The California legislature recently banned employers from mandating RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) implants for their employees. While I’m glad I’m covered in my state, why isn’t this ban being implemented at the Federal level to cover every citizen? I’m not suggesting that we ban the devices; I’m suggesting that no one should be forced to stick on of these in their body just to get a job. I’ve covered the issue of RFID many times before and I’m not fundamentally opposed to RFID technology or RFID implants, but I do oppose the idea that anyone should be forced to implant one in their body and it would be just as offensive if my employer asked me to tattoo a bar code on to my forehead.
It would be just as offensive if my employer asked me to tattoo a bar code on to my foreheadVerichip RFID implants are worthless from a security standpoint because they’re essentially passing clear text data over the radio waves and it can easily be cloned. If it’s cloned, you’ll have to undergo knife treatment to get a new one unless the chip is reprogrammable. Even if Verichip stopped using clear text authentication and switched to strong NSA Suite B grade crypto, I wouldn’t want it inside my body. Is any material item in this world worth life or limb? If someone wants my access device and password at the point of a gun, I’d give it to them. I don’t want them to have to cut it out of my body.
Last summer there were some issues raised about the privacy and safety of RFID enabled passports. While the scenarios were arguably remote and the privacy concerns overblown because someone can copy the same information from a regular passport, there is no reason to have the RFID in the passport since an optical or contact based system would have the same effectiveness. RFID in the traditional sense gives you more flexibility and convenience because of its long wireless range but the usable range for RFID passports is literally a few millimeters away. RFID in the Passport implementation is effectively a contact based solution that has none of the flexibility but all of the security liabilities of a wireless solution.
What about the argument that we need RFID implants for our children? I have two kids and I can tell you that RFID isn’t going to make me feel any better. First of all, that RFID implant isn’t going to be a “LoJack” device for children and you’re not going to be able to track them down if they’re abducted unless you’re within a few feet of the child. Second, having the RFID implant might mean the abductor will cut it out of your child to take out the implant. I might consider an external device hidden in a watch or something that has an active transmitter with some effective range but implants are simply out of the question.
As critical of RFID as I am, I’m not so sure why some people are so anti-RFID that they don’t even want the devices to exist in the first place. RFID implants can make sense in medical areas. If it makes it easier for emergency workers to identify a patient’s special needs, that’s great so long as the consumer gets to voluntarily place it in their own body. There’s also new technology being developed for diabetics where the RFID sensor can wirelessly report glucose levels without you having to prick your finger every day. RFID inventory tracking and logistics can simplify and automate many things so we must distinguish between good RFID devices and bad ones.
A few weeks ago, former White House advisor Karl Rove made waves by questioning Senator Hillary Clinton’s electability. In an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Rove stated that Senator Clinton was a “fatally flawed” candidate. Rove explained that Senator Clinton’s approvals were, “in the high 40s on the negative side and just below that on the positive side” and that “there’s nobody who has ever won the presidency who started out in that kind of position.”
While Democrats muse about whether this is actually a Rovian plot to take Clinton’s electability off the table in the Democrats’ primary (what Democrat wants to parrot Rove’s words?), there is some truth to Rove’s argument. Senator Clinton’s high unfavorables are one of the reasons that she has never run particularly well in her races. In both of her Senate races she ran behind the Democrats at the top of her statewide ticket. Clinton supporters counter that she has plenty of time to turn her unfavorables around, and will be able to reintroduce herself to America during her campaign.
This may be true. After all, her husband did just that in 1992. But Clinton lacks her husband’s charm. Perhaps more importantly, she shares his tendency to attract scandal, which could make it difficult for her to turn her unfavorables around. Her 2008 campaign is proceeding apace, with a fundraising scandal already rearing its head months before the first primary.
The things we know about Norman Hsu, the Democratic fundraiser at the center of the scandal, are strange enough. We know that Mr. Hsu never made a contribution to a political campaign until three years ago, when he burst upon the fundraising scene. Today he raises millions of dollars in bundled contributions -- packages of smaller individual contributions -- for Democratic candidates across the country. To date he has raised close to a million dollars for Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign.
We also know that the details of many of these bundled contributions are suspicious, and have drawn a federal investigation. For example, the Paw family, which resides in a small bungalow in Daly City, California, have donated over $200,000 to Democrats since 2005. This is curious given that Mr. Paw is a mail carrier and Ms. Paw is a homemaker, and the Paw house is barely worth $200,000. It is also curious because the timing, amount, and recipients of the donations mirror those of Mr. Hsu. It is “curiouser” because the Paw home was once owned by Mr. Hsu, who used its address. We also know that a company owned by Mr. Hsu, Components Ltd., appears to have made over $100,000 in payments to nine people who made contributions to Senator Clinton. But the company itself exists only on paper, raising the question of whether it was a front for funneling money to the Democrat.
