Cookie Monster Stalkers

We're all accustomed to politicians throwing out pitiful crumbs to the common folk, while they allow the highest corporate bidders to feast and gorge at public expense. And now it turns out they're tossing us fancy cookies, too. It's bad enough that they're constantly projectile-vomiting emails into our overflowing spam buckets. But internet cookies? Say it ain't so!  Barry and Mitt are cyberstalkers!

Um-Num-Num-Num-Num.... Don't Block Me, Bro!

Well, it is so. In case you were wondering how it is, no matter what web page you visit, that the same feel-good cheesy photos keep popping up urging you to "Help the Obamas Stand Up for Working Families" and "Tell Michelle You're IN" or "Grab a Bite with Ann", it's all the fault of cookies. If you have ever clicked on a link to their campaign websites or ads, a little gizmo is activated that will not only follow you wherever you go, but will gather information about you based on where you troll on the Internet. We knew it was happening with the Obama machine months ago, when ProPublica figured out that his campaign nerds customize their money-grubbing email appeals based solely on your browsing history.  

Romney is now playing catch-up. ProPublica reporter Lois Beckett was decidedly creeped out when Mitt started stalking her across cyberspace recently. As a reporter, she spends a "fair amount of time" on his campaign website and as a result, she became fodder for a slew of ads urging her to "learn more" and donate, donate, donate.

 This is the same kind of online targeting  used by sites that sell airline tickets or shoes. If you visit Zappos, advertisements for the sneakers you looked at will sometimes follow you around the web. Romney's campaign was sending me a "donate" button instead.

But the fact that I was being targeted based on my visits to the campaign site wasn't at all clear from the ads themselves.

Each of the ads had a teensy blue triangle in the top right corner. Because I report on online advertising, I know that the triangle means I've been targeted. Many online ad companies have agreed to give consumers a heads-up that they're seeing a message that's been personalized to them. They mark targeted ads with a blue triangle icon or the words "Ad Choices."

When I clicked on the blue triangle on one of the Romney ads, a message popped up saying that a company called ShareThis had "determined that you might be interested in an ad like this." The ad had been "selected for you based on your browsing activity."

If you're interested in more of the technical details of how ShareThis does what it does, do read the whole article. ProPublica also wants to hear from you about your own experiences with political cyberstalkers and asks that you send a screenshot of the ads targeting you to: mailto:targeting2012@Propublica.org.

But if you'd rather not be part of a survey, or if the idea of being stalked by Barry and Mitt makes you queasy, take out a restraining order. No, you don't have to sue or go to the People's Court. You can make all the ads go away, forever and completely, just by downloading an ad-blocking program. I installed AdBlock (the simple version) a few weeks ago and it made every single ad disappear immediately. No more opening an ad strategically placed to be accidentally clicked while I scroll down a page. No more ads that have to be "rolled" off the page before I can read an article. It has been rated completely safe and effective, and I can attest to its sanity-preserving virtues. There are different versions adapted to different browsers, so just Google to find the right one for you.

Of course, advertisers hate it because they're still paying for ads people are not seeing. And some people are ticked because most versions of AdBlock can't always distinguish between good ads and bad ads, annoying ads and helpful ads. It's all or nothing. You can't decide you want to see the Obama ads and block the Mittster. You have no choice between Greater Evil and Lesser Evil. You can't block Walmart ads and allow Bergdorf Goodman ads. Oh, the humanity.

While AdBlock and similar programs prevent the annoying messages from reaching your screen, they do not block tracking cookies. To foil the internet spies, clear out your browser on a regular basis. (I clean mine once or twice a day. This measure has the added perk of allowing you to access sites with paywalls by erasing your "footprint history.")

As far as the annoying emails are concerned, "unsubscribing" may or may not work. You may simply find yourself engaging in a futile game of whack-a-mole. As an experiment to determine the exponential grasp of political email lists, I signed a "thank you" card to President Obama on his gay marriage evolution, sent to me by Nancy Pelosi. Sure nuff, the fund-raising emails came barfing out almost instantaneously. They came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DNC, congress critters from thousands of miles away that I never even heard of. To make it all stop, I had to unsubscribe from each person individually -- a fraught and time-consuming process. This barely put a dent in the torrent. But I think it's finally starting to dwindle down.

I tried the same experiment with the right-wingers, having signed up for alerts from the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity (a/k/a Rich People for Rich People.) The nefarious koch-heads promptly gave my email address to every right wing nut job in Nutland. Herman Cain writes often, including all those videos of stuffed animal abuse. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer offered to send me an autographed copy of her book "Scorpions for Breakfast" if I sent her 50 bucks first. (I passed). Now, of course, they're going crazy with the Down with Obamacare missives that are truly hilarious in their insistence that government medical care will kill us all. No way am I unsubscribing from that crap. It is way too entertaining.

