New Startup Aims at Ad-Supported Fuel Consumption

Doesn’t it make you sick every time you pull the receipt out of the gas pump after filling up? Mile after mile you drive! To and from work, school, running errands, meeting with friends, how about everyday LIFE!!! Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way of compensating YOURSELF for all that driving?

So begins the pitch to drivers for a new venture Gas for Free, which pays drivers up to $299 each month to place advertising on their cars.

I can’t decide what I think about this from a business perspective. It’s entirely possible — although I hope not — that Gas for Free’s founders have hit on the next big trend in advertising and are going to make a mint. It’s also possible that their target driver audience — people who are so attached to their cars that even $4.35/gallon gas won’t make them take the bus — will not be willing to deface their precious shiny automobiles with crass slogans.

From an environmental perspective, this makes me utterly sick. It’s bad enough that this venture aims to artificially support the completely unsustainable practice of driving fossil fuel-powered vehicles everywhere rather than taking public transit. (I love that they call themselves “eco-ethical.”) But on top of it, it further clutters the already overwhelming mental and emotional experience of driving. Billboards are bad enough. Now I have to stare at advertising on someone’s car as well?

This kind of reminds me of the GOP’s ham-handed attempts to reduce gas prices which includes:

1. A gas tax holiday.
2. Releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserves.

and last but not least…

3. The supply-and-demand-defying Find More, Use Less campaign, which asserts that if we excavate for more fossil fuel resources at the same time that we all voluntarily work together to conserve them, we can keep the price of gas low.

All in all, it’s ludicrous. We’re all grasping at straws trying to fix a system whose time is beginning to pass. Let’s pull out our thinking caps and use some of that innovative brain power to actually solve our energy crisis, rather than putting yet another band-aid over a gaping wound.

[Via Mashable.]

Sweet, I Can Break The Law

So I’m totally allowed to steal cars, rob banks, and kill people. All I need is a note from my lawyer saying that it’s not illegal.

(5 minutes, 55 seconds in)

Basically, the Attorney General just said that if any Department of Justice Official signs off an anything, that whatever actions are taken, no one can be held accountable.

And what he’s really saying is: “I’m not going to investigate the President under any circumstances, even if you have indisputable evidence that he authorized torture.”

Eulogy For The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment was conceived in 1789 as a series of constitutional amendments, and was born on December 15, 1791. Proud father James Madison said it was one of his favorites, although the First and Second Amendment generally got more attention.

The Fourth Amendment started growing in importance and prominence, however, when the Supreme Court adopted the exclusionary rule in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), prior to which all evidence, no matter how seized, could be admitted in court. A few decades later, the Fourteenth Amendment helped bolster the importance of the Fourth Amendment with Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961) where the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment is applicable to the state governments by way of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the early part of the 21st century, the Fourth Amendment grew concerned, after its brother, the Eighth Amendment, was exiled by the Bush Adminstration. Not long after, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments were tied up, gagged, and locked in Dick Cheney’s basement.

In 2003, an official memo in the Bush administration stated “… our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations”. Given that the NSA was involved in domestic military operations, this was, in essence, a death threat against the Fourth Amendment.

A few years later, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, signed by President Bush today, not only legalized the secret warrantless surveillance program the president approved in late 2001, it also gave the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.

Since then, the Fourth Amendment has gone missing and has been declared dead by White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. The ACLU has argued that the Fourth Amendment is not in fact dead, and it’s just scared and has gone into hiding.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the new wiretapping law, arguing that gives the Bush administration virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls. The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work - which relies on confidential communications - will be greatly compromised by the new law.

In the meantime, several other Amendments, including the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth, have hired bodyguards and 24-hour security forces, and the Twenty-Second has said he is considering cancelling his quadrennial appearance this coming November.

Obama And FISA

Obama explains his support for FISA. I still strongly disagree with him on this position and hope he reconsiders. At least he’s willing to explain his position. But while I’m mad at him I’m going to keep linking to Bob Barr.

P.S. It’s also pretty cool that Obama blogs.

The Only Presidential Candidate Who Will Cut Spending

I’m pretty annoyed with Barack Obama right now. His current plan to expand Faith-Biased initiatives, to me, shows a lack of seriousness about balancing the budget. I’m all for helping the poor, but I’m not all for borrowing money from China and the Middle East to do so. So far the CBO and the Tax Policy Center have said that both Obama and McCain’s projected budget’s would run in the red.

