Greg In The Desert

I have a feeling there will be some last minute changes that will still allow all states driver license. If not the situation could get ugly.

The Bush administration passed the law, designed to stop terrorists from entering the country, after Sept. 11, 2001. All 50 states have to comply with its regulations by Jan. 1, 2010.
Sec. Rick Homans said the clock is ticking and New Mexico is nowhere near close.
“The way it is right now, come Jan. 1st, residents of New Mexico and residents of about 25 other states wouldn’t be allowed to board airplanes unless they had a valid passport.”

This is not looking good.

Sen. Udall: Yeah. Well, as you are probably aware, the situation that we’re in now — we have health care on the floor — where if tried to move to anything else I think it would make it much more difficult procedurally. So I think if — I don’t see us getting to Pass ID on the Senate floor between now and the end of the year. So I think it would be very helpful for you to issue a statement — you might use this as an opportunity to do it — to assure people that after December 31st they will be able to travel with something other than a passport. I don’t know if you want to do that at this point but if you decline that’s fine.

Sec. Napolitano: I think I will not accept that invitation at this point in time.

• Is war on drugs worth it? Maybe not, new FBI data suggest. | csmonitor.com – The new statistics point to a continued emphasis on drug interdiction – otherwise known as the "war on drugs" – that more and more law enforcement officers are now questioning. While many experts hold the anti-drug campaign to be the key reason for the decline in the crime rate in the US, especially violent crime, since the 1990s, these police officers, as well as current and retired judges and prosecutors see, instead, thousands of American lives ruined for small drug infractions in a costly and possibly unwinnable "war."
• Al Jazeera English – Europe – Italian mafia ’sunk toxic waste’ – Italian authorities have begun investigating a shipwreck allegedly containing toxic waste off the Calabrian coast, after claims it was deliberately sunk by the mafia. A former member of the criminal organisation says the vessel and its cargo were blown up in a lucrative radioactive disposal scheme and that the ship contained "nuclear" material
• The White House – Blog Post – Reality Check: The Truth About "Czars" – But of course, it’s really the hypocrisy here that is noteworthy. Just earlier today, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California and one of the leaders in calling for an investigation into the Obama Administration’s use of "czars", had to admit to Fox News that he had never raised any objections to the Bush Administration’s use of "czars". Many of these members who now decry the practice have called on Presidents in the past to appoint "czars" to coordinate activities within the government to address immediate challenges. What is clear is that all of this energy going into these attacks could be used to have a constructive conversation about bringing this country together to address our challenges moving forward – and it doesn’t take a "czar" to bring that about! Just some folks willing to act in good faith.
• Nazi flag flying high over East Mesa again – Las Cruces Sun-News – Triplett's flags – which he said signified protest against what he viewed as unjust government action and impending communism – were taken down Sept. 11 but went back up Monday, a Nazi flag still on top but the American flag right-side-up this time. A call to Triplett at his business, New Mexico Roof Coating Co., met with no reply and a hang-up. A subsequent message left there, seeking comment, was not immediately returned.
• Colo. budget plan: 6,400 prisoners face early release – The Denver Post – Colorado Department of Corrections officials underreported by thousands the number of prisoners — including thieves, drug dealers and killers — who are eligible for early release under a $19 million budget-cutting plan. A review of the list shows that among the hundreds of violent offenders to be considered are several convicted killers and a man who shot and wounded a police officer, even though DOC officials and Gov. Bill Ritter have promised that the prisoners are not the type who would be eligible for early release. The early-release plan, announced Aug. 18, is part of a plan to shore up a $318 million gap in this year's budget.
• Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’ – Telegraph – Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.
• AMREP Reports First Quarter Fiscal 2010 Results – PRINCETON, N.J., Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — AMREP Corporation (NYSE: AXR) today reported a net loss of $1,056,000, or $0.18 per share, for its fiscal 2010 first quarter ended July 31, 2009, compared to net income of $71,000, or $0.01 per share, for the first quarter of the prior fiscal year. Revenues were $32,457,000 in the first quarter of this fiscal year versus $35,570,000 in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. First quarter 2010 revenues from land sales at the Company's AMREP Southwest subsidiary were $1,485,000 compared to $1,263,000 for the same period of fiscal 2009, with the results of both periods reflecting a continuing softness in the real estate market in the greater Albuquerque-metro and Rio Rancho areas that is consistent with the well-publicized problems of the national home building industry and credit markets.
• Why I Love Al Jazeera – The Atlantic (October 2009) – Al Jazeera is also endearing because it exudes hustle. It constantly gets scoops. It has had gritty, hands-on coverage across the greater Middle East, from Gaza to Beirut to Iraq, that other channels haven’t matched. Its camera crew, for example, was the first to beam pictures from Mingora, the main town of Swat, enabling Al Jazeera to confirm that the Pakistani military had, in fact, prevailed there over the Taliban.
• When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings | Washington Examiner – The controversy over President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush's speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.
• BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Huge ’sky explosion’ investigated – An Irish astronomy group is calling for help in tracing the origin of a huge explosion in the skies over the country on Thursday evening.

