“It breaks your heart when you drive through and you see people and they’re crying for you,” Vicki said later. She was especially struck by the nameless mechanic in his coveralls, black with oil. He had crawled out from under a car, out of the pit, and he stood in front of the garage, perfectly straight, perfectly still, saluting the hearse, and lines formed under his eyes in the oil on his face.

http://www.esquire.com/features/things-that-carried-him

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.” That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director’s cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

Rolling Stone: Jesus Made Me Puke

The leaders of an alternative newspaper chain were arrested after running a story about grand jury subpoenas they received seeking reporters’ notes and information on who visits their Phoenix weekly’s Web site.

Michael Lacey, executive editor of Village Voice Media, and Jim Larkin, CEO of the Phoenix-based chain, were arrested at their homes Thursday, the same day their story was published in the Phoenix New Times, a free, weekly alternative paper.

Capt. Paul Chagolla, a sheriff’s spokesman, said Lacey and Larkin were arrested on suspicion of violating grand jury secrecy and that the arrests came at the requests of the prosecutor.

The story, titled “Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution,” said Maricopa County authorities want every story New Times has written about Sheriff Joe Arpaio since Jan. 1, 2004, and all the notes, tapes and records of the reporters.

The subpoenas also seek online profiles of anyone who read four specific articles about Arpaio and profiles of anyone who visited the paper’s Web site since Jan. 1, 2004. Also sought was information on what Web users did while on the site, the story said.

KPHO Phoenix

edit - original story - breathtaking-abuse-of-the-constitution.

When my wife and I got to the airport, we were informed that I was checked in but she was in danger of being bumped off the flight because it was oversold. I reacted to this news by informing the agent I felt that this was “unfair.” The ticket was pre-purchased. We were traveling together. It was the last flight of the night and we needed to be on it. I was firm but I wasn’t overly aggressive — no cursing, no loud talking, no six vodka tonics before boarding (three, max). Plain and simple, the woman behind the counter was being a derogatory term for the female anatomy. I asked if I could speak to a supervisor, to which she replied, “Go sit down or you can talk to the police.” After I wondered aloud if Sting and Stuart Copeland were on the flight, she repeated herself. “Go sit down or you can talk to the police.” Yep, she was serious. She was trying to turn a minor disagreement into a jail-worthy confrontation.

The Huffington Post

Monday’s New York Post ran a story by bureau chief Charles Hurt blaming a delay in NSA surveillance activities to find information about captured soldiers in Iraq on the privacy framework that protects Americans from unfettered surveillance.

The biting story, based on a leak from an administration-friendly source, blames bureaucratic rules for a 10-hour delay in getting permission to set up a wiretap inside American telecom switches to capture Iraqi communications — hours that could have meant the difference between life and death for the soldiers.

Hurt’s piece, relying on a “senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case” is quite compelling, but would be even more so if it weren’t a carefully constructed, politically motivated lie that’s already been discredited.

Threat Level

Threat Level - Wired Blogs

Debating Spy Laws Kills Americans and Telcos Did Spy on Americans, Spy Chief Says

——-
What a nut.

For the Aviation Safety records, see http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20050515-0

…”On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall.
…
Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have the heart to take off these days, says, “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.”
…
One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description — a Middle Eastern man driving a white Beetle with out of state plates — and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, “What country is he from?”

“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant.

“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.

At some length, several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. “When I recycle?” I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an “honest mistake,” not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.”
http://alternet.org/rights/50939/

In case you missed it, this is related to all this noise, which is largely unreported in the general media.

“The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.

Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.”
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/19421.html