We also know that Mr. Hsu has been a fugitive from justice for the past fifteen years, arising out of his failure to appear in California state court to respond to charges of fraud arising from a Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Mr. Hsu. We know that he was recently brought before that court and posted a $2 million bond, which he promptly skipped out on. He was later located in a hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he had apparently suffered an injury while heading east by train.
But the things we don’t know about Mr. Hsu are even stranger, parts of his life that are shrouded in mystery. We don’t know, for example, who was behind all of this. What prompted Mr. Hsu’s sudden interest in politics at a relatively advanced age? Did he really want to put this amount of money into Clinton’s campaign due to late-blooming political beliefs, or are there more sinister motives? There are also allegations from further in Hsu’s past, including stories of kidnappings by the Triad Society -- something of a Chinese Mafia -- and other unsavory business relationships that inevitably raise the question: “Who is this guy?”
What we also know is that the Clinton machine has not lost its deft ability to handle scandal. The potential damage to Senator Clinton’s campaign was obviously huge, as it immediately raised memories of Bill Clinton’s 1996 fundraising scandal. That scandal -- or more accurately, series of scandals -- involved fundraisers at Buddhist temples, contributions by persons connected to the Chinese government, and of course, the use of the Lincoln bedroom for campaign contributors. The Senate Government Affairs Committee found “strong circumstantial evidence” that foreign money had been used to influence the 1996 election. The scandal resulted in twenty-two guilty pleas (some by Clinton fundraisers), and over one-hundred other people fleeing the country, “pleading the Fifth,” or otherwise avoiding questioning.
To top it off, the Los Angeles Times has reported that the Clinton camp had been warned about Mr. Hsu’s donations by a California Democratic Party official, and by a California businessman. Senator Clinton’s campaign finance director for Western states reportedly dismissed these concerns, writing: “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a Ponzi scheme . . . He is COMPLETELY legit.”
Any other candidate would be a victim of the 24-hour news cycle. But Senator Clinton gradually renounced the funds in a crafty fashion. The first funds -- Hsu’s direct contributions -- were renounced at around 6:30 PM on August 29, shortly after the evening news had begun. Then, on September 10, Clinton announced the return of around $850,000 in bundled donations. She did this on the day of the Petraeus report, the eve of 9-11 celebrations, and again, at 6:40 in the evening, virtually ensuring that the story got minimal press coverage.
To be sure, this story shows that the scandals that dogged President Clinton through much of his term may dog Senator Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency. Other scandals involving Clinton’s bundlers wait in the wings.
But the story also shows that the Clintons’ uncanny ability to deflect scandal and master the news cycle has not dissipated in the intervening years, and that Republicans should anticipate a strong, canny opponent in the fall should she win the nomination.
The final version of the widely celebrated ethics bill, passed by overwhelming margins in both House and Senate a month ago, finally and quietly made its way last week from Capitol Hill to the White House. It surely will soon be signed into law by President Bush. What only a handful of leaders and insiders realize is that this measure, avowedly dedicated to transparency, actually makes it easier for the Senate to pass pet projects without the public -- or many senators -- being aware of it.
Until now, one or two senators could block any provision that had not been passed by either Senate or House from being inserted, usually at the end of a session, in the final version of a bill. Under the new rule, it will take 40 senators to block such proposals that are protected by the majority or even the bipartisan leadership. That will make it much easier to enact any number of special interest measures, which is the goal of all too many members of Congress.
This momentous change could not have slipped by without bipartisan Senate leadership connivance, but was unknown to ordinary senators -- much less the general public. Deception is the watchword on Capitol Hill. Indeed, outsiders do not realize that the ethics bill was held for a month after final passage Aug. 2 before going to the president's desk. It was delayed to prevent Bush from exercising a "pocket veto": not signing the bill during the August recess when an absent Congress could not override it.
On Aug. 2, Republican reform Sen. Tom Coburn called the just-enacted ethics bill "a landmark betrayal, not a landmark accomplishment. Congress had a historic opportunity to expose secretive pork-barrel spending but instead created new ways to hide that spending." As for the act's highly publicized new restrictions on lobbyists, Coburn asserted that "the problem in Washington is not the lobbyists" but "members of Congress." He voted no as the bill passed the Senate, 83 to 14 on Aug. 2 (and the House a day earlier, 411 to 8).
