Politics

Before Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the town received no federal funds. As mayor, she hired the Anchorage law firm of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh, to help the town obtain federal funds. The Wasilla account was handled by Steven W. Silver, a partner in the firm and former chief of staff to indicted-for-corruption Sen. Ted Stevens, who helped secure $67 million in federal earmarks for the town of 6,700 residents–$4,000 per person. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) Palin has stood up to corruption, blowing the whistle on unethical behavior by the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party despite taking a lot of heat for it. But she’s also gotten into some trouble of her own, and it almost seems that she fell into her anti-corruption role by accident. A description of Palin from her fellow Wasilla, Alaska resident Anne Kilkenny is well worth reading. (Kilkenny is also quoted regarding Palin in this New York Times story.) For further perspective, here’s another close-up view of Palin as she’s seen in Alaska. UPDATE (September 4, 2008): As governor of Alaska, Palin asked for $550 million in earmarks in her first year in office, and for 31 federal earmarks totaling $198 million so far this year. Oink! John McCain has long been a critic of earmarks. Turns out he has specifically been critical of earmarks requested by Sarah Palin.

Last year, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared “Christian Heritage Week” in Alaska from October 21-27, 2007, with a proclamation that misquoted and misrepresented various Founding Fathers, at least two of whom would have opposed just such a proclamation (Jefferson and Madison). Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars steps through her proclamation and corrects the misinformation. tom (2008-09-02): Andrew Sullivan had these up as well:Justifying her position on the Alaskan pipeline:"I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."On Iraq:for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.On the Pledge:Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not? PALIN: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.I can't imagine that this is going to help McCain's numbers with independents. ...

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars shows that McCain’s VP nominee, Sarah Palin, didn’t take long to utter her first falsehood as candidate. Near the beginning of her acceptance speech, she said: And I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress – I told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on that bridge to nowhere. (APPLAUSE) If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves. ...

Conspiracy theorists like to make arguments of the form “A is linked to B, B is linked to C, therefore A and C are in cahoots,” where the links between each entity may be extremely tenuous. P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, following dogemperor at the DailyKos, maintains that “Sarah Palin’s home church is dominionist, with connections to Joel’s Army,” for which the evidence dogemperor provides is the following: A look at the home website of Palin’s church tends to be revealing. Among other things, a particular Assemblies buzzword associated frequently with Hillsong A/G and New Zealand Assemblies churches shows up (“Destiny”, here, is a buzzword for “Joel’s Army”, and is being preferred even as the phrase “Joel’s Army” is getting enough negative spin that even the Assemblies is now having to do some rather massive spin control); cell churches are promoted (of the same sort that are linked to short-term and longterm psychological damage and are among the most coercive tactics ever documented in spiritually abusive groups). The church, like a number of other large Assemblies churches, is the center of a dominionist broadcast TV center whose programming is carried across multiple channels in Alaska. ...

P.Z. Myers reports on the behavior of police in Minneapolis, which looks similar to Denver.

Barack Obama has supplied his answers to the fourteen questions from Sciencedebate 2008. John McCain has said that he will also be supplying answers. UPDATE (September 17, 2008): John McCain has also supplied his answers to the Sciencedebate 2008 questions. Click here to see their answers side-by-side.

