Snitch Line Quietly Shut Down

After a fanfare announcement and a large backlash, the White House’s snitch line flag@whitehouse.gov has been shut down silently in the night.

Cuffy has details that the email address now bounces with a message to send feedback to http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck instead.

So while the opportunity to rat your neighbors out to the White House via email has disappeared, you can still snitch via a web form.

But that also misses the mark a bit since the linked site does specifically mention that people should

Please refrain from submitting any individual's personal information, including their email address, without their permission.

I’m still not sure that this is this is the right place to collect this type of information but at least they are making a show of not collecting personal information. Unfortunately, as discussed before, we can’t know what information is submitted here at all.

Its not about your speech, its about you not saying your speech!

Sometimes you read something and you are glad you live where you live. Apparently some Holocaust denier in Australia is now serving a jail term for contempt of court.

In their verdict, the judges of the Federal Court said the case was not about the Holocaust but about whether Toben had complied with orders of the court.

That soooo would not fly here in the US (I hope) even though what he says is completely wrong, insulting and inflammatory. They are claiming Its not about what he said. Its about him saying it after they told him not to say it. Riiiiiight. Well why did they tell him to not say it in the first place? Because of what he was saying!

He just better hope they don't try to extradite him to Germany.

Do you really remember Woodstock?

As the 40th anniversary of the historic concert passes by and we see much fanfare and nostalgia, I can’t help but wonder if we might have more stories like this one if everyone there had a cell phone to capture their experience in pictures and video to reintroduce a bit of reality to the fond memories.

I Was At Woodstock. And I Hated It. | Newsweek.com

It probably would have also brought YouTube to its knees. :)

Whole Foods Saves Health Care

I’m glad to see John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) getting some traction on his op-ed in the WSJ regarding a real way to reform the country’s health care system without dismantling it or transforming it into something that will destroy what works today or bankrupting the country.

He ultimately makes the same argument that I have been pushing for – untie health care from employment, give people real choices, and make the costs transparent.

I’ve seen references to this op-ed in a number of places now and having attention drawn to a real alternative to the existing House plan really works better than just shouting “No, not Obamacare!” without any other good suggestions to go with it.

Flip-Flops will kill you!

And while we are banning things we need to BAN THE FLIP FLOPS!!!!

According to the NY Daily News

The flip-flop is the preferred summer shoe for many New Yorkers. But on city streets, the flimsy footwear can be deadly

As much as I hate some of the extreme casualness of wearing a thick piece of paper with a string and calling it a shoe (and don’t wear your pajamas to Wal-Mart either!) I have to agree with John Stossel’s Take on this

If flip-flops were so deadly, people would be lying dead all over the sidewalk.

With apologies to John…. “Gimme a break!”

Ban the taser?

Are “less than lethal” tasers too easy to use? The more items I see like this one from Carlos Miller or these from Radley Balko (aka The Agitator) I move more and more towards wanting to remove the taser’s from the police arsenal.

Provided as an alternative to drawing a firearm and promoted as less than lethal, I wonder if it is too easy to justify using a taser in the mind of the police. “Its not really going to cause permanent damage right?” Maybe, but the officer has no way of knowing that. The victim may or may not have a health issue that makes the taser just as dangerous as a bullet. Since it is promoted as “safe” it gets drawn much too often.

I’m starting to think going back to “using your hands or using your gun” draws a brighter line for the officer involved. That removes a large gray area of when its appropriate to even draw the taser. Some police departments don’t even provide guidelines for when its appropriate to brandish a taser, which says to me that they don’t take it seriously as a weapon. They do know if they misuse their firearm somebody may die.

The White House needs you (to rat on your neighbor)

From the the White House’s official blog – they want to you to report any political speech that they don’t agree with?

If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

And it gets a little more interesting since this is a privacy grey area. According to Senate Judiciary Committee lawyers any info gathered in this way is

• not covered by the Privacy Act, which prohibits government agencies from keeping any records
• not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which means it would not have to release any information on the plan to members of the public who make a request.
• likely will be covered by the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve and maintain its records for permanent storage in a government database.

So if that is true this becomes a secret database of people who disagree with the presidents policies (which they can of course act on) which does not have to be disclosed for at least a decade.