Author: Rayne

A teen has sued his mother for harassment after she logged into his Facebook account and changed content. He also claims she’s made “slanderous” comments about him in Facebook as well. It’s important to note that this 16-year-old lives with his grandmother and not his mother, and that he appears to be old enough to drive in his home state of Arkansas.

His mother says,

“You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account or whoever’s account.”

There are a lot of unanswered questions in spite of many reports about this story. What did the teen feel was “slanderous”? Does the mother have custodial rights? Where was the grandmother in all of this hubbub — is she out of touch with technology? What are the state’s laws regarding age of independence? And what exactly did the state’s prosecutors see which encouraged them to take up the case?

I talked this morning with my own 16-year-old about this situation; how would she feel if I’d “hacked” her Facebook page and changed content or wrote on her page? She was puzzled; she said she couldn’t imagine me changing anything on her page let alone logging into her site…

But there’s a reason for this: my kid’s been coached since she was old enough to hold a mouse and bang on a keyboard that protecting one’s privacy is paramount on the internet. We didn’t allow private email accounts until she was a teen in middle school, and instant messaging was occasionally supervised. She was only allowed to open a Facebook page after a year’s worth of coaching about privacy controls and online bullying along with sharing lots of examples online; we also talked frequently about the nature of the internet. Once published, content is out there forever, and anything she said could be misconstrued and used against her. And I wouldn’t be able to protect her from the consequences once she began to use social media. She’d be taking a very big step toward her own independence without her mom holding her hand.

In spite of all the precautions and coaching, kids will still blow off parents and ignore pointed warnings. It was a mixed blessing that within 24 hours of creating her Facebook page, my kid was harassed unmercifully by a so-called friend — someone she thought was a friend in real life — to the point where she had to unfriend and block other communications from them. I couldn’t have made my case any better about the dangers of social media if I’d paid the obnoxious bully to do it for me.

Since then we’ve had no further drama with social media. There’s the occasional outburst of excessive texting by someone in her circle, or someone else becoming non-responsive, but these temporary situations generally mirror something else going on in the face-to-face world. The non-responsive person might have a new boyfriend/girlfriend, for example, and is hyper-focused on that new relationship instead of their friends. This happens in the unwired world as well as in the internet-mediated world, so not a surprise.

It still hurts to see your kid dealing with some very ugly truths, even after you’ve coached them about the ways of the world. It’s one thing to explain that some people are only fair-weather friends and what that means, but quite another to see it played out in the form of rabid bullying online. There’s only so much we can do as parents. At some point our kids are going to have to learn the hard way, just as we did. (more…)

Our team gathered some great video which didn’t get paired up with featured articles this week, but they’re excellent Easter evening treats. Here’s a second chance for some videos we couldn’t squeeze into this week’s lineup.

First up: The Nation’s Chris Hayes appeared on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to talk about hedge fund managers’ ridiculous compensation of $25 billion dollars in total.

Twenty. Five. Billion. Dollars. Compensation.

That’s obscene, it’s contemporary obscenity. How have our lives been enriched, if at all, by these guys we’ll never see and never meet, who make such extraordinary earnings for something we can’t see or touch?

Next up, David Corn on Countdown, talking about the clueless wingnut ranting against the Constitutionally mandated Census.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) doesn’t seem to realize that discouraging the conservative base from completing the Census will hurt their chances at equitable apportionment in terms of Congressional seats and federal funds.

Shhh…don’t clue her in.

Our third clip is MSNBCs Rachel Maddow covering the domestic terrorist Scott Roeder; Roeder was sentenced to life in prison for for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, with eligibility for parole in 50 years. In sentencing Roeder, District Judge Warren Wilbert took into consideration the deliberate stalking of Tiller and his murder in a place of worship; Roeder might otherwise have been eligible for parole in 25 years had not these circumstances been factored into sentencing.

Considering Roeder’s age of 52, it’s virtually certain he will never leave prison for the rest of his life and will pose no further threat to doctors providing reproductive health care services to women.

We’ve got one more clip coming for you as soon as our illustrious video team gets done combing through the cutting room. Stay tuned!