• YouTube – Leo Laporte Blows up at Mike Arrington on the Gillmor Gang – June 6, 2009 – Leo Laporte calls out Mike Arrington of TechCrunch after Leo got mad at him for implying that his opinion of the Pre was effected by the fact he had a free review unit.
• Bachelorette Contestant Has Rio Rancho Roots – Albuquerque News Story – KOAT Albuquerque – The season premiere of ABC's hit show 'The Bachelorette' aired Monday night.
  One of the contestants on the show is a New Mexico native looking for love on this season's bachelorette.
  Greg Bilbro, 31, grew up in Rio Rancho, where his mom Haz Brown still lives.
• Police: Handgun handed off at airport, gets on plane | Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/04/2009 – A U.S. Airways employee was being questioned by authorities this morning after a bag containing an unloaded gun apparently circumvented security and made it onto a plane at Philadelphia International Airport, police said.

  A passenger waiting to board Flight 1195, destined for Phoenix, noticed another passenger handing a carry-on bag directly to the airline employee, said Officer Christine O'Brien, a Philadelphia police spokeswoman.

• ABQJOURNAL NEWS/METRO: El Nino Might Drench Your Plans in New Mexico – A rapid warming in the Pacific Ocean during the past few weeks led climate watchers Thursday to issue their first forecast in three years for an El Niño, a climate pattern that favors wet weather for the Southwestern United States.
• Ex-State Dept. employee arrested for spying for Cuba – Washington Times – A former State Department official and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government and conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to the Cuban government.
• Family wins $6.5 million settlement from city – Six-year-old Adrian Trevino was asleep in bed next to his 3-year-old sister, Aletse, when he was jarred awake by loud noises outside his window: a helicopter flying overhead, yelling, then rapid gunfire.

  Just as Adrian sat up in bed, a stray bullet pierced his Maryvale home and struck him in the back, permanently paralyzing him from the belly button down.

• MacGourmet organizes and helps find new recipes Review | Software | Mac Gems | Macworld – If you’re a recipe geek and need a place to store, organize, and categorize your current and potential meals, look no further than MacGourmet. From the program’s recipe box metaphor to its flexible visuals, plug-in architecture, auto import functions, and smart searching, this is one of the most versatile and extensible programs available for any cook.
• Fatty foods — not empty stomach — fire up hunger hormone | Science Blog – New research led by the University of Cincinnati (UC) suggests that the hunger hormone ghrelin is activated by fats from the foods we eat — not those made in the body — in order to optimize nutrient metabolism and promote the storage of body fat.
• TidBITS Media Creation: iMovie ‘09 8.0.3 Adds New Hidden Features – Apple released iMovie '09 8.0.3 this week, a seemingly minor update that "addresses general compatibility issues, improved overall stability and fixes a number of other minor issues." However, I've discovered that this small iteration turns out to have two new features, along with some other undocumented changes.
• Don’t expect DEA raids on N.M. medical marijuana dispensaries – The nation’s top cop said Friday that marijuana dispensaries participating in New Mexico’s fledgling medical marijuana program shouldn’t fear Drug Enforcement Agency raids, a staple of the Bush administration.

  U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking in Albuquerque during a meeting focused on border issues, including drug trafficking, said his department is focused “on large traffickers,” not on growers who have a state’s imprimatur to dispense marijuana for medical reasons.

• jfleck at inkstain » On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events – My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time and energy thinking through ways of reducing the probability of the high-consequence event.

  But if the chance of the truly horrific event is somewhere betwen 57 and 95 percent over the next four decades? Holy crap. If you’ve seen that coming and haven’t already started doing an awful lot to try to drive that number down, your system for solving societal problems is seriously fucked up.