So I thought I would give a quick shout out to Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for President. Yes, he’s not going to win. But at least he’s campaigning hard on two things that matter: a balanced budget and restoring the writ of habeaus corpus. So even though I don’t support Bob Barr, I think it’s important that at least his voice on these matters is heard.

Say It Aint So ‘O’

I’m still in shock over Obama’s announcement that he will vote to give the telecom’s retroactive immunity after they allowed the NSA to illegal wiretap people without warrants. Obama said that “given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay.”

I have yet to hear any evidence that the wiretapping has made us any safer. President Bush has already whited out the Eight Amendment with his policy of torturing potentially guilty “enemy combatants”. The wiretapping vote effectively whites out the Fourth Amendment. I was hoping that Obama would move the debate back into the realm of reality. This hope is the reason that as many as 65,000 people have turned out to see him at rallies.

Instead, it appears that Obama is instead going to be playing the “security scare” game, where we pretend like the threat of terrorist attacks is so grave that we must ignore the principles this country was founded on in order to fight “a new kind of war.” Maybe this vote will make Obama a stronger “general election candidate”. But before he votes for this bill, I will need to hear him give a speech on why terrorists threats outweigh the Bill of Rights.

More Push-Polling And Scamming

801-623-4621. Just got a call from them, no voice, just dead air, and did a look up. Apparently this number comes from a calling company in Provo, UT that does push-polls and/or scams. Looks like they are going to be out this election season.

Hillary Clinton - Help Me Pay Off My Debts

Hillary Clinton overspent by about 20 million dollars. Now she wants help paying off the debt she racked up.

Now maybe I’m wrong about this, and its a common practice for politician to try to continue to raise money for their campaigns after an election is over so that they can pay off huge debts. But this seems really messed up to me.

The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder

The lawyer who prosecutor Charles Manson and wrote the book Helter Skelter just released a novel in which he claims to lay the foundation for murder charges against President Bush.

In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

I was listening to this guy on the radio yesterday, and I’m going to order the book. Honestly, just listening to some of the excerpts, I have to say that the odds of Bush actually being tried are higher than I thought. Although, higher is still of course a long shot, and one has to consider the ramifications of actual charges against President Bush for starting a war in a country in which we still have 100,000 troops stationed.

Basically, the arguments goes, that if President Bush knowingly misled the country in order to start a war, he is personally responsible for the resulting deaths. A quick summary of the strongest evidence that Bush knowingly misled the country:

Bugliosi calls our attention to the fact that after Bush had started talking about the possibility of war with Iraq he said that his decision will be based on the “latest intelligence.” What he never said, of course, is that on October 1, 2002, the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies said that Saddam Hussein was NOT an imminent threat to the U.S. Not long after that, on the afternoon of October 7, 2002, then CIA director George Tenet delivered a letter to Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical or biological weapons) against the United States.” That evening Bush delivers a speech to the nation at the Museum Center in Cincinnati, Ohio in which he called Saddam Hussein a “great danger to our nation.”

However, for many, the conclusive evidence that Bush knew Saddam Hussein was no threat to this country, therefore an attack on Iraq was unjustified, will be the memo which has come to be known simply as the “Downing Street Memo.” This was written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on July 23, 2002, about high-level meetings he had with Bush Administration officials. This memo contained the statement that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.”

McCain Wants To Go Nuclear

Power that is. Given that gas was at $4.37 the last time I filled up, and will probably be at $4.50 by the time I fill up again, I say its about F*CKING time. I know there’s probably a reason why we haven’t built a new power plant in 30 years. At least I hope there is, and we just haven’t been sitting on our hands hoping that someone was going to make cars run on trash.

P.S. Al Gore would have made cars run on trash if he were President.

Our Next Vice-President

I can’t wait to see Jim Webb debate John McCain about his new GI Bill. Jim Webb is a straight thug, and I’ve been saying that he’s going to be the VP in 08 since January of 2007.

Senate Intelligence Report: Bush Administration Lied About Reasons For Invading Iraq

While it’s true that I’ve been saying that for the past six years, the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee is now saying this is kind of a big deal. Yet, I’ve heard very little about this on the news, on the internet news, and in the blogosphere. Isn’t this basically grounds for impeachment/war crimes?