And while we’re waiting for the video, what other video have you seen this week which might be of interest to the rest of the community? Please share in comments — oh, and let us know what the Easter Bunny brought you. Unfortunately the rascal left not only an overlarge heap of jelly beans but a rather large ham at my house; we’ll be eating ham-this and ham-that all week.

 

There’s a very big hole in the center of the story about the firing of all teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island.

This article features quotes by students and teachers.

This one includes quotes by administration and union officials.

And this one includes quotes by education big wigs and pundits.

Notice the hole? It’s big, very, VERY big.

Where the hell are the parents?

I write this as I listen to my kids bickering in the background about the best way to present a science project which is due this week. I know exactly what phase they are working on right now, having finished a description of the process and the data chart and the graph of the data. And I will have a very good idea by the end of the afternoon whether the project is going to meet all the requirements of the project syllabus for a sixth-grade science class.

There’s another project going on here today, too; the older kid is working on chemistry and I’ll know by the end of the evening whether a paper has been completed in sync with an A.P. Chemistry syllabus.

Both kids will have shown me their grades on line by tonight, and I’ll have reviewed and signed my younger kid’s academic planner, reflecting the assignments and work done over the weekend.

School has taken up a big chunk of our weekend. OUR weekend, not just their weekend. This is my role as a parent, to answer some questions without actually doing their work, to find resources if they need them, to facilitate the learning process. And most importantly, to help set expectations. Failure is not an option here. (more…)

I’m so torqued off right now I could spit. Perhaps it’s because I’m a mom and I’ve dealt with enough temper tantrums to last me a lifetime. But I’m tired of the whining I see and hear about the lack of democratization in progressive organizations, and about the ineffectiveness of these groups, specifically Organizing for America and MoveOn.org.

Yeah, these groups are in tough shape. But the challenge is really YOU.

YOU have the power — it’s just not with OFA and MoveOn. It’s actually rather disappointing to see that readers are supposed to assume these are the only two progressive organizations out there. Both groups cited have pointed limitations apart from democratization.

Until only a few months ago, MoveOn was an online organization which punctuated the face-to-face world only at election time on races of national importance. MoveOn was a first for progressives in that it captured the energy of the disenfranchised but wired left starting in 1998 as an email group, but it did not have a physical state/local infrastructure, so efforts and democratization was naturally limited to national issues voted on by participants located across the internet. It’s been nearly 12 years since MoveOn launched, and it’s still heavily online and only limitedly represented on the ground; don’t you think by now that progressives should understand this fundamental limitation?

Organizing for America was the remnants of the Obama campaign, which means that from the start it was hampered by the lack of a unifying mission and vision since the original goal around which it had organized — the election of Obama — had been realized. Without an immediate regrouping to shape a new mission and vision with clear objectives, OFA floundered. It was also co-opted by a struggling Democratic National Committee which has been equally rudderless under the leadership of VA Gov. Tim Kaine.

And about the DNC: those of you who are not Democratic Party activists need to understand there is a cycle of events dictated by the party’s charter. The cycle includes the election of a party chair every two years; after a Democratic president has been elected to office, tradition dictates that the new president and his team have considerable power to earmark the new party chair who takes the helm at the DNC after inauguration.

Which should explain to you why the highly effective former Gov. Howard Dean, the man who set in motion the 50-State Strategy which enabled Obama for America’s campaign, is no longer the DNC chair. No, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has had an ongoing feud with Dean and instead of sticking with effectiveness opted for a pawn who would ensure that the party did what Emanuel wanted. The members of the DNC comprised of representatives from each state party, voted to follow tradition. (I suspect there would be a revolt if an election for party chair was held today.)

So OFA has been doing what the DNC chair and in turn the White House chief of staff have wanted up until this time: they floundered and waited in a kind of invisible cage allowing themselves to be called “fucking retarded” if they ever tried to escape and demand real change, while the foot soldiers they’d recruited and engaged in 2008 slipped away.

And now the whining about the lack of democratization and ineffectiveness…

Frankly, real activists know where the action has been all along. They know that there are more than two progressive organizations which get stuff done.