Update: This just in from Herman Cain. It's a teaser about "Cain TV", supposedly coming soon to a cable channel near you. I can guarantee it will also play in an endless loop on MSNBC, the liberal outrage channel. From the preview, it appears to be a hodge-podge of paranoid apocalyptica coupled with slapstick comedy with a racist-misogynist slant (there's a segment with a black comedian doing a minstrel routine--hard to figure out if it's satire, or the blatant hurling of red meat to bigots and militia groups. For now, I'll choose the latter.)  At the end, Herman himself appears, telling us: "Hello. I'm Herman Cain. They think we're stupid."  And he concludes with "Let's give a lamb a gun. I am Herman Cain. We are not stupid."

This has all the makings of a summer hit.

Remembering Amelia Earhart

Lost and Found

A Poem by Nan Socolow

Rumors that Noonan

and I were buried

on Saipan or Tinian

That we were

spying for America

before Pearl Harbor

beheaded at

Garapan

by the Japanese

False rumors

urban legends

all

Noonan and I

just glided

from the sky

Out of fuel

we dropped

from the clouds

Past Howland

onto a Phoenix isle

in Kiribati

Nikumaroro

known then as

Gardner Island

My Lockheed

Electra

landed hard

On the atoll's

sharp shallow

reef

I was 39

that day

2 July 1937

And I did so radio Itasca!

radioed Itasca

over and over!

They searched

every dot and cranny

for Noonan and me

Except for Gardner

the obvious spot

350 miles from Howland

The day we fell

2 July 1937

I was 39

Five eight tall

fair and freckled

gaptoothed

Small shoe

size 6

Cat's Paw heel

The Press

called me

"Lady Lindy"

But they never

got the story

straight

Noonan and I died

marooned

needles in a haystack

And the story hung

by a thread

the thread just a leaf

overturned

in the island underbrush

by a hermit crab

revealing the

Cat's Paw heel

of my shoe

I would have been lost

gone with the wind

forever

My poor bones

were sent to Fiji

(and "misplaced" there)

Sic transit

Gloria

Mundi

Sic transitted

my Lockheed

10 Electra

My DNA awaits

discovery

on Nikumaroro

Bits of the

Electra's

undercarriage and

My heel

and smashed jar of Dr. Berry's

Freckle Ointment too

I went

the way of all flesh

on 24 July 1937

My 40th birthday

no cake or candles

or balloons

But isn't it swell?

Isn't it neat?

This news

That the seekers

will find me this July!

Or maybe next year?

+ + + +

Nan Socolow

British West Indies

nan@candw.ky

*******************************

Ed. Note: Nan, a frequent contributor to the New York Times readers' comments feature, says she has always been fascinated by the exploits of Amelia Earhart, who "disappeared" 75 years ago today during a round-the-world flight.

Just in time for the anniversary, a jar of the freckle cream that Earhart was fond of using, and other artifacts were discovered recently on a remote South Pacific atoll near the crash site. Experts have also been able to prove that there were several radio transmissions from the immediate area in the days after the plane went down. 

That she and Noonan not only survived the crash, but survived for a substantial period of time, is now morphing from speculation to proven fact. But the absence of any human remains only adds to the continuing mystery of their ultimate fate. An expedition using high tech equipment is being launched this week in an attempt to locate the wreckage of her plane off the coast of Nikumaroro. You can read more details here, here and here.

Amelia Earhart would have reached the ripe old age of 115 later this month. 

Weekend Open Thread

Lots going on, and too many topics to mention and cover all by my lonesome.  Consider this your own have-at-it, no-holds-barred (within my admittedly lax boundaries) space. I will continue to moderate the comments, just to keep the spam and porn links at bay.

Personal anecdotes and book and movie and article reviews and recommendations continue to be welcomed and encouraged!

A Morass of Orwellian Depravity

 Congressman Dennis Kucinich has now joined Nation writer Jeremy Scahill in referring to President Obama's targeted drone attacks as acts of murder. In an exclusive interview with the Britain-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism, the Ohio Democrat scathingly denounces this open secret of covert war, calling out the President, the Congress and a complicit press for their mutual descent into "a morass of Orwellian depravity." Said Kucinich:

You are looking here at an executive power that is unleashed. Our system of justice, according to the Constitution, is highly structured. There are broad areas of our constitution that have to do with people being investigated, arrested, charged, having a trial, and then if they are convicted being properly sentenced and incarcerated.

What we have done here with the drone programme is to radically alter our system of justice. Because, remember, if the whole idea is that we are exporting American values, those drones represent American values. And now we are telling the world that American values are summary executions, no rights to an accused, no arrest process, no reading of charges, no trial by jury, no judge, only an executioner.