• ABQJOURNAL NEWS/METRO: Actor’s $50,000 Keeps Boys/Girls Club Running – Arthur Garcia, its executive director, said his club — which has been in Roswell since 1965 — was on the verge of closing for the summer, its busiest time. The economy, he said, had taken its toll on donations the club needs to survive.
  "We were drowning," he said. "Even our grants have been cut."
  So, last week after KRQE Channel 13 did a story on the club's financial pain, Denzel Washington called to say he'd love to help.
  Washington, who is in Albuquerque filming the "Book of Eli" at Albuquerque Studios, donated $50,000 to the club, enough to keep it open through the summer.
• Where Gadgets Go to Die: Facility Strips, Rips and Recycles – With 15 locations in the United States, Sims Recycling Solutions is one of the world’s largest electronics scrap recyclers. Pictured here is the "demanufacturing" center of the company's Roseville, California facility, where workers disassemble everything from printers, cameras and computers to Jumbotrons for their reusable materials. The facility receives roughly 150,000 pounds of used electronics a day.
• Report Details Alleged Fraud Scheme Against AT – CBS 11 News has uncovered new information about FBI raids against Dallas companies that provide web servers for dozens of businesses in North Texas and across the country.

  Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon.

  Court records show Verizon first went to the FBI this past January, alleging some North Texas web server providers were cheating them and AT&T out of millions of dollars.

• Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics | Society | The Guardian – Barrel Man is immediately put on a drain. Several clear bags of fluid are emptied from his stomach every couple of hours. During the night, at around 2am, we are awoken by the sound of a cry and a splash of liquid. The room fills with the aroma of faeces. A nurse dashes in, switches on the light and pulls Barrel Man's curtain round, but not before we have glimpsed the pool of blood and faeces on the floor. Two doctors arrive. Barrel Man is wheeled down to the theatre. We don't expect to see him on the ward again. With typical understatement, the following day the nurse reports his condition as "very poorly".
• “Dow 36,000″ and your pension – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of billions.
• What Fourth-Graders “Know” About Money – Recently I used some of the latitude I have in teaching social studies when completing a unit on economics with two 4th-grade classes (41 students total). One group of students was from my classroom; the other group of students was from a neighboring teacher’s class. During the unit, I had an opportunity to gauge the students’ knowledge of a few concepts of money and the financial world around them.
• Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: What We Can Learn From MacHeist – Mac software impressario Phill Ryu brought his controversial MacHeist bundle back for another round recently, this time with one of its former critics in the fold, which means that the old debates about its legitimacy and value have been raging once again. I’ll admit I’ve been a critic of MacHeist in the past, and one way to think about it is definitely as either a sign of or cause of a troubling devaluation of indie software. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why software products and services succeed or fail, though, and I’ve started to feel that, whatever you think of them, we indie developers can learn a lot from MacHeist.
• The G-20 can do better next time | csmonitor.com – The Group of 20 meeting took place largely because of a demand by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to set up a global regulatory cop to rein in excessive risk-taking by financial institutions – mainly American and British.

  For two reasons, he rightly didn't succeed.

  As long as the world remains organized around sovereign states, capitalism will largely be regulated within each state. Even the European Union can't agree on tougher rules for hedge funds, etc.

  A second reason is the difficulty of regulating complex financial instruments. Even the people who design them failed to see their flaws as this crisis unfolded. Would a global cop do any better at assessing such intricate risk? Exhibit A: The SEC's inability to uncover Bernie Madoff's scam.

• Al Jazeera English – Americas – FBI rejects Taliban US attack claim – The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dismissed claims made by the Pakistan Taliban that it was responsible for an attack in the state of New York in which a gunman killed 13 people.

  Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, had claimed in a phone call to Al Jazeera that he had ordered the shooting in which a man, believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant, opened fire at an immigration centre.

A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency’s closely guarded interrogation techniques.

In recently filed court documents, the Justice Department said those methods, along with the locations of the CIA’s network of prisons, are among the nation’s most sensitive secrets. Prisoners who spent time in those prisons should not be allowed to disclose that information, even to a lawyer, the government said.

They should copyright their torture procedures and make the “suspected terrorists” sign a NDA, then they have a legal means to prevent them from revealing their secrets.