Some of them also know that the Democratic Party continues to be ripe for a coup, because there is a power vacuum from top to bottom of the organization. You want to democratize progressive activism? you can actually take over the Dem Party at this point if you tried. Been there, doing it, new party chair who is a hard core progressive to be elected in a scant two weeks, and we’ve already been reshaping local and state politics since 2004. Have you checked to see if there’s a progressive caucus within your state’s Democratic Party? Are they organizing enough caucus members to shape and create the agenda and platform of the state party? There’s one route to real change.

Democracy for America is another; it has a boots-on-the-ground organization, and it’s been working on getting progressives elected to office from bottom to top of the food chain since its inception. Its mission is to get progressives elected to office and once there, keep them in office. Just look at their website and you will see state/local progressives they are endorsing and supporting in their run for office (This I know well as I’m a local organizer, have been since 2004).

Progressive Democrats of America also has a boots-on-the-ground organization, although it’s thin and needs more groups across the country (I know I need to look into having one set up in our locale). They also work on getting real progressives elected to office; they also work on shaping Democratic policy (again, been there, done it as a task force member).

There’s more groups out there, but you have to take the time and energy to look. Once you find them, you have to make the commitment required to create a thriving, effective, and sustainable. organization.

And if you can’t find a local progressive organization to work with, MAKE ONE. It’s not rocket science. Go to Meetup.com, create a regular meetup, start working with a group of like-minded invidividuals – but I’d start by checking to see if some other equally frustrated progressives don’t already have something set up in Meetup.com.

The founding fathers didn’t sit around whining about the lack of democratization; they got off their butts and they did something about it. They swore with their lives and on their honor and committed themselves to making change happen. They certainly didn’t wait for some big all-powerful organization to come to them and ask how they could get their wish for democracy granted. I know my kids are learning about the founding fathers in their history and government classes right now, and they aren’t hearing about who waited and talked about democracy and the process of realizing one; they’re learning about activists who actually made democracy happen.

To realize democratization both as a progressive and as a citizen, it’s going to take the same kind of commitment from you. Oh, and you won’t even have to swear your life and honor to do this. Better get moving, because real progressives are already working on fundraising, endorsements, literature drops and door-knocking, website design, social media planning, organizing candidate forums and phonebanking. We could use your help.

And if you do a really great job, you’ll find OFA and MoveOn are calling you for help. I’ll answer their emails when I have time, really I will. But right now this mother has laundry and real progressive work to do.

 

Our team gathered some great video we didn’t put through with other featured articles this week, but they’re too good to let go by. Here’s a second chance for a couple of videos we couldn’t squeeze into our front page line up.

First up: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow at CPAC this week — heck, just saying that much tells you this is going to be a good one. But here’s a teaser — Rachel and Liz Cheney, in the flesh, in the same frame.

Next up: Jonathan Turley appeared on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the U.S. Department of Justice OPR report. The Office of Professional Responsibility found that Bush Administration attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee were not guilty of misconduct, only bad judgment in their legal work supporting the use of torture on detainees as part of euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University who speaks frequently about constitutional and statutory law, smacks down the notion of bad judgment and points to the Nuremberg trials and the special responsibility which attorneys have in counseling clients at risk of committing war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention.

What other video have you seen this week which might be of interest to the rest of the community? Please share in comments — and no, we’ve seen quite enough of Tiger Woods this week, thank you.

 

[Welcome Rich Benjamin and Host Rayne.] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread. – bev]

Rich Benjamin is a very brave young black man. He traveled into the heart of the whitest white of the United States for two years to take a closer look at what makes these racially homogenized places tick in what many believe is now a post-racial society.

Some of you may know that I’m of mixed race, although I “pass”; it would be difficult for you to figure out what my ethnic and racial heritage is without some help. But I don’t personally identify myself as white, and I certainly wouldn’t be brave enough to do what Benjamin did. Hell no. I live near an ethnic enclave of white people now, and it’s scary to imagine spending a week there on vacation, let alone living two years among them.

In some respects, Benjamin’s Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America is much like Barbara Ehrenreich’s decade-earlier work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. Like Ehrenreich, Benjamin made a wholehearted commitment to traverse deep into territory which might not be welcoming or even safe, in order to find answers to his questions.