If you have only an executioner that is not justice, that is something else. Not only the United States but the world community should be properly appraised about these so-called targeted killings. And because the emphasis in on killing, this is murder. If someone shot a grocer and his defense was ‘it was a targeted killing’ he would be put on trial for his life. But we are told that these targeted killings are somehow to be considered apart from any legal system.

Kucinich explains that the United States is"getting away" with bombing Pakistan and killing innocent civilians because it is engaged in good old fashioned double-dealing. Our government is able to ignore the Pakistani parliament's demand that the U.S. stop the drone strikes because it is dealing only with the real people in charge: the Pakistani military. We are in a defacto war against one Pakistan while being "friendly" with the other Pakistan. Doublespeaking, double-crossing and Orwellian to a degree than even Orwell might not have envisioned.


The congressman, who is serving his last term after being defeated in the primary, finds it hard to believe that so few are condemning, or even mildly questioning, the new American role of judge, jury and executioner of any person suspected of being a terrorist, suspected of canoodling with terrorists -- and worst and most recently, any male with the poor taste to live in a tribal area and to be of "military" age. He told The Bureau:

I hope it is not going to be too far into the future, somebody is going to look back at this and go ‘oh my God, why was this permitted?’ The US government just goes ‘we spent more money on arms than any other country in the world just because we have the most powerful military.’ We cannot assume for ourselves the right to impose a war anywhere we well please, and yet we have. And there is little accountability, so what I am trying to bring about in the Congress is to force accountability and transparency. Transparency in terms of ‘how are you able, you know, what about this extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions? What is the legal authority for the government to conduct extrajudicial killings, where did this come from?’ Really, where did this come from? Says who?

As far as the stenographic role of the American media is concerned, Kucinich is equally harsh. It is not considered bad form, he says, for a president to kill people. But it is a huge faux pas to dare to talk about it!

Let me say that there has been a tradition of American journalists in modern times to serve as the spear carriers for the government. They may look like pens but these are the spears of supernumeraries who have reporters’ cards. It’s what happens when you have fewer and fewer newspapers, and newspapers that are tied to large corporate interests. And a lack of enough institutions in the major media who are willing to serve as an effective counter-balance.

Look at the New York Times. It bought in wholesale into the war in Iraq, and came back to apologise. But how do you apologise for all of the dead bodies and the dead soldiers? We feel the dead soldiers, but we should also feel the dead civilians… There is a disturbing tendency to ignore civilian casualties, in any conflicts that we’re involved in whether they’re declared or undeclared.

Yes, indeed, look at the New York Times. The paper of record recently used the usual anonymous government sources to smear the same Bureau of Investigative Journalism which today brings us the Kucinich interview as well as exposing the hundreds of civilian deaths and dismemberments resulting from Obama's robotic and open-ended War on Terror. Scott Shane, the same reporter who penned the hagiographic article on the president's secret "Kill List" and Terror Tuesdays, came close to accusing the BIJ of giving aid and comfort to the enemy by having had the chutzpah to talk about American bad behavior:

The bureau’s investigation, which began last year with a detailed study of civilian casualties, involved interviews with villagers who said they saw strikes, wounded people and family members of those killed.

The bureau counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones since President Obama took office, and it said that 282 to 535 civilians had been “credibly reported” killed in those attacks, including more than 60 children. American officials said that the number was much too high, though they acknowledged that at least several dozen civilians had been killed inadvertently in strikes aimed at militant suspects.

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

I am willing to bet that the anonymous official is none other that Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, former Bushie and Islamophobe extraordinaire and an obvious source for Shane's Kill List piece. (he even came out of the closet to be photographed for it.) He has been popping up all over the place lately, coyly bragging about the White House assassination squad even as the White House officially denies it existence and refuses to divulge the secret law it unilaterally enacted to give itself carte blanche for murder. Brennan was also outed by another Times reporter, David Sanger, as the discredited source behind the original botched narrative of the bin Laden assassination. Brennan even came to NYC this spring, just to applaud that city's spy program against Muslim Americans and, while he was at it, to blast the Pulitzer-winning Associated Press for exposing it.

"Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." From George Orwell's lips to the American Media-Industrial Complex's plugged-up ears.

Is There an OccuDoc in the House?

Yep, there is. If you want to avoid all the talking heads exploding, and the Democratic email fund-raising frenzies and the Republican bitch-fests in the wake of the Survival of Obamacare, watch this full-length (an hour and fifteen minutes) film, titled American Autumn.

Rumors of the demise of Occupy are severely premature, despite the best efforts of the corporate media and the corporate politicians to convince us otherwise.

Obamacare may have survived, but millions will remain uninsured and three of them are still dying every single hour for lack of basic preventive health care. JP Morgan Chase has suddenly "lost" $8 billion instead of $2 billion but remains profitable at our expense. The Mortgage Fraud Task Force has yet to issue a single subpoena. Privatization of schools, prisons and infrastructure continues apace. Whole cities are declaring bankruptcy. One in four children is officially poor. Something's got to give.