(Image from here. Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

One of my prized possessions, now in a box in a closet somewhere, is a T-shirt that says on its front “This T-shirt is a munition.” Underneath it is some machine-readable barcode that encodes the RSA public-key encryption algorithm expressed in Perl. As the seller of the shirt advertised, “it’s machine washable and machine readable." When I bought and regularly wore that shirt, taking it out of the country was a crime punishable by up to a $1 million fine and 10 years in federal prison. This is because U.S. rules under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), then enforced by the Department of Commerce, ruled that strong encryption qualified as a munition subject to export controls and requiring a special license for export. After the Dan Bernstein case was decided in 1996, computer source code printed in a book (human readable format) was not subject to export controls, but computer source code in a machine readable format, such as on my shirt, still was. So I could wear my other T-shirt with RSA Perl code on it, which had a program in the shape of a dolphin, out of the country, but not the machine readable “This T-shirt is a munition” shirt. The implication was that you could take a copy of Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography out of the country without an export license, but not a disk containing the very same code fragments printed in the book. This website authored by Adam Back, written at the time, proposed some possible motives for government restrictions on cryptography. What the ITAR regulations on cryptography did for Internet software development was prohibit web browsers and server software from implementing the strong encryption necessary to protect electronic commerce from being exported from the United States. The result was that this development work simply occurred offshore. There were no barriers to importation of the software into the U.S., only to export it out. So the software was developed and sold by companies in places like Canada, Russia, and Estonia, which had no such inane restrictions. Finally, in 1999, the U.S. wised up and relaxed the ITAR restrictions on encryption, allowing export without a license to most countries (the exceptions being countries with links to state-sponsored terrorism). But ITAR is still around, and still having the unintended effect of pushing business out of the United States. The current victim is commercial satellite production. In 1999, ITAR authority over satellite technology export was shifted from the Department of Commerce to the Department of State, and since that time the U.S. share of commercial satellite manufacturing has dropped from 83% to 50%. The company Alcatel Alenia Space, now known as Thales Alenia, took steps in the late nineties to eliminate all U.S.-manufactured components from its satellites, with the result that it has subsequently doubled its market share to over 20%. The European Space Agency, Canada’s Telesat, and the French company EADS Sodern, that makes satellite control and positioning systems, have all been phasing out their use of U.S.-supplied components. They’ve done this because dealing with U.S. vendors increases costs (due to regulatory compliance costs) and causes unpredictable delays in the supply of parts. Nevada’s Bigelow Aerospace delivered an aluminum satellite stand to Russia in 2006, which Robert Bigelow described as “indistinguishable from a common coffee table.” But because it’s associated with a satellite and officially part of a satellite assembly, it is covered by ITAR and had to be guarded by two security guards at all times. Even commodity items like screws and wiring, when part of a satellite, are covered by ITAR regulations. The purpose of ITAR is to prevent key U.S. technologies with military applications from being leaked out to other countries that might be hostile to the U.S. But the effect of its overly broad application has been to shift the development of that technology to other countries and reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete in the commercial satellite business. Congress should look to reform ITAR–when export controls are so badly broken as to have nearly the opposite of the intended effect, they clearly need to be relaxed. (Satellite and ITAR info via “Earthbound,” The Economist, August 23, 2008, pp. 66-67.) ...

We put a Barack Obama for President sign in front of our house on Sunday; it’s already gone today. A Google search for “Obama sign stolen” shows that thefts of Obama yard signs are occurring all over the place–Midland, TX; Staunton, VA; Springfield, MO; Ivins and St. George, UT; Sartell, MN; Upper Arlington, OH; and so on. A Google search for “McCain sign stolen” shows allegations about McCain stealing a prisoner of war story, Cindy McCain stealing a recipe, and stories of thefts of Obama yard signs–but no reports of stolen McCain signs. I suppose either our sign was stolen by an unethical Obama supporter for their own use (in which case the stolen sign should be popping up elsewhere), or by an unethical McCain supporter who has no respect for freedom of speech or private property. I suspect it’s probably the latter. UPDATE (November 5, 2008): Here’s a story about a university instructor who wrote about his stealing a McCain/Palin sign in Minnesota–he has resigned his visiting professorship at St. Olaf College as a result. Philip Busse is described in the article as a journalist and political activist from Portland, Oregon. ...

Lori Lipman Brown, the nonbelievers’ lobbyist in Washington D.C., will appear on The Colbert Report tonight. She works for the Secular Coalition of America, an organization whose members include the American Humanist Association, the American Ethical Union, Atheist Alliance International, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Institute for Humanist Studies, the Internet Infidels, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, the Secular Students Alliance, and the Society for Humanistic Judaism. UPDATE: She won’t be on tonight–maybe next week? UPDATE (August 30, 2008): She was on last night’s show, which is online. ...