Yes, I said not safe; it’s one of several ironies revealed in Benjamin’s work. Many of Whitopia’s residents complain about the necessity to be on guard and move to a safer place, away from those people (pick the bogeyman of choice, from illegal immigrants to L.A. yuppies). In truth, a lone black man in a predominantly white municipality has much more to fear than did the people he met and interviewed. Residents of Whitopia need not fear being pulled over for driving while white, for example; if you’re white living in a majority white area, the issue of your ethnicity/race rarely even crosses your mind. It certainly never enters into your thoughts that you might be physically harmed simply because of your race.

And yet Benjamin’s writing conveys a conversational and open tone. Observational details offer a sense of intimate understanding and awareness of the subjects he’s studying, without a hint of guardedness. His book makes for a pleasant and fun read because of this ease. At least one person Benjamin met during his sojourn has written a warm and appreciative review of his work at Amazon – not on his book, but on Benjamin’s research efforts. Perhaps the success of his work lies in his warm and friendly approach with the people he studied.

There has been critique that Benjamin’s work left readers with many “shoulds” – broad efforts we as a society should undertake to bridge the gaps between communities and socio-economic groups, instead of more specific, actionable tasks. I would heartily beg to differ.

You see, Rich Benjamin has taken a contemporary candid portrait of a nation which was founded on flight. Certainly some of the populations Benjamin studied were the result of white flight from more diverse urban centers, but some of the people he met were fleeing other things besides whatever brown people they felt were an existential threat. They were leaving behind those things they felt were threats to their culture — like those snotty L.A. yuppies or *gasp!* the gays, which are virtually non-existent in much of Whitopia. Some were fleeing a future they did not welcome, being deeply “nostalgic for the old days,” as one woman in my own home state said.

Flight is what made America, though; the denizens of uber-white enclaves are only doing what their forefathers did before them. Our nation celebrates every year the Pilgrims’ survival; they’d set sail on the Mayflower and headed for uncharted lands in which to shelter their small clan, to develop and share a culture based upon a religious sect. Flight is what brought waves of immigrants for the next two hundred years, leaving behind economic and political fears for a new home where they could have some sense of control over the course of their lives. With a history of flight and the inherent fragmentation and factionalization of small groups clustering in protective enclaves, it would be grossly unfair to believe that Rich Benjamin alone could provide us with a pointed list of steps we Americans of all stripes should take to reduce the inequities which have been embedded deeply in our society.

But he makes a valiant effort at opening our eyes to the possibility that we can and should slow American flight and begin to fully embrace the melting pot we are. It’s up to us to recognize ourselves in the mirror he holds up to our faces, stop our fearful flight to Whitopia or whatever sheltering but exclusionary community we have chosen, and make a home in a richly diverse nation.

Speaking of looking in the mirror, I can say Benjamin’s work checked me up short. I heard my own voice in some passages where the locals of Whitopia talk about seeking refuge from whatever their bugaboo — brown people, crime, nouveau riche, name it. A handful of years ago I built a new home in a small neighborhood of McMansions because we needed more room for growing kids and I wanted to escape a Walmart which sprang up in a cornfield only a block from my house. The amount of traffic and garbage and noise were incredible; the property values in the neighborhood fell and the crime increased. So we left and moved to a new home only a mile away.

In those reasons for leaving are a lot of the same rationales that the residents of Whitopia give for creating and maintaining their isolated islands as small as blocks and as large as counties. Was there a racial element to my decision making process? No, not at all. But I didn’t stay and fight the problems which came with the new store and the strip mall in which it was anchored. I could have demanded better of the municipal management with regard to noise and traffic control. I could have asked more of the surrounding neighborhood to fight the issues with me, organizing meetings and a citizen crime watch. I could have organized a suburban beautification effort to maintain and improve property values.

But no, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead of increasing my civic engagement and working with my neighbors, I fled. And now I live in a tiny Whitopia, surrounded by others who wanted a quiet, safe neighborhood and who unfortunately are at least 95% white.