Occupy!

Supreme Court Rulz/Open Thread

Check the SCOTUSblog on Blogroll to your right for live updates and the link to the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts apparently cares about his legacy and the well-being of the private insurance cabal and has thus ruled with the "libs" in upholding the Affordable Care Act.

Here is the continuing New York Times coverage.

Here is the full opinion.

Weigh in, if and when are you able.

Nobody Knows Nuthin

There hasn't been this much nail-biting and speculation since the nation awaited the series finale of The Sopranos. And when that last episode ended, not with a bang but with a quick whimpering fade to black, the reaction was a mixture of "huh?" to "cop-out!" to "this was the most meaningful and epochal moment in the history of mafia dramedy."

Same for Thursday's much-ballyhooed Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act. There are as many theories on the outcome as there are pundits with too much time on their hands, so I won't add to the arcane clutter. Possible endings are all over the map. I read this morning that the jurists may even punt on the issue until right before Election Day, following that old Washington tradition of can-kicking important issues into oblivion, as well as the gimmick of the season-ending summer cliffhanger.

I imagine this would piss off the VIPs who are sticking around the swamp just to be the first to pontificate on this momentous decision instead of raising campaign cash, serving their constituents or going on their bi-monthly vacations. Wouldn't it be something if it turned out the Supremes were just a bunch of Bada-Bing teases, that they had been playing us all along with their come-hithers on health care? 

If you are a suspense junkie, do tune in to the ScotusBlog this Thursday around 10 a.m. for the final (maybe) episode. I'm embarrassed to admit I succumbed yesterday, finding myself hooked on their live clicks. It was a real tease, all right. I could just envision the politburo dancers in their black robes, casting off one decision at a time to a ravening audience of thousands. First, Arizona immigration law, next came sentencing rules for murderous youth, and in between there was that contemptuous bump and grind affirming Citizens United. And no health care! Not one little hint! Oh, the agony.

Of course, lost in the hoopla is the fact that these decisions affect real people. Hispanics will continue to be subjected to the fascist "papers please" law in Arizona, until the Supremes decide to think it over some other time. Corporations will continue to steal our democracy and not even have to tell us who they are or where they come from.

Same with health care. As much as I dislike the Affordable Care Act, I will not rejoice if it is struck down. For one thing, the insurance leeches would be absolved from refunding billions of dollars this summer in overpaid premiums that were not spent directly on patient care. For another thing, there are some people who are already benefiting from the law, such as children with pre-existing conditions. Would they be cut off from chemo without a second thought by the for-profit health insurance mafia?

The only thing we can be sure of come Thursday is the cacophany of the chattering class and the unctuous spin of the politicians. Here's what Michael Shear of the New York Times is forecasting:

But the momentary chaos could be downright dangerous for political candidates who move too quickly to embrace or condemn the court’s actions. A stray statement made before all the facts are understood could easily come back to haunt a political candidate.

In the White House race, Mitt Romney and President Obama are both preparing for any eventuality.

Mr. Romney’s top advisers have been working with Republicans on Capitol Hill to coordinate the health care message, according to senior aides. Various scenarios have been sketched out and statements prepared.

Aides say they believe Mr. Romney can benefit politically no matter what the court decides.

At the White House, Mr. Obama’s lawyers and political advisers are said to be preparing their own responses — both legal and political.

But the trick for both men will be to calibrate their statements appropriately in the moments after the decision is announced. And that won’t be easy if the court’s decision is a complicated one affecting different provisions in different ways.

And the trick for the 50 million people who currently lack health insurance will be either to calibrate a game plan for hanging on until 2014 if the ACA survives, or coordinating a more open-ended agenda for the rest of their foreshortened lives. Whatever happens, the Obama family and the Romney family and the Supreme Families and the Congressional families and crime families of all stripes will all maintain their own guaranteed health coverage today and for thousands of tomorrows.

A new report by Families USA estimates that lack of health insurance now accounts for 26,000 needless deaths every single year in this country. These are working age people in the prime of their lives. (25-64). Although this number is about seven time as high as the tally of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, their deaths simply don't garner anywhere near the same amount of attention and government response. These deaths are not a national emergency because they are mundane, protracted and lonely deaths. And our government likes its crises to be dramatic, immediate and profitable.

Sick and poor people do not have a lobby, nor a newspaper column, nor a seat on the cable talk shows. And if they're uninsured, they're dying off at the rate of three per hour. They're being whacked at about the same rate as in an average Sopranos episode.

We spend the most money on health care of any civilized country, yet we have the worst results in terms of morbidity and mortality. No politician can spin those stats, so they just ignore them, and campaign, and echo the words of mob boss Tony Soprano: "Let me figure out how to take care of you."