Coburn objected to the bill taking new policing of pork barrel earmarks away from the Senate's non-partisan parliamentarian and giving it to the majority leader. "That makes the quarterback the referee," he said.
But not even Coburn's detailed analysis of the bill's treatment of earmarks mentioned the audacious change in Senate Rule 28 that covers inclusion in a Senate-House conference report of "extraneous matter" that neither chamber passed. For years at the end of a session, party leaders solicited senators for dozens of their pet extraneous projects to insert in conference reports. However, it would take 67 votes to suspend the rules in the 100-member Senate to enact each such provision. In practice, if a party leader learned of serious opposition by one or two senators in his caucus, he would remove the provision because those dissenters might derail the entire conference report.
But the ethics bill's revision of Rule 28 removes that safeguard. Any senator can propose that points of order on the conference report be waived for all extraneous provisions with a mere one-hour debate permitted for the lot of them. That can add to a bill 40 or more such provisions that never really will be debated. The floodgates will be open.
Multiple earmarks now will be added to a conference report by only 60 votes after but one hour of debate. As Coburn has complained, the final version of the ethics bill permits newly required identification of earmarks and posting on the Internet to be waived by either the majority leader or minority leader. They can also waive the new requirement that conference reports be posted on the Internet no less than 48 hours prior to the Senate vote. So much for transparency.
With recourse to a pocket veto denied him, George W. Bush ought to be in a quandary. Should he consider the option of vetoing the pride and joy of the Democratic Congress and be accused, however unfairly, of pandering to lobbyists? He could at least avoid the signing ceremony for a pork-prone ethics bill, and maybe even let it become law without his signature.
I am writing concerning the Select Committee to Investigate the Voting Irregularities of August 2, 2007, established by the House on August 3, 2007 to investigate the circumstances surrounding the overturned 215-213 vote on a Republican measure that sought to add language to the Agriculture Appropriations bill prohibiting illegal immigrants from receiving taxpayer-funded benefits.
Now that you and I have appointed six distinguished Members of the House to serve on the panel, I hope you will join me in ensuring that the select committee is provided all the resources necessary to complete its important work; and that you will agree to expand the inquiry’s scope to include several other troubling incidents occurring just prior to the August recess that were closely related to the controversy over the roll call vote that prompted creation of the Select Committee.
As you know, the House has customarily provided investigative select committees with professional staff as well as substantial financial resources in order to conduct the type of comprehensive, thorough inquiry Majority Leader Hoyer surely had in mind when he said on the House floor “I welcome the investigation. I applaud coming to the bottom of what happened…”
Accordingly, I propose that you and I jointly introduce a resolution to:
-- Provide $1 million in funding for professional staff, consultants, and other expenses related to the inquiry. -- Authorize the Select Committee to retain, on a contractual basis, the services of professional investigators and other individuals with expertise relevant to the inquiry. -- Direct the Office of the Inspector General of the House to detail to the Select Committee, to the extent feasible, professional staff whose assistance could help expedite the inquiry. -- Authorize the detail (both full and part-time, as needed) from the offices of leaders, officers, committees, and Members of staff necessary to conduct the inquiry.
In light of the September 30, 2007 deadline for the Select Committee’s initial report to the House, we should strive to introduce the resolution and urge its passage by the House as soon as possible.
As you no doubt recall, Madame Speaker, the disputed roll call vote was just one of several exceedingly controversial events in the House that occurred in close succession in early August:
-- During the first recorded vote the very next day, for example, the ordinarily reliable automatic voting system broke down, requiring a three hour suspension of legislative operations. -- Making matters worse, the account of that day’s deliberations in the Congressional Record for August 3, 2007 was altered substantially in a manner wholly inconsistent with the actual debate, as confirmed in recordings provided by the House Recording Studio. -- Finally, those same recordings plainly show the Speaker Pro Tempore declining to recognize a Member on his feet actively seeking to exercise his right under House Rules to propound a point of order.
Madame Speaker, our votes in the House are cast on behalf of the American people – and public confidence in the integrity of legislative actions in the House can only be restored by fully and aggressively investigating the circumstances surrounding each of these deeply disturbing events. Simply put, the Select Committee must follow the evidence wherever it leads – and it must have all the tools necessary to complete that critically important task. Restoring the bonds of trust between the American people and their elected representatives demands no less.