Except for me, my blonde-haired kids with their oddly Polynesian brown eyes.

I am become Whitopia.

What about you? Do you live in Whitopia, too? Why are you there? If you don’t live in Whitopia, what’s it like and should we move back? What things should we be doing individually and collectively to address the issues which cause white flight, or is this a lost cause? And if you’ve read Rich Benjamin’s work, what did you take away from it? Be sure to check out this video overview of Rich Benjamin’s work, too. Join us in comments for what should be a lively discussion.

 

Let’s say you’re a middle-aged, well-educated progressive woman who speaks her mind plainly.

Let’s say you’re hungry to serve others and make real, transformative change happen in doing so.

Let’s say you’re a Hoosier, too.

Sister, right now you’re fucked, and here’s why.

1) The progressive community in Indiana has lost much of its spark.

Take a look around the progressive blogosphere in Indiana; it’s difficult to find more than a few blogs which provide solid and detailed content of interest to progressive Hoosiers, let alone those which post daily. This is a mirror of progressive politics in Indiana; the grassroots are thin and growing sparsely, and there’s not enough fertilizer to encourage thicker, rapid, healthy growth.

Take a look, too, at Meetups and events on Facebook. It won’t take long, because there are few if any even in an election year.

If you want to win, you will first have to build your own empowered and energized posse, because the progressive cavalry which existed in 2008 has become disenchanted and disaffected when not co-opted. You are also going to have to talk with and recruit bloggers who can make things happen with mere words.

2) Training for candidates and campaign supporters is wanting.

There’s simply not a lot of it in your neck of the woods, and what there’s been during the last several years put on by the state’s Democratic Party apparatus has been co-opted by a single incumbent, Evan Bayh.

Yeah, imagine wanting to train as a candidate to run for the senate against Evan Bayh, at a program with his name on it.

You will have to find an alternative method for training, like Democracy for America’s Night School programs. Contact EMILY’s List and find out if they are offering training in your state. Look into programs offered by The White House Project.

3) About that party machine…

Yes, there is one, no matter how much pooh-poohing you hear from the mainstream media and from the Democratic Party itself. There’s a hierarchy of power which is entrenched and exists in almost every single state in the union. It doesn’t like to give up power (or money) easily, and it won’t like any newbies who threaten its worldview and its ability to call the shots. You need to recognize it and figure out how to work through or around it effectively.

You also need to avoid ever, ever mentioning the machine because it will call you a paranoid, crazy-assed bitch for doing so, even if you can see them, the old boys network gathered in the smoke-filled rooms patting each other on the back as they point at you and laugh. You may refer to running into their obstructionism as “experiencing cultural stickiness” or “the expected resistance of the status quo to change.”

Unfortunate, you also cannot count on training to teach you this; you may have to learn this by networking with others and from cagey blogs. When pressed about this topic, smile broadly and change the subject to a key platform issue dear to your heart.

And fundraising…did I mention fundraising? You are going to have to make “the ask” for money every day, too, put a time set in stone on your calendar to do so. Get comfortable with explaining why you are a worthwhile investment with a well-crafted 30-second elevator speech. Start with organizations which are women-centric and women-friendly and work them for financial assistance. Reach out to other minority groups regularly, too. This is a necessity because you sure as hell can’t count on a nanometer of silver from the good old boys in the party machine we won’t ever mention out loud. (more…)

Indiana’s Sen. Evan Bayh continued his farewell tour yesterday, kicking it off the day with support for reform of the filibuster during an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. This was a surprise to many who find the current state of gridlock immensely frustrating and who also believe Bayh to be a key part of that gridlock.

But by afternoon he was his usual ConservaDem self, pleading for student loan firm Sallie Mae and the jobs Sallie Mae provides in his home state. Student loan financiers have been under fire for their expense and hassle which discourages students and locks them into a debt-spiral, while acting as an expensive middleman at the estimated cost of $89 billion over ten years. President Obama made it a priority to change this situation, declaring himself ready to fight for reform of the student loan system. The fight has made it through the House with the passage of H.R. 3221, Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 in September of this past year. The bill is now facing the usual Senate evisceration in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Indiana is deservedly gun-shy about job losses; the state has taken a beating over the last several years with layoffs and terminations due to the downsizing of the automotive industry. One might think Bayh’s concern about the 2,356 workers employed by Sallie Mae in Muncie and Fisher, Indiana locations was reasonable.

