because he has committed the ultimate sin of embarrassing Preznit 29 Percent while his poll numbers continue to decline. If it weren't for that, he'd continue to be fat, dumb and happy until 20 Jan 2009.
Show of hands, how many of you are in the 26.5 million? Thought so.
Because we need a police state, this freedom and liberty thing is overrated
Well, golly. It looks like the racist fuck congresscriminals in an effort to change the discussion from corruption and incompetance have succeeded in some part by flogging the bodies of the brown people from the south.
They want a "national database" of US employers and employees to make sure that everyone is legal. They want it, despite the fact that prototypes (beta tests?) have apparently got the same success rate as the strategic defense initiative's missle intereceptors.
A federal database program with a checkered track record could dramatically expand to affect every U.S. employer and worker under provisions of the sweeping immigration legislation being considered by Congress.
The program is intended to keep illegal immigrants from working in the United States and to discourage more from entering, but in nearly a decade of small-scale tests, it has had trouble distinguishing between those who are here legally and those who are not. Fixing it and rolling it out nationwide could cost more than $1 billion.
Get that? One Billion dollars? And that's the estimate. You can be dead-sure that the contract will be awarded to the crony du jour and the costs will go up from one billion to at least 10 or 20 billion and take years.
Meanwhile, to combat the inevitable delays look for "Tex" Sensenbrenner to roll out the National ID program.
Welcome to the Soviet Union, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood republican party. Comrade.
The bloom is off the rose, John. The end came after your staffer decided to take a New School student to task in your name, insulting her, her character and her passion. Sorry, you're done. Oh, and it's nice that you're give back the money from the Wyly Brothers...
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) returned $20,000 in campaign contributions from two prominent Texas businessmen after staff members for his political action committee discovered that there was an investigation into one of their companies.
The donations were made to Straight Talk America -- McCain's leadership political action committee -- by Sam and Charles Wyly, billionaire brothers who have been major players in Republican fundraising for years. Each cut a $5,000 check to Straight Talk, as did Sam's wife, Cheryl, and Charles's son, Charles III.
The presidential campaign manager for Sen. John McCain filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Monday alleging that a recent anti-McCain ad paid for by the seemingly spontaneously created Republicans for Clean Air Committee -- organized and paid for by a number of allies of Texas Gov. George W. Bush -- is in violation of federal laws.
The ad, launched last week in swing areas of New York, Ohio, California and Vermont, touted Bush as an environmentalist and accused McCain of being a polluter, a charge disputed by environmental organizations like the Sierra Club. The ad -- and at least a $2.5 million ad buy -- is being paid for by Sam and Charles Wyly, who together have given more than $210,000 to Bush's past two gubernatorial campaigns.
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Hughes also charged that "the media should be ashamed for playing along with" the McCain campaign's charges, providing unbalanced coverage of the Wyly brothers' ad and the ensuing controversy. Although the Bush campaign has repeatedly denied knowing anything about the ads, Hughes says, "If you read the [press] reports over the last two days, it's sort of a wink and a nod, like 'Sure they did.'"
Davis said that the charge filed with the FCC was just against the Wyly brothers for an alleged "violation of the disclaimer law." Since Republicans for Clean Air is not a real organization, Davis said, the ad should say "paid for and authorized by Sam and Charles Wyly," Davis said.
The more serious charge, filed with the FEC, claims the Bush campaign "coordinated expenditures," a serious violation of federal law. Since Charles Wyly is a "Pioneer" -- the Bush fund-raisers charged with raising more than $100,000 apiece for the governor's campaign -- he falls into one of two categories in relation to the Bush for President campaign, Davis said.
So what event besides some mythical "internal investigation" made the McCain campaign give back that loot? We may never know, but isn't it interesting that the Wyly Brothers are, after working to crush McCain in favor of Preznit Utterly Incompetant, now funding the guy they wanted to smear in 2000.
Republicans, nice to look at, but don't feed them please, they'll just multiply.