To that end, I hope you agree that we should urge the Select Committee to expand the scope of its important inquiry, and that you will join me in introducing immediately a resolution providing the panel with staff, funding and other resources essential to its mission.
Sincerely,
John A. Boehner Republican Leader
Mr. Boehner, a Republican, is minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. He represents the 8th District of Ohio.
A very embarrassing chapter in the history of our nation's scientific establishment has been unfolding thanks to a creative new website www.SurfaceStations.org set up and run by Anthony Watts. This site is providing unwelcome scrutiny to the United States’ surface temperature measurement network, supposedly the most reliable in the world. The reputation has been built over the years in part because of our government’s purported insistence on uniformity of technology as well as siting (putting the gauges where they will gather the most accurate data) and maintenance standards.
But if you place your measuring equipment in the wrong place you could help start a global warming panic. Which is, apparently, just what government bureaucrats are doing.
Recently, evidence increasingly made its way to people who pay attention to such things that that our network’s reliability was not all that it was cracked up to be, that there just might be misplacement of measurement instruments enhancing a mild warming trend begun in the late 1970s that otherwise seems to have stopped. Now, a full-blown scandal is erupting, exposing the expensive U.S. surface measurements as quite possibly not much more than yet another tool in the global warming alarmists’ kit to frighten taxpayers into accepting a radical eco-lifestyle agenda.
The importance of network standards and accuracy emerged as a concern after economics professor Ross McKitrick charted a dramatic, worldwide closure of fully one-half of the planet’s surface temperature measurement stations from 1989-91. Those closures -- and the limitation of data that resulted -- resulted in a statistical artifact -- the “hottest decade ever!” according to agenda-driven alarmists -- of an apparent jump in global surface temperatures in the 1990s. Not a warming trend, mind you, but a sudden shift upward. As it turns out this in all likelihood is simply a product of having closed thousands of cold-weather latitude stations, at a time when for example the Soviets/Russians found themselves with bigger things to worry about than maintaining Siberian thermometers, such as a collapsing empire.
So the enterprising Mr. Watts, a TV and radio meteorologist, began taking a closer look here at home. Watts put out a call for individuals to photograph each of America’s 1221 surface stations. As the first snaps came in Watts noticed a preponderance of ridiculously sited temperature apparatuses which common sense would dictate factored in a warming bias among the U.S. network (which, remember, is the world’s least unreliable).
It seems fair to conclude that siting thermometers in Arizona parking lots, overhanging black asphalt pads, near cell towers and hot-air blowing air conditioner exhausts or next to trash burn barrels has to result from either a complete breakdown of scientific discipline or an intent to skew the data to produce evidence of global warming.
But what can you say about setting one just away from a chimney directly above a Weber barbecue grill? That’s just what they did in Hopkinsville, KY. These practices would be hilarious if they didn’t result in large amounts of corrupted data upon which our policymakers desperately seek to base an energy scarcity regime.
This embarrassment came amid NASA also having to correct its data since the year 2000, which has been used to support many of the global warming alarmists’ “money claims”, such as Al Gore’s line that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past decade.
Well, no. We now know that this is false and that NASA has corrected the record to reflect that the warmest year in the U.S. was 1934, 4 of the 10 warmest here occurred in the 1930s, 3 during the 1990s, and one each in the 1920s, 1950s and this decade.
That this claim has now been debunked, like most every other statement of substance in Mr. Gore’s movie, will no doubt be disregarded by activist educators using the propagandistic movie in school curricula.
Regardless, as a result of all of the controversy a clearly not amused National Climatic Data Center suddenly pulled the actual locations of the temperature measuring stations from publicly available resources! Mr. Watts took them to task. As of this writing, the locations are again publicly available.
This brazen act nonetheless prompted me to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the internal deliberations behind such apparent trickery. NCDC has yet to respond, but watch this space, for I also sought internal discussion of a related, potential scandal picked up by climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. That is NCDC’s continuing decision to not make photos of particular Historical Climate Network sites, that are in their possession, publicly available (see Pielke’s blog post, “NOAA Cover Up Of US Historical Climate Network Surface Station Photographs”).
Remember, even though they may not want us to look, these are your tax dollars at work. Not for you, but for those who are aiming to saddle you with a greater tax burden and their idea of a green lifestyle. As Kermit the Frog used to say, “it’s not easy being green.” For Americans, it won’t be easy. It’ll be enormously expensive.
(Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Mr. Watts as Dr. Watts. We regret the error.)
Herramientas 
Posted by George Ou @ 9:29 pm 