If there is evidence that the Bush administration deceived Congress and the American public into going into a war, isn’t this grounds for SOME sort of punishment? And why are people not flipping out about this.

An analysis:

The committee’s report is arguably the clearest and most direct presentation to date of the disconnect between what was known by the intelligence community in the run-up to the war and what was claimed to be true by the administration. On the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability, for example, the report analyzes in detail the White House’s willful disregard of the conclusions of the Department of Energy and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes claimed by the CIA to be part of Iraq’s supposed uranium enrichment apparatus were in fact being used for the purposes of a conventional rocket program–a point that was confirmed by the postwar findings of the Iraq Survey Group. And when confronted with CIA and DIA assessments that a purported meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in 2001 could not be confirmed, the administration continued to insist that such a meeting had taken place and that it proved high-level cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Can someone explain to me how lying about the reasons for starting a war is NOT grounds for impeachment?

What Is North Korea Like?

Any guesses as to what the most highly fortified border in the world is? If you said US-Mexico, you need to stop watching Lou Dobbs. If you said Israel-Palestine, you’re still not even close. There are 2 million North Korean troops stationed on the border with South Korea, who have over 500,000 stationed on their side.

A journalist actually made it into North Korea and made a documentary. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.

McCain’s Health Care Plan

Reading Ian and Jeff debate health care and John McCain, I realized I don’t know jack about what McCain would do as far as health care. In a word, “increased privatization.” I know that’s two words. Here’s two summary below, one objective, one partisan.

Basically, McCain believes that by allowing individuals to choose their health care providers, the increased competition will lower costs. The only way I can see that lowering costs is by excluding those who are elderly or “high-risk”. It also sounds like a lot more work on my end. Obama’s plan on the other hand basically consists of further subsidizing health care with taxpayer money, although primarily for children. As I’ve said before, the reason I support Obama is that I believe he is more like to reach compromises in DC and actually get anything done, rather than that I’m excited by the idea of moving towards universal health care.

Clinton Calls It Quits

Well, it only took her four months after most of the rest of the country realized she was not going to be the Democratic nominee, but 30 million dollars later Hillary Clinton is poised to give her concession speech tomorrow, four days after Barack Obama officially clinched the nomination. To her credit, it was supposed to only be three days after, but when her staff found out that today is the 40th anniversary of the RFK assassination, they decided it might be better to do it Saturday.

Personally, I think Tuesday would have been a better choice (as would have been, say, March) but at least she’s going away. Kudos to Barack Obama for not backing down and trying to cut a deal with her, while at the same time not making her feel marginalized, ignored or mistreated. I think how Barack Obama deals with Clinton gives us a good vision of how he will deal with other political leaders when he becomes President, and he did an excellent job here.

McCain vs. Obama

Wow. If the general election is anything like last night, I am worried. Not that I don’t love Barack Obama, but the idea of a candidate winning by the type of margins that last night suggests is a little unnerving, even if the candidate has as much integrity as Obama.

“What are you talking about Andy?” You might ask. “Obama and McCain are virtually tied in all the polls.”

That’s true. Largely because the last three months have been Clinton attacking Obama, with McCain shuttled off to foreign countries and out of the spotlight. But if you think that McCain has a chance against Obama, even if Hillary Clinton takes her fight to the convention, watch the two speeches last night.

Barack Obama:

John McCain:

The analysis:

I can’t see how even Cindy McCain could watch both of these speeches and then cast a vote for Senator McCain. McCain is one of the worst orators I have ever seen in my life. Obama is, without question, the best of this decade. McCain also had three weeks to write and prepare for this speech. I can only imagine how they will look and sound side-by-side and on the spot.

DISCLAIMER: I didn’t actually watch all of John McCain’s speech. I’ve tried several times, but it’s just too awkward and boring.

Obama Has Won

According to the Associated Press, Obama now has enough superdelegates that he has clinched the nomination regardless of his showings tonight in Montana and South Dakota. Many of these superdelegates have made private as opposed to public commitments, so that Montana and South Dakota’s voters can still feel their vote counts, and so that Obama will be pushed over the top by pledged, rather than superdelegates.

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