Jeebus, it doesn't get much more obvious than this. Jack Cafferty nailed it when he said that once again there is a double standard for CongressCriminals in everything from healthcare to parking spaces, and now how their "privacy" is treated. So, the fucking FBI goes and takes some documents with warrants before evidence can be destroyed. And the congressional buttheads whine. Hey, shitheads, you just handed police-state powers to an mentally defective juvenile who sits in the people's house over the last 5.5 years. Good Morning, how do you like the police state so far?
In a rare bipartisan action, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi demanded yesterday that the Justice Department immediately return documents that were seized when federal agents raided the office of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) as part of a bribery probe.
Noting that "no person is above the law, neither the one being investigated nor those conducting the investigation," Hastert (R-Ill.) and Pelosi (D-Calif.) asserted that the Justice Department must cease reviewing the documents and ensure that their contents are not divulged. Once the papers are returned, "Congressman Jefferson can and should fully cooperate with the Justice Department's efforts, consistent with his constitutional rights," the statement said.
That's the biggest crock of shit coming from congressional asshats who passed with no discussion the first Patriot Act and then Patriot 2, the sequel.
Researchers taping calls of the putty-nosed monkey in the forests of Nigeria may have come a small step closer to understanding the origins of human language.
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Language is a surprising faculty because it seems to pop up almost out of nowhere in the human lineage, instead of evolving in steady stages.
Researchers studying monkeys and apes have learned that they possess all the basic apparatus needed to make and analyze sounds. But the nonhuman primates did not seem to possess either of the two combinatorial features of language, those of combining discrete sounds into compound words, and of stringing words together under rules of syntax.
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"Because there is no evidence that the calls are words or even wordlike, the connection to language is tenuous." he said.
Who knew? Here we thought he was a chimp...nope, he's a putty-nosed monkey, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Abu Gonzales™ is threatening journalists from the NY Times, trying for the double-play of intimidating both the press and those in the government who leak info to them.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales raised the possibility yesterday that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information based on the outcome of the criminal investigation underway into leaks to the Times of data about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between the United States and abroad.
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Yesterday, Gonzales said, "I understand very much the role that the press plays in our society, the protection under the First Amendment we want to promote and respect . . . but it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity."
I guess that Daniel Ellsberg might be tried waaaay after the fact, after all he made the mistake of going to the press with the Pentagon Papers, and look how happy the Chicken-fucking-hawks are with what that resulted in.
My guess? The real reason that the 1600 Crew wants to arrest and try journalists is to save themselves any embarrassing moments, and I am sure that there are a lot of them. After all, we know that they don't give a rat's-ass about "National Security", unless it's as a campaign issue.
I doubt that unless they do the trials in secret, any journalist would be convicted...this is purely a measure designed to intimidate the press and the whistleblowers. Again, history will judge these motherfuckers for what they are: con men and low-lifes.
To all my brethren, on either side of the ideological divide, this is pretty bad news.
Personal data, including Social Security numbers of 26.5 million U.S. veterans, was stolen from a Veterans Affairs employee this month after he took the information home without authorization, the department said Monday.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson said there was no evidence so far that the burglars who struck the employee's home have used the personal data _ or even know they have it. The employee, a data analyst whom Nicholson would not identify, has been placed on leave pending a review.
Nicholson, like every other 1600 Crew official will not be held accountable. They never are.
The VA needs to pay for every veteran to have unlimited lifetime "credit/fraud insurance", because those SSN's are prime territory for sale to the credit-scam artists. 26+ million of them means a smart burgular retires today. The VA also needs to get with the DoJ and Social Security Administration to change the SSN's of all of us. Like now, because we are all Pwn3d. For life.
I'm sure that well all get solicitiations from the major credit bureaus and other assorted scum-suckers for "protection", because the 1600 Crew will sell all our data to them to, of course, "help" us.
As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.
Read it and weep. No one, it seems went to Mess O'Potamia unless they had the 1600 Crew-standard two-week notice or got hired off the Heritage Foundation website.
And we wonder why there's an "insurgency" in Iraq. Must have been those 1000's of small errors, all on Preznit Hopelessly Fucked's watch.
