Month: August 2006

Two attorneys representing claimants in a lawsuit over wiretapping by the National Security Agency will subpoena the White House today.

The lawyers, who represent hundreds of plaintiffs in lawsuits against Verizon, AT&T, and the US Government, will announce this afternoon that they are serving both the Bush administration and Verizon with subpoenas.

In Watergate, the house of cards began to collapse when people in legal trouble began to sweat, and started talking in order to save their own asses. I desperately hope that this will be the beginning of a similar circumstance for the criminals currently occupying our government.

Legislation that would open up the murky world of government contracting to public scrutiny has been derailed by a secret parliamentary maneuver.

From the story:

“An unidentified senator placed a “secret hold” on legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year. The database would bring transparency to federal spending and be as simple to use as conducting a Google search.”

So yeah — Nobody knows who did it….and until the “Mystery Senator” releases the hold, it will never come up for a vote.

Government of the people, for the people and by the people….my ass.

Well, hell — apparently this is the real thing.

I finally got a letter today from ERB, Inc’s NYC lawyers.

Fairly weak, though — a general admonition to not distribute the public domain material in the European Union (where it is still under copyright), and a demand that we not imply or state that an authorization or trade connection exists between us and ERB, Inc. Oh, and some fuzzy logic about the fact that since our Preview was free, that means that file sharing wasn’t illegal.

I’m sending an actual physical letter response, where I re-iterate that we’re NOT distributing ANY ERB material, public domain or otherwise, and that we are willing to add a disclaimer to the effect that there is no connection or authorization between us and ERB, Inc. We’ll see what they say.

Annoying Bullshit.