But the jobs at Sallie Mae are likely attributed to servicing student loans, not originating them. The loans won’t go away altogether, they’ll merely be funded on a more direct basis with loan origination handled by the government, rather than through private sector firms reimbursed by the federal goverment. Sallie Mae will probably always service student loans since they have the best software for doing so. So these Indiana-based jobs won’t go away simply because Sallie Mae can’t originate loans any more.

Which begs the question: what kind of jobs are these and why will taking loan origination — not loan servicing —  away from from Sallie Mae hurt these jobs?

And then there’s all the jobs and the students in Indiana which will be impacted if the Senate does not pass this bill; let’s look at the numbers.

Total estimated faculty 13,437
Total estimated staff 20,000
Total estimated students 148,307

School	Faculty	Students	Notes
Indiana University	2,007 full time, 354 part time	40,354	[1]
Purdue University	6,614	39,697	[2]
Indiana State University	436	10,534	[3]
Vincennes University	301	4,522	[4]
Ball State University	955	20,423
Univ. of S.Indiana	821	10,576
Univ. of Notre Dame	1241	11,733
DePauw University	254	2,350
Earlham College	97	1,194
Valparaiso University	220	3,874
Univ. of Evansville.	137	3,050	[5]

[1] Unclear whether this is total faculty and enrollment for all (10) campuses or only Bloomington.
[2] Unclear whether this is total faculty and enrollment for all (15) campuses or only West Lafayette.
[3] Unclear whether this is total faculty and enrollment for all (4) campuses or only.
[4] Estimated number based on student per class ratio provided by school.
[5] Estimated based on overall state average student to faculty ratio.

There’s a sizable economic benefit per student to each of the communities in which these schools have campuses. (There may be community colleges which are impacted as well, but not listed here; you get the drift.) There’s also a magnet effect generated by colleges, stimulating growth; a study in neighboring Michigan revealed that the greatest economic growth occurred near college towns, with the largest schools having the greatest growth. If school loans remain challenging for students, one would surely expect a negative affect on college communities’ economic growth as students are challenged financially to stay in school.

So why would Bayh place a premium on a nebulous number of jobs affiliated with a single industry in a small area of the state of Indiana, at the risk of jobs and economic growth across the entire state? Why would he ask the rest of the states to protect an unidentified number of loan origination jobs at the risk of their own economic growth and the additional $89 billion expense over a decade?

Perhaps we ought to ask Earl Goode, who has served as chief of staff to the governor of Indiana since 2006, and served as deputy chief of staff from April 2006 to November 2006, and who coincidentally serves on the board of Sallie Mae. Would Mr. Goode be able to shed any light on this tradeoff?

 

“Look over there!” said Dick Cheney, and the media dutifully looked as he directed.

If the media hadn’t looked as he directed, they might have figured out the underwear bomber’s attack was Dick Cheney’s fault.

Dick’s administration – yes, the one that Dick was running with George Bush acting as a meat puppet – spent $500 million of your tax dollars on a boondoggle counterterrorism database initiative nicknamed “Railhead” which failed to meet requirements to which it was supposed to perform. Railhead was supposed to screen for terrorist suspects attempting to enter the U.S.

The government even knew on Dick’s watch that Railhead was a debacle; the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology investigated the project’s technical shortcomings, way back in summer of 2008. You can be certain that problems with Railhead were recognized well before investigation and analysis which developed subsequent diagnostic memos.

But let’s back up to the point of origin. Railhead was launched after 2004, in an effort to create an improved datamining tool which would eventually replace the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), operated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). TIDE was ordered in 2003 by the Bush administration, centralizing data on suspected terrorists from across the intelligence community. After several years, the hastily created and implemented TIDE had exploded in size but not become more effective in the process, yielding far too many “bad” names in the no-fly component.

