Too Little Too Late

But still, better than nothing I suppose.

U.S. intelligence on Iraq was “dead wrong,” dealing a blow to American credibility that will take years to undo, and spymasters still know disturbingly little about nuclear programs in countries like Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported on Thursday.

The commission’s bluntly written report, based on more than a year of investigations, offered a damning assessment of the intelligence that President Bush used to launch the Iraq war two years ago and warned that flaws are still all too common throughout spy agencies.

“We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the commissioners wrote.

Follow-up on RFID

Midterms are over; time to focus on everything else that’s been piling up. Like renewing my now-expired passport. The application has been sitting on my desk for months, but I really need to get off my butt & do it before I get RFID’ed.

I’ve posted previously on the problems with putting RFID chips into passports. As this recent article notes, DHS is “dealing” with the problem not by looking for a better solution, but by engaging in an Orwellian re-naming of the technology involved.

Conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians, fear not. The U.S. government will not use radio-frequency identification tags in the passports it issues to millions of Americans in the coming years.

Instead, the government will use “contactless chips.”

The distinction is part of an effort by the Department of Homeland Security and one of its RFID suppliers, Philips Semiconductors, to brand RFID tags in identification documents as “proximity chips,” “contactless chips” or “contactless integrated circuits” — anything but “RFID.”

The Homeland Security Department is playing word games to dodge the privacy debate raging over RFID tags.

So very typical of this administration.

Quick Observation

I’m supposed to be studying for my Accounting midterm, but this song just cycled through my iMix and I just had to say it:

The Dave Matthews Band song “Grey Street” is a really good song. But it would be even better if Peter Gabriel covered it.

Friday Itunes Blogging

Been listening to a lot of random plays this week. Here’s the current Next 10:

Letter Song – The Secret Garden
American Tune – Simon & Garfunkel, The Concert in Central Park
Pastoral Symphony – George Frideric Handel, Messiah
Love Me Tender – Amy Grant
Pump up the Jam – Technotronic
The Lion Sleeps Tonight – They Might Be Giants
Philadelphia Freedom – Elton John
Book Of Days – Enya
Fate & Finale, Act I – Kismet
Koyaanisqatsi – Philip Glass

One of the benefits to growing up in New York City — I was actually at the above-mentioned concert in Central Park, with a bunch of friends from high school. We ate fried chicken and generally had a great time. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have $15 on me to buy a concert t-shirt; for years afterward I stared with envy at the friend who did get the t-shirt every time he wore it.

Rethinking Health Care

Brad Plumer has some policy-wonk posts up today about health care reform. Although this isn’t a front burner issue for me most of the time, it got me thinking.

I’m generally supportive of converting America to a single-payer health care system like what most European countries and Canada have. And then it hit me — what if my wish came true?

Would I trust my government to make decisions about things like who gets access to prescription birth control devices? Not if a Republican were in the White House. Given the SCOTUS precedent of Griswold v CT, I’m fairly sure they couldn’t eliminate birth control entirely, but they could include things like ‘conscience clause’ that would allow doctors to not write prescriptions for birth control pills if they chose not to. As we’ve already seen with abortion services, if nobody chooses to provide something, you have an effective ban on service even if it is still legal.

That’s a really scary scenario, and one that is making me rethink whether I support single-payer health care after all. Just one more thing to blame on the right wing nut jobs trying to run this country.