A handful of different contractors were involved in creating the new Railhead database search tool; Boeing and SRI International have been mentioned most often by various sources. Boeing was apparently responsible for managing the project while the other entities involved contributed content. Numerous complaints about Railhead, from the appearance of conflicts of interest between Boeing and SRI, to the misuse of funds for building a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, and to the inability of the initiative to provide basic contracted deliverables, may have spurred additional oversight by Congress.

The House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology’s research into Railhead revealed that the program could not do basic Boolean searches. This may be Greek to the average non-techie reader; here’s a fairly straightforward explanation by Rep. Brad Miller from the Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight:

The TIDE database does not conduct text based searches like popular search engines, such as Google, for instance. Instead, TIDE relies on Structured Query Language (SQL), a cumbersome and complex computer code that must utilize complicated sentence structures to query the TIDE database. Without a detailed index of the data stored in each table in TIDE, the SQL search engine is blindfolded, unable to locate or identify undocumented data. The current TIDE database is composed of data fields that are presented in 463 separate tables, 295 of which are undocumented.[7] As a result, critical terrorist intelligence in the TIDE system may not be searched at all. [Source, page 2]

The failures are not completely outlined here, but you get the gist; this is what three years and half a billion dollars bought for our national security — a failed project.

But Dick Cheney would have you believe that the Obama administration should have cleaned this up and corrected this mess in less than a year’s time (and one would imagine with little money), in order to prevent the underwear bomber’s attempted attack.

Note this well: the Cheney-era cobbled up system which ran over budget and past its due date, which cannot perform a search even as well as a commercial search engine could do a decade ago, could not match up Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with his father, Dr. Umaru Mutallab after Dr. Mutallab expressed concerns about his son’s intentions.

Abdul, in Arabic, means “servant of God”; any construction of a name including Abdul should also be searched without Abdul. A query for “Abdulmutallab” should also have included occurrences of “Mutallab” for this reason. It’s been suggested that Railhead could not handle this simple rule in queries; if it couldn’t do Boolean searches, it couldn’t do this.

Worse, as their systematic obstruction has demonstrated to date, Republican members of Congress have not supported the administration’s nominees to political appointments, including those in key positions in national security. Which means that Cheney’s peeps believe the Obama administration should already have cleaned up this CheneyCo mess using the very same persons and teams which created the mess to being with.

We’ve seen how this works with the financial industry: it doesn’t.

There was moderately good coverage in 2008 of the problems with Railhead, from Karen DeYoung at The Washington Post to Michael Krigsman at ZDNet. But the public didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the problem, what with the lion’s share of media coverage focusing on the presidential campaigns and on the incipient financial crisis. And while the media did a fair job of recognizing the problem, it did not make this particular national security problem a campaign issue; the media failed to break through to the public’s general awareness.

And now the media exacerbates the situation by giving Dick Cheney a bully pulpit through which he can redirect our attention away from the gross errors of governance committed by the previous administration, when he was calling many of the shots on national security. Cheney says Obama makes us weaker and presto, the media gives his claim oxygen instead of pressing back at Cheney and asking him why he was such a national security fuck-up, leaving Obama’s administration to straighten out Cheney’s messes, while our nation remains exposed to preventable terrorism.

 

This is the house which burned to the ground, killing the children inside it.

This is the fire station which would have answered the call faster, if only it were still open.

This is the budget crisis which hasn’t been solved, which reduced the funding for community safety, shutting down fire stations.

This is the business crisis which has been brewing for a decade while resulting in revenue shortfalls, deepened by partisan lip service.

This is the political infighting at state level which prevents budget reform, caused by partisan obstructionism in the Republican-led state senate.

This is the same political infighting in yet another state which prevents resolution of budget crises, caused again by Republican state senators’ partisan obstructionism.

This is the partisan obstructionism at federal level which puts the brakes on money to help the state to solve its budget crisis to keep firefighters on duty to save homes like the one burnt to the ground with the children inside it.

This is the definition of enabling, which defines the efforts of  some Democrats who encourage the obstructionists’ agenda.

This is the change we voted for, which has yet to change the pattern of obstructionism.

This is you, deciding to be the real change we’ve all needed, instead of waiting for a hero.